The examples are worth squat. Many (if not most) MBAs cover at least one case of a company who succeeded by implementing a very aggressive profit sharing program. How many companies out there do you find implementing profit share plans?
Same with higher quality. You might spend weeks paying lip service in class to Apple and other upscale manufacturers, but out there in the real world MBAs are, more often than not, one trick cut-costs ponies.
Someone should write a paper or a book about the destruction of American business by the MBA.
My experience is that nowadays all MBAs know is how to reduce costs and thus move your product downmarket. They can talk for hours about how to save 5 cents in shipping costs, but have no idea how to produce a superior product that would allow you to double your price and people happily dole out the cash (apropos of Apple and the late Steve Jobs).
"Then George Evans made his move. He arranged for fans, young women, who were paid $10 a pop, to attend and make as much of a scene as possible. They didnâ(TM)t disappoint."
NEITHER side comes out clean when the battle lines get as entrenched as they are today.
I agree that neither side is clean, but again I insist that for the last ten years Republicans have taken the non-factual partisan game to a whole new level.
To go no further, the Republican party is right now controlled by its radical wing (the Tea Party). The equivalent on the democratic side would be if Louis Farrakhan or Ralph Nader were now in charge, vetting potential candidates in primaries. There really is no comparison today.
News flash: neither party can be counted on to deal in facts. I will also say with utter confidence that your party line (of which there are only two) will not determine how factual you are. There are goddamn liars among all the ranks of any party.
Sorry, but for the last ten year or so they haven't been comparable. Yes, neither party is perfect, but only one party has taken a conscious ideological (as opposed to strategic) hard tack away from the facts.
Only one party has made it a party platform to attack scientific facts based upon religious or ideological principles.
This is why some people, like myself, do not take climate alarmists seriously. They make these grandiose pronouncements that have little, if anything, to do with the facts.
Most likely this is just like Y2K, SARS, and yes, even AIDS. All real, actually happening events and yet at the same time exaggerated by people who have much to profit from pushing an agenda (in this case funding for their own research programs).
Apparently, from recent conversations with former astronauts, the vibrations at take off during Mercury/Gemini/Apollo were extremely uncomfortable, yet all astronauts reported only "minor rattling" least they be considered wimps.
They are focused on the hardware at a time when the software (i.e. apps) are becoming more and more important. At recent events they had plenty of people talking about wireless and network technology and not a single one about software engineering, development platforms, algorithms, web 2.0, etc.
Commander Taco is being replaced by Chicken Little in slashdot.
Expect numerous announcements on how we "just" grew by a billion in twelve years, while the previous billion took ten years and the billion before took even less, starting from smaller bases. For a more balanced explanation of the situation see:
What I'm saying is that if the first 61 transactions were legit, and the 62nd was not he could certainly argue that he was carefully led into breaking the law, thus entrapment.
Did you watch, say, "Saving Privat Ryan" or "The Patriot"? These are semi-historical movies and you don't need to know which parts actually happened to take home their message. The details are just the background to the story.
Up until very recently (like 200 years ago), no book was ever written to an exacting historical standard. Even accounts such as those of Pliny and Marco Polo had substantial third party anecdotes without any acknowledgment of such.
The bible was written in a world where it was understood nothing was to be taken literally, just like no one walks out of "The Smurfs" thinking there are blue people walking in New York without having to put big signs at the exit of the theater saying "warning: the movie you just saw is not to be taken literally".
Business schools will teach you hundreds of ways to cut expenses since those are common across all industries. In contrast you'll get very few techniques on how to increase quality, create a new product, move upscale or increase return customers since those tend to be industry specific.
To give an actual example, consider the case of a corporation--which shall remain nameless--whose entire value proposition is top notch customer service. Its clients are wealthy people whose accounts range in the $100K to $10M a year. One of their brand new MBAs decided in his great wisdom that they could save a few million dollars a year by moving to a voice activated answering service instead of the personalized service their wealthy customers had come to expect.
Call center costs went down by 40%, and the MBA was promoted.
However I happen to know that a few large customers left due to displeasure with the new system. They never took the time to register the reason for walking away, so the original corporation has no way to link the "savings" from the MBA "efficiencies" to the losses in accounts. In their next quarterly report they simply explained away the customer losses as "due to competitive pressures" and life went on, with other MBAs following the example of their predecessor.
When this becomes sufficiently widespread they eventually open space for a competitor to move in their previous space. You can think of many examples of high end producers moving downwards through cost cutting (and ultimately into low margin markets) while opening space for the competition in their previous higher up space.
A consequence of this is that a corporation is quite willing to roll out a $10M dollar call center customer that will "save" a few million a year, but completely unwilling to hire a staff of 15 R&D people at a cost of $3M a year, but with potential returns of $10M a year, every time they chance onto a significant innovation.
Do you dispute the basic math that tracking 2nd and 3rd order associations grows exponentially?
