Improving your chances

What can we each do to improve our chances of making a professional contribution over time? What keeps us employable? There are no guarantees, but AnnMaria De Mars gave her views recently in Why I Won’t Be Unemployed in 2017: It’s Apples. The punch line comes at the end, but you need to read from the beginning to understand the message.

What do you think? What's your approach to learning, now that (most of you, probably) are out of formal schooling?

Changes

The main site for Facilitated Systems will be undergoing various changes over the next period of time, as I restructure it and modify the content somewhat. There's one important change to note: in the past, you could access any of the Facilitated Systems pages except this blog with http://facilitatedsystems.com. Starting soon, you'll need the full name: http://www.facilitatedsystems.com/. If you try the former and it doesn't work, try the latter. If you have bookmarked a page somewhere inside my site and it fails to work, try the home page, and work from there.

A Story of Three Books

I just read two books, which made me think of a third to add context.

I first read Management der Unternehmensentwicklung: Phasengerechte Fuhrung und der Umgang mit Krisen (St. Galler Management-Konzept) (German Edition) when the book was first published. I found it a helpful book in that it explained nicely the lifecycle of a firm and how one should act effectively in each of the four phases they described. One thing jumped out at me: as a firm approaches the last phase, it needs to think about returning to the first. That's a problem, because startup phases won't support the full organization, so the typical response is to split the firm into different segments or business units. These two (or more) units take different times to pass through the phases, so that the firm eventually finds itself with different parts in different phases and thus needing different approaches to management. That flexibility is difficult to manage. I recommend this to any who are interested in management of organizations and who can read German.

Much more recently, I finally got around to reading The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and Business Transformation (Stanford Business Books). Many management histories I've read tend to praise or condemn the past, but House and Price did a very good job of portraying the challenges of the major transformations Hewlett-Packard has made since it was founded in 1939. I learned much about what I had not observed while working there; I also learned to think more deeply about the challenges we all see in organizations. I'd recommend this to any who have been or are still at HP, for you may gain perspective on your experiences. I would also recommend it to any from other high-tech, growth-oriented companies, for it might help you think about what you'll likely face as your company evolves.

Finally, I just finished David Wortley's Gadgets to God. Like The HP Phenomenon, this book focuses on transformations, this time at a much smaller scale. As Chuck and Ray did for large companies, David gives a clear description of the challenges and transformations he negotiated as an entrepreneur of a small business in a growing, changing market. As someone who ran a small business in much the same time, I find that his descriptions of the life of a small businessperson should be required reading for anyone setting out to do the same thing, for it should help you prepare for the challenges you'll face. David also puts the developments of the past few decades in a larger context, which may help you, too, consider the values and norms you bring to your work. Incidentally, David is a friend and colleague, for, as you can find somewhere in the book, we've worked together for a number of years without ever having seen each other.

Three books, one theme: transformations. The theme is a seeming constant in our world, and each of the three might bring different facets of the theme to light in your work.

Running into a brick wall

When I teach information dynamics at the University of Washington (what their Information School calls system dynamics), I include material on initializing models in equilibrium. That is a common technique for creating models that are easier to understand and easier to make work as intended.

I go past the current text, Sterman's Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World with CD-ROM
, to include techniques from Richardson's and Pugh's Introduction to System Dynamics Modeling with Dynamo. They teach how to initialize a model in a state of constant growth, too. That's handy for certain types of models, and it teaches a useful principle.

To sketch out their example, imagine a population of anything that can be modeled with a simple birth and death process. Births per year is proportional to current population, and deaths per year are modeled as the population divided by the average lifespan. You can work out the equations or read chapter 4 of Richardson and Pugh to figure out how to initialize a model in a state of constant growth.

Imagine you've done that for an arbitrary growth rate. If there is a limit to growth, then, at some time, births per year will exactly equal deaths per year. At that point, the net growth is zero. If you think of world population and birth rates of 4% to 5% per year (the figures quoted in the book), and if you assume that the limit to growth occurs because of an increase in deaths per year, a bit of algebra lets you compute the average lifespan at that moment of equilibrium as 20-25 years. When students discover this, the classroom usually gets very quiet as the lesson sinks in.

As the lesson comes from the equations and their behavior, it would apply to any system that has birth and death processes, whether it's a population of living things or an economic system such as our economy of businesses.

