Where Were You?

Gun owners always bring up two old fallacies when they try to defend the incredible rate of gun violence in the US: “A well-armed society is a polite society.” and “As any student of history knows, gun control figures prominently in the designs of totalitarian states.” The USofA is the best armed society in the world, with 89 guns per 100 citizens (as of a 2007 survey), and I find it hard to imagine that anyone would classify us as “well mannered.” The NRA has bought and paid for a collection of gutless and moronic congresscritters to maintain a national inability to make decent estimates as to how many households are gun-toting, but most estimates put the number at about 40%. That’s not far from the “traditional” number of armed American households, so if history were on the side of the “defenders of freedom” argument, you’d think we’d have some evidence in our history. We do not have any such evidence.

The well-armed citizens of Andrew Jackson’s 1830’s regime did absolutely nothing to stop the forced “Trail of Tears” march, the ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee,Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations. In fact, well-armed citizens often stood along the trail harassing the victims and, even, occasionally killing one or more including grabbing children from their mothers’ arms and bashing them to death on rocks and wagon wheels.

During the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike, the military was called in to bust the union after Pinkertons and the local cops failed to successfully violate workers’ rights. I’m sure you’ll be amazed to learn that the hundreds of thousands of well-armed Americans around the country sat on their hands and watched Andrew Carnegie’s goons, local cops, and the Pennsylvania State Militia crushed the strike and tossed the steel workers back into near-slavery. There was plenty of violence on both sides of the labor battle, but damn little contribution from the well-armed society that read about the strike, the strike breakers, and saw the Pinkerton goons abusing their neighbors and fellow workers. In the end, the busted strike cost workers income and rights all over the country as the union collapsed along with most of the union movement and the mine owners retaliated by lowering wages and increasing work hours.

Likewise, the 1894 Pullman Strike was settled with military assistance and cost workers a few more rights and a crapload of jobs. Still, no response from the armed citizenry who were supposed to believe will rise up and defend democracy, freedom, and the American Way. In fact, the average American disapproved of the strike because it inconvenienced them slightly, along with agitating the Faux News of the day; the yellow journalism Hearst newspaper. Grover Cleveland, the jackass Republican President of the time created Labor Day as a diversion to placate unions and the rare semi-alert American laborer. Eugene Debs, one of the union organizers, went to prison, studied Karl Marx, and became a socialist who ran for president five times. Eventually, our tolerance for democracy hit a new low when Woodrow Wilson’s merry band of goons tried and convicted Debs for in 1918 under the Espionage Act of 1917 and sent a presidential candidate to prison for 10 years. If an armed public were capable of being incited to revolt in the interest of freedom and democracy, you’d think jailing a legitimate candidate who received 900,000 votes might have done it. But it didn’t.  Apparently, putting up road blocks between capitalists and their war profits is an unacceptable and unforgivable crime.

In 1903, the Colorado Labor Wars gave the armed public yet another chance to grow a pair and rise up on their hind legs. “There is no episode in American labor history in which violence was as systematically used by employers as in the Colorado labor war of 1903 and 1904.” The Blackwater goons of the day, the Pinkertons, and the state militia abused miners at will, even publicizing some of their abuses in national newspapers. After numerous beatings, murders, illegal imprisonment of miners and their families, a couple of incidents of military sniping and general purpose class warfare, the miners were forced back to work or fired for union activity. The state of Colorado’s citizens revolted, mildly, passing a referendum requiring an 8-hour workday. The new corporate-owned Republican governor tabled the constitutional amendment and the legislature let it die. 

When Herbert Hoover sent Douglas McArthur’s Army and six tanks to dispatch/disburse the “Bonus Army” (WWI vets who had been screwed out of the cash value of their “service certificates” so that bankers and other Great Depression scammers could continue their corporate welfare party.), there is no record of the millions of American gun owners rising up to defend fellow citizens who had fought for them in the first “Great War.” The majority of Americans turned their heads just as you might predict they would if they were disarmed.

That was then and this is now, right?

How about the 1968 Chicago Police Riots? Crooked cops went on a rampage, beating the crap out of war protestors, political campaign workers, bystanders who just happened to be walking, driving, or standing in the general territory of the crazed and crooked police (Remember the Time Magazine headline, “Cops on the take can’t take orders?”) ; including Hugh Heffner who was just picking up his morning paper when he got clobbered. Just a “bunch of hippies,” right? Not worth your gun-toting time to protect their rights from the powers that be.

How about the 1970 Ohio State National Guard Murders? Talk about the moment when the government comes to end civil rights. It’s hard to beat the inspiration that should have come from the murder of four students after the crazed military goons fired 67 rounds into a crowd of peace protestors. We’d just “escaped” from 8 years of the terror of liberal Democratic government. Gun ownership was hitting all-time new highs. Where was the outrage? Where were the armies of pissed off and armed citizens? The government was overstepping every Constitutional boundary and a fair number of Nixon’s goons were ready to send the military after anyone who disagreed with their power grab and profit-taking. Still, no protests, except from the kids who would be asked to dump blood and futures into this regime.

And today?

 

 

There is no shortage of moments in American history where liberty could have been defended by the mostly-bullshit-filled Second Amendment proponents. Every opportunity has been ignored. Where do these gun loonies show up? At political rallies, in movie theaters, at Starbucks, in restaurants, and in grocery stores. They are not fighting for liberty, they are scaring the shit out of the rest of us. These crazy fucks don’t give a flying damn about freedom, democracy, or liberty. They are wannabe terrorists who don’t have a clue why the Second Amendment is in our Constitution. Because of them, I think it’s time to repeal that poorly considered portion of the Bill of Rights.

 

One of the more obvious things about gun owners is that they are practically never anyone you might consider to be revolutionary, defenders of liberty, progressive, or, even, liberal. They are overwhelmingly conservative. Conservatives, by definition, are the least likely people on the planet to have to worry about being harassed by “the government.” With the obvious understanding that “government exists to protect the rich from the poor,” you would have to be a Fox News simpleton to imagine that our military, police, or any other government agency would be “coming for my guns” if you are anything less than an armed Arian Nations KKK-sheet-wearing nutball. If you aren’t a noisy nutball, even then you’re pretty damn safe from the US government.

On the other hand, if you are an unarmed Occupy kid protesting the rape and pillage of the American Treasury by our well-dressed criminal banking class, you’re going to get your ass handed to you by every goon with a SWAT patch on his uniform or a riot-control suit to play in. If you are foolish enough to possess weapons while supporting any sort of change in our corporate oligarchy you are probably going to be shot or rounded up and tried for treason. For the most part, the people who are most likely to be harassed by any government on the planet are also the least likely to own guns. But we know that’s not the NRA’s crowd, right? Those folks will be helping with the round up long before they make a useful contribution to restoring democracy or creating a fair society. They are, after all, conservatives and conservatives support the status quo no matter how evil it may be. They always have and always will.

Sucking Professionally and Academically

I’m currently reading a book (Quiet, by Susan Cain) that about introverts, introspection, and the polar opposite of those qualities which seem to be valued irrationally by our brain-dead culture. The chapter I’m currently working through is focusing on my all-time least favorite school, Harvard Business School. In my experience and study, I believe the best thing any business that hopes to be successful can do is to purge all MBAs from positions of responsibility (The best way to foolproof any system is to remove the fools from the system.) and ship as many HBS MBAs to the competition as possible.

A friend of mine recently went through a job search and, happily, found a position with a research firm in Michigan. I’m glad he has work, he’s glad he’s finally re-employed after a painful period of financial instability, and his new employer is, I hope, happy to have his talents at their disposal. I hope this is a “happily ever after” story.

If I were back on the hunt for work, though, his new employer wouldn’t be on a list of jobs I’d want. The reason is that this employer uses the HBS bury-them-in-bullshit interview system for employee selection. There may be nothing on earth I despise much more than the “interview by committee” selection system. I’ve gone through it myself a few times and have been selected by the process at least three times. Only one of those three turned out to be a good experience for me or the employer and that one happened because the owner of the company, and chief engineer, overrode the “committee” and made me an offer before the committee members came to a consensus. I turned down one of the other two jobs because I found a better opportunity before they made up their minds and the third job was one of the worst experiences of my working life.

A small part of my distain for the HBS “pull credit up, push blame down” mismanagement style comes from the dichotomy their multiple personality philosophy forces on their minimally skilled “students.” Quiet quotes the school’s profs saying “If you’re preparing alone for class, they you’re doing it wrong. Nothing at HBS is intended to be done alone.” and “Don’t think about the perfect answer. It’s better to get out there and say something than to never get your voice in.” The idea seems to be to derive every decision from a committee and for the committees to be driven by the noisiest, least prepared, least thoughtful members. Not only is that the idea, but it is absolutely the end result of their mismanagement style. The dumbest, most arrogant, least technical, least knowledgeable, loudest, threatening fools rise to the top and Decisions are consistently foolish. The work atmosphere is consistently childish and hazardous to those who think on their feet, as opposed to those to emote on their feet. If you can’t make a decision on your own, do your own research, make up you own mind, what useful contribution can you make to a committee? The answer is, of course, “none.” However, that hasn’t slowed our empire’s worst companies from swirling around that toilet bowl.

Harvard Business School’s influence on a huge variety of organizations has been catastrophic. To be clear about how completely useless HBS is, remember Larry Summers is the school’s President. Summers is on record for never having made an intelligent decision about anything in his life. He is at the heart of the world-wide economic depression we’re currently struggling to escape and he was chosen to lead this worthless institution after doing a perfectly miserable job in the Clinton administration. If you chopped that lardass into bite-sized chunks, he wouldn’t make good dog food.

