

Scott Adams: The Bad Management Stimulus - hak
http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_bad_management_stimulus/

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camccann
This brings to mind the story that begins with William Shockley's famous
management and interpersonal skills. From Wikipedia:

 _Shockley attempted to lure some of his former colleagues from Bell Labs to
his new lab, but none of them would join him. Instead, Shockley started
scouring universities for the brightest graduates to build a company from
scratch, one that would be run "his way".

"His way" could generally be summed up as "domineering and increasingly
paranoid". In one famous incident, he claimed that a secretary's cut thumb was
the result of a malicious act and he demanded lie detector tests to find the
culprit. (...)

(...) In late 1957, eight of Shockley's researchers, who called themselves
"the Traitorous Eight," resigned after Shockley decided not to continue
research into silicon-based semiconductors. Several of the eight met with
Sherman Fairchild and described the situation, and the eight started Fairchild
Semiconductor (...)_

Over the following decade, problems at Fairchild resulted in people leaving to
create new opportunities, resulting in the founding of (among other companies)
Intel, AMD, and Kleiner Perkins--and I think everyone knows how the story goes
from there.

So, I suppose we owe a debt of gratitude to Shockley, not only for his
excellence in engineering, but also for his abysmal incompetence in
management.

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gvb
I loved the comment by wishnevsky (Nov 26, 2009).

"... I had no government or financial aid, except unemployment from my last
job. Went to try for a government grant, and they offered to help me spent six
months "creating a business plan" I told them i had a plan, "Buy some wood,
make guitars, put them on eBAy, sell them, buy more wood."

"They looked at me like i was a three headed Martian hillbilly. So, i bought
some wood..."

~~~
hernan7
Wow, I bet that would be the www.wishbass.com Wishnevsky -- I actually have
one of his basses; alas, it's too neck-heavy for me to play comfortably. But
then, it was a one-off prototype based on a crazy idea of mine (how about a
bass guitar that you can bow?) Some day, I will buy one of his more "regular"
basses.

~~~
cool-RR
I always fantasized about a bass you can bow :)

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tokenadult
To me this brought to mind pg's essay "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss."

<http://paulgraham.com/boss.html>

It's easier to recognize the downside of having a boss when the boss is on the
Dilbert model rather than on the _Inc._ magazine cover story model.

After edit: Adams also refers quite directly to the Peter Principle

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle>

that "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of
Incompetence," but calls it his Dilbert Principle, that "in the modern
economy, the least capable people are promoted to management because companies
need their smartest people to do the useful work."

~~~
kscaldef
It's common to confuse the Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle, but they
are not the same. In fact, they are nearly opposite to one another, despite
producing similar outcomes. The DP proposes that those who have shown
themselves incompetent are promoted, either to get them out of the way or
because the competent people are needed to do "actual work". The PP proposes
that those who display competence in their current work will be promoted until
they reach the point where they are no longer competent. Notice that the PP
assumes that higher-level jobs are harder or require rarer skills, while the
DP assumes the opposite.

~~~
tokenadult
Thanks for the correction to the last paragraph of my comment (parent to your
comment).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dilbert_Principle>

I appreciate your attention to detail.

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umjames
I'm glad he hinted that there are a lot of people reverse telecommuting at
their jobs. Even though companies usually try to stop this by monitoring their
employees' desktop and network activity (which I think is wrong), it's nice to
know people still do it.

As mentioned in PG's "What Business can learn from Open Source" essay,
employees often want to build great things for the companies they work for.
When companies squelch that by locking down their computers and networks and
spying on employees (I understand the security and intellectual property
motives of this), they sometimes inadvertently prevent such enterprising
employees from helping them in this way.

Even if it doesn't look immediately relative to their jobs, working on a more-
interesting side project brings new skills to the employer for free. It also
revitalizes that employee toward their actual job. When the employee can no
longer do this for themselves (and their employer), they get upset and leave,
taking their increased abilities with them.

Eventually, they realize that pretty much anywhere they go, they'll encounter
the same problems they just left. That's the cause of a lot of
entrepreneurship.

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three14
Of course, a good manager _could_ add more value than the people she manages.
Engineers can fail to appreciate all the fuzzy unmeasurable people-stuff it
takes to keep a big team communicating and working together.

Mediocre managers probably don't, which implies they should pay themselves
less than they pay the engineers that report to them. Seems like a problem
that's unlikely to be solved.

~~~
omouse
Engineers? What are you talking about? My dad's an engineer and he knew how to
appreciate all the fuzzy unmeasurable people-stuff. He communicated with
multiple departments and kept things running as smoothly as he could. He dealt
with salespeople without going crazy too! The only value added by his bosses
is that they gave him enough room to do the things.

Oh wait, you mean "engineers" as in "software engineers"...well then you're
just continuing the stereotype of programmers being socially inept.

~~~
three14
_I'm_ a "software engineer". I said _can_ to try to hint that sometimes
someone who's an expert at one thing, who, unlike your dad, happens to not be
an expert at a second thing, fails to appreciate the challenges of that second
thing, and that general pattern can specifically cause an illusory case of the
issue described by the OP.

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alanthonyc
Great insight:

 _"I have to think that bad management pushes a lot of capable people out of
their day jobs, and those people go on to become entrepreneurs.

...the least capable people are promoted to management because companies need
their smartest people to do the useful work. ... a situation where you have
more geniuses reporting to morons than at any time in history."_

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zby
It is quite convincing that bad management pushes people to become
entrepreneurs - but on the other hand if we had perfect management we would
not need so many different enterprises.

