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In Search of Stupidity
Rick Chapman, on the back of the dustcover, features an impressive resume of MicroPro, Ashton-Tate, IBM, Inso, Microsoft, Novell, DataEase, Stromberg, Sun Microsystems, Teradata and Ziff-Davis. For those who just recently caught up to speed with the computer industry, some names might sound unfamiliar. Indeed, a great many tech companies were driven into the ground either by poor management practice or poor product planning.
About the book
The author explores the stories of Digital Research, MicroPro, Ashton-Tate, Borland, Motorola, Novell, Netscape and a slew of ASPs (Application Service Companies), as well as dot-coms, to derive lessons on mismanagement. Chapman also talks about current behemoths, IBM, Intel and Microsoft, telling stories of numerous product failures and the ways the companies have managed to deal with each blow. Apple Computer is also mentioned, but don't forward a copy of the title to your local friendly Mac zealot -- contemplating Apple's current market share and influence on the market (with some speculations on what could have been done), Chapman calls Apple the world's largest irrelevant company.
Want to learn secret skills of ruining a perfectly good product line? How about being a great company for thousands of developers and then pissing off almost 100 percent of them? Want to get a clear roadway on publishing two parallel software products that compete with one another, while even the sales people are unable to clarify the differences? In Search of Stupidity takes the reader on the joyous ride, following closely the growth and downfall of technological giants.
Developers! Developers! Developers!
Famous Joel Spolsky provided a preface for Chapman's title, where he provided some interesting statistics about world's largest consumer software companies as well as thoughts on the issue of who runs the company better -- programmers or business majors? "When Pepsi-pusher John Sculley was developing the Apple Newton, he didn't know something that every computer science major in the country knows: handwriting recognition is not possible. This was at the same time that Bill Gates was hauling programmers into meetings begging them to create a single rich text edit control that could be reused in all their products," writes Spolsky, implying that people who run software or hardware companies better have some knowledge about their business.
Chapman's critique of that preface runs throughout the book -- the famous setback that can be expected from the developer's community is the notion that the code should be re-written for the new version, as the old one simply is too buggy and it's easier to start anew.
What's good about the book
In the introduction chapter Chapman provides a great overview of what to expect in the book. His style is lively, full of analogies and old tales. The book is marked by a good sense of humor, without actually going into jokes (except for occasional re-telling of Intel Pentium FPU-related humor). All the companies who were not big enough to deserve a separate chapter but still stupid enough to be in the book are mentioned in introduction. Street Technologies, who in an advertising brochure bravely claimed the owner of its software could "eliminate half of the work force," and whose literature probably never made it through the mail room. Syncronys, who sold the SoftRAM product, which promised to "double your computer memory," except for the fact it didn't actually do it. Project Iridium from Motorola, which burned through $5 billion before figuring out that market for thousand-dollar phones and hundred-dollar service charges was a bit limited.
The table of contents can be found on the book Web site, and from the subchapter names like "The Great Pentium Bunny Roast" one can deduct that the book is full of good humor mixed with sarcasm. Sometimes Chapman is merciless when mentioning some of his stories' subjects. Here's his introduction to a chapter on Netscape vs. Microsoft battle:
If you like the horror movies, you know the cast usually sports a character you've come to think of as The Idiot Who Deserves to Die. He's the knucklehead who runs screaming into the path of Godzilla just as the giant reptile is heading out to spend a relaxing afternoon destroying Tokyo, and gets squashed like a bug. The dimwit who sticks his noggin out of the deserted cabin in the woods and yells out "Mad slasher? What mad slasher?" just before the mad slasher decapitates him. The space-bound fumble-fingers who always manages to drop his blaster right when the Tentacle of Doom is zeroing it on him for lunch. If Marc Andreessen, co-founder of one-time wonder company Netscape, ever gives up high tech for a career in horror movies, he'll play that character.The author does provide a pretty good collection of facts on just what Netscape has done wrong, and how Microsoft's onslaught could have been avoided, so the quoted paragraph is not just an attempt to personally insult Andreessen. Here's a story of Ashton-Tate and its leader Ed Esber, who eventually ruined the company:
Esber did fancy himself something of a business guru, and one of his favorite quotes was "A computer will not make a good manager out of a bad manager. It makes a good manager faster and a bad manager worse faster." He had something there. It had taken George Tate about 5 years to build Ashton-Tate to software giant status; it would take Ed Esber only 2.5 years to put the company on the road to ruin. And Esber had a PC on his desk the entire time.
Debunking the myths
Besides providing a lot of good stories from the history, Chapman also tries to dispell some myths about the industry. Most of the myths somehow involve Microsoft, which is hardly surprising, provided Chapman dedicated more attention to software companies than hardware companies. He describes the attitude towards the company in the early stages of the industry development, points out why ISVs flocked towards DOS/Windows instead of more stable OS/2, and denies the common belief that Bill Gates' project owes most of its success to the deal with IBM to put DOS on the PC.
Chapman also analyzes the mistakes made, and shows how Apple Computer could've been the 99% market share vendor right now, but a few stupid mistakes in the company's past allowed for better short-term gains while leading the company into oblivion. In the last chapter, the demise of dot-coms and application service providers is told in a sort of haphazard way, without going into details of any specific company. Chapman keeps his sense of humor and is not so full of sarcasm and "I told you so" attitude as Philip Kaplan's F'd Companies .
Overall
The book is an enjoyable read, and with roughly 250 pages of interesting and fact-packed text makes an informative one, too. Even if you have been in the industry long enough to know better about the mistakes Chapman names, the book is worth reading just to re-fresh the past memories and learn some juicy details about the companies' internals (Chapman personally worked in MicroPro's WordStar team and at Ashton-Tate, among others). For others, it's a great learn to take a look at serious and less-serious screw-ups by major technological companies.
Each chapter is preceded by a caricature. The chapter on MicroPro shows WordStar and WordStar 2000 pointing a gun to one another's head with an apparent attempt to pull the trigger. The chapter on OS/2 (titled The Idiot Piper) shows that very idiot piper playing apparently a tune of OS/2, while the products designed for the operating system are heading off the cliff. Chapter on Intel's Pentium flop features bunny suits dancing around the barbecue fire with equations like "9/3 = 2.999" on their aprons.