#43 When Did Whiners become Winners? (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

"Eat the rich,
"There's only one thing that they're good for
"Eat the rich
"Take one bite now - come back for more " Aerosmith

I guess I first noticed this in the early 90's, when Neuter Gingrich and George ("I'm not always a wimp") Bush started speaking in public. Still, it amazes me that so many whining old men hold positions of power in Washington. What's up with that?

"Well, I woke up this morning
"On the wrong side of the bed
"And how I got to thinkin'
"About all those thing you said . . . "

A few weeks back, my clock radio woke me up with the simpering whine of Trent Lott and an equally pitiful sounding politico named "Connie Mack."

(I thought Connie Mack was a baseball minor league. When did a professional sports franchise get the right to run for public office? Did we allow our current pack of elected morons to hold a Constitutional Congress and I didn't hear about it?)

Anyway, these two doofuses were bawling about how traumatized they were by the federal government's "armed invasion" of the Miami home where Elian Gonzalez had been held. It sounded like a pair of East Coast trust fund babies trying to convince their mother to let them borrow the Mercedes and the mountain resort for the weekend. I practically smashed the bedside stand, trying to put a stop to that awful noise.

I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of irritant gets votes in the hope that they'll shut up once they get a job. It doesn't work. Quit voting for them, whoever you are.

"And I just can't see no humor
"About your way of life
"And I think I can do more for you
"With this here fork and knife "

A couple of decades ago, some brilliant media commentator went on record saying that no woman would ever be elected President of the United States because a woman's voice would not be capable of calming a panicked American public in times of crisis. Times have changed. For the last twenty years, we've been packing the House of Representatives and the Senate with rich and whimpering frat boys whose voices make blackboard scratching sound musical. Was this a liberal conspiracy to condition our ears for the first female Chief Executive? Make me listen to that Connie Mack character for thirty seconds and I'd vote to replace him with Phyllis Diller or Mad TV's Cabana Chat lady. If we'll tolerate these voices, discriminating against any human (or not) aural characteristic has come to an end.

Back in the 80's, I wondered about the aural capacity of folks who could tolerate listening to George Bush through four years. Things have gotten much worse. I'm astounded at the people who put up with thirty seconds of G.W. Bush. That man could irritate a rock. Combine a middle aged spoiled brat with that Texas "we all talk through our noses down here" thing and you'd think that ought to create a combination that would trap the man in his country club for life. You'd hope. And you'd be wrong again. All that moral damage we were told that rock and roll would cause has taken a different sort of toll on the American public. We're all freakin' deaf!

I guess it was bound to happen. After two hundred and some years of laughing at those grumpy old English men with speech impediments who punctuate every speech's conclusion with "hurumph, hurumph" or "here, here" followed by "mumbly, mumblay, mumbly," it's probably our turn to be stuck with an embarrassing sounding government. Now, the rest of the world can record our politicians' public utterances and play them back for comedy relief on their late night talk shows. I know that Danny Quaile provided the world with that sort of entertainment, so maybe we're just adding more fuel to the world's comedy quotient. Still, it's going to be painfully embarrassing to travel overseas until this problem is fixed.

For me, this is doubly humiliating. Not only are these whiners running my government, but they're, mostly, from my generation. We should have seen it coming. All of the macho guys from the Baby Booming generation got toasted in Vietnam, fried their brains on dope, got rich in rock and roll bands and have dropped so far out of the mainstream that they can't find it with a fishing pole, or gave up on politics, altogether, after wasting a few years charging windmills in the 70's. That leaves the country in the hands of the Ivy League dorks who couldn't get lucky or noticed, unless they waved the contents of their billfolds out the windows of their Porches and Beemers. What we're left with for public offices are the kids who were drawing an allowance from their parents long after their 40th birthdays.

Even knowing all that, I want to know why they're getting votes? When did Americans lose all aural discrimination? Are we so used to traffic noise, tinny television speakers, and crappy car radios that we don't know the voice of authority when we hear it? Maybe the way to fix American politics is to improve the noises we all live with. If we got a good stereo system installed in every kitchen, maybe we'd get a better class of politician.

July 2000

#42 Customer Service in Our Times (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

Supposedly, the 80's were the decade of quality management and the 90's were the decade of customer service. I read that somewhere. I don't believe it for a minute, though. I'd call the 90's the decade of pretending to care about customers while doing the exact opposite of what any rational customer would expect.

We've all heard the statistics that tell us that most businesses only hear from 1-4% of dissatisfied customers. Those of us who studied customer service and product loyalty have seen the numbers that tell us that the other 96-99% of customers just swallow their disappointment and go away. We've been shown that 90+% of the folks we've disappointed NEVER come back. No matter how much marketing we throw at them, those customers remember the shafting they received and do their best to avoid making the same mistake twice.

The old numbers said that each of those burned-for-life customers told eight folks about their experience and that word-of-mouth connection spreads the news to as many as 100 potential or existing customers. That might have been true in 1980, but those numbers are ancient history today. We're living in a new world of direct experience information and, while the MBA crowd doesn't know it yet, it's really easy for a single ripped off customer to warn off thousands of victims from a product or company.

For example, in 1994 I was just getting into the Internet, through maillists and newsgroups. I'd purchased a Back-UPS Office 500 from APC (who's marketing mantra is "legendary reliability") and that product turned out to be a disaster. Instead of protecting my computer from power interruptions, the APC product introduced dozens of interruptions and, eventually, screwed up my computer so solidly that the hard drive had to be reformatted. Since the UPS had a warranty, I attempted to get some assistance from the manufacturer or the dealer (CompUSA).

Of course, CompUSA sent me to the manufacturer. Anyone who's ever bought anything from CompUSA knows that they are a customer-hostile organization that exists only because of their (sometimes) low prices and available inventory.

APC's Tech Service rep told me that my product had been released with a glitch that did exactly what I'd described. He sent me to Customer Service where I was told I'd have to box the unit and ship it to them for replacement. It has always seemed to me that, when a manufacturer admits to selling a defective product, the customer shouldn't be liable for the shipping for repair or replacement. I mentioned that and got a stern lecture about APC's "reputation for excellence," something the Customer Service person thought that "everyone knows" about and respects. I didn't know squat about APC, but I learned plenty during the course of getting this product replaced and having the $20 mail-in rebate voided because of the way APC chose to make the replacement (with an alternate product that didn't have a mail-in rebate offer). (with an alternate product that didn't have a mail-in rebate offer).

So, I wrote all this up and stuck it in a letter to a half-dozen newsgroups. I got a few letters from folks thanking me for warning them about this funky company. That was the end of it, for me. I have avoided APC, while purchasing a dozen or so UPS units for my employers, ever since. Count me as one customer in the 96% who never go back.

But my opinion of APC didn't end there. I got an email from a guy from Holland, about a month later. He said he'd read my article in a Dutch newspaper and thought I might get a kick out of the translation. I gave him my address and he sent me a copy. It was an article about the "new" communication link between customers. My article was included as an example of how a single customer could influence hundreds of potential customers, all over the world. There were a half-dozen articles, all in the same vein as mine, which did a half-dozen companies no good at all, I'm sure. Who knows how many Dutch computer users saw my article about APC? How many read it, worldwide?

It still hasn't ended. I get an email, about once every few months, from someone thanking me for the APC warning. So, what kind of statistics can you derive from all this? If only one in a hundred customers complain to a company when they find their hard-earned money was wasted on a product, how many people do you figure write someone about an article they've read, like the one I wrote? One in a thousand? One in ten thousand? This is the kind of word-of-mouth with which advertising can never compete.

I'm not the only guy to write this kind of "review," either. I see detailed product/company comments on a regular basis and they hold a lot of weight for me, too. In fact, I'd value a direct customer experience opinion over a professional reviewer's opinion by an order of magnitude. Anyone who didn't have to, personally, pay for the product or service isn't really a customer.

The weirdest aspect of my personal opinion of APC is that the replacement that I, finally, received from the company has been working, flawlessly, for all these years. It's practically an invisible part of my office. Every a year or so, when I'm vacuuming the office, I jar the desk hard enough to dislodge the UPS from its outlet and I get to hear it beep and flash its LED's, letting me know it's still working. A couple of times in that period, Midwestern lightning storms have shut down our neighborhood's power and the UPS is the only electrical thing working in the house for that period. Still, I can't notice the little beige box next to my computer without remember that APC cheated me out of $40, by my calculations. They substituted a cheaper UPS than the one I'd originally purchased and they weaseled their way out of paying a $20 rebate. I guess it's a principle issue. I paid too much for what I got and I didn't get what I intended to buy. So, in my mind, APC may always be a dishonest company.

So why do companies insist on writing hostile customer policies? Why do they keep trying to piss us off, when we're actually doing them a favor by taking the time to complain? My guess is it's because there's no glory in providing decent customer service. Nobody gets to put a glossy high-tech advertising campaign on a resume. Nobody gets to present a dog-and-phony show, with overheads and spreadsheets showing how much money was saved by cutting X feature/function/cost out of Z product, to pack of detached executives who have absolutely no connection to or interest in whoever might be foolish enough to buy Z product. Nobody collects brownie points for cutting the budget from Customer Service and adding to the pile of dollars available for executive bonuses. Providing actual customer service has absolutely no sex appeal. Talking about it is all anyone really wants to do. Doing it requires too much thought and effort.

