In this case, because it is entirely due to choice (partially by the youth, partially by the larger society), the difference is instructive rather than disingenuous.
No, though the lines can be blurred somewhat, there is a recognized and fundamental difference between what are termed 'knowledge workers' and laborers.
In the case of laborers, the value of the operation in which they participate lies primarily with the capital and resources of the operations. This is most readily apparent when the labor of any one individual is a commodity that is easily substituted with the labor of another while the capital and resources are relatively scarce. In this situation, the owner of the capital and resources has a huge advantage, as laborers essentially have to bid (via offering to work for less compensation or less favorable terms) for access to participate in the operation (i.e., have a job). A fast food restaurant whose facilities, location/real-estate and equipment are valuable and scarce relative to the availability of the labor required to operate the facility is a typical example of an operation largely reliant on low-skilled labor. A radiologist is an example of a highly skilled laborer (highly skilled laborers are often referred to as technicians to distinguish them from both low-skilled labor as well as knowledge workers).
In the case of knowledge workers, however, the knowledge and expertise that they possess is scarce relative to the capital and resources of the operation that are applicable to their roles. In fact, the total capital and resources of an organization based primarily on knowledge work may be negligible (i.e., consulting groups where individual members work from their home office). These situations are most readily recognized by the characteristic that the value the person is able to generate for the organization is a function of their knowledge and expertise moreso than the capital and resources allocated.
From a worker's perspective, the most important distinction between labor and knowledge work is that the ownership of the primary means of production is inherently owned by the worker in the latter case, while it is owned by the organization in the former.
Real-estate bubbles the world over demonstrate the foolishness and fallacy of this position.
Your statement is ambiguous, but I assume that you are implying that real-estate bubbles were bad for society, but that you believe that profitability as a measure would judge them to be good for society, therefore profitability is a poor measure of benefit to society.
If the above is an accurate representation of your argument, then my response would be that your argument is based on a misunderstanding of profitability.
The question you have to ask is whether the net effect of the bubble created by government policy was a profit or loss for society. If the net effect was negative (i.e., not profitable), as in the case of the most recent housing bubble in the US, then the actual effect of those policies that contributed to the bubble were bad as measured by profitability.
Any management decisions that sacrifice the overall or long-term viability of the business for short-term benefit do not, in fact, generate profit (or minimize losses) for shareholders with the exception of the case where management has determined that the business itself is no longer economically viable and winding it down is the only way to avoid throwing more good money after bad.
Even if management is able to pump the stock price temporarily, if that is done at the expense of the fundamentals of the core business then it actually destroys shareholder value and profitability. It is critical to remember that just because share price goes up, that does not mean profits for shareholders because that potential profit is not turned into actual profit unless they sell their shares at the higher price. For these schemes to work, however, the number of current shareholders who are aware of what is happening must be significantly smaller than the number of new investors/shareholders-to-be who are fooled, because otherwise the net sell-off of shares will crash the stock price before it can be inflated. The only shareholders who profit from these pump and dump type schemes are the ones who actually realize what is going on (due to either greater insight or insider information) and wisely decide that it is no longer worth being a shareholder and thus sell their shares at the temporarily inflated price before the reality of what has happened becomes apparent to the wider market.
In other words, for the kind of temporary 'milk the cash cow' type strategies implied earlier in the thread to work, they need to fool the majority of current and potential shareholders such that they do not realize that the value of the company is in fact being destroyed. The fact that this does not "generate profit for shareholders" overall is almost tautalogical.
Whatever happened to companies that loudly proclaimed, "The most important assets we have . . . are our employees!" . . . ?
. . . and actually meant what they said . ..
They mean what they say, but the mistake you're making is the implicit assumption that all employees are equally valuable* (to the company in terms of economic value, not as human beings in general).
For technology companies in particular, the key employees with true, industry-leading expertise in their field comprise the crown jewels of the company's "assets". In these cases, while it is true to say "The most important assets we have are our employees", the truth is that those 5% of employees who are critical to the core business represent 95% of the company's economic valuation of human resources.
* A good way to figure out how valuable you are to the company is to ask the questions "How much would it cost to replace me?", "How does that cost compare to the cost of continuing to employ me?", "How significant is the impact of my departure for other reasons?". If you are the LeBron James the answers might be "at insanely prohibitive cost, and quite likely only with inferior substitutes", "Very high while we lose games and merchandising revenue", and "Massive downgrade of the brand". If you're the janitor, however, those answers would be "The time it takes to process any one of the 300 applications we have on file", "insignificant difference", and "nothing".
The second concept you listed--wealth given to shareholders--is return on investment, not profit. Whether that return on investment is in fact amounts to profits for those shareholders is a different matter.
Also, you have to be careful to distinguish profits generated for some entity other than the business (e.g., shareholders, employees, customers, etc.) vs. the business itself being profitable. Put another way, managing a business to be profitable is an entirely different matter from managing the business to generate profits for certain stakeholders. The latter can happen even in the extreme case of stakeholders destroying a viable business at a loss if that results in a net gain for them because of other factors. E.g., a large organization purchasing a smaller competitor for more than the latter is worth and then winding it down might be ultimately profitable if the resulting increased control over the market is sufficiently valuable. An individual employee (including the CEO) may also profit greatly by compromising the profitability of the company via what amounts to sabotage in return for bribes (which may take the form of anything from cash to guarantees of future employment elsewhere) or insider trading opportunities.
You are not the GP, but you're making the same mistake. "Just for profit" != "profit NOW" Also, you are conflating the motivations of individuals within the company with the purpose management of a company in and of itself.
MBAs want to make more profit NOW. Not just this quarter, or this month, but NOW. And they don't care if it's only on paper, or only stealing sales figures from tomorrow. They will play a shell game to look better in the short run without producing anything.
By your own words, that is not managing for profit, it's managing "to look better". Managing in a way that deliberately compromises or destroys an institution's ability to continue generating profit is by definition not managing "just for profit".
