How a mighty company can destroy itself

Great article John thanks for posting.  I agree with Morgaine in that most the poeple making rules are usually not technically capable at all.  Most of them are number crunches and to make up for their lack of knowledge they put in processes because thats all they know how to do.

Nate Chapman wrote:

 

to make up for their lack of knowledge they put in processes because thats all they know how to do.

It also tends to be down to the drive to please wall street at the expense of everything else. So use below minimum wage workers who don't care about anything beyond friday night and the processes become required to make any progress. Of course the people creating the processes are barely one step up the ladder themselves.

You'd be amazed how many low paid office workers we have simply to cut&paste columns around in excel. It's not as if you could give them a macro to do it, as in six months there's be nobody who knew what it did or why they were doing it and you then have a historic 'process' in place that nobody needs, wants, or understands, but that's the way it's always been done so they keep doing it that way and it becomes impossible to change.

</soapbox>

Between the Yes-men who keep the bosses happy just to climb the ladder, and the 9-to-5'ers who accept anything as long as they can go home on the dot, and the low paid who are just glad to have a job and won't endanger losing it, and the social backpatters whose lives are dedicated to peergroup reinforcement, and the plain incompetent who can't recognize good from bad, it's a miracle when companies manage to accomplish anything outstanding at all.  The odds are against it.

It's a core principle of Control Theory that a system without negative feedback is a system that is out of control.  Control Theory is typically taught as part of ElecEng, but it's equally applicable to all systems, including human ones.  An organization that rejects criticism and surrounds itself with Yes-men is an organization that is out of control.  It's only a matter of time before the ship hits the rocks.

Morgaine.

Used to be called Control Techniques or Control Systems way back when I did my Electrical&ElectronicEng.

Where I work we have a feedback mechanism. Only problem is they use it to identify and weed out the 'troublemakers' instead of the broken management behaviour. Then they give the management a bonus for getting rid of troublemakers.

In a lot of ways I think the 'system' is almost designed to break you down, turn you into a 9-5'er.  Company treats you like something to be scraped off the CEOs shoe, they've only got themselves to blame.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Between the Yes-men who keep the bosses happy just to climb the ladder, and the 9-to-5'ers who accept anything as long as they can go home on the dot, and the low paid who are just glad to have a job and won't endanger losing it, and the social backpatters whose lives are dedicated to peergroup reinforcement, and the plain incompetent who can't recognize good from bad, it's a miracle when companies manage to accomplish anything outstanding at all.  The odds are against it.

Great rant-sentence, Morgaine.  I think our answer comes from George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

It's the people who perversely refuse to Accept Things As They Are and insist on following their dreams and ideals in spite of heaps of abuse are the ones we all depend on for progress.  Now, where's that windmill?

There's nothing new in most of these observations - many are nicely articulated in:

Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress (London, John Murray, 1958)

(wiki article en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law)

My own small contributory thought on the subject is that the age of the organisation is nearly as important as its size - even quite small companies (and individuals) get totally locked into their habits and may become very inward looking (Basil Fawlty being an extreme example !).

The problems at Microsoft (who still make some pretty good stuff) are to be seen in embryo (or even as unruly teenagers) at Google, Apple, Facebook, HP etc.

Michael Kellett

@John: I think Shaw was sitting on the fence a bit there, trying hard not to call a spade a spade and annoy someone in power.  Those "reasonable" people would quite likely understand him to be saying that progress needs to be restricted in order to stay reasonable.  I don't think he quite meant that.

Today's civil war in the area of media copyright holders versus the public is a case in point.  One could validly observe that governments worldwide are being bought lock, stock and barrel by modern day Luddites wielding DMCA takedown notices instead of pitchforks and leading the FBI in acts of piracy to capture servers on the high seas of the Internet.  Unfortunately they don't see it quite that way.

What's reasonable and what is progress depends very much on personal worldview, and you usually have to spell it out and risk annoying people if you want your message to get through.  Preaching only to the converted isn't very helpful after all.

Morgaine.

@John: I think Shaw was sitting on the fence a bit there, trying hard not to call a spade a spade and annoy someone in power.  Those "reasonable" people would quite likely understand him to be saying that progress needs to be restricted in order to stay reasonable.  I don't think he quite meant that.

Today's civil war in the area of media copyright holders versus the public is a case in point.  One could validly observe that governments worldwide are being bought lock, stock and barrel by modern day Luddites wielding DMCA takedown notices instead of pitchforks and leading the FBI in acts of piracy to capture servers on the high seas of the Internet.  Unfortunately they don't see it quite that way.

What's reasonable and what is progress depends very much on personal worldview, and you usually have to spell it out and risk annoying people if you want your message to get through.  Preaching only to the converted isn't very helpful after all.

Morgaine.