Many authors and, especially academics, think that economy and administrating people is nothing but incentive science. This means that incentives constitute an instrument created to push the individual to do what is considered to be correct (and is good), pushing him away from what is considered to be detrimental (and which is bad). The question that emerges out of this affirmation is: for whom? Considering the fact that incentives do not pour down from the sky and that somebody has to invent them, a question immediately appears: for what reason? We are all educated according to the logic of incentives and its opposite, from a very early age. That is, awards and punishments.
If you got a good grade, fine! The red flaming bike is yours. If you are silent during an interrogation, that is bad! You appear to be an idiot. If you are part of the football team of your institute,
fine! You are tough. At the end of the year, if you manage to reach the objectives for sales and returns, great! You are in the career. Too
many contributors do not pay income tax? Withhold money at the source for everybody. And so on …It would seem to be a perfect mechanism, but strange things happen. If the problem is about incentives, then how can you avoid that somebody behaves shrewdly? After all, we are all continuously in situations where we feel
like changing things, “push” data or behave shrewdly. Our culture often seems to award those who behave shrewdly. Like “ifsomething is tempting, imagine the feeling obtaining it through shrewdness”. Therefore we have football players simulating, waitresses that withhold tips and do not share them with their colleagues, managers that manipulate data (for their personal good or for their image sake). And an athlete who cheats to lose is exposed to insults (cheating to lose is a mortal sin within the world of sports), whereas a person who cheats to win is only a shrewd person and he finds a great number of people who are ready to defend him (cheating to win is a venial sin in the world of sports) .
tWhich is the spring that allows somebody or renders somebody available to actions that are not correct? Plato thought over this problem in "Republic". The position is very simple: if the only reason to be just (and get the award) is given by social conventions (rules under the form of incentives), then it is sensible to behave justly in public only, when we cannot do otherwise, that is only when we are visible.
“Is it possible to resist evil temptations if you are certain that you will not be discovered?”(Plato)
Here we shall discuss the concept of invisibility. If you manage to be invisible, then you can allow anything. Then you assist the deliberate “thefts” in your company, towards the collaborators, towards anybody between the “employee” and the obtainment of the objectives. The bigger the company, the easier it is to be invisible. And every year, these companies resemble jukeboxes more and more: the more incentives, the more money, the more “songs” will be played at a high volume level. Pity that they often and
suddenly are false. The cycle becomes perverse and in short you must reset everything and recommence with new
awarding systems, new modalities for distributing the incentives. A continuous
merry-go-round based on mechanisms that are unique for economic recognition. Incentives as opposed to economic value. And then the jukebox starts to play, more money and more songs.
How do we get out of it? Easy. We bet on people! We bet on their value, we bet on
creating environments where we substitute the chorus in songs that are out of tune. And then we can convince them that it is possible to pursue that which Adam
Smith wrote on the innate honesty of individuals in his book “Theory of moral feelings”.We only need a small effort. We create satisfaction and environment to promote recognition. For example, when “Somebody” makes a good job, we say so sincerely, publicly.
“No matter how egoistic the human being may seem, there are obvious innate principles in human nature that make man take an interest in the destiny of the next man, the good of which becomes a necessity, even if he cannot obtain anything but a detached feeling of satisfaction”.
(Adam Smith)“Every face is the basis for expression just as it was intelligently moulded onto the inner soul, since the rest is heredity, mystery or fate”.
(Joseph Conrad)Face, face! It is a simple refrain by now. Even though our face is the thing we deal with every day, it is definitely “that” of which we speak less and expose directly as little as possible. The way we use it, how much we can control it, how we distribute it, how often we use it by ourselves, how often we “delegate”..., so many questions, so many doubts, so many hopes!
Our face is like a flipper? Does it assume a different appearance according to the coins we insert?Our face should be preserved from emotions? Maybe somebody will use it for their benefit, against ourselves. A face for all occasions? Strong with the weak and weak with the strong?
Well!!!
