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Technology Rewriting the Rules of Business
theStorminMormon writes "Fortune magazine is running a story describing the overthrow of Jack Welch's old rules of business. (Welch responds here.) Although the article lists Google and Apple as two paragons of the new rules of business, it fails to note that the old rules of business originated from straight manufacturing firms while the new rules of business are coming from the (more service-oriented) tech sector." From the article: "Steve Jobs has emphasized that Apple hires only people who are passionate about what they do (something that, to be fair, Welch also talked about). At Genentech, CEO Art Levinson says he actually screens out job applicants who ask too many questions about titles and options, because he wants only people who are driven to make drugs that help patients fight cancer."
If you are passionate about what you do, you'll get out of bed in the morning and actually look forward to going to work. Passion also drives you to do your best, not to just get by so you can collect a paycheck.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
I work to live not live to work. I will do my job to the fullest, but I want a life. I don't want to wake up when I'm old and find that I'm alone and regretting that I didn't live my life instead of wasting it in the office.
It's always the crazy ideas that change the world. Of course not every crazy idea is a good one, and there are thousands of business that have gone under for thinking a little too outside the box. If you look around, there's really only one Amazon, only one Google, only one Apple. Companies that operate in more traditional ways seem to last longer on average, but nowadays they're often not leading things.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
I surely hope they have other methods of screening applicants, because I think that some people are easily able to fool interviewers and sound passionate.
They are are just waiting to get hired and once they are, they lay back and start making all kinds of demands.
Got MILF? It does a body good!
Possibly too passionate? Where does Steve Jobs draw the line?
From his rebuttal:
> When has there ever been a divergence between shareholders and customers? No one is out saying, "Let's screw this customer today, and if we do, our share price might go up 20 cents." They're just not doing it.
25 years later, the secret of his success slips out: he has never owned a wireless phone.
"Although the article lists Google and Apple as two paragons of the new rules of business, it fails to note that the old rules of business originated from straight manufacturing firms while the new rules of business are coming from the (more service-oriented) tech sector."
Of course the "service sector" revolves around IP and the creation and maintainance of it.* The other kind of "service" is "would you like fries with that", but you can't build much of an economy on that.
*Billions and billions of dollars as compared to the "buggy whip" sector.
"Hire passionate people." Well, if that isn't touchy-feely management at its best.
Welch's rule was to grade your players and go with the A's. Some of us might call that a meritocracy. To the B or C graded employee, of course, it looks like an unbalanced, unfair gold-key system driven by self interest on the part of senior managers.
What's the alternative? "Hire passionate people."
Am I the only one who imagines the following conversation: "Look, Bob, I know you're working hard. Your code is better than everyone else's on the team, and that's great! You did a good job getting everybody working together on that one project, too, and you were right about cutting out those side jobs -- if we were still eating those expenditures this project would have crashed and burned months ago. But Dave's the right guy to get this promotion, even though we only brought him in from that middle-manager position at Nabisco three weeks ago, and I'll tell you why. Frankly Bob, you just don't have Dave's passion."
Breakfast served all day!
just a few people want to play with words to make ideas their own. As he pointed out in his rebuttal a lot of the ideas that are being set out for today are compatible if not part of the ideas he espoused.
I do agree with one item, weed out your worst. It is true. You will come to find that that passionate ones will not be lost in this. I'm in a company which doesn't do this, its a good old boy club. As such we still make money but never really move forward. We have so much deadwood it stifles innovation. The only time things change is when someone dies or retires.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Whenever I hear the phrase "passionate about what you do" I get this eery feeling that they're going to offer up far more "passion" in their compensation package than "salary". Passion is all and well, and enjoying work is naturally important, but a large number of employers (especially in tech sectors) love to use the "passion" card as a way of underpaying their staff. If employees ever complain about meagre wages the employer can always counter with "But you LOVE this work! You should be glad to be doing this for a living!"
There's a fine line between passion and simple exploitation of that passion to get stuff done for cheap. And I don't trust most businessmen to look out for my best interests when cutting a deal.
I work to live not live to work. I will do my job to the fullest, but I want a life. I don't want to wake up when I'm old and find that I'm alone and regretting that I didn't live my life instead of wasting it in the office.
If your mission in life is best accomplished at the office, then how can spending your time there be a waste? If you are genuinely afraid that, when you are old, you will regret the time you spent at work, then maybe you chose your career poorly.
