Streamline Training & Documentation

Father's Day 2010

2010-06-20T12:03:00.003-05:00

With a special tribute to the octogenarian fathers of the world . . .

(theexpertsagree.com)
###

Memorial Day 2010

2010-05-31T07:50:00.002-05:00

For those graduating today . . .

2010-05-16T23:29:00.004-05:00

The Amaranth
Ah, in the night, all music haunts me here. . . .
Is it for naught high Heaven cracks and yawns
And the tremendous Amaranth descends
Sweet with the glory of ten thousand dawns?

Does it not mean my God would have me say: —
"Whether you will or no, O city young,
Heaven will bloom like one great flower for you,
Flash and loom greatly all your marts among?"

Friends, I will not cease hoping though you weep.
Such things I see, and some of them shall come,
Though now our streets are harsh and ashen-gray,
Though our strong youths are strident now, or dumb.
Friends, that sweet town, that wonder-town, shall rise.
Naught can delay it. Though it may not be
Just as I dream, it comes at last I know,
With streets like channels of an incense-sea.

– Vachel Lindsay

###

Seamus Heaney's Sequence in Memory of His Mother

2010-05-09T08:44:00.001-05:00

In his 1987 collection, The Haw Lantern, Seamus Heaney included a poem in memory of his mother, Margaret Kathleen Heaney.

Clearances

in memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984
She taught me what her uncle once taught her:
How easily the biggest coal block split
If you got the grain and the hammer angled right.

The sound of that relaxed alluring blow
Its co-opted and obliterated echo,
Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,

Taught me between the hammer and the block
To face the music. Teach me now to listen,
To strike it rich behind the linear black.

1
A cobble thrown a hundred years ago
Keeps coming at me, the first stone
Aimed at a great-grandmother's turncoat brow.
The pony jerks and the riot's on.
She's couched low in the trap
Running the gauntlet that first Sunday
Down the brae to Mass at a panicked gallop.
He whips on through the town to cries of 'Lundy!'

Call her 'The Convert.' 'The Exogamous Bride.'
Anyhow, it is a genre piece
Inherited on my mother's side
And mine to dispose with now she's gone.
Instead of silver and Victorian lace
the exonerating, exonerated stone.

2
Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.
The china cups were very white and big --
An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug.
The kettle whistled. Sandwich and tea scone
Were present and correct. In case it run,
The butter must be kept out of the sun.
And don't be dropping crumbs. Don't tilt your chair.
Don't reach. Don't point. Don't make noise when you stir.

It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead,
Where grandfather is rising from his place
With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head
To welcome a bewildered homing daughter
Before she even knocks. 'What's this? What's this?'
And they sit down in the shining room together.

3
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives --
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

4
Fear of affectation made her affect
Inadequacy whenever it came to
Pronouncing words 'beyond her'. Bertold Brek.
She'd manage something hampered and askew
Every time, as if she might betray
The hampered and inadequate by too
Well-adjusted a vocabulary.
With more challenge than pride, she'd tell me, 'You
Know all them things.' So I governed my tongue
In front of her, a genuinely well-
Adjusted adequate betrayal
Of what I knew better. I'd naw and aye
And decently relapse into the wrong
Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.

5
The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They'd make a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

6
In the first flush of the Easter holidays
The ceremonies during Holy Week
Were highpoints of our Sons and Lovers phase.
The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick.
Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next
To each other up there near the front
Of the packed church, we would follow the text
And rubrics for the blessing of the font.
As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul . . .
Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on.
The water mixed with chrism and oil.
Cruet tinkle. Formal incensation
And the psalmist's outcry taken up with pride:
Day and night my tears have been my bread.

7
In the last minutes he said more to her
Almost than in their whole life together.
'You'll be in New Row on Monday night
And I'll come up for you and you'll be glad
When I walk in the door . . . Isn't that right?'
His head was bent down to her propped-up head.
She could not hear but we were overjoyed.
He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,
The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned
And we all knew one thing by being there.
The space we stood around had been emptied
Into us to keep, it penetrated
Clearances that suddenly stood open.
High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

8
I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.
I heard the hatchet's differentiated
Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh
And collapse of what luxuriated
Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.
Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval
Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,
Its heft and hush became a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.

###

May Day 2010

2010-05-01T10:41:00.005-05:00

May Day
painting by Sharon Esther Ascherl

(www.sharonascherlfolkart.com)
###

Thomas H. Connell III, 1942 -2010

2010-04-27T23:21:00.005-05:00

One of the most charming obituaries I've ever read is that for the Metropolitan Opera's chief stage manager, Thomas Connell, published in today's edition of the New York Times.

Thomas H. Connell III
(Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera)
Here is the closing portion of the Times obituary:

... no stage manager can take the weight of a singing horse. In the same “Falstaff,” Ms. Pierson recalled, the soprano made an entrance on horseback. One night, as she began her aria, the horse was moved to bray along in bold duet.

“What do you do when the horse starts to sing at the same time as the singer starts to sing?” Ms. Pierson asked.

There was only one thing for it. Mr. Connell fired the horse.

The full text of the obituary is here.

###

"Nothing Stays Put" by Amy Clampitt

2010-04-25T23:20:00.003-05:00

Nothing Stays Put
In memory of Father Flye, 1884-1985

The strange and wonderful are too much with us.
The protea of the antipodes--a great,
globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom--
for sale in the supermarket! We are in
our decadence, we are not entitled.
What have we done to deserve
all the produce of the tropics--
this fiery trove, the largesse of it
heaped up like cannonballs, these pineapples, bossed
and crested, standing like troops at attention,
these tiers, these balconies of green, festoons
grown sumptuous with stoop labor?

The exotic is everywhere, it comes to us
before there is a yen or a need for it. The green-
grocers, uptown and down, are from South Korea.
Orchids, opulence by the pailful, just slightly
fatigued by the plane trip from Hawaii, are
disposed on the sidewalks; alstroemerias, freesias
fattened a bit in translation from overseas; gladioli
likewise estranged from their piercing ancestral crimson;
as well as, less altered from the original blue cornflower
of the roadsides and railway embankments of Europe, these
bachelor's buttons. But it isn't the railway embankments
their featherweight wheels of cobalt remind me of, it's

a row of them among prim colonnades of cosmos,
snapdragon, nasturtium, bloodsilk red poppies,
in my grandmother's garden: a prairie childhood,
the grassland shorn, overlaid with a grid,
unsealed, furrowed, harrowed and sown with immigrant grasses,
their massive corduroy, their wavering feltings embroidered
here and there by the scarlet shoulder patch of cannas
on a courthouse lawn, by a love knot, a cross stitch
of living matter, sown and tended by women,
nurturers everywhere of the strange and wonderful,
beneath whose hands what had been alien begins,
as it alters, to grow as though it were indigenous.

But at this remove what I think of as
strange and wonderful, strolling the side streets of Manhattan
on an April afternoon, seeing hybrid pear trees in blossom,
a tossing, vertiginous colonnade of foam, up above--
is the white petalfall, the warm snowdrift
of the indigenous wild plum of my childhood.
Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel.
All that we know, that we're
made of, is motion.

– Amy Clampitt

###

Earth Day 2010

2010-04-22T10:02:00.004-05:00

To mark the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day, here is a nice, straightforward video explaining how to make a worm composting bin. The video is the work of Canadian Bentley Christie ("the Compost Guy"), who runs RedWormComposting.

###

The Clerk in the Canterbury Tales

2010-04-18T13:33:00.005-05:00

A lover of learning and teaching ...

Illustration and opening lines from the portion of the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that describes the Clerk from Oxford. The full text of this section of the prologue is given below, first in modern English and then in the original Middle English.

(From William Caxton's second edition, published in 1483)
(British Library)

A Clerk from Oxford was there also,
Who'd studied philosophy, long ago.
As lean was his horse as is a rake,
And he too was not fat, that I take,
But he looked emaciated, moreover, abstemiously.
Very worn off was his overcoat; for he
Had got him yet no churchly benefice,
Nor he was worldly to accept secular office.
For he would rather have at his bed's head
Some twenty books, all bound in black or red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy
Than rich robes, fiddle, or gay psaltery.
Yet, and for all he was philosopher in base,
He had but little gold within his suitcase;
But all that he might borrow from a friend
On books and learning he would swiftly spend,
And then he'd pray diligently for the souls
Of those who gave him resources to attend schools.
He took utmost care and heed for his study.
Not one word spoke he more than was necessary;
And that was said with due formality and dignity
And short and lively, and full of high morality.
Filled with moral virtue was his speech;
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach.

[lines 287-310 of the General Prologue to
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer]

The original text:

A Clerk ther was of Oxenford also,
That unto logyk hadde longe ygo.
As leene was his hors as is a rake,
And he nas nat right fat, I undertake,
But looked holwe and therto sobrely.
Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy;
For he hadde geten hym yet no benefice,
Ne was so worldly for to have office.
For hym was levere have at his beddes heed
Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed,
Of Aristotle and his philosophie,
Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie.
But al be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre;
But al that he myghte of his freendes hente,
On bookes and on lernynge he it spente,
And bisily gan for the soules preye
Of hem that yaf hym wherwith to scoleye.
Of studie took he moost cure and moost heede.
Noght o word spak he moore than was neede,
And that was seyd in forme and reverence,
And short and quyk, and ful of hy sentence;
Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche,
And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

[Source: Librarius]

###

2010-04-14T00:04:00.000-05:00

Last November, I wrote about the competencies required to be licensed by the US Coast Guard for working on a tugboat. Pretty dry (no pun intended) material, but the sort of detailed technical information I like because it creates a very specific picture of the topic.

This week The New Yorker has an entire article devoted to the details of what's involved in operating a tugboat. Naturally, the story that staff writer Burkhard Bilger tells is far more colorful than a set of competency matrices. Bilger reports on one family's involvement in running tugboats over a period that dates back to the sixties, meaning he covers the time both before and after the Coast began tightening licensing requirements.

The family of Latham Smith, which now has two factions each operating its own tugboat, bases its operations in Morgan City LA. Here are some excerpts from Bilger's report, focused on the contrast between old-style and new-style tugboating:

The Smiths are from Florida originally, of Irish and British extraction, but the Cajuns have accepted them as their own. Latham is something of a legend in the towing world. When he and [first wife] Elsbeth first took to the sea, in the late sixties, they seemed like characters from a picture book: the little tugboat family, island-hopping across the Caribbean, homeschooling five children as they went. Together and separately, Latham and his children have weathered cyclones on the Atlantic, towed barges up the Amazon, and circumnavigated the globe, even as the industry around them has grown ever more regulated and safety-conscious.

. . .

"When we started out, you could do anything," Elsbeth says. "You could pick up your crew from the homeless section of the DuPont Plaza parking lot and take 'em out and sober 'em up." ... "The other tugboats, they always went for the old alkies and the deadbeat people," Elsbeth says. "We took a different approach," ... Latham took to hiring any sailor or surfer who wandered past and whose conversation he could half abide. "It was the time of the flower children, the Beatles, and the long skirts," Elsbeth says. "We found people everywhere, just everywhere — beautiful young people. These hippies would come down on a one-way ticket from Florida to Rincón, Puerto Rico, and they'd run out of money and get desperate. So we'd hire them just for the ride back to the States." ...

When regulations began to tighten, in the seventies, and a minimum of two licensed sailors were required on every tug, Latham and Elsbeth both put in for captain's licenses.

. . .

... the footloose spirit that once sent sailors to sea has been slowly starched out of the business — mostly with good reason. Beginning with the Exxon Valdez oil spill, in 1989, regulations have ratcheted up with each high-profile accident ...

Most tug captain's licenses now require at least three years' training at sea, if not a four-year degree from a maritime academy. Background checks, safety inspections, and drug and alcohol tests are mandatory, as are certifications in radar, firefighting, first aid, and social responsibility. As a result, in the past decade oil spills have decreased by more than eighty per cent compared with the nineteen-nineties, and crew fatalities and injuries have been nearly cut in half.

... the tramping days of Latham's youth, when a sailor could spend his shore leave exploring the markets of Bangkok, the bars of Panama City, are gone.

. . .

Technology has taken some of the risk out of the business. Many new tugs can be steered by joystick — though most captains disdain it — and trainees often learn to operate them on land, in mock wheelhouses surrounded by virtual harbors. (When I tried my hand at this recently at the Maritime Simulation Institute, in Middletown, Rhode Island, I spent an hour doing doughnuts in Los Angeles Harbor; I couldn't seem to stop ramming my bow into the container ship I was towing — and that was before the computer called in the heavy fog and twenty-foot seas.) But a virtual storm is still no substitute for a howling gale, or the mad tilt and groaning steel of a ship on rough seas.

If this story of one family's life in the the tugboating world appeals to you, by all means get yourself a copy of the April 19 New Yorker and read the whole thing. The entire issue is dedicated to the theme of travel, so if that's your cup of tea, you'll find other articles of interest as well. The table of contents is here.

###

Using Second Life for Medical Training

2010-04-13T23:37:00.003-05:00

In a January post I talked about the simulation center at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. As a follow-on, I'd like to mention an article in today's Wall Street Journal that describes another approach to using simulation to train medical personnel, namely creating virtual environments, such as hospitals, in Second Life and then having trainees deal with various scenarios designed to hone assessment, diagnostic, and treatment skills.

In the main example described by reporter Stephanie Simon,

ER nurses log in to the virtual world, where each assumes control of an avatar — a cartoon rendering of a nurse wearing crisp blue scrubs. The nurses can walk their avatars through hallways, up and down stairs and through doorways using keyboard or mouse controls. They can give voice to their avatars by typing — their words pop up as a text box — or by speaking into a special microphone. Headsets let each nurse hear ambient noise from the virtual scene and listen to the other avatars talking.

In the drill, which lasts three hours, the nurse-avatars must create a triage system, assess each patient and figure out how to isolate the most contagious.

Some patient avatars are controlled by instructors ... Other avatars are preprogrammed; they speak only phrases that the instructors have prerecorded ("I can't breathe!"). Nurse-avatars can click on the patients' bodies to pull up text boxes with vital signs and a list of symptoms.

At any point, the instructor can "throw a wrench into the system," Dr. Greci [the simulation's developer] says, by setting off a virtual earthquake or blackout or dumping rain on the patients waiting outside.

The above gives you an idea of how a Second Life medical simulation can be set up. You can check out the look and feel of one such simulation in the video below, which is an overview of Second Life training prepared for paramedic students at St. George's University of London.

###

"In April" by James Hearst

2010-04-11T23:01:00.009-05:00

In April
This I saw on an April day:
Warm rain spilt from a sun-lined cloud,
A sky-flung wave of gold at evening,
And a cock pheasant treading a dusty path
Shy and proud.

And this I found in an April field:
A new white calf in the sun at noon,
A flash of blue in a cool moss bank,
And tips of tulips promising flowers
To a blue-winged loon.

And this I tried to understand
As I scrubbed the rust from my brightening plow:
The movement of seed in furrowed earth,
And a blackbird whistling sweet and clear
From a green-sprayed bough.

– James Hearst

###

A Critical Thinking/Problem Solving Rubric

2010-04-08T23:16:00.014-05:00

As part of a volunteer project I do every year, I have contact with a number of local high schools. This year's project began last week, and, in checking online to see whether there had been any changes in the administration at Springfield High School of Science & Technology, I came upon a rubric (pdf) for critical thinking and problem solving that seems worth sharing.¹

The rubric evaluates five dimensions of critical thinking and problem solving:

Concepts

Procedures

Analysis

Solutions

Conclusions

For each dimension, the rubric specifies distinguishing characteristics of mastery at the Exemplary, Accomplished, Developing, and Beginning levels. These characteristics are reproduced below (with some editing).

Concepts

Exemplary — Creatively and thoroughly demonstrates complete understanding and the relationship of complex concepts, hierarchical thinking, and multi-faceted problems, employing evaluative synthesis.

Accomplished — Completely demonstrates understanding and the relationship of complex concepts, hierarchical thinking, and multi-faceted problems.

Developing — Demonstrates understanding and the relationship of complex concepts, hierarchical thinking, and multi-faceted problems.

Beginning — Does not demonstrate understanding and the relationship of complex concepts, hierarchical thinking, and/or multi-faceted problems.

Procedures

Exemplary — Clearly identifies specific problem(s) and integrates complex ideas. Employs formulas, procedures, principles, or themes accurately and/or creatively. Selects sufficient relevant data/information.

Accomplished — Identifies specific problem(s) and integrates complex ideas. Employs formulas, procedures, principles, or themes accurately. Selects sufficient relevant data/information.

Developing — Does not necessarily identify specific problem(s) or integrate complex ideas. Employs some formulas, procedures, principles, or themes. May have some inaccuracies and/or insufficient or irrelevant data/information.

Beginning — Does not identify specific problem(s) or integrate complex ideas. Inaccurately employs formulas, procedures, principles, or themes. Has insufficient or irrelevant data/information.

Analysis

Exemplary — Insightfully and accurately interprets and comprehensively evaluates information, positions, or perspectives that balance opposing points of view.

Accomplished — Accurately interprets and comprehensively evaluates information, positions, or perspectives that balance opposing points of view.

Developing — Provides weak or incomplete evaluation of information, positions, or perspectives.

Beginning — Misinterprets or incorrectly evaluates of information, positions, or perspectives.

Solutions

Exemplary — Gives exceptionally clear, coherent, and cohesive solutions, incorporating the most effective method to solve the problem. Explains multiple solutions, anticipating questions.

Accomplished — Gives coherent and cohesive solutions, incorporating effective methods to solve the problem. Explains solutions clearly.

Developing — Gives simple or abbreviated solutions with some minor inconsistencies or omissions. Explains solutions with only partial clarity.

Beginning — Gives simple or abbreviated solutions with significant inconsistencies or omissions. Presents ideas in a fragmented manner with no clear or coherent order.

Conclusions

Exemplary — Conclusions are accurate, detailed, complete, well-supported, logical, consistent with the available evidence, and often unique.

Accomplished — Conclusions are generally accurate, complete, logical, and consistent with the available evidence.

Developing — Conclusions are imperfectly accurate, complete, logical, and consistent with the available evidence; there may be minor inconsistencies or omissions.

Beginning — Conclusions are inaccurate, incomplete, illogical, and inconsistent with the available evidence.

__________
¹ Previous posts dealing with critical thinking rubrics are here, here, and here.

###

What to Do about the Shadow Banking System

2010-04-07T23:01:00.001-05:00

If you've been following discussions of the players involved in the financial crisis, you're aware that broker/dealers in the headlines, such as the now defunct Bear Stearns, are referred to as members of the "shadow banking system."

The shadow banking system consists of nonbank financial firms that borrow funds — often through the short-term money market and commercial paper market — and then lend those funds to borrowers such as corporations or use the funds to purchase relatively long-term assets such as mortgage-backed securities.

A key point is that such firms do not take deposits and, therefore, are not subject to the regulations that depository institutions — commercial banks, savings institutions, and credit unions — must adhere to.

In addition to broker/dealers, the shadow banking system includes such entities as government sponsored enterprises (GSEs), e.g., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, GSE and other mortgage pools, finance companies, and issuers of asset-backed securities.

In a July 2009 paper (pdf), Tobias Adrian, an economist at the New York Fed, and Hyun Song Shin, a professor of economics at Princeton, analyze in reasonably accessible fashion, how financial regulations might be revised in order to reduce the potential for the shadow banking system to exacerbate financial instability in the future. Adrian and Shin note that, as of the end of June 2007, the shadow banking system's $16.6 trillion in assets stood well above the assets of the conventional banking system, which amounted to $12.8 trillion.

