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“Bomb hoax” hoax undermines our real emergency response ability
Ok. I can’t keep quiet about this any longer. It’s driving me nuts. I just read a story titled $2 million US settlement in Boston TV ad bomb hoax. This is a fine example of how the wrong words can do damage, even when intending to inform.
“Bomb hoax” implies intent to deceive people into believing a bomb was present. People who engage in hoaxes (“perpetrators”) aren’t nice people. Just the phrase smears the characters of the men who placed the ads around Boston.
In a real bomb hoax, someone calls a building and says “There’s a bomb!” In this ad campaign, they put boxes with lighted cartoon characters around the city, where they stayed unmolested for a couple of weeks before being noticed. The same boxes in a dozen other cities produced only calm amusement. That doesn’t sound much like a bomb hoax.
A more accurate headline would be, “$2MM paid to Boston to compensate for ad mistaken for bomb.” Or, if you want the language to correctly specify who did what, “Turner pays $2MM to compensate for Boston Mayor and Police mistaking ad campaign for bomb.”
The Mayor, Governor, and emergency response people kept saying that “in a post-9/11 world, [Turner] should have known” that police and bomb units would mistake glowing cartoon characters for bombs. That’s absurd. In a post-9/11 world, police and bomb units should be well-trained to notice something wrong, investigate it, quickly identify what is and isn’t a threat, and only shut down the city if there’s danger.
I live in Boston. It took the city’s emergency response team a couple of weeks to discover brightly-lit ads that were designed to be noticed. Is this supposed to make me feel more secure? Once they noticed the ads, it took them hours to figure out the difference between a light-bright and a bomb. And in an oft-overlooked postscript, while investigating the cartoons, they found two real pipe-bomb hoaxes that they’d not have found if they weren’t looking for the Turner ads. Oh, boy. I feel like they’re really keeping me safe in a post-9/11 world. Not.
Our emergency response team screwed up, big-time. They’ve successfully shifted the blame using words like “hoax” and “perpetrator” so they needn’t take the responsibility for their slow response, their extraordinarily inept discovery of the real situation, and their missing the real hoax pipe bombs. Now, they’re showing the same lack of skill in identifying and fixing their contribution to the problem. All so they needn’t say “we screwed up.” I only hope they perform better if we ever have a real emergency.
Other than pure profit, why would anyone pretend fast food is glamorous?
In an article on Reuters, Steven Anderson, the National Restaurant Association’s Chief Executive, has asked that an ad starring Kevin Federline as a fast-food worker leaves the impression that “working in a restaurant is demeaning and unpleasant and asking the commercial to be dumped.”
Does Mr. Anderson really think the commercial will hurt people’s opinions of fast-food jobs? Does he think we consider working in a burger joint to be a fun, exciting, high-growth, deeply meaningful job? Perhaps he thinks we all secretly envy the kid behind the counter for their excellent benefits, great health insurance, stellar hourly wage, and wonderful team environment.
Get real. Steve, we don’t think fast-food jobs are glamorous. Kevin’s commercial will not be shattering anyone’s fantasies. Except maybe yours. Your industry depends on filling these crap jobs so the CEOs can make their million-dollar bonuses. Why don’t you spend six months behind a McFastFood fry machine. Then tell us with a straight face that service jobs in fast food are anything other than low-paying, demeaning, unpleasant dead-end jobs.
Meanwhile, let Kevin’s commercial air. At least it will give us something to laugh about while we sit in our comfy chair, awaiting our fast-food obesity-driven coronary.
The answer to CEO pay: yes, make them pay…
In a recent New York Times article on CEO pay, the reporter closely examines pay practices where companies use peer groups to justify CEO pay. But they don’t disclose who those peers are, allowing CEOs to inflate their pay by carefully choosing the peer group.
That all sounds fine and dandy, but I must ask: what difference does the peer group make, even if it’s chosen well? There is this bizarre assumption that CEO pay should somehow be linked to what other companies pay. What absurdity! That argument would suggest that if it’s the norm to vastly overpay executives (which it is), then a company should overpay their CEO for doing a job that just isn’t worth what they’re being paid.
