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Disruptive behaviour in school is often caused by boredom. In a professional setting, I guess it could also be for ego/political reasons. But if somebody is th

Disruptive behaviour in school is often caused by boredom. In a professional setting, I guess it could also be for ego/political reasons. But if somebody is thinking along and asks genuinely good questions, it isn't usually for ego reasons - they want to learn. I think it's worth pursuing: either a) you find somebody knows why it was done a certain way, and it's good to spread that knowledge (and get to know other people in the org) or b) everybody has left/forgotten why it was done that way, and it's good to increase/regain that knowledge. By the way, acceptable answers for doing it a certain way include "politics", "time pressure", and "we didn't know any better". These are way better than "don't know", because they're valuable knowledge. "Don't know" can also easily translate to "we don't understand the risks, so there's no way you're going to be allowed to change this". "don't know and we'll never know/don't care" is the easiest way out. My advice to anybody who keeps hearing this is start looking for your next job - this place will never care about personal development and helping you grow.

zigzigzag 10y ago
Disruptive behaviour is caused by frustration, and frustration in school is often caused by boredom (it's not like there are many other sources compared to the workplace). The problem with workplace politics is that there are usually two kinds of critical thinking: thinking that boils down to "we are doing OK, but we could do better if we did X" which is the type of critical thinking everyone loves, and then there's "we are doing something obviously wrong and we need to stop", which is literally critical thinking and is invariably risky (it's criticising people, often management). Organisations always say they want independent and critical thinkers, but they hardly ever do. They want yes men who will cheerlead for the side. That's tough on people who genuinely care about an organisation or want to see it succeed because strange or dysfunctional behaviour (ignoring customer feedback for example) can easily occur in almost any workplace, and sometimes there's no positive or upbeat way to say "we should probably listen to our customers" or "maybe that process you just put in place is a waste of time", or whatever the problem of the day is.
- TheBobinator 10y ago
  I've found the best tactic, being an underling, is to perform the critical thinking for management and continuously improve your area of work. As a funny and relevant anecdote, I used to process returns for an e-tailer and we had a particular type of refurb product that had a different part numbers on the box, in the firmware, and on the back tag. One day when I had the shop running full bore, I stopped for a few hours while the boss was out, grabbed a piece of paper, then spent some time in a thought experiment reverse-engineering the manufacturers supply chain to find out why. I discovered they had specs for these devices for a particular market, models a through z, and wanted to refurb to those specs to maximize profits. We got the cobbled together unique items that met no spec. I went to the manufacturers website, pulled up a list of PN's by model series, and plug and chugged until I got a valid warranty on every unit with 3 different PN's. We also had a lot of mis-shipped, mis-picked, mis-recieved, and mis-advertised product. I asked the guy building the SKU's and Ad's for a spec sheet and then grabbed a factory service manual, and by my logs, discovered the issue was they didn't have the right ports on the side listed. The guy doing the SKU's made a change in how he advertised product, the throughput of devices coming through my shop dropped 80% within 3 weeks. I then had time to do things like assemble reciepts for a dozen AV Head units, find and send skids of them to an ASP, get them repaired and sent back, and restocked. Then we discovered we had someone stealing product. All of those fixes resulted in about $400k a year in savings for a $20 million a year company. How did the CFO Find out about all this? We were selling to a liquidator anything I couldn't fix. They gave us 55c on the dollar of book value when I started, then 35c, then 25c, then 15c, then 5c. Finally nobody would take the garbage I was producing; literally if I had one liquid damaged item I'd use the parts to repair anything and everything else I could and I even did crazy things like using lego's to replace screwable-pegs inside of TV's using 2-part epoxy. So one day about a year after I started the CFO wanders down to the warehouse to see what's going on, and finds 15 skids of absolute garbage. He then turns to my boss, the warehouse operations manager\account manager, and begins yelling "WHAT THE !@!@# ARE YOU DOING? WHY HASN'T THIS BEEN SOLD? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LIQUIDATOR!" and on and on and on. Apparently, nobody in corporate had performed any quantitative analysis. I had with a 200 meg excel 2003 document that would tell me what was coming in and how much it was. I was saving him $400k a year. The cheapskate gave me a buck an hour raise for the effort, what a crok. They kept me around as the company shrunk from 200 employee's to 20 and went through bankruptcy. On the other end they were going to use my refurb shop since that was the only profitable side of the org entertainingly enough. I eventually left the place entirely. The problem in America is that there's a boat-load of executive managers who have no critical thinking skills themselves, so their employee's see that fact, and see decisions are made subjectively or arbitrarily, and they are demotivated or as I call it, they catch "IDon'tGiveAShazbotItus". Lots of people catch the terminal version of that disease; doesn't matter where they go, they will never give a shazbot because they've been lied to so many times. You just cannot work with someone who has no critical thinking skills. There's no striving for continuous improvement and no rewards for it either. My entire career has been about doing bad things to computer and even worse things to executives; I have lost count of the number of people I've gotten fired, including executives. After-all, if some schmuck with 1 IT certification in a warehouse can save you $400k a year at a 20 million a year company, and the CFO doesn't notice where it's coming from. That's either incompetence or abuse.

