Use the comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. No Covid here.
Month: September 2021 Page 2 of 3
I want to talk a bit about management measurement. I recently spent a number of years in a good sized multinational, and I watched management trying to gain control through measurement. And mostly I watched as they gained the wrong sort of control; as they crystallized behaviour in ways that lose more from employees than they gained.
(This is an old, old piece, one of the few I saved from BOPnews. Originally written in 2004 back when I was still corporate. Since almost no one will have read it, and those who do won’t remember it, here it is again. I’m putting it back up because it relates fairly closely to the recent article on the lack of belief in good and why incentives rarely work.)
When you’re dealing with small numbers of people, simple measurements are all you need, and indeed the time spent measuring can be a simple waste of time. For larger groups, and as management becomes disassociated from the actual work of the organization, measuring is necessary so that management knows what is happening and can modify it. The old saying (which I’m sick of) is that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” It’s a statement with a lot of truth to it, but so is this – “you measure what you manage, so you’d better be sure you’re measuring what you want to manage.”
Here’s an example. A friend of mine used to do customer support for laptops. He was measured on how long he was on the phone and how quickly he picked up. If he spent too long on the phone on average, then he was taken aside and reprimanded. These measurements encouraged tech support employees to get people off the phone as quickly as possible, whether their problem was solved or not. Assuming management actually wanted happy customers (ie, that they saw tech support as a way to sell the next laptop, rather than something they had to do as cheaply as possible) then the way to measure this would be to have an automatic survey at the end of the phone call, asking how satisfied the client is. Since there will always be jerks who are never happy with phone support, you set the threshold at a certain percentage of “unhappy” customers and then if someone goes over that you investigate. To keep productivity up you measure phone time and compare to satisfaction ratios and (horrors) investigate individual reps who spend more time than normal on the phone, then coach them individually on how to solve problems with less chit-chat while still keeping the customer happy.
I’m going to discuss five issues related to measurement. The first is the problem of measuring what you can easily measure. Simply put, it may be more difficult to measure some things than others. Management tends to measure those things that are easy to measure. In a call center there are plenty of systems which will allow you to track a wild variety of phone stats, but you can’t measure one CSR helping another with a call. In sales you can measure how many sales a salesman makes and how much they’re worth, but it’s more difficult to measure whether he’s made verbal promises your company will have trouble living up to. You can measure the number of code lines a programmer put out, but it’s harder to measure how easy they will be to maintain down the line.
This is often a systems issue. Whatever the system assists your employees to do, is easy to measure. So if you have a system that presents work items, and which employees close those work items, it’s easy to measure how fast they’re doing them. But what if some work items are harder than others? And what happens to those employees who are taking calls or e-mails you can’t track and are helping customers or other employees with those problems – is that behaviour you don’t want to encourage? Because if you’re measuring only processing times then those who do other things will be measured as less productive. So they stop helping customers, and soon you have a reputation as having unresponsive employees who never want to take time to help people.
And this leads to the second issue, which is what I call Putting your Fingers Down. Another way of putting it, is “you get the behaviour you measure.” If a job involves 10 activities, and you publicly measure only 5 of them, your employees will gravitate towards those activities. It often seems obvious what an employee does. Let’s say you have repair techs in a retail store and you decide to measure their productivity by measuring how many appliances they repair. Sounds good eh? Productivity increases and you’re happy.
Until you start getting complaints that the repair techs don’t want to talk to customers, and that when they do all they seem to want to do is get away from them. You also hear that some techs are taking easy repairs and leaving the hard repairs for others, who put them off, because that boosts their stats. So easy repairs are getting done fast, the hard ones are getting done slower, and customers aren’t getting individual personal attention any more, so they aren’t happy. That worked well!
Which leads to what I call the The Limits of Coercion. Public measurement is a form of coercion. The idea is to measure people and then push them to do better and get rid of the ones who don’t measure up. You put your fingers down and say, “do this!” And you can absolutely do it. Whatever behaviour you are able and willing to take the time to measure, you can and will get. But what you can’t get is positive cooperation. You can’t make people do the extra things. And people resent the wrong type of measurement. The problem is that you as management think you understand the job. Problem is, unless you still do it yourself, you probably don’t. Outside of the sort of jobs that are truly subject to Taylorization, most jobs require a myriad of little tasks and if people don’t do them, the overall job suffers. If you start measuring the wrong specific things then people’s attitude when you pull them in for a talk is “I’m doing fine on the stats you said you want, I don’t have time for the other stuff.”
