Why is everyone shouting at each other these days?
I think I know why: It’s nothing more than pent up resentment over how bad managers have treated people for decades. We can’t get back at the managers, so we’re redirecting the anger.
For example:
Assigning blame
Ever have a boss who, when something went wrong, mostly cared whose fault it was?
Say it was a server crash that caused an hour-long outage. It crashed because the power supply shorted out. The recovery took that long because the troubleshooters needed 10 minutes to figure out that the problem was, in fact, the power supply, 5 minutes to replace it, and 45 minutes to boot the server and verify it was operating properly.
The server wasn’t part of a fail-over cluster because the business couldn’t afford a fail-over cluster.
Your boss’s response? “Why don’t you and your team take responsibility when something goes wrong? Somebody screwed up. I want to know who it was.”
Here’s a widely reported fact: American business is sitting on $1.8 trillion of cash. If they invested just half of it in employment, America’s execs could fund three million jobs, each lasting three years and paying $100 grand a year including benefits.
Think that might get the economy moving again? It’s their fault unemployment is still high.
Ask the execs who are sitting on top of the money and what do you get? “The regulatory environment is uncertain.” It is, of course, a nonsensical argument. The future is always uncertain in some way, shape or form.
We’re blaming the execs; they’re blame-shifting to the politicians; but the problem is structural — it’s nobody’s fault.
Businesses don’t hire employees because they can afford them. They hire employees so they have enough capacity to satisfy demand (the reason business tax cuts wouldn’t create jobs, by the way). No demand, no hiring. The way to generate demand? Other companies have to hire people.
If everyone hired at the same time they’d all be fine. But nobody is going to be first, and so everyone sits on their cash.
We want it to be somebody’s fault, but it isn’t. It’s how we’ve structured our whole economy.
Insistence on oversimplification
Go back to the last time you tried to explain why some project, assignment, or what-have-you was much bigger and more difficult that it looked, and your boss asked, in an irritated tone, “Why do you IT people have to make everything so complicated?”
Your answer, “It is complicated. I didn’t make it that way — I’m just trying to explain it,” fell on even-more-irritated ears. You resented it, didn’t you?
When the healthcare bill was making its way through the Senate and House of Representatives, one criticism was that it was so long.
Healthcare represents about 16% of the U.S. economy and is an incredibly complicated subject — probably even more complicated than running IT (at IT Catalysts we’ve identified 150 moving parts in IT organizations, so were I to write just 5 pages about each, the result would be a 450 page book … just to give you a point of comparison).
We wanted healthcare to be simple, and got angry when someone tried to explain how complicated it really is.
Doing more with less
It’s budget season. You know what you have to get done and what it will cost. Your boss assumes you’ve padded your budget, and also assumes you aren’t running your operation very well. What you get is a 5% budget cut, and more to get done than you had on your plate last year.
Your boss then delivers the coup de grace: “It’s your job to find ways to streamline, and if you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”
How many of us know, with complete certainty, that government at all levels collects plenty of tax money to get everything done — the problem is all the waste. Do you have any evidence of this? I sure don’t, but I sure do hear plenty of certainty on the subject.
I’ve known plenty of managers who, having had to deal with bad bosses, needed an outlet for their frustration. Their bad karma flowed downhill to their staff. That’s the point this week: If you have a bad boss, don’t let that turn you into a bad boss.
You’d be better off going to a Tea Party confab to vent.
And by the way, shouldn’t progressives start a Coffee Klatch movement, just for parity?
Starbucks, spend some of your cash. I see a business opportunity for you …
I know, because I work for the government, that there is a ton of waste in government. There are a lot of reasons, but the bottom line is a lot of money gets spent by the government that isn’t necessary. One of my favorites is spending money to buy something and then never even taking that item out of the box that it’s shipped in while still complaining about how tight money is and there isn’t enough money in the budget.
I agree but would point out a couple of things:
1) A lot of this is structural more than bad management at the lower levels. Purchasing lead times can be quite long, which can affect decisions about what to order and result in orders that turn out not to be as helpful once they finally work their way through the system. Also, I would not be surprised if those items in the boxes were ordered from a grant that was about to expire or a budget line that cannot be transfered to the area where money is tight. I agree that it is still a waste but the solutions are more complicated than people assume.
2) Have you talked to people who work in large corporations or non-profits? There is plenty of waste there, too. I suspect that it may be more a matter of size, complexity, and bureaucracy than being government, per se.