In Search of Stupidity is an excellent source of information, analysis and good laughs. It's one of the few industry titles that will give you a large supply of stories to re-tell to other developers over a beer. Chapman's book is also an excellent case study collection of anti-management rules that one should avoid when running a high tech company.
You can purchase In Search of Stupidity from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I turn to OSDN and the various /. editors for my management advice.......
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
In Search of Stupidity
Your search is over.
Trolling is a art,
The stupidest management/leadership advice book ever: Make It So, by Wess Roberts and Bill Ross.
And I say this as a Trek fan.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Find someone in your family that has management experience and is successful, and ask them for advice?
If you don't have anyone in your family that has successful management experience, then it's just not in your genes. Give up now.
evil adrian
Now where have we heard that before? At least these guys will be able to get a job in the Bush administration.
... is this book any more useful as a textbook for businesses than rah-rah stuff like In Search of Excellence? In other words, is it useful either to pick out really smart things companies have done, or really dumb things companies have done, and say "Do this, and you'll succeed; do that, and you'll fail"?
I'm not sure it is. Certainly the lessons of history are just as important in business as in any other field of endeavor. But a listing of successes and failures -- both, inevitably, filtered through the authors' biases -- does not constitute useful history in itself.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
This is a great read:
THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY by Carlo M. Cipolla
Excerpt:
"... human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid."
See also:
True Stupidity
-kgj
-kgj
Here, on planet Earth, it's exactly the opposite!
On the flip-side, there are quite a few IT professionals that get products completed inspite of the (non-technical) bosses who are only trying to further their own career. Loyalty works both ways. Why should I be loyal to a company that might lay me off next week and outsource the work I'm doing?
When Pepsi-pusher John Sculley was developing the Apple Newton, he didn't know something that every computer science major in the country knows: handwriting recognition is not possible.
Yes it is, and Apple did it. This is not a pro apple rant, but the 1.1 release of the Newton handwriting recognition system was lauded as "pretty good." That's something funny to say, but at the time no one came close to that level except for Palm. Palm has a handwriting recognition system that also works very well, except you simply have to write a certain way, and it doesn't recognize your specific style. Now we have the tablet PC from microsoft with handwriting software. Exactly what is so impossible about handwriting recognition?
I was a CIS major, and hell I didn't know handwriting recognition wasn't possible? I always thought the CIS majors were smarter, and now I have proof!
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
"No sense of loyalty or obligation to the ones who hired them in the first place."
After years of down-sizing and raided pension funds, many employees have learned their sense of coporate loyalty and obligation from the corporations themselves.
And I hardly see how this is a "blue-collar" experience.
...when this is free.
If you're happy and you know it read my blog
This concludes my search for stupidity!
I've always wondered how DEC transformed itself from a great computer company (PDP-8, PDP-10, PDP-11, VAX, Alpha) to a historical footnote.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
ASPs (Application Service Companies)
Gee that's "ceculiar" acronym.
in the good old US of A
"old" yes, "good" not anymore.
One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be in danger in a hundred battles.
One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes win, sometimes lose.
One who does not know the enemy and does not know himself will be in danger in every battle.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
For others, it's a great learn to take a look at serious and less-serious screw-ups by major technological companies.
Didn't have to look very far, did we?
I heard that company was brought down by some english guy.
Someone is wrong on the Internet!
Apple Computer is also mentioned, but don't forward a copy of the title to your local friendly Mac zealot -- contemplating Apple's current market share and influence on the market (with some speculations on what could have been done), Chapman calls Apple the world's largest irrelevant company.
I dunno -- it's pretty much accepted among zealots that Apple management between Steve and Steve was disastrous. Most of us can't hear the word "ameliorate" without cringing.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The easiest thing in the world is to look back and deride the losers while applauding the winners and point out why each is what it is. It's a little harder to pick them in advance.
What do you get out of reading this book? Unless it is some tools for making predictions, you might as well rip out the pages and wipe your ass with them.
As for Netscape vs. Microsoft, well, if you can't figure out why that happened (clue: it had nothing to do with Andreessen being an idiot or deserving to die), then you have no business attempting to analyze more subtle corporate interactions.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
You can legislate morally you can't legislate morality
If CIS majors were smarter, you would have realized that what he meant was: "handwriting recognition that is good enough to be usable and not to piss many people off isn't possible for the reasonably forseeable future".
It's a link to goates.cx - beware!
I suspect that ASP is not an abbreviation for Application Service Company.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
Xerox should be Microsoft & Intel combined, in terms of the computing industry.
Long narratives are fun reading but what we really need out of business books is a bunch of design patterns for businesses. We already have books on Business Modelling with UML . Why not start a whole patterns anti-patterns series based on this approach?
Well, DUH. What else did you expect in a "management bible"??
don't.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
VeryGeekyBooks has more reviews of this book.
Why should I be loyal or obligated to someone who will fire my ass in a second, if the company's bottom line dictates it?
Think about it.
I have long since decided that my obligation is to my work only, i.e. that I will do my job and all of it the best I possibly can.
If a new employer comes along and decides to offer me better compensation or otherwise offer a better deal, I'm outta here just as fast as I would, if the company's quarterly earnings were dissapointing and they laid me off. At no circumstance will I EVER feel obligated to do anything just because someone has a fancier title than I do and is my boss.
That sort of stuff is for lambs.
I'm paid to do a job, nothing more or nothing less. That's where my obligation starts and ends.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I have now become the "stupid manager" of my small but growing business and I've realized that I just have to remember what my stupid bosses did over the years, and don't do what they did. Sounds easy, but it isn't. I just saw OfficeSpace again. I saw a little of myself. I was afraid.
Bosses like improvements. Radical change. Go faster, go faster. They tend to like this because that's how they got where they are -- right or wrong they tend to have hard driving personalities. Employees don't like constant change, in my opinion. No one likes coming to work and finding a new policy on their desk about their TPS report cover sheets. Change is useless much of the time.
I call this "overbehaviour." Doing something -- anything -- because it... just needs to be improved! Most improvements aren't.
So now that I'm the boss I'm trying to change as little as possible. Try and keep things in a rhythm and ask people to help come up with ideas. Not for internal processes, but for products. And then, give control of that idea to the guy who came up with it. It's his baby, let him nurture it. Let him take credit for it. People tend to live up or down to your expectations.
Use this to make the customer happier.