The other problem is that people subvert the measurements. There are almost always ways to make the numbers come out better than they should, and people will take the time to find them and do them. Which leads to the fourth issue, the question of “Public metrics and private metrics.” Simply put, when you’re setting up metrics you should first find out which metrics track each other; figure out why they track each other; and measure both sets. But one set you keep private and the other is the public set. If the private set starts diverging from the public set then you should investigate if people are fiddling with the public set. Odds are they are.
But the real, final point is that you should be looking for your “Bottom Line Metrics”. In a call center it might be the percentage of happy callers divided by the average time per call. In a processing center I once worked in the VP (a very wise man) used to publicly (I’m sure privately he had a number of measurements which had to remain satisficed) measure only one thing – the average time from a piece of work entering the center to the time it left. He didn’t measure any specific processing times – only how well the center was working overall. If that number went up he’d want to know why, and when he wanted it to go down he let people tell him how they were going to get it down, not the other way around. The center ran very well. When he left his successor started putting his fingers down and both customer satisfaction and employee happiness declined.
In the end you should ask yourself “what are we trying to accomplish?” Then you publicly measure that, and only that. It may seem that you want to do multiple things, but in most cases you can boil it down to one thing – as with the customer service center where happiness was divided by call times. You want people to go away happy after their call with the least time necessary to make them happy. If you can’t break it down then you either don’t understand what the job actually entails (or what your division or company does) or you may need to break the work into different functional groups.
Finally, don’t fall into the MBA trap. As a manager you probably don’t really know what your employees are doing. You probably don’t really understand what is required to do the job well. However unless you’ve beaten them down too hard, or you’ve got a crew of reprobates, most people want to do a good job. Most people want to be able to say “damn, we’re good!” Don’t treat them like untrustworthy children, and you may find that they’re on your side and that measuring only the bottom line, on the minimum, is sufficient. When you go to war with your employees and try and measure every specific behaviour, generally both sides lose.
(Originally published in 2004 at BopNews. Republished April 17, 2009.)
(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)
Are humans good, bad, or neutral?
It’s an old philosophical debate and not just in the West. Confucius thought they were born neutral, for example, while the later Confucian Mencius felt they were good, noting that everyone who saw a child fall into a well would be horrified. Others, including many Confucians and the Christian church, with original sin, have felt that humans are born bad, and they have to be made good.
This is also the general view of the ruling ideology of the West: Ecnonomism. Humans are greedy, selfish, and only care for themselves. Popular biology, derived from books like Dawkins “The Selfish Gene” and 19th century social Darwinism has led to similar views.
If you think humans are bad, the question becomes how do you get them to do good? Traditional Christianity’s answer was, “Hit them while they’re kids, a lot, that’ll make them good.” (spare the rod, spoil the child), which can be judged fairly by Christianity’s record: “judge by the fruits” being reasonable when dealing with people who claim to follow Jesus.
Economism’s answer is, “If they’re greedy and selfish, give them rewards for doing what you want.”
Strangely, giving lots of rewards to bankers, CEOs, executives, and politicians has not made them better.
Now, of course, a pure selfishness/greed/incentives disciple might reply, “But they are the ones who decide what they get rewarded for, and that doesn’t make them good. You have to reward people for doing good!” But those same disciples are the folks, or descendants of the folks, who argued that the only thing corporate executives were responsible for was raising stock prices, and that giving them stock options was how to do that.
Didn’t work out. Teaching greedy people to be more greedy by rewarding their greed had the results one would expect: even more greed, in a lovely spiral upwards, while the middle and bottom of society had its heart cut out.
My own observation has been that when incentives are removed people are more likely to do the right thing. You don’t want doctors to own stock in drug companies, or make more money the more surgeries they do. Conversely, punishing surgeons for bad results actually lead to surgeons being unwilling to do risky surgeries which were still medically indicated: they wouldn’t want their success/fail rate to go down.
I’ve written in the past that I consider most humans neither good nor bad, but weak. They do more or less what their group wants. But really I’d say that humans, absent fear and incentives, have a slight bias to good. Most people like helping people, don’t like hurting people, and so on, as long as they themselves are not hurting or blinded by greed.
The moment a lot of people become chronically scared or greedy, however, that goes away. The scared are defensive and ready to be angry and hate, the greedy become sociopathic or even psychopathic, concerned only for themselves and, sometimes, a few people around them. Furthermore, incentives always cause tunnel vision — people pursuing incentives ignore everything that doesn’t get them to the incentive, and even well designed incentives leave out much that should be done.
As horrible as the idea is to us, the best thing to do with people is for leaders to be selected because they are kind and good, to set goals for oganizations without significant incentives (this doesn’t mean don’t track and correct), and remove fear from people. Make sure they know their needs will be met, and that no one wants to hurt them, and that help is available.
