Comment by forkandwait | Hacker News Reader

Comment by forkandwait | Hacker News Reader

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I am currently reading a bunch of the Toyota Way books, Deming, etc. and sometimes I wonder if one of the most basic assumptions in the West is that the individual is the root and the system is a derived thing. This assumption starts, maybe, with Christianity which tells us that we stand alone before God judged on our individual character, not on our wealth or social position. Buddhism, on the other hand, tells us that even our perception of selfhood and autonomy is an illusion to be rooted out and discounted.

To toss out an assumption as fundamental as these would require a huge realignment of all sorts of things -- how we punish and reward, our sense of self worth, who is good and who is bad, etc. So we don't really want to go there.

I think the West could benefit from a swing to the Systems/ Wholeness side of the dichotomy, but I wouldn't want to discount how powerful and what a creative force our individualism has been throughout the last 2000 years.

(EDIT, PS: Deming is the real deal, and the Toyota Way/ Lean books and movement tries to take some of his surface ideas and implement them without challenging their readers in the way Deming wanted to.)

(EDIT, PPS: Toyota / Buddha says "You see a problem? Change the system." Microsoft/ Jesus says "You see a problem? Roast the culpable individuals, reward the virtuous individuals.")

(EDIT, PPPS: Hegel and his philosophical descendants have the best take on the dynamic movement between individual and collective, without discounting either of the two viewpoints.)

That's a really good point. Its not just the useless people that reduce a team's effectiveness.

A few jobs back, I worked with a person that was incredibly brilliant, and a very prolific developer. Unfortunately he made everyone around him miserable in countless ways (definitely a prima donna). He would rewrite large sections of code and change core user functionality without asking product managers or other developers. When confronted, he refused to revert his changes because he had done it right and "everyone would see once it was released".

His abilities and contributions would likely put him at the top of a stack rank, but overall he may have hurt the company more than he contributed.

For more on Deming's ideas see

  http://blog.deming.org/

  http://blog.deming.org/2013/09/online-resources-for-w-edwards-demings-management-ideas/

  http://blog.deming.org/tag/performance-appraisal/

"The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good.

The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise." W. Edward Deming - see: http://blog.deming.org/2013/02/the-idea-of-performance-ratin...

Minor point...

I'd say Christianity goes along with the original poster's idea of everyone getting the same reward - ie grace - nothing you do can merit it - it's a gift.

The parable of the vineyard workers explains it - it doesn't matter how late in the day the workers start working - they all get the same reward.

Also, if Jesus was interested in "roasting" people, he wouldn't have bothered coming here.

And if His old man weren't interested in roasting people, He'd have used industry-wide best practices such as two-factor authentication and salted password hashes on the root server, to keep Satan from hacking into the source repository.

That may be true, but it doesn't take into account the Protestant work ethic[1]. I think Wikipedia has a good explanation:

the notion developed that it might be possible to discern that a person was elect (predestined) by observing their way of life. Hard work and frugality, as well as social success and wealth, were thought to be two important consequences of being one of the elect; thus, Protestants were thus attracted to these qualities and supposed to strive for reaching them

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

This is a really interesting observation, and one I've thought about before.

I've noticed that companies tend to fall into two philosophical camps, both of which can be successful if executed right. One camp says that you should create a great process so that you can stick anyone in it and they can be successful. Another camp says you should get great people and the process will work itself out. I'm illustrating the extremes to clarify the picture: even process-driven firms need good people, and people-driven firms need good processes.

I'm not sure there's actually a "right" answer to the question, so much as you need to make sure you execute in the right way against the strategy you've chosen, although I do think that certain industries and firm sizes tend to advantage one over the other.

There must be a balance, since both are in fact true.

The same can be said of politics, but extreme ideologies exist still.

Completely agree, I think you have the roots of the different paradigms entirely correct. It's also the same dichotomy that produces the bisected political extremes in the US.

I disagree that we don't want to go there. One of these seems to produce better results, companies, and societies, while the other produces effectively dysfunctional ones, like the example we just read.

I seek realignment. This can be improved.

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