
Moral Mazes: Bureaucracy and Managerial Work (1983) - luu
https://hbr.org/1983/09/moral-mazes-bureaucracy-and-managerial-work
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dragontamer
> “All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need...
> fantasies to make life bearable."

> REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE
> HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

> "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

> YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

> "So we can believe the big ones?"

> YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

\-- Terry Pratchett, The Hogfather

\-----------

One of the defining characteristics of humans is our ability to create shared
fantasies... or "lies" if you are cynical. One of the most important jobs as a
manager is the creation of the shared fantasy of the workplace environment.

"Hard work creates results" is an obvious lie, or fantasy, to anyone who has
any amount of programming experience. You can look to colleagues and see that
some people can get things done in hours what another person may take weeks,
or months (of good, hard work) to accomplish.

So what's the point of the fantasy? If the fantasy is no longer helpful, we
humans have the ability to change the fantasy, change the story, change the
workplace culture, to better suit the morale and psyche of the modern worker.

With luck and hard work, a shared fantasy can become a shared reality.

In the case of "Hard work creates results", the fantasy is real if the
programmers have the support they need to move in the correct direction. Its
not so much that hard work creates results, its that a GOOD MANAGER creates
situations where hard work creates good results.

~~~
Nasrudith
I think in most cases it is the proverbial tail wagging the dog. The
established fantasy to use your terms is what leads to the behavior and
productivity is the rationalization.

Giving up on "hard work" feels to managenent and their bosses like leaving
money on the table. Even if they would consistently get five times better
results and no downsides by having say game programmers work eight hour days
and spend half of the day having LAN parties in the game so they became
intimately familiar with its mechanics, performance, bugs, and flaws it would
emotionally feel morally wrong "slacking" because it contradicts their values
- in spite of the purpose of the values.

Inertia tends to keep things the status quo until "feedback" forces changes on
it.

Confusingly the status quo itself may not be stable - rewriting the code base
every three years in a new language regardless of how well it works is just as
much a status quo as leaving it in untouched COBOL and only putting efforts
into compatability layers when absolutely needed.

------
jt2190
(1983)

Reading this, I feel like there’s some historical context that’s implied but
probably easily missed if you’re unaware: In the U.S. this was the end of the
era of managers working at one company for their entire career, of showing
undying loyalty to the company which in turn would march them up the corporate
ladder. Many companies had gotten large and complacent from this, and their
competitiveness had eroded terribly, because (as the article points out)
management was focused on appearances and the short term.

Thus this article seems to be right in step with the times of calling into
question the benefits of strong, hierarchical management.

~~~
sgt101
Do you have evidence for the idea that US companies had become uncompetitive
in the early 80's? I think that the oil crisis and globalisation had very
significant effects on the US economy (also the vietnam war) at around that
time.

~~~
Spooky23
The trend for companies had been to scale up and diversify to avoid antitrust
and avoid risk.

Big companies are always slower, and that hasn’t changed. We’re as dependent
on big business today as ever, perhaps more so.

An upwardly mobility seeking suburban family would want their kids working at
GE or IBM, versus today where finance and tech are the way.

The stagflation of the 70 and early 80s broke a lot of things in big
companies, and magnified the impact of smaller competitors. Deregulation in
finance, changes that defanged antitrust, and tax changes but the nail in the
coffin for the old dinosaur companies.

------
AlexCoventry
There are some good excerpts from _Moral Mazes_ (book-length version) here:
[https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/05/30/quotes-from-moral-
ma...](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/05/30/quotes-from-moral-mazes/)

~~~
chalst
Zvi has a lengthy Less Wrong sequence that builds on this.

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ham9i5wf4JCexXnkN/moloch-
has...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ham9i5wf4JCexXnkN/moloch-hasn-t-won)

------
KKKKkkkk1
In recent years, working at a top tech company has become accepted by many as
a path to success (if not success itself). Although Robert Jackall did his
field research in the 80s in big industry, his work has a lot of great
insights into what life is like in the FAANGs. Also, this was one of Aaron
Swartz's "very favorite books."

