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Tuesday, October 04, 2011

RANDOM THOUGHTS #59

Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself.

1. Leanna and I watched a dozen episodes of TUDORS during our anniversary weekend, and I continue to point out that Henry VIII didn't just want a son to prove he was a man's man. He wanted a son to prevent a civil war between various branches of the previous Plantagenet dynasty that wanted the throne back and were constantly scheming to achieve their goal. (Two branches of Plantagenets, York and Lancaster, had fought in the Wars of the Roses, but those lines died out. That left several distant Plantagenet cousins (Glochester, Buckingham, Clarence, Cambridge, Bedford, Warwick) who all claimed they should have had the throne after Richard III died in battle. (Richard III died because he could not find a horse on which to escape from Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII. Henry Tudor was a branch of the Lancaster house, and married Elizabeth York, uniting the two warring factions.) None of these claimants had a strong enough claim that everyone in England would accept it without argument, and it was obvious that without an heir to Henry VIII (the second Tudor) there was going to be one very nasty civil war upon his death. England had (to that point) not had a Queen Regnant, and it was unclear if people would accept his daughters (Mary and Elizabeth) as able to rule. (In the end, they both ruled successfully.)

2. In another business case study (those classes that Leanna and I take), a businessman was having great sales, but losing money. Once the idea of employee embezzlement was ruled out, the logical answer was that his costs were out of control. In the case of one of his product lines, his employees were mixing too much of the most valuable element into the product. In the case of his other product line, he had 70 items when 20 would cover 90% of the orders, and stocking perishable elements of 70 items meant that he was throwing away half of everything he bought.

3. Yet another business case study: A man is in an industry for 40 years, sometimes owning a store and sometimes working for other stores. Call it mixed success. At the point of retirement, his children say "Take your retirement money and buy us a business. We know we don't know how to run a business, but you can take your last five working years to teach us (working part time yourself) by which time we'll have paid back your retirement money. Then you can retire and we'll have a working business. He agrees, but the children won't listen to him when he says that starting a new business means working 12 hours a day. Worse, they hire a bunch of friends to man the store and run it like a party. At least they aren't losing money, but they aren't paying back the loans, either. Dad calls in the expert with their own TV show, but the children say "We don't need help. We're doing fine." Dad, pointing to the lack of any business growth or loan payments, disagrees. This all comes back to leadership. If the leaders run the business like a party and haven't even tried to learn business skills (they don't even know the average number of customers served per week) the business is not going to thrive. I'd really love to run a business that makes so much money that I can do an awful job of running it and still make a nice salary and have no debt.

4. I think my greatest failure in running ADB, Inc., is in failing to account for things that obviously need to be done (and done early in the priority list) but which are not on the "time budget" for work to be done. Now, there will always be things one cannot predict (say the warehouse burns down and we have to spend a lot of time with insurance claims and figuring out what to replace) but that's normal and you cannot plan for it. The big issue right now is that the Mongoose Joint Venture is eating up 80% of my design time. (Checking ships is taking a lot longer than it we calculated to take. Reviewing their rulebooks was thought to be a matter of a couple of hours a week but I've spent about six hours this week and that only caught up to the third draft; I haven't read the fourth. While it makes perfect sense that I will spend less time writing the 40 pages of background their rulebook needs than I would have spent fixing something they wrote, there were no hours in the budget for me to do that. (It will take only about 10 hours since I just have to string together and write-through existing background from SFB and the RPG books. Even so, this obviously represents poor planning on my part.) There is also the issue that I keep scheduling unfinished projects based on a guess of the work it will take to finish them. If it's a project that Steven Petrick and/or I are doing, we can get a pretty good guess. If it's a project someone else is doing, we have a tendency not to guess very well. (That, and sometimes we don't get documents from the outside designer as fast or in the form that we expect to get them.)