Many or even most people choose their career poorly. Sometimes this is avoidable. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes the best occupation is one that pays poorly or not at all. Too many don't even try. They just chase the money instead. But those who do manage to unify their passion with their career are more effective employees.
Because you can't eat elegant code.
Well, I assume you could, but I don't recommend it.
How dare someone be interested in their own benefits!?!?!
Living for work is a basic abuse of a person's life.
In the cosmic or geological scale of things, our lives
are a fly fart in a hurricane. We are but a flash in the
pan of live unless we distinguish ourselves like Hitler,
or more appropriately, Dr. Jonas Salk.
We turn around and we find we are OLD. I am way past my
median age and can look forward to only 20 statistical years of
life left. Time flies. Trust me.
Seize the day! Live while you can. Enjoy what you can. Unless
there is a mania for work, lighten up if your basic needs are
met.
So far, you only live once , until a second person returns
from the dead to substantiate the afterlife.
nm
30 years from now: "Why am I broke? Whaddya mean I should have set aside money for retirement? I created ART! Shouldn't somebody support me now? I shoulda talked to girls, maybe I coulda had kids to feed me now :( "
"If you are passionate about what you do, you'll get out of bed in the morning and actually look forward to going to work."
That's not passion. Passion is working for free. Giving all your possessions away. And living off of handouts from complete (and sometimes ungrateful) strangers.
Some of you are confusing passion with obsession. A passionate employee loves his or her job and strives to do a good job - they don't necessarily devote their entire life to it. I know plenty of passionate people who have lives outside of the office. You can really love your job and try really hard without even taking it out of the office.
In my experience some of the people who are obsessed with their job (spending nights / weekends) actually hate it.
Does anyone else see a creepy Apple vs. Microsoft comparison here? I know a couple of managers at Microsoft, and the "old" rules sound exactly like what they do.
Haiku for you!
And if Steve Jobs isn't lying (I'm too cynical not to suspect that he is), you're exactly the sort of person he's looking for. I'm with you - I'm in it for the coding. I enjoy learning about the core business (the real stuff like, "what do we sell" and "how do we make money") but only as it relates to learning it well enough to automate it.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Well they can say what they want but, in my experience, the corporate sector thrives on mediocrity. Most companies want to hire average people and pay them an average amount of money, or a bit less if they can get away with it. I don't claim that this is necessarily wrong, just hypocritical.
They can go on about "passion" and wanting "the best people" but they know that passionate people can be difficult to deal with and the best people not only want the best money and benefits but they want some say in how things get done.
And would they hire someone "passionate" in their late forties or is this merely another codeword for "naive new graduate"?
Ame
Apple on the other hand is so clearly old line. Make quality and useful products targeted to an audience willing to pay for the products. Charge enough for the product to create a good profit. Give good service before, during, and after the sale. Charge enough so that at the end one has enough to pay for fixed costs, manufactureing, service, overhead, and research and development. Do not be afraid to change the product to meet demands, and throw in a bit of flash. This probably had not changed since Ford innovated the car in on color Black, with evolved into the mustang of many colors. I think the old Ford put some big dogs out of bussiness as well.
I understand what the article is saying, but the article is talking about established firm. Apple, as an established firm, did exactly what it was supposed to do. That is fixed itself. Apple has been, and is, a major manufacturer of consumer and proffesional intergrated computer solution. So is Dell. MS only supplies software. Apple is and will continue to be, at least in the near future, a to manufacuturer of high tech solutions. The have proven that they will adjust to meet new needs, just as old bussiness says they should. The article cites IBM, which also did what it needed to do. Refocus on the customer, develop customer oriented products that provided real value. They talk about how the iPod is unique, but how many new catagories of product did IBM help create? The selectric, the PC, SQL, GML, etc.
It is ludicrous to think that anything other than good products or services matter, or that creating new products is something new. IBM exists because it started creating products and focused on customers.
As far as google, that is a story yet to be wrote. They have an Enron like grasp on the ad market, unregulated, not transparent, unpredicatable. The success may be last remant of the dot com boom, or they may be able to leverage advertisers in the same way that TV did. If they are succesful, it will be nothing but bussiness as usual. Create a product, namely adwords, charge enough for it to generate a profit, and use some of the cash to innovate.
