Abelard and Heloise surprised by Master Fulbert (Painting by Jean Vignaud)

I’ve been receiving email the last couple of weeks.  “Where are the WWC  posts?”  “Are you still writing on WWC?” The short answer is “yes,” but I am taking a short sabbatical to finish my book Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities in the 21st Century.  I like the idea of taking a sabbatical from writing to be able to write something, but it’s not an original idea.  I noticed that when New York Times columnists like Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd go silent for a few weeks to finish a book, they say that they are taking a sabbatical, and I thought that I would also take a sabbatical. Maybe some their  marketplace magic will rub off on me.

What’s the book about?  It’s a WWC story about the challenges that face American higher education as the sudden appearance of abundant choices in university education erode the value of traditional colleges and universities.  I have written a little about this before.  My colleague Dick Lipton has an excellent post on what he thinks is the doomsday scenario for American colleges.

The appearance of Peter Abelard’s name in the title of my book always draws curious looks.  It is in part a metaphor for a long-lost approach to education in which the connection between students and teachers defined the learning experience.   But it is also a real part of the story of where our universities are heading because it is the starting point of an historical arc that might well lead to Liptons’s extinction event.

Peter Abelard is known today mainly because of his disastrous love affair with Heloise, but

Few teachers ever held such sway as Abelard now did for a time. Distinguished in figure and manners, he was seen surrounded by crowds — it is said thousands — of students, drawn from all countries by the fame of his teaching, in which acuteness of thought was relieved by simplicity and grace of exposition. Enriched by the offerings of his pupils, and feasted with universal admiration, he came, as he says, to think himself the only philosopher standing the world…Great as was the influence exerted by Abelard in the minds of his contemporaries and the course of mediaeval thought, he has been little known in modern times but for his connection with Heloise[1].

Abelard to Apple will be published in 2011 by MIT Press.  I will be back with new WWC posts in  few weeks.

References

[1] George Croom Robertson, M.A., Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic at University College, London, 1867-1892, first editor of Mind, his articles have been republished under the title of Philosophical Remains.

San Jose Mercury News (CA)

December 23, 2001
Section: Business
Edition: Morning Final
Page: 1F

VC LEGEND LEADS CHARGE FOR HP-COMPAQ
WITH TIES TO BOTH COMPANIES, PERKINS HAS UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE
MATT MARSHALL, Mercury News

Thirty-six stories above the placid blue waters framing Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge, Thomas Perkins fidgets in his chair. If conversation lulls, his thumbs twiddle impatiently. He is a man driven by ambition. Perkins, 69, has turned his Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, into the most successful VC firm in the world. Kleiner Perkins has returned around $20 billion to investors over its 30-year history. But Perkins‘ impatience comes from his latest, unexpected challenge: the bitter battle over the proposed merger of Compaq Computer with Hewlett-Packard. As a board member of Compaq — and former executive at HP, the Palo Alto computer firm where he cut his teeth more than four decades ago — he has become one of the most outspoken backers of the merger. But some HP heirs — sons and daughters of founders William Hewlett and David Packard — have signaled their intent to vote down the deal, saying a merger doesn’t make economic sense. They also say the layoffs likely in a merger threaten to ruin HP’s vaunted tradition, the so-called HP Way, which they say emphasizes company loyalty…

…A merger will create a mammoth company that can take on giant IBM — and beat it. HP and Compaq, he explains, have better ties with Microsoft and Intel — two other key protagonists in the computer industry drama. Together, he says, the foursome create an industry standard that can easily outdo IBM. ”Microsoft will be the software department, Intel will be the hardware department, and HP-Compaq will be the marketing-customer delivery department,” he says. ”Wouldn’t you go for it?” In part, Perkins is fighting for Compaq. But he also is fighting for his right to interpret the legacy that Packard and Hewlett left for Silicon Valley..

I remember opening the paper a couple of days before Christmas, 20001 and feeling like I had just been kicked in the stomach.  It was not the best time to be an officer of HP. Bill Hewlett’s son and HP board member, Walter, had come out swinging against the HP-Compaq merger, and Carly Fiorina, my boss, was under incredible pressure to sell the deal despite howls from the local press, the Hewlett and Packard families, an active message board for HP employees, and now a fractious board of directors. And there it was in black and white in the morning paper:   Tom Perkins, a Compaq board member and a driving force behind the merger had a plan to turn HP — the company whose logo said “invent” — into the marketing department for Intel and Microsoft.  I had to think hard about how I was going to face my own Technology Council and reassure HP’s 12,000 engineers that — despite what Perkins said in the  interview –  the company was not backing away from its commitment to innovation.

Earlier in the month, Carly had invited us to her house for a very low-key holiday celebration — much more subdued and informal than the elegant holidays parties that were the custom when the company was doing better.  Carly had paid for much of it out of her own pocket.  It  turned out to be a  tense and not not very festive evening.  Carly was running on a few hours of sleep, and the rest of us were trying to tie down the ship’s rigging in the middle of a storm. There was an air of uncertainty. We sat around smaller tables with our spouses as dinner was served.  Carly and her husband Frank were at an adjacent table.   As much to break the tension as anything, the discussion at our table turned into a silly  guessing game over which actors would be cast to play which of us when the HP-Compaq Merger Movie was made (West Wing star Allison Janney was the consensus choice to play Carly).   We must have been loud, because I could see Carly stiffen.  Carly didn’t know who on her own staff she could trust, and it must have sounded like we were tossing off the seriously difficult times that would be coming for HP and its employees.  We weren’t.

I spent virtually all of my time that winter keeping our major technology initiatives on track, promoting strategic product directions with customers, and talking to our engineering teams around the world.  The outcome of the proxy fight was uncertain and there would have been antitrust repercussions if HP and Compaq had gotten too cozy, so Webb McKinney, who was in charge of HP’s side of the integration team and the clean room that allowed the companies to begin planning merger details without violating antitrust laws, kept most of us with day-to-day management  responsibilities in the dark about post-merger plans for technology and products.

Once shareholders approved — by a hair’s breadth — the merger, Perkins was named to the board of the new HP.  Compaq’s  Shane Robison was named to a new position that combined my old CTO role and a Chief Strategy Officer position that had not existed before. I was still concerned about the Perkins comments from his December interview.  My first encounters with the Compaq technologists were not encouraging. I got into a shouting match with one of Robison’s staff members about how much HP should be investing in security for its products.  This was less than a year after the 9/11 attacks, and I had been working closely with CTO’s of other Silicon Valley companies and federal agencies to forge a comprehensive strategy for information and communications security.  The official Compaq position was that this was a problem for Microsoft, not HP, and I was told to keep quiet about it.

Imagine my surprise when Perkins and Robison led an effort to form a Technology Committee for the HP board to oversee and track R&D the same way that Audit, Governance, and Compensation Committees oversee financial  and operational matters.  I didn’t always agree with the direction it took, but it seemed to breathe new life into a technology governance process that had been stalled for many months.  Prior to that, HP — like most companies — did not place much visible  faith in its board to integrate technology into corporate governance.   There were a few public boards that had technology committees. They had been prominently featured in the  magazines for directors that wrote about best board practices, but those articles were disappointing:  most existing technology committees were for  informal oversight of technology spending by CIO’s.  What Perkins was  proposing was something different — and so at odds with his public statements about the value of a merged HP and Compaq that it took me a little while to catch on.   The HP Technology Committee would not only monitor  technology developments, it would help educate the board about new trends and directions that would impact board-level decisions and provide informed advice on the technology implications of financial and personnel decisions, including how to maintain a workforce advantage.

