Do You Know Peter?

Reading The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study made me regret that "fashions" in business-think mean this valuable insight is much less familiar to today's workforce than it was to my young one.

This analysis--combining ecology, game theory, and computer science--is a way of looking at the Principle that I don't think was possible thirty or forty years ago. Fascinating.

A lot of scattered thoughts--going nowhere in particular with any of them.

Although the article does a good job of summing up the principle in the Abstract, let me add my own definition: "In traditional corporate structure, any highly competent employee will be promoted into failure."

The part that I'm thinking about today--I never quite looked at it like this before--is the underlying corporate perception that someone who is a good worker will be good at any job. That people who are "good" at something are just, you know, naturally good at things.

It's a very Liberal Arts approach, isn't it?

Hard science says that a molecular biologist--even a brilliant one--is not qualified to work as a nuclear physicist. The Liberal Arts say, "you can do anything if you know how to think."

University business studies programs have always been an attempt to take the Liberal Arts "if think-then do" approach and apply it to a specific set of situations--the corporate world.

This has been good for business and for labor in a number of ways, not the least of which has been the ability of workers to shift or outright change job responsibilities from one company to the next. If you were "good" at your last job, you're more likely to be "good" at this one. This approach has also allowed businesses to widen the pool of candidates for each job opening--and the wider the selection, the more likely they were to find the "perfect" candidate.

In a world where work is becoming increasingly specialized--but where the labor force is becoming increasingly unwilling to be pigeon-holed and filed into categories--how is this going to shake out?

It may become irrelevant--traditional corporate structures could be dying out.

The entrepreneurial push--the drive for all of us, no matter how unfit*, to "be my own boss" is part of the trend. The fact that many of today's most successful corporations are taking a nontraditional approach to hiring and retaining their labor force is another--flexible hours, remote workplaces, independent projects, etc., are virtually eliminating the traditional career ladder.

Of course, the previous generation (mine and the one before me) are still active and many of these people are the ones running today's companies and corporations. They still have OldThink mindsets, so this Principle is still an active factor in today's business world.

(I know this for a fact because I'm desperately fighting against being promoted out of my own area of competence at the moment.

The company (management consisting largely of Old White Guys) wants me to step up their ladder. I'm not interested in their ladder, or that step. I've been there and it was boring and I was bad at it and I have no interest in seeing the view from that ledge again.)

(Thus, we see that the Peter Principle is not, as the article says, unavoidable. If people refuse to be promoted into failure, then it's avoidable.)

(Sadly, not everyone is as aware of their limitations as I am of mine--but I was less aware of mine twenty or thirty years ago, so maybe I'm being unreasonable.)

I wonder if the next generation will be able to break out of this corporate mold when they're the ones at the top? Are they drinking the kool-aid or are they just biding their time, waiting their turn?

Will we someday see IBM with badminton courts in the middle of the corporate office courtyard and employees working to the job--not the clock--and half their staff logging into today's video-meeting from a park, a coffee shop, or a home office 500 miles away?

Will it be the next generation--or the one after that, or the one after that?

Like I said. Random thoughts. Leading nowhere in particular.

_________________________

* Because I'm cynical and disillusioned, it's my personal guess that 10% or less of the workplace is fit to be their own boss.

Anyone, for instance, who imagines sleeping late every morning, working when their favorite soap opera isn't on or it's too rainy to go golfing, "firing" clients they don't like, and having a lot of free time? Is too clueless to go it alone.

Anyone who, when the boss is out of the office, takes that opportunity to spend three hours chatting with co-workers and anyone who sneaks in four hours of social media updates, personal email and texting, during the average workday--they should not go it alone.

If you don't work when no one is watching you? You'll never make it on your own.

Anyhow. The "American Dream" used to be for people to own a house. Now it's to own their own business. Why can't we dream of world peace, an end to hunger, curing disease, something like that? Sheesh.

Long, Little Privacy Rant

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google + - they've all gotten kicked in the teeth recently over the same thing.

Privacy.

Just this week, we found out that LinkedIn had sneaked in permission for themselves to take information from our profiles and use it for their advertising. Many users are leaving in disgust--others are simply fighting their way through the system to the place where they can block the practice.

At the same time, Facebook is getting their tenth (or is it twentieth?) kick in the teeth--this time it's over the issue of harvesting and displaying people's phone numbers.

Notable in the vast majority of the wars over personal privacy in the last year or so is one, simple concept--opt out vs opt in.

