Criticism of Privilege

Paul Krugman | No One Is Reading Anymore | Elsewhere: Fast Culture Change? Start with 'Culture Detox'.

Photo by Artem Klets on Unsplash

Nothing makes a privileged man angrier than criticism of his privilege.

| Paul Krugman, Enshittification and the Bitterness of Billionaire Bros

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As above, so below. Krugman was writing about the billionaire class, but the general insight is equally applicable to those most privileged in business.

In the Elsewhere section below, I provide a few links to the challenges surrounding cultural change in organizations, and one of the largest barriers is the dissonance between the behavior of leaders and the officially promoted principles that the organization espouses. The Sull, Sull piece is especially spot on.

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No One Is Reading Anymore

I thought of E.O. Wilson’s totemic line — ‘We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom’ — while reading Steven Sinofsky’s recent If Writing is Thinking….

Sinofsky worries about the decline of reading and writing in business, although a lot of his argument is grounded in his experience at Microsoft in the Bill Gates/Steve Ballmer era:

Getting an organization—of any size—to actually read is almost impossible.

The only reliable thing people read? Org memos. And even then, if one (as I often did) didn’t include an org chart picture—rather than just words—people would skim or skip and wait for (hopefully) a tree graph in the email.

And these were from the “big boss,” sending out “big strategy.” So if you think folks in big orgs are reading 40-page PRDs, budget plans, new product proposals, or deal docs deeply and regularly… you're probably kidding yourself. I know how the Amazon process has evolved from friends there. It too is breaking down which is a bummer as I am a huge fan of that.

I’ve written in praise of the Bezos six-page memo in the past. As I recall, it was hard to enforce as a thinking discipline even when Bezos was running the show, although many praised it. Andy Jassy reportedly continued the practice, but Sinofsky hints it may be ‘evolving’. And what might be forcing that evolution?

AI.

For millennia, people have offloaded aspects of cognition — such as memory — to written materials. But people still had to do the initial cognitive work of understanding and transposition. And, on the other side, people had to read and comprehend what was written by others, to gain a reflection of the understanding of the author.

In recent years, the atomization of everything led to an atomization of communication, even in business. Reports became memos, memos became emails, emails became Slack messages, and now people are using AI to read and write even these fragmentary comments. (I wonder how many readers of workfutures.io are having an agent summarize this issue?)

As Tom White quipped —

Most books should be articles, most articles should be paragraphs, most paragraphs should be sentences, and most sentences should be silence.

— which recognizes that much of what is written isn’t worth reading.

Nonetheless, we have to communicate somehow, and bee waggle dancing isn’t in our DNA. But technology is creating two messes at the same time:

1. The AI slopification of business communication is a strange straddling of performative productivity and the supposed time savings from offloading cognitive work to LLM agents. But the ‘writer’ doesn’t have to do the work, and the work is the point: gaining understanding of the subject discussed. Ditto for the reader.

2. The atomization of communication ushered in by ‘work media’ — the Slacks, Hangouts, and Teams that the business world has embraced — has perhaps reached its apotheosis: killing off email.

Even back in 2023, younger workers were rebelling against reading emails [emphasis mine]:

According to a survey conducted by Slack and OnePoll in August, workers using email say their questions often go unanswered, they're addressed by the wrong name, and they're frequently asked questions by others that have already been directly answered.

With so much content available online, it appears that people are also getting choosier about what they spend their time reading. Over half of respondents said they won't bother reading an email if it is eight or more sentences, and many added it's caused them to miss deadlines and lose out on opportunities.

In addition to these practical implications, organizations that choose to communicate solely through emails may be leaving a negative impression on employees — 46% of the survey respondents believe that using email means their company is "lagging behind with technology" and half of respondents would like their company to move from email to other forms of communication.

Some organizations are taking notes, turning towards instant messaging chats instead.

In the final analysis, people seem to reject the aspiration for wisdom, and perhaps even turn away from the more basic goal of gaining and sharing knowledge with others within their organizations.

If people won’t spend the time to distill a business challenge or opportunity down to a readable, grammatical, and concise section of text, that is shared with others who read and respond, where are we?

Will business communication devolve to TikTok-sized videos created by AI based on eight-sentence-long prompts?

That may be what is looming over the horizon, or in your business, already, today.

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Elsewhere

Is fast culture change possible, or even desirable?

Back in 2018, I first came across 10 Principles of Organizational Culture by Jon Katzenbach, Carolin Oelschlegel, and James Thomas, who offered useful advice in a listicle-style post, one that highlights the desire for leader-driven culture change, which is reasonable at its core, but can lead to coercive excesses. [Emphasis mine]:

We don’t believe that swift, wholesale culture change is possible — or even desirable. After all, a company’s culture is its basic personality, the essence of how its people interact and work. However, it is an elusively complex entity that survives and evolves mostly through gradual shifts in leadership, strategy, and other circumstances. We find the most useful definition is also the simplest: Culture is the self-sustaining pattern of behavior that determines how things are done.

Made of instinctive, repetitive habits and emotional responses, culture can’t be copied or easily pinned down. Corporate cultures are constantly self-renewing and slowly evolving: What people feel, think, and believe is reflected and shaped by the way they go about their business. Formal efforts to change a culture (to replace it with something entirely new and different) seldom manage to get to the heart of what motivates people, what makes them tick. Strongly worded memos from on high are deleted within hours. You can plaster the walls with large banners proclaiming new values, but people will go about their days, right beneath those signs, continuing with the habits that are familiar and comfortable.

But this inherent complexity shouldn’t deter leaders from trying to use culture as a lever. If you cannot simply replace the entire machine, work on realigning some of the more useful cogs. The name of the game is making use of what you cannot change by using some of the emotional forces within your current culture differently.

The last paragraph is where I think the authors misstep, and employing the metaphor of cogs in a machine is one indicator of how this mindset — using culture as a lever — can go wrong. However, the practical advice offered in the piece countered my concerns. For example, this takeaway:

The best way to start is to ask yourself a series of questions. What are the most important emotional forces that determine what your people do? What few behavior changes would matter most in meeting strategic and operational imperatives? Who are the authentic informal leaders you can enlist? And what can you and your fellow senior leaders do differently to signal and reinforce those critical behaviors?

Check it out.

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What motivates the desire for a fast cultural change? Toxicity.

In my research, I’ve come to believe that How to Fix a Toxic Culture, by Donald Sull, Charles Sull, is one of the best expositions on toxic culture. Their work is based on a meta-analysis of 11 meta-analyses on toxic culture — yes, a meta-meta-analysis — and they found: