Hmm. The focus on organization size, nor on “keeping the wrong people” out (keeping the wrong behaviors out, I can get behind) isn’t working for me. I think the relevant failure dimensions are about NOT having object-level objectives, and the resulting belief (and truth) that personal success is through the appearance of success to your supervisors.
My main advice for avoiding it is: do something real! Whether that’s entertaining people for hours by shipping your game, reducing shipping costs by calculating better warehouse locations, picking a better investment by using more/faster data, manufacturing mosquito nets that use less material or are slightly more durable, or anything else, it has to be in some way measured by outside forces.
Market discipline is incredibly powerful, and very hard to fool for very long. You probably _DO_ need to be aware of politics in any organization with more than 3 people, and more aware in larger ones. But as long as you’re making object-level contributions, and those around you are primarily talking about that rather than the politics, you’re in an OK place.
Edit: after further reflection and discussion (thanks, y’all!) I retract the second part of that sentence. I forgot the standard adage “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”. Market discipline _is_ incredibly powerful, but it can be extremely slow. It’s quite possible that it’s too slow to break down or prevent such mazes.
I still advise doing something real—even if it doesn’t remove the maze around you, it can be a profitable and rewarding path to being a successful loser (in the sense that you’re playing a different game than most maze-dwellers).
A high maze level makes a fixation on object-level results impractical. Middle management has three defining characteristics:
It’s remote from object-level interactions. It rarely deals with individual customers or particular bits of inventory. Its knowledge of the business process is largely abstract, and its concrete knowledge is often outdated (because it was accumulated before promotion). Object level outcomes (e.g. sales or new products) are not easily attributable to specific middle managers.
It is responsible to upper management, who is even more out of touch on the object level but demands “results” in the form of plausible data that can be spun to the markets as good results. Upper management also demands obedience to its narratives; when upper management tells the market your firm is going big into Fad X, then middle management needs to be seen to support Fad X. (Note 1)
Its staff have object-level information. They often have strong incentives to distort management’s perspective of this information. When accurate information is available, it’s often contrary to middle management’s narrative. E.g. “Fad X? Yeah, we tried that twelve years ago. We could never monetize it.”
If your organization gets big enough to need many layers of management (note 2), these effects will show up.
Note 1- A friend of mine at an Army lab told me that he was once asked by higher management how they would use nanotechnology in infrared sensors. My friend responded that, since infrared photons have micron-sized wavelengths, it didn’t make sense to use nanotechnology. My friend was ordered to use nanotechnology anyway, and one of his experiments was eventually published (billed as an effort to use nanotechnology for this purpose). The experiment had actually been regarded as a failure because it had grown useless nanostructures instead of doing what it was supposed to do.
Note 2- It varies with activity, but generally a good manager can handle about six staff each. Since each six managers need an upper-level manager, you can use the base-6 logarithm of your worker count for a lower bound of the number of levels you need in your hierarchy. Note that this includes all workers in your process, even the work you contract out (contracting generally adds at least one level in practice).
A few areas of research that have not been apparent to me in this sequences are the economic theory around joint production settings, the whole Industrial Organization Principle-Agent literature, I suspect there is something to find in Behavioral Economics. My sense is that the maze problems here is at the intersection of those three literature/research areas.
The other aspect that I have been wondering about is the fact that people do form social relationships by nature and the fact we find people spending more time in “work” settings rather than outside “work” does not immediately lead me to conclude that is pure moral maze results as seems argued here. Has anyone actually ran the claims from the book through a check of fallacies like mood affiliation or, what might be called, preference projection?
I’ve grown a little skeptical of the extent/size of this problem. Reaching conclusions about the extent of the problem seems a bit premature. If so, solutions might also be impacted. I don’t think the problem and it’s causes have actually been sufficiently defined. However, I’m not at all ready to either add to that effort or even adequately critique so simply offer some literature where perhaps additional insights might be gained.
I think mazes are related to the sorts of extreme principal-agent problems that are common in real life but AFAIK understudied by economics. Suppose I [1] invest my retirement savings with a financial company [2] who invests it with an American business [3] that contracts its manufacturing to a Chinese company [4] and sells to American retailers [5] who sell to American consumers [6]. That’s six numbered agents, most of which are complex entities with their own internal principal-agent problems. There are countless interactions of that level of complexity in the real economy.
I agree, you cannot just run this through the standard IO P-A analysis and expect much. That why I suggested the intersection of the three literature areas would be the more interesting place—however I suspect there is not a lot of work there (as yet)
But I didn’t really see much in this sequence that really seem to engage any in an obvious way—or missed it.