The reality is that many engineers do things that are nearly as bad as the caricature of a MBA you describe, and can be extremely ineffective at managing even if the company flourishes while they are at the helm. The reason is that they compromise the systemic health of the organization by effectively turning it into a mechanism to extend the reach and scope of their own creative abilities. This typically represents the best way they know how to "make a better product", but leads to a company that is absolutely reliant on that specific person remaining at the helm in order to function*. That is why so many once-great companies crap out once their founders leave. Driven by the sole purpose of creating great products, the founders inadvertently constructed a fundamentally unstable organization without systemic protections against being taken over by idiots and shysters (in the best case this happens organically after they retire, but can also happen even before they actually leave--or can even force them to leave against their will). This also destroys profitability and threatens the company's survival in the long term (though on a longer-term horizon than the kind of deliberate value destruction described in your post).
* This is not too dissimilar to the situation where a programmer creates a polyglot codebase that elegantly solves complex problems, but that only he or she can ever get to compile or run without crashing and leaving behind only inscrutable log files and core dumps.
Management just for profit means destroying companies in the long term.
Management for profit is a simple requirement for company survival--all it means is that you manage the enterprise such that the value that it is able to generate and capture as a result of its operations exceeds its share of the cost burden of its operations. You're conflating sacrificing long-term viability for short-term gains with management for profit, or perhaps confusing managing for what is profitable for specific individuals with what is profitable for the corporation.
That being said, there are several broad strategies for increasing profit:
1) Increase total value generated. E.g., Facebook improving its service or expanding the scope of its service.
2) Increase captured share of value generated. E.g., Facebook 'monetizing' the value generated by the social graph--people already use it to conduct trade, advertise, etc. Facebook just wants a bigger cut of the action.
3) Reduce total cost burden of the operation. E.g., Facebook improving energy efficiency of its data centers.
4) Reduce share of total cost burden borne by the operation. E.g., Facebook lobbying governments to subsidize its operations with various tax breaks etc.
Variations or specific implementations of the above strategies may be unethical, risky, etc. (e.g., strategy 2 can damage your reputation and actually result in reduced value generated overall, or strategy 4 might result in a backlash from the groups that had to absorb the externalized cost of your operation), but all are at least intended to improve the probability of survival of the corporation.
One of the goals of your organization seems to be commoditization of innovation itself in order to free inventors from having to implement or otherwise directly participate in a complete commercial pipeline in order to monetize their inventions. In order for commodity markets to function well and on a large scale, however, there need to be well-understood ways to classify, quantify, and otherwise understand the commodity in question such that it is possible to price the commodity and thus increase accessibility to capital markets. Do you think it might be possible to identify key attributes of innovations in general in order to make invention valuation more reliable and accessible to capital markets? Is the nature of invention such that it would require unique/yet-to-be-developed mechanisms to create such a market or do you see Intellectual Venture's current business model as the ideal?
There are a few issues with your line of reasoning.
First is that the increase in productivity has anything to do with teachers. My personal experience has been that it is due to technology (both 'hard' tech like advances in electronics and 'soft' tech like Lean, Balanced Scorecard, and other improvements in the methods by which we organize people) that is responsible for the increase in productivity. The 'teachers' of these tech improvements (consultants, enterprising employees, entrepreneurs, etc.) absolutely have been rewarded.
The second issue is the assumption that the educational system allows for differentiated remuneration based on value provided. If teachers' pay was differentiated based on the quality and quantity of output, there would be incentives (and therefore more effort) by motivated teachers to provide greater numbers of students with a higher quality of education. Many people who actually have the skillset required to improve the educational system would also find it worth their while to participate there rather than in industry. Current systems, however, do not permit such differentiation so there is little economic incentive. Furthermore, interested outside actors (e.g., tomorrow's employers of today's students) have no mechanism by which they can reliably incentivise and provide resources to good teachers, so it is in their best interest to instead withold resources from the K-12 educational system and employ them in internal training systems or to higher ed scholarship programs instead.
The final issue is the fact that progress in every aspect of every society in the world has at times been subject to disruptive change. That is to say, further improvement to the system may be directly detrimental to and against the interests of many current participants in the system. In many cases we can also see that incumbents deferring or preventing the disruption in an area essentially deferred or prevented progress in that area by doing so. Technology and cultural evolution have driven disruptive change in all aspects of industry that are now much more productive than they had been previously, while disruption in the education system has not been allowed by participants in the current system.
In summary, there is no incentive for the educational system to provide education for any purpose besides improving the standardized test scores by which the system's funding is determined, there is no systemic incentive for teachers to teach better or for highly skilled individuals to become teachers in the first place, there is no systemic incentive for outside entities to improve the existing educational system, and there are many systemic barriers to disruptive improvements. In the end, K-12 Teachers are in fact expected to provide less of the total education ultimately required to function in society (one could argue that they have been prevented from providing it), so society has largely distributed the benefits of increased productivity elsewhere.
Just to be clear, I feel that good teachers are among the most valuable people in a society. The issue is that systemic problems essentially limit their ability to actually apply their skills effectively and to receive economic rewards commensurate with value provided. These two overarching problems discourage both idealists (because their ability to make a positive difference will always be limited, minimized, and often even discouraged) as well as pragmatists (because there is no economic incentive). The stranglehold that incumbents have on the system also prevents (or at least significantly hinders) innovative but disruptive improvements from gaining any traction. This has largely resulted in a feedback loop where the improvements in K-12 education have not kept pace with the educational requirements of society, so society allocates more resources to higher ed or other education systems instead, and the people with the knowledge and skills required to improve the system take their skills elsewhere.
In this context, the definition of "directly" that you are implying is useless. E.g., was it the solider, rifle, bullet, the disruption of basic neural function due to the brain being massively traumatized, the cessation of cardio-pulmonary activity, or the resulting cascade failure of metabolic pathways that "directly" caused the enemy combatant to die when shot in the head?
