James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote:
> The next year, when the money was supposed to become available, NASA HQ > punished NASA Ames for going over their head (even though it was a > grassroots organization chaired by yours truly) by reducing the > discretionary budget for NASA Ames by an amount equal to the earmark. . . . > the guy who gave me the budget figure begged me to do nothing more like > that again because his job was on the line. > That is exactly what I would predict. I expect that would happen at any government agency, corporation or university. It is never about science. It is never about profit, or a technology that might benefit humanity. It is all about politics. Power and money. When you mess with someone's prerogative to divvy up the money, he will strike back. You might have the cure for cancer. You might be trying to develop zone refining -- a technique critical to the success of transistors. When the guy in charge (Shockley, in the latter case) finds out you are allocating funds or working behind his back, he will try to shut you down no matter how much merit your idea has. I am not being cynical. That's the way the world works. Almost all of it. The only reason some corporations deviate from that pattern is because they love money more than politics. Politics are often explicit. They are built-in to the structure of the institution. See, for example, IBM in the 1980s or Microsoft today. Microsoft has what they call "stack ranking" or "the performance model" which is a recipe for destruction. It is guaranteed death-by-politics. See: http://m.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer QUOTE: By 2002 the by-product of bureaucracy—brutal corporate politics—had reared its head at Microsoft. And, current and former executives said, each year the intensity and destructiveness of the game playing grew worse as employees struggled to beat out their co-workers for promotions, bonuses, or just survival. Microsoft’s managers, intentionally or not, pumped up the volume on the viciousness. What emerged—when combined with the bitterness about financial disparities among employees, the slow pace of development, and the power of the Windows and Office divisions to kill innovation—was a toxic stew of internal antagonism and warfare. “If you don’t play the politics, it’s management by character assassination,” said Turkel. At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. . . . - Jed
