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A Lifetime of Systems Thinking

thesystemsthinker.com

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Re: A Lifetime of Systems Thinking

#31

Post by mathattack »

adamcstephens wrote: post #9
mathattack wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a subtle distinction between labor and capital. And gets blurred by debt vs equity. Who owns the company? The people who work there? The person who founded it? The people who the founders sold shares to? Or the people who lent it money? Legally it’s the people who own shares. And if they miss their debt payments, it’s the lenders. Companies can inform their shareholders “if you want to invest, here is how we ope…

Except the quote isn’t about legal ownership it all. It’s about who has skin in the game, and who actually makes the company function. The vast majority of shareholders have very little skin in the game, while the employees of the company absolutely have a lot of skin in the game. The employees depend on the company for their livelihood, whereas a shareholder is generally just trying to make money on their money.

I view him as defining value as to accrue to stakeholders, with employees as primary.

One way to frame the question is “If the company gets a million dollar windfall, who should get it?” Employees? Owners? Even the most customer centric company won’t say a cash payment to customers, though they may say improving service or R and D.

Re: A Lifetime of Systems Thinking

#32

Post by throwawayboise »

> The interactive manager plans backward from where he wants to be ideally, right now, not forward to where he wants to be in the future.

I'm having trouble understanding this point. Is he saying the interactive manager looks backwards at what he might have done differently in the past, to be in a better place today? Would a better term for this be a "retrospective manager"?

Or does this mean something else?

Re: A Lifetime of Systems Thinking

#33

Post by znpy »

ryanschneider wrote: post #4

> The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation. Providing the shareholders with a return on their investments is a requirement, not an objective. I love this quote. At first it sounds very critical, but thinking about it more it reveals something deeper: companies are a collection o…

> So maximize for worker

Uh, the article explicitly mentions "those who manage the corporation" not "those who work for the corporation".

You're thinking of regular workers, but i would bet 10$ that the author is thinking about upper management (not even team-leaders or middle-managers).

Re: A Lifetime of Systems Thinking

#34

Post by heymijo »

shoto_io wrote: post #27
heymijo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> companies are a collection of people Peter Drucker was on top of this. It's so obvious yet so often forgotten (ignored?). An organization is a group of people. Jumping back to systems thinking. People can respond a number of ways in organizations. Enter 'policy refusal' (see Donella Meadows' systems literature for more). Executive wants A to happen. A is not in employees' best interest. Employees ignore, delay, obf…

What’s your favorite resource on Drucker? I love re-reading his book “The Effective Executive”.

His 1973 tome Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, The Essential Drucker, and Managing for Results are three I find myself opening regularly.

The Effective Executive is great as well. It's hard to narrow down because he was such a prolific writer. Recommendations are also hard because you've got to meet the reader where they are. I picked up and put down Drucker early in my career. Years later, the same pages burst with insight when I read them.

Re: A Lifetime of Systems Thinking

#35

Post by abecedarius »

ryanschneider wrote: post #4

> The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation. Providing the shareholders with a return on their investments is a requirement, not an objective. I love this quote. At first it sounds very critical, but thinking about it more it reveals something deeper: companies are a collection o…

> to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation.

Considering that managers compete to climb the hierarchy, I'm surprised to hear this claim from a systems thinker. It'd predict that managers work 40 hours or less per week, for example.

"Corporate behavior is shaped by managers shaped by this competition" seems a more realistic starting point.

Re: A Lifetime of Systems Thinking

#36

Post by [deleted] »

znpy wrote: post #33
ryanschneider wrote: post #4

> The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation. Providing the shareholders with a return on their investments is a requirement, not an objective. I love this quote. At first it sounds very critical, but thinking about it more it reveals something deeper: companies are a collection o…

> So maximize for worker Uh, the article explicitly mentions "those who manage the corporation" not "those who work for the corporation". You're thinking of regular workers, but i would bet 10$ that the author is thinking about upper management (not even team-leaders or middle-managers).

[deleted]

Re: A Lifetime of Systems Thinking

#37

Post by neolog »

WalterBright wrote: post #26
ryanschneider wrote: post #4

> The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation. Providing the shareholders with a return on their investments is a requirement, not an objective. I love this quote. At first it sounds very critical, but thinking about it more it reveals something deeper: companies are a collection o…

The thing to remember is people are nearly always motivated by selfish impulses, not altruism. (Even the most dedicated communists in the USSR still participated in the black market.) Any system that relies on people being selfless is doomed to failure. (Even charity work is selfishly motivated - people like the status they get from donating to charity, praise from their social circle, and feeling good from doing it.…

So a system that relies on people being altruistic can work fine as long as people feel good about being altruistic?

Re: A Lifetime of Systems Thinking

#38

Post by dminor »

throwawayboise wrote: post #32

> The interactive manager plans backward from where he wants to be ideally, right now, not forward to where he wants to be in the future. I'm having trouble understanding this point. Is he saying the interactive manager looks backwards at what he might have done differently in the past, to be in a better place today? Would a better term for this be a "retrospective manager"? Or does this mean something else?

I think he's saying the interactive manager doesn't guess what the future will be and plot a course for success in that future, but rather asks what would be ideal right now and plots a course to achieve that ideal.

Re: A Lifetime of Systems Thinking

#39

Post by ethanbond »

znpy wrote: post #33
ryanschneider wrote: post #4

> The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation. Providing the shareholders with a return on their investments is a requirement, not an objective. I love this quote. At first it sounds very critical, but thinking about it more it reveals something deeper: companies are a collection o…

> So maximize for worker Uh, the article explicitly mentions "those who manage the corporation" not "those who work for the corporation". You're thinking of regular workers, but i would bet 10$ that the author is thinking about upper management (not even team-leaders or middle-managers).

All the way down to the person managing a single grill on the kitchen line, everyone is managing something. Their ability to steer the org toward their own quality of life improvements is dependent upon the scope of their management, but indeed everyone holds the exact same objective.

Re: A Lifetime of Systems Thinking

#40

Post by slumdev »

trixie_ wrote: post #17
ryanschneider wrote: post #4

> The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation. Providing the shareholders with a return on their investments is a requirement, not an objective. I love this quote. At first it sounds very critical, but thinking about it more it reveals something deeper: companies are a collection o…

I'm not a huge fan of this quote because it's an opinion presented as a fact.

It reads like a descriptive statement, not a normative one, because it calls out specifically that the corporation enriches its management, not its employees.
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