Great Teachers

I've been thinking recently about some of the great teachers my children have had. There have been many. There was the kind elementary teacher who would play guitar and sing with the kids and bring her dog in to visit as a reward. There was the history teacher who regularly traveled with the kids to a national history competition or the science teacher who did the same for a large science event. There's the band and orchestra teachers who share their love of music with a new generation of musicians. There is the English teacher who stepped up to make a school musical happen when no one else would. There's the one who runs the birding club.

Then there's our school system that has been traditionally built around core subjects that are not as relevant as might think they would be, given the emphasis placed on them. There is the push for measurements and accountability of teaching, learning, school quality, etc. This push at times results in an educational industrial complex where large centralized assessment companies sell their assessment services to school districts to help them measure student performance and then at the same time they also sell the key in the form of study materials that make it easy for teachers to teach to the test and give students the ability to perform well on the matching assessments.

Then there's the COVID-19 pandemic which has forced a harder look at what is or isn't important, what can be cancelled, what can be postponed, what should still go on, and so on. The big question is whether we will take advantage of the pandemic to undo the maddening assessment culture we have built and focus on what is really important. Universities need easy ways of measuring who to give scholarships to (GPA and ACT/SAT scores), but they have been willing to bend the rules and find other ways to reward students who were not able to take standardizes tests due to the pandemic.

What if we stopped focusing so much on some of the mostly irrelevant topics like calculus (relevant to engineers but not many others) and pushed more for creativity and travel and experiences and useful projects and actual skills? What if we pushed to teach our kids languages, cultures, how to serve others, and be generally good people? At some point there can and should be exposure to some topics that may spark a desire to go on and become a great scientist or mathematician, without forcing those who don't need those skills to waste time focusing on something they will quickly forget anyway.

What if we explored nature and performed music and built things?

Big Tech

The interesting semi-pejorative name I've been seeing thrown around in the political circles recently is Big Tech. I think there are some rogue marketers out there somewhere who are just having a heyday coming up with all the various ways to tear down others by labeling them negatively instead of using creative words to positively build up one's own brand. But this latest is a very interesting turn.

Social media in all its various shapes and forms is the tool many people use to communicate these days, especially if you're looking at groups of people who are united by a common interest but who may not have a normal face to face relationship. Early social media was a way for people who knew each other to keep in contact with each other. As social media grew and expanded, it became more and more a tool for people who didn't already know each other through family, friends, school, work, or otherwise to make connections. This was a powerful shift but also one that has been able to foment conspiracy theories and provoke actions that polite society might normally disapprove of.

As conspiracies and provocations have abounded, so-called Big Tech has been called upon or chosen of their own accord to start trying to filter illegal or inappropriate behavior. They have always tried to put themselves in a place of being a neutral communication channel who is not responsible for what other people use their networks for. As they have started to crack down on those committing illegal acts using their services, the call has started to appear for the need to take a few of the large, powerful technology companies to be split up a la Ma Bell. Such a breakup may be called for, but the breakup of AT&T's phone monopoly in the 80s is different than what we're seeing now.

Fox News reports on how Big Tech companies are helping to preserve data from rioters and other extremists who posted their activities online and are now trying to delete the evidence. The funny thing is that the article makes it sound like the social media companies are doing something special by preserving that data, but I've always taken it as common knowledge that social media companies never actually delete anything. If you say you want to delete something, it may make it invisible to you and others, but it's always going to be archived somewhere that it could be pulled up again if needed or for the company who owns your data to be able to mine and build your profile. If anything, that is more information about you, knowing that you posted something and then deleted it.

The main issue that people seem to have is that they are claiming that their rights are violated by having their hate speech or violence or otherwise illegal behaviors shut down. They think by breaking up these large tech companies who can currently limit social media behaviors or websites and app stores that host various content, the ability of any given company to lock out a law breaker or rioter will be diminished. The only other option they have is to move to dark web communication tools. How ironic that those who claim they are trying to do what is moral and right will end up having to hide underground as their misdeeds are published to the world.

