And yet people work in huge corporations and those are succeeding fine. Yet the collective farms that I mention led to famines and underperformed severely.
Comment on We live wasted lives
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoThe same is true for capitalism too, though.
If you work in your own little company or if you are self-employed, then the “mission” of your work might be important to you and a source of motivation.
But if you work in a huge corporation, hardly anything you do actually matters. If don’t perform at 100% and instead slack off, there are other people doing the same work. And if everyone slacks off, then they just hire more people. And even if the whole department underperforms, there are other departments that rake in the money.
And whether the company thrives or goes under, your input as a lowly grunt wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. Even as a mid-level manager your input wouldn’t have made a difference.
Years of my work at my job can be wiped out with one email from the CEO.
Literally the only difference between capitalism and communism when it comes to that is whether the CEO wipes out my work or the state.
Maalus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Huge corporations also underperform compared to smaller startups.
If a small startup wants to roll out some new thing they just get to the work. If a corporation does the same thing it first takes a year of preparation and internal politics.
Remember the old anecdote about how long it takes to order an empty cardboard box at IBM? That one was an extreme example, but the concept persists.
We had a project, created by two people over half a year. The corporate parent liked it and wanted to expand the product to all the country division. So they planned for a year, then assembled 8 teams with a total of 50 people to copy that project with a planned development time of 3 years. They overran the deadline by 2 years.
Maalus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Cool. Yet you are ignoring the very tiny fact that collective farms started famines. They didn’t “just underperform”.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Well, I guess the great depression never happened, correct?
brendansimms@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
iirc…Lysenko (soviet agri-scientist - a shitty one) had convinced the party leaders that his newly bred ‘winter-hardy’ wheat breed was worthy of being planted en masse. It had worked well under ideal lab conditions but failed after several crop yields when planted in the field, and this created famine.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
But if a CEO does something that actually destroys the company (without question) the governance structure that most companies in most countries have will put a halt to it. If the company is of size to have an actual CEO than they will have a need for a governance structure.
The sad part is that due to whatever reason it doesn’t always work like that.
Heck somebody once told me that in the US you can just fire people for whatever, which is insane to me
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Governance structures aren’t without fail either, as exemplified with quite a few big corporations going down over time.
Governance structures are also present in political systems, and also there they can fail.
A government and a corporation are really not all that dissimilar when it comes to managing work, projects and so on.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
Yeah that was also my reason to say that it doesn’t always work like that.
People also defend companies or system that lack transparancy, things like not publishing annual reports etc