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Lumifer comments on Military Rationalities and Irrationalities - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (58)
Generalizing a particular experience to the entire world is perilous :-) Yours sounds particularly bad.
Management is a necessary skill, a lot of smart people do management, some of them are willing to train others.
True, but that wasn't what I was doing. And if you can describe an empirically detectable difference, I WOULD appreciate it.
However, the specific adage "if someone is irreplaceable, fire them immediately" was repeated to me many, many times, by many different consultants and managers, even before I started that training.
(The original argument for it was apparently different - "anyone who is irreplaceable must spend more time defending their territory / looking for opportunities to be irreplaceable than actually doing their job, therefore they must be unproductive and contentious, therefore firing them will improve company culture" - but it evolved reasonably quickly into "anyone who understands things better than you is a threat to your power base")
I am not quite sure what are you asking. What is proper management training? How to recognize it? Are you doubting that management training is a legitimately useful activity?
By the way, having irreplaceable people is bad, but not because they are a threat. The issue is the "hit by the bus" problem (will your organization survive if the irreplaceable person is hit by a bus tonight?) and the solution is to train more people to the same skill/competency level.
Oh, and, of course, anyone you can fire is not really irreplaceable.
Absolutely. My proposed solution was to reassign the 'irreplaceable' to training potential back-ups, and only firing those that refuse to do so. (A lot of people found this idea problematic, because it could lead to them creating unofficial coalitions and favor networks that did not respect the command structure).
What's up with the fetish of "the command structure" in your organization? The preoccupation with power politics seem very dysfunctional.
It wasn't a single organization; these were consultant seminars, which is why I felt comfortable making somewhat broader generalizations about the corporate environment.
Note that at the time, the subset of consultation I was involved with had something of a hero worship for "Neutron Jack" Welch and was rather obsessive about "innovative business and accounting practices" of the sort that Enron had just been hit hard for.