Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Management

The Art of Measurement

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On September 17, 2021

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I want to talk a bit about management measurement. I recently spent a number of years in a good sized multinational, and I watched management trying to gain control through measurement. And mostly I watched as they gained the wrong sort of control; as they crystallized behaviour in ways that lose more from employees than they gained.

(This is an old, old piece, one of the few I saved from BOPnews. Originally written in 2004 back when I was still corporate. Since almost no one will have read it, and those who do won’t remember it, here it is again. I’m putting it back up because it relates fairly closely to the recent article on the lack of belief in good and why incentives rarely work.)

When you’re dealing with small numbers of people, simple measurements are all you need, and indeed the time spent measuring can be a simple waste of time. For larger groups, and as management becomes disassociated from the actual work of the organization, measuring is necessary so that management knows what is happening and can modify it. The old saying (which I’m sick of) is that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” It’s a statement with a lot of truth to it, but so is this – “you measure what you manage, so you’d better be sure you’re measuring what you want to manage.”

Here’s an example. A friend of mine used to do customer support for laptops. He was measured on how long he was on the phone and how quickly he picked up. If he spent too long on the phone on average, then he was taken aside and reprimanded. These measurements encouraged tech support employees to get people off the phone as quickly as possible, whether their problem was solved or not. Assuming management actually wanted happy customers (ie, that they saw tech support as a way to sell the next laptop, rather than something they had to do as cheaply as possible) then the way to measure this would be to have an automatic survey at the end of the phone call, asking how satisfied the client is. Since there will always be jerks who are never happy with phone support, you set the threshold at a certain percentage of “unhappy” customers and then if someone goes over that you investigate. To keep productivity up you measure phone time and compare to satisfaction ratios and (horrors) investigate individual reps who spend more time than normal on the phone, then coach them individually on how to solve problems with less chit-chat while still keeping the customer happy.

I’m going to discuss five issues related to measurement. The first is the problem of measuring what you can easily measure. Simply put, it may be more difficult to measure some things than others. Management tends to measure those things that are easy to measure. In a call center there are plenty of systems which will allow you to track a wild variety of phone stats, but you can’t measure one CSR helping another with a call. In sales you can measure how many sales a salesman makes and how much they’re worth, but it’s more difficult to measure whether he’s made verbal promises your company will have trouble living up to. You can measure the number of code lines a programmer put out, but it’s harder to measure how easy they will be to maintain down the line.

This is often a systems issue. Whatever the system assists your employees to do, is easy to measure. So if you have a system that presents work items, and which employees close those work items, it’s easy to measure how fast they’re doing them. But what if some work items are harder than others? And what happens to those employees who are taking calls or e-mails you can’t track and are helping customers or other employees with those problems – is that behaviour you don’t want to encourage? Because if you’re measuring only processing times then those who do other things will be measured as less productive. So they stop helping customers, and soon you have a reputation as having unresponsive employees who never want to take time to help people.

And this leads to the second issue, which is what I call Putting your Fingers Down. Another way of putting it, is “you get the behaviour you measure.” If a job involves 10 activities, and you publicly measure only 5 of them, your employees will gravitate towards those activities. It often seems obvious what an employee does. Let’s say you have repair techs in a retail store and you decide to measure their productivity by measuring how many appliances they repair. Sounds good eh? Productivity increases and you’re happy.

Until you start getting complaints that the repair techs don’t want to talk to customers, and that when they do all they seem to want to do is get away from them. You also hear that some techs are taking easy repairs and leaving the hard repairs for others, who put them off, because that boosts their stats. So easy repairs are getting done fast, the hard ones are getting done slower, and customers aren’t getting individual personal attention any more, so they aren’t happy. That worked well!