Ultimately, that's all that matters.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
management consultants. Ever thought what management consultants do? I used to be one. They get paid good money to dress unpopular decisions up as the results of their 'independent studies'. What do they actually know about management? I graduated in history and started with a consultancy 2 years after graduating. There is never an industry as nepotistic and bent as management consultancy - that's how I got the job (through a friend).
My advice? Ask the oldest guy (or the person who's been there the longest) in your company what they did last time the same thing happened. They usually know, but you might not know that.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
CS majors get it hammered into their heads that you don't try to program a solution that doesn't have a RESEARCHED solution YET. Otherwise, as Apple found out, you do the research while burning through your budget, and sometimes find the answer is several billion dollars away - if there even exists a solution that your team is BRILLIANT enough to find. Nuclear energy wasn't possible before Einstein for example. Is he on your team?
My CS courses contained several of these sorts of examples and my code design courses always emphasised KNOWING the solution BEFORE you start. Pity your CIS courses didn't.
There's no mention of SCO flushing themselves down the toilet. That's classic stupidity. "Let's not make product anymore, let's make lawsuits instead."
It'll make an interesting read once it's all over.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
That's all right, we Americans were distracted by the whole Michael Jackson molests another kid saga to pay attention even if the Brits did unaccustomably grown spine.
you have discovered a nearly ?working? scriptdead bullend of felonious fauxking corepirate nazi ?pr? ?firm? hypenosys, with phonIE payper liesense stock markup fraud execrable, being masqueraded as 'stuff that matters'.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... prepare to be illuminated.
And you still wonder why corporations treat their employees like commodity?
The owls are not what they seem
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Commodore a company as it was going under still paying Execs millions.
Or, as a friend of mine declared: "Stupidity: it's a renewable resource!"
As I recall, they went in search of stupidity in the 70s. Consensus was that it could be found somewhere on Mount Ararat, but ancient astronauts may have messed with the evidence.
Obligatory Indiana Jones reference:
ASPs.. Very dangerous. You go first, Indie.
That would explain department stores, where the floor managers are treated to company outings at amusement parks and the workers are told, "I don't care if you had to backup cashier all day. If you don't finish your department tonight, you're fired."
Profit is not a creation of wealth: it is an accumulation of wealth from the rest of society and companies are only one side of the equation. They charge through communities and export the cash to their headquarters while ignoring the jobless. Corporations will start to care when they consider us as 'people' and not as 'consumers'.
I took a Management class in college where we spent a large amount of time focusing on some of the strategies successful companies used. It was all good at the time because the companies were pulling in massive amounts of customers and money. However several years after that class, these companies that were bragging about their innovative strategies were failing.
A few that I can remember was AOL and the Time Warner merger, Jack Welch and GE, and some others.
Just goes to show you, just because your successful in the short term with some crazy new strategy, doesn't mean it is a good one.
See slashdot.org
I used to be loyal to a fault. Then I noticed the corporations treat their employees like commodity regardless.
Was buddy-buddy with the bosses, too. I still am, whenever the boss is someone I would be friends with if he wasn't my boss, but I don't make the mistake of thinking that means anything in my professional life.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
It's funny how you push the attitude problem off on the employees. There may be a reason why "most managers....are burdened by workers who just work there" and have "no sense of loyalty or obligation". This is usually a leadership/management problem. One thing I learned in the Army that has rung true thoughout my civilian life: "If you take care of the people who work for you, they will take care of you." If management executed this philosophy they would find that not only do they have a team of people who are loyal and have a sense of obligation to the company, the result would allow management to meet company goals and objectives.
Instead the majority of organizations are rich with idiotic PHBs.
Hindsight is 20/20. If Marc Andreesen said the code sucked, and needed a rewrite, then it sucked and needed a rewrite. How long would it have taken to add all the latest features to the old code base?
Microsoft had the Mosaic code. They were not going to rewrite it, even though it sucked, because that would not be "good business". They sold the sucky product to win a short-term victory, and they're still doing it today.
Delivering good products should always be the goal. Given the choice between A) competing against Microsoft at repackaging bad code and B) rewriting the code completely, the choice is obvious.
Sposky and Chapman appear to believe that market domination defines correct decisionmaking. Criticize people for not understanding the business they're running, but don't criticize them for having integrity.
sigs, as if you care.
Search the countryside of New Jersey for Joe Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest. He should be on Howard Stern - titled as King of Stupid People.
How about covering up for Bill Clinton's drunken escapades, blowjobs from interns, and complete ignorance about foreign policy?
Then, watch as Bill tries to take credit for the greatest (false) economy in our history, and blame the crash on his successor.
Amazon Link
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
You must have never worked for a boss who was obviously more stupid than yourself.
Many workers are burdened by stupid bosses who do not survey the best course of action. These bosses rather follow what another peer has done since there is less risk. Many times, a weak boss will only listen to other managers for actionable advice since there is less risk.
If you see your boss going home before you do day after day and you have to work later than you should because you are short staffed, then your boss is obviously not loyal to you, overly loyal to the company, or they are not intelligent.
Obviously, something is going to give -- quit, company goes bankrupt, boss fired or moved out.
It is actually sad to go to work day after day with a boss who doesn't know anything outside of management techniques/approaches and chattiness to get ahead. Yep, nothing is worse than having a manager ask you "show me the numbers that indicates your value to the company" while not providing the tools or the means to capture the numbers. Later, if you point this out - they say "just do it anyway you can, just show me". This is the worst burden of all - not having value measures independent of a cheap, dumb boss.
corporate loyalty requires trust on both sides.
the default 'trust' that employees have for employers is gone. Wildly growing management compensation vs the stagnation of working wages, raiding of benefits packages, downsizing, outsourcing, fly-by-night conversions of 401k shares into company shares... why again should the workforce trust the average company?
when a group of guys is doing unpaid overtime in serious crunch mode to ship software, only to be put on the street with no severance just after the code is turned in, 2 weeks before christmas, not in a noble attempt to save what part of a failing-company that they can, but rather to -maximize-profit-, all the while petitioning the board 'forgive' a multimillion dollar loan for a gulfstream... well, i don't exactly see where the employee is making a mistake by taking the realist viewpoint of 'i just work here'.
sure, the boss is not necessarily the root of all evil. but the employee is well served to assume that he is, until such a time as he has proof that he is not. and in our current employment situation, that just isn't happening by and large.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Add to this John Boyd. OODA loop. One hell of a career for a fighter jockey.