In this context, a political leader is 'directly' responsible for the consequences of a decision when those consequences were reasonably foreseeable without the benefit of hindsight. Every decision has tradeoffs, so it is expected that a political leader has weighed those tradeoffs and decided that the foreseeable positive/desirable consequences outweigh the foreseeable negative/undesirable consequences such that the tradeoff is acceptable and he/she is willing to accept responsibility for the outcome (i.e., both positive and negative consequences).
On the other hand, a political leader is 'indirectly' responsible for those consequences of decisions which were not reasonably foreseeable due to the limits of the knowledge available to them at the time. This acknowledgement does not and should not, however, always absolve the leader of any accountability related to indirect consequences.
To argue that Bush was not 'directly' responsible for American deaths you have to argue that American deaths were not a foreseeable consequence of going to war. That deaths are a foreseeable and well-understood consequence of war does not, of course, automatically mean that going to war was a bad decision. To make that judgment requires that you decide whether or not the positive consequences of the war outweigh the negative consequences (such as dead American soldiers). To paraphrase one of my old JROTC instructors, a politician should only decide to go to war if, on the 10,000th time he does so, he can still fold up that flag, look that kid's mother in the eye as he hands it over, and still believe that it was worth it. FDR and Churchill would have been able to--and history would agree with them. Would Bush have been able to do the same? I personally do not have an answer to that question, but that is the bar that should be set.
This is off-topic, I know you were half joking, and this is not particularly aimed at you, but it irritates me when I see that quote.
The typical application of that quote only indicates that you are intelligent enough to understand your shortcomings but not sufficiently intelligent to be able to understand and internalize the notion that rational action based on the knowledge, understanding, and insight that you do possess will result in better outcomes than either chronic indecision or irrational behavior justified by lack of perfect knowledge. I.e., it only holds if you fall into a sort of 'uncanny valley' of intelligence where you're just smart enough to be your own worst enemy. As my parents used to say, "Smart enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be useful."
If you are intelligent enough to understand that your doubts are actually a useful part of your knowledge--essentially meta-data representing your confidence in the accuracy, completeness, or precision of the data or your understanding of the data and its implications, if you will--you can utilize them to help guide your decisions. This guidance might take the form of risk mitigation steps to guard against (or deal with fallout resulting from) flaws in your decisions and understanding or a realization that you should first obtain more information before making the decision (if circumstances allow this as a viable option).
"Joe did better because he's too stupid to realize that he should've wallowed in self-doubt and indecision like me" is a cop-out--especially if Joe is consistently doing better than you. If group X is able to effectively and consistently marginalize and derail the efforts of group Y over long periods of time, then it doesn't indicate that group X is too stupid to recognize the shortcomings in their knowledge and understanding and is simply getting consistently lucky, it more likely indicates that they understand how to manage those shortcomings better than group Y. Group Y invoking Russel's quote in that situation is them simply burying their heads in the sand rather than confronting the uncomfortable-but-more-likely alternative that Group X is in fact more intelligent (in at least certain areas).
No, they do not charge to preserve exclusivity--they practice need-blind admission and provide need-based financial aid (up to and including essentially waiving tution for lower-income students). The exclusivity comes from the rigorous selection process.
This can be a good step, but you'll want to sort out your vision of the market before you approach potential investors or marketing partners. The direction and priorities of future development will be influenced--if not dictated--by the marketing campaign. That is, after all, the entire point of marketing (as distinguished from sales--actually, first be sure you are in fact looking for marketing expertise as opposed to sales expertise!). In fact, a marketing effort cannot succeed without that kind of authority.
Before you form any kind of business relationship with a marketing partner, therefore, you must first ensure that their vision and your vision of the market are compatible or things will go south very quickly.
Not saying that I agree with your parent poster (actually, I'd guess the assertion to be utter BS), but your reasoning does consider all of the necessary factors to determine that windmills could not make money under those conditions (producing less energy than required to construct).
Cost of energy changes radically based on market environment--a large scale Hydro facility can generate electricity for 10% of the cost of a smaller diesel-fueled power plant. Even in the same physical location, if the cheap coal-fired plant operating today has to shut down because of environmental impact 3 years from now, it may make sense to take advantage of today's cheap energy to manufacture windmills to profit off of tomorrow's soaring energy prices.
Basically, if you manufacture the wind mill in a cheap energy environment and then operate it in an expensive energy environment you can still make a profit even if it generates less energy than it took to build. From an economic perspective it is basically a device by which you can perform energy arbitrage across energy market A and temporally (and possibly physically) displaced market B. Market distortions such as subsidies and cheap capital (minimizing the negative time-value of money impact caused by the temporal displacement of returns) make it easier to make a profit.
In the interest of being pedantic (this is/. after all), I would argue that Society is not necessarily more forgiving, but that the punishment is effectively negligible or trivial to people with sufficient resources.
It is difficult for a working class person to make a comeback simply because a large enough scandal will ruin him/her to the point that all of their attention is focused on scraping together the basic necessities of life, whereas someone with sufficient funds in the bank can focus their time on rehabilitating their public image. The punishment is the same, but their ability to cope with the punishment is dramatically different.
As another example, the average college kid hit with multiple $3k settlement offers for illegally downloading The Hurt Locker may have their life ruined or seriously altered because they are forced to drop out of school as a consequence of the additional financial burden, whereas it is possibly a minor annoyance (maybe increased frequency of disapproving looks from the folks at thanksgiving?) for a rich kid in the same situation. Again, equal punishment but vastly unequal outcomes due to ability to cope with the punishment.
The above are simply natural consequences of the fact that our system of justice is based on, for the most part, equality of punishments for transgressions rather than equality of outcomes.
Leave the hire, fire, and promote decisions to the managers.
This is already how it works in every company with which I'm familiar. The sad thing, however, is that there is a significant impact from the obstensively procedural/administrative input from HR.
This comes in 2 broad forms:
The disproportionate reaction to poor outcomes. Poor people decisions (of which hiring/firing are perhaps the most visible) are the worst kinds of management mistakes you can make in terms of impact on the organization as well as your career. Following HR 'recommendations' is very effective political cover for the mistakes that every manager will eventually make at some point. This effect is very closely related to a broader category of manager behavior, an example of which that most/.'ers would be familiar with would be 'Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM'.
