If you are the only one following the rules, are you the loser ?

At some point in grade school the phrase "cheaters never prosper" may have crossed your path. If it did, you've probably been given ample opportunity to wonder whether everything you needed to know you really did learn in kindergarten, or did they just fill your head with loser mush?

The following little article would be quite amusing if it were fiction, but it is not. The punch line comes at the end.

Dying for a Chance to Get a Cheat’s Job - http://bit.ly/1dYSF7G (H/t: Project Managers.net).

Don't giggle at this as something that only happens in the Third Word.  At a national level, check your daily newspaper: anything goes as long as my friends are the ones doing it.  Especially if they are likely to do me a little favor in return. It speaks to the trend, endorsed even by our national leaders through their deeds, misdeeds and choices over what to do nothing about.

The moral of the story is: if nobody enforces the rules, there are, de facto, no rules.  This has pretty obvious implications for governance.

How many of you are filling out templates for the PMO, for the budget office, for the security review and so on and so on, all in the name of the serious consequences that might arise if we didn't go through this analysis? Set aside for the now the matter of the quality of the work. It still takes time to do it. And now how many of you have experienced the annoyance that another project somehow gets money and staff and goes sailing off (often over a cliff, true) without any of this oh-so-vital paperwork? All the hands still in the air, I see. At that moment you start thinking to yourself, "why did I waste time on all that? Next time I'll just scrape some crap off the internet and turn it in. Or buy the boss a beer and not bother with turning anything at all".

It may be worth evaluating "if everybody did that, would the organization come crashing down?" If not, then maybe it is time to back off on the policies and templates and give people some credit for having common sense and technical competence.  If such a catastrophe really might occur, then it is worth opening up a dialog as to who is allowed to cheat and why. Possibly a useful risk-based oversight framework might evolve.

So, please, weigh in on the basic question: If you are the only one following the rules, does that prove why you are a loser ?  Or should you be praised (by whom?) for soldiering on heroically?