A poor man’s Letter from America

Many years ago - I think in the 1940s - Alister Cook, an Englishman by origin, but an American by adopted home, began writing and delivering a series of weekly radio broadcasts called Letter From America. Cook was a remarkable journalist with an ability to find interest in the seemingly mundane and to show how mundane things that we had though were interesting really were. Remarkably, that capacity remained undiminished despite his having lived in the US for over 60 years.

I make no claims to have Cook's, wit, insight or eloquence, (or for that matter, his wonderfully calm, gravely and gravitas-laden radio voice that I still hear clearly in my head as I write, though it is probably 10 years since I heard one of his broadcasts). Nevertheless, the one thing we do share, is that like Cook, I came to this country in my 30s - well late 30s; 39 to be precise. Having grown up in England, with a different cultural heritage, the move has been a times slightly bewildering, but at the same time interestingly revealing. Culture, the set of symbols, myths and things that we take for granted, is obviously something to which one pays almost no attention as one grows up - it becomes an almost invisible and indivisible part of who one is. But when ones is transplanted, that terra firma disappears and the ability to fall back on almost instinctive understanding of “the way things are done around here” evaporates. That’s the hard part.

The interesting part comes because finding things are not what one is used to, brings into sharp relief questions about the way we organize ourselves and assumptions we make, for example about government, the rule of law, the political process, indeed institutions more generally.
In this present observation - I hesitate to say the first of many, since I have no illusions about my ability to be either disciplined or creative in the endeavor - I am struck by materialism. Some take the position, which I do not, that materialism is intrinsically evil; that lusting after the things money can buy is somehow bad in and of itself. A desire to earn money has its good points; it promotes effort and industry. In the right context, it fosters innovation and entrepreneurship. These are good things, things that have made America an exciting as well as wealthy country.

However, the downside of materialism, may come from our overwhelming preoccupation with both the acquisition of money and almost incessant bombardment of enticements for things that money allows us to buy. We are at once fascinated by the lives of those with extraordinary wealth, people who receive more in a week than I can realistically expect to in the rest of my working life. Potentially, a preoccupation with money, and the lives of those who have a lot of it, drives out of our thinking, for no other reason than we have a limited amount of time to think about things, the willingness and subsequently the ability to consider more abstract issues in a nuanced way. Issues such as justice, rights and equity. In turn we are enticed by easy, often overly simplistic solutions to complex problems. A simple solution means we need to spend less time worrying about a problem.

Compounding this, we increasingly delegate to others, usually our elected representatives, the task of considering these questions, but then fail to exercise serious oversight. This creates a fertile ground for corruption to set in. Perhaps this is what is meant by the phrase “a decadent society”.

Tim Russert - in memoriam

Tim Russert, anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press, an influential Sunday morning political talk show, died suddenly on Friday, while taping a segment for today’s broadcast. He was only 58. With his passing, the country has lost a great asset - one of the very few journalists who held politicians accountable for their earlier commitments. Unlike Bill O’Rielley’s truly dreadful program, Meet the Press really was a “no spin zone”. Russert combined searching questions with hawk-like attention to his guests’ replies. He followed up relentlessly if he thought they were pulling the wool. Yet he did so with a seemingly endless reservoir of good humor that made even the toughest questions seem completely matter of fact and eminently reasonable (which they usually were). His insight, professionalism and tenacity are a model of television journalism, which has lost perhaps its greatest exemplar of recent years. And we have lost the benefit of his quest for truth in political advertising. Sunday mornings will seem strangely empty; he will be greatly missed.

Not something you see every day…

Image (c) Bill Johnson, www.mymotherload.com

Numerology

My favorite number is 5; has been since…, well for as long as I can remember, and for no particular reason that I can recall. 25 is also a nice number, being 5 squared. I quite like 49 too, being just shy of the half century (and one vote short of a tie in the Senate). It’s also 7 squared. I sometimes feel sorry for seven. It’s almost a big number like 8 and 9 but just not quite there yet. That being said, I don’t let this rule my life; or even influence it that I know of. I was worried, as most of us were, when oil passed $49 a barrel, and will be unhappier still when petrol reaches $5 a gallon. I doubt that my 50th birthday is going to be a life changing watershed any more than my 5th was, though the latter definitely seems further away. And I doubt it will come with a chocolate cake in the shape of a train.

Content vs. process: what do you know, what might you conclude?

