How to get the most out of critics

Arnold Jorgensen is the finest human being, engineer and engineering manager I’ve ever worked with. I worked for him for over 4 years shortly after graduating from MIT, and decades later he chose to work in my company until he retired. In both relationships we were primarily fellow human beings who respected, trusted and liked each other.  It was from him that I learned how to become an outstanding engineer, a true craftsman at engineering, not merely a creative smartass with a brace of patents. It was from him that I learned how to enthusiastically employ and manage critics so as to do the best possible job. He didn’t sermonize or lecture, he led by example.

Arnold grew up in Norway which was occupied by the Germans during his teenage years. He had a role in the Norwegian underground, risking his life. But his description of German soldiers was not out of propaganda manuals, it was first and foremost of individuals; some of them decent people doing their jobs and others sadistic jerks. After WWII, Arnold married Ingar, started his family and immigrated to Chicago. Their two year old daughter died tragically. They moved to California where he went to work at Burroughs ElectroData running the engineering group that designed its first solid state computers using newfangled germanium transistors. A year after starting work there, I was fortunate enough to be assigned to Arnold’s group as its most junior engineer.

There were two things immediately evident about Arnold: he genuinely liked people and he loved to ski ― he was a master of the sport. In recent years on the slopes he has been confused with Stein Erickson, one of Norway’s greatest skiers; after whom Arnold named his younger son. When he first moved to Pasadena he excitedly thought that the wide firebreaks on nearby mountains which plunged vertically downwards from summits to bases were ski-runs; a story he told on himself.

Eventually I discovered that Arnold was as good an engineer and as effective a manager as you could find anywhere. I wouldn’t call him brilliant; although he was plenty smart. But he had two other qualities that made him the best: he was systematic and he was humble! When designing something he always started with the fundamentals, discussing them and making sure he and we properly understood all the significant issues. Then he took clear, systematic, logical steps toward solutions. He would go through this process on his blackboard with those of us working on the design, and we informally contributed to it.

But, the most dramatic lesson Arnold taught me was about 6 months after I started. I was sitting in my office working on a circuit, when Arnold walked in with a request delivered with a thick Norwegian accent. “I’ve completed designing this circuit, and I’d like you to review it thoroughly, find any mistakes and suggest improvements.” I was thrilled, and tackled the job with gusto. I found several mistakes and developed numerous brilliant suggestions. At first I felt quite clever, then I wondered how Arnold could have made those mistakes, and finally I worried about how Arnold would handle my discoveries and suggestions. With mounting apprehension, I went to his office and Continue reading

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How we’re killing American innovation and why it matters

I can proclaim myself to be an authority on innovation because I hold 23 US Patents, co-founded two successful electronics companies and co-founded two other intense learning experiences. Having, somewhat ironically, tried to establish my authority solely based on a few bits of evidence, let me suggest that a primary source of innovation is evidence based authority, and a primary stifling mechanism is tradition based authority.  

The growth and application of evidence based authority was essential to the Industrial Revolution and its innovations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Evidence based authority came out of the development and spread of the scientific method in the early 17th Century; a method for finding and sifting evidence until a body of evidence established an authoritative principle, process or person which could be relied on thereafter to produce beneficial outcomes. Isaac Newton and successful applications of his work were particularly important to British thinking and helped to stimulate the necessary political innovations which separated economic authority from tradition based political and religious authority and allowed innovation to flourish.

Evidence based authority was universally seen as a threat by tradition based authorities and was quickly throttled in countries where traditions were strong and under tight control of a tiny elite such as Italy. This is probably a key reason why the Industrial Revolution, the flowering of innovation, never occurred in China or Spain.

The first successful separation of politics, religion and economics surfaced in Holland early in the 17th century and then in England in 1688 with the ascent of William of Orange (who migrated to England from Holland in a bloodless overthrow of James II) to the British throne with the support of a propertied Parliament. That Parliament made it clear that they held the purse strings, which he and all future kings accepted one way or another. It ended the tradition based rule by British kings and queens who combined in their person absolute political, religious and economic authority. (However, it didn’t end the random quality of royal succession by inheritance.) That decision making bottleneck had stifled England’s development with perpetual religious and political wars. The 1200 propertied families who effectively controlled Parliament until about 1850 used the purse strings (and creation of an ongoing national debt brokered by its banking system) to subordinate Kings’ execution of politics and the Church of England’s Continue reading

