OT: Bon Voyage UK!

[Dave Platt]

In article <bsbh3fp5pgt6vsk2ijhhmqag84n9bof58q@4ax.com>,
John Larkin <xx@yy.com> wrote:

When information flows up through multiple management levels, or
commands flow back down, there is surely distortion at every
transition, like the old phone systems that garbled speech after a few
repeaters. I wonder how many management levels it takes before the s/n
ratios become useless.

I work with one organization that has 12 levels. The s/n seems to hit
zero after three or four. Groups care about themselves locally and not
about the ultimate good of the enterprise.

See "The Plan": https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sme/CSC340F/humour.html

I remember reading a version of this (likely in Datamation magazine)
when I was in college back in the 1970s.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même merde.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 6:28:20 AM UTC+11, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Monday, February 3, 2020 at 1:59:34 PM UTC-5, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
Am 03.02.20 um 19:37 schrieb dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com:

Congratulations to the U.K. on joining the freed peoples of the
big blue marble.

Isn't it common use over the world from China, India, Africa to America
that the words "free" and "UK" in one sentence means "free _FROM_ UK"?

That's what we American colonists have been telling them
since 1776 .

Of course the American colonies all joined up to form the united states of America, and the northern colonies got quite upset when the southern colonies tried to do their own Brexit and form the Confederacy.

James Arthur is prone to ignore this kind of inconvenient detail

But it wasn't until now that they've finally recently been on the
receiving end of that arrangement -- ruled rather than rulers --
that they finally understood the folly. That makes it rather fun.

They weren't ruled by the EU, they were just one a number of co-operating nations - and not one of the more co-operative ones.

As with all co-operations, you have to trade off some advantages to win others.

The UK - or at least Brexiteer faction - didn't think that that what they were getting was worth what they were giving up. Informed observers don't seem to think that this wasn true, and now we are going to get to see how this will work out in practice.

James Arthur's selective vision is blind to this kind of detail. He probably doesn't get pension income denoted in UK pounds, so he may be less interested than he might be.

> Congratulations, U.K., and welcome to the party!

The party isn't going to be lavishly catered.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Martin Brown]

On 03/02/2020 23:47, John Larkin wrote:

I work with one organization that has 12 levels. The s/n seems to hit
zero after three or four. Groups care about themselves locally and not
about the ultimate good of the enterprise.

There is a lot of "what you measure gets controlled" going on.

Whilst 12 does seems excessive it is hard for a large organisation to
get by with less that about 6 or 7 levels of management. Something like:

Main board - global strategic outlook and planning
National managers - national strategy and planning
Site managers - local site operations
Plant managers - production kit
Process managers - production scheduling
Line Supervisors - day to day operations
Workers

There is a practical limit to the number of people you can have
reporting to you and still be able to supervise their activities. It
isn't uncommon to also need a layer of regional managers as well.

Enlightened organisations that depend on R&D sometimes have a parallel
non-management structure to allow progression of scientists and
engineers in their technical specialty without man management
responsibilities. There tends to be a glass ceiling on this though.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown