Mysteries
As we left the Angelika on Saturday, I blithely offered to make Ms NOLA a CD of the pieces that are played - a few of them over and over - in Jacques Audiard's De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté. It didn't cross my mind that I wouldn't have, somewhere, the Bach that Tom Seyr (Romain Duris) tries to master for an audition with his late mother's agent, as part of a larger attempt to save himself from following in his father's sordid footsteps. I remember that, whatever it was, it was "en mi mineur" - E minor. Ms NOLA remembers that it was a toccata. Most toccatas are written for organ, but Bach composed a clutch of them for keyboard, and BWV 914 is in E minor. It doesn't sound familiar. I ought to know what it was - I ought to have recognized it at once, just as I recognized the Debussy (Images I: "Des pas sur la neige") and the Brahms (Rhapsody, Op. 79 No. 2). But I didn't recognize it. I'm not sure that I'd ever heard it before seeing the film. I am making a note of this because no end of Googling and sampling at Tower has cleared up the mystery. Perhaps you can.
Here's another mystery: How will Hewlett-Packard be able to function with 14,500 fewer employees? How can there be so many "extra" workers? Was Compaq never fully digested by HP after the ill-advised 2002 acquisition? I can understand that it took the current president, Mark V Hurd, six months to decide on a plan for rescuing the struggling firm from the slide that was brought on by Carly Fiorina's hubris. And I read that a division of HP, the Customer Solutions Group, will be "dissolved." (Would that "solutions" would be dissolved!) But how can a company employ 150,000 people? How can it function? Well, at the moment, it can't, can it.
There is no way that a group of executives - the fifteen, say, or twenty people at the top - can collectively visualize the activities of so many people, and yet such visualization is all that they've got to go on when making operational decisions. Breaking important decisions down into smaller decisions, made by junior people, simply blurs the picture.
Where did I read of the manufacturing company that aims to keep the number of workers at each plant down to 150? This means lots of plants, but the approach pays off because everybody knows everybody else at any given site. (150 is supposed to be the greatest number of people, roughly, that a person can keep track of from day to day.)
Update: Mr Sun asks some pointed questions about the HP layoffs.
Comments
My guess is that you were reading about WL Gore.
Posted by: Anonymous | July 20, 2005 08:13 AM
Ahhhh. I have a new computer with side-by-side monitors and I am in heaven but I see that I need to re-enter my personal information. The hubster works for WL Gore and the small plants make a lot of sense. They have other problems with their innovative work culture but that's not one of them.
Posted by: Flather | July 20, 2005 08:20 AM
rj, re mfg and plant size, basically my factory experience at pfizer was overseas with 60-100 people. My german citric acid mentor emphasized You Gotta make eye contact and smile at EACH co worker every day, at least once. O.k. in egypt, turkey etc this was easy. With Lilly in U.K. five floors and almost 200 bodies, but diligently i made the rounds daily, good exercise. The most important thing i learned, nobody can bullshit you when you have looked at every square foot of the factory. With Revlon at tuckahoe, hundreds of people on nine floors, but old chuck stayed the course. Most of these people had never seen a Vice President let alone get a smile. You can guess productivity skyrocketed - the old adage, the best fertilizer is the eye of gardener is sooo true, ref HP and 150,000 the people at the top only know what the people one or two levels down ALLOW them to find out, next week i go to managua to help a Purdue alum who owns a little pharm plant, 60-70 people, twelve years ago during my first visit i reported something he jumped up, I DID NOT KNOW THAT, i reply, course not, you never get that fat ass out of the chair to walk around your plant. when he calmed down we became big buddies, this is the fun part of volunteering, do not worry about the accountants/lawyers, they cannot fire you. chuck
Posted by: chuck | July 20, 2005 12:16 PM