I’ve seen someone apply for, and get, a $500,000 grant because, “Do you want to explain to the school board why we didn’t get that grant money? I don’t.” That grant was a government grant which means taxpayer money. Today, two years later, that $500,000 grant has not been used. Every penny of it was spent on equipment and installation and it’s sitting there collecting dust.
I’m in a position to actually see the finances behind the scenes. Trust me, the stuff which I’m referring to is not structural. It’s all poor management or people buying toys to play with, like the guy who bought a bunch of home media servers and took one home to “test” and left the rest sitting around collecting dust.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious … this sort of behavior is hardly limited to the public sector. Many non-profits go after every grant they can plausibly pursue, and I know of any number of projects in the private for-profit sector that were pointless “pet projects” that delivered pure shelfware.
It’s bad leadership. Voters can and should demand better … but they don’t. They want the school board to get those grants. Boards of directors can and should demand better too … but mostly, they don’t either.
Re: Tea party counterpart is Drinking Liberally.
http://livingliberally.org/drinking/
The problem with the healthcare reform legislation is that it extended coverage to people who were not covered, but does little else. If it had been true reform legislation, money would have been given to medical schools or some other incentives legislated to double the number of healthcare providers (doctors) in 4-8 years. Drug patent protections might have been examined and the patent laws modified, to reduce monopolies on drugs while still leaving the pharms a decent margin to make a profit. Clinical trials could have been revamped or publically funded and standardized to lower drug development costs, and reduce drug prices. Medicare could have been extended to cover more people as a public option to increase the competitiveness of the health insurers. But the public option was dropped. Medicare may be cut back by the deficit commission thereby making the sick and elderly sick pay part of the costs of the GFC bailout. It is known that the US pays twice as much on healthcare than any other developed nation, yet we are sicker on average than the citizens who are in these national plans in other countries. So, there is obviously room for improvements, but the politicians would have had to fight three powerful lobbies, the AMA, the pharmaceuticals, and the health insurers. We saw the result, a law that is vague and that everyone hates and no one likes because it really didn’t solve the problems at hand.
Part of the IT problem is that hardware gets better and more powerful and cheaper due to Moore’s law every 18 months, so one really can do more with less at the hardware level. Virtualization can help contain costs as well, but there is only so much one can do on limited budgets. If you go to open source to control costs, then you need knowledgeable workers and programmers who can customize the software to do what you need it to do for your business and some of your savings is lost in labor costs. (The best any IT worker or manager can hope for is to be ignored because things are working rather smoothly.)
But many IT disasters are self-inflicted due to lack of funding or management ignorance of the technological solution. Thanks to desktop computers becoming practically an appliance, many people, especially in management, assume that servers are just as easy to set up and are as reliable as desktop systems. This is like thinking that a Formula One racer that is built for a specific purpose is as robust and reliable as a family sedan. The analogy is not a perfect one, but it does illustrate the difference in purpose and function of a server versus a client desktop computer. The server has to work reliably 24×7 and serve high demand workloads at least 8 hours or more per day, whereas the desktop only needs to function for around 8 hours per day, five days a week for a typical business. Which system is going to receive more wear and tear?
Unfortunately, the art of argument has suffered to some extent the last 20 years and argument is not seen as an educational exercise whereby both parties learn from one another via logic and discourse. Argument is now seen as a form of disloyalty or dissent and tends to be either dismissed or stifled. For the various ways, people cope with the presentation of evidence, see this post: http://www.badscience.net/2010/07/yeah-well-you-can-prove-anything-with-science/ .
As far as anger rolling downhill, businessmen always remind their partners, customers and employees that this is nothing personal, it’s business. But if they say one thing and do another, well, we know what those types of people really are. They are called hypocrites. They may not even know they are being hypocritical, but they are taking a problem and making it very personal because money or ego is involved.
“Ask the execs who are sitting on top of the money and what do you get? “The regulatory environment is uncertain.” It is, of course, a nonsensical argument. The future is always uncertain in some way, shape or form.”
It is silly to refer to these fears as nonsensical. There was uncertainty for any soldier crossing the Normandy beaches on D-day. There is also uncertainty about the results of doing a parachute jump in Oklahoma. Just because the future is always uncertain is no reason to equate the two.
What business executives are facing now is more like the risk that soldiers exposed to heavy enemy fire were exposed to.
