The Professional Managerial Class - PMC

Big government, big departments and big salaries attract career managers and leaders keen to enhance their reputations and earning capacity. These people are in charge of complex systems that have complex problems, that are often unreconcilable. They know almost nothing about the specific workings or issues within the organisation and devise means to protect themselves and reduce their exposure. The ones that really suck use other people up, play politics or create cultures around them that are toxic and wasteful. Certainly not the role modelling we want our youth exposed to.

In a recent piece authored by Bryce Edwards: How politics got captured by the middle class, and why it's a problem, Bryce refers to the PMC and the perspectives of Barbara Ehrenreich, the American thinker and journalist who died recently. It provides some insight into the wiring of these people.

"This increasingly powerful force in society – the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) – is prone to see the majority of ordinary people as reactionary and culturally backward, racist, sexist and homophobic. The PMC see their political role as dispelling and combatting these views.

They often regard change as something to achieve through individual actions – eg. how we behave or policing how other people behave. This liberal approach is especially concerned with language and clamping down on “wrong opinions” – which is not that surprising, because their day jobs of such individuals often involve “telling people what to do”.

The PMC also push for political reforms that might make New Zealand a more tolerant, diverse, and enlightened place. Many of these top-down reforms are entirely admirable but aren’t without problem. Ehrenreich, and others who have been influenced by her theories on the PMC, have argued that this enlightened, or “woke” approach, can be very superficial and misses out on making transformative change to improve the lot of the majority of society. Instead, such critics characterise this middle-class political agenda as being one of self-interest. After all, the reform programme reinforces their own moral or public standing, while often remunerating them very highly."

The PMC tends to enjoy empire building because it feeds their ego and justifies their remuneration, while and at the same time poor leadership and decisions are far easier to hide in an expanding budget. This really sucks, because the PMC's tend towards making things bigger and messier, not smaller and simpler.

The Parasites

The parasites suck because they know the system is broken, but they keep on taking and faking anyway. Dragging things out, looking busy, politicking, back-stabbing, time wasting and always 'overworked'. 

Always looking to hook on to the latest ritual, buzzword, virtue-signaling movement, they produce little or nothing while on full pay. They might even be looking after their own affairs sitting at home on the sofa on full pay, with the odd email or Zoom strategically timed to give the impression they are hard at it.

They love incompetent leaders and managers because they haven't got a clue what they are up to and it is so easy to please them, because they themselves have such low expectations.

Summing up

A few years back a senior manager in government was asked if they thought the whole of government could be reduced and if so, by what amount. She said she had spent some considerable time thinking about that challenge and that in her opinion, with a redesign and reconfiguration, including some law changes, the whole system could be made to function on between 30% and 50% of what was in place at that time. It has expanded further since then.

Since the 1950's, all the central government has done is make itself bigger, more complicated, more expensive and more important, except for a period in the 1980's we refer to as 'Rogernomics', that most people still try to forget.  

The government has its place; there are essential things it does and will need to do in future. But it also needs to be able to cut its cloth to suit future income and, more importantly be far more oriented to the needs of the regions. 

This will require new thinking, new models, ways of working and new cultures. Creative people that can make things smaller, better and simpler are required. And it will need to be far more efficient. There ought to be no room for bureaucrats that suck in future.

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This week's quote

“All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.” 

– Winston Churchill