I think what happened, especially in the 70's and 80's, was the sense of entitlement of the big corporations. That somehow Americans were obligated to purchase the products no matter how horrible they were. In a perverse way, they were applying the soviet model to capitalism, where the people had to buy what they state supplied, except in out case capatilism provided such an oversupply that we had the illusion of choice. This was illustated with the government bailout of chrysler. In fact, some of the few comapnies that haven't leared thier lesson are in the auto industry. Chrsyler has so given up and is running ads featuring it German owner. In the end what we may be seeing is not new rules of bussiness, but the return to the basics. Make a product, sell a product at a fair price, and realize the consumer is the boss.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
At least he's not so passionate that he would, say, throw a chair.
For the vast majority of coders, business pays their salary.
That being said, I agree that this is an article for suits (well, what do you expect from Fortune) and it's packed with business jargon that means very little. A lot of non-tech types make fun of techie jargon, but the jargon means something; when we say "TCP/IP," it's because it's a lot quicker than saying "transmission control protocol and internet protocol," and a whole lot quicker than spelling out, in detail, what each of those terms actually means. Suits have long had a habit of either taking technical jargon (from various fields, not just CS) and twisting it until it doesn't mean anything, or just making up jargon that didn't mean anything in the first place.
"Six sigma," mentioned in the article, is a fine example of this. How many suits really understand what a "sigma" is in this (or any) context, or why six of them is an interesting quantity? Then the six-sigma crowd compounded their sins by using the phrase "black belt." And of course there's all the military talk they love to throw around, this bunch of lifelong civilians who wouldn't know which end of an M16 the bullet comes out of. As a mathematician, a martial artist, and a veteran, I find this particular combination to be the Holy Trinity of bad suit-speak.
So the answer to the question, "Why should we care?" is, "Because that's where the money is" -- but that shouldn't keep us from pointing out what a bunch of jackasses they are.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Speak for yourself. With no big business to pay an IT department, you're relegated to programming after your pizza delivery job. Actually, without big business, there wouldn't even be PC's.
See, i disagree. If you got into IT for creativity, you should have looked into marketing. IT is about standards, best practices, and things 'just working' for your customers (ie the company's internal people). Yes, there are places where creativity is good, but no more than any other 'office job' at the same company.
Lets see, i need a fool-proof disaster recovery scheme. Best practices or art? I choose best practices. File server? Yep, best practicies. Email? Exchange, please.
Like i said, there is room for creativity, but only here and there. IT is not alchemy by any stretch.
Han shot first.
"At Genentech, CEO Art Levinson says he actually screens out job applicants who ask too many questions about titles and options..." Mr. Levinson went on to say that he also screens anyone asking about salary, vacation, internal advancement, the company's business model, stock performance, or any other matters pertaining to the position. "I ask them, 'Do you want to cure cancer?' It's a simple 'yes or no' question. Any information about us is irrelavant."
Anybody else notice Slashdot has added ads in the RSS feeds? This story's summary has an ad for Camtasia Studio and it's the first I've noticed.
Hrmm. A bit annoying...
Oh man I could spend all day replying to this article.. I just put in my 2 weeks notice for the same reason.. screw the suits, screw the investors who don't give a flying fuck about their employees, screw them all, they will learn at some point now or later.
Technology has been changing the way business has been conducted forever. People can run their business in pajamas while doing laundry at home. I think it all evens out, though. Avant garde companies hire people who are passionate about their work while old-school companies hire good businesspeople. In both instances, the person being hired is probably a very hard worker, or else they won't last long.
"Why are so many folks in IT obsessed with business? "
Because a good and solid businessmodel is the most important thing of all because it's pays the bills so you and your family can live.
If you work in this industry a economically viable businessmodel is more important than anything else, you will also understand this when you get a family.
Investors don't really care about the employees or the customers. All they care about is money. Kudos to you for having the balls to leave a company based on that. I don't exactly agree with a lot of the red-tape beaureaucracy that goes on at my company, but I still need money to live.
With regard to hiring. . . After a company reaches a certain level of success and public recognition, large numbers of people start applying for jobs just because they want to work for a successful company -- not because they want to help make the company successful. In other words, they want to ride the gravy train. Those are the ones you have to weed out.
Start-ups and small companies rarely have this problem. It's after your company turns out to be Google, then everybody wants to climb on board.
