5 ms·

"Hence everybody learns to suck it up and do the bare minimum that keeps them employed, perpetuating the cycle." In my point of view, that's how you lose solut

by Xunjin 6y ago

"Hence everybody learns to suck it up and do the bare minimum that keeps them employed, perpetuating the cycle." In my point of view, that's how you lose solutions to stay in the comfort zone, and I'm not saying the people whom actually "just obey orders" but those who make them. As I gain more experience, with age and some wisdom (I hope), I see that most top-down decisions are actually the worst way to decide things, people who are "at the bottom" maybe not understand how a entire system works however they do really knows (and suffer) on how their work is sub-optimal.

marcosdumay 6y ago
That's evidently correct, and all the empiric results point into correctness too. As always I recommend reading Deming. Or go directly to the Toyota production system. The best working system is one where management sets the goals and workers decide the means, while one trusting each other to do their job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System But somehow, management never accepts this reality. Even the Japanese auto industry is regressing into Taylorism.
- NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
  There may not be that much difference between Lean (Toyota) and Taylorism. Don't forget that Toyota (Toyoda) is not that far from Fordism - "you get whatever color you want as long as it is black". Employees get to tweak the process but the fundamental model stays the same. They don't get to change the assembly line, nor the parts, nor what is assembled. And Toyota guaranteed life-long employment when it was implemented. I've worked the line twice - first time as a teen looking for any work, the second time as an undercover analyst hired to examine why Lean was failing at a plant, both doing the same type of job: electrical component assembly. I got physical injuries (minor) both times. The majority of the assembly line workers had repetitive stress injuries, including losing fine motor skills and wrist control due to use of impact wrenches and exposure to bad ergonomics. If a human delaminates, you can't glue them back. Although rational (Taylorism, Management by Objectives, MBO, OKR, Milestones, management by goals ) vs. normative (Lean / Toyoda, human-centric, Agile, humanist, culture ) division of management styles/rhetoric has been proposed, they should perhaps be seen through the prism of Creative Destriction (not disruption, and surprisingly, CD comes from Marx). In a vulgar approximation, imagine capital-backed entities served by the manager class, which are stressed by short deadlines and performance-tied bonuses and careers. They are constantly shifting basic approximations of solutions and perspectives, without challenging the system. Give employees more autonomy, and output and managerial control suffer. Instill more rigid control, and risk losing the ability to innovate and "knowledge producing" (Drucker of MBO fame) talent such as programmers. In an antagonistic system, whatever you come up with has its own roots of destruction on top of built-in conflict (Marx again). Hence the back-and-forth re-framing between "rational" (Taylorism) and normative "culture, baybe, Holocracy!" so fast that today it is a zombie that has both and neither. You end up with projectification, corporate "culture" that demands the soul and meeting arbitrary "milestones" from employees, but the corporation itself can only guarantee arbitrary termination. There is a great and influential analysis "Design and Devotion: Surges of Rational and Normative Ideologies of Control in Managerial Discourse" by Barley and Kunda. I would suggest reading "Management fashion" by Abrahamson as well. Both can be found through G.scholar, including no-registration copies. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2393449 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2393449 https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amr.1996.9602161572 https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amr.1996.9602161572
