3 ms·

Post '08? All of this dates from the US stock market reforms of the 1970s, ultimately, which led to an explosion of IPOs, and fed the explosive growth of manage

Post '08? All of this dates from the US stock market reforms of the 1970s, ultimately, which led to an explosion of IPOs, and fed the explosive growth of management consultancy and MBA culture. "Business" became something one specialised in as a career farming a quasi-commodity. The culture of the "exit" is the problem; the notion of routine payment with stock options, etc. etc. Back when I was working in a dot com (well a dot co dot uk) I noticed this; if you ask for a hard salary in lieu of stock options you are treated as if you have a communicable disease. Something I am glad I did, actually, because I saw other people leave with vested options that the company refused to either honour or buy back. Everything about the subsequent 21st Century IT culture is short-term-ist, naïve, and sick, and it is still taboo to talk about some of the problems.

slashdave 10mo ago
I wouldn't blame this on MBAs. The fault lays in the culture of the Board Room. There used to be a time that the board cared about the welfare of employees and the good of society as a whole. I know this is hard to believe in contemporary times.
- amarant 10mo ago
  Aren't contemporary boardrooms generally stuffed to the brim with MBA's though? Or is that just my preconceptions talking?
  - slashdave 10mo ago
    The Board represents shareholders, at least in principle. More celebrities really.
- exasperaited 10mo ago
  I struggle to find things in the modern business world that cannot be blamed on the culture of the MBA. What you are talking about — boards not caring about the welfare of employees — is a fundamental result of the culture of the MBA, which has suffused through all business thought in a way that casually depersonalises and humiliates. I used to work for a small business and I decided I would have to quit one day when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that". There were four of us.
  - coldpie 10mo ago
    > when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that". Hahaha, I got hit with that, too, also working for a small company. Luckily it was the client who called me "a resource", not someone from my company, but good lord what a way that is to talk about human beings.
  - quesera 10mo ago
    This one trips me up. Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"? Literally nothing about the word "resource" has negative connotations for me. Resources are finite and precious. They are protected and important. Sometimes they are exploited and undervalued, sure. What isn't? Certainly not humans or employees. Every project requires resources. Some of them are human. It's just a category. Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"? I don't use the word, and the first time I heard it, I thought it was a little impersonal. But then I thought about it more, and I just don't understand the strength of reaction. It might help that, in general, my goal is not to be seen as a living human being with real human complexity and needs and desires, at work.
    - dogleash 10mo ago
      >Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"? It's simple dehumanization. It's not outlandish or anything, it's just really easy to notice. And the sophistry to try make them equivalent terms is also easy to notice. For a business to need resources it means a category of stuff that can include people, tools, raw materials, etc... Using the name of a category to mean one thing inside it instead of explicitly naming that one thing is concealment. Just like how I might say "fertilizer" instead of "cow shit." The better question is why we started concealing it. Why are we so sensitive about the words person, employee, or personnel?
      - frm88 10mo ago
        Because starting from the 1980's corporate organisation was focused on managing resources, of which humans were a part that had to be dehumanized to fit with the rest of the theory. There was a brief phase where it was called HCM - human capital management, but that never caught on widely; so HRM it is with a focus on managing as opposed to organising and supporting. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/evolution-hr-terminology-why-matters-ojotule-opaluwa-alagbe-7vrhf https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/evolution-hr-terminology-why-...
ambicapter 10mo ago
What were the "the US stock market reforms of the 1970s", roughly?
- exasperaited 10mo ago
  OK so I am not an expert here at all, but my broad contention is that much of the modern way business works traces back to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Stock_Brokerage_Commission_Deregulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Stock_Brokerage_Commissio... The equivalent in the UK — the Big Bang — was very much fresh in the minds of my leftie economics teachers in 1990 :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets) On top of the creation of NASDAQ and subsequent NYSE reforms that opened up electronic trading and allowed banks to start selling stocks, these things meant that ordinary people, individuals, etc., developed more of an interest in the stock market and of "business" as an abstract. This did two things: first it means that there's so much more heat around IPOs and so much more interest in them. But there's also an amateur/individual obsession with quarterly performance over the slower, institutionalised trading that went before it. That changes the culture of business, Wall Street and London so much that it fuels the market for business schools, MBAs, economics degrees. Then once you have the broker-driven (and exchange-competition-driven) obsession with the hunt for IPOs, you start to see the modern venture capital market, and thirty years later after a few crashes, the reactive rebirth of private equity. But before these reforms, people on the streets in either country did not really have access to the stock market, and stock trading was sort of a gentlemen's club: they were absolutely furious that the fixed commission era was ending. Fixed commission regulated by the SEC is such an alien concept now. The startups I worked for in the late 1990s in the UK simply could not ever have happened before the Big Bang. The entire culture of venture capital changed.
  - ambicapter 10mo ago
    So it seems like kind of a mixed bag of democratizing access, but which also created a little more individualized, selfish pressures on the way the market behaves.

