TI2011 Spring 2020

--Originally published at Coder Bebop

Now it has begun unfolding: the real plot of this book, the real threat that the author wishes to show us, and it is *drumroll* politics. To be more precise, and to quote the book, pathological politics. And I find this interesting, because I have always seen politics as an attempt to organize all the resources in a country (or a big organization), so we may say that it is management on a great scale. As the characters discuss: what they are trying to build is politics, organizing people and moving them towards a goal. Belok’s practices are those of destruction and mischief, since he just wants to screw around and take all the credit for himself.

Something interesting that came from a character whom I did not excepect too much participation from was General Markov. When the trio are discussing their strategy to keep up the production and sidewind the NNL’s best, he says something that I think describes what this book’s core is made from: “Remember we are here to work hard and learn.” Nothing that our characters have done until now matters until the final product is achieved and they get the results they want from their experiments. The only way that our characters will fill their roles is by working, their obstacles are the very people in charge of them. I wonder if this will go full “Animal Farm” with the workers revolting against this one douche.

It is a shame when not everyone involved in a project is on it for the purpose of doing said project, but rather stalling all the work for their own benefit. I suppose it is much quicker and easier to let others work and get all the profit, but it never ends well.

--Originally published at Coder Bebop

So basically this whole chapter consists on:

Mr. T (finally!) ensuring he is being payed for his time, effort, and masterminding of turning a nobody-company into a billionaire enterprise (strangely enough, he does not mind adding “kidnapping” to the payment list) in two years.

Him meeting and discussing about management guts with Abdul Jamid to talk about guts and do a model on Mr. T’s guts (which sounds weird outside of context).

That’s pretty much it for this chapter. Very few things happened, yet it took 21 pages to get to the point: there is a way to measure guts if you apply the principles of divide-and-conquer and take every piece there is in a hunch, a small reason behind that decision. A gut is basically made up of this teeny reasonings which you cannot feel, but putting all of them together gives off a strong resolve to act in a certain way.

I liked the example used by Dr. Jamid in which doubling the size of a team makes it even less productive. It is weird how Mr. T can describe little by little how he would decide not to do this, but the guy has no idea whatsoever why he would make that call. But is this practice even possible in real life? Is it a thing which I have never heard about before reading this book? My guess would be that this is some high-level reasoning in the management business. And like a joke from another country that I could not understand, this is probably something management professionals have longed to attain and regular people do not have knowledge about, mainly due to lack of experience. Perhaps that is the reason why I did not find this chapter that much interesting.