After detailing the way in which leverage of financial firms grows to an excessive level during a boom period, Adrian and Shin argue that this market failure should be mitigated through regulations that constrain systemic risk, especially since systemic risk has risen substantially as a result of burgeoning securitization.

Adrian and Shin explain:

One element of improved regulation will be a ... systemic regulator who could take on two important tasks. First, the system regulator should gather, analyze, and report systemic information. This will require reporting from a broader range of financial institutions, such as hedge funds, and the shadow banking system. Second, the systemic regulator will operate capital rules [rules regarding how much capital a firm must hold relative to the amounts of various types of liabilities on its balance sheet] with a systemic focus. ... Given the central bank's intimate connections with the financial market through its monetary policy role, it is likely to have the best market intelligence in performing the role of the macroprudential regulator. Furthermore, the fact that the central bank is the lender of last resort (LOLR) gives it the capacity to intervene in the market when necessary. ...

In the new, post-crisis financial system, many familiar features of the system before the crisis will cease to be in place. The role of securitization is likely to be held in check by more stringent financial regulation and the recognition of the importance of preventing excessive leverage and maturity mismatch [short-term liabilities funding long-term assets] in undermining financial stability. Institutional changes and the conduct of monetary policy will flow from the recognition of the role of the financial system as the servant of the real economy, rather than an end in itself. In particular, we might see the return of a more staid "utilities" version of banking based on the model of banking as a support to the real economy.

Adrian and Shin emphasize that the effectiveness of regulations such as those they discuss depends on the diligence of the regulators. It remains to be seen exactly what new US regulatory legislation emerges from Congress, which is currently working on Senator Dodd's proposed bill, a more strict bill having already passed in the House of Representatives.

###

Easter 2010

2010-04-04T02:23:00.000-05:00

Easter Greeting (1912)
Boris Kustodiev (1878 - 1927)
(Wikipedia)
###

April Fool's Day 2010

2010-04-01T23:40:00.001-05:00

"April Fool," Norman Rockwell
Saturday Evening Post cover, Mar 31, 1945
(Norman Rockwell Museum)
###

Timothy Murphy on Jazz Improvisation

2010-03-27T20:34:00.008-05:00

Readers of this blog will know that I'm fascinated by the process of improvisation, a subject I discussed most recently here. I'm firmly convinced that one of the prime aspects of expertise is the ability to conjure up promising ideas on the fly. I'm also confident that this is a skill that can be steadily honed through practice.

The Spring 2010 issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine gives its last page over to a summary of how an accomplished jazz pianist in an ensemble undertakes to improvise. The summary is provided by Timothy Murphy, a keyboardist and teacher at Hopkins' Peabody Conservatory and at Towson University.

Murphy's offers these four bits of advice:

First, clear your mind. Get rid al all the words coursing through your head. Sit quietly about 30 seconds before putting your hands on the keyboard.

Improv is a conversation. Watch the facial expressions of the other players, listen to them, try to respond to what they do with the least predictable thing that's still musical.

If you suddenly go blank, just smile and keep pressing the keys until something good happens. Now and then, the best thing to "play" is silence.

(Wesley Bedrosian)
A good solo should have a shape. Pay attention to the inner voice that's telling you that you've reached a high point and it's time to wind it down and get out elegantly.

The most direct business application of Murphy's schema is to meetings in which creative thinking is needed, for example, concerning the design of a new product or service or the solution to a problem. An individual's contributions don't have to be "the least predictable thing," but they certainly shouldn't be trite. Everybody should contribute, but no one should overwhelm the conversation. Soliloquies should "have a shape" and, even if the speaker doesn't end elegantly, he or she should not run on.

###

Monday, March 22

2010-03-22T23:32:00.007-05:00

Spring is like a perhaps hand
III
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

– E. E. Cummings

###

"A Red Palm" by Gary Soto

2010-03-21T18:21:00.009-05:00

A Red Palm

You're in this dream of cotton plants.
You raise a hoe, swing, and the first weeds
Fall with a sigh. You take another step,
Chop, and the sigh comes again,
Until you yourself are breathing that way
With each step, a sigh that will follow you into town.

That's hours later. The sun is a red blister
Coming up in your palm. Your back is strong,
Young, not yet the broken chair
In an abandoned school of dry spiders.
Dust settles on your forehead, dirt
Smiles under each fingernail.
You chop, step, and by the end of the first row,
You can buy one splendid fish for wife
And three sons. Another row, another fish,
Until you have enough and move on to milk,
Bread, meat. Ten hours and the cupboards creak.
You can rest in the back yard under a tree.
Your hands twitch on your lap,
Not unlike the fish on a pier or the bottom
Of a boat. You drink iced tea. The minutes jerk
Like flies.

It's dusk, now night,
And the lights in your home are on.
That costs money, yellow light
In the kitchen. That's thirty steps,
You say to your hands,
Now shaped into binoculars.
You could raise them to your eyes:
You were a fool in school, now look at you.
You're a giant among cotton plants.
Now you see your oldest boy, also running.
Papa, he says, it's time to come in.

You pull him into your lap
And ask, What's forty times nine?
He knows as well as you, and you smile.
The wind makes peace with the trees,
The stars strike themselves in the dark.
You get up and walk with the sigh of cotton plants.
You go to sleep with a red sun on your palm,
The sore light you see when you first stir in

– Gary Soto

###

Spring Equinox 2010

2010-03-20T23:47:00.004-05:00

Spring Equinox Sunset 2009
St. John, Virgin Islands
(St. John Life)
###

Fess Parker, 1924 - 2010

2010-03-19T23:46:00.003-05:00

I am just one of millions of kids who loved Davy Crockett, as embodied by Fess Parker.

Fess Parker in 1955
(www.fessparker.com)
I haven't seen Walt Disney's Davy Crockett TV shows for many years, so below I quote an appreciative review that someone with the screen name gobirds2 posted at Amazon in April 2002, a few months after Disney issued the five original shows on DVD.

Davy Crockett is one of Walt Disney's most endeared and remembered live action characters. He was presented to American audiences by Walt Disney on the Disneyland TV Show in 1954. He was personified by Fess Parker beloved ever after by his sincere portrayal. This colorful and entertaining character was first seen in three episodes from the TV show ("Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter," "Davy Crockett Goes to Congress" and "Davy Crockett at the Alamo"). Parker, with his coonskin cap and homespun drawl and witticism created a nationwide phenomenon in 1954. Who can forget "The Ballad Of Davy Crockett" composed by George Bruns and Tom Blackburn. Buddy Ebsen played his sidekick George Russel, whose adventures take them from Tennessee to Washington, D.C. to the Alamo in the first three episodes. The series' third episode focusing on the defense of the Alamo, though well remembered, is somewhat labored until we see the final image of Davy Crockett passing into legend and glory. This straightforward and beautifully photographed series expounds the virtues of honesty, integrity and bravery. The country could not get enough of Davy so he and George Russel returned in 1955 for two more episodes ("Davy Crockett's Keel Boat Race" and "Davy Crockett and the River Pirates"). For Davy Crockett's second season on television the show was retitled "The Legends of Davy Crockett." The necessary title change came about because we had seen Davy come to his end defending the Alamo and Walt Disney wanted to continue bringing us his adventures. "Davy Crockett's Keel Boat Race" is about a riverboat race between Davy and another American folklore hero Mike Fink. "Davy Crockett and the River Pirates" is about Davy's attempt to stop an Indian uprising with Mike Fink's assistance. In some ways these two episodes are the best. Davy Crockett appears less the frontier fighter and more the good-natured peacemaker in these episodes. The riverboat race with Mike Fink is very entertaining and a high point in Disney's American frontier live action adventures. I don't even think John Ford could have filmed this sequence any better. Kenneth Tobey, who worked with John Ford, is excellent in a great comedic part (Fess Parker made note of Tobey's performance in a supplemental interview on the DVD). Walt Disney gave this actor a chance to demonstrate his great versatility and range as an actor. Also, Mike Fink's boats may look a little familiar since they are the basis for the riverboat ride at the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World. That's a nice nostalgic tie in! Bert Glennon's cinematography is beautifully picturesque as ever and is matched seamlessly with some very effective glass shot special effects by Peter Ellenshaw. This is one of the best DVDs to come from the Disney vaults. Walt Disney introduces each of the five episodes exactly as they were originally presented on the Disneyland TV Show. The Supplemental Features on this DVD are above and beyond what I had expected. Most of Disney's DVD extras seem to concentrate on the technical aspects of the feature presentation. This DVD focused more on the phenomenon that the legend of Davy Crockett created and the [effect] it had and continues to have on those who were brought up in those times. There are two exceptional Features: "A Conversation with Fess Parker" and "The Davy Crockett Craze." "The Gallery" of photos and memorabilia is also excellent. "A Conversation with Fess Parker" really hit home with me. Fess Parker appeared to be the genuine article that he was. In a world of eroded morals filled with dirt and filth everywhere you turn it was more than comforting to hear Fess Parker's fond recollections of his portrayal and the ideals that Walt immortalized through the tales of this legendary character. If your eyes feel a little watery its because [you're] remembering a time not so long ago when our heroes were real heroes. This is one of the best and should help keep the legend alive for those that lived it, those that loved it and for those that will someday be touched by it.

The New York Times obituary is here.

###

St. Patrick's Day 2010

2010-03-17T01:08:00.004-05:00

(As the Clever Crow Flies)
###

Francis Bacon on Discourse

2010-03-16T23:08:00.004-05:00

Francis Bacon first published "Of Discourse" in 1597 in a collection of short essays, and then in somewhat expanded form in subsequent 1612 and 1625 editions. Here, to give you a sense of Bacon's view of how to converse well, is the conclusion of the 1625 version:

I knew two noblemen, of the west part of England, whereof the one was given to scoff, but kept ever royal cheer in his house; the other would ask of those that had been at the other’s table, Tell truly was there never a flout or dry blow [scornful jest] given? To which the guest would answer, Such and such a thing passed. The lord would say, I thought he would mar a good dinner. Discretion of speech is more than eloquence; and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal, is more than to speak in good words or in good order. A good continued speech, without a good speech of interlocution, shows slowness: and a good reply or second speech, without a good settled speech, showeth shallowness and weakness. As we see in beasts, that those that are weakest in the course are yet nimblest in the turn; as it is betwixt the greyhound and the hare. To use too many circumstances ere one come to the matter, is wearisome; to use none at all, is blunt.

###

Alexander Pope on Criticism

2010-03-15T23:38:00.000-05:00

You will probably recognize line 625 in the excerpt below from Alexander Pope's "Essay on Criticism." The excerpt comprises lines 610 to 642.

Such shameless bards we have, and yet, 'tis true,
There are as mad abandoned critics, too.
The bookful blockhead ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head,
With his own tongue still edifies his ears,
And always listening to himself appears.
All books he reads and all he reads assails
From Dryden's Fables down to Durfey's Tales.
With him most authors steal their works or buy;
Garth did not write his own Dispensary.
Name a new play, and he's the poets friend
Nay, showed his faults — but when would poets mend?
No place so sacred from such fops is barred,
Nor is Paul's Church more safe than Paul's Churchyard:
Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead,
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Distrustful sense with modest caution speaks,
It still looks home, and short excursions makes;
But rattling nonsense in full volleys breaks,
And, never shocked, and never turned aside,
Bursts out, resistless, with a thundering tide.

But where's the man who counsel can bestow,
Still pleased to teach, and yet not proud to know?
Unbiased, or by favor, or in spite,
Not dully prepossessed, nor blindly right;
Though learned, well-bred, and though well-bred, sincere,
Modestly bold, and humanly severe,
Who to a friend his faults can freely show,
And gladly praise the merit of a foe?
Blessed with a taste exact, yet unconfined;
A knowledge both of books and human kind;
Generous converse, a soul exempt from pride;
And love to praise, with reason on his side?

Note: The Wikipedia entry for John Dryden's Fables, Ancient and Modern is here. You can read about Thomas Durfey here. The Wikipedia entry for Sir Samuel Garth is here.

###

William James on Genius

2010-03-14T23:34:00.006-05:00

In "The Perception of 'Things,'" Chapter 19 of The Principles of Psychology (1890 edition), William James explains his view of genius . . .

In logic a concept is unalterable; but what are popularly called our 'conceptions of things' alter by being used. The aim of 'Science' is to attain conceptions so adequate and exact that we shall never need to change them. There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate, its ideas. Our education is a cease-less compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors. Every new experience must be disposed of under some old head. The great point is to find the head which has to be least altered to take it in. Certain Polynesian natives, seeing horses for the first time, called them pigs, that being the nearest head. My child of two played for a week with the first orange that was given him, calling it a 'ball.' He called the first whole eggs he saw 'potatoes' having been accustomed to see his 'eggs' broken into a glass, and his potatoes without the skin. A folding pocket-corkscrew he unhesitatingly called 'bad-scissors.' Hardly any one of us can make new heads easily when fresh experiences come. Most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impressions in any but the old ways. Old-fogyism, in short, is the inevitable terminus to which life sweeps us on. Objects which violate our established habits of 'apperception' are simply not taken account of at all; or, if on some occasion we are forced by dint of argument to admit their existence, twenty-four hours later the admission is as if it were not, and every trace of the unassimilable truth has vanished from our thought. Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

###

Richard Stites, 1931 - 2010

2010-03-13T23:51:00.000-05:00

(Yale University Press)
Creating nests of cultural life required more than money. Only about 2 to 3 percent of nobles could afford to build and maintain the two hundred or so staff required, say, for a large house, church, planned garden, and other amenities; and to hire foreign conductors, musicians, ballet masters, and set designers. The middling and poorer Maecenases of art had little alternative but to deploy their serfs on the front lines of creativity and performance. But even the grandees drew on their serf population for rank-and-file performers. The belief, just starting to erode in other parts of Europe, that artists were hardly better than artisans or servants remained intact in Russia; playing a violin or dancing on stage seemed only a step away from craft skills or household and farm chores. Owners of large estates could draw from armies of field hands, drivers, under-stewards, and various technical workers. For more modest landlords, household serfs made up the recruitment pool: cooks, scullery maids, butlers, and valets. Serf artists of all kinds could be differentiated and segregated from field serfs and domestics in treatment, apparel, and even housing. Just as often, they shared the status of stable boys, millers, blacksmiths, and domestics, even alternating in these roles on a regular basis. An ex-serf recalled in his memoirs how owners inhibited initiative and pride of work by shuttling serfs from farm to house, turning cooks to coachmen, lackeys to clerks or shepherds. [p. 30]

The New York Times obituary for Richard Stites, longtime professor at Georgetown University, is here.

###

Encouraging Words From Walt Whitman

2010-03-10T23:28:00.004-05:00

O Me! O Life!
O Me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;

Of the endless trains of the faithless — of cities fill’d with the foolish;

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light — of the objects mean — of the struggle ever renew’d;

Of the poor results of all — of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;

Of the empty and useless years of the rest — with the rest me intertwined;

The question, O me! so sad, recurring — What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.
That you are here — that life exists, and identity;

That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

– Walt Whitman

###

A Vivid Preview of US Air Force Basic Training

2010-03-08T15:06:00.010-05:00

You can find voluminous information about the US Air Force at www.af.mil, but if you want to check out the really cool stuff, the place to go is www.airforce.com.

Thanks to the March/April issue of Communications Arts magazine, I'm now aware of the immensely engaging and informative section of airforce.com devoted to detailing what happens during Air Force basic training. You can access this section here.

You'll find that the navigation is organized according to the eight full weeks recruits spend in basic training:

Week 1 — Fall In

Week 2 — Basic War Skills

Week 3 — Combat Lifesaving

Week 4 — Countering the Threat

Week 5 — Ready to Fight

Week 6 — The Beast (Basic Expeditionary Airman Skills Training — field exercises and combat scenarios)

Week 7 — Airmanship

Week 8 — Graduation

Each week's material includes a video overview, a short inspirational blurb (accessed by mousing over an image on the screen representing the week's focus), video comments from a Military Training Instructor, still photos, and a summary of the schedule for the week.

The site also provides guidance on how to prepare for basic training (e.g. what to study in advance, what to pack, and what not to pack).

On every screeen a visitor is one click away from launching an online chat with an "advisor" or launching a tool for finding the nearest Air Force recruiter.

Visitors can also:

click on "See What It's Like" to access video on such activities as combat search and rescue, serving on a bomb squad, and special ops.

try various interactive features, such as "Train a Military Working Dog," "Refuel a Plane," "Launch a Rocket into Space," and "Fly with the Thunderbirds."

play simulation games

The basic training section of airforce. com is the handiwork of GSD&M Idea City.

###

William Kamkwamba's Book

2010-03-07T20:10:00.002-05:00

In a couple of 2007 posts, I wrote about William Kamkwamba, a young Malawian man, now 22, who distinguished himself back in 2002 by building a windmill in his home village, using timber, bicycle parts, and varous materials from a junkyard.

You can now read a book-length version of Kamkwamba's story in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope, co-authored by Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer. An excerpt from the book is here.

Bryan Mealer going over the manuscript of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind with William Kamkwamba and translator Blessings Chikakula
(Gift Kamkwamba)
The video below (1:17:22) shows Kamkwamba and Mealer speaking (after some technical difficulties) at MIT on October 27, 2009. The program was under the auspices of MIT's Technology and Culture forum.

This next video is much shorter — only 4:31 minutes. It shows Kamkwamba answering questions submitted by readers of the reddit blog.

If you want to keep up with William Kamkwamba's blog, you can find it here.

(www.bryanmealer.com)
###

Working People of Holyoke VI: Urban Agriculture

2010-03-06T23:31:00.007-05:00

In the nineteenth century, the largest immigrant groups arriving in Holyoke were the Irish and, later, French Canadians. More recently, the population of Puerto Rican extraction has grown to the point that it now comprises over a third of the total.

Many of the Puerto Ricans come from a rural background, so there was a logic back in 1992 to creation of an organization — Nuestras Raíces (Our Roots) — that promotes and enables small-scale farming within the city by adults and youth.

Senorita Ada's Casita at la Finca (The Farm) of Nuestras Raíces (2008)
(masslive.com)

Nuestras Raíces' website explains:

Urban agriculture has proven to be an effective way to promote community development because it is a way for the residents of downtown Holyoke to maintain a connection to their culture while putting down roots in their new home. Most of our members grew up on the farms of rural Puerto Rico and many first came to the Northeast as migrant farm workers. Though they may live in the city now, they are farmers at heart. They have lifetimes of experience in agriculture and it is part of their heritage. Projects based on agriculture, such as markets and community gardens, build on the skills and knowledge that participants already have, and are proud to have the opportunity to use to improve their community and to teach to a younger generation.

To read about Nuestras Raíces' various projects, including La Finca (The Farm), a thirty-acre spread on the shore of the Connecticut River within the city limits, you can start at this page of their website. A nine-minute video showing an exhibition of paso fino horses, some of which are stabled at La Finca, is below.

###

Working People of Holyoke V: Mill Reuse

2010-03-05T23:16:00.006-05:00

As textile and other mill jobs moved south, New England towns were left with numerous abandoned or underutilized mill buildings, often centrally located and generally occupying potentially attractive waterfront land.

Such was the case in Holyoke, which now offers an example of mill reuse that is representative of redevelopement of mill properties underway in a number of Massachusetts towns.

