Executive

I’ve only started work on a new section at my workplace not long ago. It’s a place where, in spite of my long tenure in my department, I have never gone to – well, for more than 6 months at a stretch. That’s because they like to pigeonhole people, and I happened to have been pigeonholed as a “techie”, although not without reason. But I always resist pigeonholing, and I was bored of all that techie shit. So in my section, I get involved with more frontline stuff.

When you get closer to the frontline, it’s not so much thinking anymore. It’s a lot less being right about everything, and just a little more of doing. A lot more of making do, making compromises, a lot more of just doing a good job instead of doing a perfect job.

I know a lot of people at my workplace have invested a lot in a certain branch of management science. It sounded wonderful and intriguing at first when I heard about it but later on I grew to not like it very much. (And believe me it’s not very nice when you don’t like your job.) There is often a very big misfit between theory and reality and every time this misfit gets too large, it makes my stomach churn.

Yes, I know, I did pure maths. But I was comfortable with that because I never ever have to deal with a clash of cultures. I never have to make approximations, sweep some aspects of the problem under the carpet. Anyway I thought I would get more into that mode of executive thinking. This is something that I’ve always been a little weak in, and I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever cut it in management and stuff like that.

I know that, as a consequence of me having an elite education at just about every stage, there are naturally people who see me as one of those who put a little too much emphasis on book knowledge. While this is partially true, I also have parents who constantly drummed into me the limits of that. Like NWA said, "you are about to witness the strength of street knowledge". I have always understood the importance of street knowledge, even though, well, I hardly put that into practice.

I have always been a procrastinator, a ditherer. It is very true that a lot of people have brains that are wired up differently. This is the P-J axis on the Myers Briggs test – perceiving or judging? Perceiving people take a long time to think about things, and they go through a lot of very interesting but possibly marginal thoughts. Judging people make decisions quickly, and they stick to it. But in the event they are wrong, you probably have to break a chair over their head in order to convince them they are wrong. Generally, P and J people tend to drive each other up the wall. Among my friends and acquaintances, I have a rough idea who are the P and J people.

Needless to say, I am a P person. Unfortunately J is much more suitable for a corporate environment. So you could say I’m in here to learn a little bit more J thinking.

Now don't get me wrong, there are a lot of reasons why I loathe the executive mindset, and why it never was my natural mode of thinking. I have a distaste for people who jump right to conclusions. I always believe that I can come up with a better idea when I wait just a little longer. I never really liked the corporate mentality which focused everything on the profit and bottom line. We all know that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but why is this so? Because most of us are corporation slaves who dedicate our lives to just this cause, whether we like it or not. Every time we squeeze out a little bit more of corporate profits, we are making some rich motherfucker even richer.

In a more general sense I don't like the executive mindset because it optimises the situation according to some narrowly defined criterion and says "fuck you" to everything else. You maximise profits, and some poor sucker elsewhere gets screwed. You maximise your wealth, but you piss other people off by pissing on them. Or you jeopardise your own mental health and your happiness.

In "Wall Street", Gordon Gecko says "greed is good. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit" I agree with the second part. But does it follow, then, that greed is good?

But I am willing to hold up my hands and say that a lot of the time, greed is good. Making snap judgements, trusting your instincts, saying the first good thing that comes to your mind, at least doing something instead of nothing, is good.

I’m not a man of action, rather I’m one of thought. But I need to get it all straightened out now and I suppose submitting myself to this sort of discipline is one way to proceed. When I was younger I used to have this disdain for management theory, management thinking. But I suppose it’s because there are a lot of intellectual creases in there that needs to be ironed out. Everything you do, you do it for a certain reason, but there are also a handful of reasons not to do that thing too. If you think too much, you could get immobilized by the inaction. Therefore it’s just useful to not think too much, just do it, have a stronger stomach, and just learn to say fuck that shit.

I used to put a lot of obstacles in front of me, so that I wouldn’t have to do anything. I don’t know if it’s just my way of avoiding responsibility, but this has been going on for a little too long. I suppose I read a lot of books because I enjoyed the knowledge, but I think I also enjoyed the lack of stress and the indolence from just curling up in front of a book, and kidding myself that a lot of good knowledge was going up into my head. The fact that this was partially true, I guess, just allowed me to go on a little longer. I would say that last year was a year I had set aside and allowed myself to ease back. (If you consider preparing for a marathon “easing back”) This year I’m a little edgier but time is slipping by and still a lot of things that need to be done still don’t get done.

The executive mindset is this: you focus on the task at hand. Get it done however and not get wedded to a certain ideology. Do it today, not do it tomorrow.

You know what we all say in engineering: a good solution today is better than a perfect solution tomorrow. Unfortunately we are all in the “perfect solution tomorrow” department. I see a lot of people who are more or less wedded to that mindset, dreaming about a better, more glorious tomorrow. Well I don't bank on being around when tomorrow comes. Or they forget about the law of unintended consequences: the big snazzy solution that you come up with today will be screwed up in a way that you currently are still unable to imagine.

Well good luck to me being able to change my mindset. This has taken forever.