"But we are stuck with organisations that have generally forgotten what they are for, run by people who are only there to loot them..."
Another example is Boeing. Boeing forgot its mission, and went from being an engineering and quality-control-focused organization to being a rules-focused-organization. This is a quote from a recent NY Times article about the apparent suicide of John Barnett, a Boeing Whistleblower just before a deposition on a Boeing legal case he was involved in:
"Mr. Barnett also told The Times in 2019 that he had reported to [Boeing] management that defective parts had gone missing, raising the possibility that they had been [improperly] installed in planes. He said that his bosses told him to finish the paperwork on the missing parts without figuring out where they had gone."
I.e. Barnett was told to just follow the FAA rules [paperwork], never mind what they are for!
Here's more from the NY Times article:
“Over the years, it’s just been a steady pecking away at quality” at Boeing, Mr. Barnett said, adding, “This is not a 737 problem. It’s a Boeing problem.”
"Boeing needs to “get back to basics,” he said. “They need to get back to airplane building 101.”
After years of culture change that subordinated engineering to cost control, compressing schedules, ROE and DEI, Boeing's PMC lost the corporate memory to actually build safe planes. As a result, ROE has suffered as well. Ironically, the FAA and Boeing PMCs' answer to this problem will be more rules. But a rule focus without a mission focus is just typical PMC window dressing--cheap and easy cosmetics.
John Bartlett felt he had to leave Boeing. He couldn't build planes that way anymore. The ones who are still there are the ones who will reliably follow the very detailed but poorly understood rules.
John Barnett was quoted as saying he'll never fly in a new-model Boeing plane ever again. I recently cancelled a trip in part because it involved flying cross-country on a Boeing Max 737-800.
While you pointed out the benefit of rules (predictability and less corruption), what's interesting here too is that the natural endpoint of the rules proliferation is a return of tribal corruption. With enough rules that someone is always breaking one, we're already seeing the massive importance of prosecutiorial discretion at all levels of government/institutions, which is increasingly applied by the political friends/enemies test. Either visibly pledge your fealty to the power, try and buy friendship if you're wealthy/a corporation, or take your chances.
Reminds me of the ISO 9000 Quality Management standard, was most commonly interpreted as filling forms rather than addressing essence of quality. Was necessary for machinery exports, so we took it. Later when ISO 14001 environmental management standard became a requirement, we said this is enough bullshit and didn't bother with it.
Our motto first thing on our homepage was:
A Millennium Behind
Somewhere in the evolution of industry from the artisan-craftsman to the global corporations of today, craftsman’s values and pride embedded in the product were lost. From products made to be everlasting, to products with planned obsolescence.
Technologies are tools; craftsman’s pride is the soul.
Implementing today’s tools while preserving millennial values is the challenge.
re: "but the PMC doesn’t do sensible, and the people who administer universities these days don’t have the management and personal skills any more to think beyond simple clichés and the appeasement of various power groups."
"Columbia University vice president Gerry Rosberg was unable to respond when asked if Palestinians are human. He stated that this question was “intimidating”. "
This reminds me of what Richard Feynman used to call "Cargo cult" science. It originally referred to practices carried out by certain pacific islanders, but it can be generalized to rituals which originally might have been performed as part of obtaining some useful objective. Over time, the useful objective is forgotten but what is left are the rituals with no actual purpose. The whole thing is of course pointless but organizations can persist with it for a surprisingly long time. So as Aurelien describes it, many of our institutions still have rituals and in fact ever more of them (the "rules"), but the purpose is forgotten.
>>>But we are stuck with organisations that have generally forgotten what they are for, run by people who are only there to loot them, and all living in a society where life is increasingly just about commercial transactions.
Isn't this what neoliberalism has become? An excuse to reduce the value of *everything* to money including, or especially, people? Since money is increasingly just 1s and 0s anyways, everything is now judged by those arbitrary or capricious 1s and 0s, which means *nothing* has true value,or even existence, excepting the value of the day by the boss, party functionary, or bureaucrat. It goes good with postmodernism.
