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I once did consulting for a bank, I shall call them La Trappe Financial. They were a European powerhouse who came to North America, launching in Canada first,

I once did consulting for a bank, I shall call them La Trappe Financial. They were a European powerhouse who came to North America, launching in Canada first, and then in the US when they had used the Canadian launch to sort out doing business in North America. The Canadian unit paid a big consulting firm to build an online banking app. Fine. When they launched in the US, the Canadians didn't want the US unit to have the banking app. Why? Because management at Trappist Financial stack-ranked its business units against each other, so if you help another unit, your bonuses will suffer. There was a protracted fight, and eventually the US unit got the source code in one big lump. However, the consultants that had built the app were forbidden to do any work for the US unit, thus the firm I worked for were parachuted in to take over. Development diverged, with both Canada and the US adding new features, but the code forked and neither unit would share its additions with the other unit. So there was much duplication of features, and zero knowledge-sharing. It's not for me to say whether this made La Trappe Financial more successful overall, but I can say that I witnessed a great deal of wasted engineering and lost opportunities that everyone attributed to the perverse incentives created when units compete with each other rather than collaborate. I imagine that they only way they would have cooperated on a project like internet banking would be if someone was savvy enough to create the illusion that only by cooperating could they beat Germany, or A/NZ, or Japan, &c. What a colossal waste.

magduf 7y ago
This is the kind of idiotic thinking you get with Libertarianism. They're thinking, simplistically, that "competition is good", but the problem is that they're already in competition: in your case, the bank is already competing against many other banks out there. In Sears' case, they were already competing against Kohl's, Home Depot, Best Buy, etc. Internal competition might reduce a little waste and get people more motivated, but it isn't made for when considering the outside competition. Another example I can think of is Microsoft under Ballmer; they operated that way to a certain extent. It didn't work out too great for them either, but they were a monopoly of sorts, so they had the luxury of being able to operate that way without it killing them.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  It’s a kind of idiocy that you find in ideologues of all stripes. “My ideology says this thing is axiomatically good, therefore more of this thing must axiomatically be better!” It’s just the nature of ideologues to think this way; you don’t become an ideologue by practicing pragmatism.

magduf 7y ago

This is the kind of idiotic thinking you get with Libertarianism. They're thinking, simplistically, that "competition is good", but the problem is that they're already in competition: in your case, the bank is already competing against many other banks out there. In Sears' case, they were already competing against Kohl's, Home Depot, Best Buy, etc. Internal competition might reduce a little waste and get people more motivated, but it isn't made for when considering the outside competition. Another example I can think of is Microsoft under Ballmer; they operated that way to a certain extent. It didn't work out too great for them either, but they were a monopoly of sorts, so they had the luxury of being able to operate that way without it killing them.

smacktoward 7y ago
It’s a kind of idiocy that you find in ideologues of all stripes. “My ideology says this thing is axiomatically good, therefore more of this thing must axiomatically be better!” It’s just the nature of ideologues to think this way; you don’t become an ideologue by practicing pragmatism.