Flutterby™! : Implosion at Ecomom 2013-04-25 04:35:30.799474+00

Implosion at Ecomom

2013-04-25 04:35:30.799474+00 by Dan Lyke 7 comments

Business Case Study - Cost Accounting: Implosion at Ecomom. Newly minted CPA gets company controller job at Ecomom.com, discovers that company... well... worth a read, both on how a company can have growing sales and fail spectacularly, and how hard it's going to be to make money in ecommerce going forward.

Thanks, after listening to "Every frigging business proposal" yesterday from a pompous twit looking to start a roll-up with a "world class sales team" and "work/lifestyle balance" and a theoretical 5mil in VC, I needed that sanity check.

Huh - and they guy who figured it all out and brought some sanity and critical thinking skills to bear? Has a bachelor's degree from one of those wretched liberal arts colleges you're always railing against. Ahem.

Medley, I suspect that the other people who didn't figure it out had similar degrees. Correlation ain't cause.

But, yeah, Meuon, I'm seeing a number of businesses that really aren't businesses, driven forward by the energy and charisma of the leader who doesn't have time to really understand the numbers, and they work so long as they can exploit easily excited investors, and people working for them who hear "deferred earnings" and "think about the future" and really really want to believe.

Yeah, poking around for educational history of the various other Ecomom higher-ups, there was no shortage of college degrees, either liberal arts or more technical.

I don't claim that huge conclusions can be drawn from these facts, but they do serve as counterweights to your oft-stated implications about formal education.

(The fact that Prentiss went to Williams is just icing on the cake for me, given that I could have easily gone to Williams instead of the other liberal arts school I ended up at.)

Yeah, my snark in that science quiz entry was completely unfounded, given that there really aren't enough liberal arts grads to account for those abysmal results...

And, yes, Jody Sherman was a high school dropout, but he was surrounded with people who weren't. Once again I think the best explanation is the Krueger and Dale work that suggests that college is just a filter and we make our own learning.

#Comment Re: made: 2013-04-25 16:50:25.140884+00 by: meuon [edit history]

Too many people are willing to go for the ride as long as they are getting paid well for the journey, even when the ship is sinking along the way.

Liberals arts major or not, seems few people had critical thinking skills. No-one was willing to look at the big picture, or at least, if they saw it, had the guts to rock the boat.