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This is a follow-up to yesterday’s essay in which I confronted the MacLeod Hierarchy of the organization, which affixes unflattering labels to the three typical tiers (workers, managers, executives) of...
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Gervais rehash, part III: Markov and management, plus a 4th culture
This is a follow-up to the pair of essays I wrote earlier this week. First, I amended the MacLeod organizational hierarchy to include a fourth category, the Technocrat. Secondly, I began to explore...
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Gervais / MacLeod 4: a world without Losers?
This is a continuation of last week’s analysis of various work cultures and the patterns of degeneracy. I’ve analyzed hierarchies that form in organizational cultures and the relationship between...
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Gervais / MacLeod 5: Interfaces, meritocracy, the effort thermocline, and a...
Today, I continue my analysis of the MacLeod hierarchy and the Gervais Principle. (See: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.) I’m going to analyze the interfaces between the three MacLeod tiers in order to...
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Gervais / MacLeod 6: Morality, civility, and chaos.
This is probably the second-to-last item in my series on MacLeod’s organizational hierarchy and the Gervais Principle. (See: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.) I’m leaving the country for a...
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Gervais / MacLeod 7: Defining organizational health, the Mike Test, and...
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve delved into organizational health and the processes that compromise it. (See: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.) Typically, organizations tend toward a...
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Gervais / MacLeod 8: Human Nature, Theories X, Y, Z, and A.
Well, this is yet another “second-to-last post” in the Gervais/MacLeod series (See: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7) as I’ve realized that I need to cover one more topic: human...
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Gervais / MacLeod 9: Convexity
Originally, I had intended the 9th part to be the one in which I solve this damn thing for good. Unfortunately, as that “9th post” crossed into 12 kiloword territory, I realized that I needed to break...
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Gervais / MacLeod 10: The pull of lawful evil
I’ve posted a lot about organizations and their corrosion (See: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9). but there’s something that I realize I have not covered, and...
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Gervais / MacLeod 11: Alignment and careers.
I discussed recently the process of social competition that enables the lawful evil to succeed in large corporations. That’s one of their two main weapons. The other one (existential fear) requires a...
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Gervais / MacLeod 12: Growth, chaos, and risk
As I get further into the organizational problem– with the hope of, one day, working a way out of it– it becomes increasingly clear that there is no simple solution. There are a variety of principles...
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Gervais / MacLeod 13: Separability, work and play
We are close. Close, that is, to having done sufficient exploration into the role and operations of economic organizations (such as the corporations or nation-states we love and hate) to start solving...
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Gervais / MacLeod 14: expanding alignment, plus well-adjustedness
I didn’t intend this to be part of the Gervais / MacLeod series. It was just for fun. Yet, here we are with the 14th essay that answers a burning question. I’ve talked about alignment a great deal and...
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Gervais / MacLeod 15: What is being rich?
After the 14 previous essays, we now have a deep understanding of why business organizations degenerate (i.e., why, for most people, work sucks). We’ve got a working taxonomy of the players by rank...
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Gervais / MacLeod 16: Healthy culture vs. “Why you?”
I’ve discussed a number of problems that businesses face, and started work on at solutions. There’s one major issue that I still need to address. A good organizational culture is expensive. It’s not...
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Gervais / MacLeod 17: building the future, and financing lifestyle businesses
I’ve opined quite a bit on the VC-funded ecosystem (“VC-istan”) and put forward the hypothesis that we’d be much better served by a fleet of 50,000 so-called “lifestyle businesses” than 500 red-ocean,...
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Gervais / MacLeod 18: more on trust, Square Root Syndrome, Brownian and...
In Part 17, I discussed the financial considerations of starting a technology company financed by passive equity-holders. In that model, these investors are enabled to enjoy the high rate of return...
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Gervais / MacLeod 19: Living in Truth, fighting The Lie
Yahoo recently bought Summly, a startup run by a 17-year-old, for $30 million. Since the product was shut down, it was a “talent acquisition” (or, “acq-hire”) intended to hire the team, making the list...
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Gervais / MacLeod 20: Bozo bit vs. simple trust
We’re almost finished. There’s a lot that I might add to this series in the future, and I’m seriously considering the book idea, but this series has taken a lot of time and work, and there are some...
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Gervais / MacLeod 21: Why Does Work Suck?
This is a penultimate “breather” post, insofar as it doesn’t present much new material, but summarizes much of what’s in the previous 20 essays. It’s now time to tie everything together and Solve It....
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