Mittwoch, 29. Juni 2016

Agile, Risk Shifts and Wastefulness

Go over to Forbes and read Steve Denning's interview-article on "The Most Wasteful Economic System Ever Invented?". Come back here after that, please.

Let me summarize the interview:
  • Flexibility and agility are the all-pervading buzzwords. Organizations use all methods to be more agile and more flexible.
  • One of the major methods to achieve more agility is a shift from an "employment based" to something I'd like to call a "contractor based" economy.

    It does not matter if the contractor is on a salary or not, in fact the worker is treated like a contractor: Results are his/her responsibility, he/she owns the risk. Binding between company and contractor is limited. The company assumes very limited responsibility, the contractor is seen as replaceable.

    The worker/contractor carries the full burden to maintain his/her market value by himself/herself.
  • Haydn Shaughnessy argues (much too briefly) that the effect are huge costs, but those costs do not appear in organizations. They are individualized or (ultimately) socialized. Risk for corporations is minimized and shifted to individuals. Agility and flexibility become a demand rather than a value.
Well ... these are the same problems that I constantly see in modern neo-liberal (be careful with that term, when following the definition of neo-liberal, we do not have a neo-liberal system, we have a neo-feudalistic system) economic systems all over the world:
  • Demands on individuals increase, especially with regard to flexibility.
  • Risk is shifted down (to individuals).
  • Cost is shifted down or socialized.
The marketing mode for these shifts is via the more freedom and/or more individualism scheme:
  • More freedom for the individual (and unacceptable risks)
  • More choice and more flexibility (less transparency and more individual risk)
The result is a a whole new level of worker exploitation for the corporate well-being.

If you get a truthful manager/economist, he/she will tell you, that the whole thing is actually a race to the bottom: To create return of investment, the quality of life of those that actually create value is reduced. And since everybody does it, anybody that tries to quit the circus is quickly eliminated.

Well, our School of Chicago idiocy has set the fox (big global capital) to keep the geese (well being of the masses) for decades now without any stops. We already know that the system has lost its target (increase wellbeing) in favor of something easier to measure (corporate profit), but the rise of "atypical" work models really is something to fear. If it is not offset by an increase in social security, it basically fucks everyone over but capital owners ...

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