You need a scorecard to figure out who is playing on which team, and who you can actually talk to, because half the time the people you dealt with to get the contract, aren’t the people affected by the work. There is nothing like walking into an area to begin the work and finding out that no one there was aware any work was going to be done.

Large corporations make the military look good by comparison. They should consider using unit insignia, so you know who the “enemy” is.

Worst project I ever worked on was in the mid 90’s for a major project for our largest retailer after two retailers merged (The Coles supermarket chain and the MGB (Myer-Grace Bros) Group (which at the time included Target, K-Mart and others). For whatever reasons, they had decided to keep merge *part* of the MGB and Coles IT divisions, and keep some separate (I believe it had to do with the completely different systems, software and even network infrastructure that would take years to consolidate, and was part purpose of this project). The newly formed IT group was called CMIS, and the original was simply MGB IT. The project was being run and budgeted by MGB. CMIS believed they should control it and they spent the next two years doing all they could to sabotage it. I was hired as a roving *trouble shooter/fixit* guy, answerable to the Board. Because of the gurilla warfare CMIS waged, they caused the MGB Group (and of course, the Coles-Myer shareholders) to waste $246mill. The project was finally cancelled after almost 3 years, about 2-3 months before it would actually have been completed (final testing had just begun). IBM didn’t help, part of this new project required 60 PC’s, and they decided to stick with IBM and their new (untested) Valuepoint series based on ‘486 CPU’s and we needed to run Windows for Workgroups 3.11 which had never been tested on these PC’s, and didn’t in fact work. After a month of testing, I concluded the BIOS was seriously faulty. I reversed engineered it as best I could and discovered it was not even beta, the version was 0.0.2! Then, we got lucky and one was delivered from the local IBM reseller that was one of the earlier revisions. It had a Pheonix BIOS, not the new IBM inhouse BIOS. It worked. Turned out, the original PC’s had Pheonix, IBM got caught in copyright violations, and they settled, but they were not allowed to use Pheonix BIOS in the PC’s. So, they made their own. IBM flew two R&D engineers out from the USA. They had a special notebooked hooked up to their R&D lab via encrypted sat link. It took 11 rewrites to get it to even boot and limp along. (the first rewrite killed the KB, the next killed the display… etc). Looking at all the trace data, we could see that somewhere between the code and the CPU, data was getting garbled randomly. I discovered a simple fix. If we removed the IBM 2nd level cache SIM module, and used one from Kingston, it worked! 😆 IBM refused to ship with anything other than IBM cache, so they rewrote the BIOS to bypass the cache altogether, and the system became as slow as an old 8088! I had enough and went and got 4 HP Pavillion PC’s, and they worked out of the box. And that was how IBM lost one of it’s biggest customers here and they went HP, including the big HP server systems. The other reason was that IBM refused anything other than *token* (no pun intended) support for Ethernet and would only support Token Ring networks. BTW, IBM quietly killed the whole valuepoint range after that, so you can thank Coles-Myer and yours-truly for that! 😆

The fact that the Board of Coles-Myer failed to deal with the two completely different cultures when the two merged is the main reason why CM have had so much trouble the past 2 decades and have just limped along, and have had so much financial difficulty. One example is that in the main Myer department store in Melb (one of the largest stores in the World), they decided long ago that upto $10k/day in stock loss (theft etc.) was acceptable! And that thinking didn’t change until profits dropped like a rock in recent years and they had to replace almost all of the top and middle management and even lowe-level staff to change that culture. It was part of a culture and mindset where the Myer family had a problem a couple decades ago where they went public and got a lot of mom-dad investors. When they had a great year of high profits and dividends, most of these investors sold their stocks and made a great profit. Unfortunately, one of the bigger investors saw these small stocks being sold and got a bit nervous, decided that the margin was too good to ignore, and sold most of their stock, which caused a panic in other major investors, and almost killed Myers! So, they created a secret department whose job was to ensure by any means possible that their share prices never rose too high or too fast, including allowing a certain level of theft or stock-loss (we would sometimes get a container shipment of goods and discover a lot missing. Usually when the share price was high, for eg). Amazing what companies will do… 😉

– Badtux the Culture Geek
.-= last blog ..Food for the trail =-.

