Wendell_Wagner:
The five monkeys in a cage grabbing for bananas and getting sprayed story is not told as a parable. It is told in management books and presentations as the exact account of a scientific experiment which needs to be explained to managers or prospective managers who can’t be bothered to look at the original article. Reading scientific articles is the job of those fussy technical people who understand details, which of course isn’t the job of managers. You can’t allow technical people to be managers, of course, since that would get in the way of understanding the big picture (and, more importantly, fitting that big picture in a pre-established management paradigm). You can’t even allow technical people to directly talk to the managers, since their understanding of details might pollute the minds of the managers and prevent them from worrying about the big picture. You have to have a level of people between those technical people and the managers whose job is to wildly oversimplify and distort the ideas that the technical people are trying to get across. That way these intermediate people can sufficiently stretch the true detailed story enough to make it fit into the pre-existing mindset of the managers.
Look, you want to look as the five monkeys in a cage grabbing for bananas and getting sprayed story as a parable? O.K., let’s look what lesson that story (as told in the OP and various management books and presentations) seems to be preaching: It’s saying that at one point long ago in your corporation someone tried something new. It didn’t work out. After that point, everyone else in the corporation was afraid to try new things. It didn’t matter that eventually everyone who actually saw the new idea not work out has since left. Just the collective memory that a new idea didn’t work has prevented people from trying new ideas. So, the management consultant says, you should try new ideas all over the place. Think outside of the box. Change everything, no matter how much it seems to threaten the corporation. Your whining that the new idea might destroy the organization is like the monkeys complaining that at one point they got sprayed with a hose.
That’s a fairly terrible management lesson. Furthermore, it doesn’t teach most people anything new and useful. Any intelligent person and any intelligent corporation (and any intelligent institution at all) knows already that sometimes but not always new ideas are useful. You should try them if they seem reasonable. Occasionally they won’t work, but that’s a chance you should take. You have to make a compromise between never changing and always changing everything. There’s no really good rule for when changing is best.
Furthermore, the story in the OP has almost nothing with the point that the OP was trying to make. The story is not about monkeys quarreling for no reason at all. It was about monkeys beating newcomers to their cage because those newcomers don’t understand something that happened before. Even taken as a parable, it’s not a parable applicable to the point the OP was trying to make.
This.
It’s too long and I didn’t read any of it. But I’m certain it’s something highly relevant and worth repeating for everyone’s benefit.
People, people, you don’t need to argue with him.
Just poke him in the carotid sinus and he’ll go down. It’s simple.
I love it when a moron starts a thread like this and there is payoff like Girlundone . We should trade get lives for another Girlundone , but we’d have to give up a first round draft pick, and an aging but respectable utility infielder.
QuickSilver writes:
> It’s too long and I didn’t read any of it. But I’m certain it’s something highly
O.K., just a second while I grab the hose. I intend to get a little respect around here, no matter how many people I have to spray to do it.
But… but… He perceives more than us peons. Shouldn’t we take note of his superior wisdom before we poke him???
Naaaahhhh!
True. It’s shit. We fling SHIT around here.
Of course you get the banana. You brought a gun to a water hose fight.
sylmar
July 24, 2013, 12:55pm
148
Winner, winner, chicken dinner!
Maybe YOU should look up [coding]coding[/coding].
DAY-O!
DA-A-AY-O!
Daylight come and me want go home…
Just watch out for the deadly black tarantula.
I’d like to welcome Girlundone to the SDMB as well.
I take people at face value. It’s a personality flaw I need to work on.
You are a bitch. I like that in a woman, which I assume you are because I take people at face value.
Shodan:
“Cite?”
Regards,
That triggered an asthma attack. Thanks.
get_lives:
It’s a sick place, and its sickness makes me sad. It makes me wonder how much malice is hiding beneath the surface of the people I deal with every day, and just how deep it goes. Certainly none of you bring this kind of energy to your interactions IRL.
The hell I don’t, you goat-felching ass-blister.
I couldn’t be more fucking productive. It’s helped me in the long run by feeding me and putting a roof over my head. And I accomplished the miraculous feat of ignoring how fucking ugly your mom is while she sucked my cock, all while wishing that her head would explode when I came so I wouldn’t have to hear her bitch about how much she hates you and wishes she had just gotten that abortion. I figure maybe I wasn’t “processing the malice” hard enough; I’ll do better next time, ya know, after her jaw heals.
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board BBQ Pit, asshole.
sylmar
July 25, 2013, 10:25am
156
I’m not running for any office but I still heartily approve of this message…
[QUOTE=dropzone]
Can you clarify which meaning of bitch you’re using? Hot bitch, badass bitch, pansy ass bitch, punkass bitch, stupid bitch, worthless bitch, crazy bitch…because I only accept some of those labels.
Some descriptors would be helpful. Thanks.
sylmar
July 25, 2013, 3:40pm
158
“Bitching” is synonymous with cool in Cali.
I think Dropzone believes you are the point to which the lodestone of all cool actions points.
Merely conjecture on my part…
oh, ok, a cool bitch.
I was going to add dirty bitch and freaky bitch to the list, but I realized hot bitch was already there, so yeah, redundant.
Umm, sylmar , I recognize that you’re kinda new, but the preferred “flirting-in-the-Pit” line around here is a simple “How you doin’?”
You get points for smoothness with yours, though, don’t get me wrong. We just don’t really need anyone raising the bar…
(As we have no banana now…)