Comment by jimnotgym
13 days ago
Thank you for taking a moment to reply.
Firstly, I have met very few malicious people in my career. Most of the really destructive people are products of their environments. It is complicated, but it is normally an incentives problem, most commonly status/ power rather than monetary. Often they have created blocking processes that the company sees as some sort of control or policing. It tends to be rather easy to change that if you are their boss. It is harder, but not impossible as a colleague. Often the application of cold hard rigorous logic, an understanding of the real controls etc. Can unstick them.
I work in a 100k person company at the moment (admittedly I'm not in charge of that many of them), so I understand the problem of scale, but I would counter that the changes neede are rather subtle. I think much can be achieved by focusing on the 20 people at the top. Culture cascades. For example if you dig in over a KPI not being achieved, when someone explains that it is counterproductive, or conflicts with another KPI, how do you think they will manage their team in future?
> Firstly, I have met very few malicious people in my career.
Few people are openly malicious. That doesn't mean they are altruistic or motivated by some concept of "greater good". Most people will go along with the general sentiment though their actions are typically focused on their own benefit. This makes a lot of sense.
Honestly, your perspective feels a little out of touch. If you had some private conversations with individual contributors at multiple levels of your organization, you may get a different perspective. In my experience, most "leadership" is about maximizing the leader's personal gain. They are running their own company within the company and will compete in whatever internal currency the company culture has. This is why incentives are difficult.
Perhaps the simplest way to manage is to a P/L and employee retention. So long as those are healthy, the group is healthy.
> Honestly, your perspective feels a little out of touch.
As does yours too me. I have been a senior manager in finance and IT at companies from $15m and a middle-manager at a mega-corp (on the senior management team of a business unit with 600 staff). I have had staff in several countries, I work with people in many more. Honestly most people want to do a good job without their boss shouting at them.
> will compete in whatever internal currency the company culture has
You seem to be agreeing with me.
>> will compete in whatever internal currency the company culture has
>You seem to be agreeing with me.
I'm saying this is a bad thing. The "currency" is often based on perception of what the leader likes. My suggestion here is instead focus on actual dollars and cents. Does the sub-org bring in more than they spend? It will change the way you think about organizations. If the group has no source for income, you have to wonder why it exists.
I have been mostly in tech but also in companies that are not solely tech companies. For you, it seems like "senior management" means you talk to VPs. I have been a "senior manager" but it speaks mostly to my depth of experience. I talk to VPs and directors when I need to, but mostly I'm speaking to folks that are doing the work. I think this is why our perspectives are different. When you're two or more levels away from the point of execution it's very easy to be out of touch.
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I agree that culture cascades but leadership is not the top of the food chain, their decisions or culture is often influenced by the capital.
The meta recently has been to ignore everything and only focus on maximizing the stock price, which is aligned with their incentives (stock based compensation, bonus based on stock performance) and the modern investors (money quick now).
I wonder if the rotten feeling I have on management is linked to western societies moving from high trust to low trust and from patient to impatient.
Yes, that is the excuse I read for a recent accounting scandal at a listed company. However, it is a weak one. Yes their incentives have slipped from long-term shareholder value to short-term share price, and the market loves to be irrational...especially about AI and Musk.
Except only some of the market does, and the incentive can be met in other ways. Most capital is less worried about how you run the company than the returns. They worry about fundamentals, ROCE etc. If you have too much inventory, then yes you will get pushback. But encouraging your employees to be creative won't get you in trouble. This is just an excuse. I mean, being polite to your employees, having dedicated inspired staff, won't hurt your share price. I think assholes getting to be CEO is a symptom of a failing meritocracy, bad career development, focus on loyalty over ability. I think it harms the share price by lowering productivity.
But capital is conservative. Board members are chosen from a tiny select group of people who have done it before, or at least sent to the right elite schools.
When I worked in PE, the biggest thing I learnt was that PE partners (as a whole) know very little about running businesses. They only know about balance sheet fundamentals, and whether you answer their questions convincingly. They were specialists in the pissing contests, but could be easily fobbed off if your ratios were good and you met your forecast. Imitating their behavior inside the company is a choice, not an inevitability.
Sorry, a bit 'stream of consciousness' rather than a well argued response, but you seem smart enough to see what I mean.
I see your point, this reminded me of the incompetent/malicious section.
Yes, leadership could do the right thing, but the right thing is difficult to measure by shareholders and can only grasped by shareholders until it is too late (Disney for example), but why would they?
I agree, people are not malicious but the system currently selects for people that ignore the difficult to measure right thing to do (in SWE it’s doing the grunt platform work that no one will appreciate) and skip to things that are rewarded (cool feature tm that users hate by gives a cool slide to the CEO), it might seem like people can do both but it’s not in practice due to having limited energy.
Also stream of thought answer, but I feel like we are back to the trust thing, the right thing to do is impossible to measure, so we can only hope they do it because they care about doing the right thing, but incentives punishes them and makes them scarce at the top and the only solution is to go back to a high trust society (maybe like Japan where CEOs care and the incentives are set so people are often doing the right thing).
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