I have a vague childhood memory of watching cartoons in which a How-to narrator give Goofy instructions on "how to play baseball" or "how to fix this or that" and the result was always poor Goofy mistaking things and doing a mess of himself.
The reason I am saying this is that I would love to have the proper skills to take the ideas in this essay and turn them in a parody of those Disney cartoons with ironic tips on topics like "How to survive in a modern office", "How to not be canceled in University" or "How to act in a date and not be labeled as misogynist emissary of Patriarchy", because yes...the sensation that working life, romantic life and just personal life itself is ever full of unnecessary complexities is patent. It is tangible in the form of smartphones. They're provided with all kinds of amazing things and apps, but you never dare to actually call someone, specially if they are younger than 35 years, or they will be genuinely shock.
Apply to a Job, any job, and you will get the taste of endless and useless H.R. puzzles and gimmicks that turn the task of finding a Job into a job itself, of course first you need the luck (or the looks) to pass the A.I. trial then the video interview, then your social media will be scrutinized and if finally you get the job you will go through all the lectures on their many values and the "culture" of the business that seem designed to give the appearance the higher manegment actually care to provide quality in services or products, and is not just outsourcing you so they can make money from the easiest way possible.
Modern life is both amusing and paralyzing. In the end (here comes the cliché) It all depends on your attitude towards it. Wim Wenders "Perfect Days" recently expressed this in a lovely manner showing a man with a mundane and simple life, doing the most mundane and simple job and living with himself having joy in the little things of his everyday. Of course, maybe it is easy to be a toilet cleaner in Japan than it is in any another country, but between going mentally sick living in conformity with a society "where life is increasingly just about commercial transactions" or trying to live a meaningful life despite all that the choice is ours.
So true. I’m reading Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society at present, marvelling that a book published over seventy years ago sounds so topical and contemporary. We are now sufficiently deeply enmeshed by la technique that there is, for the average person required to earn a living, no way out. It’s only been since l retired that l’ve felt free to live according to my values. I very much enjoy your thoughtful and deeply felt, well-informed essays, but wonder why a coffee costs €5: administrative overheads, or do you go to a very posh coffee shop?!
"Whereas in the past there were often simple rules which people took pleasure in violating (“no visitors in your room after 10pm” for example), these days students are likely to be subject to highly complicated but vaguely-expressed rules, whose application is largely subjective and often random, and which are the result of competing power groups each trying to influence the behaviour of students and staff in different ways. "
As a practical matter, the question of when these rules apply and whom they are applied to boils down to a status contest.
The Cool Kids can do no wrong. When the uncool kids try to ape them, they are cast into Outer Darkness for their temerity.
Gödel's theorem states that no matter how many rules there are, there always is a situation that is not covered by the rules. And if you make a rule for that situation, there will be another situation that is not covered by the rules.
Most belief systems - capitalism, communism, religion, mathematics - consist of a closed set of rules. What sets mathematics apart is that mathematicians know their work will always have flaws - no matter how many theorems, there will always be something that is true but can't be proven.
There was a joke about quartermasters during WW2 that went like the following (apparently, every army had a story like this) : during a hasty retreat, the person in charge of one of the storage depots reports: "All inventory accounted for, sir. Ready to blow everything up now."
Then applying "AI" for decison making in various fields of society (health care, policing, jurisdiction a.s.o.) must have been a wet dream for the PMC. Deciding without responsibility and reasons because the AI knows better than any human beeing.
One small contradicition against your rant on "protocols": checklists comparable to those applied by air carriers are very usefull in hospitals, for example to comply the standards of hygiene. But these checklists, developed in a non-hierarchical meetings, allthough being very usefull are seldom applied or even unknown to many healthcare managers.
"But we are stuck with organisations that have generally forgotten what they are for, run by people who are only there to loot them..."