The front door of one of the mill buildings making up the redeveloped Open Square complex
(Open Square)
The Open Square project has been underway since 1996, when architect and principal John Aubin began gradually rehabbing the 685,000 square feet of space in the seven-building Lyman Mills complex, which his family has owned since 1969. Tenants are a mix of offices, retail stores, restaurants, artists, light industry, and condo owners. (A list of current tenants is here.)

Below are some more pictures showing what has been accomplished so far.

Open Square's favorite picture of what their refurbished interior space looks like. This particular space is on the fourth floor of Building 4, an area that has been configured for offices.
(Open Square)

The office of Cover Technologies,
an environmental services company,
in Building 4 of Open Square.
(Open Square)

The Open Square complex,
showing one of the canals between which it sits
(Open Square)

In November of last year, the local public TV station broadcast a feature on Open Square. You can watch the 5:49 segment, based largely on interviewing John Aubin, below. (BTW, the correct call letters for the TV station are WGBY.)

###

Working People of Holyoke IV: Holyoke Heritage State Park

2010-03-04T23:56:00.003-05:00

Wikipedia provides the basic information:

Holyoke Heritage State Park celebrates the history and culture of the City of Holyoke, Massachusetts. It is operated and managed by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation. Park features include a visitor center with exhibits about paper manufacturing and Holyoke's industrial and cultural history. Admission to the park and visitor center is free.

The Holyoke Merry-Go-Round, the Children's Museum at Holyoke and the Volleyball Hall of Fame are located in the park.

The site in which Heritage State Park has been built was once the land used for the William Skinner Silk Mill. Heritage State Park was planned after Skinner's mill burned down [in 1980].

William Skinner's Silk Mill
Holyoke, Massachusetts (1887)
(Digital Treasures)
###

Working People of Holyoke III: The Decline of New England's Mills

2010-03-03T23:39:00.007-05:00

Stagnant wages in Holyoke mills, enforced by the availability of low-wage workers in the southern states, contributed to pervasive disenchantment with mill work among young people in New England after World War II. William Hartford describes the situation in Working People of Holyoke: Class and Ethnicity in a Massachusetts Mill Town, 1850-1960:

The crucial decade was the 1930s. As Marc Miller has written of Lowell [MA] during the depression, "a natural partner to high unemployment was exemplary school attendance." ... As late as 1950 in Holyoke, median school years completed was still only 9.9. But this was an increase of nearly a full school year since 1940, and there was every indication that this and related measures would continue to rise in the future.

{. . .]

... A number of parents simply stated that they wanted their children to be happy, to be able to do what they wished. However vaguely phrased, these statements tell us much about the meaning of social mobility in working-class America. What these parents most wanted for their children was that they have choices, choices that they as children did not have; and in the end, what their children chose to do was less important than that they be able to choose at all. As Madeleine Biehler [a Holyoke resident of French-Canadian extraction] said of her mother, "It was always do what I didn't do"

When the next generation began making these choices, textile employment ranked low on its list of career alternatives. ... This was the case not only in Holyoke, but throughout much of New England as well. From Adams, Massachusetts, Wauregan, Connecticut, West Warwick, Rhode Island, and Biddeford, Maine, came similar reports after World War II, all stating that young people were consciously avoiding textile work. The reasons for their decisions were perhaps best summarized in a 1950 study of the state textile industry by the Massachusetts House of Representatives:
It was represented to the Commission that because of beliefs such as that mill work entailed lack of opportunity, unpleasant surroundings, absence of progressive personnel and industrial relations policies, relatively low wages, and the uncertainty of regular employment, a stigma is attached to employment in the industry in the Northern States. These beliefs repel younger persons and children of textile workers, the normal replacement, and results in their turning to other forms of employment.
Holyoke TWUA [Textile Workers' Union of America] official Anna Sullivan put it more bluntly: textiles was "at the bottom of the heap." [pp. 202-203]

###

Working People of Holyoke II: The Bishops' Program on Social Reconstruction

2010-03-02T23:38:00.010-05:00

It shouldn't surprise anyone to learn that the tensions between, on the one hand, Catholic clerics concerned with social justice, and, on the other hand, clerics concerned with supporting existing social relations, have existed for many years. For example, in Working People of Holyoke: Class and Ethnicity in a Massachusetts Mill Town, 1850-1960, William Hartford describes a conflict between these two points of view dating back to the 1920s:

Although the 1920s would be a cheerless decade for both trade unionists and social activists, the period opened on an optimistic note. In 1919, Father John Ryan penned a sweeping statement on contemporary social problems that was subsequently adopted by the National Catholic War Council. Popularly known as the Bishops' Program on Social Reconstruction, it called for minimum wage legislation, unemployment and old-age insurance, public housing for workers, and the abolition of child labor. The document also urged organized labor to look beyond its own immediate interests and assume a more active legislative role. Although their proposals were in many respects similar to a statement recently issued by the AFL's Reconstruction Committee, the bishops chided labor leaders for leaving such vital matters as a living wage and eight-hour day to union voluntarism, an apporoach that failed "to give sufficient consideration to the case of the weaker sections of the working class, those for whom trade union action is not practically adequate."

A persisting commitment to voluntarism was not the only feature of the AFL declaration that the bishops found wanting. They also faulted labor leaders for an unwillingness to develop means by which workers might "become owners as well as users of the instruments of production" and recommended that steps be taken to provide labor participation in management through copartnership agreements and producer cooperatives. Intended as a moderate alternative to the British Labor Party's postwar social reconstruction agenda, the bishops cast their proposals in a framework of reciprocal rights and duties that would preserve the interests of labor, capital, and society at large. The laborer, they concluded,
must come to realize that he owes his employer an honest day's work in return for a fair wage, and that conditions cannot be substantially improved until he roots out the desire to get a maximum of return through a minimum of service. The capitalist must likewise get a new viewpoint. He needs to learn the long-forgotten truth that wealth is stewardship, that profit-making is not the basic justification of business enterprise, that there are such things as fair profits, fair interest, and fair prices.
Despite its conservative features, the bishops' program was not what American corporate leaders had in mind when they enthusiastically endorsed Warren Harding's call for a "return to normalcy." The statement looked much further down the road of industrial reform than capital was willing to travel, and the National Civic Federation (NCF), acting on behalf of the nation's largest businesses, mounted a counteroffensive. The NCF gathered "expert testimony" from anonymous Catholics who collectively affirmed that the bishops had exceeded their authority by issuing so wrong-headed and radical a declaration. Their program, a 1921 NCF report asserted, tended to undermine public confidence in the government and institutions of this country," and was apparently the work of a small band of radical priests sympathetic to Marxism.

However self-serving, NCF contentions that the bishops did not speak for all Catholics were only too accurate. During the early 1920s, conservative hierarchs opposed to the social-justice orientation of the recently formed National Catholic Welfare Conference persuaded Pope Benedeict XV to lift his approval of the organizstion. Although Benedict's successor, Pius XI, resanctioned the council, episcopal opposition would continue to hinder its activities, particularly efforts to implement the bishops' program. As Father John Ryan, head of the council's Social Action Department, observed: "The first obstacle confronting the department is the fact that neither the bishops, the priests, nor the laity are convinced that our industrial system should be reorganized in this radical fashion." If anything, Ryan understated the difficulties facing Catholic progressives. For as the decade unfolded, traditionalist churchmen, seeking to restore a threatened hegemony, would mount one final campaign to impose their paternalistic nostrums on American Catholics. [The campaign in question was a successful effortin 1924 to defeat an amendment to the US Constitution banning child labor.] [pp. 158-159]

###

Working People of Holyoke I: Commitment to Learning

2010-03-01T23:04:00.006-05:00

In 1990 William F. Hartford, an independent scholar, published Working People of Holyoke: Class and Ethnicity in a Massachusetts Mill Town, 1850-1960. His book is a detailed study that helps one understand how workers in Holyoke's factories — principally paper and textile mills — gradually, and with plenty of setbacks, arrived at somewhat improved wages and working conditions, only to see the mills close as owners shifted production south, where wages were lower.

The passage below, from Chapter 6, touches on learning activities — one dimension of the workers' efforts to improve their lives in the years after 1905.

As they struggled to preserve some semblance of independence [i.e., having an independent voice in community affairs], trade-union respectables [as opposed to "saloonists," who tended to have a relatively casual connection to the industrial workforce] displayed an intense commitment to learning, not only for themselves but for all working people. The Dynamiters [a group of Holyoke trade unionists who met every Saturday evening] regularly badgered the state legislature to appropriate funds for university extension classes, and individual members ... periodically organized adult-education programs for local wage earners. Even more important than these efforts was the meaning that trade-union respectables attached to education. In their quest for knowledge they were not seeking to emulate or impress the local bourgeoisie. Rather, they saw learning as a valuable resource that could be used to engage life's problems. The Dynamiters thus maintained a file of the Congressional Record and other reference sources that members consulted to frame legislative petitions, contest the actions of local authorities, and challenge the assertions of visiting academics who, as the Springfield Republican's Sunday correspondent observed, "came [to Dynamiters Hall] hotfoot for argument and got it good and plenty." [p. 127]

In Chapter 7, Hartford offers an example from the mid-1920s of one of the more formal programs sponsored by the Dynamiters Club:

A course on "Labor Problems in Modern Society" conducted by Paul Douglas, then a professor at Amherst College, covered such topics as wealth and income distribution, recent wage movements, family-allowance systems, unemployment insurance, and the history of organized labor. During discussion periods, particpants debated whether centralized labor markets reduced unemployment, why welfare capitalists [owners who adopted a paternalistic approach to labor relations] so often opposed worker organization, and what impact technological innovation had on trade unionism, among other questions. [p. 169]

###

Measures of Employment and Unemployment

2010-02-28T23:48:00.006-05:00

With so much attention and policy discussion nowadays understandably focused on high unemployment, it's important to have a reasonably clear idea of how overall employment and unemployment are measured.

In the US, producing the relevant data is the job of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which conducts two surveys each month:

Current Population Survey (CPS) — a survey of households

Current Employment Statistics (CES) — a survey of nonfarm payrolls

The January 2010 issue of the Economic Letter published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas reproduces a BLS chart comparing the two:

Universe surveyed
CPS: Civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and older.
CES: Nonfarm wage and salary jobs.

Type of survey
CPS: Monthly sample survey of approximately 60,000 households.
CES: Monthly sample survey of approximately 150,000 businesses and government agencies covering 390,000 establishments.

Major outputs
CPS: Measures labor force, employment and unemployment with significant demographic detail.
CES: Measures employment, hours and earnings with significant industrial and geographic detail.

Reference period
CPS: Calendar week that includes the 12th of the month.
CES: Employer pay period that includes the 12th of the month.

Employment concept
CPS: Estimates the number of employed persons.

Counts multiple jobholders once.

Includes individuals absent from work without pay.

CES: Estimates the number of nonfarm payroll jobs.

Counts multiple jobholders for each payroll job.

Includes only those receiving pay for the reference period.

Employment definition differences
CPS: Includes unincorporated self-employed persons, agriculture and related workers, private household workers, unpaid family workers (persons working without formal pay in their family’s business) and workers on leave without pay.
CES: Excludes all the groups listed above, except for the logging component of agriculture and related industries.

Benchmark adjustments
CES: No direct benchmark for employment; adjustments to underlying population base revised annually to intercensal estimates and every 10 years to the decennial census.
CES: Employment benchmarked annually to employment counts derived primarily from unemployment insurance tax records.

As the accompanying article explains,

Both surveys have their strengths and weaknesses. The CPS provides a broader picture of nonfarm employment because it includes the unincorporated self-employed, unpaid family workers, private household employees and workers absent without pay. It may even partly capture off-the-books employment not reported in the CES. However, the CPS employment classification is based on interviewees’ descriptions of their jobs and doesn’t always agree with employers’ reporting in the CES ...

Analysts often view the CES as a better gauge of cyclical movements in employment by sector because of its higher sampling ratio. However, it’s subject to double counting because it may include persons with more than one job or those who change jobs in a given payroll period.

Because the CPS and the CES often diverge to a marked degree, the BLS also publishes an adjusted CPS that brings its definition of employment into closer alignment with that of the CES. Discrepencies between the two remain,

mainly related to differences in definition, size and concept of the two surveys. These differences range from sampling errors and benchmark revisions to off-the-books employment, the birth of new firms and varying job-to-job movements.

By taking the trouble to learn the basic differences between the CPS and the CES, you equip yourself to make sense of such seemingly contradictory data as those in the opening sentence of the BLS Employment Situation News Release of February 5: "The unemployment rate fell from 10.0 to 9.7 percent in January, and nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged (-20,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today."

###

Alfred Sloan's Memoir X: Summing Up

2010-02-27T23:22:00.006-05:00

In Chapter 23 of My Years with General Motors, Alfred Sloan summarizes one of his central convictions concerning management of a multi-division corporation:

It has been a thesis of this book that good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization, or "decentralization with co-ordinated control."

Eash of the conflicting elements brought together in this concept has its unique results in the operation of a business. From decentralization we get initiative, responsibility, development of personnel, decisions close to the facts, flexibility — in short, all the qualities necessary for an organization to adapt to new conditions. From co-ordination we get efficiencies and economies. It must be apparent that co-ordinated decentralization is not an easy concept to apply. There is no hard and fast rule for sorting out the various responsibilities and the best way to assign them. The balance which is struck between corporate and divisional responsibility varies according to what is being decided, the circumstances of the time, past experience, and the temperaments and skills of the executives involved.

The concept of co-ordinated decentralization evolved gradually at General Motors as we responded to tangible problems of management. As I have shown, at the time its development began, some four decades ago, it was clearly advisable to give each division a strong management which would be primarily responsible for the conduct of its business. But our experience in 1920-21 also demonstrated the need for a greater measure of control over the divisions than we had attained. Without adequate control from the central office, the divisions got out of hand and failed to follow the policies set by corporation management, to the great detriment of the corporation. Meanwhile, the corporation management was in no position to set the best policies, since it was without appropriate and timely data from the divisions. A steady flow of operating data, for which procedures were later set up, finally made real co-ordination possible.

[. . .]

Much of my life in General Motors was devoted to the development, organization, and periodic reorganization of these governing groups [governing committees and policy groups] in central management. This was required because of the paramount importance, in an organization like General Motors, of providing the right framework for decisions. There is a natural tendency to erode that framework unless it is consciously maintained. Group decisions do not always come easily. There is a strong temptation for the leading officers to make decisions themselves without the sometimes onerous process of discussion, which involves selling your ideas to others. The group will not always make a better decision than any particular member would make; there is even the possibility of some averaging down. But in General Motors I think the record shows that we have averaged up. Essentially this means that, through our form of organizatipon, we have been able to adapt to the great changes that have taken place in the automobile market in each of the decades since 1920.

[pp. 429-430, 435, 1990 edition]

###

Alfred Sloan's Memoir IX: The Technical Center

2010-02-26T23:25:00.010-05:00

Three cheers for Alfred Sloan that he decided to hire top architectural talent — Eliel Saarinen and his son Eero — to design the General Motors Technical Center, which opened in Warren MI in 1956 (by which time Eero was the main architect, his father having died in 1950). As Sloan explains in Chapter 14 of My Years with General Motors, there was some disagreement over the "architectural and aesthetic standards" that should be set for the Technical Center.

Staircase, designed by Eero Saarinen, in the Research building of the General Motors Technical Center
(Critical Detroit)
... Harley Earl had contended from the beginning that we should engage an architect of stature, and aim for a center that would be distinctive. Several others felt that any emphasis on high aesthetic standards might be detrimental to the practical operations of the center, and so they wanted General Motors itself to design and plan the project. At about the time this argument was in progress, I happened to visit the Ethyl Corporation laboratores in Detroit, which had just been completed. These handsome facilities made an excellent impression on me, and so I inclined to Mr. Earl's point of view more than I might have otherwise.

Among those who expressed some concern about the effects of an aesthetically oriented center was Mr. Lammot du Pont. He felt, quite properly, that he would not be fulfilling his responsibilities as a director unless he was satisfied, on certain points. I wrote to him on May 8, 1945, arguing the advantages of retaining an outside architect, and on May 17 he replied that he was satisfied on the point. His letter said, in part:
The whole layout and the description of its preparation gave me the impression that the matter of esthetic treatment, or as I would style it, "dressing up the place," had been an important factor from the beginning. I questioned whether the matter of appearance was of any importance in a project of this kind, the sole object being to get technical results. It was with this thought in mind that in offering my remarks, I started out with the layout which had been made by an architectural firm, whereas according to my line of thought, it would have been more appropriate to have had the layout made by an engineering firm or General Motors engineers.

I gather from your letter that it is not the intention to allow the appearances to interfere with the technical possibilities or to add substantially to the cost of the project. With those two assurances, my only remaining question with respect to the project would be answered.
We asked Mr. Earl himself to find the right architect for the center. He visited a number of leading architectural schools and sought out the opinions of others who were knowledgeable in the field, and he found in the end that virtually everyone made the same recommendation. The selection of the Saarinens was not a difficult choice. [The landscape architect was Thomas Church.]

General Motors Technical Center
Warren, Michigan
(Michigan State Historic Preservation Office)
[The General Motors Technical Center] is located on a 900-acre site northeast of Detroit, about twelve miles from the General Motors Building. At the center of the site is a twenty-two acre artificial lake surrounded on three sides by clusters of buildings. On the north side are the Research Laboratories. To the east are the Manufacturing Staff and the Engineering Staff buildings. To the south are the Styling Staff buildings, including a distinctive domed auditorium in which fairly sizable groups can gather for showings of the staff's work.

[pp. 259, 262-263, 1990 edition]

###

Alfred Sloan's Memoir VIII: The Great Depression

2010-02-25T23:59:00.000-05:00

The trauma of the Great Depression was intense in the auto industry. Alfred Sloan's response was to re-emphasize the importance of having a strong and agile central policy-making capability, even as policy execution remained the responsibility of the individual GM divisions.

As Sloan recalls in Chapter 10 of My Years with General Motors,

The automobile industry in the United States and Canada dropped from a production of about 5.6 million cars and trucks, worth about $5.1 billion at retail, in 1929, to about 1.4 million units, worth about $1.1 billion in 1932. That was lower than any year since the war year 1918.

Thanks to the financial and operating controls, the development of which I have described in earlier chapters, General Motors did not approach disaster as it had in the 1920-21 slump. We made an orderly step-by-step retreat in all matters, including wage and salary reductions. Sales by our United States and Canadian plants dropped to 526,000 cars and trucks in 1932 as compared with about 1.9 million in 1929, a tremendous drop (72 per cent) when you consider the many expenses that are fixed. That we fared relatively better than the industry is shown by the fact that our share of the market increased from 34 per cent in 1929 to 38 per cent in 1932, the trough year of the depression. Our profits dropped from about $248 million in 1929 to $165,000 in 1932, still in the black, thanks mainly to our financial-control procedures. In 1932 we were operating at less than 30 per cent of capacity.

[. . .]

... Inevitably when an industrial enterprise is shaken with such a force as we met at the onset of the great depression, there has to be confusion. In November 1933 I began to write again on the subject of new policies, beginning at the beginning, on the subject of policy itself. I said:
I feel that this [policy] phase of the general organization problem is of particular importance to General Motors, not because of its size particularly but on account of the nature of its business, subject as it is, to what I might term "rapid changes". In other words, I contend a unit of the automotive industry has far less "coasting ability", I might term it, than units in most any other industry that might be selected for comparison. As I analyze our picture, looking forward into the future, our success or, let me say, the maintenance of our position, absolutely depends upon the ability of our organization to lay down a strategy as will enable us to forecast the rapid changes that are taking place and will continue to take place in the various activities in which we are interested, involving all the functional divisions within such activities, and to provide for those changes with sufficient rapidity.

