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> 1990s? That's when being a "company man" ended. Yep - The Dilbert Principle came out in 1996, and had entire chapters devoted to how companies had abandoned
by Bartweiss 9y ago
> 1990s? That's when being a "company man" ended.
Yep - The Dilbert Principle came out in 1996, and had entire chapters devoted to how companies had abandoned long-term loyalty in favor of stock-boosting job cuts. Even by then, people were mocking the transparency of euphemisms like "rightsizing" and "reengineering". If an idea is a naive laugh-line in popular culture, it's probably not also a cutting-edge insight.
I honestly have trouble working out how Taleb thought about that idea enough to specify a date and still got it so badly wrong.
- Animats 9y agoYes. The "company man" is a 50s cliche. Many 1950s movies were made about it, such as "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" and "The View from the 40th Floor". The 1950s were the high point of manual bureaucracy. People were doing with paper and people what's now done with computers. This required huge buildings full of paper-pushers. Assembly-line organization was applied to office work. Because everybody in the 1950s had military experience, office work tended to be organized on military lines, with the military emphasis on uniformity.