James Drogan

Re Conversations with Dave

In The Value of Corporate Values is seems to me that an important voice is lacking -- that of the employees.  Consider the following paragraph.

"The meaning of this new emphasis on values, however,is less obvious than the trend itself. So to explore how deeply these values are embedded in organizations and to examine the role that values are playing, in 2004 Booz Allen Hamilton and the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit and nonpartisan forum focused on values-based leadership and public policy, conducted a global study of corporations in 30 countries and five regions. Senior executives of 365 companies were polled, almost one-third of whom were CEOs or board members. (See “Methodology,” page 13.) The purpose of the survey was to examine the way companies define corporate values, to expand on research about the relationship of values to business performance, and to identify best practices for managing corporate values."

Embedding ought to mean, in this context, that the values guide the behavior of the employees.  They are the only ones who can tell the researchers.

Suppose the following diagram.

The height of the boxes represent the degree to which management believes values are embedded; the width is employees view.  Box A looks like the start of a revolution; box B represents, perhaps, the embedding process; box C represents balance, the desired state.

Booz Allen is a very good company, but I think an important part of the picture was omitted from their report.

Re Conversations with Dave

I've been tempted over the last several minutes to wonder whether e pluribus unum is any longer an apt motto, at least in the sense the Founding Fathers had.  Having succumbed to the temptation, I now ask.  I think I am pushed to ask the question, in part, by Matt Miller's OpEd in today's NYT; Is Persuasion Dead?

Do the recent battles in the Senate regarding the process of advise and consent on the judiciary represent e pluribus unum?  I hardly think so.

My view of e pluribus unum is that it represents a melding of the best and brightest of the kaleidoscope of cultures that have found their way to our shores.  The unum is not predefined.  It emerges from a sense of understanding and compromise.

Re Conversations with Dave

Let's see now.  How do I turn

"Ascape is a software framework for developing and analyzing agent-based models. In Ascape, agent objects exist within scapes; collections of agents such as arrays and lattices. These scapes are themselves agents, so that typical Ascape models are made up of "collections of collections" of agents. Scapes provide a context for agent interaction and sets of rules that govern agent behavior. Ascape manages graphical views and collection of statistics for scapes and provides mechanisms for controlling and altering parameters for scape models."

into something a businessperson can understand?

I recall an earlier remark of yours; "All that's neither here nor on the table because the industry is being driven by technicians and techniques - not consumer requirements." May 19.  I disagreed with you then, but I will agree with in the case of Ascape.  Computer science graduates run amok

The best line on the Ascape web page was "Keep in mind that to develop Ascape models you will need a working knowledge of Java programming."

Re Conversations with Dave
 
Holmes (Sherlock) and Watson (Dr.).  Few would have known about the legendary sleuth without his chronicler.  Hence, Livingston and Livingston.

I agree with your approach to critical thinking.  Paul Samuelson once said, "There is no substitute for paying attention to the empirical facts of life, and no substitute for systematic reasoning about them."  It is unfortunate that this approach is not more widely shared, particularly amongst the laity.  What you do is deliberate and by design.  Your line of thinking and resulting conclusions and recommendations cause your readers to view issues in a different light.  I consider this provocative and good.

As to James, I have simply concluded that all of us can benefit by being reminding from time to time of the basics of our craft.  You have cited Ben Hogan on numerous occasions.  I suspect he spent more than a little time on the driving range and practice green.

Aaaaaahhhhh, moral discipline.  I tell my students that without integrity, not much else matters.

But culture shapes the meaning of the word.  The parsing of moral discipline and integrity yields different results in different cultures.  I'm thinking just about America here.

Re Conversations with Dave

Only on rare occasions do I read Krugman.  I'm not as competent as you in economics and the related arts, but I've formed the same opinion as you about the man.  How he says what he says makes him a tad difficult to latch on to.

His "turning" happens all the time.  Success and acclaim is a fertile breeding ground for hubris.  Failure to achieve what one is obviously the best qualified at is a fertile breeding ground for the "shrillness" that you and others have noted.  All of us have met people like this.  Greenberg at AIG and Grasso at NYSE come to mind.  I suppose we could pick one or two out from our joint time together at IBM.  I think it difficult to remember where one came from, what got one to one's present position, and when one didn't know what one now knows.  Humility, like integrity, is difficult to hold on to.

The NYT has undergone, as you doubtless know, a self-examination of what it is and how it is perceived by the public.  I've not yet seen or heard of any substantive changes in modus operandi, but perhaps Krugman was an object, if not a participant, in the examination.  We shall see what we shall see.  Perhaps balanced, well-reasoned, well-written journalism will be back in vogue.

Re: Conversations with Dave

I can easily adjust the navigation on the new site. The right side of the page currently looks like

About Me is probably okay at the beginning of the list and droganbloggin is the name of the blog. However, Ideas and Information is where I publish my papers and presentations. Perhaps it ought to be third on the list.

