Listics

Jeneane Sessum excerpts a 1990 article by Michael Ventura:

As a worker, I am not an "operating cost." I am how the job gets done.

I am the job. I am the company. Without me and my companion workers,
there’s nothing. I’m willing to take my lumps in a world in which
little is certain, but I deserve a say. Not just some cosmetic "input,"
but significant power in good times or bad. A place at the table where
decisions are made. Nothing less is fair. So nothing less is moral.

And
if you, as owners or management or government, deny me this - then you
are choosing not to be moral, and you are committing a crime against
me. Do you expect me not to struggle?

Faced with a budget crisis, the Governor of the State of Wisconsin intends to lay-off 10.000 state workers. My advice:  take a close look at how this is being managed.  There is a clear win possible if they take the time to work with the demographics of the situation.  The number of baby boomers due to retire can make up the bulk of the target staff reduction, but that will require working with people, re-organizing work to deliver public services with less staff.  Before the governor chops off heads, he owes it to the state to show us a demographic analysis of retirement projections.

Either that, or there are going to be bricks through windshields, fires, walk-outs, intimidation of contractors who are engaged to do state workers’ jobs.  We could be looking at a one term governor here, and it’s too bad he’s a Democrat faced with clearing up Republican caused problems.  But it’s worse that he isn’t applying the egalitarian principles we’d expect from a Democrat.  Is there still room for progressives in the Democratic Party?

Flackster Michael O’connor Clarke has been outed as the mysterious boy-in-the-blue-serge-suit seen going and coming in the oval office at all hours of the night. Who knows what the dry cleaner failed to clean out of that suit? Senator Kerry, you’ll want to get the rug cleaned when you move in.

Thanks for the tip from papa-papparatso himself, Gary Turner.

Water by the gallon is worth more than gasoline. Ask Perrier. Nestle and Perrier came a calling not too many years back, and they wanted our groundwater. Concerned citizens kept the corporate water miners at bay, but the threat lingers and there is no reason to think that we’ve protected the resources forever. We haven’t. They’ll be back, with pumps and pipelines and tank trucks and they won’t leave us alone until the entire Great Lakes Basin is as arid as the Mojave.

In fact, while Wisconsin was able to stave off the corporate greedsters for a while, it was at the expense of Michigan, where the bottlers sunk their well and began extracting the fresh water. “Since May 2024, a facility owned by the Nestle Corporation has been pumping 200-400 gallons per minute from a Michigan aquifer that is hydrologically connected to the Great Lakes. The majority of the water pumped out is bottled and shipped away, never to return to the watershed.”

The Great Lakes Basin is endangered. A few weeks ago I was swimming in Lake Superior and drinking the water I swam in. I remember when you could roam the high Sierra with a Sierra Club cup on your belt and no fear of contaminants in the mountain streams. Those days are gone. How much time does the big lake have left? Here’s a cheerful thought…. The lakes will be terminally polluted long before they dry out.

And they will dry out. There are plans to divert the water as far as Arizona, and no plans for replenishment. I ask myself if I’m engaged in some kind of rarefied NIMBYism. I don’t think so. I think it’s my responsibility to be aware of those who would degrade my environment and to encounter them.

Sometimes it’s hell living in paradise.

Free all political prisoners.

Lisa DiCarlo calls Bain a “White Shoe Consultancy” (thanks to Doc for the link). I wonder if this means they close down after Labor Day? Regardless, DiCarlo’s Forbes article and Doc’s article are thought provoking. The impediment to opening a large organization to a good relationship with its own internal IT resources is strictly cultural. Companies by and large aren’t organized with coherent strategic direction of IT resources that can be embedded in business units and work to support unit goals. Budgets are segregated. IT project efforts are managed by a separate service unit. Management of the IT unit talks the talk about internal service provision and customer service to internal business partners. Often, this bespeaks a distinction, a gulf of understanding dotted with islands of responsibility in a complex enterprise.

When people come together to do something, they have choices about how to get things done. The less transparent the internal IT organization, the more likely they will find themselves competing for work with external providers. We seldom speak anymore of the arcane priesthood of the glass walled and raised floored temples to dinosaur maineframe-ism, but cultural vestiges remain, both in the experience and expectations of senior management and in the attitudes and training of IT professionals.

Corporate strategic planning must include a significant IT component. IT strategic planning that is managed separately exposes the enterprise to risks that can be avoided. Rather than asking IT planners to craft an IT strategic plan, corporate planners have to integrate that effort with the broader planning efforts that are always underway. So often it comes back to improving communications and eliminating silos. IT people can educate their company’s management on the possibilities, while management can help the IT people to understand the limits for investment. But everybody needs to be working in the same room with t heir eyes wide open to these possibilities and constraints.

Have you subscribed to the hard copy, snail mail version of Worthwhile yet? If you enjoy business writing, it’s bound to be worthwhile.

I try to keep my subscription to EGR paid in advance. Oh sure, I’m concerned for the kitty. It’s important that she have sufficient palatable food available. But here’s the real reason…

So this article by Andrew Goodman is on a site called Traffick, which I had never seen before, not giving a damn about traffic, myself, except to suggest that certain people go play in it. (btw, that was a classic hortatory subjunctive construction, for you non-native speakers and those of you playing along at home.)

How many of us have fucking “hortatory” lingering anywhere near our active vocabulary stack? And further, while the non-native speaker of English may find the distinction between the subjunctive construction and the Swahili -ki- to be of more than academic interest, I wonder how many native speakers could tell RB which requires the subject of the second verb to be the object of the first?

From widows and orphans to the junk bond banditos…. Will Henry Kravis be the new “Pa Bell?” Is KKR seeking a leveraged buy-out of AT&T and what would that portend?

Thanks to David Isenberg for this insight from Nobuo Ikeda.