Opportunities from the Dark Side

The Dark Side of Accountability provides real opportunities.

To identify new opportunities, one often simply has to analyse the absurdities (i.e., the Dark-and-Far sides) of corporate (as opposed to individual) accountability.

Computer Says No

About 20 years ago, the catchphrase "computer says no" became a meme.

Computer-says-no can help us find new opportunities.
Let's see how.

Individual Accountability in Business

On page of 317 of version 1.4 of our book about Outperformance, you will find the following:

“We followed process: Ergo we are blameless”. Hannah Arendt agrees: “... bureaucracy, or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held
responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody.”

(Note: Arendt's word 'responsible' is equal to 'accountable' in corporate-speak.)

Our point was this: the corporate bureaucracy of processes, procedures, Standard Operating Procedures, and other such tools work really well. They drive good outcomes such as predictability.

Yet, these ways of doing things have both 'good' sides and 'bad' sides.

Most of us understand the 'good' there. Yet, this understanding often makes us blind to the 'bad' (of which we will now list two), namely (1) the way in which innovation is then suppressed and (2) how individual accountability is then removed to the point of creating Arendt's "system of bureaux" which is then a "rule by Nobody"

Corporate Accountability

We recently became aware of Dan Davies' book, “The Unaccountability Machine”. (Jon has read the book, but the writer of this post has not.)

Davies' book has since spawned a huge interest in what he calls "the accountability sink". Examples are articles in Financial Times, Bloomberg, Business Insider (all stories sadly behind paywalls) and others.

More gruesomely, Tim Harford (who also re-visits 'computer says no') reminds us of the (1999) case of the 440 squirrels thrown in an industrial male chicken shredder. (Harford is the author of “The Undercover Economist”, which we have read.)

As an aside:
Once you have emotionally dealt with the horrendous fate of the 440 squirrels, you may also ask why male-chicken-shredding is then fine. Well, this author spent four years producing software for agricultural financial decision making. Suffice to say that the male-chicken-shredding-thing is very real and that there is some very 'wild stuff' that happens in the chicken industry. But, let's get back to our hypothesis.

In short (probably too short, so please read the links above!), accountability sinks is how large corporates evade accountability through elaborate systems of processes, call-centres, third parties, computer-says-no methodologies, and more.

Opportunity

Accountability sinks are rent-seeking ways of becoming or staying profitable.

These are successful strategies if all of your competitors are doing the same thing; i.e. if all of us are equally 'bad'.

Yet, (a) when the whole world world is covered in accountability-sink-bull-dung, and (b) you have 'customer-first' as one of the principles flowing from the Guiding Policy of your Strategy, there are then huge opportunities.

Corporate processes based on accountability sinks are nasty experiences for customers. Figure out a way to avoid these in your industry and you will have a huge competitive advantage.

If you are in a consumer-facing business, we just know that your business will almost definitely operate some of those accountability sinks. We also know that you cringe a bit when you acknowledge that fact (every now and then when you do so).

But there is nothing else to be done, is there?

There is.
Find it.
Innovate.
Then profit from the innovation.