James Drogan

I am, as you may know, a fan of podcasts.  I load up the iPhone and listen to and from work.

Here is a list of my current subscriptions.  Several of these are TED Talks (the speaker's names are given first).  The others are collapsed lists of the podcasts on my iPhone.

All this is to bring you to a podcast carrying the title of this post.

In this IT Conversation podcast Dr. Moira Gunn talks with former Wired magazine Editor-in-Chief, Kevin Kelly, about his new book, What Technology Wants, and his theory that technology is undergoing its own evolution.

Kelly is provocative in the way that Ray Kurzweil is provocative; a different point of view on the issue at hand and consequent conclusions that cause you, or at least me, to think of the world in a new way.  New thinking provides the opportunity for new solutions and better outcomes.  That appeals to me.

I invite you to listen.

...to challenge prevailing orthodoxies, misplaced policies are more likely to go unquestioned and uncorrected. Wouldn't it have been better if more well-placed people had objected to the U.S. decision to build massive nuclear overkill (including 30,000-plus nuclear warheads) during the Cold War, questioned the enduring fears of "monolithic communism" and Soviet military superiority, or challenged the wisdom of three decades of financial deregulation? Some did express such qualms, of course, but doing so loudly and persistently was a good way to find oneself excluded from the political mainstream and certainly from the highest corridors of power.

Walt, S. M. (2011). Where Do Bad Ideas Come From? Foreign Policy, (January/February 2011), 48-53.

From Governance, Triangulation and Compromise by Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

One of the most important qualities in good business leaders is organizational and social skills, that is, the ability to rally a diverse set of people to attack and solve the complex problems that all institutions face.  Wikipedia emphasizes this point in its definition of leadership  “ . . . as the process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task . . .” 

The rest of the post is worth a read as Wladawsky-Berger support is claim with examples from contemporary times.  I have been saying for some time that the world is an increasingly complex, fast-paced, and opaque system.  It requires new levels of management and leadership skills in order to survive, thrive, and make a difference. 

Good enough is not good enough.

No matter how one compares UConn’s streak with U.C.L.A.’s, Auriemma said: “One thing is non-negotiable. The one thing we have in common is, we settle for nothing less than the absolute best we can give you every single night, every single day [emphasis added]. And there’s very few people that do that. They did it and we’re doing it. Everything else to me is meaningless.”

Longman, J. (2010, December 19). UConn Women Match U.C.L.A. With 88th Straight Win. The New York Times.

This comes to me by way of Dan Gilmore's SupplyChainBrain.  Read the article and give some thought to what Dan is saying.

More about my feelings on the importance of communications can be found in Ethics, Critical Thinking, and Communications.

Since the middle of the first decade of this millennium I have used the graphic to the left -- the issue stack -- to represent my view of what is critical for the well-being of a society. 

I was reminded of this by another of Hans Rosling's magnificent dynamic displays of data, 200 Countries and 200 Years in 4 Minutes.  In particular, I was drawn to the implied importance of health as a precursor to economic well-being.

I have also started my last seminar in the MA in Diplomacy program at Norwich University, Global Corporate Diplomacy.I've been introduced to Steger, U. (2003). Corporate Diplomacy. Chichester, England: Wiley.  I'm with Steger in that the need is achieve a balance between social, environmental, and economic needs.  That is to say that the issue stack needs to be modified to include these three needs (what Steger calls the new trinity).

I undertook to examine the environmental needs beginning in 2002 when I was teaching international logistics at the graduate level at Baruch.  The class and I decided we need to embellish the concept of the balanced scorecard (Kaplan, R., & Norton, D. (1992). The Balanced Scorecard - Measures That Drive Performance. Harvard Business Review,January-February 1992, 71-79.) to include attention to the environment.  The result is indicated in the following graphic (click on the thumbnail to see a larger image).

What my students and I added has now blossomed in corporate social responsibility (CSR).  See Responsibility at IBM for what I consider to be an excellent example of CSR (fair disclosure; I worked for IBM for 36 years).

Of course the movement towards CSR, like the movement towards Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), adds additional complexity and cost to the business system.  However, the process of adding this additional complexity has the potential for indicating opportunities for improving business performance that might otherwise be missed.  However, if we let our vision be clouded by the extra complexity and cost we may miss the opportunities.

Look at and think about the following chart taken from John Mauldin's Thoughts from the Frontline Weekly Newsletter of November 26.

Now America has become a service economy and those jobs do not show here, but the growth of government has, it would seem, gotten out of hand.

Paul Krugman posts this morning, The Instability of Moderation, a short piece reminding us that to get out of the ditch, it's helpful to know how we got into the ditch.  Krugman's brief reprise of economic history reminds us how important is to understand history.

I also read yesterday a related article in The New Yorker, What Good is Wall Street?  I would be remiss in not pointing out the subtitle is, "Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless."  I wonder whether a child confronted a parent with the lines, "It says here what you do is socially worthless.  What about that Dad?"

Which leads me to ask whether you will like what you become when you grow up?

By in large, except in affairs of the heart and other undertakings where emotion rules, I think the world is deterministic.  Where you are is largely the result of where you have been and the decisions you made along the way.  Where you will be is largely determined by where you are now and the decisions you will make hence forward.  One can't always see the outcomes, but one can prepare for a series of likely outcomes.  For example, knowing that you face a certain decision, knowledge of what others have done when faced with a similar decision is information of value.  Where does that information reside?  In history.    

In Bizz School Re-Thinking 6/19/5 I made mention of the gap hypothesis that had emerged from my involvement with CUNY via Baruch in November 2003.  The hypothesis is that the gap between what academia produces and what business wants is constantly increasing.  In the blog post to which I have provided the link above I concluded:

Rather than pointing fingers, academia and business ought to come to the realization it is in their common interests to work together to resolve the issue. The combination of academically qualified and business qualified teachers is a must. The trick in all this is to somehow prevent class warfare.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger has taken up the same issue in Bridging the Gap between Business and Government.  He, like I, seems to be searching for the motivator that will prompt academia and business to to collaborate to close the gap.  This is not, by the way, to say that none of this is going on.  The MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics Partnership Program is an example of collaboration of the sort that I and, I think, Wladawsky-Berger have in mind.  Fair disclosure:  I had a relationship with this program during my career at IBM.

I wonder, however, if the gap is not self-perpetuating given the different missions of academia and business. 

So, to my friends in academia and business alike, I remind you we are in this together and, quite likely, more progress can be made if we work together than if we wander around, occasionally bumping into each other.

In 1914, John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, addressed the first session of his two-year lecture course as follows:

“Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies that (will) form a noble adventure…Let me make this clear to you. ..nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – that if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.”

 From The Big Picture.