You forgot the most fundamental option, decide based on who makes the most profit/acquires the most fungible resources. Which is what nearly all of the outlier private organizations do.
This can’t applied everywhere though, especially where the lag between decision and result is multiple decades.
The most famous example in the financial world is RenTech. You could be the most anodyne guy in the world personally, with nothing super special going for you, but if you can land a position as an anonymous intern and consistently make above average profits week after week, they will promote very quickly into a seven figures total compensation position.
Maybe even before age 30 depending on just how above average the performance is.
It’s probably the most exceptional example of organizing via pure merit. You can’t quite just walk in and by year’s end start earning the equivalent of a sizable house in Berkely every quarter, but it’s not that far off.
At that level all these games mentioned in the post simply peter out once folks figure out it’s literally 10x slower and 10x less reliable than just shutting up and earning profits.
It’s true though for those who don’t have that kind of competence, or who are in the situations with too much delay between decisions to assess, that all the various tricks and schemes start to come into play.
This is because moderately above average people are actually quite tough to rank and distinguish based on anything other then hard to change physical characteristics.
i.e. nearly everyone at the 95th percentile has a similar enough chance of being a competent employee once promoted to middle management that noise, random chance, etc., will drown out any actual differences.
Probably even RenTech has a non-zero amount of mis-promotions and mis-hires every year due to happenstance.
decide based on who makes the most profit/acquires the most fungible resources
...within some period of evaluation. That’s how you get Jack Welch hollowing out GE. That’s how you get managers who raise profits by cutting out maintenance and training, and hope to get promoted fast enough to outrun the resulting problems so they can blame their successor.
The most famous example in the financial world is RenTech
Their main fund results are not nearly as good, but they got investment largely using their famous internal-only Medallion fund as advertising. I’ve seen some people say that famous Medallion fund got much of its good returns by sacrificing their main fund performance, by doing trades then deciding which fund those belonged to post-hoc.
There’s also a lot of insider trading going on at big hedge funds, which is totally legal as long as you pool transactions together such that you only ever don’t do transactions based on insider info. What’s illegal is doing transactions based on insider info. That’s part of why you see siloed trading groups so often.
You forgot the most fundamental option, decide based on who makes the most profit/acquires the most fungible resources. Which is what nearly all of the outlier private organizations do.
This can’t applied everywhere though, especially where the lag between decision and result is multiple decades.
The most famous example in the financial world is RenTech. You could be the most anodyne guy in the world personally, with nothing super special going for you, but if you can land a position as an anonymous intern and consistently make above average profits week after week, they will promote very quickly into a seven figures total compensation position.
Maybe even before age 30 depending on just how above average the performance is.
It’s probably the most exceptional example of organizing via pure merit. You can’t quite just walk in and by year’s end start earning the equivalent of a sizable house in Berkely every quarter, but it’s not that far off.
At that level all these games mentioned in the post simply peter out once folks figure out it’s literally 10x slower and 10x less reliable than just shutting up and earning profits.
It’s true though for those who don’t have that kind of competence, or who are in the situations with too much delay between decisions to assess, that all the various tricks and schemes start to come into play.
This is because moderately above average people are actually quite tough to rank and distinguish based on anything other then hard to change physical characteristics.
i.e. nearly everyone at the 95th percentile has a similar enough chance of being a competent employee once promoted to middle management that noise, random chance, etc., will drown out any actual differences.
Probably even RenTech has a non-zero amount of mis-promotions and mis-hires every year due to happenstance.
...within some period of evaluation. That’s how you get Jack Welch hollowing out GE. That’s how you get managers who raise profits by cutting out maintenance and training, and hope to get promoted fast enough to outrun the resulting problems so they can blame their successor.
Their main fund results are not nearly as good, but they got investment largely using their famous internal-only Medallion fund as advertising. I’ve seen some people say that famous Medallion fund got much of its good returns by sacrificing their main fund performance, by doing trades then deciding which fund those belonged to post-hoc.
There’s also a lot of insider trading going on at big hedge funds, which is totally legal as long as you pool transactions together such that you only ever don’t do transactions based on insider info. What’s illegal is doing transactions based on insider info. That’s part of why you see siloed trading groups so often.
Huh? I’m explicitly not ‘worshipping’ them. Did you skip reading the latter half of my comment?
I’m pretty sure most passing readers will already interpret ‘mis-hire’ and ‘mis-promotion’ as implying some degree of destructive efforts.