161–170 of 223 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Morris himself said something like he didnt really feel he got to know Rumsfeld and had no real idea what was in his mind compared to his previous interview with McNamara.
Guess Donald himself was one of the “unknown unknowns”
Quick story: I was the CFO for a company that sold to a private equity group (PEG). I took over as the CEO as the founders retired, leaving me to deal with the PEG. It quickly became apparent that the PEG managers looked at everything through the lens of an Excel spreadsheet. These guys were brilliant attorneys and analysts but lacked experience building businesses and managing teams. Ultimately, they couldn’t add mu…
You can think many things of Bezos, but he does know how to make a business make money. Data is important, but things that are hard to measure that you only learn as anectodes is also important.
Quick story: I was the CFO for a company that sold to a private equity group (PEG). I took over as the CEO as the founders retired, leaving me to deal with the PEG. It quickly became apparent that the PEG managers looked at everything through the lens of an Excel spreadsheet. These guys were brilliant attorneys and analysts but lacked experience building businesses and managing teams. Ultimately, they couldn’t add mu…
The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it. - Jeff Bezos You can think many things of Bezos, but he does know how to make a business make money. Data is important, but things that are hard to measure that you only learn as anectodes is also important.
Quick story: I was the CFO for a company that sold to a private equity group (PEG). I took over as the CEO as the founders retired, leaving me to deal with the PEG. It quickly became apparent that the PEG managers looked at everything through the lens of an Excel spreadsheet. These guys were brilliant attorneys and analysts but lacked experience building businesses and managing teams. Ultimately, they couldn’t add mu…
The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it. - Jeff Bezos You can think many things of Bezos, but he does know how to make a business make money. Data is important, but things that are hard to measure that you only learn as anectodes is also important.
I believe the McNamara Fallacy is a real thing, although I would say Goodhart's Law expresses the more fundamental issue. But, the examples they give (Vietnam and Afghanistan wars) are bad examples, because in both cases the issue was primarily not that the U.S. military was relying too much on quantitative metrics, but rather that it was being asked to do a job which militaries are not good at. In neither case, desp…
Yes and no. It is a difficult problem, but it has been done before ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_Wa... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayan_Emergency , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars ). There is a rough roadmap about how to go about it, something along the lines of suppressing the rebels and providing security for the majority of the populace while you reform the governme…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a fallacious line of reasoning on several fronts. A) The beneficiaries of a war need not be the ones who pay the cost. If you personally stand to benefit from the war itself, regardless of win or lose, you want the war. B) It's applying a rational economics approach when it's pretty clear that humans aren't rational. Japan kept fighting even when it was clear they would lose. Pride, image, your future after th…
I really don't think the GP is wrong here. Yes there are ideologues, but there were plenty in the Japanese high command who understood logistics and understood that war with the U.S. would end the Japanese empire. It was the same way with Germany. The people who understood logistics knew it would be absolutely impossible to win a two front war and nearly impossible to win a one front war with the U.S. having a thumb…
That's not entirely true, though. Modern WW2 historiography acknowledges that this vision of WW2, that "Hitler was mad and his generals were afraid to contradict him", is mostly the version the surviving German generals gave in their self-serving memories, as a way to save face and paint themselves as more useful to the West during the Cold War.
More recent assessments contradict this version and show many German generals were enthusiastic about war with the Soviet Union, they fully expected to win, and in many cases goaded Hitler into making fatal mistakes he himself wasn't as sure about (an example: Operation Citadel, the battle of Kursk). The ones who knew the enterprise was doomed? The logistics guys, who did the calculations and predicted when the Wehrmacht would overextend itself and run out of supplies -- not the generals!
Professor Jonathan House, an American military historian specializing on WW2's Eastern Front, has a whole lecture about this, available on YouTube.
Quick story: I was the CFO for a company that sold to a private equity group (PEG). I took over as the CEO as the founders retired, leaving me to deal with the PEG. It quickly became apparent that the PEG managers looked at everything through the lens of an Excel spreadsheet. These guys were brilliant attorneys and analysts but lacked experience building businesses and managing teams. Ultimately, they couldn’t add mu…
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
Quick story: I was the CFO for a company that sold to a private equity group (PEG). I took over as the CEO as the founders retired, leaving me to deal with the PEG. It quickly became apparent that the PEG managers looked at everything through the lens of an Excel spreadsheet. These guys were brilliant attorneys and analysts but lacked experience building businesses and managing teams. Ultimately, they couldn’t add mu…
Quick story: I was the CFO for a company that sold to a private equity group (PEG). I took over as the CEO as the founders retired, leaving me to deal with the PEG. It quickly became apparent that the PEG managers looked at everything through the lens of an Excel spreadsheet. These guys were brilliant attorneys and analysts but lacked experience building businesses and managing teams. Ultimately, they couldn’t add mu…
Your story is the story of most companies. I watched "my" company get sold to private equity, and leading up to our "soon" sale they have been slashing the one thing they can, employee benefits (it's been a quick 3 year decline). I've watched more than half our team leave, much to the chagrin of befuddled execs. "Why are they leaving?" "Well, we used to have meaningful raises, bonuses, profit sharing, etc. but you ha…