With those big companies, commonly there simply isn't a productive way to walk the line.
Saving face and preserving "decision making credibility" means that taking advice is simply not on the cards for a large portion of the middle management class.
> commonly there simply isn't a productive way to walk the line
I think that sums up the problem of institutional dynamics and
individual talent rather well. For people with strong work ethics,
sense of duty and genuine creative optimism, it's very painful to sit
in a room of avoidant, grinning suits being superficially nice to one
another wasting time trying to find "clever" reasons not to do
anything. The whole show is a cloying deadlock. It's squandering human
intelligence and life opportunities. I can't be witness to that
tragedy and no remuneration, however many zeros you add, can make it
worthwhile.
> Saving face and preserving "decision making credibility" means that taking advice is simply not on the cards for a large portion of the middle management class.
While I'm happy to admit that this construct may be true in practice; it is _deeply_ infuriating that so many people's calculus nets out in this manner. It's infuriating to me, primarily, because I simply don't understand. By my understanding, "decision making credibility" comes _exclusively_ from *being right*. If you're optimizing for this metric, then how you get there should be an almost irrelevant footnote.
Yet here we are; with a non-trivial percentage of managers coming to the conclusion that the correct answer is to not take advice.
Decision making credibility is simply not anchored in "being logically correct."
It's anchored in the ability to consider the needs of the tribe appropriately.
Leadership credibility in human society is mostly anchored via your track record of emphasizing with the needs of a Dunbar's number sized tribe.
Empathy, not logic, is the KPI our brains are tuned to. Empathetic leaders emphasize data collection, logical ones make decisions using that data. Evolution has optimized for empathy.
The core problem with large companies is the middle management buffer grows large enough that it forms a subculture which drives decision making.
Plus, institutions of 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, all have their "local" rules of detailed management
know-how. Add it all up, and you have a problem that's just as thorny & knotty as any engineering problem. Requiring just as much detailed expertise.
In any large company, everything is so complex and connected with each other that it's close to impossible to hash out the actual output (positive or negative) of any big decision. So, decisions are not based on merit because it's impossible to reason what is good what is not. Instead, there's a leader who has some kind of vision and the company follows that vision, for better or worse.
Saving face and preserving "decision making credibility" means that taking advice is simply not on the cards for a large portion of the middle management class.