Clickbait Unlimited

I wrote about this about almost two years ago, but clickbait seems to be ramping up if anything. I guess Google or whoever else is spying on my browsing habits knows that I like to watch Stranger Things, Mandalorian, Cobra Kai, etc. My issue isn't that someone knows I like those shows, because they are good shows and a lot of people like them. The issue I have is the amount of clickbaity articles being written about them.

I can't count the number of times I have seen a link to a story saying something about a new release date being announced for the next season of a show or that a new actor has signed on to play a certain character. You click into the story, and there is just a pile of garbage paragraphs saying something vague about how we don't know when the new season will come out but probably sometime next year and that we're not totally sure that actor is in the show but if they are then they are excited to see what character they are going to play.

So we've got a whole article written to say nothing more than that we don't know anything about the next season yet.

The other thing I have been seeing more and more of is the random cross-posting of the same old content over and over. An actor will post something semi-controversial or barely interesting on their Twitter account, and then it is screenshotted, copy/pasted, and linked to the post. At least that's what happens when there is a quick boring text post. But when there is a video or image or something that you really want to see, you'll see a full page article about how someone's performance at an awards show was bad or a famous person was acting rudely in public, you can click around forever and never find the actual video everyone is talking about.

I don't know if this is what we get for letting real journalism get eaten up by free news online. The actual newspapers are going under, being replaced by free material, apparently written by either AI bots or middle school students in third world countries to do no more than drive advertising and suck up personal information and habits.

New Normal

As the year 2020 hurdles along, I am reminded of what I thought was such a funny joke at a New Year's Eve party - something along the lines of where do you see yourself in a year and the punchline about not having 2020 vision. I don't think any one of us foresaw any, let alone all of this, from an impeachment to massive conspiracy theories in the political realm, the COVID19 pandemic and all the businesses/sports/schools being shut down with it, famous people dying (Alex Trebek, Eddie Van Halen, Sean Connery, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Regis Philbin, Kobe Bryant, and countless others), California and Australia fires, the monolith appearing and then disappearing in the Utah desert, racial unrest and riots, murder hornets, and who knows what remains with a month left.

How many of those things do we recover from? Celebrities die every year. There are always wildfires. People get sick. Social media is always on the lookout for the next big cultural talking point.

More importantly, how do we work together to build a new normal? Is it possible to come together like we did in the early days of the pandemic, before it seemingly permanently divided us? I hope we can roll into 2021 with a determination to keep the things that unify us and make us happy and healthy and leave behind the divisiveness and bickering. I see flashes of brilliance in between all the crazy, and I'm hopeful that this Christmas season can be an early start.

Small World

It's a small world. We've talked for decades now about how the world is becoming more and more flat. It's easier than it's ever been to communicate around the world. We're often more likely to be talking to someone in a different location than we are to be talking with the people in the same room as us.

Yet at the same time, there's always a little bit of a disconnect. There are always shibboleths that let us differentiate who really belongs and who doesn't. Who is the outsider vs. the insider? What are the things that we misread or mishear or otherwise misinterpret?

I was looking up information about the calories in some of McDonald's food on their website, and I saw the following:

I was totally surprised, thinking maybe McDonald's had expanded from the Travis Scott and J Balvin celebrity meals, and that they had gone out and set up a deal with Disney.

When I clicked on the large option and saw this, I realized my mistake, knowing there's not such a thing as Large World:

I was reading it as "Small World" "Famous Fries" when it should have been "Small" "World-Famous Fries". This wasn't someone trying to be tricky. It was just my mind playing tricks on me. It reminded me of an ad I heard on the radio not long ago for some event at the Utah State Fair Park. The funny thing was how the announcer strung the words together. Nothing would have sounded off to anyone unless you are local to Utah. I don't know how no one local caught it before the ad aired. Maybe they did, but it was too late.