A committee like this would have been helpful years before, because HP had a history of plunging into technology investments and acquisitions that, to most technology observers, made little sense.  HP’s  decision in 2000  to purchase a middleware/software company called Bluestone was one such decision.  A distant fourth in a crowded and fragmented marketplace, the idea behind the Bluestone acquisition was based on a faulty reading of HP’s current capabilities in the space, the ability of any small entrant to alter the dynamics of the marketplace and the needs of HP-UX customers who felt themselves always last to the trough when third-party software developers released new products.  After two years of chaos and the dismantling of HP’s web services organizations, Bluestone was dumped at a $400 million  loss.

HP’s decision to sell its considerable VLSI design assets to Intel was also  made for financial reasons, although it was widely known in HP’s technology community  that the success of its 32 and  64 bit  processors, including  Itanium,  depended on custom chipsets that HP had invested  in for many years.  The original architects of Itanium were on my staff,  and it was hard to peel them off the ceiling when the announcement was made, especially since they had virtually no voice in the decision-making process.

Officers were invited to sit in on the  entire HP  board meeting, except for the closing executive sessions.  Even so,  it took me awhile to realize how rare technology discussions actually were. After a particularly fiery Industry Analysts’ Meeting, during which I made a slash-and-burn  presentation on our competitive advantages over Sun Microsystems –  that made the analysts smile but our marketing folks queasy — Carly asked me to reprise the talk for the board.  Patty Dunn (who would later take over as Chairman  in a controversial  tenure after Carly’s dismissal in 2005) and others approached me to say how much they appreciated the competitive information and the willingness to be combative in defense of HP product strategy.  They claimed, incredibly, that it was the first time they had heard this kind of presentation.

The Perkins proposal would have given the board a lens to look at issues like these — necessary in  a company where financial forecasts are only as good as the underlying technology.  HP was not only one  moving in this direction.  Motorola and other technology companies  had — at about the same time — formed Perkins-style Technology Committees.  Ram Charan’s book  Boards That Deliver helps explain why technology companies need to take the Technology Committee seriously, more importantly, how they can help  a board move beyond the role of compliance to a deeper assessment of health and prospects:

Financial health, operating performance and risk each require separate attention.  A company can show good operating performance while financial health…is in decline. Dot-com companies, for example, were notorious for delighting their customers with fantastic (or fantasy) products and services while bleeding cash.  Similarly financial health can appear to be sound when in fact the guts of the business have been severely compromised.  Any risk can be underestimated, especially when it is assessed piecemeal, rather than in totality.

The reason that the Technology Committee is a good idea for  public technology companies is that the worlds of innovation and execution are going to collide, and a board cannot deliver value by simply checking off a box on a governance worksheet.   What do you know, for example, about the real performance of key technology executives  without a deep insight into how they would be evaluated by their peers  and competitors?  How do you know that an acquisition based on a couple of good financial quarters and self-congratulatory product  press releases has no market advantage over an in-house solution?   That’s not the kind of question that due diligence is going to ask. After I left the company, I watched the downsizing of research and heard often from former friends and colleagues who thought one decision or another was wrong-headed, and I often  wondered about how effectiveness the committee actually was.  And then I would see something preserved that made no short-term financial sense, although everyone knew how important the technology would be some day.

When I joined the board of RSA Security, I was definite about my plans.  “Look,” I told CEO Art Coviello, “RSA’s performance is a three-legged stool, and the board needs to be as informed about the technology and markets as it is about finance and operations.” Ram Charan would have said the three legs are Finance, Operating Performance and Risk. I said the risks are Technology, Markets and Organization. Both Art and Chairman Jim Simms were on board, but it was not an easy proposition to sell to the rest of  RSA’s board, although I did.  The RSA Technology Committee had a big impact on board dynamics and ultimately on the long-term health of the company.  It is one of the WWC success stories that I will tell in more detail in a later post.

I can’t think of any reason that the board of directors of  a public company — especially a technology company — needs seven CFO’s, but that is the profile of far too many companies.  Even  on boards where the majority of the non-management directors are CEO’s, financial expertise overwhelms all other skills, and it is not healthy.  It’s hard to find a technology company that has failed in recent years where the  roots of failure were not widely known on that other planet outside the boardroom.  I emphasize public companies only because they are great targets.  Later stage privately held companies would also be wise to pay attention to board dynamics and find some way get a handle on the company’s technology.

Once I got over the stomach ache that Tom Perkins gave me, I realized why technology had a seat at the table of his boards.   Kleiner-Perkins got to be the world’s greatest venture capital firm by delving deeply into the  technology implications of business decisions.  Engineers have the impression that board rooms are filled with accountants who know very little about the details of the  business but are not shy when it comes to talking about it.  Enter the Technology Committee.

I always liked the scene in Annie Hall where Alvy Singer, the Woody Allen character,   is getting more and more annoyed by a guy standing behind him in a movie theater line who is carrying on about Marshall McCluhan, trying to impress his date:

Man in Theatre Line: It just so happens I teach a class at Columbia called “TV, Media and Culture.” So I think my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity!

Alvy Singer: Oh, do ya? Well, that’s funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here, so, so, yeah, just let me… [pulls McLuhan out from behind a nearby poster]… Come over here for a second… tell him!

Marshall McLuhan: I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work!…How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!

Alvy Singer: Boy, if life were only like this!

I enjoyed reading  the new book about innovation at Hewlett-Packard  that Chuck House and Raymond Price just published[1]. It’s quirky and curiously researched, but, most of all, I was happy to read their account of Carly Fiorina’s tenure as CEO at HP.  History was in need of some fact-based revision.   If ever worlds collided, it was at HP when Carleton S.  Fiorina took over the reins after a stunning rise through the executive ranks at ATT/Lucent.  Chuck  points out that, although Carly was not well-liked by her employees (even her direct reports, many  of whom  ultimately undermined her), she sowed the seeds for Mark Hurd’s success.

The executive suite at HP Headquarters on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto was in those days a row of large cubicles, and, in keeping with  the HP culture, there were no doors and no outer offices.   Everyone’s office  – including Carly’s — was really just a cubicle. Carly insisted that I have two offices: one in HP Labs adjacent to the museum-like offices of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard — these were not cubicles but were real offices,  impeccably maintained in their original 1960’s orange-and-brown Madmen decor —   and the other next to hers overlooking  a Japanese garden.    Carly’s executive council met nearly every week in a nearby conference room whose glass wall looked out over the same garden.

Several   council members had offices elsewhere, but those of us who had direct access were within a thirty-foot radius of her office.  These were the Gold Badge days at HP when a favored few retirees were granted the privilege of unrestricted, lifetime access to any building and any office suite in the company. The daily comings and goings telegraphed events that would not be visible outside the CEO’s office for days or weeks, even among business heads who had broad authority over multi-billion dollar enterprises.  This turned out to be an important vantage point from which to view sand being  thrown in the gears during HP’s acquisition of Compaq, but I will save these stories for later posts.

Chuck House had been gone from HP for some time when Carly arrived, so his account is based on interviews with a relatively narrow slice of insiders who were his colleagues — an impressive number of people, to be sure, but in a company with 80,000 employees not enough for a definitive portrait.  But House has never been shy about charging ahead when the terrain looks interesting, a personality trait that once earned him a medal from Dave Packard for “Extraordinary Contempt and Defiance Beyond the Call of Duty.”  It was awarded to commemorate a mutinous tour of customer sites to demonstrate a new display monitor after HP management in Colorado Springs had decided to shut it down.   Nevertheless, House’s account gets many things right.  One of the things he misses was what Fiorina brought to HP:  a WWC focus on the customer that was foreign to HP’s engineering culture before her arrival.

