Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists | The Evolution Institute
Locked
12
12
Re: Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists | The Evolution Institute
 
|
Teams can give individuals more power, but they can discourage work that is novel. Often dense or clever things are seen as irrelevant because the context of applicability is not obvious. Sure I can have more power, but I'm not learning anything more about the world or really getting any better -- the exercise of that power is confined to an arena that is closed and not significantly mutable nor redefinable by me. And sure, skills are honed, but at the end of the day it is still selling out. Meanwhile, there may be great insights to be made on the camel journey to Astana even though there is no general social reason to do it. Defining everything in terms of its social value draws many if not most people into similar kinds of thinking and valuing similar kinds of work. The units of cost implied by the term `productivity' are even defined socially, esp. the cost of labor. And come on, your neighbors have expectations of you, and not all of those expectations are reasonable or fair. For a long time I've had the hypothesis kind of along the lines of what Steve said. The first purpose of teaching people how to cope with compliance is survival, the second is to create enough rage to do something different.
-----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen ? Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2016 2:44 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists | The Evolution Institute OK. But by making that argument, you've ceded the necessary assumption within your original argument. At this point, we're agreeing on the gist and disagreeing on minor embellishments. Teams, in the overwhelming majority of cases, increase the individual agency/power of the team members. As Steve said, the article didn't really teach us anything new. But one wonders at the persistent false attribution of success and failure to individuals alone, or further, the false dichotomy between the collective and the individual. On 10/27/2016 12:40 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > All roads leading to Rome does not imply sufficiency of transportation in general. At some point someone might propose, "I'd like to visit my family in Astana and would like a road so that I don’t have to take a camel from Casablanca", and then they'd look at the map and see that Pisa lacked a road to Rome. Pisa being closer to Rome, that road gets built instead. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
|
You seem to be saying that, if an individual is a member of a team, they a) cannot do _anything_ outside the context of that team and b) they can't belong to any other teams. That's a very strange set of conditions to imply. Just because you're an employee of the NSA does not mean you can't use your math skills to design a better horse trailer (assuming the NSA doesn't design horse trailers ...). Granted, lots of employers include noncompete clauses in their employment contracts. But they're usually limited to a domain and time and space ranges. So, an individual still has most of their repertoire available to them outside any 1 team to which they belong. I can see a situation where, if you simultaneously join too many teams with noncompete contracts, then your ability to act as an individual will shrink. But my guess is the extent to which any particular team can claim exclusive right to a particular skill/trait of its members is very limited. And I also guess that individuals only have a limited number of teams they can possibly commit to. On 10/27/2016 02:11 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > Sure I can have more power, but I'm not learning anything more about the world or really getting any better -- the exercise of that power is confined to an arena that is closed and not significantly mutable nor redefinable by me. And sure, skills are honed, but at the end of the day it is still selling out. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
|
Re: Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists | The Evolution Institute
|
|
"You seem to be saying that, if an individual is a member of a team, they a) cannot do _anything_ outside the context of that team and b) they can't belong to any other teams. That's a very strange set of conditions to imply. Just because you're an employee of the NSA does not mean you can't use your math skills to design a better horse trailer (assuming the NSA doesn't design horse trailers ...)."
A professional avoids doing things outside of the stated goals of a team because their consulting rates or salary is in part a function of their productivity, and further belonging to other teams makes risks making them less potent on their primary efforts. Some teams tolerate outside interests, e.g. at one point Google let people work ~10% on their own projects), but the other ~90% ends-up being team goals. Bottom line is that multitasking is less efficient than batch processing. Of course, what one does is find teams that best match for one's interests. Teams that lack focus tend to run out of money and disappear. So better to participate in several smaller, efficient and well-matched teams rather one big team that spends money in a careless fashion or has team members that are non-committal or insufficiently skilled.
