Power Ecosystem: Management and Check Balances | Generated by AI
Question: Translate the following Chinese Zhihu article to English.
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Author: Chenyue
Link: https://www.zhihu.com/question/658625912/answer/1990866399384577090
Source: Zhihu
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What you see as internal friction and a disaster, executives see as an ecosystem.
You think everyone gathers together to make the pie bigger, but most of the time, the people sitting around the table are calculating how to cut and take the existing piece.
Many people view the workplace too simply, believing that as long as the company makes money, everyone will share in it, so everyone should think and act in unison. This is extremely naive linear thinking. If you view the company as a purely economic organization, you will never understand why high-level struggles are so fierce. You must introduce the perspective of political economy and see the company as a miniature power distribution system.
Here, I will first present a brutal conclusion.
Peace within a company is often more dangerous than war. Absolute unity means an imbalance of power, and even the risk of the owner being sidelined.
The palace intrigue-like scenes you witness are not failures of management; on the contrary, they are often inevitable byproducts of the management structure design, or even a dynamic balance intentionally maintained by the top decision-maker.
Let us start from the top-level perspective.
The Security of Power Comes from Checks and Balances
You must understand a concept called the “Island Effect of Power.”
For the big boss or board chairman, what they fear most is not executives arguing below them, but executives forming a solid alliance.
If the company’s COO, CFO, and HR Director are extremely close, advancing and retreating together with highly unified opinions, do you think the big boss would feel relieved?
Absolutely not. They would feel a chilling dread.
Because this means losing control over information. When subordinates form an ironclad bloc, the information reported to you is filtered and coordinated. The reports you see and the market feedback you hear are all what they have agreed to let you see. These three united could effectively sideline the top decision-making layer.
Therefore, any leader skilled in power, when designing the organizational structure, will instinctively place people with incompatible personalities or conflicting interests in key positions.
Let the marketing department charge aggressively, while arranging a conservative finance department to tightly control budgets. Let R&D pursue technical perfection, while arranging a product department to emphasize commercial viability. This is not just a business process need but a power structure need.
Such structural conflicts are destined to evolve into personal conflicts.
When the marketing director slams the table and curses the finance director for not understanding the business and slashing budgets indiscriminately, the big boss sitting above feels at ease. Because as long as these two are arguing, the financial data is authentic, and marketing expenses are regulated.
This mutual attack and defense forms the big boss’s source of information. To attack B, A will desperately dig up B’s mistakes; to defend, B will desperately prove A’s incompetence. In this process, the big boss can grasp the most real situation without being on the front lines.
So, what you see as internal friction is, in the eyes of the top designer, a necessary control cost—an insurance premium paid to prevent the emergence of independent kingdoms.
The Principal-Agent Dilemma and Temporal Misalignment of Interests
You ask why they cannot conspire for development—this assumes that the interests of executives and the company are completely aligned.
This is a huge misconception.
Shareholders and founders pursue the company’s long-term value and survival ten years from now. Professional managers—the executives you see—pursue maximization of benefits during their tenure and a polished resume for the next job.
This creates a severe temporal misalignment of interests.
Consider a specific scenario.
The company now faces a critical technological transformation, requiring massive investment in R&D for a new system. If done, the financial reports for the next three years will look ugly: profits will decline, possibly leading to losses. Executives’ year-end bonuses will vanish, and they might even be dismissed due to poor performance. But if successful, in five years the company will dominate the market.
If you are a CEO or VP with only a three-year term, what would you choose?
Most rational people would choose not to do it—or shout slogans on the surface while actually tilting resources toward old businesses that yield quick results and polish reports.
At this point, if a executive who truly wants to achieve something and push R&D emerges and insists on long-term investment, they immediately become the public enemy of all others seeking short-term bonuses.
This triggers conflict.
It is not because everyone is bad, but because their positions dictate different priorities. The pro-R&D executive threatens others’ immediate interests.
