Recent View from the Prairie Articles

May 2019

Disasters and Our Assumptions

Recently the famed Notre Dame De Paris Cathedral burned. It had stood for many centuries and people naturally assumed that it would remain for years to come. In business, we get surprised when our assumptions are broken. Often, the worst surprises come from the breaking of the biggest assumptions we have. We do well to go back to our core values when responding to when our assumptions are broken.

Ethics of Whistle Blowing

Whistle blowers have a dubious ethical standing in our world. Some have been praised. Others have been condemned. It all depends on who is exposed and what the consequences of both telling and not telling. When faced with a situation where people are behaving contrary to our ethics, we have a difficult decision.

Computer Systems Hygiene

When humans were living in small, isolated bands, we could operate without a lot of rules. As we gathered into larger and larger groups and started trading long distances, we were forced to learn rules of hygiene. New diseases spread through what had been common practices and we had to change our ways. We learned to isolate sick people. We learned to wash our hands often and learned other practices. Pandemics rightfully scared us. We are at the same point with computers.

Facebook Or Happiness?

Right now, most Americans are spending more hours viewing content such as TV, Facebook, Videos, etc. or playing video games than we do sleeping. The result is that a majority of people are mildly depressed, certainly sleep deprived, and this pursuit of happiness isn't making us happy. What are the factors that really make us happy?

Managing Creative People

The story goes that a CEO called a manager in and told him to fire person X. "That person spends all his time staring out the window." The manager responded that person X was the one who had come up with a number of highly profitable products. Highly creative people do not fit into the normal ways of the modern corporation. Yet, creative people can be successfully managed by understanding the needs of creative people and the science of creativity.

Yet, the nature of creative people is to not fit in. That is exactly why they benefit the corporation: they see things that are missed by the standard way of seeing things.

Disasters and Managers

The Boeing crashes, the Challenger disaster, and the failure of many a startup company all have one thing in common: people who pushed the project forward believing that the risks were lower than they turned out to be. People are urged to "power through the day", making the world into what it "should be". That is a tactic that works when it is only human powered actions at stake. Civilization is full of examples where societies grew more than their ability to cope with and manage the number of people and the technologies involved.

Artificial Intelligence Still Needs People

The Islamic State has been recruiting young people (as young as 12-13), people just at the stage of breaking away from their parents and looking for a group to belong to. Google recently revealed that they are allowing non-profit groups to use Google's ad targeting algorithms to provide counter views to radicalism. These non-profits found out that they can't just turn it on and let it go. They have to have people directing all the time.

This need for humans to direct artificial intelligent systems is universal. It will not go away. At its core, AI is always a trailing system, not a leading system. It works from past data.

What is Your Vision?

"A land flowing with milk and honey" is one description of "the promised land" - a land people yearn for. That is a description of a land covered in grasses and wild flowers. That vision is perfect for a nomadic people who raise sheep and goats. Open grasslands are a wonderful land for grazing and the many flowers give wild bees a lot of nectar. That vision does not inspire city folk. But to get to "the promised land", we need a vision of where we are going.

Strain then Failure

A marriage fails and people wonder what went wrong. A favorite retail store goes under and we wonder why. A country's economy suddenly collapses and we look for the reason why. Many systems can operate for years slowly straining more and more until suddenly collapsing. The system was resilient until it finally buckled under the strain. We humans often adapt to the stress instead of seeing the danger signals. Systems fail in complex ways. Yet, we often run systems close to the breaking point.

Individualism vs Group Cohesion

Americans have a strong mythos about individualism. Comparing how police are using facial recognition technology in America vs China shows that mythos. American researchers worry about misidentifications and what happens when the recognition is wrong. Chinese people worry about identifying those who do not fit in.

Time Management and Priorities

In this busy time of year, we often lose track of time, miss events due to an over busy schedule, and stress out over all the tasks we think we need to do. Time management is a common theme. Often, people suggest different tactics. But the most common need is a better connection with our priorities and with our own styles.

Rebel Workers

A recent book by Francesca Gino makes the case for "Rebel Talent". In that book, she claims that companies do well to hire such rebel talent. While that is true, companies can't only hire such. There are successful rebels and there are people who only are rebels without succeeding in work or life.

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