meetings

Clifton Leaf, The truth in small doses : why we're losing the war on cancer ── and how to win it, 2013 

pp.146-147
p.147
Eric Lander, a professor of biology at MIT
p.146
Every Friday morning without fail for seven (7) years, a handful of project leaders got on the phone to discuss strategy, problems encountered, suggested fixes, and anything else that might move the project one or two steps forward each week. 
p.146
   It was done because it got itself organized. You know, we got on the phone every goddamn week and we hated it. Because what a pain in the ass, but we managed this thing by close coordination. We argued, we fought it out, but at the end, there was a team. Yes, there were three or four big labs in the project, but those three or four big labs learned how to work as a team, and the funding agencies coordinated with the grantees and we got things done. We set ludicrous goals. They were audacious goals, so we could tell when we were a certain percentage away from a goal or a hundred percent toward a goal. 

   (Clifton Leaf, The truth in small doses : why we're losing the war on cancer ── and how to win it, 2013, ) 


Mark Stefik and Barbara Stefik, Breakthrough, 2004            [ ]
p.75
Ted Selker
  ... [...] ...4
  That was wonderful because Yamada was the main objector to this technology. It helps to include people in the process when you are solving their problems. I believe that including Yamada was the key to succeeding. What the Japanese really wanted, what they always seem to want, and what I really enjoy about their approach to innovation and product technology, is that if we're going to have a solution we're going to have a Team consensus. All members of the team have to contribute. If you don't include everyone, they don't believe you. I learned more from that process than almost every other part of the experience. When adversaries were willing to engage in creating a solution, we could make more inventive progress than when adversaries just had to be convinced, and would only listen to “the facts, ma'am.”
  There were a lot of good things about progressive commitment. When we first started working on the idea, I thought it was a six week project. Many years went by before we got to the part of the story where we worked with Yamada. Overall, it was a ten-year project. I would have never gotten involved in it if I had thought it was going to consume so much of my time.

   (Stefik, Mark., Breakthrough : stories and strategies of radical innovation / Mark Stefik and Barbara Stefik., 1. technological innovation., 2. inventions., 2004, ) 


Laurie Garrett, The coming plague, 1994 
p.35
   Researchers also understood that viruses had a variety of different types of proteins protruding from their capsules, most of which were used by tiny microbes to lock on to cells and gain entry for invasion. Some of the most sophisticated viruses, such as influenza, sugarcoated those proteins so that the human immune system might fail to notice the disguised invaders. 

p.584
   A number of stress proteins were discovered in microbes──proteins (or the genes that coded for them) that were activated when the cell was challenged by a range of threats: heat, fevers, some human hormones, arachidonic acid (an immune system activator), and a variety of human disease states. When activated, these proteins acted rapidly to protect vital biochemical functions inside the microbe. Termed “molecular chaperones”, the proteins guided fragile compounds through their duties. The stress proteins guided fragile compounds through their duties.  The stress proteins could be turned on and off experimentally by inflicting definable changes upon their environments. There was no clearer example of a microbe's adaptation to its environment──adaptation that required genetic as well as chemical change.102 

p.584
   Studies of vancomycin resistance in Staphylococcus aureus strains found in a handful of European clinical settings revealed that seven separate genes were required to render the bacteria invulnerable to the drug. The seven genes prompted one simple alteration in the chemistry of the microbe's cell wall, replacing an ester bond in structural protein with an amide one. The ester bond was the target for vancomycin. 

p.584
   Here was the amazing thing: those seven resistance genes were switched on only when vancomycin was in the bacteria's environment. How the bacteria knew of the threat's presence was an utter mystery.103 

p.412
   Switching from inexpensive penicillins to methicillin increased drug treatment costs for a typical patient approximately tenfold; changing to vancomycin meant turning to one of the most expensive antibiotic on the market. It was a burden in the wealthy countries, but not prohibitive. 

