Quote:
Originally Posted by MicroRoller
One of the first and most important steps in problem solving is identifying the problem. Here's a simple example of why it's so important. A friend of mine noticed some paint peeling in his upstairs bathroom. He noticed it, scraped the paint and repainted. A few weeks later same thing happened. He decided to try a different paint. Scraped, painted. A few weeks later he was scraping, spackling and repainting with a more expensive paint. A few weeks later when the peeling happened again he asked me if I knew of a good bathroom paint that won't peel. After describing how many times he repainted in the past few months I knew there was something else going on. One day when it was raining I took a peek up in his attic and saw there was a leak around his vent stack that was dripping on the drywall above where the paint kept peeling. He got the leak fixed and the paint stopped peeling. Had he stopped to look at what the cause of the problem was he could have resolved the problem sooner, saved the hassle of repainting multiple times and not have to deal with the mold situation that developed.
In the case of FTP it was important to determine why the company had the problems it had. It seems that a big part of the problem was due to incompetent management. If that's the case then you don't want the same people that did such a poor job of running the company being in charge of the disaster recovery.
I could just as well point at that if your solution is always to fire the person who made bad decisions without ever examining other factors like company culture, training, or oversight processes (or lack thereof), then you are more like the guy who keeps repainting the bathroom wall than you are similar to the one who finds the leak.
The scope of my argument is super narrow, however, and doesn't require that you agree with this point.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MonsterJMcgee
Yeah but there's a difference between assigning blame for the sake of being vindictive and finding the root of the problem for the sake of fixing it.
Obv HL felt that people were trying to find out who caused the problem for unconstructive reasons.
This is the crux of the argument. It doesn't matter if you agree with HL here, the point is that DF doesn't properly interpret what he's saying.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Just_a_guy
Like with many things HL related one can start with a logical premise and then apply it to self-serving and bizarre scenario. Example: It would be unconstructive to fire someone who could easily get oneself arrested therefore it is logical to pay someone 200k a month to.... do what?
Again, the point here is a narrow one. Simply put, it's that when HL says, "in situations like that it’s very difficult to get people to take responsibility for the problem. And people have to take responsibility for the problem before they really feel like they need to fix the problem," DF presents it as contradictory to facts that if anything support that he felt this way. It's a minor point, but one that I think almost anyone with any business experience would understand.
There's no larger point here. (Although, I guess, if one wanted to do so they could argue that it's a minor blow to DF's credibility as her articles basically put us in the position of trusting her ability to properly interpret and relay the information she receives from her sources.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by MicroRoller
His opinion obviously isn't worth much. People who don't want to find out the cause of the problem usually have something to hide.
You're telling me that if you invested a lot of money to start a company that winds up being successful and later it gets destroyed by bad decisions, bad management, theft and fraud, you wouldn't want to know why?
For one thing, I think you're underestimating the extent to which the major problems were understood at this point. Of course owners will want to know what went wrong, but once you have a basic understanding of how things went down, you don't want to see strategy meetings get bogged down by people who would rather harp on the bad decisions that were made instead of offering contructive suggestions as to how to proceed. Perhaps at some point you decide you do need to unseat the board and get rid of Ray, but you can't even have a successful discussion in that regard if everyone is busy bickering over who did what when and why instead of taking ownership of the problem.
That having been said, I don't want to make too big a point of this as you don't have to accept it as true in order to understand that the contradiction that DF sees in HL's statement is not real. All you have to do is make a reasonable inference about what he was trying to say.