BTW, there are no progressives. There are only people hiding behind the label Progressive, trying to fool people into thinking they are somewhat like the Progressives of the early 20th century. There are no liberals, either. They went extinct in the mid-late 1980s(*). I would tend to call these people leftwing fascists, but they don’t seem to like that one, and anyhow, that label is probably not much more fitting, historically, than progressive is. So I just call them leftists. The loonier ones I call moonbats.
(*) Myself, I’m a conservative liberal or liberal conservative, I’m never quite sure which, never mind what I said about liberals having gone extinct. Left liberals are the ones who have gone extinct.
And I drink coffee: 5-6 cups a day, much of it bird-friendly, organic coffee from small growers, brewed in a french press from freshly roasted beans, freshly ground. I don’t like tea, though I wouldn’t mind a tea-bag bumper sticker for my bicycle, if it had a bumper.
150 * 5 != 450
150 * 5 = 750
I usually like your stuff, but when you get into these political parables, you lose me.
I can agree that many of the simple solutions proposed by politicians and non-politicos are nonsense when you dig a little deeper. However, I am holding cash reserves in my business because I know that I have a huge tax hike in my future, I also know that I meet the minimum requirements to be bound to implement the Health Care “reform” legislation put in place. I also know that there are opportunities out there for me to take advantage of because of the economic downturn and I want cash on hand to be able to act quickly when a deal comes along. Could I hire more people right now? Yes. Is there any lost opportunity by not hiring? Possibly. Will I hire? No, I have worked with my team so that they understand that we will continue to grow and when policies and need dictate more team members, I will hire them then.
I like the analogy that “The Reticulator” made in the last sentence of their post – We Are Facing Heavy Fire Everyday. I am not big enough to be psudo-nationalized like GM, but this fascist president and his ilk scare the tar out of me. Yet another reason for large reserves, to serve as a defense mechanism.
Thanks for the IT stuff, but please stay out of politics.
RE: the blame game – that was one of my major annoyances with Congress in the early days of the BP oil spill – they were holding hearings to find out what went wrong! If you are insistent on finding blame, at least wait until the situation is over – talk about distracting time and resources from the real problem.
Bob,
99% of the time you are truly a scholar and a gentleman. I enjoy your thought-provoking postings.
Bringing politics into the mix does not work. You want to talk about uncertainty about the future? Talk about those people who were holding GM bonds.
Or ponder the US Justice Department acting like a common highwayman against a multi-national corporation. This country is headed for uncharted territory.
It seems that some very fundamental principles are disappearing arbitrarily. Business has reason to be uncertain.
Or maybe Mr O. could just mandate that our businessmen hire those 3 million people. What would be wrong with that? Does the old party of National Socialism come to mind?
Don’t dismiss the Tea Party.
My parents held GM bonds. Had the feds not stepped in, those bonds would have still been worthless.
The feds didn’t drive GM to the brink. GM’s management drove it to the brink, in slow motion, over a span of decades. Speaking as a management consultant, I’ll tell you — it was pitiful to watch a company that big completely lose track of the importance of fielding winning products.
Does business have reason to be uncertain? Of course it does. The future is always uncertain, even when the economy is strong. Now it isn’t. But the current weakness wasn’t manufactured by excessive governmental interference in the conduct of business. Wall Street manufactured this mess all by itself. Personally, I’d prefer a civil discussion regarding the proper roles of government and various industry sectors in helping it recover.
I presume the “multinational” you’re concerned about is BP. The Wall Street Journal’s investigation strongly suggests BP behaved with considerable negligence — the spill would not have taken place otherwise, and there’s a strong likelihood its negligence was, legally speaking, criminal.
So what are you proposing — that the Justice Department fail to investigate criminal behavior that resulted in the loss of life and enormous property damage? If that is, in fact, what you’re proposing, then I’ll have to agree — some very fundamental principles are disappearing.
In any event, in KJR itself I didn’t bring politics into the discussion. As I mentioned in another reply, what I brought into the discussion was commentary about commentary about politics. I find I learn a lot about organizational dynamics when I listen to how people discuss politics. That’s what I’m trying to share here.
RE: “How many of us know, with complete certainty, that government at all levels collects plenty of tax money to get everything done — the problem is all the waste.”
Well I live in Illinois so I think it’s fair to KNOW the problem is corruption, graft, and shoe boxes(remember Paul Powell?). Proof enough… LOL
Having grown up in the Chicago suburbs during the Daley Senior administration, I can say with confidence that you’re looking at this all wrong.
