Twitter and universities

From Rob Wiesenthal at the Wall Street Journal re Elon Musk and Twitter: 

Minutes after closing his purchase of the company, he started a process that reduced the workforce from 7,500 to 2,500 in 10 days....

Mr. Musk is trying to cure a degenerative corporate disease: systemic paralysis. Symptoms include cobwebs of corporate hierarchies with unclear reporting lines and unwieldy teams, along with work groups and positions that have opaque or nonsensical mandates. Paralyzed companies are often led by a career CEO who builds or maintains a level of bureaucracy that leads to declines in innovation, competitive stature and shareholder value....

Mr. Musk set his new tone immediately. He eliminated a 12-member team responsible for artificial-intelligence ethics in machine learning, the entire corporate communications department, and a headquarters commissary that cost $13 million a year (despite prior management’s pandemic decree that Twitter employees would be “remote forever”)....

he knows he doesn’t need five layers between him and the employees who actually do the work. His recent email to the engineering team stating, “Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 pm today,” makes it clear he doesn’t want a membrane of corporate yes-men between him and the people who actually build things....

As sole owner, he can also quickly terminate the members of Twitter’s black hole of middle management, that cold and lonely place where great ideas go to die at big companies....

The days of nap pods, emotional-support dogs, corporate pronoun guides, personal wellness days and email blackouts after 5 p.m. are quickly vanishing....

 Those employees who relish getting things done will thrive.

My thoughts go naturally to my home institution, Stanford. We are self-evidently bloated with administrative staff. Stanford proudly lists 15,750 staff, for 7,645 undergrads, 9,292 graduate, and 2,288 faculty. 

The "12-member team responsible for artificial-intelligence ethics in machine learning"... I just learned that Stanford, like other institutions, now has an "Ethics and Society Review" bureaucracy gearing up. We already have the large and cumbersome Institutional Review focusing on human subjects, but it had a pesky limitation 

The IRB should not consider possible long-range effects of applying knowledge gained in the research [...] as among those research risks that fall within the purview of its responsibility.

Well, let's not let that get in the way, 

... it is inappropriate to ignore the risks that research poses for our collective future: the risks of artificial intelligence to the future of work, the risks of sustainability interventions to the societies that they are purported to support, the risks of the internet to professional media and accurate information. 

"to ignore." Don't you love passive voice? For the university bureaucracy to ignore is less self evident. If you stop and think just a moment, absolutely no research can pass this test. Risks to future work? Sorry about that steam engine Mr. Watt. Sorry about that word processor Mr. Wang. "risks of the internet to ... accurate information." Yes, a university bureaucracy wants to stop research on that basis. Which brings up another Twitter story... well, I'm getting off track. ("Voluntary" for now.) 

Read the rest with a university in mind, and it is just a delicious fantasy.

Why can't a Musk come in and similarly clean up a university? It's an obvious takeover target. $37.8 billion in money it doesn't know how to use, and an obvious target for getting back to its core functions. 

Well, because Stanford is a non-profit. Non-profit doesn't mean "doesn't make a profit." Non-profit really means that it does not have shares outstanding, which you can buy up if you think the thing is badly run, and clean the place up. Non-profit means protection from the market for corporate control.  

It's time to rethink whether the non-profit structure is doing what it's supposed to do. A regular corporation is perfectly free to not make money if its shareholders choose to operate that way. But bloated immoveable "nonprofits" don't make sense. 

from The Grumpy Economist https://ift.tt/ZIR9dxs