zigzigzag 10y ago

Disruptive behaviour is caused by frustration, and frustration in school is often caused by boredom (it's not like there are many other sources compared to the workplace). The problem with workplace politics is that there are usually two kinds of critical thinking: thinking that boils down to "we are doing OK, but we could do better if we did X" which is the type of critical thinking everyone loves, and then there's "we are doing something obviously wrong and we need to stop", which is literally critical thinking and is invariably risky (it's criticising people, often management). Organisations always say they want independent and critical thinkers, but they hardly ever do. They want yes men who will cheerlead for the side. That's tough on people who genuinely care about an organisation or want to see it succeed because strange or dysfunctional behaviour (ignoring customer feedback for example) can easily occur in almost any workplace, and sometimes there's no positive or upbeat way to say "we should probably listen to our customers" or "maybe that process you just put in place is a waste of time", or whatever the problem of the day is.

TheBobinator 10y ago
I've found the best tactic, being an underling, is to perform the critical thinking for management and continuously improve your area of work. As a funny and relevant anecdote, I used to process returns for an e-tailer and we had a particular type of refurb product that had a different part numbers on the box, in the firmware, and on the back tag. One day when I had the shop running full bore, I stopped for a few hours while the boss was out, grabbed a piece of paper, then spent some time in a thought experiment reverse-engineering the manufacturers supply chain to find out why. I discovered they had specs for these devices for a particular market, models a through z, and wanted to refurb to those specs to maximize profits. We got the cobbled together unique items that met no spec. I went to the manufacturers website, pulled up a list of PN's by model series, and plug and chugged until I got a valid warranty on every unit with 3 different PN's. We also had a lot of mis-shipped, mis-picked, mis-recieved, and mis-advertised product. I asked the guy building the SKU's and Ad's for a spec sheet and then grabbed a factory service manual, and by my logs, discovered the issue was they didn't have the right ports on the side listed. The guy doing the SKU's made a change in how he advertised product, the throughput of devices coming through my shop dropped 80% within 3 weeks. I then had time to do things like assemble reciepts for a dozen AV Head units, find and send skids of them to an ASP, get them repaired and sent back, and restocked. Then we discovered we had someone stealing product. All of those fixes resulted in about $400k a year in savings for a $20 million a year company. How did the CFO Find out about all this? We were selling to a liquidator anything I couldn't fix. They gave us 55c on the dollar of book value when I started, then 35c, then 25c, then 15c, then 5c. Finally nobody would take the garbage I was producing; literally if I had one liquid damaged item I'd use the parts to repair anything and everything else I could and I even did crazy things like using lego's to replace screwable-pegs inside of TV's using 2-part epoxy. So one day about a year after I started the CFO wanders down to the warehouse to see what's going on, and finds 15 skids of absolute garbage. He then turns to my boss, the warehouse operations manager\account manager, and begins yelling "WHAT THE !@!@# ARE YOU DOING? WHY HASN'T THIS BEEN SOLD? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LIQUIDATOR!" and on and on and on. Apparently, nobody in corporate had performed any quantitative analysis. I had with a 200 meg excel 2003 document that would tell me what was coming in and how much it was. I was saving him $400k a year. The cheapskate gave me a buck an hour raise for the effort, what a crok. They kept me around as the company shrunk from 200 employee's to 20 and went through bankruptcy. On the other end they were going to use my refurb shop since that was the only profitable side of the org entertainingly enough. I eventually left the place entirely. The problem in America is that there's a boat-load of executive managers who have no critical thinking skills themselves, so their employee's see that fact, and see decisions are made subjectively or arbitrarily, and they are demotivated or as I call it, they catch "IDon'tGiveAShazbotItus". Lots of people catch the terminal version of that disease; doesn't matter where they go, they will never give a shazbot because they've been lied to so many times. You just cannot work with someone who has no critical thinking skills. There's no striving for continuous improvement and no rewards for it either. My entire career has been about doing bad things to computer and even worse things to executives; I have lost count of the number of people I've gotten fired, including executives. After-all, if some schmuck with 1 IT certification in a warehouse can save you $400k a year at a 20 million a year company, and the CFO doesn't notice where it's coming from. That's either incompetence or abuse.