Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 14:43:41 -0500 From: graywolf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Powerpoint Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>Then we can look at it another way, a person who >makes a possibly life >threatening multi-million dollar decision from a >twenty minute >PowerPoint >presentation certainly fits my definition of a fool. > >Of course, the adviser who presents it that way fits >my definition of >incompetent. > > [graywolf] Well, I'm not going to defend Nasa, and I would assume there's some incompetence there - nor would I wish to preach to someone like you who I know has more life experience than I do - but consider that a particular director faces maybe 5,000 decisions which could later turn out to have been life threatening - some maybe even based on a quick phone conversation or chance thought. That powerpoint presentation may have had 50 other points which were taken casually and rightly so - though if one of them HAD caused a problem we'd go back and say "I can't believe he didn't take it seriously." Almost anything that goes wrong is on a memo on someone's desk (well, more lately, in an email) but if we scrutinized every memo to death we'd never be able to build a mousetrap let alone a shuttle. Somewhere was some information on the 9-11 attacks which shouldn't have been ignored but also there were probably 80000 other bits of info about fake things or things that didn't happen and that in a sense should have been ignored. We can get rid of all shortcuts (and I would argue we should get rid of a lot of our software) but we would certainly have to accept the consequences such as not being able to do things in a given time or at all. Let me just reiterate that I do agree that there may well be some incompetence in terms of judgment errors. Chaso ===== Chaso DeChaso "Less is more cheap" - Osvaldo Valdes, Architect __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing. http://photos.yahoo.com/