House and Price defer to old-guard HP employees in characterizing Carly as a marketer, a fiction that was rooted more in style than in substance.  Fiorina was unnervingly accurate in her assessment of general  market trends,  like the importance of the internet to HP’s mainline businesses,  but, in fact, she was a consummate saleswoman.   What she brought to the table was not the “let’s-see -what -they-think-about-this” arrogance of corporate marketing organizations,  it was the ability to listen to customers, sift through encyclopedic  knowledge of internal plans and projects, and  envision a solution.  Sometimes a  solution was forthcoming.  Sometimes it took a little while longer than customers were willing to wait.  But sometimes solutions were sabotaged.   To have an HP outsider from the East Coast — a telephone equipment salesman, not an engineer — propose a solution to customer problems was an unpardonable sin to some.   It was a WWC culture class that she was slow to recognize.

She was widely criticized for her lack of operational experience, but  the truth is that Carly delegated operational authority too widely and to managers with suspect motives (including past and future pretenders to the throne).  As a newcomer,  I tended to apologize for injecting long-range thoughts into the very operational discussions of the Executive Council, until one day Carly stopped me and said: “You don’t have to apologize for that.  It’s true that we’ll never get to the long-term without taking care of the short-term, but it’s the long-term that makes the short-term worth doing at all.”

Council chemistry changed in the months before the Compaq merger. Vyomesh Joshi took over as head of the imaging and printing business unit.  V.J. is not only a brilliant executive, he is a skilled engineer, whose technical  insights  were mainly responsible for transforming ink jet printing.

The other major additions were Pradeep Jotwani and Iain Morris.  Pradeep had control of worldwide consumer  sales.  He was fond of  long discourses —  sometimes literary, sometimes merely speculative — but their effect was always to slow down a speeding train and turn the discussion in a direction that was more productive.  Iain is a big, brash, Harley-riding  Scott  who Carly recruited from Motorola to carve out emerging businesses  like handheld computers and  entertainment.  Carly quickly transferred   the personal computer businesses to Iain from Duane Zitzner’s  computer business unit where they had languished as unprofitable also-rans.  Morris knew hardware, software and manufacturing from his days at Motorola, and he was also a great salesman.

At one of his first Council meetings, Iain walked in with an HP laptop and stopped everyone cold when he opened it up and bellowed: “What’s wrong here?”  When you  looked at an open HP laptop from the back, the “hp” logo was upside down. It read “dy”, and of course,  that was the way most people saw the laptop:  open and  from the back, inverted logo.  If anyone before had noticed this, it never made it to the upper reaches of management.  The order went out immediately to invert the logo and all of the millions of HP laptops produced since that time now display the logo right side up,  so that it reads “hp”.  It upset some of the industrial designers who argued that laptops were closed a lot of the time and that the orientation of the logo doesn’t matter when a laptop is closed.  It took a salesman’s eye to recognize that it was stupid to have millions customers staring at a “dy”  laptop.

This episode followed on the heels of two other quick-shifts.  One involved HP’s always painful  Federal sales performance.  I will talk about this more fully in a later post.  The other involved architectural consistency,  a concept that bridged customer issues and product design.

Shortly after VJ took over the imaging and printing business, he held an advanced projects review for me in San Diego.  I was struck but the ubiquity of infrared (IR) connectivity ports on HP printers and cameras, and mentioned it to VJ.  He had many compelling reasons for insisting on IR, but complained that Zitzner’s PC division had recently removed IR ports from HP laptops.

To Duane’s immense displeasure, I called  a meeting with some of his design engineers, ostensibly to review the component cost envelope for laptops.  At the end of the meeting, when everyone was worn out,  I asked about IR, and they had a string of good reasons to throw it out.  When I pointed out that HP printers, cameras, and PC’s no longer worked together, they just sat there blinking at me.  Carly overruled engineering objections and IR ports made  a miraculous (albeit short-lived) reappearance in HP laptops.

It would  not be apparent outside the CEO suite for months, but architectural consistency was a technology theme that would drive many R&D investment decisions, both near-term and long-term.   In an effort to jump-start a consumer-facing initiative, Carly had approached Sony about sharing some key technologies.  One of Sony’s success stories was the introduction of memory stick technology into a broad range of Sony products from hundred-dollar consumer entertainment devices to studio-quality video cameras that cost a half million dollars or more.  My counterpart at Sony was a CTO named Mario Tokoro, a computer scientist and engineer who had spent time at the famous computer science department at Carnegie-Mellon University.  Mario had been instrumental in arranging for memory stick technology across a staggering array of Sony’s consumer and business products. The idea of arranging product strategies around this kind of architectural unity would have sped up HP’s brief surge in Internet and Web technologies.  It was an idea that was undone by colliding worlds on a much different scale.

Alan J. Perlis

I had planned to write a post later this spring on the collisions between what engineers sometimes perceive as practical and what turns out in practice to be useful.  It’s a complex issue and there are examples that cut both ways, suggesting that a deeper understanding of both the underlying technology and the social “soup” where innovators thrive are needed to avoid some famous traps.  I mentioned this briefly in my discussions of the impact of social fragmentation on innovation and the pitfalls of ignoring social contexts.

Then the January 2010 issue of Communications of the ACM crossed my desk.  As I skimmed the contents, I was surprised to see my name in the headline of the Editor’s  Letter, an attack by the Editor-in-Chief Moshe Vardi on a thirty-year-old paper [ Social Processes ] that I wrote with computing legend Alan J. Perlis and my colleague Richard J. Lipton (author of the popular Godel’s Lost Letter blog and subject of Dancing with the Stars ).  The paper itself was controversial in its day and addresses exactly the WWC questions that I plan to write about.  It is extraordinary for an Editor of a professional journal to use his position to make derogatory comments about articles, especially to  further his own views.  Mr.Vardi’s letter demanded a response.  Lipton and I will jointly publish a longer and more technical essay on this subject at some point in the future, but today we are jointly publishing the following Letter to the Editor. The letter will also be sent to the Communications of the ACM.

In his  Editor’s Letter in the January 2010 issue of CACM entitled “More Debate Please”,  Moshe Vardi makes a plea for controversial topics in these pages, citing a desire to “let truth emerge from vigorous debate.”  It is a sentiment that we support as well. But we question Mr. Vardi’s judgment in using his editorial position to mount an attack on colleagues who were neither forewarned nor given an opportunity to respond.  Mr.  Vardi’s target was  our 1979 critique of formal program verification entitled  “Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs,”  It was co-authored with the late Alan Perlis, one of the originators of the field and a lifelong advocate for the kind of open discussion that the Editor advocates.  We can only hope that future contributors have higher standards for debate than does the current Editor, because his out-of-context references to the 1979 debate over the practical efficacy of formal verification, his ex-cathedra determination that the article was “misguided” and his ill-informed view of the decision to publish it have no power to illuminate  a serious subject.

We do not care to respond to Mr. Vardi’s substantial mischaracterizations and misstatements at this time, but we do think it is fair to point out that  the publication of “Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs,” was not a singular event that might be classified as either misguided or not.  “Social Processes” was a refereed article.  A preliminary version was accepted  by a highly selective conference program committee in 1976 and its presentation was attended by virtually every living contributor to the field.  It was then submitted to this journal and reviewed by anonymous referees. Its publication was followed by many months of public presentations and workshops, letters to the Editor, written reinforcements and rebuttals, and — several years later — a special issue of this journal devoted to the topic.  Mr. Vardi faults the editorial board for not publishing an opposing “counterpoint” article, a suggestion that — although it has all the “fair and balanced” trappings — would have been hard to reconcile with the confidentiality usually accorded to contributed articles that are sent to referees for review. The irony is not be lost on us  that we were offered no such opportunity prior to publication of his letter.