In such circumstances, strangely, people blossom. Happy people are more productive. About half of business literature can be summed up as, “If you treat employees well, they are way more productive, but most bosses are cunts who don’t want to do this, despite a huge preponderance of evidence.”
But when people are happy and not scared, of course, not only can you not get most of them to do evil, they don’t act servile and hop-to-it at your every command. For most bosses, ordering people around is the primary pleasure of the job (no, don’t pretend), even more than profit.
And since, with neoliberalism, they can be rich and have scared serfs jumping at their every statement of “frog,” recompense having almost no correlation with productivity or even profits, they can have the best of both worlds: rich and with what amounts to slaves, without the responsibility of caring for their servants.
This lies at the heart of all the screams about how Covid has made people unwilling to work at shitty minimum wage jobs, and government needs to stop giving them money, so they have no choice but to go groveling back to their masters for work they hate that may not even pay rent on a one-bedroom apartment.
If you insist on saying people are bad, then treating them badly, if you must be obeyed and show no concern for your slaves, then don’t be surprised if you live in Hell, and if the only thing keeping Hell from your own doors is having a TON of money.
There is another way, and maybe one day, having tried every evil thing, we’ll give it a shot.
(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)
Given the state of testing, all numbers should be assumed to be significant understatements, yet…
Colorado, “more than half of all outbreaks are in K-12 schools.”
“Well over a quarter-million children contracted COVID just last week, according to a joint report from the Children’s Hospital Association & the AAP which tracks all cases at the state level. It is the highest number of child COVID cases ever reported.
“More than 18,000 Mississippi students have caught COVID-19 in the first month of the school year. “
Modeling of how many students can be expected to be infected under different conditions:
What matters the most is proper ventilation, but I’m guessing the assumption is that most schools have done nothing about this and will do nothing.
It’s unclear what percentage of children get Long Covid. I’ve seen numbers as high as ten percent, but it seems likely to be less. Assume, say, five percent, and that your kid WILL get Covid if sent back to school. Sound like a good chance to take? And that assumes the damage is easy to spot, and you won’t realize it exists later, as with more subtle brain or heart damage.
This looks like mass-insanity to me, a crime of vast proportions. Despite all the squealing, not going back to school won’t cripple kids for life, and won’t expose everyone in their family and social circle to Covid when they get it, crippling and killing many of them.
But I guess we’re just going to keep doing Covid the stupidest, longest, and most inhumane way we can. It’s who we are; it’s who we elected, and I daresay, it’s what we deserve.
But the kids don’t deserve it, it’s just their bad luck to be born into a depraved, incompetent, psychopathic late-imperial society.
(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)
by Tony Wikrent
Injustice
Natalie Edwards Was Imprisoned this Month by the U.S. for Blowing the Whistle on Wall Street Banks’ Laundering of Dirty Money
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, September 8, 2021 [Wall Street On Parade]
Edwards is the heroic former Treasury official who tried in vain to get her superiors in the federal government to act on her concerns. Left with no other options to get action, she turned over documents to a BuzzFeed News reporter that became the core of the FinCEN Files, a collaborative investigation involving BuzzFeed News, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 108 other news organizations.
In effect, Edwards spawned an international news bureau focused on exposing the flow of dirty money around the globe by big name banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Standard Chartered, and Bank of New York Mellon. One in-depth report at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) captures the magnitude of Edwards’ service to the public interest with this headline: “Global banks defy U.S. crackdowns by serving oligarchs, criminals and terrorists: The FinCEN Files show trillions in tainted dollars flow freely through major banks, swamping a broken enforcement system.”
….Edwards deserves a pardon from President Biden, not to be sitting in a Federal Prison Camp where she cannot have visitors because COVID-19 is skyrocketing in the state of West Virginia.
Please consider signing the Pardon Petition for Edwards and forwarding it to your email contact list with a note asking your friends and family to do the same.
Strategic Political Economy
Justice Dept. sues Texas over state’s new abortion law
[Fort Worth Star-Telegram, via Naked Capitalism 9-10-2021]
Will the federal government defend Americans’ constitutional rights against local vigilantes?
Heather Cox Richardson, September 9, 2021 [Letters from an American]
Today, the United States of America sued the state of Texas for acting “in open defiance of the Constitution” when it passed S. B. 8 and deprived “individuals of their constitutional rights.” The United States has a “profound sovereign interest” in making sure that individuals’ constitutional rights can be protected by the federal government, the lawsuit declares. “The act is clearly unconstitutional under longstanding Supreme Court precedent,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
What is at stake in this case is the ability of the federal government to defend Americans’ constitutional rights against local vigilantes, a power Americans gave to the federal government in 1868 by ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution after white former Confederates in southern states refused to accept the idea that their Black neighbors should have rights.