The administrative burden that can be imposed by HR cannot be understated. If HR discards CVs that do not match formal qualifications, or simply declines to forward them unless they're specifically requested, or requires some sort of formal procedure to bypass protocols to make hires against formal qualification requirements, they can effectively make broad categories of hiring decisions even if the authority rests solely with the hiring manager in theory. They may not be able to decide who is hired, but they can effectively decide who cannot be hired via obstructive policy. Management time is precious, and for various reasons HR processes designed to minimize time wasted on non-viable candidates are rarely evaluated for their false negatives (broadly speaking, false negatives are difficult to detect by nature and detection only reflects badly on HR, who is also the only entity consistently in a position to try to measure this, so there is a strong inherent conflict of interest a work here).
Due to the above the issue is much more subtle and difficult to address than you would think, even if C-level execs and HR department heads genuinely want to address it.
Yes, but at this point I'm 29, married, and have to consider the disruptive effect that would have on my family. Also, given my industry experience and exposure, an MBA from Harvard would instantly hyper-charge my career, meaning multiple relocations (already put my wife through one of these due to my most recent promotion, with drastic changes in climate and culture) and very, very long hours at the office. Despite the popular image of fat-cat corporate bosses, my superiors are some of the hardest-working people I've ever known, and I'm coming to suspect that waiting for a reduction in family responsibilities rather than lack of experience/opportunity is the reason many did not move into higher-level positions until their kids were off to college.
Given the above, even assuming HBS would accept an undergrad dropout, I have to wonder if the seat wouldn't be better spent on someone who will give their career their undivided attention.
Re:Did Zuckerberg ever have to get past HR?
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Just Say No To College
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I went to Harvard and dropped out after my first year not due to having a great startup idea, but having to deal with family issues. I'm also not a trust-fund baby, as neither of my parents has a college degree, my mom's family business was destroyed by a natural distaster when I was a small kid, and my dad has always been a blue-collar worker in a low-paid line of work. My family qualified for food stamps and subsidised lunches but my parents wouldn't take either (and they're dyed-in-the-wool liberal democrats--imagine that). I grew up paying for my own school supplies, field trips, etc., from the money I made selling crops that I grew personally--my dad funded my initial startup in terms of seedstock and about $80 of fertilizer in lieu of allowance for working on the farm.
I started my post-dropout career at a $11/hr job technically classified as temporary field labor. There I helped my boss write a field data collection/productivity app on what was the closest thing to a hand-held tablet (the 2004-version of a CF-07 from Panasonic).
Second move was to a different company as a temp for $20/hr--also still considered field labor but I was expected to be able to operate a gps unit. There I set up their entire GIS system and surrounding business processes from scratch.
Several years later and I'm now in a full-time position (which had been advertised as "MBA + X years experience required") with that second company managing planning for regional operations and developing strategy and processes for a global multi-9-figure operations unit. Working on a degree through University of Phoenix just to get the piece of paper--but even when I do it'll be useless because I'm already at a level that requires at least a masters per formal requirements.
In short, it can be done. That being said, HR fought my initial hire as a full-time employee, and one person even made it her personal mission to limit my promotions and pay and to try to exclude me from consideration for potential promotions. The only reason I advanced the way I did was because my managers personally and specifically fought HR on my behalf. If I had the MBA and hadn't had that resistance from HR I'd be paid double what I'm paid today at the very least.
Here's my advice. If you are willing to start at the bottom, and earn recognition via tangible accomplishments, you can make a career in corporate America without a degree. It will require that you not only outperform your credentialed peers by orders of magnitude, but also build very strong professional relationships on the business management side such that your manager+3 will be willing to boot stomp HR on your behalf. You will in all likelihood still be undercompensated unless you are willing to jump ship and objectively prove your desirability as demonstrated by other companies headhunting you. As that is largely opposed to developing strong relationships with your managers, this is a delicate balancing act. If you are willing and able to do the same while actually having a degree you will earn much more $ at almost any large corporation. Also, do not kid yourself--people actually learn stuff in college, so you have to be willing to actively self-educate in order to be competitive.
If you want to start your own business in an industry that is not heavily credential-sensitive, and you have a capitlization plan that does not involve stuffy bankers and conservative investors, and feel that you can spare 4 - 6 years gaining experience, I absolutely recommend jumping in to industry and reading Drucker, Kaplan and Norton, etc. on your own as opposed to getting a degree. 4 - 6 years in a real career will be much more valuable than a degree once you're your own boss.
If you will "only" be a highly competent and consistent performer looking for a decent, stable job, GET A DEGREE.
Software and design patents do not actually require that you did, intend to, or even know how to implement the described invention. In practice, they do not require that you describe the invention in sufficient detail that it can be implemented based on the description. You can easily file these kinds of patents based on your imagination.
Patents based on imagination might not be cost-effective and/or easily enforcible, however, but that can be worked around by targeting 'adjacent' applications that are a logical consequence of the idea in question. For example, a direct patent on imaginary hard AI will be difficult to enforce, because it is unlikely that your imagination-based patent describes key details of any real implementation. What you can do, however, is patent all sorts of applications of hard AI, which essentially amounts to trolling through the patent database and rehashing everything into 'doing foo... but with AI!' much in the way that we saw 'doing foo... but on a computer/the internetz/a smartphone!', which can be highly effective and lucrative.
Your position ignores that sometimes there is an objectively "correct" thing to do and that sometimes, someone is objectively wrong for arguing against it.
That statement is not accurate. The only objectively "correct" things as relates to politics are facts. Interpretation of facts, determination the relative importance of specific facts with respect to a given social issue, and subsequent decisions are at the heart of politics, and there is never an objectively "correct" position for any point of that process-- it is all relative to objectives, philosophy, morality, ethics and beliefs. If you say that someone's political views are "incorrect" given a common body of facts, you are really saying that their system of values differs from yours.
