The Danger of the Magic Bullet

I'm trying to learn whatever lessons I can from various bad situations I've seen over the years. I think one of the biggest problems is management that is looking for a "magic bullet" to solve all their problems. One more reorg, they figure, will make it all better and suddenly unleash the productivity locked in our organization. At one place, someone declared that the "next generation hosting architecture" will be Oracle RAC on Red Hat on Intel blades, never mind the mountains of information indicating the foolishness of its wholesale adoption (RAC works great for heavy read situations and for high availability, but does nothing to solve write-intensive scenarios). If we can just get rid of all the "expensive Sun" hardware, they figure, all their problems will go away. And so on. I see this as a failure by management to face their problems and put in the hard work necessary to resolve the real, immediate issues. I've had a bit of an epiphany in this regard: Technical solutions cannot substitute for missing or broken processes. In the process, they violate the wisdom of ages by throwing out the baby with the bathwater (so to speak).

I can respect the effort to do something to move the company forward (grow or die, as the business adage says), but things are out of hand when you have technically incompetent people making decisions, refusing to work with the technical folks, and even threatening them when they don't agree with their nonsense. They're using the goal of saving money to push their pet technologies, even when they don't fit. In the manufacturing world, they call this type of arrangement a forced fit.