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> I come from an environment where, if you see a snake, you kill it. At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is go hire a consultant on snakes. Then y
by apo 7y ago
> I come from an environment where, if you see a snake, you kill it. At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is go hire a consultant on snakes. Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you discuss it for a couple of years. The most likely course of action is — nothing. You figure, the snake hasn't bitten anybody yet, so you just let it crawl around on the factory floor. We need to build an environment where the first guy who sees the snake kills it.
I can't help but read this quote in Ross Perot's voice. Hilarious and illuminating at the same time.
- cvs268 7y agoNow wondering whether the following is true... > In a sufficiently large team/group/organisation, it is a hard problem to differentiate between a snake (imminent catastrophic showstopper) and someone else's "autonomous robot without wheels" (experimental feature). Hmmm?...
- setr 7y agoI can imagine this actualy occurring between the low-level employee who spots the snake, and the game of telephone that occurs as the news travels up the command hierarchy to reach someone with authority to do something about it Which is the tradeoff issue with hierarchies; you want the person at the bottom to be sufficiently autonomous to deal with the problem, as he’ll have the most information about it, but at the same time, its the person at the top who has the global knowledge to determine how it actually effects the rest of the ecosystem. But as the information travels up the chain, it gets (necessarily) aggregated and details are lost
- cmacaskill 7y agoSpeaking of his hilarious voice, how about when Jim Carrey channeled him? https://youtu.be/m6d5vhJUGH0 https://youtu.be/m6d5vhJUGH0
- GershwinA 7y agoThe comparison itself is wonderful too
- heymijo 7y agoContext makes this quote even better--Perot was a GM board member.