Which leads to what I call the The Limits of Coercion. Public measurement is a form of coercion. The idea is to measure people and then push them to do better and get rid of the ones who don’t measure up. You put your fingers down and say, “do this!” And you can absolutely do it. Whatever behaviour you are able and willing to take the time to measure, you can and will get. But what you can’t get is positive cooperation. You can’t make people do the extra things. And people resent the wrong type of measurement. The problem is that you as management think you understand the job. Problem is, unless you still do it yourself, you probably don’t. Outside of the sort of jobs that are truly subject to Taylorization, most jobs require a myriad of little tasks and if people don’t do them, the overall job suffers. If you start measuring the wrong specific things then people’s attitude when you pull them in for a talk is “I’m doing fine on the stats you said you want, I don’t have time for the other stuff.”

The other problem is that people subvert the measurements. There are almost always ways to make the numbers come out better than they should, and people will take the time to find them and do them. Which leads to the fourth issue, the question of “Public metrics and private metrics.” Simply put, when you’re setting up metrics you should first find out which metrics track each other; figure out why they track each other; and measure both sets. But one set you keep private and the other is the public set. If the private set starts diverging from the public set then you should investigate if people are fiddling with the public set. Odds are they are.

But the real, final point is that you should be looking for your “Bottom Line Metrics”. In a call center it might be the percentage of happy callers divided by the average time per call. In a processing center I once worked in the VP (a very wise man) used to publicly (I’m sure privately he had a number of measurements which had to remain satisficed) measure only one thing – the average time from a piece of work entering the center to the time it left. He didn’t measure any specific processing times – only how well the center was working overall. If that number went up he’d want to know why, and when he wanted it to go down he let people tell him how they were going to get it down, not the other way around. The center ran very well. When he left his successor started putting his fingers down and both customer satisfaction and employee happiness declined.

In the end you should ask yourself “what are we trying to accomplish?” Then you publicly measure that, and only that. It may seem that you want to do multiple things, but in most cases you can boil it down to one thing – as with the customer service center where happiness was divided by call times. You want people to go away happy after their call with the least time necessary to make them happy. If you can’t break it down then you either don’t understand what the job actually entails (or what your division or company does) or you may need to break the work into different functional groups.

Finally, don’t fall into the MBA trap. As a manager you probably don’t really know what your employees are doing. You probably don’t really understand what is required to do the job well. However unless you’ve beaten them down too hard, or you’ve got a crew of reprobates, most people want to do a good job. Most people want to be able to say “damn, we’re good!” Don’t treat them like untrustworthy children, and you may find that they’re on your side and that measuring only the bottom line, on the minimum, is sufficient. When you go to war with your employees and try and measure every specific behaviour, generally both sides lose.

(Originally published in 2004 at BopNews. Republished April 17, 2009.)

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The Simplest Explanation for Western Decline

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On September 9, 2021

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Is just…this:

Similar numbers can be found in most fields.

This is related to the computer productivity paradox: Computers and the telecom revolution have not noticeably increased productivity.

The reason is simple enough — they weren’t used to create productivity, they were used to create control, to allow managers to micromanage employees without actually being in the presence of the employee all the time.

No society can stay healthy with this sort of admin bloat; admin are support, meant to help the people who actually do the job. If your tooth-to-tail ratio is higher than 2:1 or 3:1, something’s probably wrong.

In my personal life, at my last megacorp job I saw multiple waves of computer “improvements.” Every single one of them increased control and reduced the workload employees could handle. I know this for a fact because I measured it, in part because it was my job, in part because management refused to admit that their shiny new programs were actually slowing productivity, and, until I forced them to admit it, they wouldn’t  hire more people.

Furthermore, each wave of “upgrade” de-skilled the job further, making the employees do what the computer said, and removing their discretion. All of this was intended to raise the bottom, but what it mostly did was lower the top; the most productive, most highly-skilled employees suffered the greatest productivity losses, were the most unhappy, and tended to leave, because the job had become semi-automated, and no longer involved actually doing the job.

As a general rule, no one should run something like a hospital who is not still involved in hands-on client care — probably a nurse or doctor. No one should run a university who is not either still teaching or an active student. This principle can be applied more generally, in that no one can properly manage anything they still don’t do. This is often recognized in the business literature, but, understandably, CEOs and executives almost never want to actually perform the real work of the business, nor will they excuse themselves from interfering with those who do and, thus, actually understand what is needed.