p.584
   Researchers noted that many extremely divergent microbial species shared genetic signaling sites, called operons, that with very minor mutation conferred multiple antibiotic resistances on the organisms. For example, seven very different microbes (E. coli, Salmonella, Shigella, Klebsiella, Citrobactr, Hofnia, and Enterobactr) naturally shared an operon which, with a single point mutation, made the organisms resistant to tetracycline, chloramphenicol, norfloxacin, ampicillin, and quinolones.104  In Cairns's terms, this implied that all seven bacterial species shared a few bytes of hard disk space that was specifically designed to undergo a single data-bit alteration when necessary to respond to an antibiotic threat. 

   (The coming plague: newly emerging disease in a world out of balance / Laurie Garrett., 1. epidemiology--popular works., 2. communicable disease--popular works., RA651.G37   1994, 614.4--dc20, 1994, ) 


Preston G. Smith, Donald G. Reinertsen, Developing products in half the time, 1998 

p.202
    Frequent, regular meetings are often the heart of the project's communications systems. Most commonly they occur weekly, but at certain times some teams will raise the frequency to twice a week, or even every day. These meetings focus on the project's status and share new information that may affect the project. The meetings are used for problem identification--most problem solving should be done in smaller groups outside the meeting.
    The tone of these meetings is important if we wish to create open communications. The team leader plays a key role in getting the meeting to focus on issues rather than people and on solving problems rather than fixing the blame for them. The tone for these meetings is typically set early in the life of the project and is hard to reverse later on.

p.281
    Another general observation is that a total quality program is an excellent prerequisite for making the kinds of changes needed. There is nothing specific about total quality itself that is needed. But we have found, in working with many clients, that those with total quality programs have asssimilated many of the basic tools they will need to shorten their development times. Such tools include running meetings, collecting and organizing ideas for change, joint problem solving, action planning, and mapping processes.

    (Developing products in half the time / Preston G. Smith, Donald G. Reinertsen. --2nd ed., 1. new products., 2. product development., © 1998, )



Angler: the Cheney vice presidency, Barton Gellman, 2008
p.202
His staff scouted ahead trying to find out who had the big picture on Klamath.

p.203
Cheney to Sue Ellen Wooldridge, over a phone call
  “If we're going to put a bunch of farmers out of business, we've got a problem. We've got a massive problem.”

p.203
  “I never got any directives”, Wooldrige said, only questions: “What is the status?  What is happening?  What decisions do you need to make?  What discretion do you have?”

    (Angler: the Cheney vice presidency, Barton Gellman, 2008, )

Tom Wujec (wicked)
Tom Wujec (9:05)

9:05
Tom Wujec: Got a wicked problem? First, tell me how you make toast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vS_b7cJn2A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vS_b7cJn2A
TED
Published on Feb 5, 2015



Clifton Leaf, The truth in small doses : why we're losing the war on cancer ── and how to win it, 2013 

p.146
We can find the right biomarkers (???), but to do so will require a dramatic reorganization of the search enterprise. (???)  That, however, is just step one. 

p.255
At the first of these meetings, Kathy [Giusti] recalls, “I was sitting there in disbelief that these guys had never talked to each other.... There were then no drugs for multiple myeloma. None of the academics knew anybody [on the drug-development side], let alone how to work with them. They were hopeless at it. So over time, we ended up doing a lot of these roundtables, just to bring these different worlds together. You'd think that was simple. There was nothing complex about it. Any moron could do it.”
   Kathy even brought a how-to guide for moderators at the bookstore, and opened up one of the meetings with a “leader's question”: “We will be successful in our effort if we do what?”

p.255
“And then one of the industry guys said, ‘If you give us tissue in which we can validate a drug.’”

pp.256-257
p.256
The words shot right through her:

