Quantity vs. Quality

Taiwan's largest electronic OEM Hon Hai has troubled in their 800,000 employee facilities in China that there were 10 suicides in a row in their campuses. Hon Hai has big brand customers such as Apple and HP. Plants with scale of 800,000 employees are hard to do micromanagement anymore. In fact, they are just or part of machines, literally, machines. Ironically, there is absolutely no wrong doing in company's management. Hon Hai borrowed these lines from Japanese and this was how they get to here today. So who to blame?

Technology business is not always about breaking through convention via R&D. Many tech companies are working on techniques and attempting to achieve economical break through (such as lower cost and faster time-to-market) instead of completely new ideas. Worse, the need of manufacturing management brings huge overhead on efficiency, corporation wise and social wise such as Hon Hai's case.

Compared to tech's intelligence intensive plus labor intensive, what is common to the investing business? It is all started from people, intelligence and money. Big name investors always claim that investing isn't rocket science but simply fundamental, accounting, and discipline. Is that really so? As the days that only buying and selling stocks have long been replaced by complicated financial products developed by highly educated personnel, the simple minded investing thinking may not apply any more. Take the example of Lehman's collapse. Many investors relied on rating agencies investment ranking on Lehman's bond without, or not able to, knowing the fine prints. Lawsuits against rating agencies were sporadic around the nation but none of them has been successful so far. The bottom line is that investing is not simple anymore. Highly intelligent take well advantages to design quantitative trading models. It seems more object oriented: the goal is to use high tech to make profit.

But what is unique in the two? Business cost is one of them. This is why GE's Jack Welch brought GE Capital from almost nothing to over 30% of GE's revenue in his tenure. Manageability is another. Tech business is more visible, either break or make. Investing is more the science of art although tools like advanced mathematics, statistics, computer science, and computer technologies are much needed as the business environment is different.