The Era of the Business Idiot, Part 1

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Not all group chats are the same, just like not all Adams are the same.

Adam Brody, for example, uses WhatsApp to plan his grandma's birthday using video calls, polls to choose a gift, and HD photos to document a family moment to remember, all in one group chat.

Makes grandma's birthday her best one yet.

But Adam Scott group messages with an app that isn't WhatsApp.

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It's time for WhatsApp.

Message privately with everyone.

Drew and Sue and Eminem's Minis.

And baking the surprise birthday cake for Lou.

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And Lou getting home early from work, which he never does.

And Drew and Sue using the rest of the tubes of Eminem's Minis as party poppers instead.

I think this is one of those moments where people say it's the thought that counts.

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Hello, and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed Citron.

And welcome to the Business Idiot trilogy.

What that means will soon become obvious.

So on May 15th, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satcha Nadella, revealing that on some level, Satcha Nadella is kind of a fucking idiot.

The article revealed that, assuming we believe him and this wasn't a thinly veiled ad for Microsoft's AI, the Copilot consumes Nadello's life outside the office as well as at work.

He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, like with his ears, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his phone so that he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car as he commutes to Redmond.

At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among, allegedly, at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio.

Now, the article does not say what they do, doesn't seem like they bothered to ask, but he allegedly views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research, and other tasks, again, unnamed to the bots.

And to quote Sachinadella in this article, he says, I'm an email typist.

And he jokes about this, noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages.

None of these tasks are things that require you to use AI.

You can read your messages on Outlook and Teams without having them summarized.

And I'd argue that a well-written email is one that doesn't require a summary.

Podcasts are not there to be chatted to or about with an AI.

Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor is research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading or what you're saying, just that you are saying the right thing and that you know

facts of some kind?

To be clear, I'm deeply unconvinced that Nadella actually runs his life in this way, but if he does, Microsoft's board should fire him immediately.

It's an admission of negligence akin to a taxi driver admitting he swallows a couple of glugs of crame royale before he starts a shift.

In any case, this article is rambling, it's cloying, and it ignores Microsoft AI CEO Mustavar Suleiman's documented history of abusing his workers.

10 custom agents to do what?

What do you mean by other toss?

Why are these questions never asked?

Is it because the reporters know they won't get an answer?

Is it because the reporters are too polite to ask probing questions, knowing that these anecdotes are likely entirely made up as a means to promote a flagging AI ecosystem that costs billions to construct, but that doesn't seem to do anything, and the reporter in question doesn't want to force Satcher to build a bigger house of guts than he needs to.

Sorry.

Sorry, I'm in my new studio.

I'm all fired up, and this is a bloody long one.

But really, is it because we as a society do not want to look too closely at the powerful?

Is it because we've handed our economy to men that get paid $79 million a year to do a job they can't seem to describe?

And even that, they would sooner offload to a bunch of unreliable AI models than actually do the very small amounts of things they have to do?

Look, we live in an era of the symbolic executive, when being good at stuff matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where what's useful is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure, but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world world of work.

Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it, and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

Something I went through in the shareholder supremacy series you can go back to if you want in another extremely long series of episodes.

They're bloody good though and they're free.

Now this three-part series examines the phenomenon of something I call the business idiot.

Looking at the root causes of the idiocy in our economy itself, how they're ruining our world, and how these idiots are enabled by an embarrassingly deferential media that's too afraid to say that the Emperor has his dick out.

It's going to be long.

I'll take you on tangents, and I'll probably say fuck more than I usually do, which I admit is a lot.

But business idiots are a problem, and they deserve our scrutiny and our disgust.

I, however, believe the problem of the business idiot runs a little deeper than just the economy, where the things we see are merely a symptom of a bigger, more virulent, and treatment-resistant plague that has infected the minds of those currently twigging at the levels of power, and really the only levers that actually matter.

The incentives behind everything

we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company, an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money, has been dreamed of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it, with their leaders now focusing heavily on short-term gains and growth at all costs.

You know, I've been over that a little bit and I'll get back to it in a second, aren't I?

In doing so, the definition of what a good business is has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price with a sustainable and loyal market to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.

This is the rot economy, which is my useful description of how tech companies have voluntarily degraded their core products in order to placate shareholders, transforming useful and sometimes beloved services into a hollow shell of their former selves as a means of expressing growth to the markets.

When a social network hides things that you want to see because they want to juice their metrics, that's the rot economy.

But it's worth noting that this transformation isn't constrained to the tech industry, nor was it a phenomenon that occurred when the tech industry entered its current VC-fueled, publicly traded incarnation.

