Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
—Robert A. Heinlein
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Category Archives: Management
Quote of the Day
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
—Thomas Sowell
Electrons and Guys Over 50
It’s being reported that the electrical system of the submarine recently lost on a tourist dive to the wreck of the Titanic had been designed by a college intern. It had been previously reported that the CEO of OceanGate, the company that operated the sub, didn’t want to hire “white guys over 50.”
I’m currently working on the power systems for a couple projects for NASA. One is a robot that will be used to refuel satellites on orbit. The other is a lidar system what will used by autonomous vehicles for close-in maneuvering. While most of members of the teams working on these systems are young engineers under 30, there are at least a couple over-50 engineers and technicians on both teams. One of us is 70. I’m 75. We’re there as mentors.
It’s been said that most of us need about 10,000 hours of experience to fully master a skill. (Think of all the time Michael Jordan spent shooting baskets.) The young men and women I work with are smart and talented, but only part way up their learning curves. We geezers are there to coach them and to help them avoid mistakes we have already made.
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People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
—Thomas Sowell
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Principles and rules are intended to provide a thinking man with a frame of reference.
—Carl von Clausewitz
Team Kimberlin Post of the Day
One of the bases for several of Bill Schmalfeldt’s LOLsuits has been that the trail of blowback from his Internet activities has made it difficult for him to survive a background check, which brings us to this Self Awareness Failure Du Jour from four years ago today.
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Speaking of employment background checks …
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Vigilans Vindex left this in the comments to the original post—
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Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.
—Lao Tzu
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As a rule, men worry more about what they can’t see than about what they can.
—Julius Caesar
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If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.
—John D. Rockefeller
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Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.
—George S. Patton
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Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
—T. S. Eliot
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Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.
—Confucius
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Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.
—Alan Dean Foster
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It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
—Isaac Asimov
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I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.
—Elon Musk
20 % of the Customers Drink 80 % of the Beer
That version of the the 80/20 Rule is attributed to an English pub keeper. It’s an informal summary of the Pareto distribution, a power-law probability phenomenon that describes a great deal of human behavior. The Pareto distribution suggests it is usually the case in an organization with a statistically large population that a group about the size of the square root of the total population produces half of the organization’s beneficial work.
This tells us why Elon Musk is probably right and Robert Reich is probably wrong.
If Twitter had 7500 employees when Musk took over, something on the order of 87 were probably carrying half the real productive load. Firing only half the staff wouldn’t get rid of enough deadwood.
I’m looking forward to seeing how Twitter will be reshaped.
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The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone.
—Oswald Chambers
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The very best impromptu speeches are the ones written well in advance.
—Ruth Gordon
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And it will fall out as in a complication of diseases, that by applying a remedy to one sore, you will provoke another; and that which removes the one ill symptom produces others.
—Thomas More
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Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.
—Theodore Roosevelt
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Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.
—Confucius
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Nothing made by brute force lasts.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
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In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
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It’s strictly business.
—Michael Corleone
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Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.
—Coco Chanel