Marcus From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of glen ☣ <[hidden email]>
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2016 3:32:50 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists | The Evolution Institute You seem to be saying that, if an individual is a member of a team, they a) cannot do _anything_ outside the context of that team and b) they can't belong to any other teams. That's a very strange set of conditions to imply. Just because you're an employee of the NSA does not mean you can't use your math skills to design a better horse trailer (assuming the NSA doesn't design horse trailers ...). Granted, lots of employers include noncompete clauses in their employment contracts. But they're usually limited to a domain and time and space ranges. So, an individual still has most of their repertoire available to them outside any 1 team to which they belong. I can see a situation where, if you simultaneously join too many teams with noncompete contracts, then your ability to act as an individual will shrink. But my guess is the extent to which any particular team can claim exclusive right to a particular skill/trait of its members is very limited. And I also guess that individuals only have a limited number of teams they can possibly commit to. On 10/27/2016 02:11 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > Sure I can have more power, but I'm not learning anything more about the world or really getting any better -- the exercise of that power is confined to an arena that is closed and not significantly mutable nor redefinable by me. And sure, skills are honed, but at the end of the day it is still selling out. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
|
|
On 10/27/2016 04:06 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> A professional avoids doing things outside of the stated goals of a team because their consulting rates or salary is in part a function of their productivity, and further belonging to other teams makes risks making them less potent on their primary efforts. Some teams tolerate outside interests, e.g. at one point Google let people work ~10% on their own projects), but the other ~90% ends-up being team goals. I don't understand what you're saying, here. Are you saying that professionals don't, say, bake cookies for the PTA or their kid's baseball team? Obviously you're not saying that. So, professionals _do_ (on a constant basis) things outside the stated goals of any one of their teams. Your employer may even _pay_ you to, say, take night courses in something not directly related to your job (e.g. taking a philosophy class as part of a B.S. curriculum). To boot, when working inside an organization, people are often called on to play multiple roles on multiple teams (e.g. a machinist who also contributes to a committee on quality control). So, what you say above is clearly false. Unless you're talking about something very specific, like conflicts of interest (working for both Intel and AMD doing the same type of work). It would be nice if you could tightly specify what types of teams you're talking about. > Bottom line is that multitasking is less efficient than batch processing. Of course, what one does is find teams that best match for one's interests. Teams that lack focus tend to run out of money and disappear. Again, that's a weird (perhaps merely incomplete) statement. It seems clear from phenomena like burnout, that pure single tasking may provide high RoI for a very short time. But over the long haul, multitasking is critical to good health for a complex individual. (Even robots have to sporadically exercise their rarely used parts, lest they rust and seize.) > So better to participate in several smaller, efficient and well-matched teams rather one big team that spends money in a careless fashion or has team members that are non-committal or insufficiently skilled. Well, my guess is that effective and efficient team size and composition depends fundamentally on the objectives adopted. Very small teams can only accomplish very small tasks. It always requires a large team to accomplish a large task. Of course, teams can be nested, perhaps changing your assertion into something about power laws. Anyway, one can be a member of teams within teams. And when that obtains, there must be at least some individuals who split their time (laterally or between levels), which again argues for multiple memberships. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
|
Re: Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists | The Evolution Institute
|
|
"I don't understand what you're saying, here. Are you saying that professionals don't, say, bake cookies for the PTA or their kid's baseball team? Obviously you're not saying that." I am talking about the major compromises people make to make it up the corporate ladder or beat out their competitors. Ok, they may bake cookies, but the kids aren't coming to work, they're going to day care. Meanwhile, in case you hadn't noticed the middle class is disappearing. People are falling down or they are moving up. When I say "Professionals do XXX", I mean "It is in the best interest of professionals who want to remain professionals to do XXX", especially when the work could soon be automated. Of course, they may do all sorts of things in practice. The world you are talking about is not going to be sustainable for long. Marcus -- Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. -- Gustave Flaubert ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
|
|
OK. I agree pretty much with what you say below. But that's more of a statement about the application of resources, not the efficacy of teams. Humans, being complex machines with diverse phenotypes are best applied to multifarious problems. As automation takes over tasks, the displaced humans should be reapplied. That's not happening as fast as we'd like. But it doesn't imply that teams are less effective than individuals or that teams are mostly a tool to undermine individuals.