In Chicago, politics isn’t a matter of expensive graft and corruption. It’s a cheap form of entertainment!
Just curious, since it is American bosses that are holding the economy down ( “America’s execs could fund three million jobs,”)
How many employees will you be hiring at $100,000?
Re-read that section. I was quite explicit that American bosses aren’t holding the economy down. Quite the opposite – the problem is structural and situational, not a matter of who’s to blame.
Bob, I really like your IT assessments and insight. I don’t care for your liberal politics and leftie bias. In the words of Laura Ingrahm, “shut up and sing”. Stick to IT and you will have a loyal reader. Stick with the politics and I will unsubscribe. I have plenty of political blogs I follow where the bloggers are 1,000 percent more qualified to discuss politics.
Okay, I’m baffled. I did bring current affairs into the discussion. Current affairs provides a common experience that’s useful for illustrating important points about leadership and organizational dynamics. If you don’t like the points, the problem isn’t that I’m commenting about politics (I’m not … I’m commenting about commenting about politics).
And liberal bias? You might have noticed that I defended the CEOs who are sitting on a huge pile of cash instead of creating jobs. Last I looked, that isn’t a liberal position.
Unless “liberal bias” means saying anything at all about government that isn’t 100% negative, I don’t see it. And if “conservative” means “everything government does is bad,” then you’re equating political conservatism with anarchy … probably a bad choice.
You betrayed yourself with the term “leftie bias.” Name-calling is a revealing tendency.
“Healthcare represents about 16% of the U.S. economy … running IT….We wanted healthcare to be simple…”
Comparing the Health Insurance bill to *running* IT is apt. The question is: did we want the gov’t to *run* Health Ins./Care in the US? I didn’t.
And I didn’t want healthcare to be *simple*, I wanted options – which is what private industry creates, albeit imperfectly. Gov’t isn’t good at creating responsive options, it’s better at dictating a set of choices that *it* thinks are valuable.
This phrase by the Reticulator is just wrong, “What business executives are facing now is more like the risk that soldiers exposed to heavy enemy fire were exposed to.” A soldier faces the real risk of death. When a company dies, a bunch of papers called contracts and jobs are lost or die, but person should die. So, the analogy or metaphor is flawed. Business executives typical careers or tenures is 3-5 years (CEOS and CFOs). Their focus is short-term incentives and maximum benefits to themselves. These incentives promote looting of the firm. Look at what happened to the banks. They employed control fraud to pay themselves massive bonuses and blew up their companies. Same thing with Enron.
The current problem is a lack of demand in the economy. This is because we had a $6 trillion dollar housing bubble burst. But Bob is right that the business argument being promoted is nonsensical.
Government is less efficient than business. Well, duh! If social services that society needed were all profitable, they would be privately owned and run. Some services are necessary, but are non-profit or lossy. Police, firemen, public health, are non-profit or lose money, but they are a form of insurance against greater losses that would be incurred by crime, catastrophic fire, or disease. Not all businesses are run efficiently as well. The telecoms are one example. The banks and mortgage lenders are another. Is government’s problem of inefficiency due to an inherent structural issue, or is it due to government being co-opted by special interests, or both? One can’t use the argument that government is always the problem because that leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Besides, the banks,airlines, GE, AIG, and two automakers went to the government to solve their problems. When push came to shove, those executives got society to bail their firms out of trouble. Now those same people are trying to foist the costs of the bailouts onto the sick and elderly. There needs to be a debate about how supportive government should be of business policies when taxpayers are paying for that support.
If an analogy wasn’t flawed, it wouldn’t be an analogy.
Just because people died in one case and don’t in another does not mean it’s not an excellent analogy. Take another example: We can say the relationship between a hand and a palm is analogous to the relationship between a food and a sole. We don’t say the analogy is no good on the grounds that fingers articulate more than toes.
BTW, I should emphasize that I’ve been reading Bob’s column for years and am going to keep reading it no matter how many snide, leftwing political comments he makes. And I’m going to keep recommending him to others. His insights are too good to pass up. Even though I don’t work for the kind of organization he usually consults for, they are still helpful in understanding what’s going on and in dealing with people.
It is part of his unique charm that Bob is oblivious as to how his insights also are helpful in understanding why leftwing government is no good. No matter that he votes for the bad guys, I consider a Bob an honorary conservative because of all the aid he provides to our cause. Tea Partiers ought to be reading his column in order to understand the failures in the workings of the welfare-police state and how to be effective in opposing it.
