The Real War on Fox

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

On Sat, 2009-10-31 at 21:10 +0100, Erik van den Muijzenberg wrote:
> REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
>
> Zeg Cees, wat is het verband met D66?
>
> On 31-okt-2009, at 19:00, Cees Binkhorst wrote:
>
> > REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
> >
> > Een van oorsprong conservatief, die zich afkeert van de
> > voorlichtingsmethodes van de conservatieven.
> > Zelfs zich zodanig er aan ergert, dat hij fors tegengas gaat geven.
> >
> > Groet / Cees
> >
> > http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-30/the-real-
> > war-on-fox/
> >
[restant weggelaten]

Om dit soort situaties te vermijden (m.a.w. probeer eens een andere
bril?):
There’s an old joke, so old that I don’t even know for certain where it
originated, that’s often used to explain why big corporations do things
the way they do. It involves some monkeys, a cage, a banana and a
fire hose.

You build a nice big room-sized cage, and in one end of it you put five
monkeys. In the other end you put the banana. Then you stand by with the
fire hose. Sooner or later one of the monkeys is going to go after the
banana, and when it does you turn on the fire hose and spray the other
monkeys with it. Replace the banana if needed, then repeat the process.
Monkeys are pretty smart, so they’ll figure this out pretty quickly: “If
anybody goes for the banana, the rest of us get the hose.” Soon they’ll
attack any member of their group who tries to go to the banana.

Once this happens, you take one monkey out of the cage and bring in a
new one. The new monkey will come in, try to make friends, then probably
go for the banana. And the other monkeys, knowing what this means, will
attack him to stop you from using the hose on them. Eventually the new
monkey will get the message, and will even start joining in on the
attack if somebody else goes for the banana. Once this happens, take
another of the original monkeys out of the cage and bring in another
new monkey.

After repeating this a few times, there will come a moment when none of
the monkeys in the cage have ever been sprayed by the fire hose; in
fact, they’ll never even have seen the hose. But they’ll attack any
monkey who goes to get the banana. If the monkeys could speak English,
and if you could ask them why they attack anyone who goes for the
banana, their answer would almost certainly be: “Well, I don’t really
know, but that’s how we’ve always done things around here.”

This is a startlingly good analogy for the way lots of corporations do
things: once a particular process is entrenched (and especially after a
couple rounds of employee turnover), there’s nobody left who remembers
why the company does things this way. There’s nobody who stops to think
about whether this is still a good way to do things, or whether it was
even a good idea way back at the beginning. The process continues
through nothing more than inertia, and anyone who suggests a change is
likely to end up viciously attacked by monkeys.

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