Thinking About #5 ... Window Dressing, Monopolies and Education
Sharing a number of things I've been thinking about lately. Getting them out of my head. This time is about window-dressing-work, behavior of monopolies and what really is learning and education.
This post is part of my “Thinking About Series”. This is a semi-regular post where I get all the thoughts bouncing around my head onto digital paper. I’m averaging one every 7 to 10 days covering 3 themes/topics. I don’t have a fixed publishing schedule or template. This post was greatly delayed due to winter holidays. Happy holidays everyone!
Jobs are window dressing…
I often find myself reflecting on the nature of leadership, operational and digital support roles as this has become my professional focus. I’ve worked in front-line sales roles and run commercial teams so I can relate to how operations can impact sales.
I cannot help but wonder on the dynamics of jobs. For any company that is providing stuff (things or services), the majority of value is created in the factory and/or right next to the customer. Make the right product and you will find a way to get it to the customer / or the customer will find a way to buy it. Many companies are successful with high-friction relationships with their customers - the service or product is “worth it”.
Getting to that first point of traction and success is a mix of luck, timing and expertise. Most companies fail in that journey. For the few that survive, it's easy to fall into the trap of optimizing the wrong things. It's easy to hire more people to do more things. Productivity and streamlining are intangible in the abstract and require a lot of effort to quantify. There is always more to do, tweak and improve.
I think this happens because the early success of the company is focused on impact from sales, service and manufacturing related roles. When the company grows to the point where it needs more operational/support roles, the existing team lacks the expertise or awareness to recognize the need to carefully hire and quantify value. Without that care, such roles become window-dressing and eventually barriers to continued success. Such a company can still ride it’s early success but internally will start to feel unserious.
If you are serious you think about how any investment of time, money will impact your business and manage for it. It’s window dressing if you just leave it alone and don’t consider it until it makes a mess.
The raw appeal of a Monopoly
The increasing momentum behind antitrust and the possible breakup of Google and other actions against Meta, Apple, Amazon got me thinking more about monopolies.
There is a natural appeal to monopoly behavior. The people running the company have sufficient self interest and external incentives to encourage consolidation. Very few humans appreciate friction and conflict so finding ways to further secure the business and margins is natural and often an important part of business strategy planning. People who work in successful companies naturally believe they are best at solving all kinds of problems.
For consumers, monopolies can be incredibly convenient. Imagine having to deal with 20 different water companies or 100s of telcos. Any marginal benefit in savings would be burned by associated time/complexity costs. In a way human progress is a story of monopolies. A new technology leads to an fountain of innovation which leads to eventual consolidation. And then at some point the market sours towards that consolidation. The benefits no longer outweigh the costs. This is all perception. The people running the companies involved certainly don't think it's a worse outcome. Investors love the monopoly profits and stable returns. Yet at some point the consumer doesn't like it any more. Maybe the companies get so large and powerful that people fear them.
The further irony in this dynamic is that those wealthy investors have the most to gain from breaking up monopolies - more high growth companies to invest in. And they will fight to stop it no matter what. Why take the risk on a slate of new spin outs when it's good enough to just milk the cow?
There seems an underlying relative-value paradox where a market will start to consolidate in a positive or negative manner without needing a motivated bad actor. This can make it look like companies are trying to manipulate markets yet it's simply an emergent, expected behavior due to the effects of consolidation.
Thinking about this topic makes me more supportive of market tests rather than profitability or consumer harm assessments. A monopoly could be wildly unprofitable, popular with consumers and still need to be broken up.
This section was inspired by this post The Proposal to Break Up Google Is Finally Here and more from
on the monopoly topic.I also wonder how often monopolies are self-defeating. Any large company taking non-standard profits seems to invest those profits in an inefficient manner - often beefing up middle-management, low-potential-return investments, support-functions and other pet-projects. Large companies with high profits seem to struggle with rational thinking. Eventually that focus on lower-performing investments will catchup and margins will collapse and opportunities for competition will open. Thus, it is more a question whether the monopoly is performing badly and taking action to limit competition - ensuring a worse overall experience for everyone.
