Saw this happen with university security. They were university employees and then became contractors. As employees they spotted a leaking roof, contained a flood, ensured the buildings heating was working. As contractors they allowed a flood to destroy hundereds of thousands of pounds of equipment because it wasnt their job.
Contractor here and I am the director Completely agree with the above statement And the simple reason for this, is as a contractor, we are given a purchase order that we are to assign an invoice to. On that purchase order is a list of tasks/jobs that we can allocate cost and invoice to. If we do a job outside of that scope, we don’t get paid for it. We actually get in trouble for doing it. Hence, contractors will do what they are allocated to be paid for. If they can’t charge for the job It doesn’t get done. The biggest problem is the boss who thinks this system works. It never does. But it pays way more than a salary ever will. And employee’s mean absolutely nothing to big companies. There not even numbers anymore. They are now considered liabilities
@@dengueberries Nah, over the stretch in Australia. But we have exactly the same issues. The world is slowly turning around and realising these bosses need to go but.
@@Signaturegen2Employees ARE liabilities in most every way. As a now retired, former employee I very much resent the role government and academia have had in making me such a liability. Just because a large number of ignorant whiners can be fooled by con artist politicians into thinking someone else should take care of them all the time, they’ve ruined so much progress.
We don't hear enough about how modern technology and companies has absolutely KILLED customer service. It's practically impossible to call a company and speak to a human being these days. It's infuriating!
Even when you do talk to a human they have no power and usually not even the knowledge to actually solve the issue. All they're allowed to do is follow a script. Even if they know what to do they either have no permissions in the system to do so, or if they do have the ability they risk being terminated for going off script. On top of that, they're usually tracked by how many issues they escalate, so even transferring you to someone who can exercise judgement and solve your issue can carry a termination risk.
There is a company named Telus in Canada and the majority of their agents are English as a second language. A process that involves collecting personal details that should take 1o minutes takes these agents over 60 minutes as they struggle with a script that is as ineffective as I've ever heard. They are required to repeat themselves multiple times and keep apologizing for going on hold.
and something the dreamer are even lockup in rooms with padded walls, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯invention come form innovation, of better wheel, without all wheels today may of square or something else today
@@rbettsx humans are not bees, but I get your meaning. The question is, are humans still evolving or are the constraints placed on explorers/dreamers now so great that they no longer perform their functions.
To further exacerbate the problem in a corporatocracy, if an individual takes a chance and it succeeds, the reward is far less than the punishment would be for a failure. Successes are shared within the organisation, losses are individualised. For an individual, the upside gain is not worth the downside risk. This is why the top creatives leave and function best in small startup type companies. As creative indivoduals, we're not ignoring the waggle dance, btw, it's just not worth taking a risk.
Yeah, it is a fascinating double standard for corporations - internally we have the old proverb "Success has many fathers and failure is an orphan," yet externally we have (as you note) "failures are individualised and success is shared." We live in an age where corporate entities have greater rights than citizens - wild when you think about it. The other thing that is interesting is that once a corporate entity operationalises, you are rewarded for consistency/predictability and punished for the unexpected - be it good or bad. I remember I saved an organisation millions of dollars and we were punished for saving too much money!
There's one more step in that process for why innovators don't work / thrive / engage in large organizations: the person doing the innovating does not themselves reap the benefit / reward for the innovation when it works. Someone else is going to 'yoink!' the idea, sell it as their own and walk away with the benefits. Rory's message with regards to customer service is spot on: customer facing people have to follow scripts, procedures and policies and don't get the freedom of leeway in dealing with problems outside of the scope they're assigned. It wants to quantify everything according to a metric but we did not evolve for thinking inside of the small boxes we're being forced into. The 'data-driven' people are exhilarated about how everything follows a metric but they sacrifice everything to that. To make it even worse, because now every little thing a person does is measured and quantified they're being held liable for anything and everything they do. I remember reading 'don't micromanage people' and the next thing we do is to deploy technologies the sole purpose of which is to micromanage people. One example that stands out is a technology that looks at a programmer's camera to see, every 10 minutes, whether they're at their keyboard working. Because that's what you are as a programmer: you're a glorified typist. If you're not at your keyboard for that period you don't get paid AND you get yelled at. Because not only is it valuable reduce every job to the minimum of what the role requires, it's apparently also valuable to have people spend their day controlling that kind of behavior to 'ensure' productivity. We are humans, we have evolved to be humans, and we are reducing ourselves to being a cough in the machine because there are other humans who are Dunning-Krugering themselves through life because they simply cannot perceive any added value of what humans can deliver with regards how a corporation relates to the world at large than what their spreadsheet tells them. Humans are reducing themselves to a production factor. Something that has to justify its usefulness in life and the costs it generates. We really are too fucking stupid to live.
@@howardtreesong4860 Yeah, it really seems as if we're back to a time of "robber barons" i.e. we're in a second gilded age. We have the robbers (private equity, etc.) running the farms now. And yes, innovators need to know that they're working in a harsh and hostile (people trying to steal your stuff) environment. As for instrumentation and micromanagement, Goodhart's law is good to know and that the outcomes are often toxic. IMHO we're effectively a corporation fueled oligarchy and the only question is whether we have a reformation or descend into a new dark age (techno-feudalism).
It’s funny, I noticed this in American road construction last week. A company sets out cones, a company marks where they will be working, a company operates traffic handling, a company does the road work, a company delivers materials… and so on and so on. All individually great at their respective duties, but the inefficiency between each task is amazingly horrific, wasted man hours waiting for one company to do their thing at the same time that integrates with the other companies, it’s why cones may cut off miles of roads for a few meters of road work, because the coming company cones for entire project area, instead of where that days work will happen.. etc. etc..
In government, we refer to this as working in silos. An organisation due to teaming with different divisions forgets we are one organisation working towards a shared goal. The gaps between are huge resulting in massive wastage, inefficiencies and ineffectivities. There is a lack of respect for other teams work as we rise and fall together. It's much worse when there is a star performer team which brings in big money or clients; they get the lions share of bonuses and perks and look down on those who did the monotonous supporting work to who found the client, the registrations, finance, etc.
Reality is that if you can come up with better way of handling complex projects - you are welcome to become extremely rich. So far nobody came up with a working way of organising multiple parties to work with 100% efficiency. Even when we are talking about 5 people group, not even talking about construction with thousands involved.
@@kmdsummon Good quality staff can do great things , you got to pay though . I have worked in many self employed building scenarios where a multitude of trades built the properties to a good standard, with interaction between tradesmen because they undrstand the building process, not just there own trade . Otherside , yeah i have worked on shithole sites as well where its chaos .
As I understand it, In many parts of the USA, this is due to unions having territoriality by tasks. I recall speaking with an artisan who was upset because at a venue in NY she couldnt just carry her own boxes from the loading bay, but had to wait for the official carrier union person to do so.
@@tmorganriley you are correct, but it’s the same in most unionized countries.. the NEC in Birmingham England, Earls court in London England and so many more.. the unions have to get their slice. I did a show in Oklahoma once, the contract said free electric, so when they charged me $125 I was not happy and was vocal, they explained, it was not for the electric, it was for the union worker to plug my extension cord into the socket/outlet.
@Rory Sutherland is one of the great communicators of our age and should basically be running the country...! I've been following Nudgestock since its inception - and the reason it's not as popular as it should be is because the modern world is driven by people seeking those that offer easy / quick answers (which in the vast majority of cases turn out to be either bullshit or very short-sighted). What Nudgestock is offering is questions - questions on how we should think, how we should collaborate and how we should approach the challenge of both business & community (once must not separate the two - conventional captialist economics has been doing that for the last 70 years and that's why we're all in the shit together)... and the majority of "business / social leaders" do not like questions... and nor does society in general.... because our entire education system is built on certainty and knowledge power structures... what Nudgestock is doing is challenging the fundamental basis of those. Keep up the great work team - challenge the status quo..!!
I’ve been working as an improvement specialist in healthcare and local government for over 20 years and what Rory is talking about is so relevant. So often there is a knee jerk reaction to focus on automation and totally miss the opportunity to innovate and improve the user experience. Billions is wasted implementing technology on the assumption that it will improve systems…Rory is right that organizations need to focus on innovative and inquiry based systems.
I'll tell you in one sentence the thing that will improve your service. End all contracted out and partnership arrangements. I have a long memory. I can date decline specifically. And it is the issue I state above.
@@SierraNovemberKilo Contractors and partnerships are an effective way of managing costs and risks. That is how many businesses and projects operate. I expect it won't change any time soon if at all. They are are not the cause 'in one sentence' as you believe.
