The Travails of Micromanagement

{Excerpt} Micromanagement is mismanagement. What is it that one should decide in the higher echelons of an organization that, given the same data and information, personnel in the lower echelons might not run just as well? Inevitably perhaps given their subject’s compass, publications on management often make recommendations to enrich the discipline and enhance its practice. (Continuing advances ininformation technology and psychology—that, respectively, enable and accelerate globalization and draw from both social neuroscience and databases on billions of individuals’ decisions—will surely broaden the vista.) Startlingly, however, few articles (even less tomes) ever mention micromanagement as an endemic corporate sickness we ought to cure. Our bodies are, to a large degree, a reflectionof our lives: their physical disorders point to what we should look at, for instance, toxic lifestyles (and their workplaces) to which we may be addicted. But could it be that we learn to love our diseases? Do the belief systems and associated (sub)conscious patterns we fashion shape in turn our lives to such an extent that we eschew common sense and come to need what ails us

Dilbert-Peter Model of Organization Effectiveness: Computer Simulations

We describe a computer model of general effectiveness of a hierarchical organization depending on two main aspects: effects of promotion to managerial levels and efforts to self-promote of individual employees, reducing their actual productivity. The combination of judgment by appearance in the promotion to higher levels of hierarchy and the Peter Principle (which states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence) results in fast declines in effectiveness of the organization. The model uses a few synthetic parameters aimed at reproduction of realistic conditions in typical multilayer organizations. It is shown that improving organization resiliency to self-promotion and continuity of individual productiveness after a promotion can greatly improve the overall organization effectiveness.Organization Productivity, Peter Principle, Agent Based Modeling

The Lazy Bureaucrat Scheduling Problem

We introduce a new class of scheduling problems in which the optimization is performed by the worker (single ``machine'') who performs the tasks. A typical worker's objective is to minimize the amount of work he does (he is ``lazy''), or more generally, to schedule as inefficiently (in some sense) as possible. The worker is subject to the constraint that he must be busy when there is work that he can do; we make this notion precise both in the preemptive and nonpreemptive settings. The resulting class of ``perverse'' scheduling problems, which we denote ``Lazy Bureaucrat Problems,'' gives rise to a rich set of new questions that explore the distinction between maximization and minimization in computing optimal schedules.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures, Latex. To appear, Information and Computatio

Spartan Daily, November 7, 2003

Volume 121, Issue 50https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9916/thumbnail.jp

Information Outlook, May 2007

Volume 11, Issue 5https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2007/1004/thumbnail.jp

Conversational Agents, Humorous Act Construction, and Social Intelligence

Humans use humour to ease communication problems in human-human interaction and \ud in a similar way humour can be used to solve communication problems that arise\ud with human-computer interaction. We discuss the role of embodied conversational\ud agents in human-computer interaction and we have observations on the generation\ud of humorous acts and on the appropriateness of displaying them by embodied\ud conversational agents in order to smoothen, when necessary, their interactions\ud with a human partner. The humorous acts we consider are generated spontaneously.\ud They are the product of an appraisal of the conversational situation and the\ud possibility to generate a humorous act from the elements that make up this\ud conversational situation, in particular the interaction history of the\ud conversational partners

Treasures in jokes and cartoons: You really must be joking!

Humour has been practically neglected in the teaching of English in Malaysia and Asia as well, perhaps due to the conservative nature of its people. Yet, we go through cartoons in the dailies, enjoy jokes over the radio and try by all means not to miss humorous sitcoms like Friends or Seinfield. Mr Bean is a hit though he hardly speaks a word. Humour, undeniably is a health provider. It is also a relationship builder. However, much more can be gleamed from jokes and cartoons, especially for educational purposes. Jokes and cartoons are not simply written. A review of many cartoons and jokes in the dailies and books has shown that there are hardly any flaws in the words and phrases used in them. However, some are culturally biased, thus making comprehension difficult. In this paper I have highlighted some of the rich treasures or resources found in cartoons and jokes, especially that of the words, sounds, colours and have suggested ways they can help the English language teachers in the classroom

Additions to the Staphylinidae (Coleoptera) of the Cayman Islands

In 1947, 20 species of Staphylinidae were reported from the Cayman Islands as a result of an Oxford University expedition there in 1938 which made extensive use of a light trap. The list is here expanded to 62 spe­cies based on collections by R. R. Askew, G. E. Ball, E. A. Dilbert, B. K. Dozier, E. J. Gerberg, P. J. Fitzgerald, M. C. Thomas, and R. H. Turnbow since 1970, all of whom also used light traps except for a collection or two by flight intercept trap