The Spectator Bird

This was an interesting book for me to read. After reading it I remembered a comment from one of the Three Stooges, Curly who said, “I resemble that remark.”

It’s a novel about Joe Allston, a retired literary agent who is, in his own words, "just killing time until time gets around to killing me." His parents and his only son are long dead, leaving him with neither ancestors nor descendants, tradition nor ties. His job, trafficking the talent of others, had not been his choice. He passes through life as a spectator.

A postcard from a friend causes Allston to return to the journals of a trip he had taken years before, a journey to his mother's birthplace, where he'd sought a link with the past. The memories of that trip, both grotesque and poignant, move through layers of time and meaning, and reveal that Joe Allston isn't quite spectator enough.

Here are a few quotes:

“Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn't come back with a cartful and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to' the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time.”

***************************

“I can't see that Danish episode as an adventure, or a crisis survived, or a serious quest for anything definable. It was just another happening like today's luncheon, something I got into and got out of. And it reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events Or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonably well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.”

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“There is a feeling part of us that does not grow old at all. If we could peel off the callus, and wanted to, there we would be, un-touched by time, unwithered, vulnerable, afflicted and volatile and blind to consequence, a set of twitches as beyond control as an adolescent's erections.”

***************************

"Never disparage Marcus Aurelius," I said. "Did you know he was one of the earliest environmentalists? You could quote him to the Sierra Club. Here he says, 'That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bee,' and under that, in Allston's crabbed hand, is written, 'The world suffers from an increment of excrement,' which you might render into the vernacular as 'The world is full of shit.'''

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“What did the Europeans gain by Columbus? The illusion of freedom, I suppose. But did they gain or lose when they gave up the tentative safety of countries and cultures where the rules were as well known as the dangers, and had been tailored to the dangers, and went raiding in a virgin continent that was neither country nor culture, and isn't yet, and may never be, and yet has never given up the dangerous illusion of infinite possibility? What good did it all do, if we end in confusion and purposelessness on the far Pacific shore of America, or come creeping back to our origins looking for something we have lost and can't name?

No sooner do I ask that than I have to admit that what brought my mother and a lot of others to the New World was precisely the hope of safety, not any lust for freedom. What do I want, a drawbridge between the continents, across which the cultures and hence the generations can meet, and pass, and meet again?”

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“Today, among other junk mail, there was a questionnaire from some research outfit, addressed apparently to a sampling of senior citizens and wishing to know intimate things about my self-esteem. It is their hypothesis that a decline in self-esteem is responsible for many of the overt symptoms of aging. God knows where they got my name. Ben Alexander, maybe; his finger is in all those pies, and always stirring.

I looked at some of the questions and threw the thing in the fireplace. Another of those socio-psycho-physiological studies suitable for computerizing conclusions already known to anyone over fifty. Who was ever in any doubt that the self-esteem of the elderly declines in this society which indicates in every possible way that it does not value the old in the slightest, finds them an expense and an embarrassment, laughs at their experience, evades their problems, isolates them in hospitals and Sunshine Cities, and generally ignores them except when soliciting their votes or ripping off their handbags and their Social Security checks? And which has a chilling capacity to look straight at them and never see them. The poor old senior citizen has two choices, assuming he is well enough off to have any choices at all. He can retire from that hostile culture to the shore of some shuffleboard court in a balmy climate, or he can shrink in his self-esteem and gradually become the cipher he is constantly reminded he is.”

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“They have lived on the campus ever since he retired as editor of the New Republic many years ago. Since retiring, he has had about three heart attacks and written about five books, and it is a cinch that at eighty-five Or whatever he is he still contemplates five books more, and may be halfway through the next one. His last Christmas letter contained a line that should be engraved above every geriatric door. He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man with something the matter with him. He has a sweet humorous face and an innocent resilience that make me ashamed of myself. As an apologist for old age he is better than Ben Alexander, even. And Rosie can make you feel good at a hundred yards, just by the sight of her. Bruce says she is always trying to help old ladies of sixty down steps.”

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This is not a joyful read, but a thoughtful, introspective one. But it is well written and insightful. If you can handle the introspection of yourself it provokes, I’d recommend it.

The Spectator Bird, Wallace Stegner, Penguin Books, 1976, 214pp

Guide to Becoming a Corporate Innovant

Innovation within a corporation (or any other enterprise) results from the productive application of creativity within a box. And, as anyone experienced in corporate life knows, innovating within the box is quite often more difficult than innovating outside the box. And, in truth, most corporations don't want out of the box innovations as they are generally too risky, disruptive and often misinformed.

