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Rating: Summary: Don't lose humanity in IT world Review: I was pondering when I read this book. I have read this book for many times. Every time I got different feeling. From this book, you can feel the cheer, and the tear of them. These guys, we can call them "Blue Blood". They got the power of how to control this world, changing this world. The problem is, some of them, for example, Robert Mcnamara, was plug into the data, statistic data and lose humannity. That is why he loose in Vanem. That is also a lesson to all of us, who are at the edge of IT evolution. Don't be a robust, computer is only a tool, there is a lot of beautiful things outside this data matrix. Don't be slaved by it.Author did give a clearer picture of this ten guys. And intrigue me to know more about them. This is a rather interesting books, also a good lesson to those in "Internet" fever. Don't lose your humanity!!!
Rating: Summary: Lessons we would do well to heed Review: Just ten men -- all relatively young during the war -- were responsible for Corporate America's decline after the post-war boom? "Yes -- to an extent." is John Byrne's answer to that question in this unflinching look at how the "whiz kids" (originally called the "quiz kids" for reasons explained in the book) landed jobs at Ford Motor as a group and then proceeded to skillfully consolidate their power by using "new" numbers-based analytical methods to promote their agenda and dismiss others'. Eventually, as they occupied executive suites at Ford, several went into other business and government postions, spreading the "gospel" of "if it's not in the numbers, it's not real." As we now know, this "dispassionate" method's shortcomings become painfully evident when a field is open to increased competition (the auto industry) and/or faces an adversary who doesn't desire to "play by the rules" (the Viet Cong). Byrne takes the time to tell the story of all 10 men to varying degrees, and lays out a vivid picture of how we **will** fall short if we mindlessly follow management styles that have been around for so long that they are ingrained in some companies' cultures, but still are no more effective today then they were 30 years ago.
Rating: Summary: Military Industrial Complex Explained Review: This is a convincing look behind the scenes at Ford, as Robert S. McNamara makes his mark in big business, after figuring out how to manage logistics for the U.S. Dept of Defense during WWII. It was novel of these guys (the Whiz Kids) to insist that they all be hired by Ford as a group. Kind of a Japanese team spirit at work. Then different ones fell by the wayside, and one even committed suicide (no Japanese connection intended). The counterpart to any given U.S. whiz kid for the British during WWII was one Lord Leathers, appointed as material and logistics chief by the war cabinet, whose exploits were referred to by Churchill in his 6 Vol. history of WWII. For the Germans, we had Albert Speer, seeking to wring gasoline form coal while still promising the Fuhrer that he could still have his new boulevards and buildings in Berlin. I'm not sure who ran this end of things for Stalin, but whomever that was, they must have been pretty smart as well. The interesting thing is the way the Whiz Kids took what they had learned about moving material to feed soldiers and blow things up, and transferred those skills to rescuing Ford from the predations of Henry I just in time to save the industrial neck of Henry II (since in this tragedy we skip over Edsel I as irrelevant, since Henry I pretty much snuffed him out, emotionally anyway). This is all living history, and envy of the Whiz Kids is probably what drove GM to hire Peter Drucker from Vienna to analyze itself, leading to Drucker's first major work describing management of a major public corporation. This in turn egging on Alfred Sloan to reply with his less readable "My Years with General Motors." So a lot happened after these Whiz Kids hit the scene in Detroit. Overall, their quantitative streak seems to elevate them well above trivial "guru" status achieved by so many modern management consultants. McNamara had an interesting feedback into government, by rejoining DOD as a Kennedy guy, from which I guess he repented after the fact to assuage whatever damage he did to his soul by egging on JFK and LBJ beyond the limits of American power, if not authority. That's a lesson for businessmen, too.
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