I also don't have much in More About This Website. Perhaps I ought to announce new additions to Ideas and Information in this spot.

The too much and too many characteristics of the blogs will likely not go away. This is freedom of expression writ large. After awhile you learn the difference between the good, the bad, and the ugly. The Technocratic Top 100 ( http://www.technorati.com/live/top100.html ) is the basis for a good start at building a blogroll (my blogroll is at http://jmsdrgn.squarespace.com/blogroll/ ). The blogroll is like an investment portfolio. One needs to continually adjust the contents for value.

I'm not sure I agree that "...the industry is being driven by technicians and techniques - not consumer requirements." I see a lot of conversations that start "If I could only..." and, if someone else thinks it's a good idea, a prototype shortly makes it into the blogsphere. I'm also an Economist fan and their organization of material is superb. But getting everyone to line up behind that sort of rigor would be quixotic.

Dave Weinberger, something of a guru in the field, believes that with the power of the search engines we will someday be able to file everything in Miscellaneous. Indeed, Google's gmail, as I understand it, has no folders although you can label or tag e-mails. I had previously mentioned that I organize material into folders for archival, not retrieval purposes. I use Enfish for search when I'm looking for something on my machine. I've also investigated some other search engines -- Kartoo, for example -- that have interesting ways to graphically relate material.

Passing through my stuff with my research interests would be an interesting test. I also woke up last night thinking about some work I was doing with IBM Research towards the end of my tenure on the subject of intelligent text mining. I'll need to give some more thought to both of these.

I'm not much in favor of editing our exchanges. I tend to keep history the way it has unfolded. On the other hand, I've not figured out whether Outlook has a good means of structuring threads. If it can do it automatically, fine, but I'm not going to go through a lot of labor unless I really need to know.

There is also a class of tags associated with Technocrati that bloggers seem to be beginning to use. I'm not yet sure I see sufficient value to jump on that bandwagon.

Nevertheless and in spite of all the advances, much needs to be done in this field. We need a Burger King schema and retrieval mechanism that lets us have things our way.

Re Conversations with Dave

I think, Dave, you want TiVo "...to capture Charlie Rose, the BBC world news, the Nightly Bus Report and the CPT ed programs on Sa morning for watching at my conveinance as well as building up an archive of Rose, etc."  Or you could, as I sometimes do, set up the VCR to record on a scheduled basis.

Building the archive is the easy part.  The hard part is the indexing, search, and retrieval of the material of interest.  That may be just an add-on to iTunes.  Pretty slick stuff that iTunes.  Then you can extend the Amazon metaphor to have a system -- like a news aggregator -- that continually learns about your interests, constantly looks at what's going on in the world, and brings it to your attention.  Sort of an add-on to the associative functions of the mind.

Then, we plant a box in your brain that senses your interests and automatically -- look ma, no hands -- interfaces with  super iTunes/Tivo and what you want is there when you want it.

Finally, the box learns enough to take over and you won't be able to tell a good single malt from Dago Red.

You must read Kurzweil.

Coming back to earth, let me probe along the following lines.  Who will be able to afford this extravaganza?  Who will know how to use it?  It may be great for you, but will it widen the gap between the classes?

Are we beginning to spend so much time managing data and information that our ability to generate knowledge is impacted?

Curiosity killed the cat.  What's in store for us?

I've added Taxonomy of a Corporation to Ideas and Information.

On May 10 I posted an entry regarding Listening.  In it I mentioned that I hoped to receive Emma's permission to post her entire sermon.

Here it is.

Wednesday, August 20, 2003
PowerPoint Is Evil

Corante - Tech News: August 20, 2003 brings

"Power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely, claims Edward Tufte. The ubiquitous presentation program puts a little information - eight seconds' worth of reading material - on each of a lot of slides. ''Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another. When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships.'' PowerPoint emphasizes form over content and turns everything into a sales pitch, argues the article. Its conclusion: ''PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it.''

I have great respect for the man every since I read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Much of his rant squares with my experience in the corporate world, but I think he's a bit off-base in blaming the tool and not the undisciplined craftsman.

# posted by James : 2:39 PM

Friday, July 30, 2004

beyond bullets: The Pentagon, Politics and PowerPoint

On December 16, in a comment on an item in the FastCompany blog, I opined:

PowerPoint doesn't make you dumb. It very quickly exposes the dumbness that is already there.

The item referred to in the header prompts me to make a similar remark.

PowerPoint doesn't make you smart. It may allow one's intelligence to be seen by others.

PowerPoint is receiving far too much blame and credit for the state of things. It would be interesting to see a debate between Edward Tufte and Cliff Atkinson.

posted by James at 6:41 AM

"...re-examine all you have been told at school or church or any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul." Walt Whitman

"If stated reasons don't sit well with your conscience or stand the test of logic, look for deeper motivations."  Docent Glax Othn