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Human, all too human: Difference between revisions
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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. | 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 | 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 even though, if you look at them closely, each is subtly different. | ||
But there’s a limit. Potatoes | But the world is a messy, intractable place. You can’t always button down your inputs as tightly as that. Nor do you need to in order, at a more abstract level, to treat them as interchangeable. | ||
But there’s a limit. Potatoes have no memory. They can’t acquire institutional knowledge. Nonetheless, management theory likes to treat people like potatoes. They even name them like potatoes: “Human capital” makes them — sorry, ''us'' — like units of production: consumables that can be efficiently expended or replaced in the mechanical pursuit of a dependable income stream. From this impulse comes the idea of forced ranking: not only that one ''can'' describe the worth of a group of equivalent individuals by reference to a normal distribution, but that if you don’t, there’s ''something wrong with your description''. | |||
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 | 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 | ||