Jinn of Quality and Risk

Siebel offers stock-option relief: The software maker says it will allow employees with worthless stock options to exchange them for stock or cash. My stock options at a previous employer were so deep under water (the stock value had gone down 90+% since I had joined the company) that new employees could possibly hope to make money within 2 years, whereas people who had been with the company for one or more years had absolutely worthless options (not likely to be worth anything for another 10 years). I raised this issue with the then-CFO, but he told me that this (obvious injustice) was not considered important enough to act on. Thus stock options were turned into a major disincentive. My advice is to ask for a higher salary, and basically ignore stock options (even if, or especially if, the CEO tries to sell you on them). 

A sybarite is a person devoted to luxury and pleasure. Derived from Sybaris, a celebrated ancient Greek city noted for the luxurious, pleasure-seeking habits of its citizens. I would like to see more creative sybarites in the modern world. [inspiré par une grande rousse] 

What went wrong on Mount Everest on May 10, 1996? That day, twenty-three climbers reached the summit. Five climbers, however, did not survive the descent. Two of these, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, were extremely skilled team leaders with much experience on Everest. ... [Many publications] have attempted to explain how events got so out of control that particular day. Several explanations compete: human error, weather, all the dangers inherent in human beings pitting themselves against the world's most forbidding peak. A single cause of the 1996 tragedy may never be known, says HBS professor Michael A. Roberto. But perhaps the events that day hold lessons, some of them for business managers. [Harvard Business School, Working Knowledge]

A very interesting article and interview. Here are some salient lessons:

• leaders must pay close attention to how they balance competing pressures in their organizations, and how their words and actions shape the perceptions and beliefs of organization members;
• an unwillingness to question team procedures and exchange ideas openly prevents a group from revising and improving their plans as conditions change; in other words, insufficient debate diminishes critical evaluation; and
• people dealing with risk are very susceptible to overconfidence, an unwillingness to "cut one's losses," and a reliance on the most recent information (psychological factors in high-stakes decisions).

 

Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. ... Why this unimpressive record? There are many factors — economic, ideological, technical — but perhaps the most important has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from producing an effective military force. Some problems are: lack of leadership, hoarding of information, memorisation instead of reasoning, paranoia in the name of hierarchy, indifference to fellow human beings, trust in relatives only, and conformity as a major social virtue.