Thus, the conservative faction unites to besiege the reformer from all angles: processes, budgets, personnel. They nitpick, proving the new project has uncontrollable risks and the reformer lacks ability.
To onlookers, this is severe internal friction hindering company development. But to participants, it is a defensive war for their own survival and interests.
At this level, the company is not just a place for value creation but a battlefield for resource allocation.
Annual budgets are limited, quarterly headcounts are limited. If Department A gets more, Department B inevitably gets less. This is not a win-win game; it is a zero-sum game.
To secure more budget and protect their department’s headcount, executives must show aggression toward others. If an executive is always gentle and yielding in meetings, prioritizing the big picture and giving resources to others, within half a year their team will fall apart—because following them means no rewards, no future.
To be responsible to their subordinates, they must be ruthless to superiors and peers.
The Selection Mechanism Ensures Only Fighters Rise
Let us examine how these executives reached their positions.
In the pyramid’s apex workplace environment, no one who reaches executive level is an innocent lamb.
Mid- and lower-level corporate selection favors execution—who can get the job done. But at the top level, it selects political survival ability—who can survive in complex interest networks.
A person who only wants to work and does not understand struggle would have been eliminated halfway up the promotion ladder—either having credit stolen and quietly leaving, or becoming a scapegoat and fading away.
Those who ultimately sit in the executive meeting room are all battle-hardened survivors. Their muscle memory is etched with the genes of struggle.
Their mindset dictates that when facing problems, their first reaction is not how to solve them through collaboration, but how to assign responsibility, ensure they are unharmed in the event, or use it to strike competitors.
This mental inertia is hard to change—because over the past ten or twenty years, this way of thinking brought them promotions, raises, and power expansion. Asking them now to abandon this survival weapon and believe in collaborative development violates their survival instincts.
Information Asymmetry and the Prisoner’s Dilemma
Let us delve into a more micro-level psychological game.
Even if two executives fundamentally do not want to fight and want to work well, they fall into a classic prisoner’s dilemma.
If I choose cooperation and lay all my cards and resources on the table, but the other side holds back or stabs me in the back, I am doomed.
Since I cannot be 100% sure the other is benevolent, the optimal strategy for me is to strike first or at least maintain high defense, constantly probing and draining in the process.
This trust cost is extremely high.
In actual work scenarios, it manifests as endless meetings, tedious approval processes, and emails shifting blame.
For example, a cross-departmental project that could be resolved with a phone call—but to leave a paper trail and prevent future disputes, both sides must communicate via formal emails, CC’ing their respective bosses, even pulling in legal and compliance for endorsement.
Every step increases internal friction, but every step increases the parties’ sense of security.
Everyone is building their own moat.
When the company is thriving, incremental growth masks contradictions—everyone gets a share, and struggles are relatively mild. Once the industry enters a stock-era or company growth slows, this distrust-induced friction explodes instantly.
Because now it is not about who runs faster, but who dies slower.
How to View This Phenomenon
As someone in the midst of it, feeling disgusted by these murky struggles is perfectly normal. It shows you still retain simple professional values.
But if you want to go further in a system or large enterprise, you need to detach emotionally and observe the underlying logic.
Do not try to change this ecosystem—you cannot. It is the inevitable result of human nature interacting with organizational structure.
As long as organizations have hierarchies, resources are scarce, and information is asymmetric, power games will never stop.
What you should do is not take sides or cynically complain.
You should understand the interest demands behind each executive’s behavior. When you know why they fight—for budget, to shift blame, or to seize the next promotion—you gain a god’s-eye view.
You will discover that seemingly stupid decisions are extremely shrewd in the parties’ logic. Seemingly chaotic internal friction actually follows harsh jungle laws.
In such an environment, staying clean is an ability; using the chaos to achieve your goals is wisdom.
Do not expect a utopia without struggle. True maturity is, after seeing through all the ugliness and scheming, still finding your own survival space and accomplishing something in the cracks.
This is the truth of the workplace.
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