Listen, I can go off topic sometimes, right?
Gautam’s post on Tom Peter’s 20 dumbest business practices reminded me of something else I read recently:
TP: Mergers of Decrepit Monsters!
GG: Merging for the heck of it!
SA: More Often Than Not, Massive Galaxies Form by Mergers
New data seem to show that galaxies collide all the time. In fact, the oldest and largest galaxies in the universe most likely formed from such intergalactic combinations.
“Our study found these common massive galaxies do form by mergers,” Van Dokkum explains. “It is just that the mergers happen quickly and the features that reveal the mergers are very faint and therefore difficult to detect.”
“Quickly” on a galactic scale means just a few hundred million years–a small fraction of the 13.7 billion years the universe has been in existence–and, because such collisions rarely involve head-to-head star crashes, they leave few traces behind except in the shape of the resulting galaxy and a general slowing in its formation of new stars.Biello, David, December 6, 2005. ” More Often Than Not, Massive Galaxies Form by Mergers,” Scientific American. Retrieved from www.sciam.com on December 19, 2005.
Some strange parallel universe stuff going on here (no pun intended).
Yeah – this is what I read when not reading HR stuff. Sad, huh? So GG and Tom Peters make me think of massive galaxies? hmm….
2 responses to “Mergers and 20 dumb things…”
Good analogy…
One might argue that a massive merger might actually be a kind of slow death and precipitate the exodus of talent that would be better off standing on its own feet 😉
Did TP already write about mergers? Drat! I forgot to see that !
I agree – a strangely good analogy for which I’m frightened to think of all the odd permutations. Maybe I’ll store this away and write about it some other time.