Maybe businesses should kick it old school
Why is business so hard?
I mean, why do so many businesses struggle with basic tasks? Why do companies of smart and accomplished people seem to get bogged down on the way to success?
Here's the simplest answer I can come up with: Employees have to wade through oceans of BS. (I don't claim to be an edgelord on this blog, so I try to keep things PG-rated here. But to be clear, yes, in this case, BS stands for bullshit.)
To me, it's clear as day. I've worked at quite a few companies over the years, ranging from publicly-traded companies to family offices and a few other stops in between. When I look back at my career as a whole, I'm amazed at how often the same themes pop up again and again. Terrible leadership, unclear communication, poorly-defined processes that no amount of new and shiny technology can fix.
Among the masses of Yes Men, often parroting 'That's the way it's always been', it's hard not to feel alone. Or like you don't see reality clearly. You feel like Will Ferrell's character in Zoolander: 'I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!' In the end, maybe you start taking crazy pills just to cope.
Misery loves company, or so they say. And that's why I'm glad to have recently discovered the blog of Nikhil Suresh. Nikhil pulls no punches. Gives no fucks, as the kids say. (I've already broken the PG rating once on this post. And I'll do it again later, because quotations, so I might as well go big, right?)
To get an idea of Nikhil's subject matter, look no further than the blog posts below, which must surely be part of his greatest hits:
- I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again
- Most Tech Jobs Are A Joke And I'm Not Laughing
- PowerBI Is A Human Rights Violation
- Strategy Doesn't Matter If You Blunder Every Move
- I Will Fucking Haymaker You If You Mention Agile Again
- Your Organization Probably Doesn't Want To Improve Things
Nikhil takes something I know in my soul to be true and gives example after example of confirmation. So much of what we deal with on a daily basis is useless. The struggle leads to little productivity. You rush to meet your boss's crazy deadlines, but no one does anything with your hard work. Your report sits there unread. Your boss is an idiot who has no idea of the daily struggles required by your job, but he has an MBA and he looks great in a suit. Or, he's the owner's son. (Nepotism is a horrible business strategy that fails most of the company, yet it's far more common than you'd expect.)
Once, in a phone interview, someone asked me where I'd like to work: at a large company or a small company. I can't remember what I responded, but here's my honest opinion: Pick your poison. Each situation has its good and its bad, its pluses and its minuses. At a large company, you likely have to navigate waves of bureaucracy to get anything done. At a small company, the owner might fire you because he often gets a bit frisky on Tuesdays.
To piggyback off Nikhil's writing, I think so much of so many jobs are bullshit because so much of so many companies' operations are bullshit. Even the most successful people don't have all the answers. They're trying to figure it out as they go. But too many 'leaders' don't have the ability to figure it out, because they lack humility and curiosity and the ability to research anything they don't already have the answer for.
I find business is at its best when it's as simple as it can be. For so many companies and industries, the temptation seems to be to lean into complexity. The more complex it is, the more valid it is, right?
I urge you instead to start on the other end of the pendulum. Start from the viewpoint of simplicity. Make processes as straight-forward as you can and add complexity only when absolutely necessary. (To make sure only the absolutely necessary complexity is added, I recommend defaulting to the mindset that no complexity can be added; then you can begrudgingly allow it when the case has been made again and again, at which point you realize that maybe the extra steps truly are needed.)
I'm going to share with you a secret for making sense of complex situations: Ask questions. The asinine answers will show that no one has thought this out. No one capable of critical thought was included on the mapping of this proess.
Why is it this way? I blame the industrialist mindset.
Under the industrialist mindset, your boss seeks the best way you can make the most widgets possible. Often, the answer is for you to work harder. Or for longer hours. Or more consistently.
'Why are you talking to your co-worker when you could making me another widget!?'
That mentality might work for industrialist industries. But many of us aren't widget makers. I'm not. Neither is Nikhil or his peers.
In my own career, much of my hardest work has come from interpreting and enacting legal agreements. What does this document actually say? What was its intent? Did it cover this situation?
Sometimes you find yourself in a situation no one else in your company has ever seen before. Congratulations, you're in what they call 'uncharted territory'! This is a golden opportunity. You just don't know if it's an opportunity to make a name for yourself, or an opportunity to find a new way for things to blow up in your company's face!
In these situations, simply working harder won't fix much of anything. I can bang my head against my desk and try to make sense of it all again and again. But somtimes I need to step away and let the words bounce around my head before they start to make sense.
For most of us knowledge workers, these are the kinds of issues we regularly deal with. These are the issues that use most of our energy and take up most of our time. So it'd be nice if we could focus more time on these issues; or it'd be nice if other, lesser important tasks didn't get in the way.
So why are these lesser important issues so complicated? Well, dear reader, how else are your bosses going to know you're working hard?
When you're making widgets, I can count how many times you pull that lever. And I can see that more pulls of the lever mean more widgets.
What's the equivalent in knowledge work? The Company pays you eight hours a day. How else can the Company ensure it's getting its eight hours worth out of you? Or, look at it another way: By keeping things complex, I know you're giving me at least eight hours a day.
By now this is all soundiing familiar to fans of Cal Newport.
You'd think that someone in charge of such operation would be focused on higher-level metrics: Revenue, profit, etc. But it's easier to focus on whether you're in the office, obviously doing something for a certain amount of time every day.
We also can't discount the herd mentality. Everyone's doing AI? What's our AI strategy!? No one's on it!? Well, transfer the crypto team over. They don't have much going on these days.
As you get older and experience more of life, you realize common sense ain't so common.
With every new antitrust lawsuit against Google, it looks more and more like we're falling out of love with tech. I hope that also means that we're falling out of the habit of thinking something new is great just on the basis of its age and novelty.
On a personal level, I feel as if most of us could benefit from a classical liberal education. On a business level, I think we could benefit from leaders who focus on simplifying business and who have great bullshit detectors. The perfect mix might be finding such a person who's also a great bullshit artist so that maybe he or she will have a chance of actually changing some minds and making a difference.
In other words, I don't think it's something new that's going to unlock unrealized gains and skyrocket your business. What if the answer instead lies in old school values that have been available this whole time?
