[HN Gopher] Satan should chair your meetings - a literature love...
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Satan should chair your meetings - a literature lover's guide to
office politics
Author : dctoedt
Score : 41 points
Date : 2021-08-03 18:01 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| toomanyducks wrote:
| I do _not_ expect this to be a popular opinion, but I am slightly
| entertained reading this from more of a Marxist perspective.
|
| > We used to make things. Now we have meetings.
|
| Well, of course. This is what happens when the purpose of a
| corporation isn't production but profit, and if the workers, the
| people who by definition exist in the company _to make things_ ,
| were to own their means of production, this would look very
| differently. But anyway, I digress.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Ah, if only there were still 'workers' left in the Marxist
| sense. But automation has eliminated them (in the West anyway).
| So all that's left is managers, engineers and other
| professionals.
| [deleted]
| lefrenchy wrote:
| Yes and no, there are still workers per se but I don't think
| they exist with the conception of themselves as that (as
| much). During the 20th century when the labor movement was
| strong class consciousness existed and there was an appetite
| for a conception of the self as a worker in relation to
| capital and society. I think it still exists but in a pretty
| inconsequential way. Technology has definitely played a
| factor in atomizing workers and automating away for labor
| intensive tasks.
| codeflo wrote:
| So under Marxism, people don't need to discuss how to
| coordinate their work? That does save a lot of time. No wonder
| the Soviet economy was so efficient.
| toomanyducks wrote:
| Ah, I see how I communicated that poorly - it's not that the
| meetings aren't there, it's that they're oriented towards
| production.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I grew up working on a farm. The person in charge was a
| foreman, and his job was to coordinate how the work was
| accomplished on the ground by a crew of 5-7 people.
|
| At most fortune 50 employers today, you'd have a director
| 1000 miles away, a local manager, a supervisor, an auditor
| and compliance person reviewing the payroll records, and
| recommending to the director that the 2 workers utilize less
| overtime. The local manager would eliminate the OT and hire
| McKinsey to recommend outsourcing the 2 workers, and retain
| McKinsey to monitor compliance.
| handrous wrote:
| Modern companies are _intensive_ responsibility-laundering
| engines. It 's practically their primary function. That's
| always been a little true, but it's gotten a lot worse (at
| least in the US). It's a bunch of box-ticking so you can
| say "look, I did something!" if anything goes wrong--some
| of which box-ticking may require creating and hiring for
| new roles--and it's a downright _miracle_ if the box-
| ticking activity provides any amount of useful value to
| anyone, aside from its value for responsibility-deflection.
|
| IIRC, NPR ran a piece some years back covering how
| something similar happened to US military command (and,
| relatedly, its relationship to civilian oversight), some
| time between WWII and Vietnam, getting worse over time
| after that. Which, if that was accurate, is... worrisome.
| But that explains how you get a directionless and
| constantly-failing war in Afghanistan for nearly two
| decades, with non-stop reports of "yep, we accomplished the
| mission!" from every local command at the end of every
| deployment, and everyone in the command hierarchy just
| pretends everything's fine even though they _know_ it isn
| 't, and they are all allowed to do that with no
| consequences. Gotta evade, and launder, responsibility.
| That's job _number one_. Everything else is just a nice-to-
| have.
| ekster wrote:
| I would like to attend a meeting organized by Satan from Master &
| Margarita. Everyone's wishes are simultaneously realized and all
| hell breaks loose.
| imperialdrive wrote:
| I love seeing those M & M words!
| ClosedPistachio wrote:
| https://archive.is/20210803184730/https://www.economist.com/...
| Bishop_ wrote:
| So how do you convince other leadership and the people you lead
| that this attitude is better? I've had folks on both sides of the
| fence who feel strongly that hierarchies should be absolute and
| following top down decisions is more effective.
| mimixco wrote:
| I think the Paradise Lost analogy is about effectuating top-
| down decisions while making them _appear_ to be consensual. A
| contemporary version can be found in the Hegelian Dialectic.
|
| Bob Gurr, a famous Imagineer, said of his boss Walt Disney,
| "Walt was the greatest dictator ever. People went along with
| him because he was always right."
|
| Whether actually right or not, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk can be
| said to have had this effect.
| clairity wrote:
| moreso, a strong hierarchy can work when constructed
| meritocratically (the benevolent dictator concept). the
| (very) hard part is figuring out what's the most meritocratic
| and how to encourage that construction. most hierarchies end
| up unmeritocratic due to endless political machinations to
| subvert that definition and construction.
|
| and to be right, you can slap the puck to where you want to
| go, or skate to where the puck will be. good leaders do both,
| and much more, like communicating early and often and using
| various commitment devices (e.g., cutting off retreat).
| there's really no trite summation of good leadership.
| captainredbeard wrote:
| Weird
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