The Domino's Pizza at the intersection of 5th Main and 100 Ft. Road in Indiranagar does not believe in hiding its incentive schemes. There is a chart on the wall that talks about "Upsell goals"
In response to Arvind's comment on the previous post:
"is the disdainful business school practice" ... or is it the practice of business schools that you disdain ?
12 comments:
Disdainful business school practice.
Recall how many b school "scholars" looked at the data of enrons earnings and thought it was the best company ever. Also recall how of late these b school scholars think enron was doomed since the beginning. These same idiots thought the world of LTCM and now they are sure LTCM had bad risk management. All the while poor Mandelbrot, found no buyer for his high thought that the Black Scholes model was seriously flawed for tail events!
B School profs and students can explain almost everything in hindsight and almost nothing in foresight. Thats what happens when you data mine theories.
Case Based reasoning, the founding flaw of b schools, is based on fitting random theory to data. Nothing like, heres a theory and let me provide ways to falsify it with data and lets devise schemes by which we can generate data that can falsify our hypothesis.
B School programs must be offered along with astrology, psychic, and freudian-inkblot studies. They are a natural fit I think.
No?
Arvind
Yes to your question.
B school profs are altogether too willing to be parts in the machine. All it takes is the paltry hundreds of thousands thrown at them by the capitalist machine. Small bones as it rapes and plunders larger prey.
Re. programs - I say scrap them all. Start with Economics - the mother ship, the death star. The dismal pseudo-science that took every bit of common and good sense and gave it a name and twisted it around till it was left ugly, unrecognizable and perfectly malleable to political choice and private benefit.
So scrap them all. It will make us all feel good? Yes? But we would have just wiped off the lipstick. The pig remains. What of the pig Pals? Remember the squeals about market competition? That is another story, I guess.
The Conan Doyle quote was about methodology, and the methodology he advocates is the crappy methodology of business schools.
Whether B Schools use the method in the interest of capitalists or communists is irrelevant to my point, which is that their methods are as scientific as astrology.
Re, capitalist set up, I agree it is flawed, but it still is the best possible set up we know of. All the rest that has been tried is crap. So any argument against capitalism has to necessarily be constructive, not only in its motivation, but in its implementation. I dont think you or I have any constructive suggestions that are worthwhile. Nor can I easily judge the merit of such a suggestion.
Feynman, during communist Russian times, thought that the debate between capitalism and communism is useless to have and chose to view it as worthy experiments. One of the experiments failed earlier. The other may yet fail to a better alternative. At the moment there are no viable alternatives. An impending energy crises and warming of the globe, might get everyone off their asses and start searching for a constructive alternative. But I doubt that alternative will be idiotic communism which is the greatest killer of productivity and human rights.
Arvind
your arguments are neat, tidy, self-serving, most finely indoctrinated, and unscientific. the worst practices in the field of economics or astrology or tea-leaf reading are far less brash when asserting so conclusively that this (capitalism) is as good as it gets.
for me it is as bad as it can get. you seem to have a lot to lose. what if one doesn't? would it not be good science to try anything? including some things that have failed once (you want to fit socialism here)?
oil prices and global warming got your attention? suddenly it's time to figure out a better solution is it? firmly ensconced in the babbittesque existence of western life, aren't we?
Nope, my argument is not that this is as good as it gets, its that neither you nor I have a credible alternative. Something that was tried earlier and failed, is not worth repeating.
How about this for you. Stop bitching - Start Thinking. Come up with an alternative - feel free to write about it on this blog. And lets see if you have anything interesting to say.
So far, theres not a single shred of an idea in your rants that worth considering. Feel free to change that in your favor.
Arvind
Palls - you're doing the negative vibrations thing again..
OK, may be the delivery needs softening, but not the message.
Which is to come up with meaningful ideas as alternatives. Science does not progress by replacing a flawed theory with a failed one.
