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When you've been subjected to decades of drivel asserting loudly and repeatedly that the reason CEOs get paid big money is specifically because they are the one
by danaris 4y ago
When you've been subjected to decades of drivel asserting loudly and repeatedly that the reason CEOs get paid big money is specifically because they are the ones who hold the responsibility for screwups like this, you start to think that maybe they should actually be held accountable, just like they say they deserve.
When an individual engineer screws up, if the processes in place are working correctly, that screwup should only cost some time and possibly a bit of money—most likely within an order of magnitude of a few days and $100. This is why we have processes in place: because people are fallible, and it's not good to give any one person that much power.
When a CEO screws up, there's no one to catch that screwup. The buck stops there. So many of these companies are structured specifically to give the CEO some significant degree of autocratic power—the power to say "this is what we will be doing, because I say so", whether or not they have other justifications backing them up—and now that we're saying, "Hey, that kind of power is supposed to come with accountability," you try to tell us they shouldn't?
As for "companies can run fine without one," I'd say that's a very useful hypothesis to test. But your strawman of "give a bunch of money to people on fiverr" isn't the logical way to test it: it's "set up a system with democratic processes in place, create a management committee, possibly with a rotating chairship, and in general give the employees more say over the direction of the company they work for".
- skt5 4y ago> create a management committee, possibly with a rotating chairship, and in general give the employees more say over the direction of the company they work for". this sounds very similar to a government where politicians are elected (un)fairly. likely, this just presents another set of trade-offs.
- danaris 4y agoWhenever you have to make decisions involving multiple humans, tradeoffs are pretty much a guarantee. However, over the past few hundred years, we've been gradually coming to the collective conclusion that autocracy is inferior to democracy for systems involving larger numbers of people and decisions of larger stakes. I don't see why that should apply any less to replacing the hierarchical model of companies, where a CEO can walk into any room and say "You're fired," with a (more-)democratic system, than it did to replacing kingdoms, where a king could walk into any room and say "Off with your head," with a representative democracy.
- HTTP418 4y agoIt's a very different situation. In a country you cannot escape the king, he will be the absolute ruler until he dies. Since there was no escape eventually they were replaced with democracy. You can willingly leave a corporation at anytime you want. Autocracy have an advantage over democracy when it comes to speed of change. Sometimes it's good change (progress) and sometimes it's bad change (i.e. over-hiring). Large corporations that become democratic will lose the ability to react quickly. In order for such companies to survive, the environment must remain consistent (no competition, no new technology).
- danaris 4y agoYou can willingly leave a corporation the same way you could willingly leave a kingdom: easily if you're rich, and with great effort and danger if you're not.
- Apocryphon 4y ago> Large corporations that become democratic will lose the ability to react quickly. Not really clear that corporations that stay autocratic do much better. As with kingdoms that turn into sprawling empires, all you're left is a bunch of middle management petty kings who the CEO-emperor delegates power to, who might not be much better. Bureaucratic rot sets in.