10 ms·

I liked the book and agree with a lot of it's conclusions, but I consider relying on people's own answers to be a methodological error in the research. Line emp

I liked the book and agree with a lot of it's conclusions, but I consider relying on people's own answers to be a methodological error in the research. Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing. For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization. Not to say executives don't put people into bullshit jobs for exactly the reasons Graeber gets at. It's just that their (employees) judgement is biased and so there will be false positives. Haven't most people been on a project where people thought some task assigned was a waste of time, that maybe looking back was actually valuable?

woodruffw 3y ago
I think you're right that line employees often lack the "big picture," but the big picture is also frequently not required. An anecdote from one of my friends, who works in the finance department of a university: her entire job is to copy rows from one piece of software (PeopleSoft) into another piece of software. She's told which rows to copy by another person in the department (via email), who in turn is copying them from a third piece of software. All of this could be automated without any "big picture" changes, and everybody who works these jobs is aware of that fact; hence "bullshit."
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  Is it bullshit, though? It's definitely tedious and clearly she's replaceable, but until she's replaced, presumably there is a reason that the rows need to get copied into that other piece of software. Maybe not - maybe there was once a reason and now the whole thing's vestigial and nobody's really thought about it enough to realize she can be fired, but I would wager that more likely that not, there is an actual reason that task needs to be done. I think that too often folks conflate the fact that a job is boring/tedious/simple/whatever other negative characteristics with the idea that it's "bullshit," when really it does serve a useful purpose and is worth more to the company than they're paying in salary to the person doing it.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    The point is that they think it's bullshit. The operation of copying rows itself exists for an intelligible reason (settling the university's accounts), but the dedicated role of "row copier" is a bullshit job from the vantage point of the people working it. No shared notion of "bullshit" needs to exist between the two of us (or you and Graeber, me and Graeber, etc.). Assuming that we need to agree on what actually constitutes a "bullshit job" is making the same error that the GP points out.
    - conjectures 3y ago
      Yes, this is thread is developing some weird capitalist inverse of marxist 'false consciousness' theory. Someone comes to you and says, "my job is pointless and should not exist." The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital and their self-report is deluded."
      - kapp_in_life 3y ago
        >The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital and their self-report is deluded." The conclusion is drawn because presumably someone thinks they output enough value to continue paying them for their work. That person might be wrong, and maybe some PE firm or consultants will come through and cull the chaff to capture the lost expenses but the person themselves doing the work probably doesn't have the full perspective.
      - drewcoo 3y ago
        I think people mistake middle-brow contrarianism spoken with confidence with actual intelligence. I take it as the software version of virtue signaling.
      - idopmstuff 3y ago
        It's not that the conclusion is drawn, it's that we recognize the possibility that self-perception of the value of one's job is not necessarily an actually good measure of the value of that job.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Reminds me of when my foreign wife, new to my country and still lacking local-language skills, settled for an entry-level job at a multinational. It was glorified data entry, and after she described her job to me in detail, I said, “That could be automated with just a few lines of AWK.”
  - 13of40 3y ago
    Years ago I was doing QA for a flight simulator, and they decided that we would add every airport in the US to it. Not detailed for most, just number of buildings, runway orientation, etc. The FAA conveniently published the info, so they bought a stack of little blue books and had half a dozen of us transcribe them into Excel over a few days. Of course the data was available on disk, but the boss didn't want to take the risk of nobody in our giant building full of computer programmers being able to crack the government's database format.
  - cylinder714 3y ago
    Years ago at my sysadmin job, I thought about having a lapel button made: I WAS REPLACED BY A CRON JOB
  - analog31 3y ago
    Then the lines of AWK fail. I believe one reason for the continual use of human workers in information processing jobs is that they (we?) can keep the system running when it's broken, which turns out to be most of the time. This could be a widespread "big picture" reason for many bullshit jobs.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      I disagree. I believe that the lack of such automation is due to the clerical class largely forgetting that scripting languages exist since the mouse-based desktop-computer paradigm became entrenched in the 1990s. In the 1980s, awk and Emacs Lisp were taught to middle-aged female secretaries at various corporations, such scripting wasn’t considered something beyond an ordinary employee’s ken.
