Jason Breckenridge

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Jason "Ironpumper" Breckenridge: A Symptom of Stagnation or Excessive Growth?

The achilles heel of this sort of management philosophy is that its practitioners cannot just practice it as a matter of book learning and three-ring-binder entrepreneurship. Jason Breckenridge is a symptom of this weakness. Jason did his senior thesis on Narcolombian vs Nova Sicilian market dynamics, like some business school case study of fast food competition. Thus, while a decent manager who knows from training how the culture of the Mafia works, lacks the critical personal skills and street smarts (such as reading the directions) required of effective local mob bosses. The management by personal relationships, to endure, requires individuals who understand the concepts of 'family' and 'honor' and 'trust' in their bones, as personally visceral aspects of one's personality and embedded obligations to others, not just as a question on some b-school quiz. Enzo notices this problem, of a lack of social contract, when dealing with younger lieutenants who are unable to think on their feet, handle multiple issues at once, or deal with problems personally. Enzo seems to imply that YT is the sort of person he would like to see more of in Nova Sicilia, perhaps take over the family at some later date.

Part of the problem is that Enzo's drive to expand the Nova Sicilian franchise into as much of the power vacuum left by the collapse of the United States of America places the insular culture of la cosa nostra under threat of dilution by outside encultured individuals. We see this in Cosa Nostra Pizza University, which takes in Uzbekistani and Tajikistani immigrants and tries to turn them into effective purveyors of pizza-pie. The fiasco of the burned out microwave oven that causes Hiro's receipt of a 12 minute old pizza is a sterling example of the complications of this fast-growth strategy.

This is a common problem in a number of industries where entrepreneurial companies with innovative products, markets, or management systems come under pressure from their own success to expand too fast to maintain 'the magic' and too big to avoid having to take on a lot of anonymous and impersonal middle management. Hiring gets taken out of the hands of the bosses and put in the hands of 'human resources' so-called-experts. Management is taken out of the hands of technical experts with charisma and management potential and put in the hands of b-school grads with no technology specific expertise. To save costs, middle management hires too many employees at the wrong end of the employment demand curve.

As a result of this change, prospective employees are no longer chosen for their initiative, creativity, agressiveness, etc. but instead middle management seeks unimaginative uncreative uninnovative individuals who are moldable into the same cookie cutter mold that B-school graduates have been taught to think of as 'trainable' types (taught by professors who teach because they cannot do). The result is that corporate growth rates and productivity per worker drop, middle management engages in witchhunts to push out old-school unorthodox employees who drive innovation, and the corporation is set to fall into a 'death spiral' if it is unable to rejuvinate itself.