   I didn't realize at the time that every academic center had is own tissue
   bank. I didn't know until 2002 that they were hoarding tissue. I didn't 
   know the crappy quality of the tissue they had in their freezers. But I can
   tell you, I knew the importance of it. I was always giving bone marrow at 
   Dana Farber, as was my sister. Because we are identical twins, this was a
   great resource for looking at genomic issues. And as they would fill these
   huge tubes of marrow ... I would notice the techs standing right outside 
   the door. It hit me then how fresh this needed to be; how fragile these
   myeloma cells are. You can't kill them in the body, ironically, but they die
   right away outside of it. I had seen this all, personally, as a patient. And
   now I was hearing it at a [foundation] roundtable. I realized right away
   that we had to get tissue. And I realized that industry was not going to 
   believe in us, or bother with this [uncommon] disease, until we started
   showing them we could bank tissue──and prove that we could help them 
   get clinical trials done faster. And so I decided to do the tissue banking
   first. 

   (Clifton Leaf, The truth in small doses : why we're losing the war on cancer ── and how to win it, 2013, ) 



M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine, 2001                   [ ]

p.206
   Quite soon after his arrival, in fact, Lick organized a monthly meeting at which he and his counterparts could bring each other up to date on the research they were funding, eliminate overlaps, and look for new opportunities to collaborate. And very soon after THAT, Lick expanded the meeting to include funding officers from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health, the Atomic Energy COmmission, and any other agency around Washington that was putting even a little bit of money into computer research. 

p.206
   Their first time together was almost surreal, remembers Robert Taylor, who was then running an information-research program at NASA. “Some of the professional bureaucrats were dumbfounded. They had a history of giving grants to individual people in 24,000-dollar chunks. But Lick was talking about millions of dollars and whole teams of people. It was as though these folks had encountered this alien creature: friendly, but strange.”  Another participant, Ivan Sutherland, remembers his first meeting in 1964:  “These people met, period. The group had no charter, no responsibilities, no budget, no purpose--but it was a great thing. We would discuss what was important, what was current, and what was going on. Precisely because the group had no charter, it was a wonderful way of getting information flow between the agencies.”

   (Waldrop, M. Mitchell.; The dream machine : J. C. R. Licklider and the revolution that made computing personal / M. Mitchell Waldrop., 1. Licklider, J. C. R., 2. microcomputers--history, 2001,   ) 

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pp.276-277
Peopleware.
A major contribution during recent years has been DeMarco and Lister's 1987 book, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Its underlying thesis is that “The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.” It abounds with gems such as, “The manager's function is not to make people work, it is to make it possible for people to work.” It deals with such mundane topics as space, furniture, team meals together. DeMarco and Lister provide real data from their Coding War Games that show stunning correlation between performances of programmers from the same organization, and between workplace characteristics and both productivity and defect levels.

   The top performers'space is quieter, and more private, better protected 
   against interruption, and there is more of it. . . . Does it really 
   matter to you . . . whether quiet, space, and privacy help your current 
   people to do better work or [alternatively] help you to attract
   and keep better people? 18 

I heartiy commend the book to all my readers.

Moving projects.
DeMarco and Lister give considerable attention to team fusion, and intangible but vital property. I think it is management's overlooking fusion that accounts for the readiness I have observed in multilocation companies to move a project from one laboratory to another.
   My experience and observation are limited to perhaps a half-dozen moves. I have never seen a successful one. One can move missions successfully. But in every case of attempts to move projects, the new team in fact started over, in spite of having good documentation, some well-advanced designs, and some of the people from the sending team. I think it is breaking of fusion of the old team that aborts the embryonic product, and brings about restart. 

    (The mythical man-month : essays on software engineering, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. -- Anniversary ed., © 1985, Software engineering, pp.276-277 )

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Babel Project (mmm)

Now the whole earth used only one language, with few words. On the occasion of a migration from the east, men discovered a plain in the land of Shinar, and settled there. Then they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, burning them well." So they used bricks for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city with a tower whose top shall reach the heavens (thus making a name for ourselves), so that we may not be scattered all over the earth." Then the Lord came down to look at the city and tower which human beings had built. The Lord said, "They are just one people, and they all have the same language. If this is what they can do as a beginning, then nothing that they resolve to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there make such a babble of their language that they will not understand one another's speech." Thus the Lord dispersed them from there all over the earth, so that they had to stop building the city.

