The (business) world is full of Wimpy Managers

AUDIO VERSION

Our (old) European world is stuck fast... The (business) world is full of Wimpy Managers, but here things are just what they are meant to be. I mean, this is just how the whole system works, everywhere, everyday, for everybody.

What is a good Manager? His or her employees don't care about what he/she knows, until they know he/she cares... But in major compagnies, let's face it, what's the name of the game? Shareholders are, best financial interests are; not employees...

Bill Bryson's book "I'm a Stranger Here Myself. Notes on returning to America after twenty years away" (Broadway Books, 1999) talks about these financial interests in (what I find) the most striking way.

"I have a friend in Britain, an academic, who was recently approached by the lawyers for an American company to be an expert witness in a case they were handling.  They told him they wanted to fly the lead attorney and two assistants to London to meet him.
'Wouldn't it be simpler and cheaper if I flew to New York instead?', my friend suggested.
'Yes', he was told without hesitation, 'but this way we can bill the client for the cost of three trips.'
And here you have the American legal mind at work." (p. 202, copyright 1999 by Bill Bryson)

Are we only talking about the American legal mind at work here?  Or does this include the way the entire economic system in Europe is working?  Big companies, administration, education, justice, medecine... Let's talk about the French healthcare organisation, where each medical act is being tariffed - and please note that each type of medical act has a different tariff... So I guess Bill Bryson could have written here:  "This way we can bill the client for the cost of three different trips"... Though the attorney and his paralegals are basically all... flying to London. Some physicians (around the world) start saying, just like Bryson's friend: "Wouldn't it be simpler and cheaper if I flew to New York  instead?"  But again, this is running against the system's best financial interests. And unless you change the system itself, I'm afraid we're all gonna remain pretty much... what we have to call... stuck fast.

Picture:  "Wimpy Kid" with the "Purikura" App for iPhone (Nine Software, Tokyo)