RIGHT NOW, A BARBER with 20 years’ experience is 100 percent more likely to give you a better haircut than I could. That percentage might shift if you just want your head shaved, but not by much.
Were I to spend the next six months giving ten haircuts a day, I would close that gap, but the experienced barber would still be the better choice. It’s much easier, however, to measure the amount I improved during that six-month period than it would be to measure how much the veteran barber improved. There’s a good chance, given the habits the barber has developed and other life-related distractions, there would be no improvement at all.
If I spend another six months giving ten haircuts a day, I would continue to close the gap. And eventually that gap would become small enough to make the difference in quality negligible. (Unless I just straight sucked, which is possible.)
Executives are aware of this. They’re aware of how employees tend to plateau or get worse the more time they spend at a job because, at a certain point, they turn their attention away from getting better in favor of getting paid more. This is also why so many mid- and late-career employees get laid off and then replaced with people who have a few years’ experience. The executives are truffle-hogging for margin by hiring less-expensive employees who don’t feel entitled to wave Picasso’s Napkin at them.
The truffle-hogging game for a salon owner, then, is to figure out at what point I would get good enough as a barber that the time difference in experience ceased to matter. This gives the leverage back to executives because they can more or less say, “Fuck Picasso and his napkin. Your skill and experience are irrelevant. We can get a good-enough service from someone who’s younger and hungry to move out of their parents’ house.”
This turns what practitioners thought would be a dividend for committing their lives to a craft into a vulnerability. The veteran barber now says, “All the hard work I put in is irrelevant? I have to charge less or work faster or both? But what about the kids I have to send to college?”
And every day new technology is created to make the learning curve less steep, and more and more executives barf out maxims like “Perfection is the enemy of good” or “We just need a minimum viable product.”
Here we see the dynamic in which executives are incentivized to not only devalue skill but also sacrifice quality for the sake of margin. And when you factor in the element of the “untrained ear,” the pursuit of “good enough” becomes even more complicated and dangerous, because in matters of taste or “what will work,” nobody knows until it does or doesn’t work. (See: Appendix, “Nobody Knows Anything”)
This dynamic has been working its influence on organizations for years, and as a result a premium has been placed on scale over skill, which creates its own vicious cycle that further devalues and disincentivizes experience and expertise.
Proof of this can be found in any meeting, at almost any company, on any day of the week. Because at that meeting there will be one guy who asks, “How will this scale?” He says it over and over again because that seems to be his job, to continually remind everyone that modern technology can be used to exacerbate the exploitative practices of the Industrial Revolution and squeeze hundreds of thousands of people for the purpose of enabling a handful of others to make money while they sleep.