That lesson is important and the idea, while from a simplified model, is solid. Still, it's nice to see whether a similar situation occurs in the real world. Miller-McCune just published "Foreclosure Forcefield" in their January/February 2012 issue, ponting to research by Garrett Glasgow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, indicating that cities with "slow-growth policies in place to prevent rampant residential construction" fared better in the foreclosure crisis than did those that were "aggressively pro-growth." That sounds a lot like the lesson from Richardson's and Pugh's example. You can see more in "Local Development Policies and the Foreclosure Crisis in California: Can Local Policies Hold Back National Tides?" by Glasgow, Lewis, and Neiman in Urban Affairs Review, 48(1), pp. 62-83.

Or, in simple English, if you think you might hit a brick wall, it's much better to be walking slowly than running as fast as you can.

Learning logs

For some years, the learning logs Bob Williams and I assembled have been one of the popular pages on this Web site. Whether you use that format or another, I continue to see great value in reflection as an action learning tool, and I see value in journaling in supporting reflection.

Still, the reason I'm posting this today is that I found an old Dilbert cartoon in my learning log notes that I thought you might enjoy.

Instead of making a New Year's resolution, consider how you'll learn from your experiences, and consider reflection and journaling as part of your approach.

Thinking for yourself

Some years ago, I took freshman chemistry with Dr. Zevi Salzberg at Rice University.  I still recall one lecture that made a fundamental impression on me about how one learns and works as a professional.

As I recall, he was going to teach us about solubility and pH calculations.  He stepped to the front of the class and said something like, "Well, I forgot my notes today, so let's see if I can re-derive everything I was going to present here instead of taking time to go back to my office to get them."  Then he spent the rest of the class working through the material from (close to) first principles.   By the end of the class, I understood how to do those calculations, and I remembered that for a long time, even though I never took another chemistry course after my freshman year.

More importantly, though, I understood that one can and often should work through things for oneself. For one reason, it was possible.

For another, better reason, one was arguably more able to understand a limited set of first principles in a field and then work from that understanding to solve a problem than to remember all the specialized formulas and procedures to solve any of a large set of types of problems. Besides, remembering all those formulas and procedures wouldn't help much when faced with a new problem, but remembering first principles would.

For a final reason, it would help one continue to learn in whatever situation one faced in one's career.

I was reminded of that yesterday when I read Brad DeLong's reposting of Joan Robinson's "Open letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist," as given in Mike Beggs' piece on the Jacobin blog.

I'm not here today to persuade anyone to become a Keynesian or a Marxist; I'm writing because Robinson sounds like she has the same approach as Dr. Salzberg, when she writes,

The thing I am going to say that will make you too numb or too hot (according to temperament) to understand the rest of my letter is this: I understand Marx far and away better than you do. ...

When I say I understand Marx better than you, I don’t mean to say that I know the text better than you do. If you start throwing quotations at me you will have me baffled in no time. In fact, I refuse to play before you begin.

What I mean is that I have Marx in my bones and you have him in your mouth.

Read her letter, and see what you think.  Does she make sense to you about her way of knowing? She does to me, as did Dr. Salzberg.

By the way, I have no good reason to believe that Dr. Salzberg really forgot his notes that day; I fully surmise it was a pedagogical ruse to teach us exactly that message, and it worked. If he did really forget, I hope he forgot other years, too.

I noted one other paragraph in her letter: "But I want you to think about me dialectically. The first principle of the dialectic is that the meaning of a proposition depends on what it denies. Thus the very same proposition has two opposite meanings according to whether you come at it from above or from below. I know roughly from what angle you come to Keynes, and I quite see your point of view. Just use a little dialectic, and try to see mine." I think we'd be well served to think about that when we face some of the contentious issues of our time. She didn't ask him to adopt her views; she simply asked him to try to understand them, if for no other reason that it would help him understand his views, in some ways the antithesis of hers, better.

You don't need to be a system dynamicist ...

... to understand feedback.

I used to read Bob Pease's columns, articles, and app notes eagerly when I was a practicing design engineer.  He always had great insights and practical insights for making circuits work well.  He was also very open to helping others; he responded to a query I once sent him about Teledeltos paper.  I liked computer simulation more than he did, but I saw simulation as a way to get additional insights, not as a replacement for working in the real world, so we might not have disagreed too much on that point.

When I had occasion to look up his columns last week, I discovered sadly that he passed away last June.  I also discovered an interesting article he wrote applying feedback thinking to our current economic situation.

When you read the article, notice how naturally he reasoned through the process.  If you're familiar with feedback theory, recognize that feedback applies to human and organizational systems, too, as Bob did.  If you're not, figure out ways to get a feeling for how feedback works.  While simulation is great, I, too, got a visceral understanding of feedback by designing and troubleshooting physical circuits.  I'm looking for physical ways for non-engineers to get a similar level of understanding without limiting themselves to computer simulations.  Ideas?