At most, upper management can set general goals. They should never be in charge of deciding how to achieve them. This is the opposite of how we run things, but it wasn’t always entirely so: Auto and plane companies used to be run by engineers, insurance companies by underwriters and actuaries, hospitals by nurses and doctors, and universities by Senates of Professors.

One issue is that front line workers often really want to do front line work: Professors don’t want to administer, they want to teach or do research, doctors want to treat patients, etc.

But if you give administrators power over you, you never get it back. University Senates hired administrators, and a few decades later discovered the administrators were running the show, were able to order profs around, and were the highest paid people in the university (outside of the football coach), while doing no actual teaching or research, and understanding little to nothing.

It is also important to understand that while it’s certainly better if you have done the front-line job at some point, that you lose that knowledge quickly. Ten years out, and you’re clueless — you’re just another administrator. Managers and executives have to keep their hands in, or they wind up clueless.

Bottom line: We can’t afford to let anything important be run by people who aren’t actually practitioners. They don’t know what they’re doing, and they spend most of their time building bureaucratic empires that do nothing but act as modern courtiers. In the best case, they do no harm other than sucking up resources, but in most cases they try to justify their existence by trying to tell the front lines how to do their jobs and make things worse.

If we want to fix our society we have to get rid of this admin bloat, along with the cluelessness it represents.

But what usually happens, instead, is some form of societal collapse, which strips out administrators in a more brutal and effective fashion.

That’s what where we’re headed.

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Why US Leadership Stinks and Drone Assassination Doesn’t Matter (Leadership in Organizations People Believe In)

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On January 4, 2020

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The assassination strategy the US pursues is interesting, not in what it says about the US’s foes, but what it says about the American leaders. Al-Qaeda’s “No. 2 Man” has been “killed” so often that it’s a running joke, and Taliban leadership is regularly killed by assassination. Bush did this, Obama really, really did this. Probably a lot of these stories are BS, but it’s also probably safe to assume that a lot of leadership has been killed.

The Taliban is still kicking the coalition’s ass.

Leadership isn’t as big a deal as people make it out to be–IF you have a vibrant organization in which people believe. New people step up, and they’re competent enough. Genius leadership is very rare, and a good organization doesn’t need it, though it’s welcome when it exists. As long as the organization knows what it’s supposed to do (kick Americans out of Afghanistan), and everyone’s motivated to do that, leadership doesn’t need to be especially great, but it will be generally competent, because the people in the organization will make it so.

American leaders are obsessed with leadership because they lead organizations in whose goals no one believes. Or rather, they lead organizations for whom everyone knows the leadership doesn’t believe in its ostensible goals. Schools are led by people who hate teachers and want to privatize schools to make profit. The US is led by men who don’t believe in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Police are led by men who think their jobs are to protect the few and beat down the many, not to protect and serve. Corporations make fancy mission statements and talk about valuing employees and customers, but they just want to make a buck and will fuck anyone, employee or customer, below the C-suite. They don’t have a “mission” (making money is not a mission, it’s a hunger if it’s all you want to do); they are parasites and they know it.

Making organizations work if they’re filled with people who don’t believe in the organization, or who believe that the “leadership” is only out for themselves and has no mission beyond helping themselves, not even enriching the employees or shareholders, is actually hard. People don’t get inspired by making the C-suite rich. Bureaucrats, knowing they are despised and distrusted by their political counterparts, and knowing that they aren’t allowed to do their ostensible jobs, as with the EPA generally not being allowed to protect the environment, the DOJ not being allowed to prosecute powerful monied crooks, and the FDA being the slave of drug companies and the whims of politically-connected appointees, are hard to move, hard to motivate, making it hard to get to anyone to do anything but the minimum.

