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A half century of government-subsidized child abuse and torture by religious institutions (over-the-top-ironically called the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy), and nine years of rearguard obstruction to prevent the story from getting out. US governments were mainly asleep at the switch; the Irish state delivered children to these wolves by the busful. Wow.
I [...]
Archive for the ‘Management’ Category
May 20th, 2009
May 5th, 2009
I suggested in last week’s post on the dumb fly-over of New York Harbor that the desired photo, and lots like it, could be better made on a computer than with actual airplanes burning thousands of pounds of fossil fuel. And indeed, Will Sherman provides these nice examples of AF1 in various places including [...]
April 28th, 2009
Let me get this straight: flying an Air Force One around lower Manhattan with a fighter plane chasing it, which scared the pants off the locals (I wonder why?) was a photo session, to get a picture of the airplane near the Statue of Liberty?
Never mind the idiot who thought it would be a [...]
October 22nd, 2008
Category: Energy and Environment, Management
The Frontline documentary on global warming, Heat, is an excellent piece of work, two tough hours of very heavy stuff. It will make you really scared and really angry. I would have done it with somewhat different emphasis, especially in the balance between implicitly promising salvation through this or that subsidized technology, and through [...]
October 19th, 2008
Category: Management, Sports
The Sox fought hard, and they have nothing to be ashamed of, but they couldn’t hold, because Tampa Bay is a better team. Not a lot better, and not better in every way, but better. They were better during the season, better in the playoffs, and when they had every reason to be intimidated [...]
October 13th, 2008
Steve, Mark, Jonathan, and I have now weighed in on the importance of (i) deficit spending on an economic stimulus (ii) focused on investment rather than consumption (iii) that can get up and running quickly. Mark points at all the great research that didn’t make it into the outrageously stingy budgets of the last decade, [...]
September 14th, 2008
I make no pretense toward understanding the world of complex international finance, but by the time most of us at RBC wake up tomorrow morning, the financial system might be unrecognizable.
Lehman Brothers will apparently declare bankruptcy, as other banks have given up trying to save it; the immediate hit could affect thousands of Lehman’s 25,000 [...]
April 17th, 2008
This week I returned from a memorial service for my first collaborator in arts policy research, and my second PhD advisee, to find that my most recent coauthor, on biofuels and global warming, had taken his life. It’s been a tough week, as both were friends, optimal colleagues, much too young, and respectively central to [...]
February 28th, 2008
Category: Management
One of the illuminating koans of management directs attention to the production possibility frontier in a space defined by “good” and “cheap”. My late colleague Bob Leone taught me that while there obviously is one, no real organization is actually operating at that boundary, so we should assume we can make stuff both better [...]
May 18th, 2007
Category: Leadership, Management
A common parable about leadership goes as follows:
Halfway through the construction of the cathedral, the architect died. The bishop, not knowing what to do, went out to walk through the stoneyard, and found a man hammering on a chisel. “Bless you, my son. What are you making?”
“About twelve centimes a day, your [...]
