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“Not adding value is the same as taking it away.”

Seth Godin

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“Truth has two main problems. Truth tends to be complicated and truth tends to be painful.”

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• Opening note/warning: let me be clear that what I am suggesting today is simply representative of business as it exists today, not how business should exist. Soe part may be maddening to those who, like me, who believe in fostering emergent, dynamic, generalist-skewed, organizational behavior. Just imagine how maddening parts of this were just in typing.

Value-extracting creates nothing new: it simply moves money around. It does not grow the economy, it does not lead to innovation, and it contributes to greater inequality. Well. That is certainly one vein of wisdom. But let’s talk about an uncomfortable version of value extraction. Yeah. We talk in business about value creation all the time. Maybe we should talk about value extraction just a bit more. Why? Because a lot of business is extracting value and ideas and thoughts from semi-formed value, ideas and thoughts in the people around you. Oh. And to exploit those extractions. Yeah. I just said that. That sounds bad, doesn’t it”? Let me explain. The business world is, and has been, a specialized world for a while. Decades and decades of ‘specialize to optimize your career’ has wrought a world of, well, specialists. And because business is business, they have tripled down on that specialization encouraging people to invest their outside energy honing that specialization and honing their ‘productivity skills’ surrounding that specialization. As a consequence, that means the business world is strewn with specialists who really aren’t adept at offering value, and value creation, ideas beyond their constrained specialist zone. I am not suggesting that zone cannot be deep and valuable, just that it isn’t particularly broad and valuable in a larger scope. Given what I just said, a minority of good business people are good at plucking out the ideas, thoughts, skills from the people around them. Uhm. Extracting and exploiting.

Which leads me to best practices.

Best practices extract value. Yeah. I just said that. Let me slice this two ways. It extracts value potential in a creation standpoint (bad) and it extracts value from those involved in the process (semi-good). The latter is actually the real reason leaders love process. It extracts replicable value, not optimal value, from the organization. But let’s be clear, management loves to use best practices to extract value and exploit worker “time”. Once again, a significant portion of this comes back to that specialization thing. Business has this weird belief that if you reduce everything it will expand, well, something (I am unclear what). Anyway. I am not anti-process, but using process TO extract is wrongheaded. Process should be a baseline ‘way to work’ so that workers have an opportunity to think and create the shit that an ‘extractor’ will be scanning for.

Which leads me to technology.

Here is the weird thing. Much of what technology offers business, at least as implemented, extracts from value. Its weird because we should be seeking, relentlessly I may add, to use business as a value creator. Anyway. Technology gets you both coming and going. Coming in it extracts effectiveness because for the most part people are asked to fit to technology rather than technology augmenting people. Going technology gets you with technical debt which inevitably clogs up any chance of increasing value. That said. Let’s get back to the uncomfortable part. Technology, used well, can extract the value from the minds of people. Some people may suggest this is augmenting people. Shit. I am a proponent of technology crafted to augment people. But for today I am discussing pure and simple extraction. While much of digital transformation is useless in terms of expenditures and effectiveness, there are many technological tools available to isolate individual’s who have the knowledge, wisdom, skills and thoughts that can be extracted from the organizational machine and incorporated into the larger value creation machine. It may sound creepy to say that but, what the hell, if I am going to infringe n people’s privacy I may as well figure out how to do so in a way that permits the individual to contribute beyond their specific skill cage.

Which leads me to how technology could augment positive extraction.

Within the next decade we ought to develop tools that would allow us to interact not only with information, but also with simulations and predicted futures, concepts, that might emerge depending on the dynamic marketplace and the choices we might make to exploit the market opportunities. It would be silly to ignore the fact technology offers the best opportunity to do this. knowledge graphs, AI which analyzes computer usage, LLMs which pluck out individuals for the extractors to go seek out. There are a number of semi-creepy ways to extract and exploit – in the interest of generating business value.

Which leads me to ‘culture fit’.