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Bulldog of the Month

In the heyday of Pro-Log Corporation, about 5 years after its founding, I picked up a lapel pin at a trade show which displayed a picture of a bulldog and a caption “We need more bulldogs and less bullshit.” My first instinct was to wear it at our monthly all-hands meeting. Then I decided, more or less on impulse, to award the pin to an employee who had done something outstanding in the previous month, label that person “bulldog of the month” and have that employee identify and award it to the next recipient.  During the intervening month, the “bulldog of the month” was encouraged to take time to look around the entire company and then describe what had merited the award. Who or why they selected a particular person was at their sole discretion. Humor, cheering and applause were encouraged.

My part in making the first award was easy because the man in charge of our accounts receivable, a person who over the years couldn’t have done a better job managing cash flow had the money been his own, had successfully put the Federal Government on COD, and collected!  One of our customers was China Lake, whose payments had stretched out beyond 90 days. Then they ordered some electronics that were critical to one of their experiments and he put them on COD, faced down a flurry of resistance and collected. I had a great deal of fun, and personal pleasure telling the whole company of his accomplishment and naming him the first “Bulldog of the Month.”  When I spelled out his, and future recipient’s responsibilities to present the award each month, I clearly stated that I would have nothing to do with the selection process thereafter.

This award went from person to person, department to department for about 2 years. Bulldogs took their responsibilities seriously; some even cited runners-up in their presentations, soliciting cheers and recognition for more than one other person.  I found it to be the highlight of our monthly meetings; eagerly awaited and loudly cheered. Then it happened! Someone in the personnel department had received the award and chose to pass it on to one of the company’s executives, her boss. I realized that the award had run its course and quietly terminated the program. (There had been other signs in previous months.)  I don’t recall that anyone complained about its demise; although many fondly remembered its highlights and the camaraderie for the next decade.

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Republican Death Spiral enters militant phase

Last April I posted “Republican Death Spiral tragically pursues extremist precedents and a need to fail.” Since then, the Death Spiral has proceeded on its destructive course and has entered its militant phase in which its sole objective will be to disrupt and eventually to overthrow our democracy. These are harsh judgments on my part, not obvious to the casual observer, perhaps not yet obvious to many of the Republicans involved in the process, but the signs are there. As the Republican extremists suffer more legislative defeats, feel ever more inferior, shed more of their relatively moderate or rational brethren and openly behave in a less constructive way, they will increasingly play to fanatic and alienated groups like the Tea Baggers and right wing religionists and use common hatreds and defeats to justify their actions. Some elected officials recently stood on a balcony of the Congressional Building urging on Tea baggers. Others, in the House, encouraged obnoxious behavior from the gallery and yelled insults at fellow congressmen.

Among things that have developed since last year is the overwhelming focus on President Obama as a devil incarnate. A recent Harris poll found that 24% of Republicans think that President Obama is the anti-Christ! The very intractability and ferocity of this hatred is only possible from poorly educated and fearful extremists who demonize those who aren’t 100% with them. As Eric Hoffer pointed out: in order to hate a person or group (like the Nazi hatred of the Jews in Germany), you must feel inferior to them in some way. Hitler portrayed the Jews as secretly running everything in Europe and the US to the detriment of Germany, unwittingly implying that they were more intelligent and clever than his fellow Nazis who could only root them out with brutal ruthless force. He picked the Jews because European cultural myths played into his stereotypes.

President Obama, a well educated, highly intelligent, rational and articulate person, easily inspires hatred in less educated and less competent Tea Baggers and good old boy Congressmen and Senators steeped in slave-owning cultural myths. Obama’s honest efforts at dialog and compromise have simply fanned the flames of hatred because they further exacerbated the right wing’s sense of inferiority and highlighted their injustices to him. As Hoffer said: it is far more likely that you hate someone because you’ve done him an injustice than that he’s done you one. 

In contrast, as much as I thought George Bush was an extremist schmuck, who made destructive military and economic decisions as President, I felt some anger but more pity for him than anything else; never hatred. He was simply doing the best he could under the circumstances, leading from his gut because he was not up to leading with his intellect. We were responsible for electing him (including myself who carelessly voted for him the first time and those left wing extremists who voted for Ralph Nader) and according to democratic principles we had to suffer under him until he was replaced through the ballot box. But then, I’m a moderate and think differently than extremists.