The issue is the same across the board. You have management and business guys that don't know shit making decisions about how things should be done. Because they don't know shit they make bad decisions. This is why small companies with experts leading can create massively successful companies while the massive companies continue to either coast along or continuously fail at daily ops tasks. I work at a successful mid sized older company, and every day I shake my head at the idiocy I'm surrounded by. They hemorrhage cash and the only reason they are successful in the market is because of how big the margins are.
I'm so shattered. I'm the doorman. That's exactly what I do at work (software dev), and I've been fired twice and unpromoted by managers who liked and appreciated me by just didn't have beans to count. I even started believing I might be a bad egg, so it's nice to have a category to belong to. Just how to get it to pay the bills..
@@mikolowiskamikolowiska4993freelance is the worst for results. Like Steve Jobs said, consultants have never done anything since they don't stick around to see their output through.
@mikolowiskamikolowiska4993 - I used to be freelance. Successful. Then the gov't cracked down on freelance IT professionals. Right as that was coming down, I switched to being a consultant with a major tech firm and have managed to dance in the system for over 30 years. It hasn't been at all clear-cut.
This is literary what I am living. Ideas that come from engineers with huge experience are ignored, and same idea that come from manager who watched one UA-cam video is adopted, just engineers are not involved in development but just informed of changes that make not sens as management had no idea how to do it.
Professional managers are often not qualified in anything else. They will tell you can put a manager anywhere, the reality is their own insecurities, ambition, caring for staff matters a great deal but so does experience.
Add supermarket self check-outs, airport passport barriers, number plate recognition etc. All great when operative, but still need to be manned because they have such a high failure rate.
The "keep your job" effect is very real. I work as a consultant with leaders of financial services firms. They will almost always spend over the odds to bring in the most established technologies. Despite them being not as good, despite them being vastly more expensive. And the reason why is simple. Nobody ever got fired for making the decision to work with the market leader. And if it doesn't work, well, that's the problem of the person leading the implementation isn't it?
"Customer service is deteriorating because the constraints within which the people are operating are insufficient to handle any unusual requests" I think about this all the time. What a great quote.
As someone in customer service, I agree completely. Factor in the shortcomings of outsourcing and having to contend with contractors, whose motivations don't align with our companies goals, results in customer contact being an exercise in futility.
It's a perfect quote. As someone who works in high volume customer service, any non-standard requests are given a firm "no" as we have efficiency and time targets that we would be reprimanded for not achieving. In spite of our "customer first approach" philosophy, it is in fact anything but.
He's absolutely right, the problem is that decisions are being trickled downwards but nothing ever gets suggested upwards in a company it's always a few senior executives who are detached from the actual problems who are making all of the decisions.
Big one that comes to mind is the automatic reciept barriers in supermarkets now. Makes you feel like a criminal. makes you have to dig through your bag to retrieve your reciept, then you have to get the barcode just right for the barrier to open... all for what reason? so they need less security? less staff? horrible idea and actively avoid any shop with these barriers.
your also just not allowed to try anything, work in retail and you find a way to speed up shelf stacking for you in your shop, youll be told NO do it by the book they do everywhere in the country because your here to work not to think.
Unfortunately if you twist your ankle and they allowed you to do it not by the book they owe you compensation, otherwise they are covered by their regulations. It's risk management.
It's out of print, read the "Peter Principle" . It's about the tendency of... "people rise to their level of incompetence" in organizations. It's (rising to a level of incompetence) an insidious process. It is actually more complex and intesting than the simple "rising to one's level of incompetence". Also...it's a fun read, most of the examples are from schools as that was the aurhor's/inventors background.
The IT industry especially at client sites desperately needs this kind of approach. Rampant outsourcing and offshoring have gutted and weakened the very nervous systems of countless companies, organisations and even government departments to a point that now the cloud is turning sour (risk levels realised as much higher, costs soaring to 2-3 times that of on-prem) organisations can't re-establish their skillset and risk containment as they completely discarded this element when they outsourced in the first place. Consulting firms pushed this hard, took the money and ran so they are responsible yet take no responsibility whatsoever. The fly by night managers who pushed it probably moved on too... Now the world is becoming quite that much more dangerous this is the next major thing to deal with, it's not yet getting much coverage as many firms want the problem out of public discourse for the time being.
GDPR and cyber security is a huge driver of this too. Many government organisations, large businesses, etc., had their own software teams who'd build and maintain systems internally. Suddenly, the level of cyber security, impact to reputation and revenue due to GDPR infringements meant organisations need a 'credible' system that keeps them and their assets safe, or a team of very clever and competent software engineers that can provide security upgrades. Whilst regulation serves a purpose, it has definitely eradicated a lot of legacy and independent software solutions.
In management theory, there used to be something called the 'plant'. A board-member at very senior level who 1: would come up with off-the-wall solutions, and 2: wouldn't mind having them rejected. What happened to them?
My personal gripe is that the people who do not understand the value or application of creativity are often the people who can make the decision not to bring creatives in. Example: huge company X constructs a highway and does the landscaping as well. They treat the landscaping as an afterthought. It's efficient to put a tree every 4 meters because the machines work well that way and they are efficiency people, so they do it that way. The idea that you could get more out of this piece of industrialized nature doesn't occur to them. So they don't hire any creatives until the marketing part. And that's why we have nature everywhere that looks like a robot designed it. Bringing in creativity in early stages is uncomfortable because it changes the whole game. It can fundamentally change the way we do things. This is bad for the people who like control and predicability. But great for the project and for society as a whole. And ultimately great for the efficiency people as well because they can contribute to more meaningful outcomes and better business cases. But there might be failure. So let's just ignore all that potential. I'm guilty of this as well. The higher you are in the tree, the more invested you are in the status quo, the harder it is to give people who might upend things an equal seat at the table. Realising that we might be the dinosaurs in the way of progress is the first step in not becoming/staying one. Early stage creativity is often the part where you determine what's the question underneath all the questions. The essence of what the team is trying to accomplish. This is such an efficiency gain that it totally changes the game.
I work in R&D and care a lot about empowering my teammates to be creative and productive by removing their hurdles. My financial controllers care only about how much is spent and maintaining processes that stiffle people's productivity. There is ZERO consideration for how much value was created in the process. I try hard to have them simplify the life of people who develop the products so in the end, WE come out more productive. So far, I have been unable to have them understand what it's like being in my shoes.
My last three jobs I've been employed specifically to challenge the way things are done and I've stuck to that remit throughout. I've been lucky to have management that allowed and encouraged me.
Rory for pm!! I don't understand why this broadcast has been edited and has a voice over explanation. The only explanation needed is why there's an explanation.
It's very normal in teaching. Many, many people learn better when things are repeated, or summarised. Your learning style may not be like this, but assuming everyone is like you is another common fallacy in business.
I appreciated the bonus segment. What's annoying about all this stuff is how it all seems to be common sense except for the part where it's not common at all, and politicians seem to not want to understand this.
Yes, my thoughts exactly. That it’s at all necessary for common sense to be explained so extensively -complete with data, analytics, history lessons and metaphors - is absurd/worrisome/sad/etc.
That overwhelmingly resonated with what I read in a seminal book on (senior) leadership, called "The Drama of Leadership" by Patricia Pitcher, quite a while ago, where she identified three archetypical leadership personas, i.e. the Artist, the Craftsman, and the Technocrat (read: accountant). Her analysis of many, and a few exemplary blue-chip corporations consistently identified those failing were led by technocrat, whereas those led by Artists were thriving. (Extremely condensed conclusion from the book). Million-dollar-question: Can you odentify corporations led by Artists, by Craftsmen, and by Technocrats?
I can name one with all three: Steve Jobs was an artist. Steve Wozniak was a craftsman. Apple hasn't put out a revolutionary product since the technocrats took over. Look, it's the new Apple XX+ with a metal inlay on our old plastic case. How cool is that?
My company said "How do we increase value, without spending any more money, time, resources, or staff?" Answer: Make everyone work harder for less pay. They said "We love it" and the morale went right into the toilet angering the customers and hurting the value
Spot on with risk pooling. I work in IT services, and every contract has to have its own risk pool, contingency fee. That is a heavy burden on each proposal and effectively castigates each client and client team, whereas with risk pooling, after appropriate reviews of course, the entire corporation = the full set of clients can share the risk as agreed in the reviews, and the client teams only need to appropriate a much smaller risk fee, or potentially none, depending on the risk profile of the project.
The biggest problem is that all success is claimed by the owners. All failure is pushed on the worker or a scapegoat. There is too smal of an incentive for a worker to take risks.
The perfect example is the "invention" of the light bulb (actually it was the making a practical working example of one). It was made practical by trying all sorts of various materials to see what would make the best filament. This would have involved hours of tedious work. Did Edison do all that? I imagine it was one of his employees at Menlo Park but it is Edison who gets remembered.
Micro efficency leads to Macro indigenous. Is why I believe productivity has disappeared over the last 20 years. We need to get back to real productivity over cost cutting.