June 2000

#41 Why Oh Why Did You Go Away? (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

I

was recently offered the opportunity to try out a new telephone service. The old one, U S West, was expensive, featureless, and about as friendly as Doc Holiday a day away from his last glass of whiskey. The new one, Media One, is very personal, easy to contact, and actually sent an installation guy to do the changeover at a time that didn't require me to take a day off work. Imagine that! The new service gave me every feature available from my old telephone company for the same money as adding a single one of these features would have cost from U S West. To get every feature from Caller ID to Auto-Redial to an improved Internet connection to VoiceMail, I spent about $4 over the old basic phone bill. I doubt that I'll use half of the stuff that's on my phone now, but 21 features for $4 seemed like a reasonable deal. Add all that to getting to speak to a real person when I call for information and a the very informative and conscientious guys who have been out to do installation work on two different systems, and it was a no-brainer for me. Goodbye U S West!

A solid month after I dumped U S West, I got a form letter from their Customer Service Center. "We want to understand why you no longer have U S West service. If this service was terminate without your knowledge . . . If you did choose to leave U S West, and your decision was based on a problem you may have experienced, we would like the opportunity to regain your trust and your business . . . We also recognize there's competition for your business. We welcome this competition . . . Sometimes customers switch companies for what may seem like a 'better deal' at the time, only to be disappointed later . . . You are important to us. Please call . . . After a century of service, your satisfaction is still our number one goal." And so on.

What the heck? I had a bad day at work. I needed a good laugh, so I called their 800 number.

First attempt, "We're sorry. This number has been disconnected. Please check your number and try again. If you believe . . ." I hit redial and got through the second time.

"Welcome to U S West . . . (yada yada yada "you can go to our website" etc.) In order to assist you, you will be required to enter your telephone number . . . " Forty-seven pointless key entries later, I remembered why I hated calling U S West for anything.

Once, during a thunderstorm when my phone line went dead, I called them from a payphone to get the repair process started. Since I wasn't calling from the phone number I was trying to get repaired, the freakin' system refused to accept my repair request information. I discovered that, if you ignore the automaton voice long enough, you'll get a "customer service person." Soaked to the bone and on my last quarter, I got the same routine from the live person (if he really was living) that the brainless automated system had given me. "Sorry sir, but we can not take a repair order for a residential telephone from a number not listed to that customer." WHAAATTTT? If it was freakin' working, why would I call to get it fixed? And so on.

Back to my hopeless attempt at providing U S West with a bit of "why I'm leavin' you" feedback. I remembered that, if you ignore all of the automated instructions and pretend you still use a rotary phone, there are one or two living voices that may lower themselves to answering a customer service call. "All our representatives are busy right now. Your expected wait will be approximately 18 minutes." Intermittently, I am informed that the robot voice is "sorry you're having to wait so long. Your call is very important to us." (Who is "us?" The Borg? Obviously, no human cares about how long I'm waiting.)

Fortunately, I have a hands-free phone and it's an 800 number and I'd rather tie up my phone line than take a chance on getting an incoming call from a telephone solicitor or some jerk who wants to shame my wife into paying her credit card bill. So I left the phone on hold and went off to start dinner.

Twenty-four minutes later, pass through my office and a voice is calling. "Is anyone there? Hello?" I talk to Leo. Leo is a very nice person who has not been told that he would be getting this sort of call. But he made a stab at shipping my call to another department, the Product Service Center.

I'm back on hold with a new automated voice. This time the Borg Lady doesn't bother to tell me how long I'll be on hold.

I'm guessing for the entertainment value, the Product Service Center Borg Lady quotes U S West's prices for all of the new features I'm now getting from Media One. Adding them up in my head, it sounds to me like my $4 worth of Media One features will cost about $60 from U S West. What can a Product Service Center person do to knock $60 down to $4? This ought to be interesting. Still, the Borg Lady chants, intermittently, about how important I am to U S West and that someone will answer my call if I live long enough.

I smell food burning.

Twenty-eight minutes into this game, I decide it's less entertaining that I'd hoped it might be. I want to finish dinner, watch a basketball game, and write this Rat Rant. I will never know what U S West would say to bring me back "home." I bet the Product Service Center person would have told me how they'd like to be as customer friendly as Media One, but they just don't have the money, technical capacity, or the management willpower. Sort of like Lilly Tomlin's old "because we're the telephone company," except they don't have anything to threaten me with because I'm no longer their customer.

I wonder how long it will be before Media One starts hiring U S West's out-of-work executives and it becomes impossible to remember why I bothered to change telephone companies? I'm going to ship this one and put it in the archives so we can accurately measure the "time to mediocrity."

April 2000

#39 Modern Economics (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

In the 1950's overstuffed corporations, managers were made to be the factory floor's enemy by design.  Any manager who was appreciated by the people he managed was denigrated as being "soft" and inefficient.  Nothing changed much through the 60s, except that we began giving up industries to Japan because management was so busy, patting itself on the butt for its lousy performance, that the ruling class didn't notice the water circling in the economic toilet. 

In the 1970s, bad management was usually blamed on the fact that technical folks who were being promoted to managers were not "people-people."  The good ole' boys laying this blame were non-technical managers who were not particularly skilled in any activity, except office politics which is only marginally a people-skill.  Entrenched management certainly wasn't skilled in personal relations, or any people-oriented activity other than sucking up to the next level of power.  Still, technical skills were generally turned into management liabilities and the powers that be kept on being what they'd always been. 

By the early 80s, management began to notice that the country had been in a recession for nearly a decade.  (That's the kind of mental acuity that comes with good breeding and higher education.)  Not that noticing the disaster caused them to reconsider their basic anti-labor assumptions or to accept any part of the blame for the recession, but it was a start.  Mostly, the nation's awful execs blamed business failures on "inefficient American labor" and went hunting for cheaper labor overseas.  That seemed like a successful tactic until Japan moved some of its manufacturing here and discovered that American labor was equal to any, including Japanese.  So equal that several Japanese manufacturers produced the best Japanese products in the U.S. 

Japanese managers walked around so much that they sometimes got in the way of the production line.  And the Japanese managers were very technical, mangling another MBA myth.

The American management solution was to focus attention on increasing middle management productivity.  Since upper management can rarely spell "productivity," this was a clever tactic.  The answer to our shriveling economy turned out to be painfully simple.  It was especially painful for the people who did the actual work.  What happened was that middle management became a two-for-the-price-of-one position.  Once again, middle managers were selected for their technical skills but there was also a minimal effort made to encourage development in the person-to-person aspects of management.  Labor managed to cut its own throat, politically, so that management was able to crank up productivity demands while reducing actual labor costs.  More than a decade of Republican-owned law-making helped push this management "advancement" along pretty brutally, too. 

Now, we're reaping the rewards of having let management pay itself in seven-figure denominations for four-figure competence.  Even the rich can only vote themselves rich for so long before the house of stocks and bonds collapses in a light breeze.  I keep hearing about the stalling economic recovery and Wall Street's confusion regarding why that recovery is moving so slowly (if you can find signs that it's moving at all).  There's nothing confusing about any of this.  The spread between the rich and the rest of us is measured in light-years.  If the government were to stop propping up the few profitable industries that still attempt to produce real products, the economy would fall flat on its face. 

April 2000

#38 The True Meaning of Business Dress Codes (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

"Back of tranquility lies always conquered unhappiness." -- David Grayson

Unfortunately, this subject can be explored in about a paragraph. If I did that, I'd be stuck looking for another topic to tack on to the end of this Rat, so be forewarned; I'm going to waste some space here pretending this is a more complex issue than it really is.

One of the Twin Cities papers had a big business section spread, a few days ago, describing a half dozen of the area's newest instant millionaires. This group of guys posed for their fifteen minutes of business news fame in jeans and tee-shirts, rumpled khakis and an NBA-logo sweatshirt, or bicycling shorts and a short sleeved sport shirt with a pocket protector stuffed with pens (probably stolen from the company's office supplies). Not a suit among the bunch. Their message is; successful people wear comfortable clothes.

The same day, I listened to an NPR report about the infestation of the casual workplace and the economic problems that was creating for the Fifth Avenue boys and girls who design and sell $1,000 suits to executives and wannabes. The suit builders are trying to drum up interest in "dress up Thursday." The bulk of their market is brain-dead Fortune 500 executives and they hope to convince these hopeless morons that "productivity" can be improved by choking off the blood to the brain and making workers wear clothes that would overdress a Texan spending Xmas in Nome, Alaska. Of course, it makes sense that the suit pushers would be pushing suits. It doesn't make sense that anyone could believe that discomfort increases productivity.

At the root, dress codes are about power. There's nothing more to it, for 99% of office workers who are forced to waste precious resources on antiquated clothing styles, because of company dress codes, in order to keep marginal jobs. For the 1% who actually face live customers and are pretending to "show respect" for those customers by wearing overpriced clown suits, this discussion could be out-to-lunch.

But for the majority, when how we look is more important than how we do our jobs, we're not paying attention to important employment clues. In reality, dress codes are based on a lack of respect. (I could have said that, right at the top of this essay and saved you several minutes of valuable reading time.) That's what they were about in high school and that's still what they're about. To those of us forced to wear tourniquets around our necks, it's pretty clear that being asked to kill brain cells is not an issue of respect or productivity. It's about fear.

Like cops and politicians who couldn't earn respect under any situation, executives who instigate dress codes are mistaking fear for respect. It's possible that they don't care about the fine points that separate one emotion from the other. The existence of an employee dress code is a symbol of disrespect for the employees' skills and value to the company. A dress code screams, "a significant portion of your salary is being paid to entertain me, your boss. I want you to wear a clown suit and you're gonna do it because you don't have any other options."

