I am old, I know.
When I was at the beginning of my career "In Search of Excellence" was the book to read. And I did. And I was totally fascinated by it, and sold.
At that time I had a crappy little job, I was a cog in the machine, but I was eager to improve and build a career.
3 degrees and 3 decades later I have built a decent career; and I have worked with some interesting companies, but I can count on one hand the leaders that I have worked for that I respect on a professional level. Most are at best psychopaths, and at worst clueless.
Why is so?
I am conducting a job search, and all the job openings are just so blend and run-of-the-mill, not much has changed in job descriptions, roles, duties ever since 1982 (the year "In Search of Excellence" came out).
So, we all experience the dichotomy that leaders want to hire creative and progressive individuals, but then, when push comes to shove, they just want the same old, boring, pre-internet era type of people.
And they want with the exact experience and system version's as they use, so that they can say "we do things differently here".
I don't see much excellence around. Do you?
How do we change this?
\end_of_rant
> This is problematic, clearly. A company needs to be able to treat its employees as interchangeable and expendable, both individually and collectively. It needs to be able to periodically layoff 17% of its workforce to cut its margin overhead by 1% and temporarily boost its stock price by 5%, without having to endure existential upheaval to its ongoing business processes.
as for the solution: basically I think the people who CAN be better managers keep saying, "oh I hate working with people, I'd rather code" and hence you're left with a very specific subset of managers.
> everybody is better off if companies ignore this caution with the same exuberant disregard as people doing their jobs with inadvisable devotion. The most transformational human ideas begin in individual hearts, whatever gantlets of brainstorming and strategic opportunity-analysis they subsequently have to run. Spotify was more right, I think, to tolerate my curiosities and experiments for 10 years than they were to finally give up on them out of exasperation or ignorance.
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