[HN Gopher] The CEO and the Three Envelopes (2010)
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The CEO and the Three Envelopes (2010)
Author : mooreds
Score : 47 points
Date : 2023-12-21 19:08 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kevinkruse.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kevinkruse.com)
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| "move to the cloud" "move to on-prem" "move to acquisition"
| superfrank wrote:
| Optional step 2.5, "Say AI on the earnings call as many times
| as you can"
| swarnie wrote:
| Cash out, buy a yacht, leave WSBs with the bag.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Back-updated to cover 2000 to 2020: "outsource", "on shore",
| "blame tarifs".
| candiddevmike wrote:
| "rewrite" "replatform" "resign"
| efitz wrote:
| Very old joke. Here's the role-independent version:
|
| "Blame your predecessor"
|
| "Blame the reorg"
|
| "Make three envelopes"
| CharlesW wrote:
| So old that it's weird that the author would seemingly self-
| attribute it.
| Terr_ wrote:
| To add supporting evidence, here's something from 41 years
| ago where the butt of the joke was the leadership of Soviet
| Russia, and the inheritance was 2 letters:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/01/15/a.
| ..
| jfoutz wrote:
| A couple years ago I went looking for soviet jokes. They're
| amazing. I imagine google can find you some.
|
| A bunch of them were great. One I recall,
|
| American: The U.S. is the best! I can stand in front of the
| Whitehouse and yell, Ronald Regan is the worst president
| ever!
|
| Soviet: Comrade, I can stand in front of the Kremlin and
| yell the same thing!
|
| There's a bunch, with varying levels of grim. If you're
| ever bored, it's a rabbit hole that's worth poking around
| in.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| That was then. In 2023, in the USA, try standing in front
| of your local police department and explaining the
| simple, statistically likely, fact that they have at
| least one sexual predator working there. They will
| physically abuse you until you leave. If you refuse to
| leave, they will send you for a mental evaluation. If you
| still resist, they will kill you.
| jfoutz wrote:
| Even more reason to look them up.
|
| Soviet standing in red square handing out blank pieces of
| paper.
|
| Police come, and tell him to stop distributing protest
| flyers.
|
| Protestors: Protest? they're blank paper!
|
| Police: Comrade, everyone knows what's wrong.
|
| I might have messed it up a little, but, you get the
| gist.
| aslfjiasf wrote:
| Humor imitates life:
|
| Russia arrested anti-war protesters holding blank signs:
| https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-war-invasion-
| protest...
|
| But apparently this a thing in many countries, and
| there's even a Wikipedia article about this form of
| protest:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_piece_of_paper
|
| Ah, to be in America:
|
| >In 1970, Anna Halprin organised a "Blank Placard Dance"
| by members of her San Francisco Dancers' Workshop. They
| paraded, dressed in white, while holding blank placards.
| She explained, "...there were so many protests going on
| and this way each person watching us could just imagine
| whatever protest slogan they wanted on the placards."
|
| It's nice to be able to protest with blank signs because
| you want to make a joke, and not because of fear of
| arrest.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| They should arrest you for misuse of statistics.
|
| Since this is a joke thread, I'll share one related to
| this concept:
|
| The police catch a man trying to sneak a bomb onto a
| plane, and question him.
|
| Man: I was doing it to increase the flight's safety!
|
| Police: How can a bomb make a flight _safer_?
|
| Man: Obviously I'm not going to set mine off, and what
| are the chances that there are _two_ bombs on the same
| flight??
| praptak wrote:
| They told this joke about A. Mikoyan who survived all
| Stalin's purges which made him the oldest living member
| of the Politburo at that time:
|
| - Comrade Mikoyan, you forgot your umbrella!
|
| - Don't worry, I'll walk between the raindrops.
| bluedino wrote:
| Funny, I remember this specific joke from my childhood.
|
| My dad would bring home photocopied jokes or cartoons
| from work. It's funny to imagine someone making 50 copies
| of one of these, then passing them out around their
| workplaces laughing with their co-workers.
|
| 15 years later you saw the same stuff in email, fwd: FWD:
| FWD: Re: Why American is great
| er4hn wrote:
| My personal favorite:
|
| A man yells in the street: "Nicholas is a moron!". He is
| taken away by the police on charges of lese majeste
| (insulting the monarch). He tells the policemen "Please
| let me go, I meant another Nicholas!". The police chief
| replies: "Do not lie. If you said 'moron', you certainly
| meant the Tsar!"
| pjot wrote:
| Comrade 1: What are one potato say other potato?
|
| Comrade 2: Premise ridiculous! Who have two potato?
| jll29 wrote:
| This got me laughing - and I reckon it's because of the
| extremely high laughter-to-length ratio.
