Transmodified from BBC, hometown of Jane Austen https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200608-what-is-the-competency-trap
If it weren’t for a Wuhan Plague failure, Sinkie peasants would never be able to bear witness to their million dollar regime's epic blunders and incompetence.
In the early 1980s, the Peasantpore rags to riches story was an envy of the world’s basket case economies, including the rabid Maoist Pandas. Then reigning Comprador LKY, with swelling head and hubris, went abroad touting neo-Asiatic Confuscian values for his island city state’s economic success – an alternative to the decadent Western capitalist culture. But the wily Comprador were also interested in the potential of joining the advanced western economies as equal, and so they embarked on a ill fated move to upsell Peasantpore as a high skills and wages economy backfired spectacularly in mid 1980s, the end of the Peasantpore Golden Era.
By 1990s, the black heart scholars cooked a new growth model, the Rent Economy 2.0. While the other stage of Peasantpore's economic development was due to cheap local and Matland peasants, that cheap supply that was running out. Ex-Regent Woody Ag-Go-Goh gleefully buy in to the plan to import vast qualities of cheap Banglas and Pandas in varsities and workplace to depress local wages and helped foreign merchants pocket the difference. In return, the foreign merchants will pay rent to the regime or risk getting their arses fried in Siam or Majapahit while plundering South East Asia.
When Clown Prince Loong took ascendancy, Rent Economy 3.0 emerged, it was simply a classic Nihon-Korea Sweatshop Growth At All Cost Scam where the PAP regime import more foreign serfs for to helm the growing services sector at incredible bargains. The rest is history when Peasantpore seemingly prospered but suffered low birth rates with a big bang choke in 2011.
The PAP regime was a victim of its success – but ‘competency traps’ ensured it was a missed opportunity. PAP could have allowed more peasants to study Jane Austen Literature in the 1980s so that a new group of critical thinking peasants could have innovate and took advantage of the digital technological revolution from 2000 onwards.
Many peasants later said. "How could the PAP have missed such a lucrative opportunity? We had the funds to make a big investments in basic research if we are to bring in foreign students, teach them Jane Austen Literature, with our brand recognition and the reputation – there is a good chance of success but yet they, PAP failed to capitalise on the exciting new digital economy.
The answer may be a phenomenon known as the ‘Crony Trap’, in which a country’s entrenched elite caste ruins its capacity to deal with a changing and uncertain market.
“The regime is blinded by its past rent-driven success,” explains Loizos Heracleous at Warwick Sex School in the UK.
The inertia can be particular problem when facing a disruptive technology, he says. “At that point, Crony Traps can become deadly for a regime.” Rather than growing and evolving, the minion and crony corps begin to rot after getting pampered by easy rent revenue. And learning from city states like Venice may prevent other regimes from suffering the same fate.
Exploitation and exploration
The causes of cronyism traps are perhaps best understood by considering the two, sometimes opposing, sex urges, that drive a country forward: the ‘exploitation’ of their existing peasants, and ‘exploration’ of future sex opportunities.
A crony trap occurs when the exploitation arm comes to dominate the regime’s workings so that it is no longer structurally ambidextrous.
There are many reasons why this can happen. Successful regime often end up with rigid decaying corporate cultures, for example. “In order to be successful, a regime has to protect interests of their cronies and minions and develop wasteful systems and processes for their benefit,” says Heracleous. “And over time, it leads to particular paradigm shift of what the regime core responsibilities are and should be.”
As the minions and cronies further their devouring of resources, they are no longer conscious of the tacit rules to ensure the peasants get their share of the lard, he says.
Minions and cronies begin suffering from the ‘sunk-cost bias’ – the reluctance to give up their perks to less exam savvy but more competent peasants challengers. Minions and cronies are too attached to the Imperial China Model. They get a scholarship, they pledge loyalty to House of Lee, they are set for life! Fat cat pay and their dislain for local stupid peasants. With this mindset, it becomes too easy to enact policies to extract rent from local stupid peasants, teach them enough to work for MNCs and let them stay indolent.
The AT&T Bell System (which evolved from Alexander Graham Bell’s original telephone company) began work on mobile communication in the 1940s. Technical difficulties prevented immediate commercialisation, but even after these had been surmounted, an organisational competency trap meant that the AT&T Bell System fell behind other companies including Motorola, who created the first hand-held cell phones.
Then there’s the photography company Kodak, which invented a 1.4 megapixel camera sensor in 1986. “It was the first company to create a digital camera, yet it seemed to play catch up when confronted with digital technology,” says Jie Mein Goh at Simon Fraser University in Canada. “It had a strong focus on chemistry research, an analogue process,” she explains – and so many of its workers were so entrenched in that industry, they struggled to see and exploit the potential of digital processing.