Biggest bullshit is when you're paid shit because company defined your role as being narrow, but your manager lives in the past and thinks it's wide. Hence, quiet quitting and the complaint how nobody wants to work anymore. If you're compensated with the arithmetic applied to lowest common denominator, there's no reason to ever perform beyond that.
Definitely.. Hr department assessment of jobs is often woefully inadequate. I managed a bidding department... We were classified along with office admin as we 'produced documents' 😳😳
Abilene paradox. No one in an erudite business professors family wanted to go to Abilene, TX for ice cream on Sunday after church in the middle of a hot Texas summer. No one spoke up because they thought everyone else wanted to go. They went anyways in a car before the era of air conditioning. When they got there, the ice cream store was closed.
My wife studied business management at univeristy they taught this. Why is it commonplace for business managers to not know this and not be doing this? Do senior leaders have no business management training? Did they forget their education? How are they in highly paid jobs and lack this expertise?
From my observation they get the job because they know someone. Their wife is the HR manager, their brother and law is looking for a job, Johnny got me a good deal on that boat I purchased so hey Johnny come and work on my project, bring you wife too I will make a position available no problem, or give the job to old mate cause he drinks with me. It is not what you know it is who you know. Senior managers in construction are some of the least educated and skilled in the company. They know, and are willing to do, what needs to be done, which is f**k over the client and their own employees. 🙄
You quickly learn that there is. I upside to take any risky decisions. You are not awarded for making bets that pay off but for adhering company policy etc 😅
As a manager myself with a MSc in Business Economics and close to 20 year experience some insights: - there is a category managers that are unable to promote change. They get the job as they do the job for years and than the manager position becomes available. Their education level is usually in the range from low to medium. They gained the position on knowing a current trick but lack imagination for true change. - like every employee: there are good and bad managers. Its not an uniform group - you can have good managers but if he or she has to obey a bad higher level manager that severly hinders their output. In general, they will jobswitch in the end. - a telltale sign of a good manager is that they care and have an eye for things outside of their department or area. - the reason bad managers are staying can have a several different reasons. Relational (i.e. family), scarcity to find better replacement, time to guide such a change not currently available at director level due to higher priority issues, poor judgement on director level.
The Cost of Efficiency In search of speed, we chase the small, Micro gains, efficiency's call. We trim the tasks, reduce the role, And in the cracks, we lose the soul. A doorman once, with warmth and grace, Now gone, replaced by cold, blank space. For every door that smoothly slides, The value of connection hides. We count the cost, we chase the gain, But what we lose is hard to name. The smile, the nod, the gentle care, That once was present everywhere. Left brain rules, with data keen, But forgets what can't be seen. A touch, a glance, a moment's pause- These human things don't fit the laws. So here's the truth, a simple plea: Efficiency can blind us, see, That macro costs in heart and mind Come when we leave the whole behind.
The "micro efficiency leading to macro inefficiency" reminds a phrase coined by Cory Doctorow; "enshitification", it's the slow death of a good online platform that initially was good for end users, which is then optimised for business user (since they are willing to pay more), followed by being optimised for rent seeking, and finally the platform dies because it is shit for everyone, end users, businesses, and finally shit rolls downhill and finally affects the shareholders when the revenue dies.
Doorman and other direct contact staff in some of the De Luxe hotels used to pay a retainer to the hotel. This was because they could make big money as "gofers" even as paid companions, accompanying lonely millionaires at events.
I’m reminded of something David Willets (UK politician) complained about… he said it is impossible for politicians to safely do double-blind trials (which is a similar approach to having bees who ignore the waggle dance) because if the trial proves a failure the press will complain that ‘money had been wasted’ on a dumb trial, and if it proves a success, the press will complain that the idea should have been rolled out faster. So the system forces politicians who are media-savvy to implement every idea they have without testing it first. Then they’re safe… they have ‘done their job’, and nobody can point to proof that they were wrong.
Very very good as always. Having just 6.6k views is a sad reflection on where we’re at….linear & legacy habitual behaviours rule. So much benefit for so many people in videos like this
Banks are one of the worst offenders for getting rid of all staff and think that customers like it. We don’t. Does anyone actually phone their bank to ask for the balance? Surely everyone with a phone has a bank app and can see their balance so why on Earth do we have to waste time responding to an automated question asking if we want to know our balance?
Absolutely. 90% of the functions we used to need a teller for can be done on a smart-phone app. When we DO phone a bank, it’s an awkward inquiry/service that’s a bit difficult to put into a small sentence. Yet, you’re confronted with a speech-recognition robot designed to put you into one of three pre-determined boxes.
I think you'd be surprised tbh, I bet a lot of old people still call to find out they're balance. I know a few people that refuse to use modern banking apps and will still only check the balance at a ATM machine.
The annoying thing with banks is how their fees increase for the convenience of them building an interface so that you can do the job the bank used to do but now you have to do it yourself. They now also don't want to have individual ATMs anymore, they're now pooling those so that you have to go to one location, not a number of them for banks all over town. You now need to displace yourself a lot further just to get some cash, or you have to ask for cash in the grocery store [you have a bill, you ask 'please add 50 pesos to that', they give you cash that gets withdrawn from your account]. Banks want to make money, they're ferociously bad at it because you now have banks losing money because there's always fewer people working in banks that could show them a different direction. That's not important anymore. The 'we're your bank' people want to do literally anything that doesn't involve actually talking to their customers.
and than if you have a complaint you have to call their service line which takes forever and if you finally have someone on the phone thay do NOT have any clue what your complaint is!
16:45 There is a hidden misunderstanding in this statement. For example, in Poland, self-service checkouts have been so successful that now in large discount stores it is difficult to find a salesperson sitting behind the checkout. 90% goes automictic.
About the customer service example: I've been in CS and the problem is that the delivery companies are highly efficiënt at the primary process of getting something somewhere fast, but also highly inflexible. Communication often takes longer than it takes them to make another delivery to the same adress. So it's not a great example of customer service deteriorating, even though I agree with him.
This is a good point. I think one of the main reasons Amazon allows bad delivery drivers to keep working is there’s no accountability. If they destroy one of my purchases by tossing it onto concrete, then there’s no way I can shout at THAT delivery driver. He has no feedback on his performance. Feedback is absolutely crucial, yet it’s missing in lots of British life now - to criticise is labelled “toxic” and you’re laughed at, when you just want excellence.
Shops are taking out the human interaction element of shopping making it similar to shopping online, therefore we dont bother going to the shop we just buy online for the same level of service and we dont have to leave the house.
The most valuable and memorable part of my MBA studies was Creativity. I was described as great at seeing the bigger picture or thinking laterally in my subsequent career. It was more useful than I business finance
I don't understand how the Nudge Podcast isn't more popular. I loved rory's ideas about this and I agree with him too many businesses lose sight on what creativity can provide. I am glad I watched this as I am going to apply these principles to my own business right now. Thank you for the information and the video much love love Nudge podcast
Because they censor, nobody likes that today, people start hearing beeps and the tune away, this podcast may think they are in 1950s America, too much heavy editing to overexplain and beeping on top of their guests' voices, that's very daft.
I work at big company, following our smaller company merging. Where we make diagnostic systems. I can tell you that I had a lot more creative input about what the customers say and do when it was a small company. Now for some reason the marketing department is making decisions about what we should be doing - often by copying competitor,s, or from some dodgy market report.
He’s a man on a mission to get humans and creativity at the helm of life again. Good for you Rory! Keep going. We are creation itself. Let us dream and create ❤🎉
Whilst I don't advocate a hive mind. I believe that instead of people being left to decide on careers, most of us would love to have bern given a path. Schools need to more thoroughly assess children not to fit in a box but to find the best box for them. Less than 10%of kids know what they are good at and many have no idea all of their life. If we knew what society needs. For instance we need particle physicists but few can do this, we need road sweepers too but few want to do this. Why not make all jobs socially important and paying a good wage. That way everyone will feel valued. There will be less crime, depression and social resentment.
As a child in África in the 70s our schools syllabus was complete if you compare It to today. At 10 yrs we had people in different Jobs give us talks, had a day for clubs which we were encouraged to create. Today education thinks only about .....
@@Micheph In England we have no excuse for poorly educating people. Education is a political football here. Worse still, some state schools have been given to for profit companies to run. This directly gives state funds to profit hungry individuals. Fraud and corruption are the top items on their curriculum.
Recently stayed in a lovely old inn, filled with lovely furniture, decorated beautifully. Breakfast was a mess why because the service was buffet style, which is ok. The downsize being we were up and down for crockery, cutlery, condiments etc. The food was very good but we won't be going back because that little bit of service fell down.
One of the seminal catastrophes for business and finance were the MBA, and the Jack Walsh style of management resulting in the desolation of the business due to the relentless pursuit of unsustainable and myopic short term gains. The single most profitable position for automation in businesses is management because it eliminates two key causes for major friction: managerial ego and ineptitude (Peter principle).
