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A | 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 higher you fly, the easier it is to see your organisation this way. The chief executive has little choice - but even {{sex|he}} will find that dystopian | 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 {{sex|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! |