Of all the characters in Dilbert, I would like to say that I most identify with Wally. The truth, though, is that every day I feel a little more like Alice.
Always link to the cartoon in question.
Browsing Posts in Corporate Insanity
Alcohol was banned at Brazilian football matches in 2003 in an attempt to tackle violence between rival football fans. But with the country hosting the 2014 World Cup, Fifa is demanding that this ban be lifted.
Initially, I was a little confused as to why Fifa would be so worried about football fans’ right to get bladdered. Then I read this:
Brewer Budweiser is a big Fifa sponsor.
That clears up my question, and it also suggests a solution. Why can’t Fifa and Brazil agree to maintain the ban on beer, but allow the sale of Budweiser and other soft drinks?
And, for the last word on SOPA, here’s a copyright infringing YouTube video that I found via Nina Paley.
The Day the LOLcats died
The supporters of SOPA, and it’s Senate sister, PIPA claim that it will protect content industries. Tim O’Reilly very effectively takes this argument apart.
At O’Reilly, we have published ebooks DRM-free for the better part of two decades. We’ve watched the growth of this market from its halting early stages to its robust growth today. More than half of our ebook sales now come from overseas, in markets we were completely unable to serve in print. While our books appear widely on unauthorized download sites, our legitimate sales are exploding. The greatest force in reporting unauthorized copies to us is our customers, who value what we do and want us to succeed. Yes, there is piracy, but our embrace of the internet’s unparalleled ability to reach new customers “though it may not be perfect still secures to authors more money than any other system that can be devised.”
These bills are designed to protect companies that are unable – or unwilling – to respond to current market demands. Any law that tries to protect unrealistic business models is, inherently, a bad law.
I am aware that SOPA has been shelved. But being shelved is not the same as being killed. And PIPA is still working its way through the Senate legislative process.
I said yesterday that this site is going dark on Wednesday, as is Pulpmovies, in support of the Stop SOPA campaign. This is still going to happen.
Update
It turns out that SOPA has just been unshelved.
On January 18th, between 08:00 and 20:00 UTC, this little corner of the internet will be joining Identi.ca, Boing Boing, Rasberry Pi, and many others in an internet blackout in protest of the Stop Online Privacy Act proposed in the US Congress and its corresponding Senate bill, Protect IP.
This is a badly drafted bill, promoted by people who don’t understand its impact for the benefit of people who don’t care about your freedoms. It is so widely cast and so badly worded that it will limit what you can say online, regardless of whether you are in the US or not.
You can find more information on the SOPA/PIPA bills, and how they affect you whether or not you live in the USA, at americancensorship.org. And I hope that if you run any sort of Web service or publishing platform, you will join this blackout.
If you read any of the tech press, or spend any time around the nerdier corners of the internet, you will be aware something very bad is currently going through the US legislative process.
If you are not worried about SOPA, which is currently going through Congress, or its Senate sister, PIPA, I urge you to watch the video (from Fight for the Future by way of the WordPress Development blog) below.
I touched on this yesterday but it is worth reiterating. SOPA is a badly drafted law, promoted by people who don’t understand its impact for the benefit of people who don’t care about your freedoms. It is so widely cast and so badly worded that it will limit what you can say online, regardless of whether you are in the US or not – the videos example of Facebook having to censor its users posts is a good one.
If you are a US citizen, make your voice heard. If you are not a US citizen, encourage your American friends to make their voices heard.
If passed, this law will affect all of us.
Tellingly, the How Projects Really Work cartoon has become quite an icon in many offices, but I didn’t realise that the cartoon has also inspired a website.
ProjectCartoon.com has started with the original ten panel cartoon and added an additional eight cells – with more promised. More interestingly, the site also gives you the tools to create your own version.
Oh, the temptation!
Fantastic engineering management is…
Really great management makes a company a joy to work in, as a developer. It’s something we should celebrate and cultivate, teach and select for, not just be the natural upward path for people who have been around a while. If you truly love technology, there are lots of careers that take you to the top of the tech game without having to move into management. And conversely, if you love organising and leading, it’s possible to get started on a management career in software without being the world’s greatest coder first.
Over the course of my career, I have worked for some superb managers – people who saw their role as making sure the developers have the tools they need and don’t have the distractions they don’t need – and I have encountered other managers who were not so great. Marks Shuttleworth’s post is worth linking to both as a reminder of what makes a good manager and somthing to point to when I want to explain people why I don’t want to spend the rest of my career dealing with corporate politics.
When I clicked on a BBC article entitled How to succeed in business by doing nothing I was (somewhat optimistically) hoping for an endorsement of masterful inactivity. That’s not what the article is about, however, but what writer Michael Blastland has to say is a lot more interesting.
Essentially, the article is about the myth of the dynamic leader and the way in which this blinds people to the fact that some random variation is always present in any system. The conclusion that he draws is that, in responding to every immediate event rather than looking for the trend, people can take a temporary blip and turn it into a disaster.
The paragraph that leapt out at me, though, is this one:
It’s for this reason that the fashion for corporate dashboards displaying up-to-the-minute information about company performance makes me wonder – will bosses everywhere be staring at the numbers, twitching with every down, feeling the pulse race with every up, on the phone demanding action with every flicker on the dial?
I have seen cases of leadership teams requesting huge amounts of low level data (even the ability to drill down to individual transactions in one case). And, when I look at the flood of operational data being hosed into management reports, it is painfully obvious that any useful information is being lost in the noise of the raw data.
Just because data is available, it doesn’t follow that it is useful. And when you show me a leader demanding every bit of data he can lay his hands on, I will show you a leader who doesn’t know what he’s doing.
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