“But that’s the market price for a CEO. we HAVE To pay that or we can’t hire a good CEO.” Bull-pucky. Startups and small businesses routinely find CEOs who will work for relatively low salaries because they’re devoted to the company or industry. IF they do well, their stock is worth something, but only if they truly do well. (Many F500 company CEOs think so little of their own skills they find it necessary to backdate their own options.)
Shouldn’t we use the same criteria for Fortune 500 CEOs? In fact, why not have prospective CEOs pay for the job? After all, the jobs are in very short supply, carry huge prestige and status, and give the job holder the unprecedented opportunity to test their skills and ideas on a scale 99.9999% of the human race can never know.
So there’s my solution to CEO pay: have the CEOs pay for the job. You’ll quickly weed out all but those who have an intrinsic care, interest, and passion for the job. It’s not at all clear to me that you’ll get a lower calibre of candidate–only different. So let’s give it a try. Then we can recapture all the money and time we’re spending examining CEOs and putting together niggling little disclosure policies and do something useful with our time instead.
No one really knows how to measure software productivity
I just ran across this article on how consultants (mis-)measure productivity in software development.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/10b.html
Sad to say, I couldn’t agree more with the article. I started my career as a software engineer, and I’ve met very few people who understood what software is or how to measure it. When it comes to measuring productivity of software development, give it up entirely. The best software engineers can be 100x to 1000x more productive than merely “good” engineers, if you measure productivity as debugged-line-of-code-written-per-hour. If you measure ability-of-code-to-meet-business-goals, the best engineers can be ten thousand times more productive or even more. Much, much more.
The problem is that software is the codification of a business process. The best engineers take the time to understand the business, so what they codify can meet business goals. People Express airline ($1Bn in sales in year 2) went out of business, according to its CEO, because their reservation software had constraints that kept them from strategically changing their pricing. If their original programmers had understood the link between their software and the business, a single design decision would have had multi-billion-dollar implications and saved the business. What would the productivity be of the engineer who made that connection?
Similarly, the best managers understand that software development is, itself, a business process. The engineers hired, their skill sets, the languages they use, etc. all affect the speed to create, deploy, and support the software. As it is, I’ve only seen one manager (an ex-engineer) who understood the connection enough to use a specific programming language for business reasons. He made a couple hundred million from that decision, by the way… (It was Paul Graham of Viaweb. Read about it here.)
So if you’re a manager, take the time to understand the strategic implications of who you hire and how you have them design your product.
If you’re a programmer, you might be amused by learning to connect your coding with the business implications so you can save your company two billion dollars. But unless you work for the manager in the previous paragraph, don’t even expect anyone to understand your contribution, much less appreciate it. Even if your manager “gets it,” expect at most .01% of the bonus that she gets. Sadly, the business world is built to reward them, not you. (You can find the Harvard Business School admissions office by clicking here.)
Long-term thinking: Water shortage may bring business opportunity
I was just reading an article on the impending water shortage. Most of us are totally in the dark about it, but for years, people who track such things have been warning that our water usage is coming close to surpassing the world’s available fresh water supply. MIT’s Technology Review magazine was writing about it a decade ago.
If you’re a forward-looking entrepreneur, there’s tremendous potential here, and still some time to do something about it.
You can try to be part of the solution:
- Develop new desalinization technology.
- Create distribution systems to help water most quickly move to where it is needed most.
- Reduce the cost of waste treatment.
- Breed less water-intensive crops.
If you’d rather be part of the problem:
- Buy up water rights and start jacking up the prices.
- Heck, buy up water itself and store it away where you can later sell it for high prices.
This is a long-term strategy, but since we don’t seem to be looking ahead as a race to solve this problem, we’ll have to do it as individuals and businesses.
