Sunfish
28th Nov 2011, 18:33
Theory Over Practice - The Rush To Corporate Genocide.
"To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss"
by Sunfish.
A friend recently returned from working in Cambodia told me what struck her most about the place; "There are no old people". The Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975 and embarked on on a deliberately genocidal experiment in Marxist theory - the creation of a perfect agrarian peasant Communist republic, a 1965 theoretical construct of a group of Khmer political science students in Paris. The political strategy to achieve this dream involved the elimination of any vestige of Cambodian capitalism, root stem and branch, by the cold blooded execution of anyone suspected of being remotely tainted by it. Contemporary research suggests between 1.4 and 2.2 million died, with approximately half being due to executions, the remainder from disease and starvation (wikipedia). Victims included the entire intelligentsia and professional classes - tainted as they were by western thought. The Khmer seem to have adopted a perverted precautionary principle in selecting those for execution, embodied in their chilling slogan: "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss". In my opinion, many Western business leaders are sympathetic to this concept.
I have been struggling to come to terms with Corporate genocide - deliberately cruel and destructive management, in the Eleven years since I was personally exposed to it. Two friends in the human resources industry directed my attention to narcissism, which explains the cruelty, and my own experience as a failing MBA credentialed manager in a business I knew nothing about, and could never know anything about, supplied some hopefully relevant experience. Corporate Genocide is not about tough management and hard decisions taken in the interest of increased profitability. Those decisions must and are made every day by many businesses and Corporate Genocide tries to mask itself this way. Corporate genocide is a term I use for deliberately and needlessly cruel and unusual behaviour that destroys value in a business.
It is this stupid behavior - needless cruelty to employees and customers coupled with the destruction of shareholder value, that characterises this phenomenon. For example, I watched as whole swathes of COBOL computer programmers in a company were declared "Legacy employees", writing programs in a "Legacy Language" that ran on "Legacy computers". These older programmers were systematically denied training and promotion and encouraged to leave and there was no investment in new equipment and software. There was studied cruelty. The company invested its resources in "New" systems and employees that subsequently spectacularly failed to deliver, by which time its ignored and reviled COBOL systems were in disarray. Its demise was completed by the year 2000 computer issue which put a huge salary premium on COBOL programming experience that it no longer had.
Lest you write this off as a mere "failure of technical leadership" I need to say that it was nothing of the sort. Management had been repeatedly warned, in excruciating detail by multiple experienced people over Four years, of exactly what was going to happen, yet they deliberately and wilfully ignored what they were told - they - like the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, had already mentally written off the speakers at best as irrelevant and worse, an irritating and subversive voices that must be permanently silenced. I confess that I fired one such "noisy" employee and had him marched off the premises by security guards. One wonders for example what happened to knowledgeable folk at Qantas who extolled the B777 over the A380 and counseled about the technical risks inherent in purchasing the B787?
PPrunes Australian threads on Qantas and to a lesser extent, Airservices and perhaps CASA and others, seem to me to offer a microcosm of this Corporate Genocide that lets us examine this phenomena in more detail. The aviation industry seems to attract narcissistic practitioners because by its nature it is a highly visible activity and socially important. The first and most obvious characteristic appears to me to be a disrespect by management, nay out and out hatred, of industry specific experience, especially of obviously successful performance in a relevant role. Such experience, and the natural leadership it creates, is directly opposed to the credo - marketed by business schools, that management is a discipline in itself that ranks equally with the sciences and the trades. What follows of course is the idea that anyone can manage anything and that actual coalface experience of the thing being managed is not only irrelevant, but positively harmful because it blinkers people to "new possibilities" - cloud cuckoo land dreams of how things should work as opposed as to how they actually perform, hence the famous management quote "I don't care if it works in practice, I want to see it work in theory!"
Of course this wouldn't matter that much if managers could be educated like the fictional Army Lieutenant who it took his Sergeant Two years to train, but that brings us to the second problem - multiple layers of know nothing managers. Why for example would any manager hire as a subordinate someone with more industry experience than themselves? That is a form of career suicide! It is thus that Airservices allegedly hired for a head of its training college a person with training experience, but no industry experience and of course that itself begs the question of why the hiring was external in the first place. The idea that anyone stupid enough to work for an organisation is too stupid to be promoted to management is common these days.
This is how multiple layers of stupidity and ignorance are built into organisations - managers hiring and promoting people who are no threat to themselves. However even this defect can be prevented or reversed. Given time, any good consulting company can weed these people out. However what really, and almost certainly, kills the organisation is the narcissist in management. This provides a lethal genocidal combination; vast ambition and an overweening belief in their own "specialness"; a special talent for sycophancy, office politics and mimicry that makes them very hard to spot and even harder to remove; lack of the practical experience that would make them natural leaders and the terrible self knowledge that they are ultimately impotent; the hate this knowledge generates for real achievement, and finally the narcissists total lack of empathy towards anyone.
This is how a manager can decide to make people reapply for their jobs. This is how an airline can tell its staff that their jobs might go overseas - or not - at a date to be decided by management. This is how management can deliberately destabilise, demoralise and depress its workforce. "Legacy Airline" - says it all really. And I almost forgot, this is how management can deliberately **** in its customers faces by suddenly grounding an airline.