In your example Bob IS the passionate person. From the factors the manager listed there is no way he hates his job and can write top code and work well with everybody. Being passionate about what you do isn't about saying how much you love it, its about waking up in the morning and WANTING to go to work and get stuff accomplished.
;P
The manager you imagined is just an example of a bad manager, and not how I imagine hiring passionate employees at all. I would imagine the manager hiring Bob and hearing Bob talk with enthusiasm about all the ideas he has to implement. Hed probably pass over the cookie cutter from Nabisco
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
Of course the "service sector" revolves around IP and the creation and maintainance of it.* The other kind of "service" is "would you like fries with that", but you can't build much of an economy on that.
Blinking a few little industries like Financial Services (banking, corporate, private, hedge and mutual fund management and advisory services); Corporate Services (outsourcing of payroll, HR, fulfillment, customer service or IT); Legal Services (anything other than IP law); Medical Services; et. al.
I think you'll find the french fry and clean linen group just isn't putting up the numbers necessary to account for the growth of service industries in the national GDP. There is some fuzziness in semantics; recall that line cooks have been mooted to be *manufacturing* hamburgers.
illegitimii non ingravare
No, I hear ya 100% Luckily I get health benefits through my wife's company. I've been screwed over by investors more than once in a company and I've about had enough. I think things are changing but maybe I am naive. I hope more people start standing up for this bullshit.
Your ill-advised rant (which has nothing much to do with the concepts in TFA anyway) is akin to griping about Microsoft having a program they've titled "Windows" -- the name is meant to convey something. Ditto for Six Sigma and the roles' titles -- keep in mind that Motorola developed this program to instill a new way of thinking about management.
Means very little to you, you mean. To people who focus on strategy rather than tactics, there is a lot of meaningful dialogue in the article. Whether or not you get anything out of it is a different story.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The problem is that his passion vs results never goes both ways. Can a manager at Genetech who misses his numbers tell Art Levinson, "It's not about the money, it's about helping cancer paitients so you should just forget about those numbers I missed"? I seriously doubt it.
OOPS! Too late. I've already got one and I work for a non-profit. So go stick that in your pipe and choke on it. Yeah! Me: 1 The Slashdot Poster: 0
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
One thing I've come to believe, after years in corporate america, is that no, they won't learn. Now, OR later.
I do agree with the "screw them all" part though.
The thing is, there will always be people who will do anything the company wants them to do. The assurance of a paycheck every other week is what they base their lives around, and if that goes away, then so does their comfort zone.
You got that right.. I can't believe how many people are in a "comfort zone" here. All I really care about anymore is to just be happy but I have a hard time doing that when there are so many morons and micro-managers working around me.
Seems I don't have the new version of Firefox yet. That's "semantic," not "symantic."
In his response to this article, Welch says, "No one is out saying, 'Let's screw this customer today, and if we do, our share price might go up 20 cents.' They're just not doing it."
Clearly, Mr. Welch does not have a cell phone or cable TV.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
A-fucking-men. I always suspected the Dir. Ops at my last (engineering) job had no idea what a standard deviation was...
Were you in business between 1981 and 2001? Tens of thousands of American companies were and very very very few of them grew their business by $400 billion. In fact very very very few of them had $400 billion in gross revenue for the entire 20 year period combined. So if, as you say, old Jack was just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, how come none of the others that were also there were "lucky".
A healthy level of cynicism is one thing but, lets not kid ourselves either. Give old Jack some credit. He did have a lot to do with GE's massive growth.
Articles like this are more an artifact of savvy PR by Google and Applet than they are a material fact. Technology changes the balance of power, but has no effect on the rules of business. This is like saying that a better running shoe changes the rules of the 100M dash. Business means being profitable, and Welch understands that. The "old" rules talk about that. The "new" rules are mostly a different way of looking at the old rules and no one has proven that the "new" rules are sustainable. Apple is not a great example of profitablility or marketshare and Google is worse. Google has espoused lots of theories about how to build a great company, but has yet to prove that it has built a great company. Many of you will ramble on about how good people make a good company, how the customer comes first, and all that jazz, and you're right, albeit indirectly. These all support profitability. If your customers are mad, you can win them back or get new ones. If your shareholders are mad they can sell your shares, depress your stock price, and take legal action against you to have your leadership changed. Companies that embrace technology take money away from those who don't. But the rules of the race are the same: if you are making the most money, you're winning...for now.
You clearly either did not read the comment to which you replied, or did not understand it.
