“The era of the business idiot”

This post was initially written in French https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/87139.

Last spring, Ed Zitron published a fascinating text, and yes, a bit long, The Era Of The Business Idiot, which I only discovered at the start of the holidays (sorry). He does not just say that some organizations are badly managed, he describes a type of social selection. He explains that you climb the hierarchy because you know how to produce signs of competence, not because you know how to understand a problem and solve it. You learn to speak the right way, to present the right way, to surround yourself the right way, and then to survive any real test by shifting the discussion toward convenient metrics and flattering stories. I have always stayed fairly far from organizational issues, out of incompetence above all, but also because I think I am very bad at reading signals. What Ed Zitron reminds us is that the modern company (and I would include academia) has gradually organized itself around a signal economy. As sociology and political economy have described at length, institutions protect themselves by making value visible in the form of indicators, rankings, procedures, prizes. That gives legitimacy, it simplifies decision making, but it also transforms the nature of work. This kind of cross reading is almost mandatory if you keep in mind the way Pierre Bourdieu analyzes the academic universe as a field structured by hierarchies, forms of capital, and struggles over the definition of merit, in Homo academicus. It becomes even more natural if you follow Wendy Brown when she describes the spread of a neoliberal rationality that rebuilds institutions using a business grammar, in Undoing the Demos. Ed Zitron’s post tells, in a more vivid way, what many scholarly analyses document. I wanted to come back to his article, by summarizing his argument, and by pushing it where it becomes more general, while trying to connect the corporate world and the university.

Before we begin, a preliminary note is in order. I am not exempt from this logic, and I am not writing as an outside observer. Like many of my academic colleagues, I play the game, at least when students are involved. I will talk here about prizes and awards, and for those who do not know the academic world, one detail is worth stating, and it may be surprising. We are often asked to promote ourselves, very directly, by assembling the files that will be used to award us prizes. You have to tell your story, choose your evidence, format your merit, and sometimes even guess what kind of narrative the committee expects. It is not only value that matters, it is the ability to make it visible, to translate it into readable signals, and to produce the file that will count as proof. If I no longer put together files to chase prizes in my own name, I happily do it to support students, because I know these signals weigh on their applications, their scholarships, and their future paths. And if I publish a newsletter every six months that sums up the group’s work, it is first to highlight the students, and also because my funder asked me to. I asked myself the same kind of question on another front, climate. Seeing colleagues take planes to fly around the world, literally, to give a twenty minute talk, sometimes in front of five people, I considered banning myself from any air travel. A colleague pointed out that this would also be a way to take myself out of the game, and that the question was not simply yes or no, but finding a middle ground, setting rules, and accepting compromises. It is the same for most of the signals discussed here. You can criticize them, you can try to reduce their grip, but you also live with them, because they structure real opportunities, and because withdrawing completely often has a cost, especially for younger people.

The figure of the out of touch decision maker

In Ed Zitron’s essay, the central figure is a decision maker who lives above reality. There is nothing mysterious about that. The higher you climb in a hierarchy, the more abstract the world becomes. The problem, for Ed Zitron, is that this abstraction becomes a skill in itself. You learn to stay far away, to avoid looking too closely, to manage people like rows in a spreadsheet. This intuition matches a very robust idea in the social sciences. Organizations produce a gap between talk and action. They can speak of efficiency, quality, mission, while making decisions that answer to other constraints. Nils Brunsson studied this gap in The Organization of Hypocrisy, showing that organizations can hold together by separating talk, decision, and action. The out of touch decision maker is not only an incompetent person. He or she can be the product of a system in which the expected competence is first a competence of justification. What makes Ed Zitron’s post useful is that he insists on the cultural dimension of this selection. In many environments, no one asks for fine grained understanding. They ask for a posture, a tone, an ability to state management truisms. Mats Alvesson and André Spicer describe this very well when they analyze the grip of routines, slogans, and pseudo solutions that fill the space and prevent people from seeing what matters, in The Art of Less. Their point is not that people are stupid. Their point is to show how environments packed with signals end up making it rational to add more signal.

