Business

The Emptiness of Business Idiots

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Sorry for the lack of posts. My fiancee got COVID and I took care of her while she isolated, while work was busy, the holiday was happening, etc. So I sort of wasn’t thinking of my columns for awhile. But now I’m back, and it won’t surprise you that I want to discuss my latest mental chew toy, Ed Zitron’s idea of Business Idiots – people who live in the world of vibes, leading while disconnected, having deliberately sought out their disconnected state of power.

Now a strange thing about Business Idiots is that they really do seek a state that is purely performative. If you’ve ever listed to a podcast with some overpromoted idiot with a business degree or a TED talk that is making the audience cringe you know. There are people who have worked their way up the ladder because their only skill is working their way up the ladder.

Ever see a politician good at winning elections and not much else? Wait, don’t answer that, we all have, and we probably voted for one at least once. That’s a Business Idiot.

The thing is these Business Idiots are posing as something they aren’t. Visionaries, geniuses, great leaders. The thing we don’t want to admit – and they don’t want to admit – is that all they are good at is working their way in the system. If there was no “system” they might not be in power, but their sole skill is twiddling the knobs of our culture.

Kind of like people who treat talking to AI as a skillset. Hmmm.

I find it’s hard to actually see this because the business press and hell, the press in general, loves to laud some vapid moron they have access to. They need that access! So they’ll parrot whatever is said to get clicks and sell issues, and the vapid idiot just gets more powerful. However, I recently found a way that helps me understand Business Idiots.

Social Media. Wait, trust me on this, it’s not “old man yells at cloud time.” It may be old man yells at CROWDSTRIKE now and then, but trust me.

I was recently contemplating the utter vapidity of some modern social media stars, which is easy as we have a lot of examples. They’re good at promotion, they’re good at algorithms, they optimize their thumbnail images. They are in short good at marketing, because a lot of social media being about clicks and selling ads, is primarily a marketing machine.

I’m sure you know some teeth-grinding examples. You know the Social Media figures you hate (as opposed to the ones you love that are virtuous and good).

This Social Media manipulation is a skillset. It can get you rich and famous because you’re tweaking a giant social-technical-financial machine. You didn’t build the machine, you don’t work on the machine, but as a user you spend a lot of time figuring out how to work it. So you can reach great heights – and be insulated from reality, and thus a form of Business Idiot.

The thing is on your way up you don’t necessarily get good at anything else. You’re a salesperson and an attention-getter and that’s pretty much it. You may be famous and powerful because our systems love centralization, but you’re not really anyone but the same person podcasting or videocasting about their latest purchase.

Now when I look at these media stars and work backwards it’s a lot easier to see how our social, media, and financial systems can be taken advantage of. You don’t need any skills but hacking a complex system people are used to and that they probably didn’t put a lot of thought in. You don’t have to be anything but a knob-twiddler if you know the right knobs.

And that’s where we get Business Idiots. Worse, people who are quite competent get taught to twiddle the socio-economic knobs, become Business Idiots, and lose whatever they were.

And you know? You can’t run a complex society that way. As, I fear, we are finding out.

Steven Savage

The Rapture for the Disconnected

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

As all my regular readers know, I get obsessed with things, which finds its way into my blog posts. I’d like to share my latest obsession, Ed Zitron’s comments about how terrible leaders in the business world are what he calls Business Idiots.

The Business Idiot is going to sound familiar to a lot of people – and you, my regular readers, are almost certain to have met these people. People who are completely outside of (and unfamiliar with) actual productive work, focused on things like “growth” and “market share” but not doing things, and absolutely out of touch with reality. They may be lauded by the business press for their genius, but what we don’t have any proof they actually know how to do anything. They probably have business majors and have never not been in some kind of management.

They don’t actually do anything, but want to enter the world of vibes and powerpoints and that’s it. They move things around and get press, money, and venture capital. Any actual useful product, anything for community, is at best a side effect.

Business Idiots, worse, are aspirational for people. Their goal is to get away from people doing actual work as soon as possible so you can enter the airy world of management. It’s like some kind of Rapture for the Disconnected.

You’re probably nodding, if only in your head. You’ve dealt with people like this. You might even be trapped in a Business Idiot job and hate it. We’ve all been there.

I got Zitron’s post and am going to be chewing this one over for awhile – and for several blog posts doubtlessly. Beyond bringing it to your attention, I wanted to note the importance of being good at something. That’s a good reminder of why these Business Idiots are dangerous – the contrast.

