My holiday read was The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies
It was a bit of a struggle getting my head around it all
Basically it talked about lot about cybernetics (an approach to how complex organisations could be run), and how it was never fully developed and therefore adopted, as it was overtaken by a focus on numbers, facilitated by computing power becoming available to even mid size companies in the 50’s/60’s
There’s a convincing take put forward about all the ills of companies being laid at the door of the focus being solely on profit maximisation to the exclusion of everything else. There’s also a nice dig at limited liability and a slagging-off of private equity
Ultimately the lack of accountability is a result of complexity, which is no good for our desire to finger point at particular individuals when things go wrong. There’s a great (but grim) story about KLM and squirrels, illustrating how difficult it is to assign accountability
It’s well written, but I wouldn’t say it was a casual read. I found it interesting and engaging…I might give it another read in a few months to get a more complete understanding
