BF2S Forums Running America as a Business

I agree with everything you've said, but think we may hold different perspectives.

Given your example of Wal-Mart, presumably the CEO would agree that the government should be run as a business where the clerk would not, correct? I think this very disparity highlights the very point I'm making. Wal-Mart succeeds by starving the lower tiers. This allows the top layers to retain the maximum of wealth.

Especially with respect to a small government ideology, whatever taxes are collected should absolutely be for the benefit of the populace, correct? How can a government be modelled after a framework which is designed to minimize that output?

This persistent concept that "government is a business" is a saw so smugly and wildly circlejerked in conservative every-man circles that it's not even worth getting into an argument about. You'll just further cement their conviction that liberals are out to squelch them and that their own opinions are somehow more correct for it. They simply know more about this stuff because they've read a book on General Patton or whatever.

It really exposes ones ideology when one automatically equates squeezing the little guy for profit when one thinks of business. Most people, when they use the term, talk about increasing efficiency and lowering costs. I would enjoy a more productive government that wastes less of my money. The status quo is a government of time servers attending endless meetings and generating reams of paperwork in order to justify having their salary paid for by taxpayers. In the corporate world they would be declared redundant.

Jay wrote:

It really exposes ones ideology when one automatically equates squeezing the little guy for profit when one thinks of business. Most people, when they use the term, talk about increasing efficiency and lowering costs. I would enjoy a more productive government that wastes less of my money. The status quo is a government of time servers attending endless meetings and generating reams of paperwork in order to justify having their salary paid for by taxpayers. In the corporate world they would be declared redundant.

I work for a big multinational corporation (actually work for a subsidiary, but interact on a daily basis with HQ and travel there once a quarter).  The idea that a business is somehow exempt from having paper pushers and people who are inept at their job is silly.  In my experience, the larger the corporation, the more pointless meetings and processes.  In my experience, large corporations aren't looking to trim the fat at every chance they get - they HATE laying people off/firing.  Obviously that depends on the type of business (a McDonalds-owned franchise location is going to be less tolerant on wastage than a billion dollar tech company) but it's frankly stupid to say what you did unless you are discussing theory.

You seem to confuse the IDEA of business with the REALITY of business, and also have a very bleak view of government that is sometimes true and sometimes untrue.  I think you overestimate the idea that since government isn't concerned primarily with the bottom line, there is inherent waste, and conversely, that because businesses are so profit driven that they will eliminate any and all unwanted waste.

In my opinion, more important than the concept of wastage is the quality of the people occupying those jobs and the people who manage them.  That goes for public and private sector.

When I think business I immediately think of increasing efficiency and lowering costs.

haha

hahaha

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

When I think business I immediately think of increasing efficiency and lowering costs.

haha

hahaha

What does every MBA program teach?

How to hand over money without thinking too hard?

I survived three years at Ford, it was as much as I could take.

An inefficient bureaucracy stuffed with people who did nothing but justify their own existence would be hard to create. The standard joke was that Ford was a paperwork company which had a waste product of cars which had to be disposed of somehow. 30% of the roles were entirely superfluous, further savings of about 30-50% could have been made if people just worked efficiently and quietly without a lot of paperwork, meetings and bullshit.

Despite the top-heavy management, the place was out of control. Most people I discussed it with reckoned that if they threw a sulk, put their feet on their desks and refused to do any work it would take about a year to be got rid of. Even then most likely they would be pushed sideways into somewhere they couldn't cause trouble. Worst cae you'd be retired on a full pension. Even then there were endless bolshie fuckwits to deal with who made the life of an engineer trying to get stuff done absolute hell. Getting a simple drawing change through took a days work and about five miles of walking. It was quicker, cheaper and a whole lot easier to go to a Ford dealer to get a vehicle component than it was to go through the internal store, wait half an hour and watch the storesman scratch his balls and talk about football to be told "we ain't got none" when you'd checked the system beforehand and knew they were right there.
There was one year when the person responsible for the fleet cars forgot to renew the road tax, for business trips we all rented GMs.

My managers were bloody terrible
Manager the First - "What should I do?" "I err ah I'll get back to you"
Manager the Second "I'm out of here in six months - do what the hell you want"
Manager the Third "This is all new to me, I was hoping you'd tell me what I should be doing"

I did a year at a manufacturing plant doing the process introduction work. At some point I discovered there was a complete shadow team of process engineers who sat in a hidden room and did nothing, the oldies, the useless, the obnoxious who no-one could work with. There was one guy who really fucked up about $1m worth of tooling, he was put in charge of cardboard boxes, he had to design about five cardboard boxes a year. After the third or fourth prototype they would usually be almost right.

The occasional trip to Detroit was enlightening, each year saw a thicker layer of dust on the test equipment which was so heavily used none of my parts could go on it, the CAE guys who were too busy to do my work but spent their day adjusting their stock porfolios or dozing in the cyclone shelter.

Really grating was how people worked the system. There was one woman who produced 5 kids in 10 years, then decided she'd like 10 years worth of promotions despite having done no actual work. And she got it.

Most irritating to me was the corruption, managers signing each other off for thousands of hours of overtime, at double or quadruple pay, when they were out of the office running their own businesses, execs taking massive backhanders from suppliers etc.

So yeah, run America like a business, it'll be great.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2017-03-29 02:09:32)