So American leaders, and indeed the leaders of most developed nations, think they’re something special. in fact, getting people to do anything is difficult, and convincing people to do the wrong thing, when they joined to actually teach, protect the environment, make citizens healthier, or actually prosecute crooks, even more so. Being a leader in the West, even though it comes with virtually complete immunity for committing crimes against humanity, violating civil rights, or stealing billions from ordinary citizens, is, in many respects, a drag. A very, very well-paying drag, but a drag. Very few people have the necessary flexible morals and ability to motivate employees through the coercion required.

So American leaders, in specific, and Westerners, in general, think that organizations will fall apart if the very small number of people who can actually lead, stop leading. But that’s because they think that leading the Taliban, say, is like leading an American company or the American government. They think it requires a soulless prevaricator who takes advantage of and abuses virtually everyone and is still able to get people to, reluctantly, do their jobs.

Functioning organizations aren’t like that. They suck leadership upwards. Virtually everyone is being groomed for leadership and is ready for leadership. They believe in the cause, they know what to do, they’re involved. And they aren’t scared of dying, if they really believe. Oh sure, they’d rather not, but it won’t stop them from stepping up.

So Obama kills and kills and kills, and somehow the Taliban is still kicking his ass. Al-Qaeda, in whatever country you care to name, has its #2 killed every few weeks, and somehow there’s always another one. Because these people believe. There’s always another believer, if it’s a functioning organization, so on it goes.

The declaration of the Haqqani network as terrorists made me laugh. You read about them, and this is what you discover–the founder was a minister in the Taliban government. So, let’s get this straight. His country, in which he was a minister, was invaded, and ten years later he’s still fighting–and he refuses to negotiate with the US, because hey, he figures he’s winning.

Imagine if the US was invaded, occupied, and a puppet government was set up. A cabinet minister escaped, went underground, and set up a resistance network. What would you call him? A terrorist? Sure, if you’re the occupying power. If you’re a citizen? Well, maybe not, eh? Sure he fights nasty, but the nation which kills so many civilians with drones can’t really cast the first stone, can it?

And one day, they’ll probably kill him.

And it won’t make any damn difference.

Originally published Sept 11, 2012. Back to the top August 13,2018.

Back to the top again, January 4th, 2020 because of Qasem’s assassination.

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The Internet Makes Real Organizing Harder (Technology and Prosperity #2)

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On November 3, 2014

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When it comes to communications technologies and their effect on freedom and prosperity we have to remember that income and wealth share is a product of power.

All wage increases are a result of either scarcity of labor, whether labor in general or a shortage of specific skills; or they are a matter of organizing to convince powerful people, whether corporate bosses or politicians, to give you more money.  (There should be no shame in this, the rich spend billions influencing politicians to give them more money and power.)

This means that there are three conditions where wages are good:

1) Labor is scarce and people can easily find a new job.  The job market is, therefore tight, there are really more jobs employers want done than there are people who want work.

2) Wages can be good in specific jobs even if they are lousy elsewhere if there is a shortage of workers in that field: see computer programmers during the late 90s.

3) People can make a good living without working for someone else, or at least a good enough living so that they have to offer a good job for people to stop doing so.

The more fungible labor is, that is the more one person can be replaced by any other, the less it is paid.  If every job is skilled, workers are harder to replace.  The more jobs are Taylorized – easy jobs that anyone can do, as with the de-skilling of fast order cooking by places like McDonalds, the less the workers get paid.  (Short order cooks, before the rise of fast food, were well paid.)

Communications technology influences this in two ways:

1) the ability of management to control workers without being there themselves.

2) the ability of workers to organize, either politically, or in the work place for work stoppages, strikes and so on.

Before the telecom revolution it was very hard to offshore or outsource so much work.  It wasn’t impossible, the telephone and the jet airplane existed, but it was hard.  You couldn’t control the people working for you overseas.  As a result, you tended to want to keep your factories close to hand.  Generally in or near your home town or city; and if you moved to a cheaper locale, it was still in the country.  If you wanted to properly control workers and production in foreign countries you had to send your own executives to do it because you just didn’t have the easy communications we have today.

