Curt Doolittle

Theme: Incentives

  • WHY DO PEOPLE WANT TO EXIT THE CONSULTING BUSINESS? (OVERSING UPDATE) Everyone w

    WHY DO PEOPLE WANT TO EXIT THE CONSULTING BUSINESS?

    (OVERSING UPDATE)

    Everyone who builds a consulting company always seems to want to exit. There are a lot of reasons for this. First, it is a low capital investment industry that is easy to get into and exit even if exit is at low multiples (1-2x). So it attracts people who work overly hard, and get tired of it. Second, it is an extremely volatile business full of constant risk, because there is no way to entrench yourself in a customer other than relationships and knowledge of their business. It is very hard to raise rates. Skills are rapidly perishable and subject to swings. Employees are not sticky. Receivables very high, and credit on receivables difficult and constraining to your growth. And it is the first business to feel recessionary pressures. It is a very mercenary business. And that is because it is largely impossible to collect rents. (which I find fascinating really. it is an example of how all of us seek rents, because the constant productivity of consulting is like the constant productivity of hourly labor, except you’re working in a higher paid white collar capacity. So by inversion that means most of us seek employment where we can seek rents.)

    You start get enter the safety zone as you approach 500 people, and generally get somewhat safe after 1000, because even if you halve the business, you can halve the staff, and have the cash flow to rebuild.

    SOLVING THE PROBLEM

    The only way to solve the problems of the stressfulness of running a services business is BRAND, SCALE, PORTFOLIO, and PROCESS.

    Build a reputation for excellence that feeds you leads.

    Get large enough that you can tolerate volatility without causing doubt in the staff. (maintain your ‘other’ customer base of employees).

    Look at portfiolios of either customers or offerings or both, and plan two years out at least, if not three.

    Create a process of continuous training (education) for your employees.

    WHY CAN SOME PEOPLE NOT DO THIS?

    Because actively managing your business is pretty hard. And investing in your employees skills is not expensive, but it is a constant effort.

    ****So the best way to create process of continuous improvement is to treat the company as a university that does paying work for clients rather than unpaid homework for the professor.****

    And instead of relying upon the professor’s or management’s opinion for your grades, you rely upon the reviews of your peers and your customers.

    If you grasp this. That this is probably the business model for all businesses in the 21st century. That we have passed the era of lifetime careers. That we have passed the era of decade long careers. That instead we are in an era of continuous education of our staffs, and that we need processes to achieve that continuous training at lowest possible cost, then you will understand why we built oversing.

    ***BECAUSE ALL COMPANIES ARE TURNING INTO CONSULTING COMPANIES AND ALL LABOR INTO PROFESSIONAL WORK.***

    Whether we have made oversing powerful enough yet to achieve this is certainly debatable. But that we have made it powerful enough to do much of it is not.

    Oversing is a platform of the management of human capital in the 21st century.

    It’s a Social ERP for The constant Improvement of human beings.

    And the data we will give you about your organization after using Oversing will blow your mind.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-17 02:45:00 UTC

  • “Take comfort from the gasoline price. It indicates that the powerful aren’t rea

    “Take comfort from the gasoline price. It indicates that the powerful aren’t really what they believe they are. In the long run, decentralized markets always outpace and outwit the ability of elites to dictate and manipulate them. Every penny by which the price drops signals to the world: freedom can prevail even in a world in which the powerful are conspiring to destroy it.” – Jeffrey Tucker

    —“Once you reject the Hayekian insight of the spontaneous nature of the social order, everything looks like a consequence of deliberation and war. All social and economic effects have a powerful, volitional, intentional cause. It’s a fundamental error.” –Tucker

    Well the first statement is a psychologism.

    It is not necessary to reject spontaneous order.

    It is always possible for asymmetries – particularly state asymmetries – to distort that order.

    Ergo there is no incompatibility between the self organising market and asymmetric influence that distorts it.

    As such, as far as I know, the current price is a reflection of intentional distortion of the price through sale at below necessary return rate in order to achieve aforementioned ends.

    So the source of your error is the intentional use of the pretence of rule ethics outside of the discipline of rule of law, applying it to truth propositions.

    This is the source of Rothbards and mises errors, the source of Hoppe’s error of argumentation, and the source of kinsella’s error.

    That this is nothing but justificationary excuse making is logically obvious.

    That does not mean that a generation or two of useful idiots didn’t fall for it. They did.

    The reality of the current state of affairs is that your era’s gentlemen should stick to advocacy of Liberty and leave philosophy to those of us who practice social science.

    It seems that molyneux has learned and therefore move to advocacy after failing at philosophy.

    I defend you as a moral man. I know you well enough.

    But the difference between your eras use of justificationary rationalism and my eras use of ratio-scientific testimonialism is as great a difference as that between accounting and calculus.

    Better to learn from my work and ask questions than think ones self able to participate in philosophical discourse of this magnitude.