It is quite amusing how much the Air Force appreciated him.
The sentence I like most in Sun Tzu: All warfare is based on deception.
SCO?
You don't need a book to tell you how to manage people well... It boils down to just a few simple points:
1) Break down the "big" tasks into personal-project-sized chunks. If a large number of underlings complain about the size of those chunks, adjust accordingly. If one or two people complain, tell them to quit whining.
2) Leave people alone to do their work. Realize that deadlines will occasionally slip, and some people will have bad weeks on occasion. If one or two people consistantly underperform, axe them. If everyone consistantly fails to do their work in time, the problem sits at your own desk.
3) Give people a reason to remain loyal and do their work. Money obviously forms the single biggest motivating factor, but pride in their work, credit for exceeding expectations, and comfort in their jobs matters quite a lot as well. If your best worker always comes in at noon and leaves at eight (at a 9-to-5 company), don't complain, but rather appreciate that someone knows when they do their best work. Same applies to attire - Unless your underlings deal directly with the public, every day should count as a dress-down day, within reason. PJ's obviously do not seem acceptible, but jeans and a T-shirt? A tie doesn't make people more productive, despite what management-types seem to believe. It just makes them uncomfortable.
Overall, I suppose I can sum this up in two abstractions - Treat people like you would like them to treat you (golden rule, basically); and, if everyone seems to complain about you, don't assume you have a lazy team, start looking at your own job performance.
This is one aspect of diversity that's often overlooked. As we try to ensure that departments and companies have a sprinkling of various races, genders, creeds, and personality types, one thing that's often overlooked is that not everyone within a group needs to be a "caffiene achiever." There are perfectly good workers who aren't interested in a promotion, but are happy doing what they're doing - very often, they're dependable and are worth their weight in gold in a pinch.
An example would be a night-shift computer operator. I had that position as a 23-year old, but moved up the first chance I got to the daytime shift, then programming, etc. For the department, the next couple years were a constant hassle of finding people to adequately fill the night shift - either they didn't stick around long, or (in one unfortunate case) were more interested in stealing laptops than actually working. Eventually, we found an older guy who was a few years away from retirement and was interested in steady work. He took the position, and has performed well in it for the last 5 years.
I guess the overall lesson is that customer satisfaction can often by strengthened by dependability, which can suffer when management is constantly reshuffling teams in search of marginal improvements.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Some of the data was faked?
No way, management would never spout untrue b.s.!!!!
Actually, after having worked for others, both good and bad, and myself (having employed others), I've come to the conclusion that it's often not a mistake to believe the boss is the root of all evil.
A good boss is one that knows what you're meant to be doing, and communicates it to you effectively, then lets you do what you're hired to do, and get on with it.
The unfortunately all too frequent boss is indeed one who knows the buzzwords (after all, that's how (s)he got hired). After that, it's all about making themself look good.
I worked in one place, where the manager (actually, tech director) produced a lovely little Gantt chart with all the work schedules I was meant to be doing for the next 60 days.
All with pretty, and short titles, so they looked neat on the side of the page.
Unfortunately, on asking what the first 5 days of work actually entailed, I got the answer that he didn't know (and he wrote the project plan!).
Same with the second and third 5 days.
It took me 4 days of running round the company, talking with anyone I could find, until I found anyone (one of the sales chaps that met with the clients on a particular meeting) that had any idea what it was meant to be.
Then, it turned out the estimate was wrong.
Every step of the way, all I got from the boss was 'You're meant to be at this point now, the chart says so..'.
However, having worked for a great boss, I know the other side of things also.
That chap used to have a project planner talk to us, explain how we should tailor our estimates by bringing up questions about how long debugging would take, talking to other people, unexpected errors that always creep up..
In the end, he got reasonable figures from us on how long it would really take.
Higher management often didn't like the figures, but he let it be known that they could have crap for less time, and probably end up with people leaving, and a working solution for the time given, and hold onto experienced employees.
He then left us to get on with work, while intercepting all attempts from above to poke and prod us at our desks, and otherwise get in the way.
He was good enough at the job to know we weren't slacking, and a good enough manager to know how to get the best out of people.
That, trust me, is a great rarity in the business world, where it's often believed that the numbers are what people adhere to, rather than people defining what the numbers should say.
When the numbers say what people should be doing, you give rise to books such as the headliner for this topic..
Most managers work for the better of the company and are burdened by workers who "just work there". No sense of loyalty or obligation to the ones who hired them in the first place.
Only an idiot, or someone completely ignorant of standard business practices over the last few decades, would blame lack of employee loyalty on the employees.
Here's a clue for you: Loyalty is earned. Companies that show loyalty to their employees have loyal employees. I think it's kind of funny when allegedly highly educated MBAs can't understand that basic relationship.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Maybe its a chicken or the egg argument, but when I can be laid off at anytime, then I don't feel bad about taking any better opportunites that come my way at any time.
How about being a great company for thousands of developers and then pissing off almost 100 percent of them? Red Hat?
With statements from former Enron execs, who also go over the benefits of plausible deniability, and Ken Lay who gives advice on stashing your ill-gotten booty in variable annuities and bribing the sons of presidents.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Your statement is incorrect, and frankly so is the statement made by the author of the book.
There are tons of examples of decent handwriting recognition. This was an attempt by the author of the book to sound clever and funny while pointing out Sculley as a bad CEO (and to the trained eye, it was a failed attempt). Sculley WAS as bad CEO, but that was simply because he had no understanding of technology over all. To a businessman, nothing is impossible, but a good technology CEO knows the limits of what can technology can provide vs how much money can be spent.
If you frame the statement correctly you are right. For example you can't make a handwriting recognition system that's not based on a fully sentient AI that could recognize any one person's distinct handwriting and translate it into digital characters. But you can make perfectly acceptable systems, depending on who you are making it for, that is effectively handwriting writing recognition.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
> According to Rick Chapman, the answer is
> simpler:
> Microsoft was the only company on the list that
> never made a fatal, stupid mistake. Whether this
> was by dint of superior brainpower or just dumb
> luck, the biggest mistake Microsoft made was the
> dancing paperclip. And how bad was that, really?
Microsoft's past is littered with failures: Microsoft Bob, early versions of Windows, early versions of PocketPC, all versions of Smartphone so far, the original MSN "Blackbird", LAN Manager, UltimateTV, Windows At Work, Windows DNA, and huge internal projects like Pyramid and Cairo that never even saw the light of day --- these are just some of the examples.
