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Advantages of incompetent management

What constitutes managerial competence? As a vague starting point for an answer, we could say that competent management sets achievable objectives and then achieves them, by organizing and incentivizing the necessary work. It turns out that even this near-tautological banality is enough to see why competent management puts many desirable things out of reach.

A relatively inexperienced VP attends a meeting where senior management is asked to shrink their budgets due to the adverse economic climate brought about by the coronavirus pandemic. A place like this evolves the healthy laziness that keeps animals from moving their body parts all the time, needlessly burning calories, in order for the claws, wings and tails to get a good performance review from their head at the end of the year. This is possible if there's a culture where a manager gets to look good through means other than appearing to be on top of plans and status - for example, by presenting shiny things the team is working on (regardless of their exact impact on the bottom line or even chances to be deployed in production.)

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