On October 27, 2016 5:32:18 PM PDT, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
-- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
|
Re: Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists | The Evolution Institute
|
|
For hard problems that take a lot of working memory and a big knowledge base I think teams are hard to scale. Rather than making long-term commitments to a
few people that can tackle the hard problems over time, organizations tend to favor easier to decompose problems than can fan out to more interchangeable staff. But this isn’t a problem solving tactic, it’s a problem selection tactic. In politico-speak,
it is a pivot. Normalizing the occult mental representations of experts is a slow process. From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]]
On Behalf Of glen ep ropella OK. I agree pretty much with what you say below. But that's more of a statement about the application of resources, not the efficacy of teams. Humans, being complex machines with diverse phenotypes are best
applied to multifarious problems. As automation takes over tasks, the displaced humans should be reapplied. That's not happening as fast as we'd like. But it doesn't imply that teams are less effective than individuals or that teams are mostly a tool to undermine
individuals. On October 27, 2016 5:32:18 PM PDT, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists | The Evolution Institute
|
|
In reply to this post by gepr
Everybody,
One point of clarification. Altruistic (i.e. group fitness-enhancing behavior that diminishes the actor's fitness) does not have to be "nice" behavior. One of my favorite candidates for altruistic behavior in humans is road rage. A road rager risks his own safety to enforce a norm of driving behavior on somebody who has violated that norm. It doesn't feel like altruism when one is doing it, but it is. Of course there are other potential explanations of this sort of behavior ... reputation enhancement, etc. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of ?glen? Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2016 8:59 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists | The Evolution Institute But you're assuming that being a member of a team, prevents you from operating as an independent agent. That's just not true. Team membership doesn't redesign the individual from the genes up. It simply changes the context in which the individual behaves. And most team contexts are not as zero-sum constraining as you assume. In fact, most team contexts are enabling, not restrictive. For example, because my team has done things like pave 1000 mile long roads, built airplanes, deliver mail, etc, my individually driven agency is way more powerful than it would have otherwise been. Or, to go back to the article, a forward can be, individually, a much better overall soccer player _because_ of the full backs, not in spite of them. On 10/27/2016 07:46 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > And there are even more occult paths to success without the team, if a larger solution space is considered to be better, and the same set of people follow their noses as independent agents. Looking around in a solution space isn't free. Each experiment takes some time and energy. -- ␦glen? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
|
|
My favorite example of this is the curmudgeonly tech lead in any significant organization. Such a tech lead ends up splattering all the young'uns with spittle as she rails against all manner of neophyte mistakes and useless new acronyms (that don't do anything new except rename things she's been doing her entire career). Maybe call it code rage. All the while, the curmudgeon drives her career further and further into the ditch as the young'uns move on to new gigs within competitors and sibling organizations, to which the curmudgeon will soon be applying for a job because the apparent value of her produce drops below the apparent value of her salary, despite the vital role she plays on the team.