For sure I do. The number of potenial first order connections between n people is n^2 not 2^n. There is nothing exponential there. If you add 2nd and 3rd order you get n^3 and n^4 potential connections respectively.
Even that overstates the actual growth, since it assumes a brute force search. A simple indexing structure keeps the number down to roughly your number of friends cubed. This is a modest number that is essentially independent of the size of the country.
But whatever, you like being patted and submitted to obnoxious security procedures. Enjoy!
Again with the uncited claims. I say you are lying.
Right, because yours are full of references. I fly regularly through Ben Gurion and it is one of the easiest airports to go through among the ones I regularly visit. Keep in mind that it is so even though they face a risk that is orders of magnitude higher than anywhere else.
It doesn't work like that. The costs grow exponentially with size if not faster
There you go. Fully referenced made up statement: "costs grow up exponentially".
It is actually quite within scale. Population in Israel is 1/50th of the USA. GDP is 1/100th. So whatever they do we can do something that is 200x bigger.
Say, Ben-Gurion is 1/3rd the size of O'Hare. So we can do 66 O'Hares.
And the consequences of FAILING with a false positive (terrorist mistaken for authorized pilot).
How about the costs of scanning them. Say they are improperly rushed through because they need to get to their plane? How about instead developing a system to preclear trusted people, which we deploy first with pilots, then flight attendants, then certain trusted members of the population?
Wouldn't work you say? That's what they do in Israel.
This essay is Oh so wrong. Schneier is smart but not always right.
We do not have the resources to properly scan everyone, so we end up doing a very shoddy and useless job. If instead we had some very good one way filters with no false negatives then we can spend substantially more resources on the truly suspicious cases.
Don't take my word, compare with the best security system in the world, the one with the most threats and the least attacks: the Israeli security system. They do not scan every one.
Slashdot Mirror
The examples are worth squat. Many (if not most) MBAs cover at least one case of a company who succeeded by implementing a very aggressive profit sharing program. How many companies out there do you find implementing profit share plans?
Same with higher quality. You might spend weeks paying lip service in class to Apple and other upscale manufacturers, but out there in the real world MBAs are, more often than not, one trick cut-costs ponies.
Someone should write a paper or a book about the destruction of American business by the MBA.
My experience is that nowadays all MBAs know is how to reduce costs and thus move your product downmarket. They can talk for hours about how to save 5 cents in shipping costs, but have no idea how to produce a superior product that would allow you to double your price and people happily dole out the cash (apropos of Apple and the late Steve Jobs).
Frank Sinatra pioneered the move.
"Then George Evans made his move. He arranged for fans, young women, who were paid $10 a pop, to attend and make as much of a scene as possible. They didnâ(TM)t disappoint."
http://socialmediatrader.com/why-frank-sinatra-would-fake-his-feed-numbers/
I think many bands have used it since.
There are smart ways of achieving the same effect:
Orange pays actors to sand in line for the iPhone:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/423221-Orange-Pays-Actors-To-Stand-In-Line-For-The-iPhone
Apple was heavily rumored to have hired people to stand in line during the first releases of the iPhone to increase the hype.
The Beatles and other rock bands have admitted to paying some of the more hysterical screaming fans often shown on TV.
Maybe you haven't seen Scheme.
Or maybe he has like all other people who took programming languages in their (CS undergrad (and (completely '(hated it))))
Yup, I know about monads. A clear step forward particularly in terms of reasoning about state in an immutable language, but still a bit of a kludge.
By the way, observe that functional language != immutable language. People often confuse the two.
From TFA: A complete commitment to immutability is a commitment to never building anything real.
If only all other functional languages learned this....
NEITHER side comes out clean when the battle lines get as entrenched as they are today.
I agree that neither side is clean, but again I insist that for the last ten years Republicans have taken the non-factual partisan game to a whole new level.
To go no further, the Republican party is right now controlled by its radical wing (the Tea Party). The equivalent on the democratic side would be if Louis Farrakhan or Ralph Nader were now in charge, vetting potential candidates in primaries. There really is no comparison today.
News flash: neither party can be counted on to deal in facts. I will also say with utter confidence that your party line (of which there are only two) will not determine how factual you are. There are goddamn liars among all the ranks of any party.
Sorry, but for the last ten year or so they haven't been comparable. Yes, neither party is perfect, but only one party has taken a conscious ideological (as opposed to strategic) hard tack away from the facts.
Only one party has made it a party platform to attack scientific facts based upon religious or ideological principles.
This is why some people, like myself, do not take climate alarmists seriously. They make these grandiose pronouncements that have little, if anything, to do with the facts.
Most likely this is just like Y2K, SARS, and yes, even AIDS. All real, actually happening events and yet at the same time exaggerated by people who have much to profit from pushing an agenda (in this case funding for their own research programs).
X windows as mainly developed at MIT
but he said successful as opposed to "kludge used in the absence of anything else".