I work in IT, in medicine and academia, as a Project Manager. Now the best Project Managers are people who’ve done something else before being a Project Manager. You were good at something and you can in turn apply that to managing things. I used to code, still mess around a bit and do websites, as well as my art under a pen name and other project. I get doing something and still do, and thus I can be old and crotchety and complain about web frameworks.

I also work with a variety of doctors, nurses, researchers, and so on who moved into management, leadership, and so forth. Some of them still practice their previous profession, but all of them knew how to do something and the results it had for other people. As I put it to a friend, when you work with someone who has reached into a human torso or handled deadly chemicals, you pay attention to them.

That old joke about people getting overpromoted to management ignores the problem of management that never knew how to do anything. I’ll take the people who have done surgery, written code, or had to ask the safest way to handle acid, thanks. They get results and they get who they work for and what their co-workers are like.

And yes, I’ve dealt with people promoted over the heads. But upon reflection I’d rather deal with the formerly competent who may be so again, who get how things run, than those that never did. It’s also a reminder to value real leaders.

The Business Idiot reminds me of distant royalty – inbred, pampered, only knowing how to lead their lives moving people around like chess pieces. We have, unsurprisingly, re-created royalty, and as royalty does, it’s pretty inbred – only this time it’s mental. Well, for now.

It’s also not just Business. But that’s for later discussions.

I think Zitron’s definition is something that needs to get out there, become part of the lingo. Business Idiots. We have name for the people running huge companies and more that make horrible decisions to the applause of a sycophantic press. Because naming it is the start of addressing it – and if you look at the state of economics and government, we’ve got issues.

Now prepare for more posts on this subject over the next few months. You’ve been warned.

Steven Savage

Yellow Sticky Notes And Operating Costs

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Once, many years ago (I think in the 2010s?) I interviewed at a video editing software company to be a Project Manager. When I asked what tools they used to track work, they pointed at a glass divider covered in sticky notes. That was it, that’s how they wrote video editing software which, as you may guess, is not exactly a simple process.

If you’re familiar with Agile methods, it may not seem entirely unusual. If you’re not familiar, then I’ll summarize all-too-simply: Agile is about breaking work into small, easy, tested chunks as you go through a larger list of work. It’s basically quick, evaluated development of software in order of importance.

So sticky notes were, in theory, all you needed for Agile, especially if the Product Owner (person with The Big List Of Stuff To Do) had their act together. I’m going to assume this company had one that did since, hey, sticky notes.

This experience stuck with me. Now, some 15+ years later, having used many project management tools, having seem many technical innovations, being friends with people in tech for decades, a lot of us seem to want the sticky notes back.

We’re beset by enormous choices of tools and the tools have choices. You can buy this software package or that and integrate them. All of them have their own workflow which you have to learn, but you can also customize your workflow so you can confuse yourself your own way. Plus you have to work with everyone else’s tools together in some half-baked integration.

But when all of that doesn’t work, does the tool fix it? Nope you get to! So soon you’re downloading a spreadsheet from one tool, to load into another tool, then you have to correct the issues. That’s if you can think like the people that designed the tools or the workflow, and those people weren’t you.

Past a certain point all our new helpful tools require so much learning and reconciliation, we might want to use sticky notes. And yes, I have met people who still use sticky notes in otherwise high-tech organizations.

I’ve begun to wonder if we’ve entered an era where we’re so awash in tools that the price of learning them, customizing them, and integrating them outweighs their value. This is amplified by the latest updates and changes from vendors, companies being bought out, or regulation and policy changes. There’s a lot of change and adaption that we have to put time into so we theoretically become efficient in the time left.

And that’s before there’s a software outage somewhere in the Rube Goldberg world of ours that brings it all to a halt. I’m looking at you, Crowdstrike, I still have trauma as I write this.

I’m finding a great test of good software is to ask how it would work if it wasn’t software. What if was, I don’t know – done by yellow sticky notes? What if the software wasn’t software but a human recorded, human run physical process. Would it still make sense?

This is something I noticed working with certain medical and research software. Some of it may have old-school looks, or be specialized, but it works (and has to or people get hurt). I once took a training course on medical software and it was both insanely complex because of medical processes, but in review everything I learned made perfect sense and I could see how it’d be done on yellow sticky notes. Even I, some IT nerd who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a patient could figure out how this all came together – and had decades before the software existed.

Sometimes it’s worth asking “what if we did this old school” to see what the software should do and how much cost there would be in changing everything or making it incoherent.

And, hey, maybe you’ll just go back to the sticky notes. Maybe you should.

Steven Savage