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 — can be articulated as one or the other.

Legend has it the specifications for farmers growing the potatoes that McDonald’s turns into French fries run to 30 pages. With that level of particularity you can unitise your inputs: One potato meeting criteria as tightly drawn as those is entirely substitutable for another.

The world, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb likes to say, 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.

It’s hard to see employees like that when you work amongst them - when you see the daily hue and cry of interpersonal reactions that makes up the average working experience - but that doesn't stop consultants — who must perpetrate some kind of willful blindness when considering their own position, after all — convincing themselves that the flesh and blood that parries emails, attends conference calls and files T&Es is a unit of production, as interchangeable as a spud.

he 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!