On 12/23/2013 5:55 PM, Joe Gwinn wrote:
....

There is also an inherent difference in objectives here. In the late
1960s, I asked one of my better EE professors why they taught us so
much theory and so little of what was actually being used in industry
at the time. His answer was quite succinct - the stuff actually used
today would be obsolete in a few years, but the theory would endure for
an entire career.

So, the companies wanted short-term knowledge (so the new employee
could "hit the ground running"), but the theory is the better
investment from the employee's perspective.

....

It's also by far the better investment for the company as well.

--

On Mon, 23 Dec 2013 18:30:48 -0600, dpb
wrote:

On 12/23/2013 5:55 PM, Joe Gwinn wrote:
...

There is also an inherent difference in objectives here. In the late
1960s, I asked one of my better EE professors why they taught us so
much theory and so little of what was actually being used in industry
at the time. His answer was quite succinct - the stuff actually used
today would be obsolete in a few years, but the theory would endure for
an entire career.

So, the companies wanted short-term knowledge (so the new employee
could "hit the ground running"), but the theory is the better
investment from the employee's perspective.

...

It's also by far the better investment for the company as well.

Indeed, but this again conflates/confuses the company with
its management. In the last analysis the
company/corporation is a trope like mother nature or father
time. The decisions are made by real people with personal
agendas, which may or may not include the best interests of
the owners/stockholders in either the short or long term.
In too many cases the decisions are made based on what will
jack up earning and the stock price for the quarter so
management can cash out rather than the long-term viability
of the company and stockholders/stakeholders such as the
employees and community.
--
Unka' George

"Gold is the money of kings,
silver is the money of gentlemen,
barter is the money of peasants,
but debt is the money of slaves"

-Norm Franz, "Money and Wealth in the New Millenium"

distro pruned -- following NGs eliminated
alt.religion.christian,alt.california,or.politics, alt.politics.democrats,talk.politics.guns,can.poli tics,
rec.bicycles.tech,misc.survivalism,tx.guns

On Mon, 23 Dec 2013 18:10:18 -0800, Rudy Canoza
wrote:

snip
The decisions are made by real people with personal
agendas, which may or may not include the best interests of
the owners/stockholders in either the short or long term.

As Alchian showed, those firms that survive are, in fact, the ones that
maximized profit, just as the theory of the firm predicts.
snip

Non sequitur

Mother Teresa worked at a corporation? Need the data
showing the total compensation of the decision makers. It
might well be that by ignoring the best long-term self
interests of the stockholders/stakeholders/firm management
maximized their own profit, e.g. they took the money and
ran, and the management of the firms that survived had lower
compensation than their peers.
http://www.motherteresa.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa

As for the reality of a company/corporation, please post a
picture of one. Just as real as Santa, the Easter Bunny,
the Great Pumpkin, etc. All of them are tropes, most of
them with a "Wizard of Oz" type, e.g. Chainsaw Al Dunlap,
pulling the levers behind the scenes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_J._Dunlap
snip
Reports of the methods Dunlap used to inflate revenues led
the board to review Dunlap's practices in June 1998. It
turned out that Dunlap had sold retailers far more
merchandise than they could handle. With the stores
hopelessly overstocked, unsold inventory piled up in
Sunbeam's warehouses. As a result, Sunbeam faced losses of
as much as $60 million in the second quarter of 1998. The
company's comptroller also told the board that Dunlap had
told him to push the limits of accounting principles. On
June 13, Dunlap was fired. The shareholder suit against
Dunlap dragged on until 2002, when he agreed to pay $15
million to settle the allegations.[4][5]

In 2001, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Dunlap,
alleging that he had engineered a massive accounting fraud.
Also named in the suit were four other former Sunbeam
executives and the lead partner for Sunbeam's account with
Arthur Andersen LLP. An SEC investigation revealed that
Dunlap and others had created the impression of a greater
loss in 1996 in order to make it look like the company had
experienced a dramatic turnaround in 1997. By the SEC's
estimate, at least $60 million of Sunbeam's 1997 earnings
were fraudulent. He also offered incentives for retailers to
sell products that would have otherwise been sold later in
the year, a practice known as "channel stuffing". The SEC
also argued that the purchases of Coleman, Signature and
First Alert were made to conceal Sunbeam's growing problems.
Sunbeam never recovered from the scandal, and was forced
into bankruptcy in 2002.[3]
snip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTro82HVIi0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npFKStNMHeE



--
Unka' George

"Gold is the money of kings,
silver is the money of gentlemen,
barter is the money of peasants,
but debt is the money of slaves"

-Norm Franz, "Money and Wealth in the New Millenium"

On 12/23/2013 7:42 PM, F. George McDuffee wrote:
On Mon, 23 Dec 2013 18:30:48 -0600,
wrote:

On 12/23/2013 5:55 PM, Joe Gwinn wrote:
...

There is also an inherent difference in objectives here. In the late
1960s, I asked one of my better EE professors why they taught us so
much theory and so little of what was actually being used in industry
at the time. His answer was quite succinct - the stuff actually used
today would be obsolete in a few years, but the theory would endure for
an entire career.

So, the companies wanted short-term knowledge (so the new employee
could "hit the ground running"), but the theory is the better
investment from the employee's perspective.

...

It's also by far the better investment for the company as well.

Indeed, but this again conflates/confuses the company with
its management. In the last analysis the
company/corporation is a trope like mother nature or father
time. The decisions are made by real people with personal
agendas, which may or may not include the best interests of
the owners/stockholders in either the short or long term.
In too many cases the decisions are made based on what will
jack up earning and the stock price for the quarter so
management can cash out rather than the long-term viability
of the company and stockholders/stakeholders such as the
employees and community.

You're' right at the point that "decisions are made by real people" but
from there you pretty much lose it at the technical employee level of
hiring.

In every organization I've been associated with, either as an employee
or as a consultant (and w/ 30 yr working time that turns out to be
quite a sizable number), almost w/o exception the actual employment
interview/decision once past the preliminary screening was done by
individuals at a low-enough level that these high level boardroom-level
corporate direction objectives had no effective bearing whatsoever on
the evaluation of candidates. Again w/ the exception of a couple of
PHB/Dilbert types who were simply totally inept, the actual hiring
decisions were made pretty much on rational evaluation of perceived
abilities weighted by the intangibles of "team player", etc., etc.,
etc., ... I ran across very few who would choose an obvious
robot-follower over a clearly capable innovator/thinker type for any
position other than an assembly-line operator.

--