The professional voice-over person lilted the words ever so differently than we normally do, calling it the "Utah" "State-Fair" "Park". Everyone has heard of a state fair. It makes sense that Utah would have a Utah State Fair, and we do. But it isn't the state-fair park. For whatever reason, it is the "Utah State" "Fair-Park". That is, the way we pronounce it, it doesn't emphasize that it's the park where the state fair is held (even though it is) but rather it's the fair-park for the state of Utah. Read that outloud a few times, switching between connecting the words State and Fair and then connecting the words Fair and Park. Utah State-Fair Park. Utah State Fair-Park. Say it enough times, and it sounds completely different and awkward, like you can tell the artist reading the script is definitely not from here.

Does it matter that they aren't from here? Does it matter if we can tell? There's always a way to tell, but I think it comes down to what we do with that information. Do we take the presence of an outsider as a blessing? Are we using diversity to learn and make ourselves stronger? Are we building on different experiences and making everyone feel welcome? Or are we xenophobic? Are we using the differences as a way to divide us and keep people out? Are we using dog whistles to secretly signal our intentions to our friends while keeping our enemies in the dark?

I hope we're making friends rather than enemies.

It is a small world, after all.

Pomodoro

A pomodoro is a tomato in Italian. It's also a system for time management and maintaining focus in order to get work done, invented by Francesco Cirillo. The name refers to a tomato-shaped timer he used to keep himself on track.

The basic idea is that you can do just anything for a short period of time, even if it is difficult or unpleasant or if there is something that causes you to lose focus. You also want to make sure you don't get too deep into something that will suck you in all day and keep you from getting to other tasks that need to be done. In the agile project management world, we use a concept called timeboxing, which is where you set a certain amount of time for a meeting or a task, and you have to fill the box but not overflow the box. When the time is up, the meeting is over, and you all move onto the next meeting or task, rather than letting it bleed into the next hour and make everything else start late, cascading through your day's calendar to where you end up staying late or pushing it to tomorrow to get things done.

To put it another way, considering the traditional triple constraints in project management, of scope, time, and cost, we more or less ignore the cost factor a bit and really look at things as a tradeoff between scope and time. Either you work until a task is completed, no matter how much time it takes, or else you work for a certain amount of time no matter how much work was completed.

In the system, a pomodoro is a 25 minute block of time in which to complete work. You want to break up the work into chunks that you think can be reasonably done in that time. The longer you use the system, especially if you track what you get done, the better you get at estimating what you can do in that amount of time. If you get to the end of the 25 minute timer, and you're not done, that's okay. You stop anyway. Take a 5 minute break to go to the bathroom, listen to a song, do some jumping jacks, eat a sandwich, or whatever will allow you a little bit of release without getting sucked into something else time consuming. If you get done early, you keep working anyway until the full 25 minutes are up. It could be reporting on the work you completed, getting a head start on the next task, planning out your next day, or anything else that keeps you productive.

You repeat 4 pomodoros, at 25 minutes each, with 5 minute breaks in between them. After the fourth pomodoro, you take a half hour break. After that half hour, you do another block of 4 pomodoros. A pomodoro could be working on a report or spreadsheet, a meeting with a client or coworker, checking and responding to emails, doing professional development, or if a student doing something like reading a chapter, working through homework problems, watching some class lecture videos, taking a quiz, practicing an instrument, etc.

The key is to not break up the 25 minute pomodoro into anything smaller. If you get a call or text or someone popping into your office or anything else that seems urgent, push it back to your break if possible. If not possible, then the interrupted pomodoro doesn't count, and you reset the timer to 25 minutes when you are ready to start up again. Turn off notifications on your phone and close your email client to ensure you're only checking messages when the planned pomodoro calls for it or during a break.

By keeping focus in short bursts, they will add up to you getting more work done than if you let a constant stream of distractions get you off your groove, while still knowing you won't get burnt out since you do have a break coming up in just a few minutes.

