Dear Ben,
your writing is so familiar to me, reading your mail is a bit like feeling
home. Yet, I cannot agree with the content of your writing. This is, why
I had to leave home. I have not found what I am looking for, I even do not
know, whether there is any other home waiting for me, with a fireplace to
sit at and knowing, this is where I always wanted to be. I have my big
troubles with some humanistic ideals as well. But I remember the reasons
that makes it impossible for me just to return.
Let me summerize your thinking as follows:
The harder you work (accept responsibility for your success),
the better your performance will become,
as long as you know what kind of performance is valued as performance
(define it - better let the customer define it - and make it measureable)
and as a matter of justice the best performer should get the highest rewards
(rank the employees, feedback their performance).
This IS a systemic approach (feedback) and it creates the possiblity of
learning.
Problems are caused for instance by "government trying to take
responsibility for individuals".
If there is a mistake in this summary of what I understand is your
understanding, please correct me!
Now, what threw me out of this logic?
- There is still a big discontinuity between those who have money/wealth
and those who have to work hard.
- Our life is not eternal: The wealth of the parents is mainly transferred
to their children. If the parents earned that wealth through hard work,
these children may take the parents wealth as a compensation for missed
love and acceptance of them. At least the wealth of the children is not
correlated to their performance (the same with the cost for the children
for our, the parents, sins of today). It is not too far from "The son of
the king should be king".
- The idea (illusion) of "working capital" (it is never capital that
works): "You perform by using my money, so some of the reward of your
performance should be mine." Who is setting the price for work, who is
setting the price for capital? People have basic needs for food, clothing
and housing. Capital does not. So just hold your capital back, until
people become hungry and buy the workforce cheap. This argument is one of
the roots of Marx' critic of capitalism. Although I feel close to
liberalism, it does not avoid the inherent problems of capital
accumulation.
- Performance is not a question of the individual, but of a social
infrastructure. One hour work at HP is very different from one hour work
in an indian village. There are limits to the effect of "accepting
individual responsibility". In India, our example, there is a high effort
necessary to create a suitable infrastructure - this is mainly a
cooperational, not instantly rewarding process. A competitive climate
together with the wish for short term rewarding is in such cases very
destructive. The opposite happened in the "Wirtschaftswunder" of Germany
after world war II: Cooperating humans, competing companies.
- A good competition is not won by strength but by differentiation - even
better by anticipating a strong vision and building up the required
competencies. The key to good (company-)performance is the cooperation of
different people with unique strengths. Competition arises only (and is
necessary there) if two try to do the same. It is a problem of our
educational system that it tries to normalise people and not to develop
individuality together with communication (cooperation) skills, which lead
to such a high competitive attitude.
- There are many ways for competitive high-performers to keep the
performance of their competitors low.
- There are many ways of the not-so-competitives to undermine the
performance of the competitive, undermining the competitivness of the
whole company.
- The problem of children, old or handicaped people, who are not unwilling
but unable to take the responsibility of their success.
This is neither complete, nor systematic, not even precise. It is
discribing problems without offering solutions. (I should be punished
therefore in a competitive environment. There, its the solution that
counts, and if I have a solution and no problem to it, I better find a way
to create the problem to become the king when presenting the solution.)
Many of these items are being discussed on this forum.
Writing this, I get an idea: If good cooperation is so vital for
performance and competition such a good kick to become better, why not
compete for cooperation? And determine the ranking internally by a secret
election process. The reward must be calculated on the base of the
companies earnings and include the ranking of the last 3-5 years
(depending on the time lag of performance and revenue). Did anyone try out
something like this?
Best Regards, Winfried
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