There’s a story I’ve heard about that which drives me nuts. It might be apocryphal, but it does sound believable.
When I was pursuing a degree in IT, I had to take a Business 101 class for reasons I never quite understood. The instructor launches into this story about a guy who goes to a big toothpaste company - Crest or Colgate probably, but the who of it doesn’t really matter.
This guy comes in with a pitch, he says that he’s got an idea that’s guaranteed to increase their revenue by 25% but he won’t share it with them unless he’s given an arbitrarily large sum of money. It must have been convincing because they agree to hear him out.
So they pay him out and he tells them the idea: make the nozzle on the toothpaste 25% larger.
My instructor asked what lesson we learned from the story. “You can make a bundle by helping corporations cheat their consumers,” was not marked as correct, but I maintain that’s the chief lesson.
I don’t see what other lesson the instructor was trying to teach. Maybe “Get a guarantee you’ll get paid before you help corporations cheat their customers”? The engineer who invented SMS learned that the hard way.
They’ve steadily been making the hole bigger too.
There’s a story I’ve heard about that which drives me nuts. It might be apocryphal, but it does sound believable.
When I was pursuing a degree in IT, I had to take a Business 101 class for reasons I never quite understood. The instructor launches into this story about a guy who goes to a big toothpaste company - Crest or Colgate probably, but the who of it doesn’t really matter.
This guy comes in with a pitch, he says that he’s got an idea that’s guaranteed to increase their revenue by 25% but he won’t share it with them unless he’s given an arbitrarily large sum of money. It must have been convincing because they agree to hear him out.
So they pay him out and he tells them the idea: make the nozzle on the toothpaste 25% larger.
My instructor asked what lesson we learned from the story. “You can make a bundle by helping corporations cheat their consumers,” was not marked as correct, but I maintain that’s the chief lesson.
I don’t see what other lesson the instructor was trying to teach. Maybe “Get a guarantee you’ll get paid before you help corporations cheat their customers”? The engineer who invented SMS learned that the hard way.