Comment by jldugger
5 months ago
> Too focused on the bottom level. If a given business process results in employee A doing their job correctly according to the process... then the person who is accountable for the end result being shit is the manager who is responsible for the process itself.
The book's point is that while this _should_ be the case, all too often it's not. AFAIK, nobody has been charged with forging documents in the case of Wells Fargo cross selling. Not the counter clerks who directly responded to incentives and management pressure nor the executives who built that system.
> nor the executives who built that system
This is exactly why being an executive of a large organization is so incredibly difficult to pull off well. Sure, you can let your assistant fill your calendar with a bunch of meetings you don't want to be in to spend 95% of the meeting listening, 4% being the arbiter who tells people what they already knew they needed to do but refused to do it until asked by someone in authority, and 1% saying you'll take it further up the ladder. You will also fail hard because you will be constantly blindsided by people either fucking up (at best) or gaming (at worst) the processes for which you are responsible. Small example litmus test: in organizations that use Jira, whether the executives are comfortable with JQL and building their own dashboards to tell them what they need to know, or whether they expect their direct reports to present their work. If it's the latter, how can an executive be surprised that their reports are always coming in with sunny faces and graphs going up and to the right?
That too many companies are not willing to hold executives accountable for processes that they are, in theory, supposed to be accountable for is an entirely different problem. The law proscribes, the officer arrests, and the judge presides, but all rests upon the jury to convict. If a company's "jury" is not willing to "convict", because the crime is one of negligence and not treason, then the company has larger problems and I'd like to short their stock, please.
Also, usually these situations involve intentionally (or not, depending on how charitable one is being) passing back and forth between different divisions/groups.
So the only one with consistent power over all groups is an executive so high up the food chain (in some cases not even the CEO!) that they can plausibly claim ignorance.