COB-60: board meetings

A corporation’s esprit de corps depends on having frequent, long meetings.  Despite the grave dangers currently confronting economies across the world, some irresponsible bloggers are urging the reinvention of the bored meeting.  That’s a waste of time.  The bored meeting has already been invented.  Why invent it again?

Venture Capitalist Brad Feld richly displays the extent of faulty reasoning and missed appreciation.  Feld writes:

I hate board meetings.  I probably have 100 per year which means I’ve gone to well over 1,500 of the past 15 years (I’m sure the number is much higher). The vast majority are excruciatingly inefficient – three to four hours that could be handled in 45 minutes.  And even then, it’s unclear that the information covered was particularly useful to the entrepreneurs and management, who are the ones the board meetings should be useful for in the first place.  And they don’t merely waste three hours – they burn a day in advance “getting ready” and who knows how much time after following up on random things generated by me and my fellow board members.  Toss in travel (since we invest all over the country, I lose a lot of time to traveling) and it just sucks.

If a three-to-four-hour meeting could be handled in 45 minutes, then the reports presented at the meeting lack quality and importance.  Management should be advised to hire additional staffers to prepare better cover sheets.  Ensuring that board meetings are interesting requires good bureaucratic leadership, a proper organizational structure, and leadership commitment to full participation in the meeting.

prepare for a board meeting

In another bureaucratic issue this month, Scott Adams, who has probably done more than anyone to increase appreciation for bureaucracy, has sadly failed to follow best bureaucratic practice for resolving conflict between himself and a horde of crazed Internet critics.  One honored bureaucratic procedure is a mediation meeting.  That probably wouldn’t be possible in this situation.  Hence Adams should have appointed a commission to write a report analyzing the problem and recommending steps to move forward to formulating a plan to establish an organization to address the problem.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats. Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here. Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.

book ownership in England c. 1700

From 1675 to 1725, only about 20% of middle-rank English households reported books other than Bibles in probate inventories.  Bibles were listed in only 5% of inventories.  Middle-rank households means households with statuses ranging from lesser gentry down to lesser yeomen.  Less than a quarter of these households apparently owned significantly valued books c. 1700.

Picture ownership was similar to book ownership.  Cooking pots, in contrast, were reported in about 70% of probate inventories.

Lower book prices, greater literary, and more leisure time explain the much greater personal interest in books compared to three centuries ago.  What determines demand for owning books and how that demand relates to e-books held in the clouds is much less clear.

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Statistics: Book and picture ownership in English probate inventories, 1675-1725 (Excel version)

Data source: Lorna Weatherill.  Consumer behaviour and material culture in Britain, 1660-1760, 2nd ed (London: Routledge, 1996).

Douglas loved Raggedy Ann

After the world-renowned Carnival of Bureaucrats included a picture of a wounded Raggedy Ann, the media has been filled with lurid accusations and fabricated stories.  To set the record straight: Douglas Galbi is not a functionary in any bureaucracy that wounded Raggedy Ann.  Douglas as a young child loved Raggedy Ann, and they were together for a number of years.  He would never do anything to hurt her, although her head did come off when she bashed one of his brothers with his help.  She has now completely recovered and is in smiling good health.

return to civility in media

In 1870, William Thompson started a newspaper, the Plaindealer, in Roseburg, Oregon (population about 900 persons).  The Plaindealer competed against Thomas and Henry Gale’s existing Roseburg newspaper, the Ensign.

The competing newspapers competed in part by attacking in each other in print:

Thompson made much of the fact that [the Gales] had law offices. “To own a newspaper is as convenient to a defeated and wrathy lawyer as a kennel is to a whipped dog — he can rush into it and howl,” he wrote on Aug. 12, 1870.

The Ensign attacked a “lengthy but flimsy article” in the other paper doling out “a pack of nonsense and maudlin sophistry.” The Plaindealer said the proprietor of the Ensign had indulged in “a bare faced falsehood, and the alligator knew it — scaly, Alligator, scaly.”

The Ensign made reference to “the ‘ripe scholar and gallant gentleman,’ who stands — when sober enough to stand at all — behind the Plaindealer chair….” … The Gales suggested that the Plaindealer “get somebody with brains enough to incorporate at least one idea in each article, to write up the thing,” and told their rival: “You are a sardine among codfish.”

The competing newspaper proprietors eventually attacked each other in person.  In a fight on the street near the Roseburg post office, Henry Gale shot Thompson about four times and nearly killed him.  Thompson shot Thomas Gale in the chest and severely beat Henry Gale with his emptied gun.

Three months later the Ensign‘s printing house burned in a suspicious fire.  The Ensign‘s newspaper business never recovered from its proprietor’s wounds and the fire.

About four months after the Ensign‘s printing house burned, Thompson sold the Plaindealer and left town.  Soon thereafter, the Paindealer‘s successor, now the only newspaper in town, switched its partisan affiliation.

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The source for the above story is David Loftus‘s wonderful article, “Papers’ feuding editors settled dispute with gunfire.”  The above quote is from that source.