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by nostrademons
4063 days ago
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There is a prisoner's dilemma aspect to office politics: the more time you spend learning the politics of an organization, the more effective you will be within that organization, but the more time that everyone in the organization spends politicking, the less effective the organization will be as a whole. At some critical point, the organization collapses inwards on itself and becomes unable to react to changing market conditions, and goes out of business. That's why there's resistance to teaching or even making people aware of politics: eventually it results in the destruction of everyone's jobs. There's another game you can play, which is to find organizations (or parts of organizations) where there is a minimum amount of politics to begin with. These are usually younger, high-growth companies filling a real need in the marketplace; because everyone's so busy delivering value to the customer, they don't have time to compete with each other, nor do they need to because the pie's expanding faster than anyone can gobble up a piece of it. As Eric Schmidt liked to say, "More revenue solves all known problems." The problem with personally optimizing for office-politics is that now you have a big comparative advantage over other employees, but only in high-politics workplaces. That will bias your selection criteria toward companies which are about to fail in the marketplace, which may not be a winning strategy in the long term. |
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I agree that this conflict of interest exists.
At some critical point, the organization collapses inwards on itself and becomes unable to react to changing market conditions, and goes out of business. That's why there's resistance to teaching or even making people aware of politics: eventually it results in the destruction of everyone's jobs.
That, I'm not sure that I buy. Large tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have a lot of politics but are still very successful. I think that, at some point, companies get to a level where typical political behavior doesn't help them, but won't unhorse them either. Most Fortune 500 companies do just fine at delivering returns to investors and salaries to employees, despite being large and political.
The problem with personally optimizing for office-politics is that now you have a big comparative advantage over other employees, but only in high-politics workplaces.
Sure, and I don't advise learning only politics. I think that people need to learn enough to solve political problems and to avoid losing fights. (It's rare that any kind of fight is ever "won", so avoiding political fights in general might be best. I wish I had known this when I was at Google.) Ideally, it's best to specialize in something that adds value but learn enough politics to get by, protect the good, and keep one's work from falling into a black hole.
The sad truth, as we'd both agree, is that organizations tend to end up being run by people who specialized in politics itself. That's unfortunate and, given the game-theoretic issues that you already described quite well, I don't see an easy solution. When bodies end up being overwhelmed by individually fit cells that harm the organism we call it "cancer". When corporations' upper ranks are filled with individually fit (politically speaking) people who lack vision or care for the organization, we end up with exactly what you described.