The article itself has been reprinted dozens of times and has appeared in several anthologies in the philosophy of mathematics.  Its publication and the ensuing debate have been the subject of social science research (Donald MacKenzie’s 2001 book[1] “Mechanizing Proof” remains the definitive sociological and historical analysis of both the paper and its implications for the field). If our arguments seem off the mark to Mr. Vardi, then perhaps the right course of action is to resurrect the social process that led to the article’s publication in the first place and jump into the fray. Until that time, the correct editorial position for CACM and its Editor is to let both the paper and the written record that surrounds it speak for themselves.  It strikes us as inappropriate, after thirty years of silence,  to use the cover of an Editorship to  attack unsuspecting passersby, especially while touting the moral virtues of free and vigorous debate.

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[1] Donald MacKenzie, Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust, MIT Press 2001, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

There are many ways for Chief Technology Officers to be undone.   Appropriately enough  — in light of  Friday’s  college football bowl fest —  being an effective CTO is  like being a college football coach.  You don’t actually do the blocking and tackling yourself, but you’ll fail if the fundamentals are not done right —  even if your game plan is perfectly constructed.  I will have more to say in an upcoming  post about game plans, but today I want  to recognize the arrival of the  New Year with a short note about the fundamentals.

George Heilmeier, former DARPA Director, Bellcore CEO, and the inspiration for my” Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” series[1][2][3] was a mentor to me and to many other  technology leaders .  One day I asked him for a bit of career advice, and he hauled out a Heilmeier list — twelve  rules for CTO’s to follow if they have any hope of navigating the many dangers of the colliding worlds of innovation and execution.  I quickly found out that, true to form,  George had reduced best practices to a few rules of the road because dozens of others had asked for the same advice.  They are fascinating and valuable bits of advice, and they range in scope from broad business fundamentals to technology and culture.   I haven’t come across anyone who thinks that they are not important lessons — not to tuck away for future use, but to internalize and use as a platform for technology management in any setting.  It was December , so I turned George’s list into New Year’s resolutions.

For each “client” establish/conceive a list of technologies and initiatives that drive his business and a list of technologies and initiatives that could change his business.

Use the Catechism to get people to focus on the real “care-abouts” when making investment decisions and establishing priorities.

Establish the physical, economic, and manufacturing limits of the technologies and capabilities that drive the business today.

Establish a good working relationship with your peers

Establish what [insert name(s) of  your CEO and Chairman] real priorities are.

Establish the metrics for success in their eyes.

Don’t shy away from doing some near term problem solving.  It builds credibility and respect.

Never have your peers or clients come to your office for meetings with you.  Go to theirs.

Any display of arrogance will cost you. Don’t do it.

Compile a list of “innovations yet to be made”

Make sure that each program or initiative is output oriented not activity oriented.

Learn the [insert your company name here] culture.  It is unique.

Have a happy and safe New Year, and, by all means, don’t get caught when worlds collide.

[2] http://wwc.demillo.com/2009/10/11/guess-whos-coming-to-dinner-part-2/

[3] http://wwc.demillo.com/2009/10/19/guess-whos-coming-to-dinner-part-3/

Eiríks saga rauða (Saga of Eric the Red) Icelandic manuscript (17th century)

In Murder, Starvation and Catastrophe, I drew a line to connect the historical behavior of doomed societies with the business performance of large enterprises.  One of the most compelling of Jared Diamond’s stories is the saga of Eric the Red, the 10^th Century Viking who founded Greenland.  The preposterously named colony was eventually home to 10,000 Norse settlers who were perhaps fooled by the name into thinking they were heading off to some sort of North Sea resort for Vikings. The story of Eric the Red is a parable for how the human factor in WWC  promotes or stifles innovation.

Eric was a scoundrel.  A suspected murderer, he fled Norway for Iceland around 980 AD.  It was a short, but violent, stay.  He was ejected from Iceland, and, sailing west, discovered an island of fjords, glaciers and grasslands. He returned to Iceland long enough to kill a few people and recruit an expedition of 25 ships to build a settlement on Greenland. Despite their violent beginnings,  the Greenland settlers established a farming economy and a humane society, including a government that provided for the poor in times of scarce crop production.  The Viking settlers had sporadic wars with the Inuit natives, but apparently flourished for hundreds of years until sometime in the early 1400’s when they just disappeared.

It was one of the great anthropological mysteries of all time:   how could fierce competitors — apparently successful  in a new environment that was not much different than the one they left behind – suddenly fail so catastrophically that their entire society was wiped out in only a few years? When archaeologists excavated the Greenland settlements, they found the usual trash of human civilization:  tools, debris, the remains of livestock,  and garbage from cooking.  But they found no fish bones.  The Norse Greenlanders were expert seafarers who lived in the world’s richest fishing waters and inexplicably starved to death because they did not eat fish.

The Vikings brought with them the culture and preferences from home. They brought food:  pigs, cows, goats,  and sheep.  The Norse knew how to grow crops in cold climates, so they planted crops like barley, oats, wheat, rye, cabbage, onions and peas. They hunted seal for food and  traded  walrus ivory with Europe  for material not available on the island.

By 1400,  demand for ivory, polar bears, and other luxuries from Greenland fell. Black Plague had wiped out nearly half of Europe’s population.  The Crusades opened new sources of ivory and spices to the now smaller market in Europe. The early 1400’s also marked the beginning of the Little Ice Age, blocking natural water inlets and delaying the arrival of migratory seals.  Deforestation left Greenlanders short on lumber, fuel, and iron.  Climate change and poor crop rotation led to crop failure, so the settlers consumed pigs, cows, and sheep to the point of extinction.

They had cultural inhibitions.  They did not eat their pets, for example.  They could have learned to hunt fish from and traded with the Inuits, but the Norse regarded the natives as pagans. Greenlanders were Norse, and they thought of themselves as dairy farmers.  When Eric the Red founded Greenland, it was uncharacteristically temperate —  a special time when their cultural preferences led to success.  They relied on past behavior and — when the climate changed, relations with friends and enemies faltered, and their environment was damaged —  they starved to death.

15^th Century Greenland has something in common with IBM  in 1980:  a belief that historically successful behavior will succeed in the future. The Norse preference for pigs and cows required them to dedicate more time and grazing land to those animals than to the heartier goats and sheep.  Their Euro-centrism prevented them from learning from and adopting the eating habits of “pagan savages.” The thinking appears to be that their lifestyle was successful in Norway, so there’s no reason it shouldn’t be successful in Greenland. On the other hand the Norse settlers were not great innovators.

Thomas Watson Sr, understood the role that innovation would play in the company’s future. He opened IBM’s  first dedicated research center next to Columbia University in 1945 and the results were immediate, spectacular innovations including time sharing and  magnetic core memories.  Thomas Watson, thinking it was too risky to continue having its research done in the relative open environment of a joint university lab, and using Bell Labs as a model, established dedicated corporate research labs in New York and Zurich. This ushered in a golden age for IBM.  By any measure of success—sales, market cap, profits, patents, R&D budget—IBM,  and  in many ways,  defined the industry.

Then came the 1980’s and its disruptive changes to the computer industry. These  changes were not kind to IBM and in 1992 the company reported the single largest annual loss in U.S. corporate history to that point: $4.96 billion after taxes.

How did this happen?  Unlike the Greenlanders’ demise, this one isn’t a great mystery.  The Watsons believed fervently that doing the things that had made IBM a great corporation would make it successful in the future.  IBM knew how to profitably sell computers and to whom.  After all, they defined the industry.  There is a widely known internal 5-year forecast of worldwide PC sales that shows shipments peaking  at less than 80,000 units in 1983 before settling into a comfortable rate of 40,000 per year by 1987.  Less than 250,000 over the five year period.  5% to business customers who would continue to rely on IBM mainframes.  In fact, over a million PC’s were sold by 1985.  The industry was in the midst of explosive change and not only did IBM did not recognize it but they believed that past success was a predictor of future success.

