Optimizing The Whole

OK so this is my little two sense of what I got from this optimizing business. Let’s use a sports analogy shall we. Say I was trying to make a football team and I have 10 million dollars to buy players on to this team. So I have to first look at the team as parts of the whole. Ok so let’s see, a football team has an offence, defense, and special teams. All are vitally important to the success of the team. I can’t rationalize and say, “Well because the offence is the one who puts points on the board I will spend most of my money on them.” That would be called optimizing a part. When that happens you know in a game when the defense is on the field we will be demolished every time. So we have to look at all the parts as important and divvy the funds to the parts almost equally. If we don’t nearly equalize the funds then all is lost and so is the game. I say this as perhaps from the organizational group and we need to not only focus on our own parts but realize the importance of the other parts and collaborate to discuss to maximize the potential of each group. So let us all hold hands and think of the greater good.

The word is Miscommunication

Today, within our little organizational group, (talking about the Colombia case) we discussed the problem that occurred and looked at it from an Organizational perspective. In other words we tried to answer the question of how was the organization as a whole and parts contributed to the demise of the shuttle Colombia, R.I.P. See in my opinion majority of problems that occurs in most everyday to corporate level situations are due to a little thing which I like to call miscommunication. According to Webster, the definition of this word is, “failure to communicate clearly.” Well I thought of this definition as, Lite, to use a beer analogy. So I went to dictionary.com and found a definition most satisfactory to my liking, “Lack of clear or adequate communication.” That is exactly what our group thought about the so called “NASA organization” and what happened.
Now I’m a friendly guy and don’t particularly like to think of anybody as not being able to perform in their jobs at least at par level especially at NASA. Let me tell you it’s not easy to get into NASA. When I was in high school the opportunity to go check out what NASA does and everything associated with Astronomical something or another was present. Well they only take to crème de la crème of the kids so that left me out. This was just to go look and play around and stupid kids couldn’t even do that because they only wanted to elite. Anyway my point is NASA doesn’t just take any Joe of the street and have him work for them. So even to minions at the bottom, I think, hold some credibility. Well Big guys at the top didn’t think so. The info was all there but due to the guys who wear the pants in the organization that most vital information never reached the ears of those willing to hear which could have in turn saved some people’s lives.
Now in defense of the tyrants on top they do have, I would believe, the most pressure from the people who are funding this. I was in intro to Journalism for 2 days and the one of three things I learned was you have to please people behind the advertisements because they are the ones who are paying you for what you do. So in NASA’s case they have to please the government or there would be no NASA. So you can’t just take every little bad feeling that anyone who works for NASA has and investigate it thoroughly. That takes too much time and time is money. So they were probably making some executive decisions in foregoing the warnings. The demand of, “go to space and tell me what you see,” from the government was greater then, “warning problems with the o-ring.” So before we jump to judgment on how bad the top people were we have to try and see it from their point of view. And that is what I have to say about that.