[FRIAM] !RE: A million tech jobs unfilled

[Steven A Smith]

I'm sure I'm dragging the topic (yet) further astray here...

It seems like the underlying pattern is sort of a dynamic balance in an 
abstract system space.

Firstly, I appreciate Glen's acute description of corporations... it IS 
worth noting that they always exist within the charter of a government, 
though it is curious what it means to be an "international" 
corporation.   It seems that many take advantage of the seams between 
different governments, and as we know anecdotally, there are entire 
nations which exist somewhat significantly for the purpose of providing 
a base for these type of wily? corporations?

I'm curious if there is a "taxonomy of organizations" out there 
somewhere... and by "organization" I limit that to organizations of 
human beings and their artifacts, not herds of animals, groves of trees, 
colonies of symbiotic creatures, or ice floes, etc. Where does a church 
fit in?  Seems like the Holy Roman Catholic church, while located within 
the boundaries of Italy and supported (how?) by the Swiss guard, 
represents a fully extra-governmental organization.   Multinational 
corporations may also fit that model in some sense?   Multinational 
NGOs?  Red Cross, Amnesty International, Doctors without Borders?   What 
about street gangs or motorcycle gangs (are they that different?).   
Drug Cartels? Large cooperatives?

In the case of he workplace and the concept of an HR department. The 
general principle of adding an extra degree of freedom in a system to 
make problems more tractable would seem to show one of it's downsides 
here.  That extra level of indirection can yield the kinds of problems 
we have been citing here... mostly of disconnection between the goals of 
the sub-organization (individual, team, project, division, etc.) and the 
policies and practices in head hunting, interviewing, hiring.

I do believe that complex human organizations do take  on a bit of a 
proto-organism status and do begin to do things like grow and organize 
themselves entirely around the principle of self-coherence, 
perpetuation, growth, even sometimes propagation.

- Steve

On 3/15/17 4:05 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I may have missed the gist of the thread.  I thought the observation was that there were exceptional places to work that were able to maintain and grow a talented and productive staff.   What makes them different?  Perhaps it is that they are ideological and are not just concerned about the number of gold stars that come with each participant.  In contrast, there's the possibility that this kind of technology grows without that deep motivation, and just for the sake of growing.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen ?
> Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2017 2:30 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] !RE: A million tech jobs unfilled
>
>
> I think you're oversimplifying organizations.  First, an organization's "stated mission" isn't even, itself, a simple thing.  If it's a corporation, it has a charter from the state.  We mostly consider that meaningless.  But it can be important as we've seen with Trump and New York.  There's even a question about what it means to incorporate.  There are different types of incorporation (C, LLC, etc.).  Then there are add-ons like subchapter S or 501c3, etc.   And that's all before we dig into the vagaries of "mission statements" and profits, publicly listed, private, etc.  Then there are even things like the B certification or (as Robert mentioned) ESOPs and such.
>
> Maybe you see the above as digging my own rhetorical grave ... showing that any assumption the overhead of an org serves some identifiable purpose is convoluted, at best.  But I think it turns your argument on its head.  All organizations exist to serve their constitutents, even if those constituents are distal (like passive investors or only impacted by externalities, e.g. eating oysters after the Deepwater Horizon).  So, the direct constituents of an org _should_ (moral imperative) construct sub-organizations designed to meet their organizers' objectives.
>
> This should all fit with concepts like group selection or sociological theories of groups or sub-cultures.  The corporation is, just like the cell phone, a technological invention (techne, technique), part of the human phenotype.  The question I'm asking is a specific sub-focus of "What's the next technological milestone in the exponential leap in sociological group formation?"
>
> How do/can we customize corporations to better suit our needs and abilities; even more particularly, how do we move away from buzzword matching and ham-handed HR departments?
>
>
> On 03/15/2017 11:08 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> If you accept the assumption that the other stuff (e.g. bureaucracy) mostly serves the organization's stated mission, then ok.    Another hypothesis is that it doesn't, necessarily, and that these behaviors are a way for sub-organizations to emerge, and this becomes an end in itself.  The sub-organizations are convenient alternative venues for individuals to become influential or at least protected, i.e. `alternative' relative to the mission.  They'd be the ones saying "Safety is job #1" like your example.   Now this could all lead to a sweet spot environment, or it could be more like a cage where cross-disciplinary communication is squelched because it tends to undermine the various local power hierarchies.
>
> --
> ☣ glen
>
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