Month: October 2022 (Page 1 of 2)

Like many readers out there, I’ve taken an interest in Mike Duncan’s podcast The History of Rome. Among other merits, Duncan effectively describes the Roman world as it transitioned from Republic to Principate to Dominate.

This takes me to today’s topic in the Corporate Politics 101 series. For anyone who doesn’t know quite how to think about a CEO and their role, try starting with a Roman Emperor. Especially a Roman Emperor of the Principate era.

Like the Emperors of the Principate, CEOs usually don’t demand the total subservience of their employees. They take care to create at least the illusion of worker (or at least middle manager) governance. But they’re still CEOs, not consuls or (god forbid) tribunes.

And much like in the Roman Empire, the overall experience of what it’s like to work at a company can change quite a bit based on the whims of the CEO. The company run by a Caligua or a Commodus feels much different from one run by a Marcus Aurelius or Hadrian. This holds true even if – again, much like the Roman Empire – broader social forces govern the actual performance of the company.

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One of my most popular posts on this blog was an early one about leaving academia. I offered advice to people interested in taking up a non-academic job. But there’s a broader lesson here worth emphasizing. And I think academics often fail to heed it. The lesson is this: incompetence is far, far more widespread in the non-academic world than the academic world. Even though I’ve pointed out before (in this series no less) that incompetence often rises in the business world, I can’t emphasize this enough.

The truth is that there’s a lot of quality control involved when it comes to deciding who gets to be a professor at a college or university. All or almost all tenure stream faculty at most schools have a PhD (or at least a Master’s) in their subject area. And these days, even many adjuncts hold a terminal degree. The degree requirement – while it has any number of problems – keeps incompetence from becoming widespread.

We simply don’t see this in the non-academic world. That world does at times fall into credentialism of one sort or another. But business degrees or certificates simply don’t weed out incompetence like academic degrees.

Trust me: many a fool obtains an MBA.

So why does this happen? In most cases, the answer is office politics. Some people in the business world are very good at convincing those in power that they can handle jobs that they can’t handle and have no business trying to handle. How do they do this? In The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber suggests that they’re able to convince bosses that they believe the myths companies tell about themselves.

That sounds plausible enough to me. But the short story here: some people are good at talking their way into jobs they shouldn’t have. To succeed in the corporate world, you’ll have to figure out how to handle those people.

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