American View: How Much Snarky Business Culture Analysis is Enough?

Future of Work07 May 2024

This is my 600th published column since I started as Lyonsdown’s “resident American ‘blogger” on 20th June 2012. I’ve split my American View by-line about 3:1 between Business Reporter and TEISS for most of that run, attempting to generate new weekly material every weekend since I graduated from being a “guest contributor” to earning a regular weekly slot in 2013. It’s been a heck of a ride, especially since this isn’t my job; I’m not a salaried staff writer … heck, I’m not even a stringer. I post here to try to give back to the tech and business communities. I craft stories to help persuade leaders get better at their craft … “better” by my definition, meaning “morally, ethically, and compassionately better than their organisation’s culture requires.”

On reflection, 600 compositions averaging 2,000 words each has been a huge investment of time, energy, and creativity. That works out to about 1.2 million words (or 3.5x copies of the Stephen King’s The Stand) of published work (not counting all the material I’ve submitted to the print supplements). Along the way, I’ve parlayed my American View works into seven of my own books for easier consumption, all in my “spare” time.

Family and friends have asked when I planned to set this “hobby” aside and take up something less stressful, like juggling chainsaws, clearing minefields, or narking on Boeing to the feds. Besides, haven’t I run out of original stories? I should be tapped out by now … right?

Honestly … no. Both my professional research focus and my niche for American View are about understanding people, culture, and absurdity. These are evergreen topics since human nature doesn’t really change. Business fads and technologies come and go like expensive pandemics, but people? Not so much. I contend that us modern officer workers just as irrational and silly as our forebears, prone to all the same cognitive mistakes and foolishness.

“Buongiorno, Flavioano, what’s happening? Ehhhh, I shall require thee to come in tomorrow. So, if you could be here before mid-morning that would be great ... oh oh! and I almost forgot … ehh, I also require thee to go ahead and come in on Sunday after mass, too. We ehh lost more people to the Black Death this week ...”

To illustrate my point, let’s take a quick romp back to 600 CE ^[1] and explore how little has changed in the last 1,400-ish years. Here’s a brief “greatest hits” list of the top-trending Twitter stories of the 6th Century:

First, King Agilulf of and Queen Theodelinda built a massive palace complex in Monza in the Lombardi region of modern-day Italy. Their “investment in the brand’s future” led to the construction of Autodromo Nazionale di Monza and the creation of the Italian Grand Prix. King Agilulf was lauded as a visionary chief executive, accurately predicting both the Italian love of motor sport and the logical success of Namco’s Pole Position.

Unfortunately, investors abandoned Agilulf’s early “motor sports” races after discovering that his “racecars” were really just 1,000 contractors in India pretending to be Monza’s revolutionary AI (autoracing infrastructure) tech.

In Wales, the “Prince of Bards” Aneirin published his bestselling poem Y Gododdin about how 300 elite Brittonic warriors valiantly fell in battle, fighting against overwhelming odds. Somewhat later, Frank Miller optioned Aneirin’s story for a screenplay, getting almost everything wrong in his film adaptation. Aneirin, being the better man, never whinged about the mistreatment of his work to the Hollywood Reporter.

Meanwhile, clever boffins in “second golden era” of the Sasanian Empire began using windmills to support irrigation in areas afflicted by insufficient rainfall. While technologically and logistically superior to contemporary methods of water delivery, the popular “glug economy” service “Uber Drinks” sued the Persian engineers, claiming their new technology would irreparably harm the thousands of “independent cultivators” who hauled jars of water by camel for tips.

The motto of any good start-up has always been “move fast and trample things.”

Further east, the iconoclastic technologists at the Tan Dynasty’s Píngguǒ xiězìjiān (Scriptorium of Apples) released the revolutionary new “Quill Pen” to frenzied consumer demand. These lightweight flight feathers proved superior in every way to their main competitor, the Microsoft Wet Clay Surface, despite not coming standard with a pen knife and costing nearly twice as much.

Back in Europe, King Cholthar II of the Franks lost Neustria to his cousins after he was unable to mobilise his armies until – as required by policy – every knight, archer, and engineer had updated their Program Epics in Jira. Since this goal has always been intrinsically impossible to achieve, Theuderic II of Burgundy and Theudebert II of Austrasia took half of Cholthar’s territory without effective resistance.