It's not easy to have the motivation to be an explorer in the company when your manager regularly takes credit for your work and steals your ideas, even plagiarising work.
I totally agree that customer service has this robotic style of handling things in the UK. One thing I love about living in Italy (ok, and despise every now and then!) is that most of the time, things aren't black or white. It is the persitence of the grey areas that help us get along. Even laws are ' open to interpretation'.
Modern industry is geared to pick low hanging fruit. Industry doesn't want to deal with individual problems, no oddities, it is geared accommodate the easy to service customer. Customers with requirements outside this model can either conform or shop elsewhere.
This is EXACTLY why the use of Enterprise Architects in companies is so powerful. But companies don't understand or use them properly (or at all) which is why PEAF exists.
The Internet is basically a big fat example of getting rid of the doorman. It's the primary reason why addictions have risen while "life has gotten better".
It isn't just a sharable upside but is a replicatable upside. The bees that ignore the waggle dance are called scout bees. They have this role - they are not "ignoring" the information. In research there should be an allowance for high risk research to discover opportunities.
Oddly I think in supermarkets that automatic checkouts are a better experience - because manned checkouts are very false and rushed interactions anyhow and they involve more waiting. I do agree with the general premise though. Exploring is important.
Rory is definitely my kind of thinker, at work when people ask what my role is I answer ‘jack of all trades’… I might rephrase that to ‘I’m the explorer!’
As a software engineer ... When you find a one off issue, you then optimize for that one off issue. The next time that thing comes up (after the feature is complete) it's not a 36 hour problem. And, in the mean time the general system is saving hundreds of hours of work per pay cycle. Yes, it's an issue when you find a shortcoming in the design of the system. Then you add a feature to handle it so the next time it comes up it's inconsequential. Should someone have a macro view of a problem that is bouncing around a bunch and know to take a closer look at it before it's been stuck in limbo for 36 work hours? Yes. Yes, that should also be a thing. Identify the problem. Solve it as a one off issue. Make the request for the new feature to account for it next time and get it into the backlog of issues for the team to take care of prioritized at whatever level the team feels it should be at (based on frequency ... not high if it's not come up before, also based on the customer impact, and also based on the cost to the organization). As an aside ... another system to track and identify these one off problems may not be challenging to implement either. In fact, I would find it extremely hard to believe that the system already in place didn't account for this to allow for metrics on how long things were taking and call attention to things that were handled too slowly while looking for similarities to find areas for improvement.
It's famous that Sony's walkman was born out of a side project because Masaru Ibuka wanted something lighter to carry around to listen to music when traveling. Creativity can come from ideas of individual employees that could define the company's success in the future.
“A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls.” -R.W. Emerson
I never understood why businesses must constantly grow. If there is a good concept that works, why is it necessary for it to be bigger and globalised and different every year?
I don't think it is necessarily the growth per se but rather the constant reinventing of the company. Without that it is easy for a company to stagnate and not be able to respond to market changes.
__ On paper you'd think Rory is the absolute opposite of everything I stand for as a philosopher and dreamer and hippie who hates big corporations, yet I could listen to him talk all day. It isn't just that he's hypnotized me, with his cadences, it's that there's a sort of deep honesty to him. Honesty in the belly of the beast!
I work for a company that regularly tasks two teams with a goal, independently. Sounds like what is being suggested here - except that the team that succeeds is kept on and the other team is fired.
The worst paradox is that creativity thrives in the face of difficulty, a problem to solve. But at the same time, companies are less open to risk creative solutions when they have too many problems (economic problems especially)
Our company has a project management department. One of them hung a t shirt on their office wall that read, 'i solve problems you didn't know you had in ways you can't understand'. Which i corrected one night to, 'i create problems you didn't know you had in ways i can't understand'. 😂
I was so exasperated by the decisions management were making I doubted my own sanity. Passing the Mensa test in the top 1/2% reassured me I'm not the problem.
I have a friend that works as a call center representative for a credit card. They get given congratulated for waving more fees than anyone else on the team. They also get given a monthly budget to give to people who call, for any reason they deem necessary.
I have flying school. We make daily bookings and are written down in a A4 folder with daily sheets. A business owner supplied us some aircraft. He said why don't you do online bookings, i have a system.........having no experience of running a school. We said no, our system as worked for 40 years, we are not changing. Online system would be a right pain for us.
The larger a company becomes (based simply on number of employees) the number of rules go up exponentially until a company can no longer pivot and a ASAP response takes weeks. It’s no wonder new technology comes out of someone’s garage.
6:22 I am the rogue bee in the software development world. I’m highly creative with 30 years solid experience and I can’t get hired right now. There are a lot of reasons for that, I’m sure, but one of them is, I bring my creativity to my job every day. Which means I don’t often have cookie cutter solutions. There is a place for that kind of work. But modern consultancy says that’s the *only* kind of work they should be doing. I’ve come in and solved problems the core developers struggled with for two years in a matter of days. Am I so much smarter? Probably not. But my ADHD brain doesn’t work like everyone else’s. And so I often see possibilities others don’t. What happens to people like me is essentially some boss bee comes along and cuts off our wings to keep us “grounded.” Then wonder why our ability to deliver honey has cratered. Letting a group of well suited individuals deviate from the norm is a powerful tool for growth. Which, I believe is Rory’s point. I need a boss with at least that aspect of his perspective. I don’t know much else about him at this point so I can’t speak to anything else.
Rory is absolutely correct on the brexit side of things, i didnt know how to put it into words but that is exactly the reason i voted leave.. and in a way i wish I hadnt now as Boris has destroyed the UK as a result
Absolutely fantastic this video aswell as the bonus episode too explains why house orices have skyrocketed and why we all feel like we just live to work these days
Rory is a genius. His mind works on 1 million different caliber than us regular people mind could never get to and he knows what the world is. That’s how he does what he does. It’s that simple.
Oh there is another one: capable people aren't retained. Instead of giving a raise to someone 10y in a crucial position they'd rather hire 3 people to replace the position, each of them more expensive. HR is mental.
Interesting argument, you are close to something. Remember when we had a guy that operated the elevator? Remember when we had serfs running the land rather than machines? You're correct in that we need more creative thinking, but adaptability is more important. More than happy to discuss where your argument can improve.
Saw this happen with university security. They were university employees and then became contractors. As employees they spotted a leaking roof, contained a flood, ensured the buildings heating was working. As contractors they allowed a flood to destroy hundereds of thousands of pounds of equipment because it wasnt their job.
Contractor here and I am the director
Completely agree with the above statement
And the simple reason for this, is as a contractor, we are given a purchase order that we are to assign an invoice to. On that purchase order is a list of tasks/jobs that we can allocate cost and invoice to.
If we do a job outside of that scope, we don’t get paid for it. We actually get in trouble for doing it.
Hence, contractors will do what they are allocated to be paid for. If they can’t charge for the job
It doesn’t get done.
The biggest problem is the boss who thinks this system works. It never does.
But it pays way more than a salary ever will. And employee’s mean absolutely nothing to big companies. There not even numbers anymore. They are now considered liabilities
Southampton? ;)
@@dengueberries
Nah, over the stretch in Australia. But we have exactly the same issues.
The world is slowly turning around and realising these bosses need to go but.
@@Signaturegen2Employees ARE liabilities in most every way. As a now retired, former employee I very much resent the role government and academia have had in making me such a liability. Just because a large number of ignorant whiners can be fooled by con artist politicians into thinking someone else should take care of them all the time, they’ve ruined so much progress.
Wait, people are motivated by loyalty?!?!?!
Who would've known
We don't hear enough about how modern technology and companies has absolutely KILLED customer service. It's practically impossible to call a company and speak to a human being these days. It's infuriating!
Even when you do talk to a human they have no power and usually not even the knowledge to actually solve the issue. All they're allowed to do is follow a script. Even if they know what to do they either have no permissions in the system to do so, or if they do have the ability they risk being terminated for going off script. On top of that, they're usually tracked by how many issues they escalate, so even transferring you to someone who can exercise judgement and solve your issue can carry a termination risk.
I hate how clicking the "contact us" button brings up the "contact us" page.
@bipl8989 and when they want feedback they give you options to choose from.
@@counterflow5719 Never the options I need either. Nor in the Help section. With 5 pages of info to fill in, then it fails to post.
There is a company named Telus in Canada and the majority of their agents are English as a second language. A process that involves collecting personal details that should take 1o minutes takes these agents over 60 minutes as they struggle with a script that is as ineffective as I've ever heard. They are required to repeat themselves multiple times and keep apologizing for going on hold.
Absolutely correct Rory. “Society kills the dreamers”, and the dreamers are always the catalyst for invention and innovation.
