When management is treated as a generic function that can be performed by a particular class of people in any field rather than the most senior expert practitioners in their respective fields, this is what happens.
You get insecure authoritarians who latch on to (utterly wrong) metrics as a means of "understanding" what it is their subordinates do without actually understanding what it is they do.
With software developers it used to be SLOC (thankfully that died). With GPs it's "number of patients seen". With teachers it's standardized test scores.
There's a direct correlation between managerial technical ineptitude and insistence on working long hours.
Can't upvote hard enough. Even in the digital media space I'm in, with all our endless data, picking the right thing to measure and measuring it the right way is extremely hard.
Metrics have consequences as what gets measured gets managed, often to the detriment of everything else. Pick the wrong metric and you can shoot yourself in the foot inadvertently.
Here's how I manage to not just live in a cabin in the woods. If it's hard for me, I can only imagine how hard it is for the boss ( because scale ) . Even if the boss is an idiot, there's probably a lot more gain in cooperating and trying to fix it than in being belligerent.
But broken measurement systems invite corruption. It's now possible for ... dishonorable cliques to overtake the measurement regime and bend it to their own advantage.
Since they're going to be organized around the short term ( because that's how humans manage information overload - they go short term ), they're more likely to do things that will damage the organization for the long term.
Have you seen "All Cared For By Machines of Living Grace" by Adam Curtis? I wonder if Curtis used this as source material? It's the same basic idea, although it may appear that Curtis generalizes to a different view of the fallacy underlying all this.
The ghost of Otto von Bismarck laughs every night.
Thanks for the suggestion - the summary info I read makes it sound like a lot of intuitions I don't have fleshed out well enough to explain thoroughly. It's likely going to be either great or maddeningly off in subtle ways. Either way I'm interested in watching it.
Adam's films are .. just essays. They're flawed and informal, but the basic ... bones of his ideas are intriguing and stimulating.
I am glad I could reciprocate with something because I really like "Thinking Like a State" ( after my rapid-read treatment, with a slow read TBD). It encapsulates so many ideas I've never really seen bundled before, along with some that require further digging. I would not be surprised if "Thinking.." wasn't an influence on him.
And making sure that your decision to measure a thing isn't incentivizing the system to optimize for the measure. This is, in short, why Germany doesn't have good forests - in the 1800s, they started measuring the number, species, and age of trees.
MBAs and MBAification.
When management is treated as a generic function that can be performed by a particular class of people in any field rather than the most senior expert practitioners in their respective fields, this is what happens.
You get insecure authoritarians who latch on to (utterly wrong) metrics as a means of "understanding" what it is their subordinates do without actually understanding what it is they do.
With software developers it used to be SLOC (thankfully that died). With GPs it's "number of patients seen". With teachers it's standardized test scores.
There's a direct correlation between managerial technical ineptitude and insistence on working long hours.