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Review of some films at the New York Gay Film Festival.

It seems the ship of state has thunked into an iceberg. Amazing what Cheney can say one day and the Prez the next week. I guess reorganizing the government does make sense. There are a lot of top rate ex-Enron executives looking for a new job. Or so I've heard. A few more of them in government, and we won't have to worry about Social Security ever again.

The House, ever one to vote against suicide, has ruled that a good reason to permanently retire estate taxes. Why, otherwise they might be liable for some billionaire making an early exit to take advantage of the tax loopholes. Increase spending, decrease revenue. And here I thought Republicans were fiscally conservative! They are just as creative with their spending as I am!

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From:

davidschroth.livejournal.com

One thing that always gives me the giggles is when some candidate for public office, with no prior experience in politics/public service, will go on and on about how they'll bring business efficiency to government. This due to the fact that, as an employee of a large company, my usual view is that most businesses succeed in spite of themselves.
And now the Shrub is planning to apply to the government the one action that, in my company (and probably most others), is the one unfailing indicator of incompetent management - the reorganization. Intended to hide and protect known incompetent cronies, and give the appearance of Being On Top Of The Situation and Boldly Repositioning Ourselves For Future Success.
My experience strongly suggests that moving boxes around on the organization chart does not actually make an organization more effective. YMMV (although, in this instance, I'm definitely from Missouri).

From:

webbob.livejournal.com

I agree with you that reorganization is often the action of incompetents trying to hide and excuse their failures; sometimes it's also done by optimists who think that they can break up unofficial clacques who ruin the effect of policy by conspiring to bypass it.

In smaller, newer companies (my past employers Genuity and PictureTel, for example) erecting new headquarters buildings is usually the pride that cometh before a fall: you have the distraction by trivia, the needless expense, and the work disruptions of a reorganization without even the thought that the company will be more efficent.

Headquarters buildings usually seem to be about ego, and marketeers who care more about making the CEO and board happy by stroking their egos ("With this new building, we'll have real market visibility!" Too bad the building is in Andover, Massachusetts and its picture will never be published outside of a company annual report or an auction brochure for the bankruptcy sale.) than about providing an honest evaluation of where money needs to be spent to increase profitability.

This is not entirely suprising, since marketeers are often faced with not knowing anything that could help sales: they know damn well that this means that the right answer is to save money by dismissing them and looking for somebody who DOES know how to increase sales.

Sorry this is so long, I hadn't realized I'd saved up so much resentment. But those were good companies, and good jobs, damnit!

From:

davidschroth.livejournal.com

I suppose it would be nice if I didn't understand your resentment (or, for that matter, my resentment). But I do find it telling that as soon as the Shrub starts to feel a little heat, he immediately pulls out this business classic. And I'm confident it will be just as effective for the feds as it ever was for my company (I don't even want to try to count the number of reorganizations I've lived through. But I have no difficulty coming up with the number that actually made a positive difference. Here's a hint - it's an integer between -1 and +1, excluding -1 and +1).

From:

webbob.livejournal.com

If you're as creative with numbers as a few of the marketing folks (the minority) I've met, that still leaves a lot of leeway.

Like the wunderkinden who noticed that there were more Novell IPX/SPX workstations than TCP/IP or NetBIOS hosts in the PC LAN universe, and therefore aimed all the development effort at a LAN videoconferencing product for that space. Never mind that 95%+ of those workstations had no disks, no colour monitors, and no prospect of ever being used for anything but the reason the employer purchased them.

Thus trading away a potential early lead in the TCP/IP (or even NetBIOS, yuck) videoconferencing market -- we would have practically invented the market, so far as mainstream business VCS use was concerned. Instead it hit us from the side and got haphazard support in the standards arena. Of course, that in turn was from the flipside, a pure engineering project that never had any real visibility for Marketing, which (I thought then and in hindsight) was given too much attention after IP videconferencing made it market-f*cking present felt.

If typing were aerobic exercise, I'd be fit for the day. Phew.

Bush & Co. seem to me to be misdirecting effort in similar ways, probably misled by Marketing results showing them what changes are supposed to get W. back in office.