Finally, Pope Gregory the Great officially changed the mandatory verbal response to a sneeze from “We Are Quality!” to “God Bless You.” This completely paralyzed the entirety of Christendom as the Vatican’s Humanis Opibus department required every parishioner to complete a 30-minute CBT (Catholic Beatitudes Training) module to “prove” they had been “trained” on the change in the event administrative action was required to address wilful noncompliance. It took nearly three decades for Internum Audit to achieve 100% accountability, which was only possible thanks to Justinian’s Plague (since the dead automatically received an exemption).

If all this seems a little silly … you’re right. That’s kinda my schtick here at American View: I try to analyse and deconstruct real business problems with a healthy measure of snark to explore how and why they happened … and to suggest what might be done to keep such problems from manifesting again. Sometimes I write about other people’s stories ^[2] but mostly I rummage through my own library of Stupid Business Moments™ for fodder. There’ve been so many …

Yes, my goal is to entertain rather than just educate; people are more likely to listen to an idea if you make them laugh in the process, proving that humanity really hasn’t evolved all that much over the centuries. Sure, we invented agriculture, but we also invented Agile Methodology so I’m calling it a draw. As a species, we’re still the same confused and curious hominins that laid the groundwork for what we now pretend is a functioning civilisation. Our world is an inescapable comedy of errors; sometimes all you can do is laugh to keep from belting an idiot co-worker.^[3]

Forget foosball tables and cake in the breakroom. The next “must-have” management trend needs to be mixed martial arts cage fighting as a replacement for political skulduggery. “You can’t spell ‘gladiator’ without GLAD, amiright?”

Unfortunately for our hunter-gatherer brains, our world never stops changing. Daily life never slows down. People, though, don’t change nearly fast enough to cope with the seeming insanity of working life. We’re bombarded with information faster than we can process it and struggle to survive in glass-and-plastic environments that leaves us perpetually isolated, anxious, and depressed. Sure, we “get things done” but for what purpose? We make lines go up because the shiny suited tell us to but so what? What does our “work” have to do with anything meaningful?

In the end, we work because we must. Modern society requires us to shill our surplus labour value at the expense of our physical and mental health for most of our lives. We’d all rather be somewhere else doing anything else, but that ain’t an option for 99.9% of humanity. Instead, we toil confusedly, all the while pretending to understand what’s happening and assuming that we’re each of us the only people who don’t “get it.” We hope that everyone else knows what they’re doing and that things are Under Control.

This is why I argue that our highest duty as leaders is to be purposefully decent to one another. Regardless of our duty title, our personal mission should be to create and maintain a supportive environment where others can, if not flourish, at least not suffer as much. To gain wisdom and then to apply it to clearing away the self-imposed obstacles that culture, history, and irrationality conspire to litter our path. To struggle to understand the world as it truly is, not as a £500/hour “productivity consultant” tells us it should be. To make some sense of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it so we can, thereby, make things slightly better for everyone.

That, then, is why I’m not hanging it up at column number 600. I took this gig to try and help folks. I’ve heard from a handful of readers how my goofy stories did help them, so I’m going to keep this going as long as I can. Sure, my mates are getting awesome book deals and social media prestige while I’m not. While that’s true, good for them! They’ve Earned it. I might not be popular, rich, or invited to keynote the cool conferences, but that’s fine. I believe in doing what you can where you are. For me, that means spending my weekends writing amusing columns in the outskirts of Dallas. If I help one more person improve the lives of their employees, then it was all worth it.

So … yeah. So long as people are struggling under terrible bosses and dysfunctional organisational cultures, I’ll definitely be back. Hopefully I’ll see y’all here at American View this time next week.

^[1] Also known as 1144 in the Buddhist calendar, 4360 in the Hebrew calendar, 3700 in the Kali Yuga Hundi calendar, 23 BH in the Islamic calendar, and 3298 Absalom Reckoning (if you’re a hardcore TTRPG nerd).
^[2] Anonymized, of course.
^[3] Why isn’t this legal? Have none of our lawmakers ever been forced to sit through a six hour briefing where a dull-as-dirt presenter slowly reads every word on every slide?