Occam's Razor

Just four VCs alone should guarantee gridlock

This is one of the funniest read on how to manage a board from a CEO perspective i have EVER read. Point 8 is of course my favorite...

1. Meet by phone whenever possible.  Most of them will be doing their email or goosing their admin or something and not paying any attention at all.  They’ll just vote when you ask’em to.
2. Never distribute anything in advance; they might read it and get themselves all confused.  Just present it all: gets you through most of the meeting.
3. Never number the pages of what you are presenting.  Lots of time can be used constructively figuring out what page everybody is on.  If you email the material (preferably just after the start of the meeting), send lots of separate files.  Turkeys’ll never know what to look at.  Bonus suggestion: send slightly different copies of files with different pagination to everyone; it’s a lotta work but it’s worth it.
4. Have your CFO present numbers, lots of numbers.  Make sure they get a chance to go over variances in the pencil budget.
5. If you have to meet in person – it is gonna happen sometime – use food.  Any discussion you don’t want input on should be right after lunch.  No one’s gonna be awake then.
6. Speaking of lunch, you can play this for lots of time.  Have your dumbest admin take orders off some huge takeout menu. Get what type of bread they want, dressing, meat, lettuce, all that. Then have a smart admin shuffle the list so NO order is right.  Wrong bread with wrong filling etc.  No veggies for vegetarians (they tend to be nitpickers anyway). Kills lots of time and helps make sure they meet on the phone next time.  BTW, they’ll pay no attention to anything between when lunch is ordered and when it comes so minimum of an hour.
7. Do bring up board comp and director’s liability insurance.  Sure to get their attention and won’t interfere with the real business of the company.
8. Have a nine person board with three insiders, four VCs and two people who don’t have a clue.  Just four VCs alone should guarantee gridlock.
9. Every meeting should run way over schedule.  You control the agenda: presentations up front; substance in the third overtime period.
10. If they’ve gotta discuss something, get’em down in the weeds.  Color of the office; words for the new ad campaign; what bank to deposit tax payments in.  That keeps everybody out of trouble.
11. If you’re public and their questions are going where you don’t want to go, tell them you’d be glad to answer but that’ll make them insiders for the next two years.  You can also tell by who squirms who was planning to sell.

Occam's Razor and Sand Hill Slave

Following a recent post on Occan's Razor and Dilbert, here is one on Occam's Razor and Sand Hill Slave...

Occam's Razor takes a swipe.

The Principle of Parsimony.

Occam's Razor states the following: When faced with two or more possible explanations for a situation, choose the simpler one.

I am sure M applied this...

Dilbert's shaving with Occam

A must-read dilbertian perspective (the comments above the post are also worth a quick browse...) on Occam principle..

For Skeptics, occam’s razor has become analogous to a religion. It has a sensible core concept but over time it has morphed into the irrational belief that “the simplest explanation is usually correct” in all sorts of contexts where it just isn’t true.

For example, if you were arguing that millions of people have been abducted by aliens, and you had several theories for why no physical evidence has ever been found, the skeptic would bring up occam’s razor. “The simplest explanation is that those people are lying and/or deluded.” The skeptic would be right in this case, but a lucky rabbit’s foot appears to work sometimes too. The problem is not that occam’s razor works; the problem is that it APPEARS to work in EVERY case, even for people with opposite theories.

I call this problem Adams’ razor, and it goes like this: “The explanation that you believe is correct will always seem simplest to you.”

A must-read dilbertian perspective (the comments above the post are also worth a quick browse...) on Occam principle..

For Skeptics, occam’s razor has become analogous to a religion. It has a sensible core concept but over time it has morphed into the irrational belief that “the simplest explanation is usually correct” in all sorts of contexts where it just isn’t true.

For example, if you were arguing that millions of people have been abducted by aliens, and you had several theories for why no physical evidence has ever been found, the skeptic would bring up occam’s razor. “The simplest explanation is that those people are lying and/or deluded.” The skeptic would be right in this case, but a lucky rabbit’s foot appears to work sometimes too. The problem is not that occam’s razor works; the problem is that it APPEARS to work in EVERY case, even for people with opposite theories.

I call this problem Adams’ razor, and it goes like this: “The explanation that you believe is correct will always seem simplest to you.”

Blog Fight Club

Good pearls of wisdom's from the cocomment guys:

Rule #1: The last word does not matter
Rule #2: Trust the readers
Rule #3: 99% of times, ignorance is the answer
Rule #4: Be aware than 10% of people make 90% of the noise
Rule #5: Don’t look for instant confirmation you won
Rule #6: Don’t let anger answer
Rule #7: Stick to the facts
Rule #8: Fight on your own turf
Rule #9: Fight the big guys. Only the big guys.
Rule #10: Irony = arrogance

I particularly like rule 4...

[Source B Giussani]

Darwin Award of the day

A trader at Mizuho Securities tried to sell 610,000 shares of a legitimate stock at ¥1 (less than a penny) each. The trader intended to enter an order for 1 share at ¥610,000. What's more, the number of shares in the order was 41 times the number of the company's outstanding shares. The Tokyo Stock Exchange duly processed the order and chaos ensued. By the end of the day, Mizuho Securities had lost at least ¥27 billion (about $225 million)…

[From FierceFinance]