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Human, all too human: Difference between revisions
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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. | 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 {{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! | |||