With all the noise generated in the media, regarding the country's labor shortage and the difficulty in finding people to fill skilled positions, you'd think that creating employee-hostile policies would be a foolish move. Apparently, there are a lot more of us to go around than employers would like to admit, because there is no shortage of awful employers or company policies that create miserable workplaces.

As an employee, being in a position where geek clothes are required ought to be a wake-up call. When you are in demand, nobody talks about what you look like or what you're wearing. You won't have to deal with this kind of crap, when finding people who do what you do is more difficult than poking a criminal in the eye while standing in the middle of the U.S. House of Representatives. Don't kid yourself about this. If what you wear is more important than what you do, you are highly disposable.

Taking the-glass-is-full perspective, employee-hostile company policies are management's way of pointing out a precarious personal employment situation. As Andy Grove (Intel's ex-CEO) tried to tell us a while back, our employer is one of the customers in our own personal business. When that customer is telling us that our product is insignificant, we ought to be paying attention. Being reasonably free Americans, we have lots of options. We can attempt to increase our value to our employer or increase our employer's awareness of our particular skills to the employer's business. We can find a new employer who recognizes our unique contributions and value. Or, we can go back to the drawing board and develop new products (skills) to attract new customers (employers).

What we shouldn't do is accept an employer's disrespect for a few extra bucks and a moment's imagined security. Bobby Dylan once pointed out that "he not busy being born is busy dying." That goes for your career, too. And dead folks don't get much respect.

April 2000

#37 Why Don't You Live Here? (2000)

[As I often am, I was wrong. There was a difference between Bush and Gore. Bush was the worst president in American history. Gore couldn’t have aspired to that kind of incompetence if he’d have been brain-damaged.]

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

"When they ask 'why don't you live here?' I say 'man, I don't believe you don't leave.'" -- Bob Dylan

When I first started writing Rat Rants, I had hoped to keep certain sorts of my personal beliefs to myself. Mostly, I've been true to that objective. This essay is going to violate that intent and I apologize to those of you who might be offended.

Vice President Gore recently took a stand regarding the Miami family kidnapping of six year old Elian Gonzalez. Gore and Bush have stated that they think the demands of Florida's Cuban exile community are more important than a father's right to be with his son. It's almost impossible to tell one of these rich kids from the other, so I'm going to stop making the effort.

Like his amoral clone/competitor, Bush, Gore's stand is based on his desperate desire to get elected, regardless of the damage he does to this country and to the people who live here. Of course, Gorebush would never say anything so honest. Instead he pontificated, "Let us be clear that the real fault in this case lies with the oppressive regime of Fidel Castro. Elian should never have been forced to choose between freedom and his own father. Now we must take action, here on our own shores, to make sure that Elian's best interests are served."

The only interests Gorebush have ever been interested in are the 25 Electoral College votes controlled, mostly, by Miami's expatriate Cuban community. These folks may not be able to tell a Constitution from constipation, but they vote, relentlessly. The rest of Florida's residents fearfully avoid ballot boxes like normal Americans. Most of the state's registered voters could care less about politics, unless someone's talking about reducing Medicare or Social Security funding.

Bushgore has also said that the kid should be left with his distant relatives, until they can find a Florida family court judge who will rule that the boy's father be permanently deprived of his parental rights. Bushgore accuses Gorebush of posing for the Cuban vote. One pot calls the other kettle black and why do we care?

The heart of the story, here, is that a gaggle of distant relatives are making a grab for custody of a little boy, against a parent's will. Parents all over the country ought to be terrified by this spectacle. The fact that they aren't, is even more scary. If any of these clowns cared about the best interests of children, there wouldn't be a kid left in that cesspool we all know as Miami. At the least, we'd be hearing as much hand-wringing about the kids who are gang victims, every single day of the year, as we are about this one six year old.

Think about this story in a non-political light. Say, my cousin, who lives in California, ships his kids out "to the country" for a summer vacation. Being a conservative family-loving Midwesterner, I take a liking to those kids. Because I watch TV, I know what a vicious, rotten, Tower of Babble, California is and I decide these kids ought to "he be given a chance to feel what freedom means" (a quote from Bushgore). Obviously, a kid is a lot more free in Minnesota than in California, so I assume custody of the kids and ignore their parents' pleas for their return. Gorebush picks it up and, not wanting to insult the Midwestern voters, decides to hand the decision over to Minnesota's family court system and I get to keep the kids. That sort of stupidity will put a bit of strain on the decision to let the kids "visit Grandma for the summer," don't you think? Kids shipped out of New York and all of the decaying eastern cities, California (especially LA and San Francisco) and most of the decadent western cities are likely to have new homes, if this perverted set of rules become established. Everyone knows that Midwesterners are morally and culturally superior the rest of the country, right?

What a cool way to get even with your ex. You get the kids, for a weekend visitation, bag 'em up and mail them to a Midwestern relative. Essentially, that's what Elian Gonzalez's mother did. She happened to drown on the way (along with her boyfriend who had a really questionable history), but parental death shouldn't be a requirement for this kind of legalized kidnapping. If she'd have made it here, I doubt that Mr. Gonzalez's loss of parental rights would even be known outside of his immediate family. Even the fact that Mr. Gonzalez had been granted custody of his son by his country's family court system seems to be escaping the microscopic capacity of our own media. If Cuba's family court system is anything like ours, Ms. Gonzalez would have been a pretty awful parent to lose custody of her child.

Bushgore added insult to injury by babbling, "I would hope if Mr. Gonzalez does come over, that he come over as a person who's able to make a decision based on his desire . . . and that decision be made in a family court." Short form, if Elian's father doesn't relent to political extortion, he's obviously incapable of being a decent father and should lose custody of his son. If he doesn't "decide" to leave his kid with distant relatives, the court will make that decision for him.

I am hard pressed to believe that, if the father had died attempting to cross international boundaries with his son (violating a family court custody order), the nation would be reacting with the same "family values" hypocrisy. Father's rights are dramatically less powerful than mother's rights. This whole disgusting episode illustrates that so vividly that I can't feel a single positive emotion toward Florida's Cuban population. They, simply, disgust me. This is not a good feeling for me, because I have at least one friend who is part of that population. Apparently, the civilized and honorable folks in that city are being terrorized into pretending they are going along with the kidnappers.

And, personally, I want to make it clear to any relative, who might be considering shipping their kids my way, I consider almost every other state in the Union an unfit place to raise children, especially Kansas. Not that I want my family's kids. In fact, the opposite would be true. My kids are grown and, mostly, taking care of themselves, but it would be my moral duty as an American to prevent the kind of child abuse that comes from kids growing up in stupid places. Consider this my line drawn in Minnesota lake mud.

April 2000

#36 Campaign 2000

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

As I write this, on March 7 just after Doomsday Tuesday, it appears that we're in for another Tweedly Dee vs. Tweedly Dum presidential election. I'd be willing to write Bill Bradley or John McCain's tossing-in-the-towel speeches for them.

It would go something like this:

"You gutless wimps. You call yourselves Americans, but you have absolutely nothing in common with real Americans, like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, or, even, John Kennedy. You're afraid of your own shadows. You're afraid of anything that isn't spoon fed to you by the grumpy old men who hold the power in this nation. Even American kids are freakin' wimps. All it would take to invade this puke of a country would be for someone to yell "boo" really loud and a third of you would dive under your beds for protection. The other sixty-some-percent could care less what the hell happens as long as your favorite television shows don't get cancelled.

"It's one thing that those pitiful old men want to hang on to the power they've had for so long. That's understandable, if a good bit disgusting. It's totally another that the average, working stiff is happy to give those inbred losers control over a nation that could be democratic, if it wanted to be.

"So, now you get to choose between Gore and Bush. Gore, a political hack who is the son of a political hack. A politician who lost the credibility war with Bill Clinton in 1992. Bush, the son of a pitifully lame ex-president, a spoiled rich kid of a politician who's owned by so many special interests that his butt is tattooed like one of those Beef Council diagrams of a fattened steer.

"The upside is, it doesn't matter who wins. They're one and the same. Or maybe that was what you wimps wanted, all along."

If I could choreograph this speech, I'd have my guy give the nation (especially the media) a single digit salute and call it a night.

There's so much going on in a major election that I don't understand. For instance, I'll never understand how the Republican Establishment gets a single vote from people who work for a living. I know, Republicans claim to be "pro-business," but they're really just pro-rich people. The closest the Republican Party ever comes to associating itself with the function of business is when executives give away their stock holder's money to promote special tax breaks for executives.

The list of "business interests" that Republicans have hustled on the rest of us is pretty amazing: the military/industrial complex, the savings and loan deregulation disaster, the sixty zillion tax loopholes that encourage international corporations to save money by moving jobs out of this country, a gigantic income tax break for the top tax bracket. And so on.

Sure, they throw the "pro-life" bone to the religious right, but they don't really mean it. After all, if the poor couldn't get abortions the welfare rolls would be increasing faster than they are now and that would, eventually, force the rich to pay higher taxes to support those not-being-born-and-not-wanted-by-anybody kids. Trust me, that's not gonna happen. Rich folks look out for their own interests like scorpions hunting for a warm boot on a cold night.

None of that lets the Democrats off of the hook, either. Different money interests for different folks. Without the support of the 80 million members of government employee unions, Gore wouldn't get noticed at a high school dance (until he started waving money). This crowd of union bozos have discovered that it is possible to vote yourself rich. They are the only thing separating Gore from Bush. Gore wants to keep spending tax money to support the unemployable in the lifestyle to which they've become accustomed and Bush is willing to trash the country's economy by letting the ruling class make one last dash to the feeding trough. Both candidates represent the ruling class interests from around the world. Gore just gets some of his money from the government employed ruling class while Bush gets a much bigger chunk from the sort of con artist who really appreciates getting to take a poke at the national treasury.

