Comment by InsideOutSanta
2 days ago
This is the answer. It's not just government bureaucracy, large corporations are intentionally built to diffuse responsibility in order to allow the corporation to do things any single person would find abhorrent. This means that if you see something you want to fix, you most likely can't, because nobody is really fully responsible for that thing or can directly do anything about it.
So you just hit your head against wall after wall after wall until you burn out, and that's how you learn to just do your job instead.
Sure, I get your point. But there are lots of tiny things that we can do to make our lives a teeny, tiny bit better - these things are fully in our control.
Example - someone makes a large spreadsheet, but without locking the header row or adding filters. It would take 10 seconds to do, but people in my org don’t, even after I requested them, showed them how.
I understand fixing massive problems like money in politics etc are super hard. But it doesn’t cost anything to not play music in elevators without headphones (yes, it happens, I am not lying) or write a sensible bug report with useful details instead of “this ain’t working” etc. If we can’t even do small things well, how can we even begin to take on massive problems like wealth inequality, poverty, judicial reforms etc?
An organisation arizes around people. The organisation that arises with the traits you describe, one that allows organizational behavior that non of the members would individually allow, but also behavior that has a competitive advantage towards other organizations that lack this behavior, will thrive. They are a cancer that grow around us instead of within is.
The fact that people pursue this sort of thing is extremely strange to me. They’ll admonish people under them for not caring while creating and perpetuating a system that requires it.