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The Disneyfication of a University

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Re: The Disneyfication of a University

#181

Post by smoyer »

ahi wrote: post #174
smoyer wrote: post #144

Hey GW ... I hear that "Don't Be Evil" is available again and seems like it would be suitably generic. On a more serious note, I'm on staff at a relatively major university having spent the previous 30 years in private industry. One of the things I (now at least) appreciate is that the university isn't supposed to have a corporate culture. There isn't a profit motive, it provides a safe-haven for "new thoughts", and…

I am an '05 alum of GW. GW disqualified itself from using "Don't Be Evil" a long time ago. e.g. https://www.propublica.org/article/george-washington-univers... But GW isn't really an academic institution. It's a real estate developer that uses rich kids from Long Island to fill it's square footage.

Interesting ... they heavily recruited my daughter who's a senior in high school and looking to go to business school in supply-chain-management. She applied to GW but it was her last choice and she was accepted everywhere she applied.

Re: The Disneyfication of a University

#182

Post by pdonis »

riazrizvi wrote: post #92

Unpopular opinion... you can make almost anything sound awful with the right tone of cynicism, and the intended substance of this article is just a cynical tone. Looking at the observations presented I'm inclined to side with the university president. 1. The university staff were mostly sullen at a culture workshop, enthusiasm was low. 2. Disney is an entertainment world leader. 3. Disney attributes its leadership po…

> The university staff were mostly sullen at a culture workshop, enthusiasm was low.

Maybe they would be happier if the administration would just let them do their jobs?

Re: The Disneyfication of a University

#183

Post by lowdose »

bitwize wrote: post #55
Seenso wrote: post #25

Several years ago, I had to attend a full day "culture training" session given by Senn Delaney (a division of Heidrick & Struggles) [1]. It was also a massive waste of time. Our company actually has a really great culture, and what I remember of the training amounted to a somewhat subtle attempt to indoctrinate employees to be more blindly obedient to management change initiatives. There was some other stuff, but I h…

Not long ago at $JOB I sat through what I call "mandatory psychobabble day". The particular psychobabble being peddled to, or rather, imposed on, us was the DISC system -- a variant of which was recently outed on Hackernews as pernicious hucksterism which somehow held much of Sweden in its sway. It was supposed to make us better collaborators, under the rubric that understanding the traits of both your own star sign…

For anyone else wondering if Bitwize just came up with the word of the week or Psychobabble is really a thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychobabble

Re: The Disneyfication of a University

#184

Post by masswerk »

riyadparvez wrote: post #48

As someone who is not from North America, this positive/good vibe culture really baffles me. You are a human being. Negative emotions are part of life. World is full of pain and sufferings. You are supposed to feel empathy for other people and feel bad for their misfortune even if you have the good luck of not going through suffering. I just don't understand this obsession of feeling good all the time. I don't know h…

For an example for a culture much to the contrary, in Austria, there's a tradional way of being "grantig" (grumpy, ill-tempered). According to at least one of the etymologies, this was based on an ill-informed observation of supposedly typical behavior of Spanish nobles, i.e. Grandes -> like a Grande -> grant-ig. To this day it's some of a poor man's way of professing accomplishment, not to the smallest of irritations in the service industry, especially with guests from abroad.* However, from the inside, it's just a reminder that respect is a mutual affair, to be payed by either side. (From this perspective, being able to show yourself "grantig" translates to a minimum reserve of freedom and empowerment.)

*) The traditional, class struggle related response, however, is, "They are paid too much."

(Obviously, this is to be read with a grain of salt.)

Re: The Disneyfication of a University

#185

Post by pdonis »

brightball wrote: post #85
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #23

A good rule of thumb is that the more a corporation talks about "culture", the more the employees should be wary that they are getting fleeced. A lot of companies have realized that they get employees to work harder for less if they are able to get the employees to develop some sort of emotional attachment to the company. If you as an employee are getting a lot of push about "company culture" and the company is tryin…

You're on the right track, but I think you're taking a more cynical view of it (just to be frank). Whether you're a business, volunteer organization, sports team or anything else you want the people working with you to be motivated. No matter what. Motivation is the goal. If you get into motivational psychology, especially for people in the software field, studies consistently show that motivation for us boils down t…

> feeling good about the place that you work will feed into that purpose motive.

Of course, but that's not the problem with what GW is doing. The problem with what GW is doing is that trying to make people feel good about the place they work with by putting them through artificial "team building" exercises doesn't work. The way you make people feel good about the place they work with is to make it a good place to work. That means letting people do their jobs, giving them the tools they need to do their jobs, and removing obstacles that are in the way of them doing their jobs. Forcing people to stop work and go to these events fails at all three.

