6 ms·

It may seem that way from the outside, but once you're actually involved with a leadership team at the top of such an organization, you realize it is 100% a hum

by maaku 11y ago

It may seem that way from the outside, but once you're actually involved with a leadership team at the top of such an organization, you realize it is 100% a human endeavor.

jbooth 11y ago
It's not, those people at the top are being run by the organization as much as they're running it. What information they get, what considerations are possible for political/stockholder reasons.. and even after those it's never 1 human but an emergent set of factors that effectively makes the decisions.
thefastlane 11y ago
you're being downvoted (edit: not by me!), but there is certainly merit to your comment. usually a board of directors or trustees is driving the direction that an organisation takes -- primarily with financial profit in mind (this is as true of a company as a research university, unfortunately). of course, they would not like us to think that's the case, and so will spin narratives that often misdirect our attention. that said, i think this can happen at the same time that the organisation is indeed taking on 'emergent properties' of its own -- human beings are complex, and build complex systems.
IsaacL 11y ago
I agree. I went through a period where I seriously held the same insight as the grandparent and thought that it was profound insight into the nature of the universe -- "omfg, corporations are artificial intelligences! reality is an interlocking series of patterns! collective intelligence is the future!" I cured myself of these beliefs when I looked at how reality actually works (and when I stopped smoking weed). When Louis Gerstner turned around IBM as the company's first outside CEO, that was a result of his decisions and vision, not the emergent decision-making power of IBM. More fundamentally: people can think about companies, companies can't think about people. There are no collective minds, only individual minds working together. The actual article in interesting. It sounds like Russian/Chinese/non-Western multinationals are growing in power, and with significantly less scruples than their Western counterparts.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  I totes don't smoke weed bro, not even on the weekend. My point is not really to present the thought as a deep explanatory insight into the universe but more to get people to apply an existing mythology of powerful otherness to corporations. An interesting POV to consider, nothing more. And I think that while corporations don't quite think, they do use business rules and abstracted information about individuals to trigger actions. The humans writing those rules are probably reasoning differently about the rules than they would the individual decisions. The corporation can become more than the sum of it's parts through very simple mechanisms.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
This is exactly right. I think this dissonance arises from a separation between what someone who isn't in the C-suite thinks is going on, and what folks in the C-suite think is going on. Throughout my career I've been amazed at how differently things looked from different levels of the organization. That is in part due to information compartmentalization (required in publicly traded companies) and in part due to variation of practical versus vision type goals. Sort of "keeping the lights on" vs "staying ahead of the competition."
pasquinelli 11y ago
yeah, but isn't it in a similar way as to how a human is a 100% cellular endeavor?
lucozade 11y ago
Indeed but with very large organisations what happens is that perfectly reasonable questions/decisions at the top level grow lives of their own as they permeate through the organisation. In my experience the reason is often that the rationale for the decision, say shareholder perception, is not something that the majority of people working actually spend their time caring about. As the actions move further from the rationale, you start to get emergent behaviour. This is exacerbated by the tendency of managers to feel a need to do something even when not doing anything is demonstrably better. So I often see cases where someone senior make a fairly throwaway comment of the form "What are we doing about X?". Even if the answer is nothing because nothing was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, the effect of the question is that something gets done. The higher the level of the questioner the more activity it tends to generate.
jessaustin 11y ago
...100% a human endeavor. That's actually good news of a sort. It might imply that corporate behavior might still be governed by a program of targeted .....? Just thinking out loud here folks...

by maaku 11y ago

It may seem that way from the outside, but once you're actually involved with a leadership team at the top of such an organization, you realize it is 100% a human endeavor.

jbooth 11y ago

It's not, those people at the top are being run by the organization as much as they're running it. What information they get, what considerations are possible for political/stockholder reasons.. and even after those it's never 1 human but an emergent set of factors that effectively makes the decisions.

thefastlane 11y ago

you're being downvoted (edit: not by me!), but there is certainly merit to your comment. usually a board of directors or trustees is driving the direction that an organisation takes -- primarily with financial profit in mind (this is as true of a company as a research university, unfortunately). of course, they would not like us to think that's the case, and so will spin narratives that often misdirect our attention. that said, i think this can happen at the same time that the organisation is indeed taking on 'emergent properties' of its own -- human beings are complex, and build complex systems.

IsaacL 11y ago

I agree. I went through a period where I seriously held the same insight as the grandparent and thought that it was profound insight into the nature of the universe -- "omfg, corporations are artificial intelligences! reality is an interlocking series of patterns! collective intelligence is the future!" I cured myself of these beliefs when I looked at how reality actually works (and when I stopped smoking weed). When Louis Gerstner turned around IBM as the company's first outside CEO, that was a result of his decisions and vision, not the emergent decision-making power of IBM. More fundamentally: people can think about companies, companies can't think about people. There are no collective minds, only individual minds working together. The actual article in interesting. It sounds like Russian/Chinese/non-Western multinationals are growing in power, and with significantly less scruples than their Western counterparts.

maxerickson 11y ago
I totes don't smoke weed bro, not even on the weekend. My point is not really to present the thought as a deep explanatory insight into the universe but more to get people to apply an existing mythology of powerful otherness to corporations. An interesting POV to consider, nothing more. And I think that while corporations don't quite think, they do use business rules and abstracted information about individuals to trigger actions. The humans writing those rules are probably reasoning differently about the rules than they would the individual decisions. The corporation can become more than the sum of it's parts through very simple mechanisms.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

This is exactly right. I think this dissonance arises from a separation between what someone who isn't in the C-suite thinks is going on, and what folks in the C-suite think is going on. Throughout my career I've been amazed at how differently things looked from different levels of the organization. That is in part due to information compartmentalization (required in publicly traded companies) and in part due to variation of practical versus vision type goals. Sort of "keeping the lights on" vs "staying ahead of the competition."

pasquinelli 11y ago

yeah, but isn't it in a similar way as to how a human is a 100% cellular endeavor?

lucozade 11y ago

Indeed but with very large organisations what happens is that perfectly reasonable questions/decisions at the top level grow lives of their own as they permeate through the organisation. In my experience the reason is often that the rationale for the decision, say shareholder perception, is not something that the majority of people working actually spend their time caring about. As the actions move further from the rationale, you start to get emergent behaviour. This is exacerbated by the tendency of managers to feel a need to do something even when not doing anything is demonstrably better. So I often see cases where someone senior make a fairly throwaway comment of the form "What are we doing about X?". Even if the answer is nothing because nothing was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, the effect of the question is that something gets done. The higher the level of the questioner the more activity it tends to generate.

jessaustin 11y ago

...100% a human endeavor. That's actually good news of a sort. It might imply that corporate behavior might still be governed by a program of targeted .....? Just thinking out loud here folks...