Some divisions within Kodak were at the forefront of digital camera technology, but the company chose to focus on film instead (Credit: Getty Images)
To add salt to injury, Ruler Loong continued his father's policy to pay million peanut stipends to minions and cronies to ensure they pledge their loyalty to House of Lee by suppressing peasants. The culture began turning toxic, it became not what you are good for but whose arse are you sucking up too. In addition, a well funded Gestapo Unit began digging dirt on dissenters, aided by legal kangaroos to sue the shit out of dissenting peasants.
And despite repeated protests and evidence that the minions and cronies are on cruise mode on Rent Economy 3.0, Ruler Loong subverted the Westminster system to concentrate more power to himself, with the fiasco of declaring a Neh as a Mat so that she could be a Obedient Rubber Stamp President, marked the peak of absurdity in his otherwise lackluster reign.
Taiwan and South Korea wised up quickly filled that technology void that Peasantpore unwisely vacated. See the re-emergence of Samsung and TSMC, contrast with Ho Jinx and Peelip Yeo's harebrained gambles....
The regime’s failure to evolve led to many other missed opportunities, besides the PAP’s failure to capitalize on the digital service revolution. Heracleous notes that Ruler Loong had quickly passed a decree (which was ignored to the point of non-existence) to support digital cash after realizing the murderous PRC Pandas had created some innovative cashless services while his own minions and cronies were largely contented with their fat cat rent-driven lifestyles.
Lessons learned
Any regime facing the crony trap may require a French Revolution style overhaul if the decay has permeated to the core, says Heracleous.
Ruler Loong should make a special effort to fire fat cats scholars and purge a special interests caste e.g. PA affiliates cum merchants, who thrived under House of Lee's Patronage before retiring to Cluny Road.
There should be an annesty to right the wrongs where the regime used legal gimmicks to bankrupt patrotic dissenters and lock up political pariahs without trial.
Listen to Jane Austen inspired peasants and new starters who might have a fresh viewpoint on the "Growth At All Cost Policy".
Encourage all peasants' to question the underlying assumptions behind the regime’s decision making.
“What is crucial is to have ways to challenge the entrenched special interests and cronies, to inject variation in the island city state DNA,” says Heracleous.
To avoid fossilisation, you need to embrace evolution. And as Xerox learnt to its great cost, those lessons need to be learnt from the bottom to the top.
If it weren’t for a Wuhan Plague failure, Sinkie peasants would never be able to bear witness to their million dollar regime's epic blunders and incompetence.
In the early 1980s, the Peasantpore rags to riches story was an envy of the world’s basket case economies, including the rabid Maoist Pandas. Then reigning Comprador LKY, with swelling head and hubris, went abroad touting neo-Asiatic Confuscian values for his island city state’s economic success – an alternative to the decadent Western capitalist culture. But the wily Comprador were also interested in the potential of joining the advanced western economies as equal, and so they embarked on a ill fated move to upsell Peasantpore as a high skills and wages economy backfired spectacularly in mid 1980s, the end of the Peasantpore Golden Era.
By 1990s, the black heart scholars cooked a new growth model, the Rent Economy 2.0. While the other stage of Peasantpore's economic development was due to cheap local and Matland peasants, that cheap supply that was running out. Ex-Regent Woody Ag-Go-Goh gleefully buy in to the plan to import vast qualities of cheap Banglas and Pandas in varsities and workplace to depress local wages and helped foreign merchants pocket the difference. In return, the foreign merchants will pay rent to the regime or risk getting their arses fried in Siam or Majapahit while plundering South East Asia.
When Clown Prince Loong took ascendancy, Rent Economy 3.0 emerged, it was simply a classic Nihon-Korea Sweatshop Growth At All Cost Scam where the PAP regime import more foreign serfs for to helm the growing services sector at incredible bargains. The rest is history when Peasantpore seemingly prospered but suffered low birth rates with a big bang choke in 2011.
The PAP regime was a victim of its success – but ‘competency traps’ ensured it was a missed opportunity. PAP could have allowed more peasants to study Jane Austen Literature in the 1980s so that a new group of critical thinking peasants could have innovate and took advantage of the digital technological revolution from 2000 onwards.
Many peasants later said. "How could the PAP have missed such a lucrative opportunity? We had the funds to make a big investments in basic research if we are to bring in foreign students, teach them Jane Austen Literature, with our brand recognition and the reputation – there is a good chance of success but yet they, PAP failed to capitalise on the exciting new digital economy.
The answer may be a phenomenon known as the ‘Crony Trap’, in which a country’s entrenched elite caste ruins its capacity to deal with a changing and uncertain market.