Insurance is just community for a profit
Insurance is a weird beast. Basically, we all band together and put in money so if any of us hits misfortune, the pooled money can be used to help out. It works because typically, most of us do fine, and we can cover the misfortunates.
This is basically what communities do. We take care of each other. We all pitch in, with the expectation that we’ll all be able to fall back on each other should misfortune strike.
The weird part is that when you’re talking insurance, it’s not emotional commitment, it’s financial. And since the insurance companies are for-profit enterprises whose first duty is to their shareholders, not their policyholders, the have incentive to refuse participation to anyone they think might collect, they want to charge premiums as high as possible, and pay out as little as possible. In short, the profit motive directly acts to make them oppose the slightest movement in the direction that insurance was designed to provide: a safety net provided by a mutually interdependent community.
Bizarre stuff. Gotta run. Five more pages of paperwork to fill out…
Even our “best and brightest” aren’t doing so well in actual ability.
Wow. I knew we were in deep sneakers when it came to the preparedness of our next generation to become productive members of society. I had no idea how bad it’s become.
“According to scores on the 2006 ACT college entrance exam, 21 percent of students applying to four-year institutions are ready for college-level work in all four areas tested, reading, writing, math and biology.
For many students, the outlook does not improve after college. The Pew Charitable Trusts recently found that three-quarters of community college graduates were not literate enough to handle everyday tasks like comparing viewpoints in newspaper editorials or calculating the cost of food items per ounce.”
Check out the rest of the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/education/02college.html. The big question is: what can we do?
There’s more to life than funding and taxes.
We’re approaching our state primary for Governor here in Massachusetts. All the commercials I’ve seen simply tell how each candidate will cut taxes taxes taxes. “I’ll cut the gas tax.” “I’ll push to roll back the income tax.” “I’ll cut all taxes.”
I can’t help feeling rather discouraged by all the talk, mainly because it’s all such crap. Let’s think about the business equivalent. What would you think if someone came into your office wanting to be put in charge of an important project (say, running the entire state of Massachusetts) and this was their business plan:
1. I’m going to reject equity funding and fund with debt.
Would you put them in charge of anything? Of course not. Because frankly, deciding how to fund a project is something you decide after you decide what the projects will be, what the expected benefits will be, etc. In fact, it makes no sense to even think about financing before you know the ROI (in whatever currency is important to you) of the various projects. Some things have such a high return, you’re happy to finance them with high-interest-debt or with high taxes. Other things have a low return, and you only want to finance them if they’ll pay for themselves in 3 months.
Running a state is much more complex than running a business, and at some point we’ve been brainwashed to care about nothing but knee-jerk rejection of taxes.
Let’s see a return to sanity and recognize that taxes, like bonds and foreign borrowing, are nothing more than a funding choice. We will pay for the cost of government one way or another–borrowing eventually must be repaid (with interest!) from dollars raised through taxation. So the focus should be on what programs we want to use money for, and only then should we discuss where that money will come from.
It bodes ill that candidates from both parties today worry only about tax promises, and so much less about policy and governance.
How do you charge for your products or services?
I just read a great article on the difference between a consultancy and a body shop. The author does an excellent point of laying out how perverse the incentives are at a body shop that charges time + materials, versus a consultancy that is very clear about providing value by bringing capability to the table, rather than time.
As a culture, especially a business culture, we persist in sticking to the decades-outdated idea that hours worked are somehow related to value. Sometimes the relation holds, say for an assembly line worker. Or a retail store clerk. But for most business jobs, there’s no link at all between hours worked and value created. In fact, anyone who has gotten rich by owning a company has made all that money through a market mechanism that completely disconnects hours from value. (If you doubt it, let’s film Bill Gates as he brushes his teeth, quiz him as to his thoughts during those moments, and see if those thoughts are directly worth the $100,000+ he earned during those moments.)
So when you find yourself obsessing over hours, yours or others’, let it go. Concentrate instead on the value you’re creating, and how you can create more of it faster, so we can all leave work early and go play.