Whitacre Vows to ‘Learn About Cars’ as Chairman of New GM Board - Bloomberg.com

June 10 (Bloomberg) -- Edward E. Whitacre Jr. built AT&T Inc. into the biggest U.S. provider of telephone service over a 43-year-career. By his own admission, he becomes chairman of General Motors Corp. knowing nothing about the auto industry.

Not to criticize his selection (I don't know enough one way or the other), but if you look at the history of AT&T you will see that it was for most of it's history a monopoly until roughly 1984 when it was busted up into several smaller regional monopolies providing local phone service. AT&T then proceeded to flounder around either merging with other companies or spinning off parts of itself in a desperate struggle to survive as a non-monopoly company.

The regional bells, continuing to rake in unearned profits wisely sought to diversify themselves, going into publishing, cable TV, cellular, and even the furniture business. It would be at least very difficult to catalogue where all the monopoly money ended up, except to say that some of it, if not most of it, ended up wasted on dead-end products and projects. In the process all the baby-bells as they cam to be called went on wild rebranding sprees yielding meaningless names such as Verizon, Qwest and SBC (which might have stood for Southwest Bell Corporation at one time but just stands for SBC (nothing ) now).

I certainly don't know what Whitacre's real resume would look like, but he was at least NOT with AT&T during most of this time, but when AT&T re-merged with SBC in 2005 (AT&T as the company being acquired) he was head of SBC, not AT&T.

Someone else can figure out to what extent he was responsible for the success of what was still a mini-monopoly, I'm more interested in the principle than the individual.

The principle being, as someone put it recently, that most of these companies are not too big to fail, they are in fact too big to exist. I personally think that busting the AT&T monopoly was a good thing, particularly as it wasn't just a big company it was almost an extension of the government in its monopoly powers.

Now, in saving GM (and some banking and investment businesses), we are moving in the opposite direction, that of combining more and more businesses into government run monopolies (including offloading of Chrystler to the Italians so that we at Government Motors only have one remaining private company, Ford, to deal with). Of course we are told that all of this is only temporary. Problem with that is that temporary can turn into a very long time.

The two most likely outcomes are that GM will succeed, at the expense of the only other large American car company, ending real choice, or that through gross mismanagement, it will fail, leaving taxpayers with a big bill to pay and also leaving Americans with only one company to chose from.

Very little that is good can come from this, but our die has been cast, and I will not let those around me forget who (which voters that is) are the responsible parties. Before anyone protests, no, the Obama administration didn't cause it all, they have just provided the "punch line" that shifts our course from heading toward simple socialism to something much much more sinister.

For the real punch in the gut, we should all remember that none of these recent course changes can be corrected during most of our lifetimes, assuming we start correcting them in 2010, which is still doubtful considering new high school graduates know almost nothing about this country's history or how its government was designed to work. Congratulations to all of you who "won".

Pillars of Amazon's Success

Bezos calls the process "working backwards" from customer needs rather than a "skills-forward approach that says, 'We are really good at X. What else can we do with X?'" While useful, the skills-forward approach doesn't enable a company to develop fresh skills or capabilities. It becomes outmoded. "Working backwards from customer needs often demands that we acquire new competencies and exercise new muscles, never mind how uncomfortable and awkward-feeling those first steps might be," he said.

Motorola Speed Dials Cell Overhaul - WSJ.com

"New Mobile Chief Plans to Slash More Jobs, Focus on Google Software to Simplify Design and Cut Costs"

A Former Marine Discusses IT in Iraq

"While I don't think IT created micro-management, I think it made micro-management a lot easier. It's a tempting thing to do. But the more accessible the chain of command is, the stronger you have to be to not micromanage.

The dangers of micro-management are well-known. If someone is deciding for you every last detail of how you should get your job done, you stop thinking for yourself. Given the type of battlefield the military is dealing with these days, they're in need of a lot of individual initiative. There are so many small units off on their own."

Interesting how this might be true of businesses as well. Communications is so good these days that almost no one has to make a decision on their own and await the outcome. You can always, easily and quickly, invite others to "buy in" to your decision and become part of a face-saving consensus. Of course, someone with a thorough understanding o that process can significantly influence the outcome of the process without appearing to be particularly involved. We used to just call it "playing politics", but the game is a lot more subtle than it used to be.

How to Stop the Dilbertization of IT

"First" there was this article: How to Stop the Dilbertization of IT

Which was mentioned in this Slashdot article.

