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> The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. This has been the bane of my corporate life for

> The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. This has been the bane of my corporate life for almost 30 years now. The ED's just don't feel they have to understand the technical details of what's happening underneath them, which leads to the pervasive culture in all Fortune 1000's: the middle managers run around creating little fiefdoms, and fighting over their share of the department's budget. In my current company's onboard training, I counted 5 dimensions of cross-functional reporting. Also, there are at least 4 major IT departments. Who's responsible for what? Who knows! It's impossible to know! But they're fighting about it, and every group has a new policy or layer to add, every couple of months, to justify their existence. Meanwhile, people are just trying to do their jobs in the face of impossible deadlines due to workflow congestion caused by 40-year-old mainframe constraints.

mhh__ 4y ago
Social media is now littered with lifestyle-consultants who sell this grand idea of becoming an "analyst" or consultant of some kind, raking in loads of money while going to the onsite gym and eating smoothie bowls. No knowledge of the domain, or statical training required. Good for them, but if you hire these kinds of people in your business you deserve to go bankrupt.
int0x2e 4y ago
I suspect it will never happen, but I would love to work at a company that has front-line managers and recognized "thought leaders", and nothing else at all, most of all - no middle managers, little to no concept of "promo work", etc. Once you remove the incentive for managers to grow their org (because there's a point where managing more people directly becomes infeasible, or at the very least - painful), you'll have little to no politics, no more constant re-orgs, etc. Wishful thinking, I know...
hintymad 4y ago
> which leads to the pervasive culture in all Fortune 1000's: I feel this is the same problem as an online community faces: the density of talent gets diluted over time as the community grows larger. When you only 1000 members in Quora, you get detailed and nuanced answers that open your eyes and expand your mind. When you have 100M users in quora, most of the answers are meh. Similarly, when a company grows rapidly with only few hundreds of people, you get amazing talent as described in the book Show Stopper. When the company grows to north of $1T with hundreds of thousands of people, well, you get current-day Microsoft and eventually IBM

mhh__ 4y ago

Social media is now littered with lifestyle-consultants who sell this grand idea of becoming an "analyst" or consultant of some kind, raking in loads of money while going to the onsite gym and eating smoothie bowls. No knowledge of the domain, or statical training required. Good for them, but if you hire these kinds of people in your business you deserve to go bankrupt.

int0x2e 4y ago

I suspect it will never happen, but I would love to work at a company that has front-line managers and recognized "thought leaders", and nothing else at all, most of all - no middle managers, little to no concept of "promo work", etc. Once you remove the incentive for managers to grow their org (because there's a point where managing more people directly becomes infeasible, or at the very least - painful), you'll have little to no politics, no more constant re-orgs, etc. Wishful thinking, I know...

hintymad 4y ago

> which leads to the pervasive culture in all Fortune 1000's: I feel this is the same problem as an online community faces: the density of talent gets diluted over time as the community grows larger. When you only 1000 members in Quora, you get detailed and nuanced answers that open your eyes and expand your mind. When you have 100M users in quora, most of the answers are meh. Similarly, when a company grows rapidly with only few hundreds of people, you get amazing talent as described in the book Show Stopper. When the company grows to north of $1T with hundreds of thousands of people, well, you get current-day Microsoft and eventually IBM