    “Curt how did you come to that conclusion?” is a great way to start. 😉

    Affections. Always.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-16 09:13:00 UTC

  • The Family Institution…

    [W]ithout the family we create great incentive for defectors, and we increase vastly the cost of individual housing, insurance, and sustenance and survival, That’s all. Marriage makes people wealthier by lowering costs, and creating a higher barrier to reproduction that prevents the underclasses from reproductive parasitism. So it is less important that our BEST breed a LOT, than it is for our worst not to breed even a little. IT IS LESS IMPORTANT FOR OUR BEST TO BREED A LOT THAN IT IS FOR OUR WORST NOT TO BREED EVEN A LITTLE

  • The Family Institution…

    [W]ithout the family we create great incentive for defectors, and we increase vastly the cost of individual housing, insurance, and sustenance and survival, That’s all. Marriage makes people wealthier by lowering costs, and creating a higher barrier to reproduction that prevents the underclasses from reproductive parasitism. So it is less important that our BEST breed a LOT, than it is for our worst not to breed even a little. IT IS LESS IMPORTANT FOR OUR BEST TO BREED A LOT THAN IT IS FOR OUR WORST NOT TO BREED EVEN A LITTLE

  • Without the family we create great incentive for defectors, and we increase vast

    Without the family we create great incentive for defectors, and we increase vastly the cost of individual housing, insurance, and sustenance and survival, That’s all.

    Marriage makes people wealthier by lowering costs, and creating a higher barrier to reproduction that prevents the underclasses from reproductive parasitism.

    So it is less important that our BEST breed a LOT, than it is for our worst not to breed even a little.

    IT IS LESS IMPORTANT FOR OUR BEST TO BREED A LOT THAN IT IS FOR OUR WORST NOT TO BREED EVEN A LITTLE

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-14 05:56:00 UTC

  • IP: WHY SHOULD AN AUTHOR HAVE THE RIGHT TO INCOME ON IDEAS AND OPINIONS? Well, I

    IP: WHY SHOULD AN AUTHOR HAVE THE RIGHT TO INCOME ON IDEAS AND OPINIONS?

    Well, I am not sure we should unless we want to subsidize the production of more ideas and opinions than can be produced without subsidy. And the evidence is that we produce far more ideas and opinions than the market will bear.

    Propertarianism says the opposite: that you may not sell those ideas and opinions without contributing a percentage of the income to the author. We call this the Creative Commons license. Which is that creative products cannot have commercial use without compensation, but have free use for non-commercial use.

    This strategy does not violate the test of productivity or parasitism.

    This would have an enormous impact on the publishing industry, all of which would be for the better.

    One of the reasons, if not the most important reason that we have sh_t art, literature and cinema, is that the creative subsidy of copyright protection shifts the quality downward.

    This is what I object to, and I consider immoral.

    I do not consider individual cases of ip protection (subsidy generation) necessarily bad if they are to produce goods that the market cannot afford to. In other words, I consider IP an effective method with which a market can conduct off-book research and development at low cost and risk. In fact, I cannot think of a better combination of incentives than the private sector taking all the risk and paying all the cost of failure, and only profiting if they succeed. This is a great set of incentives.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-14 04:33:00 UTC

  • JUST AS RELIGION MANUFACTURES IGNORANCE, SO DOES NAP Falsehoods create ignorance

    JUST AS RELIGION MANUFACTURES IGNORANCE, SO DOES NAP

    Falsehoods create ignorance. Some falsehoods create incentives tor maintain ignorance. This is the purpose of rothbardianism.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-13 07:58:00 UTC

  • ***Now, without protection all of their accumulated potential – what we call ass

    ***Now, without protection all of their accumulated potential – what we call assets – from the imposition of costs, what do people DO? Not what do we WISH they did – because that is fantasy – but what do people do? They retaliate. That’s what they do. If they can’t retaliate they constrain their risk. If their risk constraint is sufficient to inhibit their consumption, then they leave. If enough inability to retaliate occurs, and enough risk constraint occurs, and enough deprivation of consumption occurs, people leave systematically and stop coming systematically. You don’t choose the level of suppression necessary to form a stateless polity: THE MARKET FOR HUMAN COOPERATION DOES.***

    Not why this is complicated for a libertine to grasp. But the market determines membership in a exitable and enterable polity. As such people will choose what is in their interest to cooperate with, boycott what is not in their interest to cooperate with, and destroy what is in their interest to destroy.

    This is natural law.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-12 06:36:00 UTC

  • ***Under the advice of Keynesian economists, Americans have been turned into a n

    ***Under the advice of Keynesian economists, Americans have been turned into a nation of migrant workers.***

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-10 03:35:00 UTC

  • My experience is that most purchasing departments exist to cause vendors to fail

    My experience is that most purchasing departments exist to cause vendors to fail, engage in political positioning, and/or rent seeking. A good purchasing department functions like a lawyer who is too busy: they make sure you don’t hurt yourself. But a young lawyer trying to prove himself, or a purchasing agent trying to prove himself is something very different. They create problems by trying to create value. I was too naive about big business in my early life. The optimum behavior is to find out what makes the agent successful and give him what he wants even if it is bad for his business. I find this immoral. I want to give organizations what they need regardless of whether they understand it or not. This is most visible in the construction industry where the architects and primary contractors do not possess the knowledge to construct the building, only the suppliers do. But purchasing engages in all sorts of schemes to get reduced prices then trap vendors into bankruptcy by enforcing bids made without sufficient information. And while construction may be the most corrupt field in this regard outside of state dependent contractors, and then state employees – and their corruption the reason for the existence of most code and regulation – the same thing happens at CocaCola, Nabisco, Comcast, Dell, ATT, Intel, Microsoft (less so – they have management problems instead) and dozens more I could name (and not TMobile in my experience). Running a moral business takes more effort but it almost always ends up in your favor in the long term.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-01-09 03:43:00 UTC