I would rather get a paper cut!

Vicious Circle of Nothing!

Ow! That’s gonna hurt! And my head already does!

Lets take a looksee. Yep we only sold 2 blue flugels between 2pm and 3pm to pregnant blond women under 50 driving blue Frius on the second rainy Saturday of the full moon .  Damn! That sucks! We better step it up a notch! Let me see what how we did on the last full moon!

The new technology that is bleeding into the workplace is getting to be a bit overpowering. And despite the age old voice that it will “help us get a better picture of our business” what it really does, in my opinion, is become a techno-data quagmire of nifty neato stuff. Will it give us a better picture? I doubt it. We already have that picture. It’s not a good one, but we have a good picture. Will it allow us to move forward with productivity and the like? I’m skeptical. Other than verifying what we already know.  Will it get the next vertical  levels of management to coach as they are purportedly chartered to do? Another NO vote here. Will it adjust for these hard economic times locally? Another No, not likely. If it truly allows for some productive adjustments, Great! If not, just more data collecting silliness.

Thank You Captain Obvious!

What I do see is the possibility of it becoming another weapon to make the human element of upper management more disconnected from the day to day operations. With the sagging economies in general and with some metropolitan areas being hurt worse than others, you would hope that an addition of these “tools” such as this would enlighten the local and national management as to the real world state of affairs business wise. And that there may have to be some localized adjustments. Unfortunately I can see that this same “tool” intended to help could be just as easily used as a weapon.

How? You ask. Well, here is a simple example. With all the corporate data crushing they.. key word here is they, have set a revenue goal of $XXX. Probably based on some magic projection of past history. They have delegated XX hours of manpower. Once again based on some magical calculation of this and that.  Now if you carry this out to an end that this $XXX goal is not reached in a specified time period with the manpower that they assigned to you, it would not be a stretch of imagination to conclude that the personnel are all schmucks? And all the supervisors all nincompoops? Probably.  [ Note! In most states mugging is still a crime! ] Looks good on  paper!

I didn’t do it! It’s not my fault!

Now this same collective data that has the distinct capability of showing a consistent downturn in business after some long periods of  normal operations might signal a local economic problem. Along with the news media, the web and the Government reports. And these same people that got the job done before this time have all fallen into a big pit of stupid. Probably not. But of course, the local levels are going to be pegged as the bad guys and their upper management “handlers” are “just trying to do the job”. Usually accompanied by mutterings of  “It’s not my fault! These guys suck!”.

With all that being said I must say that while it is cool to have all these “business tools” available the one common denominator here is the human element.  And having a business hierarchy that can enforce its’ own policies and  control the personnel in charge of running the lower levels and not let them run amok and appear to be doing a whole lot of nothing.