In making this statement I am not minimizing in any sense, the importance of effectively and economically carrying out such policies as may be adopted — I am simply trying to emphasize the point that the policy phase is of vital concern because, unless we can, with reasonable intelligence, meet this issue — no matter how able an administrative set-up [i.e., policy execution set-up] we may have, it is limited in its opportunity to function. I might add further, that looking forward I feel that we have got to more aggressively deal with that phase of our problems than we have in the past. It is going to be harder to maintain both our competitive position and our profit position. We can not afford to take the time in the future that we have in the past to make up our minds what we should do with respect to changes in trends which are having an influence on our position ...
My main purpose in the memorandum from which the above passages are taken was to reassert the purely policy-making role of the Executive Committee.

[pp. 176-178, 1990 edition]

###

Alfred Sloan's Memoir VII: The Milford Proving Ground

2010-02-24T23:52:00.007-05:00

Interestingly, Alfred Sloan has very little to say in My Years with General Motors about production line workers. On the other hand, he gives lots of attention to GM's managers, engineers, stylists, and dealers.

(click to enlarge)

GM's Milford MI Proving Ground
(gadgetopia.com)
For the engineers, one of the biggest steps forward was the creation of the General Motors Proving Ground in Milford MI. As Sloan explains in Chapter 14,

The most important step we took to standardize and improve test procedures was the establishment in 1924 of the General Motors Proving Ground, the first of its kind in the automobile industry. The thought was that we would have a large area, properly protected, and entirely closed to the public. It would be provided with roads of various types representing all the various demands on the motorcar from the standpoints of high speed, hills of various grades, smooth roads, rough roads, ability of a car to move through water — which is frequently required in severe storms — and the like. There we would be able to prove out our cars under controlled conditions both before and after production and we could also make comprehensive tests on competitive cars.

... Michigan is rather flat, and at first we had difficulty locating an area of sufficient size that would give us all the various grades we needed. However, almost every foot of the United States has been measured topographically, and the record was available in Washington. We went to Washington and from the Geological Survey maps available there we determined a location that appeared to fulfill our needs. Then the general executives and engineers of the various divisions and myself spent a day at the prospective site. We walked all over the place, ate a picnic lunch under the trees, and finally came to the conclusion that that particular area of 1125 acres — now 4010 acres — at Milford, Michigan, would meet the requirements we had in mind.

[. . .]

The land was surveyed; the straightaways were laid out so that we could check the effects of different winds on speed; a track was built and banked so that it was reasonably safe to operate cars at speeds up to 100 miles an hour or more. Engineering buildings were erected, so that indoor tests could be made in correlation with outdoor tests. Headquarters and facilities were provided for the corporation's engineers. Separate engineering headquarters and garage facilities were eventually provided for the staffs of the engineering departments of the various divisions, so that they could preserve their divisional autonomy in testing. Chevrolet, for example, could do its own testing if desired, in addition to that being done by the corporation. A clubhouse was erected that provided sleeping quarters, dining facilities, and the like for those attached to the Proving Ground operations, since the Proving Ground itself was a considerable number of miles from any town where commissary facilities were available.

In those days I used to spend a day and a night, sometimes longer, at the Proving Ground every other week. I would go over the engineering of General Motors' cars and competitive cars. I would examine what was being done in the way of testing future products. The Proving Ground thus afforded my associates and myself a wonderful opportunity to find out what was going on in the automobile industry from the engineering point of view. To the original Proving Ground we have since added a special, desert proving ground at Mesa, Arizona [replaced in 2009 by a facility in Yuma], and a station to test cars in mountain driving and a garage and shop facility to service our test cars at Manitou Springs (Pike's Peak), Colorado [closed in 1999].

[pp. 253-255, 1990 edition]

###

Alfred Sloan's Memoir VI: Getting Dealers Up to Speed

2010-02-23T23:56:00.000-05:00

The woes of discontinued General Motors dealers have been much in the news lately. It's interesting to go back in time some eight decades to see how Alfred Sloan viewed the issue of developing a strong distribution system based on franchised dealerships. In Chapter 16 of My Years with General Motors, Sloan recalls:

Alhough in the 1920s we had made great advances in getting the facts about General Motors' economic position, we did not then have the facts regarding the economic position of our dealers, and so were handicapped in thinking through dealer problems. When a dealer's profit position was failing, we had no way of knowing whether this was due to a new-car problem, a used-car problem, a service problem, a parts problem, or some other problem. Without such facts is was impossible to put any sound distribution policy into effect.

In the Proving Ground address which I mentioned earlier [delivered to the Automobile Editors of American Newspapers on September 28, 1927 in Milford MI], I made the following observations on this subject:

... I want to outline to you what I believe to be a great weakness in the automotive industry today and what General Motors is trying to do to correct that weakness.

I have stated frankly to General Motors dealers, in almost every city in the United States, that I was deeply concerned with the fact that many of them, even those who were carrying on in a reasonably efficient manner, were not making the return on their capital that they should. Right here let me say that so far as General Motors dealers are concerned, from what facts I have — I realize there has been much improvement during the past two or three years, but interested as the management of General Motors must be in every step from the raw material to the ultimate consumer, and recognizing that this chain of circumstances is no stronger than its weakest link, I feel a great deal of uncertainty as to the operating position of our dealer organization as a whole. I hope that this feeling of uncertainty is unwarranted. I am sure that with a responsibility so great, all elements of uncertainty must be eliminated and that our dealers should know the facts about their operating position as clearly and as scientifically as I have outlined to you we feel that we know the facts about General Motors' operating position.This brings us back to ... two words — proper accounting. Many of our dealers, and the same thing applies to dealers of other organizations, have good accounting systems. Many of them have indifferent ones and I regret to say that too large a percentage of them have practically no accounting system at all. Many of those who have accounting systems, through lack of their being properly developed, are not able to effectively use them. In other words, they are not so developed that they give the dealer the facts about his business; where the leaks are; what he should do to improve his position. As I said before, uncertainty must be eliminated. Uncertainty and efficiency are as far apart as the North Pole is from the South. If I could wave a magic wand over our dealer organization, with the result that every dealer could have a proper accounting system, could know the facts about his business and could intelligently deal with the many details incident to his business in an intelligent manner as a result thereof, I would be willing to pay for that accomplishment an enormous sum and I would be fully justified in doing so. It would be the best investment General Motors ever made.

Accordingly, in 1927 we set up an organization called Motors Accounting Company. We developed a standardized accounting system applicable to all dealers and sent a staff into the field to help install it and to establish an audit system.

[pp.286-287, 1990 edition]

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Alfred Sloan's Memoir V: Autos in the Olden Days

2010-02-22T23:55:00.001-05:00

There are precious few people with firsthand experience of driving cars from the early years of the automobile era. In Chapter 12 of My Years with General Motors, Alfred Sloan reminds his readers of what mass-produced autos c. 1920 were like:

1920 Chevrolet 490 Touring Car
(www.howstuffworks.com)
Today's driver, of course, would find the typical car of 1920 completely unsatisfactory. It had a four-cylinder engine whose crankshaft and associated connecting rods and pistons were inherently unbalanced. Ordinarily this car had two-wheel brakes with braking confined to the rear wheels; it had no independent springing of the front wheels; it had a sliding-gear transmission, and an engine of low power. It vibrated and often shimmied; it veered and sometimes skidded when the brakes were applied; it rode hard and rough; the clutch grabbed; the gears often clashed in the shifting, and, owing to the low power available, they always had to be shifted on hills of substantial gradient. But the car usually got somewhere and back; fortunately it was unable to go fast or far enough for many of its deficiencies to become serious drawbacks. It was roughly adapted to its environment — and its major parts were reasonably adapted to each other, at however low a level of integration and efficiency.

[p. 220, 1990 edition]

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Alfred Sloan's Memoir IV: Introduction of the Pontiac

2010-02-21T23:51:00.006-05:00

The post from day before yesterday quoted Alfred Sloan's explanation of how General Motors formalized its policy of producing "a line of cars in each price area, from the lowest price up to one for a strictly high-grade quantity-production car."

A "market segmentation price ladder" of General Motors models from 1925/26: a Cadillac sedan, a Chevrolet touring car, a first-year Pontiac coupe, a Buick touring car, and an Oldsmobile sedan.
(www.cnet.com.au)
As Sloan goes on to explain in Chapter 9 of My Years with General Motors, the corporation's management recognized in 1924 that there was too big a price gap between their $510 Chevrolet touring car and their $750 Olds touring car. GM decided to introduce a new make, the Pontiac, to fill this gap.

[The gap] was big enough to constitute a volume demand [from prospective auto buyers] and thereby to accommodate, on top of Chevrolet, a competitor against whom we then had no counter. It was therefore an important gap to fill both offensively and defensively; offensively because there was a market demand to be satisfied there, and defensively because competitive cars could come in there and come down on Chevrolet as we planned for Chevrolet to come down on Ford. On this reasoning, we made one of the most important decisions in the history of General Motors, namely to fill the gap above Chevrolet with a brand-new car with a new six-cylinder engine. We had come to believe from an engineering standpoint that the future favored sixes and eights. However, to make the strategy effective, it would be necessary to fill the gap with a car that also had some volume economies. Otherwise, because the new car would draw some volume away from Chevrolet, reducing its economies, a loss would result for both cars. We concluded, therefore, that the new car must be designed in physical co-ordination with Chevrolet so as to share Chevrolet's economies and vice versa.

[. . .]

... the Pontiac represented the first important advance in co-ordinating the physical product in manufacturing. Physical co-ordination in one form or another is, of course, the first principle of mass production, but at that time it was widely supposed, from the example of the Model T, that mass production on a grand scale required a uniform product. The Pontiac, co-ordinated in part with a car in another price class, was to demonstrate that mass production of automobiles could be reconciled with variety in product. This was again the opposite of the old Ford concept, which we persistently met and opposed at every turn. For General Motors, with its five basic price classes by car makes and several subclasses of models, the implication of the Pontiac idea was very great for the whole line. If the cars in the higher-price classes could benefit from the volume economies of the lower-price classes, the advantages of mass production could be extended to the whole car line.

[. . .]

The Pontiac went on the market on schedule for the model year 1926 with the coach priced at $825, that is, about halfway between the Chevrolet coach, priced at $645, and the Olds coach, priced at $950; and the gap in our car line was closed.

[pp. 155, 158, 160, 1990 edition]

Note that Sloan also briefly addresses the gap in 1924 between the $1295 Buick "6" touring car and the $2985 Cadillac touring car. This gap was filled by the Cadillac La Salle, which was introduced in 1927, its base model priced at $2685, or about $700 less than the Cadillac seven-person sedan.

An ad for the 1927 La Salle
(John's Old Car and Truck Ads)
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Alfred Sloan's Memoir III: Management of Cash Flow

2010-02-20T23:58:00.000-05:00

Until Alfred Sloan and his senior management colleagues stepped into the breach, handling of cash flow at GM was a shambles. For instance, in Chapter 8 of My Years with General Motors, Sloan reports:

The way cash was handled at that time [1920] is almost unbelievable. Each division controlled its own cash, depositing all receipts in its own accounts and paying all bills from those same acounts. Since only the divisions sold products, none of these cash receipts flowed directly to the corporation itself. We had no effective procedure for getting cash from the points where we happened to have some to the points where we happened to need some. When the corporation, as an operating company, had to pay dividends and taxes, and such items as rent, salaries and other expenses of the general staff, the usual procedure was for the treasurer to request cash from the divisions. That was not so simple as it sounds, however, for the divisions, operating independently, tried to keep their cash balances high enough to satisfy their own peak requirements. Therefore, when they had more cash than they needed at the moment, they were not eager to turn it over to the corporation.

I remember that Buick, for example, at that time was very loath to give up its cash. This profitable division was, of course, the most prolific source of cash for the corporation, and long experience had made Buick's financial staff highly adept at delaying its report of the cash they had on hand. Buick made a practice of maintaining large cash balances in its factory sales branches. The amounts of these balances were not ascertainable at headquarters until Buick had submitted its monthly financial statement for the division as a whole — and this was usually a month or two after the fact. When the corporation needed cash, the treasurer, Meyer Prentis, would try to guess how much Buick actually had and how much of it he could probably get from them. Then he would go to Flint, discuss whatever other questions might be outstanding between Buick and headquarters, and at last casually bring up the subject of cash. Buick's financial people would invariably express surprise at the size of Mr. Prentis' request and occasionally would try to resist the transfer of such a large amount. Naturally, this cat-and-mouse game did not result in the most efficient utilization of funds, especially when some divisions had more operating cash than they needed, at the same time that other divisions were short of operating cash.

In 1922 we changed all this by setting up a consolidated cash-control system. This was a new concept for a large corporation. Depository accounts were established in some one hundred banks in the United States, and all incoming receipts were deposited in these accounts to the credit of General Motors Corporation. All withdrawals from them were administered by the central Financial Staff; the divisions had no control over cash transfers from these deposit accounts.

[pp. 122-123, 1990 edition]

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Alfred Sloan's Memoir II: Competing with Ford

2010-02-19T23:50:00.006-05:00

In the spring of 1921, General Motors' Executive Committee created a special committee to study the company's de facto product policy and make any recommendations that might seem advisable for adjusting it. As Alfred Sloan explains in Chapter 4 of My Years with General Motors,

The product policy we proposed is the one for which General Motors has now long been known. We said first that the corporation should produce a line of cars in each price area, from the lowest price up to one for a strictly high-grade quantity-production car, but we would not get into the fancy-price field with small production; second, that the price steps should not be such as to leave wide gaps in the line and yet ... great enough to keep their number within reason, so that the greatest advantage of quantity production could be secured

[. . .]

The core of the [GM] product policy lies in its concept of mass-producing a full line of cars graded upward in quality and price [with Chevrolet at the low end and Cadillac at the top]. This principle supplied the first element in differentiating the General Motors concept of the market from that of the old Ford Model T concept. Concretely, the General Motors concept provided the strategy for putting Chevrolet into competition with the Model T. Without this policy of ours, Mr. Ford would not have had any competition in his chosen field at that time.

In 1921 Ford had about 60 percent of the total car and truck market in units, and Chevrolet had about 4 per cent. With Ford in almost complete possession of the low-price field, it would have been suicidal to compete with him head on. No conceivable amount of capital short of the United States Treasury could have sustained the losses required to take volume away from him at his own game. The strategy we devised was to take a bite from the top of his position, conceived as a price class, and in this way build up Chevrolet volume on a profitable basis. In later years, as the consumer upgraded his [automobile] preference, the new General Motors policy was to become critically attuned to the course of American history.

[pp. 65, 69, 1990 edition]

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Alfred Sloan's Memoir I: Using ROI for Investment Decisions

2010-02-18T23:58:00.014-05:00

In 1964, when he was 88 years old, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. published My Years with General Motors (written with John McDonald), a book renowned for its account of Sloan's role in disseminating modern management practices.

Portrait of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. (1875-1966)
Sloan Building (E52)
MIT Sloan School of Management
(MIT Sloan Japan Club)
For instance, in Chapter 3, "Concept of the Organization," Sloan writes about his frustration in 1918, when General Motors acquired United Motors, a group of parts and accessory companies of which Sloan was president:

... I found that if I followed the prevailing practice of intercorporate relations I would no longer be able to determine the rate of return on investment for these accessory divisions individually or as a group. This would necessarily mean that I would lose some degree of managerial control over my area of operations. At that time, material within General Motors was passing from one operating division to another at cost, or at cost plus some predetermined percentage. My divisions in the United Motors Corporation had sold both to outside customers and to their allied divisions at the market price. I knew that I operated a profit-making group, and I wished to continue to be able to demonstrate this performance to the general management, rather than to have my operating results on interdivisional business swallowed up in the extra bookkeeping profits of some other division. It was a case of keeping the information clear.

It was not, however, a matter of interest to me only with respect to my divisions, since as a member of the Executive Committee, I was a kind of general executive and so had begun to think from the corporate viewpoint. The important thing was that no one knew how much was being contributed — plus or minus — by each division to the common good of the corporation. And since, therefore, no one knew, or could prove, where the efficiencies and inefficiencies lay, there was no objective basis for the allocation of new investment. This was one of the difficulties with the expansion program of that time. It was natural for the divisions to compete for investment funds, but it was irrational for the general officers of the corporation not to know where to place the money to best advantage. In the absence of objectivity it was not surprising that there was a lack of real agreement among the general officers. Furthermore, some of them had no broad outlook, and used their membership on the Executive Committee mainly to advance the interests of their respective divisions.

I had taken up the question of interdivisional relations with Mr. Durant [president of GM at the time] before I entered General Motors and my views on it were well enough known for me to be appointed chairman of a committee "to formulate rules and regulations pertaining to interdivisional business" on December 31, 1918. I completed the report by the following summer and presented it to the Executive Committee on December 6, 1919. I select here a few of its first principles which, though they are an accepted part of management doctrine today, were not so well known then. I think they are still worth attention.

I stated the basic argument as follows:
The profit resulting from any business considered abstractly, is no real measure of the merits of that particular business. An operation making $100,000.00 per year may be a very profitable business justifying expansion and the use of all the additional capital that it can profitably employ. On the other hand, a business making $10,000,000 a year may be a very unprofitable one, not only not justifying further expansion but even justifying liquidation unless more profitable returns can be obtained. It is not, therefore, a matter of the amount of profit but of the relation of that profit to the real worth of invested capital within the business. Unless that principle is fully recognized in any plan that may be adopted, illogical and unsound results and statistics are unavoidable ...
[pp. 48-49, 1990 edition]

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Ford's CFO Teaches about Leverage and Cash Flow

2010-02-17T05:23:00.012-05:00

I continue to follow Ford's fortunes (see these prevous posts) in the Alan Mulally era.

Today what caught my eye was an article by Scott Leibs, the editor-in-chief of CFO, about Lewis Booth, a long-time Ford employee who became the company's CFO in November 2008. Of particular interest to me, as someone focused on training, was what Lewis told Seibs concerning his discussions with executives and other operations people about how they can assist the finance department's ongoing efforts to repair Ford's balance sheet.

As Seibs explains, Lewis has made it his business to teach Ford employees about the link between finance and operations.

Within a month of assuming the CFO post, he began to walk Ford's senior-most executives through the grim realities of the company's balance sheet [which was and is heavily burdened with debt]. A month later, he extended that tutorial to an additional 400 Ford managers. "When I was in operations, the balance sheet was really viewed as a finance problem," he says. "We've managed to make it a collective responsibility."

Booth's aim was not to make Ford more finance-centric but rather to "identify what we thought was an appropriate road map" for restructuring the balance sheet. ... "The goal was to show where we are, where we want to be in three to four years, and what contribution to that effort can come from operations" versus the treasury department.

The message, Booth says, is that "it's not about borrowing more money, it's about making more money so you can pay back some of those debts." Indeed, debt is perhaps the top challenge of Ford now. GM and Chrysler face the same hurdle but to a much smaller degree, thanks to their respective bankruptcy agreements. One analyst estimates that debt servicing adds $1,500 to the cost of every vehicle Ford sells. Booth takes issue with that particular metric, arguing that "it's not particularly helpful to frame debt in $X-per-vehicle terms. I view it more in terms of what you will pay over the period of a given product program, because that excites people and keeps us focused on why we're in debt in the first place: to invest in new products."