GENESIS 11:1-8


p.74
A Management Audit of the Babel Project

According to the Genesis account, the tower of Babel was man's second major engineering undertaking, after Noah's ark. Babel was the first engineering fiasco.
     The story is deep and instructive on several levels. Let us, however, examine it purely as an engineering project, and see what management lessons can be learned. How well was their project equipped with the prerequisites for success? Did they have:

1. A clear mission? Yes, although naively impossible. The project failed long before it ran into this fundamental limitation.
2. Manpower? Plenty of it.
3. Materials? Clay and asphalt are abundant in Mesopotamia.
4. Enough time? Yes, there is no hint of any time contraint.
5. Adequate technology? Yes, the pyramidal or conical structure is inherently stable and spreads the compressive load well. Clearly masonry was well understood. The project failed before it hit technological limitations.

     Well, if they had all of these things, why did the project fail? Where did they lack? In two respects--COMMUNICATION, and its consequent, ORGANIZATION. They were unable to talk with each other; hence they could not coordinate. When coordination failed, work ground to a halt. Reading between the lines we gather that lack of communication led to disputes, bad feelings, and group jealousies. Shortly the clans began to move apart, preferring isolation to wrangling.

    (The mythical man-month : essays on software engineering, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. -- Anniversary ed., © 1985, Software engineering, p.74 )

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pp.39-40
     Furthermore, increases in information eventually, produces a condition Meier (1963) called “information overload.” As the amount of information received increases beyond the amount its receivers can handle effectively, they use less and less of it. Not only do receivers become saturated with information--and therefore cannot receive any more--but they can and do become super saturated--discard some of the information they already have.

     An organization with purposeful parts almost inevitably generates internal conflict. Wherever there is choice, conflict is likely; without choice, there can be no conflict. In conflict situations, organismic thinking is in-effective because it tries to resolve conflict by increasing the flow of information, contrary to conventional wisdom, does not improve but aggravates the conflict. For example, the more information enemies at war have about each other, the more harm they can inflict on each other.

   (Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, hardcover, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., pp.39-40)

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Mark Stefik and Barbara Stefik, Breakthrough, 2004            [ ]

p.87
John Reidl
He believes that education should inspire students, and that mostly, it does not:
  ... [...] ...2
  We have a weekly scheduled meetings. The meetings are the nag factor. Students are always thinking that they should have produced something because they are going to have to meet with me and I'll look grouchy if they didn't. But in those meetings it's mostly just them coming in and talking to me about what they worked on, what they have had successes with, or what stumbling blocks that they have bumped into. We spend most of our time talking about those stumbling blocks. If they have strategies to overcome them, then that's great. If they don't, I will see if I can suggest someone to talk to, a paper to read, or a direction to go.
  ... [...] ...2

p.88
John Reidl
They have read a bunch of papers, but producing one is different from reading one.

p.97
Mark Stefik
  At about the time I began graduate school, I remember taking a walk with Joshua Lederberg. I had asked him about the “war on cancer” that the National Institutes of Health was starting to fund He told me that cancer was very complicated and had many different kinds of causes. This was not the kind of problem──like say “going to the moon”──that was likely to yield to a crash program. There wasn't a single place where the research could be focused to get the desired results. He thought that the program might be good politics, but it was badly thought out.
  On other occasions, we talked about how science competes for funds with other economics needs. For example, money is always needed for defense, for social programs, and so on. A scientist needs to deeply understand why research deserves a share of the investment. Advances in science and technology are exactly the things that change the way the world works. Potentially, they can make tomorrow better than today. Few other investments can do that. I think that researchers need to understand this in their bones, and be ready to make these kinds of arguments at various point in their careers.

p.98
   Apprentices learn what the life of research is about. Students have to know deeply why research and innovation matters──both to society at large and to particular businesses and funding organizations. In the course of a career, scientists will be called on to defend or explain why the work is important. what kinds of arguments have been made before? Which of these have proved right? Your reputation as a scientist will depend on good judgments about what kinds of results research will lead to. You need to know what is important, what is trivial, and when a crash program can work. Dealing with these issues is part of the responsibility in a life of science and technology.

