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Archive for Control

Bureaucracy and Its Handmaiden: Voicemail

Andy Spero | July 11, 2010 | 0 Comment(s) |

State Government, Inertia, and Your Tax Dollars

A friend of ours has spent much of his adult life interacting with state government appointees, bureaucrats, and a few good men and women in their employ and association. He tries to help those in need with state resources, when possible.

On Friday, he mentioned that due to a fiscal-year-end financial crisis/dispute, he made twenty calls to various state employees during the holiday-shortened four-day work week.

None of his calls were answered, nor did he get a response from any of the messages… Read the rest

On the Use of a Single, Corporate-wide Performance Measure

Andy Spero | July 9, 2010 | 0 Comment(s) |

We have substantially updated and expanded our analysis of a common fallacy of performance measurement and compensation: One (Performance) Measure to Rule them All.

Many firms use overly-gross or general performance measures, and while there may be justifications in some cases, there’s usually not a good motivational reason for doing so.

Our analysis has been updated to include several new graphs that help illustrate the basic concepts that need to be understood to follow the argument.

As always, we look forward to receiving comments or questions from our readers.

Get Your Bitsmith Here!

Andy Spero | July 8, 2010 | 0 Comment(s) |

Expert Subject & Information System Knowledge

We occasionally get comments (from folks that don’t know us very well) that our consulting practices seem broad and unrelated. Their (unsolicited) advice is usually that we should “focus.”

In those situations, our verbal response is simply, “thanks.” However, it is quite possible to be an expert in more than one field, especially if those fields are (1) related at a more basic level and (2) support each other.

More importantly, for knowledge workers, cross-field expertise applied to substantial and/or… Read the rest

Managerial Control & Risk Management

Andy Spero | July 6, 2010 | 0 Comment(s) |

We have a new page that describes our risk management services for industrial organizations. The practice is actually broader than industrial firms and encompasses all non-financial firms.

Histogram generated from Monte Carlo Analysis

Managers at many such firms realize that they do not (currently) have the expertise to employ hedging tactics, including the purchase of futures or forwards contracts or derivatives contracts, and they may not know where to start.

Others may realize that they do not have the expertise to negotiate with sophisticated trading firms or banks that who serve as counter-parties to… Read the rest

Lack of (Self) Control at the SEC

Andy Spero | April 24, 2010 | 0 Comment(s) |

We suspect there are few announcements that the SEC could make that would stimulate as much laughter of its Inspector General’s report of porn viewing by 33 of the agency’s employees. (See ‘Watchdog’ — The SEC’s Porn Problem or Workers Punished in SEC Porn Flap.) It’s Godsend for comedy writers.

Unfortunately, we have no jokes, only three comments.

First, this is one more example of the federal government’s ineptitude, and it’s inability to control its bureaucracy.

Controlling access to individual web sites and entire categories of sites is free, or… Read the rest

This is So Cool!

Andy Spero | April 21, 2010 | 0 Comment(s) |

Our Dissertation is on-line in Korea

We rarely “Google” our name, but today we did so out of curiosity.

We had thought it had been forgotten; so, we were surprised to find that a scanned version of our doctoral dissertation is available on-line at the library at Pai Chai University in Korea and at Google Docs, too.

We’ve never heard of Pai Chai, but attribute that more to our sheltered existence than anything else. (If we had to guess, we suspect “Pai Chai” means “peaceful tea,” but then we’ve… Read the rest

Helping the Faith

Andy Spero | April 4, 2010 | 0 Comment(s) |

Happy Easter!

Easter seems to be a good day to write about problems in our Church: an organization that’s about 1,980 years old and has faced many and varied problems since its founding–both self-inflicted ones and those created by others.

As we will hear repeatedly during the next several weeks at Mass, immediately after the Resurrection, some disciples were hiding, some were fleeing, and all were doubtful and doubting. The eleven and the others needed repeated assurances from the risen Lord, and that was despite witnessing Christ’s miracles and ministry… Read the rest

Good (Late) News from the SEC

Andy Spero | January 25, 2010 | 0 Comment(s) |

We Missed It a Few Months Ago

On the front page of the The ‘Money & Investing’ section of today’s edition of The Wall Street Journal, there is an article entitled, At SEC a Scholar Who Saw It Coming.

The article is about Henry Hu, who manages the newly-formed Risk, Strategy and Financial Innovation division at the SEC.

Though he sounds like a good guy, we don’t know much about Mr. Hu, but that’s not why we’re writing. It also mentions that in November, Mr. Wu hired Richard Bookstaber… Read the rest

Inefficient Bonus Schemes

Andy Spero | January 13, 2010 | 0 Comment(s) |

The Outrage Makes Them Larger

Recently, much has been written about “Wall Street” bonuses. Almost all of those articles mention the same two things: (1) populist and government sentiment against the bonuses, and (2) the composition of the bonuses towards long-term, restricted stock and away from cash. At least some of the drive towards a more stock-heavy composition seems to be management’s attempt to appease the government and the public. In this post, we argue that such moves are needlessly costly, which means inefficient and larger than need be.1… Read the rest

Government Whining and Bailout Fees

Andy Spero | January 12, 2010 | 0 Comment(s) |

Given the past two days’ front page headlines in the The Wall Street Journal, it seems that banks are doing a lot of bracing. Monday’s headline announced that Banks Brace for Bonus Fury, and today’s headline announces that Banks Brace for Bailout Fee.

The first article notes of complaints by the public and government officials about bonuses paid for 2009 ‘results.’ The second article describes a likely attempt by federal officials to, in some sense, monetize those complaints by levying new fees onto banks. (Soon, we’ll soon publish a… Read the rest

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