>evolved into a group think belief that management could function as fungible & completely replaceable units of work That is just an element of consistency. S

>evolved into a group think belief that management could function as fungible & completely replaceable units of work That is just an element of consistency. Since the 1980s management 'wisdom' has been centered around the idea that all workers should be fungible, replaceable units of work. Ideas like 'if you are irreplaceable, you are expendable' and the notion that your degree of importance to the functioning of a company is also a measure of how much of a liability you are, etc. They're ideas rooted in the notion that a business should prefer to close its doors rather than do anything which could raise the cost of labor in the market. If an individual becomes important in the functioning of a business, they should be eliminated as swiftly as possible because otherwise they will remain and eventually ask for more money. Since you can never, ever, consider granting that request, you will have to fire them at that point and the damage would be even harder to repair than if you had disposed of them when you first realized their importance. So better to eject them when you first realize it and clean up whatever damage that causes when it is more containable. Perhaps that viewpoint might have had some relevance in industries centered around commodity repetitive physical labor, but I would argue that it is overall destructive in knowledge-based industries. It has been phenomenally successful at suppressing the cost of labor (between 1950 and 1980, the median wage of workers rose 75%, between 1980 and 2010 it rose by only 1%) but it's caused a widespread host of much larger problems that threaten the very foundation of the economy.