   (Stefik, Mark., Breakthrough : stories and strategies of radical innovation / Mark Stefik and Barbara Stefik., 1. technological innovation., 2. inventions., 2004, ) 

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The Rational Manager
A Systematic Approach to Problem Solving and Decision Making

Charles H. KEPNER
Benjamin B. TREGOE

pp.149-154
Case of the Stultified Staff Meetings
     Let us now turn to the "Case of the Stultified Staff Meeting" and see how one group of managers is putting the concepts and procedures of problem analysis to work every single day. This example shows how problem analysis can become a continuous part of managerial thinking. This application took place in one division of a major company where the plant manager runs a twenty-four hour, seven day a week operation. For years this manager has been meeting with eight or nine of his key superintendents every weekday morning at 9 A.M. and sometimes on weekend. The average length of these meetings was two hours; they should have taken far less time. Everybody involved agreed on two points:
(1) the meeting were frustrating and time wasting, and
(2) none of the managers could get along without them.
One manager expressed the common complaint this way: "I sit there for two hours wishing I weren't there and thinking about all the things I have to get done. What I'm really waiting for are the two or three minutes of information that I have to have in order to stay out of trouble in my operation."
     After the plant manager had been trained in systematic problem analysis, he took a long hard look at this meeting system and identified the problem as "too much time spent in meetings." He recognized that this problem could be broken into three parts, because the daily meeting performed three separate functions:
(1) it was used to pass on general information;
(2) it was used to report the current status of operation in each department;
(3) and it was used to report and discuss particular problem such as the breakdown of equipment, unsatisfactory performance of men or groups, faulty manufacturing process, etc. 
Analyzing each separately, he saw no loss of time in the first function, since very little time was normally devoted to passing out general information. He saw the second function (reporting on current status of operations) was redundant, and no time should be spent on this; he decided to eliminate this function entirely since such information was already available on a wall chart, which department head could consult as they chose. Eliminating this function alone cut about twenty-five minutes off the average meeting time.
     Now the plant manager concentrated on the third function of the staff meetings. He recognized his real problem was "too much time spent on reporting and discussing the hot problems in the plant."  Too many problems, he realized, were being mixed together and talked about simultaneously, and there was too much complex analysis of a particular problem by two or three managers while the others sat around and waited. Then he recognized that there was a great deal of time spent in talking about possible causes and very little, if any, time devoted to specifying what the problems actually were. The plant manager was satisfied he had spotted the major cause of his lost-time problem, and he promptly made a decision. He established a new ground rule whereby the daily meeting would, henceforth, be used only to identify problem clearly, to set priorities, and to make assignments for working on specific prob lems or for reporting on problems previously assigned. Analysis of problems was strictly forbidden during the meeting.
     Under this new rule, the meeting procedure calls for each superintendents to report the major current problems and potential problems in his area, and to identify each as to whether its cause is known or unknown. Each man also states whatever interim or corrective action may have already been taken on each problem. If the plant manager or his assistant or the division manager, who also lead these meetings, think that more details on a problem are needed, the superintendent involved will be asked to come into the plant manager's office after the meeting. A problem may be dropped with no further discussion if a superintendent says that the cause of a problem is known and corrective action has been taken. But the plant manager, his assistant, and the division manager have all had training in systematic problem analysis, and they usually question the superintendents closely about "known" causes to find out to what extent the problem has been analyzed. If the cause of the problem is conceded to be unknown, the analysis of it is assigned and a report-back date is set. Sometimes the plant manager will set the priority at once by saying, "Let's take care of this immediately."
     To help keep track of the problems and actions a chart was devised with room for only ten problems listed according to priorities. A sample of this chart appears in Figure 21. If more than ten problems are accumulated, those with the lowest priority are dropped from the list. ([ All problems are recorded in the problem log book (database).  To deal with daily problems,  when problem shows up someone write it on a post-it note and put it on the community board. ]) The chart provides information under seven headings:
(1) the problem,
(2) responsibility, 
(3) date recognized,
(4) interim action,
(5) cause, 
(6) corrective action, and
(7) follow-up.
This daily staff meeting procedure has succeeded in cutting as much as an hour and a half from the time such meetings formerly consumed. The managers have, on the chart before them, the record of the priorities and the assignments and actions to be taken, and thus they are not bothered with any elaborate system for handling these things. In addition, this procedure enables these managers to make visible to themselves and the different things they may do in handling problems. 
     They can keep separate the jobs of recognizing problems, specifying them, and finding cause; they see the differences between a general discussion of problems, and the analysis of problems; they can separate problems whose cause is known from problems whose cause is unknown; they are aware of the different purpose of interim action and corrective action. 
     In short, these daily staff meetings now tend to impress on these managers the usefulness of building systematic problem analysis concepts and procedures into their own everyday thinking.

