[lbo-talk] People today just don't have the work ethic they used to!

[John S Costello]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 10:28 PM, andie nachgeborenen
<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Now of course we are all thoroughly broken, so the question is, why
> does this efficiency-wrecking (as well as soul-destroying) practice
> continue? It's not as if the psychological results are not known. Maybe
> they are not believed, probably managers don't believe them, but
> you'd think that just a few companies that were sensible about this
> would have a serious competitive advantage. And this isn't rocket
> science; you'd think it was totally obvious that rested, happy workers
> would do more and better than tired, bitter workers who need constant
> monitoring. Nonetheless, the prevailing managerial philosophy throughout
> the capitalist world is "the whippings will continue until morale improves."
>
> How this can persist, in capitalist terms, seems to me to be a very
> important question.

Google lets its employees have a "20% project", which they can pick
for themselves and can be anything they like.  All the benefits accrue
to the company, of course.  This seems a clever maneuver to me -- let
your employees have some play time (most people who work at Google
*like* their day job, so "more of the same but whatever catches your
fancy" really begins to look more like play than work) and skim off
the cream of the ideas.

It's not a strategy you can export to very many other industries, though.

-- John