The reason why McKinsey/MBA types like Sundar and his recruits ruin companies is that ultimately too much focus and belief in shareholder capitalism thinks that companies are devices that produce money.
But neither do employees go to work with the wish to produce money for their shareholders, nor do customers buy products with that intent.
Employees want to help the customers and get paid for that. Customers want the value of the product. Money to shareholders is a byproduct.
@HalvarFlake yup, it's a classic failure from Goodhart's law: the financial success of a company is a metric* of its ability to satisfy customers, but for them it becomes a target, leading to failure.
@oblomov@HalvarFlake what motivates over-reliance on metrics is that at scale it is literally a management problem. Overconservative people (employees, managers, whatever) won't change fast enough to track (never mind lead) the market, but the excessively inventive will piss away resources jack-rabbiting after the latest pet rock. Numbers and dollars are very convincing to many people, thus their popularity as a management tool.
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@oblomov@HalvarFlake IMO numbers are a good choice if you have limited resources and many problems -- which moles do we whack first? An example where numbers are good is e.g. managing climate change, where one of the purposes of a carbon tax is to help a consumer decide between (for example) locally sourced lobster and air-freighted apples from New Zealand. But we don't have a manager for Elon Musk, who thinks the answer is Mars. /
@oblomov@HalvarFlake Numbers fail when we fail to account for externalized costs, anything we can't measure, we either must guess a number or pretend it is zero, and factions will cook the guessed numbers to support their favorite choice. Conservatives will over-cost change. Imaginative jack-rabbits will over-cost failure to change, over-benefit adoption of their pet rock. And what has the security team ever done for us? And the privacy and user safety teams, they just slow down launches.
@dr2chase@HalvarFlake yeah, but that's the thing: even if one limits itself to things you can measure (like the company's profitability) and even if you assume that that's sufficient (after all, it gives you a pretty solid idea of the sustainability of things as they are), it only works as intended if it's taken for what it is. Even if you could measure everything perfectly, when your target is quarterly profits any long term investment is a net loss however you look at it.
@dr2chase@oblomov they also have the property of diffusion responsibility effectively -- "I decided according to this metric" absolves people from responsibility for their action.
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