- bumby 3y ago
  A lack of big picture understanding is often what creates “bullshit” jobs. Consider when someone is doing something simply because “That’s the way we’ve always done it” with no understanding on how it fits into the larger scheme of things. When business goals or processes change, these jobs persist out of simple inertia because people have lacked the understanding of their original relevance (and more recent obsolescence)
  - version_five 3y ago
    Yes this definitely happens. I'd say the flipside though is Chesterton's fence, where there's a good reason some things are the way that they are, but people with limited perspective say they're pointless. Both things happen and it's hard to tell which is which.
    - bumby 3y ago
      Sure, but the chestertons fence scenario isn’t a bullshit job. It’s just not understanding the system. My point was more pressing back on the idea that someone can just be a cog without knowing the larger machine.
- pharmakom 3y ago
  Perfect example of how RPA with a sprinkling of LLMs will change the world of work.
- sebastialonso 3y ago
  bumby is on right on the money. I've seen it happen: a poor understanding of the big picture leads to pretty common scenarios: department and role duplicity, unnecessary redundancy and cases like the one you mentioned. Personally it's pretty obvious the problem arises precisely because no one has the visibility that there's people doing bullshit jobs, meaning the process can be automated. When you say "automated with big picture": who do you think has 1) the incentives to fix the issue; 2) the power to order that and 3) the cultural capital to push for a change in the old ways? Who do you think will "run the automation"?
  - esafak 3y ago
    That's an executive failure to communicate (the big picture). Sometimes they don't know that they're failing, and sometimes they're just beyond their depth.
- esafak 3y ago
  Carl Icahn offers a great illustration of the point that executives can think it's BS too. He once acquired a firm that had an office whose business purpose nobody was able to explain to him so he fired twelve floors of workers. https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/i-fired-12-floors-of-people-icahns-hostile-strategy-that-musk-could-emulate/ https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/i-fired-12-floors-of-...
- taskforcegemini 3y ago
  in my experience the big picture is usually not given for bullshit reasons, for instance because someone thinks it is not required.
bakuninsbart 3y ago
> I consider relying on people's own answers to be a methodological error in the research. If the conclusion of the research is "these jobs are bullshit", then I agree, but if it is about how people are doing in these jobs, it is completely valid. Graeber was mixing these in his book to have more popular appeal, which is bad. > Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing. That's what Marx called alienation of labor. While it may increase efficiency, it takes all the pleasure out of work. But that's not really the topic of the book: There's entropy in any larger organization, and I'm sure we all have an example or two of people who are a pure waste of energy in their position.
- a1o 3y ago
  > That's what Marx called alienation of labor. I am almost positive Adam Smith pointed to this problem before with the pin factory example
  - jaggederest 3y ago
    You might not be surprised to learn that Marx, as an economist among other things, was almost certainly familiar with Adam Smith's work. Capital, for example, was at least partly a direct critique of On The Wealth of Nations.
whiplash451 3y ago
If people complain about leadership decision en masse, then maybe the leadership failed to explain the decisions at the first place. Give people a meaning and they will do much better work. It’s not rocket science.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  > Give people a meaning and they will do much better work. It’s not rocket science. This sounds good, but it's honestly just not realistic in a lot of jobs. How are you going to make working at an Amazon warehouse meaningful? Stocking shelves at Walmart? Making fries at McDonalds? You can give the usual platitudes of how you're helping to make sure that people in your community can get the goods/food/whatever they need, but I think most people know that they're not really contributing to the betterment of society in a lot of jobs. And to be clear, that's not just menial labor - I've been a PM on some products that could disappear off the face of the earth without making anybody especially worse off (except the guy managing the part of the operation that used our software, but ultimately he'd go to a competitor and all would be fine). I think that it's often better to forget the idea that work needs to be deeply meaningful and treat people with the respect of recognizing that they're there for a paycheck and nothing else, and then try to do what you can to make the day-to-day work easier and more pleasant. Meanwhile I'll be hoping against hope that when these meaningless jobs get replaced by robots and AI that we get UBI and people can actually work to find meaning.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    I think people have this idea that meaning must not be fair compensation (or put another way, adequate compensation relative to the size of the company and demands required). I think excluding compensation from those jobs, meaning higher compensation, from the idea of meaning is losing sight of it all. There at a lot of jobs that if people were compensated better they would find it to be more meaningful to engage with. It can be a primary motivation to simply do well because they feel fairly valued. It’s not all heart and soul stuff
