Why we were right about the war

This was nominated for Best Blog Post Ever, and you can see why. Informative and humorous all in one handy, tasty package!

The D-Squared Digest One Minute MBA - Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101

Literally people have been asking me: "How is it that you were so amazingly prescient about Iraq? Why is it that you were right about everything at precisely the same moment when we were wrong?"... the secret to every analysis I've ever done of contemporary politics has been, more or less, my expensive business school education....

Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance. I was first made aware of this during an accounting class. We were discussing the subject of accounting for stock options at technology companies... Since the tech companies' point of view appeared to be that if they were ever forced to account honestly for their option grants, they would quickly stop making them, this offered decent prima facie evidence that they weren't, really, all that fantastic.

Fibbers' forecasts are worthless. Case after miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. Not only that people who want a project will tend to make inaccurate projections about the possible outcomes of that project, but about the futility of attempts to "shade" downward a fundamentally dishonest set of predictions.

The Vital Importance of Audit... it's been shown time and again and again; companies which do not audit completed projects in order to see how accurate the original projections were, tend to get exactly the forecasts and projects that they deserve.

Bush was going to be the MBA President, remember? Read the whole thing....