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Human, all too human: Difference between revisions
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You can understand the impulse to do this: making sense of the almost countless inputs and outputs that make up a modern multinational conglomerate is hard enough without having to evaluate them ''qualitatively''. Switch off the lights, and a corporation resembles a huge, organic, steam-punk machine. If you stand back from a skyscraper at night, the light behind each window flipping on and off as clerical assistants come and go, might as well be a transistorised chip. In this way do the springs, valves and pistons of commerce twist, turn and push. | You can understand the impulse to do this: making sense of the almost countless inputs and outputs that make up a modern multinational conglomerate is hard enough without having to evaluate them ''qualitatively''. Switch off the lights, and a corporation resembles a huge, organic, steam-punk machine. If you stand back from a skyscraper at night, the light behind each window flipping on and off as clerical assistants come and go, might as well be a transistorised chip. In this way do the springs, valves and pistons of commerce twist, turn and push. | ||
Yet, what works for potatoes works less well for people. It works badly for people whom you employ to use their brains - to evaluate and react to novel situations and opportunities for which an no-one has written a bullet-proof decision tree. 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 | Yet, what works for potatoes works less well for people. It works badly for people whom you employ to use their brains - to evaluate and react to novel situations and opportunities for which an no-one has written a bullet-proof decision tree. 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 [[meatsack|sacks]] of flesh and blood that parry emails, attend [[conference call]]s 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 officer]], or an [[inhouse counsel]]?), but its ''cost'' is straightforward. (Salary. Pension. Office rental.) | 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 officer]], or an [[inhouse counsel]]?), but its ''cost'' is straightforward. (Salary. Pension. Office rental.) | ||