Corporate efficiency?

Olive is software to put facsimiles of the newspaper print editions on line.  By clicking on an article, a reader can see a more screen friendly copy of an article.  Both the Duluth News Tribune and the Star Tribune have Olive editions.  I subscribe to both, partly to get the comics rather than the text of some of the articles.

But for years the Olive edition has had a major flaw; a flaw that still exists in the current version rolled out last year.  I don't know where they get o• writing about people like Je•rey.

The Olive edition of the 2017-04-17 Duluth News Tribune converted a USA Today article about North Korea to:

"The secretive state also showed o• a submarine-launched missile that it successfully fired last year.
"Analysts said that the weapons on display raised new questions about North Korea’s capacities going forward. Je•rey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, Calif., called the show 'a bewildering array of new missile-related hardware.'"

I did change the quote marks to match the standard for quoting material that includes quotes.

Given all the product recalls, the unfriendly skies of the airlines, and much more, I would say the only efficiency in far too many corporations is move as much revenue as possible to the CEOs and board members.  Gosh, I wish I could get $250,000 or more for showing up for six board meetings a year.  And many of these people, including the CEO's are on the boards of several companies.

More on corporate bureaucracies

I don't write these little nasties because I think all large corporations are bad.  I write them because there are too many commentators who think all government is bad and all private enterprise is efficient.

Sorry, folks there are also efficient governments and inefficient corporations.  The determinant is not the organizational type, but management.  There are plenty of good managers in both government and corporations, and there are plenty of bad managers in both government and corporations.

Anybody who thinks otherwise doesn't read "Dilbert".  Scott Adams bases his characters on real-life people in his various corporate jobs.  See http://www.dilbert.com/about/.  I couldn't find it on his website, but I understand that he gets many contributions from readers about crazy situations that they have encountered.  I do know that I've seen Wally, the slacker, as a co-worker many times in large corporations.

Wow, that was a long introduction to a single minor observation.

I just paid my Verizon Wireless bill online.  At the top of the page is a weather report for Two Harbors MN.  I live in Duluth, a larger city about 25 minutes down the shore with quite different weather.  Several months ago I sent a comment to Verizon Wireless about this, and I received some waffling comment that really didn't bring about any change.