Saturday Fun (週末趣味)

There was a time, not so really long ago, when a manager was really a manager. He started learning whatever he was doing from the bottom up, starting off at the most junior position, working his way up and knows every step of the business: what needs to be done, how to do what is to be done, who is best for doing what kind of work and how to make every one happy doing whatever it is that he is doing and rising to his own particular level of incompetence. Then came along universities, polytechnical colleges and professional schools and institutes which thought they could help "improve" the quality of management and before long, the job market is flooded with MBA's who have learned all kinds of "theories" of management but who really have little or no meaningful experience of how actually to run a real business enterprise. If the boss of  or the "managing director" or managing partner of a small or medium size enterprise has an exaggerated respect for such "experts", the price of hiring such management "expert" can sometimes be disastrous. Yet society has become so complex that nobody can be expected to know everything there is to know about his own business and there is no way of turning back the trend: we have already become a society run by "professional elites". Fortunately, there is one way of consoling ourselves still open to us: to joke about it, more or less the way that a person perched on the branch of a tree waiting for a pack of howling wild dogs below him to go away on their own and in their own time may have to learn to appreciate the beauty of the surrounding scenery. So here's one.

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost.
He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below.
Descending a bit, he shouted to her, "Excuse me, I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago but I don't know where I am. Can you help me?"

The woman below replied, "Your hot air balloon is hovering about 30 feet above the ground, between 40 -41 degrees latitude north and between 59- 60 degrees west longitude."
"Thanks. You must be an engineer," said the balloonist.
"I am," replied the woman, "How did you know?"
"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct. But I haven't got the faintest clue what to make of your information. I'm still lost. I'm afraid I have to say that you haven't been helpful at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip !"

The woman below responded, "You must be in Senior Management."
"I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," said the woman, "you don't know where you are nor where you're going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise, which you've no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."

Have a nice weekend.