4 ms·
We talk about management as if they were appointed by corporate divine right. These too are just people, and their job is also just a job. These ‘clever’ polici
by jl2718 5y ago
We talk about management as if they were appointed by corporate divine right. These too are just people, and their job is also just a job. These ‘clever’ policies of top-down social manipulation often fail because there is no such thing as top-down execution of policy. All action in any system or organization is bottom-up. This is tautological. But information only propagates top-down. This is because of destructive mixing on the way up. So any policy that is designed to expect execution according to dictate is bound to fail, as individual actors will seek only their own best benefit and security. This has broad implications across business and politics. Most strategy games (e.g. Civilization) also help imprint this fallacy, and history books can’t avoid simplifying explanations that require omnipotence of a single agent. Its probably more reasonable to say that, while information asymmetry tends to create single points of accumulation for tremendous wealth and influence, the same principle in reverse also says that these are somewhat random choices, and they actually have no real power to do anything but filter, accumulate, and distribute the benefit of actions that that flow through them.
- ramblerman 5y agoYour point about history being oversimplified is pertinent, but pretending a company is actually run bottom-up is just silly. Incentives still matter, and are very much driven top down. If you are incentivized to let go of 10% of your team, then that's what you will do.
- jl2718 5y agoMaybe the point is that central power is always indirect through manipulation of information and financial incentive, the definition of finance being a centralized accumulation of future benefit. Direct power would be to hold a gun to someone’s head and tell them to do something. But the same power doesn’t go along with an email. The power of that email is complicated because it depends on what specific threats or benefits are promised, and how it is measured, and by whom. So it’s very easy for a system of incentives to directly contradict the command given by a policy. For instance, if I tell everybody to nominate the worst performer on their team, who will be fired by popular vote every week, it won’t be long before they all wise up and start voting in their own best interests, which will either be the top performer, or the least loyal to themselves, which would be the new hire, which is exactly what this article is about. The lowest performer, however, is the most loyal, and the strongest political player. Now imagine that they vote for the best performer to become their boss. The most loyal person is getting elected for that role.