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Not really the entire hierarchical structures of corporations is actually highly inefficient it's something a lot of universities have been talking about for a

Not really the entire hierarchical structures of corporations is actually highly inefficient it's something a lot of universities have been talking about for a while now. Which is ironic when you realize most universities are designed similar to churches with indentured servitude.

darkerside 4y ago
So you're saying their theory differs from their practice? Hmm.
- yike321123 4y ago
  Why share the cake when you can have it all to yourself. After all they did spent their entire life getting to that point shouldn't everyone else suffer as well? Maybe just a little worse every iteration until we just stop paying them. /s
rootusrootus 4y ago
I've never been too impressed with what academics think the corporate world is like. Some of them, maybe, are pretty knowledgable, but a lot of them have been inside the academic bubble too long.
- yike321123 4y ago
  Honestly, they're right more than they are wrong under the correct circumstances that is. Too bad being locked in a room for your entire life leads to a lot of other issues instead of experiencing the world and grabbing a better understanding of how everything ties in together. But who would change that after all if we believe what the modern psychologist says altruism doesn't exist.
  - taeric 4y ago
    Are they, though? Specifically in predictability of models. Really good at explaining, but not good at hedging on how likely what happened was to have happened.
    - yike321123 4y ago
      It depends. Science doesn't occur in a vacuum. Change occurs overtime with the experiences of others. No one can do anything independent from the world. In several instances in the world the most meaningful leaps and changes in scientific theory have been when individuals have gone and seen real experiences. Such as nightingale and her contribution to sanitation. In my opinion, any model that predicts any sort of outcome when doing so accurately is overfitted and lacks the proper contextual knowledge necessary. Should the work of actuarial science be validated as just a series of lists to prove the risk and likely hood of death? Should we all have numbers above our heads dependent on the fate and caste we are born into? These are all things these models ignore and misrepresent. If I was born into a lower middle class black family if no one knew who I was would they care about me? My struggles, my pain? So far all that I've seen are people who would rather choose to mock me. Wearing my clothing, pretending to sing my songs, my struggles. Yet nothing changes, no one cares about me, it's not my problem they say. What my ancestors did is not my fault nor my problem. While some in the scientific community care about these issues, the majority just ignores it. Even today all they care about is what book they need to read in order to follow their identity politics over real system change. Having been forced to live a lie, I can't see how or why others would care without having people who have seen and experienced it themselves. When you exclude more than half the world it really does make you wonder if we are right more than we are wrong.
      - edmundsauto 4y ago
        > In my opinion, any model that predicts any sort of outcome when doing so accurately is overfitted and lacks the proper contextual knowledge necessary For me, models that do not make predictions are not very useful. Without predictions about the future, it's very hard to tell if the work is useful moving forward, or if it should be read as a historical analysis that doesn't matter in the current environment. Predictions are critical, they are a primary mechanism to find out if something is useful.
stult 4y ago
This touches on the controversy that sparked Coase's Theory of the Firm. He proposed the idea that firms exist to reduce transaction costs as an explanation for why capitalist firms look like mini-soviets internally, with highly centralized control and planning. Which seems like a contradiction to classical economists. If free markets are so effective, why can't you run a company like a free market? eg have workers bid for tasks from managers. Turns out that is wildly inefficient because of the transaction costs involved in coordinating competitively instead of cooperatively (at least in successful companies). I suspect pandemic WFH has revealed there are much more efficient ways to coordinate cooperatively than simple centralized planning, and those methods generally do not require as much managerial facilitation because they rely much more heavily on asynchronous communication.
- lupire 4y ago
  The offices solution to Coase's paradox is that central planning doesn't scale well. This is similar to federalism -- central governments don't work very well for everything, but scaler local governments are still effective for local issues.
  - vkou 4y ago
    Except that the most successful companies work in the opposite manner from what you describe. Your line workers and manager may know how best to solve a problem, but they are almost never empowered to implement that solution, because upper management is not interested in delegating that power to them. Pour one out to anyone who has ever done a sprint retrospective, or a company 360 review, where all the important problems get skipped over because 'there's nothing we can do about this, this, and that.' Line workers and managers are given an incredibly narrow window in which they are permitted to operate. Anything beyond that needs beurocratic approval. Much like in the Soviet Union, sometimes that beurocracy is staffed by intelligent human beings, but usually it is staffed by donkeys. People who care enough about doing their work find ways to work around the latter, or just give up and punch in their 9-5.
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
throwaway93982 4y ago
Yep, hierarchy comes from religion (hierarkhia, "rule of a high preist"). Traditional capitalist hierarchical organization is just one of many potential hierarchies, so definitely it could be improved. But hierarchy is ingrained in culture, and culture is probably the third hardest thing in the universe to change, after genetics and cancelling your gym membership.
- hallway_monitor 4y ago
  It seems to me that hierarchy is ingrained in nature, and human nature is an extension of that. There will always be a hierarchy in any system of living (and therefore competing) organisms. It seems more productive to focus on making sure the difference between the top and bottom doesn't get too extreme, rather than lamenting the fact of nature and wishing there was no such thing as competition.
  - trhway 4y ago
    The nature didn't for the most part had software nor networks, and thus couldn't fully explore and utilize the alternative approach of self organization from the bottom up with closed loop feedback to achieve desired emergent properties/product/etc. There are good chances that many known human hierarchies are going the way of dinosaurs.
    - FerociousTimes 4y ago
      Does this scale?
    - la6472 4y ago
      Exactly lot of middle management functions can be automated and even more objective evaluation can be done.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  If you are talking about hierarchy copying the Catholic Church, well the church also copied the Roman government, that appeared mostly naturally from the existence of an imperium.
xwdv 4y ago
By far the most inefficient part of the hierarchy is at the very bottom. Workers slacking off, not working optimally, and still getting paid for the full 40 hours. Wouldn’t need so much redundancy if you could truly get their full output.
- tonyedgecombe 4y ago
  That's a management problem as well.
- alan-hn 4y ago
  Are you aware of any data or studies that back up this claim? I would love to read about it
- phoe-krk 4y ago
  > if you could truly get their full output. Getting the relative most out of the bottom line workers and finding and taking care of the underperformers is the direct responsibility of their managers, and I'm saying this unironically. Managing is about being a performance multiplier, and the most hands-on part of management always involves concrete teams of people doing concrete dirty work. It's the manager managers that are the problem mentioned here.
  - cpeterso 4y ago
    And the productivity of line workers doesn't matter if management is prioritizing the wrong projects. Bad managers have a bigger negative impact than bad line workers.
- akomtu 4y ago
  It's always the horses who fail the king. If only those lazy animals did more than the bare minimum, the king wouldn't need to be such a despot.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  > Wouldn’t need so much redundancy if you could truly get their full output. The incentive structure is that those workers capture much less than the value of their total output. If they worked harder so the firm required less employees, how do they benefit?
mvkel 4y ago
I'm not sure what you mean. If you have a > 100 person company, you either have managers, or you have too many reporting to too few.
blindmute 4y ago
Yeah I'm sure the academics with a preconceived agenda against hierarchy of all forms have figured out how every successful business is doing it wrong