I think your sequences of P-A relationships will likely show that the collection has more error than any one of the individual stages but I don’t think that is what the problem the moral maze here is getting at. In the scenario you offer where is the force driving people to sacrifice all other values away in their life at the corporate alter of career advancement? I think the levels have to be internal to the organization—though that might be an interesting extension (thought probably ends up something of a rehash of Marx)
Do you have a suggestion for keeping the wrong behaviors out, without keeping the wrong people out? (In general I agree with ‘give people feedback’, but ‘deception’ is one of the specific cases where I’m much less optimistic about that. They were willing to deceive in the first place, how do you trust that they didn’t just get better at deceiving rather than reform?)
I reject essentialism and I’m very aware of attribution bias, both of which make it hard for me to accept that in most cases the wrong people are to blame, rather than bad culture and bad interactions (which you are part of, if you’re there).
Roughly to the same extent that you have power to keep people out, you can ALSO influence behaviors of people you let in. Show them the better way. Share your soul in the game. Validate their soul in the game. Keep the conversations about impact and good (positive-sum aspects of the organization) rather than about relative position and authority (zero-sum).
Of course, some people start out closer than others to your preferred behaviors, and you really should _also_ keep the most-distant-from-desired out. I don’t actually mean to say that everyone is fungible or equally valued to your purposes.
I think this is the central puzzle on the topic: where is the money coming from to pay the rats who are in (and creating) the mazes? Why wouldn’t customers prefer a more efficient provider?
My current speculation is that there’s a ton of slack on the scale were talking about. Mazes aren’t actually less efficient than non-mazes, they just spend the slack on unpleasant things rather than pleasant. To the extent this is true, my advice will actually reduce overall slack—the winners still will have to work harder and longer than they like. But they’ll enjoy it (both the work, and the remaining slack) more. So, less overall non-work energy, but better able to use it for non-work purposes.
Moloch still wins eventually, as eventually you have to compete with other hard-working non-maze-waste orgs. But that can take a long time, and the ramp is far more pleasant.
“Why wouldn’t customers prefer a more efficient provider?”
What choice do they have? If mazes are inevitable, there is no non-maze provider.
I should state that I have loved this series and it matches my experiences and observations so I’m inclined to believe it. With that said....
″ Moloch still wins eventually, as eventually you have to compete with other hard-working non-maze-waste orgs. But that can take a long time, and the ramp is far more pleasant. ”
As best as i can tell your solution is “Don’t do non-maze things”. That there is some kind of ‘good Moloch’ that is possible. (Do you have any examples of that happening?)
Zvi has laid out his case for why this isn’t realistic. You may disagree, and I would love to hear where you think he has gone wrong. But it seems like you are dismissing his points and saying that you can willpower(?) your way out of this.
I truly mean this all in good faith and would love to figure a way out if for financial reasons alone ( I agree with your point that if someone could escape this, it seems like it would be very profitable. I just don’t see any solutions)
This is a new assertion—mazes only occur in monopolies? And I guess the answer for why people would participate in the maze is that they only happen in labor monopsony conditions? It’s possible, in which case the solution is simpler (to state; not always to do): break up the monopoly. I don’t think that’s what Zvi and others are claiming, though (except maybe in the finance industry, which may be an effective monopoly on employment: there are no options which aren’t mazes), and it doesn’t match my experiences or second-hand stories of acquaintances close enough that I’ve gotten details. Even in cases where it _is_ currently a monopoly, you have to answer WHY there are no competing options to do it better and more pleasantly at the same time. (note: if pressed, I will admit that this paragraph was written mostly for me to introduce the phrase “cultural monopsony”).
Oh, wait—you said “if mazes are inevitable”. They’re not universal today. I don’t know about eventual inevitability, but there are large organizations that are not entirely maze-like, at least not to the degree described in this series. I have indirect experience (not myself, but relatively close friends and/or relatives) with GM, IBM, and the US Navy, and none are all that bad for middle managers—there’s politics, but there’s also actual production and rewarding work impact.
I don’t think I’d claim that “good Moloch” exists or is possible. I make the much weaker claim that Moloch hasn’t actually optimized very far, so you CAN beat ‘em and don’t have to join ’em. For some time, at least—perhaps decades or generations. I really have no prediction about the long-term beyond “today isn’t a stable equilibrium”, but I don’t see anything that overall beats competition as a motive for optimizing on legible dimensions over illegible ones, in a finite universe with infinite potential desires.