But by 1982 it was all over. If IBM had recognized the value of the PC, they would have kept it proprietary and the computer industry would have developed very differently.  Without its IBM  licensing deal, Microsoft would have withered early.  Intel would be a niche player.

IBM, Xerox,  AT&T, and Nortel were all  innovative companies.  They hired the best and brightest – and there was low employer mobility since after all how many places were there for a computer science PhD to work?  The IBM Research Lab in Yorktown Heights developed and incubated products in the historically successful vertical way.  The barriers to entry for IBM’s  competitors (especially the small ones like Compaq and DEC) were huge. How could a small competitor build a direct sales network to rival the famed Xerox sales force?  What did an academic startup like Cisco,  aimed at the tiny data network market, have to do with the output Bell Labs or the market clout of Nortel?

This is how innovation looked at the end of the last century. It is too easy to draw conclusions about why old models stumble.  An apparently obvious lesson from the story of Erick the Red is that  the Little Ice Age caused the Vikings to die off in Greenland. Current conventional wisdom is that the technology giants stumbled  because they were too old or rigid or bloated to compete smaller, nimbler competitors who were themselves innovating although in very different ways.  Actually neither is really true.

It is simply built into the fabric of innovation that the marketplace is an environment – you have to adapt to it to survive.  If people want low-cost computers then drive cost out of the manufacturing process and learn to prosper on thinner margins. There are occasionally companies that try to change the environment.  Hewlett-Packard grew for 60 years on a simple business model:  innovate to create a product category and ride market growth until the margins shrink.  Then exit.  The ink jet printer is such a product — and there is much discussion in HP about exit strategies for ink jet printing. So was the hand-held calculator.  Most companies cannot imitate those successes. HP eventually faltered when it tried large scale environmental engineering with its failed acquisition of PWC and the gut-wrenching merger with Compaq.

So, if adjusting to the environment is the answer, why didn’t the Greenlanders just start eating fish?  The Greenlanders damaged their environment through poor livestock selection, clear-cutting forests and poor crop-rotation. There was significant climate change brought on by the Little Ice Age. The Inuit qualify as hostile neighbors.  They had friendly trade partners for many years, but eventually lost them.  But above all,  the Norse Greenlanders’ response to these factors was culturally based.  They didn’t eat fish  because it was not viewed as a reasonable option in their culture.

Innovation is frittered away because it is not viewed as a reasonable option in a company’s culture.  The structure of leadership accounts for a lot in determining the role that culture plays.   Distant, authoritarian, decision-making tends to rely excessively on the past as a predictor of the future.  Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said as much  in a 2008 speech at the Stanford Graduate School of Business:

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made over time…is not wanting to nurture innovations where I either didn’t get the business model or we didn’t have it.

Examples abound. The HP Jornada™ pocket PC could play MP3 music files before the  iPod™  hit the market.  But there was no HP music store. Running an online music store was not an HP competency.  There is a certain — sometimes irrational –  optimism that past success engenders in leaders at the precipice.  When Mike Zafirovsky took over as CEO of Nortel Networks in late 2005, it was a company on the brink of failure.  Massive layoffs had decimated the iconic Canadian company.  In early 2006, I was escorted for the last time through its cavernous Toronto facility — a building laid out as a city with streets and parks — just before it was shut down.  All you could hear was the click of heels reverberating down the empty faux boulevards. Mike Zafirovsky wanted to communicate his energy and sense of the future to the demoralized employees who remained.  His first email  in December 2005 to Nortel employees defined the tone of his administration and sent the company down a path that emphasized execution of a plan that emphasized ideas that had worked before:

To Nortel employees,

Last Friday night, as I was flying back from a very productive trip to Europe following several customer and employee visits, I came across a newspaper article entitled “Optimism Puts Rose-Colored Tint in Glasses of Top Execs.” Included in the article were quotes like:

“99% of CEOs thought they could lead their companies from crisis;”
“Optimism is all about possibilities, change, hope…without those qualities, how can any leader succeed?;” and,
· “By definition, leaders are slightly delusional.”

My first reaction was to take exception to the word “slightly” . . . .

Seriously, the question of our confidence in ourselves—and as members of Team Nortel—is something I will begin discussing today and a topic I will continue to raise in the coming weeks and months. Confidence in ourselves and each other will be critical factors in how far and how fast we take this 110-year-old company..

I discussed with you in a previous letter our plans for the BIG initiative (Business Transformation, Integrity Renewal and Growth Imperatives), our new leadership values, and our focus on people that will be rolled out as part of Session I in the first quarter. In my first few weeks, I have also spent time evaluating our relative strengths and weaknesses and pinpointing areas for improvement.

…My strong take-aways and beliefs are that our positives are significant and difficult to replicate. At the same time, our challenges are also significant but, I would argue, very fixable. I don’t believe I am looking through rose-colored glasses, but rather have adopted what I describe as an attitude of “forceful optimism.” This is a mindset, a belief and an attitude that I expect from everyone at Nortel—a combination of positive anticipation for the future combined with a determined approach to maximize positive impact.

Forceful optimism is one of the 30 action attributes supporting our recently-defined Nortel leadership values. And as promised in my last letter to you, I worked with select members of the Leadership Edge program and cabinet members to finalize these attributes before year-end.
[...]

As a positive heads-up to the many people who were hoping to be on the Business Transformation teams, we will be kicking off the Six Sigma Quality Program in the first quarter, and there will be opportunities for involvement and leadership. We will be looking for Six Sigma champions and master black belt, black belt, and green-belt candidates (much more on this early next year).

The combination of the Business Transformation initiative and the Six Sigma Quality Program will improve the basic equation of our business, including higher customer satisfaction, simplified processes, lower cost-of-rework, fewer quality issues and lower costs for our products and business structure. And we’ll see teamwork inside the company improving as a result. We will continue the focus on forceful optimism, leadership and our people agenda by launching our Session I program in the first quarter. The programs and initiatives we deliver as part of Session I will ensure we are building strong leadership capability and bench strength across Nortel.

Lastly, and arguably most important for the long-term health of the business, here are my thoughts on customers and the Growth Imperatives, which you will be hearing much more on throughout 2006. I am meeting and speaking with an increasing number of our customers (e.g. the four largest European customers last week) and our go-to-market and product management teams, and I can’t wait to attend our global sales conferences in January. In my straightforward view, good, profitable growth is to a business as air and water are to flowers. We have much to build on and also much work to do, including how we develop meaningful value propositions for our customers. To this end, I am excited to report that we will be introducing our new business mission at the sales meetings. It will guide much of our behavior externally and internally, and keep the focus where it belongs—on our customers.

Let me wrap it up by saying how privileged and proud I am to be leading Nortel and to be working with all of you. I wish you and your loved ones a relaxing holiday and warm wishes for a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2006.

Thank you for all you are doing for Nortel.

Mike Z

Mike Zafirovsky is a capable senior executive, an alumnus of Jack Welch’s CEO boot camp at GE.  He was part of a long string of strong leaders that Nortel recruited to put the company back on track.   He could not have anticipated the Little Ice Age of late 2008, but by New Year 2006, Nortel was already hurtling toward disaster.  Its stock was delisted and the company was shrinking.   I asked Mike about industry changes, but he did not react.  There was no sense of urgency at Nortel. There was a sense that the telecom equipment market was not an environment at all and that what really mattered was the company’s belief that its current direction would take them back from the edge: “a combination of positive anticipation for the future combined with a determined approach to maximize positive impact.”

In January 2009, Nortel filed for protection from its creditors. Its main businesses are being sold. When that is complete,  it will cease operations. Zafirovsky stepped down as CEO in late 2009.

