James Drogan

I've long been a follower of Irving Wladawsky-Berger.  I find that his insight across a broad array of subject areas to be of immense value, satisfying my curiosity on the one hand, but, on the other, adding to it.

I bring to your attention his recent post, The Global Business Environment: Success or Struggle?

I'm in the business of preparing young men and women to go into the world to add value through their efforts and lead satisfing lives.  The post referred to above gives us guidance on how to do this preparation.

"The world we live in is fluid, extraordinarily complex, and perhaps inherently unstable, prone to sudden and unpredictable changes.  What is most needed to cope with such a reality are individuals capable of responding to complex and particular realities, in other words, professionals with enough autonomy that they can address these situations quickly and effectively" (Golden, R. (2013). Northern Twilight: SUNY and the Decline of the Public Comprehensive College. Thought & Action, 29(Fall 2013), 45–56).

I've listening to podcasts from the this seminar, Stanford University MS&E 472, for some time.  You can find them on iTunes.

I call your attention to two of the most recent.

This question was posted on Quora this morning.

My answer: Critical thinking, communications, and curiosity.

From John Mauldin's Thoughts from the Frontline of October 12.

After last week's discussion of the Affordable Care Act, it would be easy to drift off into all of the negative consequences of the current problems in Washington DC. There's just so much negative energy every time you turn on the TV that it simply drains you. I am well aware of what's happening and why, and yet I still find myself weary simply from the process of trying to follow what's happening. If I feel that way, it's no wonder the polls show that the general public's attitude is "a plague on all your houses." Of course, the snafus always seem to get resolved, but you just wonder how worthwhile all the drama is.

Of late I have been commenting on change in the world; accelerating at an increasing rate, complex, and often opaque.  How does one survive, let alone thrive and ultimately change the game played in this environment?  In 2003 I wrote a small bit, Forces, that considered these questions.

The hypothesis is that the human requires new capabilities (i.e., knowledge, skills, experience, and attitudes) if the comment on change is correct and one is to survive and thrive in the emergent world.

Related to this comes Transient Advantage (McGrath, R. G. (2013). Transient Advantage. Harvard Business Review, 62–70) echoing, in many ways, the observation of Charles Darwin that, “It's not the strongest who survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most adaptable to change.”

I'm in the  higher education business with the mission to "...prepare graduates for the external environment.  The effectiveness of the program is the degree to which successful completion has prepared the graduates for their chosen career as measured by their uptake by industry."  As the external environment changes, higher education must change or risk Darwinism.

I've been particularly taken by two of Tom Friedman's op-eds.

The first, How to Get a Job, from the 2013, May 28 edition of The New York Times, contains this rather pithy line.

It is best summed up by the mantra from the Harvard education expert Tony Wagner that the world doesn’t care anymore what you know; all it cares “is what you can do with what you know.”

The second, The Internship - Not the Movie, followed on June 8 with some advice as to how to acquire the ability to deliver value using what you know.

Internships are increasingly important today, they explained, because skills are increasingly important in the new economy and because colleges increasingly don’t teach the ones employers are looking for. Experience, rather than a degree, has become an important proxy for skill, they note, and internships give you that experience.

However high one's GPA, however long the set of intials after one's name, whether or not one is a "Bard-man," matters little if these attributes cannot be translated into value appreciated by the employer.

What knowledge, skills, experiences, and attitudes (yes, attitudes matter -- a lot) do you need to deliver value?

Think about it.

I served as a discussion facilitator at this symposium, something I have done several times before.  My habit has been to write a brief discussion paper focusing on the themes of the symposium.

From this morning's Financial Times.

Mr Li hinted at this frustration on Sunday when he noted that it was “harder to tackle vested interests than to touch a person’s soul.”

From John Mauldin's Outside the Box of March 15, 2013 in which he quotes Dylan Grice.

Of the many elemental flaws in macroeconomic practice is the true observation that the economic variables in which we might be most interested happen to be those which lend themselves least to measurement. Th [sic] us, the statistics which we take for granted and band around freely with each other measuring such ostensibly simple concepts as inflation, wealth, capital and debt, in fact involve all sorts of hidden assumptions, short-cuts and qualifications. So many, indeed, as to render reliance on them without respect for their limitations a very dangerous thing to do. As an example, consider the damage caused by banks to themselves and others by mistaking price volatility (measurable) with risk (unmeasurable). Yet faith in false precision seems to us to be one of the many imperfections our species is cursed with.