Issues With Big Companies

As I delved into the idea of blame, failure, and incompetence found at work in the last blog post, I started thinking about how these things really start adding up in large companies. It made me realise that it's vital to employ intelligent, self-aware employees. Self-aware, because incompetence in itself isn't a killer: but the lack of self-awareness to see that we're incompetent in a certain area is.

Finding a root cause for problems is hard enough when it's just mechanical: when we're trying to find out which piece of equipment is failing. Finding out if a person is incompetent is one step more complex. They may be in charge of a process or piece of equipment, so the equipment might be hard to control or the person might not have good understanding of the kit. We have to take into account the equipment and the person, now, not just the equipment. After that, they may be interacting with others, and the interdependence between others starts creating problems where blame can be shared. It starts becoming pretty hard to find the cause of why something is going wrong, and it'll be hard to test the process to see that the point of failure is someone's incompetence.

In this way, the more employees we hire, the more chance there is of any one of them being bad at their job and taking down the whole company. It only takes a few incompetent, un-self-aware people who are let off the leash to ruin a company. They start tinkering in areas they think they have minimal knowledge in, and all of a sudden, the car has no brakes. In this way, hierarchy becomes important. If the employee can't take responsibility in assessing whether he's competent at his own job or not, a manager is vital to keep their employees in check. But this isn't ideal: it means that a lot of time is spent by the manager just assessing a subordinate's work to see if it's good enough or not.

The solution, in my mind, is self-awareness. After that, you can de-localise the manager to a greater extent. Each part conducts their job self-sufficiently, and each person says when they know they're out of their depth. From there, more help can be given accordingly, and then the manager has a larger bandwidth to work on other things. Because ultimately, a manger will never be able to fully keep up with everything each employee does anyway, so if a subordinate is good at being incompetent, it's only a matter of time until problems arise.