Rationality is an illusion
Businesses and certain “experienced business people” like to pretend that rationality is the only way to make “real” business decisions.
Here are some irrational decisions I see many businesses make:
- Penny-wise and pound foolish. Buying under-powered equipment, not having maintenance and backup plans, reacting to repeated and avoidable emergencies. Because thinking and planning is too hard.
- The boss gets the fastest/best/most powerful computer to surf the web with, while the workers struggle with deprecated hardware. Who is actually making the money?
- Demanding insane work hours, fostering unhealthy oneupmanship between staff, and generally disrespecting people. It is easier to continue to pay for the lost productivity and loyalty.
- Spending huge effort and resources to try and appeal to everyone, and thus attracting no one. Checklist marketing – we have done it therefore we have marketed. But we don’t actually know who we are talking to, what they are thinking, or even if they are listening.
- Using marketing to solve all problems. If we say it is not happening, it is not happening. If we tell people what to think about us, they will do so. No one will notice we don’t keep our promises.
- Maintaining a culture that attracts and encourages workplace psychopaths and bullies, while paying through the nose for staff turnovers, harassment suits, and crap productivity.
I am sure you can think of loads more examples of such irrational decisions. When will this denial stop?
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All the points you make are very genereic and can also be attributable to everyday people. Why just slag businesses?
Your second point about “the boss gets the fastest/best/most powerful computer to surf the web” - what century do you live in? This sort of practice doesn’t happen at all these days. Most workers get the exact same computers as their bosses in many companies I’ve worked with. Many (especially large) companies are using open floor plans too.
How can you prove that companies do checklist marketing? And by the way, you’re confusing marketing with promises. Marketing is meant to be about product/business promotion and putting the best foot forward to make a sale. It’s not a binding promise. We have laws to catch businesses out for misrepresentation or lying. Promises are reflected in discolosure statements and contracts.
“Maintaining a culture that attracts and encourages workplace psychopaths and bullies”. Who? Where? How? This is just a meaningless statement with no facts to substantiate it.
I work as a business journalist and I’m tired of seeing slags on business that don’t have supporting facts. It’s just a playground debate if these can’t be backed up.
Well I live in the 21st century and have worked in corporate and government all my adult life.
To claim that bosses don’t get better tools than the rest of their workforce “at all these days” is just laughable.
You need only to check the carpark of any business to see who is entitled to the better car on the corporate lease plan.
And I’ve yet to meet an executive with a mobile phone more than 12 months old, while their staff only get replacements when strictly necessary.
Corporates employ full-time chefs to provide their exectuives’ meals, at no cost to themselves, while staff are lucky if there’s an on-site bistro.
Perhaps Ray Williams is one of those egalitarian bosses you have in mind Bassi? He had gold-plated fittings in his executive onsuite.
I can easily rattle off companies with poisonous workplaces where the Type A aggressive personalities are always rewarded. You can’t possibly have worked in any large organisation to deny thats the way they work.
Oh, and about those open floor plans. Every company I’ve worked for has used open floor plans for the workers while the executives still get their offices.
And without fail, everytime its been implemented, the moral and performance of the workers plummets. Office dividers finally materialise to restore harmony.
Perhaps you should give some examples of these utopian businesses you see all the time. I’d certainly like to work in one.
@Bassi Kumar: How cute. I love your aggressive, accusatory tone. That always makes people comfortable and improves the quality of the discussion, yeah?
As a “business journalist” you would, I’d have thought, know the difference between the words “some”, “many”, “most” and “all”, and between “some businesses” and the abstract concept of “business” itself.
Even at 6.30am I can tell that Zern’s bullet-point list is a set of examples, not a claim that all businesses are like this. But that said, even amongst my own small client base I can think of specific instances matching 5 of the 6 points.
I’d also have thought that, as a “business journalist”, you’d realise that a publication or website focussing on business issues would talk about issues as they affect business — even though those issues might also affect other areas of human activity.
Obviously not all businesses exhibit all 6 “bad signs”. Der. But no-one was saying they do — apart from some imagined straw man you’ve decided to battle. You keep demanding facts and evidence, but provide none yourself. There’s a word for that: hypocrite.
(There’s another word, too, which I’d certainly use on my own website. However Zern seems to prefer a more refined standard of discussion here, so I’ll leave it as “hypocrite”.)
What intrigues me most is that you see Zern’s piece as an attack on business itself. You’re so defensive of “business” that I was waiting for you to say “communist”! Anyone with even halfway-decent analytical skills should be able to see that Zern’s piece is an observation that certain behaviours in some businesses are undesirable — and a call for those behaviours to change.
This, I reckon, is your key point:
“Marketing is… not a binding promise. We have laws to catch businesses out for misrepresentation or lying. Promises are reflected in discolosure [sic] statements and contracts.”
Pointing out dishonesty in communication is one of the major themes of Zern’s writing. He calls for more authenticity in business — more transparent and honest communication. Maybe you’ve been too busy fighting your anti-business straw man to notice, but this “marketing is not a promise” attitude, where dishonesty is actually your core business mode and you just try not to be “caught out” by the law as you put it, is precisely what Zern is fighting.
No wonder you’re getting defensive!
I’m guessing, therefore, that by “business journalist” you actually mean you’re in PR as opposed to doing, you know, actual journalism and stuff?
@Zern Liew: Maybe you need to clarify that all decisions have both a rational and a non-rational component? I think what you’re saying is that businesses (in general) claim to act rationally in their own best interests, but that non-rational elements mean that decisions are sometimes not in the best long-term interests of the firm. Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?
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Absolute contradiction is always good to stir up debate. I gazed over the article when it first came out and thought yes, yes, yes, yes, some workplaces operate as if the employees can not see these phenomena’s actually happening… hence the reason to fly solo.