Bureaucratic Homeopathy

[One Skunk Todd]

I have decided that the process of distilling information for successively higher layers of management should be called bureaucratic homeopathy.

I'm supporting a series of meetings of grant reviews whose end product is apparently going to be a fairly brief PowerPoint presentation with, as far as I can tell, practically no discernable value or content.

[korjik]

Sounds good to me :)

[peter eldergill]

That gave me quite a chuckle..thanks!

Pete

[Swift]

ROFL :lol::clap:
Our parent corporation must be the king of Bureaucratic Homeopathy. We'll have these visits from some bigwig from the corporate office, visiting the little people in the provinces as it were. Invariably we'll have to put on some big dog and pony show about what we're working on (I'm in R&D) that they obviously couldn't care less about. As Tom Lehrer said (in particular about Gilbert & Sullivan), "full of words, and music, and signifiying... Nothing"

[Larry Jacks]

Perhaps the Lieutenant’s Axiom applies to your organization as it did in the military:

"Rank times IQ equals a constant."

The higher the rank of a briefing's audience, the more dumbed down the briefing had to be.

[darkhunter]

There are times the big bosses don't need to know what goes on--it would just upset them.

[Torsten]

Your mention of "a fairly brief powerpoint presentation" reminded me of The Gettysburg Address (http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld006.htm) in powerpoint.

[Swift]

Your mention of "a fairly brief powerpoint presentation" reminded me of The Gettysburg Address (http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld006.htm) in powerpoint.
:lol:

[NEOWatcher]

...Invariably we'll have to put on some big dog and pony show about what we're working on (I'm in R&D) that they obviously couldn't care less about...
Example:
In the age of the 386, we were working on automating some CAD processes (construction industry). We demonstrated it to the bigwigs only because they happened to visit us. My boss had explained how we cut down a particular process from 5 minutes down to mere seconds. The VP said "So; that's just time he would spend taking a leak anyway". :wall:

And these are the same guys that were putting effort into another division trying to use CAD to design the perfect hole alignment on a baseball cover so the cheap outsourced labor could sew them better.

It seems to me that leather stretches and buildings don't. :think:

[tdvance]

I seem to remember a relevant "Dilbert"--Dilbert had to explain to the CEO why a project had to be funded, but he couldn't talk technical or the CEO wouldn't understand, and there wasn't enough time in the briefing to explain things properly, so he did a presentation in which, I forgot exactly, flying monkeys or something? would destroy the company if they didn't fund the project.

[One Skunk Todd]

I seem to remember a relevant "Dilbert"--Dilbert had to explain to the CEO why a project had to be funded, but he couldn't talk technical or the CEO wouldn't understand, and there wasn't enough time in the briefing to explain things properly, so he did a presentation in which, I forgot exactly, flying monkeys or something? would destroy the company if they didn't fund the project.

I don't remember that one, but there was one where a comprehensive report/study gets reduced and reduced until it's finally three bullet points along the lines of:

Oxygen is good
I like cats
Competition is bad

and the competition one is too controversial so it has to be removed. That strip popped into my head right after I thought of the phrase. :)

[mike alexander]

One of my favorites was when they gave the boss an Etch-a-Sketch and he brought it to Dilbert saying the screen was corrrupted or something similar. Dil told him it had to be rebooted, then turned it upside down and shook it.

[tdvance]

One of my favorites was when they gave the boss an Etch-a-Sketch and he brought it to Dilbert saying the screen was corrrupted or something similar. Dil told him it had to be rebooted, then turned it upside down and shook it.

I remember that one--in the same vein (and we're topic-drifting here):

Wally puts a "Fax Machine" sign on the "ShredCo Paper Shredder" and watches while the PHB comes with a stack of documents to fax. At work, though, people jokingly refer to the all-in-one printer/copier/fax machines as "printer/copier/shredder" machines because of what paper jams in the document feeder do to people's originals.

[mike alexander]

It's not so much drifting as noting the difference between distillation and dilution.

[mugaliens]

Why make them brief? Why not bloat them and totally overcharge?

[tdvance]

There are people who expand talks, definitely. I've prepared plenty of talks where I had to get it approved by someone who said, "but you must mention this, this, this, this... too!", and next thing I know I have to do a two hour talk, while still being allotted one hour....