Archive for the ‘Management as cargo cult’ Category
The story of Sammy
I was once introduced to an expatriate, let us call him Sammy, who proudly identified himself as a ‘businessman’. The business in question was Import-Export. It all sounded very grand, but what it all boiled down to was that Sammy spent his days in a squalid little office full of junk that he had successfully [...]
Man was given a brain that he might cover his ass
The advent of the MBAs was supposed to enhance the efficiency of business; this is so only if we posit that a farmer who skins his sheep instead of shearing them is efficient. But there is no doubt that they have enhanced the efficiency of excuse production. The point of soliciting professional advice, whether from [...]
Climbing the ladder
An average I.Q. is 100, by definition. Most of the readers of these essays, on meeting a person with an I.Q. of 100, will find him mentally rather slow; the rest are being charitable. And yet half the population, again by definition, will be even slower. Where are all these dummies? It seems unlikely that [...]
Restructuring
In the old days, companies endured, and most workers were hired by the day. Now, it is the other way around: most workers can expect to outlive half a dozen company names. Especially in former state-owned corporations, where frequent rebranding is confused with customer service.
Work is currently something done in the odd minutes when [...]
Corprats at their PCs
There are people alive and sitting at computer keyboards in the year 2010 who put a hard carriage return at the end of every line, as if they were using not only a typewriter but an ancient mechanical one. Can there really be secretaries who learned their keyboarding in the Sixties and who have never [...]
The 419 and business excellence
Why are we not encouraging the ‘Nigerian Letter’ as a paradigm of both successful entrepreneurship and foreign aid? On the first head, the spending of a few naira in Internet cafes can net an unemployed semi-literate tens of thousands of dollars; this is a return on capital that the business schools should be studying. As [...]
Ricardo in the bedroom
The situation whereby each man makes love to his own wife is grossly inefficient and irrational, a relic of primitive craft-based economies. Ricardo’s laws would dictate that production of sexual services be entrusted to those husbands who had a comparative advantage, and traded against other services in which the erotically less competent husbands had their [...]
Corporate Genesis
‘And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that their asses were uncovered; and they sewed excuses together, and covered their asses.
And then they heard the voice of the Chairman walking in the garden in the cool of the day; and Adam and his personal assistant hid themselves from the presence of [...]
The emotional satisfactions of command
In the 1960s American companies discovered oil on the Norwegian continental shelf, and an oil boom began. One of the first Norwegian oil workers has recently described the spirit of those days on the platform. The Americans demanded continuous, visible work, whether or not any needed doing, so the Norwegians made them happy by carrying [...]
Fortune cookies
When executives commission analyses, translations, reports and so forth, they sometimes insist on having them done immediately. They need them ‘by yesterday’. A month later they call back and say, ‘I’m reading that document I got from you, and…..’ So they didn’t actually need the things by yesterday at all, they didn’t even need them [...]