Pinball was a real game, a unique experience. Not at all connected to time, but to pure ability. Few rules, schemes that differed all the time, no game like the other. The ability was to adapt the way of playing to the evolution of the game and respond quickly to input, continuously changing strategy if necessary. Difficult if not impossible to cheat. There was a variation which was a group game. Tournaments and competitions of all kinds took place in bars. The spectators took an active part in the competitions.
Today pinball is an incomprehensible game. It is full of options and unclear rules; it is difficult to see any strategy, if not that to play for as long as possible, hoping to receive a tip, an alternative to allow us to continue the game, although we have no idea about what happens exactly. The spectators (few to tell the truth) try to understand and extract some rules to allow them to use it subsequently.
The evident analogies with the market in general are too easy and so are the analogies with which that happens inside organizations. Too easy. The operation of organizations is more and more approaching that of modern pinball. A heap of rules that are unclear, little known and not even disclosed with precision, or even when they are disclosed, they appear
incomprehensible. This is the essence of bureaucracy. Rules to use at the moment and according to the situation, for one´s own benefit, especially in moments of crisis, exploiting also the scarce knowledge that people have in general. All this to consolidate a kind of micro-power and construct a territory to defend by using the same rules that were used to construct it. In the meanwhile, we proceed gropingly in the organizational magma among committees and meetings and extra hours, hoping to have time enough (trusting in our big start) to pin the right move, to look for the rule that allows us to “take off”, to perpetuate the status quo. More rules, more opportunities.
Rules as Saints we can lean onto in case of need and it is obviously so that there the more Saints there are ….. That which should be a set of rules to allow us to manage our organizational lives efficiently (and make it into a kind of court where we play in teams, with loyalty, against an adversary), instead becomes a non-homogeneous set of conditions that only allow us to perform a donkey race. And a donkey with thirty years of experience remains a donkey (though a little older).
This strange race exasperates the tendency of each one of us to live in his own world, different and separate from that of our peers, nurturing our dreams but also our nightmares. The inclination of living in a reality that is mainly nourished by our particular elaboration increases, rather than an authentic relationship to others. The result is that we are each prisoners of the spider-web that we ourselves weave to become its only true victim. That is: many and ambiguous rules; a chaotic spider-web to use only when you want to or when you sense a result that is coherent with your own interest. As a screen or a convenience and often only to avoid expressing an opinion. Rules that isolate also groups of people, not only individuals. Rules that end up determining the identity of a group defining its characteristics. “We members of the administrative management...” “You members of the commercial sector...” Each little group sets up its own rules (and spider-web) and it is this complex web that hinders the group to have authentic relations.
And the face in all this? Simple: “missing in action”!Ever feel stupid,
and then know that you really are? Ever think you're smart.
Then you find that you aren't
Ever play the fool,
And then find out that you're worse? Ever look at a flower,
And hate it? Ever see a couple kissing
And get sickened by it?
Ever wish the human race didn't exist.
And then you realize you're one too?
Alas, after a certain age, each one is responsible for his own face.
(Albert Camus)
(Latin proverb)
In a famous page in Gulliver´s travels, there is a narration about a long war that was fought with great ruthlessness and enormous losses for both sides – the small inhabitants of Lilliput and the rival empire of Blefuscu. In a world that is so crazy and fantastic at the same time, in which two realities live side by side, Lilliput and Blefuscu, so different and yet so similar due to the problems that they have to solve every day, although in different ways. Equally crazy (and maybe a little less fantastic) are the motivations for such a strong rivalry.
Gulliver himself is
astonished to learn the reason for the war
between the two worlds: it is connected to
different ideas about how to break eggs
before using them: one part says that they must be broken from the
pointed side, whereas the other part claims they should be broken from the rounded part. <Absurd! - thinks
Gulliver – Anybody with a brain must exclaim "Absurd! Totally crazy!
What sad times await us!"> And who would not say he was right? In any case he shrugs his shoulders (intellectuals) and he goes beyond, ready to meet someone else that does "crazy" things so as to be able to exclaim again …
Are we really sure that our discussions, our “wars”, our meetings, our kick-offs, our commitments seem much more intelligent than the war about breaking eggs to those who look at our actions from the outside? An extraterrestrial looking at our daily problems, would almost certainly exclaim: "Absurd! Totally crazy! What dark times await us! Things for (intellectual) dwarfs!"