One of my first projects at Bellcore  was to redefine its core software business for the emerging ISP and Cable markets.  The climate was changing in the early 90’s.  Bellcore sold  operations support systems – a sort of ERP for telcos.  A typical sale was in the $25-30M range and $100M deals were not unheard of. So we rolled up all the functions that we could think of – customer acquisition, provisioning, engineering, support – and came up with a product that we thought we could sell for $15M.  When we showed the requirements to cable operators, they just shrugged.  They were using Excel spreadsheets which cost them essentially nothing.  Today, Bellcore — operating under the name Telcordia — leads in none of the operations support or business support markets that defined its core business in the 1990’s and is not even in the top ten in cable and ISP markets.  What they really wanted help with were the services that they could sell to their customers.  One of those services was search.  Another was customer aggregation.  Both were areas in which Bellcore had fundamental patents.  One for the “seed” that underlies virtually all search engines today.  The other for “recommender” technology that underlies all social networking. The search technology was given away to Excite.  The recommender technology was assigned to MIT’s Media Lab and eventually became part of Amazon’s recommendation engine.  We were not in the lightweight database business – although there were many smaller competitors who were.  We were not in the search engine or social networking  businesses, although we had friendly relations with companies that were and had many university collaborations.  We were in the software business.

There’s a kerfuffle on the eve of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. 1,700 email messages  that were supposed to be stored on a secure server somehow found their way to open servers and were rapidly picked up by bloggers and others, who jumped on the opportunity to use the sometimes embarrassing messages to discredit  the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists that the earth is warming at an alarming rate and that human activity is the most likely cause. Aside from the shocking coincidence of events — what are the chances that a massive, worldwide fraud would be exposed at the same time the conspirators are getting together to impose their new world order? — and the uproar among climate scientists — who are launching ad-hominem attacks at every skeptic who pokes his head above ground — are there other lessons to be drawn from this shameless bit of theater?  My Georgia Tech colleague, climate scientist Judith Curry, hit the nail on the head when she  pointed out that: (1) there is really nothing in the released messages that discredits published scientific results and (2) scientists are being incredibly counterproductive by retreating into their Ivory Towers and passing up the opportunity to educate and engage both skeptics and the public.  Her Open Letter to Graduate Students and Young Scientists should be required reading for everyone interested in how to keep worlds from colliding:

…even if the hacked emails from HADCRU end up to be much ado about nothing in the context of any actual misfeasance that impacts the climate data records, the damage to the public credibility of climate research is likely to be significant. In my opinion, there are two broader issues raised by these emails that are impeding the public credibility of climate research: lack of transparency in climate data, and “tribalism” in some segments of the climate research community that is impeding peer review and the assessment process.

For “climate science” you can substitute “innovation” and the message is the same. If you’ve circled the wagons and are shooting at anything that moves, the easy target is public understanding of not only science but innovation in general.  The American public is not interested in the long-term thinking required to make sense out of squabbles like this. There are simply not enough people like San Diego Florist Steve Boigon, who — according to the New York Times — downloads MIT physics lectures because he  finds that:

I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes.

Curry did not go after the easy targets. Instead, she talked honestly to students about the importance of climbing down from the Ivory Tower. The interactive relationship between basic science, technological innovation and public policy — what Donald Stokes calls Pasteur’s Quandrant –  is a hot topic these days, because  so many important societal issues can only be resolved at their intersection.

There’s a veil that conceals the inner workings of creative science and engineering  from the lay public, and attempts to lift it sometimes produce  bizarre reactions.  I was once struck speechless  at an all-hands meeting when one of my engineers stood to scold  the  CEO for making product decisions because he knew “nothing about electronics.”  A prominent member of my Board of Advisers at the National Science Foundation once countered criticism of his particularly cumbersome approach to software development by angrily proclaiming,  “Programming is like playing a piano.  Only virtuosos should do it!”  A world-renowned engineer once responded to an essay critical of his methods by widely distributing a letter entitled “On a Political Pamphlet from the Middle Ages.”  I was one of the young authors who was at the receiving end of that one.  When  outsiders try to lift the veil, the best course is to repair to the upper reaches of the Ivory Tower, hope that the hubbub goes away, and shoot down if it doesn’t.

It is a world view that is somehow wired into university training. The Medieval regalia, semi-religious icons,  and murmured  incantations that convey special status on the conferees reinforce the impression at every college commencement that something mystical has taken place. Science textbooks are uniformly silent on how science is done, presenting instead the subject as a linear, completed work — orderly in progression and tidy in its use of knowledge.  Nearly every engineering textbook guides  readers through well-rehearsed exercises to successful completion of design tasks. Why would anyone want to learn how to build a bridge that falls down?

Insiders, of course, know differently. What takes place behind the curtain is as important as the finished product.  Some of the best technical books ever written lift the veil.  Proofs and Refutations by Imre Lakatos describes  the centuries-long frustration of mathematicians  trying — and repeatedly failing –  to precisely define polyhedra.  The process led some of  the greatest mathematical results of all time. Why Buildings Fall Down by Mario Salvatori and To Engineer is Human by Henry Petrosky are both compelling arguments that progress in  engineering is inextricably tied to understanding engineering failure.  Insiders know that failure is part of the package.  That’s exactly what makes the most outrageous of the climate change attacks so improbable.

There is a sub-genre of humor devoted to obvious, boundlessly incompetent scientific failure, real or imagined.  The Journal of Irreproducible Results is perhaps the defining publication that holds technical vanity up to ridicule. An article entitled Peaceful Use of Nuclear Explosives helpfully noted that

Development of hydro power in the desert of North Africa awaits only the introduction of water

My personal favorite medical discovery was an announcement entitled The Incidence and Treatment of Hyperacrosomia in the United States:

Some very famous Americans  have indeed been afflicted with Acute Hyperacrosomia, among them Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Lyndon Johnson.  Their condition is readily apparent upon comparison with normal individuals such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Truman Capote  and Dick Cavett…..Since the male population does express the condition to a higher degree, it falls primarily to the female population to objectively consider the risks of involving themselves with hyperacrosomic males…

The jokes are so well-known that Henry R. Lewis apparently had not second thoughts when he wrote The Data Enrichment Metho d:

The following remarks are intended as a non-technical exposition of a method which has been promoted (not by the present author) to improve the quality of inference drawn from a set of experimentally obtained data.  The power of the method lies in its breadth of applicability and in the promise it holds in obtaining more reliable results without recourse to the expense and trouble of increasing the size of the sample of data.

I have a hazy understanding of the data manipulation charges that climate skeptics are leveling at researcher, but I am pretty sure that The Data Enrichment Method was not involved.  There is also the issue of transparency that is specific to climatologists, but Curry handles that well. And then there are the charges that editors of journals were unduly influenced by political considerations.  Like the Inspector in Casablanca, I would be shocked — truly shocked — to hear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of smart, educated, and highly ambitious people make decisions based on self-interest. The secret that Curry reveals is that it may be regrettable, but  it doesn’t matter in the long run.  Science is not an orderly, axiomatic progression of knowledge. It is a social process.

Even a brief peek under the veil would be enough to convince many fair-minded skeptics that if there were another, compelling, contradictory analysis of the same data, it would have by now appeared in a reputable scientific journal.  Why?  Because it would be a career-making result.  The article would write itself.  What editorial board could long resist publishing an epochal article?  History teaches that political manipulation is much more likely to focus on who gets priority as multiple groups rush to publish simultaneously.  It’s a to maintain a conspiracy when everyone is looking out for himself.  None of this means that everything that has been published is correct. It just means that it’s very unlikely that the shrill cries of  systematic fraud have any validity.

