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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 1789353" data-attributes="member: 259">[Hijack]In the late nineties, I subcontracted for IBM writing a three-day course on Web marketing:  how to globalize and localize your Internet presence, the differences between opt-in and opt-out advertising, the various formats for Internet advertisements available at the time, the virtues and pitfalls of intrusive ads, etc. Per IBM's standards, the course was written in their equivalent of PowerPoint. For each slide, I had a relevant graphic and some stats; the notes for each slide were very extensive, usually half a page of crunchy stuff.  Students in the course would receive a notebook with all the graphics and notes. During the final revision to the course, a couple of new management-types reviewed what I'd done, and told me that there were too many notes:  they wanted me to slash most of the notes in the student copy, leaving them only in the teacher copy. I asked why, and they explained:  the department of IBM that was budgeting the course's development would then be "charging" other IBM departments to participate in the course.  If the student notebook contained all the information, then someone from another department could take the course, then go back to her department and teach it to everyone else.  In other words, the course was too useful in its current format, and they needed me to make it less useful, so that their department could maintain its budget. Ever since then, I've had no confidence whatsoever in the ability of large organizations to act rationally. I don't think that Fox tried to torpedo the show, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that, say, a mid-level executive was assigned to the show after she'd predicted doom and gloom for space-shows in some meeting, and that this executive torpedoed the show in order to make her prediction come true. Daniel</blockquote>

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