Amanda Taub’s New York Times piece, Actually, Democracy Dies in HR, centers on the idea that it doesn’t take a whole bunch of evil people to destroy a country, but rather just a few evil leaders at the top and a whole bunch of dummies and paperwork, and voila, the end of democracy. Clearly, the headline states, this is the fault of the Human Resources department.
The article doesn’t state any of that—in fact, HR isn’t even mentioned in the article. It’s simply clickbait because, as The New York Times is fond of telling us, HR makes people miserable, and is not your friend, anyway. And it worked. I clicked because of the headline.
What the reader is supposed to surmise is that all those bad things are the same things that HR does. For instance, Taub writes:
“It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.”
To keep reading, click here: ‘Democracy Dies in HR’ Is Great Clickbait—and Bad Management Analysis