None of these mistakes were fatal simply because Microsoft could always fall back on the revenues of their OS monopoly, and later Office monopoly.
It gets my goat when people point to companies like Netscape and say "they deserved to be crushed by Microsoft, because they made mistakes". Everybody makes mistakes. The difference is that the monopolist gets a lot more lives.
Ditto for Intel. What other company could have survived the IA64 debacle? Yet Intel has, on the back of its x86 near-monopoly.
We do use GOST.
We don't need the stupid E-expansion of DES and analyzing this stupid algorithm we did have found the 48 bits key, it really wasn't 56 bits!
Bosses like improvements. Radical change. Go faster, go faster. They tend to like this because that's how they got where they are -- right or wrong they tend to have hard driving personalities. Employees don't like constant change, in my opinion. No one likes coming to work and finding a new policy on their desk about their TPS report cover sheets. Change is useless much of the time.
Perhaps in a standard corporate environment (read: the environment you're in, whatever that may be), but not so much the production environment. I've been very successful in my jobs because, in Production, there are real changes that can be done that will save the various workers many hours each week. Sometimes they're simple, sometimes they're complex.
Yes, I've caused trouble by implementing some changes, but by and large, even the trouble has been a good thing. I've made projects that would have otherwise been impossible not only possible but easy, because I looked at the way we did things the previous time and fixed the things that were wrong. If you do something 150 times every week, and you can do something that saves you about a minute each time, then that's a couple of hours of work saved.
So, perhaps if you're just filing the TPS reports, you may not want to rock the boat. And perhaps if one isn't good at implementing change (which I do not mean to imply about the parent poster, I really do mean in general), then it would be wise do let things improve in the manner you suggest. But in the proper enviroment, I find that the better way to work is to make sure that you eliminate all of the things that keep the employee from being able to do the job that he or she wants to do (art, programming, or what have you) by making the computer do the work, hiring less expensive labor to take care of it, or by taking it over yourself. This promotes happy employees who work to get things done when they need to (again, especially in a Production environment, such as newspapers or certain types of software).
If I were the type of manager who just sat back and let the work happen the way it has, I would not try to get a job in management. Of course, once it is working properly, well, I'll let it go, until I can see a way to improve it that will be worth the effort necessary to make the change.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
[Anonymous, because I don't need the Karma and I've tried to be very candid ]
I acutally find the opposite happens *quite* often. Managers focus purely on their own little petty domains, and the good of their department and their career, even when decisions are being made that are detrimental to the company as a whole. I've been frustrated many times in my career by political in-fighting between groups, usually led by the managers of the groups in question. As one who spent most of his career "in the trenches", this is utter BS, and I mentally mark such people as the First Ones Up Against The Wall when I'm uber-dictator.
Hell, I once recommend to my boss that if he thought the company should go in "Direction X", he should fire me, because I didn't see myself as strategic once that decision was made. Luckily for me, "Direction X" never happened... but I always figure I'm getting paid to think of the company as a whole, not just my perspective.
This is why stock options are such a wonderous idea. It helps bolster that opinion, because at least in some small way, you as a worker do have an interest in the company. Sure, it's not as big an interest as the big-wigs who sell off options continuous so they can buy new golf-carts, but it's *something* to make you see the bigger picture.
Anyway, I think the picture of managers working for the good of the company as a whole has largely been disproven in my own experience. Even a couple of the "great" people I've worked for clearly played political games that, in retrospect, I have to view as having been bad choices. Almost all of my "cool" bosses got canned while I was under their purview, because in the long run they made short-sighted choices that were good for those of us working for them, but bad for the company as a whole. The "really cool" people were the ones who managed to be supportive of their people, but always put the company goals ahead of their own goals (or at least tried to move the company/division as a whole in the same direction if they thought change was needed).
So now that I'm the boss I'm trying to change as little as possible. Try and keep things in a rhythm and ask people to help come up with ideas.
Sounds like the Japanese idea of benign neglect - upper management sits back and allows line managers to get on with the job.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Since when do you have to search to find stupidity? It's EVERYWHERE....
If it weren't for Apple, who would Microsoft steal user interface ideas from?
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
In a perfect company with perfect managers, perhaps. Your rose-colored glasses approach doesn't account for:
There's more but you get the idea. Managers, for better or worse, have to work with humans, who are notoriously non-deterministic.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
I read this book... don't waste your time if you are remotely familiar with computer and tech history.
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
The part about laying off the programmers right before xmas?
Hell, there are no rules here. We're trying to accomplish something. - Thomas Edison
Y'all be freaky lookin in Kansas
Your rose-colored glasses approach doesn't account for:
The first two have nothing to do with managing the team under you. Both describe hassles that any manager needs to deal with, but do not have much relation to their personal style of managing.
The third I consider a problem, but one that also has no affect on dealing with one's underlings. Trying to meet an impossible schedule or budget just stresses people out, for no good reason. Or put another way, if I give you the task of proving 1+1=3 by next month, you might as well play solitaire for the next month, because you'll get the same end result.
The fourth I consider a real problem, though again, not one that a person can do much about. With a good metamanager, you could perhaps give a mini-ultimatum that either you have the authority to deal with those under you, or you have no accountability for their performance (when doomed to failure, you don't have much to lose anyway). If not, you simply route around the driftwood, perhaps finding something helpful they can do... "Bill, you take care of the backend DB. Mary, you have the thin client. Steve... Um... Steve, you keep the coffee-pot full".
Managers, for better or worse, have to work with humans, who are notoriously non-deterministic.
While I basically agree with that, I also consider it somewhat of a cop-out. No, things won't always go perfectly. But not sticking to the three points I gave will all but guarantee failure and resentment.
I mean, stuff like "Attack everywhere is attack nowhere."
How many times have your PHB told you that all of your work items are the most important one? Seriously? I've heard it so many times I'm getting grey hairs.
They may be platitudes, but as long as I don't see our leadership UNDERSTANDING these damn obvious lessons, I'm going to keep pointing to it in my bookshelf, next to PeopleWare and Debugging the Development Process.
The easiest thing in the world is to look back and deride the losers while applauding the winners and point out why each is what it is. It's a little harder to pick them in advance.
What do you get out of reading this book? Unless it is some tools for making predictions, you might as well rip out the pages and wipe your ass with them.
