Quotulatiousness

February 13, 2013

US Cyber Command’s recruiting headache

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

Strategy Page on the “who could possibly have seen this coming” problems that the new electronic warfare organization is having with staffing:

U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) has been operational for two years now, and it is encountering some serious problems in recruiting people qualified to deal with the enemy (skilled hackers attacking American networks for whatever reason). People in the software and Internet security business have been telling Cyber Command leaders that they will have to change the way they recruit if they want to get qualified people. That means hiring hackers who lived on the dark side (criminal hacking) at one point or another. Such recruits would not pass the screening usually given to potential government employees who would be handling, and protecting, classified information and critical Internet systems. Few government officials are willing to bend the rules, mainly because no one wants to be responsible for some rogue hacker who got hired without the usual screening. It’s safer to go by the book and use that for your defense when the inadequate recruiting effort leads to a major Cyber War disaster.

Cyber Command is headquartered in Fort Meade (outside Washington, DC), most of the manpower, and capabilities, come from the Cyber War operations the military services have already established. Within Cyber Command there are some smaller organizations that coordinate Cyber War activities among the services, as well as with other branches of the government and commercial organizations that are involved in network security. At the moment Cyber Command wants to expand its core staff from 900 to 4,900 in the next five years. Twenty percent of those new people will be civilians, including a number of software specialists sufficiently skilled to quickly recognize skillful intrusions into American networks and quickly develop countermeasures. That kind of talent is not only expensive, but those who possess often have work histories that don’t pass the normal screening. These are the personnel Cyber Command is having a difficult time recruiting.

The big problems are not only recruiting hackers (technical personnel who can deal with the bad-guy hackers out there) but also managing them. The problem is one of culture, and economics. The military is a strict hierarchy that does not, at least in peacetime, reward creativity. Troops with good technical skills can make more money, and get hassled less, in a similar civilian job. The military is aware of these problems, but it is slow going trying to fix them.

January 16, 2013

The 9 iron-clad rules of business

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Rosabeth Moss Kanter has the nine rules many businesses follow:

  1. Be suspicious of any new idea from below — because it’s new, and because it’s from below. After all, if the idea were any good, we at the top would have thought of it already.
  2. Invoke history. If a new idea comes up for discussion, find a precedent in a an earlier idea that didn’t work, remind everyone of that bad past experience. Those who have been around a long time know that we tried it before, so it won’t work this time either.
  3. Keep people really busy. If people seem to have free time, load them with more work.
  4. In the name of excellence, encourage cut-throat competition. Get groups to critique and challenge each other’s proposals, preferably in public forums, and then declare winters and losers.
  5. Stress predictability above all. Count everything that can be counted, and do it as often as possible. Sweep any surplus into master accounts, and eliminate any slack. Favor exact plans and guarantees of success. Don’t credit people with exceeding their targets because that would just undermine planning. Insist that all procedures be followed.
  6. Confine discussion of strategies and plans to a small circle of trusted advisors. Then announce big decisions in full-blown form. This ensures that no one will start anything new because they never know what new orders will be coming down from the top.
  7. Act as though punishing failure motivates success. Practice public humiliation, making object lessons out of those who fail to meet expectations. Everyone will know that risk-taking is bad.
  8. Blame problems on the incompetent people below — their weak skills and poor work ethic. Complain frequently about the low quality of the talent pool today. If that doesn’t undermine self-confidence, it will undermine faith in anyone else’s ideas.
  9. Above all, never forget that we got to the top because we already know everything there is to know about this business.

Yep, several of the companies I’ve worked for followed most or all of these rules … to suppress creativity and innovation. Worked a treat, too.

January 11, 2013

In praise of mergers and takeovers

Filed under: Business, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:15

In The Register, Tim Worstall points out that most mergers lose money, but that they’re good for the economy anyway:

The final one of the four is the vital part that takeovers play in the clean up of the economy’s failures. Take a company that goes bust. The whole point of bankruptcy proceedings is to make sure that its assets aren’t then left, orphaned, or chained to an unpayable debt. The idea is to get them off into someone else’s hands where they might be put to good use. This is true of contracts, or the workforce, of the land and any other asset. It might be that the machinery is worth most as scrap. Or the factory is worth most as a supermarket. Or it could be that the OS coders and their desks would be best put to writing games: but under different management.