One of the recurring questions seems how much should we be emphasizing content versus process. It seems to me that the more we focus on content, the more immediately useful the university experience will be to our student. They will leave with their heads full of useful knowledge that will make them valuable to any employer. They will know what the law says about X or what is the formula for calculating Y. And for this they may expect to be rewarded with higher salaries.

It is also easier to measure. We can set exams for which there are easily identifiable right and wrong answers and there may come a time when we might even agree on what those important sets of facts are that we require students to memorize.

If on the other hand, we focus on processes and activities (for example, identification of relevant facts, logical reasoning, articulation of an argument, choice of relevant theory, and using theory to make predictions) we may make it harder for students in the short term. It may be more difficult for them to impress a potential employer without having a vast array of facts and figures at their fingertips.

However, I do believe that process skills are ultimately more fundamental and more important aspects of what we should be facilitating and nurturing in our students. Facts, even theories, like diets, come and go. What the law says about something today may be overturned tomorrow. Being able to see further, for example reasoning that such a change might suggest a changing trend in public thinking, what might this mean for other tings the company does, are at least as important. The ability to apply one, to abstract away from messy confusing detail into the parsimony of a theoretical generalization, is a skill students will value for a lifetime.

It’s not a question of either or, but rather about not loosing sight of the fact that we need a balance. As we move to increasing the amount of measurement and assessment we do, we need to keep this in mind, because measuring content is generally easier that measuring thinking and reasoning, and as Peter Blau noted, ‘what gets measured tends to get done’.

Renewed Darwinian Theory of Human Behavior

Paul Lawrence (of Lawrence and Lorsch, “Organizations and Environment”, 1967 fame) has a website relating to his current work attempting to reintegrate a wide variety of theories of human behavior from economics and sociology, to psychology and cultural anthropology. This is the kind of endeavor that only great (and tenured and usually retired-from-teaching) scholars can (or arguably should) attempt.

A holistic understanding of human behavior, like Grand Unification Theory, would be a tremendous accomplishment and an enduring legacy. I encourage you to visit the site and read Professor Lawrence’s manuscript “Being Human“.

FakeRAID and Linux

A couple of months ago my C drive packed up. Nothing too major but a lot of hassle reinstalling the OS and all the application S/W. I didn’t want to do that again so I decided to go the RAID5 route. (Of course, this was before doing any real research).

I bought an Intel motherboard with the ICH8R chip that supports RAID5; no budget for a RAID controller card, unfortunately. Since I have been a Windows user for some time (Mac OS6/7/7.5 and X, and for a while in the 90s OS/2), I began by creating the RAID array and installing XP on one of the partitions I set up on the array. All went smoothly. The I tried installing Linux (FC7) on another partition, also in the RAID5 array, but the installer didn’t recognize the RAID5.

After some belated research, I discovered that the Intel chip delivers what is termed ‘fake raid‘ I eventually installed FC7 on a spare disk outside the array. Not really a solution as my data is on the fake RAID5 array. It appears that that the Linux dmraid module which supports raid arrays will support the ICH8R chip but only for RAID 0 and 1. Although I know nothing of the complexity of writing this kind of driver, it seems odd that Intel’s south bridge is not supported since (again an assumption) I presume a large number of motherboards use this chip. Of course it may be that this chips is far lass common among the developer community, hence the lack of a need for this support. So for the moment it’s back to good ol’ Windows XP until I can figure something out. Likely next step: a new motherboard.

Remarkable

This is one of the most innovative, artistic websites I have seen. It’s really worth taking a little while to explore.

There, I said it!

This morning I listened to Cub Country (94.5 FM). There, I’ve said it! My father would be mortified if I told him - actually he’d probably just be confused, but that’s a whole different story. Cub Country, as the name implies, is a country music radio station; I was brought up listening to Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Smetana, Schuman and Vivaldi. Opera, usually The Marriage of Figaro, on Sunday mornings; that was tradition.

In my mid teens I began to rebel, venturing out to buy records of Bartok and Prokoviev. Bartok’s second piano concerto in a recording by Stephen Bishop-Kovacevich I listened to almost incessantly for several months.
Then the unthinkable happened. Anthony Lewis lent me the Beatles double album 1962-66. The first popular music that had come into the house. 1966-70 soon followed. The first steps on the slippery slope. Next an encouraging push from Nick Hockin to buy Pink Floyd’s Animals. Boot’s had opened a record department and I became a regular customer.