Another example is Boeing. Boeing forgot its mission, and went from being an engineering and quality-control-focused organization to being a rules-focused-organization. This is a quote from a recent NY Times article about the apparent suicide of John Barnett, a Boeing Whistleblower just before a deposition on a Boeing legal case he was involved in:
"Mr. Barnett also told The Times in 2019 that he had reported to [Boeing] management that defective parts had gone missing, raising the possibility that they had been [improperly] installed in planes. He said that his bosses told him to finish the paperwork on the missing parts without figuring out where they had gone."
I.e. Barnett was told to just follow the FAA rules [paperwork], never mind what they are for!
Here's more from the NY Times article:
“Over the years, it’s just been a steady pecking away at quality” at Boeing, Mr. Barnett said, adding, “This is not a 737 problem. It’s a Boeing problem.”
"Boeing needs to “get back to basics,” he said. “They need to get back to airplane building 101.”
After years of culture change that subordinated engineering to cost control, compressing schedules, ROE and DEI, Boeing's PMC lost the corporate memory to actually build safe planes. As a result, ROE has suffered as well. Ironically, the FAA and Boeing PMCs' answer to this problem will be more rules. But a rule focus without a mission focus is just typical PMC window dressing--cheap and easy cosmetics.
John Bartlett felt he had to leave Boeing. He couldn't build planes that way anymore. The ones who are still there are the ones who will reliably follow the very detailed but poorly understood rules.
John Barnett was quoted as saying he'll never fly in a new-model Boeing plane ever again. I recently cancelled a trip in part because it involved flying cross-country on a Boeing Max 737-800.
While you pointed out the benefit of rules (predictability and less corruption), what's interesting here too is that the natural endpoint of the rules proliferation is a return of tribal corruption. With enough rules that someone is always breaking one, we're already seeing the massive importance of prosecutiorial discretion at all levels of government/institutions, which is increasingly applied by the political friends/enemies test. Either visibly pledge your fealty to the power, try and buy friendship if you're wealthy/a corporation, or take your chances.
Doing nothing is very hard to do... you never know when you're finished. (Leslie Nielsen)
Superb article!
Reminds me of the ISO 9000 Quality Management standard, was most commonly interpreted as filling forms rather than addressing essence of quality. Was necessary for machinery exports, so we took it. Later when ISO 14001 environmental management standard became a requirement, we said this is enough bullshit and didn't bother with it.
Our motto first thing on our homepage was:
A Millennium Behind
Somewhere in the evolution of industry from the artisan-craftsman to the global corporations of today, craftsman’s values and pride embedded in the product were lost. From products made to be everlasting, to products with planned obsolescence.
Technologies are tools; craftsman’s pride is the soul.
Implementing today’s tools while preserving millennial values is the challenge.
re: "but the PMC doesn’t do sensible, and the people who administer universities these days don’t have the management and personal skills any more to think beyond simple clichés and the appeasement of various power groups."
Yes, indeed. Here is a prime example: https://twitter.com/ColumbiaSJP/status/1767659055907053789
"Columbia University vice president Gerry Rosberg was unable to respond when asked if Palestinians are human. He stated that this question was “intimidating”. "
I am starting to wonder if the "PMC" are human .
Ishmael Zechariah
This reminds me of what Richard Feynman used to call "Cargo cult" science. It originally referred to practices carried out by certain pacific islanders, but it can be generalized to rituals which originally might have been performed as part of obtaining some useful objective. Over time, the useful objective is forgotten but what is left are the rituals with no actual purpose. The whole thing is of course pointless but organizations can persist with it for a surprisingly long time. So as Aurelien describes it, many of our institutions still have rituals and in fact ever more of them (the "rules"), but the purpose is forgotten.
>>>But we are stuck with organisations that have generally forgotten what they are for, run by people who are only there to loot them, and all living in a society where life is increasingly just about commercial transactions.
Isn't this what neoliberalism has become? An excuse to reduce the value of *everything* to money including, or especially, people? Since money is increasingly just 1s and 0s anyways, everything is now judged by those arbitrary or capricious 1s and 0s, which means *nothing* has true value,or even existence, excepting the value of the day by the boss, party functionary, or bureaucrat. It goes good with postmodernism.