And it’s this last part of the whole system that our economists think is the most important. When failure happens, the vital thing is to clean up the mess and quickly. Don’t leave potentially useful assets orphaned but auction them off and get them working again. The price that is realised doesn’t matter very much at all: from the view of the entire economy, getting people and assets back to work pronto is the vital part. So important is this that we’re urged to overlook all of the above problems with takeovers and mergers to allow this part of it to function as efficiently as possible.

Yes, most takeovers lose money for the shareholders of the company doing the buying. This is often because the interests of the management diverge from those of those owners. Similarly, many companies are kept running longer than they should be for those selfish management reasons. But we put up with all of that (although try to constrain it) so that the scavenging upon the assets of the bankrupt can be as efficient as possible. For this is the very heart of the success of capitalism: Not how the successful make profits, but how the system deals quickly and cleanly with failure.

June 25, 2012

No innovation can survive the bureaucratic process

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:44

A story that won’t surprise anyone who has ever worked in a large bureaucracy is still eye opening — even Scott Adams’ Dilbert characters have it easier to get their suggestions implemented:

It was the summer of 2010, and the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) was about to launch the Employee Innovation Program — kind of like the employee suggestion drop box by the water cooler.

Except, nothing like it at all, as TBS employee Anna Bevilacqua was about to discover.

[. . .]

The employees who answered the call for creativity had to follow several rules, including: An employee could not make a suggestion without his or her boss’ approval; and proposals that might lead to a change in TBS policy would be rejected.

Managers tracked the proposals using a spreadsheet that noted the date and exact time a proposal was received, whether an individual or team of workers made the submission and the date it was received by a committee of three TBS managers.

The program designed to cut waste was taking shape. A bloated, forbidding shape.

[. . .]

Four managers formed a “Sub-Committee for Initial Triage” to conduct a “pre-screening” of the proposals. The selection process would be guided by a flow chart with text inside parallelograms and rectangles connected by arrows.

[. . .]

Bevilacqua needed to complete an “implementation framework” document. If she failed to “clearly define objectives, benefits, deliverables, exclusions, assumptions, responsibilities, estimated costs and timelines,” if her plan did not identify possible “slippage in target dates,” if it did not use a “risk log” or a “risk mapping approach,” it could die in Phase Two.

She and the other applicants were warned: “A wrong plan is worse than having no plan at all.”

[. . .]

The vetting and revising and perfecting continued. Each surviving proposal was screened by the Treasury Board’s chief information officer, deputy chief financial officer and chief financial officer.

[. . .]

The months of meetings, memos and emails confirmed her idea was a no-brainer. Her plan would be put into action.

A congratulatory note was vetted by three people before it was sent to her.

Then, the extensive trail of TBS paper — nearly 550 pages obtained by the Star through Access to Information legislation — ends in late 2010.

The employee who suggested this had already retired before the suggestion was implemented — and it was implemented outside the suggestion program anyway. The final line of the article sums it up perfectly: “Not one employee has received a cash award.”

H/T to Andrew Coyne:

https://twitter.com/acoyne/statuses/217238022482169857

April 24, 2012

Is your boss a baboon? You’re quite correct

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

Matt Ridley reviews a new book, Games Primates Play by Dario Maestripieri:

Generally, junior professors write long and unsolicited emails to senior professors, who reply with short ones after a delay; the juniors then reply quickly and at length. This is not because the seniors are busier, for they, too, write longer and more punctually when addressing their deans and funders, who reply more briefly and tardily. The asymmetry in length and speed of reply correlates with dominance.

When a subordinate chimpanzee grooms a dominant one, it often does so for a long time and unsolicited. When it then requests to be groomed in turn, it receives only a brief grooming and usually after having to ask a second time.

[. . .]

