[ale] Cost of freedom

[Sergio Chaves]

Wow!
Is like you just described my current environment! You are dead on!

On Tue, 2011-05-17 at 09:05 -0400, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> As a former Controller (head of accounting) for a multi-million dollar
> business I can tell you you’re dead wrong.  
> 
>  
> 
> While my job certainly included controlling costs my main job was help
> insure the business succeeded and I knew it.   More than once I made
> decision that weren’t correct “accounting” decisions but were correct
> “business” decisions.   It isn’t the “financial” folks that typically
> prevent business important purchases due to short sighted cost issues
> but rather operational management.   Operational management often
> tends to think only of “making their numbers” for the current period
> to the exclusion of impact to the business for longer periods (e.g.
> the month vs the quarter, the quarter vs the year) and worse yet long
> term impact on the business.   It usually seemed to me that most
> managers acted as if they didn’t expect to be around when their bad
> decisions would finally catch up with the business.    I vividly
> remember one year discussing something that would occur at the end of
> December in a management staff meeting in September and being laughed
> at even though my point was that every year they’d wait until early
> December to start purchasing for the end of the month and pay a
> premium because the items being bought were seasonal and more
> expensive the closer one got to the end of the season.
> 
>  
> 
> When doing budgets or forecasts we’d do in depth analysis of expected
> business as compared to past business to come up with fairly accurate
> budget/forecast.   It truly annoyed me when senior operational
> management in a meeting would say something like “increase the
> revenues in the forecast by 5% and decrease the costs by 10%”.   They
> were always later surprised when they didn’t hit their numbers.
> 
>  
> 
>                                    
> ______________________________________________________________________
> From:ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jim
> Kinney
> Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2011 8:02 AM
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [ale] Cost of freedom
> 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 7:46 AM, Geoffrey Myers
> <lists at serioustechnology.com> wrote:
> 
> Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> > On 5/16/11 11:30 AM, David Hillman wrote:
> >> Why did we go with the Netgear box in the first place? Someone with
> >> control over the purse strings thought it would be easier and
> faster.
> > Someone was dead wrong and had a misconceived idea of what's really
> > important.
> 
> 
> Time and again, I see financial people making decisions regarding
> technology.  It is so wrong.
> 
> Would you have your plumber do your taxes?
> 
> 
> When I did plumbing, yes :-)
> 
> Financial people make decisions based on a single viewpoint just as
> the tech people do. Both views are valid but the combination is the
> correct action. It's the collaboration that is always missing.
> Competition within the organization is not a process I've seen to be
> long-term productive. A prior employment location had very little
> understanding of "we all work on the same team" and so planning
> meetings were always mired in backstabbing and power grabs and just
> plain old fights. 
> 
> 
>         
>         --
>         Until later, Geoffrey
>         
>         "I predict future happiness for America if they can prevent
>         the government from wasting the labors of the people under
>         the pretense of taking care of them."
>         - Thomas Jefferson
>         
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> -- 
> James P. Kinney III
> 
> As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to
> consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as
> they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the
> outcome.
> - 2011 Noam Chomsky
> 
> 
>  
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