We simply notice it more in tech because we use tech in our personal and professional lives and thus it affects everyone in a way that's kind of impossible to ignore.

In the shareholder supremacy, I drew a line from the early 20th century court ruling, which opened that Ford must put shareholder value ahead of the interests of its employees, though it was a beta dicta, meaning it was just literally said by the judge, but a lot of people ever since have taken it literally.

And then I went to, of course, former GE

CEO Jack Welch to the current tech industry.

But there's one figure I didn't really pay that much attention to, and I regrettably now have to do so.

Famed Chicago school economist and dweller of hell Milton Friedman once argued in his 1970 doctrine, no, literally that's what it was called when it was published, of course, in the New York Times, which is an incredible act of hubris when you think about it, that those who didn't focus on shareholder value were unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of free society these past decades.

Acting with social responsibility, say treating work as well, doing anything other than focusing on shareholder value, is tantamount to an executive taxing his shareholders by, and I quote, spending their money on their own personal beliefs, said Friedman.

Friedman was a fundamentalist when it came to unrestricted, unfettered capitalism, and this zealotry surpassed any sense of basic human morality, if he had any.

For For example, in his book Capitalism and Freedom, he argued that companies should be allowed to discriminate on racial grounds because the owner might suffer should they be required to hire an equally or better qualified black person.

Bear in mind, this was written at the height of the civil rights movement, just six years before the assassination of Martin Luther King, and when America was rapidly waking up to the evils of racism and segregation, a process I add that's ongoing, sadly not complete, and people still don't seem super happy with.

I'm not going to read the full quote because I've already got a lot of talking and not much time and also there are some words that I really don't want to say.

But you can see it in full and in its original context on the newsletter version of this episode that I'll share in the episode notes.

And as a special treat, I'll actually update them.

Friedman was really grotesque though.

I'm not religious, but I really do hope that hell exists only for him and Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Actually quite a few people.

Anyway, the broader point I'm trying to make is that neoliberalism is inherently selfish and it believes that the free market should reign supreme, bereft of government intervention, regulation, or interference, thinking that somehow these terms will enable freedom rather than the kind of market-dominated, quasi-authoritarian dictatorship thing where our entire lives are dominated by the whims of the affluent and that there's no institution that could possibly push back against them.

Of course, there's no example in current politics like that.

Now, Friedman himself makes this kind of facile argument that economic freedom, which he says is synonymous with unfettered capitalism, is a necessary condition of unfettered political freedom.

Obviously, that's bollocks, although it's an argument that's proven persuasive with a certain class of people that are either intellectually or morally hollow, or both, or run the New York Times op-ed page.

Neoliberalism also represents a kind of modern-day feudalism, dividing society based on whether somebody is a shareholder or not, with the former taking precedence and the latter seeming irrelevant at best or disposable at worst.

It's curious that Friedman saw economic freedom, a state that is non-interventionist in economic matters, as essential for political freedom, while also failing to see equality as the same.

I realize all this is kind of clunky and big, but I want you to understand how these incentives have fundamentally changed everything and why they're responsible for the rot we see in our society and our workplaces and our tech industry and a bunch of other shit.

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When your only incentive is shareholder value and you raise shareholder value as a platonic ideal, everything else is secondary, including the customer you are selling something to.

Friedman himself makes a moral case for discrimination because shareholder value, in his example, the store owner, matters more than racial equality at its most basic level.

When you care only about shareholder value, the only job you have is to promote further exploitation and dominance, not to have happy customers, not to make your company a good place to work, not to make a good product, and not to make a difference or contribute anything to the world other than further growth.

While this is, to anyone with a vapor of an intellectual or moral dimension, absolutely fucking stupid, it's an idea that's proven depressingly endemic among the managerial elite, in part because it's entered the culture and because it is hammered again and again across in MBA classes and corporate training seminars.

In simpler terms, modern business theory trains executives not to be good at something or to make a company based on their particular skills, but to find a market opportunity and exploit it.

The chief executive who makes over 300 times more than their average worker is no longer a leadership position, but the kind of figurehead measured on their ability to continually grow the market capitalization of their company or the theoretical valuation before they flog it to a public company or they take it public themselves.

It's a position inherently defined by its lack of labor, the amorphousness of its purpose and the lack of any clear responsibility other than making sure the money goes up to them.

While CEOs do get fired when things go badly, it's often after a prolonged period of decline and stagnancy and almost always comes with some kind of payoff.

And when I say badly, I mean that growth has slowed to the point that even firing masses of people doesn't seem to make things better.

