You know, the best thing that ever happened to me was when I worked for… well, I can’t talk about the broader company, but a specific part of Siemens, in a specific office. The reason why it was the best thing for me is because it’s almost the perfect counterfactual to how you should run a company. I honestly think that, you know, a coin flip has a batting average of 50%. If you just do the perfect opposite of literally everything about that place, you would probably clock in at 60 to 70% of getting everything right, which would mean you would outperform probably 90% of all companies in the world. So that was really, really helpful.

Among other things, almost every incentive system was just wrong. For instance, there was no way you would get a promotion or recognition if you weren’t dressed in a suit or if you didn’t use slides in a particular way that resembled the legal profession.

They really taught everyone that, regardless of your gender, creed, or background, you should basically emulate the same 60-year-old lawyer in persona. Effectively, your career was dependent on whether you got this right, and to me, that just seemed insane. This is infantilization, but the funny thing is that they call this professionalism. To me it is the exact opposite. It’s infantilization because you literally have a policy about how to dress. If you have a policy on how to dress, that means you don’t trust people to dress. It was a pretty stark experience.

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