darkerside 4y ago

So you're saying their theory differs from their practice? Hmm.

yike321123 4y ago
Why share the cake when you can have it all to yourself. After all they did spent their entire life getting to that point shouldn't everyone else suffer as well? Maybe just a little worse every iteration until we just stop paying them. /s

rootusrootus 4y ago

I've never been too impressed with what academics think the corporate world is like. Some of them, maybe, are pretty knowledgable, but a lot of them have been inside the academic bubble too long.

yike321123 4y ago
Honestly, they're right more than they are wrong under the correct circumstances that is. Too bad being locked in a room for your entire life leads to a lot of other issues instead of experiencing the world and grabbing a better understanding of how everything ties in together. But who would change that after all if we believe what the modern psychologist says altruism doesn't exist.
- taeric 4y ago
  Are they, though? Specifically in predictability of models. Really good at explaining, but not good at hedging on how likely what happened was to have happened.
  - yike321123 4y ago
    It depends. Science doesn't occur in a vacuum. Change occurs overtime with the experiences of others. No one can do anything independent from the world. In several instances in the world the most meaningful leaps and changes in scientific theory have been when individuals have gone and seen real experiences. Such as nightingale and her contribution to sanitation. In my opinion, any model that predicts any sort of outcome when doing so accurately is overfitted and lacks the proper contextual knowledge necessary. Should the work of actuarial science be validated as just a series of lists to prove the risk and likely hood of death? Should we all have numbers above our heads dependent on the fate and caste we are born into? These are all things these models ignore and misrepresent. If I was born into a lower middle class black family if no one knew who I was would they care about me? My struggles, my pain? So far all that I've seen are people who would rather choose to mock me. Wearing my clothing, pretending to sing my songs, my struggles. Yet nothing changes, no one cares about me, it's not my problem they say. What my ancestors did is not my fault nor my problem. While some in the scientific community care about these issues, the majority just ignores it. Even today all they care about is what book they need to read in order to follow their identity politics over real system change. Having been forced to live a lie, I can't see how or why others would care without having people who have seen and experienced it themselves. When you exclude more than half the world it really does make you wonder if we are right more than we are wrong.
    - edmundsauto 4y ago
      > In my opinion, any model that predicts any sort of outcome when doing so accurately is overfitted and lacks the proper contextual knowledge necessary For me, models that do not make predictions are not very useful. Without predictions about the future, it's very hard to tell if the work is useful moving forward, or if it should be read as a historical analysis that doesn't matter in the current environment. Predictions are critical, they are a primary mechanism to find out if something is useful.

