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Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

This crisis, which it is, is caused by the unrecognized necessity for effective communications within science and technology and business, which is not taught. Not really, only a lite "presentation skill" is taught.

Fact of the matter: communications is everything for humans, including dealing with one's own self. Communications are how our internal self conversation mired in bias encourages or discourages behavior, communications are how peers lead, mislead, inform, misinform, and omit key information - including that critical problem information that people are too often afraid to relate.

An effective communicator can talk to anyone, regardless of stature, and convey understanding. If the information is damningly negative, the effective communicator is thanked for their insight and not punished nor ignored.

Effective communications is everything in our complex society, and this critical skill is simply ignored.

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My dad worked his way up to middle management in a large railroad.

Management and executives had almost all worked their way up the ladder. Toward the end I think some of the higher-up ones were encouraged to get an MBA as they advanced, but they didn't do much hiring of MBAs.

The company got bought by another in IIRC the late 90s, and this other one had already been taking over by the "professional managerial class", and they quickly replaced most of the folks from the top down to the layer just above him with their own sort.

His description of what followed was incredible amounts of waste. Not just constant meetings that should have been emails (though, LOTS of that) but entire business trips that could have been emails. Lots of them fucking things up because they had no idea how anything worked, but wouldn't listen to people who did know. Just, constant.

The next step was they "encouraged" his layer to retire early, for any who were old enough, which was lots of them since, again, most of them had worked their way up the ladder to get where they were, not stepped straight into management as a 25-year-old with no clue how actual work gets done. I haven't asked, but I assume they replaced them with a bunch of young business school grads.

There are sometimes posts on HN suggesting that our dislike of business school sorts is silly or overblown, but if anything I think it's too weak. The takeover by them and, relatedly, the finance folks has been disastrous for actual productivity and innovation. Companies should be run by people who've done the work that the company does, and not just for an internship or something.

There are a lot of companies out there (HP, Intel, Boeing, GM, Xerox) where if you dive into the history, at some point somebody says something to the effect of: "This used to be a great engineering firm until the finance guys took over."

> The takeover by them and, relatedly, the finance folks has been disastrous for actual productivity and innovation.

The fact that so many companies play tricks with CAPEX and OPEX completely misses the point that almost all corporate spending should be seen as investment or spending to support investment at some level.

The past 50 years of business school has taught people that outsourcing your core competency is a good idea because it gets things "off the books" and makes quarterly reports look better. The end result was shifting huge swaths of our economy to a hostile country.

Here in tech, I've literally seen companies shift stuff into the cloud even though it's more expensive, because OPEX can be written off right away and they don't want CAPEX on the books, only for a year later to want to shift back because they decided it's now better to optimize for actual cashflow. It's infuriating.

I read Moral Mazes recently and what it describes is not a lack of communications skill, to the contrary, the incentives created by managerial social hierarchies place very high praise on difficult communications skills such as the ability to fluidly support contradictory positions on different issues, the ability to manipulate symbols and euphemism to justify necessary actions, the understanding of what makes others in their management circles feel good.

What you're describing is the opposite end of the spectrum, those that do understand communications and language to the degree they can appear to fluidly support contradictory positions, but they are in fact operating at a higher communications level and spinning circles around those less adept in communications. They are masterful language and perception manipulators, in a strategic game of corporate dominance.

But, there's a hyperparameter here; we culturally and organizationally get to choose how much of this game exists and how effective it is.

And certainly some of these games are useful; abilities of this kind are highly correlated with other abilities, and having masterful language and perception manipulators act for the interest of your company or nation is valuable.

But it's not the only useful skill at the upper tier of organizations, and emphasizing it over all else is costly. So are internal political games-- when your organization plays too many of them, the benefits one gets from selecting these people and efforts are dwarfed by the infighting and wasted effort. It can also result in severe misalignment between individual and organizational incentives.

There is a misunderstanding that being an effective communicator equals political gaming of situations. That is possible with or without effective communications, and largely misses the point that effective communications is not playing games, it's avoiding them. It is not trying "to win", it is seeking shared understanding and consensus. If one's management is playing political games, they are failing in their communications, trying to win in some personal game, not for the betterment of the company.

> If one's management is playing political games, they are failing in their communications, trying to win in some personal game

Is this not A) ubiquitous, B) rich with incentives, and C) not downright implied in "They are masterful language and perception manipulators, in a strategic game of corporate dominance." and "the understanding of what makes others in their management circles feel good."

This is the very difficult part: people adept at manipulation tend to be highly intelligent. Simply spending time with a good manipulator is dangerous. The only good metric I know here is the old saying "the key purpose of an education is to be able to recognize one in others." Good communicators also sort out weasels via their lack of distinct language and similar tells.

For a while I thought about starting a nonprofit or foundation or whatever whose goal was get universities to adopt the coop model for all majors, not just engineering. The idea was to take a year and learn how the world actually works. We're talking literally basic business skills like how to run a meeting, how to do an effective presentation, etiquette for email and slack etc. Also give exposure to different types of work (office vs frontline vs outdoors etc) and industry types. 1/3 business, 1/3 nonprofit, 1/3 government.

What happened to this line of thinking? Did you pursue?

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