Management Reform in The Valley

A cocktail of bitter irony and much hilarity as Silicon Valley tackles The Problem of Management with as much fumbling bravado as it attacks The Problems of All Things Young White Men Need:

A workforce expecting more autonomy while it willingly abandons responsibility for its food, entertainment, transportation, social life, and emotional and spiritual well-being to workplaces that ever-more resemble company towns.

A faux-rebellious, adolescent demand for flat companies that still can’t shed the founder mythology, nor the cult of personality, nor, you know, hierarchy.

Startups that trade managers for team leads, visionaries, leaders, project heads, coaches, guides. These are still fucking managers. A rose by any other name is still fucking up your team.

Techniques for more enlightened teamwork cargo-culted from manual and machine labor optimization strategies in industries notorious for creating and supporting systemic wealth gaps.

A shared delusion of meritocracy built on top of a damning system of racist and sexist oppression.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Of course, the potential evils of management are vast. The practice of management represents a pooling of power that has an intense and deeply personal effect on “subordinate” employees within a single individual. Generally, the practice of management is based on profound asymmetry of power and information between employee and manager. The direct influence of managers on the economic security of the people they manage inherently shapes all interactions and provides the basis for a fully exploitable and asymmetric power relationship.

The greatest irony of management is that the very moment at which management begins to fail its teams is the moment that this allocation of power is most dangerous. What is the recourse for broken teams under the profound asymmetry of this relationship? A trap that only tightens as your struggle.

Still, no true management reform is possible without:

• Critical consciousness about the cultural, psychological, emotional, racist, sexist, and power dynamics of management — something very few employees, much less managers, have… or even have access to.
• Engagement and critique of the economically enforced power structures that underpin the relationship between manager and employee.
• An articulate strategy for remediating breakdowns in teams and management — a management reform which does not anticipate the menagerie of catastrophic dysfunctions that teams experience regularly is no reform at all.

No surprise that most current attempts at management reform in the Valley lack all three.