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"Fads Gone Wild" with gullible CEO's jumping from one naked fad to the next in some lame attempt to prove that they are hip and youthful.

Bingo! Every so many years the Finance Boys (junior G-men from the VC firms, etc. that they stick on your board) get caught up in one of these fads and there is no stopping them. These are guys who don't know anything, but who think they do because they talk to a lot of other people (who also don't know anything, but who think they do because they talk to a lot of other people). As soon as the dumb idea acquires a buzzword like "outsourcing" or "downsizing," the wind starts blowing through the heads of these guys and that's the only noise they make until they've wrecked a couple hundred companies.

It's been almost two years now since this fellow I know was bragging about how he had hired Ph.D. mathematicians from the Russian Academy of Sciences to do his new product. He was getting these geniuses for $25,000 a year and they were doing a bang-up job. Like I say, it's been two years... and he still doesn't have his product. In a competitive industry, being late is as good as being dead.

Bogus accounting savings alert

But the delay is costing the agency about $1.4 million in maintenance and support costs for running its health benefits applications on a system hosted by another state agency, said Neitzel. That's money the Washington State Health Care Authority didn't expect to be paying.

The agency might be paying that, but it's in-house "funny money" that probably represents very little extra expense to the state or to the taxpayers. Odds are, when they finally do pull this benefits application off that other system, the other system will cost no less to run. It will just have idle capacity.

"It's been almost two years now since this fellow I know was bragging about how he had hired Ph.D. mathematicians from the Russian Academy of Sciences to do his new product. He was getting these geniuses for $25,000 a year and they were doing a bang-up job. Like I say, it's been two years... and he still doesn't have his product. In a competitive industry, being late is as good as being dead."

It's been my limited experience that "geniuses" are concerned about one thing: making their One Big Breakthrough. Mundane things such as delivering a quality product on time means little or even nothing to them, though your mileage may vary.

But the Market for solving some "unsolvable" math equation from the 14th Century isn't exactly attractive to most businessmen, to say the least. Oh sure, GO Team! We've got math geniuses now in our programming department. Yeah, but what's that really going to get you?? Are these math geniuses concerned about churning out copious quantities of high-quality, mundane code, or do they want to develop innovative algorithyms that you may not even *need* in your current design cycle?!

Sigh... I know, I'm preaching to the choir. You should see the looks that I get from executives. "You just keep delivering on time and on budget, and let us worry about our future direction."

And so I do. Why fight the tide of adopting fads as fast as you hear about them, when that's what your clients want to pay for, after all?!

Currency exchange rates?? "Don't tell about those, they've *always* been in our favor. Besides, what could change during the life cycle of a two year offshore development project?"

Oy Freakin' Vey.