29 July

Every machine is the folding together of the social relationships of the people who made it, and the people who use it. People and machines are not two separate things. Machines aren’t ’tools’ for people. A machine takes a whole suite of social relations between people, and embeds them into material objects. And once that’s done, the people stop arguing and fighting, and just use the machine. The logical extension of this is, as the diagram illustrates, is that companies who focus only on people produce machines (and services) that are just the expression of their internal status rivalries. The late American writer Tracy Kidder, when doing fieldwork to understand how computers are made, realised that he could open any computer and begin to read the organisational structure of the company that made it, just by looking at the ‘technical’ bits inside. Companies that focus on material outcomes instead and ignore interpersonal things, produce remarkable machines and remarkable places to work, that create remarkable human cultures. The Romans knew it. Tesla knows it. Engineers create civilisation. And the only organisations that last and are worth working for. Everything else is human status rivalry. Any organisation that focuses on people and what the company produces as two separate things is going to fail, and be a miserable place to work. Crap products, and facile staff ‘motivation’ and incentive games.