dworin

12 ms·

61.
by dworin 13y ago
It's not just startups that have this problem with Lean management. I've told a few clients in more traditional industries that they were confusing "lean" and "thin." Lean is about efficiency, continuous imp
62.
by dworin 13y ago
I really like this model and framework - most people underestimate the impact of transaction costs, and I think it's partially why many companies overestimate the value they'll get from outsourcing. But in the real world, I'v
63.
by dworin 13y ago
One issue I have with transparent salaries is that employment is an agreement between the employee and the company: it's a two-way street. Yet when you implement transparent salaries, the company is unilaterally deciding to share crit
64.
by dworin 13y ago
One issue is that transparency makes discovering someone's salary easy, but discovering their value is still hard (at least for the non-employer). I haven't done all the math, but my intuition based on similar markets is that it
65.
by dworin 13y ago
Here is a summary of some research saying salary isn't that important for motivation: http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv/ However, here's a good summary that argues that pa
66.
by dworin 13y ago
The hidden fine print is that you have to affiliate with a university and support that university's mission. I wonder how loose they'll be in interpreting that support. Does "providing internships to students every summer
67.
by dworin 13y ago
I didn't think they were waiving personal income taxes either, but it actually looks like they are: What is the Personal Income Tax exemption for employees? Employees of businesses in START-UP NY will pay no income taxes on their wages
68.
by dworin 13y ago
I have a small company in New York, and agree with all of your reasons why it's terrible. The one advantage besides talent pool (which is a big advantage!) that both New York and San Francisco have, and that's often overlooked, is
69.
by dworin 13y ago
The business equivalent of Christmas gifts is "we have to use up the whole budget by the end of the year or we'll get a smaller one next year."
70.
by dworin 13y ago
Usually a revenue run rate means "we extrapolated our previous short term over the next year." It's useful for rapidly-growing companies where your next three quarters are much more likely to look like your current one than
71.
by dworin 13y ago
That speaks to the problem of train travel on the opposite end: it's really only feasible in the half-dozen or so American cities that have highly reliable, built-out intra-city public transportation. If you need a car when you get th
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by dworin 13y ago
Most gasoline taxes, which are a loose proxy for miles driven, go to pay for roads and highways (although other funds are used too).
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by dworin 13y ago
When people compare train travel in the US to Europe, they tend to forget the huge differences in distance. Washington, DC to Miami is five times the distance as Rome to Florence. Trains are a better value than flying when the difference b
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by dworin 13y ago
With some exceptions, especially at the top, the "downtime between campaigns" is called unemployment.
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by dworin 13y ago
I'd argue that Facebook is actually the next AOL (a tool for managing your connections, communicating, and viewing curated content in a walled garden). Teenagers in the late 90s/early 00s lived on AOL in the same way that they la
76.
by dworin 13y ago
Management practices, on average (there are always exceptions) tend to be much better in the developed world. Here's some research from Harvard Business School that looks at it more quantitatively: http://www.hbs.edu/f
77.
by dworin 13y ago
>> "What managers end up doing is being responsible for all of the shit work so their team can go do what they do best" This is, in essence, a manager's most important job. It gets under valued, because when it's
78.
by dworin 13y ago
NASA's budget is still 18 times larger than the Chinese space program: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Space_Administra... Not to dimin
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The Post Office Has Turned Amazon Into The Worlds Worst Brick and Mortar Retail(blog.dworin.net)
5 points by dworin 13y ago|6 comments
80.
by dworin 13y ago
Knowing what his managers did is one thing, knowing what his managers should have been doing is another. The problem is that there's a difference between what's on his list and what the best managers do, and what an organization
81.
by dworin 13y ago
There are some routes where trains are more efficient, especially if you consider delays and time waiting in the airport. It's just that most of them are on the east coast, where you have a lot of large, dense cities that don't r
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by dworin 13y ago
Disagree. Absent large barriers to entry like economies of scale, network effects, or legal/regulatory hurdles, monopolies are fairly unstable in a capitalist system. The excessive profits that they bring in (monopoly rents) are a ri
83.
by dworin 13y ago
This is a really interesting observation, and one I've thought about before. I've noticed that companies tend to fall into two philosophical camps, both of which can be successful if executed right. One camp says that you should
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by dworin 13y ago
Equally shared bonus pools were fairly common in top-tier professional services firms until the late 1990s, and even when they changed, most kept fairly equal distributions of profits between partners and to associates. However, almost all
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by dworin 13y ago
I don't think you want to be replicating the management practices of major law firms, which are generously considered awful places to work. Lockstep bonuses only apply to associates, and are usually a function of the senior attorneys&
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by dworin 13y ago
This reminds me of a great study about the relationship between cultural and legal norms in looking at corruption. Because of the UN, nearly every country has a diplomat in New York, and because of diplomatic immunity, none of them are res
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by dworin 13y ago
This is a very popular topic in development economics, and there's a rich literature looking at India specifically and developing countries more generally, but there isn't one definitive theory on the origins of corruption. Here&
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by dworin 13y ago
For many of the most common business and consumer applications (web browsing, using MS Office), adding a more powerful computer just doesn't do that much for you. Power users will upgrade their old machines, but most users will just k
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by dworin 13y ago
I'm typing this on a PC where I did the same thing as the author. Over the past 10 years, I've swapped out a part every two years or so to keep it running the latest and greatest. But the CPU is five years old and still running
90.
by dworin 13y ago
You always have a choice; it's the same choice you have with investors and clients, the option to stop (either by quitting or getting fired). Mentally, you might not see a job that way, but it's the same basic choice. If you hav

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