If a hooligan breaks windows of the flats in a block and they are not repaired immediately, all windows of the block will be devastated within short (this is a phenomenon that the American George Kelling defines as the “broken window effect”). In areas where nobody intervenes, in which one does nothing to restore the environment, you think that everything is possible. Therefore, when seeing a broken window, it would be natural to exclaim: "Absurd! Totally crazy! Everything is going to pieces, what bad times awaits us!" But then, inevitably, they shrug their shoulders (intellectuals) and go beyond to search a new block with broken windows to be able to say again ... : Well... these are things for dwarfs (intellectuals)!
Nietzsche claimed that everybody has the duty to evolve, to elevate and become a “superman”, for example by letting his better side prevail to rise above the norm ...
If it is true that as dwarfs, our desire would be that to climb up onto the shoulders of the giants and not of other dwarfs, maybe even more dangerous, and find dwarfs that think they are giants, only because they have stilts. In fact, too often we settle for the mediocre and do not care about what we can (and would/could) become.
Too often ours is a “Grand Hotel” approach: many images, enormous titles, but no substance. Everything is done with a profound superficiality: we do not make in-depth studies, we look at the surface, to establish that there is nothing there, it is not worth investing time and intellectual resources. It is easier to say: Totally crazy…
But to speak/gossip/shrug one´s shoulders is often a behaviour of people that have positions that are not adequate for their organizational/cultural/project height; it is the behaviour of people on stilts and with a visibility given only through their own living ability and to walk on stilts. How tiresome to live a life on false legs, that make walking difficult, but offer only an illusion of living a life with a different visual effect, but which is not necessarily better because it comes from above!
It is no use trusting these giants, therefore; one cannot lean on these fictitious giants to see better, to dream, to realize/be realized since they are nothing but dwarfs with stilts, dwarfs dressed up as giants... We do not need them, they are not different from us, but they pretend, and they let us believe they are giants!
Let’s climb up onto the shoulders of a true giant thinking of Fabrizio De Andrè in his “Il suonatore Jones”: "In a vortex of dust, others see dryness.In a vortex of dust, others see dryness.
I remember Jenny´s skirt during a ball many years ago.
[...]
And then people know and people know that you can play, You have to play all your life and you like to be listened to ..."
I remember Jenny´s skirt during a ball many years ago.”; “Where you see dryness and dust, I see a dream and it is no use that you hide, since”...
And people know how much you are worth, so: play, make, give your contribution. Let us stop laughing at the errors of others, at the efforts to create, to scorn attempts at searching other opportunities with sarcasm, to wait for them to fail and instead help others to grow and make their efforts less heavy. When we see one, ten or a hundred broken windows, let us fix them or teach somebody fix them. Otherwise, we shall have the courtesy to be silent for ever, without expressing judgement as pseudo-intellectuals and continue to live amongst dwarfs that shrug their shoulders! Let us do all that while we wait to reach our Samarcand. Since, at the end, the donkeys recognize eachother and stroke one another, feeling good about the mere contact.
And if we think that everything is going bad, let us then do the right thing, let us stop and rebuild the situation, let us not criticize the work of others, of our male or female colleagues, but let us help them to change the window. Only in this way, as dwarfs – or as dwarfs on the shoulders of a giant – will we become protagonists without risking to climb up to the trampoline and pretend we are giants... people know.
Absurd! Really crazy! What sad times await us! Hey look: somebody is fixing a window.And I remember whom
fantasy put in power ...
they were days of great dreams you know
even utopias were true
One obligatory direction… The idea of progress could give us the feeling of a one-way direction: you go from the spade to the plough, but you do not go back. That is it, you do not go back. This is different from the one-way direction: it is not the same thing, it is not the same phenomenon, even if linguistically speaking they are “almost” similar. And it is this almost that changes history. There is no going back and progress leaves its signs on the way, transforms things, allows us to have alternative views and opportunities, but there is no going back. Not going back means that there has been a change, that thoughts and people are no longer the same.