Since the 1950s, the Supreme Court has used federal power to protect the rights of minorities and women when state laws discriminated against them. S. B. 8 would strip the government of that power, leaving individuals at the mercy of their neighbors’ prejudices. The government has asked the U.S. district court for the western district of Texas to declare the law “invalid, null, and void,” and to stop the state from enforcing it.
This issue of federal supremacy is not limited to Texas. Glenn Thrush of the New York Times today called out that in June, Missouri governor Mike Parson signed the Second Amendment Preservation Act, which declares federal laws—including taxes—that govern the use of firearms “invalid in this state.” Like the Texas abortion law, the Second Amendment Preservation Act allows individuals to sue state officials who work with federal officials to deprive Missourians of what they consider to be their Second Amendment rights. “Obviously, it’s about far more than simply gun rights,” one of the chief proponents of the bill, far-right activist Aaron Dorr, said to Thrush about his involvement.
[Angry Bear, 9-11-2021]
Use this thread to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. Please keep vax/anti-vax discussion out of this thread as well.
I don’t usually write “just go read this” posts, but I’m going to make an exception for this piece by Matt Stoller on how a monopolized economy causes shortages. This is the best article I’ve ever read on how monopolies and oligopolies work (Stoller tends to just say monopoly), and how their incentives systematically induce them to reduce the welfare of almost everyone in society.
Matt starts by noting that now that Uber and Lyft have destroyed Washington DC’s cab companies, waits for rides are now ten to 20 minutes, as well as being more expensive.
It was obvious that this was the play; destroy the cab industry by underpricing, then reap monopoly profits, and it’s something I pointed out repeatedly for years.
But Matt has put together a systematic explanation of how the entire process works which is the best I’ve seen, and you should read it.
Is just…this:
Similar numbers can be found in most fields.
This is related to the computer productivity paradox: Computers and the telecom revolution have not noticeably increased productivity.
The reason is simple enough — they weren’t used to create productivity, they were used to create control, to allow managers to micromanage employees without actually being in the presence of the employee all the time.
No society can stay healthy with this sort of admin bloat; admin are support, meant to help the people who actually do the job. If your tooth-to-tail ratio is higher than 2:1 or 3:1, something’s probably wrong.
In my personal life, at my last megacorp job I saw multiple waves of computer “improvements.” Every single one of them increased control and reduced the workload employees could handle. I know this for a fact because I measured it, in part because it was my job, in part because management refused to admit that their shiny new programs were actually slowing productivity, and, until I forced them to admit it, they wouldn’t hire more people.
Furthermore, each wave of “upgrade” de-skilled the job further, making the employees do what the computer said, and removing their discretion. All of this was intended to raise the bottom, but what it mostly did was lower the top; the most productive, most highly-skilled employees suffered the greatest productivity losses, were the most unhappy, and tended to leave, because the job had become semi-automated, and no longer involved actually doing the job.
As a general rule, no one should run something like a hospital who is not still involved in hands-on client care — probably a nurse or doctor. No one should run a university who is not either still teaching or an active student. This principle can be applied more generally, in that no one can properly manage anything they still don’t do. This is often recognized in the business literature, but, understandably, CEOs and executives almost never want to actually perform the real work of the business, nor will they excuse themselves from interfering with those who do and, thus, actually understand what is needed.
At most, upper management can set general goals. They should never be in charge of deciding how to achieve them. This is the opposite of how we run things, but it wasn’t always entirely so: Auto and plane companies used to be run by engineers, insurance companies by underwriters and actuaries, hospitals by nurses and doctors, and universities by Senates of Professors.
One issue is that front line workers often really want to do front line work: Professors don’t want to administer, they want to teach or do research, doctors want to treat patients, etc.
But if you give administrators power over you, you never get it back. University Senates hired administrators, and a few decades later discovered the administrators were running the show, were able to order profs around, and were the highest paid people in the university (outside of the football coach), while doing no actual teaching or research, and understanding little to nothing.
It is also important to understand that while it’s certainly better if you have done the front-line job at some point, that you lose that knowledge quickly. Ten years out, and you’re clueless — you’re just another administrator. Managers and executives have to keep their hands in, or they wind up clueless.
Bottom line: We can’t afford to let anything important be run by people who aren’t actually practitioners. They don’t know what they’re doing, and they spend most of their time building bureaucratic empires that do nothing but act as modern courtiers. In the best case, they do no harm other than sucking up resources, but in most cases they try to justify their existence by trying to tell the front lines how to do their jobs and make things worse.
If we want to fix our society we have to get rid of this admin bloat, along with the cluelessness it represents.
But what usually happens, instead, is some form of societal collapse, which strips out administrators in a more brutal and effective fashion.
That’s what where we’re headed.
(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)