Text and Multimedia Links on Conscious Capitalism

Mackey/Friedman/Rodgers debate: Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business - https://reason.com/2005/10/01/rethinking-the-social-responsi-2/

After Words with John Mackey - https://www.c-span.org/video/?309877-1/after-words-john-mackey

What is a Conscious Business? - https://www.huffingtonpost.com/fixcapitalism/what-is-a-conscious-busin_b_8351802.html

Reimagining Capitalism with Higher Consciousness - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8faXr6WhCM

The Business Case for Conscious Companies - https://consciouscompanymedia.com/sustainable-business/infographic-business-case-conscious-companies/

Concious Capitalism - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL86E52E7A0EC8FA8B

How to Create a Compelling Purpose for your Business - https://consciouscompanymedia.com/sustainable-business/how-to-create-a-compelling-purpose-for-your-business/

Roy Spence: The Power of Purpose - https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x10kj09

Fundamentals of Cultural Transformation - https://www.valuescentre.com/sites/default/files/uploads/2010-07-20/Fundamentals.pdf

How Southwest Airlines Built its Culture - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_CeFiUkV7s

A Culture Discussion with Edgar Schein - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq9XL0N_fR0

Introduction to Systems Thinking - https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Introduction-to-Systems-Thinking-IMS013Epk.pdf

Managing for Stakeholders - http://www.stakeholderslab.nl/wp-content/uploads/Freeman-Managing-for-Stakeholders-2.pdf

Strategies for Managing Stakeholder Relationships with R. Edward Freeman - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlK6582g700

Dan Pink: The Puzzle of Motivation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y

Business and Society in the Coming Decades - https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/business-and-society-in-the-coming-decades

The Social Responsibility of Business - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5KZhm19EO0

Leadership from the Inside Out - https://www.bkconnection.com/static/Leadership_From_the_Inside_Out_EXCERPT.pdf

Bob Chapman on Truly Human Leadership - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njn-lIEv1LU

Breathe In, Breathe Out - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/breathe-out-raj-sisodia/

Paul Hawken: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring - https://gratefulness.org/resource/brilliant-earth-hiring/

The Healing Organization - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWs6HFOkNEY

5 Reasons to be Optimistic - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyV4PLSBxaU

Conscious Leadership

"Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership." -Peter Drucker

Conscious leaders will sacrifice and serve those under them. They will create a vision to help others achieve what they did not even know was possible.

A leader needs to be both strong and caring. Strength without caring is brutal, while caring without strength is ineffective.

Leadership needs to be authentic, meaningfully communicate with and influence others, and create value. Artifice is too easily seen through. Not working with others is about the furthest from leadership possible. Doing the wrong thing is worse than not doing anything at all, as such a misdirected leader will not only fail to build what they should but will have their people digging a hole that must be filled in by others before restarting the building process after they are gone.

The most neglected stakeholders

Stakeholders are anyone or anything that either has an effect on our business or project, or who our project or business has an effect on. It is easy to forget those we have an effect on if their effect on us is less clear.

If you don't have a healthy planet and functioning society, nothing else matters.

The CEO of Wal-Mart discussed how companies can contribute to society. The first principle is to prioritize issues relevant to the mission of the company. A grocer, for example, would care about the sustainability of the world's food supply. Second is to draw on the company's capabilities. If a company has a resource they can use to help other people, they should do so. For example, a grocery store may donate food that is approaching its expiration date to a local food bank. It costs them nothing, as the food would have gone bad before it sold anyway. Third, aim for the triple bottom line. This includes considering how companies can positively affect profit, people, and the planet. Four is reshaping the system for lasting improvement. By collaborating to improve the system for oneself, the sytem is improved for everyone that is part of it. Number five is engaging partners in transforming systems. The challenges we face in our world are not ones that can be addressed solo.

It is interesting that someone from Wal-Mart would have this discussion, since they are known for brutally taking over their suppliers' supply chains in order to squeeze every drop they can from them. They do this in the name of efficiency which can be good, but it really turns out to be high volume and low per-unit net income at the expense of employee expertise and quality. A company who charges slightly more can afford to provide better service and a higher quality product.

