Horological Meandering

For instance, GE was a great company. Huge profits. But for how long? 20 years later, the company wasn’t competitive anymore. How did this come to be?  Welch didn’t invest in much research and development. Thus, he saved costs and delivered great profits. He was a hero at the time. But today, his cost cutting measures have now been realized as cost deferment. 

Back to the article. It looks purely at number of employees and output. It doesn’t look at the training of those employees. Eric Coudray was probably twice as productive than the average watch designer. And unfortunately the reader under their own assumptions are lead to believe that all employees have the same value because of the way the data is presented. The data simply presents a total production of watches/employees. It forgets that some employees are below average and some are above average.  The article doesn’t distinguish complicated watches vs simple watches neither. And we all know complicated watches can take more time to craft. The article doesn’t take into account how big the team is at R&D. Nor does it take into account a wide variety of factors. It simply provides a simple statistic which has lead to people deriving big conclusions from it. For instance a watch company can invest ten years of research and a billion Swiss Francs to hire George Daniel and design the most innovative Grand Sonnerie movement that can be quickly assembled and quickly decorated. It would have a relatively low Lee position on this article’s totem pole today. 

All I can say is that readers need to stop making too many assumptions. The author, who is a wonderful individual and a friend of mine probably didn’t mean to frame the article this way. And I think he’d be surprised as to how some people are interpreting his article and perhaps reading too much into it. 

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