27 Oct 2005

Does Innovation strive on Chaos?

Every project I see around me suffers from serious lack of coordination and chaos. As a matter of fact it has reached epidemic proportions that can only be eliminated by someone strongly resolute and with serious leadership.

Having said that, I'm infamous for being the cynic in my workplace. In my eyes everything seems to be going on wrongly and all decisions appear to me as counter productive and inefficient. I guess I was brought up to sneer at incompetence. What bothers me is not incompetence itself as much as dismissal of any criticism of it as a form of cynicism. I often get the "who are YOU?" retort, which usually aims at changing the subject and falls under the "argumentum ad hominem" (Attacking the Person) tactic of insecure corporate clones.

Here's an example to demonstrate this point. One of the "boxes" we sell to our customers will be updated such that it will carry 4 times the existing capacity. I pointed out this fact to our pricing "specialists", nevertheless they decided to price the new box at the same price like the existing box. They even added price erosion on top of that. Any form of logical arguments I presented got dismissed as the rhetoric of a typical "technical" guy who does not know how the "real world" functions. In the best case, my remarks get ignored or brushed aside.

Perhaps the psychology behind this behaviour is that people are worried about being exposed and would rather sit securely in a corner instead of standing up and facing criticism. Or perhaps, the corporate world does suffer from serious incompetence where things are almost expected to be suboptimal. Alternatively, an equally plausible explanation is that "corporate clones" have egos bigger than the Excel spreadsheets they control.

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