He observes two university colleagues in a coffee shop and notes how the senior one takes the chair with the back to the wall (the better to spot attacks by rivals or leopards), is less attentive to her colleague’s remarks than vice versa, stares down her colleague when a contentious issue comes up and takes the lead on walking out the door at the end-all of it neatly corresponding to the behavior of two baboons when one is dominant.

(A new member of a committee on which I served once asked me why a senior colleague was being so horrible to him. I replied: “Oh, it’s because when a new male baboon joins a troop, it’s traditional for the alpha male to beat him up before becoming his best friend — soon he’ll think the world of you.” I was right.)

It includes a fascinating insight into the benefits and problems of peer review.

April 21, 2012

The NFL draft: top picks no guarantee to turn losers into winners

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:29

Tom Pelissero has an interesting column up on the actual impact high draft picks can have on the teams who select them:

The NFL is designed to promote competitive parity, from the salary cap to revenue sharing to a draft order inverted by record and strength of schedule.

However, it remains a league of haves and have-nots in many ways. Look no further than the inability of roughly half the league to capitalize on the sorts of opportunities the Minnesota Vikings have with the No. 3 overall pick in this year’s NFL Draft.

Since the NFL playoffs expanded in 1990, 17 teams have made multiple top-three draft picks, accounting for 56 of those 66 picks (84.8%) overall. Only three of those teams — St. Louis, Indianapolis and Washington — have won a championship.

The other 15 teams have combined for 32 Super Bowl appearances, including 19 of 22 titles (86.4%).

In other words, no amount of talent can fix a bad team if the team is bad for organizational reasons. Management/leadership matter more than raw talent, at least in NFL terms.

January 10, 2012

When “everyone agrees” about excessive executive pay, something else is being sold

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

Tim Black on the amazing unanimity of thought that the most pressing problem in the world right now is big pay packets for corporate CEOs:

Occupy London, the Labour Party, the Lib-Con coalition, the Archbishop of York… It doesn’t matter to what or to whom you look, you’ll find the same simple-minded sentiment: the root cause of our economic and social problems is greed. The greed, that is, of bankers, of overpaid CEOs, of those at the top of society who simply have and want too much.

[. . .]

If there was ever a striking indication of the deadening political conformism, the dearth of social imagination, that so characterises our contemporary impasse, it is there in the sheer ubiquity of the Greed-is-Bad argument.

So what is driving this pervy, across-the-board obsession with the pay packets of super execs? It’s certainly not impelled by a desire to get to grips with the economic crisis that holds most of the developed world in its grip. No doubt there are some simple-minded souls in a state of Occupation who believe that blaming and bashing company CEOs or bankers is somehow to understand the economic crisis. But just as the remuneration packages of a few bankers and bosses did not bring about the current crisis, so seeking to limit their wages, to impose a maximum national wage, will not solve the crisis. And while £3million or £4milllion for a CEO’s annual salary does seem huge, such figures amount to very little in the grand economic scheme of things. As the Investor’s Chronicle points out: ‘The average FTSE 100 CEO is paid £3.9million year. But this is only one four-thousandth (0.025 per cent) of the average market capitalisation of a FTSE 100 company.’

The current fashion for attacking large pay packages, then, is economic neither in impulse nor intent. Rather it is driven, in the first instance, by a narrow moralism. For its numerous proponents, either in party offices or in spartan tents, it represents an easy posture, a cheap critical pose. One Guardian columnist virtually gave the game away: ‘Like phone hacking or MPs’ fiddled expenses, this is an issue that only needs to be described to seem reprehensible.’ That is, to the right-thinking types on liberal broadsheets, criticising large salaries is just too good an opportunity to miss. Indeed, like attacking tabloids and MPs, it is a mark of one’s membership of the right-thinking to have a pop at the really, really rich.

But there’s a deeper, darker impulse driving this cheap attack on exorbitant pay packages than just preening self-righteousness. And that’s the belief that the large pay packets pursued by the undeservedly wealthy are a symbol of a society-wide pathology. The cheap attack on top earners is also an attack on the material aspirations of the rest of us. We are, in short, just too greedy now to be left to our own unregulated, uncontrolled devices. A report from the High Pay Commission — a grandiosely monikered body established by centre-left think tank Compass, a few trade unionists and business secretary Vince Cable — makes this clear by drawing the highly questionable link between this putative celebration of ‘greed’ — or ‘an elevation of the concept of the rational self-interested man to unprecedented heights’ — and the August riots. ‘It should not perhaps surprise us’, the report states, ‘that the rioters took the trappings of wealth that they could not afford — the TVs and designer trainers. It reflects a sense of entitlement that pervades society from the very top to the bottom.’