Here is another article Bob wrote on feedback control systems.  We'll miss him, and we'll miss Jim Williams, whose funeral Bob had just attended when he passed away.

Amazon likes Emacs, too

I've written about Emacs before as a highly productive tool for just about anything one does on the computer.  Now I see that Amazon has—or at least had—a similar opinion.  See Steve Yegge's Tour de Babel, a several-year-old commentary on programming languages, which includes a number of comments about Emacs and how it was used at Amazon.

If you like that and already use Emacs, check out his 10 Specific Ways to Improve Your Productivity With Emacs.

Teaching

One of the things I do is teach, and one important aspect of teaching is learning from real data how to do it better.
Richard Hake is among those who have dedicated a significant portion of their careers to taking data about the learning that goes on in his classes and experimented to find ways to improve. He recently posted a follow-up to an earlier posting called "Re: Lecture Isn't Effective: More Evidence." If you teach through lecture, perhaps this is one entry point into a different way.
And I do encourage you to follow his advice and read Robert Morrison's The Lecture System in Teaching Science. It reminds me a bit of a graduate course I had from Dr. Joel Cyprus at Rice many years ago. On the first day of class, he gave a pop quiz right at the start (needless to say, we didn't do well, but we learned to be prepared!). Then he announced, among other things, that we had two weeks to read our textbook. After that, he'd consider it fair to assign homework or ask questions on quizzes or tests about any of the material in the text.
Dr. Cyprus didn't talk much about the textbook in class. He gave pop quizzes at least once a week, I recall, he showed us ways to analyze and design circuits, and he gave us plenty of opportunity to try out what we were learning in class. He also gave plenty of advice about being a professional.
While it's been some years since I have designed circuits professionally, I still remember most of what I learned in that class, and I use the ideas (understanding exponential growth and decay, for example) in other work I do today. I also try to emulate what I've learned from him and from those such as Richard Hake in my teaching.
By the way, that computer described in the article about Dr. Cyprus is one of the first two I ever programmed, the other being an IBM machine.

Stocks and flows: a quiz

Some time ago, I wrote about two types of numbers. Now Mike Russell of Pivotal Writing has created a nice introduction to stocks and flows that includes a quiz, courtesy of Dr. John Sterman of MIT. Check it out, and see how well you do.

While you're on this subject, check out my More on two types of numbers from 2005. While the concept is still as valid as it was then, the view of the example I chose sounds so dated today.

The One Degree War Plan?

A colleague pointed me to Paul Gilding's work. In addition to a new book, he's got a number of articles on his Discussion Papers page, including The One Degree War Plan, written with Jorgen Randers, one of the authors of Limits to Growth.

Have any of you run into his writings before? Do you have any thoughts to share?

Jeremy Grantham's advice

Read Jeremy Grantham's April 2011 quarterly letter entitled Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever. I think you may find it interesting.

Thanks to The Oil Drum for the lead.

Research on the impacts of natural gas on climate

With the current current glut of shale gas, there's a temptation to consider most of our energy problems solved if we can only move to gas from coal and imported petroleum products quickly enough.

Cornell's Robert Howarth has just published research indicating that shale gas is likely worse for climate change than coal over the next twenty years, and conventional natural gas may even be worse than coal. Over the next century, the differences seem to even out, but emissions from shale and conventional gas seem to remain in the general region of coal emissions.

Check out their Web site for more information. While I've watched less than a half so far, their video seems informative--or wait for their published paper.

On the far side of growth

We've talked about growth here from time to time. Recently, thanks to a Wuppertal Institut newsletter, I discovered Jenseits des Wachstums, a conference coming up next month in Berlin on that very subject. While I know nothing of this conference except what I read, it seems worth checking out.

Those of you who prefer English-language text may find the English flag button of use. Before you leave the German page, though, scroll to the bottom and check out Der unmoegliche Hamster, a short video in English with German super-titles.

Thanks to the Wuppertal Institut (English) for the lead.

An analysis of the benefits of growth

I've occasionally written about the potential implications of unrestrained growth. Now the Eugene Weekly has posted an article, Prosperity: Growth and Prosperity: Public policy often based on unsupported assumptions that suggests that, of the largest 100 US cities, those with the largest growth may not have fared as well on significant dimensions as those with slower growth.  


Read the article and the associated report for specifics, check out the data, if you're so inclined, and let me know what you think.  Do you have data (or analysis of their data) that supports their conclusions?  Do you have data or analysis that suggests an alternative conclusion is more warranted?


Thanks to Sightline Daily for the link.