Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
My-Way-Itis (n.)
A mental disease.
It is, quite plain and simply, an inability to comprehend a situation in which some other person might take charge of a familiar task, and by implementing methods the observer would not have used, acquire beneficial results. It is an irrational conviction that the observer’s way is not only the best way, but the only way, to achieve the stated goal.
In the advanced stages it becomes paranoia: Anyone who’s doing things differently from the way I would be doing them, must be acting under sinister ulterior motives.
The technology business tends to see more than its share of this. It moves through stages that seem like fresh-blazed brand new trails at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight one realizes it’s all the same old turf:
Phase One. A youngster is discovered who can demonstrate his ability to do neat things most other people cannot do. Executive or capitalist opportunists cluster around him, he discovers a livelihood, and a fledgling industry is assembled around what amounts to nothing more than a boy’s parlor trick.
Phase Two. The business interests find out, through a series of painful exercises, about the yawning gap that exists between a business process and a parlor trick.
Phase Three. Out of a desire to close this yawning gap, a premiere value is placed upon the commodity that is the Idea-Man…the guy who has strong ideas about how to do stuff. Not quite so much how to do the stuff, but having strong ideas about how to do the stuff. A candidate who shows a strong track record of getting things done on time and under budget, but doesn’t talk too much about how he does them, is not valued quite so highly. Another candidate who lacks the strong track record, but talks quickly, loudly and forcefully about the steps involved in doing things — and who identifies all who would do things a different way, as potential enemies — is valued much more highly.
Phase Four. Once all the projects of any magnitude or importance are managed solely by people with festering, advanced cases of My-Way-Itis, the business goes through new pains.
An interesting aspect of My-Way-Itis is the degree of willingness — even enthusiasm — with which the sufferer will knowingly depart from reality. He labors under the unspoken conviction that anybody who doesn’t follow his ready-made-script for success, will have to fail. Confronted with an example of someone who got ‘er done a whole different way, he makes absolutely no effort to revise the paradigm he just spoke aloud that was instantly debunked; instead, he will regard this alternatively-completed successful project as some kind of evil thing, something that can be the source of absolutely nothing good, something that must be banished. Much in the same way the villagers of olden times might have ostracized a suspected witch, or had her burned at the stake. He becomes the fox in Aesop’s fable about the “sour grapes.”
Another notable symptom is that once the patient is put in charge of weighty responsibilities dealing with the allocation of staff, he starts to show a myopia with regard to understanding specialties; his mind neatly categorizes talents according to “the things I do” and “the things others do,” the latter being completely fungible. In other words, one hour of whatever it is John does, is equal to one hour of whatever it is Susan does, which is equal to one hour of whatever the hell it is Charlie does. And so the business that has been entrusted to him, deteriorates from one extreme to another: Coming into existence specifically for the purpose of making use of a little boy’s parlor trick, it suffers a senile dementia to such an extent that it cannot appreciate a potentially-profitable parlor trick if the parlor trick walks up and bites it square in the ass. After that, it must suffer all the pains attendant to any business that has forgotten what it is in the business of selling; and these are not paper-cut pains. They are life-threatening.
I imagine I’ll be accused, with some legitimacy, of venting my spleen over some specific unpleasantness that occurred within one particular experience. The truth is darker than that: I don’t have any one single experience out of my twenty years that fits this better than any of the others. Except, perhaps, for my very first jobs…in which I was the inexperienced young boy who knew the parlor tricks. I’ve seen this play out, over and over again, in pretty much every position I’ve been placed in as I watched it from different vantage points, playing different roles. Wherever I worked that this did not happen, there was at the very least, a very powerful pull in this direction. The pull is always there, in any business in which a service is needed but not yet acquired. It’s tough to think in moderate, realistic, self-restraining terms about the Holy Grail that is still out of reach, especially when dollars are on the line.
So for all the above reasons, I suppose management by the insane is ultimately unavoidable. A business finds out a parlor trick doth not a profit center make — and then, tragically, it overcompensates, putting the inmates in charge of the asylum.
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[…] speaking here of the Freeberg Village Theory, discussed here and here and here and here and here and here. The process by which, in a season a famine, one or several individuals are declared […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 03/17/2013 @ 09:25