“Hey, Jerry, YES you are…”
Dateline Carlsbad, CA: From the Thursday, May 29, 2008, edition of The Daily Journal serving San Mateo and greater environs, in the Business Briefs column, the following headline appeared: “Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang says his company is not “UNDER SIEGE“.
Hey, Jerry, which rock are you hiding under? Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is riding in on a black horse in black clothing wearing a black hat. Did you miss his dust cloud on the horizon? He is now the wolf on your doorstep and he is about to blow your house down. Ballmer, it is rumored, graduated from the Attila the Hun Graduate School of Management:and their fight song is rumored to be, “Rape, Pillage, and Burn: and Then Do It All Again!” And corporate raider capitalist bastard pig Carl Icahn ( yes, he has earned this reputation and the wording is, again, not mine but only being shared with you from another listener / caller to KGO Radio AM 810 in San Francisco ), rumor has it, has borrowed and then paid for, at full retail price, the Nazi uniform of Erwin Johannes Eugen “The Desert Fox” Rommel* of the Nazi North Afrika Tank Corps from the same wax museum where the wax statue of dictator ( that’s putting it politely ) Adolf Hitler had his wax head knocked off on the opening day of the museum ) along with a fully restored Tiger 1 Afrikacorps tank with which to batter down the door of your board room with you in the cross-hairs of the turrent-mounted 88 mm gun that was used against the Allies in the sands of the Sahara. ( * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel )
The article in the Daily Journal goes on to read in its first paragraph: “Yahoo! Inc. CEO Jerry Yang is rejecting the media’s characterization of his company as ( being ) “under siege“. Let us then, as highly intelligent, very creative, totally imaginative, and 100% sincere, and for some, individually divine project managers, study, in depth, the concept of “siege” (http://en.wikipedia org/wiki/Siege.
A siege is a military blockade of a city or fortress with the intent of conquering it by attrition ( wearing people down ) and / or assault ( destruction ). The term derives from the Latin word for “seat” or “sitting”. A siege occurs when an ( outside ) attacker encounters a city or fortress that cannot be easily taken by a frontal assault and the people inside refuse to surrender. Sieges involve surrounding the target and then 1) blockading the reinforcement of, or escape of, troops and / or civilians ( residents ), 2) block-ading the provision of supplies, and 3) typically is coupled with a) attempts to reduce the fortification ( destroy its walls and / or outer buildings ) by means of siege engines ( battering rams ), artillery bombardment ( catapults ), or b) by ( under- ) mining the walls or tunneling into the center, or c) by the use of deception or treachery to bypass defenses ( the Trojan Horse used in the siege and then burning of Troy = http://www.stanford.edu/ ~plomio/history.html ). Failing a military outcome, sieges can often be decided by starvation, thirst or disease, which can afflict both the attacker or the defender.
Well, Ballmer and Icahn are neither dumb nor stupid: at times. They are the Greeks, and when Yahoo! decided to go public just to get more money to grow, they became the Trojans. The Greeks won and Troy was burned to the ground. Cassandra was pulled from the statue of Athena and raped. See what happens when you go public? You get raped. Really, Jerry Yang should have stayed self-employed as a one man band.Now, on Thursday evening, July 17th, we all opened our Yahoo! front page to find that the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat, California ( yes, the best man for this job is a woman from California and the California delegation is, thank be to the God of your believing, mostly women ) calling the moron* and idiot** and war criminal*** in the White House a “TOTAL FAILURE: who has lost all credibility with the American people: and our friends ( and ex-friends ) overseas.” Again, the adjectives with asterisks are not my wording, but by now, you know who those adjectives belong to. You are intelligent: just tune your radios to AM 810 for KGO Radio’s 50,000 watts of broadcast power. The printed Yahoo! News article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080718/ap_on_go_pr_wh/pelosi_bush , and the video of her rebuttal interview to W’s accusations about Congress can be found at: http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=3906861&cl=8865209&ch=4226716&src=news
So, what is a project manager to do? Dearly beloved, “Let us pray, for we are gathered here today to mourn the loss of American innocence and genuineness and integrity.” And before we close up the grave of the past 8 years, let us throw in the daisies of Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s political TV ad that destroyed the candidacy of Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 ( now there was a mushroom cloud worth talking about! ). That stupid, fear-generating, reference to a “mushroom cloud above New York” was taken personally by all of the red-state, red-neck, beer-drinking, illiterate, under-educated, mis-informed, ill-informed, and un-informed NASCAR fans who throw beer bottles and coolers onto the race track every time Kyle Busch wins: God, they love to hate him. And what about those bikini-clad bimbo women of NASCAR? Photo-op sluts, if nothing else, and that’s putting it politely.
Dearly beloved, “Let us study: for project management is the carefully planned and organized effort to accomplish a specific (and usually) one-time effort, for example, the construction of a building or the managing and governing the State of California ( search under Arnold Schwarzenegger ), or managing and governing the non-United States of America* and its military and its agencies and / or programs ( the EPA, the FAA, the Dept. of Agriculture, the Dept. of Education, Medicare, Social Security, National Parks, FEMA ( see Hurricane Katrina = “Good job, Brownie!” )). * Sorry but the Civil War was not fought to free the slaves: the Civil War may have been fought to “preserve the Union”, but the Civil War was really fought because the South was about to raise the price of cotton by the ton or bale and the Northeastern cotton mills and garment factories were not going to stand for that for one minute: again, sorry to burst your grammar school bubble of deception from your American history textbooks, but really, as project managers, you should only read what is in the Library of Congress: go there sometime J )
The British know that we have gone stupid. Just listen to the BBC sometime. The French think that we have gone stupid but they are too busy drinking wine on the Left Bank to know it with the same certainty as the British and they ( the French ) toast us with their original and real French version of our Freedom Fries ( and in case you were wondering, Marie Antoinette never did say, “Let them eat cake.” That was Queen Theresa of Spain ( she took over the reigns of the realm from Isabella ( you remember her: she gave a nice Jewish boy, originally from Italy and now busy escaping The Inquisition, named Cristobal Colombo some money for three ships, three crews, three horses, three goats, three pigs, and a few cannonballs so that he could go “west” and fall off the edge of our flat Earth ). The Italians, who have had 46 changes of government since Benito Mussolini enjoyed swinging from the gallows with a noose around his neck ( no, he never did make the trains run on time ) just re-elected the previously disgraced Prime Minister Bertolini because he was LESS CORRUPT than the super-corrupt Pisano he replaced. The Italians get it: they dump the super-corrupt for the less corrupt.
So what is a project manager to do? Join me tomorrow, on Sunday, July 20th, for Blog # 5 ( the last one, thanks be to the God of your belief: please, no wooden or ivory idols ( remember? Abraham smashed all of those in Ur before he and the lovely Sarah, along with his brother Lot and his soon-to-be-salted-over wife ( see Sodom and Gomorrah )) fled to the Land of Canaan: ooooh!: their lucky day! ).
Blog # 5 will be your Land of Canaan. Guaranteed: or your money back! Love, Dave.
David M. Katz
National Sales and Business Development Director
Young Einsteins Enterprises!
Sole maker and distributor of the Perfect Number Line and Graph Maker plastic piece tool.
davemathtutor@yahoo.com