January 2, 2012

The least welcome additions to “managementspeak” in 2011

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:48

Macro Man runs down a selection of words and phrases which became common last year:

We are nearly at the end of 2011 and another year of mayhem behind. We will be judging our 2011 Non-Predictions and trying to dream up some new ones for 2012 in the next fortnight or so but this week we have been able to get some long needed admin done. With it came a realisation that even if the financial industry is suffering the creative management community has been in full swing dreaming up new terms and phrases to camouflage the blindingly obvious. The evolution of ‘management speak’ means some phrases die and some survive and flourish. TMM really don’t know what determines the success of one term or phrase over another other than, as with the arts, adoption and patronage by the most respected in the field. TMM hope that this year’s rash of newcomers all die off naturally but we would like to help with a shove into their deserved obscurity.

TMM have noticed that every cause nowadays needs an “Awareness” campaign and though we feel that “doing” is of much greater importance than “awaring”, we will go along with the fashion and launch a Management Talk Awareness Week with the list of phrases and terms we have found most irksome this year.

So here are TMM’s top ten annoying phrases of 2011 (even if some are older) that we would like to see the back of.

“Hi, I hope all is well. We have identified a need to internalise our ideation of the requirements of the Stakeholder Community before we reach out to them.”

July 18, 2011

“We used to talk to career criminals all the time. They were our sources”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:15

A look inside the News of the World newsroom before the closure:

“It was the kind of place you get out of and you never want to go back again.” That’s how one former reporter describes the News of the World newsroom under editor Rebekah Brooks, the ferociously ambitious titian-haired executive who ran Britain’s top-selling Sunday tabloid from 2000 to 2003.

Journalists who worked there in that period describe an industrialized operation of dubious information-gathering, reporters under intense pressure attempting to land exclusive stories by whatever means necessary, and a culture of fear, cynicism, gallows humor and fierce internal competition.

“We used to talk to career criminals all the time. They were our sources,” says another former reporter from the paper who also worked for Murdoch’s daily tabloid, the Sun. “It was a macho thing: ‘My contact is scummier than your contact.’ It was a case of: ‘Mine’s a murderer!’ On the plus side, we always had a resident pet nutter around in case anything went wrong.”

April 11, 2011

Wormme mashes up Theodore Sturgeon and Frederick Winslow Taylor

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, Government, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:46

wormme read an older Atlantic article linked from Instapundit and had this to say:

Via Insty, this is one of the best things I’ve ever read. It eviscerates the myth of management competence the way that Joe Biden destroys the idea of government competence. But let’s take a step back from the specifics of business management. Look at all the other occupations that share management’s main trait.

Because in reality they’re all the same thing.

Here’s some fields in which competence is assumed, all evidence to the contrary: government, law, management, education, economics, scholarship, and all journalistic media.

Notice what they all have in common? As a primary feature?

Jaw flappin’, tongue waggin’, hot air spewin’ talkety talk talk words blah blah blah.

“Them that can, do. Them that can’t, teach.” And manage and report and govern. But you don’t hear that adage anymore, do you? The Talkers have brainwashed people into thinking they’re Doers as well.

I expect this is the thing that actually brings down Western Civilization. The Doers letting the Talkers take over the Doings.

The chin-waggin’ industries want “ex cathedra” status for their every mumble. How do they repay? By finding nothing but fault in the Doers: industries, energy production, “big box” stores, etc., all the way down to the evil of the Happy Meal.

This still wouldn’t have spelled civilization’s doom, had the Talkies remained apart. Journalism in particular is supposed to report on lies and wrongdoing. And they do so with gusto, when investigating Doers. Do you ever see them going after fellow Talkers like that? They’re in cahoots. Total…cahoots.

