Asymmetrical Information

"Mr. Cayne referred to Ms. Albright as "unbelievably irritating."

Who knew?

My very thought!

Beyond that, I give credit to Komansky and the others who were paying attention for being willing to stick by their actions, regardless of my agreement or disagreement with those actions. How novel, to hear someone involved in a controversial decision take responsibility for that decision and not try to plead extenuation or point fingers.

C'mon now. I'm willing to accept that in the best “Wisdom of Crowds” sense the decisions reached by the board were better than the decisions that any of the individuals involved would have arrived at on their own. Of course, it doesn't say much about the individuals…

Im not buying the idea a bunch of stupid people working together will outperform one smart(and handsome) person. Every once in a while a bunch of blithering idiots get lucky and do something well. Sometimes its not luck, it's just shocking treachery and hatefulness, some method straight out of Roves political necromicron. It's much easier to believe a single fool can be put in a high place by evil, evil, rich people- see jr and the current rep party, then a group of admittedly stupid, at the very least not sophisticated or even clever people, of coming to the right decision of what to pay some CEO.

Hive behavior by insects is certainly interesting. I think the somewhat famous flatworm experiment is more interesting. Scientists "taught" a group of flatworms a maze, and recorded how long it took them to "learn" their way through. They then took that group of flatworms, ran them through a grinder, and fed those flatworms to another group of flatworms that never had been in the maze. The group of flatworms that ate their family learned the maze about 20 times faster then the original group or subsequent control groups. I hate to think what the world would come to if we thought it was valid to use this sort of insect biology and behavior in order to find a method to change human behavior.

So if you take everyone who's been in Congress more than 12 years and grind up all their brains together...

You get a heap of stuff you wouldn't want to feed to even a flatworm, but the next Congress is bound to be an improvement.

"Former New York State Comptroller Carl McCall, who brought Mr. Grasso's contract to fruition, was viewed by his colleagues as incompetent and, in the words of Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson, not 'financially sophisticated.'"

C'mon, he was Comptroller of the State of New York, for crying out loud.

After the briefest look at the state's finances and pension committments someone has to tell you he was incompetent and not financially sophisticated?

Fortunately for the citizenry he was just as incompetent at running his campaign for governor. In a state that is 3 to 2 Demcoratic, for a while there it looked like he was going to come in third.

But he's paid his dues so the Democrats will find a job for him -- put him on a commission drafting National Health Care reforms or some such.

From my own observation, which is, of course, totally unscientific, a group of smart people working together is quite often far less than the sum of its parts. The marginal contribution is never equal to one person.

I read somewhere that, disappointingly, the flatworm experiment has been debunked. Apparently the original experimenters did not clean the maze, and subsequent groups of flatworms were following trails left by their predecessors.

'in this case Madeleine Albright and Carl McCall'

Can there be any situation in which those two were involved that could ever have a successful outcome? Whenever I see her all I can think of is Margaret Dumont on the Three Stooges.

Former New York State Comptroller Carl McCall, who brought Mr. Grasso's contract to fruition, was viewed by his colleagues as incompetent and, in the words of Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson, not "financially sophisticated."

As far as I'm concerned, Grasso's compensation is between him and the NYSE, anyway. It strikes me as far more disturbing (and far more worthy of media attention) that someone so apparently incompetent was running the finances of New York than that he helped to overpay Grasso.

Jack --

Margaret Dumont often played the dowager with the Marx Bros., while it was Symona Boniface who filled that role with the Three Stooges.

AT--

That is certainly the way it is in most committees, where everyone else thinks someone else is taking care of the details, they have better things to do. But (usually voluntary) collaborations among people who know or can do different things that are all needed can accomplish wonders. Some of the best things I've accomplished were in small groups, where none of us could have done it ourselves.

As usual, Despair, Inc. has a demotivation poster that sums it up: http://www.despair.com/meetings.html

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