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About my home state of New York …

  1. Between 2001 and 2009, public school enrollment declined 4.6%, according State Education Department data. Yet more staff were hired, and the fastest growing category was non-teachers, up a staggering 26%. There’s room to trim without hurting children.
  2. According to the Reason Foundation’s annual report on state highway systems, New York ranks in the bottom five of all 50 states in the condition of its roads and bridges—despite spending $407,122 per mile on repair and maintenance, compared with the national average of $134,535. Reason called New York’s highway maintenance “extremely inefficient,” noting that work rules put too many employees at the same work site or on the same shovel. Those rules need to be changed.
  3. The average state employee earns a whopping $92,332 total compensation for an average workweek of 37.5 hours, according to the Empire Center for New York State Policy (based on figures from the state comptroller’s office).

2 Responses to “Fun Facts to Know and Tell”

  1. Harry says:

    I’m not sure the same segment of the management consulting business — operations and productivity — even exists today, but you have identified a need for it to arise once again.

    Our problem was always to find a client who wanted to increase the ratio of output over input, leading to making millions more every day, every year. Step two was to convince that person that we could implement that while making his organization better and vastly more successful. We did this, thousands of time over, delivering huge measurable results, and much more that was not measured.

    Generally, when we did the project, we figured we could improve productivity by at least twenty percent. We assumed everything was screwed up, which it often was. OK, not everything, but there was always enough: too many people, too much equipment, too much space, too much everything devoted to doing the wrong thing at the wrong time with too much energy and capital. This was not just manufacturing, but also engineering, sales, everywhere.

    But these were successful companies who could afford us.

    My company never did any business with the government, although our biggest competitor did. I never heard a single success story from any of their projects, although I do not mean to diminish what they might have done. But their relationship to their government clients had to be different from private business clients, because the client was not motivated by profit.

    You must have at least one student (better, three students named Manny, Moe, and Jack) who could put together an organization that would figure how to crack the trillion-dollar waste in government.

    Note I hesitated before I wrote “trillion” as opposed to “trillions”.

    I do know that the way to solve this problem is not to recommend, but to install, and the process has always to happen on the front line where the work, or in the case of the government, “work”, is done. It cannot be done from an armchair, and one’s client has to believe there is enough in the effort for him.

    Boy, I wish I had the Governor of New York as a client, where we could discuss the schedule of where I could deploy my people to save him millions here and there. My biggest problem would be how rapidly I could hire enough smart people. Come to think about it, that was always one of the biggest problems my old company had; the next one was to train them to walk into any area and think it is all screwed up.

    I cannot drive on any highway without counting the number of guys standing around and the number of guys doing anything, including the guy eating a sandwich. Who says America, or Europe, is not a land of opportunity?

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