We have as a society reframed all business leadership, which is increasingly broad, consisting of all management from the C-suite down, to the equivalent of Paul Blart Mall Cop, a person that exists to make sure people are working without having any real accountability for the work themselves, or to even understand the work itself.

And I must apologize to Mr.

Blart.

He worked hard.

He stopped some criminals in that movie.

Really should respect his service.

But when the leader of a company doesn't participate in or respect the production of the goods that enrich them, it creates a culture that enables similarly vacuous leaders on all levels.

Management as a concept no longer means doing work or even managing work.

So the output of that work is better.

You know, management.

No, it's become about establishing cultures of dominance and value extraction.

A CEO isn't measured on happy customers or even how good the revenue is today, but how good revenue might be tomorrow and whether those customers are paying them more.

A manager, much like a CEO, is no longer a position with any real responsibility.

They're there to make sure that you're working, to know enough about your work that they can sort of tell you what to do, but somehow the job of telling you what to do doesn't come with...

any actual work of their own and instructions don't need to be useful or meaningful or impart any great wisdom.

Now if you're a manager hearing this you're really not going to like these episodes.

These episodes are really going to dig at your heart.

Now I've heard from a few managers when I've had a dalliance with this in the past, and usually 50-50, 50% of people saying, like, hey, I get it.

I'm a manager too.

And, like, I think you're right about management.

Great managers move stuff out the way.

They get people the resources they need.

They understand and respect the labor that they're working with.

And they help them do their work.

They make sure they're on task.

They

get business idiots out of their way.

Then the other 50% get real butt hurt.

If you're butt hurt here in this, go cry, but go cry outside.

Nobody likes you.

Now, decades of direct erosion of the very concept of leadership means that the people running companies have been selected not based on their actual efficacy, especially as the position became defined by a lack of actual production, but on whether they resemble what a manager or executive is meant to look like based on the work that somebody else did once.

That's how somebody like David Zaslav, a lawyer by trade and arguably the worst CEO in the entertainment industry, managed to become the head of Warner Bros.

That and he kissed up to Jack Welch of GE, who he called a big brother that picked him up like a friend.

Jack Welch fired like over 100,000 people over his tenure.

Real piece of fucking shit.

Talking to pieces of shit, it's how Carly

Fiorina?

Fiorina?

Not going to fix that.

An NBA by trade, went on to become the head of HP, only drive the company into a ditch where it stopped innovating and largely missed the biggest opportunities of the early internet era.

The three CEOs that followed her at HP, Mark Hurd, who was ousted after fudging expense reports to send money to a love interest and still got tens of millions of dollars in severance, Leo Apotheker, who the New York Times suggests may have been worse than Fiorina, and Meg Whitman, famous for being both a terrible CEO of HP and co-founding the doomed video star up Quibby.

Well, they all similarly came from a non-tech background and similarly did a shitty fucking job in part because they didn't understand the company or the products or the customers or really give a shit about anything other than getting paid.

Hey, you know where Meg Whitman now is?

She's on the board of fucking Corweave.

I swear to God, history's driving me insane.

Management has, over the course of the past few decades, eroded the very fabric of corporate America.

And I'd argue it's done much the same to other, multiple other Western economies, too.

I'd also argue that this kind of dumb management thinking also infected the highest echelons of politics across the world, and especially in the UK, my country of birth and where I lived until 2008, delivering the same kind of disastrous effects, but at a macro level, as they impacted not a single corporate entity, but the very institutions of the state.

Now, the UK has never been an egalitarian society, as demonstrated by the fact that one fee-paying school produced 20 of our 55 prime ministers, and that 20% of the current MPs went to either Cambridge or Oxford University.

And yet things have changed markedly in the past few decades, and you can kind of use the Thatcher years as the epoch when that political culture shifted.

I was born in the midst of the Thatcher government.

My formative years were spent as British society tried to recover after her reforms, which is itself a comfortable euphemism for the reckless shedding of the state and a push towards an American-style individualism.

Thatcher, who fucking loved Friedman's thinking, once famously quipped that there was no such thing as a society.

Jesus Christ, it's like sub-Jokarian thinking.

She didn't understand how things work, but was nonetheless completely convinced that the power of the market to handle what was the functions of the state, from housing to energy to water.

And if you know how things are going with Thames Water, what do you think?

The end result of this political and cultural shift was in the long run.

Pretty bad.

The UK has the smallest houses in the OECD, the smallest housing stock of any developed country and some of the worst affordability.

The privatisation of the UK's water infrastructure meant that money that would previously go towards infrastructure upgrades was instead funnelled to shareholders in the form of dividends.