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    Sorry, but if all you got from Toyotism was Lean, than you got somewhere already fully geared into Taylorism. There is much more to it, and yeah, even one of the tenets you will get from Deming is that short deadlines and performance-tied bonus and careers can't work. He also goes a great length about empowering employees to change things like part sourcing, but yeah, not the final product. (I don't know about worker health problems, and I imagine that poor as Japan was at the time, any empiric data on it would be useless. But, anyway, I don't think the management structure is the correct place to fix that one problem.) And I'll have to break into your Marxist narrative, but all that was once incredibly successful in a fully capitalist framework. It never became non-competitive, it was only replaced by order of top-down command structures.
    - NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
      I would appreciate an expansion on the "break into". The approach I outline can explain and predict why the two Ts rotate, including at Toyota (Toyota going Taylor, or rather normative - rational). I prefer not to base my experience on what Deming or anyone else wrote, but how their writing relates to real-life practice (though of course as a critic of Taylorism as represented by MBO and other Performance Evaluation rational schools, he is a welcome breath of fresh air). Have you observed, preferably both as a participant and independent, Deming idealism in a functional real-life system? I have only seen a shift towards projectification and cultural hegemony.
      - marcosdumay 6y ago
        What breaks the narrative is that the system is clearly not antagonistic. Giving the correct kind of autonomy to the workers increases every single item that management should care about, at least in a capitalist system. And both logic and evidence point that way. > Have you observed, preferably both as a participant and independent, Deming idealism in a functional real-life system? As a participant, never. As an independent, we are talking about the mentor of the movement that teached the Japanese management how to go from an industry that didn't produce anything good into the highly developed one that outcompeted everybody all ever the world.
yawz 6y ago
Pushing down the decision making is important for that reason. The “makers” know best most if not all of the time. The manager is there for support and for facilitating the learning. E.g. With decisions we make mistakes. As a manager it’s important to ensure that the team reviews past decisions and learns from them to improve the decision making process.
dasil003 6y ago
"Top-down" has become an epithet that disgruntled engineers throw around, but the reality is that there are problems at all layers of an org, and they should be solved at the appropriate level. Trying to solve every problem top-down manifests as micro-management that beats the morale and initiative out of strong ICs. But on the other hand, trying to address everything bottoms-up leads to local maxima, no standardization across tech or product, and warring factions within the company. There is real art to this. Being able to grok the incentives and structures of a vertical slice through the org (C-level, VP, Director, Mgr, IC) as well as the tech (Brand, Product, Pages, Components, APIs, Middleware, Storage, Infra) is a rare and extremely valuable talent that allows solving problems that are impenetrable by any traditionally defined role.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  Everything you said is true. And it still doesn't change the fact that most organizations [I've been in] utilize the top-down approach on 99% with the occasional 1% of bottom-up. That's an unbalanced state of affairs that completely loses very valuable feedback everywhere along the chain. Part of the job of a manager is to find this perfect balance on the level they are working at. And most don't. They just pass the pressure put on them, down below to their underlings.

