Management 3

Before we can improve management, we need to understand well, the things that can go wrong with it.

Think of some of the ways an individual manager can be or go sour:

• incompetent that rides coat-tails of the competent
• only wants to feather own nest
• keeps better talent down, or even other talent
• takes credit for work of others
• could be a saboteur, either through incompetence or malice, or, put in place by competitor or other hostile
• perpetrator of stupid ideas, for example, doggedly and single-mindedly persuing some doomed, impractical “vision”
• complies with the idiot pronouncements and demands of a delusional superior without pushback, which is to say, practices suckholery
• may be trying to cover up some mistake he made
• doesn’t support his staff
• undesirable character traits: disruptive, creates bad working environment, makes others uneasy, liar, insensitive, “set in ways” — doesn’t keep up to date on trends and changes (though equally bad is simply to blindly follow trends, without understanding them)
• embezzler
• only hires certain type of person
• practices sycophancy

There’s a rule of thumb by Derek J. de Solla Price: the square root of the employees in a group do half the work, and the remainder do the other half. There is a stipulation that this is for creative work, but it seems to have applicability in other areas also.

The Price rule also applies to sports teams!

A different rule, the Pareto principle, indicates that 80% of the responsibility and work are shouldered by only 20% of the employees, which is basically the same principle, that a minority do disproportionately more of the work.

(Note that this mocks the traditional routine of job interviews and jumping through hoops, when it is well known that the single most important criterion for how you’ll do in a job is your performance in your prior jobs.)

One interesting thing is that, the top performers will chase better options and leave a company. The company will reel, leading to layoffs, then more of the top staff leave, leading to a death spiral, and there’s no known way of dealing with this problem! Also, this effect can happen very suddenly (therefore catching management by surprise).

Thus, Fortune 500 companies only spend 30 or fewer years at that top ranking.

If only 20% are competent, that would include managers, too. This is a serious matter that isn’t being taken seriously, an indication, again, that we are treated simply as farm animals, and everything is controlled to the nth degree, in order to enable waste and stupidity, as bizarre as that sounds.

There’s no need to be standing around helplessly. People could pursue a new system that avoids this pitfall. But we’re too tightly wound up and controlled for any such initiative and independence!

Expanding our scope, to look at the flaws of the entire managerial system:

1. inefficient use of people, not using people to their full capacity (this is a big one)
2. single point of failure can ruin everything/dependence on single person (or a very few people)
3. easy to take control of an organization and ruin it that way (as we see with the BlackRock investment company, which directs countless organizations, appointing management to do its bidding, as with the “woke” fiasco)
4. misallocation of resources, where those at top are overpaid (the disproportionate allocation of salaries is partly deliberate, to instill jealousy and envy within the teeming masses)
5. no one learns anything, no progress, its all politicking — no improvement of the organization, which is what needs the attention, not the self-serving, preening management types with their nefarious agendas
6. arrogant, overbearing, selfish management has caused incalculable damage to companies and their customers over the years.

There’s nothing natural about “managers,” as we can see, simply from the unaddressed flaws, but we’re conditioned into accepting them, a sophisticated control mechanism developed over considerable time. It’s obvious the system has to be done away with, by anyone wanting to run a serious organization, and a new system devised.

We’ll go through point-by-point to address each one of the listed failings, after stopping to look at a couple of things to season the pot: synergy and accountability.

Synergy: This entails properly utilizing people, the most important resource. Understanding synergy and how to create it isn’t a trivial endeavor.

Accountability: We need a system that doesn’t allow any rogue elements to run roughshod over a company at their whim.

• An improved system has to utilize people’s abilities properly. Instead “managers” today prefer to say, “Oh, that one’s dumb, that one’s lazy...” No. As we’ve discussed, everyone can contribute something, if the right approach is used.
• Instead of a single point of failure, we need to “turn the pyramid upside-down,” in a sense, to where there’s managerial input from a wide range of people. Also, with this wide range, it’s not so easy to mount a hostile takeover, which addresses the second and third points in the above list.
• Misallocation, one of the most serious and obvious problems, is addressed by the same initiative, since, with more people assuming managerial responsibilities, there’s more in the budget to pay them better. With everyone in a role of responsibility, there would inevitably be less peacocking, jockeying for position and the like.
• Continual learning and training needs to be built in to the system.

Now we need to figure out how to implement all that with a real-world solution, a progression for future articles.

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