We obtain a transformation, since exchange and change are continuous, since there are no one-way streets in which you do not encounter anybody, since there are no conversations in which the interlocutors do not listen to each other: we meet, we listen, since we all firmly believe that only by moving forward will we have a possibility of feeling better, so the street is obligatory … But it is not one-way. It is rather a street without return, a street that disappears or changes when you arrive to the end if you turn around after having completed a course, you will no longer see that which you just saw, the course, the experience.
In these moments our "gurus", those people we ask to indicate the street to follow and to interpret the courses commenced, continue to claim that we must slow down, that we cannot absorb all these changes, that we must break, that it is necessary to travel slowly along the course and consolidate it. Practically, they say that it is
better to concentrate on our
own navel (which is another
form of one-way activity).
This leads to fear, a wish
to stop, a wish to think,
to believe that “… well
maybe, things were better
when they were worse”.
Maybe things were better
when somebody told you
what to do, without focusing
so much on groups, on
cohesion, on the importance
of creativity, on smiling, on
investing every day on
ourselves, on recognizing the
value of others, ...
independently of the nature of
You are strong
you are beautiful
you are invincible
you are incorruptible you are a … singer and a songwriter
you are wise
you bring trough
you are not a common mortal you are not allowed to cheat you are a … singer and a songwriter
this “maybe”, the issue is how we choose to walk along our course, since it is our course anyway.
All right … enough, this is only work: we welcome anybody who wants to tell us what to do, leaving the rest be; participating for what, if there are always the same people that ...?
Well, to recollect Calvino (“Invisible Cities”) in the dilemma of the living hell, between "accepting hell and becoming part of it to the point when you do not see it any more" and "search for that which is not hell ” “... make it last, give it space”, to go back then means to choose to roll in cold hell.
It is really true: there is no definition of stupidity, but a great many examples of it.“A stupid person is a person that damages another person or a group of people without obtaining any advantage for himself or even suffering damage”.
(Third law of stupidity, Carlo Cipolla)If it were possible to use a particular microscope, capable of focusing all microbes that make our life an extremely complicated and absurd matter, both tragic and ridiculous, then it would be possible to recognize and identify the microbe of envy, that of presumptuous imbecility, that of rage, of vanity, of gluttony and of cruelty. Each one of us has all possible varieties in our own character - the full package, to use a common expression – of microbes that influence our behaviour, making us ambivalent and unpredictable. In their immense variations, microbes are often also used as a defence, the classical excuse not to do something, to postpone, to declare war and fights to defend one´s territory. The territory, defended by the physical and mental space, of one´s own cultural habits.
On the basis of this force, a struggle is activated between the numerous microbes for the assertion of one or the other; a circuit is activated to let the strongest of these microorganisms survive (in a certain moment). What are the conditions that allow one microbe to survive rather than another? And what if fear is the true bond of everything? The true driving force of one behaviour or another?
At a certain point of “The
Philosopher´s Stone”, the first film of the well-known saga of Harry Potter, when he walks around the school corridors, hidden by an invisible mantle that belonged to his father, in one room Harry Potter finds a big mirror which reaches up to the ceiling and has a golden frame. The mirror has an inscription engraved backwards “Erised”, i.e. “Desire”. The young wizard cannot move away from the image projected by the mirror and only in that particular mirror, he sees his heart and his most secret desires. Hypnotized and unable to move away from its fascination, he remains looking at the images in the mirror, which becomes a mania. Fortunately, the wise Albus Dumbledore warns Harry about this enchantment: the mirror of Desires does not grant knowledge nor truth; it is only a means to
hide in dreams, letting you forget to act and live true life.
And for our story we always expect a happy ending, just as happens in the tale of “Squary” drawn by Antonio Rubino: a boy with a perfectly square face is forced to lose his geometric identity due to an incident. In fact, as in all his tales, there is a happy ending in “Squary” which is to be found in the final line:
“But his mother comes quite soon And with great care she is there To make his face real square”
The happy ending is guaranteed by an external intervention, in this case, his mother appears and makes things right again (but Harry´s mother is no longer there): very similar to the important character that solves (often only on paper) situations, very similar to the theatrical turning-point which magically solves everything (but only on pages and in fairy tales). Magic! That is the solution, maybe... And if we would prefer human qualities instead?
