Re:Maybe today’s Navy is just not very good at driving ships
by fsloth on Tuesday August 29, 2017 @01:25AM
(#15122284)
I would claim the core problem is an environment than incentivizes people to care more for their careers than for the actual work they are doing.
Sounds pretty much like Soviet Union, actually [0]. The chickens have come to roost, indeed. Managerial science driven process oriented organizations and what happened in the soviet countries share the same basic tenent: individuals don't matter. This is a cancer for performance and quality of life. The former should concern all economically minded people and the latter just everyone. It's not a lose-money, gain happiness proposition, it's a gain-money, gain happiness one.
The problem is that local optimization (career, prestige) causes the global system to reach an unoptimal state. In computer science we say - greedy algorithms seldom lead to globally optimal solutions[1].
Of course, no one is stopping from developing key-performance indicators for a person being a good person - but this seems really arse-backwards way to approach the problem as being a good person is what most people would prefer to do naturally given a healthy environment to begin with.
To slightly misquote Suzuki on his basic idea on how to maintain good character in a group: "Watch, but don't judge. But, do watch". [2]. Ie. make it understood everyone is responsible for their results but don't be an anal retentive accountant while you're at it.
Sounds pretty much like Soviet Union, actually [0]. The chickens have come to roost, indeed. Managerial science driven process oriented organizations and what happened in the soviet countries share the same basic tenent: individuals don't matter. This is a cancer for performance and quality of life. The former should concern all economically minded people and the latter just everyone. It's not a lose-money, gain happiness proposition, it's a gain-money, gain happiness one.
The problem is that local optimization (career, prestige) causes the global system to reach an unoptimal state. In computer science we say - greedy algorithms seldom lead to globally optimal solutions[1].
Of course, no one is stopping from developing key-performance indicators for a person being a good person - but this seems really arse-backwards way to approach the problem as being a good person is what most people would prefer to do naturally given a healthy environment to begin with.
To slightly misquote Suzuki on his basic idea on how to maintain good character in a group: "Watch, but don't judge. But, do watch". [2]. Ie. make it understood everyone is responsible for their results but don't be an anal retentive accountant while you're at it.
[0] http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/index.html This is a damn fascinating read. A bit like autobiographic Catch-22.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Mind-Beginners-Informal-Meditatio...