You've met them at work, the type that does everything verbally, yack and yack. Outlook email didn't fix anything, since they just learned to type. Many people have 25,000 emails in their Inbox, all from yackers, who cc anybody and their dog, just to make sure. :)
I am a male technical purist, and I call myself a 'grunter'. Two of us can make a two-hour conversation in "Going fishing?" "Yep".
Now here's where artificial divisions come in, just like the old 'Venus and Mars'. His divisions were at the 80-90% mark, and he called them absolute. I'll do that, too. Don't yada-yada me about the exceptions, who cares?
My category is "Intellectual Depressives", who are 90% northern male, descended from Barbarians. So, the world is divided into Barbarians and Romans (late Romans, the early ones were barbarians), or Grunters and Yappers. I'm not talking about shy people, we're talking about people who use their entire brain to crystallize things into two words.
As you can guess, the Grunters are considered anti-social, look at Google+ versus Facebook. They aren't really, they just don't like to yap, and parties make them uncomfortable. But they are a powerful force in the world.
Take the start of any technical company. It's a bunch of grunters, all white males who do powerful things, like Blackberry. Their productivity is orders of magnitude above that of any other company, and they don't talk.
I saw these in California. Just stuns the mind, and the money people are just the same. These companies usually follow the same path, they need yackers to deal with customers. The Romans can't interface with the Barbarians, and they hire more yackers. They complain about the grunters that they 'hate us'. No woman alone could survive that, she needs some friends. Now comes the huge mistake that eventually destroys the company -- they hire yackers for Human Resources. Soon all the new hires are yackers who got the job by impressing yackers. That's the end. Goodbye Blackberry, and the yackers have the best parties with lots of booze.
Google may be fending this off, by having 'grunter' hiring practices like weird tests. The best organization I know is Linux, which is headed by the Biggest Barbarian on the street - Crazy Linus. Everybody is judged by what they do, not how well they impress. This organization is a 1000 times more productive (per person) than MS. Of course, when an organization gets big, they get in trouble for not hiring 'yacker diversity'.
My old company was totally taken over by incompetent yackers when we stopped building nuclear plants. Now they are digging a black hole, and trying to restore a plant that fell apart in only 20 years. There is no hope for them.
The only hope for starting companies is not to hire 'pure yackers' but the one in million person who can span both worlds. This is a person with intellect and social skills. My sons are like that, but I've met many women like that. Usually, they are just the CEO, but the company needs these people as managers. At the old company we had many people like that, until they all left for better things.
So, I'm now trying not to be sexist. As the famous biologist said, you can't just drop a woman into a company of male grunters, but, on the other hand, no company can stay that 'pure' for long. It's just a matter of whether you can keep things growing and productive, or head for destruction.
Wait! I've got to get back to the title. The Internet has allowed anti-social grunter organizations to become much more powerful before they fall apart. Look at Uber! If they can last a couple of years, they can take down inefficient yacker organizations. IBM is falling apart. The world is changing.
No comments:
Post a Comment