Technology

CEO: I need the highest possible performance otherwise the board will fire me.

Board: We need the highest return otherwise we’re not willing to support the CEO.

Fund managers: We need to only invest in the most profitable ventures, otherwise people will move their money out of the fund I’m managing.

Pension companies: We need to only put our money in the most high performing funds.

You: I need the best return on my pension so I can retire as soon as possible.

If you’ve ever moved saved money to an account offering higher interest or performance, you’re part of this. I’m not saying that to blame, but people often don’t connect their own behaviour with the behaviour of the market.

Yup. Not all value is easily and directly measurable. Trying to overmanage and only value measurable factors is incredibly counterproductive. But hey, that makes the stock price go up. So who cares about anything else.

This means after 5 to 10 years of this cycle all that's left of the company's institutional knowledge is how to deliver for KPIs and the sycophants who best adapt to this reality. You get a hollowing out of the company.

That happened (and continues to happen) to my former employer.

After years of layoffs and outsourcing, the company doesn't have anyone on staff anymore who knows how half of the systems work.

Theae days, if something is more than 5 years old, the operations and maintenance staff (entirely outsourced contractors now) have to pray the documentation is correct (or even obtainable) if they have a hope of fixing it if anything breaks.

The justification they give for the figure is that it's the lowest performing 10%

But that would be turnover rate, not cuts.

I remember the grocery store I worked at started posting the rate for each cashier of items scanned per minute logged into a register. They didn’t say anything about it, but I now realize they were probably leading into using that data as justification for something.

My dumbass 16 year old self thought “I’m going to get that number so high it breaks the system.” I would lock my station after the previous customer, and take a little time to face all of the UPC codes and look up produce codes and make a general strategy. Then, I would unlock the register, scan like a madman, then lock it and casually start bagging. The customers would get concerned they needed to hurry up based on my fervor, so I would tell them “Take all the time you need, see that show yesterday?”

Next time they posted the rankings, my number was 20x as high as second place. After a few weeks of getting my number a little higher each time, my boss’ boss came by and told me to knock it off since I was polluting their metrics. Next week no new rankings.

I like to think I inadvertently helped prevent KPI nonsense.

I think we are already seeing that with Microsoft. Another 2-3 rounds of AI and they forget how to build windows.

It also fosters a culture of non-cooperation with colleagues (because they are now your competition), where workers and teams try to sabotage each other, or at least not help, and throw each other under the bus. So there's mutual mistrust too. And no one wants to take a risk and innovate, leading to further stagnation.

The justification they give for the figure is that it’s the lowest performing 10% according to internal key performance indicator (KPI) metrics

The thing is, that's not what layoffs are supposed to be. That's effectively firing someone for cause. Maybe in America the difference doesn't matter, but in the civilised world, at least in theory, it does. But in reality they can somehow get away with this and call it "layoffs".

If a company does layoffs, they should not be allowed to hire any staff in the same or similar roles for 12 months.

Yes that always irks me. We can have 15 “markers of a recession”, but as long as nobody says it’s name, it can’t be true. The media has the Voldemort approach to economics.