(I scoured my experience and did, actually, remember a female that fit the pattern ... only one, mind you, but extant. So, I don't feel entirely disingenuous using "she" and "her" above. But my guess, based on stereotypes, is that most use cases will see a male -- perhaps with a spittle-flecked gray[ing] beard -- in the role.) On 10/31/2016 12:43 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > One point of clarification. Altruistic (i.e. group fitness-enhancing behavior that diminishes the actor's fitness) does not have to be "nice" behavior. One of my favorite candidates for altruistic behavior in humans is road rage. A road rager risks his own safety to enforce a norm of driving behavior on somebody who has violated that norm. It doesn't feel like altruism when one is doing it, but it is. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
|
Re: Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists | The Evolution Institute
|
|
Glen -
> (I scoured my experience and did, actually, remember a female that fit > the pattern ... only one, mind you, but extant. So, I don't feel > entirely disingenuous using "she" and "her" above. But my guess, > based on stereotypes, is that most use cases will see a male -- > perhaps with a spittle-flecked gray[ing] beard -- in the role.) but I don't know you to sport a beard? The rest is something I can feature though! I miss your ur-signature: " get off my lawn <fistshake>! " This whole line of observation seems somewhat like a simple point-example of the broader idea that nothing (and no-one) exists in isolation, everything is part of a larger ecology, and every role, no matter how absurd nor humble contributes to the milieu. I suspect even the lowly dung-beetle imagines him(her)self to be a (ig?)noble apex predator! - Steve PS. I DO have a gray beard and it is more often flecked with my lunch than spittle, but I do recognize the image you paint in the mirror... now "get off my lawn!" ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists | The Evolution Institute
|
|
In reply to this post by gepr
It casts doubt on the value of the expertise if the words change every few years but the meaning remains the same. Better to have some enthusiastic puppies that find it all new every so often? Or better yet, just solve the problem once and for all and move on.
-----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen ? Sent: Monday, October 31, 2016 3:31 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists | The Evolution Institute My favorite example of this is the curmudgeonly tech lead in any significant organization. Such a tech lead ends up splattering all the young'uns with spittle as she rails against all manner of neophyte mistakes and useless new acronyms (that don't do anything new except rename things she's been doing her entire career). Maybe call it code rage. All the while, the curmudgeon drives her career further and further into the ditch as the young'uns move on to new gigs within competitors and sibling organizations, to which the curmudgeon will soon be applying for a job because the apparent value of her produce drops below the apparent value of her salary, despite the vital role she plays on the team. (I scoured my experience and did, actually, remember a female that fit the pattern ... only one, mind you, but extant. So, I don't feel entirely disingenuous using "she" and "her" above. But my guess, based on stereotypes, is that most use cases will see a male -- perhaps with a spittle-flecked gray[ing] beard -- in the role.) On 10/31/2016 12:43 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > One point of clarification. Altruistic (i.e. group fitness-enhancing behavior that diminishes the actor's fitness) does not have to be "nice" behavior. One of my favorite candidates for altruistic behavior in humans is road rage. A road rager risks his own safety to enforce a norm of driving behavior on somebody who has violated that norm. It doesn't feel like altruism when one is doing it, but it is. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
|
|
In reply to this post by Steve Smith
Heh, I don't fit the pattern very well. I am known to be grumpy. But my agnosticism is much too broad for me to engage in code rage. I sometimes cut-n-paste. I sometimes put the curly brace on the same line or the line after. I sometimes use library widgets and sometimes roll my own. Patterns are phantastmagoric pareidolia. I'm incapable of playing code cop ... not because I don't care, but because it's all about context to me ... whatever gets you through to a _working_ pile of @#%!$ is fine by me. I think this is because I was reared as a simulant. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what's _inside_. What goes in or out is all that matters ... maybe I'm a behaviorist ... the holographic principle gone awry. But I will defend those spittle spewing morlocks to the death, perhaps because of my inability to play their role. On 10/31/2016 02:40 PM, Steven A Smith wrote: > but I don't know you to sport a beard? The rest is something I can feature though! > > I miss your ur-signature: " get off my lawn <fistshake>! " > > This whole line of observation seems somewhat like a simple point-example of the broader idea that nothing (and no-one) exists in isolation, everything is part of a larger ecology, and every role, no matter how absurd nor humble contributes to the milieu. > > I suspect even the lowly dung-beetle imagines him(her)self to be a (ig?)noble apex predator! > > - Steve > PS. I DO have a gray beard and it is more often flecked with my lunch than spittle, but I do recognize the image you paint in the mirror... now "get off my lawn!" -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
|
«
Return to Friam
|
1 view|%1 views
| Free forum by Nabble | Edit this page |