March 18, 2011

Tim Harford: The management lessons from the war in Iraq

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

November 26, 2010

Rewarding bravery or giving “attaboy” awards?

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

Strategy Page reports on the huge increase in medals being awarded to US troops:

The U.S. Army has reported that some 857,000 medals have been awarded to the 1.2 million soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s 48 percent as many medals awarded during World War II, when six times as many soldiers served overseas. It’s also 30 percent of those awarded during Vietnam, where 25 percent more soldiers served. This odd pattern is the result of the excessive number of medals given out during the Vietnam war.

This has not been forgotten. Five years ago, American troops began grumbling about what was perceived as disrespectful use of Bronze Star medals as “attaboy” awards for officers and senior NCOs who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, or for lower ranking personnel you want to pin a medal on for no good reason

[. . .]

This awards inflation was a very unpopular aspect of the Vietnam war, and became a major embarrassment after the 1983 Grenada invasion (where the army tried to award more medals than there were troops involved, but the public caught wind of it and forced the brass to back off.)

Compared to the Canadian military, the US hands out a lot more medals: in my long-ago militia days, we used to joke that American recruits got medals for shining boots and using the latrine. Of course, that was right after the Vietnam era, so the “medal inflation” was perhaps at its most obvious stage.

June 7, 2010

QotD: Investing in well-managed companies

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:57

When companies make money, we assume they are well-managed. That perception is reinforced by the CEOs of those companies who are happy to tell you all the clever things they did to make it happen. The problem with relying on this source of information is that CEOs are highly skilled in a special form of lying called leadership. Leadership involves convincing employees and investors that the CEO has something called a vision, a type of optimistic hallucination that can come true only in an environment in which the CEO is massively overcompensated and the employees have learned to be less selfish.

Scott Adams, “Betting on the Bad Guys”, Wall Street Journal, 2010-06-07

May 19, 2010

Military bureausclerosis, explained

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

Like many bureaucracies, the US Army has a plethora of generals running an organization that is far from its maximum historical size. Those generals all need staff, the staff need working space, transportation, support staff of their own, etc. Multiply that a few times and you get stories like this:

Gates rattled off examples of costly bureaucracy inside the military, as well. A simple request for a dog-handling team in Afghanistan must be reviewed and assessed at multiple high-level headquarters before it can be deployed to the war zone. “Can you believe it takes five four-star headquarters to get a decision on a guy and a dog up to me?” Gates said to reporters Friday.

The Armorer gets to the real point of the story, rather than the one Gates thinks he’s making:

I’ll just take this statement: “Can you believe it takes five four-star headquarters to get a decision on a guy and a dog up to me?”

And say — “Gee, Mr. Secretary, I can’t believe that a decision on a guy and a dog has to get to you.”

If you’re making those kinds of decisions, that’s just another reason the Services have put that many Generals in the loop.

This is what, in the private sector, is called micromanagement and it’s generally thought to be a bad thing, and a sign of incompetent leadership. What’s it called in the US Army?

October 28, 2009

Toronto FC also looking for new head coach

Filed under: Cancon, Soccer — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:33

Hmmm. First Middlesbrough fires their top guy, now Toronto FC does the same. Of course, the situation is different, in that Middlesbrough is still in the top few spots of the Championship, while Toronto just got blown out 5-0 and missed out on the playoffs again. This is from a letter Mo Johnson sent out to the Toronto FC fan base yesterday:

I share your disappointment that we missed the Playoffs and I am still devastated by the manner of the performance at New York on Saturday. In all my years as a player and manager I never have seen a meltdown like this. I can tell you we are only one point away from the Playoffs but in the context of a 5-0 blowout? That doesn’t give me any comfort.

This morning I announced that Chris Cummins will be leaving the club and the search will start right away for a new head coach. I want to thank Chris for the job he has done since taking over as interim head coach at the end of April. When John Carver went it left us with a hole and I think under the circumstances Chris did a hell of a job. I think he is going to be a very good coach one day but I’ve known for a couple of weeks now that he wanted to be closer to home. We want all of the other members of our coaching staff to stay.

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