|
| Has anyone formally evaluated joke effectiveness (apart
| from Monty Python's "deadly joke")?
| fatbird wrote:
| I can't believe this is still up, but it's amazing:
| Russian lolcats.
|
| https://rolcats.wordpress.com/
| xmprt wrote:
| I guess it's hard to be a "NY Times bestselling author and
| keynote speaker" when you have to come up with all original
| ideas.
| gowld wrote:
| Anyone who publishes a book with a marketing budget is a
| NYT bestseller. It means nothing.
| importantbrian wrote:
| Being able to get your book published and having the
| publisher spend enough on marketing to get you on the NYT
| Bestseller list means something.
| hiatus wrote:
| What does it mean? Rich parents?
| aslfjiasf wrote:
| It means a publisher ranked possibility of a positive
| return on investment for that book to be higher than the
| books they decided not to publish.
| wiml wrote:
| I think the other version I'm familiar with is a Navy captain
| or new minted admiral - especially in the age of sail - someone
| who has to operate on their own for a long stretch. Looking
| around I see a bunch of variations:
|
| - the CEO or other corporate leader - a government leader
| (sometimes specifically Soviet or British) - a pastor or abbot
| - military officers of various ranks - a distinctly non-
| leadership corporate role that can catch a lot of flak
| (sysadmin)
|
| I wonder how old it is? How far back would envelopes have made
| sense? Do you suppose Ea-Nasr left three bullae to his
| successor?
| mathgeek wrote:
| I heard a similar version years ago as "blame someone, blame
| something, take the blame".
| lencastre wrote:
| I first heard that in a movie. Something about politics, blame
| on me, blame on society, write 3 envelopes...
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| There's a version in the movie Traffic (2000) that uses "two
| letters": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gmpyjSW6WQ
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| /1/ Say something humane, play for employees' and shareholders'
| trust.
|
| /2/ Lay off thousands of workers. Squeeze out a blandly
| sorrowful text and a few cold tears.
|
| /3/ Take the money and run, don't trouble yourself about
| leaving any envelopes. But if you have a pang of regret and
| must leave something, leave your little plastic bottle of cold
| artifical tears.
| eitland wrote:
| When I first heard or read this I think it used to be years, not
| months between each time he opened an envelope.
| wharvle wrote:
| We've become far more efficient.
| Terr_ wrote:
| To adapt a sci-fi scene:
|
| > The CEO: You are here because your investment is about to
| be destroyed. Its every active employee terminated, its
| entire balance-sheet eradicated.
|
| > Neo : Bullshit.
|
| > The CEO: Denial is the most predictable of all stakeholder
| responses. But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we
| have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient
| at it.
| fluxem wrote:
| Add two more envelopes:
|
| "Blame covid "
|
| "Blame market conditions"
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| "Blame post-covid changes" "Blame pre-covid changes"
| sporadicallyjoe wrote:
| Add to the final envelope: "Take your golden parachute and do it
| all over again"
| hasoleju wrote:
| The CEO in the story had no clue what he was doing. But he was
| facing the same problem everyone has when the outcome of your
| actions takes time to manifest. Much too often society expects
| that results change immediately after a change in leadership. But
| the small changes a leader can make take time to ripple trough
| the organization and manifest in results. Often people are not
| patient enough to wait for this.
|
| A real life example for that is Paul O'Neill CEO of Alcoa from
| 1987-1999. His main change was putting worker safety in Alcoas
| plants to first priority. The business outcome of this action
| manifested years later.
|
| During the first 6 years of his CEO career the stock only
| doubled. In the 6 years after that the stock prize rose to almost
| 10x of the prize where he became CEO.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm not sure if this big effect also was related to
| the Dotcom double.
| ilc wrote:
| It is an old joke, it has been told about Presidents, and
| various other figures.
|
| Thinking long term is not something that is rewarded next
| quarter, in general.
|
| This is a large part of why I've worked over half my career for
| non-public companies. I want my management making the best
| choices for the product and the company. Not what Wall St. will
| like.
|
| If the invisible hand worked... yes they would be the same.
| Reality says they aren't.
| takinola wrote:
| So what's the practical solution to this issue? If you focus on
| the long-term but have no short-term impact, you will not be
| there to see things play out (As Milton Keynes famously said
| "In the long term, we're all dead").
|
| My guess is you need to figure out some small wins along the
| way that make people feel good and stop them from panicking and
| tossing you (and all your long-term plans) overboard.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| _Ballmer just opened the Second Envelope_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1391554 - May 2010 (65
| comments)
| thih9 wrote:
| > I first heard this joke in the late 1980s, but the protagonist
| was the Soviet Premier.
|
| https://wiki.c2.com/?ThreeEnvelopes
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