John Fletcher muses on the true value of a job, and why losing consciousness of yourself and of your ego in your single-minded application to the task in hand counts for more than you may imagine in making any job worthwhile.

John Fletcher wonders why hierarchy is in such disfavor. For an idea that seems so natural, and has been independently discovered so often, it’s surprising how quickly it’s dismissed by management gurus. Is that another case of a fashionable management mythology that flies in the face of actual experience?

John Fletcher reflects on the value of money as an incentive and why we need to rethink our relationship with monetary rewards. “Give somebody an incentive to be stupid and they will be stupid,” he writes. “Give somebody a large incentive to be stupid—like allowing them to borrow thirty times the capital of their bank to gamble with—and they will be extra-stupid.”

John Fletcher explains that, when you give up the incessant mental chatter, when you learn to concentrate, you’ll not only work better, you’ll be happier. Good working environments don’t make happy workers all by themselves. You bring your emotional and intellectual baggage with you to work, just as you take it home again. You have to deal with that if you want to enjoy your working day more.

If Hitler is the sick, demonic parody of a success-at-any-price modern executive, Stalin is the control-freak, gray accountant who turns up from nowhere and institutes a reign of terror in the organization. He’s the godfather of the new boss who tells you you’ll have to do more with a smaller budget and fewer staff—and if you can’t succeed you’ll be replaced.

The modern gospel of economic Darwinism — psychopathic competition to the death — has replaced the social Darwinism of the 1920s and 1930s. The leadership of those who pursue only their own interests and ambitions, using organizations and their personnel as nothing more than raw material, is the style of leadership we are called on to admire nowadays. John Fletcher draws a disturbing parallel that shows where it can lead.

One of the differences between a happy and an unhappy organization is how well its structures and processes match its objectives. John Fletcher calls this ‘coherence’ — a coherent organization is one which is organized and managed in a way that embraces its objectives, rather than just not getting in the way. Fitting the structure to the organization’s purpose is essential to create a civilized workplace again.

The Prussian general Von Moltke famously said that no plan survives contact with the enemy. There doesn’t need to be a literal enemy for this to be true of other sectors also. The real challenge for an organization is how it deals with the unexpected, bearing in mind that the unexpected is the one thing that always happens. These days, most organizations, with their cultures of central command and micro-management, don’t deal with it very well. John Fletcher explains one reason why.

Economic Darwinism is a virus infecting how we think and how we speak. It’s probably the dominant way of writing about economic issues today. And it’s total garbage, producing only a mindless culture of internal and external, psychotic competition in the media and among the ‘punditocracy’. As a way of organising an economy and a society, it’s as near useless as makes no difference. Psychopathic competition now seems so natural and so ordinary, after a generation or more of propaganda for it, that we accept it as a description of reality, even if it conflicts with our sense of morality, never mind our common sense. But life is not war, business is not slaughter, and organisations are not arenas for gladiatorial combat.

Today’s obsession with quantifiable objectives is more about office politics than performance

I was working for a well-known European government a couple of decades ago, in the days when quantifiable objectives for performance measurement were new and exciting — at least if you were excited by quantifiable measures of performance objectives. We had an office in [...]