The Resistance Movement that Matters - Resist Tribalism

Posted by mshupe 6 years, 5 months ago to Culture
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Trial and error, reason applied to reality, families and households participating in markets, each participant with their own values and goals.

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  • Posted by mshupe 6 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Yes, I thought that was a powerful endorsement, and perhaps add that this greatest discovery is related to the invention of money.
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  • Posted by mshupe 6 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Very good observations, and scaled up businesses are a great human achievement. The problem is one of skin in the game. The more vertical the hierarchy, the less accountability there is for decisions of upper management. I was recently downsized by a large bank. My ideas for serving clients, creating efficiencies, and differentiating our brand were totally ignored because they weren't the ideas of the senior leaders. And they were spending gobs of money strategizing and publishing, none of which was creating value. Of course there's eventually a price to be paid for that. But in the mean time I was expected to input data on new business opportunities and successes to the point of being granular and none of it was considered when the personnel decision was made. I agree that for joining a large organization can be a great thing. But it tends to become a safe haven for the senior team, and to keep their cash flow, they bow down to the PC culture and force employees to submit to tribal tests of diversity and multiculturalism.
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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 6 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "Large hierarchies [..] are selling unity."
    Selling labor to a business is having a job. (It's an often under-rated arrangement b/c the person selling the labor takes no risk.)
    If you do the work for yourself, you own your job.
    If you hire a great team, you own a practice.

    To expand from there, to help more customers, you need to systematize it or develop something that can be sold to a systematized organization. This means having a mission statement, org chart, job description, processes/procedures, and other things that I used to think were just meaningless red tape before I tried to build a business. Now I completely understand the need for those things. My great team and I are not scalable, or "saleable". The team needs to be a structure into which you can add capital + team members acting with autonomy but within the framework of that structure. It's the Good to Great thing: Get the right people on bus and let them go.

    I struggled mightily with this, and I could not scale it up, which is why I have a job working for someone who could.

    I don't think there anything nefarious about this unity. They need a system, not just a great manager, that kicks the wrong people off the bus, for everyone's benefit.

    "members of tribes"
    I'm a fan of Seth Godin's Tribe. None of this is a creepy passive-voice "being conditioned" or being sold on unity. It's just the way to go from a sandwich shop to Subway.

    All of this is great for business,it's a nightmare to build a society this way. You can't kick people off the bus. As the article says, society needs not to be a system, just a minimal framework for people to interact in mutual trades.

    As the Oingo Boingo son says, you need a lobotomy to want to live in a society that's a system: https://youtu.be/HLKfKhGyRKs
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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 6 years, 5 months ago
    "That people can live together in peace and to their mutual advantage without having to agree on common goals was the greatest discovery mankind ever made. Capitalism is its economic expression."
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  • Posted by mshupe 6 years, 5 months ago
    Large hierarchies such as corporations and governments are selling unity. We are being conditioned to be members of tribes with a common purpose.
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