More birther stuff: a recent poll concluded that “as many as three-quarters of Southern whites either asserted that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, or at least had doubts.

And we wonder about innumeracy and financial literacy and whether there should be a CFPA. There must be method to this madness.

Your high regard for George Orwell has got me thinking about our previous comment competition: “So who is our Upton Sinclair and when will they write the definitive piece that captures imaginations and changes the terms of the debate? Is it about how consumers were mistreated, politicians captured, or the public treasury ransacked?

There is so much brainwashing underway I am wondering if an author more akin to George Orwell would be the right person to write the book or movie proposed by JS

I read again and again people trying to refute Milgram or the Stanford experiment – I believe the results of both wholeheartedly because I have seen situations like that in miniature form in office life – I call it judging Miss Marple Style: that reminds of the … we had in St. Mary Mead …

Silke you are very cool in my books.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Goose

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_That_Laid_the_Golden_Eggs

Although, I do recall a certain Fable by a pair of your countrymen, folklorists of sorts, the German version based on an older version by Aesop about a
Goose that Laid Golden Eggs. The German fable being more charming of the two Wiki entries.

- Employers of all sizes are forever dreaming of the super workforce, programmable like roboters but smart as the hottest savants. Or as one of our popular mantra stipulated “25 year olds with 50 years of experience” – the crazes they came up with to achieve there ideals are really without end and most of them are teaching quite a patronizing (I am better and wiser than you) attitude while claiming it is all about understanding and compassion and I am your equal. In small outfits if you are unlucky your boss will just try the latest it-book of the tennis- or golf club on you.

Fortunately the world is full of sane people who manage to return to their original decency once the enthusiasm for all the new stuff they have been told wears off.

The big guru of the management by motivation guy seems to be a Peter Drucker who seems to be quite a sound person albeit from the Freudian tradition. But as always even if the originator is to be taken serious there are lots of followers who also want to make a buck in the training business. Also I found Dale Carnegie’s book “how to make friends and influence people” full of sound advice when having to get excitable staff submit to bureaucratic necessities and stay friends with them and trustworthy at the same time.

I get excited about Thaler/Sunstein because it looks like they have come up with something genuinely new and different from the two I mentioned above (if no miracle ihappens it is going to be management by stealth). But pitching it via the urinal-example just awakes the old cynic in me imagining all those management trainees coming back dreaming about how to implement flies in urinals.

Oh, and one more thing the probably rightfully esteemed management consultant Drucker was according to his wife completely incapable of running even the smallest outfit himself – she started one herself rather late in life and was as to practicalities all by herself. Therefore I presume to doubt that Mr. Thaler has even the vaguest idea of how young managers talk to their subordinates and how they react if their bright new strategy does not bring the instant wonderful result the workshop promised them they would achieve.

One more extreme but no way rare example for you:
in the 70s the biggest Dutch insurer (life and health) kind of forced his salaried salesmen (the “better ones” those who kept corporate clients happy) to participate voluntarily (note: forced voluntarily) in Psycho-weekends were they were supposed to open up (opening up was the fad of the 70s anybody who insisted on keeping private things private did this only because he/she was neurotic and therefore in urgent need of undergoing disinhibition treatment) – if they got somebody to writhe on the floor while shedding tears they felt they had done a good job (the salesman taking care of me at my company was quite devastated after the event and worried what his refusal to writhe and cry would do to his career). If you refused to sign up for one of these voluntary opening-up exercizes you could more or less let forget about promotion. Having experienced eachother “opening up” showing their most inner sorrows etc etc. was then supposed to create unique human bonds between the middle range managers (at the beginning of this century it was ass pushing.)

Just one more example of the more serious kind:
when McKinsey hit the department I was working in in the 90s they pitched the idea that avoiding the last 10 percent of mistakes it cost 80 or so percent of the total so it was cheaper to incur the cost for correcting these mistakes (always when they talk about the last 6 months of life health costs did they tweak the figures after they had heard of MIcKinsey’s idea or did they come up with it independently?). As I was working as a paralegal in Intellectual Property we had a real hard time identifying those 10 percent that did not irrevocably make us lose our patent rights. It took us months and months and proved on the whole not to be a bad idea at all. Just as we were through the next schooling day had to be attended to hopefully invented by another consulting company. It was called TQM-Total Quality Management and promoted zero toleration for any kind of mistake.

The last department boss I had showed us some of the power points he had brought back from his last schooling – something to do with happiness or being content and intereconnectedness less thinking in up and down more flat – it was a circle with segments The thing that struck me was that even though time figured prominently on the thing, location did not. Obviously it stipulated that you had to manage to be happy no matter where you found yourself, claiming that a nomadic life had to be wonderful for everybody and having roots in one place something not to be desired.

To summarize whatever theory is developed by the theoreticians the schooling industry will turn it into workshops and educate the world.

“keeping in mind the picture of themselves trying to hit a fly while pissing… sorry, it must be class thing but this image makes me furious without end