Corporate Management

A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing a translation of Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" over at The Gutenberg Project (free books online!)--you know, just for fun. I guess I'm that kind of pretentious bastard. Anyway, the point at the time was to amuse myself with all of the subtle truths contained therein that management at my job was clearly not following, and I had a good little chuckle about that. But it got me to thinking.

Over the course of a few weeks, I began to realise something that I hadn't considered at first. When I was thinking about how the "command structure" here at work fails to follow Sun Tzu's advice, I was thinking in terms of the employees being troops and their managers being commanders. What I came to realise is that this paradigm is not the best fit--rather, the managers are an army, and the employees are an enemy army. Re-reading the relevant bits from the version of "The Art of War" that I have makes it painfully clear that management is, in fact, more aware of such basic truths than I had first thought.