Concluding that we need an "anti-bullshit movement" to get rid of bullshit is missing the forest for the trees.
Bullshit is organizational self-deception. Comfortable statements intended to insulate leaders and followers from uncomfortable problems.
In other words, bullshit isn't abnormal; it's natural. A reflex to maintain the status quo while the surrounding environment decays.
And, the greater that decay, the more wool must be spun to pull over our eyes. It is said that, in North Korea, the only state organ that worked every single day during its great famine, was its propaganda department.
In my view, calling upon employers to have the courage to be genuine, to think and talk in more authentic ways... will give birth to yet another management fad. A movement shouldn't center around some vaguery, nor should it rely on each individual's moral fiber.
Instead, a better approach would be to determine what bullshit is the everyday kind versus the kind concealing systemic failures in our present and future society, e.g. "Bullshit jobs" -> Basic Income, or "Corporate Social Responsibility" -> Tax Avoidance .
Finding and solving the latter would reduce the need for, and thereby existence of, the more unbearable bullshit. Attack the disease, not just its symptoms.
As usual, the really interesting bits are in the comments. I especially find "bullshit jobs" -> Basic Income especially true. I've always thought the same thing for as long as I've had a professional career. I worked in the aerospace industry as my first programming job and saw so much bullshit flying left and right, and identified that at least 60% of my coworkers and 80% of my bosses did exactly nothing but bullshit like reporting and summarizing on things that were already reported or summarized, or creating useless documentation that had to be created because of some arbitrary standards. We were very top-heavy and at one point I saw a hilarious org chart where there were more managers than engineers. Then one day I thought to myself that this whole project was basically equivalent to wealth redistribution and was not at all the meritocracy I had envisioned it to be. Now, 20ish years later, I'm pretty damn jaded and the bullshit has only increased, but now it's just more cleverly disguised in management methodologies like "SCRUM" and "Agile", with all of that deeply-imbedded culture and terminology baked into our everyday tools like the Atlassian toolset (Jira, Kahnban boards, etc.). Bullshit is here to stay, but in a sense it saves us from our own incompetence.
> Then one day I thought to myself that this whole project was basically equivalent to wealth redistribution and was not at all the meritocracy I had envisioned it to be.
This is precisely why I have loathed the cult of "pay per performance". Bonuses, salary bumps and promotions become a sort of (I wish this were an exaggeration of terms but it isn't) conspiracy to pass wealth and prestige to buddies. But they fill it with phony paperwork and propaganda about how the buddies have been objectively evaluated and are all top performers. If you are an honest worker doing good things but not in a management in-crowd, this can have crippling effects on morale.
I've seen agile work and not work. It doesn't transmit well from a book or blog post.
I think it's fairer to say that excitement generated by a new concept attracts dilution by bullshit artists and folks learning via the telephone game. By the time the hubbub dies down, the original sparks of insight have long since drowned in a sea of mediocrity, ranging from the shallows of well-meaning ignorance through to the dangerous deeps of machiavellianism.
I worked for a fortune 500 company that had been developing their own in house software for 30 years. They decided that they wanted to switch from their traditional waterfall approach, to scrum and agile.
Honestly, the transition went pretty well. Meetings decreased, test coverage went up, feature delivery rate seemed to increase. People were spending more time working on the problem at hand, and less time creating and managing huge requirement documents. There were rough spots. Obviously requirements didn't go away, we just went to a just-in-time model instead of a heavily front loaded model, and sometimes it was difficult to manage just-in-time requirements in a way that gave everyone clear oversight as to what was being implemented (our business rules were extremely complex for regulatory).
One interesting thing I noticed was that every time there was a problem, people would try to add more layers of bureaucracy to "solve" the problem. The hardest part we found was figuring out which ceremonies were useful to stop future problems and which "solutions" were just a reflexive attempt to go back to the way things were before and make things more difficult for everyone.
I see Scrum/etc as a program for people. It implies certain values, and defines new words, but in that sense it's like any program (in the machine sense). You may not like it, but it's hardly bullshit in the sense of the article.
I have known companies that were entirely run on the stuff. C-levels and wannabe C-levels would spew it in every direction. It was simply a signaling mechanism that you were a company player. It was so patent that it could serve no other purpose. If one rotated it the correct way, it was not unlike a Monty Python sketch.
At some point I had a list of banned words, because they had lost all meaning, turning only into rest stop on a Markov chain road-trip. It simply wasn't possible to think with them, the Sapir-Whorf-Frankfurt Hypothesis.
> In my view, calling upon employers to have the courage to be genuine, to think and talk in more authentic ways... will give birth to yet another management fad.
The best thing about the Netflix culture deck linked in that article is how much "bullshit" it contains. The part about "adequate performance gets a generous severance" is especially amusing, since most measures of performance are also bullshit. It's also "we only work with the best" re-worded.
>Concluding that we need an "anti-bullshit movement" to get rid of bullshit is missing the forest for the trees.
Bullshit is organizational self-deception. Comfortable statements intended to insulate leaders and followers from uncomfortable problems. In other words, bullshit isn't abnormal; it's natural. A reflex to maintain the status quo while the surrounding environment decays.
Sure, but that's assuming we need those organizations, and we need them to continue to operate as they do.
And if not that, it at least assumes that some companies don't overdo this thing.
Do you have a reference re: north Korea comment. I am so interested in what actually went down but so little official information has reached the picking through refugees.
It comes from a passage in "The Cleanest Race" by B.R. Myers[1], which I recommend as a lens into the internal effects of North Korea's propaganda
>"One colleague told me he finds the North Korean personality cult too absurd to take seriously; indeed, he doubts whether even the leadership believes it. But no regime would go to such enormous expense, year in, year out for sixty years, to inculcate into its citizens a worldview to which it did not itself subscribe. (The only institution in the country that did not miss a beat during the famine of the mid-1990s was the propaganda apparatus.”
There was another book on North Korea which corroborated this statement with actual numbers; I'm having trouble pulling it up at the moment.
That's more a statement of just how backwards North Korea is in an increasingly prosperous world in which the median standard of living is at an all-time high and continues to rise by the year, famines are between extremely rare and non-existent, and global poverty is at an all-time low. It looks increasingly like North Korea may be among the very last of the failed state hold-outs. Even Cuba looks like it's set to change considerably for the better in the coming years.
> "But no regime would go to such enormous expense, year in, year out for sixty years, to inculcate into its citizens a worldview to which it did not itself subscribe."
That seems like an odd and unsubstantiated assertion.
Bullshit is organizational self-deception. Comfortable statements intended to insulate leaders and followers from uncomfortable problems.
In other words, bullshit isn't abnormal; it's natural. A reflex to maintain the status quo while the surrounding environment decays.
And, the greater that decay, the more wool must be spun to pull over our eyes. It is said that, in North Korea, the only state organ that worked every single day during its great famine, was its propaganda department.
In my view, calling upon employers to have the courage to be genuine, to think and talk in more authentic ways... will give birth to yet another management fad. A movement shouldn't center around some vaguery, nor should it rely on each individual's moral fiber.
Instead, a better approach would be to determine what bullshit is the everyday kind versus the kind concealing systemic failures in our present and future society, e.g. "Bullshit jobs" -> Basic Income, or "Corporate Social Responsibility" -> Tax Avoidance .
Finding and solving the latter would reduce the need for, and thereby existence of, the more unbearable bullshit. Attack the disease, not just its symptoms.