As a result, Britain is literally unable to process human waste and is actively dumping millions of litres of human sewerage into its waterways and coastline.

When Britain privatised its energy companies, the new management sold or closed the vast majority of its gas storage infrastructure.

As a result, when

the Ukraine war sparked and natural gas prices surged, Britain had some of the smallest reserves of any country in Europe and was forced to buy gas at market prices, which were several times higher than their pre-war levels, thus sending household and energy bills through the fucking roof.

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What happens when Delta Airlines sends four creators around the world to find out what is the true power of travel.

I think it helped me sort of like get grounded.

I think I unlocked some like childhood dream.

Turn my stress into excitement.

Take that gratitude from those experiences into your daily life.

That's why Jimma Speg, host of the Psychology of Your 20s, sat down with Dr.

Henry Ting, Delta's chief health and wellness officer, an instrumental voice behind this travel experiment.

I love that the dream trip versus, you know, the around the corner trip both have very similar mental and social perks and benefits.

Oh, yeah, very much so.

On both trips, their emotional well-being and social well-being went through the roof.

Find out more about how travel can support well-being on this special episode of the Psychology of Your 20s, presented by Delta.

Fly and live better.

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I'm no fan of Thatcher, and like Friedman, I hope she fucking burns and it hurts.

The reason I brought her up was to stress the consequences of this kind of clueless managerial thinking on a macro level, where the impacts aren't just declining tech products or white-collar layoffs, but rather the emergence of generational crises of housing and energy and the environment.

These crises were obvious consequences of decisions made by someone whose belief in the free market was almost absolute, and whose fundamentalist beliefs surpassed the actual informed understanding of those working in energy, housing, or water.

As the legendary advertiser Stanley Pollitt once said, bullshit baffles brains.

The sweeping changes we've seen both in our economy and in our societies led them to an unprecedented gilded age of bullshit where nothing matters and things, things of actual substance, only matter even less.

We live in a symbolic economy where we apply for jobs, writing C Vs and cover letters that will resemble a certain kind of hire, with our resume read by someone who doesn't do or understand our job, but is somehow responsible for determining determining whether we're worthy of going up to the next step of the eighty-seven point hiring process.

All this so that we can get an interview with a manager or an executive who will decide whether they think we can do it.

We're managed by people whose job is implicitly not to do work, but to oversee it, which doesn't necessarily mean they understand.

We are, as children and young adults, encouraged to aspire to become a manager or an executive or to own our own business, to have people that work for us, and the terms of our society are, by default, that management is not a role you work at so much as a position you hold, a figurehead that passes the buck and makes far more of them than you ever will.

This problem, I believe, has poisoned the fabric of almost every part of modern business, elevating people that don't do work to oversee companies that make things that they don't understand, creating substrates of management that do not do anything but create further distance from doing actual work.

While some of you might automatically think and email me again and again that I'm talking about Graeber's concept of bullshit jobs, and I've linked to it in the show notes, what I'm talking about is far, far, far bigger.

The system as it stands selects people at all levels of management specifically because they resemble this kind of specious workerverse dullard that runs seemingly every company.

A person built to go from meeting to meeting with the vague consternation of someone who may or may not be busy that suggests, I don't know, that they're hard at work and they're important and that you should respect them.

As a result, the higher you get up in an organization, the further you get from the customer, the problem you're solving, and really any of the actual work.

And And the higher up you get, the more power you have to change the conditions of the business and the ways in which you actually make money.

On some level, modern corporate power structures are a giant game of telephone where vibes beget further vibes, where managers only kind of sort of understand what's going on, and the more vague one's understanding is, the more likely you are to lean toward what's good or easy or makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

The system selects for people comfortable in these roles, creating org charts full of people that become harder and harder to justify other than they've been here here a while and they're nice, even if they're not.

They do not do work on the product, and their answer as to why would be, what am I meant to do?

Go down to the line and use a machine?

Or am I meant to call a customer and make a sale?

And the answer is, yes, you lazy fucking piece of shit.

You should do that once in a while.

Or at the very least, go down and watch or listen to somebody else doing so and do so regularly.

Why do you look down on the things that make you rich, you piece of shit?

But that's not what a manager does, right?

Management isn't work.

It's about thinking really hard and telling people what to do.

It's about making the calls.

It's about managing people.

And that can mean just about anything, but often means taking credit from someone or passing blame to someone else.

Because modern management has been stripped of all meaning other than continually reinforcing power structures for the next manager up.

The system creates products for these people because these people are more often than not the ones in power.

They're your boss, your boss's boss, and their boss too.

