This is feelgood venting, but without addressing the root of the problem.
All these managers are paid to do this BS. By the company. And that company is owned by people, who ultimately have the final say how it will be run, and who are paying the price.
There needs to be a lot more discussion around corporate governance with regards to this topic. I.e. how is it allowed to happen.
Why aren't companies adequently training and selecting managers, when it's the biggest effector of their performance vs their competitors? To the extent that dysfunctional management is nearly ubiquitous?
Why do we frequently hear stories like Icahn goes and fires a floor of staff with no effect on operations?
Because it sounds like a huge opportunity in the M&A space. Perhaps new tech can be developed to detect companies like these, to target them for acquisition and then purge them of BS.
It reminds me of every layoff ever. It's a remarkable feature of layoffs that the people organizing them never have to lay themselves off. Think of the awkward conversations they would have had to have with their family...
"Honey, I did a cost/benefit analysis and found that my role was parasitic value extraction. To maximise the goals of the organisation I have decided to make myself redundant. Further I have decided to give myself 0 days of notice and 0 compensation so that the organisation can use that money to further it's important goals. I'm afraid Christmas is cancelled this year. However, think of the shareholder value I have created."
The mistake OP makes is to assume that the objective of the business is to be a an efficient and productive enterprise.
But that ignores the fact that the business is composed of individuals drawn of the population of human beings who have more prosaic biological needs. From the perspective of management, the enterprise is simply a thing that exists for the purpose of letting them be in charge of it.
This explains several other "paradoxes" such as why wages are low, or why the social security safety net isn't great. Happy, healthy, productive workers, who can speak their minds freely when it comes to problems, even problems created by their superiors, might lead to more efficiency and higher profits. But they also rob management of their social position and the daily experience of being surrounded by people who hold them in very high regard, and treat them with respect and deference. We don't need to do a randomized controlled trial to figure out which of these two alternate universes we're currently residing in.
That is why any political treaty or consensus between management and workers, such as the new-deal or post-war consensus, will eventually be attacked and destroyed by the managers and owners even if it tanks the entire economy with it. The last 40 (and especially the last 10-15) years of US/european history and the destruction of the post-war consensus appears to have borne this theory out.
The point of takeover layoffs is that problem you describe in the first paragraph is nullified.
A well publicised example was the recent takeover of Musk of Twitter. He started by firing everyone at the top first, before moving on to cutting general staff second.
That's usually exactly the way to fix this problem, because BS-ing middle management requires apathetic upper management who're only concerned with milking their positions as long as they can (requiring no-one upset the apple cart). That in turn requires owners who are too dispersed, distant, or incompetent to band together and root out such parasites from the top down.
> Why aren't companies adequently training and selecting managers
We've never trained managers. My father used to complain about this. He was an army officer before he went into industry; army officers are trained to manage.
I guess the difference with industry is that a trained manager can switch jobs; a trained army officer has a choice of exactly one employer. So training an officer is a long-term investment for the army, but training a manager just gives him an incentive to jump ship.
Is the article not valuable without address the root of the problem?
The author explains how he copes with the way organisations behave. Without this coping mechanism, he would be less happy and more angry. This coping mechanism could help a lot of unhappy/angry people right now, while solving the root problem requires more time and collaboration. Maybe it is also okay if we make people more happy right now, and work on the root problem in the next article?
I've written elsewhere on this. I actually did drastically reduce my work hours and begin exploring other careers, plus starting my own business. However, it didn't seem like it was my place to tell people what they should do, and decided to stick to commenting on what might be a waste of time instead. Everyone's on their own journey, etc, etc.
I've been much happier, but for hopefully understandable reasons, do not wish to bore my long-term readers by repeating myself re: all that history. After all, most of my posts are read fifty times tops by the same people.
> Why aren't companies adequently training and selecting managers, when it's the biggest effector of their performance vs their competitors? To the extent that dysfunctional management is nearly ubiquitous?
That's how the world used to work, back in the 90s and before.
It doesn't work today, since job mobility is so high. What's the point in training up someone, just for them to jump ship to a competitor for a healthy pay raise?
A skilled acquirer would've interviewed engineering before moving forward, ostensibly on the grounds of "knowing what they're buying". They'd then know who to give bonuses and promotions to, vs those to kick out, from day one.
All these managers are paid to do this BS. By the company. And that company is owned by people, who ultimately have the final say how it will be run, and who are paying the price.
There needs to be a lot more discussion around corporate governance with regards to this topic. I.e. how is it allowed to happen.
Why aren't companies adequently training and selecting managers, when it's the biggest effector of their performance vs their competitors? To the extent that dysfunctional management is nearly ubiquitous?
Why do we frequently hear stories like Icahn goes and fires a floor of staff with no effect on operations?
Because it sounds like a huge opportunity in the M&A space. Perhaps new tech can be developed to detect companies like these, to target them for acquisition and then purge them of BS.