Taking a position, wider society has more to gain from fewer monopolies and more companies competing. Such competition broadly creates more jobs, more innovation and better results for consumers. Monopolies should be allowed in situations where competition is detrimental to the common good or innovation and considerable public funding or regulation is needed. Those cases seem generally rare.
Education matters but what is it?
Unlimited, universal access to all human knowledge via ‘formal’ higher education and the internet hasn't solved any major problems. Or has it? It sometimes feels like I’m surrounded by information yet not learning.
University (or ‘formal’) education is prevalent throughout the world and may professions require degrees or higher to simply apply. Yet books like “The Case Against Education” (the author
is here on Substack - recommended!) make a strong argument that returns to higher education are specific to certain professions and a majority get a negative return on the cost of education. Books like “Bullshit Jobs” (the author has unfortunately passed away) remind us that the vast majority of professionals jobs which require higher educational qualifications are often bullshit.Then what is education? Universities don't have a monopoly on any knowledge or instruction. If anything Universities lag the knowledge in the market by at least one year. If Universities are, like Caplan and others argue, mainly signaling (not entirely) then the learning of ‘formal’ education can happen elsewhere.
And education isn’t purely content. YouTube is bursting with content about any subject you can imagine but consuming such content is largely passive entertainment. “Like, Comment, Subscribe” shows the lengths that the people behind YouTube have gone to make the content engaging and entertaining.
The more I think about this topic, it seems like the difference between “Performance and Learning” explained in “Outsmart Your Brain” (around page 136 - Tip 41/42). Watching a YouTube video or reading a few articles gives us enough understanding of a topic to recognize when someone is taking about it. This can give us the impression we are “Performing” and thinking “I know what they are talking about!”. But this isn’t Learning. We aren’t able to apply the skills or teach someone else the meaning of that content. Yet as we move around consuming more content, our feeling of Performance comforts us while we never actually Learn new skills. Many topics will “make sense”. But we aren't proficient or able to apply that knowledge as an expert.
The process of learning to become proficient in something is maybe the best description of education to me. And if so, the process of education is much more internally driven than a university may profess and it's much more uncomfortable than a Duolingo session will make us feel. This reminds me of my earlier writing about managing my learning overload.
Taking this into the present arguments about LLMs disrupting education:
If education is simply “knowing things” then LLMs are a disaster as anyone can figure out anything now - anyone can demonstrate “Performance” in almost any subject using an LLM.
If education is becoming proficient in a skill, then LLMs are simply another tool on that journey.
has some excellent articles looking at how LLMs can be used to enhance education.
We may see the return of more practical and historic approaches to testing knowledge since “Performance” will no longer be a way to accurately assess someone’s knowledge. And there will be continued pressure on the signaling value of ‘formal’ education. Recently, I’ve attended some paid networking events which clearly aim to capture some of the MBA experience yet in a decoupled manner.
Education is something which makes us uncomfortable and brings us closer to a level of expertise that we desire. Sometimes that expertise is simply performing well on an exam or signaling our professional standing. Yet increasingly those things can be captured in different ways.
Conclusions
All three of these topics - Window-Dressing, Monopolies and Education all seem related in a manner I wasn’t first expecting. Monopolies can create the market for Window-Dressing jobs which require Education focused mainly on signaling. This can lead to a distant feeling from real learning and expertise as we continue to cycle through content.
We can get caught into these cycles easily no matter what are jobs our employers are. Thinking through this it give more value to that saying about always making yourself uncomfortable and pushing some level of expertise in different areas. And if needed, even building a Skill Tree.
I’ll continue to explore these and other topics in future “thinking about” posts. Do let me know your additional perspectives and we can continue to explore.