stult 4y ago

This touches on the controversy that sparked Coase's Theory of the Firm. He proposed the idea that firms exist to reduce transaction costs as an explanation for why capitalist firms look like mini-soviets internally, with highly centralized control and planning. Which seems like a contradiction to classical economists. If free markets are so effective, why can't you run a company like a free market? eg have workers bid for tasks from managers. Turns out that is wildly inefficient because of the transaction costs involved in coordinating competitively instead of cooperatively (at least in successful companies). I suspect pandemic WFH has revealed there are much more efficient ways to coordinate cooperatively than simple centralized planning, and those methods generally do not require as much managerial facilitation because they rely much more heavily on asynchronous communication.

lupire 4y ago
The offices solution to Coase's paradox is that central planning doesn't scale well. This is similar to federalism -- central governments don't work very well for everything, but scaler local governments are still effective for local issues.
- vkou 4y ago
  Except that the most successful companies work in the opposite manner from what you describe. Your line workers and manager may know how best to solve a problem, but they are almost never empowered to implement that solution, because upper management is not interested in delegating that power to them. Pour one out to anyone who has ever done a sprint retrospective, or a company 360 review, where all the important problems get skipped over because 'there's nothing we can do about this, this, and that.' Line workers and managers are given an incredibly narrow window in which they are permitted to operate. Anything beyond that needs beurocratic approval. Much like in the Soviet Union, sometimes that beurocracy is staffed by intelligent human beings, but usually it is staffed by donkeys. People who care enough about doing their work find ways to work around the latter, or just give up and punch in their 9-5.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago

throwaway93982 4y ago

Yep, hierarchy comes from religion (hierarkhia, "rule of a high preist"). Traditional capitalist hierarchical organization is just one of many potential hierarchies, so definitely it could be improved. But hierarchy is ingrained in culture, and culture is probably the third hardest thing in the universe to change, after genetics and cancelling your gym membership.

hallway_monitor 4y ago
It seems to me that hierarchy is ingrained in nature, and human nature is an extension of that. There will always be a hierarchy in any system of living (and therefore competing) organisms. It seems more productive to focus on making sure the difference between the top and bottom doesn't get too extreme, rather than lamenting the fact of nature and wishing there was no such thing as competition.
- trhway 4y ago
  The nature didn't for the most part had software nor networks, and thus couldn't fully explore and utilize the alternative approach of self organization from the bottom up with closed loop feedback to achieve desired emergent properties/product/etc. There are good chances that many known human hierarchies are going the way of dinosaurs.
  - FerociousTimes 4y ago
    Does this scale?
  - la6472 4y ago
    Exactly lot of middle management functions can be automated and even more objective evaluation can be done.
marcosdumay 4y ago
If you are talking about hierarchy copying the Catholic Church, well the church also copied the Roman government, that appeared mostly naturally from the existence of an imperium.

xwdv 4y ago

By far the most inefficient part of the hierarchy is at the very bottom. Workers slacking off, not working optimally, and still getting paid for the full 40 hours. Wouldn’t need so much redundancy if you could truly get their full output.

tonyedgecombe 4y ago
That's a management problem as well.
alan-hn 4y ago
Are you aware of any data or studies that back up this claim? I would love to read about it
phoe-krk 4y ago
> if you could truly get their full output. Getting the relative most out of the bottom line workers and finding and taking care of the underperformers is the direct responsibility of their managers, and I'm saying this unironically. Managing is about being a performance multiplier, and the most hands-on part of management always involves concrete teams of people doing concrete dirty work. It's the manager managers that are the problem mentioned here.
- cpeterso 4y ago
  And the productivity of line workers doesn't matter if management is prioritizing the wrong projects. Bad managers have a bigger negative impact than bad line workers.
akomtu 4y ago
It's always the horses who fail the king. If only those lazy animals did more than the bare minimum, the king wouldn't need to be such a despot.
willcipriano 4y ago
> Wouldn’t need so much redundancy if you could truly get their full output. The incentive structure is that those workers capture much less than the value of their total output. If they worked harder so the firm required less employees, how do they benefit?

mvkel 4y ago

I'm not sure what you mean. If you have a > 100 person company, you either have managers, or you have too many reporting to too few.

blindmute 4y ago

Yeah I'm sure the academics with a preconceived agenda against hierarchy of all forms have figured out how every successful business is doing it wrong