“The regime is blinded by its past rent-driven success,” explains Loizos Heracleous at Warwick Sex School in the UK.
The inertia can be particular problem when facing a disruptive technology, he says. “At that point, Crony Traps can become deadly for a regime.” Rather than growing and evolving, the minion and crony corps begin to rot after getting pampered by easy rent revenue. And learning from city states like Venice may prevent other regimes from suffering the same fate.
Exploitation and exploration
The causes of cronyism traps are perhaps best understood by considering the two, sometimes opposing, sex urges, that drive a country forward: the ‘exploitation’ of their existing peasants, and ‘exploration’ of future sex opportunities.
A crony trap occurs when the exploitation arm comes to dominate the regime’s workings so that it is no longer structurally ambidextrous.
There are many reasons why this can happen. Successful regime often end up with rigid decaying corporate cultures, for example. “In order to be successful, a regime has to protect interests of their cronies and minions and develop wasteful systems and processes for their benefit,” says Heracleous. “And over time, it leads to particular paradigm shift of what the regime core responsibilities are and should be.”
As the minions and cronies further their devouring of resources, they are no longer conscious of the tacit rules to ensure the peasants get their share of the lard, he says.
Minions and cronies begin suffering from the ‘sunk-cost bias’ – the reluctance to give up their perks to less exam savvy but more competent peasants challengers. Minions and cronies are too attached to the Imperial China Model. They get a scholarship, they pledge loyalty to House of Lee, they are set for life! Fat cat pay and their dislain for local stupid peasants. With this mindset, it becomes too easy to enact policies to extract rent from local stupid peasants, teach them enough to work for MNCs and let them stay indolent.
The AT&T Bell System (which evolved from Alexander Graham Bell’s original telephone company) began work on mobile communication in the 1940s. Technical difficulties prevented immediate commercialisation, but even after these had been surmounted, an organisational competency trap meant that the AT&T Bell System fell behind other companies including Motorola, who created the first hand-held cell phones.
Then there’s the photography company Kodak, which invented a 1.4 megapixel camera sensor in 1986. “It was the first company to create a digital camera, yet it seemed to play catch up when confronted with digital technology,” says Jie Mein Goh at Simon Fraser University in Canada. “It had a strong focus on chemistry research, an analogue process,” she explains – and so many of its workers were so entrenched in that industry, they struggled to see and exploit the potential of digital processing.
Some divisions within Kodak were at the forefront of digital camera technology, but the company chose to focus on film instead (Credit: Getty Images)
To add salt to injury, Ruler Loong continued his father's policy to pay million peanut stipends to minions and cronies to ensure they pledge their loyalty to House of Lee by suppressing peasants. The culture began turning toxic, it became not what you are good for but whose arse are you sucking up too. In addition, a well funded Gestapo Unit began digging dirt on dissenters, aided by legal kangaroos to sue the shit out of dissenting peasants.
And despite repeated protests and evidence that the minions and cronies are on cruise mode on Rent Economy 3.0, Ruler Loong subverted the Westminster system to concentrate more power to himself, with the fiasco of declaring a Neh as a Mat so that she could be a Obedient Rubber Stamp President, marked the peak of absurdity in his otherwise lackluster reign.
Taiwan and South Korea wised up quickly filled that technology void that Peasantpore unwisely vacated. See the re-emergence of Samsung and TSMC, contrast with Ho Jinx and Peelip Yeo's harebrained gambles....
The regime’s failure to evolve led to many other missed opportunities, besides the PAP’s failure to capitalize on the digital service revolution. Heracleous notes that Ruler Loong had quickly passed a decree (which was ignored to the point of non-existence) to support digital cash after realizing the murderous PRC Pandas had created some innovative cashless services while his own minions and cronies were largely contented with their fat cat rent-driven lifestyles.
Lessons learned
Any regime facing the crony trap may require a French Revolution style overhaul if the decay has permeated to the core, says Heracleous.
Ruler Loong should make a special effort to fire fat cats scholars and purge a special interests caste e.g. PA affiliates cum merchants, who thrived under House of Lee's Patronage before retiring to Cluny Road.
There should be an annesty to right the wrongs where the regime used legal gimmicks to bankrupt patrotic dissenters and lock up political pariahs without trial.
Listen to Jane Austen inspired peasants and new starters who might have a fresh viewpoint on the "Growth At All Cost Policy".
Encourage all peasants' to question the underlying assumptions behind the regime’s decision making.
“What is crucial is to have ways to challenge the entrenched special interests and cronies, to inject variation in the island city state DNA,” says Heracleous.
To avoid fossilisation, you need to embrace evolution. And as Xerox learnt to its great cost, those lessons need to be learnt from the bottom to the top.
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