Like the usual 70% who will stay away from this election, it just doesn't matter to me which of these morons wins in November. Kill me slow or kill me quick, I'm still dead.

It will never happen, because of the gutless character of what passes for today's "Americans," but now is the time for the NOTA movement. None of the above. Here's my version of this ballot entry:

The parties can submit their usual human refuse, for the election. But as part of getting to take a roll with these dice, they put up a bond, equal to the campaign funds, for that candidate. No soggy money. No non-candidate advertisements allowed. You're either part of a campaign or you're a spectator. If the voters "elect" NOTA for a particular office, the bond money goes to fund a second election.

None of the clowns from the first campaign can run again. The second campaign works just like the first one. Another bond gets funded for the next batch of mindless morons. And so it would go.

That's actually my second option. My first choice would be, if NOTA wins, NOTA serves. The office goes vacant for the term of the position. At the end of the term, if it is not obvious that we need someone to do that job, the office is abandoned. I figure in twenty years, there wouldn't be an elected government office in the nation.

March 2000

#35 NYPD Pink (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

Act like you're surprised. The four white, plain-clothes cops, who fired 41 shots at and into an unarmed man in New York who endangered their lives by attempting to show them his identification (or give them his billfold), were acquitted in a New York court.

Score: Cops "we can shoot 'em whenever we want," Citizens 0.

The press pretended to be amazed that the court's judge (Judge Judy?) spent the weekend after the decision, celebrating, with the defense lawyers in an upscale politicos' hangout. I guess that tells us more than we wanted to know about the intelligence of the press. This decision has been written so many times that no one needed to consider new text for the story. Change one name and it's a wrap. The surprise is that anyone imagined the verdict would be any different.

Never happen. Not in my lifetime, anyway.

There has been a lot of half-hearted hand wringing about how "the system" needs to be changed and how the police ought to do a few weeks of community service PR to "regain the public's trust." Yeah, that would do it for me. Plaster a couple of Deputy Dog posters on the phone poles and we're all friends, just like before a pack of freaked-out cops shot the hell out of a man coming home from work.

Even the jurors got into the act. Juror Tom Knowles said that Amadou Diallo "looked at the police officers, they identified themselves, and as they moved toward him, he turned and backed away. . . Why? Why? We won't know those answers."

I can't imagine, either. Four badly dressed freaks, waving guns, come charging up, shouting gibberish (none of the witnesses said the four coherently identified themselves), and I'm gonna assume the wackos are cops. Every time.

Given the same circumstances, I'd assume (especially in that slime pit we Americans loving call "New York City") that they're muggers (even if they're wearing uniforms and badges) and I'd try to throw them my billfold in hopes that, while they pounced on the money like a pack of starving hyenas, I could sneak out of sight and shooting range. Since this group of New York's elite managed to hit their target 19 out 41 shots at 15 feet and closer, I think Diallo made the only safe move available. It was obviously his bad luck that these fruitballs managed to hit him at all.

In case you haven't read about this story, the four gunmen were part of the NYPD's "elite" Street Crimes Unit. "Elite" means they are so skilled that they can hit a well lit, mostly stationary target at fifteen feet, 19 times out of 41. The coroner said the cops managed to hit Diallo several times after he was dead. It is reasonable to assume that their accuracy improved once he quit "resisting arrest." When the victim tried to go for his billfold, one of the timidly elite NYPD'ers shouted "Gun!" and, as he and his partner tried to run away from the vestibule where their victim was trapped, they blasted away like their guns were stuck in Lethal Weapon mode.

It gets worse. One of NYPD's finest tripped over his own flat feet, which convinced the other nutballs that their little buddy had been shot. That really scared 'em . Nothing irritates NYPD cops more than when one of their victims scares them into falling down. The other three totally panicked and emptied their guns into the dying, but still exceptionally terrifying, citizen who was threatening them by creating a very large and hazardous pool of blood. The ricochet from the next round of wild shots scared the cops, even more, and convinced them that the dead guy was shooting back with his James Bond billfold. When the cops ran out of bullets and quit peeing in their pants, they discovered Diallo was long dead. After they gave him time to be really dead, they went looking for a weapon and discovered he didn't have one. That pissed them off so much that one of them actually screamed "where's the f__ gun?" Like Diallo owed them some sort of justification for all that misspent adrenaline.

All that evidence and a New York jury still couldn't find a reason to bring a murder, manslaughter, assault, or double-parking conviction against the cops. In fact, so far, the cops haven't even been suspended without pay.

One of the other jurors said the cops' testimony was "quite believable." A few of us might think the jurors were quite gullible, if we could grant them enough credibility to believe that they're being sincere in these statements. And I can. Since we have stumbled into a system of justice that's administered by housewives and other folks who can't or won't find useful employment, any sort of idiocy done by our court system is credible. Although this decision pushes those loose limits pretty hard.

Which brings me to the point of this Rat Rant.

The problem with New York's cops is no different than cops in any other city, except for New York being New York and there's no help for that. Cops, like the military, have convinced themselves that their primary job is to protect themselves from danger. They have a union, so they can't be reprimanded for doing their jobs incompetently. They have their fraternal "brotherhood" cover-up factory, so they can't be prosecuted for crimes they commit against the rest of us. They "protect and serve" themselves; first, second, and always.

New York City's head hopeless moron, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, admitted "we probably don't always do the best of training everyone." Duh. Depends on what you're training them for, Rudy.

Cops are trained to make sure that nothing bad ever happens to a cop. What they ought to be trained to do is to protect law abiding citizens from criminals. The job is supposed to be dangerous. If it weren't, the folks doing it wouldn't be needed. Until we decide that the job of police officer is the same as (and more important than) the task of the United States Secret Service, we're all in danger of becoming their victims. (Although, your chances of being a police victim are a lot greater if you're a person of color. Almost infinitely greater.) Until the citizens of this country take away the party money for all of the non-productive games police play in their never-ending effort to stay out of harm's way, we're putting guns in the hands of people who shouldn't be allowed to play with rubber bands.

Any cop who isn't willing to throw themselves between harm's way and a law abiding citizen is nothing more than an average citizen. There's no hazard pay for that. No 20 year retirement with a pension. No lifetime disability for damaging your back carrying an oversized box of donuts. No guts, no glory; or perks. Cops, like the ones who slaughtered Amadou Diallo, add to the bad bad rep of a group with an already bad reputation. It's time to redefine the job.

March 2000

#34 The Rat's Rules: #1 No business is more than necessarily smarter than its customers.

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

For the last twenty-five years, I've gathered a collection of business rules based on observations I've made whilst trapped in the business world. I used to give those rules random numbers, to make it seem like I have more than one or two of them (the same way some people start a new checking account). Not anymore. I'm going to expose, to the world, just how little I've learned in my dreary little career. So here goes:

The Rat's Eye Business Rule #1: No business is more than necessarily smarter than its customers.

This is a rule of efficiency, in my opinion. When a company is a lot smarter than its customers, resources are wasted. Brainpower and possible technology, for instance.

For example, a company that could be designing user-hostile WYSIWYG operating systems, is wasting time and money porting a me-too, de-featured version of Basic to dozens of godawful personal computers and remedial operating systems. In a perfect business world, this sort of new wave, mid-tech, ambitious little company ought to make an alliance with a really big, really dumb mainframe computer company and concentrate on building software that will make millions of people miserable, instead of just a few thousand nerdy programmer types. That's a hypothetical example, of course.

At the other end of the spectrum, a company that isn't as smart as its customers isn't going to build products that those customers will respect. Worse, if that company is based on an originally good idea, but can't competently execute it, someone will. If the company is really dumb, someone will do a great knockoff almost instantly.

For instance, once there was a really big, dumb computer company that made huge, slow, hard to program computers and software. They accidentally hired and promoted a not-dumb executive who saw a future where very small companies and individuals would have applications for cheap, small, reasonably powerful computers. He drug the big, dumb company (kicking and screaming) into his vision and they did their usual mediocre job of cobbling up the first system they offered to the world. But it was a great idea and that stimulated about every reasonably intelligent computer engineer and techno-executive to reconsider the application for what became "personal computers."

"Big Dumb," we'll call them, flourished for a few years and then has floundered ever since in, what became, a new world of high tech, intense competition, high profile for computer companies. Big Dumb abandoned the twelve loyal (and dumber than most) customers they'd held onto and went back to building large, slow, hard to program computers for the Fortune 500 companies who are not as bright as the PC crowd. In other words, Big Dumb managed to survive because they bowed to the Rat's Rule #1, they moved down the intellectual scale until they found their natural customers.

Another example of this rule was apparent in the 'ole Military Industrial complex. These guys had an unearned reputation for excellence that still sticks in the most terminally brain-dead technological backwoods. In the late 1980's, some of these giant industrial sloths saw the writing on the wall. That brand of rich man's welfare was coming to an end. They made feeble attempts to move their companies away from building products that needed entire battalions of repair techs and millions of dollars of cost-overrunning re-engineering to produce $3,000 toilet seat lids into the hot new world of high tech consumer products.

They failed in every attempt they made. From CAD systems to industrial controls to communications satellites, these foolish executives and their big, dumb companies ended up downsizing so fast they practically killed Southern California's economy. The state still hasn't regained its standard of living, after twenty years of leaching the life out of the other 49 states during their golden corporate welfare years.

