The Last of Anything

Eudora Welty | The Hedge Against Hierarchy | Factoids | Elsewhere, Elsewhen

source: unknown

Never think you've seen the last of anything.

| Eudora Welty

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The Hedge Against Hierarchy

In Rethinking Hierarchy, Nicolai Foss, Peter Klein argue that hierarchy is still needed, if only to manage large projects or organizations, but needs to be reconsidered in light of the need for greater autonomy in knowledge-based work.

They make a distinction between Mark 1 and 2 hierarchy:

Authority has many faces: It may mean the right to hire, fire, instruct, supervise, intervene, and sanction [Mark 1 or management]. But the exercise of managerial authority is also associated with other behaviors: leading, creating structures and processes, forging consensus, aligning behavior around shared goals, and fostering change [Mark 2 or leadership].

If they want to make a distinction between managing and leading, why the Mark 1 and 2 lingo?

The transition to Mark 2 organizations is tricky, especially when the organization is 'delayered'. The discussion becomes a bit sketchy in the middle where a great deal of managerial intuition is invoked. Seems like this is a response to bosslessness article. They end on a high note:

The need for hierarchy isn’t going away, but the form it takes is changing: deciding how things will be done rather than telling people what to do, and designing and enforcing the rules of the game rather than making everyone play it in a certain way. As Haier Group founder and CEO Zhang Ruimin put it, “Leaders of other enterprises often define themselves as captains of the ship, but I think I’m more the ship’s architect or designer. That’s different from a captain’s role, in which the route is often fixed and the destination defined.”

In redesigning managerial authority and hierarchy for the 21st century, leaders must realize that they don’t need to know everything, but only just enough, and they need to consider what their employees want and think is fair in designing structures and systems.

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Factoids

Homelessness on the rise.

The U.S. recorded its highest ever homelessness count of 653,000 in 2023 and is on track to break that record this year. Though there are other factors, researchers have consistently found housing costs are the biggest driver, explaining why the homelessness rate is 17 times higher in New York than Mississippi or 19 times higher in San Francisco than Houston, with the lack of low-cost housing being particularly important. In the meantime, the post-pandemic office vacancy rate has reached a record 20 percent nationwide. Replacing windows and extending plumbing to each apartment pushes the cost to convert modern office buildings to more than $400 per square foot, often making these conversions infeasible even for high-end units.

| Alex Horowitz, who is advocating for relaxing the requirement for operable windows (‘openable’) and other apartment zoning rules to hasten the conversion of commercial real estate to large-scale single room occupancy housing: basically, like boarding houses or college dorms. A form of co-housing that would dramatically lower the cost of housing for many. And all built on the back of commercial real estate left high-and-dry by remote/hybrid work.

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Sitting is the new Smoking.

Those who sit most of the work day had a 34 percent higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease than those with less sedentary jobs did — and a 16 percent higher risk of mortality overall.

| Jen Murphy

Odd that so much of knowledge work is conducted while sitting, which seriously increases mortality. How can we shift that risk? Obviously, walking phone calls, walking and stand-up meetings, and active forms of commuting.

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7 percent.

Just 7 percent of the 193 countries that make up the United Nations have a woman as their head of government. Only 30 percent of them have ever had a woman leader.

| Joanna Slater, Karin Brulliard

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Throw the bums out.

Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened.

| John Burn-Murdoch

That might not take the sting out of election day results for U.S Democrats, but we’re part of a worldwide recalibration away from the incumbents.

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Elsewhere

The Basque people’s story told by their genes.

In A language family of one, a land beyond conquest, Razib Khan in his usual magisterial way deciphers the clues in the genetics and history of the people of Euskara, the Basque country.

The dream that unpicking Euskara might teach us about Ice-Age Europe because they were the lone untouched Pleistocene-forager descendants in our midst is mostly wrong. The Basque have more forager ancestry than their neighbors, but that is a coincidence of their greater subsequent isolation. Instead, Euskara may be the last linguistic legacy of Europe’s Neolithic civilization that peaked in 3100 BC and collapsed in the centuries after. Theirs was the lost European age of megaliths and the most populous villages in the world before Sumer, some with over 10,000 inhabitants even five millennia ago.

Rather than representatives of the Ice Age, the Basque are perhaps the last cultural descendents of a Europe before Indo-Europeans, a realm of European farmers and monument builders that once stretched from Ireland to Romania and from Sweden to Sardinia. The Basques remain indisputably weird and unique in Europe, but a plot twist care of 21st-century genomic advances can now confirm that the lost prehistoric age from which they alone may bear clues is an entirely different one than the field had long assumed.

And yes, Basque is not related to any other known language.

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Kayfabe World: Deception, first, last, and always | Stowe Boyd

I maintain that Trump — and a sizeable majority of those that voted for him — have drifted into a worldview similar to [pro wrestling’s] kayfabe: they are all agreeing to participate in the deception — at many levels — that the world of Trumpian falsehoods is real, and, analogous to the fakery of body slams and pulled punches, they agree to accept the endlessly repeated lies and disinformation as if they are true.

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Trump mysteriously tweeted the unknown word ‘covfefe’ in 2017: ‘Despite the constant negative press covfefe’. My bet is that he had never read the word ‘kayfabe’, but instead had only heard it in wrestling circles: he didn’t know how to spell it.

If in fact he intended ‘kayfabe’, his statement can be interpreted to be a warning to others in on the long con he was playing to not talk about the con in front of outsiders, especially the press.

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Elsewhen

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Announcement: Unoffice Hours

Starting at the beginning of 2025, I will be co-opting the idea of ‘unoffice hours’ (lifting from my old friend Matt Webb: see here). I will be opening times in my calendar for paid subscribers, once the holidays are done. I will write a post about this soon, and the link to schedule will be sitting behind the paywall, down there↓. Might be a good reason to fully subscribe.

I will also be holding occasional (monthly, perhaps) group sessions on various topics, like Dave Gray’s School of the Possible’s campfires.