This was one thing if you were sending them to Canada or Western Europe. It was another thing entirely if it was some third world country where, servants aside, the executives would hate living.

So the telecom revolution makes it much more practicable to offshore production to both lower cost domiciles and to domiciles where you can expect the government to beat, jail, torture, rape and in many cases kill any labor organizers.  Even if you don’t move overseas, you can easily keep your wages cheap by playing domestic workers off against foreign ones: “if you don’t make concessions, we’ll move this factory to China/Bangladesh/Mexico.”

(There are many other factors.  In a very fast moving market there are reasons to keep production at home for the fastest turnover, for example, but in an economy where there are only 3 real smart phone companies, why bother?)

The second question is of organizing ability. In the work place people can organize if they know their fellow workers, if they trust their fellow workers, and if withdrawing their wages will leave their employers unable to produce (which is why scabs are so hated.)  In the days of classic union organizing everyone worked in a few huge factories; they knew each other; and they worked with dangerous machinery and trusted each other.

The internet fragments people.  Instead of grouping people geographically so that they can learn to trust each other even if they have some differences, it finds ways to group us with like minded people.

Worse, it makes real political disruptive political organizing extremely difficult.  The bottom line about the internet is that everything you do can be tracked, and tracked easily. If you use the internet to organize a strike or a demonstration or to shut down a city: whatever it is, the authorities know.   Most of it is public, what isn’t public is spied on.

Worse are cell phones.  Everyone carries one, and it is a bug you carry in your pocket, which can even be turned on remotely to listen in on you.

One result of this is pre-emptive arrests.  You get organized to protest the G20, or whatever, you show up, and the day before the summit, the key organizers are all arrested on trumped up charges.  Even if they beat the rap, they aren’t there for the key days making sure things work.

And if you intend to do any serious work: a strike large enough to shut down a city or a major corporation: something that actually inconveniences the rich and powerful, they will know as well.

If you significantly encrypt and use one-off cell-phones and so on, this sends up a red flag as well, and there are a variety of ways around it. (If your laptop has ever been out of your sight, it is not your laptop.  If you ordered it online and had it shipped, it may well have been intercepted, as with one TOR developer’s laptop (diverted to Richmond, I kid you not.)

Cameras, computer, license plate, and cell phone surveillance mean that it’s almost impossible not to be surveilled.  As routine use of recognition systems is rolled out, as audio pickups are added to cameras in larger numbers, and as drones are added to the domestic surveillance mix, it will become even harder.

Oh sure, if they don’t know you’re organizing they can’t narrow down to you.  But they will know, because to organize most significant actions you have to be visible.

Politics is ultimately where most of distribution is decided.  Absent a vast array of “free trade” treaties and protections, the massive movement of jobs offshore from the late 70s on would not have happened.  Absent the breaking of unions by Reagan and Republicans and Democrats from 80 onward, wages would not have stagnated nearly so much.

If you can’t organize effectively, you are politically mute.  And, by and large, workers are in the US, and increasingly so in almost every other Western country.

A communications technology that actually enables people to organize requires ways of vetting people that can’t be goosed by the government. It needs to bring people together in geographic areas where they can actually work together. It needs to allow the experiences which create solidarity amongst them, and generally that means they must meet and do things together which build trust.

By taking so much of the talk that used to occur in unlistenable, unwatchable ways, and making it visible to the government and any corporation willing to make friends with the right people, the telecom revolution has made actual revolution much, much harder. In the old days you basically had to have spies, and you could never be certain how reliable they were.

Now you can just listen in or watch.  You can see the networks developing in real time, you can identify the leaders, and you can use the information you have to take the leadership out and to be ready for any action before it happens.

The telecom revolution may less about freedom that in it is about control.  It enables the surveillance state revolution: the 24/7 panopticon and rather than putting power into the hands of the people, it puts power into the hands of those who control it.  That’s not to say it has no use: Twitter wasn’t banned in Turkey because it wasn’t making the authorities’ lives harder, after all.