slashdave 10mo ago

I wouldn't blame this on MBAs. The fault lays in the culture of the Board Room. There used to be a time that the board cared about the welfare of employees and the good of society as a whole. I know this is hard to believe in contemporary times.

amarant 10mo ago
Aren't contemporary boardrooms generally stuffed to the brim with MBA's though? Or is that just my preconceptions talking?
- slashdave 10mo ago
  The Board represents shareholders, at least in principle. More celebrities really.
exasperaited 10mo ago
I struggle to find things in the modern business world that cannot be blamed on the culture of the MBA. What you are talking about — boards not caring about the welfare of employees — is a fundamental result of the culture of the MBA, which has suffused through all business thought in a way that casually depersonalises and humiliates. I used to work for a small business and I decided I would have to quit one day when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that". There were four of us.
- coldpie 10mo ago
  > when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that". Hahaha, I got hit with that, too, also working for a small company. Luckily it was the client who called me "a resource", not someone from my company, but good lord what a way that is to talk about human beings.
- quesera 10mo ago
  This one trips me up. Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"? Literally nothing about the word "resource" has negative connotations for me. Resources are finite and precious. They are protected and important. Sometimes they are exploited and undervalued, sure. What isn't? Certainly not humans or employees. Every project requires resources. Some of them are human. It's just a category. Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"? I don't use the word, and the first time I heard it, I thought it was a little impersonal. But then I thought about it more, and I just don't understand the strength of reaction. It might help that, in general, my goal is not to be seen as a living human being with real human complexity and needs and desires, at work.
  - dogleash 10mo ago
    >Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"? It's simple dehumanization. It's not outlandish or anything, it's just really easy to notice. And the sophistry to try make them equivalent terms is also easy to notice. For a business to need resources it means a category of stuff that can include people, tools, raw materials, etc... Using the name of a category to mean one thing inside it instead of explicitly naming that one thing is concealment. Just like how I might say "fertilizer" instead of "cow shit." The better question is why we started concealing it. Why are we so sensitive about the words person, employee, or personnel?
    - frm88 10mo ago
      Because starting from the 1980's corporate organisation was focused on managing resources, of which humans were a part that had to be dehumanized to fit with the rest of the theory. There was a brief phase where it was called HCM - human capital management, but that never caught on widely; so HRM it is with a focus on managing as opposed to organising and supporting. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/evolution-hr-terminology-why-matters-ojotule-opaluwa-alagbe-7vrhf https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/evolution-hr-terminology-why-...

ambicapter 10mo ago

What were the "the US stock market reforms of the 1970s", roughly?

exasperaited 10mo ago
OK so I am not an expert here at all, but my broad contention is that much of the modern way business works traces back to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Stock_Brokerage_Commission_Deregulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Stock_Brokerage_Commissio... The equivalent in the UK — the Big Bang — was very much fresh in the minds of my leftie economics teachers in 1990 :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets) On top of the creation of NASDAQ and subsequent NYSE reforms that opened up electronic trading and allowed banks to start selling stocks, these things meant that ordinary people, individuals, etc., developed more of an interest in the stock market and of "business" as an abstract. This did two things: first it means that there's so much more heat around IPOs and so much more interest in them. But there's also an amateur/individual obsession with quarterly performance over the slower, institutionalised trading that went before it. That changes the culture of business, Wall Street and London so much that it fuels the market for business schools, MBAs, economics degrees. Then once you have the broker-driven (and exchange-competition-driven) obsession with the hunt for IPOs, you start to see the modern venture capital market, and thirty years later after a few crashes, the reactive rebirth of private equity. But before these reforms, people on the streets in either country did not really have access to the stock market, and stock trading was sort of a gentlemen's club: they were absolutely furious that the fixed commission era was ending. Fixed commission regulated by the SEC is such an alien concept now. The startups I worked for in the late 1990s in the UK simply could not ever have happened before the Big Bang. The entire culture of venture capital changed.
- ambicapter 10mo ago
  So it seems like kind of a mixed bag of democratizing access, but which also created a little more individualized, selfish pressures on the way the market behaves.