What they discovered would have been obvious to anyone interested in doing the research: the military is a dumb customer and, in comparison, consumers are infinitely smarter (it's a divide by zero thing). People who have no vested interest in buying a functioning product don't spend their money carefully. People who are spending their own, hard-earned money on something they intend to use tend to pay attention to little things like reliability, ergonomics, function, and cost.

You can find examples of this rule everywhere you look. Doctors aren't nearly as interested in effective medical procedures and products as are patients. Government is considerably less competent in managing money as taxpayers. And so it goes.

Remember, you heard it hear first: The Rat's Rule #1.
February 2000

#33 Us vs Who? (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

In the middle of my career, I had the incredible opportunity to work for a small company at the beginning of its success. Before I started with that company, it had survived for a little more than a decade without ever turning an annual profit. My employment began in the middle of the company's first profitable year, so I had the opportunity to be a part of the success (and to be rewarded accordingly). I also got to know the people and characteristics that had seen the company through the hard years.

One of the most obvious differences between this company and my previous employers was the concept of "enemies." We had 'em.

There were folks who we had never met that we outright hated. If we'd have caught them naked in a dark alley, with no witnesses, there's no telling what we'd have done.

Another cool thing about our particular industry was that we had domestic and international enemies. We were an equal opportunity, worldwide hater of people we didn't know.

On the surface, this probably seems pretty ethnocentric and parochial (and you thought I didn't know any multi-syllable words). It seemed necessary because every month was a fight for survival. Two bad months in a row could have set us all free to "pursue other options," to use the terms HR departments abuse in describing someone whose employment has been terminated.

Those enemies were taking money directly from our individual pockets. When one of our competitors came out with a new product that resulted in a drop in our monthly sales, we reacted like a hillbilly family hearing that a neighbor has destroyed the family still. We wanted revenge. We wanted the damn still/customers back. We were willing to resort to anything, within our power, to get it back.

Fortunately, none of our competitors were within shooting distance. Our only practical source of revenge was to make better products, provide better services, and steal some of their customers with whatever hook we could connive. In less than five years, we beat out several competitors. We killed a couple of them. We chased a couple of big names in Japanese electronics completely out of our market. Those were heady times, but they didn't last.

In the beginning, it was impossible to tell the execs from the grunts without a program. After a dozen years of failure, the company's managers had been reduced to driving 10 year old cars and living in their parents' basements. We all wore the same jeans and tee-shirts to work. We all shared overcrowded, grungy offices without windows or secretaries. Every office had an "open door policy," because the only doors in the building were to the outside. We all used them to get in and out. A lot of meetings were held in the middle of the manufacturing floor, because that was the only space large enough to hold two people more than shared the office.

Then we "got rich." The first sign of success was that the execs decided we had enough money to hire a business consulting service. This "service" provided us with the corporate equivalent of an evil stepmother. We discovered that some people in the company were overworked and that others were hardly working. The consultant recommended punishing the innocent and promoting the guilty and useless. That provided the company with its first opportunity to engage in true Fortune 500, MBA-style back-stabbing and finger-pointing. Some of our execs discovered hidden talents. These new activities took hold of the exec's imaginations and became a fixture of the company's changing anti-character

A few months, post-consultant, we lost our external focus. Some of us discovered we had more internal than external enemies. Once the first few quarts of blood were let, it felt like there was no limit to how much would flow or who would be doing the slicing and dicing. That caused the execs to circle their wagons and defend themselves from all directions, regardless of the source or hazard or reality of the threat. In fact, the less dangerous the threat the more likely that source was to get tromped.

Within a year from the consultant infestation, any uninterested passerby could pick out a company exec from a worker bee. Even consultants could figure out who was who, without introduction or the usual remedial hand-holding. Our execs had expensive European cars, they wore clothes that would never be mistaken for work outfits, their salaries were a dozen times the company average and took another leap every time someone picked up a copy of Fortune and saw what Steve Jobs was paying himself this week. Several of the Big Cheeses took to "putting in appearances" instead of doing a day's work and, when they did show up, they wouldn't look you in the eye if you stuffed a gun up their nose.

Our talent attrition was incredible. People quit, got fired, and some simply stopped coming to work. Good people and not so good people were chased out of the company. The company became an Equal Opportunity Unemployer. A lot of the people who had enjoyed the times when the company was a close knit family went away and their commitment was impossible to replace.

We "fixed" the loss of employee involvement, on the manufacturing floor, by making the process "smarter." We automated product testing and every assembly process possible. We installed intensive "Quality Engineering" (QE) systems to compensate for a pissed-off and incompetent assembly floor. We moved complicated assembly process off-site, to vendors who (hopefully) hadn't been as "successful" as us and could still deal with complex assembly processes.

Management became so isolated from the function of the business that it was like being in an amnesia club. One of the founders started jabbering about how we were a "marketing and conception" business, not an engineering and manufacturing company. That created a hierarchy within the company's departments that gave us a whole new, and very deserving, group of internal folks to hate. Manufacturing and "R&D" split off from each other and became competitors for resources. QA became QE and split off from the whole company, becoming a useless pack of cops who spent their days looking for Dunkin' Donut equivalents and avoiding contributing anything useful to the company's processes or products. And so it went.

The most interesting thing about the experiences was that I had been were the company was going, in my past employment history. I'd worked for big companies that had only internal enemies and politics. I took the job with this company, specifically, to escape that foolishness. Since then, I've done time at one other small company and a pair of giants. The thing that is most obvious about screwed up companies is something said by a cartoon character (Pogo) thirty years ago, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

January 2000

#32 What if the Twentieth Century Really Likes Us? (1999)

All Rights Reserved © 1999 Thomas W. Day

We're approaching Y2k as I sit at my computer and hack this Rat out. Three days away from the turning over a big one on the calendar's odometer. As I wait, almost perfectly unprepared, for all the disasters that the really paranoid types (as opposed to my own mostly paranoid state) are sure will mark "the end of the world as we know it," it struck me that this could turn out a lot differently than we all expect.

On a cosmic, geological, or cultural level, Y2k is as arbitrary a disaster marker as a pothole sign on a New York City street. Year 1 wasn't declared until the sixth century, and that was based on a sloppy calculation made from biblical dates and the estimated origin of the Roman Empire. All of this makes the precision of this date something like a really sloppy statistical calculation, like an economic prediction. Even more foolish is the fact that we've decided that a date system invented by a religious leader of a cult that represents less than 5% of the world's population is some kind of benchmark for the entire universe. Europeans are nothing if not arrogant.

Then there are the nitpickers who claim there was no year zero, therefore, somehow that proves that the millennium doesn't actually start until 2001. And you're not really a teenager until age fourteen and you're not in your forties until you're 41, by that precise, but boring, logic. Let's get past all that by admitting that we're no longer a world controlled by events and religion and that we've "moved on" to digits and sophisticated stuff like computer glitches that can cause international calamities due to shortsighted programming and buggy operating systems. The world's odometer is about to roll up three zeros and that's what matters. No computer on this planet will give a flying damn about 2001, so why should we?

So, having resolved that important philosophical argument, I want to move on to the really important concept that just snapped into my mind after downing my usual late night Jack Daniels tranquilizer: what if the Twentieth Century doesn't want to go quietly into history?

Think about it. Of all the dumb things humans have animated and anthropomorphized, the century that produced the largest growth in human knowledge (by a factor of several bazillion, by my last count) ought to be at least as sentient as your average straight-ticket Republican voter. And if that brain-dead logic works for you, consider this; why would the Twentieth Century go out without a fight? Based on the amount of money put into defending our public utilities, communication systems, personal computers, IRS data, and VCR clocks that always flash 12:00, someone thinks Y2k is a serious danger to all the things humanity holds dear, or manages with a remote control device. Consider the possibility that there is a government conspiracy to keep us from finding out who is really in control of this planet's calendar.

So here's my scenario: January 1, 2000 arrives and all that Y2k programming turns out to be a waste of effort. All of the world's computers start the Twentieth Century over again, date-wise. After a few months of wrestling with the hopeless task of forcing the world's computers to admit to the year 2000, humanity gives up and starts the 1900's over again. After all, we are the generation that can't make change without instructions from a cash register, the dumbest of all computer systems. How could we ever hope to defeat the efforts of the really smart computers, like PIII's and Gameboys?

The downside is, for a couple of decades, all of the working class will be negative years old, sort of the reverse of vampires; the walking unborn. That will create a momentary ethical problem for the government, who may be accused of taxing . . . something less than fertilized eggs? A pre-gleam in a father's eye? Whatever. Governments can always find an excuse to tax their victims, so that won't be much more than a blip on the radar of the repeated century.

The upside will more than make up for this little ethical hitch; no one gets to retire for another 65 years. All those deadbeats currently hanging out in Florida and Arizona will be put back to work. The Social Security system will be "saved." Even the military and government employment retirees will be forced off of the public dole, most of them will have to work another eighty years to put in their "twenty." Think of the tax rebates this will produce!

Of course, the other possibility is that the "system" will simply choose to ignore anyone who is not yet "born." That would serve us Boomers right, since we once advocated not trusting anyone over thirty. That philosophy could be carried over into completely disregarding anyone over fifty, or some other totally arbitrary age (just like "thirty" was in the first 1960's). It wouldn't take more than a year or two of unemployment and digital non-existence for starvation and exposure to weed out the "unborn" and provide the planet with a clean slate for the second Twentieth Century.