Effective influencers, understanding the above, consequently spend their time trying to convince their audience as to why their view is more consistent with the audience's system of values than the opposing view. Less effective people try to get their audience to change their system of values to match their own. Unsuccessful people label their audience wrong.
Not sure if you're a troll, but, in case you're being serious and just suffered a reading comprehension failure or skipped over the ggp post because you're browsing at >0, I suggest that you re-read the thread.
Strictly speaking, at minimum it would require two time fields and two boolean fields, with each boolean field specifying whether or not the interval is inclusive of each corresponding end point. It would also require a lot more than one simple constraint to get the desired behavior provided by the new datatype--and the whole mess would need to be repeated for every single interval with a simple exclusivity constraint. The new range datatype also makes it relatively simple to, e.g., specify a non-zero overlap constraint, which is significantly harder without it.
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In this case, because it is entirely due to choice (partially by the youth, partially by the larger society), the difference is instructive rather than disingenuous.
No, though the lines can be blurred somewhat, there is a recognized and fundamental difference between what are termed 'knowledge workers' and laborers.
In the case of laborers, the value of the operation in which they participate lies primarily with the capital and resources of the operations. This is most readily apparent when the labor of any one individual is a commodity that is easily substituted with the labor of another while the capital and resources are relatively scarce. In this situation, the owner of the capital and resources has a huge advantage, as laborers essentially have to bid (via offering to work for less compensation or less favorable terms) for access to participate in the operation (i.e., have a job). A fast food restaurant whose facilities, location/real-estate and equipment are valuable and scarce relative to the availability of the labor required to operate the facility is a typical example of an operation largely reliant on low-skilled labor. A radiologist is an example of a highly skilled laborer (highly skilled laborers are often referred to as technicians to distinguish them from both low-skilled labor as well as knowledge workers).
In the case of knowledge workers, however, the knowledge and expertise that they possess is scarce relative to the capital and resources of the operation that are applicable to their roles. In fact, the total capital and resources of an organization based primarily on knowledge work may be negligible (i.e., consulting groups where individual members work from their home office). These situations are most readily recognized by the characteristic that the value the person is able to generate for the organization is a function of their knowledge and expertise moreso than the capital and resources allocated.
From a worker's perspective, the most important distinction between labor and knowledge work is that the ownership of the primary means of production is inherently owned by the worker in the latter case, while it is owned by the organization in the former.
Real-estate bubbles the world over demonstrate the foolishness and fallacy of this position.
Your statement is ambiguous, but I assume that you are implying that real-estate bubbles were bad for society, but that you believe that profitability as a measure would judge them to be good for society, therefore profitability is a poor measure of benefit to society.
If the above is an accurate representation of your argument, then my response would be that your argument is based on a misunderstanding of profitability.
The question you have to ask is whether the net effect of the bubble created by government policy was a profit or loss for society. If the net effect was negative (i.e., not profitable), as in the case of the most recent housing bubble in the US, then the actual effect of those policies that contributed to the bubble were bad as measured by profitability.
Any management decisions that sacrifice the overall or long-term viability of the business for short-term benefit do not, in fact, generate profit (or minimize losses) for shareholders with the exception of the case where management has determined that the business itself is no longer economically viable and winding it down is the only way to avoid throwing more good money after bad.
Even if management is able to pump the stock price temporarily, if that is done at the expense of the fundamentals of the core business then it actually destroys shareholder value and profitability. It is critical to remember that just because share price goes up, that does not mean profits for shareholders because that potential profit is not turned into actual profit unless they sell their shares at the higher price. For these schemes to work, however, the number of current shareholders who are aware of what is happening must be significantly smaller than the number of new investors/shareholders-to-be who are fooled, because otherwise the net sell-off of shares will crash the stock price before it can be inflated. The only shareholders who profit from these pump and dump type schemes are the ones who actually realize what is going on (due to either greater insight or insider information) and wisely decide that it is no longer worth being a shareholder and thus sell their shares at the temporarily inflated price before the reality of what has happened becomes apparent to the wider market.
In other words, for the kind of temporary 'milk the cash cow' type strategies implied earlier in the thread to work, they need to fool the majority of current and potential shareholders such that they do not realize that the value of the company is in fact being destroyed. The fact that this does not "generate profit for shareholders" overall is almost tautalogical.
Whatever happened to companies that loudly proclaimed, "The most important assets we have . . . are our employees!" . . . ? . . . and actually meant what they said . . .
They mean what they say, but the mistake you're making is the implicit assumption that all employees are equally valuable* (to the company in terms of economic value, not as human beings in general).
For technology companies in particular, the key employees with true, industry-leading expertise in their field comprise the crown jewels of the company's "assets". In these cases, while it is true to say "The most important assets we have are our employees", the truth is that those 5% of employees who are critical to the core business represent 95% of the company's economic valuation of human resources.
* A good way to figure out how valuable you are to the company is to ask the questions "How much would it cost to replace me?", "How does that cost compare to the cost of continuing to employ me?", "How significant is the impact of my departure for other reasons?". If you are the LeBron James the answers might be "at insanely prohibitive cost, and quite likely only with inferior substitutes", "Very high while we lose games and merchandising revenue", and "Massive downgrade of the brand". If you're the janitor, however, those answers would be "The time it takes to process any one of the 300 applications we have on file", "insignificant difference", and "nothing".
Whether that return on investment is in fact amounts to profits for those shareholders is a different matter.
Wow. Apparently my brain simply does not function properly in the morning before I've had caffeine.
The second concept you listed--wealth given to shareholders--is return on investment, not profit. Whether that return on investment is in fact amounts to profits for those shareholders is a different matter.
Also, you have to be careful to distinguish profits generated for some entity other than the business (e.g., shareholders, employees, customers, etc.) vs. the business itself being profitable. Put another way, managing a business to be profitable is an entirely different matter from managing the business to generate profits for certain stakeholders. The latter can happen even in the extreme case of stakeholders destroying a viable business at a loss if that results in a net gain for them because of other factors. E.g., a large organization purchasing a smaller competitor for more than the latter is worth and then winding it down might be ultimately profitable if the resulting increased control over the market is sufficiently valuable. An individual employee (including the CEO) may also profit greatly by compromising the profitability of the company via what amounts to sabotage in return for bribes (which may take the form of anything from cash to guarantees of future employment elsewhere) or insider trading opportunities.
