Three Institutional Sins
Someone asked me yesterday about my post on necessary traits for running a good institution. Does it follow that, if you need competence, fairness and stability, the things you least want are incompetence, unfairness and instability? Well, yes and no.
It's quite clear that incompetence, unfairness and instability are breakers of the perfect game, so to speak. I've seen institutions with one or more of these traits thrive for a while though. That's because it depends on the mission of the institution. As implied in the previous post, you can run a thinktank, a prison, or a pleasant but low-quality service provider — or anything else which doesn't need to be great — even if you have one or more of these traits.
But some things will corrupt people and places from the get-go, and great will be the fall thereof. The three sins (apart from generic evil) which tend to ruin the long-term viability of institutions are:
1. Greed. Greed kills. It leads to overreach and a mentality that overvalues the quantitative. Essentially, the greedy mind is a point-scoring mind. The greedy mind, after a while, begins to invent its own scoring system. Greed isn't always about consumption, but about wanting more than is needed — much more. It tends to breed unfairness.
2. Stupidity. Stupidity deadens. No institution can function when there is an internal resistance to information transfer, accumulation and processing. This is especially true in an age where the edge is sometimes defined completely in terms of information quality and the quality of information use. Stupidity tends to breed incompetence.
3. Mediocrity. Mediocrity sucks. That is, it sucks everyone towards some sort of mean at which people begin to tolerate the first two. A penchant for mediocrity is sometimes disguised as tolerance, wanting to get along, not wanting to rock the boat or move too quickly, desire for caution in an age of change... and so on. It can breed the wrong kind of stability, the kind of stability a ship has when it is touching the ground in a sheltered position.
You can still find surviving institutions with all three of these negative traits. But they quickly dinosaur themselves out of existence or lumber around as bad examples of throwbacks to some other era in which they could thrive unnoticed for what they are.
It's quite clear that incompetence, unfairness and instability are breakers of the perfect game, so to speak. I've seen institutions with one or more of these traits thrive for a while though. That's because it depends on the mission of the institution. As implied in the previous post, you can run a thinktank, a prison, or a pleasant but low-quality service provider — or anything else which doesn't need to be great — even if you have one or more of these traits.
But some things will corrupt people and places from the get-go, and great will be the fall thereof. The three sins (apart from generic evil) which tend to ruin the long-term viability of institutions are:
1. Greed. Greed kills. It leads to overreach and a mentality that overvalues the quantitative. Essentially, the greedy mind is a point-scoring mind. The greedy mind, after a while, begins to invent its own scoring system. Greed isn't always about consumption, but about wanting more than is needed — much more. It tends to breed unfairness.
2. Stupidity. Stupidity deadens. No institution can function when there is an internal resistance to information transfer, accumulation and processing. This is especially true in an age where the edge is sometimes defined completely in terms of information quality and the quality of information use. Stupidity tends to breed incompetence.
3. Mediocrity. Mediocrity sucks. That is, it sucks everyone towards some sort of mean at which people begin to tolerate the first two. A penchant for mediocrity is sometimes disguised as tolerance, wanting to get along, not wanting to rock the boat or move too quickly, desire for caution in an age of change... and so on. It can breed the wrong kind of stability, the kind of stability a ship has when it is touching the ground in a sheltered position.
You can still find surviving institutions with all three of these negative traits. But they quickly dinosaur themselves out of existence or lumber around as bad examples of throwbacks to some other era in which they could thrive unnoticed for what they are.
Labels: Management
etched with acid at 8:11:00 am
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