  - whiplash451 3y ago
    Your point about warehouses and fast foods is a fallacy. If you talk to these workers, you can tell those who have a careful manager from those who don’t.
littlestymaar 3y ago
> For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization. Because of course, the executive are always driving things in the optimal way, but only them can see it… In fact, in most orgs the higher in the management position you climb, the more acutely you see the organisational warts of the company, which more often than not, is governed not according to some clever plan from the executives, but instead is the results of political struggles between entities whose leader often hate each other.
coldtea 3y ago
>I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization. There are lots of instances that the leadership decisions are BS, and hamper growth or drive the company to the ground.
- bboygravity 3y ago
  There's also instances of leadership being installed with the goal to drive a company into the ground. Using BCG consultants for example.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    cough Nokia cough
bumby 3y ago
If you ever start feeling bad about your job being pointless, remember that someone somewhere is installing a blinker light on a BMW. -advice (and an old joke) from a former colleague
lr4444lr 3y ago
Having leadership that can't help you see the big picture and leaves you feeling like a duct taper or a goon is a problem in and of itself, for multiple reasons.
civilized 3y ago
I don't think it's an error to ask people what they think. It's one imperfect source of information, and better than just blindly assuming that any money spent on wages or salary is spent on something truly "productive" regardless of the perceptions of those doing the work. Graeber was an anthropologist. Anthropologists want to understand how people feel about their lives and why. They don't take feelings of meaninglessness to imply that, objectively, a job could be cut without consequence. Just that many jobs don't satisfy a human thirst to be doing something subjectively worthwhile.
why5s 3y ago
> but I consider relying on people's own answers to be a methodological error in the research. Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing. Is it not problematic that so many people feel that their jobs are bullshit? Is that an issue with the individual or society at large?
- toofy 3y ago
  > Is that an issue with the individual or society at large? i think it’s likely a problem with both. no matter how many repeatedly delude themselves otherwise, both society and the individual are inextricable.
rgblambda 3y ago
>Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing. Been a while since I read Graeber's book but I recall one self reported "bullshit job" being to lift rocks scattered across a field and put them in a pile. The people doing the task thought it was a time wasting activity as they were unaware that winter frost pushes up new rocks every year. It's possible that a lot of these so called bullshit jobs are just jobs where the purpose hasn't been explained to the employee.
kamaal 3y ago
>>For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization. Common theme in most of the executive decisions that I've seen. Lets shutdown product X, it costs us Y to run. We could use ~X from a different company that costs Y-2.5% to run. Then only months to an year later- We shouldn't have shut down X, as ~X is not what we actually want and our initial budgeting didn't cover it but we need 2Y to pay for and rebuilding X could cost us up to 10Y-20Y. People at the top generally don't have what is 'precisely' needed. And the kind of resources it could to go about achieving it.
avgcorrection 3y ago
Oh, so then the problem is only that they are spending their nine-to-five in an alienated existence and it is impossible (“They don't have the executive view”) for them to fix it. No biggie.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
>Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing. And executives do not understand the details of what is actually happening on the production floor. They might be fed inaccurate information or outright fantasies by middle management. This is how Russian leadership believed they had winter uniforms, but in reality those uniforms did not exist. The same power dynamics, hiding of errors, exaduration of what convenient, happens in companies. >For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization. So you could use the same logic to say that electorate has no business complaining about decisions taken by politicians, after all they have no big picture view and don’t have access to the report that politicians do.
notfromhere 3y ago
Line workers have a better idea of whether their jobs make any kind of sense. Yes, they don't often have the executive view, but the executives frequently have no idea how the work gets done all the way down the chain; they have a huge amount of blindness as to the realities and limitations of things on the ground. Especially at large organizations, they're relying on summaries of summaries of summaries observed by line managers summarizing information. Tons of information is lost that way. This is why high-level strategy fails. Theoretical ideas hit reality and fall apart pretty quickly. Few executives are grounded enough to actually know how things work.

