every corporation assumes that most employees will lie, cheat, steal, and slack as much as possible.

now, it’s easy to account for someone stealing from the till or not stocking shelves. but because knowledge work is vague and hard to measure, a smart white collar worker can have a much easier time exploiting the company.

there’s probably about one employee any corporation can trust, the founder. but after some point, the founder really can’t know all of what’s going on in a company.

how do you solve this problem?

first, track and report everything. tickets, metrics, commits, standup, milestones, OKRs, “artifacts”, etc. knowledge work is hard to measure? well, we just haven’t tried hard enough, we’ll just devote a third of our time producing paperwork to obsessively make things legible and measurable. and then we’ll use competition to make this measurement more objective: e.g. we make middle managers “calibrate” each other’s claimed accomplishments. it’s a big chain of accountability to reduce everything to easy to understand numbers.

this helps with trust problem. it becomes easier to verify other people’s work, even if the system isn’t perfect.

second, we enforce a strong behavioural code. everyone has to be visibly helpful, happy, smart, nice, and a hard worker! you can never appear to work for your own interests, you must always work towards the best interests of the company. smile!

(of course, inside your trusted circle it’s different. if you don’t take the mask off at the right times, people won’t trust you and you’ll be excluded from the real conversations.)

anyways, all of this oppression is really good! really good!

first of all, who doesn’t love well-defined roles with lots of rules. especially when the official roles include things like “being objectively right about really complicated things”, “hiding your emotions”, and “obsessing over computer systems”. it’s like a second womb.

second, if you want to provide anything of value in the global economy it takes a lot of teamwork between really smart strangers. thousands of ‘em. but the reward for getting such a team together is dipping your pockets in that global money stream and oh boy is that a lot of money. so if you can hack it in these totalitarian surveillance systems, you can get a slice of that pie!

of course, the sociopaths, manipulators, and generally speaking humans know this and are constantly trying to sneak in. they’ve learned by now how to wear the masks and inevitably succeed in infiltrating. but the suffocatingly oppressive atmosphere of “best behaviour” can keep the damage limited (at least for a while).

but anyways your awesome company gets captured by the vampires, they work the rules to their advantage, they suck the blood out of the company, and it dies. if this makes you sad you should internalize that everything dies, and that the good times are only ever temporary.

the beautiful part is that natural selection of companies continuously pushes us towards more and more effective corporate structures that are better at seizing these lazy selfish humans and forcing them to do things that are useful for other people.

all models are wrong but some models are useful. i don’t think this model is useful, but it’s interesting.