Monday 7 August 2017

Post No. 1,057 – The World: A Lamentation

I recently read an article on LinkedIn about the so-called “Lean” philosophy, an article that had been written by an ex-military person.
It was the most amathiac thing I have read in a long time.
In a war, there are times when circumstances compel people to make do with less than they need – as examples, consider the Battle of the Bulge, or the Siege of Jadotville, or the guns at Brécourt Manor.
There may even be what some would consider a “noble” purpose in that – e.g., destroying an active force of evil that had been allowed to develop material power in the first and third example, and attempting to fulfil a peacekeeping mandate in the second.
NONE of that justifies deliberately planning to be under-resourced in a peacetime situation, and that is how the so-called “Lean” philosophy is interpreted – see how much further workers can be driven, if they’re duped into drinking the Business World Kool Aid of Konformity, a bit like using mindfulness to blame workers for being unhappy when they’re overworked.
I’ve been through this sort of rubbish before –notably, in the 80s and 90s, business people used war and violence in their exhortations to workers – e.g., “we’ve got to smash our rivals to bits” (I’ve watered down the language actually used).
Then, and now, the aim was to distract and drive (perhaps re-socialise is a more appropriate and accurate term) workers into sacrificing themselves, their health, their families’ well-being, their lives to the goal of profit for the business holders.
Not only is that morally indefensible, it is morally offensive.
People have inalienable rights, and several of those boil down to quality of life: low emotional intelligence managers and supervisors (let alone the psychopaths who are, at least, now acknowledged – see here, here, and here) have NO right to reduce that.
Furthermore, the overloading of people is counter-productive. In the business world, that leads to reduced output as a result of poorer health/exhaustion from lack of sleep/etc, people leaving, people not being able to think clearly and be creative (on that, look at this TED talk, on the benefits of a certain amount of procrastination to creativity – or, as business people term it these days, creativity), and ill-will – no matter what carefully limited surveys and the like may suggest.
In war, under-resourcing as part of planning can also be disastrous: compare the ultimately successful, within two years, liberation of western Europe by the allies in World War Part 2 with the “cut off the head” approach to the US-led invasion of Iraq which had so limited success that, combined with other mistakes, western powers are still there - 14 years later.
It is necessary to always look at the bigger picture.
As an example, in the 80s, although there was a need for some changes in my home state, the approach adopted, with the then-fashionable privatisation (now being rolled back in many places in the world because of social costs and abuses – e.g., see here, and here) and the ever-fashionable amongst business elites union bashing, effectively threw out the baby with the bathwater – the industry I work in lost countless, irreplaceable years of experience through people leaving or committing suicide. It was also clear to me – and others - then that the world was heading for trouble, with so-called “economic rationalism” evolving into “neoliberalism” and, today, we have the situation where workers are suffering staggering abuses and problems.
In that decade, I saw many people getting browbeaten into the new BusinessThink: had more of those people resisted, perhaps the world would not be in such trouble now. (incidentally, many business computer departments are also plagued by their version of GroupThink, and ineptness when it comes to enabling people to work as those people best do, rather than as the computer department thinks they should.)
Had business people been more emotionally intelligent, and worked with their employees rather than trying to be autocratic, or dictatorial, or a semi-military style leader (let alone those who were psychopaths), they could quite possibly have achieved the change they wanted – and with far less disruption to the market they were trying to sell to, which comprised the workers who are no longer buying because of income insecurity/reductions …
That style of leadership problem is also an inherent problem I’ve seen with some – not all – ex-military people trying to move into the civilian world. There was an article on LinkedIn warning of such problems in the security industry: it was, unfortunately, too long ago for me to track down now, for which I apologise.
To sum up:
people are all individual human beings, not cattle or economic units; treat us with decency, respect and patience, and things will go better for all.
Business leaders need to start thinking of themselves as stewards of the human and other resources of their company …
And finally, “naïve" – aka stupid! – expectations of consumers for ever cheaper goods/more convenient services need to be challenged –the growing destruction of the world may be the way that is done.
We need to slow down, and think. 
 

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Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).

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