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Yeah, applying “free market principles” instead of getting workers to just _make better decisions_ is real consultant bullshit that upper management eats right

by rtpg 7y ago

Yeah, applying “free market principles” instead of getting workers to just _make better decisions_ is real consultant bullshit that upper management eats right up Imagine you have a bunch of workers who don’t know how to effectively avoid meetings, because they haven’t learned about working more asynchronously. You start charging them for the meeting rooms Now you have a bunch of people who don’t know how to effectively work without meetings, who can’t use meeting rooms anymore.

dmix 7y ago
These guys can get heavily rewarded by using those meetings effectively. It's hardly just punishing people for doing regular business activity, it's all about earning bonuses on top of a base income combined with a decentralized managerial approach. It says top performers can get a full years salary each quarter which is hardly working for some peanuts like most bonuses. The workers can choose which managers to work under based on their ability to perform, while allowing workers to bid and propose what to work on, while freeing up budget capital directly under the people doing the actual work. Which together is an amazing concept by itself. Plus I don't see how this fuels consultant speak or useless managerial processes. If anything this is very hostile to those types of people who feed off useless meetings, long email threads, powerpoint presentations, unwieldy google docs, etc at high hourly rates. I can't count how much of my career (and millions of other people's careers) was wasted appeasing heirachical managerial processes, usually via useless meetings so the managers can feel like they are doing something. Although I agree that the small stuff like charging for "space for a wet umbrella" is taking the concept too far. Sometimes basic ideas work really well in some core areas... then people get excited and try to pigeonhole it onto everything (gamification is a good example of this in software). The other challenge is avoiding rewarding "vanity metrics", which means they need a very good analytics and data science teams working with top management to establish KPIs, with frequent retroactives to evolve the reward models. This also obviously isn't for everyone but I could see this working very very well with certain types of people. Valve has a similar structure, minus the currency part, which resulted from hiring a very left-leaning economist to help build out a decentralized company structure. So it's not just "free markets" vs top-down authoritative control. But rather strict hierarchical managerial structures vs decentralized individual units. Combined with a purely fixed compensation vs a basic income + fluid performance based compensation. TLDR: It sounds brilliant to me, given a couple of the above asterisks (avoiding vanity metrics; pushing back on pigeonholing incentive systems onto everything just because you can; not every personality or industry niche flourishes in these types of environments).

by rtpg 7y ago

dmix 7y ago

These guys can get heavily rewarded by using those meetings effectively. It's hardly just punishing people for doing regular business activity, it's all about earning bonuses on top of a base income combined with a decentralized managerial approach. It says top performers can get a full years salary each quarter which is hardly working for some peanuts like most bonuses. The workers can choose which managers to work under based on their ability to perform, while allowing workers to bid and propose what to work on, while freeing up budget capital directly under the people doing the actual work. Which together is an amazing concept by itself. Plus I don't see how this fuels consultant speak or useless managerial processes. If anything this is very hostile to those types of people who feed off useless meetings, long email threads, powerpoint presentations, unwieldy google docs, etc at high hourly rates. I can't count how much of my career (and millions of other people's careers) was wasted appeasing heirachical managerial processes, usually via useless meetings so the managers can feel like they are doing something. Although I agree that the small stuff like charging for "space for a wet umbrella" is taking the concept too far. Sometimes basic ideas work really well in some core areas... then people get excited and try to pigeonhole it onto everything (gamification is a good example of this in software). The other challenge is avoiding rewarding "vanity metrics", which means they need a very good analytics and data science teams working with top management to establish KPIs, with frequent retroactives to evolve the reward models. This also obviously isn't for everyone but I could see this working very very well with certain types of people. Valve has a similar structure, minus the currency part, which resulted from hiring a very left-leaning economist to help build out a decentralized company structure. So it's not just "free markets" vs top-down authoritative control. But rather strict hierarchical managerial structures vs decentralized individual units. Combined with a purely fixed compensation vs a basic income + fluid performance based compensation. TLDR: It sounds brilliant to me, given a couple of the above asterisks (avoiding vanity metrics; pushing back on pigeonholing incentive systems onto everything just because you can; not every personality or industry niche flourishes in these types of environments).