[sinnsro]

The core issue with the article is that author mixes up bad management and "fog of management" with the fact that financial results have a disproportionate amount of influence in how things are organised. Every team and employee should do their part to contribute to the financial targets every quarter and within the fiscal year. Which clashes with Deming's points 11b and 12b [1].

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1. https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/

[estearum]

The problem is that "every team and employee doing their part to contribute to financial targets", as-stated, is liable to produce suboptimization.

A person on the assembly line can "contribute to financial targets" taking a shortcut, reducing their local spend, but which emerges as a much more expensive problem down the road.

So it's true that every employee should do their part to contribute to financial targets, but defining "their part" is the hard part, something only management can do, and that MBO obscures and tries to make as simple as waterfalling the goal from above.

[ffsm8]

> Every team and employee should do their part to contribute to the financial targets every quarter and within the fiscal year

The inevitable result of this is however the devaluation of the future. Eg if the statement was true, it'd be the R&D workers responsibility to hand in their resignation ( or their managers layoffs) if their product won't get paying customers within the same fiscal year... And the same applies to any other long term expenditure/investment that company might be considering. E g building a new fab/production line etc pp

So no, that statement of yours is not actually true. It should not be entirely ignored, but it should not become a leading cause unless you want to run the company in the ground.

[sinnsro]

The statement holds true for a broad set of companies and management styles. I speak from personal experience: the wrong incentives are always there, and they run counter to many things listed by Deming. The obsession with "financial impact" is there with varying degrees, even in functions where it is hard to quantify said impact.

It might not apply to R&D-heavy companies, but we do see engineering companies pivoting into more finance-oriented management. Boeing is one such case and look at the damage.