And them maybe coincidentally or not I thought yesterday's Dilbert cartoon was particularly relevant.

And I'll leave as an exercise the finding of the /. comment I was responding to, except for the last line I've quoted here. Leaving only the questions: "Can anything be done, and if so, what?"...

"Debt" is a ten thousand year old playground game.

I don't know if this and the rest of your comment are original material or not but it is profound, so I decided to say so rather than use mod points as I originally set out to do. More and more in my own observations of the modern world the term "game the system" pops, unbeckoned into my head and I don't even remember when I first learned the term.

I do remember in short studies of game theory learning that it is easy to construct a game in which a mutually beneficial outcome works against outcomes with are "best" for all participants. What continues to surprise me is not that such games spring into existence in the real world, but that those who have at least some power over the game rules continue to do nothing to change them so that the outcomes that are best for the individual are more synchronized with those that are best foor the organization.

I guess that's a round about way of saying "why doesn't someone above simply fire the PHB?" And if the problem exists at a higher level, why doesn't someone above that do some firing as well? Examples in the real world are easy to find. Imagine a Microsoft without a CEO who makes a PR blunder every time he opens his mouth. Imagine if Ken Lay, or the Enron board had fired Jeffry Skilling when he first announced that he wanted the company to be "as asset free as possible" rather than giving him even more authority to implement such a PHBesque notion.

In all my career the Dilbert-like (and this is certainly not a new phenomenon) activities have only sometimes been initiated by my immediate boss, and almost never at the top of the company, but somewhere in the murky in-between, where rumor has it that people are all first cousins or go to the same church (because there is no other rational explanation for their existence).

I suspect that in some very successful companies there is still one of those overpaid (though not in such case so much overpaid) people who can peer down into the organization and burn off the underbrush so that those doing constructive things have more chance to grow. Most companies somewhere along the line lose these key people at the top and become the Enrons and Microsofts of today.

One big problem though in many countries it is harder and harder to fire people for a variety of reasons, even when they grossly under-perform, or mis-perform. We have to look no further than our governments (particularly federal) for just how bad this can, and probably will get even for companies like Google that start out with so much talent and enthusiasm. Even if they can at first have a fairly good control over their talent pool (as they grow rapidly) at some point they are going to be full of "Wallys" who no one can figure out what to do with, but who have kept enough within the rules to avoid being terminated.

I don't by any means think, as the article implies, that this is confined to IT. Quite the contrary, we see it everywhere more and more. The change, if it is going to happen at all (I'm not optimistic) has to come from our elected officials who can once again make it easy for companies to clean house. After all, in a society that more and more takes care of the unemployed and under-employed, worse things can happen than being the victim of a corporate "downsizing". the question is whether there is anyone at most companies making sure that the right PHBs are let go during such events.

Application Exchange: Business Software Built on Google Apps

From the website:

"The first business applications fully integrated with Google Apps for your domain. See meetings scheduled with your prospects, support cases open, and use Gmail to track and follow-up on both.

All of this available on-demand, on-site and 100% open source. Find out more.

Launching Q1 2007. "

Survey: Apps Availability Drives Choice Between Linux, Windows

"While 92 percent of Rackspace's Linux customers and 60 percent of Rackspace's Windows customers said they feel that Microsoft's operating systems are more vulnerable to security threats, Microsoft remains the fastest growing part of Rackspace's business."

...

"In the end, however, the company found that Windows ends up costing about 20 percent more because of additional software costs and the need for additional hardware to support the same number of applications."

...

"Thus, Rackspace found that its clients continue to choose Windows, despite it being more expensive and less secure, because of accessible developer talent and availability of integrated tools.

The buying decision itself was driven at a relatively low level. Application developers and IT departments are still making the operating system choice. "

Which is why the Dilbert cartoon will always be popular. Moronic decisions will continue to be made by incompetent middle managers until the cumulative effect of those decisions eventually overwhelms the bottom line of those (mostly US) companies. That is, unless litigation costs for security issues don't get them first.

PHBs by any other name...

CEOs are faking it, Stanford professor says - Computerworld: "In the interview, Grove added that it is important not to be weighed down by the burden of making important decisions without a clear picture of things. 'Try not to get too depressed in the journey, because there's a professional responsibility. If you are depressed, you can't motivate your staff,' he said."

Researchers finaly confirm what we suspected all along.