I agree, and even before you look for tools to make predictions, it's important to have truthful data on which to use those tools.
This raises the question what relationship do business anecdotes have to truthful data? The truth-content of what management wiseacres say is often not that great: some of them are masters of spin and disguise.
I would nominate, as anyhow one among several tools to predict success or failure, any good measure of how much the organisation can accept and deal with unpalatable messages and truthful criticisms, especially without firing the messenger: in short, its relationship with the truth.
Machiavelli was pulling half of it out of his arse. The problem with the Prince ...
Well, the 'Prince' only represents part of Machiavelli's output on the subject of government (read management), and IMO he's much underrated by treating him only as author of the 'Prince'. In the 'Discourses' he gives dispassionate analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of different types of government/management -- especially the ways in which each type tends to decay -- a close point of contact with the current topic -- and also he makes it clear that princes/autocrats are not his preferred style anyway.
In my experience:
Good boss: One who guides you in company policy and overall communication, but knows that you understand the technical stuff best and leaves you to it.
Bad boss: Likes buzzwords, uses company vehicles/resources for personal use, hires his son-in-law as your overseer, and think he knows how you should be doing your job.
The majority of my experience has luckily been with good bosses. Some even had coding experience, and could assist when I did a dumb mistake (tm) like missing a semicolon or something like that, but generally didn't interfere with heavy work stuff unless asked (or they noticed an impression on the workdesk from repeated head-banging).
I like to say tha he's a "Steal and Spend Liberal."
In other words, is it useful either to pick out really smart things companies have done, or really dumb things companies have done, and say "Do this, and you'll succeed; do that, and you'll fail"?
The core assumption made by the student of history is that tomorrow will be like yesterday. The core assumption made by readers of business books like In Search of Excellence is that my company is like their company. Too bad these assumptions are so often wrong.
They say that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it because the blindly repeat the failures) But it is also true that those who do learn from history are doomed to repeat it because they blindly repeat the successes. The point is that context is important and context is different in different companies and in different times.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
every last breath's been beaten out of this book. slashdot - move on.
Leadership Secrets of Attilla the Hun
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Handwriting recognition, or understanding strokes, is a difficult but nowhere near impossible problem. A 1991 Siggraph paper "Specifying Gestures by Exampe" by Rubine listed the 13 'features' used by most recognizers today. That is, 13 numbers derived from the actual pen stroke, although only a few of them are really needed. I've written my own using only 9 of those features, and using the Graffiti symbols (Palm's alphabet) have very good accuracy.
Other 'handwriting' such as marking menus or gesture-based commands (see /. headline earlier today about some) can be and are easily implemented using a few features from the Rubine feature set (angle, curvature, relative size based on the entire drawing, etc.)
So 'handwriting recognition' depends on your definition. Recognizing a set of specific, carefully crafted symbols as they are written can be done with very high accuracy. Recognizing the same symbols after drawing can be done, but its currently a little more difficult. Recognizing anybody's handwriting, including awful scribbles, at any point in the alphabet's history, is probably computationally impossible.
Two examples:
Example with 'bad handwriting' Draw an 'A', with three strokes, but don't connect the top peak: it could be an 'A' or it could be 'H'. Increasingly advanced recognizers are also looking at the context, since "T?E" and "H?T" are most likely to be 'H' and 'E' respectively. Palm (specifically the Graffiti alphabet) resolves this by making the symbols un-ambiguous. Sufficiently bad handwriting and poor grammar (ie: hasty lecture notes) will always cause problems.
Example with old script I've carefully examined documents ranging from the present day to copies of nearly 500-year-old script. Most old papers I've looked at, up until this century, had more curves and sharper corners. In the 1700's and 1800's, many people had fancy serifs, with especially practiced serifs on their names (like a spiral before starting an F or B, only one swirl on content, but 5 swirls on their signature). In the beginning of this centry, my own collection moves from spirals to sharp angles, then moves toward big curves+corners. I personally enjoy looking at the serifs on 'A' and 'F' from people who learned to write in the WWI time frame, especially the people who seemed to compose letters from connected sharp-cornered triangles and curves. Today's 'good' handwriting more closely mirrors what we expect to see in a sans-serif font, with exceptions on a few letters (F, D, B, q).
I am already seeing people draw 'E' as they would in Graffiti (two curls) rather than the traditional form of lines and angles. Personally, I don't see it taking too many more decades before our handwriting starts to evolve to a more recogniser-friendly style.
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Doesnt the briefcase, phone and hat look like "Pumba" from "Timon and Pumba"
McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty Bag filled with vegetable soup.
....
You mean Darl McBride? Then maybe it's not soup
-kgj
-kgj
He actually had to go out and look for it ? Umglaublicht!
Did he also dress in a robe, put on a long white beard, and carry a lamp ?
But, of course, it *is* always prudent to have the slave that carries the laurel leaves over the emperor's head, keep whispering in his ear : "Remember that thou art mortal, O Caesar!".
No notice of what happened to the slave after nthe parade, tho.
Want to know how management is damaging your brain ? Here's the quick proof :
I call this "overbehaviour." Doing something --anything -- because it... just needs to be improved! Most improvements aren't.
Signs that you're a manager: inventing words like "overbehaviour" when "stupidity" word already exists and is well understood.
Sorry pal, I'll look for you in Office Space 2
"The Sloppy Labelling Categorists".
;>
Oh, that's right they fall under : "The Stupid".
Tsk!
There's such a fine line between clever and... stupid.
If you assume that everyone who comes up with a sufficiently large number looks at it and immediately says "that can't be right" and revises it downward - that is, if there is some sort of universal human mental block to knowing the truth.
Of course, that can be disproved by finding someone who earnestly believes that the entire human race is stupid. Good luck; such people tend to have a very high opinion of themselves...
I prefer the Dilbert Principle: Everyone is an idiot about something.
You are implying that nothing Netscape could have done would have helped their cause. Which, maybe, is true. However, that doesn't mean Netscape didn't still mess up. And it might still be an important exercise to say, "Well, when Netscape did this, MS did that, and Netscape could have come back and done this, but instead they did that, and that hastened their fall." Etc.
Ugh, go crawl in a hole and die, you pathetic idiot.
"Plus it was written at a time that "democracy" was pretty much unheard of"
Machiavelli was a strong believer in the superiority of the republic over other forms of government. You know "republic"? It means the same thing that we say "democracy" to mean.
