Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

LOL! No...just because people MAY sell crap, and it should NOT be considered morally good or bad, that doesn`t give YOU the moral obligation to do anything.

That`s my main point; it`s your own choice as to what you will consider quality, and if you`ll offer to sell what you consider to be low-quality products.

We`ll, I believe my posting days at SuN should come to an end, I finally got CraigL, our resident self proclaimed newly self discovered philospher to give me an "LOL".  

(Too bad text doesn`t convey tone very well.  I am amused and pleased.  Craig, since you seem to be the most well read, contributing member on SuN, maybe a LOL rating system would be in order, a humor rating as it were.  Or, given this thread and the off-the-wall contributions we all make from time to time, a BS rating?)

 

Actually, I haven`t gotten the highest accolade, a ROFL.  So I guess I`ll keep at it until then.

BTW, in your profile you indicated a stint in IT.  When I was doing consulting work for F-500 companies, I too made a couple of discoveries.  What I discovered was two things:

1) When companies started on the "Quality" campaigns in the early `80s, it seemed to me that the quality of work/product was inversely proportional to the number of "Quality" posters and "Quality" meetings being held.

2) That the BS in all the major corporations was only ankle deep.  Didn`t matter the industry, location, corporate environment.  It was only ankle deep.  The real issue was in how good a consultant one may be.  That determination was made by one`s ability to tell if one was in head first or feet first.  The BS always came up to one`s ankles. 

Thanks, Craig, keep the observations/critiques coming, just don`t forget the humorous side of philosophy.  : )

 

I`m going with the BS rating. :-) It`s easier to visualize, I think.

One of the very first rules I ever came up with, way the hell back when I was 18, was that "Whatever a company advertises as being their central value, that`s the single thing they definitely do NOT have anywhere in the company."

Back then, I wasn`t thinking about philosophy. I was just trying to compress life down into some basic rules-of-thumb I could use. It was mostly just a game, and a chance to play around with some of the humor and irony in life.

I too found that when a company goes on a mission to explain to all its employees that "quality" matters deeply, right along with customer service, it`s usually right before a cost-cutting campaign. They`re about to terminate all interest in quality, product, and CS. They`re about to lay off half the quality management and CS personnel.

Hypocrisy, contradiction, redundancy, and backward values are the hallmark of so many companies, it`s no wonder the cottage industry is growing so rapidly.

As for humor, I think the main reason academic philosophy has all but collapsed in modern times is because there`s so little humor involved. Most philosophy professors seem to have a problem laughing at themselves or the inanities of what they`re teaching. The real philosophers tend to be the comedians we see on TV. Unfortunately, because they`re comedians, most people don`t really spend much time thinking about their observations.