Hmm. The focus on organization size, nor on “keeping the wrong people” out (keeping the wrong behaviors out, I can get behind) isn’t working for me. I think the relevant failure dimensions are about NOT having object-level objectives, and the resulting belief (and truth) that personal success is through the appearance of success to your supervisors.
My main advice for avoiding it is: do something real! Whether that’s entertaining people for hours by shipping your game, reducing shipping costs by calculating better warehouse locations, picking a better investment by using more/faster data, manufacturing mosquito nets that use less material or are slightly more durable, or anything else, it has to be in some way measured by outside forces.
Market discipline is incredibly powerful, and very hard to fool for very long. You probably _DO_ need to be aware of politics in any organization with more than 3 people, and more aware in larger ones. But as long as you’re making object-level contributions, and those around you are primarily talking about that rather than the politics, you’re in an OK place.
Edit: after further reflection and discussion (thanks, y’all!) I retract the second part of that sentence. I forgot the standard adage “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”. Market discipline _is_ incredibly powerful, but it can be extremely slow. It’s quite possible that it’s too slow to break down or prevent such mazes.
I still advise doing something real—even if it doesn’t remove the maze around you, it can be a profitable and rewarding path to being a successful loser (in the sense that you’re playing a different game than most maze-dwellers).
A high maze level makes a fixation on object-level results impractical. Middle management has three defining characteristics:
It’s remote from object-level interactions. It rarely deals with individual customers or particular bits of inventory. Its knowledge of the business process is largely abstract, and its concrete knowledge is often outdated (because it was accumulated before promotion). Object level outcomes (e.g. sales or new products) are not easily attributable to specific middle managers.
It is responsible to upper management, who is even more out of touch on the object level but demands “results” in the form of plausible data that can be spun to the markets as good results. Upper management also demands obedience to its narratives; when upper management tells the market your firm is going big into Fad X, then middle management needs to be seen to support Fad X. (Note 1)
Its staff have object-level information. They often have strong incentives to distort management’s perspective of this information. When accurate information is available, it’s often contrary to middle management’s narrative. E.g. “Fad X? Yeah, we tried that twelve years ago. We could never monetize it.”
If your organization gets big enough to need many layers of management (note 2), these effects will show up.
Note 1- A friend of mine at an Army lab told me that he was once asked by higher management how they would use nanotechnology in infrared sensors. My friend responded that, since infrared photons have micron-sized wavelengths, it didn’t make sense to use nanotechnology. My friend was ordered to use nanotechnology anyway, and one of his experiments was eventually published (billed as an effort to use nanotechnology for this purpose). The experiment had actually been regarded as a failure because it had grown useless nanostructures instead of doing what it was supposed to do.
Note 2- It varies with activity, but generally a good manager can handle about six staff each. Since each six managers need an upper-level manager, you can use the base-6 logarithm of your worker count for a lower bound of the number of levels you need in your hierarchy. Note that this includes all workers in your process, even the work you contract out (contracting generally adds at least one level in practice).
A few areas of research that have not been apparent to me in this sequences are the economic theory around joint production settings, the whole Industrial Organization Principle-Agent literature, I suspect there is something to find in Behavioral Economics. My sense is that the maze problems here is at the intersection of those three literature/research areas.
The other aspect that I have been wondering about is the fact that people do form social relationships by nature and the fact we find people spending more time in “work” settings rather than outside “work” does not immediately lead me to conclude that is pure moral maze results as seems argued here. Has anyone actually ran the claims from the book through a check of fallacies like mood affiliation or, what might be called, preference projection?
I’ve grown a little skeptical of the extent/size of this problem. Reaching conclusions about the extent of the problem seems a bit premature. If so, solutions might also be impacted. I don’t think the problem and it’s causes have actually been sufficiently defined. However, I’m not at all ready to either add to that effort or even adequately critique so simply offer some literature where perhaps additional insights might be gained.
I think mazes are related to the sorts of extreme principal-agent problems that are common in real life but AFAIK understudied by economics. Suppose I [1] invest my retirement savings with a financial company [2] who invests it with an American business [3] that contracts its manufacturing to a Chinese company [4] and sells to American retailers [5] who sell to American consumers [6]. That’s six numbered agents, most of which are complex entities with their own internal principal-agent problems. There are countless interactions of that level of complexity in the real economy.
I agree, you cannot just run this through the standard IO P-A analysis and expect much. That why I suggested the intersection of the three literature areas would be the more interesting place—however I suspect there is not a lot of work there (as yet)
But I didn’t really see much in this sequence that really seem to engage any in an obvious way—or missed it.
