Management by-the-numbers: an eerily familiar ring

Previous post sent folks to NYT article, Report Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders.

Of the many... uh, questionable practices highligted in this article is the following:

"... In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”

This has a very familiar ring to it.

Back in the day, I was an Enron junkie. Here's a lengthy quotation from Kurt Eichenwald's Conspiracy of Fools:

"... Enron projected earnings per share of $1.80 for 2001. But the real delight was 2002 - $2.25 a share. Impressive. But how? There was nothing explaining what Enron was planning to do to achieve such stellar results.

During a negotiating session later that day, Tarpley decided to ask. He looked across the table at Dave Delainey.

"Dave," Tarpley said, "I'd really like to get a copy of Enron's business plan for 2002."

Couldn't happen Delainey said. "We don't have a business plan available," he said.

How then, Tarpley asked, did Enron get its 2002 projections if it didn't know what it was planning to do?

Delainey shrugged. "We just increased the prior year's results by 25 percent," he said simply.

Cool!

Again, just exactly what are they teaching folks at the Harvard Business School?

I think that body-counts are a ridiculous metric for success in war, but I've seen nothing to suggest that this metric was systematically falsified during the Viet Nam conflict (I could be wrong!).
... and the low numbers of "al Qaeda leaders killed" in both Iraq & Afghanistan suggest that body-counts of bad guys aren't being inflated in today's pointless wars.

BUT - you have to have something to measure... or at least, some numbers to report.
And if you can't honestly measure what you claim, making up the numbers is as good a way as any to fabricate progress!

More recent - unrelated - news reports a gigantic ($50Bn) Ponzi scheme engineered by brilliant Wall Street money-manager, Bernard Madoff.

[aside: "Word of the day" - desultory

des·ul·to·ry
1. Moving or jumping from one thing to another; disconnected
[The Free Dictionary Online]

Yes - this is a desultory post!]

All of which leads me to ask - Why not turn over management of Citi, GM, and the Pentagon to just regular folks?
Folks who have managed a household budget for 20+ years?
Folks who will ask silly questions like, "How?"?

The "best & the brightest" don't seem to be doing such a great job.

Stop the madness!