new organizational discovery

Take a child and two parents to a park that has a lake and a party going on. Is the child going to be more likely to drown if two parents show up with the child or if only one parent shows up with the child?

Care to expand on that pearl of wisdom, John?

if you mail 20 people about a problem they will all assume someone else will take care of it

This is new??? Art

Right. One of our boxes failed and took down a very big system with a lot of visibility. About 15 people and managers are copied on the "escalation." My experience with these people is that nobody will do anything (which is, specifically, to get our boxes some cooling.)

Maybe they will assign a Tiger Team, which is a slower way to do nothing.

It's why, supposedly, in an emergency it's more effective to point at someone and say "Hey you, call 911 on your cell phone!" than shout "Would someone please call 911?!"

I think it works double, by reducing pressure and felt responsibility to do it right

if you are told to do something, all you can do is the best you can if that isn't enough someone else made a bad choice

if you volunteer and fail, it was you that failed thinking you could do it

I'm a big believer in fans.

In conjunction with vents. I've seen fan-heavy cooling without any provision for pulling outside air through the box...

These are small book-sized boxes (smaller than your book!) and they mounted six of them in a very tight 3x2 array. The two inner ones bake.

This, in fact.

That's a 12-bit 250 MHz ADC in the middle. Things get a tad warm.

I'm watching (from a distance) some people do that right now with an acoustic enclosure for a CNC machine. I've mentioned the potential problem, and they've declined to do any guesstimates of heat generation and thermal conductivity.

this remind me: "too many cooks spoil the broth" delo

"John Larkin" ha scritto nel messaggio news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Not exactly. Too many cooks spoiling the broth is a whole lot of people doing different things to the same broth which aren't entirely compatible.

Copying too many people with an e-mail message runs the risk that not even one of them will tackle the problem.

If you ring every last one of them, each one is likely to tell you whether or not they (or somebody who works for them) is going to do something about the problem. Requesting a response to an e-mail ought to have the same effect, but doesn't.

It is to me. Maybe I'm slow about wetware.

So you're a fan, of fans? ;-)

That's what they taught us in the USAF way back when, in emergency drills . The first person on the scene, regardless of rank, assesses the immediate situation and goes hands-on with the worst-injured as needed and points at three (3) people and says "You, you, and you go get help". The idea was to defeat the natural "Let George do it" tendency most people have rather tha n assign responsibility, specifically.

Businesses could benefit from a strong dose of "less talk, more do".

But then, way back when, businesses were run by people with military expe rience, not MBAs.

Mark L. Fergerson

It's a corollary to 'the more people in the meeting, the less likely any progress will be made.' Art

But this one is a big deal, very visible, highly escalated. Many managers are involved, so there's no management.

That goes along with the observation that most inventions are inspired by whacko amateurs, and not by the scientific establishment.

The more people invited to a meeting, the less important the meeting.