Power politics

Saw this little meme on the interwebs, it made me smile, I quite like the idea of taking a nap on a boat, preferably in the sunshine. It also made me think about the strange way we (i.e. Humans) commonly attribute properties to people that are exactly the opposite of reality and we often value compliance over competence. You see this a lot in business, I reckon it stems from the insecurities and inadequacies of poor managers and their paranoia about being usurped by smarter underlings or exposed as incompetents.

My experience of this kind of thing, over the years, is that it's a fairly safe bet that the people who value compliance over competence the most are usually the worst managers of all. They tend to prefer "happy talk" over reality (i.e. no bad news, awkward questions or criticism), they often value communication over innovation, they take credit for other people's good news and blame everyone but themselves for bad, and they obsess about how things look vs. how well they work. I've seen it most of all in larger organizations where people who aren't massively valuable in position because of mediocre competence (but not disastrously so) are quite often shuffled sideways into managerial/administrative positions where they can focus 100% on politics rather than production, and the greasy pole is ascended. But, because such people are not usually inclined to invest in understanding or mastering a competency (politics is time consuming after all!) they always feel somewhat insecure, this leads to them surrounding themselves with "yes-men" who aren't a threat, and, they hold at arms length competent people for fear of being exposed. Thus we end up with people with power but no depth of understanding with which to formulate good decisions, and, people with deep understanding but no power to implement it, it's a funny old game.