I think your sequences of P-A relationships will likely show that the collection has more error than any one of the individual stages but I don’t think that is what the problem the moral maze here is getting at. In the scenario you offer where is the force driving people to sacrifice all other values away in their life at the corporate alter of career advancement? I think the levels have to be internal to the organization—though that might be an interesting extension (thought probably ends up something of a rehash of Marx)
Do you have a suggestion for keeping the wrong behaviors out, without keeping the wrong people out? (In general I agree with ‘give people feedback’, but ‘deception’ is one of the specific cases where I’m much less optimistic about that. They were willing to deceive in the first place, how do you trust that they didn’t just get better at deceiving rather than reform?)
I reject essentialism and I’m very aware of attribution bias, both of which make it hard for me to accept that in most cases the wrong people are to blame, rather than bad culture and bad interactions (which you are part of, if you’re there).
Roughly to the same extent that you have power to keep people out, you can ALSO influence behaviors of people you let in. Show them the better way. Share your soul in the game. Validate their soul in the game. Keep the conversations about impact and good (positive-sum aspects of the organization) rather than about relative position and authority (zero-sum).
Of course, some people start out closer than others to your preferred behaviors, and you really should _also_ keep the most-distant-from-desired out. I don’t actually mean to say that everyone is fungible or equally valued to your purposes.
“Market discipline is incredibly powerful, and very hard to fool for very long.”
If this is true, why do the mazes exist at all? Why doesn’t the market shed mazes (or the companies that don’t shed mazes)?
I think this is the central puzzle on the topic: where is the money coming from to pay the rats who are in (and creating) the mazes? Why wouldn’t customers prefer a more efficient provider?
My current speculation is that there’s a ton of slack on the scale were talking about. Mazes aren’t actually less efficient than non-mazes, they just spend the slack on unpleasant things rather than pleasant. To the extent this is true, my advice will actually reduce overall slack—the winners still will have to work harder and longer than they like. But they’ll enjoy it (both the work, and the remaining slack) more. So, less overall non-work energy, but better able to use it for non-work purposes.
Moloch still wins eventually, as eventually you have to compete with other hard-working non-maze-waste orgs. But that can take a long time, and the ramp is far more pleasant.
“Why wouldn’t customers prefer a more efficient provider?”
What choice do they have? If mazes are inevitable, there is no non-maze provider.
I should state that I have loved this series and it matches my experiences and observations so I’m inclined to believe it. With that said....
″ Moloch still wins eventually, as eventually you have to compete with other hard-working non-maze-waste orgs. But that can take a long time, and the ramp is far more pleasant. ”
As best as i can tell your solution is “Don’t do non-maze things”. That there is some kind of ‘good Moloch’ that is possible. (Do you have any examples of that happening?)
Zvi has laid out his case for why this isn’t realistic. You may disagree, and I would love to hear where you think he has gone wrong. But it seems like you are dismissing his points and saying that you can willpower(?) your way out of this.
I truly mean this all in good faith and would love to figure a way out if for financial reasons alone ( I agree with your point that if someone could escape this, it seems like it would be very profitable. I just don’t see any solutions)
This is a new assertion—mazes only occur in monopolies? And I guess the answer for why people would participate in the maze is that they only happen in labor monopsony conditions? It’s possible, in which case the solution is simpler (to state; not always to do): break up the monopoly. I don’t think that’s what Zvi and others are claiming, though (except maybe in the finance industry, which may be an effective monopoly on employment: there are no options which aren’t mazes), and it doesn’t match my experiences or second-hand stories of acquaintances close enough that I’ve gotten details. Even in cases where it _is_ currently a monopoly, you have to answer WHY there are no competing options to do it better and more pleasantly at the same time. (note: if pressed, I will admit that this paragraph was written mostly for me to introduce the phrase “cultural monopsony”).
Oh, wait—you said “if mazes are inevitable”. They’re not universal today. I don’t know about eventual inevitability, but there are large organizations that are not entirely maze-like, at least not to the degree described in this series. I have indirect experience (not myself, but relatively close friends and/or relatives) with GM, IBM, and the US Navy, and none are all that bad for middle managers—there’s politics, but there’s also actual production and rewarding work impact.
I don’t think I’d claim that “good Moloch” exists or is possible. I make the much weaker claim that Moloch hasn’t actually optimized very far, so you CAN beat ‘em and don’t have to join ’em. For some time, at least—perhaps decades or generations. I really have no prediction about the long-term beyond “today isn’t a stable equilibrium”, but I don’t see anything that overall beats competition as a motive for optimizing on legible dimensions over illegible ones, in a finite universe with infinite potential desires.