Sir N. O. Vant originated as part of an innovation enhancement program in IBM in the 1980s. He was devised as a play on words and a metaphor easily recognized, a gallant knight. I apologize immediately to the females of the business world for it was not and still is not my intent to offend anyone or suggest that females could not be innovants. Sir N. O. Vant represents the limits of my imagination to create a character or set of characters that would be gender neutral. So, with apologizes to the women in business who are certainly more than damsels in distress, I offer our gallant knight.

The character of Sir N. O. Vant developed over the seven years that the innovation enhancement program ran, and were a feature in each edition of an internal magazine, Creativity!, with a distribution of over 60,000 technical profesionals. All of the cartoons are creatively drawn by Scott Byers. Each episode features our fearless knight, Sir N. O. Vant, undertaking some perilous activity to bring a new idea into a business. Each is accompanied by a short description expounding on the principle. The colloquialisms represented by the cartoons are drawn from my experience innovating inside IBM, research and experience as a consultant. They began when I was asked to share my personal experiences in IBM as an internal entrepreneur. They were part of a presentation I gave many times within IBM.

The context for these thoughts is an individual inside of a large organization with a strong and resilient culture, often portrayed as the dragon.

I hope in this series of cartoons and brief essays to show that there are some practices you can follow which will help you do what you have resoundingly said you want to do -- innovate, be a change master, an intrapreneur, an innovant.

Some definitions:
Innovant: Having innovations
Innovation: The introduction of something new; something which deviates from an established doctrine or procedure; something that differs from existing forms
Intrapreneur: A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation

Paul Schumann
April 1, 2011
Austin, Texas

Guide to Becoming a Corporate Innovant

Oligarchy

With apologies to Lewis Carol and his poem Jabberwocky from Through the Looking Glass, I offer:

Oligarchy

’Twas brillig, and the lobbyists[1]
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the bureaucrats[2],
And the ideologues[3] outgrabe.

“Beware the Oligarch[4], my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Oligopolist[5], and shun
The frumious Plutocrat[6]!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Oligarch, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Oligarch?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the Plutocrats
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the theocrats[7],
And corporatocrats[8] outgrabe

[1] A lobbyist is a person who tries to influence legislation on behalf of a special interest or a member of a lobby. Lobbying (also Lobby) is the intention of influencing decisions made by legislators and officials in the government by individuals, other legislators, constituents, or advocacy groups. Wikipedia

[2] A bureaucrat is a member of a bureaucracy and can comprise the administration of any organization of any size, though the term usually connotes someone within an institution of a government or corporation. Wikipedia

[3] An often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology. Merriam-Webster

[4] Oligarchy is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of people. These people (oligarchs) could be distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, corporate, or military control. Wikipedia

[5] An oligopoly is a market form in which a market or industry is dominated by a small number of sellers (oligopolists). The word is derived, by analogy with "monopoly. Because there are few sellers, each oligopolist is likely to be aware of the actions of the others. The decisions of one firm influence, and are influenced by, the decisions of other firms. Wikipedia

[6] Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy, or power provided by wealth. The combination of both plutocracy and oligarchy is called plutarchy. Wikipedia

[7] Theocracy is a form of government in which a state is understood as governed by immediate divine guidance especially a state ruled by clergy, or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided. Wikipedia

[8] Corporatocracy, in social theories that focus on conflicts and opposing interests within society, denotes a system of government that serves the interest of, and may be run by, corporations and involves ties between government and business; where corporations, conglomerates, and/or government entities with private components, control the direction and governance of a country, including carrying out economic planning notwithstanding the 'free market' label. Wikipedia

Here's the original version in case you've forgotten it:

Jabberwocky

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

From Wikipedia: "Jabberwocky" is a poem of nonsense verse written by Lewis Carroll, originally featured as a part of his novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1872). The book tells of Alice's travels within the back-to-front world through a looking glass.

While talking with the White King and White Queen (chess pieces), she finds a book written in a strange language that she can't read. Understanding that she is traveling in an inverted world, she sees it is mirror-writing. She finds a mirror and holds it up to a poem on one of the pages, to read out the reflection of "Jabberwocky". She finds it as puzzling as the odd land she has walked into, which we later discover is a dreamscape.

It is considered to be one of the greatest nonsense poems written in the English language. The playful, whimsical poem became a source of nonsense words and neologisms such as "galumphing", "chortle", and "Jabberwocky" itself.