Personal tests, market challenges, the realization of objectives are overcome thanks to courage, force, friendship, loyalty: human qualities that are more important than magic or trusting a big star or a powerful friend. But a happy ending is something we all expect, to which we all relate; and it is what we hope will happen when we read a story, a fairy tale or when we see a film. Are we sure about this?
Hey Mr. Tambourine man, play a song for me,
Hey Mr. Tambourine, play a song for me,
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to,
Hey, Mr. Tambourine, play a song for me,
in the jing jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you
Are we sure that we always wish for a happy ending? Even when “our” happy ending is not there for one reason or the other? Even when there is a different happy ending in an organization, due to reasons connected to living together? And in this case, when are we willing to give up our aims for those of a group and not individually? When is it that the development and the future of an organization passes from renouncement to a “happy ending” to the development of the "end" of a group even if it is in contrast with ours? How willing are we to participate in the scheme of a leader that identifies a happy ending for the group, even if it remains obscure to many of the individuals (and one takes upon him full responsibility for it for any failure and also for any consequences)? Which is the place to share emotions; where are our thoughts? And fantasy that helps us to build another reality and shape a critical conscience that is useful for us when we have to face problems?
We have said that tests, challenges are exceeded, that objectives are reached thanks to courage, force, friendship and loyalty. We have said that these are human qualities that may be more efficient than the magic or trusting a big star or a powerful friend. I repeat this: qualities that are emphasized in a true relation to the group or groups we belong to. But if this was not so, then we would have to look into a mirror with a golden frame that reaches up to the ceiling: another fine hiding-place to say “what bad luck I have had, look how nice things were before…”. If this is the solution or the only way (or the most comfortable way) to choose, then it is not necessary to have a guide, to have somebody who represents/defends and emphasizes the quality of single persons, you just need an anthropologist that studies the modalities for disappearance, extinction of the group. Are we sure that we have identified the right happy ending?
(Hillary Clinton)
To conclude, it is obvious that the future offers great opportunities. It is also full of traps. The trick is to avoid traps, embrace opportunities and be back home in time for dinner.
(Woody Allen)
The crisis of our way of acting, our way of behaving when changes take place, our way of living our organized lives (and not only!) is identifiable both with the barbaric state in which our ideas are right now, and with the “prehistoric level” of our attitudes that are still bound by thoughts, values and theories that do not differ very much from the myths and the magical rites that guided our
ancestors. The limit in all this is to believe firmly that there is a point in which everything stops, or rather in which it is better to stop, in which it is wiser an more comfortable to stop; a point not to pass, since beyond it you risk the peril of novelty, you risk ending up in the territory of
comparison and rethinking, in the territory of challenge: the land of “questioning oneself” and having to rethink one´s own heroes, beliefs and above all the necessity to create new values.
Like the pillars of Hercules, the mythical point for the ancient Greeks that was not to be passed, in order not to be exposed to the rage of the Gods. On this part of the pillars, life proceeds absorbed by navigation in silent seas of gains that (with fatigue) have been acquired during years; beyond it lies the need to recommence. And even farther beyond it, the usual routine (still tiresome), based on knowledge acquired; beyond it the need for new and more tiresome knowledge. A kind of waked sleep: on the one part the need to be awake, on the other part the need to be ready.
On the other hand, sleeping is considered a value in our occidental culture, whereas waking up is considered tiresome. We, in fact, say continuously “I have slept like a stone” to assert a positive condition, but then we say “I suddenly woke up” and here the phrase has a maybe negative ring to it. Sweet dreaming, a long and deep sleep and so on. Shortly, we like to “sleep” and even more to think that things will settle between dusk and dawn and that sleep brings solutions and advice. But a company cannot live by sleeping, it cannot hope that its problem
will be solved suddenly in the
morning, or rather have been
solved, nor can it trust a long
and regenerating drowziness:
that would mean certain death.
When facing a crossroad, the
company cannot pretend it is
no