House of Eratosthenes

Many among our fellow countrymen think of themselves as putting a plan into into effect that has yet to be tried, when what they’re really doing is putting a plan into effect that has yet to succeed. They forget the plan has been tried before. I think that is reasonable when you’re trying to figure out how to do things for yourself that others have done: mix together the perfect dry rub, change out a bad power supply, write a file conversion utility. When you’re doing something that impacts many others, or perhaps everyone, and earning money doing it, I don’t think this is reasonable anymore. Prior failures become relevant. They matter. And whoever wants to make an honest go out of whatever is being attempted, shouldn’t need to be told about that. I would expect them, if they’re worthy of trust, to already be boning up about the prior attempts. I would expect them to take the initiative to answer the question: “What’s the difference between the attempt that was made before, and what we are doing now?”

This is not another conservative/liberal rant…at least, not on purpose. A reasonable argument could be made that the paragraph above captures the divide that exists today between conservatives and liberals. Implementing a plan that has yet to be tried versus implementing a plan that has yet to succeed — some of us see the difference between those two and some of us do not. No, it’s not ideological, it is personal. And because it is personal I’ve been putting off writing about this (hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals). Hits a little close to home, y’know.

Edward E. Whitacre Jr. built AT&T Inc. into the biggest U.S. provider of telephone service over a 43-year-career. By his own admission, he becomes chairman of General Motors Corp. knowing nothing about the auto industry.

The 6-foot-4-inch Texan nicknamed “Big Ed” said steering the nation’s largest automaker after bankruptcy is “a public service.” People who know him say he can meet GM’s need for the type of transformation he orchestrated at Dallas-based AT&T.

“I don’t know anything about cars,” Whitacre, 67, said yesterday in an interview after his appointment. “A business is a business, and I think I can learn about cars. I’m not that old, and I think the business principles are the same.”

If I could pick just five merry-go-rounds for all the human species to get sick of riding tomorrow morning and never hop on ’em ever again, this would certainly make the cut: Putting an “executive guy” in charge of things outside his experience, hoping it all works out because “the business principles are the same.”

Stupidity A decade ago I saw it tried with regard to maintaining enterprise application and file-and-print servers. Saw it with my own two eyes. Same stupid cliches trotted out, about business principles being the same. Many, many decades will have to come and go before I even begin to forget the wreckage that resulted from this. And no, I wasn’t the guy put in charge of those servers. He didn’t last long. Let us just say, when it was all said and done, we were not left with something that got assembled that could be used…we were left with shattered pieces lying on the ground that had to be put together…the same pieces that were lying on the ground, waiting to be assembled, before. Plus some damage. It’s not necessary to elaborate about that, is it? I mean isn’t that exactly what you expect to get when you task someone to put something together, and it’s well outside of their skills and specialties?

Isn’t that a piece of drama that has some suspense to it only when you’re living in the middle of it? With the wisdom that comes with distance, it seems silly to have ever wondered about the outcome.

It is only through a close look that this bears the appearance of making some sense. It’s like making movies out of video games. Stop doing this. Just stop it. To all the people who can make this kind of decision — if it seems to you like it might be a great idea, go back to bed and take a nap until it doesn’t look like a good idea anymore. Because it stinks.

There I go, possessing and using a memory again. How unreasonably right-wing-extreme of me.

“Business principles are the same.” The words still ring in my ears after all the time that has flowed by. And I know why they ring — because they were repeated over and over again. I remember it become a cliche, and then, an echo.

People were repeating it over and over again, because that’s exactly what people in groups do with ideas they know have to be chosen, even though they are bad. They repeat them. They repeat them because they know if they keep doing it, a bad idea will start to look like a good one. That’s how groups of people make bad decisions.

I’ve seen this too. When I was at Southern Pacific, the last-gasp (failed) attempt to avoid going under involved “outsourcing” the IT function to a division of IBM, which took over the department and attempted to re-engineer the way we were running the railroad.

Transportation is a fascinating and complex discipline; it’s worth noting that Class I railroads, led by the SP, virtually invented and developed the concept of EDI in the ’70s. The IBM guys that came in (ignoring the history that IBM developed the SP rail-shipment-and inventory system in conjunction with railroad guys in the first place) had the attitude that “we installed ticketing systems for the airlines” and therefore this wouldn’t present a problem.

My point that freight shipments, unlike passengers, didn’t bring themselves to the yard under their own power was treated with gentle condescension, and on was moved immediately. Guess what happened?
- rob | 06/24/2009 @ 12:11
Bob Nardelli, fresh outta the Home Depot, was installed in the corner office at Chrysler when Cerberus took over from Daimler – and that worked out okay, didn’t it?

Oh, yeah. Right. Sorry.
- CGHill | 06/24/2009 @ 20:00
“Business principles are the same.”

Progressivism sprouted from soft-“science” academia. Soft “Sciences” are playgrounds of speculation. Some insightful, some not. Very little in the way of verifiable/falsifiable “facts”. They’re not really sciences because the theories cannot be tested in the way that theories in physical, real sciences can be tested.

That is, in order to test social theories, especially those concerning state planning and control — you have to attempt to foist your controls on either A) a willing populace B) an unwilling populace, or C) some combination of the two.

It is unethical, no matter how good your intentions are.

To the extent that unethical experiments in Progressive State Planning have been done, they’ve all been done on C) a combination of the willing and unwilling, or B) an unwilling populace. The only way to get A) is an opt-in State. Which these days is out of the question if you are to even consider ethics.

Does “the business principles are the same” actually work out when those in charge are merely theorizing parallels outside of the realm of their experiences? I say NO. I’m sure you say NO as well. But these people point to their pieces of paper on the wall that say they know a lot about what a bunch of other people have speculated on, which have been boiled down into a lot of self-referencing mish-mash with some more speculation built on that “solid” foundation and say, “We are the experts. Step aside!”

They want us to be their guinea pigs in their ego-stroking drive to prove their theories correct … all for our own good of course. Trust them. They know. We are ignorant.
- philmon | 06/24/2009 @ 22:36
Which these days is out of the question if you are to even consider ethics.

And by that I mean you’re going to have to steal some land from someone who doesn’t want to opt in to get it done. Or it’s gonna be a really tiny country.
- philmon | 06/24/2009 @ 22:40
[…] Now imagine what it would be like if people like that ran a car company. […]
- dustbury.com » The bar remains low | 06/26/2009 @ 16:39

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“I Don’t Know Anything About Cars”
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009