One need only look at this administration's response on 11 September to appreciate their credentials. The top man is an MBA who never ran a single successful company. This author repeatedly cites the primary reason for failure and death - reasons that many who are too 'politically connected' cannot appreciate. Those contrarians with political agendas instead see political motives everywhere. Meanwhile 85% of all problems are directly traceable to the real enemies of America - bad management.
Every engineer said don't launch the Challenger. Management murdered seven astronauts. Engineers were desperately seeking information that would have saved seven Columbia astronauts. Again, bean counting mentalities - especially cited is Mission manager Linda Ham - for all but wanting to kill those astronauts. This because of a management style based in business schools AND not based in product oriented thinking. Previously noted in The Cellar was a dogged engineer Richard Roche who desperately attempted to save those lives:
Dogged Engineer's Effort To Assess Shuttle Damage in 23 Sept 2003 NY Times
Other symptoms of MBA management include a benchmark boondoggle: an $80+ billion
Space Station that does no science. Top management spending money on useless endeavors are exemplified by George Jr's changes to the Space program that even makes "The ISS is ... a useless bit of money gobbling metal in orbit." (quoted sentence corrected to agree with what we now know to be true).
So what is the strategic objective? Is it the product? Or the greater glory of MBA trained managers?
If those symptoms of bad management were not obvious, need we also cite New Orleans? Or the FBI whose lab was falsifying test results, translators ordered to slow down or were accused when they discovered coworkers working as spies, internal security investigator (Hanssen) actually working for the Russians for decades, a long list of suspects falsely accused as spies, the bungled anthrax investigation, George Jr political appointees who literally ordered FBI agents off of investigations that would have discovered the 11 September attackers, firing this nation's #1 anti-terrorist investigator (John O'Neill) only because he was *shouting* the truth .... and now this.
One poster in the Cellar was an employee of SAIC. What he could not discuss was a project he was (probably) working on. The new FBI computer system started during George Jr's first year. It went downhill fast due to management.
It's bad enough that MBAs throw money at problems like grenades, refuse to admit that quality control inspectors mean decreased quality, promote the mythical man-month, and somehow create magic expressions in a belief it will solve problems (ie 'Quality Control Circles' or 'Faster, Cheaper and Better'). The last was why well over $200 million spent on a Virtual Case File (VCF) was wasted from the very beginning.
One symptom of bad management was demonstrated by a SAIC employee, Mathew Patton, who desperately tried to call top management's attention to a system chock full of security defects. What Mathew did not realize is that those failures were embedded by top management because of who they are. Using classic MBA school management techniques. Mathew posted a desperate cry for help in a discussion groups:
InfoSec News (isn_at_c4i.org)
Quote:
I work on the FBI's new Trilogy program ... and at every turn all I get are really lame excuses why security isn't important - the chief one being "we're all good guys, everyone has a gun, and we all have TS security clearances, we use KG84's [encryption hardware] to encrypt our trunk lines, etc." Like I'm supposed to be impressed. Proving to me or any auditor that the network is demonstrably secure is impossible. As the very FBI repeatedly asserts, 80+% of the threat is internal. Are they under the delusion that the same figure doesn't apply to them? No less after all the moles and traitors they've unearthed in the not too distant past?
Am I nuts to object strongly to the notion that Windows(tm) can be explicitly and fully trusted to provide authentication and prove identity of the person on the other end of the keyboard, especially when the desktop's security is very much in question and the FBI wants to have non-repudiatable logging of user activity?
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Management trained to meet the definition of patriotic American would have immediately sought this engineer out and started asking what would have been embarrassing questions. But that was not Sherry Higgins who read the post, took it as a threat (as an MBA manager must when loyalty is more important than the project), and reported Patton to the FBI's Security Division. You tell me where anything there was a violation of national security. Meanwhile, Sherry Higgins even has a scrapbook full of internal FBI correspondences which she shares openly.
Another symptom of bad management - they demand loyalty - they demand the employees work for them, rather than top management working for the employees. The latter is essential for quality. The former is a dictatorship - as taught in communism and business schools.
The enemy of MBA management is a patriot called a whistle blower. Whistle blowers are not loyal - according to MBA training - because only management (not the product) is important. Another symptom of MBA management - they prosecute the patriots who 'blow the whistle'.
BTW, what was Sherry Higgin's previous job? She ran a help desk for AT&T and then for Lucent. I can find no programming experience in her background. But she meets the criteria set forth all through George Jr's "we demand loyalty" administration: from the top man right through Fatherland Security, and into FEMA managers who also murdered hundreds in New Orleans. Or Linda Ham who did everything she could to kill seven Columbia astronauts. Or the MBA and lawyer in First Energy who knew nothing about electricity or utilities, continued to operate a nuclear reactor with a known Three Mile Island problem that we later learned could have taken out Toledo, and who create the Northeast blackout.
A wasted $107 million just for SAIC written software alone was completely avoided had management enough guts to even listen to their own outside consultants who said on Sept 2002 that 1) the FBI should create an enterprise architecture to guide the development of its IT system, and .... yes anyone with simplest computer knowledge would understand this .... 2) the flash cutover from their existing ACS system to the new VCF system should not occur all at once.
Appreciate the total stupidity there. Some details. The existing ACS system that had all FBI case files would be shut down on Friday. On Monday, the entire FBI would be running on a new VCF system with no way back or access of the original working database. If the ACS did not work, then all FBI case files were not accessible. This was deemed by top FBI and SAIC project management as a good way to implement a completely new (and later found to be woefully untested) database system for all ongoing FBI investigations.
Is there any reader here who does not find that to be stupid? But then who were the managers of this project? People who would even prosecute a whistler blower - another symptom of MBA management.
Up top was listed the MBA managers solution to the problem. "Faster, cheaper, and better". Good slogans as taught in business management school. Reality: at best, only two can only be accomplished. Anyone with dirt under their fingernails would know that. Sherry Higgins couldn't. Her previous experience was management - running a technical help desk department.
So we know Mathew Patton was truly being loyal. We know that MBA management always hates honesty when it might expose incompetent management. We know what SAIC was doing in VA just outside Washington. It’s called a 'beltway bandit'.
BTW, the system being replaced - Automated Case Support or ACS - was considered by management to be 'state of the art' in 1995 ... using 3270 green screen, IBM, text only monitors connected by dedicated serial cables to an IBM mainframe computer (probably running Timeshare). Ok. Not everyone will appreciate the joke here. That was what advanced computing once was in 1968. By 1990 - five years earlier - even homes had networking and PCs when the FBI was upgrading to text only, green screen 3270 IBM monitors. Anybody yet smell classic MBA trained managers?
Just because FBI agents had to go home, use their home computers, to access FBI database or send e-mail - something that FBI field office equipment could not do - is not a symptom that the top management is bad? Bull. 85% of all problems are directly traceable to top management. When that top management says there is plenty of blame to go around, then you know
99% of all problems are directly traceable to the top man. You know him. He's the one who says the buck stops at him - but then blames anyone who blows the whistle. Or says mistakes were made elsehwhere. Classic MBA mentality from the same schools that George Jr partied at.
Defined is but another example of failures directly traceable to top management that does not come from where the work gets done.