Oddly, or maybe paradoxically, hiring for culture is counter to value extraction. Yeah. Culture fit extracts value potential from the organization which means if you are scanning about seeking to extract dormant value you will see less and less to extract. It becomes a reductionary universe in which ideas and thoughts inevitably get smaller and smaller and incremental value creation gets smaller and smaller. Circling back to the thought that part of today’s business world is actually figuring out how to extract valuable thoughts and ideas from an organization, culture fit makes that more difficult. Culture fit will tend to emphasize not only similar thinking but emphasize specialization. Uhm. Both reduce the possibilities for larger value creation thinking, thoughts and ideas.

In the end.

I know it sounds horrible to speak about extract and exploit in some semi-positive way, but it is kinda true in today’s business world. In order to maximize the potential in an organization you almost are forced to put people in a room that on the surface seem more a pain in the ass than a valuable contributor and, well, set out to extract from their strengths in order to exploit the knowledge to the benefit of the business. Ponder.

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cesiumadventures:

i just have this persistent feeling of “i’m not doing enough” combined with “i don’t have the energy to do anything” and it just really fucking sucks

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“Many people are busy trying to find better ways of doing things that should not have to be done at all. There is no progress in merely finding a better way to do a useless thing.”
Source: Ford News
11/15/1922

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Ever get the feeling you are doing a lot of ‘somethings’ and, yet, you look around and it sometimes looks like nothing? I tend to believe a lot of people feel some version of this. I have a stack of unanswered emails to people I really would like to respond to and, yet, I always have something to do. I rarely have an open minute, by my choice and I like it that way, but some of those minutes mean not doing something else. And therein lies ‘nothing.’ Nothing IS something. It resides in the choices left behind. I am doing nothing with all these emails and people who I genuinely like and conversations I genuinely would like to have and, yet, I have done nothing with them. They are something and what I have done is something and have created nothing in doing so. This may sound convoluted and slightly absurd, and it should.

It is indicative of the slightly warped pretzel logic we place to justify our productivity madness.

It is indicative of something generally happening in work.

Work never stops, we never stop, other people never stop, there are no stop signs, and yet with all this ‘not stopping’ productivity and productive performance has, well, stopped. Okay. Not stopped, but certainly hasn’t matched the amount of non-stoppedness it appears business is doing. I imagine I could say a bunch of things here but I would suggest the nonstop world costs us some creativity and absolutely costs us some critical thinking.

We are paddling so hard we can’t see where we are going or if we are even making any meaningful progress. It’s not like people aren’t trying to give is more advice on how to actually be productive because if you go to Amazon there are something like 100,000 books telling us how we can achieve more. If you don’t want to read, just pick one of the 1000’s of apps you can download onto your already nonstop 24/7 smartphone internet feed. The ‘hustle culture’ (and economy) is more a hamster wheel than hustle. While any ideal business progress trip should be one in which you reach some far-reaching destination, in today’s world it is just a circular treadmill encased in a cage.

This worship of productivity comes at the expense of everything else. It’s kind of like purposefully implementing mediocrity. Now. Within the productivity ideology they can’t see the mediocrity because their scale is biased – they don’t see the sacrifice; they see the achievements. They don’t see lost outcome possibilities; they see pragmatic outcome gains. This self-defeating behavior means a bunch of people are doing a lot of somethings all the while doing some nothings. There is no ebb and flow of imagination or creativity, it is all directed toward the God of Productivity. This God wields metrics of productivity to measure output and achievements, but also, we as human beings.

Look.

I don’t really need to share some research to be able to say, generally speaking, most workers are overworked <this can be time driven or task drive> which, generally speaking, lessens job performance, hence, productivity. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that technology adds on an additional burden to individual productivity stress – we also now compete against automation, AI and algorithms. We fight against the system and technology – in other words “the black box against us.”

Which leads me to the battle between more and zero sum.

More.

Growth, scale, expansion, higher, all are synonyms for “more.” Business is obsessed with more. If you did something yesterday, tomorrow can only be better if there is more than yesterday. It’s absurd and unhealthy. Let me use the business buzzword of the day, Transformation, to point out even that is never really about becoming better; it is always about producing “more faster” (better is a pleasant addition if it happens). ‘More’ simply begets an obsession with continuous output and THAT obsession arcs toward the worst of Taylorism in which Lillian Gilbreth-ism trumps Follett-ism.

