I LOLed. Nicely done.
I’m now picturing a conveyor belt with little rectangular molds passing by under a big machine with a nozzle that squirts some nasty-smelling goo labeled " Weltschmerz" into each mold, overfilling them all so some is running down onto the floor. But meanwhile we’ve got these neat little rectangular blocks of the noxious stuff solidifying in the molds.
I hope all of them would have said “develop a weapon to win the war.”
But it’s a good point. And indicative of culture. When I started in the Bell System our mission was pretty clear - to create a reliable phone system for everyone. Certain divisions, like microelectronics, would create nonoptimal products from their point of view for the benefit of the whole system.
After divestiture, when each of these divisions was supposed to make money, things changed a lot, and the missions were to make money for the division, not the whole system.
You get all kinds of problems when people in the same supposedly integrated company work to very different mission statements.
Exactly. I mean, you would never even consider buying an Acme widget. But if it cured Weltschmerz, you’d beat a path to their door and they’d still probably have sold out. And how would the employees feel about that?
I agree Weltschmerz probably smells bad. It doesn’t sound great. I don’t know what it looks like. But I bet it would sell pretty well, with the pandemic there seems to be a lot of it about.
When I wrote that I was actually thinking of Weltschmutz (lit. world-shit), the nasty sludgy residue at the output end of all human endeavors, and especially the stupid and evil ones. And of neat little compressed regular blocks of that gunk. All prettified for resale to unwitting consumers as something new & useful.
But does it need to be rectified?
It’s much easier to put on pallets for shipping and pile on end cap displays for selling once it’s been rectified. As undifferentiated goo it doesn’t stack or smell anywhere near as good.
Differentiation also makes it more appealing for niche markets, allows the addition of valuable vitamins and minerals, and results in a product easier to ship and consume.
Although many examples of rectified Weltschmerz exist, the one that comes to mind is Lunchables. How can you charge harried mothers a few bucks for five crackers and undifferentiated salami?
That is exactly what came to my mind. And people buy them. Go figure.
I once asked my boss if the company had a mission statement. He looked at me like I was soooo naive… “Yeah, we got a mission statement, or maybe it’s a slogan, or it might be just a jingle. It goes something like this: Do Good Work, and hopefully Make Money Doing It. You got a problem with any part of that? If not, we should probably both get back to doing good work.”
Lunchables are always among the top requested item at our food pantry. We use a good bit of cash donations to buy these, because in-kind donations are not possible. Drives some of the people on the board of trustees nuts, because they think it is so unwise. But many of our clients are really pressed for time. Some of them are legitimately working 80 hours plus long commutes. Their kids need to be able to pack their lunches/snacks themselves.
I’m a made-from-scratch maniac foodie. We make our own yogurt, soy milk, sprouts, bread, grow a bunch of herbs and even some vegetables. But I have wife who works part time. My job is mostly 9-5. We have a house with a huge yard. We have MORE time than most of the food pantry clients. The single biggest reason for non-senior folks being food pantry clients is that they working two jobs and still are just barely able to live in a very expensive town with very good schools, but make too much to qualify for food stamps.
Sounds like your clients already have a lot of Weltschmerz, so what’s a little more? Still, it seems like a tough lesson to pass on to the progeny. Except kids probably love Lunchables. They come in a box!
Not to be picky, but the guy over here thinks that getting things out on schedule is good work, even if he skips a few tests, while the person over there thinks meeting the budget is good work, even if she has to drop a few features, while the other person thinks that quality is all.
This isn’t theoretical. One of the many reasons the project I was on was a disaster was that no one was in charge of determining how we traded off speed, area and quality. Three rights might make a wrong.
I can’t imagine a project having something worse than that going on.
That is a clusterfuck in need of basic leadership! How did it end up?
.
(A friend’s company website had three sliders for clients to play with: Good/Fast/Cheap. As you increased a slider, the other two would decrease.)
Yep. There’s a million variants on that.
In the motorcycle word, when talking about aftermarket parts, we’d say there are three things you look for in a part – performance, reliability and economy.
Pick two. You can’t have all three.
A billion dollar disaster for a major company. I got out after a year and a quarter. The product eventually came out, but never sold well. It’s dead now but it was on life support from the beginning.
One thing I found was that engineers in the various groups that build parts of this thing liked to optimize different factors. So I, who was pushing quality, hung out with the engineers who were into it, while the managers in my group pushing speed hung out with them.
This was hardly the only problem - when I had headcount I found that no one in the company wanted to move into the group.
Uh… OK… yeah. Which is exactly why I put this one as the one that pisses me off, which, BTW, is the intent of this thread.
Your ability to be pedantic, however, is noted.
Our current multi million dollar consultants favorite is “Leading Practice”
When challenged to define this, they said we aspire to prescribe something better than Standard Practice but Best Practice seems like we are imposing something from one client onto another. Instead we synthesize what works from a number of successful clients.
In other words we are recommending a cocktail that probably hasn’t been used anywhere.
They somehow don’t see the obvious problem with this.
If they are successfully billing your idiot management for providing this drivel, it’s hard to see how there are any problems with it. From their POV of course. Whether it benefits your employer, their client, is not really their concern whatsoever.
And whether it benefits your department or lowly you (or me down the hall) is especially not their concern.
“Leading Practice” is weasel-wording for what we used to call “Best Practice”, because what if it’s not really the “best”? I guess “better practice” isn’t “strong” enough, and “process improvement” is a worn-out buzzword.