The guy who created the QR code as we know it is a Denso employee, probably saved the rest of his working career.
Hitler was a dreamer who dreamt a bit too hard.
There's an evolutionary reason for that, too. It's important to the survival of the hive that only a small minority of bees are explorers.
and something the dreamer are even lockup in rooms with padded walls, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯invention come form innovation, of better wheel, without all wheels today may of square or something else today
@@rbettsx humans are not bees, but I get your meaning. The question is, are humans still evolving or are the constraints placed on explorers/dreamers now so great that they no longer perform their functions.
Ah Rory Sutherland. I listen to him when I’m going slightly insane. A good antidote to the head scratching bland madness of the modern world.
The head scratching is caused by alienation, inequality and lack of humane logicality. Those are all caused by capitalism.
To further exacerbate the problem in a corporatocracy, if an individual takes a chance and it succeeds, the reward is far less than the punishment would be for a failure. Successes are shared within the organisation, losses are individualised.
For an individual, the upside gain is not worth the downside risk. This is why the top creatives leave and function best in small startup type companies.
As creative indivoduals, we're not ignoring the waggle dance, btw, it's just not worth taking a risk.
Yeah, it is a fascinating double standard for corporations - internally we have the old proverb "Success has many fathers and failure is an orphan," yet externally we have (as you note) "failures are individualised and success is shared." We live in an age where corporate entities have greater rights than citizens - wild when you think about it.
The other thing that is interesting is that once a corporate entity operationalises, you are rewarded for consistency/predictability and punished for the unexpected - be it good or bad. I remember I saved an organisation millions of dollars and we were punished for saving too much money!
There's one more step in that process for why innovators don't work / thrive / engage in large organizations: the person doing the innovating does not themselves reap the benefit / reward for the innovation when it works. Someone else is going to 'yoink!' the idea, sell it as their own and walk away with the benefits.
Rory's message with regards to customer service is spot on: customer facing people have to follow scripts, procedures and policies and don't get the freedom of leeway in dealing with problems outside of the scope they're assigned. It wants to quantify everything according to a metric but we did not evolve for thinking inside of the small boxes we're being forced into. The 'data-driven' people are exhilarated about how everything follows a metric but they sacrifice everything to that.
To make it even worse, because now every little thing a person does is measured and quantified they're being held liable for anything and everything they do. I remember reading 'don't micromanage people' and the next thing we do is to deploy technologies the sole purpose of which is to micromanage people. One example that stands out is a technology that looks at a programmer's camera to see, every 10 minutes, whether they're at their keyboard working. Because that's what you are as a programmer: you're a glorified typist. If you're not at your keyboard for that period you don't get paid AND you get yelled at. Because not only is it valuable reduce every job to the minimum of what the role requires, it's apparently also valuable to have people spend their day controlling that kind of behavior to 'ensure' productivity.
We are humans, we have evolved to be humans, and we are reducing ourselves to being a cough in the machine because there are other humans who are Dunning-Krugering themselves through life because they simply cannot perceive any added value of what humans can deliver with regards how a corporation relates to the world at large than what their spreadsheet tells them.
Humans are reducing themselves to a production factor. Something that has to justify its usefulness in life and the costs it generates. We really are too fucking stupid to live.
@@howardtreesong4860 Yeah, it really seems as if we're back to a time of "robber barons" i.e. we're in a second gilded age. We have the robbers (private equity, etc.) running the farms now. And yes, innovators need to know that they're working in a harsh and hostile (people trying to steal your stuff) environment. As for instrumentation and micromanagement, Goodhart's law is good to know and that the outcomes are often toxic. IMHO we're effectively a corporation fueled oligarchy and the only question is whether we have a reformation or descend into a new dark age (techno-feudalism).
It’s funny, I noticed this in American road construction last week. A company sets out cones, a company marks where they will be working, a company operates traffic handling, a company does the road work, a company delivers materials… and so on and so on. All individually great at their respective duties, but the inefficiency between each task is amazingly horrific, wasted man hours waiting for one company to do their thing at the same time that integrates with the other companies, it’s why cones may cut off miles of roads for a few meters of road work, because the coming company cones for entire project area, instead of where that days work will happen.. etc. etc..
In government, we refer to this as working in silos.
An organisation due to teaming with different divisions forgets we are one organisation working towards a shared goal. The gaps between are huge resulting in massive wastage, inefficiencies and ineffectivities.
There is a lack of respect for other teams work as we rise and fall together. It's much worse when there is a star performer team which brings in big money or clients; they get the lions share of bonuses and perks and look down on those who did the monotonous supporting work to who found the client, the registrations, finance, etc.
Reality is that if you can come up with better way of handling complex projects - you are welcome to become extremely rich. So far nobody came up with a working way of organising multiple parties to work with 100% efficiency. Even when we are talking about 5 people group, not even talking about construction with thousands involved.
@@kmdsummon Good quality staff can do great things , you got to pay though . I have worked in many self employed building scenarios where a multitude of trades built the properties to a good standard, with interaction between tradesmen because they undrstand the building process, not just there own trade . Otherside , yeah i have worked on shithole sites as well where its chaos .
As I understand it, In many parts of the USA, this is due to unions having territoriality by tasks. I recall speaking with an artisan who was upset because at a venue in NY she couldnt just carry her own boxes from the loading bay, but had to wait for the official carrier union person to do so.
@@tmorganriley you are correct, but it’s the same in most unionized countries.. the NEC in Birmingham England, Earls court in London England and so many more.. the unions have to get their slice. I did a show in Oklahoma once, the contract said free electric, so when they charged me $125 I was not happy and was vocal, they explained, it was not for the electric, it was for the union worker to plug my extension cord into the socket/outlet.
@Rory Sutherland is one of the great communicators of our age and should basically be running the country...! I've been following Nudgestock since its inception - and the reason it's not as popular as it should be is because the modern world is driven by people seeking those that offer easy / quick answers (which in the vast majority of cases turn out to be either bullshit or very short-sighted). What Nudgestock is offering is questions - questions on how we should think, how we should collaborate and how we should approach the challenge of both business & community (once must not separate the two - conventional captialist economics has been doing that for the last 70 years and that's why we're all in the shit together)... and the majority of "business / social leaders" do not like questions... and nor does society in general.... because our entire education system is built on certainty and knowledge power structures... what Nudgestock is doing is challenging the fundamental basis of those. Keep up the great work team - challenge the status quo..!!
100% Rory for PM
Really? All he ever does is tell weak analogies about bees in a posh accent.
Business has always been separate from the community. It's there to get the most money out of the community, not to "serve" it or "care" for it.
@@davidcobb77weak for a surface level thinker like you.
I’ve been working as an improvement specialist in healthcare and local government for over 20 years and what Rory is talking about is so relevant. So often there is a knee jerk reaction to focus on automation and totally miss the opportunity to innovate and improve the user experience. Billions is wasted implementing technology on the assumption that it will improve systems…Rory is right that organizations need to focus on innovative and inquiry based systems.
Not wasted! It is working as intended by the tech companies. They love all the money that's wasted on them.
I'll tell you in one sentence the thing that will improve your service. End all contracted out and partnership arrangements. I have a long memory. I can date decline specifically. And it is the issue I state above.
@@SierraNovemberKilo Contractors and partnerships are an effective way of managing costs and risks. That is how many businesses and projects operate. I expect it won't change any time soon if at all. They are are not the cause 'in one sentence' as you believe.
The issue is the same across the board. You have management and business guys that don't know shit making decisions about how things should be done. Because they don't know shit they make bad decisions. This is why small companies with experts leading can create massively successful companies while the massive companies continue to either coast along or continuously fail at daily ops tasks.
I work at a successful mid sized older company, and every day I shake my head at the idiocy I'm surrounded by. They hemorrhage cash and the only reason they are successful in the market is because of how big the margins are.
I'm so shattered. I'm the doorman. That's exactly what I do at work (software dev), and I've been fired twice and unpromoted by managers who liked and appreciated me by just didn't have beans to count.
I even started believing I might be a bad egg, so it's nice to have a category to belong to.
Just how to get it to pay the bills..
Freelance
@@mikolowiskamikolowiska4993freelance is the worst for results. Like Steve Jobs said, consultants have never done anything since they don't stick around to see their output through.
@mikolowiskamikolowiska4993 - I used to be freelance. Successful. Then the gov't cracked down on freelance IT professionals. Right as that was coming down, I switched to being a consultant with a major tech firm and have managed to dance in the system for over 30 years. It hasn't been at all clear-cut.
This is literary what I am living. Ideas that come from engineers with huge experience are ignored, and same idea that come from manager who watched one UA-cam video is adopted, just engineers are not involved in development but just informed of changes that make not sens as management had no idea how to do it.
Also replacing people thinking about what they are doing with process obedience is killing industries.