From there, things moved steadily down hill. Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Dire Straits, Steely Dan, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Yes, and after a long hiatus, recently the John Meyer Trio. Not forgetting of course Judy Tzuke, Kate Bush, Tracy Chapman, Joni Mitchell and Joan Armatrading.

And in the background the constant influence of the Average Rainfall Band. Although Foys, on lead guitar, grabbed most of the limelight, it was their rhythm guitarist, Mike Tier, who was probably responsible for much of their creativity, though from his self-effacing demeanor, you’d never guess. Check out his recent work with the Hardley Davidson’s - the recording is a bit rough around the edges but his song-writing genius is still there in spades. Tier had relatively eclectic taste, including Genesis, T-Rex and it was rumored that he’d even gone to see Abba, though under duress. It was Tieir’s liking of Skynyrd’s music that perhaps was my first introduction to music made in America.

Some might say that my conversion to country had something to do with the genre’s embrace of rock influences. While that may to some extent be true, for me one of county music’s most appealing features is its directness and its straightforward honesty. It opens a vicarious window onto life in Middle America that would be hard to experience unless one read books or the newspaper or even lived there. But apart from that, and the roads, and the plumbing and the education system, since I’m living here in California and don’t read much - I never read books and the only newspaper I read is the Economist - it provides a pleasant, upbeat window onto a way of life that seems innocent and uncomplicated, at once optimistic and depressingly parochial, a way of life that is strangely conjured in my mind by the Dire Straits song Telegraph Road, though it’s not clear that this is at all what Mark Knopfler had in mind: “Rivers of headlights, rivers of rain” seems more reminiscent of England than the midwest with its vast tracts of rolling corn fields. Perhaps he was thinking of the industrial rather than the rural parts?

Country’s images are often humorous, self effacing and strangely - I know this seems an odd word but it seems to fit the bill here - tender. There is a simple humanity, a caring if you will, that for someone brought up in a culture of stiff-upper lip, never let your emotions show, is actually quite refreshing. So when I turn on the radio to listen to music these days, Cub Country is up there on the presets along side jazz, rock, and increasingly infrequently classical.

Privacy and the internet

Vinnie Lauria, after a discussion about trust on the internet, recently alerted me to this recent blog on WAXY.ORG: someone posted a fake ’sex wanted’ add on Craigs list, collected and posted all the replies, in their entirety, on his website. His ruse, which extended a similar though less controversial one by Simon Owens, attracted numerous comments, largely centered around the issue of privacy; was Fortuny breaking any laws when he posted the replies and did the respondents to his advertisement have any right to expect their emails would not be published? What I found particularly striking, however was the fact that of the 62 comments posted, 94% withheld their identities using only their first names, and 61% used pseudonyms.

The internet, by allowing people to assume ‘new’ identities, tacitly encourages people to behave in ways they would otherwise be ashamed to for fear of social sanction. It is unclear to me whether this is a good thing (i.e. socially desirable) or not. On the one hand, it might allow people to ‘let of steam’ which moderates their real face to face interactions. However, as Owen and Fortuny’s experiment seems to suggest, rather than balance (an increase in activity in a virtual domain reducing the prevalence of that tendency in the real one), the internet may be altering peoples’ understanding of what is socially acceptable and what is not.

Of course this is exactly the same unresolved debate that has been going on about video games, and before that about television. As the Neil Peart (and others before him) has said “plus ca change…”.

Organizational politics

I was told recently that “…a Strategic Management professor has to show SOME sense of politics” to get anything changed in an organization. “While you don’t have to be a great politician to teach strategic management, it doesn’t make sense to say you’re a strategy professor and then say you’re too innocent to think about how your goals can be accomplished.”

I disagree. I dispute the notion that organizational politics is inevitable if you want to get something changed.

It’s not that I’m completely innocent (well perhaps I am); its just that engaging in politics, however well intentioned, has at least three consequences (other than achieving the espoused goal which is anyway far from guaranteed), all highly undesirable.

First, it creates internal distrust and hostility, neither of which is, in my view, beneficial for any organization. Second, it drives those involved towards thinking about their own interests rather than those of the organization, and towards zero sum rather than positive sum calculus. Finally, it is time consuming, taking energy and effort away from other more productive endeavors.

