So I just came back from a business meeting at my store, which is a large grocery chain. It really drove home to me the Anarchist desire to get rid of work hierarchies. No, not because the meeting was mind-numbing (it actually wasn’t too bad, although it was worse than any actual serious business meeting I went to when I was a programmer), but because it really showed me how useless my boss’ work is.

As the manager of the store, he has to account to his own bosses, and he has to constantly justify to them the ups and downs of somewhat random and irrelevant metrics gleaned from “mystery shopper” reports. And so he has to make up new “solutions” to make sure that those semi-random metrics go up instead of down, or at least fluctuate. And we get the pleasure of implementing those half-assed “solutions.”

And of course his bosses are in the same shoes, all the way up to the CEO. I mean, think about it. CEOs of big companies like that have to justify their own actions to the whims and feelings of their shareholders. Their metric is not any more based on reality than my manager’s.

And the saddest part is that the store manager doesn’t even get to own anything. I kept thinking back to my dad. He was the president of his own business. He didn’t have any shareholders or bosses. No stupid irrelevant metrics. Just “are we making money? are the customers happy? are the employees happy? All right, what are we doing new next year?” Real stuff. Not this bullshit.

We already know that self-management is the only form of work organization that is connected to reality, so I’m not really telling you anything new here. There’s also the fact that managers are inevitably disconnected from what is actually going on due to the fact that they have to macromanage, and that thus only a self-management system can be connected to the reality of everyday work. But that doesn’t really have anything to do with the meeting, which was just, to me, a case in point of the futility of the system that we have.

In the end, it really makes me happy about having the measely ground-level job I have, because I’m actually doing something productive and helping people in my own way. So what if I’m a grunt? It could be worse.

I could be a manager.