First, he's complaining about the name Six Sigma, and why it's stupid. He didn't claim Fortune invented it. He did say it's stupid, and why it's stupid. I happen to agree, but that's not really pertinent - the point is, your rant is ill informed (what I think you meant to say - an ill advised rant is one you shouldn't be making because it will have negative repercussions.)
As for using the names of martial arts belts for types of people (or whatever) in the six sigma methodology, he's complaining about this because it, too, is stupid. There's no such thing as a black belt manager unless we're talking about a dojo with a hierarchical management structure.
There is not a lot of meaningful dialogue in the article. Most of it is just being smug and self-assured for the sake of smugness and self-assurance. "Look how smart we are, we're rewriting the rules of business." In fact, from that standpoint, it looks a lot like a Cringely or Dvorak article. There's a small amount of meaningful dialogue in the article, which you could probably fit in a bee's butt and have room left over for what I know about molecular biology.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A-fucking-men. I always suspected the Dir. Ops at my last (engineering) job had no idea what a standard deviation was...
Um...isn't that when you like to do it a little rough, or maybe in the kithen when the kids are at a sleepover.
Oh, you mean, like the square root of the variance. Oops, my bad.
Bravo.
Personally, I've worked for some major corporations in the day, but I've found my most favorite jobs to be small businesses.
Small businesses always pay less, but its always easier to sleep easy at night and easier to wake up in the morning and be happy with life.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Disclaimer: I'm a Jack Welch fan.
Rank and yank is not a viable long-term strategy for personnel management. It's great for the first few rounds when you can presumably cut large chunks of deadwood. However, once you've removed all the deadwood, there's only live wood left, and it's at that point that you begin hurting your organization. Here's a link to a statistical study that illustrates this effect: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j .1744-6570.2005.00361.x
Note: This may be why Jack did this for a few years at GE, then "made adjustments". Based on the study I've cited above, using rank-and-yank for more than 3-4 years is a complete waste of time.
-- If you're posting to be funny, and your sig is funnier . . . .
Suppose your workers' performance is in the 90th, 85th, and 80th percentiles for performance. In grade school, that would be a solid B-average workforce. Now the bottom gets slashed, knocking out all of the 80th percentile people. Who replaces them? If the workers' performance followed a Bell curve, the next percentage should be at 50%. Congratulations, you have just shot yourself in the foot.
Jack Welsh was another hardass CEO interested in his own self-interest and full of ego. That's the fact.
--Chag
Genentech screens out people who show an interest in politics? Sure, because those folks will be harder to steamroll.
:)
Passionate people who don't give a shit about corporate politics are much more maleable.
Of course, after they get their passion crushed, they're even easier to work with, particularly since they're also clueless about politics.
Hmmm. Maybe I'm in the wrong place.
And apparently you missed an entire point of my post... that people name products and methodologies for a reason. Choosing to ignore those reasons is ill-advised, as it makes one look like an idiot, hence "ill-advised" in my OP.
As to the smugness... I think you're projecting onto the author. The piece is primarily observational, I'm not really sure where you're going with that statement about "look how smart WE are" (emphasis mine).
I'm guessing you weren't involved in big business in the past two decades, or even now. Corporate structure and methodologies ARE important. Management philosophies DO impact not only the bottom line, but the welfare of the employed.
Welch's words were practically gospel in the 80s/early 90s. A refutation of them is not unimportant, nor is it meaningless.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What? Six Sigma is the name of a specific approach to management of a company.
It's great for process oriented manufacturing concerns. It's crap for an engineering company. You need the freedom to fuck up in order to make the really good things that cause growth, which means that you must occasionally thrash the black belts. There are good ideas in the approach, but it looks like the sort of thing a weak manager would latch on to dogmatically.
"Black Belts," "Green Belts," "Champions," etc. are the titles of specific roles within the program. It's not a generic (which is a mistake in TFA, they should have capitalized it) term, it's a proper term.
It's a bastardization of a bastardization, so no it isn't. a Black belt means that you are no longer merely a student. White belt means that you are - you don't want white belts in your org except as FOB college hires.
Your ill-advised rant
You mean ill conceived, and no, it isn't. It's perfectly legitimate to complain when some suit coopts a phrase to make himself look cool. When we were in high school, these were the posers, and they got their deserved ass kicking.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
See, i disagree. If you got into IT for creativity, you should have looked into marketing. IT is about standards, best practices, and things 'just working' for your customers (ie the company's internal people). Yes, there are places where creativity is good, but no more than any other 'office job' at the same company.
