we can do younger! Oh yes we can! :o)
On a serious note, I am happy for the new meritocracy that the Obama administration represents. A 26-year-old fashion designer and a speechwriter is 26 (or 27, depending on which source you believe). Obama himself is young, especially for a President, and companies around the world are increasingly comfortable with handing over the reigns to ever-younger CEOs.
I'm firmly convinced that a person's decision-making process can be just as sophisticated at 25 as it is at 52 (rare, but possible). Nowadays people in their 30s-40s are savvier than ever, and oftentimes the only thing holding a candidate back is access to information. With the ever-widening scope of databases and technologies to make that raw information useful, the underlying intellectual processes of the decision-maker take front and center - not just "experience." Of course, data is not a substitute for *all* experience, not by a long shot, but much of what used to take corporate drones eons to learn can now be experienced in a small fraction of the time. This trend of younger CEOs is a marker of a larger shift towards trend towards true meritocracies, a change I fully embrace.
Showing posts with label business. Show all posts
Showing posts with label business. Show all posts
22 January 2009
08 December 2007
milking the consumer
1 Competition is supposed to drive down prices, unless, of course, firms are competing against each other as to who can screw the consumer the hardest through collusion! Hooray for free markets!
2 BBC's anatomy of what appears to be a disasterously American idiocy.
3 Who says that Americans are largely desensitized to violence? Certainly not the VT victims!
4 Save the environment, eat a kangaroo!
Why do people complain that solutions to being environmentally responsible are costly and all that jazz when they come up with even more convoluted, potentially disastrous solutions? Bacteria in livestock? Yeah, like that's a system we can fully control. Not, you know, the highly mechanized, extremely precise industrial and transportation machinery that is responsible for nearly half of the remaining GHG emissions globally. Also, the solution should not necessarily be just make the livestock flatulate less, but to grow them in an environment that's more conducive to health - also known as eliminating industrialized, "factory" farms. That would help a lot, not that anyone appears to be proposing such a solution with any real vigor.
5 This could've been a straight Onion article, lol. Had they published it in 2006, many people would've laughed at its blatant absurdity.
6 110% dude, WTF? Not a single person needed to use the lavatory OR thought to clean said lavatory in FOUR DAYS? Yeah, mark that on my list as the 1001th place I need to see before I croak.
7 I'm surprised he didn't just say "E.T. phone home" and cackle at his wit.
2 BBC's anatomy of what appears to be a disasterously American idiocy.
3 Who says that Americans are largely desensitized to violence? Certainly not the VT victims!
4 Save the environment, eat a kangaroo!
Why do people complain that solutions to being environmentally responsible are costly and all that jazz when they come up with even more convoluted, potentially disastrous solutions? Bacteria in livestock? Yeah, like that's a system we can fully control. Not, you know, the highly mechanized, extremely precise industrial and transportation machinery that is responsible for nearly half of the remaining GHG emissions globally. Also, the solution should not necessarily be just make the livestock flatulate less, but to grow them in an environment that's more conducive to health - also known as eliminating industrialized, "factory" farms. That would help a lot, not that anyone appears to be proposing such a solution with any real vigor.
5 This could've been a straight Onion article, lol. Had they published it in 2006, many people would've laughed at its blatant absurdity.
6 110% dude, WTF? Not a single person needed to use the lavatory OR thought to clean said lavatory in FOUR DAYS? Yeah, mark that on my list as the 1001th place I need to see before I croak.
7 I'm surprised he didn't just say "E.T. phone home" and cackle at his wit.
27 August 2007
some people can do no right
I don't normally read Forbes because I think it's tripe, but this "welcome screen" (a.k.a., welcome to unwanted advertising interfering with your reading experience) really caught my eye:
On a somewhat related note (involving reading, President Bush's current lack thereof, and the outsourcing of the illegal reading of your private electronic or voice conversations as American citizens), READ THIS.
To some, it's just the same old song and dance, just as when the US government embraced the idea of the "military-congressional-industrial complex" not as loony conspiracy theory but as a business plan and outsourced the building of military hardware to private defense contractors. They then outsourced the military advisors, and now they're looking at the intelligence. It's one thing to outsource the people who follow your orders or give advice, but it's another to outsource the people that actually provide you the data, faulty, politically-motivated, or otherwise, that actually leads to war.
