MrKnoot @MrKnoot: "🖥️ 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗮..."

United Kingdom

Edited

🖥️ 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆'𝘀 𝗦𝗲𝗹𝗳-𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗳𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗹𝗲𝗱𝗴𝗲-𝗕𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 Knowledge work is extremely hard to quantify and measure. Despite being the most valuable and moat-building kind of work institutions can produce. When studying companies, I try to find companies whose culture encourages and celebrates people capable of producing intangible and hard-to-measure, but valuable, outcomes. This is what $GOOG (Alphabet) was famous four in the old days. This is what has set $META (Meta Platforms Inc) apart for a while. Encouraging the production of intangibles is way easier said than done, obviously. Let me be honest for a moment, the vast majority of middle managers could not set actually SMART goals if their life depended on it. And not many companies have protocols to make that easier. The internals of how companies work are sometimes obscure and hard to study from the outsude, beyond leaks and rumours. Which is why very hard to identify what companies are capable of measuring the productivity or impact of knowledge work. But I will say that it's actually very easy to identify companies that are absolutely terrible at it. Just by looking at this behaviour: They desperately push for RTO policies. You can see that on headlines, official announcements and on public comments of their directive. They despise remote work and blame workers for "slacking off" when allowed to work on their own terms. They think everyone on the company will be more productive if they all come work at the same office at the same time. You can tell they think of office spaces as a factory. Whenever I see that, I see a company with a terrible working culture; a dumb hiring strategy; and an absolute lack of understanding of how to measure knowledge work. There are many teams that greatly benefit from in-person interactions. There are other teams that do not, really. Distinguishing them is key. Companies that are sending everyone to the office are companies incapable of telling those teams apart. My bet is that they're not even using the in-person interactions to enable tighter collaboration and the creative flow of ideas. They’re simply pushing the template of an outdated culture of control and oversight that distrusts their individual contributors. This kind of culture destroys creativity, empowers bullies and antagonises employees. It’s a huge red flag. If employees are slacking off the moment their manager looks the other way, that company has serious deeper issues that will not be solved by harsher vigilance and expensive office spaces. They need to rethink how they hire and promote people. They need to rethink how they’re motivating and compensating their employees. They need to rethink how they operate. A company that distrusts and antagonises their employees will only have workers that perform the bare minimum so as to not get fired. Which in turn will further light up managements paranoia with their employees slacking off. It’s a vicious cycle. It’s a hostile environment. And that’s not a place that will produce great results. Especially in an industry where knowledge and creative output matters. I see the same thing with AI. You can tell when a company reacts to technological breakthroughs with “nice! we’ll be more productive” or with “finally! we can get rid of all these leeches”. The technological breakthrough is the same. The mood is completely different. And so is that company’s future. This is the difference between companies like $AAPL (Apple) or $JPM (JPMorgan Chase & Co) . This is what makes most of the $NSDQ100 (NASDAQ100 Index (Non Expiry)) outperform the $SPX500 (SPX500 Index (Non Expiry)) . A company’s culture is its most important asset.