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 intelligence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intelligence. Show all posts
22 January 2009
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?).
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