Tempestuous Fury

For those who are interested in such things: tie bar clip.

It’s two and a half inches long by one quarter inch wide, and as you can see it’s got that nice, shiny silvery mirror finish. It also cost just barely over $20 off Amazon with shipping, which is a quite the deal in my opinion because no one seems to carry these anywhere except for jewelry stores. Tie clips are apparently considered jewelry, and classy looking ones are accordingly often made of sterling silver, while the cheaper stainless steel versions have all kinds of weird holes in them and styling BS which dilutes the effect of propriety I’m trying to achieve. I mean really, if I wanted to look New Age or in touch with my inner child in a suit, I’d grow a ponytail or wear an earring, not put on some ridiculous looking piece of cheap stainless steel that looks like some kind of industrial manufacturing error. After all, I have role models that I look up to and have to emulate.

It’s quite exciting to have found something which stylistically appears to be identical to what was used in the movie, don’t you think? Makes me want to go out and look at prices and weight figures for Desert Eagles. You know they always lose in the movies, but no one can deny the Dark Side has style and class going for it. Plus, real life isn’t a movie.

I’m going to start wearing it to my job tomorrow; it just came in today. Freaking awesome.

Job is boring. I show up and hang out all day long in the office, hoping someone comes in to have their taxes done. Business has really died down now to almost nothing; we’re waiting for April to roll around when all the procrastinators start rolling in and freaking out. I’ve taken to reading Alfred P. Sloan’s autobiographical My Years with General Motors, which is all about the development of the corporate committee structure of GM which everybody else then studied and tried to implement in their big time companies. Ever wonder where the term “bean counter” came from? It apparently arose out of GM, most likely from the Operations staff as a convenient moniker for the Finance staff. The original intent of the committee system was to act as a policy making body to decide upon policy, which would then be implemented by individuals. The intent was to “centralize control and decentralize execution.” The reasoning was simple: a committee couldn’t implement a one size fits all policy everywhere; only individuals could do that because only they at their level would know the best successful way to do things within the intent of the policy. (Amusing sidenote: If I recall correctly, I first saw that particular quoted phrase in the US Army Operations Field Manual, FM 100-3 I think. It would seem they plagiarized Mr. Sloan’s management concepts into their own operational doctrine as early as 1973, if not earlier. *chuckles*) Anyhow, I got onto this because I got a free book entitled Call Me Roger, all about how some GM CEO named Roger Smith steered GM into the tar pits, going from industry dominance industry to not-dominance in the 1980s.

Talk about your PHBs. It would seem that GM was on the leading edge there, too–I wonder if American industry again analyzed what GM was doing and recreated that in their companies in the early 1990s to produce the idiocy that Scott Adams would make tons of money satirizing. This is apparently what happens when you put bean counters rather than Ops. in charge: things go into the toilet because those jokers don’t generate money like Ops. does. So rather than reading the apologetic, heartbroken whine of one of Smith’s speech writers going on about how Smith was “visionary” but “didn’t understand people” and “had the best of intentions” (look where that last one got you, lost market share), I opted instead to read the book written by the Sloan, which both these people seem to reference as a minor religious saint.

I’ve read alot of dry tomes on management and leadership, but this one takes the cake. It causes me to wonder why there’s a recommendation on the cover of it sourced to Bill Gates. Granted, it’s… Interesting… At times. Certainly the development of what we know as the modern corporate structure and management system is compelling, but other parts are not, like the statistics of GM’s volume of sales for specific years and the bloody Org charts after every reorganization. It is interesting to see the same traps dealt with then that corporations have fallen into today, too: Overcentralization. In Sloan’s case, he carried alot of weight on the board and his arguments generally succeeded on putting the company away from that, which lends credence to what I’ve believed for a while: that it’s individuals, not systems of humans, that make the world go round and cause things to happen. Take a crappy system with good individuals in it and a great system with crappy individuals and the good individuals win out every time in competition. A well designed system of human beings, or bureaucracy, with good policies, etc., simply takes longer to destroy or fail if composed of morons, because the morons have to overcome bureaucratic inertia first to alter the system and introduce destructive policies.

What a run of rambling that was. OK, time to sack out. Oh yes, and my concept of how the gold price moves seems to more closely match Reality now. I am more cautiously optimistic than before; I move very carefully now and only in certain times and places, and my losses have been much smaller than my gains. Amusing coincidence: 2008 is the Year of the Rat, my personal year on the Chinese Zodiac, and thus of course it’ll be a banner year for me. Interesting that my proficiency is reaching practical levels right about this time, isn’t it? *chuckles* A good omen.