"To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss"
by Sunfish.
A friend recently returned from working in Cambodia told me what struck her most about the place; "There are no old people". The Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975 and embarked on on a deliberately genocidal experiment in Marxist theory - the creation of a perfect agrarian peasant Communist republic, a 1965 theoretical construct of a group of Khmer political science students in Paris. The political strategy to achieve this dream involved the elimination of any vestige of Cambodian capitalism, root stem and branch, by the cold blooded execution of anyone suspected of being remotely tainted by it. Contemporary research suggests between 1.4 and 2.2 million died, with approximately half being due to executions, the remainder from disease and starvation (wikipedia). Victims included the entire intelligentsia and professional classes - tainted as they were by western thought. The Khmer seem to have adopted a perverted precautionary principle in selecting those for execution, embodied in their chilling slogan: "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss". In my opinion, many Western business leaders are sympathetic to this concept.
I have been struggling to come to terms with Corporate genocide - deliberately cruel and destructive management, in the Eleven years since I was personally exposed to it. Two friends in the human resources industry directed my attention to narcissism, which explains the cruelty, and my own experience as a failing MBA credentialed manager in a business I knew nothing about, and could never know anything about, supplied some hopefully relevant experience. Corporate Genocide is not about tough management and hard decisions taken in the interest of increased profitability. Those decisions must and are made every day by many businesses and Corporate Genocide tries to mask itself this way. Corporate genocide is a term I use for deliberately and needlessly cruel and unusual behaviour that destroys value in a business.
It is this stupid behavior - needless cruelty to employees and customers coupled with the destruction of shareholder value, that characterises this phenomenon. For example, I watched as whole swathes of COBOL computer programmers in a company were declared "Legacy employees", writing programs in a "Legacy Language" that ran on "Legacy computers". These older programmers were systematically denied training and promotion and encouraged to leave and there was no investment in new equipment and software. There was studied cruelty. The company invested its resources in "New" systems and employees that subsequently spectacularly failed to deliver, by which time its ignored and reviled COBOL systems were in disarray. Its demise was completed by the year 2000 computer issue which put a huge salary premium on COBOL programming experience that it no longer had.
Lest you write this off as a mere "failure of technical leadership" I need to say that it was nothing of the sort. Management had been repeatedly warned, in excruciating detail by multiple experienced people over Four years, of exactly what was going to happen, yet they deliberately and wilfully ignored what they were told - they - like the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, had already mentally written off the speakers at best as irrelevant and worse, an irritating and subversive voices that must be permanently silenced. I confess that I fired one such "noisy" employee and had him marched off the premises by security guards. One wonders for example what happened to knowledgeable folk at Qantas who extolled the B777 over the A380 and counseled about the technical risks inherent in purchasing the B787?
PPrunes Australian threads on Qantas and to a lesser extent, Airservices and perhaps CASA and others, seem to me to offer a microcosm of this Corporate Genocide that lets us examine this phenomena in more detail. The aviation industry seems to attract narcissistic practitioners because by its nature it is a highly visible activity and socially important. The first and most obvious characteristic appears to me to be a disrespect by management, nay out and out hatred, of industry specific experience, especially of obviously successful performance in a relevant role. Such experience, and the natural leadership it creates, is directly opposed to the credo - marketed by business schools, that management is a discipline in itself that ranks equally with the sciences and the trades. What follows of course is the idea that anyone can manage anything and that actual coalface experience of the thing being managed is not only irrelevant, but positively harmful because it blinkers people to "new possibilities" - cloud cuckoo land dreams of how things should work as opposed as to how they actually perform, hence the famous management quote "I don't care if it works in practice, I want to see it work in theory!"
Of course this wouldn't matter that much if managers could be educated like the fictional Army Lieutenant who it took his Sergeant Two years to train, but that brings us to the second problem - multiple layers of know nothing managers. Why for example would any manager hire as a subordinate someone with more industry experience than themselves? That is a form of career suicide! It is thus that Airservices allegedly hired for a head of its training college a person with training experience, but no industry experience and of course that itself begs the question of why the hiring was external in the first place. The idea that anyone stupid enough to work for an organisation is too stupid to be promoted to management is common these days.
This is how multiple layers of stupidity and ignorance are built into organisations - managers hiring and promoting people who are no threat to themselves. However even this defect can be prevented or reversed. Given time, any good consulting company can weed these people out. However what really, and almost certainly, kills the organisation is the narcissist in management. This provides a lethal genocidal combination; vast ambition and an overweening belief in their own "specialness"; a special talent for sycophancy, office politics and mimicry that makes them very hard to spot and even harder to remove; lack of the practical experience that would make them natural leaders and the terrible self knowledge that they are ultimately impotent; the hate this knowledge generates for real achievement, and finally the narcissists total lack of empathy towards anyone.
This is how a manager can decide to make people reapply for their jobs. This is how an airline can tell its staff that their jobs might go overseas - or not - at a date to be decided by management. This is how management can deliberately destabilise, demoralise and depress its workforce. "Legacy Airline" - says it all really. And I almost forgot, this is how management can deliberately **** in its customers faces by suddenly grounding an airline.