So strong is the urge to seek out systematic scientific fraud, that there is a magazine devoted to the subject. The Skeptical Inquirer (SI) is a kind of companion to The Journal of Irreproducible Results. It specializes in debunking academic myths and scientific hoaxes.  It has over the years exposed magicians, perpetual motion charlatans, creationists, and hundreds of scientific frauds.  Who are these crusaders?  They are the very power brokers that would have to be co-opted if the climate change conspiracy theorists were right.  Here’s a partial list of SI Fellows:

James E. Alcock <http://www.cicap.org/congress/alcock.html> ,* psychologist, York Univ., Toronto

Marcia Angell <http://www.hms.harvard.edu/dsm/WorkFiles/html/people/faculty/MarciaAngel.html> , M.D., former editor-in-chief, New England Journal of Medicine

Stephen Barrett <http://www.quackwatch.com/> , M.D., psychiatrist, author, consumer advocate, Allentown, Pa.

Irving Biederman <http://geon.usc.edu/%7Ebiederman/> , psychologist, Univ. of Southern California

Susan Blackmore <http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/> , psychologist, Univ. of the West of England, Bristol

Henri Broch <http://www.unice.fr/zetetique/> , physicist, Univ. of Nice, France

Jan Harold Brunvand <http://www.janbrunvand.com/> , folklorist, professor of English, Univ. of Utah

Mario Bunge <http://www.mcgill.ca/philosophy/faculty/bunge/> , philosopher, McGill University

John R. Cole, anthropologist, Dept of Anthropology, UMass-Amherst; Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, UMass

Frederick Crews, literary and cultural critic, professor emeritus of English, Univ. of California, Berkeley

Richard Dawkins <http://richarddawkins.net/> , zoologist, Oxford Univ.

Cornelis de Jager, professor of astrophysics, Univ. of Utrecht, the Netherlands

Kenneth Feder <http://www.anthropology.ccsu.edu/faculty/feder/Feder.html> , professor of anthropology, Central Connecticut State Univ.

Antony Flew, philosopher, Reading Univ., U.K.

Andrew Fraknoi <http://www.foothill.fhda.edu/ast/afraknoi.htm> , astronomer, Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, Calif.

Kendrick Frazier,* science writer, Editor, Skeptical Inquirer

Yves Galifret, Exec. Secretary, l’Union Rationaliste

Martin Gardner,* author, critic

Murray Gell-Mann <http://www.santafe.edu/%7Emgm/> , professor of physics, Santa Fe Institute

Thomas Gilovich <http://www.psych.cornell.edu/people/Faculty/tdg1.html> , psychologist, Cornell Univ.

Susan Haack <http://www.as.miami.edu/phi/haack/> , Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, prof. of philosophy, University of Miami

C. E. M. Hansel, psychologist, Univ. of Wales

Douglas Hofstadter <http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/people/homepages/hofstadter.html> , professor of human understanding and cognitive science, Indiana Univ.

Gerald Holton <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/holton.html> , Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of History of Science, Harvard Univ.

Ray Hyman,* psychologist, Univ. of Oregon

Leon Jaroff <http://www.time.com/time/columnist/jaroff> , sciences editor, Time

Sergei Kapitza <http://www.thefutureofscience.org/veniceconference2005/speakers/kapitza_s.htm> , editor, Russian edition, Scientific American

Edwin C. Krupp, astronomer, director, Griffith Observatory

Paul Kurtz <http://www.SecularHumanism.org/home/kurtz/> ,* chairman, CSI

Lawrence Kusche, science writer

Leon Lederman <http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1988/lederman-autobio.html> , emeritus director, Fermilab; Nobel laureate in physics

Scott Lilienfeld <http://www.psychology.emory.edu/clinical/lilienfeld/index.html> , psychologist, Emory Univ.

Lin Zixin, former editor, Science and Technology Daily (China)

Jere Lipps <http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/people/jlipps/> , Museum of Paleontology, Univ. of California, Berkeley

Elizabeth Loftus <http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/> , professor of psychology, Univ. of Washington

David Marks, psychologist, Middlesex Polytech, England

Mario Mendez-Acosta, journalist and science writer, Mexico City, Mexico

Marvin Minsky <http://web.media.mit.edu/%7Eminsky/> , professor of Media Arts and Sciences, M.I.T.

David Morrison <http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/workshops/1996/astrobiology/speakers/morrison/morrison_bio.html> , space scientist, NASA Ames Research Center

Richard A. Muller, professor of physics, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley

Joe Nickell <http://www.joenickell.com> ,* senior researh fellow, CSI

Lee Nisbet,* philosopher, Medaille College

Bill Nye <http://www.nyelabs.com/> , science educator and television host, Nye Labs

James E. Oberg <http://www.jamesoberg.com/> , science writer

Irmgard Oepen, professor of medicine (retired), Marburg, Germany

Loren Pankratz, psychologist, Oregon Health Sciences Univ.

John Paulos <http://www.math.temple.edu/%7Epaulos/> , mathematician, Temple Univ.

Steven Pinker <http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/> , Cognitive Scientist, Harvard

Massimo Polidoro <http://www.massimopolidoro.com/> , science writer, author, executive director CICAP, Italy

Milton Rosenberg, psychologist, Univ. of Chicago

Wallace Sampson, M.D., clinical professor of medicine, Stanford Univ.

Amardeo Sarma, engineer, Senior Manager at NEC Laboratories Europe <http://www.nw.neclab.eu/> , Chairman, GWUP, Germany

Evry Schatzman, President, French Physics Association

Eugenie Scott, physical anthropologist, executive director, National Center for Science Education <http://www.ncseweb.org>

Robert Sheaffer <http://www.debunker.com/> , science writer

Elie A Shneour, biochemist, author, director, Biosystems Research Institute, La Jolla, Calif.

Dick Smith, film producer, publisher, Terrey Hills, N.S.W., Australia

Robert Steiner, magician, author, El Cerrito, Calif.

Jill Cornell Tarter <http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=277939> , SETI Institute

Carol Tavris, psychologist and author, Los Angeles, Calif.

Dave Thomas, President of New Mexicans for Science and Reason <http://www.nmsr.org/>

Stephen Toulmin <http://blue.butler.edu/%7Epclauss/toulmin.html> , professor of philosophy, University of Southern California

Neil deGrasse Tyson <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/tyson.html> , astrophysicist and director, Hayden Planetarium, New York City

Marilyn vos Savant <http://www.marilynvossavant.com/> , Parade magazine contributing editor and CBS News correspondent

Steven Weinberg <http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1979/weinberg-autobio.html> , professor of physics and astronomy, University of Texas at Austin.

Richard Wiseman <http://www.psy.herts.ac.uk/wiseman/> , psychologist, University of Hertfordshire

Marvin Zelen <http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/facres/zln.html> , statistician, Harvard Univ.

If there is  a less easily manipulated group under one banner, I have not seen it.

Judy Curry’s Open Letter does not only apply to climate scientists. It applies to every boardroom that squashes the discussion of how innovation takes place and every executive suite where technologists are too busy innovating to engage seriously with corporate management.  Of course, it also applies to the easy targets — facile business leaders who confuse near term planning with technical progress and are too quick to jump to the “bottom line” — but that discussion will have to wait for another post.

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As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself reading more and more history. I am told that the way to appreciate history is not to “play it in reverse” – that is don’t look at history from today’s perspective where you already know what happened.  You have to “play it forward” – what was it like to live in that place and time and to have to make the big decisions of the day?  It occurred to me several years ago that we think of historical trends as big things.  Nations moving against nations.  The rise and fall of societies.  Then I realized:  Many of the big events took place in  familiar terrain  – collections of people organized around a more or less well defined set of goals and working toward a common purpose. And if you go back in history far enough – say 1,000 years or so — the numbers are also pretty familiar,  usually less than a million people.  In fact, nations and societies with 10,000 to 200,000 people were the norm.  In other words, they were in many ways like the modern business enterprise.

