Bigger Oars

From the Megamachine series · Signpost to the Megamachine

Seven steer, one rows. The solution: the one gets bigger oars.

I. The Race on the Neckar

In Oberndorf on the Neckar people used to tell a joke. The town’s firms hold a boat race on the river, and one of them loses, far behind all the other boats. There is a big meeting. After long analysis the result is clear: of the eight men in the boat, only one rowed. The meeting is adjourned. At the next meeting the solution is on the table. The one gets bigger oars.

People laugh because everyone knows the boat. It lies at anchor in every corporation, every ministry, every party and many a university. The joke needs no figure and no statistic. In a single image it shows how apparatuses think about themselves: thoroughly, without consequence, and always at the expense of the one who does the work.

This weekend the Frankfurter Allgemeine printed a commentary that unintentionally continues the joke. Sven Astheimer describes the severance programmes at BMW, Mercedes and other corporations. The portal on which BMW employees could find out about their severance pay collapsed under the load. Astheimer speaks of a “chief inflation” in the good years and of “huge apparatuses that are mainly busy administering themselves”. The diagnosis is right. What follows is the next meeting.

II. Why the Meeting Cannot Decide Anything Else

The solution with the bigger oars is not stupid. It is inevitable. Who sits in the meeting? The seven who did not row. They are to judge a boat in which they themselves are the problem. No committee resolves its own superfluity.

There is a second point. The rower is the only one in the boat whose work can be measured. His strokes can be counted, his strength compared. What the other seven do cannot be measured. They observe, coordinate, report. So what gets optimised is what can be measured, and that is always the one who works.

In “The Self-Appointed Performance Carriers” (German only: „Die selbst ernannten Leistungsträger“) we described this figure. The German word for a top performer, Leistungsträger, literally means someone who carries performance. He carries another’s performance onward, upward to the board and outward to the customer. He sees exactly who is producing something useful down below, and he knows the language of those who decide up above. Only what lies in between he cannot do: deliver the performance himself. In the boat on the Neckar the seven are such carriers. They carry the rower’s performance to the shore and then write the minutes about him.

None of this is new. In 1955 Cyril Northcote Parkinson examined the British Admiralty. The fleet was shrinking; the number of ships and sailors went down. The Admiralty that administered this fleet grew strongly over the same period. The less there was to steer, the more steersmen there were. Parkinson turned it into a law, and people took it for satire.

The pattern is everywhere. In the hospital the time at the bedside shrinks while the time spent on documentation grows. At the university the administration of research grows faster than research. And in the Bundeswehr engineers build weapons that make the difference in war, only they reach the soldier too late, because the path through the procurement office is longer than the path through development. We described this in “The Apparatus”. Everywhere one person rows, and everywhere there is deliberation on how he can row faster.

III. Severance Pay Rewards Sitting

So now the corporations are cutting back. One might think the steersmen are finally being taken out of the boat. But one has to look closely at how it happens.

First, on a first-come, first-served basis: whoever clicks first gets the bonus, at BMW even a supplement for the quick. Who clicks first? The one who has a chance outside. That is the rower. The competition wants him, the mid-sized firm on the other bank of the river wants him. Whoever has no alternative waits and stays. A first-come, first-served severance programme is selection in the wrong direction. The boat first loses the people who still move it.

Second, by length of service: in Germany severance pay is measured by the years spent in the company, not by what someone contributed. The rule of thumb is half a month’s salary per year. Whoever sat in meetings for twenty years leaves with more money than whoever rowed for five. In “Sitting Time Is Not Capital” we showed that time alone creates no value. Even Marx, the star witness of the labour theory of value, counted only “socially necessary” labour time, not time sat out. The severance programme does exactly the opposite. It turns sitting time into capital, and with the company’s money.

And third, nobody asks who caused the chief inflation. In Astheimer’s account it sounds like the weather of the “fat years”. But someone put in the layers that are now being removed at great expense. It was the same leadership layer that today announces the cuts. It does not pay for its mistake itself. It pays for it with bonuses for the others.

IV. Today the Bigger Oar Is Called AI

Astheimer names a second driver: artificial intelligence. It writes quotations, prepares presentations, draws up cost calculations. A burst water pipe, he says, it cannot fix.

One should look more closely at what it replaces. AI most easily replaces what the steersmen in the boat do: reports upward, instructions downward, slides for the next meeting. The middle layers were always messengers too. They carried information from one level to another. When information no longer needs the messenger, the layer is no longer needed either.

But who decides how AI is used? The meeting. And so AI arrives in the boat where the joke sends it: as a bigger oar for the one who already rows. With machine help he is now to do the work of eight. That the same machine could save seven seats in the boat appears in no minutes. The seven would have to decide on that.

Astheimer offers a counter-example. At Bayer, Bill Anderson removed whole management layers from the organisation chart, and employees supposedly feel again that they can make a difference. “Dare more Bayer!” he exclaims. That may be right for the middle of the company. But Bayer did not get into trouble because of its middle management. The course that ran the company onto the rocks came from the very top: the purchase of Monsanto and with it the billions in glyphosate lawsuits. Layers are always cut in the middle. At the top, where the rocks were steered for, nothing is cut.

V. The Boat in Which No One Rows

A corporation must win the race at some point. If it loses for too long, the market cuts off its money, and then it takes the steersmen out of the boat, late, expensively and clumsily, but it does it.

The state runs no race. While BMW closes its severance portal because of overload, the extension of the Federal Chancellery is rising on the Spree, nearly doubling the seat of government. In the federal ministries posts grow faster than they can be filled. We described this in “The State That Builds on Itself and Bricks Up the Future”. The corporation cuts its middle because it must. The state expands its middle because nobody forces it not to.

In the state’s boat there is therefore not even the meeting that notices only one person is rowing. The rowers sit outside: in the workshop, in care homes, in the classroom, on the building site. They do not get bigger oars. They get new forms. The title of one of our working papers puts it briefly: “It Doesn’t Matter Who Governs”. The boat is built that way.

VI. Who Still Gets In

That leaves the question of who still gets into this boat.

AI is currently taking away the work with which young graduates used to start: the first quotation, the first presentation, the first calculation under supervision. The ladder by which one once climbed from bottom to top is losing its lower rungs. If the economy cuts its middle and the state expands its middle, many young people are left with only one safe seat: one of the seven in the state’s boat. The way there leads through the party, along the long march we have described, and at its end stands what we called “The End Product” („Das Endprodukt“, German only).

This does not make cronyism weaker, but more attractive. In our working paper “Can the Young Untangle the Party?” we demanded that nobody stand for parliament before having worked for some years outside politics. The demand does not become wrong. But it becomes harder, because the professions in which one should work beforehand are disappearing.

VII. What the Joke Does Not Tell

The joke ends with the bigger oars. It does not tell how the next race turns out. One can guess. The rower pulls with his big oars until he can do no more, then he clicks on the severance portal, and the competition on the other bank takes him gladly. Now seven sit in the boat, and all of them steer.

The right solution would be simple: fewer steersmen, more rowers. Everyone in the boat knows it. But nobody who sits in the meeting can decide it. That is why the correction always comes from outside: from the market that cuts off the money, from the voter who leaves the party, or from the rower who gets out. In the corporation it comes late. In the state it comes only when citizens enforce it.

Until then, the meeting is adjourned.