Big companies build products sold by species executives or manager to other species executives and managers, and thus the products themselves stop resembling things that solve problems so much as they resemble a solution.

After all, the person buying it, at least at the scale of a public or large company, isn't necessarily the final recipient or user of the product, so they too are trained and selected to make calls based on vibes.

I believe the scale of this problem is society-wide, and it is at its core a destruction of what it means to be a leader, and a valorization of a kind of selfish, isolation-ish thinking, turning labor into a faceless resource, which naturally leads to seeing customers in an equally faceless way, their problems generalized, their pain points viewed as parts of a PowerPoint, rather than anything that your company earnestly tries to solve or even really thinks about.

And that assumes that said pain points are even considered to begin with, or not ignored in favor of fictitious and purely hypothetical pain points that sound better in presentations.

People, be they the ones you're paying or paying you, become numbers.

We've created and elevated an entirely new class of person, the nebulous manager, and told decades' worth of children that that's what they should aspire to, and that the next step from doing a job is for us to tell other people to do a job until we're one day able to tell those people how to do their job, with each rung on the corporate ladder further distancing ourselves from anything that actually interacts with reality.

The real breaking point is fairly simple.

The higher up you go at a company, the further you are from problems or purpose.

Everything's abstract.

The people that work for you, the people you work for, and even the tasks that you do.

We train people from a young age to generalize and distance oneselves from other people and actual tasks, to aspire to do managerial work because managers are well paid and know what's going on, even if they haven't actually known what was going on for years, if they ever did so.

This phenomenon has led to a stigmatization of blue-collar work and the subsequent evisceration of practical trade and technical education across most of the developed world in favor of universities.

Society respects an MBA more than a plumber, even though the latter benefits society more, though I can see that both roles involve on some level a lot of shit, with the plumber unblocking it and the MBA, well, finding new places to put it.

I should also add, I have nothing against universities in general.

I'm just saying that our university system is out of whack with the working world, except in the specialist fields, and we have a problem there.

We also have many other problems there.

But one example I'll talk about in the next episode is the push to return to the office.

Have you noticed how all those calls have come from people who occupy managerial roles and not those who do actual jobs?

Isn't that fucking weird?

Because if you go back and look, and by the way, Kevin Roos,

March 2020, Kevin Roos of a hard fork podcast in the New York Times had a story saying that working from home is not as good.

March 2020, the fucking lockdown hadn't even begun yet.

This man was so ahead of the terms of what the powerful wanted him to tell people.

I actually kind of admire

I wonder if I could do that.

I could just every week just wake up and just go to Microsoft.com and be like, and there's my work for the week, fellas.

Pardon me, sorry, I apologize to Mr.

Roos.

I would go to anthropic.com and I'd find out what they're doing.

Oh, Edge, you're such a petty bitch, but I digress.

I believe that all of this stuff I'm talking about, this process has created, like I said, a symbolic society.

One where people are elevated not by an ability to do something or knowledge they may have, but by the ability to make the right noises and honks and look the right way to get ahead.

And yeah, usually a white guy.

But increasingly, they're getting all sorts of races of guys who get these roles.

The power structures of modern society are run by business idiots, people that have learned enough to impress the people above them and around them because the business idiots have been in power for decades.

They bred out true meritocracy or achievement or value creation in favor of this symbolic growth and superficial intelligence because real work is hard and there are so many of them in power that they've all found a way to work together to do fucking nothing.

And I need you to understand how widespread this problem is.

Because it's why everything feels fucking wrong.

And the next episode will pick up from where we left off here.

And it's going to be three straight days of episode.

A crazy thing.

No monologue this week, unless you consider me just talking on my own for a while a monologue.

And you're going to say that's the definition of a monologue.

And in which I'll say, shut up, that's rude.

I really do have more to say about business idiots, though, in the abstract, because I feel as though this phenomenon is complex and multifaceted.

And when you you can identify the traits of the business idiot you start seeing them everywhere it's like they live but with management consultants you see them in your own life in your own boss to the people running the biggest and most powerful companies in the world and even some of the people you know in real life people that don't seem to do real jobs not even email jobs they're everywhere they can manage stores they can be your boss they can be your friend's boss Shit, they can run their own consultancy, they can do all sorts of things.

You run into these people everywhere.

And this three-part series is both about the history and helping you understand what a business idiot in your life is.

Catch you on the next episode.

Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matosowski.

You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matosowski.com.

M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com.

You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter.

I also really recommend you go to chat.where's your ed.at to visit the Discord and go to r/slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit.

Thank you so much for listening.

Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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