You are not the GP, but you're making the same mistake. "Just for profit" != "profit NOW" Also, you are conflating the motivations of individuals within the company with the purpose management of a company in and of itself.
MBAs want to make more profit NOW. Not just this quarter, or this month, but NOW. And they don't care if it's only on paper, or only stealing sales figures from tomorrow. They will play a shell game to look better in the short run without producing anything.
By your own words, that is not managing for profit, it's managing "to look better". Managing in a way that deliberately compromises or destroys an institution's ability to continue generating profit is by definition not managing "just for profit".
The reality is that many engineers do things that are nearly as bad as the caricature of a MBA you describe, and can be extremely ineffective at managing even if the company flourishes while they are at the helm. The reason is that they compromise the systemic health of the organization by effectively turning it into a mechanism to extend the reach and scope of their own creative abilities. This typically represents the best way they know how to "make a better product", but leads to a company that is absolutely reliant on that specific person remaining at the helm in order to function*. That is why so many once-great companies crap out once their founders leave. Driven by the sole purpose of creating great products, the founders inadvertently constructed a fundamentally unstable organization without systemic protections against being taken over by idiots and shysters (in the best case this happens organically after they retire, but can also happen even before they actually leave--or can even force them to leave against their will). This also destroys profitability and threatens the company's survival in the long term (though on a longer-term horizon than the kind of deliberate value destruction described in your post).
* This is not too dissimilar to the situation where a programmer creates a polyglot codebase that elegantly solves complex problems, but that only he or she can ever get to compile or run without crashing and leaving behind only inscrutable log files and core dumps.
Management just for profit means destroying companies in the long term.
Management for profit is a simple requirement for company survival--all it means is that you manage the enterprise such that the value that it is able to generate and capture as a result of its operations exceeds its share of the cost burden of its operations. You're conflating sacrificing long-term viability for short-term gains with management for profit, or perhaps confusing managing for what is profitable for specific individuals with what is profitable for the corporation.
That being said, there are several broad strategies for increasing profit:
Variations or specific implementations of the above strategies may be unethical, risky, etc. (e.g., strategy 2 can damage your reputation and actually result in reduced value generated overall, or strategy 4 might result in a backlash from the groups that had to absorb the externalized cost of your operation), but all are at least intended to improve the probability of survival of the corporation.
One of the goals of your organization seems to be commoditization of innovation itself in order to free inventors from having to implement or otherwise directly participate in a complete commercial pipeline in order to monetize their inventions. In order for commodity markets to function well and on a large scale, however, there need to be well-understood ways to classify, quantify, and otherwise understand the commodity in question such that it is possible to price the commodity and thus increase accessibility to capital markets. Do you think it might be possible to identify key attributes of innovations in general in order to make invention valuation more reliable and accessible to capital markets? Is the nature of invention such that it would require unique/yet-to-be-developed mechanisms to create such a market or do you see Intellectual Venture's current business model as the ideal?
There needs to be a universal standard.
This just cries out for the obligatory xkcd.
There are a few issues with your line of reasoning.
First is that the increase in productivity has anything to do with teachers. My personal experience has been that it is due to technology (both 'hard' tech like advances in electronics and 'soft' tech like Lean, Balanced Scorecard, and other improvements in the methods by which we organize people) that is responsible for the increase in productivity. The 'teachers' of these tech improvements (consultants, enterprising employees, entrepreneurs, etc.) absolutely have been rewarded.
The second issue is the assumption that the educational system allows for differentiated remuneration based on value provided. If teachers' pay was differentiated based on the quality and quantity of output, there would be incentives (and therefore more effort) by motivated teachers to provide greater numbers of students with a higher quality of education. Many people who actually have the skillset required to improve the educational system would also find it worth their while to participate there rather than in industry. Current systems, however, do not permit such differentiation so there is little economic incentive. Furthermore, interested outside actors (e.g., tomorrow's employers of today's students) have no mechanism by which they can reliably incentivise and provide resources to good teachers, so it is in their best interest to instead withold resources from the K-12 educational system and employ them in internal training systems or to higher ed scholarship programs instead.
The final issue is the fact that progress in every aspect of every society in the world has at times been subject to disruptive change. That is to say, further improvement to the system may be directly detrimental to and against the interests of many current participants in the system. In many cases we can also see that incumbents deferring or preventing the disruption in an area essentially deferred or prevented progress in that area by doing so. Technology and cultural evolution have driven disruptive change in all aspects of industry that are now much more productive than they had been previously, while disruption in the education system has not been allowed by participants in the current system.
In summary, there is no incentive for the educational system to provide education for any purpose besides improving the standardized test scores by which the system's funding is determined, there is no systemic incentive for teachers to teach better or for highly skilled individuals to become teachers in the first place, there is no systemic incentive for outside entities to improve the existing educational system, and there are many systemic barriers to disruptive improvements. In the end, K-12 Teachers are in fact expected to provide less of the total education ultimately required to function in society (one could argue that they have been prevented from providing it), so society has largely distributed the benefits of increased productivity elsewhere.
Just to be clear, I feel that good teachers are among the most valuable people in a society. The issue is that systemic problems essentially limit their ability to actually apply their skills effectively and to receive economic rewards commensurate with value provided. These two overarching problems discourage both idealists (because their ability to make a positive difference will always be limited, minimized, and often even discouraged) as well as pragmatists (because there is no economic incentive). The stranglehold that incumbents have on the system also prevents (or at least significantly hinders) innovative but disruptive improvements from gaining any traction. This has largely resulted in a feedback loop where the improvements in K-12 education have not kept pace with the educational requirements of society, so society allocates more resources to higher ed or other education systems instead, and the people with the knowledge and skills required to improve the system take their skills elsewhere.
