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...
Just a Facebook comment…the GoogleGodz are not smiling upon my effort to locate an original source, or even evidence of replication:
I am reminded of a quad chart I was introduced to a few weeks back, apocryphally from Erwin Rommel, but who knows where it came from:
Imagine two axes, of stupid/smart and motivated/lazy. This gives you 4 quadrants of [personality] types: Smart+Motivated, Smart+Lazy, Stupid+Motivated, and finally Stupid+Lazy.
Of the four, the worst for your organization is the stupid motivated person. Either Smart Lazy or Stupid Lazy people can at least be managed with supervision and the carrot and stick method works nearly as well on them as on anyone else. They still add value. When unsupervised, they tend to do nothing of note.
The Smart Motivated person does what’s right with minimal carrot and stick. They are self-actualized. They do what they do largely because it’s the right thing to do and they get a sense of accomplishment form it.
However, the Stupid Motivated person is too stupid to understand the incentive strutcure and respond to it appropriately. They must be supervised all the time- can’t even neglect them and expect them to stay neutral. They will do something positively stupid when left alone. [They] are the one[s] you need to eliminate from your organization at all cost.
Gee, hope that hasn’t been me.
Update: Come to think on it awhile longer, I think December of ’94 was right around the time I started my ≤40 hours “overtime is bullshit” rule. It’s just a simple, observed fact: If you’re working it when there’s no need, you’re already committing an error in judgment about as basic as any other, which sets up a real possibility that you’re this human-contaminant stupid/motivated guy…and hey, you know when there’s a need, it can almost always be traced to something that was done the wrong way. Which does nothing to address the current crisis, of course. But you can safely bet money that if the wrong-thing-done is accommodated, by way of heading off the impending crisis with this huge and noble investment of human effort and midnight oil, the wrong-thing-done will continue to happen. There aren’t too many exceptions to that, when all’s said & done.
I think we all have what it takes to be this stupid/motivated person, from time to time.
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Gee, hope that hasn’t been me.
The presence/absence of duct tape would be your FIRST clue.
In re: your update. My experience in the IT world was The System was structured to give you about 20% more work than you could handle in a 40-hour week… it was that goddamned “do more with less” BS. It may have changed since I got out of the game, but I didn’t know anyone… repeat, ANYONE… who did less than 50 hours per week, and often more.
- bpenni | 07/04/2012 @ 10:13Now, that is truly asinine. I always took the “do more with less” to mean, we shift the repetitive non-decision-making work to the machines, where it belongs, freeing up the humans to use their creative juices. The juices would then be applied toward returning more of this “machine work dividend,” if you will, the following year…I always thought that was supposed to be the intent.
The tragedy of the twenty-first century, from my perspective, has been that we have managed to flip this completely around. I mean, the machines aren’t here yet, we work our forty hours, we get forty hours of productivity…enter the machines…now, the humans have to put in their fifty or sixty hours, to get the same forty hours of productivity back — plus, a good-sized chunk of the sixty hours goes in to standing around, watching something, or repeating something, exercising little or no decision-making…in other words…carbon-based life forms doing the work of machines.
Throughout the years, I have gradually come to view this as a red-flag that the problem is with management; their tutelage is incompatible with the miracle of the high technology. They should be managing DMV clerks, bank tellers, or prisoners making license plates. (Apologies to bank tellers for that reference.)
- mkfreeberg | 07/05/2012 @ 10:15