From: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU (Speaker-to-Minerals)
Subject: Re: A business major catching up.
Reply-To: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU
Organization: HST Wide Field/Planetary Camera
Date: Sun, 12 Apr 1992 11:43:38 GMT

In article <1992Apr12.000435.10698@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu>, dapetersen@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu (Toothpick (-:)) writes:
>Who was it who was speaking about getting paid to have fun?

StM admits, "'Twas I."

>I certainly am!

"Congratulations."

>"I guess that's what prompted me to post before I've caught up here.  Frankly,
>I'm offended...no, that's too strong...I'm bothered by some statements I've
>seen here lately about business and management.

"I believe that the comments were actually about top-level management (the
Harvard MBA types), and possibly about middle management;  Not about low-level
management (no slight intended)"

>Specifically, Jilara's statements about business generalists having no skills
>at all and Bear's statements on getting more people out of organizational
>work.  Now, I have a liberal business background with a double major: 
>Organizational Behavior and Personnel/Employee Relations.  In layman's terms,
>I studied a lot of psychology as it relates to workplace issues and a lot of
>specific personnel related functions (compensation, interviewing, training,
>etc...).

"And if and when you reach top `management,' how many of these skills will you
still be using?   Not many, I'd wager."

>"But to say that my business skills are worthless knowledge (not your exact
>words, Jilara, I know) or to imply that managers are useless figureheads or
>that business is not a creative field (again, Bear, not your exact words), is
>to my obviously biased thinking a big mistake.

"Again, please bear in mind the distinctions between the roles of various
levels of management."

>Managers are necessary, much as many people complain about them.  Mangers are
>leaders, and society cannot function without leaders.

"That's not clear; at least not in all cases.  The Wide Field/Planetary Camera
Instrument Definition Team gets by pretty well without anybody being much more
of a "leader" than anybody else.  Of course, we have to have one person who
finally makes the major decisions, but I don't think of Jim as being much more
of a leader than anybody else on the team.  Of course, the people on the team
weren't just randomly selected from the populace at large, either.

>I believe that the problem with most ineffective managers comes from the
>fallacy that everyone WANTS to be a manager.

"There's another fallacy at work here:  That someone with managent training is
automatically qualified to manage whatever he puts his hand to.  I personally
know of two companies (both doing computer hardware maintenance) that were run
into the ground by decisions to hire "professional management."  The new
managers, who as best I can tell had absolutely NO background in computer
maintenance, began applying "management techniques" to the companies.  Among
the steps they took:
	1)  They analyzed the companies' operation in terms of "cost centers"
	    and "profit centers".  Their conclusion:  Experienced field service
	    technicians were highly paid, and frequently idle, so they cut back
	    the number of field service techs.
	2)  Of the remaining field service techs, they replaced about half of
	    the senior techs with junior techs.
	3)  They looked at usage rates for diagnostic equipment.  They found
	    that much of the equipment was both extremely expensive and idle up
	    to 60 or more percent of the time, so they sold off "redundant"
	    diagnostic equipment.
	4)  They looked at spare parts:  They found that for many spare parts,
	    they had several times as many spares as were used, on average, in
	    the time it took (again on average) to order new parts from a
	    supplier.  So they reduced their inventory of spares.
	5)  They looked at their repair operation.  They found that, on
	    average, parts in for repair spent many times longer in the shop
	    than the actual time required to repair them.  So they put pressure
	    on the repair shop to put repaired parts back in service more
	    quickly.
The results:
	1)  Customers began to find that, in the case of fairly catastrophic
	    failures (e.g., a power surge in Pasadena cripples several
	    different computers on campus simultaneously), there was a
	    significant waiting time for service.  Note that this is exactly
	    the sort of failure in which a quick response is most essential. 
	    If one computer in a department fails, you might be able to afford
	    to wait for a day or more for service.  If ALL your computers fail,
	    you need at least one of them fixed pronto.  The companies no
	    longer had sufficient field service techs to handle this sort of
	    situation.
	2)  Customers began to discover that their own people were more
	    competent at diagnosing hardware problems than were the field
	    service techs for whose services they were paying.  Worse, the
	    junior field service techs tended not to believe the customers'
	    (correct) diagnoses, instead trusting to their manuals (repair
	    manuals are almost always at least somewhat out-of-date;  they're
	    typically written BEFORE the product has been in the field very
	    long.  This means that they deal with the sorts of problems that
	    are discovered in the factory's quality control process, NOT the
	    sort of problems that aging hardware exhibits).  This often
	    resulted in situations where the customer (familiar with the
	    hardware) would tell the field service tech "This is the problem,"
	    the field service tech would tell the customer "No, the diagnostics
	    say this, and the manual says that when they say that, the problem
	    is THIS," spend hours working to fix the (nonexistent) problem
	    pointed to by the manuals, and sometimes several days later, just
	    to get the customer to stop nagging them, say, "OK, you say the
	    problem is THIS.  If that were the problem, then doing THIS would
	    fix it.  And  lo and behold, it DID fix it.
	3)  Some types of computer hardware have fairly definite mean times
	    between failure.  This means that if ONE unit from a particular
	    batch fails, a LOT of other units from the same batch are likely to
	    fail at about the same time, and for similar reasons.  When this
	    happened, the hardware maintenance companies found themselves in
	    the situation, for example, of having two disk drives in Pasadena,
	    one in Denver, one in San Diego, and one in Seattle failing within
	    days of each other.  Of course, at this point, they only had ONE
	    diagnostic device for this particular type of drive for the entire
	    West Coast, so it could take up to a week before they were able to
	    even BEGIN working on a particular drive.
	4)  Same as with diagnostic equipment:  Lots of failures of similar
	    equipment within days of each other, not enough spares to go
	    around, customer  waits while the contractor buys more spares from
	    his vendor, or while the firstparts to be replaced are repaired in
	    the contractor's shop. 
	5)  The reason the parts stayed in the shop so long was that many of
	    the problems took quite some time to manifest.  So after you fixed
	    the problem (or thought you did), you'd keep the part in the shop,
	    running continuously for, sometimes, up to several weeks.  Now, if
	    the part tests out OK in a single pass of the diagnostics, you put
	    it back in circulation.  Frequently, it fails again within a month
	    of your having installed it in a customer's system.
And, of course, as a final consequence of all of the above, the companies lost
customers.  The reaction of the "professional management"?  More of the same."

