I've recently moved back into private sector, and it's been pretty surprising to me just how little of the business world has to do with actual business. There are the expected things, such as relationship building, empire building, fiefdom building, etc.

But, it also seems that a lot of the actual effort people expend doesn't have very much to do with the business. For example, we had an executive whose passion in life was clearly just to speak in front of people. He never did real work, but made sure to take every opportunity to ensure he was speaking in front of people. It's clear that he should have been a public speaker.

I don't mean to pick on this particular executive, but it seems like there's a lot of this here. A lot of people, engaged all day in things that don't produce work. They're more about building some special, separate social hierarchy: determining who is in charge, who has influence, who matters. That seems to take up a lot of time in the private sector. I'm sure it's not universally true, but this has been my ad-hoc experience.

And, I get it: this is what people do, and what people value. We're social creatures, etc. But it sort implies that everyone's engaged in a joint lie. That lie being "we're here to work and we're all hard workers. We're primarily interested in advanced the business." It seems like a more literal truth might be: "We're here to take part in a social hierarchy, and forge friends and enemies, and do enough actual work that no one minds how inefficient our business is."