woodruffw 3y ago

I think you're right that line employees often lack the "big picture," but the big picture is also frequently not required. An anecdote from one of my friends, who works in the finance department of a university: her entire job is to copy rows from one piece of software (PeopleSoft) into another piece of software. She's told which rows to copy by another person in the department (via email), who in turn is copying them from a third piece of software. All of this could be automated without any "big picture" changes, and everybody who works these jobs is aware of that fact; hence "bullshit."

idopmstuff 3y ago
Is it bullshit, though? It's definitely tedious and clearly she's replaceable, but until she's replaced, presumably there is a reason that the rows need to get copied into that other piece of software. Maybe not - maybe there was once a reason and now the whole thing's vestigial and nobody's really thought about it enough to realize she can be fired, but I would wager that more likely that not, there is an actual reason that task needs to be done. I think that too often folks conflate the fact that a job is boring/tedious/simple/whatever other negative characteristics with the idea that it's "bullshit," when really it does serve a useful purpose and is worth more to the company than they're paying in salary to the person doing it.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  The point is that they think it's bullshit. The operation of copying rows itself exists for an intelligible reason (settling the university's accounts), but the dedicated role of "row copier" is a bullshit job from the vantage point of the people working it. No shared notion of "bullshit" needs to exist between the two of us (or you and Graeber, me and Graeber, etc.). Assuming that we need to agree on what actually constitutes a "bullshit job" is making the same error that the GP points out.
  - conjectures 3y ago
    Yes, this is thread is developing some weird capitalist inverse of marxist 'false consciousness' theory. Someone comes to you and says, "my job is pointless and should not exist." The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital and their self-report is deluded."
    - kapp_in_life 3y ago
      >The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital and their self-report is deluded." The conclusion is drawn because presumably someone thinks they output enough value to continue paying them for their work. That person might be wrong, and maybe some PE firm or consultants will come through and cull the chaff to capture the lost expenses but the person themselves doing the work probably doesn't have the full perspective.
    - drewcoo 3y ago
      I think people mistake middle-brow contrarianism spoken with confidence with actual intelligence. I take it as the software version of virtue signaling.
    - idopmstuff 3y ago
      It's not that the conclusion is drawn, it's that we recognize the possibility that self-perception of the value of one's job is not necessarily an actually good measure of the value of that job.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Reminds me of when my foreign wife, new to my country and still lacking local-language skills, settled for an entry-level job at a multinational. It was glorified data entry, and after she described her job to me in detail, I said, “That could be automated with just a few lines of AWK.”
- 13of40 3y ago
  Years ago I was doing QA for a flight simulator, and they decided that we would add every airport in the US to it. Not detailed for most, just number of buildings, runway orientation, etc. The FAA conveniently published the info, so they bought a stack of little blue books and had half a dozen of us transcribe them into Excel over a few days. Of course the data was available on disk, but the boss didn't want to take the risk of nobody in our giant building full of computer programmers being able to crack the government's database format.
- cylinder714 3y ago
  Years ago at my sysadmin job, I thought about having a lapel button made: I WAS REPLACED BY A CRON JOB
- analog31 3y ago
  Then the lines of AWK fail. I believe one reason for the continual use of human workers in information processing jobs is that they (we?) can keep the system running when it's broken, which turns out to be most of the time. This could be a widespread "big picture" reason for many bullshit jobs.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    I disagree. I believe that the lack of such automation is due to the clerical class largely forgetting that scripting languages exist since the mouse-based desktop-computer paradigm became entrenched in the 1990s. In the 1980s, awk and Emacs Lisp were taught to middle-aged female secretaries at various corporations, such scripting wasn’t considered something beyond an ordinary employee’s ken.
bumby 3y ago
A lack of big picture understanding is often what creates “bullshit” jobs. Consider when someone is doing something simply because “That’s the way we’ve always done it” with no understanding on how it fits into the larger scheme of things. When business goals or processes change, these jobs persist out of simple inertia because people have lacked the understanding of their original relevance (and more recent obsolescence)
- version_five 3y ago
  Yes this definitely happens. I'd say the flipside though is Chesterton's fence, where there's a good reason some things are the way that they are, but people with limited perspective say they're pointless. Both things happen and it's hard to tell which is which.
  - bumby 3y ago
    Sure, but the chestertons fence scenario isn’t a bullshit job. It’s just not understanding the system. My point was more pressing back on the idea that someone can just be a cog without knowing the larger machine.
pharmakom 3y ago
Perfect example of how RPA with a sprinkling of LLMs will change the world of work.
sebastialonso 3y ago
bumby is on right on the money. I've seen it happen: a poor understanding of the big picture leads to pretty common scenarios: department and role duplicity, unnecessary redundancy and cases like the one you mentioned. Personally it's pretty obvious the problem arises precisely because no one has the visibility that there's people doing bullshit jobs, meaning the process can be automated. When you say "automated with big picture": who do you think has 1) the incentives to fix the issue; 2) the power to order that and 3) the cultural capital to push for a change in the old ways? Who do you think will "run the automation"?
- esafak 3y ago
  That's an executive failure to communicate (the big picture). Sometimes they don't know that they're failing, and sometimes they're just beyond their depth.
esafak 3y ago
Carl Icahn offers a great illustration of the point that executives can think it's BS too. He once acquired a firm that had an office whose business purpose nobody was able to explain to him so he fired twelve floors of workers. https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/i-fired-12-floors-of-people-icahns-hostile-strategy-that-musk-could-emulate/ https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/i-fired-12-floors-of-...
taskforcegemini 3y ago
in my experience the big picture is usually not given for bullshit reasons, for instance because someone thinks it is not required.

