Hash Browns and Potato Farming

Its curious sometimes what long lost memories will pop into my consciousness at odd times. While slicing potatoes to make hash browns for lunch today, a childhood experience came to mind. My maternal grandfather was a farmer in central Florida who primarily grew potatoes and cabbage. The potatoes from that area were prized by chip manufacturers and I seem to recall my mother saying that granddad grew potato chips on his farm.

During a Christmas break visit, at perhaps age 6 or 7, when we went down for a visit, granddad was preparing to put in next season’s crop. 50 pound burlap bags of seed potatoes were stacked up to the rafters of the open shed that served as a barn. We kids found great entertainment by rearranging the bags at the top of the pile to make ever more elaborate “forts”. While doing this, we looked on as farm laborers (mostly African American women as I recall) sliced each potato into quarters taking care to assure that each piece had at least one eye from which to grow another plant. Nearby a piece of farm equipment made to quarter the spuds sat idle. I inquired about this and was essentially told that the machine was faster than humans, but didn’t do a very good job, making too many quarters without eyes.

Back in the kitchen I made some notes about these memories on the back of some junk mail while the hash browns sizzled in the pan.

New Term

We just started the third term at Fuqua this weekend. I’m finding the classes for this term to be quite interesting at this point. Finance is more math than expected (lots of applications of geometric series algebra). There was a light bulb moment in the management class. The lecture (and case study reading) were about issues in group decisions. The plusses and minuses of this method were discussed. One of the minuses was groupthink, which has a much more specific meaning in decision theory. The lightbulb went off when our instructor listed the symptoms of group think. Of the 5 indicators, 4 were in effect at siXis. Taken with the fact that we choose such a bad time to launch the company relative to the economy, it can be argued that we programmed to fail.

The other thought that went through my head was some of the political process implications of the bias effect that Dr. Fisher spoke to in class. He demonstrated that when there is a systemic bias in the group members, that poor decision are the result. I found myself thinking about a belief that humans do a poor job of assessing risk, that we overweight it. To the extent that this is true (which I believe is the case), then a democratic decision making process is going to always overreact to risk. I think about this relative to fears of nuclear power and other important social issues that face the US.