I took a conscious decision some time ago to try, whenever I can, to avoid acting in a ‘political’ manner (being an ‘able player’ in Burt’s terminology). I tend say what I think, and say the same thing to everyone, even though it sometimes gets me into trouble.

I am an advocate of openness, transparency and full disclosure, rather than clandestine back-room deals and exchange of hostage bargaining. I believe in truth, not versions thereof tailored for the audience of the moment. That may mean that I will hang separately, but ultimately I would rather that than spending my time guessing what others’ ulterior motives might be and plotting schemes to undermine them.

Just a personal point of view…

Time: competing for a scarce resource

We often complain (at length) about the fact that students don’t prepare properly for class. I am beginning to think that in part it’s our fault, not theirs. We simply don’t make it worth their while. Time is a scarce resource. Student’s, like good economizers, will allocate it to the activities which are most rewarding. My inference is that most of them probably have very high discount rates, which means that consequences far in the future will have little bearing on decisions that also have relatively immediate consequences. Which may explain why telling them to prepare or they will live to regret it in 10 years time when this material becomes important for their professional lives is not going to work.

However this semester I think I have found something that works for me in the short run and I believe for them in the longer run. Evidence: for my last case discussion, of 107 students enrolled in my three sections, 78 came to class and 77 of them had prepared the case. As an instructor I benefit from their preparation because 1) its much easier to have a case discussion when we are all know what we are talking about and 2) they will benefit because the discussion will make much more sense if they know the case.

All I did this semester is to adopt a rule, (which I enforce quite strictly) that anyone who has not read the case can’t be part of the discussion and should go home and do something more productive with their time. I ask each of my students individually if they have prepared. Those who admit to not being prepared, I ask to leave. Some don’t consider this a sanction (those are probably the thirty I didn’t see last class); the rest, who are keen to learn, do; so it works quite well for everyone, or seems to. All I have done is provide an incentive to those who want to learn that is much more salient than some tale of woe of the future consequences of not preparing properly. I think it’s a win-win.

Measurement error

At the COB Awards banquet last night I was sitting next to a very engaging manager from Target, the retail chain. I asked him what he wanted to see in terms of our ‘product’. He was clear that the two areas in which he would like to see improvement are soft skills (specifically he mentioned the ability to work well in project teams and ‘critical thinking’ (in my mind meaning the ability to think clearly, and articulate one’s chain of reasoning). There may be short term gains to teaching students the formula for this or that, or the piece of legislation that pertains to the other, but there must be sufficient time (and emphasis) given to the harder to quantify / measure aspects of what we do, because in the medium to long run, they are probably more important.

Customers: (who) are they really?

What do we mean when we say that our students are our ‘customers’? It this simply a metaphor or are we really talking about a contracted for service?

If we buy something we may ask the manufacturer to change the product, but does the manufacturer have an obligation to do as we say? What are our ‘rights’ as customers; what are the manufacturer’s obligations? Could we, as customers, vote with our feet and simply take our business elsewhere?On expertise:For example, suppose I were to hire a licensed contractor to build an extension to my house, and he was in the process of installing the ¾ inch plywood in the roof. If I asked him to use ¼ inch instead (as this would be considerably cheaper) should he do as I ask because I am the customer?

On sharing:

When we buy something, does is matter how much who else is footing the bill? If a friend pays 80% of your gym subscription because she thinks you should get fit, how will she feel if you go to the gym every week but eat doughnuts instead of working out? Would she be happy if you were to ask the gym owner to take out all the exercise equipment and put in armchairs instead? Should the gym owner do so if all his customers asked for armchairs? And if he did, would your friend consider her money had been well spent? Continuing in the fitness metaphor, should your personal trainer accede to your request to ‘lighten up’; that twenty reps is too hard, and perhaps you should only do should 5 instead? What about the fact that the equipment is falling apart or uncomfortable, or that there is a new type of machine that the gym might consider acquiring?

On externalities:

Many of us think hamburgers and French fries are tasty. Is it so wrong to eat nothing but burgers and fries (even when our grandmothers warned us repeatedly to eat our greens)? Does is matter that a diet of burgers could lead to most hamburger consumers dying at the age of 45? Or worse yet, being hospitalized for the last 20 years of their lives at the expense of those who ate lettuce and carrots and who are fit and healthy?

I propose no answers here — you are most welcome to respond — but simply raise some question as we think about our role as educators, as producers, custodians and disseminators of knowledge.