In sum, Lewis is giving high priority to communicating to employees the importance of producing products that generate revenue at a pace that enables the company to reduce debt to a more healthy level. He is also explaining specifics of what company employees can do to help strenghthen cash flow.

For the record, Ford's ratio of long-term debt to total capital was 1.07 as of September 30, 2009.

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Overpriced Underpowered Broadband in the US

2010-02-16T22:46:00.006-05:00

One of my pet peeves is the poor deal broadband customers in the US are offered relative to what they could get if they lived in some other market-oriented democratic country, such as France or South Korea. Thus I was quite interested to learn that the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School today sumitted to the US Federal Communications Commission its final report on broadband deployment and usage — both current and planned — around the world.

The Berkman Center began work in July 2009 and had a draft of its report ready for public comment in October 2009. In the report's preface (pdf), Yochai Benkler, a professor of entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard who served as the principal investigator, summarizes the changes that were made in response to comments. The preface sheds light on some of the more controversial issues relating to analysis of the efficiency of the US market for broadband services.

The body of the report is quite lengthy. Here I'll draw on the executive summary and introduction (pdf), to provide an overview of the report's main findings, which are:

A multidimensional approach to benchmarking broadband availability and quality helps distinguish countries whose experience is exemplary from those whose experience indicates pitfalls to beware of.

The United States is a middle-of-the-pack performer on most first-generation broadband measures, and a weak performer on prices for high and next-generation speeds. (see the graphic below.)

(click to enlarge)

Comparison of broadband providers:
Best price for highest-speed offering

(Next Generation Connectivity: A Review of Broadband Internet Transitions and Policy from Around the World (pdf), p. 172)

Transposing the experience of open access regulation from the first broadband transition to next generation connectivity occupies a central role in other nations' plans.

The Berkman Center's "most surprising and significant finding": (1) Open access policies in other countries have sought to increase levels of competition by lowering entry barriers;¹ (2) Other countries aim to use regulation of telecommunications inputs to improve the efficiency of competition in the consumer broadband market. (3) This emphasis on open access policies appears to be warranted by the evidence.

Large, long-term government investments have played a role in some of the highest performing countries.

In Europe, substantial effort has been devoted to delimiting when government investment, both national and municipal, is justified and will not risk crowding out private investment.

Several countries engaged in a range of investments to support broadband demand, including extensive skills training, both in schools and for adults.

Also of note for someone taking an abbreviated look at the report are the "Core lessons from international strategies" tabulated in Part 4 (pdf) of the report (p. 84):

Open access policy, in particular unbundling, played an important role in facilitating competitive entry in many of the countries observed. In many cases, where facilities-based alternatives are available [e.g., use of existing cable systems to provide broadband Internet access], open access-based entrants played an important catalytic role in the competitive market. In some cases competition introduced through open access drove investment and improvement in speeds, technological progression, reduced prices, or service innovations.

An engaged regulator enforcing open access policy is more important than the formal adoption of the policy.

Broadband providers are regulated as carriers, and their carriage function is regulated and treated separately from their retail service function.

Access rules are now being applied to the next generation transition, particularly to fiber.

The goal of achieving ubiquitous access has led regulators to accept increased vertical integration between mobile and fixed broadband providers. In some places this has also led to application of open access requirements to mobile broadband platforms.

In the two earliest instances where functional separation was introduced [the UK and New Zealand], it had rapid effects on competitive entry, penetration, prices, and/or speeds.

Functional separation is increasingly adopted or considered as a way of achieving open access into the next generation of broadband.

Facilities-based competition usually complements, rather than substitutes for, access-based competition.

Entrepreneurial competitors have tended to enter through bitstream and unbundling access.

Unbundled access can also be used by incumbents from neighboring countries or regions to enter adjacent markets and introduce competition; in some cases they do so by acquiring initially entrepreneurial entrants.

Where unbundling was formally available, but weakly implemented, competition was limited to facilities-based entrants, with weaker results.

The anticipated high costs of next generation transition are pushing countries and companies to seek approaches to share costs, risks, and facilities, rather than focusing primarily on creating redundant facilities to assure facilities-based competition; they aim to mitigate the loss of facilities-based competition with a range of new models of open access and shared facilities, tailored to fiber.

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¹ "Open access" refers to such policies as unbundling the supplying of physical infrastructure from the supplying of Internet services, allowing competitors bitstream access, co-location requirements (e.g, requiring that competitors be allowed a physical presence in telephone company substations), wholesaling and/or "functional separation," i.e., separation of the unit in an Internet company that provides data carriage from the unit that provides retail services.

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What's the best way to believe in yourself?

2010-02-15T23:22:00.010-05:00

According to Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck, working up to one's potential requires a growth mindset, i.e., the belief that one's abilities are malleable and can improve.

This is in contrast to a fixed mindset, i.e., the belief that one's abilities are inborn and fixed and, therefore, one is basically helpless in the face of skill deficits, such as poor public speaking or written communication.

(click to enlarge)

Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset
(Nigel Holmes [pdf])
Fortunately, there is good evidence that it is quite realistic to believe that one can improve one's abilities. What's needed are challenging opportunities to acquire experience in specific fields, which, over time, develops into deep expertise.

Most of Dweck's work has been directed at school students. For example, she and a colleague, Lisa Blackwell, have recently launched Brainology, a computer-based training program for middle school and high school students aimed at producing better academic outcomes by imbuing students with a growth mindset.

Dweck's research has demonstrated that students with a growth mindset have higher motivation to learn. When this heightened motivation is coupled with plenty of good instruction and practice, the students show solid increases in achievement.

A corollary of Dweck's findings concerning the importance of a growth mindset is the idea that trying to build students' belief in themselves by telling them how smart they are is not helpful. Doing this can, in fact, lead to worsened performance. Students are demotivated to undertake learning tasks at which they may initially fail because they're afraid their "native" intelligence will be called into question.

A much better approach to building students' belief in themselves is helping those with a fixed mindset to convert to a growth mindset.

The Brainology program is an example of how to achieve this conversion. It consists of an introduction and four units. In sum (pdf), the four units cover:

Unit 1— basics of brain structure and function, particularly what is required to maintain readiness to learn.

Unit 2 — brain behavior, how it functions, effect of emotions (e.,g., performance anxiety), and strategies to manage emotions (e.g., strategies for handling tests calmly).

Unit 3 — how learning changes the brain, and what sort of activities promote learning. You can exercise your brain "by exploring new information, learning new concepts, and practicing skills. [P]ractice is the key to learning."

Unit 4 — how memory works, and study strategies to apply the Brainology lessons in real life. "[I]nformation moves from working memory to long-term memory through a process called encoding. In order for encoding to happen you must pay attention, attach new information to existing information that supports it, and repeat the information. [O]ther mnemonics (memory strategies) include connecting information together by chunking, visual images and acronyms."

Organizations that want to cultivate learning-oriented behavior among their employees are well-advised to encourage a growth mindset, accompanied by opportunities to build experience. In practice, this means that a company's performance management system should give heavy weight to skill development, with lesser weight placed on grading employees in order to make compensation and retention decisions.

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Valentine's Day 2010

2010-02-14T09:50:00.001-05:00

(Sr. Ellie Finlay)

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Generating Business Value from IT III: A Case Study

2010-02-13T21:20:00.004-05:00

As a way of bringing together the concepts discussed in my two previous posts on generating business value from IT, I'd suggest reading a December 2007 case study (pdf) by Jeanne Ross, director of the MIT Sloan School's Center for Information Systems Research and Cynthia Beath, a professor emerita at the McCombs School of Business of the University of Texas at Austin.

The case abstract gives this overview of the case:

Pacific Life is a diversified financial services company with a history of autonomous business units. Pacific Life had five independent divisions, including Life Insurance, Annuities and Mutual Funds, and Investments. These divisions served different customers and responded to different regulatory and market requirements. Pacific Life executives embrace decentralization as the best structure for capturing excellence in the individual businesses, so they are willing to sacrifice some potential efficiencies. But while they are usually willing to forego the benefits of a more centralized organization structure, they are not willing to assume any unnecessary risks. This case describes how the company governs shared IT services and enterprise risk management to limit its risk exposure while reaping the benefits of decentralization.

Cameron Cosgrove, the vice president for IT in the Life Insurance Division, explains how Pacific Life decides which IT services will be centralized and which will be located in the business divisions:

Where the divisions have IT requirements that are unique to their core business and they need flexibility to have that independence to just GO, we've put those services into the divisions. Where the need is common and can be shared and the consensus is it's a commodity, and competitive advantage isn't really going to be derived from there, then the focus becomes running that service like a utility with low cost and reliability being the drivers — that's what ITS [the group providing IT shared services] is supposed to do for the divisions.

A key part of the decision-making structure is a set of nine Enterprise Architecture Groups (EAGs), whose role, as spelled out in a Pacific Life internal document, is to "create economies of scale, reduce support, maintenance and training needs, improve quality while reducing complexity, and optimize reusability throughout the company." Ross and Beath explain that "EAGs prioritized and scheduled initiatives to improve, upgrade or harmonize ITS's technology assets or services ... [and] secured funding for ITS-related initiatives."

Providing overall guidance is Pacific Life's Information Technology Council (ITC), which approves "the operating budget for ITS, prioritizing any projects that ITS proposed to improve its services, along with other enterprise-wide initiatives that required ITS to make infrastructure investments or process changes." A key responsibility for the ITC is implementation of "policy decisions flowing from Information Security, BCP [Business Continuity Planning], Compliance and Audit and their respective steering committees that had implications for ITS. These policies often drove the need for strategic ITS initiatives."

In sum, "Together the ITC and EAGs generated some of the benefits of IT centralization without centralizing all of Pacific Life's IT assets."

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Lincoln's Birthday 2010

2010-02-12T15:50:00.004-05:00

In February 1861, Abraham Lincoln traveled by train from his home in Springfield IL to Washington DC, where he was inaugurated as President on March 4. One of the stops along the way was Philadelphia.

Early in the morning of February 22, Lincoln went to Independence Hall, the site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence four score and five years earlier. Theodore L. Cuyler, president of Select Council of Philadelphia, welcomed Lincoln. In response, Lincoln offered the impromptu remarks reproduced below.

Mr. Cuyler:

I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here, in this place, where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live. You have kindly suggested to me that in my hands is the task of restoring peace to the present distracted condition of the country. I can say in return, Sir, that all the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments which originated and were given to the world from this hall. I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here, and framed and adopted that Declaration of Independence. I have pondered over the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army who achieved that Independence. I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland; but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. This is a sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world, if I can help to save it. If it cannot be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.

Now, in my view of the present aspect of affairs, there need be no bloodshed and war. There is no necessity for it. I am not in favor of such a course, and I may say, in advance, that there will be no bloodshed unless it be forced upon the Government, and then it will be compelled to act in self-defence.

My friends, this is wholly an unexpected speech, and I did not expect to be called upon to say a word when I came here. I supposed it was merely to do something toward raising the flag. I may, therefore, have said something indiscreet. (Cries of "No, no") I have said nothing but what I am willing to live by and, if it be the pleasure of Almighty God, die by.

(Source: Lincoln Bicentennial website)

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Generating Business Value from IT II: Risk Management

2010-02-11T23:24:00.007-05:00

Yesterday's post discussed one aspect of optimizing a company's IT investment, namely, choosing a preferred operating model, which in turn determines IT integration and standardization requirements and, therefore, critical IT and business process capabilities.

MIT's Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), the source of the research on matching IT to a company's operating model, also pushes for careful attention to IT risk management.

In a 2009 working paper (pdf), George Westerman, a research scientist at CISR, and Richard Hunter, an analyst at Gartner, Inc., offer a straightforward framework for assessing and managing IT risk.

There are two basic components to the framework:

Categories of IT risk
- Availability — keeping business processes running
- Access — providing information to the right people, and keeping it out of the hands of people who shouldn't have it
- Accuracy — ensuring information is accurate, timely, and complete
- Agility — making needed business changes with acceptable cost and speed

Disciplines for managing risk
- Establishing a sound foundation — The foundation is a base of infrastructure, applications and supporting personnel, which is well-structured well-managed and, most important of all, no more complex than absolutely necessary.
- Establishing a sound risk governance process — I.e., procedures and policies that provide an enterprise-level view of all IT risks.
- Establishing a risk-aware culture — I.e., making sure that everyone has appropriate knowledge of risk, and that non-threatenting discussions about risk are the norm.

Westerman and Hunter provide a list of questions to help managers assess their company's current risk profile. The questions are divided into executive-level and operational-level items. For executives the questions help "convert technical issues into business issues, and IT impacts into business impacts." For operational managers, the questions help in analyzing details of the dimensions and costs of particular risks. Answering the questions ensures that managers at all levels understand "the meaning, potential consequences and relative importance of IT risks."

The questions are organized aaccording to the four categories of IT risk:

Availability

Executive-level questions

Which of our business processes are most dependent on IT?

What consequences are likely if the systems are unavailable?

Operational-level questions

What is the cost of a particular process being down for an hour? A day?

What are our procedures to recover from interruption?

Access

Executive-level questions

What categories of information would be most damaging if released? For example, what is the likely impact of loss or theft of customer data? Product data?

What categories of information are most important for our firm's daily success or failure?

Operational-level questions

How do we control, protect and monitor access to these types of information?

How can we ensure that the right people get access to this information as needed (and then lose access when done)?

Accuracy

Executive-level questions

Which processes and categories of information carry the highest consequences for inaccuracy (e.g., inventory information, financial information, etc.)? What would the firm lose if it could not maintain Sarbanes-Oxley certification, for example?

What constraints has inaccurate or incomplete information placed upon the organization?

What could the firm do if it had better information in some area? For example, how much would the company save if it had better information on global customers?

Operational-level questions

How can we improve the way that we gather or manage these types of information?

How can we create or obtain valuable new types of information?

Agility

Executive-level questions

How well does IT currently deliver on new projects, and what does that mean for what the firm is able to do in the future?

What major strategic changes (new product launches, new geographies, mergers and acquisitions, global cost-cutting, etc.) are foreseeable?

What opportunity costs are entailed in missing a product launch (or other strategic move) by a month due to IT issues?

Operational-level questions

How can managers in IT and business units improve project definition and delivery?

What processes, skills and supporting systems are needed to support those changes?

How should the IT foundation change to improve agility?

Once the current risk profile has been identified, using questions such as those above, managers can proceed to implementing the three core disciplines of effective risk management, taking steps that are in line with agreed priorities and previously analyzed tradeoffs.

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"Generating Business Value from IT" I: Operating Models

2010-02-10T22:30:00.005-05:00

Last spring Jeanne Ross, director of the MIT Sloan School's Center for Information Systems Research, taught a noteworthy course on "Generating Business Value from Information Technology," for which many of the materials are available online as part of MIT's OpenCourseWare program.

A central premise of the course is that companies need to define an operating model in order to be able to optimize their IT investments. Ross explains (pdf):

An operating model is the necessary level of business process integration and standardization for delivering goods and services to customers. By identifying integration and standardization requirements an operating model defines critical IT and business process capabilities ... [and thus] guides IT investment and enhances business agility. (emphasis in original)

The graphic below lays out the four types of operating model that are determined by a company's integration and standardization choices.

(Adapted from "Forget Strategy: Focus IT on Your Operating Model" (pdf), by Prof. Jeanne Ross)
As Ross outlines in the opening session (pdf):

A company using the Coordination model operates unique business units with a need to know each other's transactions. Its key IT capability is providing access to shared data through standard technology interfaces. MetLife is an example.

A company using the Unification model operates as a single business with global process standards and global data access. Its key IT capability is providing enterprise systems that reinforce standard processes and provide global data access. UPS is an example.

A company using the Diversification model operates independent business units with different customers and expertise. Its key IT capability is providing economies of scale without limiting independence. Johnson & Johnson is an example.

A company using the Replication model operates independent but similar business units. Its key IT capability is providing standard infrastructure and application components for global efficiencies. Marriott is an example.

You can find further details concerning the characteristics of each of these models in a briefing Ross published in 2005 that serves as the assigned reading for the third session of the course.

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When to Consider Agent-Based Modeling

2010-02-09T13:54:00.001-05:00

As a follow-on to yesterday's post about using agent-based simulation to model the economy, I'd like to suggest that the technically minded have a look at a paper (pdf) Charles M. Macal and Michael J. North, both at Argonne National Laboratory, presented at the 2009 Winter Simulation Conference.

The paper discusses both how to think about agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS), and how to actually do ABMS. The latter portion of the paper includes guidance on software and toolkits specially designed for ABMS.

Even the non-technically minded can benefit from reading through Macal and North's list of criteria for considering an agent-based approach to simulating a dynamic system. The eleven criteria — any one of which is sufficient to suggest an agent-based approach — are:

The problem has a natural representation as being comprised of agents

There are decisions and behaviors that can be well-defined.

It is important that agents have behaviors that reflect how individuals actually behave (if known).

It is important that agents adapt and change their behaviors.

It is important that agents learn and engage in dynamic strategic interactions.

It is important that agents have a dynamic relationship with other agents, and agent relationships form, change, and decay.

It is important to model the processes by which agents form organizations, and adaptation and learning are important at the organization level.

It is important that agents have a spatial component to their behaviors and interactions.

The past is no predictor of the future because the processes of growth and change are dynamic.

Scaling-up to arbitrary levels is important in terms of the number of agents, agent interactions and agent states.

Process structural change needs to be an endogenous result of the model, rather than an input to the model.

Note that items 3 and 9 are particularly relevant to the argument for agent-based macroeconomic modeling put forward by Doyne Farmer and Duncan Foley, as discussed in yesterday's post.

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How to Model the Economy

2010-02-08T23:23:00.000-05:00

In the August 2009 issue of Nature, J. Doyne Farmer, a professor at the Sante Fe Institute, and Duncan Foley, an economist at the New School for Social Research, published an opinion piece (pdf) in which they argue that the types of economic models most commonly used to make economic predictions — predictions that businesses often use in their planning — are seriously flawed.

Farmer and Foley explain the two types of macroeconomic model that are currently available:

Econometric models that base predictions essentially on extrapolating from past economic data. If the economy experiences major changes from what has occurred in the past, predictions from these models go seriously off-track

Idealized models that assume a well-functioning economy, i.e., one that does not experience crises.

Farmer and Foley advocate development of an alternate type of model, one that incorporates realistic assumptions about how economic decision-makers, aka agents, behave. Such agent-based models are computerized simulations in which the agents — e.g., consumers, government policy makers, financiers, and business firms — interact through rules (preferably, derived from research) concerning the agents' actual decision-making processes.¹

In such a model,

... at any given time, each agent acts according to its current situation, the state of the world around it and the rules governing its behaviour. An individual consumer, for example, might decide whether to save or spend based on the rate of inflation, his or her current optimism about the future, and behavioural rules deduced from psychology experiments. The computer keeps track of the many agent interactions to see what happens over time. ... Policy makers can ... simulate an artificial economy under different policy scenarios and quantitatively explore their consequences.

The article offers as an example the model Farmer and colleagues have created to explore how hedge funds' use of leverage — borrowing from banks to finance their investments — affects fluctuations of stock prices. The model "shows that the standard ways banks attempt to reduce their own risk can create more risk for the whole system." Admittedly, this model covers only a subportion of the larger economy, but its structure and use are nonetheless illustrative of the principles of agent-based modeling.

