I spent a lot of last year trying to understand why companies treated the employees they rely on for success so poorly — The Man Who Broke Capitalism; Lights Out; The Idea Factory; AI Snake Oil; Leaders Eat Last; and so on are all part of that journey. At the time I was a bit fixated on Jack Welsh and his long term impact on General Electric — which I would summarize as being overwhelmingly negative. It was a classic example of managing to short term profit metrics, instead of for long term sustainable growth by delighting your customers.
Ultimately this is why I chose to take a break from working for corporate America, as being treated like a replaceable cog in a profit machine wasn’t really working for me.
Then Edward Zitron wrote this blog post which really resonated with me…
When you care only about shareholder value, the only job you have is to promote further exploitation and dominance — not to have happy customers, not to make your company “a good place to work,” not to make a good product, not to make a difference or contribute to anything other than further growth.
While this is, to anyone with a vapor of an intellectual or moral dimension, absolutely f**king stupid, it’s an idea that’s proven depressingly endemic among the managerial elite, in part because it has entered the culture, and because it is hammered across in MBA classes and corporate training seminars.
I had assumed that my general lack of enthusiasm with tech at the moment was due to burnout, but now I wonder if its because there really aren’t any companies out there that are genuinely seeking to improve the lives of their customers, instead of just doing random stuff to juice this quarter’s profit.
We live in a symbolic economy where we apply for jobs, writing CVs and cover letters to resemble a certain kind of hire, with our resume read by someone who doesn’t do or understand our job, but yet is responsible for determining whether we’re worthy of going to the next step of the hiring process. All this so that we might get an interview with a manager or executive who will decide whether they think we can do it. We are managed by people whose job is implicitly not to do work, but oversee it. We are, as children (and young adults), encouraged to aspire to become a manager or executive, to “own our own business,” to “have people that work for us,” and the terms of our society are, by default, that management is not a role you work at, so much as a position you hold — a figurehead that passes the buck and makes far more of them than you do.
I assume that management used to be people who had once done a job, “graduating” to leading a team of people who now did approximately that thing. I say “assume” because its been a long time since I’ve seen much evidence of that in the places I’ve worked at. Now, management is performed by specialists who do not actually understand the mechanics of the work being done, and therefore issue edicts which are decoupled from the reality of the work to be done.
I think this is a key idea — good managers come from the pool of people who have done the type of work they manage, not from the outside having earned some management qualification as a “decider”.
Maybe the point here is around what one should aspire to. Is a life of directing other people to do work a life that you’d consider well lived when you hit the end point? Personally I want to directly and tangibly improve the world around me. There are lots of ways of doing that, but most of them involve actually doing stuff, not just directing other people to do stuff.
I’ve been thinking similar things to Edward already, but I had been using different words. I think honestly Edward’s words are probably better than mine, although I think he’s also being more specific to business problems than I was. I note that I haven’t actually explained my unifying theory of management incompetence here, but that really seems like a topic for another day.