bakuninsbart 3y ago

> I consider relying on people's own answers to be a methodological error in the research. If the conclusion of the research is "these jobs are bullshit", then I agree, but if it is about how people are doing in these jobs, it is completely valid. Graeber was mixing these in his book to have more popular appeal, which is bad. > Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing. That's what Marx called alienation of labor. While it may increase efficiency, it takes all the pleasure out of work. But that's not really the topic of the book: There's entropy in any larger organization, and I'm sure we all have an example or two of people who are a pure waste of energy in their position.

a1o 3y ago
> That's what Marx called alienation of labor. I am almost positive Adam Smith pointed to this problem before with the pin factory example
- jaggederest 3y ago
  You might not be surprised to learn that Marx, as an economist among other things, was almost certainly familiar with Adam Smith's work. Capital, for example, was at least partly a direct critique of On The Wealth of Nations.

whiplash451 3y ago

If people complain about leadership decision en masse, then maybe the leadership failed to explain the decisions at the first place. Give people a meaning and they will do much better work. It’s not rocket science.

idopmstuff 3y ago
> Give people a meaning and they will do much better work. It’s not rocket science. This sounds good, but it's honestly just not realistic in a lot of jobs. How are you going to make working at an Amazon warehouse meaningful? Stocking shelves at Walmart? Making fries at McDonalds? You can give the usual platitudes of how you're helping to make sure that people in your community can get the goods/food/whatever they need, but I think most people know that they're not really contributing to the betterment of society in a lot of jobs. And to be clear, that's not just menial labor - I've been a PM on some products that could disappear off the face of the earth without making anybody especially worse off (except the guy managing the part of the operation that used our software, but ultimately he'd go to a competitor and all would be fine). I think that it's often better to forget the idea that work needs to be deeply meaningful and treat people with the respect of recognizing that they're there for a paycheck and nothing else, and then try to do what you can to make the day-to-day work easier and more pleasant. Meanwhile I'll be hoping against hope that when these meaningless jobs get replaced by robots and AI that we get UBI and people can actually work to find meaning.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  I think people have this idea that meaning must not be fair compensation (or put another way, adequate compensation relative to the size of the company and demands required). I think excluding compensation from those jobs, meaning higher compensation, from the idea of meaning is losing sight of it all. There at a lot of jobs that if people were compensated better they would find it to be more meaningful to engage with. It can be a primary motivation to simply do well because they feel fairly valued. It’s not all heart and soul stuff
- whiplash451 3y ago
  Your point about warehouses and fast foods is a fallacy. If you talk to these workers, you can tell those who have a careful manager from those who don’t.