But it is a two-edged sword.  As with most things, it works well only for movements which are so large that taking out the leadership is effectively impossible.  For any movement which isn’t a real mass movement, it is a death trap (and remember, most mass movements start as less.)  And you must have victory if you are a mass movement. If you aren’t, when the mobs die down, and the people go home, well the leaders have been identified, and not just the biggest ones, as in the old days, but the people who are influential without showing up on the podium.

And then the big men come.

Any technology which makes top-down control easier and which makes it easier to replace workers, will reduce prosperity.  The telecom revolution might, one day, make some sort of networked democratic decision-making possible.  But it equally might be used to create a surveillance state that would leave Big Brother in awe.

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How the structure of everyday life creates sociopathic corporate leaders

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On November 18, 2013

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We talked about how the structure of our upbringing teaches people to be passive and choose from choices offered from them, rather than creating their own, better choices.

But that’s only part of the equation. The other question is: How is our leadership created?

For this we must look at the structure that sorts out leaders from the rest of us. Today I’ll write about corporate leadership

A corporation exists to create a profit. It has no other innate purpose, this is embedded in the law. The corporation is structured so as to remove liability for criminal acts from its owners, and, in practical terms, it also somewhat shields those who control it (its executives and corporate officers) from liability for their actions.

A competitive market is one in which profits are steadily pushed towards zero. If anyone can do what you do (freedom of entry), if there are no information barriers (patents, copyright, secrets) and there are no scale advantages others cannot also achieve, there is no reason why any product or service you create cannot be copied by someone else, who then undercuts you if collusion is not allowed.

To make consistent profits higher, then, than inflation plus the rate of growth of the economy requires that you not be in a competitive market. This is explicitly recognized in strategic thinking, that in a fair market, there are no competitive advantages, and that therefore you need to create an unfair advantage.

Anything another company does which increases their profits, no matter how unethical, if not forbidden by effective law (as opposed to theoretical, aka. unenforced law) you must also do.

What is important about this is that the drive for profits above all and the requirement to gain an unfair advantage as dictated by modern strategic thinking (there are other ways to create an advantage that aren’t unfair, but that’s not what most companies concentrate on) means that you have to do evil. If your competitors use cheap conflict metals from the Congo, the control of which is gained by mass campaigns of rape, you must do so.  If an insurance company denies healthcare to people who are desperately sick, it makes more money.  If a power company doesn’t spend money on anti-pollution equipment, or dumps untreated effluents rather than treated ones, it makes more money.  If a clothing manufacturer doesn’t spend money on safety equipment for its highly flammable factories, it makes more money.

It is also in the interest of corporations to create barriers to entry: to enforce stringent patents and copyrights; to ask regulators to say that only some banks get access to the Fed window, giving them a massive advantage over others; to buy politicians who can use public money to subsidize them or bail them out; to insist that money go to them for bailouts rather than to ordinary householders, and so on.

At the lower executive level, the more you can get out of your employees, no matter how you do it, the more likely you are to be promoted.  And fear, terror and cost-cutting, while they aren’t the only way to do this, are easier to sell to higher management and pay back faster.  When they backfire in the long run, as is often the case, well, you’ll be gone, because you’ll have been promoted.

This leads to the common observation that corporate life is about the next quarter or year, not the next decade.  What matters is how much profit you’re making now and next quarter, especially to your chances of promotion, not what will happen in the future.  Corporate capitalism is largely incapable of planning more than a few years out, certainly not decades (there are exceptions, but even those exceptions, like insurance companies, have been losing that ability.)

High compensation is also an issue.  Once you ascend to the senior corporate ranks, your bonuses are based on short term performance and are large enough that after a few years, and sometimes just one, you have enough money you’ll never have to work again.  So you don’t care about the long term, because you don’t need the company to be there long term, only to make as much money as fast as possible.

As a low ranked boss, you terrorize your employees, treat them badly in whatever way is required to make short term profits and are promoted upwards.  As a high level executive you make strategic decisions that require you to hurt people you’ve never met through pollution, failing to invest in safety, or political corruption.