Framer and Foley acknowledge that there are technical issues that make creation of agent-based models a challenge, most importantly the difficulty

... in specifying how agents behave and, in particular, in choosing the rules they use to make decisions. In many cases this is still done by common sense and guesswork, which is only sometimes sufficient to mimic real behaviour. An attempt to model all the details of a realistic problem can rapidly lead to a complicated simulation where it is difficult to determine what causes what. To make agent-based modeling useful we must proceed systematically, avoiding arbitrary assumptions, carefully grounding and testing each piece of the model against reality and introducing additional complexity only when it is needed.

Farmer and Foley close their article by advocating investment of public funds in creating an agent-based model of the whole economy in order to have a more reliable tool than those currently available for "quantitatively exploring how the economy is likely to react under different [policy] scenarios."

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¹ You can read about some of the other areas besides economics in which agent-based models are used in this earlier post about US Army counterinsurgency training, in this wiki entry on use of agent-based models in biology and medicine, and in this paper (pdf) describing agent-based modeling of the airline industry.

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Communicating the Value You Add

2010-02-07T10:51:00.004-05:00

Back on January 6, Tessa Hood published a list of "10 Tips for Talking Yourself Up" that just about anyone could benefit from reading.

In brief, Hood's ten tips are:

Make it clear how what you do adds value for others — Have a compelling one-sentence explanation at the ready.

Make it hard to be forgotten once you've been introduced at any event, such as a networking event. — Share interesting information about yourself without going into a hard sell.

Practice what you preach. E.g., "If you're in finance make sure your own accounts are in order."

Be ready to share success stories.

Be proud of what you do — When talking about your job, whatever it is, sound a positive note.

Even when you are facing someone who doubts your ability, stay positive. You can be confident that they will be proved wrong.

People buy because you are offering something that will benefit them. This is fundamental to actually adding value, which is always assessed from the customer's point of view.

People make buying decisions emotionally, so tell your success stories in a way that brings out the challenges you faced, the intensity with which you attacked them, and the satisfaction your successful results produced.

Don't stint in explaining what you have to offer. There's a tendency to take one's own expertise for granted because what you do has come to feel very natural. This can lead you to understate what you bring to the table. Be sure you explain fully how necessary your expertise is for creating value in the situations you're discussing with a customer.

Keep building your brand — "Broadcast your personal brand in every possible way. Make it clear and consistent."

I've paraphrased Hood's tips above. They don't take long to read, so I encourage you to have a look at the original list as she wrote it.

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Gary Klein on Decision Making

2010-02-06T23:49:00.006-05:00

Gary Klein, a research psychologist, published his most recent book, Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making, in October of last year. The book continues in the vein he has been exploring for many years, namely reporting on what his research reveals concerning the way in which experts make decisions.

The MIT Press's summary of Klein's book explains that he offers

... realistic ideas about how to make decisions in real-life settings. He provides many examples — ranging from airline pilots and weather forecasters to sports announcers and Captain Jack Aubrey in Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander novels — to make his point. All these decision makers saw things that others didn't. They used their expertise to pick up cues and to discern patterns and trends. We can make better decisions, Klein tells us, if we are prepared for complexity and ambiguity and if we will stop expecting the data to tell us everything.

The first chapter of the book is available online. You can preview the book — on a limited basis — at Google Books.

There is an informative review at Diane Coyle's blog, and you can read an excellent overview of Klein's work, as of ten years ago, in an article Fast Company published in August 2000. Five years later, Klein was interviewed by NASA's ASK Magazine, producing another clear, compact account of his thinking on decision-making.

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Board Evaluation of Management

2010-02-05T23:02:00.013-05:00

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has created a guide for bank boards of directors that has much of relevance to the work of those serving on nonbank boards.

As a prime example of the useful guidance in Basics for Bank Directors, I offer the set of questions on pp. 59-60 of the current edition (the fifth) which boards can use to evaluate management:

Is the bank operated in a safe and sound matter?

Is the bank operated in compliance with laws and regulations?

Does the bank compare favorably with other banks in major performance areas such as capitalization, asset quality, earnings, liquidity, and sensitivity to market risk?

Does management respond quickly to address shortcomings identified in audits and supervisory examinations?

Does management keep the board informed and provide sufficient and timely information on the bank to enable the board to judge the bank's operational and financial status?

Are decisions made by management consistent with goals, plans, and policies set out for the bank?

Is management responsive to requests, directives, and questions from the board, including complying with board-approved policies?

Does management have the knowledge and expertise to supervise the affairs of the bank effectively, instill confidence, and demonstrate an ability to lead the bank?

Is management informed about the affairs of the bank and knowledgeable about events in the community that may affect the bank?

Are management's presentations and recommendations to the board done on a timely basis, of high quality, and accurate?

Has management put in place a corporate structure that establishes lines of authority and accountability; provides for delegation of authority and monitoring of delegated responsibilities; and permits open communication and free flow of information within the bank?

Has management seen to the staffing needs of the bank: established job descriptions, hired qualified staff, offered competitive compensation, provided training, and planned for management succession?

Has management established information systems to provide timely information on the status of the bank in order to identify evolving problems quickly?

Has management put in place sufficient procedures to direct the bank's operation and instituted sufficient internal controls to protect the bank's resources?

Does management plan for the bank and develop reasonable strategies for carrying out these plans?

Does management, in conjunction with the board, develop budgets for the bank and keep the board informed of the bank's progress in meeting budget goals?

Basics for Bank Directors was written by Forest E. Myers, who served as policy economist at the Kansas City Fed for over 30 years prior to his retirement in 2008.

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The Strength of Weak Ties

2010-02-04T20:39:00.000-05:00

In 1973 Mark Granovetter, a sociologist now at Stanford, published a paper, "The Strength of Weak Ties" (pdf),¹ in which he distinguishes between strong ties between individuals, i.e., relationships in which the individuals are friends, and weak ties, i.e., relationships in which the individuals are mere acquaintances.

Granovetter then goes on to argue, "Weak ties are more likely to link members of different small groups than are strong ones, which tend to be concentrated within particular groups." The significance of this is that weak ties can serve as bridges between social networks, and thereby give individuals in one network access to information beyond what is already known amongst their friends.

For instance, if someone is looking for a job, tapping acquaintances can provide additional leads beyond those that friends may be aware of. Or, if a community is trying to organize for collective action (Granovetter uses the example of threatened destructive urban renewal), it will have more success if weak ties facilitate the uniting of multiple closely knit networks within the community.

In a business setting, weak ties that act as bridges are valuable in any situation in which tapping expertise outside a team will help the team accomplish more, do a better job, and/or achieve results faster.

In the early '80s, Granovetter undertook a review of empirical studies testing the hypotheses in his 1973 paper. The review was published in final form in 1983, and you can read it here.²

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¹ Mark Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 6 (May 1973), pp. 1360-1380.

² Mark Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited," Sociological Theory, Vol. 1 (1983), pp. 201-233.

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Impact of Quality of Management Practices on Firm Performance

2010-02-03T23:01:00.010-05:00

As a follow-on to my last two posts, I want to call attention to a piece of experimental research (pdf) conducted by Nicholas Bloom and several colleagues that provides evidence in support of the hypothesis that the quality of management practices significantly influences firm performance.

Bloom et al. summarize their work (which is due to continue through April) as follows:

We run a field experiment on large Indian textile firms to evaluate the causal impact of management on performance. To generate changes in management we provide management consulting to a set of randomly chosen treatment plants, and compare their performance to a set of control plants. We find that improved management practices led to significantly higher efficiency and quality, and lower inventory levels, substantially increasing plants’ productivity and profitability. Firms also transferred these improved management practices from their treated plants to other plants within their group. Since firms adopted and replicated these apparently profitable management practices this raises the question of why these were not adopted previously? Our results suggest that informational barriers are important in explaining this lack of adoption, with modern management practices a type of technology that diffuses slowly between firms. These Indian firms were either unaware of many modern management practices, or did not have the know how to implement them.

The photo below, one of several included in the preliminary draft (pdf) of the authors' paper currently available on the internet, illustrates quite concretely the degree of operational slack crying out for systematic management attention.

The parts store at one of the Indian textile plants included in the sample Bloom et al. are studying
("Management Matters: Evidence from India" [pdf])
Takeaway: This research supports the proposition that it is effective to teach managers specific lean manufacturing practices that help optimize factory operations, inventory control, quality control, human resources, planning, and sales and order management.

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Why Management Practices Differ Across Firms and Countries

2010-02-02T23:00:00.013-05:00

Yesterday's post laid out the dimensions that Nicholas Bloom of Stanford and John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics used to investigate why management practices differ across firms and countries.

Here, with encouragement to read their entire article from the Winter 2010 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, I reproduce in slightly edited form their summary of the conclusions they drew from their research:

First, firms with “better” management practices tend to have better performance on a wide range of dimensions: they are larger, more productive, grow faster, and have higher survival rates.

Second, management practices vary tremendously across firms and countries. Most of the difference in the average management score of a country is due to the size of the “long tail” of very badly managed firms. For example, relatively few U.S. firms are very badly managed, while Brazil and India have many firms in that category.

Third, countries and firms specialize in different styles of management. For example, American firms score much higher than Swedish firms in incentives but are worse than Swedish firms in monitoring.¹

Fourth, strong product market competition appears to boost the average quality of management practices through a combination of eliminating the tail of badly managed firms and pushing incumbents to improve their practices.

Fifth, multinationals are generally well managed in every country. They also transplant their management styles abroad. For example, U.S. multinationals located in the United Kingdom are better at incentives and worse at monitoring than Swedish multinationals in the United Kingdom.

Sixth, firms that export (but do not produce) overseas are better-managed than domestic non-exporters, but are worse-managed than multinationals.

Seventh, inherited family-owned firms that appoint a family member (especially the eldest son) as chief executive officer are very badly managed on average.

Eighth, government-owned firms are typically managed extremely badly. Firms with publicly quoted share prices or owned by private-equity firms are typically well managed.

Ninth, firms that more intensively use human capital, as measured by more
educated workers, tend to have much better management practices.

Tenth, at the country level, a relatively light touch in labor market regulation is associated with better use of incentives by management.

After detailing their findings from the large cross-section of firms where they conducted interviews, Bloom and Van Reenen note that they are now gathering time series data on a smaller set of firms. This will enable them to "observe the dynamics of managerial change and make stronger statements about cause and effect."

__________
¹ For operational definitions of "monitoring," "targets," and "incentives," see yesterday's post.

###

Management Practice Dimensions

2010-02-01T23:00:00.015-05:00

The Winter 2010 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives contains an article posing the question, "Why Do Management Practices Differ across Firms and Countries?."

I'll go into how the authors, Nicholas Bloom (Stanford) and John Van Reenen (London School of Economics), answer this question tomorrow. Today I want to highlight the way they went about measuring the quality of management practices since, among other things, the dimensions they used can be a starting point for an organization wanting to design a self-assessment.

Bloom and Van Reenen's approach was to define eighteen management practice dimensions and then to interview plant managers at 5,850 manufacturing concerns in seventeen countries to get the managers' take on where on a scale of 1 to 5 (high) their particular enterprise fell on each dimension. It is important to note that these management practices are process-oriented. They do not not relate to senior management's strategic activities, such as evaluating merger and acquisition opportunities.¹

The eighteen dimensions (slightly edited) are:

1. Introduction of modern manufacturing techniques
What aspects of lean (modern) manufacturing have been formally introduced, including just-in-time delivery from suppliers, automation, flexible manpower, support systems, attitudes, and behavior?

2. Rationale for introduction of modern manufacturing techniques
Were modern manufacturing techniques adopted just because others were using them, or are they linked to meeting business objectives like reducing costs and improving quality?

3. Process problem documentation
Are process improvements made only when problems arise, or are they actively sought out for continuous improvement as part of a normal business process?

4. Performance tracking
Is tracking ad hoc and incomplete, or is performance continually tracked and communicated to all staff?

5. Performance review
Is performance reviewed infrequently and only on a success/failure scale, or is performance reviewed continually with an expectation of continuous improvement?

6. Performance dialogue
In review/performance conversations, to what extent are the purpose, data, agenda, and follow-up steps (like coaching) clear to all parties?

7. Consequence management
To what extent does failure to achieve agreed objectives carry consequences, which can include retraining or reassignment to other jobs?

8. Target balance
Are the goals exclusively financial, or is there a balance of financial and nonfinancial targets?

9. Target interconnection
Are goals based on accounting value, or are they based on shareholder value in a way that works through business units and ultimately is connected to individual performance expectations?

10. Target time horizon
Does top management focus mainly on the short term, or does it visualize short-term targets as a “staircase” toward the main focus on long-term goals?

11. Targets are stretching
Are goals too easy to achieve, especially for some “sacred cow” areas of the firm, or are goals demanding but attainable for all parts of the firm?

12. Performance clarity
Are performance measures ill-defined, poorly understood, and private, or are they well-defined, clearly communicated, and made public?

13. Managing human capital
To what extent are senior managers evaluated and held accountable for attracting, retaining, and developing talent throughout the organization?

14. Rewarding high performance
To what extent are people in the firm rewarded equally irrespective of performance level vs. having rewards relate to performance and effort?

15. Removing poor performers
Are poor performers rarely removed, or are they retrained and/or moved into different roles or out of the company as soon as the weakness is identified?

16. Promoting high performers
Are people promoted mainly on the basis of tenure, or does the firm actively identify, develop, and promote its top performers?

17. Attracting human capital
Do competitors offer stronger reasons for talented people to join their companies, or does a firm provide a wide range of reasons to encourage talented people to join?

18. Retaining human capital
Does the firm do relatively little to retain top talent, or does it do whatever it takes to retain top talent when they look likely to leave?

To arrive at an overall measure of a firm's management practices, Bloom and Van Reenen averaged the firm's individual scores on the eighteen dimensions.

For purposes of analysis, Bloom and Van Reenen divided the dimensions into four broad areas:²

Operations — whether firms use modern manufacturing processes in a way that helps improve firm performance on a continuous basis (items 1-3).

Monitoring — how well firms monitor what goes on inside their operations and use this for continuous improvement (items 4-7, 12).

Targets — whether firms set the right targets, track the right outcomes, and take appropriate action if the two are inconsistent (items 8-11, 13).

Incentives — whether firms promote and reward employees based on performance and try to hire and keep the best employees (items 14-18).

__________
¹Bloom and Van Reenen chose to interview plant managers because they "are senior enough to have an overview of management practices but not so senior as to be detached from day-to-day operations."

The firms where interviews took place "were randomly sampled from the population of all public and private manufacturing firms with 100 to 5,000 employees."

It might be more accurate to say firms in sixteen countries were assessed. Great Britain and Northern Ireland were measured separately, yielding the count of seventeen. The other countries were Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Poland, Sweden, and the United States.

Bloom and Van Reenen restricted themselves to process-oriented management practices because "many aspects of strategic management, such as pricing or takeover decisions, will be very contingent on specific circumstances with no typical 'good' or 'bad' practice..."

² For details of Bloom and Van Reenen's scoring rubric and their assignment of the eighteen dimensions to the four broader groups, see "Measuring and Explaining Management Practices Across Firms and Countries" (pdf), Centre for Economic Performance Discussion Paper 716.

###

Building Disaster-Resistant Housing in Developing Countries

2010-01-31T21:09:00.004-05:00

The Build Change organization has established a successful process for building disaster-resistant housing in developing countries. It's an approach that involves working closely with local people to ensure that

the housing fits local preferences

the people understand the value of protecting themselves by investing in housing that meets building codes

As described at the Build Change website. there are five steps in the process:

Start by learning why some houses collapsed in an earthquake (or sustained serious damage in some other natural disaster), while others did not. This involves carrying out forensic engineering studies.

Design disaster-resistant houses that are culturally appropriate, i.e., that fit what local people actually want. The Build Change process lets homeowners choose their own layout and materials and manage their own construction (with technical assistance from Build Change advisers). Build Change offers a range of solutions catering for different income levels, family sizes, cultural prefernces and climatic conditions.

Strengthen the skills of local masons, carpenters, and homeowners by providing training in how to build disaster-resistant housing. Build local capacity by hiring and working with local engineers, architects, builders, universities, and governments and by training students in technical high schools.

Stimulate local demand. Help rural homeowners see the advantage in investing some of their limited resources in building safer houses. "Make it affordable, easy to implement, and leverage the window of opportunity that exists right after an earthquake disaster."

It is also necessary for local government officials to have an easy way of enforcing building codes. "Create simple building codes, training seminars, and inspection systems that work in rural areas with little infrastructure, budget, time and personnel."

Measure the change. Look at the prevalence of disaster-resistant houses among new houses being built. "Seeing homeowners building safe houses with their own resources — not simply living in houses built for them — is the true test of sustainable, long-term change."

You can read a couple of case examples of how Build Change implements its process here. Tachnical guidelines are here.

###

Helping R&D People Pitch Their Ideas

2010-01-30T22:45:00.001-05:00

The January 2010 issue of Chief Learning Officer has an excellent case study describing how one company improved its approach to identifying ideas generated by its technical staff that have strong commercial potential.

Authors David Midgley (INSEAD) and Carlos de Pommes (now at Cambiio) explain that QinetiQ (think "kinetic"), a defense technology and security company, designed a program to:

equip their scientists and engineers to present ideas as compelling business propositions, and

make sure that ideas were brought to the attention of all relevant business units, not just the unit to which a particular research team was attached.

The program, launched in the spring of 2007, was called "Pitching to Win." For details, do read the Midgley/de Pommes write-up. I'll just highlight the training component of the program:

To make a convincing and compelling pitch, teams needed to master four key parts of an investable proposition, known internally as NABC: the need of the customer; the approach the team took to deliver the solution; the benefits for both the customer and QinetiQ; and the likely competition. Experienced instructors taught these skills during the 90 days of the competition and supported the teams throughout.

As of the time of writing, 50 ideas have been proposed, of which 11 were ultimately approved for funding.

###

STRATUS Center for Medical Simulation

2010-01-29T23:47:00.008-05:00

The Department of Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston opened its STRATUS Center for Medical Simulation in February 2004.

The Center uses a wide variety of emergency and critical care scenarios to train all categories of medical personnel.¹ There is strong emphasis on teaching teamwork and clinical decision-making.

(Brigham and Women's Hospital)

The video below provides an overview of STRATUS Center training.

The Center has several laboratories, including:

Lab for procedure training — Using sophisticated manikins, trainees practice such procedures as intubations and chest tube insertions.

Micro-simulation computer laboratory — Trainees handle emergency and pre-hospital scenarios that emulate the actual physiologic changes that patients undergo during critical injury or illness and resuscitation.

Lab with a specially designed human patient simulator (see above photo and video) that provides interactive, team-based training in two resuscitation rooms that are virtually identical to the resuscitation bays in the Alpha Unit of Brigham and Women's Emergency Department.

Note that one of the many advantages of simulator-based training is the ability to provide ample practice is handling relatively rare medical cases.

You can read additional details (with a few typos) of how the simulation training works here and here.

__________
¹ STRATUS is an acronym for Simulation, Training, Research and Technology Utilization System. In addition to training for emergency personnel, the Center provides training for personnel in a range of medical and surgical areas, such as anesthesiology, surgery, obstetrics and gynecology.

###

Alex (Sandy) Pentland on Social Signals

2010-01-28T23:48:00.011-05:00

I can't say I'm sold on the broad feasibility of "reality mining," a quantitative technique for tracking people's relationships and behavior developed by Alex (Sandy) Pentland, a professor of media, arts, and sciences at MIT. Reality mining uses electronic sensors to collect the data, which is then analyzed to identify patterns that are influencing performance.

