The Perfect Stimulus: Bad Management | Hacker News Reader

The Perfect Stimulus: Bad Management

online.wsj.com

54 pointselptacek15 comments

More funny than true. Sure, bad management makes lots of talented people leave lousy jobs and try starting a business. Which leads to more competition, innovation, etc.

Then again, bad management makes perfectly good companies run themselves into the ground, destroying economic value and making lives miserable in the process.

Also, "bad management" is somewhat a matter of opinion. Those talented people who go on to start companies (and don't forget that some of them will fail) may soon have their own employees who inwardly grumble about their incompetent leadership. News flash: sometimes the boss is right. Not always, but sometimes.

Adams' outlook on corporate America is extremely cynical; he views incompetence as the surest path to promotion. To some degree, that is part of his personality, and he's very funny when he expounds his view. But realistically: to some degree, we hate work because it's work. If it was all cotton candy and rainbows, you'd pay to do it, not the other way around. Some of us can find careers we mostly like, and for some of us, that involves being our own boss. But work is still work, and being your own boss may just mean that you LIKE the sociopath who tells you what to do.

Its also a reflection of the specific places in corporate America he was in. Adams worked in banks and telecoms during the seventies and the eighties. Even today, these industries are quite slow moving, and back then, the pace of change was absolutely glacial. Its not hard to imagine that one's experience would be colored by dealing with people who know they have a job for life no matter what they do, simply because their corporation is a monopoly in its field.

>>the media was giving the phone company a lot of heat because almost all of the managers and executives were white males. So, he explained, promoting me would only make things worse.

Adams mentions that this experience was repeated in both the large corporations that he worked in.

Clearly, this excuse wasn't used to stop the overwhelming majority of executives who shared his skin color and gender. So perhaps, it might have been instructive for him to think about why he was being singled out for this excuse.

Banks and telcos weren't adding many executives between 1979 and 1995 [1] (he never said he was considered for a new position), so it's plausible they were all hired before race and gender quotas would have required shunning them.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Office_worker

Yeah, but the point is it was still just an excuse. They could have fired any of dozens of white male incompetents and promoted Adams, but they didn't, because they were protecting the existing power structure. I wonder how many other people got told the same line? I haven't done a census of phone company executives ever but I'd be willing to bet there aren't more than a token handful of minorities in leadership positions (half of them with titles like diversity officer). So it was just a line.

Regardless of who he's replacing, promoting Adams would make things worse for them, because they'd be seen to still be promoting white men. They created the problem by discriminating, so they are required to discriminate differently until the problem is resolved. This is going to take a long time, because they are also not expanding their management ranks, so it only proceeds at the pace of turnover.

I'm sure Adams' contention would be they can't fire incompetents because it takes someone competent and powerful to identify them.

All agreed. Just providing a little pushback against the notion that it's all "political correctness"'s fault when the primary obstacle to achievement is the fact that nobody's getting out of the way.

If you stopped hiring blacks, specifically, because the Chilean subsidiary missed its numbers on account of an earthquake and now you have to make budget cutbacks, your black non-employees are not being inconvenienced by an earthquake. They are being inconvenienced by the fact that you took circumstances you had no control over and decided to address them with a policy you could control, and your policy was racial discrimination.

CC: American universities with a pallette swap.

What, Chile? If they stop hiring everyone, they stop hiring everyone. That's not a discrimination issue either, just like the general lack of room for advancement in mature industries that are run by lifers.

"So perhaps, it might have been instructive for him to think about why he was being singled out for this excuse."

Why? If he'd done that, he'd probably still be a middle manager of a bank or telco instead of drawing cartoons and writing in the WSJ.

First of all i don't think this is really about bad management, but about employees with a choice.

You have disgruntled employees everywhere. I think the real difference is that in places like the U.S (And Israel) people where raised with a sense of self entitlement, they all KNOW they deserve better (And IMHO they do!).

Some cultures have a sense of self-deprecation, which basically means you should be glad to have even the crappiest job even if it is frozen manure shoveling.

On a personal level, everything said reflects on me perfectly. I just quit the job i had for the past 3 years (IT manager/Support/Trainer), since upper management decided to replace our very loved manager with a douche. Our current manager knew how to take a small team, get them to work hard (even very hard at times) and still come back to work the next day with a smile. My salary was lower than what i could get working in a similar position in a different place (and i was constantly getting offers to let me know that), but i was happy - so i stayed.

Now that i have left, i am joining a relatively new business as a partner - an offer that i politely declined until now.

I was wondering why a piece like this would have been selected for inclusion in the Wall Street Journal, that is until I came across the phrase "white males".

Maybe, but it is also exceptionally well-written.

Not only is it exceptionally well written, it's also holds true to a certain point to this day.

Corporate bureaucracy grows in generational waves. Adams was stuck in the middle. The crew in charge in the early 90's were hired in the early 1960's and defined the old boy's network.

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