[HN Gopher] Culture eats policy
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Culture eats policy
Author : Symmetry
Score : 82 points
Date : 2023-06-23 15:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.niskanencenter.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.niskanencenter.org)
| kmerroll wrote:
| > you should ask yourself: With every decision you make, is this
| good for the company? (OfficeSpace, 1999)
|
| I'll counter that fake or self-serving cultures are more toxic
| and destructive in an organization than bureaucratic policies.
| Mandated perspectives through culture manipulation feels more
| like group think and design by committee than genuine
| empowerment.
| bruce511 wrote:
| I'm reminded of the adage that to really get things done, you
| need a small qualified team, and everyone else to get out of
| their way. (See the original Appke Mac team as an example.)
|
| Big projects are hard. They're expensive. With large budgets
| comes lots of oversight, endless second guessing, and a zillion
| rules, perfected over years, to ensure money is not wasted or
| stolen.
|
| I once pitched an off-the-shelf program to a corporate, which
| would have cost 10k to roll out company wide. But the procurement
| process demanded a proper evaluation first, which eould cost
| about 5 times that. Better that than letting someone later claim
| that 10k was wasted.
|
| Large business wastes just as much money as govt, but when a
| business makes a mistake they just stop talking about it. In govt
| it ends up on CSPAN. When it's not your money, it's easy to
| spend. Reputation (and blame doging) is far more valuable than
| cash.
|
| Which brings us back to well resourced, small teams, of competent
| people.
| newsclues wrote:
| Process for accountability is what's required.
| notquitetrue wrote:
| > _Large business wastes just as much money as govt, but when a
| business makes a mistake they just stop talking about it. In
| govt it ends up on CSPAN._
|
| The other difference is that the business has to compete with
| other businesses and turn a profit (or convince investors it
| will eventually turn a profit) to survive. In any given year
| they might get away with waste. If you're a mega corp in an
| oligopolistic business, maybe even a decade or two. But
| eventually, you live or die by the bottom line. By contrast, a
| government keeps existing no matter how poorly it manages its
| finances. Look at Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela, South Africa,
| Greece, etc.
| GabeIsko wrote:
| No, businesses absolutely collude to get out of each others
| way, and it happens a lot more than you think. Even
| businesses that are "competitors" often have different aims
| and goals in the long run. And generally their are banks an
| wall street that are willing to pick up the tab for
| businesses that are big enough, even if they are failing.
| Look at a company like yahoo, or oracle, or IBM. How do they
| keep existing, when they are essentially zombies running on
| funding through the public market?
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Oracle and IBM print money from the processes in the
| article.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Oracle's revenue last year was just under $50B. IBM's was a
| little over $60B. Free cash flows were around $8.5B and
| $9.5B, respectively.
|
| Those are not the financials of zombies running on money
| from the public market.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Incompetence has to bridge the moat to matter. Private moats
| are not tiny and government moats are not infinite.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| It should be no surprise that companies contracting with the
| Federal Government create layers to match whatever the government
| creates. It should also be no surprise that the large players in
| contracting propose changes to government structures that feed
| this cycle in perpetuity. "Digital Transformation" is all the
| current rage and the new job titles are springing up in response.
|
| The legendary Pete Worden touched on this in 1992's "On Self-
| Licking Ice Cream Cones"[0]. Not all his examples have aged well.
| Hubble was resurrected and the massive early problems (and costs)
| forgotten. He also confuses operational systems (EOS, GOES, etc.)
| with tech demonstrators (Clementine, etc.). Despite that, his
| comments on organizational behavior are well made.
|
| [0] PDF at
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234554226_On_Self-L...
| [deleted]
| Aloha wrote:
| The book this was adapted from is absolutely fantastic.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B8644ZGY/
| rpmuller wrote:
| Also check out the interview Ezra Klein did with Jennifer
| Pahlki on his podcast [1].
