Friday, February 1, 2019

Entrepreneurial Workers and Bureaucratic Workers

There are two opposing strategies to a successful career in an office job: entrepreneurial and bureaucratic. (I owe this dichotomy to someone, but I can't figure out who at the moment. Arnold Kling? I can't seem to find which of his books or essay's I lifted this from.)

Bureaucrats are rules-lawyers and system-gamers. They insist on knowing exactly the rules by which they will be evaluated. They try to figure out the formula on which they will be compensated, and maximize the pay-out of that formula regardless of what's actually in everyone's long-term interests. They are incredulous when they learn that their managers had unstated expectations of them. They come at their jobs with a posture of "I did exactly what you told me to do," even when the job sometimes calls for some creativity. It's not necessarily a difference in drive or laziness that separates entrepreneurs from bureaucrats. A bureaucrat can be an absolute gunner, it's just that their effort is spent maximizing a formula payout rather than maximizing the value for their employer.

The entrepreneurial strategy is more creative and takes more ownership of the job. It acknowledges that various measures and checklists and processes are proxies for productivity and concerns itself with the underlying productivity that is the actual goal. If the boss is disappointed in their performance or decisions, they don't throw a contract or memo back in the boss's face and say, "See! That's what you told me to do!" They try to do better and maybe even feel bad for failing to anticipate the problem. People with an entrepreneurial stance to their careers take ownership. They spot things that need to be done and do them. They spot their own skill deficiencies and acquire those skills, not because someone told them to but because they see a real opportunity to create value. They do projects for other departments, not because those things were built into their job evaluations but because doing so solves a problem and creates value for the organization.

Obviously a company has to create the right kind of culture to encourage entrepreneurs and discourage bureaucratic system-gaming. People need to feel like their initiative will be noticed and rewarded. The value of those extra projects need to be noticed and appreciated by the right people. Otherwise even natural entrepreneurs may have their spirits crushed and either turn into min-maxing bureaucrats or (hopefully) leave the company.

I'm learning how hard it is to instill entrepreneurial motives in people. It's only very recently in my career that I've had people reporting directly to me. It's been quite a learning experience. They often do exactly what I told them to do, which is to say they hit some kind of road-block in which my literal instructions make no sense, but somehow proceed on anyway. (It's a statistical research job. The nature of the job is that we find surprises, so there's no way to specify everything that needs to be done ahead of time in full detail.)

Maybe this is a good analogy to the point I'm trying to make. I like to point out that computers literally and dutifully follow the instructions given to them, with no appreciation whatsoever for the intent of the user. Some humans learn these nasty habits from computers. We call them "programmers." Programmers often will get a list of "requirements" from the business people and program "the requirements" without any regard for the usefulness of the resulting software. If the business person says, "Wait, this isn't what I wanted. It doesn't solve my problem," the programmers might shove the list of requirements in their face and say "I did what you said." This is a toxic process. It should be a conversation between professionals who both want to solve a problem for their employer. It shouldn't be an adversarial process with legalistic appeals to contracts or "requirements" lists or request forms. The business people should be trying to understand how a logical, algorithmic process will actually work once programmed, and the programmers should be trying to understand the intent of the business people. A little bit of process is okay. We need rules and procedures. But too often, filling out the checklist becomes the goal, the thing that's being maximized. Sometimes the bureaucracy gets so stifling that it's impossible to get any work done. (BTW, I'm not picking on programmers here; I do a lot of programming myself. I'm just using them as an example.)

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