| > Humans only care when the house is on fire In corporate context it's because that's, in theory, an effective use of resources: If 20 teams are constantly "there is a huge risk of fire", a lot of mental energy is wasted figuring out how to stack rank those 20 and how real of a fire risk there is. If instead you wait when there is a real fire, you can get the 15 teams actually fixing that one. In practice, you've probably noticed that the most politics-playing & winning teams are the teams which are really effective at : 1) faking fires 2) exaggerating minor fires 3) moving fast & breaking things on purpose (or at least as a nice side effect) to create more fires in their area of ownership* , and get rewarded with more visibility & headcount to fix those fires. * As long as they have firm grip of that area... If they don't, they risk having it re-orged to another team. |
In this case, with Microsoft's really amazing revenue stream, a charismatic management team can distort reality for quite some time and convince the right people within the company that there is no fire.