Taking bets on the John Lewis Sweepstake

[DownwardSpiral]

10 minutes ago, spygirl said:

They opened a Waitrose in Barry?!? That's Barry, Wales?

They did indeed. The Waitrose in Cowbridge made sense to me - Cadoxton, Barry, South Wales did not. Two Waitrose stores in Vale of Glam was unsustainable. They jumped in to old supermarket premises and Waitrose is mostly about the brand.

[spygirl]

7 minutes ago, dgul said:

But but they've all got MBAs.

IME it tends to be something like a diploma from the chartered institute of management, whatever that is ... cough... pay for debt cough.

Or chartered surveyors, which is another word for moron.

[Frank Hovis]

19 hours ago, spygirl said:

IME it tends to be something like a diploma from the chartered institute of management, whatever that is ... cough... pay for debt cough.

Or chartered surveyors, which is another word for moron.

An MBA is the true stamp of an idiot IME.

When I have encountered them I find them all common sense ideas of how to manage people have been surgically removed from their heads to be substituted with a grid of KPIs and an annual plan to improve each by a target figure each year.

Whether the original KPI measurement reveals a superb operating environment or something dire is something that their tiny minds are unable to assess.  Measure and improve, measure and improve.  Which means that rubbish performance is tolerated for decades, as long as it was totally on the floor in the first place, whereas somebody already working at peak efficiency then gets put under ludicrous strain to improve what is already peak performance.

The A1 best example of this type of lobotomised thinking happened to the husband of a friend at their annual appraisal.  The supervisor, presumably fully MBAed up, had structured all appraisals as stepping through a listing of relevant KPIs and saying "improve that", "improve that".  In his tiny mind this was an actual appraisal.

One of the targets was unclear so when asked to change the RAG rating (another mark of the monobrow; particularly if smiley faces are superimposed thereon) from amber to green this chap quite reasonably asked whether that meant they wanted more of this or less of it.

And needless to say the half-witted MBAer didn't actually know. 

[Inigo]

I started an MBA under the foolish misapprehension that it might help me run my business.  Only completed one year as out was clearly pointless and got a postgraduate certificate of management.  Used the open university which at least meant that I didn't have to meet any of the insufferable twats in real life.

An apposite ad that my wife found at the time was for tnt's new shipping software and how easy it was to use.  Middle aged woman showing the ropes to shiny suited intern, says the software is very intuitive and easy to use.  Intern says " Well, I do have an MBA", woman pauses, then says "I'll show you."