In this context, the definition of "directly" that you are implying is useless. E.g., was it the solider, rifle, bullet, the disruption of basic neural function due to the brain being massively traumatized, the cessation of cardio-pulmonary activity, or the resulting cascade failure of metabolic pathways that "directly" caused the enemy combatant to die when shot in the head?
In this context, a political leader is 'directly' responsible for the consequences of a decision when those consequences were reasonably foreseeable without the benefit of hindsight. Every decision has tradeoffs, so it is expected that a political leader has weighed those tradeoffs and decided that the foreseeable positive/desirable consequences outweigh the foreseeable negative/undesirable consequences such that the tradeoff is acceptable and he/she is willing to accept responsibility for the outcome (i.e., both positive and negative consequences).
On the other hand, a political leader is 'indirectly' responsible for those consequences of decisions which were not reasonably foreseeable due to the limits of the knowledge available to them at the time. This acknowledgement does not and should not, however, always absolve the leader of any accountability related to indirect consequences.
To argue that Bush was not 'directly' responsible for American deaths you have to argue that American deaths were not a foreseeable consequence of going to war. That deaths are a foreseeable and well-understood consequence of war does not, of course, automatically mean that going to war was a bad decision. To make that judgment requires that you decide whether or not the positive consequences of the war outweigh the negative consequences (such as dead American soldiers). To paraphrase one of my old JROTC instructors, a politician should only decide to go to war if, on the 10,000th time he does so, he can still fold up that flag, look that kid's mother in the eye as he hands it over, and still believe that it was worth it. FDR and Churchill would have been able to--and history would agree with them. Would Bush have been able to do the same? I personally do not have an answer to that question, but that is the bar that should be set.
This is off-topic, I know you were half joking, and this is not particularly aimed at you, but it irritates me when I see that quote.
The typical application of that quote only indicates that you are intelligent enough to understand your shortcomings but not sufficiently intelligent to be able to understand and internalize the notion that rational action based on the knowledge, understanding, and insight that you do possess will result in better outcomes than either chronic indecision or irrational behavior justified by lack of perfect knowledge. I.e., it only holds if you fall into a sort of 'uncanny valley' of intelligence where you're just smart enough to be your own worst enemy. As my parents used to say, "Smart enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be useful."
If you are intelligent enough to understand that your doubts are actually a useful part of your knowledge--essentially meta-data representing your confidence in the accuracy, completeness, or precision of the data or your understanding of the data and its implications, if you will--you can utilize them to help guide your decisions. This guidance might take the form of risk mitigation steps to guard against (or deal with fallout resulting from) flaws in your decisions and understanding or a realization that you should first obtain more information before making the decision (if circumstances allow this as a viable option).
"Joe did better because he's too stupid to realize that he should've wallowed in self-doubt and indecision like me" is a cop-out--especially if Joe is consistently doing better than you. If group X is able to effectively and consistently marginalize and derail the efforts of group Y over long periods of time, then it doesn't indicate that group X is too stupid to recognize the shortcomings in their knowledge and understanding and is simply getting consistently lucky, it more likely indicates that they understand how to manage those shortcomings better than group Y. Group Y invoking Russel's quote in that situation is them simply burying their heads in the sand rather than confronting the uncomfortable-but-more-likely alternative that Group X is in fact more intelligent (in at least certain areas).
No, they do not charge to preserve exclusivity--they practice need-blind admission and provide need-based financial aid (up to and including essentially waiving tution for lower-income students). The exclusivity comes from the rigorous selection process.
This can be a good step, but you'll want to sort out your vision of the market before you approach potential investors or marketing partners. The direction and priorities of future development will be influenced--if not dictated--by the marketing campaign. That is, after all, the entire point of marketing (as distinguished from sales--actually, first be sure you are in fact looking for marketing expertise as opposed to sales expertise!). In fact, a marketing effort cannot succeed without that kind of authority.
Before you form any kind of business relationship with a marketing partner, therefore, you must first ensure that their vision and your vision of the market are compatible or things will go south very quickly.
Not saying that I agree with your parent poster (actually, I'd guess the assertion to be utter BS), but your reasoning does consider all of the necessary factors to determine that windmills could not make money under those conditions (producing less energy than required to construct).
Cost of energy changes radically based on market environment--a large scale Hydro facility can generate electricity for 10% of the cost of a smaller diesel-fueled power plant. Even in the same physical location, if the cheap coal-fired plant operating today has to shut down because of environmental impact 3 years from now, it may make sense to take advantage of today's cheap energy to manufacture windmills to profit off of tomorrow's soaring energy prices.
Basically, if you manufacture the wind mill in a cheap energy environment and then operate it in an expensive energy environment you can still make a profit even if it generates less energy than it took to build. From an economic perspective it is basically a device by which you can perform energy arbitrage across energy market A and temporally (and possibly physically) displaced market B. Market distortions such as subsidies and cheap capital (minimizing the negative time-value of money impact caused by the temporal displacement of returns) make it easier to make a profit.
In the interest of being pedantic (this is /. after all), I would argue that Society is not necessarily more forgiving, but that the punishment is effectively negligible or trivial to people with sufficient resources.
It is difficult for a working class person to make a comeback simply because a large enough scandal will ruin him/her to the point that all of their attention is focused on scraping together the basic necessities of life, whereas someone with sufficient funds in the bank can focus their time on rehabilitating their public image. The punishment is the same, but their ability to cope with the punishment is dramatically different.
As another example, the average college kid hit with multiple $3k settlement offers for illegally downloading The Hurt Locker may have their life ruined or seriously altered because they are forced to drop out of school as a consequence of the additional financial burden, whereas it is possibly a minor annoyance (maybe increased frequency of disapproving looks from the folks at thanksgiving?) for a rich kid in the same situation. Again, equal punishment but vastly unequal outcomes due to ability to cope with the punishment.
The above are simply natural consequences of the fact that our system of justice is based on, for the most part, equality of punishments for transgressions rather than equality of outcomes.
Leave the hire, fire, and promote decisions to the managers.
