Drifting Suckward

After dreams come true, systems take over

Photo courtesy of Gareth Ellis

There’s a road near my apartment that is in such bad shape, I can’t decide whether to laugh or scream. Every time I drive it, I feel like I’m in a horse-drawn carriage on a rocky dirt path, and independent suspension hasn’t been invented yet. It feels unfair to my car, and to my ass.

The road is like Jude’s arms from A Little Life: he has cut his arms with razors so many times, there’s not even any arm left. It’s all scars. This isn’t even a road anymore; it’s an experiment in how bad something can get before it fails to even function.

When roads need repaired or repaved, the way it generally works is that private contractors are invited to bid on the job. A contractor then wins the job and performs it on basically whatever timeline they can, as cheaply as possible without making it a complete disaster. Most of the time, the work turns out okay (this is highly debatable in certain parts of the U.S., but I digress).

So the problem isn’t the work itself. It’s not like the contractors are doing bad work just because they feel like it. If they did that, they’d never get hired again. It’s the fact that the entire road system is a maintenance project that no one really takes any passionate level of responsibility for. No one’s job really depends on creating great roads. Their jobs depend on working their way through a backlog.

And sometimes the backlog lets things slip through the cracks. Like this road near my apartment. For another example, when’s the last time you saw a video of a bridge collapsing? If you spend a decent amount of time on the internet, it might have been pretty recently. Because it happens surprisingly often. And the worst part is, anyone with a basic understanding of engineering could tell you (and has told the government, repeatedly) that these bridges weren’t meant to last this long and that they need replaced and that they will collapse. Likely with people on them.

Sadly, knowing this isn’t enough. You still have to wait for someone to approve the project, set aside the funds, hire the right people, and make plans for how commerce will continue while the bridge is out. It’s easy to build the bridges, harder to replace and maintain them. Both logistically and bureaucratically.

The interstate highway system, along with many of our local roads, was built a century ago. The people who planned it had huge, sweeping visions for the future. The automobile was new. These people imagined the incredible benefits a national highway system would bring to humanity and commerce. The economic impact would be huge; the materials required would create a cascade of new jobs; dreams would come true as a result of this project. The interstate highway system, while we can still acknowledge that it was a political or economic project, was the kind of stuff dreams are made of. It was a vision.

But it’s no longer in the hands of people with dreams. It’s in the hands of people with jobs. And that’s why it continues to fall apart. That’s why there are local highways around my hometown that have been under construction literally all of the time for thirty years. And most of that time, seemingly, involves little more than putting cones and construction equipment on the highway and leaving it there.

A lot of our physical world is a project in maintaining and building on the promises that we (or our grandparents) made to ourselves long ago. When you drive on a bridge, you’re driving on what was once someone’s proudest accomplishment and is now merely falling apart; a hazard. When you buy an airplane ticket, you were once buying a miracle in human travel and are now merely overpaying for the wages of a bloated and inefficient company. As the Industrial Revolution got going, the physical world changed quickly based on dreams. Everything was a miracle. Everything was, unless you were the most cynical of people, amazing.

We’re coming up on 50 years since the computer revolution of the 1980s. Jobs, Gates, Wozniak, and their ilk built the world of personal computing, and they built it with an urgency and a dreaminess that comes once in a generation. Which, of course, is why they became billionaires. They changed the world. As did the interstate highway system.

But, like Breaking Bad’s Walter White, a lot of computer-era companies have changed. They’re not in the dreams business anymore, they’re in the Empire Business.

We have already seen the tragic plateau and decline in quality of Microsoft products (and employment at Microsoft the company). The only reason the company still exists is because American capitalism provided it with opportunities to swallow up entire sections of the economy and build an untouchable conglomerate. Once Microsoft’s own dreams died, it started buying everyone else’s.

If the economy ran on dreams and the fulfillment of those dreams, Microsoft would have been bankrupt after Windows XP. Because since then, their computers are subpar, their marketing is comically bad, and their relationship with the consumer is desperate. They are out of touch and they have no idea what anybody wants. I mean, do you remember how much of a disappointment the launch of the Windows Phone was? You almost couldn’t even make fun of it, because it was just so… pathetic. It almost felt like making fun of a kid who’s already crying.

It’s no surprise, then, that Windows is so buggy. It’s no surprise, then, that every time you install Windows it tries like an 8-year-old to get you to leave Microsoft Edge as your default browser. “Please! We swear, it’s as good as Chrome! PLEASE!”

Great programmers, people who do great work, don’t want to work there. It’s a place where dreams go to get replaced by systems. It’s a place where you almost can’t do great work, because it’s so bureaucratically stilted. Microsoft’s culture is what you would get if you hired an immature, overly idealistic, AI-generated “consultant” to build a company for you. They get all of their most important ideas off of classroom motivational posters, and they treat their employees like infants who cannot possibly be trusted to think for themselves or try new things.

And it shows. All of this shows in the end product. The product that we, the consumers, are stuck with because Microsoft has a monopoly.

Microsoft no longer has to have a vision for the personal computer — they can just buy the ideas of anyone who does and keep those people from embarrassing them. Because Microsoft is only a system now. A very large, very slow, very powerful system.

I would say Apple still has a dream. Because Steve Jobs, despite the fact that I personally don’t like him, did in fact do something special at Apple. He built something that had cultural momentum — an actual field of gravity all its own. He passed a dream on to other humans; he birthed not just a corporation but a culture. It’s rare for a human being to pass on dreams to other humans, and it’s equally rare for a company to have a real culture that lasts long-term. Another example of this would be GE.