The two videos below provide an overview. The first explains how "honest signals" — defined by Pentland as "unconscious human behaviors that give reliable insight into our relationships and attitudes" — are gathered and analyzed electronically. For more detail, you can turn to Prof. Pentland's 2008 book, Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World .

The second video presents clips of Prof. Pentland responding to questions concerning Honest Signals.

Data collection via sensors that record a person's location, body movements, tone of voice, etc., raises obvious privacy concerns. In an article published in 2007 in Booz Allen's strategy+business magazine, author Mark Buchanan lists Pentland's suggestions for dealing with the privacy issue in a business firm, which include:

... that the technology ought to be used on a voluntary basis, with individuals adopting it because they learn the benefits that it brings for both themselves and the company. An organization could store information on individuals’ own personal computers, rather than in a central location. It might also give people the opportunity, at the end of each day, to review the data that’s been recorded about their activities. They could have the option of deleting anything they’d prefer to keep private. The devices might be fitted with an additional button that would erase, say, the last 10 minutes of data, or data collection might be strictly limited to teams, time frames, and workplace settings where there has been explicit agreement in advance to allow the analysis. Although all these possibilities reduce the amount and quality of data that would be gathered, some steps along such lines will be crucial for giving people confidence that their privacy is being protected.

I leave it to you, after watching Prof. Pentland in the videos, to decide whether or not he oversells his concepts. As I indicated at the beginning, I am not convinced that his "sociometric" techniques have the broad application he claims. For instance, any alert business manager knows, without checking data collected by electronic sensors, that employees often need help in matching their styles to the expectations and preferences of those with whom they work, both internally and externally. On the other hand, I find Prof. Pentland's description of an application like the fuel economy game quite credible.

###

Two Helpful Sales Tools

2010-01-27T23:04:00.001-05:00

Back in April 2009 Geoffrey James posted "The Ultimate Cold Calling Tool" at BNET.com. I just stumbled on it and like it, so I'm passing the link along.

James followed up in August with "The Ultimate Prospect Qualification Tool, which you might also want to look at, though I'm afraid you'll find the format awkward.

###

Gus W. Thornton 1933-2010

2010-01-26T11:52:00.001-05:00

The Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, my favorite charity, lost one of their most outstanding leaders on January 24.

Gus W. Thornton, DVM
(MSPCA)
As detailed in the obituary at the MSPCA website, Gus Thornton first arrived at the MSPCA's Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in Boston in 1957 as an intern. He became Chief of Staff in 1966, a position he held until 1989, when he was named President of the MSPCA. He retired in 2002. He was a man respected, admired, and loved who will be much missed.

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Is a 1% productivity gain worth it?

2010-01-25T11:24:00.000-05:00

The January 16 issue of The Economist has a brief report of an experimental study that found workers responded more to being told they would lose a supplement to their wages if they failed to meet a production target, than to being told they would earn the same amount by achieving the target.

The Economist report doesn't mention that the difference in productivity between the two situations was all of 1%. For that bit of information you have to go to the original paper (pdf) by Tanjim Hossain, an economist in the Department of Management at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and John List, an economist at the University of Chicago.

So the question arises whether a 1% gain in productivity is worth telling employees that, in effect, they will be punished for failing to meet a production goal, as opposed to telling them they will be rewarded for meeting the goal.

I'm inclined to think that, overall, the straightforward proposition to employees that "you'll share in gains from improvements you help the company achieve" will do more to nurture commitment to meeting company goals than a message of "we'll dock your pay if you fall short of this week's (or month's, or whatever) production target."

###

Strategic Planning Losing Favor

2010-01-24T13:51:00.001-05:00

As a follow-on to yesterday's post concerning coping with uncertainty, I'd call attention to an article in today's Wall Street Journal reporting on companies' declining confidence in the value of strategic planning.

According to reporters Joann Lublin and Dana Mattioli, instead of trying to look ahead and plan for a "likely" future, companies are striving for "increased flexibiliy and accelerated decision making" — decision making that has a pronounced element of opportunism.

It has become evident to the companies in question that they need to respond more quickly to changes in customer demand, so they have begun updating operating budgets more frequently — often monthly rather than quarterly. And they have been thinking in terms of scenarios and spinning out ideas for how they can position themselves to respond adaptively to changes in the business environment.

###

Coping with Uncertainty

2010-01-23T23:37:00.001-05:00

The Winter 2010 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review has an excellent article addressing the issue of how businesses can best cope with uncertainty.

Spyros Makridakis (INSEAD), Robin Hogarth (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona), and Anil Gaba (INSEAD) note that there are two types of uncertainty:

Uncertainty concerning events whose probability distribution is known

Uncertainty concerning events whose probability distribution cannot be known

The authors note that even in the case of events with a known probability distribution, it is generally impossible to know when a low probability event will occur. The situation is even more nebulous for the second type of uncertainty, since even the frequencies of possible events are unknown.

Since forecasting in an uncertain world leaves the key question, "When will the Big One hit?" unanswered, the authors argue that a business should de-emphasize forecasting exercises and instead prepare for the future by developing plans for handling various scenarios, including quite extreme, if rare, situations.

The authors recommend a technique they call "future-perfect thinking." They offer this example:

Assume you’re the CEO of a major airline, and in order to formulate your corporate strategy, you need to forecast oil prices for the next five years.

First, imagine that five years have already passed. You’re now able to look back on what happened over that period. It turns out that oil prices have been quite low and stable over the “past” five years, which was a great benefit to the airline (and your career). However, instead of just enjoying that imaginary good luck, explain — or tell the story of — how such favorable circumstances came about. What were the particular economic and geopolitical events that contributed to the low, stable oil prices?

Now, take a second trip forward five years on the time machine. This time, however, when you look back at oil prices, you are exasperated. All you see is mayhem: a period of steep and highly volatile prices that made running the airline almost impossible. Once again, explain what happened. What were the particular economic and geopolitical events that led to that painful scenario?

If you do that kind of exercise a few times, focusing on the realms of your own experience, you’ll start to develop a feeling for different futures and the fact that they are all plausible. ... [T]hough there is no formal technique for converting plausibility into probability, you can use your new insights to develop appropriate risk protection strategies. That is the essence of future-perfect thinking. It involves harnessing the clarity of hindsight to develop more vivid pictures of the future.

The affinity of future-perfect thinking to scenario planning is apparent.

###

The Reality of Cultural Change in an Organization

2010-01-22T23:19:00.001-05:00

John Shook, an industrial anthropologist who worked with the NUMMI joint venture of Toyota and General Motors from its inception, has written an illuminating article about cultural change at the NUMMI factory in Fremont CA. The article appears in the Winter 2010 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review.

Shook's model of cultural change is a close cousin of that put forward by Edgar Schein, an emeritus Sloan professor who specializes in organizational development. The Shook and Schein models are diagrammed in the graphic below.

(click to enlarge)
(MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter 2010)
The arrows in the graphic represent old and new thinking concerning the process of cultural change.

The traditional view, represented by the upward arrows, is that you start by getting people to change their thinking about how it's proper to behave, and they then proceed to make the desired behavioral changes. The Schein/Shook view, represented by the downward arrows, is that you start by getting people to change their behavior and, in due course they adjust their thinking about what sort of behavior is appropriate.

In Schein's model, the initial step is to change "cultural artifacts" — "the observable data of an organization, which include what people do and how they behave." This leads to a change in people's values and attitudes and, ultimately, to a change in the "pattern of shared basic assumptions ... that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to [solving] problems."¹

In Shook's very similar model, managers initiate the process of cultural change by defining the actions and behaviors they desire, providing training, and designing the work processes that are necessary to reinforce those behaviors. This leads to a change in people's values and attitudes and, ultimately, to a change in organizational culture.

Shook describes how NUMMI's adoption of Toyota's system of requiring workers to immediately address any problem, even if that means stopping the production line until the problem is fixed, quickly produced a new culture of employee concern for quality. Previously, the factory had been plagued by worker-management friction and high absenteeism, and quality had been notoriously poor.

In Shook's view,

What changed the culture at NUMMI wasn’t an abstract notion of “employee involvement” or “a learning organization” or even “culture” at all. What changed the culture was giving employees the means by which they could successfully do their jobs. It was communicating clearly to employees what their jobs were and providing the training and tools to enable them to perform those jobs successfully.

The key take-away Shook offers at the conclusion of his article is that the "tools of the Toyota Production System are all designed around making it easy to learn from mistakes. Making it easy to learn from mistakes means changing our attitude toward them," i.e. skipping the finger-pointing and instead nurturing a culture of alert problem solving by empowered amployees.

__________
¹ Edgar Schein, "Organizational Culture and Leadership" (1993) in Classics of Organization Theory, Jay Shafritz and J. Steven Ott (eds.) (Harcourt College Publishers, 2001), pp. 373-374.

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A Simulation that Helps with Counterinsurgency Training

2010-01-21T23:18:00.008-05:00

The US military, even more than organizations in the private sector, is stepping up the pace at which it implements simulations for training. A recent example — UrbanSim — is described in a brief item in the January/February 2010 issue of The Atlantic.

Brian Mockenhaupt, a freelance journalist and former infantryman who served in Iraq, explains that the object of UrbanSim is to tilt the support of the local population in a war zone toward a U.S.-led coalition and the local government.

The game's scenarios involve named local individuals (e.g., the mayor of a town) and groups (e.g., a neighborhood), all of which are "autonomous agents that react not just to specific actions, but to the climate created by a player's overall strategy."

The intent of the simulation is to

teach commanders new ways of thinking about multiple problems in a fast-changing environment, always reevaluating instead of fixating on one approach. “You have to think through the cause and effect of your decisions,” said Colonel Todd Ebel, the director of the School for Command Preparation [where UrbanSim was first used]. “Like chess, you have to look two or three turns down the road.”

In UrbanSim, players in two-person teams take on the role of an Army battalion commander who has to plan, prepare, and execute counterinsurgency operations. The commander's task, as explained at the UrbanSim website, is to "maintain stability [a particular focus of the simulation], fight insurgency, reconstruct the civil infrastructure, and prepare for transition." Progress is measured in terms of impacts on:

governance

economics

security

essential services

capabilities of local police and soldiers

Teams receive feedback from an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) as they're working their way through whatever scenario their trainers have set up for them. The ITS is designed to help participants understand why the local individuals and groups built into the scenario react in paticular ways, given the state of the world in which they find themselves, a state significantly affected by what the battalion commander has decided to do. The ITS can also indicate the response an alternate decision by the battalion commander would have elicited from the local individuals and groups.

For more details of how UrbanSim was created and how it works, you can see a paper (pdf) co-authored by key participants in its development: Ryan McAlinden, H. Chad Lane, and Andrew S. Gordon of the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California; Paula J. Durlach of the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences; and John Hart of the U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command Simulation and Training Technology Center.

###

Teacher Training

2010-01-20T23:18:00.001-05:00

"What Makes a Great Teacher?," an article by Amanda Ripley in the January/February 2010 issue of The Atlantic, is well worth a read.

Here are two key paragraphs in which Ripley summarizes findings of research conducted by Teach for America that investigated the characteristics of highly effective teachers:

First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr [the Teach for America researcher and trainer] called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you — I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.

Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully — for the next day or the year ahead — by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

In addition to reporting on the distinguishing characteristics of highly effective teachers, Ripley discusses how Teach for America's approach to hiring has evolved over time in response to research findings. You can read Teach for America's own summary of what they're looking for when they hire by clicking here.

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KOTO Hanoi

2010-01-19T23:17:00.009-05:00

The same sort of thinking that lay behind the training offered by the now-defunct MiMe's Cafe that I discussed in an earlier post, inspired creation of KOTO Hanoi in 1996.

Jimmy Pham, an Australian of Vietnamese descent, wanted to help street children in Hanoi develop career and life skills that would equip them for stable employment and decent adult lives. His philosophy was "Know One Teach One" (KOTO):

The greatest accomplishment for the person who has helped you, is to see you stand on your own two feet and then in turn help someone else that reminds you of yourself, because if you Know One, then you should Teach One.”

KOTO's two-year training program encompasses instruction and coaching in hospitality industry skills, life skills, and English as a second language. The hospitality curriculum has been adopted from that offered by Box Hill Institute, an Australian vocational school.

The life skills program includes instruction on health issues (e.g., reproduction) and first aid; sports, social, cultural, and creative activities; and community service.

The short (4:20) 2005 BBC video below, introduces you to a KOTO graduate and lets you see some of what the training looks like in person.

For a fuller account of KOTO's history and training program, you can watch this 17:46 video from 2007.

Vivid blog entries by Steve Jackson, an Englishman who worked as a VSO volunteer at KOTO between 2005 and 2007, are here.

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Academic Earth Update

2010-01-18T23:16:00.006-05:00

Last February, I wrote a brief post calling attention to Academic Earth, a portal for videos of college lectures that was then in beta. The site is now fully functional and has notably expanded the number of universities and courses it covers.

The unversities — with the added schools marked with asterisks — are:

      Berkeley
      Columbia*
      Harvard
      Michigan*
      MIT
      NYU*
      Princeton
      Stanford
      UCLA*
      Yale

The list of subject areas is also a bit longer now (added subjects are marked with asterisks):

      AP Test Prep*
      Astronomy
      Biology
      Chemistry
      Computer Science
      Economics
      Engineering
      Entrepreneurship
      Environmental Studies*
      History
      International Relations*
      Law
      Literature (broadened from "English")
      Mathematics
      Media Studies*
      Medicine
      Philosophy
      Physics
      Political Science
      Pre-Med*
      Psychology
      Religious Studies (used to be "Religion")

I haven't personally sampled many of these courses, but can recommend "Building Dynamic Websites," taught by David J. Malan, a lecturer on computer science at Harvard College, to anyone interested in relatively advanced website development. The syllabus is here.

For a more basic treatment of computers and the internet, you can try Prof. Malan's Harvard Extension School course, "Understanding Computers and the Internet." The syllabus is here (pdf).

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A More Efficient Soybean Market in Madhya Pradesh

2010-01-17T23:16:00.008-05:00

About a year ago, I wrote a brief post about the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX), launched in April 2008 as a mechanism for helping farmers gauge their crop sales in light of up-to-date information about world commodity prices.¹

A similar effort to promote market efficiency is the subject of a study by Aparajita Goyal (pdf), an economist at the World Bank.² Goyal studied data relating to soybean sales in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh before and after introduction of internet kiosks and warehouses that provided "wholesale price information and an alternative marketing channel to soy farmers in the state."

The aim of setting up the kiosks and warehouses was to mitigate exploitation of farmers by middlemen. Due to poor rural transport and storage infrastructure, lack of reliable price information, and an inability on the part of purchasers — processing companies and exporters — to verify produce quality, middlemen were able to get away with paying lowball prices to farmers while often overcharging purchasers.

Goyal found that the availability of the kiosks,³ which began being installed in Madhya Pradesh villages in October 2000, produced a significant increase in prices received by farmers and in the amount of land farmers allocated to soy production. The rise in prices — driven by increased competition among buyers — resulted in a 33% increase in profit for farmers. Land cultivated in soybeans went up 19%.

ITC Ltd., the large Indian conglomerate that deployed the kiosks and built the warehouses — at which farmers could sell directly to ITC — benefited from the improvement in quality of soybeans procured (ITC tested beans for oil and protein content before purchasing them), from the creation of a direct marketing channel, and from a reduction in its transaction costs (principally, costs of storage, weighing, loading, and bagging). The value of these benefits fully offset the cost of the kiosks.

__________
¹ ECX trades five commodities: maize, wheat, beans, sesame and coffee. You can read remarks by Eleni Gabre-Madhin, ECX's CEO, concerning the first eighteen months of ECX's operation here.

² Members of the American Economic Association can access Goyal's paper, "Information, Direct Access to Farmers, and Rural Market Performance in Central India" (forthcoming in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics), here.

³ The kiosks are called "e-Choupals." "Choupal" is a Hindi word meaning "village gathering place." In addition to price information, the kiosks provide agricultural information and weather forecasts.

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21st Century Journalism XXXVIII: Training Rural Journalists in India

2010-01-16T23:15:00.008-05:00

On January 14, India Knowledge@Wharton published an article reporting on what newspaper publishers in India are doing to attract rural readers. Despite a rural literacy rate of only 50% and road conditions that make delivery arduous, Indian newspapers are succeeding in maintaining circulation in rural areas by covering topics of local interest, marketing vigorously, and employing resourceful delivery people.

Rajasthan Patrika, a Hindi-language newspaper that has made a point of building rural readership
(Dan Reynolds)
The article opens with an account of rural distribution of a city paper, Rajasthan Patrika, and then goes on to describe a paper that is more strictly local:

Khabar Lahariya, or News Waves, [is] a weekly newspaper based in Chitrakoot, one of the poorest districts in central India. Written in Bundeli, the local language, the paper's all-female staff has forged a reputation for investigative journalism and support of grassroots causes since the paper was founded in 2002 by Nirantar, a New Delhi-based literacy education non-profit.

With a readership of 35,000 in 400 villages and costing 4 U.S. cents, the paper has no glitzy promotion strategy like its urban counterparts. Khabar Lahariya's marketing strength is instead its bold reporting on issues concerning lower-caste communities, for which it won the 2009 King Sejong Literacy Prize from UNESCO, among other recent accolades. However, the main reason why Khabar Lahariya receives such kudos is that it is run by trained women from marginalized communities and it conducts (in conjunction with Nirantar) journalist training and writing programs for locals — a vital step, many believe, in increasing rural literacy.¹

Khabar Lahariya's training effort offers a promising model. You can get an idea of how Nirantar organizes its training workshops from an August 2007 report (pdf) that Nirantar has made available online.

A Nirantar training workshop on rural journalism
(Nirantar)
The workshop described in the report ran for seven days with eighteen participants. It was a mix of "group discussions, analysis of written material, field visits, film screening,² debates, lectures and role plays."

The basic journalism concepts covered were:

What constitutes news

Sources of news

Verifying sources

Questioning gender norms

Completing stories

Effective interviewing

Ways of writing up interviews (Q&A, feature story)

I would note that the field trips, which were timed to support the discussions of what constitutes news, maintaining neutrality,³ identifying and tapping reliable sources, conducting interviews, and doing a thorough job of gathering information, were vital for giving the training participants a real feel for the process of reporting.

It is also notable that the workshop's interviewing role plays were especially well received:

This was definitely the highlight of this session: a combination of entertaining characterizations and the excitement of interacting with the trainers in a different role really worked to draw the group into the exercise. Six groups were formed, and each given a different character to interview — ranging from officials to interesting personalities (A sleazy District Magistrate, a boatwoman, a station master, a woman freedom fighter, a woman pradhan). They were given a situation, and asked to plan/prepare questions for the interview. Some of the issues that emerged were — how to deal with long, rambling, unfocussed interviewees; how to deal with officials behaving inappropriately (and thus distracting attention from the questions asked); and how to extract important information from sources who are busy/evasive. In general, the energy was high through this activity, and provided a spur to the field trips that followed.

The report closes with notes on how the training was evaluated. To test retention the trainers used a competition, with questions in various forms — multiple choice, matching, true/false, and items dealing with more detailed issues covered inthe training. The trainers' assessment:

It was deeply heartening to see that most of the group had a grasp of the basic concepts of journalism, but also were able to articulate some of the more complex issues — of what news is important, and why, of how to write certain news. It was also an exhilarating way to end the fairly long and draining week we’d had.