It is often seen that businesses will attempt to maximize shareholder returns at all costs. The means don't matter, only the end of the almighty stock price. The problem with such thinking is that anytime we care about any end more than any of the possible means to get there, there is an inherent systemic motivation to cheat. This holds in sports, in school, in relationships, in business, and everywhere in society. By focusing only on the predetermined outcome, people will do whatever is required to steal or otherwise manipulate the inputs to achieve what is considered the best output. The thing is, if they would just focus on using the best means - cooperating, being kind, treating employees well, cleaning up the environment, and otherwise sharing their means, the best ends will result, whether or not they were the end we initially desired.

"Not everything that is confronted can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is confronted." - James Baldwin

Systems Thinking

Traditional analysis focuses on the individual components, while systems thinking considers how each aspect interacts with other aspects of the system. There are three elements of a system. The first is the individual parts. The second is the way they connect to each other. The final is the purpose. The individual elements can be switched out, and if the connections and purpose do not change with it, the result will be th same, whether success or failure. By reorganizing, a big difference can be made. Just providing more information can be one of the biggest differences.

A system is a group of interconnected and interacting parts with a common purpose. Without a common purpose or relationships, we would have simply a collection, rather than a system. A bowl of fruit, for example, is simply a collection. While they may have a common purpose, the pieces of fruit do not interact with each other in the same way the cook, waiter, customer, and others might interact in a restaurant, resulting in the bowl of fruit being provided for breakfast.

The system must have a purpose, and each component plays its own part in helping achieve that purpose and in supporting the other components. The pieces are organized in such a way that they act efficiently and provide feedback to each other. These feedback loops may be linear where each process or component provides information to be used by its successor task until the process has completed one simple pass-through. They may be circular or recurring loops, however, where each phase or task feeds into another and then repeats back to the original, interating with each run. This would be like the difference between ordering a bowl of fruit to go and eating it at home. No matter what is in the bowl, it's too late to change it. It may change whether you go to that restaurant or order that dish again, but that particular bowl can only be eaten as is or discarded. Eating in the restaurant, however, the server may ask how the food is tasting, and there is an opportunity to add more food to the order or send it back if the fruit is warm or mushy. The second scenario is a more advanced system than the first.

As the feedback loops cycles repeatedly, it can create what is called either a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle. A virtuous cycle is one where positive results lead to continued growth and positive results. On the other hand, a vicious cycle means negative results will lead to stagnation and losing sales or whatever else we are measuring. A balancing cycle is a self-maintaining loop where as good things happen and growth occurs, the growth will result in a less than idea situation, which results in loss, which then results in a better situation and the growth returns again - kind of like a swinging pendulum. When it is not obvious what is happening, a diagram of the system and results of the processes can help visualize and make clear to everyone what is working well or not.

To me a systems approach means considering all the likely results, putting processes into place to maximize good results and minimize bad results. When there are good or bad results, there should be at that point additional processes to deal with those results as well. The last thing you want to do as a business owner is to make any type of change without having any idea what the likely outcome is going to be. Everything you do should be tested and recorded so that when things get better or worse later, we know what the cause was. Changing too many things at the same time can result in two positive and negative reactions cancelling each other out or not being able to tell which of two things we changed are what created the effect we wanted. We then don't know whether to continue doing what we're doing or if we need to make additional changes. Even if we know the change we made was the sole cause of a given reaction, if that is not recorded and saved for later, years down the road new people may not have learned that same lesson and will need to repeat the same process we thought we already learned from.

As you consider the various stakeholders associated with a company, it is important that all work together for their mutual benefit. If any one stakeholder is focused too much on their own growth at the cost of the others, it will create an imbalance that can potentially lead to the company going out of business. By thinking about what others need and trusting that others will look out for theirs, everyone benefits together. You want to hire employees who are passionate about your company and its products.

“Business is not a game. It is not a math problem. It is not a machine. It is not war. It is one of the most human things we do. It is a living, interconnected and interdependent system, like a rain forest or the human body.”

“Employees and customers are like the two wings of a bird. A business cannot fly with only one.”

Too many businesses with a sole focus on shareholder value or any other individual stakeholder will result in creating chaos, imbalance, and tension. That tension will eventually have to be resolved or corrected. Why not do it right the first time?