I feel a great deal like Alice having stepped through a looking glass (mirror) and I'm now in a world I no longer recognize.

Insight, Foresight and Hindsight

I thought since the title of my blog is Insights and Foresight, it would be interesting to look at the usage of those terms over time with the Google Books Ngram Viewer. The results surprised me:

The usage of the word foresight has been low throughout the 200 years and slowly dropping. Hidsight has been even lower, but rising over the last 20 years. The surprise to me is the growth in the use of the term insight. We clearly are focusing a lot of what's happening now.

However, looking at the terms past, present and future shows a diffferent picture:
The patterns are very different. Remember however that present has several meanings so its results are ambiguous.

The use of the word complexity may shed some light on what's going on:


Perhaps insight usage is increasing as our description of the world becomes more complex. We need more insight in order to cope.

Crush Point

Crush Point, John Seabrook, The New Yorker, February 8, 2011



"On Thanksgiving Day, 2008, shoppers began lining up outside the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, Long Is-land, at 5 :30 P.M., near a small, handwritten sign that read "Blitz Line Starts Here." Like many other retailers holding "doorbuster" Black Friday sales, Wal¬Mart was offering deep discounts on a limited number of TVs, iPods, DVD players, and other coveted products. Only two months earlier, the U.S. economy had nearly collapsed, and although the Christmas shopping season was looking dismal, there was still some dim hope that the nation might be able to shop its way out of disaster, as we were advised to do after 9/11.

By two in the morning, the line ran the length of the building, past Perland, turned at a wire fence, and stretched far into the bleak parking lot of the Green Acres Mall, a tundra of frosted tarmac. There were already more than a thousand people. Store managers had placed eight interlocking plastic barriers between the front of the line and the outer doors to the store, to create a buffer zone that would keep people from crowding around the entrance. But at three people began jumping the barriers. The store's assistant manager, Mike Sicuranza, spoke to the manager, Steve Sooknanan, who had gone to a hotel to rest, and told him that customers had breached the buffer zone. Sicuranza sounded frightened. Sooknanan told him to call the police.

The Nassau County police arrived soon after the call, and, using bullhorns, ordered everyone to get back behind the barriers. The police were still there at four, when Sooknanan returned to the store. Shortly afterward, a Wal-Mart employee brought some family members inside the barriers, angering the crowd. About two hundred shoppers pushed into the buffer zone. Those in front were squeezed against two sliding glass outer doors that led into a glassed-in, high-ceilinged entrance vestibule that also held some vending machines. These had been pushed to the center of the space, to prevent people from crossing it diagonally and entering through the exit doors. As more people gathered, in anticipation of the store's opening, at 5 A.M., the pressure on the doors built and they began to shake. "Push the doors in!" some chanted from the back.

Employees asked the police for help.

According to a court filing, the police responded that dealing with this crowd was "not in their job description," and they left. Of the two-man security force that Wal-Mart had hired for Blitz Day, only one had shown up, and he was inside the store. Shortly before five, the crowd had grown to about two thousand people. The store's asset-protection manager, Sal D'Amico, advised Sooknanan not to open the doors, but Sooknanan overruled him. He instructed eight to ten of his largest employees, most of whom worked in the stockroom, to stand at the sides of the vestibule as the outer doors were opened, and be ready to help anyone who tripped or fell.

One of those men was Jdimytai Damour, who lived in Jamaica, Qweens; his parents were Haitian immigrants. Damour was thirty-four, and beefy-at six feet five inches tall, he weighed around four hundred and eighty pounds. Friends called him Jdidread, because he wore his hair in dreadlocks. He had been working at Wal-Mart for about a week, as a temporary employee in the stockroom. Like the others in the vestibule, he had no training in security or crowd control. A co-worker had reportedly heard him say earlier, "I don't want to be here."

Just before five, the workers realized that a pregnant woman, Leana Lockley, a twenty-eight-year-old part-time college student from South Ozone Park, was being crushed against the glass on the outer doors. The managers slid them open just enough to pull Lockley inside the vestibule. The crowd surged forward, thinking that the store was opening. The workers shut the doors again and braced both sliding doors with their bodies to keep them from caving in, as Sooknanan initiated the festive countdown, a Wal- Mart Blitz Day tradition. Ten, nine, eight ... At zero, the doors were opened again. There was a loud cracking sound as both sliding doors burst from their frame, and the crowd boiled in.