Re: The Disneyfication of a University

#186

Post by brightball »

odiroot wrote: post #119
brightball wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're on the right track, but I think you're taking a more cynical view of it (just to be frank). Whether you're a business, volunteer organization, sports team or anything else you want the people working with you to be motivated. No matter what. Motivation is the goal. If you get into motivational psychology, especially for people in the software field, studies consistently show that motivation for us boils down t…

> Motivation is the goal. I cannot speak for everyone but nothing motivates me more than a well defined task/problem, a reasonable amount of time to solve it, and a follow up letting me know how much my solution helped. No amount of gimmicks is gonna win with that.

What you're talking about largely falls under autonomy (reasonable amount of time to implement your solution) and mastery (feedback on your solution to the problem).

And that's totally normal.

Some companies can better fit the Purpose mold better than others. Many can't at all.

Re: The Disneyfication of a University

#187

Post by magduf »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #141
bumby wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This made me genuinely chuckle. I love economic theories applied to real life when they border on absurd because they assume everything is about maximizing utility. I'll be sure to farm out all my spousal duties if I have better things to do and I'll report back on how that went.

One time my wife explained to me that she didn't feel like I appreciated her doing my laundry. I responded that she should stop doing my laundry. I didn't feel like it was her "job" to do the laundry and if it was the source of some emotional problem, it could easily be avoided. I thought I had solved the problem. She's my ex-wife now.

This reminds me of some web article I read a while ago complaining about how women suffer more "emotional labor" in relationships. It was of course written by a women, but to me, it really seemed like a lot of whining, which amounted to "I think all this stuff is necessary, so if my husband doesn't pitch in and do half of it, it's unfair." So, for instance, if the wife insists on having an immaculately clean house, and the husband doesn't do his share on keeping the house up to her level of perfection, then he's a slacker. But from his perspective, he doesn't care about the house being that spic-and-span, so why should he be responsible for that much work? There was more to it than that; I think another big example was keeping up with social engagements. Again, something where the woman somehow thought these things were absolutely necessary, volunteered to do them, and then complained that she was having to do all this unpaid labor, while the man really didn't care about doing these things at all.

Re: The Disneyfication of a University

#188

Post by riazrizvi »

pdonis wrote: post #180
riazrizvi wrote: post #92

Unpopular opinion... you can make almost anything sound awful with the right tone of cynicism, and the intended substance of this article is just a cynical tone. Looking at the observations presented I'm inclined to side with the university president. 1. The university staff were mostly sullen at a culture workshop, enthusiasm was low. 2. Disney is an entertainment world leader. 3. Disney attributes its leadership po…

> Disney is an entertainment world leader. So basically you're saying universities are in the entertainment business and they should look to the world leader to see how things should be done? I'm not sure I would disagree with this, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't what the president of GW was thinking.

In the academic community a seminal work on performance is Anders Ericsson's The Road To Excellence. It is based on a premise that excellence in one field is pertinent to excellence in another.

Re: The Disneyfication of a University

#189

Post by magduf »

techopoly wrote: post #139
Consultant32452 wrote: post #65

The most common reason people leave companies is not compensation. It's usually about relationships, primarily with the boss but also coworkers. I'm on the spectrum, so I function a bit like an automaton which places little value on the social aspects of work, but most people aren't like that. This is how "on the spectrum" I am. One time I was on a team that did a team building exercise where we went to a local chari…

That is a really clever alternative to the volunteerism that is becoming very popular in companies -- hire others to do it. Then you're helping two groups of people. Of course that doesn't do much good for the company's employees that don't wind up volunteering / doing the work, perhaps even increasing the separation the employees may feel toward the less-privileged. Service projects, mission trips, etc. can do a lot…

>One could argue this is partly why companies want to do this sort of thing, so their employees grow (among other good / less-than-good reasons).

I really wonder how much of it is this, and how much of it is virtue-signaling at the corporate level: "look at how great our company is! We have our employees spend work hours on charity work!"

While it wouldn't do much for "team building", it seems like society would be better off if these companies simply contributed to a fund to pay minimum-wage workers to do this charity work. This would get more charity work done, and also provide jobs for some underprivileged people.

As for your soapbox, I completely agree.

Re: The Disneyfication of a University

#190

Post by mattkrause »

protonfish wrote: post #106
smacktoward wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps the most salient example of this ever-expanding bureaucracy is Stanford's shiny new 35-acre campus in Redwood City, which houses only non-academic administrative staff. The idea of a separate campus just for administrative staff feels like a real-life version of Douglas Adams' Golgafrinchan Ark B: https://everything2.com/title/B+Ark

Except we can't ship them into space.

On behalf of the science departments: "We're willing to try!"
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