scott wrote:

> In my experience it is surprising how often you see quite senior people 
> paying so much attention to figures like that that are just "noise" in 
> the signal.  Draw a proper graph of profit over time, then make your 
> conclusions based on the trend, not on some figure like "5.3% up on this 
> time last year".

I'm sure I've mentioned the guy at the top who keeps using financial 
data from our project management system, despite are repeated attempts 
to explain to him that the numbers are garbage. (As you may recall, it 
adds USD and GBP together without conversion, yeilding lah-lah numbers.)

No matter how many times we carefully explain to him that these numbers 
are meaningless, he *insists* on trying to extract meaning from them...

But then, this is the guy who takes 60 seconds and a couple of attempts 
to string together a coherant sentence. You can almost *see* the 
individual synaptic junctions firing in a desperate attempt to form a 
coordinated pattern... that's what watching this guy talk is like.

How did somebody so stupid get to be at the top? Is it just because he 
was there when the "company" was 3 students in their dad's guarage?

[NB. I'm not questioning that he was there - he definitely was - I'm 
questioning whether that's the reason.]

> Ditto here, when I first started the top guy told me how his plan was to 
> double the sales figures over a 5 year period.  We're almost up to 5 
> years now and actually are sales have gone down because other companies 
> have come in that are newer are more efficient than us.  He doesn't seem 
> to care about taking time out to fix this (ie (re)training people and 
> (re)organising stuff), just plodding on as we are trying to win more 
> business.  He'll probably be forced to do something when it's way too late.

Seems my company enjoys setting "aggressive targets". I'm not sure why. 
Maybe because it's what management likes to hear? All I know is that 
these people seem to think that just setting an "aggresive target" means 
that something will actually *happen*. They don't seem to comprehend 
that such a target requires a *plan* to make it happen...

E.g., "oh, hey, we're implementing a brand new computer system. How long 
will that take? Gee, I don't know. When would we *like* it to be ready? 
Hey, how about, um, the end of next month? OK, it's a firm date! Let's 
go..."

In other words, pick a date out of thin air, and hope they can somehow 
pull it off. Don't bother finding out how much work is or isn't involved 
or anything, just pick a date and then try to hit it...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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