This is not a great take. Politics shows up as a failure to construct an aligned organization. There will always be some politics, but it should not be the most significant thing going on at a company. In a well designed org, it tends towards zero.
In a positive sum environment, with incentives aligned with the shareholders, everyone is trying to make the business more profitable, and the "more" that everyone wants comes from the market. You have to contend with reality on reality's terms to get more.
In a zero-sum environment (which is most large corporations) nothing anyone does will meaningfully move the needle on profitability. The business has been built, and now it is coasting. How to divide up the predictable profits is decided by politics, the "more" comes from someone else within the organization getting less.
The best advice is to know which environment you are in. The "right" move is entirely context dependent. If you are in a zero-sum environment, you need to play politics, that's the game. If you are in a positive-sum environment, politics will be the noise, you can get more by building more.
> Politics shows up as a failure to construct an aligned organization.
More to the point, it reflects the failure of higher-level management to construct proper policies, processes, team interfaces, and incentive structures for teams, so that the team leads will be set up to give their engineers all the ingredients for happiness at work: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Constructing proper policies, processes, team interfaces, and incentive structures is really hard and much harder to well than most people give credit for. It is virtually always bespoke, building on individual personalities and the tools available. Balancing policies and processes with agility requires significant self-discipline on the part of upper-management to not just run roughshod over their policies and processes.
The question is whether you're optimistic or pessimistic about your upper-management. If you're optimistic about them, then you have Lawful Good upper-management that is interested in building out these governing structures that are needed for building collaborative culture. But if you accept that the vast majority of upper-management is human and flawed (like the rest of us), and there are very few Lawful Good upper-managers around, then you accept politics as a necessary evil, at least in that particular organization.
I think you are missing the game theory aspect of it. Even in the positive sum game the spoils aren’t divided equally. Additionally not everyone behaves rationally, i find the opposite to be generally true
> I think you are missing the game theory aspect of it.
That's actually exactly how I think about this, let me explain my analysis.
I view it as the composition of two games. "Should we pursue the spoils?" is the first game, and the correct strategy is to play that game and coordinate with people to play it.
The zero sum game is dividing the spoils, this is conditioned on having won the first game. As long as everyone is guaranteed enough of the spoils ahead of time for the game to be positive EV, they will play it, and continue playing games like it.
When you apply this to a company, this is just an issue of mechanism design (inverse game theory). Why weren't you architecting the game that the employees play, such that there is relatively little to be gained from the zero sum game, and most of the value comes from the magnitude of contribution to the positive sum game?
Ideally people play a positive sum game with their coworkers that is tied to revenue and their contributions to it, to the tune of 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars a year, while the zero sum game is only worth 1000s of dollars a year.
I really don't see how your reply made a new point. What the other person was responding to was that even if you were to construct your positive sum game, you will have politics because reward distributions are not equal. The very fact that some people receive bigger bonuses, RSUs or promotions and others don't is an unequal distribution such that politics will be there.
Say everyone is compensated with equity. The goal is to increase share value. Yes every action that each employee takes in theory is going to be toward that goal because that's how they're incentivized through the compensation. But in reality you do a performance review and you have to decide how much some person contributed to the overall result, which isn't possible to objectively determine. And in that space of perception and subjectivity is were politics, or as I call it social arbitrage opportunity, exists.
So, since people will play the games anyway, companies should design the office politics in such a way that the company makes more money, and therefore it can afford to pay the team members more money too. Everyone in the company is therefore better off. Did I get that right?
How would such a positive-sum game look? I'm lacking imagination because I've never worked in an environment with such a positive game.
Where I work is definitely positive-sum, but I still have to make a little noise, build connections, etc. And it's not one of those things where the situation would be better if nobody did that.
I find this take naive. First, to have a zero sum game or indeed a positive sum game you have to be playing with perfect information with rationally behaving actors. Given most organisations have high levels of uncertainty and are resource constrained you can’t rationally make positive sum game decisions as the interpretation of uncertainty is cardinal to it - and additionally the resource constraint means different views of that uncertainty will tend to bias towards the thing they know best - engineers will find more certainty in build, marketers in marketing, designers in design - take your pick.
This necessitates collaborative information synthesis to resolve uncertainty uniformly to then be able to play a positive sum game under constraints. This is possible but it necessitates exchange of information between different business functions.
As informational clarity is a communicative process with repetitive feedback cycles, it will tend to have a big delay in the overarching system of decision-making. Therefore a shortcut is to influence, i.e. use conviction processes to shorten the cycle, rather than repeat to arbitrary infinity in order to drive perfect information alignment.
Therefore influencing is a necessary component even in an otherwise perfectly healthy and incentive aligned positive sum system of rational actors - and politics are influencing.
The problem becomes when conviction isn’t used as shortcut for informational clarity but as a method of exploitation of irrationality of human actors - this is bad politics.
What I do agree with is that putting in place right incentives, processes and organisational structure minimises politics - and in an org with rational actors this is the goal.
But good luck hiring perfectly rational actors in each function, that will still behave rationally in an economic downturn :).
It's bad advice. Office politics is toxic, no matter how you slice it. It's the one thing I'd urge anyone that wants to focus on the best parts of a career to avoid at all costs. It brings out the worst qualities in people (tribalism, favoritism, gossip).