The models of work are rewarded if they generate more regardless of whether it is true progress or not.

The models of work get rewarded if they generate more regardless of whether it is meaningful or not (because meaningful means ‘meet outcome objective.’

The models of work get rewarded if they generate more if they can simply be well oiled, or fine-tuned with more oil, thereby supporting the concept of human machinery.

But maybe even worse than treating people like machines is how business treats their work. I will talk about “achievement attitude” under zero sum, but suffice it to say that if achievements are all people truly get measured on <which feeds into what a person will identify as value and meaning> and More is always yelling in your mind, well, all you will focus on is more achievements – quantity not quality. “More” is a horrible corrosive productivity concept. “More” is actually a horrible corrosive concept for the world <invest some time reading Limits of Growth; Meadows/Meadows>.

Zero sum.

I am not sure, but it’s possible “more” could have worked okay in the models of work if we weren’t simultaneously stuck in a zero-sum mindset. In that mindset universe ‘more’ comes at the expense of someone else and, worse, if someone is getting “more” that means less for you.

It’s corrosive thinking and, paradoxically, reductive in nature. The pendulum in society has swung all the way over to achievement is all that matters. In fact, we are in a society where the Value of a person seems to be either driven solely by their outcomes/results or weighted so heavily by the outcomes/results that the ‘effort portion’ has minuscule value.

That’s … well … uhm … bad. Bad for individual meaning. Bad for society. Bad for Life lessons. Just bad.

It is bad because that means many people will ignore the price they will pay to achieve the outcome because the outcome, in and of itself, will contain all the value.

Yeah.

Think about that.

Taken to an extreme that would mean the attempt has zero value and trying and failing has zero, if not negative, value.

Ok.

That is bad.

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“But he did not understand the price.

Mortals never do.

They only see the prize, their heart’s desire, their dream … but the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted.”

Neil Gaiman

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Which leads me to how zero-sum plays a role. That achievement attitude becomes even worse, for society, because it also suggests “what are we willing to do to get what we want” is a zero sum game.

What do I mean?

Well.

You are willing to do anything it takes to get what you want <the achievement>.

The hell with rules … they are for people who don’t value achievement enough.

The hell with guardrails and guidelines … they are for people who are scared to do what it takes.

This attitude cleverly steals away freedom of choice in that it suggests the only choice is the one that ensures achievement.

“Measures of productivity do not lead to improvement in productivity.”

W. Edwards Deming; Out of Crisis

This attitude strips choices of anything truly worthwhile like dignity and respect and humanity because all of those things are not criteria for what is the ultimate value – the result or outcome. Productivity is inextricably tied to achievement which also suggests productivity that does not attain some objective achievement has little or no value. It’s a horrible way of thinking that actually equates productivity with gamification theory. Horrible.

I say all this because zero sum belief sucks the oxygen out of meaningful ‘doing’, or productivity, by sucking out the true freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances and to choose one’s own way in doing things. There is no freedom because only one type of productivity is deemed the winner and anyone not achieving that is a loser.

In the end.

Some people suggest we need to prioritize new ideas rather than productivity. I am not so sure. I think we should be prioritizing meaningful progress – for both individual and the business. While this version of progress is not attached to any direction or quantity of things, it does accommodate productivity <which I believe if it isn’t worshiped can be a valuable aspect of value creation and meaning>. I would suggest the future is actually not about more, nor less, nor any quantity. But. I am not suggesting a business doesn’t have to sell some ‘quantity’ in order to sustain itself, it’s just that any quantity becomes a result of a focus on progress where doing something means something. This thought also suggests the future isn’t going to be solved by working smarter, but rather a smarter way of working. I would also suggest the current way of working is not a logical result of centuries of logical reasoned thinking about how work should be done, but rather a battle between ideas on a way to work. That last thought becomes a semi-important thought because it suggests we don’t need a new way of doing business, or a new way of thinking, or even some magical transformation, but instead we should be seeking out the ideas that exist and maybe lost a key battle here or there. It is not about a fundamental shift, but rather a revisit to the fundamentals. In doing so we change the concept of productivity and progress in business and that begets a shift in systems, policies and practices. Ponder.