Apparently, from recent conversations with former astronauts, the vibrations at take off during Mercury/Gemini/Apollo were extremely uncomfortable, yet all astronauts reported only "minor rattling" least they be considered wimps.
They are focused on the hardware at a time when the software (i.e. apps) are becoming more and more important. At recent events they had plenty of people talking about wireless and network technology and not a single one about software engineering, development platforms, algorithms, web 2.0, etc.
Commander Taco is being replaced by Chicken Little in slashdot.
Expect numerous announcements on how we "just" grew by a billion in twelve years, while the previous billion took ten years and the billion before took even less, starting from smaller bases. For a more balanced explanation of the situation see:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/multimedia/2010/11/world_population
What I'm saying is that if the first 61 transactions were legit, and the 62nd was not he could certainly argue that he was carefully led into breaking the law, thus entrapment.
62 transactions later,
A good lawyer could make a good case entrapment.
CNN dumped Akamai on September 10, 2001, for the exact same reasons as you list above. I kid you not.
They signed back up on September 12, 2001.
Did you watch, say, "Saving Privat Ryan" or "The Patriot"? These are semi-historical movies and you don't need to know which parts actually happened to take home their message. The details are just the background to the story.
Up until very recently (like 200 years ago), no book was ever written to an exacting historical standard. Even accounts such as those of Pliny and Marco Polo had substantial third party anecdotes without any acknowledgment of such.
The bible was written in a world where it was understood nothing was to be taken literally, just like no one walks out of "The Smurfs" thinking there are blue people walking in New York without having to put big signs at the exit of the theater saying "warning: the movie you just saw is not to be taken literally".
Business schools will teach you hundreds of ways to cut expenses since those are common across all industries. In contrast you'll get very few techniques on how to increase quality, create a new product, move upscale or increase return customers since those tend to be industry specific.
To give an actual example, consider the case of a corporation--which shall remain nameless--whose entire value proposition is top notch customer service. Its clients are wealthy people whose accounts range in the $100K to $10M a year. One of their brand new MBAs decided in his great wisdom that they could save a few million dollars a year by moving to a voice activated answering service instead of the personalized service their wealthy customers had come to expect.
Call center costs went down by 40%, and the MBA was promoted.
However I happen to know that a few large customers left due to displeasure with the new system. They never took the time to register the reason for walking away, so the original corporation has no way to link the "savings" from the MBA "efficiencies" to the losses in accounts. In their next quarterly report they simply explained away the customer losses as "due to competitive pressures" and life went on, with other MBAs following the example of their predecessor.
When this becomes sufficiently widespread they eventually open space for a competitor to move in their previous space. You can think of many examples of high end producers moving downwards through cost cutting (and ultimately into low margin markets) while opening space for the competition in their previous higher up space.
A consequence of this is that a corporation is quite willing to roll out a $10M dollar call center customer that will "save" a few million a year, but completely unwilling to hire a staff of 15 R&D people at a cost of $3M a year, but with potential returns of $10M a year, every time they chance onto a significant innovation.
Do you dispute the basic math that tracking 2nd and 3rd order associations grows exponentially?
For sure I do. The number of potenial first order connections between n people is n^2 not 2^n. There is nothing exponential there. If you add 2nd and 3rd order you get n^3 and n^4 potential connections respectively.
Even that overstates the actual growth, since it assumes a brute force search. A simple indexing structure keeps the number down to roughly
your number of friends cubed. This is a modest number that is essentially independent of the size of the country.
But whatever, you like being patted and submitted to obnoxious security procedures. Enjoy!
Again with the uncited claims. I say you are lying.
Right, because yours are full of references. I fly regularly through Ben Gurion and it is one of the easiest airports to go through among the ones I regularly visit. Keep in mind that it is so even though they face a risk that is orders of magnitude higher than anywhere else.
It doesn't work like that. The costs grow exponentially with size if not faster
There you go. Fully referenced made up statement: "costs grow up exponentially".
and pilots in Israeli don't get searched
90% of passengers in Israel don't get searched.
The scale of the comparison isn't even close.
It is actually quite within scale. Population in Israel is 1/50th of the USA. GDP is 1/100th. So whatever they do we can do something that is 200x bigger.
Say, Ben-Gurion is 1/3rd the size of O'Hare. So we can do 66 O'Hares.
And the consequences of FAILING with a false positive (terrorist mistaken for authorized pilot).
How about the costs of scanning them. Say they are improperly rushed through because they need to get to their plane? How about instead developing a system to preclear trusted people, which we deploy first with pilots, then flight attendants, then certain trusted members of the population?
Wouldn't work you say? That's what they do in Israel.
This essay is Oh so wrong. Schneier is smart but not always right.
We do not have the resources to properly scan everyone, so we end up doing a very shoddy and useless job. If instead we had some very good one way filters with no false negatives then we can spend substantially more resources on the truly suspicious cases.
Don't take my word, compare with the best security system in the world, the one with the most threats and the least attacks: the Israeli security system. They do not scan every one.