Comment by 72f988bf
3 days ago
> Humans only care when the house is on fire
In corporate context it's because that's, in theory, an effective use of resources:
If 20 teams are constantly "there is a huge risk of fire", a lot of mental energy is wasted figuring out how to stack rank those 20 and how real of a fire risk there is. If instead you wait when there is a real fire, you can get the 15 teams actually fixing that one.
In practice, you've probably noticed that the most politics-playing & winning teams are the teams which are really effective at :
1) faking fires
2) exaggerating minor fires
3) moving fast & breaking things on purpose (or at least as a nice side effect) to create more fires in their area of ownership* , and get rewarded with more visibility & headcount to fix those fires.
* As long as they have firm grip of that area... If they don't, they risk having it re-orged to another team.
>If instead you wait when there is a real fire, you can get the 15 teams actually fixing that one.
In this case, with Microsoft's really amazing revenue stream, a charismatic management team can distort reality for quite some time and convince the right people within the company that there is no fire.
Yeah the more "honest" side at least tried to fix it after the fire. The demagogue ones like to fake fire and move fast.