You are measuring the wrong thing: results

That thought would be much easier to disseminate if we didn't have 'business' getting in our Rosetta Stone way by selling computers and generating electricity and hosting websites and maintaining phone lines. If only I could have heard this thought via word-of-mouth while tilling the soil in a communal garden for fourteen hours a day because Business Has Succeeded in mechanizing a large fraction of agricultural labor so those of us who want to do other stuff can work full-time and spend only a fraction of the wealth we create on food and shelter. Why, again academics, scientist and businesses are measuring and analyzing the wrong thing, results.It occurs to me that this could just be a troll. If so, well done I guess: it's a masterfully accurate parody of a certain kind of woolly thinking to go from "You are measuring the wrong results" to "You are measuring the wrong thing: results." Again (for the last time, I hope), imagine the practical applications: you visit a grocery store, only to find the shelves bare. You accost a clerk: "What's the deal? I'm here to buy food, and there's no food to be had." "Ah," he explains sagely, "You were interested in the 'results' of the food industry. We are interested in Process and Community and Communication. The companies that would be supplying you with nasty consumer products containing dangerous calories are currently busy engaging in a Social Dialog with their Stakeholders, and will probably get around to producing food again when they have attained a more Holistic Discourse." There might be a way to usefully compare two businesses without focusing inordinately on 'results', but I'm not sure what that way would be. The above example is an exaggeration, but is there any point along the profit-seeking versus feverish-New-Age-wanking continuum that you would honestly want businesses to be on, except on the far profit-seeking end? Someone who wants a lot of conversation and relationships in their life doesn't have to work hard to get it; forty hours a week can fund an ascetic lifestyle with lots of savings to spare, and leaves a lot of time for other concerns. Of course, that wouldn't be the case but for the constant results-oriented, profit-seeking hardassery this guy condemns. The momentum of a train is based on speed and mass. The faster it moves with greater mass the harder it becomes to stop it and anything in its way simply gets run over.Is he trying to empathize with Rosetta Stone Software autistic readers, or was this actually supposed to be profound. In normal language, I think he's trying to say that big trends are harder to change than small trends, and also have bigger effects. I can't see why he added the train analogy, since the difference between the quote and my summary is that the quote also mentions trains. Let me try: "A mouse falling off a table has momentum. An elephant dropped from a helicopter has more. Which would you rather be under? Either way, I am profound as fuck." David's responseMr. Hobart is very much the “the frog put on to boil.” In both his posts on this topic he conflates license with freedom. There is nothing “fair” or “free” in today’s markets. Access to the “knowledge” in the market (as he notes in his examples) is privileged information Yes, you can take you broker to lunch, and you can have lunch with your competitors, and you can contribute to your preferred politicians, and you can take them to lunch too (oh, btw, there’s no free lunch either). Mr. Hobart’s long view of the market is the next tick in the prevailing market mechanism of choice (I suppose, in this case, that would be PMs). But there are longer views. Mr. Hobart’s predecessors, no doubt, hailed the wisdom of Pharaohs, Roman Emperors, and Regents that wisely, equitably, and justly influenced the distribution of resources over vast territories and polyglot populations for periods of Rosetta Stone English time much longer than that graced by market capitalism. From Astor to Zyuzin, the use of wealth has been dedicated to the accumulation of even greater wealth.