Category: Business, Organization, and Management

THE OVERSING MISSION: ELIMINATION OF MIDDLE MANAGEMENT AND THE RESTORATION OF TRIBE

Employees choose mentors. Executives choose managers.

The functional problem of the ‘firm’ is middle management, because all managers are subject to the Principle Agent Problem.

The only method of eliminating the principle agent problem is to provide the information provided by management directly between owners and employees who perform useful functions.

So just as we require a central bank for purposes of commensurability (a treasury of last resort), but we no longer require a banking and financial system (at all), we require an executive team (judges of last resort), but we no longer require middle management.

This is, in large part, what I am attempting to achieve with Oversing: the elimination of the rent-seeking class information-transmission, managerial class, and its substitution with, and restoration of, the craftsmen (mentoring) class.

So the fact that I am trying to build a piece of software that not only helps teams self organize through (extreme) transparency, and allows us to experience what we call a ‘flat organization’ that we almost all intuit that we want to work in. But software that replaces the entire organizational ‘operating system’ is so that we can eliminate what prevents the end of the capitalist organization and return to the ‘society’ that we humans want to live in, by eliminating the principle agent problem, the information-hiding, the rent seeking, the politicking (corruption), and the constant problem of employees (economic family) desiring mentorship but receiving management.

All organizations die for the same reason: the accumulated managerial rents are sufficiently extractive that there are insufficient methods and resources by which to create the incentives to reorganize the organization in response to change or shocks.

We invented the state to compensate for the limits of talent available in the noble families, when the rate of change, and the scale of operations, expanded in modernity.

We invented the corporation, and the management team, to compensate for scale of organizations surpassing the abilities of the families that owned businesses.

We improved the capabilities of management through vast expanses in data and information.

What remains is to improve the information available to employees and owners, so that we solve the principle agent problem created by middle management.

To accomplish this goal means we need a rather expansive suite of tools for the organization.

So that is why oversing’s scope is so large. The minimum feature set necessary to accomplish the goal is non trivial.