[lbo-talk] What They Teach You at Harvard Business School

shag shag at cleandraws.com
Wed Aug 20 19:15:59 PDT 2008


At 10:53 PM 8/20/2008, Miles Jackson wrote:
>shag wrote:
>
>>but i can see how all of that works, in any b-school, it teaches you to
>>get really really comfortable living in your own alternate reality.
>>because that's what most of these guys do.
>
>To be fair--isn't that what we're doing here?
>
>Miles

hmmm. i see your point. but there's something distinctly different about this reality. it is _impervious_ to correction. it is practically always built on a thorough inability to consider the world from someone else's point of view. it is a complete denial of anyone's reality besides your own. it is an ability to completely forget, if you were once in the trenches....

here, consider this: we've had horrible morale problems. people are quitting right and left. we have now reached 35% attrition, when we used to have a proud 8%. It took me to question their numbers -- politely! -- one day, for them to see that the quitting of a month ago wasn't the normal 8-10%. It was 20 fuckin' 5 percent!

and now it's 35%. it's a month later. and it's too late. it's like dominos falling. and they could have stopped it, had they paid attention and gotten outside their alternate reality. there are exactly three people in 30 who aren't looking for another job right now. and they *still* have no clue. i talk fucking openly about being on the market. i don't care anymore. you know why? not because i think they don't care. because, i have told them flat out to their face, and they ... live in another reality. seriously. it's really kind of funny when you think about it. i mean, one of these guys... his ass is on the line now b/c of all the quitting... he still can't get out of the alternative reality.

a month ago, when i gave them a hard time about their math, they all sat in a meeting with the rest of us who were giving them a hard time about what's really going on out there (with morale), and they denied that people were leaving for anything other than "my girlfriend got a job in d.c., and so i got one too. bye!" or "i've always wanted to live in c'ville..."

in other words, the believed what the hellever people said in the exit interviews. which, as you can imagine, wasn't the whole truth. who's going to tell the whole truth? they don't want to burn bridges. etc.

but what these people do is convince themselves it's the truth. that people aren't leaving b/c they're unhappy... i was actually snorted at when i said, "do you really think that, as a manager, people tell you the honest truth about everything?"

I mean, my god miles, just living in the world, from your own experience as a non-manager. from your own freakin' experience of how you deal with your OWN manager, you'd think that anyone ought recognize, with a wee bit of self reflection, that, gosh, in an exit interview, people might not always tell you the truth.

it takes a special kind of something to get people into such an alternative reality. maybe it's their self-preservation instinct kicking in, i don't know.

the kicker is, one of my managers recommended an article. in that article, i saw reference to a book and i found it at the o'reilly library we subscribe to. read four chapters this morning. guess what? a whole chapter on why people _really_ leave, and not what they tell you in the exit inteview. IOW, a whole chapter on comparisons between interviews conducted by your manager and the ansers, and exit interviews conducted by a third party and the answers.

big difference.

everything they said in this book makes perfect ordinary human experience sense. you don't have to be a rocket scientist. you just have to be, you know, uh, attentive to the world and the humans around you and reflect on your own fucking experience.

maybe that's it: a complete lack of self-reflective capacity.

</rant>

http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)



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