by Xunjin 6y ago

marcosdumay 6y ago

That's evidently correct, and all the empiric results point into correctness too. As always I recommend reading Deming. Or go directly to the Toyota production system. The best working system is one where management sets the goals and workers decide the means, while one trusting each other to do their job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System But somehow, management never accepts this reality. Even the Japanese auto industry is regressing into Taylorism.

NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
There may not be that much difference between Lean (Toyota) and Taylorism. Don't forget that Toyota (Toyoda) is not that far from Fordism - "you get whatever color you want as long as it is black". Employees get to tweak the process but the fundamental model stays the same. They don't get to change the assembly line, nor the parts, nor what is assembled. And Toyota guaranteed life-long employment when it was implemented. I've worked the line twice - first time as a teen looking for any work, the second time as an undercover analyst hired to examine why Lean was failing at a plant, both doing the same type of job: electrical component assembly. I got physical injuries (minor) both times. The majority of the assembly line workers had repetitive stress injuries, including losing fine motor skills and wrist control due to use of impact wrenches and exposure to bad ergonomics. If a human delaminates, you can't glue them back. Although rational (Taylorism, Management by Objectives, MBO, OKR, Milestones, management by goals ) vs. normative (Lean / Toyoda, human-centric, Agile, humanist, culture ) division of management styles/rhetoric has been proposed, they should perhaps be seen through the prism of Creative Destriction (not disruption, and surprisingly, CD comes from Marx). In a vulgar approximation, imagine capital-backed entities served by the manager class, which are stressed by short deadlines and performance-tied bonuses and careers. They are constantly shifting basic approximations of solutions and perspectives, without challenging the system. Give employees more autonomy, and output and managerial control suffer. Instill more rigid control, and risk losing the ability to innovate and "knowledge producing" (Drucker of MBO fame) talent such as programmers. In an antagonistic system, whatever you come up with has its own roots of destruction on top of built-in conflict (Marx again). Hence the back-and-forth re-framing between "rational" (Taylorism) and normative "culture, baybe, Holocracy!" so fast that today it is a zombie that has both and neither. You end up with projectification, corporate "culture" that demands the soul and meeting arbitrary "milestones" from employees, but the corporation itself can only guarantee arbitrary termination. There is a great and influential analysis "Design and Devotion: Surges of Rational and Normative Ideologies of Control in Managerial Discourse" by Barley and Kunda. I would suggest reading "Management fashion" by Abrahamson as well. Both can be found through G.scholar, including no-registration copies. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2393449 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2393449 https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amr.1996.9602161572 https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amr.1996.9602161572
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Sorry, but if all you got from Toyotism was Lean, than you got somewhere already fully geared into Taylorism. There is much more to it, and yeah, even one of the tenets you will get from Deming is that short deadlines and performance-tied bonus and careers can't work. He also goes a great length about empowering employees to change things like part sourcing, but yeah, not the final product. (I don't know about worker health problems, and I imagine that poor as Japan was at the time, any empiric data on it would be useless. But, anyway, I don't think the management structure is the correct place to fix that one problem.) And I'll have to break into your Marxist narrative, but all that was once incredibly successful in a fully capitalist framework. It never became non-competitive, it was only replaced by order of top-down command structures.
  - NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
    I would appreciate an expansion on the "break into". The approach I outline can explain and predict why the two Ts rotate, including at Toyota (Toyota going Taylor, or rather normative - rational). I prefer not to base my experience on what Deming or anyone else wrote, but how their writing relates to real-life practice (though of course as a critic of Taylorism as represented by MBO and other Performance Evaluation rational schools, he is a welcome breath of fresh air). Have you observed, preferably both as a participant and independent, Deming idealism in a functional real-life system? I have only seen a shift towards projectification and cultural hegemony.
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      What breaks the narrative is that the system is clearly not antagonistic. Giving the correct kind of autonomy to the workers increases every single item that management should care about, at least in a capitalist system. And both logic and evidence point that way. > Have you observed, preferably both as a participant and independent, Deming idealism in a functional real-life system? As a participant, never. As an independent, we are talking about the mentor of the movement that teached the Japanese management how to go from an industry that didn't produce anything good into the highly developed one that outcompeted everybody all ever the world.

yawz 6y ago

Pushing down the decision making is important for that reason. The “makers” know best most if not all of the time. The manager is there for support and for facilitating the learning. E.g. With decisions we make mistakes. As a manager it’s important to ensure that the team reviews past decisions and learns from them to improve the decision making process.

dasil003 6y ago

"Top-down" has become an epithet that disgruntled engineers throw around, but the reality is that there are problems at all layers of an org, and they should be solved at the appropriate level. Trying to solve every problem top-down manifests as micro-management that beats the morale and initiative out of strong ICs. But on the other hand, trying to address everything bottoms-up leads to local maxima, no standardization across tech or product, and warring factions within the company. There is real art to this. Being able to grok the incentives and structures of a vertical slice through the org (C-level, VP, Director, Mgr, IC) as well as the tech (Brand, Product, Pages, Components, APIs, Middleware, Storage, Infra) is a rare and extremely valuable talent that allows solving problems that are impenetrable by any traditionally defined role.

pdimitar 6y ago
Everything you said is true. And it still doesn't change the fact that most organizations [I've been in] utilize the top-down approach on 99% with the occasional 1% of bottom-up. That's an unbalanced state of affairs that completely loses very valuable feedback everywhere along the chain. Part of the job of a manager is to find this perfect balance on the level they are working at. And most don't. They just pass the pressure put on them, down below to their underlings.