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This was my 2nd-hand impression growing up with a father who worked for a large oil company. The extent to which nobody was really at the wheel in these kinds o

This was my 2nd-hand impression growing up with a father who worked for a large oil company. The extent to which nobody was really at the wheel in these kinds of negotiations was fascinating. As far as I could tell, many things sort of worked, when they did, because engineers had a cultural desire to "get it right", mostly for their own satisfaction. But the company itself didn't seem to either have an effective way of policing it, or maybe even really an interest. Somewhat as in government, low- and mid-level contracting didn't excite anyone in management, who were focused on issues that really "moved the needle", like securing and overseeing new exploration deals, not how much someone spent on a piece of equipment that wasn't even in the 6-figure range anyway.

vidarh 14y ago
A lot of the time people also think they can get away with a lot less than they can, because they assume that "someone" must be looking after these things. It's when you get insight into how things are run and see the boss rubber stamping expenses it starts to get scary. And someone decides to take advantage. I went with a friend a few years back, to get a helicopter ride with someone he did consulting with in the forestry industry. He told me about how the people he worked for expensed a helicopter to go for coffee sometimes... Just for the heck of it. Nobody asked. The assumption was that if they chartered a helicopter, it was for surveying, so any helicopter expenses were pretty much by default evidence they were doing their job, rather than slacking off and costing the company a fortune.
- _delirium 14y ago
  One of my favorite anecdotes along the rubber-stamping lines is that due to a miscoding in the software that auto-pre-filled expense reports (it pre-populated fields from company credit-card statements), my dad once accidentally filed an expense report with a 2-week hotel stay put down under meals, as a single $2500 dinner on the check-in date. He didn't notice the mistake until after submitting, and assumed someone would flag it, but he got the reimbursement and nobody ever asked. It's possible it did get flagged, and someone manually reviewed and realized that it was really a hotel stay, but it seems at least as likely that it just got rubber stamped, and he could've gotten away with $2500 dinners (at least occasionally) if he had been the type of person to do so.
mamcx 14y ago
I "lost" a contract (to use http://www.elmalabarista.com/bestseller http://www.elmalabarista.com/bestseller) with a big company in my country. To make it short, they choose the company of a "friend of a friend", that use a outdated tech (windows mobile) with absurd-costly mobile devices (and they object our use of iOS! their devices cost 4x), that NOT work at all, that was collecting dust (literally) in a sub-company. I tell the guy that manage the sale: "Hey, fine if don't choose us, but if you choose them you will lose ALL the money, for sure". The answer? "We don't care about lose money". PLOP! We walk away, relieved of "lost" that client.

vidarh 14y ago

A lot of the time people also think they can get away with a lot less than they can, because they assume that "someone" must be looking after these things. It's when you get insight into how things are run and see the boss rubber stamping expenses it starts to get scary. And someone decides to take advantage. I went with a friend a few years back, to get a helicopter ride with someone he did consulting with in the forestry industry. He told me about how the people he worked for expensed a helicopter to go for coffee sometimes... Just for the heck of it. Nobody asked. The assumption was that if they chartered a helicopter, it was for surveying, so any helicopter expenses were pretty much by default evidence they were doing their job, rather than slacking off and costing the company a fortune.

_delirium 14y ago
One of my favorite anecdotes along the rubber-stamping lines is that due to a miscoding in the software that auto-pre-filled expense reports (it pre-populated fields from company credit-card statements), my dad once accidentally filed an expense report with a 2-week hotel stay put down under meals, as a single $2500 dinner on the check-in date. He didn't notice the mistake until after submitting, and assumed someone would flag it, but he got the reimbursement and nobody ever asked. It's possible it did get flagged, and someone manually reviewed and realized that it was really a hotel stay, but it seems at least as likely that it just got rubber stamped, and he could've gotten away with $2500 dinners (at least occasionally) if he had been the type of person to do so.

mamcx 14y ago

I "lost" a contract (to use http://www.elmalabarista.com/bestseller http://www.elmalabarista.com/bestseller) with a big company in my country. To make it short, they choose the company of a "friend of a friend", that use a outdated tech (windows mobile) with absurd-costly mobile devices (and they object our use of iOS! their devices cost 4x), that NOT work at all, that was collecting dust (literally) in a sub-company. I tell the guy that manage the sale: "Hey, fine if don't choose us, but if you choose them you will lose ALL the money, for sure". The answer? "We don't care about lose money". PLOP! We walk away, relieved of "lost" that client.