That’s worth saying again:  except for the details of time and place, there is really not a whole lot of difference between  modern enterprises and  societies of antiquity. The fate of large groups of people is determined as much by human aspirations and failings, reactions to threats, wise use of resources, and  the emergence of leaders as by anything else.

So with that as a backdrop I want to ask a couple of questions that seem to be completely unrelated to each other.

Question 1:  Why didn’t the 1940’s Western Electric  videophone make it?

Sure, the structure of the industry mattered, but it wasn’t lack of innovation that doomed the videophone.  After all. Video conferencing is ubiquitous today. So why didn’t that technology make it when today, for a hundred dollars,  you can stream high quality video to another hundred dollar device?  The culture of innovation is fundamentally different today than it was when the videophone was developed by Bell Labs in the 1940’s.  In fact the species of innovator that Bell Labs represents is today very nearly extinct.

My Second Question is:  What was the person who chopped down the last tree on Easter Island thinking about while he was doing it?

In truth, I can’t claim credit for the question. It was posed by Jared Diamond in Collapse:  How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, an historical and geographical tour-de-force that poses a framework for looking at decisions that societies make on their way to success or failure.  Those decisions invariably relate to:

1. environmental damage
2. climate change
3. hostile neighbors
4. friendly trade partners, and
5. cultural response

Let’s take the similarities between ancient societies and  modern enterprises seriously – they involve similar numbers of people, they define their own value systems.  The historically successful route for both was a kind of vertical integration that made it reasonable to work and innovate in relative isolation. The way that 21^st century companies innovate in the face of environmental damage, climate change, and hostile neighbors is very important in their long-term prospects for survival.  On the other hand, how they treat their friendly trading partners determines how much of the work for survival has to be carried on their shoulders alone.  And what about cultural barriers?  The whole point of WWC is to learn from companies that innovate around the right values but are culturally unable to execute effectively.  Diamond’s language is anthropology, not business – but we’ll see in upcoming posts that the difference between success and failure is often rooted in the same factors that led to  murder, starvation and catastrophe in the ancient world — and ultimately to the collapse of societies.

It never fails. Someone from engineering joins the interdisciplinary team and the shoulder pad thumping begins:  tales of sales teams bartering local currency for booze in exotic locations or bailing customers out of jail for busting up a hotel lobby. Sometimes it’s that hilarious story about dressing up like a chicken, sacrificing dignity for a greater cause.  It usually has all the authenticity of  late-night, one-upmanship, “I can top that!”  fraternity bull sessions or maybe the battle scar competition between Quint, Brody and Hooper in Jaws.   I don’t remember that any of these stories had the dramatic impact of Ken Follett’s retelling of the rescue of Ross Perot’s  EDS employees from Iran [1]. But it sends a  WWC signal: “We business guys risk it all.  We’re dedicated. We live in a different — and way more exciting — world than you do.”  Maybe all the engineers need is a story like this one.

We were within hours of defaulting on the delivery schedule for an important contract.  My team was working around the clock to test and package software on a magnetic tape because those were the days when bits had to be sent from place to place in back of a truck. It was late Saturday afternoon and the only one who knew how to get to the Federal Express office in North Atlanta before it closed was our graduate student assistant, Walt, who, as we found out, was not only ingenious and loyal but had some experience in, umm,  navigating back roads.  Walt just wanted to be reimbursed for gas.  “Sure,” I said, “send me a short trip report.”

From: walt@gatech.edu  Sat  Sep 26  16:58:15  1987

Message-Id: <8709262147.AA17782@gatech.edu>

To: rad

Subject: the chase

Status: R0

well, it is on its way — but not without some work!!

i flew to fedx, speeding, running lights, etc. i ran the light at northside in front of oga’s bbq in the turning lane at 60 mph. there was a cop just gettin out of his car at the trajik markup.  i lost him by cutting thru the kroger parking lot and slipping across i-75. then i cut the big star lot to collier. next i had to get passed  the police station on collier — which i did with no trouble but then i came to the light on defoors ferry an met one comming the other way. i bit my lip hoping the other one had not radioed ahead, but he didn’t bat an eye. finally i get down the road to fedx and the truck was waiting for me. did my business and started back out.  there was 4 or 5 blue boys crawling up and down collier and defoors! i hid behind a dumpster til the coast was clear and then slipped 200 ft up defoors to bohler — an old trick — thru the residential section up to moors mill onto 75 and gone!

anyway — if they come get me tonight you may have to contact cathy for any more developments. i really don’t think they got my number.

signing off

walt — in hiding

My Thanksgiving request to all of you who would like to share a story that our dramatically challenged engineering colleagues can haul out as proof of  physical courage and personal commitment is that it be true.  Or at least someone should assure you that a friend of theirs swears that the story is true.

Like the time we took sausages in trade for network hardware.

[1] Ken Follett, On Wings of Eagles, William Morrow & Co 1983

A few days ago, thanks to OpenStudy founder and colleague Ashwin Ram (follow @ashwinram on Twitter), I learned that abundance of choice in higher education is more than an abstract concept:

New Delhi, Nov 7 (IANS) More than 27,000 additional institutions of higher learning would be required to meet the targeted Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) of 30 percent for 2020, Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Kapil Sibal said here Saturday.

“This figure includes 14,000 colleges of general higher education, 12,775 additional technical and professional institutions and 269 additional universities,” Sibal said in a presentation during the meeting of the consultative committee for the HRD ministry here Saturday. [1]

27,000 is a very large number of new institutions, but it’s hard to say how much of the market will be served once they are operational.  Twelve percent of  Indian secondary school students go on to university studies compared with the thirty percent  goal of the new Indian government and the seventy percent ratio in many developed nations. That’s about 350 millions students.

The challenge for India is to create a system of higher education that breaks the bureaucratic licensing stranglehold that has led to widespread dissatisfaction with storefront operations.  It is clear that the new Indian system will combine the two features that I mentioned last week: value and cost.  Students will have the ability to choose both their institution and their course of study.  And because many graduates are today unemployable, the value of degrees from the new universities will have to be proved in the marketplace.  That’s good news for innovators who want to move India to a position of global leadership, and bad news for the old system that is in any event being dismantled.

The costs are staggering, so new business models are welcome.  The IT company Wipro has already started to co-brand degrees with top ranked technological universities like Birla Institute of Technology in Pilani and the Sipal has been very open about needing other creative forms of private investment to offset costs.

What does this have to do with American colleges and universities? Just as low-cost, high value service industries have migrated to India, the higher education market in the US will also start to buy more educational services there as well. India is already a destination of choice for some graduate students, and not only because of lowered costs, as Cambridge medical student James Gill reports in the Cambridge University Graduate Student Blog:

Doing a medical elective in India would in theory help me to better understand and relate to Indian patients as well as colleagues that I might work with in the future.[2]

“Well sure,” I hear you saying, “but that’s a medical student in the UK.   It’s not, say, a Nobel-prize-producing chemistry lab in the US.  That’s where the real value is.  Berkeley will never be vulnerable to a lower-priced operation.”  The University of California at Berkeley is the top ranked public university in the country, and so it was something of a jolt to read in today’s New York Times that a 32% increase in fees has over the past decade helped to triple the price tag for a degree from Cal and that

Among students and faculty alike there is a pervasive sense that the increases and the deep budget cuts are pushing the university into decline.[3]

The accompanying color picture is a chemistry lab at Berkeley.  Small wonder that the students who have protested the fee hike are questioning the University of California value proposition,  and especially whether their education can be obtained quicker and cheaper someplace else.  There will shortly be alternatives for some of them. 27,000 alternatives if everything goes according to plan for Mr. Sipal.

[2] http://www.societies.cam.ac.uk/cgcm/ElectiveReports/JamesGillIndia.html

[3] The New York Times, Friday November 20, 2009, page 1