291–300 of 328 posts
So UBS did... The result was one of the most severe debt writeoffs of the Great Financial Crisis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The director of the NSA gets a modest salary of $180,000. That's roughly the comp of an associate at Mckinsey or entry level at a FAANG. I doubt that they can attract the top talent with the amount they're paying. https://cryptome.org/2014/03/nsa-salaries.htm#:~:targetText=... .
If the underlying assumption is that you can mainly attract top talent through high salaries / compensation. I think we need to acknowledge that "top talent" is going to go other places, driven by other incentives. The academic world is filled with "top talent" that work for a measly salary, compared to the industry, because they have more freedom - and can work on what they want. Or you have the military, which oper…
Of course, there will always be some hyper-dedicated public servant types who are top of the line, and I'm sure that the director of the NSA is one of them. However, I doubt that the average rank and file senior engineer at the NSA is as competent their counterpart at Palantir because otherwise, they could just do all their work in house.
I was a technical project management consultant for a long time. The value that most orgs get from a consultant isn't really in the advice the consultant gives them, it's the political cover to make changes they knew they should make all along, but didn't have the social capital or the focus to make those changes until they had a person in a chair across from them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying that you don't think office politics ...exists?
I think it is important to avoid figurative language and stereotypes and develop an argument based on specific examples. To clarify my original comment, the assumption is that if you have to have clout to bring in the consultant (either by fiat or consensus) that does not absolve negative consequences nor provide political cover if a project fails.
It gives someone the political cover to make changes beyond their typical power that they knew were necessary.
Many large organizations are compartmentalized into divisions that act almost as independent sub-organizations. In these organizations, someone might have plenty of clout/budget/authority to bring in a consultant in their division, but not enough clout to convince a cross-divisional decision maker without some help.
For example: The President of MegaCorp North America thinks the Director of MegaCorp Widget Sales is whiny and asks for too many budget increases without a plan to the President's standard. Meanwhile, the reality is that everyone in MegaCorp Widget Sales knows they need this new piece of software. So, the Director of MegaCorp Widget Sales uses $100,000 of his existing budget to bring in some consultants to do a strategy plan for phase 1. Those consultants write up the same things that the Director and his employees have been asking for, but they put it in a shiny proposal with plenty of buzzwords. This satisfies the President sufficiently enough to award the budget increase for the phase 2 implementation project.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is important to avoid figurative language and stereotypes and develop an argument based on specific examples. To clarify my original comment, the assumption is that if you have to have clout to bring in the consultant (either by fiat or consensus) that does not absolve negative consequences nor provide political cover if a project fails.
Nobody in this thread suggested it would absolve negative consequences or provide political cover if a project fails. It gives someone the political cover to make changes beyond their typical power that they knew were necessary. Many large organizations are compartmentalized into divisions that act almost as independent sub-organizations. In these organizations, someone might have plenty of clout/budget/authority to…
I was a technical project management consultant for a long time. The value that most orgs get from a consultant isn't really in the advice the consultant gives them, it's the political cover to make changes they knew they should make all along, but didn't have the social capital or the focus to make those changes until they had a person in a chair across from them.
It's exactly this. Within any organization, you can have 3 or 6 important people pushing in completely different strategic directions. And it can be clear to any unbiased observer that there's only one good, responsible choice, but within your org that gets met with essentially "but that's just your opinion , man". So you call in a consulting firm and they deliver what most of the people already know. The consultants…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats because there is 0 additional marginal cost for their salaried consultants' time, too. Like many in the workforce, they are a paid a salary, and it's the same amount whether working 40 hours or 80 hours.
Isn't unpaid overtime illegal?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn’t solve the problem because the idea here is that some laws should sunset, some shouldn’t. When a civil rights law sunsets, lots of bad can happen in a short period of time. I’m using the example of the government unable to agree on a budget as an analogy. What happens when we can’t agree on how to renew the Civil Rights Act and it sunsets for a period of time?
If the civil rights act requires over 1/2 votes to extend it and it doesn't gather that much support, maybe it should sunset. The budget votes are different because they require 2/3 of the votes which is what allows the minority party to block it from passing.
A mandatory sunset provision can only work if the legislators act with the interests of their country and constituents first and their individual pockets second, which isn't the case any more in many Western democracies. The US are just the most obvious example where Republicans blocked everything Obama tried to pass through.
I was a technical project management consultant for a long time. The value that most orgs get from a consultant isn't really in the advice the consultant gives them, it's the political cover to make changes they knew they should make all along, but didn't have the social capital or the focus to make those changes until they had a person in a chair across from them.
It's exactly this. Within any organization, you can have 3 or 6 important people pushing in completely different strategic directions. And it can be clear to any unbiased observer that there's only one good, responsible choice, but within your org that gets met with essentially "but that's just your opinion , man". So you call in a consulting firm and they deliver what most of the people already know. The consultants…
A values approach to this problem would be promoting people with good taste, and then building a culture of acquiescing when they decide to step in. If someone doesn't like that, fuck 'em. Yeah it might hurt in the short term, but every time you let people with bad taste stall the show you erode your culture a little, until one day you come to work and realize that nobody can decide anything anymore.
An equilibrium approach is to say "well, a consultant will cost $3M/year, and potentially pissing off Alice and Bob and Carol and maybe Dan is painful and it's difficult to calculate how much that will cost, and $3M I have a huge soft spot for economics, but the thing about equilibria like this is that they never account for externalities and long term costs, and $3M < UNDEFINED is just bad logic to use, and also it's spineless and cowardly and people should know better.