The comic strip Iggy is wildly popular among those in THE demographic: Young Upwardly Mobile Professionals. That is because Iggy is NOT satire. Crazy satire gets old fast. But Iggy describes a reality that LOOKS like satire.
Management really is that bad today. It is so bad that it LOOKS like satire.
Iggy looks like a satire with his crazy tie. But the reader has no doubt that that guy can work technical miracles of the most sophisticated kind simply because, in today’s world, a young person HAS to keep a job like that. We take that for granted.
It is the organization and management that provides the bitter humor.
I have listened to my young kinfolk describe the pain of dealing with sewer-level management.
SysOps is nodding vigorously.
The technical personnel have to PRODUCE. There has never been a time when the pressure was as great on them, and forgiveness for failure less obtainable. That produces technical heights.
Meanwhile management is selected by fitting people into a political maze, with the super-rich at the top. The process has no contact with reality whatsoever.
#1 by AFKAN on 02/23/2008 - 8:26 pm
This is a stronger point than many realize.
When you said:
You reminded me that most of the “management” theory I took in college was basically a series of footnotes and extensions to the models of organization developed by the damn Self-Proclaimed Greatest Generation.
I remember working at one of my first “real” jobs out of college, and having an organizational chart of TWELVE visible levels.
Each of those levels dared not admit it is essentially superfluous…
And, the fact is that so much of the current (and future) economy will deal with an Internet-enabled technology – which removes levels of organization like nothing I’ve seen – and the gated communities the “exectuves” – general officers, with their own clubs! – hide behind will fail rather quickly.
As will they..
I suspect Families, in the historical sense – Extended Families – will be the Order of the Day.
And THAT is the basis of a Racial Revolution is society, one way, or another.
#2 by Sys Op on 02/23/2008 - 8:40 pm
SysOps is nodding vigorously.
Now… how did you know that??
And “join the club” – I can’t remember the term “address bar” either most of the time. That text label no longer appears up there where it used to… so “out of sight, out of mind” and I say, “you know… jeez, that place where the URL goes — you know…”
People don’t let on what they think about that, but just thought I’d add to the confessions. We just do it, we don’t usually TALK about it!! People are impatient with explanations I’ve found. I have one guy that blurts out, “Yeah, I know all that…” But, shazam — he doesn’t and can’t figure out what’s wrong because he won’t listen long enough. I only treat people like kids if they WANT me to in order to get it to them in the most effective way.
Sorry, but you’re just A-ok!
SysOp
#3 by Dave on 02/23/2008 - 9:59 pm
It is a huge bottleneck worldwide to find good programmers and to find IT people who really understand data architecture. It takes a high IQ to master these fields.
This is a very big deal and government is way behind the curve.
Sarbanes Oxley regulation is off the charts in its stupidity. The regulators who are writing standards for American corporate transparency have no knowledge of data architecture. That is like a committee of blind persons appointing themselves society’s official mapmakers. The results are absurd to be beyond belief. Hundreds of billions are being wasted on this account.
Sarbanes Oxley is truly historic in the mess it has created and in its complete ineffectiveness. One of its predecessors, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, pales in comparison.
A milestone in “management” political correctness happened in the late 1970s when we got the “Foreign Corrupt Practices Act” after a scandal involving Boeing and Lockheed bribing foreign government procurement officials to buy American aircraft.
So the bribery that is standard operating procedure throughout the third-world moved to offshore trading companies. Today, American corporations’ brides are concealed in the broker’s commissions of trading companies that now give the required degree of separation so American companies can avoid getting nailed under the Act’s provisions.
Chinese and Vietnamese government procurement officials, for example, just love America’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Now all they do is sit back and let all these trading company hustlers, from trading companies domiciled in whatever venue has the most incompetent police and tax auditors, compete with each other in arranging the biggest bribe. The winner is the trading company salesperson willing to give the procurement official the biggest kickback from his sales commission, a commission that is then billed to the American corporation as a legitimate broker’s commission.
A person with an 80 IQ could have figured out how to get around the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. But political correctness requires us to pretend the Act is effective in its goals.
There is no need to “get around” Sarbanes Oxley. Sarbanes Oxley is so absurd and ineffective that it has to compare with those women’s bra manufacturers everybody jokes about in the old Soviet Union.
That was a bunch of old men in senior management positions whose job it was to sit around and try to figure out the demographics of female tit size throughout the Soviet Empire. It didn’t matter, the actual bras manufactured were so shoddy and uncomfortable no women would wear them anyway.
#4 by backbaygrouch4 on 02/25/2008 - 3:41 pm
I am unfamilar with Iggy, but Dilbert is much the same.
#5 by Prometheus on 02/26/2008 - 1:38 am
From working in companies where the management was restructured more often than the toilet paper in an Indian curry house is replaced, I’ve been able to get a good feel of its ineptitude.
Two things are clear.
Firstly, every new manager will restructure to do things thier way, because it is the only way they know how.
Secondly, what a manager is, is someone who can talk the talk and say what is necessary to appease those above them. Thats it. Every interaction from management DOWN is seen as irrelevant. Only the interactions from management UP the corporate chain.
There job is to ask for productivity from those they manage. How to actually utilise resources to do that, that is not the job of the manager anymore.