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The Company Isn't a Family

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Re: The Company Isn't a Family

#31

Post by madhadron »

alberth wrote: post #5

Reid Hastings (Netflix founder) uses a different analogy. He compares a company as a high performing "sports team". With the idea being, you're working towards a collective goal. You each have you're own role. But if you're not performing, you get cut. Just like any athlete would get cut. The problem with the "family" analogy is it implies "unconditional love" regardless if you're messing up, failing, not performing.

Why use an analogy at all? We have a shared notion of professional behavior, of the compromise between an employee's self interest and his fiduciary duty to his employer, and of a number of other things that are irrelevant to families and to sports teams.

The only reasons to have an analogy are you are 1) dealing with people who lack the acculturation to hold a professional job, or 2) you are trying to distort the notion of a company in your favor.

Re: The Company Isn't a Family

#32

Post by YZF »

alberth wrote: post #5

Reid Hastings (Netflix founder) uses a different analogy. He compares a company as a high performing "sports team". With the idea being, you're working towards a collective goal. You each have you're own role. But if you're not performing, you get cut. Just like any athlete would get cut. The problem with the "family" analogy is it implies "unconditional love" regardless if you're messing up, failing, not performing.

A company is nothing like a sports team. Sport teams are mostly a lose-win proposition but companies can be win-win where each company thrives and supports the other within an ecosystem. Sports teams produce no value (you could argue entertainment is value I guess but I don't mean it in this sense). An employee's impact lasts significantly longer than any player on a sports team. Code I write today will run the next 20 years. Lebron's dunk today means nothing tomorrow.

A company is an "idea", as Yuval Harari says it is something, fiction, a story, we invent to create a shared purpose. It can be like a sports team (some of which presumably are incorporated), it can be like a tribe, it can be like a family. We can make whatever we want of it. I think companies would do better with a more tribe-like story than with a sports team like story.

Re: The Company Isn't a Family

#33

Post by prh8 »

YZF wrote: post #32
alberth wrote: post #5

Reid Hastings (Netflix founder) uses a different analogy. He compares a company as a high performing "sports team". With the idea being, you're working towards a collective goal. You each have you're own role. But if you're not performing, you get cut. Just like any athlete would get cut. The problem with the "family" analogy is it implies "unconditional love" regardless if you're messing up, failing, not performing.

A company is nothing like a sports team. Sport teams are mostly a lose-win proposition but companies can be win-win where each company thrives and supports the other within an ecosystem. Sports teams produce no value (you could argue entertainment is value I guess but I don't mean it in this sense). An employee's impact lasts significantly longer than any player on a sports team. Code I write today will run the next…

There are pretty large economic impacts generated by sports teams and/or sporting events. While the rest could be debated (i.e. events meaning something in 20 years), there's not really any way to say sports don't produce anything of value. This is true for both professional and college sports.

Re: The Company Isn't a Family

#34

Post by coldtea »

trjordan wrote: post #18
alberth wrote: post #5

Reid Hastings (Netflix founder) uses a different analogy. He compares a company as a high performing "sports team". With the idea being, you're working towards a collective goal. You each have you're own role. But if you're not performing, you get cut. Just like any athlete would get cut. The problem with the "family" analogy is it implies "unconditional love" regardless if you're messing up, failing, not performing.

I worked at a company that had this framing, and it works especially well around peer-to-peer relationships: - If a teammate is doing something wrong, give them feedback. I don't try to improve my family. - If a teammate is doing well, have them share what's working. I don't try to get every detail out of family. - If a teammate is going in the wrong direction, I remind them of our shared goal. I don't try to change…

I agree that a company is nothing like a family, but not all of your counter-arguments above don't ring well.

"I don't try to improve my family." Don't most (family members)?

"I don't try to change the goals of my family." Again, don't most?

Re: The Company Isn't a Family

#35

Post by Sevii »

ShabbosGoy wrote: post #28
nerdponx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implicit assumption of capitalism is that you have a perpetual debt that cannot be repaid What? Care to clarify?

The goal of capitalism is to produce more than one is capable of consuming (i.e. market economy where one produces and sells to multiple people instead of just themselves). There are various equilibrium states between supply and demand, but utility is infinite. If utility is infinite, then the goal of production is to satisfy an equally infinite debt to maximizing utility.

