Well, I will say this once then shut up. Sorry John Rigby, I don't agree. I think your philosophies are warped and skewed from reality.
For a long time businesses were closed communities. Everyone followed what some people studying Henry Ford had concluded: that precise control was THE way to go. It didn't matter. The Old Boy Networks and the rigid philosophies almost worldwide combined to make the business a field like a watershed empire. Absolutely unassailable as long as they had the money to squash any competition that did not follow the same paradigm (and was therefore perceived as dangerous). Then along came W. Edwards Deming. He suggested that the use of statistics could improve efficiency, cut costs, make workers more productive by including them in decision-making processes, etc. He was of course laughed out of the country of origin, the US, where the worst of the business rot was entrenched. Well, General Douglas MacArthur decided Deming could be the man to help Japan rebuild their shattered industrial base. They accepted the methods and the training, and the beat the rest of the world to its knees in the 1980s as a result, but of course as businesses go the weakness of rigidity of approach set in, and others started using the philosophy, so the degree of success apparently diminished. But there is a contractor in Hawaii where the number of construction mistakes is tiny compared to any others in the world. There is a school in Alaska where in four years they went form a 40% 'F' grade to 94% 'A's, and the courses in the mean time had acquired objectives and purposes that were four or five times as difficult. A global chemical company went from mildly profitable to doubling its revenue in four years, with no increase in staffing and only minor increases in expenses. The degree of worker satisfaction (as measured by Monday morning absenteeism and turnover) apparently doubled. I fear that most people in business are looking for a quick profit. They think ahead five minutes to a few months, and they abandon any approach that does not immediately show a return. Sorry, sometimes the more efficient and trechnically correct approach takes longer. This is just another fact. And the fact that these same businessmen seem to find so hard to swallow that they ignore it completely is that software makers have very few assets. They try to erect barriers to protect _controllable_ assets with software patents and secrecy and have made a horrid mess and a genuine embarassment, so laughably far from reality that eventually only soldiers and bullets will be able to make any semblance of enforcement. The true assets in software industry are _people_; of the highly skilled and admittedly perhaps specially talented type. Businessmen shake in fear when they pause to reflect that every night their assets walk out the door. Marketing is of course important, but if you have no product to market, or a poor product to market, the expense of marketing and predation can consume every good thing a company stands for. So how has a group of (usually) about 100 paid people and a number of dedicated volunteers produced something that could be considered even a mild challenge to a behemoth like Microsoft with its thousands of engineers and billions of dollars to invest? Well that is the fact that John Rigby and others like him seem to want to avoid, or denigrate or ignore. Business does not control the best of the techs, and never will again. Environments that provide freedom of thought and cooperation(something people do automatically if left to their own devices) are showing tiny glimpses of their true potential. But management has to restructure considerably to play a useful role in that environment, and they are understandably afraid of something that requires a type of management that features letting go. The same battle was fought in some schools where Teachers were unwilling to give students control over their own education, but results like Mt Edgecumbe and now dozens of schools across the country are hard to argue with. You know, the Teachers are still there as trainers in cooperation and coaches, but they no longer have to worry about controlling the class. The big opposition is the folks who say, "We've always done it this way, so that is the only right way to do it." So, John Rigby and others, I won't flame you or suggest dishonesty, but I will challenge your knowledge, not because you are ignorant, but because you learned in a limited environment, with little or no different competition. The rules are changing, the playing field is expanding. And you aren't keeping up. Civileme
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