The second and most importantly cool vision of a total Y2k meltdown is the possibility that the entire credit system might collapse under the weight of its own bloated and greedy butt. If any system in the world is going corruptly and ineptly into the Twenty-First Century, it's the IRS and other federal government agencies. The candidate voted "most likely to imitate the federal government" is the banking system. Here's a test: what's the interest due on a loan that won't be made for eighty years? (Hint: Excel provides you with Microsoft's infamous 'ERROR!' result for this sort of calculation.)

You can bet your sweet patootie that most of us have meticulously hoarded our banking records, in case our bank balances go into negative numbers on January 1. You can also bet the patootie and its connecting limbs that any errors recorded in the favor of banking patrons will widely welcomed without many moral qualms. The only public sector group disliked more than bankers are the bankers' trust fund babies.

Politically, a sure way to get elected in 2000/1900 will be to promote "Y2k debt forgiveness" to all those yuppies and guppies who have buried themselves in credit card debt and house payments. Add the liberal arts majors who are now paying off their college loans working as assistant managers in fast food joints and you have a landslide election triumph.

If you couple our burning desire to get something for nothing with the possible mortality allergy of our ole' friend, the Twentieth Century, and we might be living the past century all over again, number-wise. Too bad it's just a numerical illusion, I wouldn't mind being -48 again.

December (just barely) 1999

#31 Unions, Double Failure (1999)

All Rights Reserved © 1999 Thomas W. Day

[In retrospect, I have misgivings about this Rat Rant. I don’t disagree with the general proposition that the existence of a union is a sure sign of mismanagement. However, I do disagree that unions are unnecessary. All human activity is corrupt, so there is no special information contained in the idea that unions are often corrupt.]

A sure sign of a mismanaged business is the presence of a union. Union membership is also a sure sign of a mismanaged career. Here's what the existence of a union says to me:

1. This business is so abusive that the people who work there need Jimmy Hoffa to "protect" them from mismanagement's idiocy.

2. The lives and careers people of who work at this place are so screwed up that they need Jimmy Hoffa to keep them off of the unemployment line.

The recent foolishness in Seattle, the protests of the World Trade Organization meeting, gives us a great picture of the capacities of the second group. Pretty much every one of our great unions was represented in the protesters. While an occasional speaker provided some useful information and analysis, too many were self-serving and simpleminded. In particular, the union speakers were pointedly simpleminded. Their speeches were full of the same "common man" drivel that they've spouted for the last 75 years. Sooner or later, you'd think one of those guys would get tired of being called "common."

A union leader from the American Federation of Teachers was especially proud of that organization's turnout. (Which made me wonder who was minding their classrooms?) Speaking in a pre-riot interview with a NPR reporter, this union representative convinced me that there are far too many teachers in today's classrooms. Students would be much better off spending their days with comic books and video games. Babbling about solidarity against everything from the "unfair" prices for farmers' produce to the loss of minimum wage, unskilled manufacturing jobs, the AFT bureaucrat proved to me that she had absolutely no comprehension of market forces and economics. Without the protection of a union, this particular "educator" would be asking us if we "want fries with that" for a living. It's scary to think that anyone would believe hiring more "teachers" of that caliber would improve public education.

My father was a high school math teacher for thirty years. A big part of the reason he didn't protest his mandatory retirement was due to the declining quality of people he had been surrounded by in his last decade of employment. Even worse, for him, he had predicted this would happen twenty years earlier when the teachers in his school voted to join the union.

In the debate over the arrival of the union, one of the most incompetent high school teachers ever to grace the long lineage of incompetent Kansas teachers had said something like, "When the teachers of this institution join this union, the standards of education will improve. I will stake my professional reputation on that." In my father's finest moment as a professional, he stood up and said, "I'll put my reputation against yours, anytime, and I'll guarantee that, once this school system is unionized, the schools will belong to the teachers, not the students." And he was right. Since that time, the sole focus of the education system has been on those who are employed by that system.

And that's the way it goes for everything that's unionized. From the perspective of a customer, it makes sense to avoid anything that's been touched by union labor. The presence of a union tells a consumer at least two things about a company: 1) the management was so incompetent and arrogant that the employees were driven to join a union to get the minimally fair treatment that unions provide, and 2) now that the company is unionized there is no chance the company will ever get a functional quality control system in place or find a way to convince employees that customers should be treated differently than serial killers.

The usual spiel about unions is "they had a purpose in their time" or "they're a necessary evil." The purpose was supposed to be protecting unskilled labor from the whimsically brutal hand of management. In most cases, what actually happened was another brutal hand was added to management, union management. From a consumer and competitors' perspective, the purpose has turned out to be to protect unskilled labor from losing their jobs to skilled labor and automation, and, if there are any spare resources, from the usual management idiocies. Unions have become a self-serving refuge of the incompetent and, otherwise, unemployable.

Sometime, in the near future, I'm going to write a Rat Rant about how we can determine which occupation will be automated next. One of the indicators is the presence of a union in that occupation.

December 1999

#30 Doing A Job vs. Doing The Job (1999)

All Rights Reserved © 1999 Thomas W. Day

Believe it or not, the Rat is being heard. Last week, I received a note from an executive who objects to my belief that, if everyone of the executive floor of a typical company were to die from catered lobster bisque poisoning, it would be weeks, months, or years before the rest of the company noticed. My lone protesting exec claims that execs are hard-working, over-stressed, and reasonably paid for the value they provide to their companies. I beg to differ.

There's a difference between working hard and being productive. For most adults, spending a dozen hours a day with the nose buried in the next-guy-up-the-ladder's butt is difficult, stressful, and only gets done with an expectation of something of value (like lots of money). However difficult that kind of activity may be, it isn't something that provides value to the business.

This is along the lines of my arguments about MBA degrees. Several readers have protested that the path to earning an MBA is as difficult as the route to something more useful. Academia can make anything hard. That doesn't prove that the actual course material is complex or hard to master, it just proves that academia would complicate selling (or giving away) ice cubes in Death Valley.

The history of the management class of humans, ever since the earliest days of clan chiefs, has been self-serving. In the dirt-floor days, a guy got to be king because he was an effective military leader (or he was the only guy left alive after the battle and the ones who stayed home mistook survival as a battle skill). It seemed to take one generation of inherited power for early royalty to forget their purpose and function. It might be true that war skills could be handed down a generation or two, but it probably wasn't. Humans tend to drift toward easy answers and the concept of inherited intelligence, skill, and courage is, mostly, a myth.

Not all that long ago, business leaders were, mostly, business founders. When a company survives the first decade or two, there is usually some skill behind the start-up. However, that skill doesn't necessarily reside in the founder, let alone his genes. Sometimes, a lucky early hire provides the talent and drive that pushes a company past the early failure zone.

Henry Ford was a great example of a founding father who couldn't have kept an ice cream truck business alive, on his own. A certifiable fruitcake with the magnetic personality of the guy holding the pitchfork in the Grant Wood painting, "American Gothic," Ford lucked into a couple of key employees who created his "legacy" and fortune. The assembly line, the mechanical genius that separated the early Ford cars from the rest of the automotive pack, and the organization systems that were necessary to Ford's survival (and which Ford did his personal best to destroy) were all created and supervised by mid-level managers. Now that we're a dozen generations away from that sketchy origin, the Fords who are left in control probably can't even drive a car, let alone make one.

These days, what passes for business leaders are too often a dramatically different group from "founder" types. The typical management types are in the Roger Smith (of GM infamy) class. Their claim to leadership is more based on their ability to avoid critical decisions, suck up to whoever's currently on top (while positioning themselves for an opportunity to slip a knife between the ribs), and an unerring obsession toward their own personal power and profit. This sort of character is the origin of the old rule that anyone who wants to lead is someone who ought not to be allowed near the job. Again, while all those devious activities are complicated and energy draining, they're not productive.

The biggest flaws in the ointment of many of the largest companies' organizations starts at the top and slithers its way down the ladder. Management is paid so outrageously that long-term corporate goals are sabotaged in the interest of making the next quarter's financial objective. The stock options from a single strong quarter can make a CEO a rich man, eliminating any interest in building a solid foundation for a company's long term success and health. Still, none of this stuff adds any value to the business.

As a culture, we seem to be able to recognize why this is unmotivating and corrupting when it happens to professional athletes, but don't seem to notice it when it's going on in our own companies. I suppose this is yet another thing we should thank the media for ignoring. Otherwise, we'd all be a lot wealthier and more secure and . . . where was I going what that?

The incestuous relationship between corporate execs and stock analysts complicates these defects even more. Analysts are no more interested in a company's long term health than that company's competitors might be. When a CEO and a pack of analysts climb into bed to create a bump in the stock value and a run of short-term profit taking, employees and non-conspiring investors have no protection. The SEC pays a little attention to this kind of stuff, but only if it's so blatant that there's no way to ignore it. The government's job is, primarily, to protect the interests of the rich and powerful. The rest of us are on our own. Still no value added.

While there's a lot of "work" going on, in climbing to and hanging on to those luxurious corner offices, hardly any of it benefits the organization. Most of the effort expended by the executive class is self-serving and always has been.

So, Mr. Exec, I'm sticking with my popguns. Until I see some evidence that you guys actually do something useful, I'm not going to make the leap of faith that you seem to think is due. But thanks for playing and try again when you have an argument that makes sense.