Dennis Fitch, one of the workers standing at the entrance, was blown backward, through the inner vestibule doors and into the store. Others man-aged to jump to safety atop the vending machines. Some attempted to form a human chain on the other side of the vestibule, to slow down the crowd rushing into the store. A crush soon developed inside the vestibule, but the people who were still outside, pushing forward, weren't aware of it. Leana Lockley was carried through the vestibule and into the store by the surge, and she tripped over an older woman, who was on the ground. As she got to her knees, she later said, she saw Damour next to her. "I was screaming that I was pregnant, I am sure he heard that," she told Newsday. "He was trying to block the people from pushing me down to the ground and trampling me .... It was a split second, and we had eye contact as we knew we were going to die."

Co-workers later testified that Damour was hit by one of the two sliding glass doors. As he went down, the door fell on top of him, and people fell overhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif it. Maybe he got up again to help Lockley, but that's not clear in camera and cell-phone-video footage of the scene. He just vanishes into the frantic tangle of limbs."

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I think that this type of situation is an example of a complex system moving from one with emergent properties (like a school of fish or a flock of birds) to a complex system in a critical state (nonequilibrium - like an earthquake or a landslide).

Is there Something Wrong with the Scientific Method?

The Truth Wears Off, Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker, December 13, 2010

Is there something wrong with the scientific method?

On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Ability, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects' psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly's Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company's top-selling drug.

But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren't any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties.

"In fact, sometimes they now look even worse," John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.

Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it's known, is the foundation of modem research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself It's a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It's as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn't yet have an official name, but it's occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to "put nature to the question." But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.

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The Efficiency Dilemma

The Efficiency Dilemma, David Own, The New Yorker, December 20 and 27, 2010

If our machines use less energy, will we just use more?

"In April, the federal government ad­opted standards for automobiles re­quiring manufacturers to improve the average fuel economy of their new-car fleets thirty per cent by 2016. The Times, in an editorial titled "Everybody Wins," said the change would produce "a trifecta of benefits." Those benefits were enumerated last year by Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy: a reduc­tion in total oil consumption of 1.8 bil­lion barrels; the elimination of nine hundred and fifty million metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions; and savings, for the average American driver, of three thousand dollars .

Chu, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, has been an evange­list for energy efficiency, and not just for vehicles. I spoke with him in July, shortly after he had conducted an inter­national conference called the Clean Energy Ministerial, at which efficiency was among the main topics. "I feel very passionate about this," he told me. 'We in the Department of Energy are trying to get the information out that efficiency really does save money and doesn't nec­essarily mean that you're going to have to make deep sacrifices."

Energy efficiency has been called "the fifth fuel" (after coal, petroleum, nuclear power, and renewable) ; it is seen as a cost-free tool for accelerating the transition to a green-energy econ­omy. In 2007, the United Nations Foundation said that efficiency im­provements constituted "the largest, the most evenly geographically distributed, and least expensive energy resource." Last year, the management-consulting firm McKinsey & Company concluded that a national efficiency program could eliminate "up to 1.1 gigatons of green­house gases annually." The environ­mentalist Amory Lovins, whose think­ing has influenced Chu's, has referred to the replacement of incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents as "not a free lunch, but a lunch you're paid to eat," since a fluorescent bulb will usually save enough electricity to more than offset its higher purchase price. Tanta­lizingly, much of the technology required to increase efficiency is well understood. The World Economic Forum, in a report called "Towards a More Energy Efficient World," observed that "the average refrigerator sold in the United States today uses three quarters less energy than the 1975 average, even though it is 20% larger and costs 60% less"-an improvement that Chu cited in his conversation with me.

But the issue may be less straight-forward than it seems. The thirty-five-year period during which new refrigerators have plunged in electricity use is also a period during which the global market for refrigeration has burgeoned and the world's total energy consumption and carbon output, including the parts directly attributable to keeping things cold, have climbed. Similarly, the first fuel-economy regulations for U.S. cars-which were enacted in 1975, in response to the Arab oil embargo were followed not by a steady decline in total U.S. motor-fuel consumption but by a long-term rise, as well as by increases in horsepower, curb weight, vehicle miles traveled (up a hundred per cent since 1980), and car ownership (America has about fifty million more registered vehicles than licensed drivers). A growing group of economists and others have argued that such correlations aren't coincidental. Instead, they have said, efforts to improve energy efficiency can more than negate any environmental gains-an idea that was first proposed a hundred and fifty years ago, and which came to be known as the Jevons paradox*.

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* Note: In economics, the Jevons paradox, sometimes called the Jevons effect, is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological improvements could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption. Wikipedia