Human, all too human

A view infects modern management consultancy that a business enterprise can be — should be — reduced to its data points: broadly, inputs and outputs; a balance sheet of assets and liabilities. On this view any activity the firm undertakes, and any plant, chattel or servant with which or through whose agency it undertakes it — should be quantified and then articulated on one side of the ledger or the other.

Legend has it the specifications given to farmers who grow the potatoes McDonald’s turns into French fries run to 30 pages. With that level of control you can unitise your inputs: One potato meeting criteria as tightly drawn as those is entirely substitutable for another, if you look at them closely, every one is subtly different.

But the world is a messy, intractable place, and you can’t always button down your inputs quite as tightly as that - and nor do you need to in order, at a more abstract level, to treat them as interchangeable.

But there’s a limit. Potatoes don’t acquire institutional knowledge. Nonetheless, management consultants like to treat people like potatoes. They even name them like potatoes: Human capital makes them — sorry, I should say us — like units of production, consumables, that can be efficiently expended or operated in the mechanical pursuit of a dependable income stream.

The impulse to do this is understandable: making sense of the almost countless inputs and outputs that comprise a modern multinational conglomerate is hard enough without having to qualitatively evaluate them. Switch off the lights, and a corporation resembles a huge, organic, steam-punk machine. If you stand back from it, a skyscraper at night, the light behind each window flipping on and off as clerical assistants come and go, might be a transistorized chip that Charles Babbage recognise.

What works for potatoes works less well for people. It works badly for people whom you employ to use their brains. It’s hard to see people like this as interchangeable units when you see, up close, what they do and how they do it. Much depends on interpersonal relations and similar collateral skills that are not directly what the employer is paying for. That doesn't stop consultants — who must perpetrate some kind of willful blindness when considering their own position to do so — convincing themselves that the sacks of flesh and blood that parry emails, attend conference calls and flip on and off those light switches that so resemble transistors is a unit of production, as interchangeable as a spud.

Now just to be clear, here, no-one is suggesting that middle management professionals and brainworkers are an irredeemable good: it is not that human judgment is an ineffable, inscrutable magic — more that its benefit is really, really hard to value (cui bono from the analysis of a credit risk officer, or an inhouse counsel?), but its cost is straightforward. (Salary. Pension. Office rental.) And humans — especially smart humans — have a spectacular skill in inventing work product ostensibly designed to further the commercial interests of the whole, but whose main practical consequence is guaranteeing that particular human’s need to do that job. That’s the definition of bureaucracy. One of the clearest ways you can further that commercial benefit is by saving costs.

So: actual, positive value add, for performing the role for which you were actually hired? No value can be assigned.

Saving costs? Easy.

The higher you fly, the easier it is to see your organisation this way. The chief executive has little choice - but even he will find that dystopian analysis breaks down when his gaze falls upon his own executive suite. Well; it must do. For he is a genius! No-one else could lead the enterprise with such clear-eyed vision!