Try again.

Post #145,194 by FuManChu 3/10/04 1:22:19 AM Reply	Try again. The goal of Management is to automate Everything you do (or think you do) SAP. For the God of Efficiency, that religion of the Econ folks - whose attenuated views of Real Life were allowed to expand and infect all: VisiCalc alone, may have doomed US to the tender mercies of the 100% mercantile mindlessness du jour. This is not a formula for human beings - but only for the velocity of money - a Pure Abstraction! On one front, you're dead wrong. The goal of Management in this case is to realize a return on investment. If the project takes one year to complete with four trained people, don't hire someone who will take six months to learn the ropes. That's all. On a grander plane, you're absolutely right. The goal of management is to automate everything you do. But interpreting this as Evil Intentions is a mistake--it is nothing more than meeting the current challenge, the challenge of adapting your company to constant, inevitable change. My job as an IT manager is to take the change of the week and do one of three things with it: 1. Reject it on provable grounds. 2. Package it into a process which a developer can manage. 3. Package it into a job which a non-developer can do. This week, it's a new website for marketing. Next week, it's IP telephony. Then GPS. Then wireless. Then refactoring. Then DB optimization. Then--you're so far out that planning is meaningless. This is what (especially middle) management does: grease the wheels of corporate change. This is exponentially true in a "knowledge-based" industry (or business unit, or department).
Post #145,196 by deSitter 3/10/04 1:30:48 AM 3/10/04 1:31:56 AM Reply	Melville understood The goal is out of balance. The goal should not be to maximize ANYTHING, rather, to put up a stable entity that thrives and does good service to BOTH the investors and the workers. When Ahab runs after Moby Dick he commits the sin of hubris, and suffers retribution. When the whalers are out to hunt whales according to stable tradition, taking what is needed to fill the barrels with oil but not killing for the hell of it, or revenge, or in greed, then the oil lamps of the world light the books of students, and clocks tick steadily and accurately marking the rhythm of stable, productive life. The sin that business makes is the sin of Ahab - chasing the demon of profit without regard to whom it profits in a larger context - and finally without regard to God's metaphysical order as revealed in stable tradition. -drl Edited by deSitter March 10, 2004, 01:31:56 AM EST Expand All History
Post #145,280 by FuManChu 3/10/04 12:39:45 PM Reply	Bzuh? You and Ashton, I swear--do you ever have conversations that don't take on cosmic significance? ;) The goal should not be to maximize ANYTHING, rather, to put up a stable entity that thrives and does good service to BOTH the investors and the workers. ...which equates to a goal to maximize stability. Change one word and I'll sign it: The goal should be to put up a ~~stable~~ dynamic entity that thrives and does good service to BOTH the investors and the workers. I was one of the original authors of VB, and I wouldn't use VB for a text processing program. :-) Michael Geary, on comp.lang.python
Post #145,281 by deSitter 3/10/04 12:43:16 PM Reply	nope, we're idealists in the strict sense :) -drl
Post #145,413 by Ashton 3/10/04 5:41:19 PM Reply	Cosmic significance? Why not.. What color was that Kool-aid you drank? What else is the concept of Cosmic about!? than - an overview of (as much as we fancy we might grok) of how a life is 'spent' >here< ? All the n-nested subcategories are meaningless, especially in their Brownian-movement ["dynamic?"] complexity. Analysis to perdition - can make no sense of the level of complexity now extant on this once-green and now daily more self-polluting planet. People are becoming nastier within this suffocating and artificial hyper-environment - or hadn't you noticed? US 'entertainment' is largely about blowing up things/people -- as are our games. Synthesis OTOH, is always hard; it is the Great Ones who ever managed some decent insights via that unteachable process. "The lower cannot see the higher" differentiation is easier than integration .. cha cha cha I think that Ross's summation below, of the Goals of Bizness 04 - is quite close enough for outlining debate of the Ends which so many are willing to employ any Means to achieve. And rare among the goals of bizness practitioners -across the board- is the occasional one who dares to see and say: that "the Ends" really are just THIS TAWDRY. Cupidity is now a virtue? Imagine.. spending that three score and ten.. in the pursuit of getting as much as you can of the entire pie, with supreme disdain for anyone not-you; the kind of society that follows from such naked Personal Greed on the part of most of its active wielders of the power (of setting 'agendas'). And if that is what "humanity" is willing to settle for, even after the crassness has been pointed out; if a large majority are willing to trade their prospects for ever possessing any leisure time or any quiet place for contemplation, for the treadmill of 24/7 constant competition to Get More - indefinitely? What would a Sci-fi author label such a deranged species on say, the planet Spin, in the autodestruct-galaxy Lemming? Machines (via Moore's Law) can manage an exponential rise in speed, til it levels off asymptotic to limits set by physical laws. We see that people cannot obey Moore's Law, but only can become enslaved, by any urge to do so. Modern Times seems now not merely prescient - it became a blueprint for Bizness 04. The innovation of Soulless (and Allegiance-less) uncontrolled multinational corps: daily forces more humans to behave like machines.. never mind the place alloted on the std. issue cubicle desk for pics of the cat and the kid. One's infinitesimal slice-of-Life within the mono-purpose cultural vacuum of an office? This is a Life ?? I see no sign of any tapering off of this rush to constant-motion madness, only signs that "we ain't seen nothin yet" -- the sort of callow fresh-MBA enthusiasm of every history-ignorant yout, since the beginning. Only - this time, the untaught and often unteachable are being encouraged to run the asylum. I figure that, those who have never learned the meaning of adequacy and insist upon More without limit, have a predictable 'End': Big Crash. (If we're lucky enough to get that splash of cold water on the fever, that is - before the nukes start going off.) Nothing 'cosmic' though, in the level of banality of our current game plan.. it's Swiftian, and I don't mean Tom) moi
Post #145,417 by Ashton 3/10/04 5:48:31 PM Reply	Koyaanisqaatsi, literally "life out-of-balance"Indians Smart

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