A smart engineer learns business and goes and makes mad money on his own.
Professional managers are often not qualified in anything else. They will tell you can put a manager anywhere, the reality is their own insecurities, ambition, caring for staff matters a great deal but so does experience.
😂 💯
Add supermarket self check-outs, airport passport barriers, number plate recognition etc. All great when operative, but still need to be manned because they have such a high failure rate.
The "keep your job" effect is very real. I work as a consultant with leaders of financial services firms. They will almost always spend over the odds to bring in the most established technologies. Despite them being not as good, despite them being vastly more expensive. And the reason why is simple. Nobody ever got fired for making the decision to work with the market leader. And if it doesn't work, well, that's the problem of the person leading the implementation isn't it?
True, and those who survive the office politics are those who avoid making any decisions at all. Unless they are amazingly talented
"Customer service is deteriorating because the constraints within which the people are operating are insufficient to handle any unusual requests"
I think about this all the time. What a great quote.
As someone in customer service, I agree completely. Factor in the shortcomings of outsourcing and having to contend with contractors, whose motivations don't align with our companies goals, results in customer contact being an exercise in futility.
It's a perfect quote. As someone who works in high volume customer service, any non-standard requests are given a firm "no" as we have efficiency and time targets that we would be reprimanded for not achieving. In spite of our "customer first approach" philosophy, it is in fact anything but.
He's absolutely right, the problem is that decisions are being trickled downwards but nothing ever gets suggested upwards in a company it's always a few senior executives who are detached from the actual problems who are making all of the decisions.
Big one that comes to mind is the automatic reciept barriers in supermarkets now. Makes you feel like a criminal. makes you have to dig through your bag to retrieve your reciept, then you have to get the barcode just right for the barrier to open... all for what reason? so they need less security? less staff?
horrible idea and actively avoid any shop with these barriers.
And they have the cheek to ask you whether you want a receipt!! 😳😳
They keep breaking down & 80% of people just tailgate or leave by the entry gate when a customer walks in. Human nature.
your also just not allowed to try anything, work in retail and you find a way to speed up shelf stacking for you in your shop, youll be told NO do it by the book they do everywhere in the country because your here to work not to think.
Unfortunately if you twist your ankle and they allowed you to do it not by the book they owe you compensation, otherwise they are covered by their regulations. It's risk management.
It's out of print, read the "Peter Principle" . It's about the tendency of... "people rise to their level of incompetence" in organizations. It's (rising to a level of incompetence) an insidious process. It is actually more complex and intesting than the simple "rising to one's level of incompetence". Also...it's a fun read, most of the examples are from schools as that was the aurhor's/inventors background.
The IT industry especially at client sites desperately needs this kind of approach. Rampant outsourcing and offshoring have gutted and weakened the very nervous systems of countless companies, organisations and even government departments to a point that now the cloud is turning sour (risk levels realised as much higher, costs soaring to 2-3 times that of on-prem) organisations can't re-establish their skillset and risk containment as they completely discarded this element when they outsourced in the first place. Consulting firms pushed this hard, took the money and ran so they are responsible yet take no responsibility whatsoever. The fly by night managers who pushed it probably moved on too...
Now the world is becoming quite that much more dangerous this is the next major thing to deal with, it's not yet getting much coverage as many firms want the problem out of public discourse for the time being.
GDPR and cyber security is a huge driver of this too. Many government organisations, large businesses, etc., had their own software teams who'd build and maintain systems internally. Suddenly, the level of cyber security, impact to reputation and revenue due to GDPR infringements meant organisations need a 'credible' system that keeps them and their assets safe, or a team of very clever and competent software engineers that can provide security upgrades. Whilst regulation serves a purpose, it has definitely eradicated a lot of legacy and independent software solutions.
In management theory, there used to be something called the 'plant'. A board-member at very senior level who 1: would come up with off-the-wall solutions, and 2: wouldn't mind having them rejected. What happened to them?
My personal gripe is that the people who do not understand the value or application of creativity are often the people who can make the decision not to bring creatives in. Example: huge company X constructs a highway and does the landscaping as well. They treat the landscaping as an afterthought. It's efficient to put a tree every 4 meters because the machines work well that way and they are efficiency people, so they do it that way. The idea that you could get more out of this piece of industrialized nature doesn't occur to them. So they don't hire any creatives until the marketing part. And that's why we have nature everywhere that looks like a robot designed it.
Bringing in creativity in early stages is uncomfortable because it changes the whole game. It can fundamentally change the way we do things. This is bad for the people who like control and predicability. But great for the project and for society as a whole. And ultimately great for the efficiency people as well because they can contribute to more meaningful outcomes and better business cases. But there might be failure. So let's just ignore all that potential. I'm guilty of this as well. The higher you are in the tree, the more invested you are in the status quo, the harder it is to give people who might upend things an equal seat at the table. Realising that we might be the dinosaurs in the way of progress is the first step in not becoming/staying one.
Early stage creativity is often the part where you determine what's the question underneath all the questions. The essence of what the team is trying to accomplish. This is such an efficiency gain that it totally changes the game.
Very well said.
I work in R&D and care a lot about empowering my teammates to be creative and productive by removing their hurdles. My financial controllers care only about how much is spent and maintaining processes that stiffle people's productivity. There is ZERO consideration for how much value was created in the process. I try hard to have them simplify the life of people who develop the products so in the end, WE come out more productive. So far, I have been unable to have them understand what it's like being in my shoes.
My last three jobs I've been employed specifically to challenge the way things are done and I've stuck to that remit throughout. I've been lucky to have management that allowed and encouraged me.
Rory for pm!!
I don't understand why this broadcast has been edited and has a voice over explanation. The only explanation needed is why there's an explanation.
Yes, just repetition.
Like that annoying guy on Dragon's Den who just repeats what was already shown.
Maybe it's for stupid people.
It's very normal in teaching. Many, many people learn better when things are repeated, or summarised.
Your learning style may not be like this, but assuming everyone is like you is another common fallacy in business.
I appreciated the bonus segment. What's annoying about all this stuff is how it all seems to be common sense except for the part where it's not common at all, and politicians seem to not want to understand this.
Yes, my thoughts exactly. That it’s at all necessary for common sense to be explained so extensively -complete with data, analytics, history lessons and metaphors - is absurd/worrisome/sad/etc.
That overwhelmingly resonated with what I read in a seminal book on (senior) leadership, called "The Drama of Leadership" by Patricia Pitcher, quite a while ago, where she identified three archetypical leadership personas, i.e. the Artist, the Craftsman, and the Technocrat (read: accountant). Her analysis of many, and a few exemplary blue-chip corporations consistently identified those failing were led by technocrat, whereas those led by Artists were thriving. (Extremely condensed conclusion from the book).
Million-dollar-question: Can you odentify corporations led by Artists, by Craftsmen, and by Technocrats?
I can name one with all three: Steve Jobs was an artist. Steve Wozniak was a craftsman. Apple hasn't put out a revolutionary product since the technocrats took over.
Look, it's the new Apple XX+ with a metal inlay on our old plastic case. How cool is that?
Hardly any Artists are allowed in any senior role at this point. Hardly in Junior roles either.
Everyone most conform to be a cog in the Machine 😅
My company said "How do we increase value, without spending any more money, time, resources, or staff?" Answer: Make everyone work harder for less pay. They said "We love it" and the morale went right into the toilet angering the customers and hurting the value
Spot on with risk pooling. I work in IT services, and every contract has to have its own risk pool, contingency fee. That is a heavy burden on each proposal and effectively castigates each client and client team, whereas with risk pooling, after appropriate reviews of course, the entire corporation = the full set of clients can share the risk as agreed in the reviews, and the client teams only need to appropriate a much smaller risk fee, or potentially none, depending on the risk profile of the project.
The biggest problem is that all success is claimed by the owners. All failure is pushed on the worker or a scapegoat. There is too smal of an incentive for a worker to take risks.
The perfect example is the "invention" of the light bulb (actually it was the making a practical working example of one). It was made practical by trying all sorts of various materials to see what would make the best filament. This would have involved hours of tedious work. Did Edison do all that? I imagine it was one of his employees at Menlo Park but it is Edison who gets remembered.
Micro efficency leads to Macro indigenous. Is why I believe productivity has disappeared over the last 20 years. We need to get back to real productivity over cost cutting.
Biggest bullshit is when you're paid shit because company defined your role as being narrow, but your manager lives in the past and thinks it's wide.
Hence, quiet quitting and the complaint how nobody wants to work anymore.
If you're compensated with the arithmetic applied to lowest common denominator, there's no reason to ever perform beyond that.