"I mean, this is the book that says it's better for a leader to be feared... and by extension, hated"
"Still, a prince should make himself feared in such a way that if he does not gain love, he at any rate avoids hatred; for fear and the absence of hatred may well go together, and will be always attained by one who abstains from interfering with the property of his citizens and subjects or with their women."
-Machiavelli (The Prince)
Worthless pseudointellectuals like yourself are a plague on humanity.
READ BEFORE CRITICIZING
Where are my mod points when I need them!
Too funny.
War is necrophilia.
Chapman also analyzes the mistakes made, and shows how Apple Computer could've been the 99% market share vendor right now
I love it when authors look back with glorified hindsight on the failures of others and zero in on their mistakes. It's as if to say "if *I* had been there, I woudn't have do it that way"
So what do you suggest now, Merrill? Let see Chapman's papers on how the Open Source movement can navigate its way through today's marketplace. Or how about a brief gaze into his crystal ball about what the future holds. When he puts his name on the line and attaches his ideas to something tangible, then I'll listen to what he has to say.
"Neo, sooner or later you're going to realize that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path." - Morpheus
Ruby on Rails Screencast
"Eat up Martha"
... Austin drivers.
You can't possibly predict what they are going to do based on a rational model of human thought, and frequently their actions cause harm and inconvenience to others while gaining, at best, nothing for themselves.
The enemies of Democracy are
As a former Marine I wish to disagree with you on a few point Most of our technology and training is still heldover from the Cold War where we envisioned broad, sweeping formations and movements between huge masses of men in Eastern Europe. Most of Marine Corp training is Battalion+ to platoon focusing on fire and manuver. This is very effective when you are fighting even the smallest of units. I have trained countless hours at the squad and platoon level and one of the favorite MCI's(Marine Corp Institute correspondence courses) is the terrorism MCI. Our equipment is pretty good but it could always be better. M1A1, Apache(Army), Night Vision Goggles, even the M16A2(some would argue that it stinks because it is not automatic but if you can only fire one or 3 shots per trigger pull you tend to aim a heck of a lot better), Lets not forget SINCGARS, . But when your enemy instead becomes a couple people whipping up homemade bombs with readily available materials and blowing up your troops a couple at a time.The "terrorists" are certainly attacking our Army where we are unprepared and not expected. We are trained to deal with situations like this that is why you see ONLY 1 or 2 die at a time. As sad and unfortunate those death are there is not really a defense for those types of attacks except due dilligence. The solders over there are not failing in any way nor did the generals forget to plan this is just the outcome of these kind of scenarios. The American people and press just weren't ready for it. I know that sounds a little cold and heartless but no Marine believes war and terrorism is like the movies and most of them are prepared for the real thing. To his credit Bush did mention in a speech before this war that this could happen. To his discredit he didn't harp on it enough. Oh ya and Korea is fscking freezing in the winter and I am from the New England.
It's all Politics
The head of DEC once said something like: I don't ever see a need for a computer in a home!
True visionaries!
Kill off your own platform! Don't kill your competitor's platform. No. Kill your own platform.
SGI: "Commercial Unix and RISC are dead anyway. Let's just make Windows PCs. No, wait, linux boxen."
DEC: "Vax/vms. No, Mips/Ultrix. No, Alpha/OSF."
HP (with their Unix boxen, which used to have more marketshare than sun BY FAR until they hinted they'd drop PA/RISC, and perhaps even HP/UX eventually).
...Even if your platform is doomed, it will take decades for it to finally die, if you keep developing and updating it. IBM still makes huge money off S/390 and AS/400 (both of which were 'dead' around 1985).
If you think that's all there is to managing, then you haven't done much managing.
Uh... there were hundreds of thousands, quite literally. The police say 110000 in london alone, and they habitually underestimate.
Not entirely our fault that the USA is now a fascist dictatorship with Mussolini's fabled government-corporate partnership model in full swing, and all mass media controlled by said partnership like Orwell warned us, and so you failed to see the hundreds of thousands of protesters on FOX "News".
Miss Lewinsky.
That's where we heard it before!
So, WHY are we searching for stupidity? I don't think we've killed enough idiots in order to have to search for them. There are far too many induhviduals [--dilbert allusion] around for us to go looking for more... Reccomended titles? hmmm... *draws blank* I have to give them some credit, I guess, because it is satiric.
Actually, I'd be interested to see if handwriting recognition improved (and if so, by how much), by improving the writing surface/input device.
When I write on my PDA, I find that the touchscreen seems to be a limiting factor. Even when you tap on it with the stylus to do something as simple as select a menu, it doesn't always register on the first tap. It seems to me that most Palm devices are more responsive near the middle of their screens than out toward the edges. (Most likely because it allows a little less "flex" when you press down near a corner.) If you can't even get it to choose a menu selection each time you tap the stylus, how can you expect it to do a nearly-perfect job of interpreting your scribbling?
under Ray Kasser, it was a disaster. Then the Tramiel brothers really ran it into the ground.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Change to try to improve things isn't bad. What you should do is have a clear idea what you are trying to accomplish by making the change, make sure you convey your thinking behind the change to your leutenants. Make sure they know that the reasoning behind the change isn't some big secret. (In a lot of orgs, the leutenants don't understand why the change is being made, so when people ask them they say it is a secret or explain it in such a way that it makes no sense to anyone.)
OK. So, now everyone in the org knows that the change happened and what the purpose of the change was. Next, make sure people are comfortable enough to freely discuss whether the change is working. Is it worth the effort?
If it isn't, admit that it didn't work and either make another (again, well reasoned) change, or go back to the old way for a while. Let everyone know that your doing that because the idea didn't pan out.
If you do it this way, people won't be afraid of the changes and they won't think you are stupid. They will think that you are open to ideas and want to improve things. Don't be surprised if they suggest good ideas and discuss how to improve things. If those ideas sound good, implement them the same way except you should also let everyone know whose idea it was.
I did this with my team of developers and it worked great. We discovered a lot of things that worked well for our group and some things that didn't work very well. Remember that not all groups are going to be the same and that situations change over time. Just because something worked with your last team does not mean it will work with your present team. Also, just because something worked terrifically in the past does not mean that it is working now.
