Smart is not enough
Jul. 16th, 2002 07:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerI just finished reading a very good article in the New Yorker about Enron. Well, it's ostensibly about Enron, what it's actually about is the fallacy that hiring lots of smart people and letting them do what they think is the right thing is a good way to run a business.
Now, I'm pretty smart myself, and I've worked and chatted to a fair number of smart people. And I can certainly see why you'd want a fair number of smart people to work at your company. But smart people tend to be arrogant, have different interests to the majority of the population and believe that the world is set up for their enjoyment. These are not factors that tend to lead to profit, or at least not on purpouse. I don't like being managed any more than the next person, but the fact is that without managers your average smart person would be off doing personal projects the whole time, playing with software and designing better mousetraps.
I thought I had quite a lot to say on this one, but on reflection it's so incredibly obvious that this is not the way to run a company that I just can't think of any way of hammering it home any harder. Read the article, and slap your forehead in disbelief at the people who thought it was a good idea.
Now, I'm pretty smart myself, and I've worked and chatted to a fair number of smart people. And I can certainly see why you'd want a fair number of smart people to work at your company. But smart people tend to be arrogant, have different interests to the majority of the population and believe that the world is set up for their enjoyment. These are not factors that tend to lead to profit, or at least not on purpouse. I don't like being managed any more than the next person, but the fact is that without managers your average smart person would be off doing personal projects the whole time, playing with software and designing better mousetraps.
I thought I had quite a lot to say on this one, but on reflection it's so incredibly obvious that this is not the way to run a company that I just can't think of any way of hammering it home any harder. Read the article, and slap your forehead in disbelief at the people who thought it was a good idea.
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Must be funny... in a rich man's world.
Date: 2002-07-16 02:41 pm (UTC)There was a funny article in the Onion a while back about how the American people would be worried if they actually understood the whole Enron affair. Since I had nothing to do at ScottishPower but read the financial news on the intranet, I -do- understand it fairly well (or did a month or two ago) and found it interesting because the only thing different in Enron to what I suspect is quite a lot of companies is that they got caught.
Why would a company do something so dangerous and so different if others didn't? Innovation like that doesn't happen much these days. And I don't think they were innovative and different. I think that they got caught and everyone else who does it is laughing while saying "My word, thank god OUR company doesn't work that way *snigger*"