Shut-up Stupid Sunday: Rising to the highest level of Incompetence

Last week I wrote about how some pundits falsely equate a person's money with productivity. Since I know a lot of my readers are techies, they will want mathematical proof. Here it is:

The Peter Principle Proven
In case you've ever wondered why ignorance rises to the executive level, here is a simple explanation that is also a mathematical proof:
Knowledge is Power.
Time is Money.
And, as every actuary (with some physics training) knows:
Work
---------- = Power
Time
So, if
Knowledge = Power
and
Time = Money
then through simple substitutions,
Work
---------- = Knowledge
Money
Solving for Money, we get:
Work
-------------- = Money
Knowledge
Thus, If Work is held constant as a positive number (no matter how small!) Money approaches infinity as Knowledge approaches zero.
What this means is:
All else being equal, the less you know, the more you make.
Source:Actuarial Review 

In business school we learn of a similar formula. The ratio of work vs. job justification. In the lower ranks of a company an employee spends most of their time working. They spend a few minutes a month justifying their job. “Hey, I do my work.”

As they rise the corporate ladder, they spend more time justifying their job. Having to pull up stats, “Since taking over this dept, we have risen, by less than the margin of error, in these areas. In the next quarter I will be concentrating on the areas where we fell by less than the margin of error.”

Basically the employees who are better skilled at justifying their jobs move into the positions where they determine who gets paid what. More successful managers are better at justifying their jobs. Sometimes a manager will be both good at doing their job and justifying it, but it's not necessary.

In college this is drilled home to students on the first visit to campus. Go to any college campus. Look at what they use to recruit students. Our professors have this, this, and this. Look at the classrooms and professor's offices. Now go to the Admin building. If you can't find it, look for the nicest one on campus, that's the one. It is easy to see the contrast. With a little digging you sometimes find the salaries of different positions. In most cases the admin staff makes more than the professors.

The places were the professors do make really good salaries are the colleges that make them justify their jobs through the publish or perish system. A professor doesn't have to be a good teacher, they just need be able to get papers like, "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" published.

In the corporate world they are better at hiding this imbalance, but it's there. At the very top a manager merely needs to say gibberish, but make it sound important. All a good manager need to do to keep their job is whenever asked for a decision say, “It is what it is. In order to minimize the disconnect, we need a game changer to reach out and leverage our cutting edge interface. By socializing we can value-add and circle back to make this thing go viral.”

When the waiter looks at them funny, they just need to add, “Think outside the box.”

Basically for someone to successfully rise through the corporate ladder they need to spend less and less time working and more time justifying their job. At the very top they spend their whole time “working” justifying their salary.

So again, I say to the people who call the highest paid, the most productive, “Shut-up Stupid, the corporate hierarchy isn't designed to reward the most productive. It has built in systems to make people less productive as they get paid more.”

By Darrell B. Nelson author of I KILLED THE MAN THAT WASN'T THERE

Shut-up Stupid Sunday: “The most Productive members of our society.”

Here's a phrase that pops whenever anyone mentions the fact that multi-millionaires pay half the tax rate of the middle class. “We shouldn't burden the most productive members of our society.” To these people I have to ask, “Where do you work? Because it isn't the same planet I'm on.”

In most American companies productivity and pay are not related. A few companies (Apple, Google, 3M) have gone out of their way to hire and reward super productive people. But most companies take extreme measures to keep the super-productive people out.

There are companies whose sole function is to discriminate against the “super-producers”. I should know I used to work for one.

In the mid 90s I worked for a Management Consulting Firm. One of the things we told small companies is to get rid of the “super-producers”. Those people who do the job of three or four employees. The reasoning was, “What if that person quits?” In a ten person company you've just lost a quarter of your production.

How about keeping that person from quiting? Paying them more and giving them more challenges. In an ideal world that would be great. But what happens when a higher-up has a project they spend weeks on using a third of the employees, and then run into a problem. They ask the super-producer for help. The super-producer says, “I got this.” Solves the problem in a few hours and inadvertently leaves the higher-up feeling foolish.

The main way to keep super-producers out of companies is the OCEANS test.

These test are designed to weed out individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking in the pursuit of group cohesiveness. That way the owner can make sure the company follows their plans. It doesn't matter if the plan is stupid, it will be followed.

This creates an environment were things can be handled quickly and predictably as workers follow herd dynamics, not individual decision making. People sacrifice themselves for the sake of the group, not looking at the bigger picture. With this set-up organizations might not make the correct decisions, but they will make predictable ones.

The other effect this has is it allows sociopaths to rise to the top.

Four percent of the population are sociopaths. They simply don't care about the suffering of others. They will do anything to get their way, no matter who it hurts. Put in an environment where people are more concerned with group cohesiveness than doing what is right, sociopaths can easily manipulate the systems put in place and gain power over the group. People who love group cohesiveness love following sociopaths. They work to keep a group together until something goes wrong. Then have no problem sticking a knife in the back of whoever is handy.

So the majority of multi-millionaires are actually sociopaths.

So to those who think that the top 1% are the “most productive”, I say, “Shut-up Stupid, being productive doesn't get you to the top of the corporate ladder. Being a sociopath does. So you should be saying, 'Should we be punishing the most destructive and insane members of our society?' I say, 'yes, yes we should'.”

By Darrell B. Nelson author of I KILLED THE MAN THAT WASN'T THERE

Shut-up Stupid Sunday: Slut Shaming

I have a confession to make. I'm a total perv.

I can imagine the reactions from all my friends to this confession. A collective, “A-duh!”

When I was in high school, there were several occasions where I gave myself friction burns because I masturbated too much. I guess I'm not the only guy to have that problem as the principal in New York’s Stuyvesant High School, Stanley Teitel, has imposed a strict dress code to protect our fellow pervs from this problem.

He says, “Many young ladies wear denim skirts which are very tight and are short to begin with, and when they sit down, they only rise up, because there’s nowhere else to go…. The bottom line is, some things are a distraction, and we don’t need to distract students from what is supposed to be going on here, which is learning.” Source: Blue in the Bluegrass “Slut-Shaming never goes out of style”. 

It's very important that pervs like me and Stanley Teitel are protected from being aroused.

Which is more important? That female students learn that they have a right to self expression. That their bodies are something they can be proud of not ashamed of. That they are human beings worthy of equal status of other human beings. Or that because pervs like me Stanley Teitel get aroused by seeing ANY female flesh (In my case the neck, fingernails, lips, anything) they must hide themselves because protecting male perverts is more important than their human rights?

I'm getting sick of all the attempts to shame females about being human.

From Rush Limbaugh hearing how much a women spends on the pill, dividing that by the cost of the pills he has to give a girl to have sex with him and being shocked at the number. To the GOP pushing to cut Women's Health Services. The attempts to dehumanize half the population makes me want to vomit.

If a woman dresses in a way that fills my head with perverted thoughts of sex, distracting me from the perverted thoughts of sex with the last girl who walked by, that's not her problem. If a woman wants to have sex for pleasure and protect herself, that's called being a human. If a woman thinks her uterus isn't a clown car and doesn't have to be used at all times, that's her choice.

So to all the slut-shamers out there, I say, “Shut-up Stupid, women are human beings and have the right to physical pleasure, freedom of expression, personal freedom, the choice of when or if to use their uterus, and how to dress as they please. If these things make my fellow perverts get friction burns on their dicks, it's not the woman's problem.”

By Darrell B. Nelson author of I KILLED THE MAN THAT WASN'T THERE