Organisational Bullshit

CYA= Cover your A(you know what) a term I don't feel appropriate if spelled out, but, you are wise enough to get it now.

Re: # 10

What is CYA?

Jack Welch the former head of GE had a good one about bureaucracies. He said something to the effect... I hate bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are not just in Government but creep into any large organisation. The trouble with bureaucracies is that everyone has their heads pointing towards their bosses with their asses to those below them.

And there is a good book on a related subject called `Holy Cows make the best Bergers'.

#9 Posted by pinku on October 29
Who red-flagged my comment and why???

Is there a red flag troll or terrorist on duty??

Factors that necessitate BS:

- CYA plays a major role in all the BS that is adopted.

- Perception is another big player in imparting and
receiving.If one fails to impart appropriately its
merely any more than garbage in - garbage out
theory/practice.

- Boot licking higher ups who do not themselves understand
the process in a practical working environment are also
responsible for creating most of the "isht" because they
got where they are due to boot licking and not due to
their performance.

- Management personnel who know the process are better when
it comes to imparting and training as well as setting up
procedures and policies and cannot be deceived by their
subordinates, while based on their knowledge and
practice, they are hands on and much more confident and
they handle attempts of deception by subordinates in a
much better fashion without confrontation, i.e. the
don't let the Bull exist let alone permitting a Bull to
"isht".

correction... in 8

But other than this one example above, everything that a manger does inappropriately to reduce his work and to pass or delegate his responsibility to lower level person/team is a BS that goes from upper level to lower level.

As for everything else, first thing is whether you define something properly or not, then only you can analyze it.

Now the article defines BS! So we can say that BS is whatever article defines. The definition is a long list of statements that says this is BS, this is BS...

As DM said, you can define your own BS and say that this is the Bullsh*t_revised_version_1, and in here, it goes from lower to upper levels and upper to lower levels both ways.

For example, a common BS that comes down in IT projects is deadline, at each level you remove buffer at your own will and give a much harder time-line to your lower level. Many times the top level people do not know how to estimate and so foolishly try to keep lot of buffer and give very tight deadline to lower level, creating a bad quality product (bad design) which takes much longer to refine than if the deadline was based on proper estimates.


But other than this one example above, everything that a manger does to in appropriately reduce his work and to pass or delegate his responsibility to lower level person/team is a BS that goes from upper level to lower level.

re: muradbaig #3

Nice Article!..

"Bullshit, unfortunatly, is a very serious problem facing us all in almost everything we try to do. "

But bullshit is all we do here!... and now you are the resident expert.

Regards,

Faruk

Baig saheb:

Very interesting and informative. I might add that, in my experience, there is as much BS from above as from below, at least in government bureaucracy; especially when the boss really doesn't know what he or she wants but won't admit and is indeed asking you to define the problem for him/her without saying so.

This was very good, Murad. All these things are well-understood by Organization Theorists and Organizational Behaviorists but your knitting them together within the BS metaphor was imaginative, inventive, and actually quite helpful.

Good stuff!!

One way to look at bullshit or 'organizational inefficiency' is to see it as an 'emergent property' of people, agendas and machines working together. Easy to mock and disown but inevitable..

Re: # 2

LOL2U2 Laddu

You are quite right.

It takes a lot of effort to become an expert on any difficult subject.

This paper evolved from a sales conference where 12 area sales managers were trying to defend their inability to meet their sales targets. Soon after I presented this to my Marketing & Sales Management class at the Faculty of Management Studies (University of Delhi). It later became a paper at the Administrative Staff College Hyderabad.

Bullshit, unfortunatly, is a very serious problem facing us all in almost everything we try to do.

Murad is an expert in BullShit!!!

LOL!!!

Beyond Bullsh*t: Straight-Talk at Work by Samuel A. Culbert (Stanford University Press, 2008),

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Susan Scott, Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and In Live, One Conversation at a Time (New York: Penguin Group/Viking Studio, 2002)