littlestymaar 3y ago

> For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization. Because of course, the executive are always driving things in the optimal way, but only them can see it… In fact, in most orgs the higher in the management position you climb, the more acutely you see the organisational warts of the company, which more often than not, is governed not according to some clever plan from the executives, but instead is the results of political struggles between entities whose leader often hate each other.

coldtea 3y ago

>I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization. There are lots of instances that the leadership decisions are BS, and hamper growth or drive the company to the ground.

bboygravity 3y ago
There's also instances of leadership being installed with the goal to drive a company into the ground. Using BCG consultants for example.
- coldtea 3y ago
  cough Nokia cough

bumby 3y ago

If you ever start feeling bad about your job being pointless, remember that someone somewhere is installing a blinker light on a BMW. -advice (and an old joke) from a former colleague

lr4444lr 3y ago

Having leadership that can't help you see the big picture and leaves you feeling like a duct taper or a goon is a problem in and of itself, for multiple reasons.

civilized 3y ago

I don't think it's an error to ask people what they think. It's one imperfect source of information, and better than just blindly assuming that any money spent on wages or salary is spent on something truly "productive" regardless of the perceptions of those doing the work. Graeber was an anthropologist. Anthropologists want to understand how people feel about their lives and why. They don't take feelings of meaninglessness to imply that, objectively, a job could be cut without consequence. Just that many jobs don't satisfy a human thirst to be doing something subjectively worthwhile.

why5s 3y ago

> but I consider relying on people's own answers to be a methodological error in the research. Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing. Is it not problematic that so many people feel that their jobs are bullshit? Is that an issue with the individual or society at large?

toofy 3y ago
> Is that an issue with the individual or society at large? i think it’s likely a problem with both. no matter how many repeatedly delude themselves otherwise, both society and the individual are inextricable.

rgblambda 3y ago

>Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing. Been a while since I read Graeber's book but I recall one self reported "bullshit job" being to lift rocks scattered across a field and put them in a pile. The people doing the task thought it was a time wasting activity as they were unaware that winter frost pushes up new rocks every year. It's possible that a lot of these so called bullshit jobs are just jobs where the purpose hasn't been explained to the employee.

kamaal 3y ago

>>For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization. Common theme in most of the executive decisions that I've seen. Lets shutdown product X, it costs us Y to run. We could use ~X from a different company that costs Y-2.5% to run. Then only months to an year later- We shouldn't have shut down X, as ~X is not what we actually want and our initial budgeting didn't cover it but we need 2Y to pay for and rebuilding X could cost us up to 10Y-20Y. People at the top generally don't have what is 'precisely' needed. And the kind of resources it could to go about achieving it.

avgcorrection 3y ago

Oh, so then the problem is only that they are spending their nine-to-five in an alienated existence and it is impossible (“They don't have the executive view”) for them to fix it. No biggie.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

>Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing. And executives do not understand the details of what is actually happening on the production floor. They might be fed inaccurate information or outright fantasies by middle management. This is how Russian leadership believed they had winter uniforms, but in reality those uniforms did not exist. The same power dynamics, hiding of errors, exaduration of what convenient, happens in companies. >For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization. So you could use the same logic to say that electorate has no business complaining about decisions taken by politicians, after all they have no big picture view and don’t have access to the report that politicians do.

notfromhere 3y ago

Line workers have a better idea of whether their jobs make any kind of sense. Yes, they don't often have the executive view, but the executives frequently have no idea how the work gets done all the way down the chain; they have a huge amount of blindness as to the realities and limitations of things on the ground. Especially at large organizations, they're relying on summaries of summaries of summaries observed by line managers summarizing information. Tons of information is lost that way. This is why high-level strategy fails. Theoretical ideas hit reality and fall apart pretty quickly. Few executives are grounded enough to actually know how things work.