Conformity is the death of CI

My last article broke my personal record of the number of impressions or unique views because I used the clickbait heading Trump vs Biden. ?So, following this formula for success, I thought I'd name this one Harris vs Vance on CI, but then it is no longer relevant.

So instead, here is a different but still very political slant on competitive intelligence that suggests some highly regarded "experts" are not that intelligent. They actually believe there is only one side to everything.

Evidence for the statement about lower intelligence

NPR (National Public Radio in the US) ?vehemently denies being partisan and biased. Here are two recent examples (from Sat. 6/29 morning show) of how it is nonpartisan.

A Law School professor was interviewed on air and denounced the Supreme Court's recent order curtailing the arbitrary, unauthorized, and undemocratic power of regulatory agencies. ?His argument? Why can’t we trust the scientists and experts used by agencies like the FDA the way we trust plumbers or taxi drivers?

The answer, of course, is that if a plumber screws up, the company needs to fix the issue or can be taken to court. It’s way more difficult to take the EPA to small claim court. And we don’t trust taxi drivers (what is it, 1980 Manhattan??), we trust their Waze. And now that Google almost acquired Wiz (an Israeli cyber company, naturally), we can say, in Waze and Wiz we trust, but not in the good intentions of bureacrats. What can a business like a fisherman do if a oh-so-powerful regulatory body destroys its livelihood without recourse – the case on which the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the fisherman- in the name of the almighty fig leaf of “to protect the public”?

The absurdity of this Law professor’s claim is multiplied in light of the emerging evidence of the arbitrary, nonscientific, undemocratic actions during Covid by regulatory Tzars. It requires a special case of academics to justify the “science” behind many of the CDC, FDA, and NIH policy decisions.

Yes, you guessed it: the guy was from Harvard Law School. Enough said? How low our once prestigious institutions have sunk when they can’t even pretend to understand the pros and cons of some actions, and unintended consequences, and a balanced approach to "government always knows better"?

Did the Notorious Political Radio (a.k.a NPR) bring out a counter perspective from say a more objective law professor? What do you think?

Economics for the Third World, Courtesy of UMass

The next item featured an associate professor of economics from U Mass at Amherst (yes, you can already guess her political preference). The issue was the persistently high prices faced by consumers even as NPR claimed, inflation is slowing down. NPR apparently doesn’t understand the difference between inflation (rise in prices from T-1 to T period) and the level of prices at T.

The U Mass scholar blamed corporate greed for the high prices, saying due to shortages high up in the supply chain (energy, shipping, commodities prices) during Covid, companies found it possible to raise prices to keep their profits. Naturally, she never mentioned the only reason companies find it possible to charge high prices is because consumers found it possible to pay, and consumers are willing to pay because the Fed and the Treasury flooded the market with money and zero interest rates for years. Now that this party is over, the Left wakes up with the mantra of “corporate greed.” How original.

OK, maybe it’s too hard to understand how markets determine prices and how government can distort the process. After all, the scholar on NPR was only an Associate Professor at U Mass. But then she recommended strategic price controls, especially for basic food items. She argued there is hunger in America and called for building strategic reserves to feed the US and even better, the whole world. And then she turned her anger at the supermarket industry being “concentrated” and argued the chains can be made to lower prices.

Never mind that the whole argument is as frivolous as a third-grader’s essay on where money comes from (trees). Factually, there is no hunger in America unless one means kids in school where Michelle Obama’s diet took hold, and supermarket prices are way lower than smaller stores in Europe, and all in all their margins are about 2%. So be it, data and logic are hard to come by in Mass. As Mel Gibson says in the movie Dark Edge (now streaming on Prime), everything is illegal in Mass. But the lesson of history about price controls is so clear, so well known, so uncontroversial, it takes a tenured Marxist to appear so blasé about facts on No Proof Required radio.

And do you think NPR interviewed a counter perspective who actually understands economics? ?What do you think?

We all hear incessantly about the risks to democracy. The biggest in my perspective, is mass media reflecting only one side (the governing regime’s ideology.) It used to be Pravada in the Soviet Union and it’s Xinhua News Agency in China, and it’s the majority of broadcast/news outlets in the US these days. Liberals who think this is good are not truly liberals.

And of course, there is Tik Tok but that’s a whole different level of stupid.

Don’t underestimate the power of brainwashing on underdeveloped minds. When we lose the ability to think critically, when we conform blindly, we lose the ability to make informed decisions.

If we lose critical thinking, we lose the ability to make informed decisions

The CI Imperative

That mantra-- if we lose critical thinking we can’t make informed decisions-- should be pasted on the cubicle wall of each and every CI professional who respects the job. Some of the worst business failures in history resulted from management refusing to listen to diverse perspectives, enforcing a culture of conformity to a one-sided “vision”, and ignoring the reality check that there are other players with different assumptions with which one should reckon. Boeing is just the latest victim.

It can take decades to bring down once a great company by enforcing a conformity culture, weeding out dissenting voices, and incentivizing just one perspective. But eventually, even the mightiest fall.

Is your company strong on conformity?

?

Alternative perspective

It’s hard to believe NPR is still funded in part by public money. It’s hard to believe intelligent people think a one-sided perspective is “reliable information’ (NPR’s ridiculous claim). Is critical thinking a lost art in our world?

If you care about critical thinking skills, join me in October/November. You can still vote any way you want, but we give you skills to keep your job regardless of the regime…https://academyci.com/registration/

?