Definitely.. Hr department assessment of jobs is often woefully inadequate. I managed a bidding department... We were classified along with office admin as we 'produced documents' 😳😳
Abilene paradox. No one in an erudite business professors family wanted to go to Abilene, TX for ice cream on Sunday after church in the middle of a hot Texas summer. No one spoke up because they thought everyone else wanted to go. They went anyways in a car before the era of air conditioning. When they got there, the ice cream store was closed.
My wife studied business management at univeristy they taught this. Why is it commonplace for business managers to not know this and not be doing this? Do senior leaders have no business management training? Did they forget their education? How are they in highly paid jobs and lack this expertise?
From my observation they get the job because they know someone. Their wife is the HR manager, their brother and law is looking for a job, Johnny got me a good deal on that boat I purchased so hey Johnny come and work on my project, bring you wife too I will make a position available no problem, or give the job to old mate cause he drinks with me. It is not what you know it is who you know. Senior managers in construction are some of the least educated and skilled in the company. They know, and are willing to do, what needs to be done, which is f**k over the client and their own employees. 🙄
You quickly learn that there is. I upside to take any risky decisions. You are not awarded for making bets that pay off but for adhering company policy etc 😅
As a manager myself with a MSc in Business Economics and close to 20 year experience some insights:
- there is a category managers that are unable to promote change. They get the job as they do the job for years and than the manager position becomes available. Their education level is usually in the range from low to medium. They gained the position on knowing a current trick but lack imagination for true change.
- like every employee: there are good and bad managers. Its not an uniform group
- you can have good managers but if he or she has to obey a bad higher level manager that severly hinders their output. In general, they will jobswitch in the end.
- a telltale sign of a good manager is that they care and have an eye for things outside of their department or area.
- the reason bad managers are staying can have a several different reasons. Relational (i.e. family), scarcity to find better replacement, time to guide such a change not currently available at director level due to higher priority issues, poor judgement on director level.
The Cost of Efficiency
In search of speed, we chase the small,
Micro gains, efficiency's call.
We trim the tasks, reduce the role,
And in the cracks, we lose the soul.
A doorman once, with warmth and grace,
Now gone, replaced by cold, blank space.
For every door that smoothly slides,
The value of connection hides.
We count the cost, we chase the gain,
But what we lose is hard to name.
The smile, the nod, the gentle care,
That once was present everywhere.
Left brain rules, with data keen,
But forgets what can't be seen.
A touch, a glance, a moment's pause-
These human things don't fit the laws.
So here's the truth, a simple plea:
Efficiency can blind us, see,
That macro costs in heart and mind
Come when we leave the whole behind.
Very appealing poem!
The "micro efficiency leading to macro inefficiency" reminds a phrase coined by Cory Doctorow; "enshitification", it's the slow death of a good online platform that initially was good for end users, which is then optimised for business user (since they are willing to pay more), followed by being optimised for rent seeking, and finally the platform dies because it is shit for everyone, end users, businesses, and finally shit rolls downhill and finally affects the shareholders when the revenue dies.
Doorman and other direct contact staff in some of the De Luxe hotels used to pay a retainer to the hotel. This was because they could make big money as "gofers" even as paid companions, accompanying lonely millionaires at events.
Bee's have been around for 20 million years so presumably they know ehat they're fucking doing 😂 outstanding
All the hives with accountants ensuring 100% compliance rapidly died out!
I’m reminded of something David Willets (UK politician) complained about… he said it is impossible for politicians to safely do double-blind trials (which is a similar approach to having bees who ignore the waggle dance) because if the trial proves a failure the press will complain that ‘money had been wasted’ on a dumb trial, and if it proves a success, the press will complain that the idea should have been rolled out faster. So the system forces politicians who are media-savvy to implement every idea they have without testing it first. Then they’re safe… they have ‘done their job’, and nobody can point to proof that they were wrong.
Very very good as always. Having just 6.6k views is a sad reflection on where we’re at….linear & legacy habitual behaviours rule. So much benefit for so many people in videos like this
Banks are one of the worst offenders for getting rid of all staff and think that customers like it. We don’t.
Does anyone actually phone their bank to ask for the balance? Surely everyone with a phone has a bank app and can see their balance so why on Earth do we have to waste time responding to an automated question asking if we want to know our balance?
Absolutely. 90% of the functions we used to need a teller for can be done on a smart-phone app. When we DO phone a bank, it’s an awkward inquiry/service that’s a bit difficult to put into a small sentence. Yet, you’re confronted with a speech-recognition robot designed to put you into one of three pre-determined boxes.
I think you'd be surprised tbh, I bet a lot of old people still call to find out they're balance. I know a few people that refuse to use modern banking apps and will still only check the balance at a ATM machine.
The annoying thing with banks is how their fees increase for the convenience of them building an interface so that you can do the job the bank used to do but now you have to do it yourself. They now also don't want to have individual ATMs anymore, they're now pooling those so that you have to go to one location, not a number of them for banks all over town. You now need to displace yourself a lot further just to get some cash, or you have to ask for cash in the grocery store [you have a bill, you ask 'please add 50 pesos to that', they give you cash that gets withdrawn from your account].
Banks want to make money, they're ferociously bad at it because you now have banks losing money because there's always fewer people working in banks that could show them a different direction. That's not important anymore. The 'we're your bank' people want to do literally anything that doesn't involve actually talking to their customers.
Your podcast is just: great value/per time unit
and than if you have a complaint you have to call their service line which takes forever and if you finally have someone on the phone thay do NOT have any clue what your complaint is!
If M&S cafe run out of milk or sausages the staff can't go down to their grocery department and pick up what they need! Bonkers!
16:45 There is a hidden misunderstanding in this statement. For example, in Poland, self-service checkouts have been so successful that now in large discount stores it is difficult to find a salesperson sitting behind the checkout. 90% goes automictic.
About the customer service example: I've been in CS and the problem is that the delivery companies are highly efficiënt at the primary process of getting something somewhere fast, but also highly inflexible. Communication often takes longer than it takes them to make another delivery to the same adress. So it's not a great example of customer service deteriorating, even though I agree with him.
This is a good point. I think one of the main reasons Amazon allows bad delivery drivers to keep working is there’s no accountability. If they destroy one of my purchases by tossing it onto concrete, then there’s no way I can shout at THAT delivery driver. He has no feedback on his performance. Feedback is absolutely crucial, yet it’s missing in lots of British life now - to criticise is labelled “toxic” and you’re laughed at, when you just want excellence.
Shops are taking out the human interaction element of shopping making it similar to shopping online, therefore we dont bother going to the shop we just buy online for the same level of service and we dont have to leave the house.
The most valuable and memorable part of my MBA studies was Creativity. I was described as great at seeing the bigger picture or thinking laterally in my subsequent career. It was more useful than I business finance
I don't understand how the Nudge Podcast isn't more popular. I loved rory's ideas about this and I agree with him too many businesses lose sight on what creativity can provide. I am glad I watched this as I am going to apply these principles to my own business right now. Thank you for the information and the video much love love Nudge podcast
Because they censor, nobody likes that today, people start hearing beeps and the tune away, this podcast may think they are in 1950s America, too much heavy editing to overexplain and beeping on top of their guests' voices, that's very daft.
It's because he pay walled half the podcast. I'm out
It's because people like experiences but they don't understand systems, and these sort of concepts
I work at big company, following our smaller company merging. Where we make diagnostic systems.
I can tell you that I had a lot more creative input about what the customers say and do when it was a small company. Now for some reason the marketing department is making decisions about what we should be doing - often by copying competitor,s, or from some dodgy market report.
This guy is great. His points are brilliant 😃👍 🙏 Thanks for the interview 🎁
He’s a man on a mission to get humans and creativity at the helm of life again. Good for you Rory! Keep going. We are creation itself. Let us dream and create ❤🎉
Whilst I don't advocate a hive mind. I believe that instead of people being left to decide on careers, most of us would love to have bern given a path.
Schools need to more thoroughly assess children not to fit in a box but to find the best box for them. Less than 10%of kids know what they are good at and many have no idea all of their life.
If we knew what society needs. For instance we need particle physicists but few can do this, we need road sweepers too but few want to do this. Why not make all jobs socially important and paying a good wage. That way everyone will feel valued. There will be less crime, depression and social resentment.
As a child in África in the 70s our schools syllabus was complete if you compare It to today. At 10 yrs we had people in different Jobs give us talks, had a day for clubs which we were encouraged to create. Today education thinks only about .....
@@Micheph In England we have no excuse for poorly educating people. Education is a political football here. Worse still, some state schools have been given to for profit companies to run. This directly gives state funds to profit hungry individuals. Fraud and corruption are the top items on their curriculum.
Recently stayed in a lovely old inn, filled with lovely furniture, decorated beautifully. Breakfast was a mess why because the service was buffet style, which is ok. The downsize being we were up and down for crockery, cutlery, condiments etc. The food was very good but we won't be going back because that little bit of service fell down.