Well thanks. I think.
A point, though: The Republican party’s single biggest defect today is that it considers the Democratic party to be its enemy, not its opposition. You apparently agree, having described the candidates you imagine I vote for to be the “bad guys.” (The Democratic party, by the way, possesses an entirely different set of deplorable flaws; this doesn’t appear to be one of them … or if it is, the Democrats are too inept at it for it to show.)
As my goal in discussing current events is always to illustrate issues in leadership and organizational dynamics, here’s why it matters to you every day: Citizens who consider the opposition to be their enemy when the subject is public policy almost certainly consider the department down the hall to be their enemy. And if not the department down the hall, it’s the Windows sysadmins if they’re Unix sysadmins, or the “bean counters” if they’re Marketing, or HR if they’re just about anyone else.
The attitude is one of the sources of what we generally call organizational silos, and leads to the sort of corporate dysfunction that’s a root cause of dreadful products and impossibly bad customer service.
That’s kind of funny, because for years I’ve been saying that the Republican party’s biggest defect is that it doesn’t recognize that the left is the enemy rather than the opposition, and has been since about 1987. It has a lot to do with why I quit being a Republican a dozen years ago.
Your points about organizational dynamics are very good ones and are useful to me in my day-to-day life. I’ve found myself making similar points to people in my organization when advising them how to deal with other people who sometimes seem troublesome. They aren’t the enemy; we all want to be successful, and want our organization to be successful.
But those points didn’t apply to situations where the Americans were trying to conquer the Native Americans and take their stuff, or Stalin was trying to eliminate the kulaks, or the left is waging total war on the people of this country and putting political power over all other considerations — environmental, economic, or whatever.
In 1808 a lot of Native Americans of the Great Lakes region didn’t believe the Americans were such a deadly threat, despite the warnings of leaders like Tecumseh. They thought they could manage to get along. In 1809 they got a huge wakeup call, and started to understand what they were in for. It was a little late. It’s probably too late for us now, too, but we’re getting a huge wakeup call. The alarm is ringing loudly.
I think this is going to end up out of order. I wanted to reply to The Reticulator’s post of 7/21/2010, 11:35 pm but there is no Reply link.
Huh? Implicitly comparing the left in the U.S. to Stalin? Waging total war on the people of this country? All without seeming to feel the slightest need to provide an actual argument or example?
Realizing that I am very intentionally making a serious accusation here, this sort of attitude is dangerous. It is arguably what got Prime Minister Rabin assassinated in Israel. Using the language of opposition is a call to defeat someone in the next election. Using words like “enemy” and “total war” can sound to someone unbalanced like a call to take whatever actions necessary to stop this supposed existential threat to the nation. If you truly believe that Obama, Pelosi, Reid, etc. are Hitler or Stalin, I suppose implicitly calling for people to defeat them through violence might make sense although it equally makes sense for those who disagree to consider you a legitimate target for violence. However, if you are using that sort of language to characterize what is really a political difference that should be resolved constitutionally, that is shockingly irresponsible and you should be ashamed of yourself.
I can make a good argument that President Bush (G.W. Bush) assumed extra-constitutional powers that should have alarmed every citizen of the country. As an example, he asserted the power of the president to arrest a U.S. citizen within the United States and hold him incommunicado with absolutely no judicial review simply by saying the words “enemy combatant.” For those who supported him in this view, I will point out that had he prevailed in this attempt, your liberty would now be at the pleasure of President Obama.
Notwithstanding all that, I did not use words like “enemy,” “war,” or “Stalin” in describing President Bush. I strongly opposed him. I voted against him twice. I honestly believe he served his first term against the true intent of the Florida voters and therefore the intent of states making up a majority of the electoral college. However, I stayed within the bounds of legitimate dissent in a democratic society.
Please tell me which of President Obama’s actions you would like to see repealed in exchange for granting him the power to throw you in prison indefinitely on his order alone. If the answer is “none,” where do you get off with the sort of language you used unless you used the same sort of language against a Republican president who actually did assert and use that power?
Sorry, meant to say that … no person should die instead of “but person should die” when a business dies.
There is a Coffee Party:
http://www.coffeepartyusa.com/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_Party_USA
Please note that I am not offering an opinion on it. I actually know very little about it. I just remembered that I had heard of it and Googled it to find the links above.