Arvind
i thought i was doing something - making a point that i keep hoping you will see. clearly, a gargantuan task.
anyway, i will try again. the point is this – competition, your mantra, is ultimately self-destructive. whether in the fine form that you think it takes or in what i feel is its grotesque abstraction, the outcome has been and is the concentration of wealth and the means to wealth. .
i guess this is one of those world view type issues. but i have given you examples over and over again so you at least appreciate where i am coming from while reserving your precious belief. consider again two important ones. first, inexplicably high risk premiums for capital. simplistically, capitalists robbing scientists. second, a $80 trillion mutual fund industry that grows annually by about 15%, through good and bad times, and maintains upward of a 30% margin. all this while investors are essentially being robbed. simplistically, big capitalists robbing the small ones. these lie at the heart of what you say is working. but then it is working so why fix it? infuriatingly axiomatic.
do you accept this or other evidence as just flaws of the best solution? and carry on with life fatalistically? i hope that is the case and that your insouciance does not mask the more fundamental problem of ignorance.
just as your argument to not fix that which is not broken is axiomatic so is your demand for a neat, tidy, complete solution infuriatingly naive. consider the magnitude of that which the malcontents like me would have dismantled. consider how far we have come believing that this is the best and, as you put forth with characteristic eloquence, everything else is crap.
for those of us who think this is not as good as it gets, life as a citizen is without hope. we live it as such, grabbing at straws here and there, and we have earned our right to, as you say, bitch.
At no point did I say, what we have is the best solution. This is simply the best, surviving idea, of all that has been tried. The economic system here in the US distributes power more equitably than in the perhaps the history of civilization. Certainly better than in the history of Indian civilizaion, where we have had to be at the mercy of the powerful few kings and other feudal crap.
Competition work better than any alternative that has been tried and so you need to come up wth a constructive alternative of some kind that suggests the way forward. I am not saying this is the best that can ever be as you insinuate - I am merely saying that you are not providing a single worthy alternative to make things better.
If you think competition doesnt reduce concentration of powerr, just look at the assholes in the Telephones department in India. One had to beg to get a phone twenty years ago. Reliance comes in and things change dramatically. There are plenty of examples like this in data that by and large dictate that society should best entrust power by avoiding the shabby evil monopoly that is the government. Corporate power and greed are terrible but not as terrible as monopolist power and greed of government.
If you think govt control is better, I suggest you spend some time with retirees in India who are denied their pension for years and years. Or the fertilizer plant (mentioned in Freakonomics) that looted money from Indian tax payers, while not having produced a single kg of fertilizer. Somehow, you are OK with this type of price extortion.
I am not asking you for a complete solution that is neat and tidy as you claim, I am merely asking you for a single good idea about what would be better. So far I have not heard any.
Arvind
equal indeed. and in all of history no less.
look at the planet - how many species made extinct? how many histories wiped out? how can you be happy about where (and on what) we stand today? but if you can bully for you.
if you are wondering how any of this is relevant then let me go back to the central point - market competition of one form or another is not some great pure force that arises naturally. it is bred and controlled every bit as carefully as imperial armies were. there has always been a great battle for wealth.
competition is just the new version of that hunt. and it has been terribly successful. more famines, more bloodshed, more of everything bad in the last century than in history. while markets and the few who run them have thrived.
we stand poles apart. and i am not sure that i can keep this up. take a leaf from your book and stop whining for ideas. see them where they exist. we cannot abdicate our responsibility as citizens. neither to an economic principle and certainly not to those who profit most from it. this simple agreement will give us many possibilities. provide education (away from the markets), provide health care (away from the markets), provide pubic transportation (away from the markets), provide basic foods (away from the markets), provide communication (away from the markets).
if that does not work here is an idea. can you please give us dick cheney's head on a platter please? as i said we live without hope but we will grab at straws. here and there.
pals,
there is some truth to your view that my discomfort with the status quo may derive from being ill at ease with my own surroundings.
however, i feel sure that i will be ill at ease, more or less, in most places. so as a citizen there isn't much hope, at least not enough for me. the systems we have seem to be flourishing, multiplying, spreading. if you were to send me it would not be to another place. it would be another place, certainly in the past. for as we go forward, to adapt a quote from the angel gabriel in the film constantine, "we are fucked".
like major major major major that makes me happy.
Post a Comment