Political Memes

making the job expectations match

Given that the worst-paying jobs are often the most physically onerous and time consuming... I'm fine with making the pay better AND the job easier.

If you pay a lot for an easy job with low expectations

Service sector jobs tend to be monotonous, exhausting, and periodically quite hazardous. I don't know if you've ever spent an eight hour shift on your feet in front of a deep fryer filling orders as fast as possible, but it isn't easy and the patrons particularly forgiving.

the flip side to that is the people who don’t perform should be shown the door

Performance metric employment is a dicey business. There's a number of famous managerial cases of businesses destroying themselves with this approach, most notably when Ed Lampert ran the Sears department store into the ground ten years ago.

But the consensus among the business press and dozens of very bitter former executives is that the overriding cause of Sears’s malaise is the disastrous decision by the company’s chairman and CEO, Edward Lampert, to disaggregate the company’s different divisions into competing units: to create an internal market.

...

Executives would attach screen protectors to their laptops at meetings to prevent their colleagues from finding out what they were up to. Units would scrap over floor and shelf space for their products. Screaming matches between the chief marketing officers of the different divisions were common at meetings intended to agree on the content of the crucial weekly circular advertising specials. They would fight over key positioning, aiming to optimize their own unit’s profits, even at another unit’s expense, sometimes with grimly hilarious result. Kimes describes screwdrivers being advertised next to lingerie, and how the sporting goods division succeeded in getting the Doodle Bug mini-bike for young boys placed on the cover of the Mothers’ Day edition of the circular. As for different divisions swallowing lower profits, or losses, on discounted goods in order to attract customers for other items, forget about it. One executive quoted in the Bloomberg investigation described the situation as “dysfunctionality at the highest level.”

As profits collapsed, the divisions grew increasingly vicious toward each other, scrapping over what cash reserves remained. Squeezing profits still further was the duplication in labor, particularly with an increasingly top-heavy repetition of executive function by the now-competing units, which no longer had an interest in sharing costs for shared opera- tions. With no company-wide interest in maintaining store infrastructure, something instead viewed as an externally imposed cost by each division, Sears’s capital expenditure dwindled to less than 1 percent of revenue, a proportion much lower than that of most other retailers.

Ultimately, the different units decided to simply take care of their own profits, the company as a whole be damned. One former executive, Shaunak Dave, described a culture of “warring tribes,” and an elimination of cooperation and collaboration. One business press wag described Lampert’s regime as “running Sears like the Coliseum.” Kimes, for her part, wrote that if there were any book to which the model conformed, it was less Atlas Shrugged than it was The Hunger Games.

A well-run athletics program does not, traditionally, pit athletes against one another and deliver outsized rewards to the handful of "star" players. They reward teamwork and comradrie, temper expectations to the anticipated limits of team members, and seek to maximize the function of the whole rather than measuring exclusively by the individual parts.

That way leads to infighting, division, and self-destruction.