Centerfield

Why The Government and Big Companies Find It Harder To Get Stuff Done (SO LONG IT'S ALMOST LIKE WAR AND PEACE)

This is something I've been wondering about since I was a teenager at my first job, a US govt summer student position doing robotics at the Nat'l Bureau of Standards (now the Nat'l Int of Standards and Technology). There were lots of smart people, and yet the job was annoying because of the constant impact of politics.

Maybe I've finally figured out why, now that I'm over twice as old. More recent inspirations for this were my earlier Civ vs. chess post and Doris Kearns Goodwin's recent great book, Team of Rivals, a book about Lincoln and his cabinet.

What Game Are You Playing?

Many government employees, and people who choose to live in big hierarchies play a different kind of game than many of the rest of us in their thinking. Like chess, there are a set number of high positions to play for, with just a very small number of top dogs. There are many very talented players playing for these positions, so talent alone can't get you in; you must make everybody who might otherwise win look bad to your superiors or at least keep them from looking good. Thus, employees playing for high position are likelier to be be disinterested in transparent evaluation and more interested in spinning and investigating to make each other look bad. Congress is an excellent example - it passes bureaucrat-bashing bills as often as crime bills, and their usual result is to make things harder for some segment of the government.

What drew me to this realization is Salmon's actions in the Lincoln Administration. Salmon P. Chase was a real cold fish, but also Lincoln's excellent Secretary of the Treasury. Among other things, he introduced paper currency and did most of the work of arranging to pay for the unbelievably expensive Civil War. Salmon was also devoutly anti-slavery. And yet, he opposed Lincoln's great Emancipation Proclamation. Why? Because he privately wanted slavery ended by one President Salmon P. Chase (and did he fear he wouldn't've done it as cleverly as Lincoln?).

Ironically, one result of this behavior is that the government looks like it's full of stupid people because it underperforms other parts of our society. But it's really full up to the gills with smart people.

Outside the government and other set hierarchies, things are different. For most of us, If we want to do something and have the appropriate talent and training, mostly, we can either persuade somebody to employ us to do somethin pretty similar or do it on our own hook at least part time. We are in effect creating new positions to do new things all the time.

Unless you happen to enjoy intrigue, a job in a hierarchical world is likely to be less fun and more bureaucratic. Like playing chess, somebody wanting to win the bureaucracy game must make best use of powerful allies and put opposing pieces out of the game to thrive. Detective work thrives in Washington, since that can be a way of putting people out of the gamek.

Much of the rest of democratic society works in a more positive way. The game's more like Civ, where you can construct new units, new places to build things, and new ways of doing things. In the real world, you can make new advances as well and create new groups. This makes most jobs better because it creates more and more better and better jobs as technology and the amount and effect of money in circulation to invest advance.

How Many People Are Above You?

There's another contributing factor: depth of hierarchy. The bigger a hierarchy is, the worse it usually performs. Let's suppose you're a grunt employee for a second, actually doing stuff. If anybody in the hierarchy above you is a bad manager, ANYBODY, your work is likely to be unpleasant and/or come to naught. Since a fair number of managers aren't up to their jobs, the more managers above you in the grunt job, chances get pretty good that ONE isn't up to his job.

The way the world's set up make statistics work hard against that poor grunt, because there's a multiplication for each level. I had six levels above me going up to President Reagan; even a 10% chance of any given mgr not being up to his job would give me a bit over a 50/50 shot of having a good mgt chain above me.

Some Fine Examples: