Yeah, What He Said

The other day I posted a meandering attempt at not ranting about information technology and the manufacturing sector. Today, Seth Godin wrote a post about basically the same thing. The difference is, his post actually makes some sense.

Talent is too smart to stay long at a company that wants it to be a cog in a machine. Great companies want and need talent, but they have to work for it.

Stop whatever you are doing and read the whole post. If you don’t read Seth, you probably should. Whether you are the guy running the show or the guy who sweeps the floors at night, he has great insight delivered daily for free.

And here’s a nice bit of irony for you…Seth Godin’s blog (for whatever reason) is blocked by our corporate IS department. Luckily, the concept of RSS feeds and readers hasn’t trickled down to them yet, so we can still read whatever we want through them.

Give them a few years and they’ll get Google Reader blocked as well.

BIG Manufacturing. Last to Know, Last to Go

I was mulling my current employment situation over yesterday, and I thought of something that I think not many people have realized yet. Dare I say this is a bold prediction?

Big manufacturing companies are notorious for being late adopters of technology. From my experience, technology tends to happen to them instead happening for them. Allowing this to continue is fast becoming a dangerous approach to business.

Manufacturers (especially the large ones) prefer to dictate the market (especially the labor market) instead of adjust to it. When the market changes, most adjust slowly and reluctantly. They’ve been successful thus far with this strategy, especially when dealing with their production work force. But they are quickly falling behind in dealing with their IT work force.

Why are they falling behind and why is this dangerous?  Because IT is becoming more and more integral in measuring and locating the biggest threat to manufacturing margins–inefficiencies.  The cost for entry into efficiency analysis technologies is becoming cheaper and cheaper, which allows smaller manufacturers with more agile and hungry management to tool up with the same resources as BIG manufacturers.  As a result, the demand for those with the skills to implement these technologies is growing.

Many big manufactures haven’t tooled themselves to the point of realizing that their old methods of measuring inefficiency are themselves inefficient.

By being late adopters, many BIG manufactures are getting a late start to using the technology available to them, and even those who catch on early run the risk of losing their talent to market forces over which their control is diminishing because of their “business as usual” mentality.

Want to see what technology can do to big industries that try to maintain the status quo in changing marketplaces?  Check out what is happening to some other “bigs”–namely BIG music and BIG newspapers.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that I’m completely wrong.  Time will tell.

In This Year of Political Calls For Change

I decided to make a few changes in my career today. Well, I didn’t actually decide today. I just put the wheels in motion officially. So there’s a good chance that I’ll be available for anyone who needs BI, software development, or sys admin work done. Of course, only high rollers need apply. I hit the ground running in two short weeks.

Might as well quote another Van Halen song while I’m at it…

Change, nothin’ stays the same
Unchained, and ya hit the ground runnin’
Change, ain’t nothin’ stays the same
Unchained, yeah ya hit the ground runnin’

Marketing at the Pediatrician

Today we took our little Chick Pea for her 6 month checkup. We go to a large pediatric group, and today we saw our third doctor. One of the things about going to a large group is that each doctor has their own personality and style, but today I noticed one common thread with all of them–the word “perfect“. Of course, we think she’s perfect, but it’s a little strange that every doctor we see uses that word so often.

Do doctors sit in marketing classes that tell them to use this word to give parents a warm fuzzy feeling about their practice?

If they don’t, they should. It works.

***UPDATE***

Seth Godin lets us know that there is also a problem with perfect.

Vanessa Hudgens, Nude Photos, and Total Jackasses

What are these people thinking? And I’m not necessarily talking only about the minor celebrities or local news people who have sex tapes or nude photos out there floating around. It shouldn’t be too much of a leap to think that we will only hear about a very small percentage of the ones that exist. Let’s face it, with digital cameras and digital video cameras easily accessible to everyone these days, it only follows that there are a countless compromising photos and videos in existence. Some of them are bound to be of celebrities people someone somewhere may have heard of.

And really, who cares?

Before Paris Hilton made this the “in thing”, I knew a guy (friend of a friend) who had some topless photos of a (super hot) high profile girl. He threatened to release them in the media, and it eventually let to her becoming much lower profile. To this day I don’t understand why he did it. Obviously, it was an attempt to embarrass her and get back in her in some way, but it made him look sort of pathetic in my eyes. I think if he’d thought it through he may have realized that would be the outcome–maybe not.

The funny thing is, I don’t think any less of her for her having the photos taken other than her poor judgment in who she let photograph her. He’s the one that came out looking like the lesser person, at least in my eyes.

I pretty much feel the same way about the Vanessa Hudgens photos. Of course, I was forced to look at them in order to properly research this post. If you haven’t seen them yet, I wouldn’t bother. They are not that big of a deal.

But the guy who released these is a complete jackass. I don’t know how much he got paid, but I doubt it was enough to buy back his word, which I’m sure he gave her that he would never let anyone else see them.

Then there is the other price he has to pay–I wish him luck in finding another girl who will let him take dirty pictures of her.

Nice move, moron.

Latest from the Tour de Dope

For the second straight day the stage winner has been booted from the race, this time by his own team. Michael Rasmussen was sent home by Rabobank for violating team rules.

I know most people in the U.S. don’t care about the Tour now that Lance Armstrong has retired, but I can’t help it. I love to sit on the couch and watch these ‘roided out oxygen-doped-blood junkies pedal up the mountain as drunk Europeans run naked in front of them, basking in the glory of socialized health care and 35 hour work weeks.

This new twist puts American Levi Leipheimer only 2:49 seconds behind the new race leader, Alberto Contador. But time is not what matters the most here.

With four stages left, that means that four more leaders are likely to get hit with doping charges. If Leipheimer can position himself into 5th place at the end of tomorrow’s stage, he has a good chance of the winner of tomorrow’s stage being disqualified along with the three winners of the next three stages, and he will sneak away with a Tour victory.

Then we can get another year of European complaints about how the Tour is rigged for Americans to win.

Let’s just hope the rest of the world doesn’t catch up to us in our ability to beat drug tests by next July.

You Won’t Believe This

Another great cyclist has been disqualified from this year’s Tour de France for blood doping. Alexandre Vinokourov tested positive for doping after he won Saturday’s time trial. If you haven’t been keeping up with the Tour, he looked like an amateur during Sunday’s stage, only to come back and tear the field to shreds on Monday’s mountain stage.

I don’t mean to be cynical–okay, I guess I do mean to be cynical–but almost all of these guys cheat. You have to be nuts to think they don’t. I really shouldn’t be news to anyone when they get caught, it just means they failed to outsmart the latest tests.

In other breaking news you may find shocking…

Professional wrestlers use steroids.
Barry Bonds too.
The gov’ment wastes a lot of your tax dollars.
There isn’t a pill that can make you safely lose weight.
Breathing smoke on purpose is bad for you.
Bill Gates doesn’t send out checks to people for forwarding emails.
That guy in Africa who emailed you about the unclaimed money…he’s a scam artist.