Now for today, pretend that you are a CEO of a major corporation. You are hired to not only maintain your existing profit level but you are strongly encouraged to increase the profit level. So if your corporation did 500 million dollars in profit last year, you are expected to make 600 million dollars profit this year. To help encourage you, a bonus in salary is offered if you can reach this objective, more bonus if you exceed this objective. Naturally if you fail, your 1 year contract will not be renewed and you will be stuck in finding employment. So you are under pressure to perform, or else. So what do you do?
Well the natural thing for you to do is to move quickly, no time to think, just perform. The current bureacratic rules does not stop you from eliminating positions within the corporation. You trim the fat. You don't want to affect production or sales in this year because that will affect the bottom line very quickly. You cut 10% in advertising expenses. You buy cheaper primary products. Assume your corporation makes computers.... you would buy cheaper plastics for the casings, for your keyboards.... doesn't matter if the current plastic would last 5 years and the cheaper ones would only last 5 months.... you have saved a pretty penny. Then you decide to cut customer service by about 90%, replace it with an automated system that makes customers wait 15 minutes to reach a technician as opposed to 15 seconds in the past. If their complaints or problems are genuine, they will wait on the phone longer, right? You have cut costs by quite a bit and so far your sales should still be the same as before.... hence higher profit!!!
You decide not to renew your contract because you know you can't sustain such decisions and the long term effects for these short term gains will be disastrous.... but you were not hired to think, you were hired to produce. You have achieved what was most important, the bottom line. Irrelevant if the loyal employees were fired so that you could get your bonus, irrelevant if the customers now complain for receiving crappy products.... you have achieved what was expected of you and you have received your bonus. You can now become CEO of a completely different company with your past success! Who will challenge proven expertise?
The statistics show how you have succeeded. The bureaucratic rules have not been violated. You have produced. So where is the problem? The problem is that if anyone was given the time to think for only a mere 2 seconds, it is obvious that this situation could not sustain itself for very long. If you would have explained the facts of the matter, you would never have been hired as CEO in the first place. You were hired for the bottom line, that's it, that's all.... and you achieved it!!! Whoever is the next CEO will now have to find solutions to deal with the growing customer complaints, the growing reputation that the finished products are crap etc. But it does not matter what the next CEO does because your contract is over with that company and you have moved on somewhere else to repeat the same procedure and given the bonuses for it!!!
The system has encouraged this form of behavior, forget long term consequences. Don't think, produce. Anyone who has a word of caution is not promoted or just simply fired for being "lazy". Statistics don't predict the obvious long term negative consequences, they only report what the leaders want to see: the profits have increased this year or not. The bureaucratic rules are written to encourage the bottom line is the most important thing. Anyone who suggests that the bottom line will be destroyed if this practice is continued is ridiculed because the statistics prove that everything is great and the rules work!
Solution? Hire thinkers. Allow thinking. Do not fire someone for daring to say "no" to a boss, evaluate the reasoning behind his "no". Give time the priority, not production. Allow employees to be happy employees, not stressed. We have the technology, we have the resources; enable them do not waste them.
Oh, since we are about to have an election soon, may I point out that the CEO problem can easily be transfered over to the leadership of a country. The politician is more there to satisfy our immediate gratifications irrelevant to the long term costs that this can affect.... So if we complain about today's problems.... remember that we have allowed this system to create them. Blaming a specific politician is hypocritical because as the example above shows.... you would have done the same bloody thing.... otherwise you would not have been voted in.
As our "system" promotes production over thinking as well as this same "system" promotes bureaucratic rules over human judgment we will continue to have short term gains with long term losses.... We are starting to feel the effects of the long term.... can you not see it yet?
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