Fred said:
Something definitely needs to be done about the professional management
types. There was a time when management personnel were expert in most
facets of the operations of the organizations they managed, and that was
because they started out as workers in these operations. Somewhere along
the way, some pseudo-intellectuals contrived the idea that this
background was not necessary, and that all management function can be
distilled into a few guiding principles that can be applied to any type
of organization. This ideology has proven to be a horrific
F-A-I-L-U-R-E!- life is just not that simple and never will be. Like it
or not, it is NOT possible to manufacture that kind of leadership, it
can be groomed and tutored, but it CANNOT be made. The situation in the
US is extremely bad, and the national treasury will have to be in the
hole by about several Tera- billion $ before anyone wakes up.
MBA = Masters of Business Annihilation. ;(
Of course, an out of date engineer can make a pretty bad manager, as
well. They don't understand any of the newer technology, or the
equipment required to build modern products.
One of the founders of Microdyne was a "consultant" and in charge of
buying test equipment. He threw a hissy fit that the test department
ordered some four channel 350 MHz Tek scopes, because "The cal lab is
full of scopes!" It was. about 20, 20 MHz dual trace Leader scopes left
over from the days when they built Satellite TV receivers for CATV head
ends and TV stations. He couldn't understand why we needed several
network analyzers to improve the quality of our products. "You can use a
spectrum analyzer, a TSS-2000 Telemetry test set, and ... like we did
thirty years ago!" He couldn't wrap his mind around the concept that our
equipment was several grades higher performance than anything he had
designed ten years before. Luckily, corporate overruled him, and we got
the equipment we needed. If we didn't get it, we would have been out of
business in a couple months.
