Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
The business world loves talking about transparency. Leaders strive for it. Consultants tell them to create a ‘culture of transparency.’ Peddlers of business trends and fads trumpet it. All of them say it’ll open up leadership decisions to more worker input, ’empower’ staff, and so on.
Readers of this blog likely know I roll my eyes at all this stuff. It’s annoying, yes, but it’s also troubling in many (often unintentional) ways. Let’s take a quick look.
I want to pick up a thread from three recent posts on the Agile business approach. This thread concerns the role of project management and project managers – two different roles, as we’ll see.
In those other posts, I pointed out – among other things – that Agile concerns product development, not product management. But I pointed out that – at a deeper level – project managers serve a role in the system of class struggle underneath Agile. Beyond that, they often serve in roles oddly parallel of those of middle managers.
Let’s ask another question along those lines: do companies really need project managers? At all? Even on their own terms (i.e., profit and loss)?
As some readers know, I’ve written several posts on Agile as a business term and theory. I’ll link to those past posts with these two links. I wanted to follow up on one issue, namely the term ‘cargo cult Agile.’
What is cargo cult Agile? Is it a problem and, if so, how can companies avoid it?
About a month ago, I wrote a post on Agile – a set of ideas, business methods, and (perhaps) ideology. I invited readers to share their experiences with it, and I reflected a bit on my own. There’s also plenty of business literature available to those who want to find it. In short, Agile starts from the need for business agility (i.e., adaptability to change), and then it moves to a variety of methods of implementation. Scrum stands out as the most common.
With a month behind us, let’s take another look at Agile!
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I’ve focused lately on some of the failures of Iowa Democrats to connect with voters. In those posts, I focused on partisan issues and the changing electorate. And in that latter post, I mentioned “partisan insults” without saying much about what I had in mind. Yeah, let’s talk about that one. Here’s a case: ‘COVID Kim‘, as used against Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds.’
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