When you\u2019re a student arguing with a professor about some topic in the field, there is always the presumption that you\u2019re wrong and the professor is right. While statistically, I would say the odds do favor that position, it seems dramatically unfair to the student at the time, especially if she is not inclined to grant the authority to the professor\u2019s position.<\/p>\n
While I generally had a terrific educational experience, undergraduate and graduate, and ungratefully took it all for granted until much later in life when I realized this was not <\/span>everyone\u2019s experience, there is still one area that sticks out just because it was unusual. The last time I remember arguing about this was probably my senior year of college. The professor repeated the same party line that we had been given throughout our business education \u2013 a good manager can manage anybody. You don\u2019t need to know the business to manage, you only need to know how to motivate people. The analogy we were given over and over was of a man driving a carriage in Central Park. He has never been the horse, he couldn\u2019t do the horse\u2019s job. That is not what matters. What matters is that he uses a carrot or stick to motivate the horse. He is oh so much smarter and more talented than the horse. The man does everything else \u2013 marketing, accounting, and, of course, is entitled to all the profits other than the minimal amount needed to sustain the horse.<\/p>\n Although I eventually learned the futility of arguing with my professors, I did not buy this argument then and I certainly don\u2019t buy it now.<\/em><\/p>\n It seems no coincidence to me that all of the software companies that continue to be successful these days \u2013 SAS, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Twitter \u2013 continue to be run by people who could debug a program, write design specifications, replace the memory in their computer and more \u2013 ON THEIR OWN. That is a really key phrase, not that they do those things all on their own any more, but when they ask someone to do it, they understand what they are asking. Over the years, I have had the good fortune to work with some managers who had vast knowledge of technology, software and\/or statistics. If I had a problem I could not solve, I could go to them and sometimes they had an answer. Even if not, they understood the question. I have also worked with people who put both replacing memory and writing an application in the same grey area of \u201ccomputers\u201d. \u00a0The nadir of these was a manager who would regularly come to our offices and plead with us to \u201cprogram faster\u201d. This just made me laugh, although more than one of my colleagues either took to profanity or drinking.<\/p>\n Tip for those who don\u2019t know \u2013 to replace the memory, you open up the computer, take out the old memory and put in the new one. To write an application you meet with people who will use it, get their input, design a prototype, run that by them, code the prototype, debug it and swear, show the results to the end user, make the changes they forgot to tell you about the first time, debug it and swear some more, show them the end result, walk around the building trying to come up with a way to do the seemingly impossible thing they want now, followed by another episode of coding, debugging and swearing. Eventually, you have your application where users do something and the computer runs a report, produces a graphic, throws up a web page or emails you a video of hula dancers.<\/p>\n I hate that line,<\/p>\n \u201cI may not know how to produce our product or service X,\u00a0 but I know people.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n What the hell does that MEAN exactly? That you can distinguish a person from say, a naked mole rate or a zebra dressed up in a person costume?<\/p>\n I can barely abide those senior managers who in a meeting try to show their personal knowledge of their employees by asking me about my family and how my daughter is doing training for her third Olympics. So far, I have resisted the temptation to respond,<\/p>\n \u201cShe is doing fine, but my other daughter had a relapse after her 47<\/em>th<\/em><\/sup> time in rehab and mowed down 14 people in Starbucks with a chain saw.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Yes, that is<\/em> mature of me.<\/p>\n I would be far more impressed if upper management person Y had an idea what Project X entails because if so it would be immediately obvious that at least 60% of the other people in the meeting added nothing, e.g., the project manager who has no task but to see that the meeting has an agenda and minutes that are emailed to upper management as proof that he\/she is doing something. At this point, upper manager Y could disperse the various extraneous people to do something useful and if they aren\u2019t capable of actually doing anything useful, get rid of them thus making the unit\/ company far more profitable.<\/p>\n So, no, I still don\u2019t agree with what I was taught in business school. I think people who know software inside and out are better at running a software company. People like me who live and breathe statistics, who can tell you how to do a mixed model in SAS, an ordered logit model in Stata and how to find odds ratios in SPSS are better at running a statistical consulting company. They are better at identifying, valuing and retaining the people who are the base of their company\u2019s profits because they are those people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When you\u2019re a student arguing with a professor about some topic in the field, there is always the presumption that you\u2019re wrong and the professor is right. While statistically, I would say the odds do favor that position, it seems dramatically unfair to the student at the time, especially if she is not inclined to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-de-mars-general-life-ramblings"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":414,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions\/414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}