From work to proof of work

The core of Ed Zitron’s argument rests on a simple idea, and a worrying one, I think. The contemporary economy rewards proof more and more, and the thing being proved less and less. In companies, this shows up as growth indicators, promises of transformation, narratives that circulate faster than real effects. In universities, the logic is surprisingly close. It runs through files, metrics, rankings, labels, prizes, in short through everything that makes value visible, comparable, and easy to narrate. You see this very concretely in the way universities communicate. Communication offices readily relay a distinction or a grant, far more rarely a result or an idea. An article is not interesting, per se, what is interesting is that it got a prize, those best paper award labels that you see everywhere (especially if you open LinkedIn). This is not only about laziness or the difficulty of popularization, it is above all about format. Prestige can be told in one line, while a result takes several pages. As an anecdote, when I shared my latest newsletter, which sums up the publications and talks of our research group, I was told I invite you to contact me when you have research results to disseminate. In other words, a list of outputs (with summaries of the work) was not a result. The result was probably somewhere else, in a more spectacular form, more sellable, more immediately convertible into signal. None of this is new. There is a huge literature on this shift, starting with the critique of bibliometrics. Yves Gingras explains how indicators built to help describe an activity end up becoming steering instruments that change researchers’ behavior, in Bibliometrics and Research Evaluation, Uses and Abuses. We stop asking what an article is worth (if we even allow ourselves to grant it scientific value). We ask which journal it was published in, how many times it was cited, what h index it produces, and how it fits into a career strategy. This is not a technical detail. It clarifies Ed Zitron’s intuition. If promotion depends on a dashboard, then the people promoted are the ones who know how to produce that dashboard. They may be excellent scientists, but the system also selects specialists of visibility. When visibility becomes a condition of survival, the central learning becomes the learning of visibility. Marilyn Strathern formulated a famous warning about this kind of transformation, showing that audit and accountability regimes can reconfigure the very practice they claim to merely evaluate, in Audit Cultures. What gets measured becomes what gets done. And what gets done becomes what we learn to narrate. Marilyn Strathern also offered the best known wording of Goodhart’s law when she wrote when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

When the state and the university adopt the grammar of business

To understand why universities increasingly resemble managed organizations, you have to go through the history of public sector reforms. In A Public Management for All Seasons, Christopher Hood gave a name to this transformation, describing a set of doctrines that privilege measurable performance, management by objectives, competition, and the importation of private sector practices. The details vary across countries, but the spirit is recognizable. The institution is pressured to describe itself like a business. It must produce numbers, plans, objectives, results. Wendy Brown offers a broader framing, showing how this rationality transforms not only management, but the way individuals and institutions think about themselves, in Undoing the Demos. The university becomes an economic actor that must maximize its value and its attractiveness. Departments become production units. Students become investors in human capital. Researchers become portfolio holders. This language is not neutral, it reshapes priorities. Michel Foucault, in his lectures on neoliberalism, helps explain why this is also a transformation of forms of government. You do not govern only through law or constraint. You govern by building environments in which some behaviors become rational, in Naissance de la biopolitique. Audits and indicators are techniques of government in a strong sense. They change what actors judge possible, prudent, risky, rewarded.

Audit as a ritual of verification

The most direct connection between Ed Zitron’s post and the academic literature probably runs through the notion of audit, as I said in Les machines, les procédures, et la fuite de la responsabilité. To complete that first part, I can mention The Audit Society, Rituals of Verification, a book in which Michael Power described the emergence of a society where verification becomes a central ritual, and where trust is replaced by proliferating control devices. This is not only a moral critique. It is an organizational analysis. The more proof you demand, the more you build machines to produce proof. And these machines consume time, attention, and skills. In a university, you see this in a thousand ways, with accreditation files, activity reports, strategic plans, dashboards of all sorts, compliance procedures, external evaluations, and constant rewrites of the institutional narrative. Each of these devices can be defensible in isolation. But the accumulation produces an economy where a growing share of work consists in making work visible rather than doing it. Marilyn Strathern, again, stresses that these devices generate second order effects. Organizations learn to answer the audit, sometimes at the expense of the mission. This connects to Ed Zitron’s satire. The business idiot excels at meeting criteria set at the top of the pyramid. In an audited university, the winning profile is the one who can anticipate the criteria, translate activity into expected categories, and produce the documentation that makes evaluation easy.

