> C. Kelley,
>
> You answered a question I didn't ask. You are talking about incentive on
>the factory floor. I believe that most people try and do a good job most of
>the time, usually despite the organizational scheme they work under. I
>think human beings are natural problem-solvers.
i gave you an example of how, currently, people have little incentive to share innovative ideas with management--the people with the power to implement those ideas. parecon seems to be an attempt to deal with that problem.
i also suggested that it's odd to think that information about what consumers want would be difficult to communicate under parecon. the people who _work_ in a firm are often also consumers of the very products and services they make. if they are spending time conceiving of the directions the company will take in design, then they have opps for input. if the coordinator/worker division is mitigated, then information flow upward won't be blocked, as it is now. there's a raft of research on this very problem and, indeed, an entire managerial philosophy spearheaded by Tom Peters that was supposed to address the problem. But, ask anyone who has ever dealt with new managerial ideologies and you'll find that implementing them is a joke. Like the Go for The Gold Campaign.
here's another example, from the wasband who used to be a food service manager in a corporate food service. the food service used to come up with some truly dorky promotional ideas. Ostensibly, these promotional campaigns were about getting their clientele--workers in their client firms to spend more money in the cafeteria. For instance, if they bought three main dish meals for lunch, they could get a nifty kewlo baseball bat shaped pen during baseball season. WooofuckinHooo! Boy, I'm 'incented' to buy three meals at $3.00 a pop --and shell otu the discount price of $1.99--just so's I can get meself one o' them thar big fat wooden basball bat shaped pens that are completely useless as a writing implement for 95% of their clientele. It was an assbackwards idea because you can get the big wooden baseball bat shaped pens for a little more than that at the local discount store and you don't have to have your dorky company logo plastered all over it, either.
Now, had anyone asked the folks who worked on the line--the food service personnel who were often friends with, married to, relatives of the people who worked in the firm--they would have told the dipshits in the upper office that their ideas were bombs. You'd think they'd figure out the ideas were bombs, since all the unit managers would complain privately that the wooden baseball bat-shaped pens did nothing to advance sales. They didn't complain publicly because they had no incentive to do so. Who wants to offend some hotshot upstairs?
In this way, bureaucracies suppress that kind of negative information flow.
But, there's more: part of what is going on with these promotional campaigns is that they are selling to the clients that make the decision to give the food service company the contract year after year. The actual consumers of their food aren't the object of the sales pitch contained in the baseball bat pen promotion. The target of the campaign, the ones who are getting the "pitch," are, IOW, other dorks in the client firm who were impressed by the food service firm's promotional campaigns: the people in HR, usually, who are in charge of making sure their workers are 'happy'. They are often also completely out of touch with what people might really want. They don't eat in the freakin' cafeteria! They get the baseball bat pens for free, anyway. And they probably aren't living so close to the edge of subsistence that they can't fathom how a factory worker or a secretary at a community college might just not have money for 1.99 pen or even a $3.00 lunch.
The dorks in the client firm's HR dept, like the dorks in charge of marketing at the food service biz, thought that the average Joe Sixpack who worked at the company would be "incented" to buy a baseball bat shaped pen and that they'd think their company was just cool for contracting a food service firm that had cool promotional campaigns.
And, if they did have objections or maybe thought the promotional campaign wasn't so amazing, they kept their yap shut because--well, really, haven't you ever been involved in committee work where these kinds of things roll on like a juggernaut, just impossible to stop because references to reality don't make a dent? It's kinda like Shrub who thinks he doesn't need to read the papers b/c they're full of political spin. So, he relied on his staff who, apparently, aren't spinning the news, so he can trust them to give him the straight dope. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
No one wants to say, "Yeah, the baseball pen idea we came up with and got "buy in" on was a real bomb. We're a bunch of dorks who don't have a klew!"
>New businesses are often necessary to come in with a new
>perspective (with which existing producers may disagree) and take the risk
>of solving a problem in a new way.
and the only reason they need to do this under the current system is reasons like the above. if you get rid of those reasons, who needs "competition" to create innovation? If, right under your nose, is a checks and balances system to bring in new ideas... If, right under your nose, is a firm constructed so that people don't get blackballed for telling the truth--these baseball bat shaped pen idea was a bomb... If right under your nose are the very people who consume your product, the people who work at the firm that produces backpacks who can tell the backpack designers that NO schoolkid wears a backpack like they were designed to be worn...
I came up with that backpack thing because I've been either in grade/high school and college carrying books in backpacks or mothering children doing same for 20 years now. In all that time, no one i knew used the backpack the way it was designed to be used. Instead of using both straps slung over two shoulders, everyone slung one strap over one shoulder and walked a little askew from the lopsided weight. After 20 years, they finally figured it out and started producing the new "d bags". If this competition thingaroo is so damn effective, why on earth did it take twenty years to figure out that the backpacks they marketed to school and college kids could be changed to make the consumer happier and, I'm going to assume, healthier for the consumer's body.
>I don't see much reason that this should
>happen under parecon.
>
>
> peace,
>
> boddi
>
>
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