Like you say, know the rules… my boss might have been griping and moaning and groaning about all the palms he had to grease to make the sales, but he knew what he had to do, or some other company would come and do it. Only good thing about Louisiana is that at least Louisiana pols are cheap, with the possible exception of Cold Cash Jefferson ;).

He may have felt that his ethnicity would give him a pass, but I think it raised the bar on compliance as far as the Chinese are concerned. Euros can get away with more than ex-pats in most of Asia – not a lot, but more – at least for the first deal. After the first deal, you are expected to know the system and they cut you no slack at all. It works the same in most of the world when you are dealing with other cultures – learn the rules and pay your dues or expect to experience a major failure.

My dealings were mainly with Taiwan, but the rules track very closely based on what my brother said about dealing with the Chinese from Hong Kong. “Presents” are expected, and you’d better have them.

The walking in front with the lantern or flag is still on the books in many US states.

Bush and co had the same *failure* mindset. They were doomed to fail, not because they were bad or evil, but because they decided the rules didn’t apply and they could do what they pleased. And the people who allowed them to get away with it for so long are the ones paying the price. There’s always a price. 🙂

We have laws here that many consider ridiculous and obsolete, even archaic. and they are… But they serve, or may serve, a useful purpose, so no legislator is in any hurry to abolish them. 🙂 For example, you can still get arrested here for driving a car at night without a walker with a lantern in front. 😉

When you consider that for a very long time all history was solely in the hands of one or another church, because the clerics were the only people who could write, history has always been subject to “editing”, by one power center or another.

The Egyptians did it by destroying monuments built by or to people who were no longer in favor.

Actually, Badtux, my great grandfather who is buried at the Chalmette National Cemetery was with the Ninth Infantry Regiment and fought in both the Philippines and the Boxer Rebellion in China. My paternal grandfather was with the 11th Infantry in the Caribbean, making it safe for democracy, so I have family history in those areas, but most Americans are totally unaware of how US agribusiness screwed over the Haitians, or the sort of things that United Fruit did in Central and South America. Few Americans know why you don’t mention Panama to a Colombian if you’re within striking distance.

I have infinite faith in the ability of the Chinese to create a very reasonable facade to convince the rest of the world that they have a wonderful free, and open country, while there is little real change underneath. It is amazing how many supposedly intelligent people say “you can do business with the Chinese”. Yes, you can, as long as you follow their rules, which tend to benefit them more than you. I believe an Australian executive is finding out personally the truth in that as he faces trial for “espionage”.

Oh, Kryten, if you are alive in the state of New York, I can find a perfectly legal way of arresting you for that heinous act. There are so many laws in the US, that if someone in power has it in for you, you can be arrested. You can always be picked up for emitting “greenhouse gases” in violation of the environmental laws – willfully increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by breathing. 😉

China have had a long history and I suspect that when they perfect their modern mask, possibly after the current old school are gone, they will be very good at it.

Deal is, we’re just smarter about it than the Chinese, because we have a couple hundred years experience at it. But give’em credit, the Chinese are learning quick, lickity split. I think they’re definitely up into the 20th century now and big-city “machine” politics, why, another ten or fifteen years or so, they might even get as good at propaganda as our best propagandists for the Demopublicans, who are so good that their propaganda goes down slick as licorice and people just slurp it up like chicken soup and say “yummy!”

Not saying that I’d want to live in China. Their government makes no pretense of being free or democratic, and even the pretense we have here in America is a lot better than that, for the most part we get the government we want here, even if we have a lot of help from our propaganda chiefs who own our media that tells us what to think and feel when it comes to deciding what we want and even if what we want is often idiotic. What I *am* saying is that China is changing so fast now that you look away for a decade and suddenly everything you knew about it isn’t operative anymore. What will China look like ten years from now? I have no idea.
.-= last blog ..Food for the trail =-.

Oh, yeah, they’ve gone through a “rebranding” of their image. Can’t be associated with the bad things that “didn’t happen” during the non-existent Cultural Revolution.

Full-employment for scribes re-writing history.

It will take a while for the “leaders” to die off, and real change to take hold, but they are already up to 1960s Chicago for a government.