The economy of prestige, prizes, distinctions, and careers

How could you not think of the university. The university is an economy of prestige. It distributes distinctions that are both symbolic and deeply material in their effects. For students of course, but also for researchers. Winning a prize, a chair, a fellowship, a label, that changes a trajectory, access to resources, credibility, the ability to attract PhD students, and sometimes the ability to teach less. James English offers a very useful reading of prizes as social devices that manufacture value by naming it, in The Economy of Prestige. Prizes do not just reward. They structure attention. They organize a market of prestige. They create visible hierarchies. They provide ready made stories. Harriet Zuckerman studied this mechanism in the case of Nobel prizes and scientific elites. Her analysis shows how recognition devices contribute to the construction of an elite and to the reproduction of the conditions of its existence, in Scientific Elite. It is not only excellence that explains recognition. Recognition itself becomes a cumulative factor. Being recognized increases the probability of being recognized again. The prestige effect becomes a wealth effect. Pierre Bourdieu provides the theoretical vocabulary to link these observations. Titles, positions, distinctions function as symbolic capital, and this capital can be converted into institutional power, into access to resources, and into the ability to define what counts as good work, as he explains in Homo academicus. If you reread Ed Zitron through this lens, the business idiot is not only an idiot. He or she is a holder of symbolic capital who knows how to convert that capital into immunity. The delicate point is that this economy of prestige is not an anomaly. It is constitutive of academic life. The problem appears when prestige becomes a substitute for value, and when devices of prestige become goals in themselves. You no longer seek a prize as a possible consequence of work. You seek work that maximizes the probability of a prize.

Metrics as a target, and the art of playing with them

Ed Zitron describes an economy where people learn to optimize the system rather than respond to the real need. The literature on research evaluation shows exactly this kind of dynamic. Mario Biagioli and Alexandra Lippman bring together research and cases showing how evaluative pressure produces strategies of manipulation, sometimes marginal, sometimes massively normalized, in Gaming the Metrics. The word gaming matters because it does not reduce the phenomenon to fraud. It describes a rational adaptation to a rule based game. Yves Gingras stresses that indicators are not bad by nature. They become problematic when they replace judgment, when they become instruments of government, and when they generate perverse incentives, in Bibliometrics and Research Evaluation, Uses and Abuses. A university governed by metrics produces metric optimizers. A company governed by promises produces promise optimizers. The link with Nils Brunsson is then direct. The more an organization needs external legitimacy, the more it can be tempted to produce talk and decisions compatible with that legitimacy, even if real action follows other logics. This helps explain a paradox. Researchers can be sincere, work hard, and still be pulled toward signal production. This is not a matter of individual morality. It is a matter of the architecture of rewards.

Mimicry as protection, and the diffusion of models

Why do these architectures spread so fast. Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell give a simple answer. Organizations converge. They imitate those that seem to succeed. They comply with coercive requirements. They adopt professional norms. They become similar in order to survive, in The Iron Cage Revisited, Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields. This convergence is often defended in the name of modernization. It also produces a standardization of forms of value. This explains a trait of Ed Zitron’s text. The business idiot is everywhere because the organizational form that favors the business idiot is everywhere. In universities, evaluation and steering devices circulate at great speed. People compare, benchmark, import, normalize, and reformat themselves. Consulting firms often play an accelerating role in this circulation. In the French context, investigations into the grip of consulting firms on public action shed light on the way management grammars spread, as shown by Matthieu Aron and Caroline Michel Aguirre in Les Infiltrés. And the sociology of consulting helps explain the internal logic of these professions, their culture of presentation, and their ability to sell rationalization devices, in Sébastien Stenger, Au coeur des cabinets d’audit et de conseil. Again, you find Ed Zitron’s theme. The most valued competence can become the competence of presentation.

From shareholder value to indicator value

Ed Zitron insists on an economic backdrop. Many organizations have been reshaped around shareholder value. In that context, the production of real value sometimes comes after the production of financial value. This critique is articulated, in other registers, by works like Lynn Stout in The Shareholder Value Myth, or Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried in Pay Without Performance. What these books show, each in its own way, is the strength of incentives and the way they shape behavior at the top. This detour through the corporate world helps to understand the university. The university does not aim at shareholder value. It often aims at indicator value. A value made of rankings, points, labels, prizes, metrics. The mechanism is analogous. When the top needs a number, the bottom produces the number. When the institution needs a story of excellence, people learn to write that story. The final effect can resemble what Ed Zitron calls the rot economy, but in an academic version. An economy in which time is devoted to making value visible rather than producing it.

