Category: Corporate dumbassedness

Minister Prentice sends me an email

The Government of Canada has introduced Bill C-61, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act. The proposed legislation is a made-in-Canada approach that balances the needs of Canadian consumers and copyright owners, promoting culture, innovation and competition in the digital age.
What does Bill C-61 mean to Canadians?
Specifically, it includes measures that would:
expressly allow you to record TV shows for later viewing; copy legally purchased music onto other devices, such as MP3 players or cell phones; make back-up copies of legally purchased books, newspapers, videocassettes and photographs onto devices you own; and limit the “statutory damages” a court could award for all private use copyright infringements;

implement new rights and protections for copyright holders, tailored to the Internet, to encourage participation in the online economy, as well as stronger legal remedies to address Internet piracy;

clarify the roles and responsibilities of Internet Service Providers related to the copyright content flowing over their network facilities; and

provide photographers with the same rights as other creators.

What Bill C-61 does not do:
it would not empower border agents to seize your iPod or laptop at border crossings, contrary to recent public speculation

What this Bill is not:
it is not a mirror image of U.S. copyright laws. Our Bill is made-in-Canada with different exceptions for educators, consumers and others and brings us into line with more than 60 countries including Japan, France, Germany and Australia

Bill C-61 was introduced in the Commons on June 12, 2008 by Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Heritage Minister Josée Verner.
For more information, please visit the Copyright Reform Process website at www.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/crp-prda.nsf/en/home
Thank you for sharing your views on this important matter.

The Honourable Jim Prentice, P.C., Q.C., M.P.
Minister of Industry
The Honourable Josée Verner, P.C., M.P.
Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women
and Official Languages and Minister for
La Francophonie

Organizational anti-patterns

This is stolen, holus bolus, from a wikipedia article on Anti Patterns.

How many of these classic screwups characterize your organization?

  • Accidental ownership: Employee is given a system that was tangentially related to their system and left to poorly maintain it without proper training, growth or focus (common among phone->network administrators in the late 90’s)
  • Analysis paralysis: Devoting disproportionate effort to the analysis phase of a project
  • Captain in the engine room: The leader spends his time and attention on technical details, and nobody’s running the ship
  • Cash cow: A profitable legacy product that often leads to complacency about new products
  • Continuous obsolescence: Devoting disproportionate effort to porting a system to new environments
  • Cost migration: Transfer of project expenses to a vulnerable department or business partner
  • Crisis mode (a.k.a firefighting mode): Dealing with things only when they become a crisis, with the result that everything becomes a crisis
  • Design by committee: The result of having many contributors to a design, but no unifying vision
  • Escalation of commitment: Failing to revoke a decision when it proves wrong
  • Hero-mode: A policy of continuously relying on the heroic efforts of staff in order to meet impossible deadlines, whilst ignoring the long term cost of failing to build in software quality from the outset.
  • I told you so: When the ignored warning of an expert proves justified, and this becomes the focus of attention
  • Management by hope: Assuming that silence means everything is going well
  • Management by neglect: Too much delegation
  • Management by numbers: Paying excessive attention to quantitative management criteria, when these are non-essential or cost too much to acquire
  • Management by perkele: Authoritarian style of management with no tolerance for dissent
  • Management by wondering: Expecting a team to define their own objectives, and then wondering what they’re doing
  • Moral hazard: Insulating a decision-maker from the consequences of his or her decision.
  • Mushroom management: Keeping employees uninformed and misinformed (kept in the dark and fed manure)
  • Not invented here (a.k.a. N.I.H.): Ignoring an idea or implementation originated outside the organization
  • Polishing the polish: Giving a subordinate or team a finished project to work on, prohibiting them from doing anything else, and then complaining about their productivity
  • Scope creep (along with the closely related terms complexity trap and featuritis): Allowing the scope of a project to grow without proper control
  • Stovepipe: A structure that supports mostly up-down flow of data but inhibits cross organizational communication
  • Vendor lock-in: Making a system excessively dependent on an externally supplied component
  • Violin string organization: A highly tuned and trimmed organization with no flexibility