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> The parent comment is making a universal statement, and so it would hypothetically apply to companies everywhere I don't find much value in hypotheicals. Eve

• Apocryphon 6y ago
  > I don't find much value in hypotheicals. Your opinion doesn't change the fact that your response was invalid. You are responding to a normative, idealistic statement about universal values with your own slightly more concrete hypothetical. A misapplied exercise in practicality. > Audi workers would never agree to convert their factory to EV had Tesla not already proven that EVs are something consumers actually want. That seems like a hypothetical without basis. One doubts that General Motors assembly line workers were the ones who killed the EV1. > Tesla was able to ramp up production as fast as it did because they didn't need to run every decision past a union. There are some smart CEOs and there are dumb ones. Who's to say that the incentives given to traditional management schemes are truly correct? Businesses fail all the time. Startups, in particular, fail all of the time, and there are no shortage of egregious examples of boneheaded management decisions, or of shortsighted shareholders. Pointing to a Tesla and Musk, or to an Apple and Jobs, is simply survivorship bias.
  • 6510 6y ago
    I keep [half] joking to my managers that they should spend a few days on the work floor doing those jobs they argue so easy about. Not doing so makes it impossible to prioritize their own tasks properly. There is some child like joy in picking tasks by what they feel like doing.
  • Aunche 6y ago
    > You are responding to a normative, idealistic statement about universal values with your own slightly more concrete hypothetical. What's your point? I obviously don't think the purpose of life is to maximize shareholder value. I'm merely illustrating where I find such idealism falls apart. I could be more specific, but I'm not trying to write a book. You don't need to be a Nobel economist to know how people respond to incentives. An average family person doesn't want to risk their time, money, and health on helping to pivot Audi to a company that makes bleeding edge EVs. A company that is truly revolutionary has to focus as much energy as possible on delivering or some other company is going to do it first. That's why most successful startups are very cult-like. This comes at a cost to the worker and leads to scam companies like Theranos, but the alternative is that you're left behind.
    • Apocryphon 6y ago
      > An average family person doesn't want to risk their time, money, and health on helping to pivot Audi to a company that makes bleeding edge EVs. That article is from 2017. EVs were already more or less an accepted mainstream technology, even though certainly not the majority of the automotive market yet. You're making it sound like it's as difficult as it was for Tesla back in 2003- the union was simply demanding Audi management to respond to the needs of the market and expand its product line, for the betterment of the company and to protect their livelihoods by staying competitive. Audi building EVs does not require, as far as I know, a pivot. Theranos is also a good example to mention. Perhaps if it was a worker-owned co-op or a union there, some sort of countervailing force against both managerial and investor incompetence, that fiasco could have been averted. Perhaps with a system in place to provide support against those powerful forces, and someone sympathetic to listen to whistleblowers, Ian Gibbons would still be alive. It's all well and good to lionize Randian revolutionary lone geniuses, but the creative destruction they tend to wreak in their wake tends to fall upon a lot of the little people. And worse off, these geniuses at world-changing companies are few and far between, and far outnumbered by copycats and wannabes who cause more damage through imitation. We have checks and balances in our societal governance; why not likewise in our corporate governance?