Keep apprised as to what is going on and continuously adapt policies and processes to serve you and your team. If it ever gets to be the other way around, you need to re-think the policies. If you find that following a company policy is a waste of time, you need to either change the policy or else discover that you are following it as an actual beneficial (and worthwhile) service to another group. Don't ever let your people think they are wasting their time following a stupid policy just because it is the policy. If the explanation isn't convincing to you, it won't be convincing to your team.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Just click and pick any other random listing.
Here we call it Teflon Suits. Upper managers are hands off, middle managers are hands off, line managers are hands off, bottom rung people are in constant panic/fire mode from lack of planning and guidance. A 5 job requires 15 work units. A horrid way to run a business but a good way to climb the ladder.
Those of us working in CIS know that you usually don't even know the problem before you have to start, much less the solution.
Of course, I'm also a C.S. major. If I was a C.I.S. major, though, it would kind of undercut my claim of experience equivilant to a C.I.S. degree.
I don't think his comments are totally baseless. I think he meant the army isn't ready for this kind of prolonged urban combat.
I mean, the Marines are "tip of the sword" and their numbers are intentionally limited. They're expeditionary. Their purpose is to kill. But this whole "peace keeping/nation building" duty by the army is not going to plan -- as evidenced by the plans to re-insert expeditionary forces (Marines) back into Iraq. Afghanstan is still a mess too.
Marines are a special type of force, and they did their job (army and af are well inserted), but "major combat operations" are over and we didn't bargin for this much bloodshed. Us anti-Iraqi-war (not all war, just this one) really wanted to be wrong about this one -- like the anti-war types of '92 were.
You have the right idea when you say that you should give control to the guy who came up with the idea though I think you got there by a strange path of logic.
Everybody wants changes (including you) towards higher efficiency but nobody wants somebody else's changes imposed on oneself. People who spend most of their time filling TPS reports know what's the best and most efficient, and any other changes imposed by management who have an idea on how it could be more efficient and imposing that is really bad.
I think the role of management is really important. Most people do not see what they want or how to do if efficiently at all. I hated management but then I now realize that I wasn't very efficient.
However, strictly imposing is not right. The role of management is in my opinion to carefully understand the workers and arrange resources as efficiently as possible so that the workers are not limited or hindered.
As an example, I really wished that management would have let me take a few classes at the local university. The classes would be 3 times a week in the middle of the day. I didn't specifically say that I wanted to take classes but always hinted at it. I wished they'd realized and setup some form of oppertunity so that I could take classes.
But, yeah never never try and take control of a project or idea that someone else came up with. I had the same thing done to me. All my ideas would be shelved or put in the back burner and then I would have to work on somebody's else ideas. I thought my ideas were great (and I have to way of verifying if it was true or it was not because it was delayed for no reason).
Now, I'm in grad school and taking classes.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
...my only friend. i am so drunk right now, i had to retype that sentence like twenty times to get it correct............ hahahahhaha
fuck approrpriate grammmar
i am doing whatever i want becauSE I RUEL
AHAHHAHAHAHA
SLASHDOT IS OWNEZEROED BY MEEEE
-------------- >>> i@ccs NU!!!
Here's a link to some of the illustrations.
The beauty of natural behavioral patterns is that, life wants to find the easiest way from point A to point B. I relate this because of humans' natural urge to improve on things to make operations faster. Unfortunetly, going from Point A to Point B as a life's exercise is a radical idea. A famous French philospher once said that "life holds no meaning, all the we strive for ultimatley is death." SO, why go through all the hassles of existance and all those theoretical points in between when A=Birth and B=Death. BECAUSE of this we always innovate, we always improve, and we always digress. We can no more make our transitional existance feasable by improvement than we can by allowing ourselves to stay the straight and narrow and die. THEREFORE, in relation to this comment (finally) Bosses and managerial types LOVE improvement and innovation for the sake of furthering our easiest way to point B. However, the people who IMPLEMENT these ideas are actually given MORE work, not less. Management moves forward as a collective business practice and the grunt down in IS works his ass off to the make these "great" improvements a reality. SO, who benefits? The company (who in trade for innovation loses morale) The managers (who get credit for the actual improvements though their workforce is lax from the investment of time) or the grunt (who puts all the effort and gets none of the return)
It's all futile in the end, let the company die, let the managers die, let the grunts die, it's their ultimate ambition anyway
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
A horrid way to run a business but a good way to climb the ladder.
You got that right. If you actually figure out what's going on, you fall out of fire-mode and get actual work done. However, nobody else knows what the hell they're doing - all they see is you slacking off, so you get fired for being competent. A favor, really.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I'm sorry I thought I made my point clearer... ,FBI, whatever. the only people who can lessen it are Iraqi's themselves. They know thier neighbors and thier streets. I thought it was a mistake for them (terrorists) to start bombing civilian targets they had an opurtunity to look like saviors but now hey look like bad guys(in the eyes of the Iraqi's).
If someone (terrorist, al-queda, whatever) wants to take pot shots at the Army or make homebrewed explosives against the Army thier is NOTHING the army can do to stop it short of leveling the place. Sadly No organization can stop it wether it be Military , Special Forces, Cia
The other problem is that we can't just get up and go without leaving a good chance another pschotic dictator will take charge. we can't get a new ELECTED government in Iraq going until there is better security. But I susupect the attacks won't let up till we leave. So it kind leaves us in this whole "chicken and egg" types mess.
Most MBs (managment books) are desinged to present some simple model, follow this and all is well. The trouble is, even if they don't fake the data, the real world is too complicated to reduce to simple rules.
Also, there is luck.
I am told that one of the reasons religion was invented was to give farmers a physcological way to deal with crop failures, since in those days weather patterns, locusts etc were completely unpredictable.
Biz books are the same thing: most of us are unable to accept teh random nature of life, and the models give us a false sense that life is not random and unkowable, but fits into a controllable pattern.
So..If u go back AFTER the fact and look, you will always see a "pattern" (in the clinical trial world this is called data dredging). I would say unless a book makes specific, testable predictions, it is not "science" but pop physcology.
And then, give control of that idea to the guy who came up with it. It's his baby, let him nurture it.
Pretty profound advice, until you realize it's from someone with the username "Helpadingoatemybaby"!
I never do unpaid hours, unless I seriously think there's a chance of extending my skills and improving my CV.
Even when I've bust my arse for free and got a bonus, the sum has worked out to a pretty pathetic rate per hour.