------
vicnov
1\. 1983 2\. I wish they were contracting it to other cultures — I wonder if
there models that a different from American and what they look like.

~~~
dragontamer
> From the September 1983 Issue

Yeah, this should get a 1983 tag. This is a surprisingly old article to
surface here.

~~~
rsanheim
Yup, and still as relevant today as the day it was published.

------
tra3
> “Managers rarely spoke to me of objective criteria for achieving success
> because once certain crucial points in one’s career are passed, success and
> failure seem to have little to do with one’s accomplishments. Rather,
> success is socially defined and distributed.”

I always thought that in IT, we have somewhat reliable metrics for measuring
everyone’s contributions. The above quote is as depressing as it is true...

------
ncr100
> “It’s characterizing the reality of a situation with any description that is
> necessary to make that situation more palatable to some group that matters.
> It means that you have to come up with a culturally accepted verbalization
> to explain why you are not doing what you are doing… [Or] you say that we
> had to do what we did because it was inevitable; or because the guys at the
> [regulatory] agencies were dumb; [you] say we won when we really lost; [you]
> say we saved money when we squandered it; [you] say something’s safe when
> it’s potentially or actually dangerous… Everyone knows that it’s bullshit,
> but it’s accepted. This is the game.”

Wow. This article wonderfully describes dysfunction in a (modern, chicken-shit
IMO) corporation, operating much like a pyramid scheme.

Accepting responsibility is discouraged.

Rational plans to profitability are avoided in favor of "looking good" for at
least as many years at the company as one needs in order to be hired by the
next company, and upon leaving the lack of planning results in a disaster.

And on modern bureaucracy vs America's classical Protestant Ethic, now often
ignored:

> The bureaucratic ethic contrasts sharply with the original Protestant Ethic.
> The Protestant Ethic was the ideology of a self-confident and independent
> propertied social class. It was an ideology that extolled the virtues of
> accumulating wealth in a society organized around property and that accepted
> the stewardship responsibilities entailed by property. It was an ideology
> where a person’s word was his bond and where the integrity of the handshake
> was seen as crucial to the maintenance of good business relationships.
> Perhaps most important, it was connected to a predictable economy of
> salvation—that is, hard work will lead to success, which is a sign of one’s
> election by God—a notion also containing its own theodicy to explain the
> misery of those who do not make it in this world.

> Bureaucracy, however, breaks apart substance from appearances, action from
> responsibility, and language from meaning. Most important, it breaks apart
> the older connection between the meaning of work and salvation. In the
> bureaucratic world, one’s success, one’s sign of election, no longer depends
> on one’s own efforts and on an inscrutable God but on the capriciousness of
> one’s superiors and the market; and one achieves economic salvation to the
> extent that one pleases and submits to one’s employer and meets the
> exigencies of an impersonal market.

And the punch-line:

> Men and women in bureaucracies turn to each other for moral cues for
> behavior and come to fashion specific situational moralities for specific
> significant people in their worlds.

> As it happens, the guidance they receive from each other is profoundly
> ambiguous because what matters in the bureaucratic world is not what a
> person is but how closely his many personae mesh with the organizational
> ideal [....]

------
commandlinefan
> This ethic of ceaseless work and ceaseless renunciation of the fruits of
> one’s toil provided both the economic and the moral foundations for modern
> capitalism.

Well, that turned into communism fast...

~~~
dragontamer
I'm sure the US was more concerned about communism in 1983 than it is today.

\----

There are some gems in this long-form rant. For example:

> Another important meaning of team play is putting in long hours at the
> office. This requires a certain amount of sheer physical energy, even though
> a great deal of this time is spent not in actual work but in social
> rituals—like reading and discussing newspaper articles, taking coffee
> breaks, or having informal conversations. These rituals, readily observable
> in every corporation that I studied, forge the social bonds that make real
> managerial work—that is, group work of various sorts—possible. One must
> participate in the rituals to be considered effective in the work.

This very much appropriately states my experience of the modern workplace
environment.

~~~
foobarian
As a network guy this reminds me of how a lot of networking equipment (and
also distributed system clusters) operate - you have this constant background
overhead of chatting and gossiping and keeping in sync with your peer nodes,
all so that when the actual work needs to be done you are on the same page. If
you are not in that network, you can not get any of that work accomplished.