I have a vague childhood memory of watching cartoons in which a How-to narrator give Goofy instructions on "how to play baseball" or "how to fix this or that" and the result was always poor Goofy mistaking things and doing a mess of himself.
The reason I am saying this is that I would love to have the proper skills to take the ideas in this essay and turn them in a parody of those Disney cartoons with ironic tips on topics like "How to survive in a modern office", "How to not be canceled in University" or "How to act in a date and not be labeled as misogynist emissary of Patriarchy", because yes...the sensation that working life, romantic life and just personal life itself is ever full of unnecessary complexities is patent. It is tangible in the form of smartphones. They're provided with all kinds of amazing things and apps, but you never dare to actually call someone, specially if they are younger than 35 years, or they will be genuinely shock.
Apply to a Job, any job, and you will get the taste of endless and useless H.R. puzzles and gimmicks that turn the task of finding a Job into a job itself, of course first you need the luck (or the looks) to pass the A.I. trial then the video interview, then your social media will be scrutinized and if finally you get the job you will go through all the lectures on their many values and the "culture" of the business that seem designed to give the appearance the higher manegment actually care to provide quality in services or products, and is not just outsourcing you so they can make money from the easiest way possible.
Modern life is both amusing and paralyzing. In the end (here comes the cliché) It all depends on your attitude towards it. Wim Wenders "Perfect Days" recently expressed this in a lovely manner showing a man with a mundane and simple life, doing the most mundane and simple job and living with himself having joy in the little things of his everyday. Of course, maybe it is easy to be a toilet cleaner in Japan than it is in any another country, but between going mentally sick living in conformity with a society "where life is increasingly just about commercial transactions" or trying to live a meaningful life despite all that the choice is ours.
So true. I’m reading Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society at present, marvelling that a book published over seventy years ago sounds so topical and contemporary. We are now sufficiently deeply enmeshed by la technique that there is, for the average person required to earn a living, no way out. It’s only been since l retired that l’ve felt free to live according to my values. I very much enjoy your thoughtful and deeply felt, well-informed essays, but wonder why a coffee costs €5: administrative overheads, or do you go to a very posh coffee shop?!
"Whereas in the past there were often simple rules which people took pleasure in violating (“no visitors in your room after 10pm” for example), these days students are likely to be subject to highly complicated but vaguely-expressed rules, whose application is largely subjective and often random, and which are the result of competing power groups each trying to influence the behaviour of students and staff in different ways. "
As a practical matter, the question of when these rules apply and whom they are applied to boils down to a status contest.
The Cool Kids can do no wrong. When the uncool kids try to ape them, they are cast into Outer Darkness for their temerity.
Gödel's theorem states that no matter how many rules there are, there always is a situation that is not covered by the rules. And if you make a rule for that situation, there will be another situation that is not covered by the rules.
Most belief systems - capitalism, communism, religion, mathematics - consist of a closed set of rules. What sets mathematics apart is that mathematicians know their work will always have flaws - no matter how many theorems, there will always be something that is true but can't be proven.
Kurt Gödel was an Austrian mathematician.
There was a joke about quartermasters during WW2 that went like the following (apparently, every army had a story like this) : during a hasty retreat, the person in charge of one of the storage depots reports: "All inventory accounted for, sir. Ready to blow everything up now."
Then applying "AI" for decison making in various fields of society (health care, policing, jurisdiction a.s.o.) must have been a wet dream for the PMC. Deciding without responsibility and reasons because the AI knows better than any human beeing.
One small contradicition against your rant on "protocols": checklists comparable to those applied by air carriers are very usefull in hospitals, for example to comply the standards of hygiene. But these checklists, developed in a non-hierarchical meetings, allthough being very usefull are seldom applied or even unknown to many healthcare managers.
One solution is for every new rule they create ten have to be eliminated!
Certainly busy then .
Another excellent essay. Thank you for your insights.
Good article, sir! Incisive.