Big C and Human Progress

I sort of alluded to the theory of this post a few months ago when I wrote about COVID and the (then coming) fall-out.

COVID, the Black Swan

I elaborate it a lot more here. It is still in the indefinite-ideas territory but let me at least dump all the stuff around this topic from my brain into a bulleted post.

The mediocre trying to become competent

My theory is as follows:

• Competent people (‘competence’ defined in multi-dimensional ways that together lead to success. it includes hard skills as well as soft skills/genetic factors like personality, guts etc.) will succeed (‘success’ defined as whatever they yearn for — money, fame, power, tranquility, enlightenment, stability, growth-in-all-these-terms, social mobility, whatever) in any situation, irrespective of the prevailing political/economic/social systems etc.
• Incompetent people will not succeed in any situation
• Mediocre people will succeed in some situations and fail at others. They need the right conditions for success — i.e. the right political/economic/social systems should exist for them to thrive and succeed. With the right conditions, they might move to the competent zone (if only temporarily) and will likely slip into the incompetent zone (more permanently) when the conditions are not right
• Now, these are not clear silos and people exist in a spectrum along these. Also, in different endeavors, they might be at different points along the spectrum.
• Majority people in the world are mediocre, say like a Bell Curve.
• For most parts of human history, the conditions for success of mediocre people did not exist. They would have existed briefly at different places/domains but nothing to lift the mediocre across cultures, countries, societies to succeed. In the medieval economy, people mostly joined their family professions, there was no social movement upwards etc. This is what typically happens even now when you look at lesser developed parts of the world including India, parts of which are stuck in 12th century or so.
• When Industrial revolution happened, along with it came changes in all spheres — political, societal, and economic. This created the conditions ripe for the mediocre to succeed. Let us focus on the economic parts here in this post.
• In terms of the economic sphere, with industrial revolution came the rise of ‘Big Corporations’. And with them came opportunities that were hitherto not available for the mediocre and reserved only for the competent
• Because of this, sure, some competent people were undeservedly pushed down to being mediocre (not good) and some incompetent people also were undeservedly pulled up to being mediocre (not necessarily bad in the overall scheme of things). But those people were anyways at the end of the spectrum. It benefited the fat-middle, which is of our interest today.
• With Big Corporations, mediocre people could focus on only a small part of the overall value creation process in which they can be competent and succeed. Their incompetence in other parts would not affect them/their employer/society at large. If left alone without a big corporation, all their incompetencies would come to the fore and they will not be succeeding at all. They would just get pushed to the incompetent bucket.
• Big Corporations are able to bring a bunch of mediocre people together and create so much value that the whole society/country/world gets benefitted.
• All Big Cs of course start small — with only competent people (aka psychopaths) at the helm. In spite of all their proclamations to hire only A-People, Bar-Raising recruits etc., beyond a stage of growth, it is not only not possible to get competent people to hire, it is also detrimental to their future successes. They are of course competent enough to realize it and start hiring the mediocre.⁴
• They cannot declare it saying “Okay, we are now open for mediocre people” since it will not sound politically right. After all, mediocre people don’t accept they are mediocre and think they are competent. If everywhere you have worked, you have been the 50th+ employee, rest assured, you are one.
• It is when all/most competent people leave the Big C and the mediocre start taking decisions does it start declining.

Slight Digression: About a dozen or so years ago, I had a group of extremely skeptical friends (including me of course, a card-carrying member of the tribe) in my office. Our lunch-time conversations would often revolve around competence of people around us. And we thought we were reasonably self-aware too. We classified people are Humans (who are really competent), Donkeys (the semi-competent), and Pigs (the incompetent)¹. By default, everyone should self-classify oneself as a Pig or as a Human. Pigs could work hard and try to become a Humans but it is more or less like Sisyphiean exercise. But if one who is classified as a Pig starts to think he/she is actually a Donkey, it is a clear confirmation that they are definitely Pigs. Those conversations came to mind as I wrote this. I think we can simply call the Donkeys for the Mediocre people defined in this post.

• Big Cs are also the refuge of all people from the real competent group when they want to take a breath. This is why you see a lot of entrepreneurs joining Big Cs for a while between their entrepreneurial endeavors (whether successful or not).
• It works the other way too. Mediocre people who think they are competent often go to work for start-ups, or start their own companies, only to bite the dust and guess what, return to the Big Cs.
• In fact, I generally abhor these people who ‘follow their heart’ and get into lifestyle businesses like ‘organic milk/groceries/vegetables distribution’, ‘selling traditional food’ etc. My experience with all of them as a consumer has been terrible. Unless I join their ‘cult’, I cannot appreciate it. I go back to consuming products from a big company — It gives me peace with respect to its quality.³
• So all this fashionable things like ‘Gig Economy’, ‘Free Agency’, and the new ‘Hustle Economy’ etc. work well for the competent folks. Some competent folks actually start peddling this to the mediocre as part of their business.² This is not always with negative intentions. Many times, they do believe that to be true. Unfortunately, like I wrote in the COVID-Black Swan post linked above, that place is Extremistan and only the competent survive.
• Big businesses are our saviors — all of us mediocre people.
• Let us pray that we have another suitable way to sustain the mediocre before the apparently inevitable decline of the corporations. At least keep me employed, folks.

Did I go too far in terms of stating ‘human’ progress and linking it to Big Cs?I don’t think. Like I said earlier, most humans are mediocre. So, if it helps the majority, I think we can generalize it to ‘human’.

As you can see, this is an argument I have built to talk myself out of any entrepreneurial ambitions that may come up. Just kidding. Not. I do religiously read newsletters like Art of Gig (only the free ones), even if only to convince myself further away from those by reading posts like this.

1. I had not read Animal Farm then. Else, pigs and donkeys would obviously be interchanged in the classification
2. Have you noticed that most techniques of self-help authors revolve around being successful in authoring self-help books, in a circular way?
3. We might still buy ‘organic’ but when that organic is from a bigger company, it feels safer. Also, the organic vegetables sold by these indie lifestyle business are terrible and look stale — When questioned, they say that is how it is supposed to be. Gimme a break, folks.
4. Another trivia you may like: When I started work, I joined this company called Wipro, but particularly the ‘Global R&D’ division, which was supposed to have the cream of the company, doing some real tech work (read: low-level system software) and had people with computer engineering degrees. The other divisions like ‘Enterprise Services’ were more superfluous (read: application software) and had people from other branches. Soon after, the company merged all of it into “Wipro Technologies” and it all became one. Old-timers used to crib about how the bar has been lowered etc. and I used to join them too, but also wondering at the back of mind if I too was a reason for ‘lowering the bar’. For every company I have joined since and every role I have taken, after the imposter syndrome goes away, and I realize the bar is not as high as I had thought, I also wonder if the bar had actually been set lower for people like me to join! This is a variant of Groucho’s quote for this: “I would not join a company which would have me as an employee!”