I went into software, so creativity is important. How else do you come up with stuff that people want and that make their lives easier?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Both of them are being pompous, Their statement should necessarily be backed up by figures that show they not only pay better than average industry wages but also take care of their employees better. It's a two way street, Yes, I want to cure cancer, everything else is left unsaid and you want to give me the best deal possible because you appreciate a passionate worker, and that too is left unsaid. Now where are those figures?
Not all of us are passionate or can be, maybe some of us have other priorities, passionate about travel but that doesn mean they don't care about work. Not all jobs require passion, maybe methodical, maybe passion. Their roles as leaders require them to be passionate, but maybe the apple accountant doesn't need to be passionate. I think realistically some people can be assholes, obessing about position and other superficialities, but other are just upfront, and not shy or shamed to put a value on themselves. Cheers to honesty.
well he would take the basic chair design, throw on a better cushin make it a little bigger then the other chairs out there and resell it with a sleek design for way more then it is actually worth.
I hope you will excuse my AC posting here but I think you will understand after reading my comment...
I own a business. I have about 50 employees in several different offices. While it is not something that I EVER would mention in public or in polite conversation, not a day goes by that I don't think about how I can "get more out of my employees" without costing myself a dollar. It may be shitty and it may be mean -- but it is a financial reality that all companies have to deal with. How do you produce/sell/create more while keeping costs the same?**
Answer: Culture.
I can certainly go out and hire X number of additional people. But the point of this daily exercise is simple: increase output while keeping "costs" the same or less. (After all, that's how you make a profit)
It is most certainly in MY (ie: the owner) best interests if my employees feel like they need to work 60-80 hrs/week to get ahead. I will do nothing to stop that kind of thinking. The smart manager or owner WANTS his employees to feel this way. And the truly genius companies that have pulled this off throughout their organizations (Apple, Southwest Airlines, etc) are almost all highly successful, partly due to this reason. They have convinced their employees that the "extra effort" is worth it -- and by worth it, they don't mean worth it for you. They mean worth it to the owners.
So yea, your post is well-placed and you don't even need a tin-foil hat to see the zero-sum game at play.
** (sidenote: Please realize that the business world is emotion-less. Finance doesn't care whether employees "feel good" or not. Please do not misinterpret that I am purposely trying to be an asshole just to be an asshole. This entire post is based on the financial reality -- not the emotional reality.)
I automaticly screen out companies that don't answer questions about salaries and options. I only want to work for companies that are passionate about compensating me.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"How many suits really understand what a "sigma" is in this (or any) context, or why six of them is an interesting quantity?" Probably every single MBA that ever graduated from an accredited program knows what a gaussian distribution is, and what it means to be one, two, or n sigma away from the norm. To suggest otherwise is to not have even a clue as to their training. Even at the undergrad level, basic business statistics will be followed by operations analysis. If anything, and I've tutored a lot of math over the years, I'd say business students have a better idea of what statistical terms mean in terms of practical applicaton than math majors, who know instead how something is defined.
"It's great for process oriented manufacturing concerns. It's crap for an engineering company."
Yeah. Well, duh. Its about process improvement by designing measurements that allow you to control deviation as nearly close as is feasibly possible to the onset of drift. An engineering company's concerns involve the creation of new processes. Talk about putting shoes on a snake!
There all a bunch of jass asses and 2 months ago my manager told me I was rated as a B. He also told me no-one was an A, 4 people got B's, most got C's, and a few got D's.
My manager got fired yesterday and ALL of the D's kept their jobs.
And the new economy stuff is mostly about making new processes (with a healthy dose of existing processes to support it), so yes, there is a difference, and 6 sig or whatever needs to accomodate that. That or not hew strictly to something that doesn't match what you need.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
This idea that the potential of a business model is more important than the actual product or service drives me crazy.
Punctuality is associated with discipline, order, conformity and control.
Passion isn't (generally).
So they want levels of passion similar to Mr Spock having a shag?
people name products and methodologies for a reason.
And what is this reason? Did the "black belt" become the "black belt" by whipping the ass of everyone else there? No, the position is just there. Of course, once you're the "black belt" long enough and demonstrated skill at training people you can become a "master black belt" which breaks whatever tenuous martial arts analogy that they had going.