From a moderate’s point of view, as right wing Republicanism becomes ever more obstructionist and bellicose the party should fade away at the ballot box and be replaced by another, more rational party. I hope that’s what will happen, but I’m not at all confident in such a productive scenario.

In the first place, extremists don’t tend to go down without a fight. Continue reading

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Tim Geithner demonstrates that he is part of the deregulation mess

Until today, I’ve hesitated to include Tim Geithner as part of the financial problem, incapable of leading us to a solution (although I’ve long believed that Larry Summers is the Donald Rumsfeld of Finance). After Geithner’s talk yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute, I know that he is an inseparable part of the problem. Both he and Larry Summers have to be dumped… they are too cozy with Wall Street and have proven to be unable to see the need for financial regulation from a system perspective.

The financial system is like the transportation system. Deregulating it has been as idiotic as it would be to turn off traffic lights, remove lane markers and stop signs, eliminate the Highway Patrol, tickets, traffic courts, driver education, etc. and tell everyone to let the “free market” decide what happens on the highways. Only a few big, well armed tanks would travel freely, total traffic would be a fraction of what it now is, and most people would use the roads with fear and trembling.  Welcome to the deregulated financial system!

People who can’t understand the tragic magnitude and scope of the “deregulation myth” shouldn’t be involved. Unfortunately this includes a significant part of Congress and the Executive Branch. “Deregulation” has been a religious myth for unthinking people, not an evidence based theory. Apparently Geithner is among the unthinking believers, as was Greenspan until his recent evidence-motivated apostasy. Let Paul Volker and Elizabeth Warren replace the Wall Street stand-ins; they know how to think and what to do based on evidence and system’s thinking.

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How we abuse entitlements and mismanage intrinsic conflicts to cripple our nation. Part 1

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”  (Walt Kelly in Pogo)

This multi-part essay suggests how we’ve gotten ourselves into the political, economic and religious mess we’re in today and indicates how we might go about making major, systematic, lasting improvements. It addresses three critical concepts in the design and operation of systems, be they political, religious or economic: entitlements, intrinsic conflicts, and tradeoffs.

These concepts and their relationships can be tools to sort productive changes from facile ones, and to develop real and lasting improvements. However, for those looking to self-righteously blame “them” and get “them” to change (them being politicians, bankers, CEO’s, regulators, union leaders, terrorists, etc.) the following remarks will disappoint and even anger. Many of “them” do have to change or be replaced, but that alone is not even a good start; necessary but not sufficient.

Unless we accurately adjust our personal perspectives, unless we realistically adjust what we claim to be our due and our ongoing obligations as individuals, families, citizens, races, religions and tribes, and unless we make serious and possibly frightening personal conversions, we will merely continue to self-righteously find scapegoats while our human experiments of democracy and industrialization collapse and remnants of humanity return to the default conditions of tribalism and scarcity. The need for Personal change should be good news, because it’s something we can do with or without the help of other people. We cannot change others. We can only support and encourage those who chose to lead their own changes.  (See Essay We cannot save other nations! We can only generate failed states  )

Entitlements

The concept of “entitlement” is fundamental to the Industrial Revolution and to all human institutions, political, religious, economic and military. Basically it is a useful human construct that says “because of A, an individual or group is entitled to B”.  Private property rights and intellectual property rights are entitlement s. So too are contracts, salaries and bonuses, interests on property and money, inheritances, corporate entities, lower taxes, the Natural Law, Constitutional Rights, water rights, Medicare, Social Security, seniority and the Senate Filibuster. Military Rank and seniority are relational entitlements within the military community. The Mosaic Covenant was a tribal entitlement. Plenary Indulgences in Christian Crusades for killing infidels and promises of heaven for terrorists who blow themselves up in the name of Allah are entitlements. Promises that believing in Christ will guarantee Salvation, that baptism washes away sins, or that 9 First Friday masses will insure instant admission to heaven are entitlement beliefs.

The benefit and attractiveness of an entitlement is that is enables an individual (or group) to perform some definable actions (often mere rituals) which they believe to provide security, predictability and to increase their scope control and power. Continue reading

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