Rosh katan

Some people believe that rosh katan is exactly why The United States work. What am I talking about?

In Russia, people tend to «think» when doing their jobs even in (often) case they have no brains. I mean that, when people have some formal directions, they still try to figure out to themselves «why the directions are like this and not like that», «why do they want me to do B after A, when I can easily do it before» and so forth. The reason for that is that people want to do as little as possible to get to the point. In most cases this «thinking» is no good, because the ones who wrote directions are smarter, know better and have better experience.

I spent my summer vacation 2003 working in The United States and was suprised by that how vice-versa the things are in there. In The States, most people don’t think when they have instructions, because, they say, they are paid to follow instructions, not to gain the result. It’s not that they are stupid and so they cannot think. They just know that they have to follow instructions. That’s the key.

For example, imagine your job is to vacuum rooms in a hotel. You get in one of those and you see that it’s almost clean except for a small piece of dust in the corner. So what are you gonna do? Average Russian will go vacuum that corner and proceed to the next room. Average American will vacuum the whole room. Rosh katan? Average Russian will say «yes». But not really. The reason for cleaning the whole room is that the guy is paid for cleaning the room, not for getting the room clean. And this is a right point.

In The States, being paid for doing something means much more to people than it does here.

And, since instructions are written by more advanced people, following the instructions is better then trying to 1) figure out what the instructions are intended to lead to, then 2) figure out how to get that done using another (simpler) way. It’s better in terms of getting the result done precisely as it has to be done.

And room cleaning is just a simple example. The same is right for everything, I guess.

Well, so some people believe, that this is why USA works. They have a way better economy, because smart people developed the system and other people follow its rules. Just follow, no analyses. In Russia, the more we try to be rosh gadol, the more problems we’re gonna have. No matter what a smart plan will someone develop to improve our economy, we will fail. Because it’s the Russian «smart» way.

Just an opinion, of course.