Technological bubbles as a permanent temptation

Ed Zitron takes AI as a contemporary example because it concentrates promises. You can extend the reasoning with a literature on bubbles and narratives. Robert Shiller shows how markets and public opinion can be carried away by collective dynamics in which narratives matter as much as fundamentals, in Irrational Exuberance. Carlota Perez proposes a reading of technological revolutions in which finance and imagination play a central role in phases of overheating and reorganization, in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. In universities, these cycles exist too. A technology arrives, it promises to transform teaching and research, and it quickly becomes an institutional imperative (platforms, analytics tools, AI solutions). And very quickly, the audit asks for evidence of adoption. Decision makers can then be satisfied with adoption signals (trainings organized, reports, usage rates, charters). The real work is more ambiguous. It includes costs, resistance, mistakes, effects on occupations. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson offer a useful correction to the discourse of promise. They insist that technologies do not mechanically determine progress. Progress depends on political and institutional choices that steer innovation toward power or toward the sharing of gains, in Power and Progress. This framework makes it possible to comment on Ed Zitron without staying at the level of denunciation. AI is not a destiny. It is an object of government, and therefore an object of struggle over ends.

The university can produce its own figures of distance

The most interesting point in Ed Zitron’s post, for an academic reading, might be this one. He suggests that institutions of knowledge (which universities are supposed to be) are not immune. They too can produce figures of distance. People who master the art of proof, the art of the file, the art of narrative, and who can go very far without being confronted with the core of the work. Pierre Bourdieu helps explain why this phenomenon can be endogenous, especially in Homo academicus. The academic field produces positions. It also produces strategies adapted to those positions. Some strategies aim at scientific production, others aim at reproducing a place. In Scientific Elite, Harriet Zuckerman showed how recognition devices structure trajectories and can reinforce inequalities in access to symbolic resources. James English, for his part, reminds us that prizes are narrative devices that manufacture reputations (especially in The Economy of Prestige). Reading Ed Zitron again with these texts changes the moral of the story. The problem is not that mediocre individuals exist. The problem is that architectures of prestige and control can select profiles whose main competence is navigating the architecture. And the more complex the architecture becomes, the more dominant this competence becomes.

The hidden cost, degradation of work and loss of meaning

Here again, the literature in the humanities and social sciences has widely shown that when an institution starts governing through layers and procedures, work necessarily changes. Harry Braverman described, in Labor and Monopoly Capital, a dynamic of separation between conception and execution, and a tendency to degrade occupations by slicing them up and controlling them. Even if his framework is tied to industrial capitalism, the intuition carries over. The more you formalize and control, the more you can lose what makes the quality of a professional gesture. David Graeber, in another register, talks about Bullshit Jobs to describe the feeling of absurdity that can arise when a growing share of work consists in producing justifications rather than effects. The vocabulary may be polemical, but it sometimes names a lived experience. That of the academic who spends the week filling out forms, entering indicators, justifying teaching choices against checklists, and wondering when there will be time to prepare a class, or to read. Mats Alvesson and André Spicer sketch a pragmatic way out in The Art of Less. Reduce. Simplify. Protect attention. Return to what matters. This is not a magic recipe, it is a way of bringing the discussion back to the most concrete level. Which devices actually produce useful work, and which devices mostly produce proof of work. And, deep down, it is also a praise of slowness. Not slowness as laziness, but slowness as a condition for good work, for attentive reading, for inquiry that branches, for teaching that is prepared, for thought that matures. It is hard not to hear an echo here of the Slow Science movement, which reminds us that knowledge is not produced at the rhythm of a dashboard. If we take this idea seriously, then the question is no longer only to produce less, but to produce differently. Fewer signals, more substance. Less displayed speed, more time truly devoted to work. That is, in any case, what I have been living for a year, during my sabbatical, almost cut off from the world, and it feels good.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Arthur Charpentier (January 1, 2026). “The era of the business idiot” Freakonometrics. Retrieved January 16, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15fi4


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