So get this, here's a likely scenario in our future Uneducated State of Ameri-duh: a private contractor, hired by the government to decode intelligence and under pressure to "cut costs" (so to charge only 1.9x what a government employee makes, instead of double), decides its "core competency" is not really intelligence analysis per se, but the delivery of analytical services. And since they need some sort of developing-world interpreters to decode the intelligence, because all of the people at the contractor are American-educated businessmen with little to no knowledge of any language besides English (and a tenuous grasp of that language to boot), they outsource the analysis right to the source.
So imagine having a Chinese analyst, probably in China, decoding intelligence that helps the US determine whether or not we go to war with China over Taiwan. Or, alternately, selling their knowledge to the highest bidder in the Chinese government (not that they don't already, but why make it even easier for them to do so?).
On a somewhat related note (involving reading, President Bush's current lack thereof, and the outsourcing of the illegal reading of your private electronic or voice conversations as American citizens), READ THIS.
To some, it's just the same old song and dance, just as when the US government embraced the idea of the "military-congressional-industrial complex" not as loony conspiracy theory but as a business plan and outsourced the building of military hardware to private defense contractors. They then outsourced the military advisors, and now they're looking at the intelligence. It's one thing to outsource the people who follow your orders or give advice, but it's another to outsource the people that actually provide you the data, faulty, politically-motivated, or otherwise, that actually leads to war.
So get this, here's a likely scenario in our future Uneducated State of Ameri-duh: a private contractor, hired by the government to decode intelligence and under pressure to "cut costs" (so to charge only 1.9x what a government employee makes, instead of double), decides its "core competency" is not really intelligence analysis per se, but the delivery of analytical services. And since they need some sort of developing-world interpreters to decode the intelligence, because all of the people at the contractor are American-educated businessmen with little to no knowledge of any language besides English (and a tenuous grasp of that language to boot), they outsource the analysis right to the source.
So imagine having a Chinese analyst, probably in China, decoding intelligence that helps the US determine whether or not we go to war with China over Taiwan. Or, alternately, selling their knowledge to the highest bidder in the Chinese government (not that they don't already, but why make it even easier for them to do so?).
30 May 2007
Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a RIM technician!
Does anyone really wonder why a lot of the world hates the U.S. and its brand of laissez-faire capitalism more generally? A lot of people claim to, but they seem to miss the more subtle, often cultural cues.
They do get part of it right, in that a large part of it has to do with envy — envy that something as frivolous as "Blackberry Thumb" can be a person's sole reason for visiting a doctor.
If there are any doctors to be had, that is. Because, you know, doctors live just around the street corner everywhere in the world, just like milk and apples come from your local supermarket conglomorate.
Behold, the ridiculously small-minded American excecutive. Your thumb hurts? Boo-hoo. Either work out or stop typing so many useless e-mails! You aren't providing leadership or clarity, you're cluttering the already-saturated information channels of your colleagues.
Also, for those of you that aren't aware, Research In Motion (RIM) are the makers of the Blackberry, which has become ubiquitous in the modern business environment. The title has nothing to do with rimming, though that would make for an extremely amusing title.
"What do you do?"
"Not much, just working as a RIM technician right now, looking to get into something a bit more advanced later on. You know, something that stretches my skills a bit."
" ... I'll bet you are!"
Though it is said that developing world countries are contracting our maladies, so I guess they are going to need a lot of RIM technicians after all.
All this text is making my fingers cramp ... medic!
They do get part of it right, in that a large part of it has to do with envy — envy that something as frivolous as "Blackberry Thumb" can be a person's sole reason for visiting a doctor.
If there are any doctors to be had, that is. Because, you know, doctors live just around the street corner everywhere in the world, just like milk and apples come from your local supermarket conglomorate.
Behold, the ridiculously small-minded American excecutive. Your thumb hurts? Boo-hoo. Either work out or stop typing so many useless e-mails! You aren't providing leadership or clarity, you're cluttering the already-saturated information channels of your colleagues.
Also, for those of you that aren't aware, Research In Motion (RIM) are the makers of the Blackberry, which has become ubiquitous in the modern business environment. The title has nothing to do with rimming, though that would make for an extremely amusing title.
"What do you do?"
"Not much, just working as a RIM technician right now, looking to get into something a bit more advanced later on. You know, something that stretches my skills a bit."
" ... I'll bet you are!"
Though it is said that developing world countries are contracting our maladies, so I guess they are going to need a lot of RIM technicians after all.
All this text is making my fingers cramp ... medic!
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