In addition, the trainers solicited oral and written feedback from the participants. In the oral feedback,

[m]any participants said they were nervous before they came ... – about the work that would be expected of them - but had enjoyed meeting so many people, and speaking to them, and learning so much. Many people listed the key concepts in the course (we were sure none of the 18 participants would ever forget what LEAD or KHABAR ["news"] or INTERVIEW meant!). [S]ome people shared the difficulty in understanding or remembering words that were used in the course ... but hoped that what they didn’t recall, they would in the work to follow. Uma shared what a different experience it was to be encouraged to go out and speak to so many different people.

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¹ You can see a sample 2007 edition of Khabar Lahariya here.

²The film used in the workshop was Mrityudand ("The Death Sentence"), a 1997 Hindi-language release.

³ In the Indian context, maintaining neutrality was difficult for some of the training participants because they felt that the (mythical) stories they learned in their religious instruction should take precedence over alternate stories based on standard journalistic fact-finding.

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Stanley Bing's Tips for Managing Up

2010-01-15T23:15:00.005-05:00

Not everything Stanley Bing writes is satirical (though everything he writes for Fortune's back page is). For instance, he regularly offers practical advice at BNET.com that is down-to-earth and unhoneyed, while also being amusingly expressed.

On January 12 the issue was how to get one's good work noticed by the boss. After encouraging the correspondent who wrote in with this question to familiarize himself with his boss's likes, dislikes, and habits, he goes on to list ten tips (abbreviated here):

1. Talk to the boss every day you can. ... Don’t wear him or her out. Just begin to establish the idea that you are a human being, not just a function ...

2. Notice when he or she comes in to the office, and then make sure you're there too.

3. Wander by his or her office now and then, and stop in for a chat if he or she doesn’t seem to mind.

4. Look for opportunities to make your boss’s life easier.

5. Never present a problem without also bringing along a couple of solutions.

6. Tell the boss the whole truth.

7. Don’t whine. If he or she treats you mean now and then, just accept it.

8. If there’s anything going on that requires a volunteer, let it be you.

9. Show your appreciation. Anybody that tells you that sucking up — done properly and with restraint — is wrong ... is simply advising you to disarm one of the most powerful weapons in your arsenal.

10. Share glory, but not blame. When there is praise due for something well done, let your boss have the credit, even if you deserve it. If there is blame, accept it, even if the boss deserves it.

The above gives you a taste of Bing's style. If you want a further dose, you can visit his website at stanleybing.com.

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Missteps to Avoid in Job Interviews

2010-01-14T23:55:00.010-05:00

In one handy package, Adriana Gardella provides a list of seven mistakes to avoid in a job interview, each illustrated with a telling example.

The mistakes are:

Being rude or otherwise behaving badly in front of low-level employees (e.g., the receptionist).

Telling the interviewer too much about your life circumstances, such as your medical situation or your childcare hassles.

Assuming your resume speaks for itself.

Taking phone calls and checking for incoming messages during the interview. (It's hard to believe that people actually do this, but take it from Gardella, they do.)

Suggesting that the job you're interviewing for is beneath you.

Following up on the interview too aggressively, i.e., leaving multiple messages to inquire how the company is progressing with their decision-making.

Being sloppy in the written messages you send to the prospective employer, whether through snail mail, email, text messaging, or social media such as Facebook. Always proofread before sending.

By all means, if you're in the job market, give Gardella's advisory a read because doing so can put important interviewing "don'ts" at the front of your mind.

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Tips for Your LinkedIn Profile

2010-01-13T23:54:00.006-05:00

Back on Christmas Eve, at Web Worker Daily, Meryl K. Evans published tips for putting together an effective profile on LinkedIn that are well worth your attention. By "effective," Evans means good "at attracting contacts, generating leads and showing off your skills."

Here is a somewhat abbreviated version of her tips:

Use the name that most people know you by professionally.

The photo you upload should preferably be one taken by a professional photographer.

Add an effective Professional Headline on the “Edit My Profile” page.

Pick the industry that best represents what you do. Alternatively, you could use your clients’ industry if they all come from the same one.

When entering details for your current and past positions, highlight the activities that represent what you do or want to do by mentioning them first.

Write a summary that highlights your most important business information. (Remember that you can add details under “Current Position.”)

List your web sites and blog. Rather than using the name of your web site and blog, use keywords that describe what you do.

If you have a Twitter ID, include it in your profile, along with your your Twitter name.

Request recommendations. (Writing recommendations for others can lead to reciprocal write-ups for you.)

Add LinkedIn apps to enhance your profile. For example, if you have a blog, you can use a LinkedIn app to feed your blog entries into your LinkedIn account. You can also turn LinkedIn into an online document collaboration platform.

If you tweet, send selected Twitter tweets to LinkedIn. You do this by adding the hashtag “#in” to the tweet. (Turn on this feature in Twitter Settings.)

Select what to display in your public profile, using the Public Profile options (which is also the section where you set up your Public Profile URL — http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname). The more you reveal, the easier it is for people to know if they have the right person.

Review your settings to make sure you've dealt with everything you want to adjust, including the new features and settings LinkedIn provides from time to time.

When Evans's tips were summarized at BNET.com, some helpful comments came in from readers, such as this one from merribame: "[A]nswer questions in your area of expertise. You'll gain exposure. [Also] ... ask questions — even when you know the answer. You give others a chance to enter your world with their perspective. And they'll love you for it!"

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Don Vandergriff VI: How to Avoid Choking

2010-01-12T23:54:00.007-05:00

Yesterday's post referenced Don Vandergriff's workshop, "Deciding Under Pressure and Fast." Today I'd like to call attention to an overview of research on performing under pressure that lends support to Vandergriff's insistence on the necessity that people get ample practice in making decisions under time pressure.

The article in question is "Avoiding the Big Choke," by Elizabeth Svoboda, in the February/March 2009 issue of Scientific American Mind. Choking is defined as "performance decrements under pressure circumstances."¹

Though much of Svoboda's article is devoted to activities like playing golf and public speaking, not to Vandergriff's main focus on training people who need to plan and execute military and law enforcement actions, there is a key point in Svoboda's report that is clearly applicable to any job requiring an ability to think on one's feet: "The best way to make a performance situation feel like rehearsal ... is to subject yourself to the same anxiety-packed conditions during practice that you expect to encounter" in the actual situation for which you are preparing.

Svoboda cites Raôul R.D. Oudejans, a professor in the Faculty of Human Movement Sciences of VU University Amsterdam. Oudejans conducted a study with Dutch police, the results of which "indicate that turning up the heat from the very first day of practice may be one of the most effective ways to immunize yourself against blowing it."

Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, weighs in with the complementary idea that "[t]he more exposure you get to these high-pressure situations, and the more you succeed [despite them], he less likely you're going to get that whole affective experience" of feeling distractingly nervous about your performance.

Svoboda summarizes: "the more comfortable you feel, the less likely you are to be affected by pressure." To become as comfortable as possible, you should devise "a high-tension practice regimen appropriate to your particular performance situation."

In concluding, Svoboda cites Harry Wallace, a psychology professor at Trinity University in San Antonio. She says:

The most effective strategies ... are the ones that imbue performers with the assurance that they can deal with any eventuality. This mind-set proves helpful even (and perhaps especially) when something goes wrong. According to Prof. Wallace, "Part of the key is not being overconfident in advance and recognizing that you may feel more anxiety than you expect. You want to address any concerns far in advance of performance. You don't want to have any second thoughts about your likelihood of success."

The affinity of this admonition with the philosophy underlying "Deciding Under Pressure and Fast" is apparent.

__________
¹ Svoboda adopts the definition used by Roy Baumeister, a professor of social psychology at Florida State University.

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Don Vandergriff V: "Deciding Under Pressure and Fast" Workshop

2010-01-11T23:53:00.018-05:00

Don Vandergriff's main training program is his "Deciding Under Pressure and Fast" workshop. The video clip below — from 0:30 to 3:17 — gives you a taste of the workshop's approach, a look at what Vandergriff's Adaptive Leadership Methodology looks like in action, and a couple of participant responses to the workshop.

The Transatlantic Network 2020 (TN 2020) summit where this workshop took place ran from September 28 to October 3, 2008 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Dublin, Ireland. The Vandergriff workshop took place on September 29 and 30.

As explained on their website, TN 2020 "works to strengthen ties between Europe and North America through the creation of a sustainable network of young leaders." TN 2020 is sponsored by the British Council.

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Don Vandergriff IV: Assessing Students in Courses that Use the Adaptive Leadership Methodology

2010-01-10T23:53:00.006-05:00

A section of the blog post by Don Vandergriff and Fred Leland that I cited yesterday is devoted to explaining how students in classes using the Adaptive Leadership Methodology (ALM) are assessed and graded.

Vandergriff and Leland describe a couple of assessment methods:

Short-answer tests — "These examinations place [the students] in a specific tactical scenario and require them to make decisions. They must then explain the reasons behind their decision in writing. For example, student might be told that he is the commander for a convoy of vehicles that [must] travel to an assigned destination within the next several hours. After being presented with information about the composition of the convoy, a map, the nature of the enemy threat, and the specifics of the mission and Commander’s Intent,¹ the student would have to determine which route he will take and then explain why he selected that route. The instructor then grades him on how he approached solving the problem using the information at hand and how well he communicates his reasoning. This gets to the point of examining 'how' the student is thinking, not 'what' he is thinking."

Graded Tactical Decision-Making Exercises (TDEs) — "Just like the short-answer tests, these are scenario-based and require students to make decisions. This technique is virtually identical to a standard in-class TDE with the exception that students are required to write out or brief their solutions to their instructors who, in turn, grade those solutions. In many cases, these examinations require students to produce a concept sketch with short hand-written notes concerning exact guidance for individuals, their teams, the sequence of events, and most importantly the purpose behind various actions."

Vandergriff and Leland note:

Regardless of the technique or format of the assessment, the tactical scenario must allow for multiple “correct” ways to solve the problem. For the assessment to be truly effective, students must have the freedom to actually make a decision on their own and formulate a plan rather than being forced to regurgitate a pre-determined “template.” If tests fail to allow room for creativity, students become focused on identifying the “approved solution” rather than thinking for themselves. In order to permit freedom of thought, scenarios must have a significant amount of ambiguity. The situation must be such that one could reasonably interpret the available information in multiple ways. Of course, this does not preclude the existence of “wrong” answers. Violations of the Commander’s Intent, unethical conduct, poor communication, or an unrealistic course of action all constitute an automatic failure. Additionally, if the student is unable to make a decision in the face of the time and information constraints of the test (the worst of all possibilities), he is assigned a failing grade.

To ensure that different instructors are applying comparable standards in grading students,

... all instructors must participate in a free exchange of ideas regarding the key concepts that are the focus of the upcoming assessment. ... [T]hese group discussions ... begin with the instructors actually taking the test followed by an open discussion regarding the content of the exam and how to approach grading. At the end of this exchange, the Course Director compiles the applicable notes from the session into a short set of general guidelines.

According to Vandergriff and Leland, this approach has produced satisfactory consistency in grading.

__________
¹ An August 14, 2009 post on the Combined Arms Center blog quotes the following definition of "commander's intent" from paragraph 5-55 of the Army Field Manual 3-0, Operations (February 2008): "The commander’s intent is a clear, concise statement of what the force must do and the conditions the force must establish with respect to the enemy, terrain, and civil considerations that represent the desired end state. The commander’s intent succinctly describes what constitutes success in an operation. It includes the operation’s purpose and the conditions that define the end state. It links the mission, concept of operations, and tasks to subordinate units. A clear commander’s intent facilitates a shared understanding and focus on the overall conditions that represent mission accomplishment. During execution, the commander’s intent spurs individual initiative."

The following paragraph adds, "The commander’s intent must be easy to remember and clearly understood two echelons down. The shorter the commander’s intent, the better it serves these purposes. Typically, the commander’s intent statement is three to five sentences long."

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Don Vandergriff III: Themes in the Adaptive Leadership Methodology

2010-01-09T23:52:00.005-05:00

In a long blog post (which seems to be the source of the article I discussed yesterday), Don Vandergriff and Fred Leland, a lieutenant in the Walpole (MA) Police Department and a security consultant, discuss the Adaptive Leadership Methodology (ALM) in detail.

Some of their key points have been covered in my previous posts. Today I'd like to note the three themes that they identify as applying to all Adaptive Leadership scenarios:

"[S]tudents learn to approach their analysis of the terrain (or tactical environment) and the opponent (criminal) with the objective of identifying that which they can use to their advantage. With respect to the enemy (criminal element), we teach our students to identify enemy strengths (which they must avoid) and weaknesses (which they must exploit)."

"[I]t is vital that students understand the long term consequences of their immediate actions. This requires the ability to operate within the framework of their higher headquarters 'Commander’s Intent.' In order to reinforce this concept, students see orders as 'contracts' between senior and subordinate. The higher commander assigns a mission (the short term contract) with the understanding that the subordinate leader will be allowed maximum latitude in figuring out exactly how he will accomplish that mission. The only stipulation is that the subordinate leader’s 'solution' must not violate the Commander’s Intent. This intent constitutes the long term contract between senior and subordinate. Ethical conduct and adherence to the Rules of Engagement (ROE) are always part of the Commander’s Intent, and this serves to emphasize the often strategic-level consequences of actions at the lowest levels."

"ALM-based courses [focus] on the way that 'tactics' are defined. In ALM-based courses, instructors describe tactics as unique 'solutions' to specific problems, not tasks or drills that must be executed through doctrinal formulas or set procedures. Following fixed rules not only results in predictability, it quickly becomes an excuse for not thinking. Since courses using ALM focus on 'how to think' about tactical problem-solving, while developing an individual’s competence and confidence, anything that discourages creative thought has no place in its curriculum."

Leland and Vandergriff cite William Lind's theory of "maneuver warfare" as the basis for these themes. Lind's theory is spelled out in his 1985 Maneuver Warfare Handbook.

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Don Vandergriff II: Developing Adaptive Leaders at West Point

2010-01-08T23:51:00.012-05:00

A couple of earlier posts discussed John Boyd, who served as an Air Force officer from 1951 to 1975. Among his notable contributions to military thinking is the "OODA loop," aka the "Boyd Cycle," a decision-making process summarized in the graphic below.

Adapted from ""No 'Approved Solutions' in Asymmetric Warfare" (pdf), by Maj. Chad Foster. The Orientation phase is highlighted because the orientation process is emphasized in West Point's military science classes that use the Adaptive Leadership Methodology.

The OODA Loop is now embedded in military science courses taught to cadets at the US Military Academy at West Point. This is part of a broader framework designed to develop students' adaptive leadership skills.

As Maj. Chad Foster explains in a brief article (pdf) published in the August 2009 issue of West Point's Assembly magazine, Don Vandergriff's Adaptive Leadership Methodology (ALM) is now used in Academy military science classes in order to nurture "effective decision-making and adaptability through experiential learning."

The graphic below shows how ALM governs the flow of a class. The OODA Loop comes into play at the points where students need to reach decisions on how to handle scenarios the teacher presents.

Use of the Adaptive Leadership Methodology in West Point military science classes
("No 'Approved Solutions' in Asymmetric Warfare" [pdf])
The emphasis is on the Orientation phase of the OODA Loop

because this is when the cadet attempts to make sense out of the information at hand. The decision is important, but how the cadet arrived at it is just as important.

In concluding his article, Foster notes that implementing the Adaptive Leadership Methodology at West Point involved considerable effort, but that the results — in terms of student engagement and learning — have clearly made the effort worthwhile.
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Don Vandergriff I: Teaching the Adaptive Leadership Methodology

2010-01-07T23:51:00.006-05:00

Back in December, Donald Vandergriff, a retired US Army officer who now acts as a consultant on leadership development, wrote a post for his blog that gives a good idea of the type of training he recommends — and conducts — for members of the armed forces and civilian law enforcement organizations.

Vandergriff advocates leadership development training that emphasizes adaptability. As you can see from his blog post, Vandergriff is focused on adaptability because it is essential for being able to handle complex problem situations, especially when time is of the essence.

In brief, Vandergriff teaches the Adaptive Leadership Methodology as follows:

Experimentation comes first through the execution of Tactical Decision-Making Exercises (TDEs) [see below] followed by the officers briefing their decisions, plans or orders. After the officer explained him or herself and responded to criticism from their peers and me, the group executed an intense instructor-facilitated after-action review (AARs). The “teaching” was accomplished through AARs as the officers discovered for themselves the concepts and principles included in workshop’s outcomes.

Vandergriff explains how the TDEs are set up:

Each TDE consisted of a scenario summary and a map with graphics. I either handed out a printed copy of the scenario or issued it verbally to the officers, requiring them to listen closely and take notes. The TDEs were two types (1) immediate decision exercises that gave the officers only 30 seconds or a few minutes to make a decision and (2) planning exercises that are longer in duration and culminate in the briefing of orders. In either case, the officers were given limited time and limited information to make their decisions and to complete their plans. This induced stress and allowed them to discover for themselves that delaying decisions until one has “perfect intelligence” or to wait for “permission” is both unrealistic and ineffective.

Citing the work of Robert Bjork, a psychology professor at UCLA for support, Vandergriff reports that he has consistently found that long-term learning is greater if specific tasks are taught in the larger context of problem solving (as opposed to being taught in isolation as a series of lessons that take the form "in situation X, do the following").

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Epiphany 2009

2010-01-06T23:35:00.002-05:00

The Epiphany (c. 1320)
Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267 - 1337)
Metropolitan Museum of Art

(smarthistory.org)
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Twelfth Day of Christmas 2009

2010-01-05T23:24:00.002-05:00

(www.istockphoto.com)
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Eleventh Day of Christmas 2009

2010-01-04T23:19:00.001-05:00

Eleven Pipers Piping

(Be Well @ Stanford)
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Memorial of the Holy Name of Jesus

2010-01-03T19:59:00.006-05:00

"... one of the Holy Name of Jesus monograms that devout Sienese put above the gates of their cities, their businesses and homes in response to the preaching of St. Bernardine of Siena. St. Bernadine urged devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus as part of a peace-making response to the many family feuds that plagued the city."

(Intentional Disciples)
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Memorial of St. Basil the Great

2010-01-02T18:51:00.003-05:00

St. Basil the Great
(St. Basil the Great Parish, Kimberton PA)
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New Year's Day 2010

2010-01-01T09:25:00.006-05:00

For all my family and friends who have been exulting over their wonderful cats . . .

(Amy Crehore)
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Memorial Day For Pope Saint Sylvester I

2009-12-31T17:20:00.005-05:00

Pope Saint Sylvester's Miracle
Maso di Banco, fresco c. 1340
Cappella di Bardi di Vernio, Santa Croce, Florence

(Women for Faith & Family)
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Sixth Day of Christmas 2009

2009-12-30T05:39:00.005-05:00

Church of the Nativity, Bethelem
(www.breviary.net)
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Feast of St. Thomas a Becket 2009

2009-12-29T07:56:00.005-05:00

St. Thomas a Becket
(Revd. Fr. Edward Tomlinson SSC)
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Feast of the Holy Innocents

2009-12-28T15:15:00.005-05:00

In lieu of an image of innocent babies being killed by Herod's troops, here's a painting of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus escaping into Egypt . . .

The Flight into Egypt,
by William Hole (1846 -1917)

(TruthBook.com)
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Feast of St. John the Apostle 2009

2009-12-27T07:49:00.006-05:00

St. John the Apostle, with his Gospel
(Greek Orthodox Diocese of America)
[Note that the Greek Orthodox Church
celebrates St. John's feast day on September 26]
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Boxing Day 2009

2009-12-26T06:49:00.004-05:00

Tree on Boxing Day 2004
(P Smith)
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