Consulting firms do not work on a long enough term to make an improvement, and it is not dependent on it being an improvement.
1:25 What is he saying? "Work in grading departments" ? I have no idea what that is?
‘creative departments’
From context I think it must be the industry speak for drawing the add
risk distribution is a fantastic idea
Great clip of RS. I have no idea why someone added a voiceover to repeat him.
looks like someone is re-packaging someone else original podcast for the income stream hence the voice-over
One of the seminal catastrophes for business and finance were the MBA, and the Jack Walsh style of management resulting in the desolation of the business due to the relentless pursuit of unsustainable and myopic short term gains.
The single most profitable position for automation in businesses is management because it eliminates two key causes for major friction: managerial ego and ineptitude (Peter principle).
It's not easy to have the motivation to be an explorer in the company when your manager regularly takes credit for your work and steals your ideas, even plagiarising work.
And gives you all the "credit" when it goes wrong!
And gives you all the "credit" when it goes wrong!
I totally agree that customer service has this robotic style of handling things in the UK. One thing I love about living in Italy (ok, and despise every now and then!) is that most of the time, things aren't black or white. It is the persitence of the grey areas that help us get along. Even laws are ' open to interpretation'.
Modern industry is geared to pick low hanging fruit. Industry doesn't want to deal with individual problems, no oddities, it is geared accommodate the easy to service customer. Customers with requirements outside this model can either conform or shop elsewhere.
This is EXACTLY why the use of Enterprise Architects in companies is so powerful. But companies don't understand or use them properly (or at all) which is why PEAF exists.
You rarely see a CFO become an effective CEO due to the spreadsheet approach to running a company.
The problem is it’s because the board pays most attention to the CFOs report
@@jaylamAs do the markets and investors
The Internet is basically a big fat example of getting rid of the doorman. It's the primary reason why addictions have risen while "life has gotten better".
I absolutely agree. Give staff the ability to make decisions and they will make good decisions to the delight of the customers.
Thank you for the excellent video!!! You really help to bring out the value
Rory Sutherland is a genius, superb insights.
It isn't just a sharable upside but is a replicatable upside.
The bees that ignore the waggle dance are called scout bees. They have this role - they are not "ignoring" the information.
In research there should be an allowance for high risk research to discover opportunities.
Oddly I think in supermarkets that automatic checkouts are a better experience - because manned checkouts are very false and rushed interactions anyhow and they involve more waiting. I do agree with the general premise though. Exploring is important.
I agree some people prefer auto checkouts but the key is choice.
Rory is definitely my kind of thinker, at work when people ask what my role is I answer ‘jack of all trades’… I might rephrase that to ‘I’m the explorer!’
As a software engineer ... When you find a one off issue, you then optimize for that one off issue. The next time that thing comes up (after the feature is complete) it's not a 36 hour problem. And, in the mean time the general system is saving hundreds of hours of work per pay cycle. Yes, it's an issue when you find a shortcoming in the design of the system. Then you add a feature to handle it so the next time it comes up it's inconsequential.
Should someone have a macro view of a problem that is bouncing around a bunch and know to take a closer look at it before it's been stuck in limbo for 36 work hours? Yes. Yes, that should also be a thing. Identify the problem. Solve it as a one off issue. Make the request for the new feature to account for it next time and get it into the backlog of issues for the team to take care of prioritized at whatever level the team feels it should be at (based on frequency ... not high if it's not come up before, also based on the customer impact, and also based on the cost to the organization).
As an aside ... another system to track and identify these one off problems may not be challenging to implement either. In fact, I would find it extremely hard to believe that the system already in place didn't account for this to allow for metrics on how long things were taking and call attention to things that were handled too slowly while looking for similarities to find areas for improvement.
Easy, I see Rory, I watch/listen.
It's famous that Sony's walkman was born out of a side project because Masaru Ibuka wanted something lighter to carry around to listen to music when traveling.
Creativity can come from ideas of individual employees that could define the company's success in the future.
“A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls.” -R.W. Emerson
I never understood why businesses must constantly grow. If there is a good concept that works, why is it necessary for it to be bigger and globalised and different every year?
I don't think it is necessarily the growth per se but rather the constant reinventing of the company.
Without that it is easy for a company to stagnate and not be able to respond to market changes.
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On paper you'd think Rory is the absolute opposite of everything I stand for as a philosopher and dreamer and hippie who hates big corporations, yet I could listen to him talk all day. It isn't just that he's hypnotized me, with his cadences, it's that there's a sort of deep honesty to him. Honesty in the belly of the beast!
This is my new favorite man in the world.
I work for a company that regularly tasks two teams with a goal, independently. Sounds like what is being suggested here - except that the team that succeeds is kept on and the other team is fired.
I had years of frustration dealing with CSRs because my postal code was wrong from sign-up.
The worst paradox is that creativity thrives in the face of difficulty, a problem to solve. But at the same time, companies are less open to risk creative solutions when they have too many problems (economic problems especially)
Our company has a project management department. One of them hung a t shirt on their office wall that read, 'i solve problems you didn't know you had in ways you can't understand'. Which i corrected one night to, 'i create problems you didn't know you had in ways i can't understand'. 😂
I was so exasperated by the decisions management were making I doubted my own sanity. Passing the Mensa test in the top 1/2% reassured me I'm not the problem.
I have a friend that works as a call center representative for a credit card. They get given congratulated for waving more fees than anyone else on the team. They also get given a monthly budget to give to people who call, for any reason they deem necessary.
I have flying school. We make daily bookings and are written down in a A4 folder with daily sheets. A business owner supplied us some aircraft. He said why don't you do online bookings, i have a system.........having no experience of running a school. We said no, our system as worked for 40 years, we are not changing.
Online system would be a right pain for us.
Just found you on suggested...great channel thank you, very interesting guests and well presented 🐫
Amazingly informative
Fantastic video. Thank you.
The larger a company becomes (based simply on number of employees) the number of rules go up exponentially until a company can no longer pivot and a ASAP response takes weeks. It’s no wonder new technology comes out of someone’s garage.
6:22 I am the rogue bee in the software development world. I’m highly creative with 30 years solid experience and I can’t get hired right now. There are a lot of reasons for that, I’m sure, but one of them is, I bring my creativity to my job every day. Which means I don’t often have cookie cutter solutions. There is a place for that kind of work. But modern consultancy says that’s the *only* kind of work they should be doing.
I’ve come in and solved problems the core developers struggled with for two years in a matter of days. Am I so much smarter? Probably not. But my ADHD brain doesn’t work like everyone else’s. And so I often see possibilities others don’t.
What happens to people like me is essentially some boss bee comes along and cuts off our wings to keep us “grounded.” Then wonder why our ability to deliver honey has cratered.
Letting a group of well suited individuals deviate from the norm is a powerful tool for growth. Which, I believe is Rory’s point. I need a boss with at least that aspect of his perspective. I don’t know much else about him at this point so I can’t speak to anything else.
You need to be self employed and not work through a boss.
Rory is absolutely correct on the brexit side of things, i didnt know how to put it into words but that is exactly the reason i voted leave.. and in a way i wish I hadnt now as Boris has destroyed the UK as a result
You think the government wouldn’t have done what they did without Brexit? The lockdown, the massive debt, the vaccine, the mass immigration?
fascinating discussion
You cannot let employees make judgements! We don’t even let judges make judgements! They might be racist. What is he thinking?
As an F1 fan, "...that Dutch guy..." made me LOL. Love Rory.
Not really sure why this video was shown to me by UA-cam or why I clicked it. Not my usual thing but fascinating stuff. Subscribed!
Having worked for Accenture for many years before my retirement, I can sympathise with that doorman.
My favorite add line was on a fruit truck i remember it from 15 years ago "Anything fresher is still growing "it made me chuckle
Absolutely fantastic this video aswell as the bonus episode too explains why house orices have skyrocketed and why we all feel like we just live to work these days
Rory is a genius. His mind works on 1 million different caliber than us regular people mind could never get to and he knows what the world is. That’s how he does what he does. It’s that simple.
Oh there is another one: capable people aren't retained. Instead of giving a raise to someone 10y in a crucial position they'd rather hire 3 people to replace the position, each of them more expensive. HR is mental.
So. Subscription models work because "you can cancel at any time"? (a supposedly two-way door).
Interesting argument, you are close to something.
Remember when we had a guy that operated the elevator? Remember when we had serfs running the land rather than machines?
You're correct in that we need more creative thinking, but adaptability is more important. More than happy to discuss where your argument can improve.
Did you just "um actually" Rory Sutherland? LOL
What a great video, from an old hand, Plus one sub and props to you and yours.
The asides in this video are an automatic door opener.
They're an automatic door opener that slams you in the face with an egg.
Really? I'd say they were the doorman. The beehive is more than an analogy, it shows how survival depends on not over optimising.