When I was in corporate training at AT&T, I was taught the new standards coming down from all the way on top of the company's hierarchy and I noticed that on the floor, the management was reticent to adhere to the new standards. Corporate training made it clear to us neophyte computer programmers that we were supposed to carry the new standards and wage a war to have the new directives followed. But how was I supposed to fight all the people in place with their old fashioned ways of doing things and how was I, someone who had numerous job issues for the first year and a half of being on the job, supposed to tell my higher ups that they had to follow my lead and not vice-versa?
It seems to me that corporate training and the leadership of the company should have had a means of upward feedback to put in place the correct way to do things. In other words, it's a top-down matter of strategic management, feedback and control.
I've noticed that a lot of times, new theories come out and are the vanguard and cutting edge of new technologies in fields like, perhaps, medicine. But you have to get the new ideas past the old power structure that's in place before it can take root and be useful as an actually used idea in practice.
The universities are wrestling with this problem all the time as old tried and true ideas are constantly being reevaluated by newer ones that if proven correct will replace the old ideas as obsolete. The university world is a very progressive one; it's the “real world” that has most of the problems dealing with new ideas and procedures.
The corporate world stresses “tried an true” ideas. What about using a priori logic to come to some state of the art conclusions as to how to run their companies?
One of the problems that I had when I was at AT&T was that I got caught in between the new standards being dictated from the corporate leaders on down to the management in the company. First of all, we down graded a computer code called Job Card Language from JES3 to its predecessor JES2. I had a real problem with installing newer features of JES2 that came out because I had a very big learning curve and I wasn't totally functional for about 1 year and ½ which is about 3 times as long as most people need to adjust from training to the shop floor. So I wasn't so effective in using my knowledge for a while.
All of the above is the reason why AT&T downsized so many people. One superior I had said that they “had to go through some Lord High Mucky Muck [to get something done].” AT&T's President at the time, Robert Allen, said he did all the down sizings to enable the company to move easier without having to go through all those layers of management.
And a friend of mine told me “he couldn't get anything done because he had to go through his boss who was a manager. The manager couldn't in turn get anything done because she had to go through her boss the District Manager. The District Manager had to go through his boss the Division Manager and the Division Manager in turn as you guessed by now, had to go through his boss the Directorate Manager and that final manager couldn't do any thing. See what I mean here?
I had the same problem with my MSM degree. In the University world I learned the newest theories and in the real world I was so far ahead of my time that the Israeli's didn't know what the degree was all about. My father kept telling me to take my Master's degree to the headhunting firms and to let them handle it but the problem was that those kind of firms only deal with experienced workers and I think that is to their detriment. The so-called “real world” really should be open to the newer ideas and to people with newer types of education.
That's even one of the things that one of my dearest friends and mentors, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach of Blessed Memory, said on his recording, The Gift of Shabbos (“Sabbath”). He lamented, “The way we do everything is old. The way we keep the Sabbath is old, [etc]” The world needs to be open to new ideas and not just new fun devices like IPods and IPhones. That's why I go to a church and follow the New Testament's way of doing business these days. New, New, New, that's what the world needs constant innovation is the remedy the ills of the Old World.