November 1999

#29 The Good, They Die Young (1999)

All Rights Reserved © 1999 Thomas W. Day

WingspanBank.com died this year.  The BankOne PR hacks say Wingspan was "absorbed" by its parent company but to those of us who were Wingspan customers "absorbed" means "digested."  Too bad, especially for Wingspan's customers.  The difference between Wingspan and Bank One is similar to a comparison between Mother Theresa and Osoma bin Laden.  Both have causes they believe in, but their motives are justified by very different philosophies. 

According to revised business history, Wingspan was a BankOne experiment in Internet commerce.  It's possible that is true, but it's more likely that Wingspan was the brainchild of something of someone a bit more renegade in the customer-hostile BankOne organization.  Wingspan's philosophy was an attempt to reflect the lower cost of electronic banking to its customers.  BankOne's philosophy is something much closer to the gang-raping that we're all more familiar with from our banks. 

Not only did Wingspan do odd things like pay higher interest rates on savings and checking accounts, but Wingspan provided services in exchange for being allowed to hold its customers' money.  Wingspan rebated up to $5 a month in ATM charges.  Wingspan provided features like BillPay, electronic cash transfers, fee-free accounting software data downloads, and 24/7 customer service.  Bank One, of course, charges for those services, on the rare occasion that it's capable of providing them at all.

Banks have been whining that U.S. customers haven't taken well to electronic banking.  Even ATM use is amazingly low, less than 10% of bank customers use ATMs.  Almost no bank customers use Internet bank features.  Of course, most banks look at these features as a way to generate more income and charge for their use.  Since a typical Internet transaction costs the bank a couple of cents, an ATM transaction costs less than a dime, and a teller transaction costs nearly a buck, you'd think it would be obvious to the folks who mismanage banks that electronic transactions should be encouraged.  Unfortunately, banks employ way too many MBAs, so simple logic escapes them.  Their complex logic tells them that any activity that doesn't produce gross income is inefficient, even if they lose net income on the transaction.

Even more humorous, to an MBA, is any activity that doesn't result in low-tech empire-building.  Efficient management exposes the fact that there is very little need for management.  Tellers, supervisors, managers, and HR departments are empires.  ATMs and accessible websites are not. 

According to bank analysts, Wingspan was not a money-maker for BankOne.  Its two closest emulators, NetBank.com and everbank.com are profitable, but Wingspan was not.  Of course, neither of those competitors had to bear the kind of executive and corporate overhead that BankOne imposed on Wingspan, but we all know executives and their entourages are rarely punished for being redundant or an unnecessary expense. 

You have to admire BankOne's "marketing" skill, or gall, though.  In that ever optimistic, "nobody's dumber than Americans," spirit, they are happily advertising that losing all of the features that attracted customers to Wingspan is an "improvement in services."  Wingspan's customers have received a half-dozen letters from BankOne, detailing the changes and reductions in service and increased costs, and every one of these letters is accompanied by large-print blather exclaiming how much better we'll all be served by Bank One. 

I gave BankOne a two week trial and suffered the consequences.  Afterwards, I started looking for a Wingspan replacement.  Netbank is where I ended up, but Netbank is no Wingspan.  It appears, in this economy, if you build a better mousetrap a large corporation will buy it and turn it into an overpriced foot massager. 

November 1999

#27 Sneaking Talent Past HR (1999)

All Rights Reserved © 1999 Thomas W. Day

From 1976 to 1995 all of my job titles contained the word "engineer." Through that period, I did an electrical engineer's job without an engineering BS, MS, Ph.D., or any other disabling affliction. In fact, for all but the few years of my engineering career I had no more than an associates degree from a fairly awful Midwestern "Engineering Technology" program. However, for part of that period, I was an engineering manager so I was constantly exposed to plenty of BS, mostly generated by company executives.

During my engineering years, mostly surrounded by boys and girls with degrees from high-priced schools, I was exposed to an incredible variety of "skills." A large part of my general purpose disdain for the output of MBA programs and engineering schools comes from my experiences working with folks who owned those misbegotten and overrated credentials. The rest of that impression was gathered during my own 25 year struggle to earn an engineering degree as a part-time, "non-traditional student."

I've worked alongside E.E. Phuds who couldn't bias a transistor, flip a flip-flop, or complete a two component circuit if their existence depended on it. I've been saddled with BS, MS, and Phud types who brought the show to a halt while they struggled with comprehending the project design well enough so that they could explain what we were doing to management, who only needed a broad concept description to justify our budget.

The hands-down best engineer I ever worked with got his education from the U.S. Air Force, as a repair technician. He made a good living re-engineering incredibly complex and incompetently designed electronic measurement and control equipment. When faced with an technical obstacle, he never considered the possibility that his lack of formal education limited his ability to solve problems. He just waded in and fixed things faster than normal engineers can screw them up.

In my college engineering classes, I was regularly disappointed by the poor quality of the technical "education" provided. On the other hand, once I stumbled on the title of "engineer," I was regularly impressed with the much higher quality of the education I received on the job. Technicians never get the educational perks that are tossed at engineers. Technical support from component manufacturers and suppliers. Hands-on component application seminars and software training. Most important, the time to study problems and research their solutions. If these resources were spread around among technicians and engineers, alike, it would be hard to tell one from the other. It seemed to me that companies could save a lot of money and time by identifying uncredentialed talent and grooming those people into experienced engineers. I had an opportunity to test that theory a few years later and found that it proved to be true.

Of the collection of people I've known who were called "engineers," my experience splits the good from the bad at about 50-50, degreed and undegreed. On the other hand, the number of degreed and incompetent engineers vs. the undegreed and incompetent is a divide by zero insolvable. You can be awful and still employable, if you have a degree. Without the credential, you must have talent.

What I also learned, in a better time and place when a few companies weren't ruled by the idiot iron hand of HR departments, was that many of the best engineers from other industries were degree-less. In fact, I suspect that if you grouped degreed and non-degreed engineers and measured their competency you'd find that the non-degreed folks are, on average, considerably more talented than the other boys and girls. They're also cheaper to employ; no tuition debt to pay off and less ego to coddle.

There's a reason for that, a degree is a passkey into a world where you don't necessarily belong. Getting through that door without the passkey requires actual, hard earned, talent. Getting the passkey is a lot easier than earning skills and experience, especially if your parents are willing to pay for it. A degree provides absolutely no evidence of actual talent or inclination for the work.

The hardest aspect of finding and hiring uncredentialed talent is getting them past the HR obstacle course. Once they are in, their abilities will take them the rest of the way. The real trick is figuring out where the door is, when you don't have a degree.

On the large scale, the examples of men like Steve Wozinak, Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and hundreds of other famous engineers and inventors ought to have taught us that universities are not the only place people learn creativity. In fact, we see examples, every day, of where designs executed by companies full of degreed engineers and scientists are complete failures. They're called "product recalls."

Usually, the door the best of these talents go through is the one they create themselves. Steve Wozinak couldn't get an engineering position at Hewlet Packard, so he started Apple Corp. in his garage and went on to riches and fame. In the meantime, HP has failed, multiple times, at selling their mediocre computer products to the PC market. What computer products they do sell are to frat-brat engineers who grew up on RPN calculators and other academic relics. HP is a large and, intermittently, successful company, but one that never made a dent into the personal computer business when they introduced their "me too" products late in the history of PC's. Even HP executives have wonder where the company would be if it had realized the value of talent over degrees. Their most successful products, laser and jet printers, were purchased from Canon. I guess we should be impressed that they were able to recognize an engineering feat, if they weren't able to create one.

Small and start-up companies, usually, don't dither over unimportant stuff. When talent is more important than credentials, a lot of doors open up with incredible efficiency. I've seen excellent examples of this sort of company with a dozen or more engineers and not a degree in sight. Not even in management. In the early days, software companies were mostly staffed with geeks who thrived on uncovering obscure programming tricks. The early conversion stage of technology, when a concept is turned into a product, is when academia is rarely useful. Even today, the majority of leading edge software companies skip lightly over the academic credentials to get to the applicant's experience and personality. They know that if you're good, you'll be doing it, and if you're not, you'll get a degree to compensate.

Established companies are much harder to break into. Incredibly hard, more often than not. Once the corporate arteries harden enough that the HR department has grown teeth, the backdoor is the only way in. You either have to plan on putting in some years working up from a technician position or you have to know someone. Someone with power.

Getting a couple of years experience on the tech bench, preferably in the engineering department, of a large brain-dead company can often be a credential to an engineering position in a smaller, faster moving company. I know a tech who was always referred to as "brilliant and indispensable to our department, but not a real engineer because he doesn't have a degree." After a couple years of being indispensable, he took an engineering management and partial ownership position at a start-up competitor of his previous employer. After a few years, he made life so difficult for those who once believed he wasn't a "real engineer" that they filed for Chapter 11 protection and may never resurface.

The two places that credentialed talent can't enter are the halls of corporate welfare businesses and government. Credentials are everything where performance means nothing. If you invented a mechanical heart that ran for three years on two AA batteries and turned grandpa into Ben Johnson (without steroids), it wouldn't buy you a work bench in the smallest medical devices or aerospace companies. While technicians often do the actual work in in these places, degrees rule both the salary scale and the patents-applied-for lists. There are some rare examples where incredible, unstoppable talent rose above this brick wall of academic segregation, but not many.

Too bad. Since the Fortune 500 won't come to them, Bill Gates and others like him will be bringing new rules to technology and we'll be seeing some new company names on that list in the future. As information becomes easier to get and the cost of developing technology is driven down by international competition and capacity, just about anyone can make just about anything if their idea is good enough.

Consumers don't care where the inventor went to school. They just want to get the best product for the best price. Cutting out useless overhead is how that standard gets met. So tell me, what did your degree contribute to the work you did today?

September 1999