This is already how it works in every company with which I'm familiar. The sad thing, however, is that there is a significant impact from the obstensively procedural/administrative input from HR.
This comes in 2 broad forms:
Due to the above the issue is much more subtle and difficult to address than you would think, even if C-level execs and HR department heads genuinely want to address it.
Yes, but at this point I'm 29, married, and have to consider the disruptive effect that would have on my family. Also, given my industry experience and exposure, an MBA from Harvard would instantly hyper-charge my career, meaning multiple relocations (already put my wife through one of these due to my most recent promotion, with drastic changes in climate and culture) and very, very long hours at the office. Despite the popular image of fat-cat corporate bosses, my superiors are some of the hardest-working people I've ever known, and I'm coming to suspect that waiting for a reduction in family responsibilities rather than lack of experience/opportunity is the reason many did not move into higher-level positions until their kids were off to college.
Given the above, even assuming HBS would accept an undergrad dropout, I have to wonder if the seat wouldn't be better spent on someone who will give their career their undivided attention.
I went to Harvard and dropped out after my first year not due to having a great startup idea, but having to deal with family issues. I'm also not a trust-fund baby, as neither of my parents has a college degree, my mom's family business was destroyed by a natural distaster when I was a small kid, and my dad has always been a blue-collar worker in a low-paid line of work. My family qualified for food stamps and subsidised lunches but my parents wouldn't take either (and they're dyed-in-the-wool liberal democrats--imagine that). I grew up paying for my own school supplies, field trips, etc., from the money I made selling crops that I grew personally--my dad funded my initial startup in terms of seedstock and about $80 of fertilizer in lieu of allowance for working on the farm.
I started my post-dropout career at a $11/hr job technically classified as temporary field labor. There I helped my boss write a field data collection/productivity app on what was the closest thing to a hand-held tablet (the 2004-version of a CF-07 from Panasonic).
Second move was to a different company as a temp for $20/hr--also still considered field labor but I was expected to be able to operate a gps unit. There I set up their entire GIS system and surrounding business processes from scratch.
Several years later and I'm now in a full-time position (which had been advertised as "MBA + X years experience required") with that second company managing planning for regional operations and developing strategy and processes for a global multi-9-figure operations unit. Working on a degree through University of Phoenix just to get the piece of paper--but even when I do it'll be useless because I'm already at a level that requires at least a masters per formal requirements.
In short, it can be done. That being said, HR fought my initial hire as a full-time employee, and one person even made it her personal mission to limit my promotions and pay and to try to exclude me from consideration for potential promotions. The only reason I advanced the way I did was because my managers personally and specifically fought HR on my behalf. If I had the MBA and hadn't had that resistance from HR I'd be paid double what I'm paid today at the very least.
Here's my advice. If you are willing to start at the bottom, and earn recognition via tangible accomplishments, you can make a career in corporate America without a degree. It will require that you not only outperform your credentialed peers by orders of magnitude, but also build very strong professional relationships on the business management side such that your manager+3 will be willing to boot stomp HR on your behalf. You will in all likelihood still be undercompensated unless you are willing to jump ship and objectively prove your desirability as demonstrated by other companies headhunting you. As that is largely opposed to developing strong relationships with your managers, this is a delicate balancing act. If you are willing and able to do the same while actually having a degree you will earn much more $ at almost any large corporation . Also, do not kid yourself--people actually learn stuff in college, so you have to be willing to actively self-educate in order to be competitive.
If you want to start your own business in an industry that is not heavily credential-sensitive, and you have a capitlization plan that does not involve stuffy bankers and conservative investors, and feel that you can spare 4 - 6 years gaining experience, I absolutely recommend jumping in to industry and reading Drucker, Kaplan and Norton, etc. on your own as opposed to getting a degree. 4 - 6 years in a real career will be much more valuable than a degree once you're your own boss.
If you will "only" be a highly competent and consistent performer looking for a decent, stable job, GET A DEGREE.
Software and design patents do not actually require that you did, intend to, or even know how to implement the described invention. In practice, they do not require that you describe the invention in sufficient detail that it can be implemented based on the description. You can easily file these kinds of patents based on your imagination.
Patents based on imagination might not be cost-effective and/or easily enforcible, however, but that can be worked around by targeting 'adjacent' applications that are a logical consequence of the idea in question. For example, a direct patent on imaginary hard AI will be difficult to enforce, because it is unlikely that your imagination-based patent describes key details of any real implementation. What you can do, however, is patent all sorts of applications of hard AI, which essentially amounts to trolling through the patent database and rehashing everything into 'doing foo ... but with AI!' much in the way that we saw 'doing foo ... but on a computer/the internetz/a smartphone!', which can be highly effective and lucrative.
Your position ignores that sometimes there is an objectively "correct" thing to do and that sometimes, someone is objectively wrong for arguing against it.
That statement is not accurate. The only objectively "correct" things as relates to politics are facts. Interpretation of facts, determination the relative importance of specific facts with respect to a given social issue, and subsequent decisions are at the heart of politics, and there is never an objectively "correct" position for any point of that process-- it is all relative to objectives, philosophy, morality, ethics and beliefs. If you say that someone's political views are "incorrect" given a common body of facts, you are really saying that their system of values differs from yours.
Effective influencers, understanding the above, consequently spend their time trying to convince their audience as to why their view is more consistent with the audience's system of values than the opposing view. Less effective people try to get their audience to change their system of values to match their own. Unsuccessful people label their audience wrong.
Not sure if you're a troll, but, in case you're being serious and just suffered a reading comprehension failure or skipped over the ggp post because you're browsing at >0, I suggest that you re-read the thread.
Strictly speaking, at minimum it would require two time fields and two boolean fields, with each boolean field specifying whether or not the interval is inclusive of each corresponding end point. It would also require a lot more than one simple constraint to get the desired behavior provided by the new datatype--and the whole mess would need to be repeated for every single interval with a simple exclusivity constraint. The new range datatype also makes it relatively simple to, e.g., specify a non-zero overlap constraint, which is significantly harder without it.