> TFA: Facebook has changed a lot since 2012. The types of projects that I thrive in were harder to come by. The magic was gone. Things I care a lot about, like quality, craft and focus, weren’t as important as scale, metrics and PSC. None of this happened suddenly, just a very slow process. That was one of the reason it was hard to leave.
> GP: It never occurred to me that my self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job.
The worker no longer trusts that they won't be a replaced by a machine. The investor no longer trusts that they will get a return on capital. The manager no longer trusts that they will have employment for life after more than a bad quarter or two.
With so much of our trust eroding, management is left with little else to hold on to, and so they grasp the false hope of blunt instruments like forced rankings and quarterly forecasting — no matter how illusory it all may be.
...We seem to have a false sense of joining something when we enter companies these days, just as Rousseau stipulated society had entered into a false social contract. This may be what's driving newer generations to look for "purposeful work" as they launch their careers: They are looking to take control by demanding meaning from work right from day one...
But Rousseau also had the idea that humans can remake themselves via their institutions, and Deming appears to share this belief.
This is what's so interesting about companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple. These rare birds tend to operate outside of our norms and customs: They educate their employees differently; they collaborate differently across silos and divisions; they incentivize people in different ways. Because of their overwhelming ability to make cash (either initially through giddy investors and eventually via customers) these companies appear to start out more like communes. They are Gardens of Eden where there is little fighting for resources and oftentimes even the core customers freely partake.
Moreover, these companies almost appear to be for the common good, and the management appears to instinctively follow Deming's philosophy. But what's even more striking is that efficiency and performance naturally improves inside of these companies without the standard methods that more established firms pursue. Sadly, there's often also a fall from grace that typically happens as these corporations become "normalized" and a more traditional battle for resources sets in.
Perhaps the answer lies deeper in what Deming was trying to say about "profound knowledge." As Deming implied, we work in complex systems with forces of good and evil always in play, and it may just be that the single most important responsibility of our top leaders is to artfully mold and shape this dynamic in a way that best suits their organizations — and produces a self-selecting ecosystem of workers, partners, customers, and shareholders who naturally align.
All of this implies a more-progressive approach to leadership. And yet we all too easily succumb to our Taylor-like impulses that assume the worst about workers — using automation to track productivity down to the nanosecond, if possible. Unfortunately, this tends to exacerbate the growing trust gap between workers that festers between our corporate silos and stymies the very productivity that we seek to enhance.
None of this is easy. And many of us will surely struggle with these issues throughout our entire lives. But in a world where the stakes appear to be getting higher by the minute, building lasting trust and cooperation across companies and communities — binding together people and long-calcified silos — may be the only way for the corporation to survive.
hbr.org, The management thinker we should never have forgotten (2016), https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-management-thinker-we-should-nev...