> My personal theory is that this is the result of an incompetent management class where no self …
> My personal theory is that this is the result of an incompetent management class where no self corrections are happening. Close. They're not incompetent; we just redefined competence. It used to be that competence was a mix of a lot of distinct, but interdependent, qualities. The end result was synergy that allowed for people and organizations (including companies) to compete and move society forward. In the 1970s, we started to allow a bunch of psychopaths (I'm saying this in the clinical sense) to redefine competence. Instead of this array of distinct qualities, they just defined it in terms of ability to create monetary value, particularly if that value was then transferred to shareholders. That was it. We also switched to quarterly reporting for for-profit companies, shrinking the window to evaluate this new definition of competence to 90 days. Three months. An end result of this was that you could simply do whatever made the most money in 90 days and be considered competent. Jack Welch was the paragon of this. …
Original discussionHas the decline of knowledge work begun?793 source comments · at import