Losing flavor

The oldest British man ever to ascent Mt Everest did so today. So, in his honor, the BBC has a bunch of little reports on the region and the mountain. The correspondent makes a nice 3 minute video of a 12 day trek to base camp. There is no way that I could condense my experiences into 3 minutes -what is he thinking? Doesn't he want his viewers to experience the smells, sights, sounds and sweat with him? I guess that doesn't make for good footage, but then again, perhaps that's why I'll never be a good travel correspondent.

Touche Mr MBA

In Gujarati, MBA is an acronym. It can stand for: "Mane badhu avreche", or "I know everything." This is apt, of course, if you have ever met an MBA, particularly one from a high profile institution. Those three letters, which took 2 years of education and probably $100,000 to acquire, are waved around like a war standard.

Since I had thought of acquiring that flag myself, I finally found someone who can help me justify my 4 years and counting to get a different three letters. PhD, or "piled higher and deeper". Apparently, the idea of a degree in Management is scarcely 100 years old. It is an American invention, created by a man who wanted to answer the question:

How many tons of pig iron bars can a worker load onto a rail car in the course of a working day?

This man devised a wholly unscientific discipline surrounding his answer to this question. It is a discipline that became loaded with jargon, which then turned into scripture. In the words of its founding father, F.W.Taylor,

… the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is.

Consultant. Your profession is justified.

Read this article by Matthew Steward in the Atlantic. It is irreverent, insightful, and an ingenious account of how words like
Business process re-engineering and organic change and lateral flows of information have turned us into a society of robots, each of whom believes their programming is better than the robot next to them.

But what does an M.B.A. do for you that a doctorate in philosophy can’t do better?

The recognition that management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.

The extremes of American engineering

I was recently in Detroit, which gave me an opportunity to reflect on the state of the American automotive industry. Fortuitously for me, I was there while one of the three remaining manufacturers declared bankruptcy, and while another decided to shed a brand which has existed in the 1950's.

So, Chrysler is gone now. Or maybe it will re-emerge in Germany as a subsidiary of Fiat, while Fiat sheds Opel to be picked up by the Swedes who are protecting their treasured Volvo from an American bankruptcy judge. Confused? You should be. Personally, I applaud the decision to reorganize in bankruptcy court. Remember, Chrysler, unlike GM and Ford, is not a publicly held company. It is owned by a venture capital firm, which, when the government was handing out bailout money like ice cream on a hot day, was eagerly holding its hand out, while secretly making Dr Evil type gestures:



Am I being callous? Do I wish for hundreds of thousands of car related employees to lose their jobs? No. However, there is something to be said for the two-faced brand of 'capitalism' we have been promoting lately. Do we want to emerge as an efficient, competitive manufacturing force again, or are we going to let our manufacturing abilities lapse, only to engage in protectionist posturing? There is no doubt that American minds can produce efficient, competitive, useful products. One only has to look here, at the list of the most promising American social entrepreneurs to know that these products can be made with a minimum of fanfare and sold to benefit many.

Yet, American engineering has a darker side. If we want to call it that. When staying in Detroit, I had the unfortunate experience of living inside the GM headquarters. In some ungodly pairing, the Marriot hotel and the GM headquarters share a structure, that looks like something from outer space. It is confusingly built, ugly, and has, at its center, a GM showroom of new 09/10 vehicles.

Among these, is the new Yukon Hybrid. The Yukon is a beast of a truck. I drove one a few weeks ago, thanks to my kind neighbor who let me borrow his. I felt very powerful. Evil, almost. And, no doubt, the beast gulps fuel as though it is going out of style. Therefore, the idea of a Hybrid beast is a good one - if men continue to have the need to boost their masculinity through large vehicles, at least they should be socially conscious about it.

But here is where it gets ludicrous. The Yukon Hybrid advertises itself as being able to do 20MPH City / 20 MHP Highway.

enough said.