I grow a bit tired, tired of seeing mistakes being made while I cannot prevent them. You see it all around you in daily life: in your family, in social life, in the news and at your job.
With the risk of sounding like a misanthrope, I wish to attribute these mistakes to human stupidity, short-sightedness and greed. While the last one is the least one (pure greed in itself has no effect, it’s the way this geed is expressed that may cause trouble) the other two are in my opinion the main contributers to our society’s everyday problems (and to a larger extend every problem can be reduced to one or more everyday problems).
Despite the list of expressions that capture perfectly real life and it’s inescapable consequences, people tend to ignore this generations old wisdom or challenge it.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s OK to challenge ideas and traditions, but try to challenge stuff that really matters and that, by being challenged, changes your life for the better. You’ll see immediately why.
“What goes around comes around”, “there is no such thing as a free lunch”, “if you pay peanuts you get a monkey”, “honesty lasts the longest”,”garbage in, garbage out” … and so on.
You catch my drift, you’ve all been certainly in one or more situations where these sayings were appropriate.
Some examples:
- Company decides to reduce IT helpdesk cost – outsources to Indian script based call center – employees experience IT problems and call – script is read to them in (bad) English without giving the solution – three days and five escalation calls later the local tech guru (or if you’re lucky the remaining IT guy) finally solves issue – work interruption did cost company 50000$ a day in lost business.
- Company gets “rid of the fat” and cuts 5% of its workforce – big uproar, company announces “is onetime event and need to to this, then we’re save” – then some months later company announces next cutting round “due to unforeseen circumstances” – again uproar and promise not to cut any further – tech leaders and most valuable employees quit and find more stable or likable job elsewhere due to increasing cuts and increased risk of lay off – the by then “lean-mean” company relies on model with low number of high skill worker – bleeds to dead due to high skill workers all did a runner.
- Guy loans garden tools from neighbour – forgets to bring them back – half a year later still not brought back – neighbour doesn’t ask for it – guy decides better not to bring them back to avoid “questions” – half a year later garden party and neighbour invited – neighbour recognises tools – outrage and eternal rows.
- New building is being decided upon – budget made based on lowest bidder, lowest cost of material and some extra undercutting of costs – alternatives rejected due too expensive (i.e. 25% more) – building started – framework ready and costs already at 110% – rest of building will cost additional 350% – decision to proceed “as we’re already that far” – end of story: drained buget for next 20 years – incredulous reactions from public (and it turns out during the hot summer there is even no airco included in this building).
Now if you really want to think out of the box, just look at the last example. Considering the guy with the 25% more expensive bid has actually done his homework, calculated at sharp but reasonable prices. He did not include a 1500 square meter glass wall at the south side which, apart from good looking, was also extremely expensive and impractical and required an extra bearing construction normally not needed for this building. Now start your brains …
… Indeed, when the project was at the stage where is was clear costs already exceeded original total cost the decision should have been made to abort, cut down or re-use what was already built, and then change to plan B. Total cost: 110% (framework only) + 125% (plan B building) + 50% (cost to break down plan A base) = 285%. Compared to 110% (framework) + 350% (“finishing”) =460% actual cost this is a gain of 185%.
It’s being afraid of the short pain, the lack of logical thought and lack of understanding of basic principles that causes these kind of short circuit thinking and corresponding disasters (large or small).
This hurts, especially when sometimes you do see they get it, like in the example where for roadwork and some construction works, a part of the government now decided to use the system of early ready = extra pay, late ready = restricted pay for their bidding procedure. As a result we see some of these construction works speed up at an incredible pace. There is indeed then the cost to pay the bonus, but on the other hand the period of hinderance is limited. And if you consider for example the cost of traffic jams on the economy in gross, this means a total net saving of millions for our country.
Just let’s hope more grasp these concepts and apply them.
