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That's a lovely article with a wincingly bad headline. The author does a very good job of describing what happens when managers give instructions and then disco
by sedev 15y ago
That's a lovely article with a wincingly bad headline. The author does a very good job of describing what happens when managers give instructions and then discover that they have instructed people to act counter to the managers' desires. That is not 'misinterpreting'. That is essentially a compiler error; the manager told the employees to do the wrong thing, and the employees trusted that they knew what they were talking about.
In a normal business environment, human cognitive biases about authority act very strongly. I think that a big part of what causes 'bad management' is that managers may tend to think of themselves as buddy-buddy with their subordinates, and rationalize that surely someone will tell them if they make a mistake, issue instructions that seem counterproductive, make bad tradeoffs like the ones in the article, et cetera, et cetera. That's almost always wrong. The incentive structure for normal employees means that you go along with the boss' idiot idea in almost every case, or alternatively that you take it on good faith that your wise and benevolent manager knows what they're doing, and in both cases employees do not critique managers in ways that the managers can hear (by which I mean, both covert conversations and social cues that managers miss).
- dkarl 15y agoIt's more like simple user error than a compiler error. "Aaaagh, why did the computer do that?" "Because you told it to." s/computer/employees/ Also, in his retelling, he skipped the part where the employees pointed out situations where they would be punished for making the right decisions, asked for assurance that doing the right thing for the business would be rewarded (or at least not punished) regardless of the official "goals" and "incentives", and were told not to expect any such consideration. I guarantee that happened, but for some reason he doesn't remember it as an important part of the story.
- sedev 15y agoI hope that we can more widely spread the news: power makes you stupid. I wouldn't say 'for some reason' - I would say 'because of cognitive biases that would afflict any other ordinary human being in his situation'. Power makes you stupid, a summary: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/25/AR2007112501236.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11... - the article in question cites work by Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University and Dacher Keltner of Berkeley. "Keltner and others have shown that power exacerbates many cognitive biases. People who lack power turn out to be more accurate in guessing the opinions of those around them, whereas those in power tend to be inaccurate. Because subordinates are also hesitant to tell superiors things they do not want to hear, the problem gets worse, with powerful people having even less input and perspective about how others think and feel." So I believe that that's a cause of a great deal of bad management - I also believe that's part of why the 37Signals folks have done so well with a minimal-management strategy, they're consciously trying to avoid the way that information becomes tainted when it travels vertically in a hierarchy.