>So we take, for instance, technical people who have done a great job and
>promote them to head of some technical department.  But often, that takes
>people away from the very work they enjoyed!  It can put them in a position of
>authority over people who were once their peers.  And often, no one trained
>them or taught them how to be a manager."

"This CAN be a problem.  It was mentioned in one of the management courses I
took as an undergrad.  But it's no worse a problem than taking someone who's
been trained to be a manager, and putting him in charge of an organization
that's supposed to be doing something, without ever training him in what the
organization's doing.  And the latter problem was NOT mentioned in the
management courses I took."

>"To me, management is a delicate balance between company interests and
>individual interests. 

"That's true.  But this means that you truly understand the company's interests. 
And management training alone is NOT SUFFICIENT TO ALLOW YOU TO ACCURATELY
ASSESS THE COMPANY'S INTERESTS.  You also have to know, at a fairly detailed
level, exactly what the company's business is, and how it works."

>"And as for business generalists causing a lot of the problems, I think it's
>the specialists who can't see the forest for the trees.

"It's also the generalists who can't tell the trees apart.  All they see is a
forest.  Using a logging analogy, their attitude is all too frequently:  "We've
cut down trees and planted new ones.  The forest is still there.  So what if
the trees that are being replanted aren't growing fast enough to replenish the
forest?  So what if the age distribution of the new trees is far from optimal
in terms of maximizing yield of the forest?  So what if we're harvesting one
species of tree and planting a different species?  The forest is still there,
and it still looks the same to me."  They just don't know enough about the
trees to tell the difference."

>To run a small company successfully, it's ESSENTIAL to consider the 'big
>picture' - to think about how one action in one area impacts another area. 

"True.  But management training alone won't let you do this."

>When a company gets so large or so complex that the functional areas start
>competing with each other to the detriment of the entire company, you've got
>problems."

"You've also got problems when, given that two functional areas are competing,
the person with decision-making authority doesn't understand the detailed
dependencies between the two areas, and instead makes his decision based on the
balance sheets of the two functional areas."

>"And for the record, scraping the bottom of my brain for ideas from that 
>original post on education, I *DON'T* believe having everyone study business
>will solve anything.

Actully, the person quoted simply said, essentially, that if you want to make
lots of money, get an MBA."
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