Management

A Critical Insight.

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Today, Belmont club has a post, with a link to another blog post, that I think explain a lot of the Obamacare fiasco.

Fernandez begins with a discussion of Obama’s technique with favored columnists.

get him in an off-the-record setting with a small group of opinion columnists — the David Brooks and E.J. Dionne types — and he’ll talk for hours. …

“It’s not an accident who he invites: He reads the people that he thinks matter, and he really likes engaging those people,” said one reporter with knowledge of the meetings. “He reads people carefully — he has a columnist mentality — and he wants to win columnists over,” said another. …

These people are, like him, unsophisticated in technology. They are lawyers or journalists and the numbers of math and science courses represented in the room are few.

The other blog post is titled “Government is magic.”

Our technocracy is detached from competence. It’s not the technocracy of engineers, but of “thinkers” who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance.

These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn’t fix a toaster.

This strikes me as a huge insight into why this administration doesn’t understand the trouble it is in.

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Willow Run Plant Needs Help

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The Willow Run plant, a 63-acre factory, was designed for the single purpose of producing B-24 bombers…and produce them it did, once it got going, at the rate of one per hour. The genesis of the plant lay in a 1940 visit to Consolidated Aircraft, where the planes were then being built, by Ford Motor Company production vp Charles Sorensen–Ford had originally been asked by the government to quote on building some components for the bomber. After watching Consolidated’s process for a while, Sorensen asserted that the whole thing  could be put together by assembly-line methods. (See the link, which is Sorensen’s own story about “a $200,000,000 proposition backed only by a penciled sketch.”)

Unused since 2010, the plant had been scheduled for demolition, but there is now a project to turn it into a museum that will be focused on  science education and social history as well as aviation history–the Yankee Air Museum is to be relocated there–and the history of the plant itself. Several million $ must be raised by October 1 to save the plant; astronaut Jack Lousma and auto-industry bad boy Bob Lutz are spearheading the effort.

An additional $3.4 million needs to be raised by October 1 if the plant is to be saved and the museum project is to go forward. You can contribute here.

“Benign Arrogance”

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Interesting stories and thoughts from Kathleen Fasanella:

“I thought you meant everybody el….”

Free Introductory Webinar Today: Lean Government – An Introduction, by Steve Elliott

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Siera is devoted to teaching things that are steps along the way to America 3.0 (Bennett & Lotus). Delivery of efficient governmental services, in a way respectful of customers, is one of those steps.

On July 9, noon Denver time, we will offer, online, a free live introduction to a 10 webinar course on “Lean Government,” created by Steve Elliott, recently with the Boulder Country Treasurer’s Office (Colorado).

Steve is president of Constant Improvement Consulting, Inc. based in Longmont, Colorado. He has decades of experience in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors as a manager, business owner, trainer, and consultant.

He was instrumental in the creation and adoption of Colorado House Bill 11-1212, which officially made Colorado a Lean Government.

When Steve was at the Treasurer’s Office they returned tens of thousands of dollars to the County as a result of their lean management innovations.

Course description and information:

http://www.sieralearn.com/free-webinar-kicks-off-lean-government-webinar-series

Please go to the above link at least 30 minutes before the start of the presentation. The registration procedure will take only a minute or two, and you will be sent a link to the presentation.

Seriously Pathetic

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In 2008, Michael and Xochi Birch sold Bebo, which is some kind of social networking company, to AOL—for 850 million dollars.

Things didn’t go too well, and in 2010, AOL sold Bebo to a private equity firm for 10 million dollars.

Things continued to not go so well, and Michael Birch has bought the company back–for 1 million dollars. He doesn’t know exactly what he’s going to do with Bebo now, but plans to have fun trying to reinvent it.

I think what often happens in such situations is this: if a company is so clueless about its market that it fails to either develop internally the product for which there is a critical emerging need…or to acquire the product externally before the prices go out of sight…then it winds up paying an exorbitant price. The price will be one that makes sense economically only if the acquiring company is able to obtain truly stellar results on its new property…but typically, the same cluelessness that led to the product shortfall in the first place will also lead to an inability to successfully integrate or even effectively manage the acquisition.