The summary of all this is that the structure of your life, of incentives, in the corporate world, sorts out people who are willing to hurt other people, now and in the future, for their own benefit and to corrupt their own system of government and law for short term advantage.  If you aren’t willing to do these things, you are unlikely to rise far in a modern corporation, and almost certain not to make it to the CEO level.

It is not that there are no other ways to run economic organizations, and it is not even that these things are necessary to gain a sustained economic advantage, but these appear to our current corporate leadership to be the easiest and quickest ways to make money.  It’s simple to make the argument “if we cut wages and make people work like dogs, our profits will go up.”  It is hard to make the argument “if we raise wages and treat our people well, our profits will go up”, even though the second is true.  And much of modern economic life is a hostage situation: if company A is using metals created through the terror of mass rape, well, you’re at a disadvantage if you don’t too.

Strong and ethical government takes those hostage situations off the table, but when you’ve bought out government, that’s no longer possible, so  you feel compelled to do evil.

People with strong ethical foundations will eventually balk.  There will come a point where they will say “no, I’m not doing that, I’m not rewarding people who rape hundreds of thousands of people by buying their blood-drenched minerals”, and that’s the end of their promotions.

Even people with weak ethical foundations may eventually say “that’s just too much, I know these employees and they’ve been loyal to me and I’m not laying them off.”  End of that person’s career.

The end result of this is Jamie Dimon.  You wind up with people who, if they aren’t clinical sociopaths and psychopaths, act like them.  At best they care for a few people close to them, their family and friends, and they hurt everyone and anyone else around them as necessary to get ahead.  People who get off on it are probably at an advantage, taking joy in your work is a competitive advantage after all: love what you do!

This isn’t necessary, in an economy where we decide to take certain behaviours off the table by agreement, legislative or ethical.  It isn’t necessary from an ideological point of view, since there’s plenty of evidence that happy employees are more productive, and it isn’t necessary even from a theoretical point of view because even very light protection of works plus happy employees allows you to create a sustained economic advantage by just creating teams of people who are better than the opposition rather than winning because they have a positional advantage.

But it is how we’ve chosen to do things.  Our society elevates functional sociopaths and psychopaths because that is not just the behaviour we reward, it is the behaviour we demand.

Why The Assassination Strategy Doesn’t Work

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On May 13, 2011

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So, Osama is dead.  Which is to say, he’s a martyr.  Of the many gifts the US gave him in his life, and they were many, this may be the last one.  Some say he didn’t want to be martyred, at least not right this moment, and no doubt that’s true.  But the difference between seeking martyrdom and not minding that much exists.  He didn’t really go that far out of his way to avoid death.  He could have shaved the beard, had some plastic surgery and disappeared into Indonesia.  He would never have been found.  His compound was not heavily guarded.  Bin Laden need never have been in the line of fire.

And remember, unlike most recent American presidents, Bin Laden did lead troops from the front line.  He didn’t dodge combat.

Westerners and global elites tend to think that everyone is like them.  They aren’t.  Leaders of organizations like al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah and Hamas (and I conflate them only in the sense that they are all subject to assassination campaigns by their enemies, not because they are the same type of organization or desire the same things) know that the job comes with a good chance of getting very dead.

Until westerners get this through their soft heads, they will continue to make major strategic errors.  The assassination program against the Taliban may be something they hate, may be something they fear, but it has not stopped them.  The assassination programs run by Israel have as often made their situation worse as better.

In healthy organizations leadership is far less important than western leaders think it is.  Western leaders think they’re indispensable.  They aren’t, and neither is the enemy leadership in most cases.  There are some exceptions, but they are rare in properly operating organizations.  The death of the previous leader makes him a martyr, and the next man in line steps up.  The dead leader, rather than one more reason to quit fighting is one more reason to keep fighting.  The basic policies continue, and the assassination is more likely to make the organization stronger ideologically than to weaken it.

Shorter post: just because for most Western elites nothing is worth dying for, and any price is acceptable to live, doesn’t mean everyone thinks the same way.

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