Every time a new privacy-violating element is added to these services the companies opt everyone in and it's only thanks to the handful of people who monitor their account settings daily that most of us find out that we need to go and opt out.

I get that websites services are desperate to turn "social media" into a cash cow. There's been so much press and so much hype about how fabulous social media is--how when Brad Putz buys a new vacuum cleaner it will inspire all his friends and relations to rush out and buy the same make and model--that these companies are all starting to believe.

What they don't seem to get is that we refuse to be milked without consent.

Whatever creative way you think your engineers have come up with to monetize your system is fine. Give me the option to opt in to it. Maybe I will and maybe I won't--you have a 50/50 chance.

I promise you, though, that if you opt me in without asking, I will opt out 100% of the time.

Privacy is not, as some seem to think, "just so 20th century."

I'm sure Zuckerberg and others wish it were, but it's not.

Like some politicians, these people make the mistake of thinking that if they wish a thing hard enough, it will become reality, but the ruby slippers only worked in Oz and this is so not Oz.

Privacy is a serious concern for a huge number of people and it becomes a bigger issue every time one of these cases hits the headlines.

*TANSTAAFL, people.*

Now, let me speak to the vast body of users of these "social media" websites.

Nothing's free.

Y'all are sucking down a lot of internet bandwidth. Are you paying your share?

Someone has to pay bills for every website you visit. If you spend a lot of time and use a lot of resources on some site regularly, you should be paying. Information and entertainment cost money--even street performers drop a hat in front of you and ask you to toss something into it. If you're reading the articles or playing games or uploading and watching videos, etc., then you're getting a lot of information and entertainment and you should be willing to pay.

If Facebook is your first stop every day, without fail, you should be willing to pay something for the use you make of the site. If the hundreds of thousands of you sitting in Facebook for ten hours a day were willing to pay a reasonable fee for access to the website & services, maybe the company wouldn't be so desperate to pay the bills that it resorts to what I would characterize as underhanded tricks to harvest private data for ad serving.

If you send and receive 500 Tweets a day, you should be willing to pay for the service. (Also? Shut up already. No one is that interesting.)

Ditto for LinkedIn. A one-off professional listing is one thing but those of you setting up massive numbers of groups, linking to the first 5,000 people you can find, sending out dozens of messages a day, blogging, linking, and loading images, networking across half the user base--how many of you are using the paid version of the program and how many of you are riding for free?

TANSTAAFL - There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

Someone's gotta pay the cook. If you don't do it willingly, then you shouldn't be surprised when you find out that he slapped an ad on your back when you weren't paying attention. The cost of your lunch has to be covered, one way or another.

*Privacy*

People in Spain are going to court for the "Right To Be Forgotten" -- to get references to themselves removed from public search databases.

It's a bit of a different issue but maybe not. It's all around how internet information is gathered, indexed, and shared.

The recent trend toward harvesting more personal data about individual people is being driven by both social uses and for advertising to Brad Putz & like-minded friends.

Clearly some people--and some countries--object.

The push toward "real names" online is the same thing. (I believe LinkedIn pioneered that one since it made sense in their venue, although naturally Facebook was right in there.)

We're all to have one name so that all we do online is connected to that one name so that our demographic and advertising profile can be as complete as possible.

Bah.

You know what? I don't really think that a blog post I made when I was nineteen, wherein I admitted to having crazy, drunken sex in a public place, _really_ needs to be connected to my professional business profile ten years later. Nor do I feel that it needs to come up in the SERPS when my daughter idly searches on my name one day just to see what the world says about me.

I don't really think my participation in a serious U2U forum talking about quantum physics really needs to be connected to my silly posts in another forum where I was giggling over some celebrity gossip.

None of those three personas need to be linked to my professional accounts online. None of this is particularly appropriate or necessary data to have linked together

I'm sure both corporations and the government would like us all to live our lives with our full names, our annual incomes, our age brackets, our genders, and our social security numbers tattooed across everything we do but it's not gonna happen.

My right to create a "real name " persona that doesn't intersect with my persona of PutzLuvRH8R and neither of which intersect with my persona of BadMom does no harm.

Contrary to what some people have said, anonymity does not breed contempt and we would not all be more civil if we used "real" names.

Rude people are going to be rude. They'd be rude under any name--real or assumed.

Names do not breed civility. Civilization does.

Society forms social interactions and boundaries.

If you think everyone posting online under an pseudonym is rude, maybe you're just hanging out in really rude spaces?

I hang out in a lot of places all over the internet, and civility is the norm in all those spaces. The names we all post under are our "real" names and the social norms of each space inform and define our behavior.