In an effort to get my feet back on the ground…
I recently decided to volunteer as a SCORE consultant to small business enterprises. This is basically doing what I have been doing for 30 years, but without the pay checks. I am hoping that this will provide me with the opportunity to get back down to the nitty-gritty of enterprise methods.
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” W. E. Deming
Speaking of knowing what you’re doing…
In a run of interesting articles (see my blog entry, “Risky Business“) “The New Yorker” has struck a resonant chord again, this time with the October 12th, 2009 article, “The Secret Cycle”* by Nick Paumgarten. (However unlikely, I can’t help but wonder if he read my my blog entry on the same subject.)
* Sadly, Paumgarten’s article can only be read (online or off) if you are a New Yorker subscriber. It is excellent and I recommend reading it if you can.
Paumgarten explores the numerological business-cycle theory of financial guru, Martin Armstrong. Armstrong dreamed up his theory by staring at patterns in financial data.— sort of like seeing cuddly animals in the shapes of clouds. Armstrong sees a financial cycle of 8.6 years and deduces that this cycle is a function of the universal constant PI, which he explains, is the “Geometry of time itself”.
Armstrong managed to parlay his theory into a financial consulting business that paid him as much as $10,000 per hour and, according to the U.S. government, a decidedly non-cyclical Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors out of more than a billion dollars. He sold “cycles” but invested in “pyramids”! He continues his good works from a prison camp at Fort Dix.
I offered up my thoughts on the subject of business cycles in my post, “Business Cycles – The Greatest Con Never Told“. The upshot is that cyclists pray on a trick of the human mind — to see meaning in patterns whether meaningful or not. The predators among us lie in wait, relying on our habitual thinking to make us easy prey. Enterprising and innovative minds understand that the patterns we see are not “out there”. Patterns are of our own making, and if we so choose, we can construct them in creatively useful ways. This idea lies at the core of Walter Shewhart’s concept of process behavior and the utility of 3-sigma.
And speaking of ambushes and enterprises…
At this very moment, our leader, Obama, is in the thick of the Afghanistan conundrum. I am following this story with great interest because, and I repeat myself pridefully, I was there before most people knew the place even existed. My brilliant cyber-colleague and friend, Greg Nixon, read my “Tom Cruise in Afghanistan” blog entry and suggested I read Steven Pressfield’s historical war novel, “The Afghan Campaign“. As always, I did as instructed.
As art, the book is a disaster — the dialog is almost unbearable. But the main point of the story strikes the right chords. If you can’t beat ‘em with your game, join ‘em in their own game.
Obama’s problem is figuring out to whom he, or proxy Tom Cruise, should propose marriage. Where is Roxana of Bactria when you need her?
Don’t you know anything? Everything goes in cycles. History is repeating itself right now. Obama is afraid to go all out in Afghanistan and kick some you know what! Just like in Viet Nam. You godless liberal commies are such sissies!
Like I said to my friend Greg, short of annihilation or perpetual martial occupation, which is probably your idea of winning, it is not the style of war making by which an invader can prevail in the region. The outsider can only gain influence by creating the perception that there is a substantive alignment of interests, guaranteed in relations of honor and enforced by a code of ruthless vendetta. The rise of the Taliban following the departure of the USSR was no different in this regard, as was the limited accommodation afforded Alkida.
I have said this from the beginning. We should have addressed our beef with Alkida by investing in gracefully stealthy efforts toward honorably ruthless revenge-taking. Had we done so, our gains by such action would have extended well beyond simple satisfaction. Having failed to act honorably, we have come to be regarded as oafish sissies and fools.