The first thing that springs to mind are the arcane company policies in large corporations, where responsibilities and duties are so finely assigned that they often become barriers to getting actual work done. This becomes especially true if a situation comes along that there aren’t codified rules for (or as I like to think of it, a selection pressure is introduced that the system isn’t adapted for).
I also think it’s interesting to contrast this to the rational technique of the least convenient possible world, where instead of removing artificial restrictions you keep adding them.
I’m curious about what “large corporations” you’re writing about. I used to work for Walmart, the largest corporation in the world, for 2.5 years and my perceptions of the “responsibilites and duties” was diametrically opposite what you are claiming. Of course, I know its the leftist/academic thing to dump on business, but could some of you who do actually provide some references that you aren’t just making these claims up.
I think a common situation is the manager/idea-generator relationship. An idea generator is a person who spends a lot of their working time simply “thinking”, and there is no apparent output to their task until the very end, when they output an idea. A programmer trying to design the right algorithm to solve a given problem is one example of an idea generator.
Often, the manager will want to have some sort of feedback on the progress, and have an estimate of the time remaining to completion. The idea-generator, however, has no idea how long their task will take. They might find the solution this afternoon, or they may spend months brainstorming on it.
And so the manager may “assign” responsibilities like writing daily reports on what was found so far, filling in time sheets, etc. to alleviate their nervousness from seeing nothing produced. Bureaucracy like this is just taking the idea-generator’s mind off of the real problem at hand, and can slow things down.
We might say there are two kinds of “responsibility.” School teaches people to be responsible to authority; the other kind is being responsible for eventual outcomes (such as truthfulness) by asking questions and challenging authority.
An example would be something I read recently about the institutional mindset held by journalists at newspapers: older editors and managers are practically begging young reporters for new ideas… the problem is the type of people who go to work for a newspapers now tend to want responsibilities (and security) given to them.
Meanwhile a lot of people who never finished their homework or followed their assignment guidelines were distracted from school by new technologies—sites like this—and learning from the proliferating information available online.
The first thing that springs to mind are the arcane company policies in large corporations, where responsibilities and duties are so finely assigned that they often become barriers to getting actual work done. This becomes especially true if a situation comes along that there aren’t codified rules for (or as I like to think of it, a selection pressure is introduced that the system isn’t adapted for).
I also think it’s interesting to contrast this to the rational technique of the least convenient possible world, where instead of removing artificial restrictions you keep adding them.
I’m curious about what “large corporations” you’re writing about. I used to work for Walmart, the largest corporation in the world, for 2.5 years and my perceptions of the “responsibilites and duties” was diametrically opposite what you are claiming. Of course, I know its the leftist/academic thing to dump on business, but could some of you who do actually provide some references that you aren’t just making these claims up.
I think a common situation is the manager/idea-generator relationship. An idea generator is a person who spends a lot of their working time simply “thinking”, and there is no apparent output to their task until the very end, when they output an idea. A programmer trying to design the right algorithm to solve a given problem is one example of an idea generator.
Often, the manager will want to have some sort of feedback on the progress, and have an estimate of the time remaining to completion. The idea-generator, however, has no idea how long their task will take. They might find the solution this afternoon, or they may spend months brainstorming on it.
And so the manager may “assign” responsibilities like writing daily reports on what was found so far, filling in time sheets, etc. to alleviate their nervousness from seeing nothing produced. Bureaucracy like this is just taking the idea-generator’s mind off of the real problem at hand, and can slow things down.
We might say there are two kinds of “responsibility.” School teaches people to be responsible to authority; the other kind is being responsible for eventual outcomes (such as truthfulness) by asking questions and challenging authority.
An example would be something I read recently about the institutional mindset held by journalists at newspapers: older editors and managers are practically begging young reporters for new ideas… the problem is the type of people who go to work for a newspapers now tend to want responsibilities (and security) given to them.
Meanwhile a lot of people who never finished their homework or followed their assignment guidelines were distracted from school by new technologies—sites like this—and learning from the proliferating information available online.