So credit to him for that, even though I despise or am indifferent to pretty much everything else Apple stands for.

The hard thing about growing a company is, if you don’t manage to build a culture, it becomes a mere bureaucracy, a mere system. And the default gravitational direction of systems is to suck. It takes something really special to keep the whole thing from drifting suckward.

If you have ever worked at a small, independent company that got bought out by a large corporation, you have seen this. You can almost watch the system suffocate the magic out of your workplace in real time.

Have you ever worked in a job where, according to the rules, “we do things this way,” even though no one knows the answer if you ask why? At my last job, I was a Project Management Assistant for a while. We had a process a few times per day where the PMA team would pull out a bunch of paperwork, cross-reference that paperwork against a bunch of new paperwork that had arrived, and decide which in-house jobs needed worked on for the next portion of the work day.

At one point, I looked at my colleagues and asked, wait, why in the hell are we still doing this? This process could just be done inside the lab information system. We don’t have to do the digital version and the analog version.

So I just stopped doing it. And guess what happened? Nothing. We saved 2 hours a day.

This process was an artifact of, I don’t know, a time before we had computers or math or common sense or something. The reason we kept doing it is because whoever started that process was no longer around to tell us we could stop.

This is how a lot of things work at big companies — or at companies of any size, or at institutions of any kind. As a company grows, it implements processes and ideas and safeguards that, at the time, make sense for obvious reasons. But as time goes on, those processes often outlive both their usefulness and their creators. Or they suffocate culture as it tries to evolve and develop, simply because managers trust systems more than they trust new ideas. If your manager’s next yearly assessment depends on your continuing to use a bad but predictable system, you’re going to keep using that system. If your manager’s next promotion depends on his department taking no risks, your department will not be taking any risks.

And before you know it, you have a company with layers of fat on it that the newer employees neither understand nor have any use for. You have layers of “procedure” to make up for weaknesses that were long ago relevant or long ago solved. Or to make up for the total lack of dreams of all of the people in all of the positions of power.

What most companies end up being, when analyzed from a management perspective, is a collection of bandages for things that went terribly wrong one time. A series of systems to prevent mistakes that people usually don’t even make; a series of systems to operationalize mediocre aspects of customer service or “culture”; a hierarchy of managers to oversee and administer those systems and to supervise each other in said management of said systems. A company that relies too hard on “systems” ends up being, quite by definition, a jobs program.

Great culture uses less paperwork. And dreams are better at accomplishing big things than systems are at maintaining them.

I can’t help feeling that, as the United States has gone from scrappy up-and-comer to Best Nation To Ever Do It™, we have tried too hard to systematize greatness and in doing so have lost sight of what greatness even is. We’ve tried so hard to systematize the American Dream so that it can be delivered to every front door, that we have forgotten how to teach people to take the kind of risks required to actually achieve it.

We teach our kids that, in order to have a great life, all you have to do is be obedient in class, get a college degree, participate in the enormous and ever-growing debt machine, and be a good consumer. If you do that, you’ll have the same great life your grandfather had. Which not only is untrue, but goes directly against what the American spirit once was anyway. The American spirit, once upon a time, was not a passive participant. It was a mover and a shaker.

When you teach people to operate quietly within lame and colorless “systems,” you neuter them of the energy that was supposed to make them great in the first place. Being great at operating within a system often means being totally without all the hormones that make you an exciting person. An alive person. Hence, the deadest place in America is in the “lucrative” middle management positions of large companies.

Sure, there’s such a thing as a great system. Some of our public school systems are miracles. It continues to amaze me that children can wake up every morning, head to the bus stop, and find the school bus not only safe to board, but perfectly on time. That’s amazing. What a blessing for us to be able to rely on that. I have no idea how they’ve made that so reliable.

(I always remember my bus drivers fondly. I still remember several of them. When I look back on my childhood, those were my heroes. They were just so damn reliable. So loving. They were exactly the kind of people the world relies on to keep going round.)

And some companies have systems that are killer at producing great results over and over. When I have a great customer service experience, it’s memorable to me. I mean, that’s probably partially culture, and kudos for that, but it also means that the system managed to put someone in front of that telephone at that moment who was actually happy to take my call. Happy to help me. That’s amazing to me, in the modern world. That means that the training is great, the hiring is great, and that person is happy to have that job.

Systems aren’t inherently a bad thing.

It’s just that, after you’ve initially chased the dream, you have to be careful about who you pass that dream on to. Because if the answer is just vague, generic “managers,” your dream probably isn’t going to last very long. It’s going to drift in the most natural direction, and before you know it you end up with roads like the one by my apartment.

I think Martin Luther King’s point wasn’t that he had a dream. It was that he had a dream that others would have a dream. Because that’s what great culture is made of. A shared dream. The passing on of something more than systems. A story.

If there’s a “so what” here, I would just remind you to look for magic and stick close to it. When you find people who are so alive, so excited, that they don’t need “systems,” you should make friends with them and work with them. Or maybe it’s that great culture itself produces great systems. Great systems, it seems, are limber and lively. They don’t replace dreams, they amplify them. While still getting things done.

Drink some water and think carefully about whether you want that promotion.

JR

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” - Ray Bradbury