re: #53 Lord of the Pies

How an Ayn Rand-worshipping Maniac Destroyed Sears.

Favorite part of that article…

Crazy Eddie has been one of America’s most vocal advocates of discredited free-market economics, so obsessed with Ayn Rand he could rattle off memorized passages of her novels. As Mina Kimes explained in a fascinating profile in Bloomberg Businessweek, Lampert took the myth that humans perform best when acting selfishly as gospel, pitting Sears company managers against each other in a kind of Lord of the Flies death match. This, he believed, would cause them to act rationally and boost performance.

If you think that sounds batshit crazy, congratulations. You understand more than most of America’s business school graduates

Let’s see, if Bob, the manager of that division looks good, then I look bad. The only rational thing to do is to undercut Bob, so I look good. Multiply by the various divisions and factions that would form and it would make Survivor look like a gathering of innocent lambs.

WTF!!! Where I work we do NOT view success as a “Zero Sum Game”. We cooperate to try to make sure all of us do well, since if one of us looks good, we all look good.

RBS
Who is too honest most of the time to do well in corporate world