(A hacker friend of mine recently heard a talk by an executive at a giant corporation, and his reaction was so funny that I had to preserve it. The company's name has of course been changed.) Hey Paul, I just heard a presentation by a woman who is the "Chief Engineer" at Megacorp about how Megacorp does business, and I couldn't believe it! You often write about practices inside big corporations, but this is my first even indirect experience with that. Here are some of the quotations or near-quotations I wrote down: "value levers" "structured phase gate approach" "Lean Six Sigma" "mistake-proofing" "it's a stage-gate execution process with a focus on the value chain" "medium impact to in-process and results metrics and Business Case. Decision Team discretion for phase exit" "TTM, LSS and DfLSS work together . . ." "All problems are business problems - engineers need to think like business people." The best part, though, was the summary at the end, when she claimed that all of the appalling processes she had talked about for an hour and a half (using 52 PowerPoint slides) showed "respect for the intelligence of the individual." Is this for real? How could anyone possibly endure this at Megacorp?