How does capitalism have a goal? That is like claiming evolution has w goal. Don't anthropomorphize it.

Re: The Company Isn't a Family

#36

Post by coldtea »

sriram_sun wrote: post #20
alberth wrote: post #5

Reid Hastings (Netflix founder) uses a different analogy. He compares a company as a high performing "sports team". With the idea being, you're working towards a collective goal. You each have you're own role. But if you're not performing, you get cut. Just like any athlete would get cut. The problem with the "family" analogy is it implies "unconditional love" regardless if you're messing up, failing, not performing.

> The problem with the "family" analogy is it implies "unconditional love" regardless if you're messing up, failing, not performing. On the flip side, the family analogy is used by the companies to their advantage as well. If working for "family", we all might accept less pay (for the good of the "family") and would do shitty work (underemployment; someone has to take out the "trash").

Not just "on the flip side", that's exactly the side by which the idea of "company as family" is used for.

No employee was spared if he was messing, not performing etc. because he invoked "but we said that this company is a family, so they must protect me unconditionally".

It was always the other way around: the company saying they're like family when asking to exploit employees more.

So the problem with the family analogy is exactly the inverse of what the parent says (and is precisely what TFA says).

Re: The Company Isn't a Family

#37

Post by sosborn »

specializeded wrote: post #12
bykovich2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know how much players on professional sports teams make?

It really depends on the league. There are lots of soccer players in America only making 60k or so a year despite playing at the highest level of soccer and being fully professional.

Nobody looks at MLS as the highest level of soccer.

Re: The Company Isn't a Family

#38

Post by coldtea »

Sevii wrote: post #35
ShabbosGoy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of capitalism is to produce more than one is capable of consuming (i.e. market economy where one produces and sells to multiple people instead of just themselves). There are various equilibrium states between supply and demand, but utility is infinite. If utility is infinite, then the goal of production is to satisfy an equally infinite debt to maximizing utility.

How does capitalism have a goal? That is like claiming evolution has w goal. Don't anthropomorphize it.

Capitalism has a very clear goal: make more money, sell more stuff.

And the culture around capitalism in different countries, gives it even more specific goals (the american dream, the rat race, etc).

>That is like claiming evolution has w goal. Don't anthropomorphize it.

Isn't this statement obviously wrong? Evolution is a process in nature. Capitalism is a human invention. One can't anthropomorphize it, because it's already anthropomorphized by the fact that it's a human endeavor.

Re: The Company Isn't a Family

#39

Post by nerdponx »

ShabbosGoy wrote: post #28
nerdponx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implicit assumption of capitalism is that you have a perpetual debt that cannot be repaid What? Care to clarify?

The goal of capitalism is to produce more than one is capable of consuming (i.e. market economy where one produces and sells to multiple people instead of just themselves). There are various equilibrium states between supply and demand, but utility is infinite. If utility is infinite, then the goal of production is to satisfy an equally infinite debt to maximizing utility.

The goal of capitalism is to produce more than one is capable of consuming

This is the goal of any economic system as far as I can tell. I don't see how ownership of the means of production matters.

If utility is infinite, then the goal of production is to satisfy an equally infinite debt to maximizing utility

Sort of. This is why we have sympathy/empathy, social mores, the rule of law, and finally the threat of Malthusian apocalypse. Each of these, in order of increasing severity, exists as a budget constraint on greed in service of utility maximization. And again, this has nothing to do with capitalism specifically -- it would be true in any economic system. Socialist and communist governments in the 20th century went to great lengths in order to remind us of that.

Re: The Company Isn't a Family

#40

Post by nerdponx »

coldtea wrote: post #38
Sevii wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does capitalism have a goal? That is like claiming evolution has w goal. Don't anthropomorphize it.

Capitalism has a very clear goal: make more money, sell more stuff. And the culture around capitalism in different countries, gives it even more specific goals (the american dream, the rat race, etc). > That is like claiming evolution has w goal. Don't anthropomorphize it. Isn't this statement obviously wrong? Evolution is a process in nature. Capitalism is a human invention. One can't anthropomorphize it, because it…

What liar told you that? Capitalism is an emergent system. Nobody designed capitalism.
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