A refutation of them is not unimportant, nor is it meaningless.
Your refutation contained no information and was therefore unimportant and meaningless. Try harder.
Incidentially, I find that GE says more about Six Sigma here than this executive level magazine says here, though I guess if your job is selling subscriptions then you better learn to say as little as possible in every issue, which probably explains where all the management-speak comes from in the first place.
Although genentech is riding high on huge waves of publicity from its anticancer drugs, it is hard to say if many of them are actually doing anything.
For instance, Genentech got a huge amount of publicity when one of its anticancer mabs worked in colon cancer - but in this case "works" meant extends median survivial from 14 to 16 months.
I suppose if you are a cancer patient or a family member, two months is a lot.
But if you are passionate about curing cancer, looks more like a super, super $$ drug that does not really do anything
bottom line: genentech is certainly passionate about selling very, very exspensive drugs that may or may not be very very good.
This keeps getting repeated. "Old way is inferior to the new way." With the new way always being a more laid back, less money oriented approach.
I have news for that will just shock the world. Companies like Google and Apple are run just like every other company. People are hired for what they can do, and are let go for not living up to their potential. CEOs do what makes them more money. The only difference, is the that "new way" hides their intent behind an "employee friendly facade." How can Apple be part of the new way when Jobs is notorious for being the typical power hungry boss who will ridicule you in front of your coworkers? How is that the "new way"?
Google and Apple are not some awesome place where everyone just relaxes all day being "creative" and yet somehow still make money. At both companies, goals are set and if they are met people get in trouble or even fired. Just like at every other company. These companies also live and die by their stock value. Who was that bough an oversized company jet and decided to refit it? Was that some greedy boss at Bellsouth or Enron? Nope, it was the good natured guys at Google who don't care about money, right?
The company you run from your garage which you are the "CEO" of does not count as a non-profit, no matter how little money it makes.
It's nice to see that the old BS executives used to spout off about is being replaced by new fresh, think outside-the-box BS. The purpose, however, is the same: to convince people how smart they are and to convince the more lemming-like investors that they are doing something new worth investing in.
It reminds me a bit of a scene in the Hudsucker Proxy:
REPORTER #4
How do you respond to the charges
that you're out of ideas? Has
Norville Barnes run dry?
NORVILLE
Not at all. Why, just this week
I came up with several new sweet
ideas. A larger model hula hoop
for the portly. A battery option
for the lazy and handicapped. A
model with more sand for hard-of hearing.
I'm earning my keep.
I suspect that a well-tanned nose would keep you in the top 10%.
You're just jealous because someone who works for a non-profit that covers a quarter of the state of Ohio is actually successful... ;P Have a rotten fucked up shitty day.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
The main rule is to remember what a business exists for. And that is not "to make money." Within three weeks of starting b-school we were being told that that was the route to disaster, because although that may be why people invest money or labour in the company, that is their reason, not the company.
The real purpose of a company is satisfy the wants and/or needs of a market segment at a price that the market segment is willing to pay. If you can do this and turn a profit, the company will continue. The market (And here, I mean the customer base, not the stock market.) does not care if you are making a profit. It does not care that your shareholders want ever-increasing profitability.
One of the thing about the "old rules" in the article is its emphasis on the stock price. This is to take your eye off of your market, and I contend that this is the major cause of most of the septic corporate behaviour in the world today.
In fairness to the CEOs, the market and thus the boards of directors insist on this devotion to share price. From the article: "Never before has a CEO more needed to take risks, but rarely has Wall Street been less receptive. A recent Booz Allen study found that a CEO is vulnerable to ouster if his stock price has lagged behind the S&P 500 by an average of 2 percent since he took the top job." (God forbid we should take a momentary hit is stock price because we are developing a new market.) "Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers says he knows a number of colleagues who are planning to step down because of the difficulty of balancing the shortterm pressures of the Street with what's in the longterm best interest of the company."
Despite what many people think about the "intelligence" of the stock market, the function of investment funds is only to make money. There is no incentive in the stock market to take the long view.
In the book "Up the Organization", the author, Robert Townsend, relates that when he was hired to be the CEO of Avis, he insisted on one condition: "Don't talk to me about the stock price for two years!" He didn't want to be distracted from the long term goals by worrying about the vagaries of the stock market. I have alwys thought Mr Townsend to be a very smart man.