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/podcasts/transcript-
| ezra-...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| +1, highly recommend
| gjvc wrote:
| "culture eats strategy for breakfast" -- Peter Drucker, (made
| popular by Mark Fields, 2006)
| pdonis wrote:
| Tl/dr: Top-down control of a country doesn't work. But we already
| knew this; the 20th Century was a huge experiment, run in
| multiple countries, in trying to make top-down control work. It
| failed. The lesson we should be drawing from all this is to stop
| asking our government and our elected representatives to fix all
| problems. The government's role should be limited to protecting
| everyone's basic rights and maintaining an orderly civil society.
| Any problem solving after that should be on us, as citizens and
| using private means, not government fiat.
| afthonos wrote:
| I feel you should clarify that "TL/DR" means "too long, _don't_
| read", since what you've written is in no way a summary, but
| rather a statement of opinion in no way supported (and indeed
| _assumed away_ ) by the article.
| lizardking wrote:
| FDR's administration was the most effective of the 20th century
| and was characterized by more top-down control than any other
| during the period in question. Maybe you don't like the
| outcomes, but it can't be argued that much was accomplished.
| [deleted]
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Effective at concentration camps, or supreme-court packing?
|
| God save us from effective government.
| b59831 wrote:
| Worked great for USSR, Venezuela, Cuba, ...
|
| FDR also had to deal with things like state's rights... But
| why worry about nuance?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Maybe you don't like the outcomes, but it can't be argued
| that much was accomplished._
|
| So you're perfectly OK with a government that accomplishes a
| lot of things that should _not_ have been accomplished, as
| long as it does so efficiently?
|
| To give just one example: FDR's administration systematically
| concealed from the American public the true nature of the
| Soviet Union, which, even before World War II started, had
| already killed many millions more of its own people than Nazi
| Germany would kill by the end of WW II, and sent to
| concentration camps many millions more still. FDR and his
| administration knew this because FDR had been sending top
| advisers of his over to the Soviet Union to meet with Stalin
| all during the 1930s, and Stalin was not at all reticent
| about explaining his grand plans for sanitizing his country
| of dissidents. Concealing all this was the only reason why
| the American public accepted the Soviet Union as an ally in
| WW II (and even then the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had to be
| whitewashed as a temporary aberration by an otherwise
| reliable ally, instead of the cynical manipulation that it
| actually was).
|
| And the result of that was that a war which was started in
| order to free Eastern Europe from a totalitarian
| dictatorship, Nazi Germany, left Eastern Europe in the hands
| of an even worse totalitarian dictatorship, the Soviet Union.
| In short, the bloodiest, costliest war in human history was a
| _failure_ , and that failure is directly attributable to FDR
| and his administration. Oh, it was all done efficiently, yes:
| everybody was so convinced that it was a great outcome that,
| after the end of WW II, Eisenhower sat next to Stalin and
| watched a parade of the Red Army through Red Square in Moscow
| and told Stalin how great it was, and the New York Times
| gushed over it. Ok by you?
| Symmetry wrote:
| A quote:
|
| >No one wants to be in the video clip as a stone-faced bureaucrat
| with no good answers, being yelled at by a righteous--or self-
| righteous--politician fighting the good fight on behalf of the
| aggrieved public. In front of the cameras, you can't say things
| like "it doesn't work because we were forced to use an ESB." You
| would look like you were trying to throw someone else under the
| bus, and the legislators wouldn't understand what you were
| talking about anyway. Your job is simply to endure the hearing,
| produce as few viral sound bites as possible, and not incriminate
| others.
|
| >As painful and sometimes humiliating as these hearings are, if
| you're a career civil servant, it is the second system of
| accountability that matters more to you. The legislature can't
| fire or officially reprimand you, no matter how bad a job they
| think you did (although they can put political pressure on the
| administration to do so). They can't make you ineligible for
| promotions and raises. On the other hand, violations of policy,
| process, and procedure--real or perceived--can do all of that,
| even if there is no hearing.
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