    (The Rational Manager : A Systematic Approach to Problem Solving and Decision Making, Charles H. KEPNER, Benjamin B. TREGOE, © 1965, pp.149-154)

            [175-176]
             1. Interim action:    buys the manager time for finding the cause of a problem.
             2. Adaptive action:   lets the manager live with the tolerable effects of a problem with an ineradicable cause.
             3. Corrective action: gets rid of the known cause of a problem.
            [Potential Problem, pages 224-226]
             4. Preventive action: removes the possible cause of a problem, or reduces its probability
             5. Contingency action: provides stand-by arrangements to offset or minimize the effects of a serious potential problem.
          (The Rational Manager : A Systematic Approach to Problem Solving and Decision Making, © 1965, Charles H. KEPNER and Benjamin B. TREGOE, McGraw-Hill Book, pp.175-176, pp.132-133, pp.224-226) 


p.175
     1. Interim action:    buys the manager time for finding the cause of a problem.
     2. Adaptive action:   lets the manager live with the tolerable effects of a problem with an ineradicable cause.
     3. Corrective action: gets rid of the known cause of a problem.
    If a manager does not recognize the differences between these three kinds of action, he is likely to find himself in trouble.  A lot of managers, for example, often confuse interim action with corrective action, and confidently tell themselves, "Well, we've done something, and the problem has gone away. We won't have to worry about that again."  But when the old problem reappears the manager will be much worse off than before.  He will have lost a great deal of time, wasted resources, and confused the issue.  Besides, by then others will know he didn't handle the problem right in the first place.
    Each of the three possible actions on a current problem serves its own purposes and each is quite different.  Let us consider each of them more specifically:  

     © 1965 by Charles H. KEPNER and Benjamin B. TREGOE

     (The Rational Manager : A Systematic Approach to Problem Solving and Decision Making, Charles H. KEPNER, Benjamin B. TREGOE, © 1965, p.175)


    An advantage does not "cancel-out" dis-advantage, the disadvantage remain until 'corrective action' (gets rid of the known cause of a problem) are taken.

approach

p.202, p.203
Note that in choosing house A the manager knew why and on what grounds he was doing so.  He did not take the "cancel-out" approach used by some managers in decision making.  In this approach, ([in this approach]) the assumption is that an advantage cancels out a disadvantage so that things even up.  This is not so.

([pause])
If there is a disadvantage attached to an alternative, finding an advantage does not get rid of it.  Once the decision is made, the disadvantage will have to be lived with until it is removed by corrective action of some sort.

([pause])
The only safe way to deal with disadvantages in decision making is to recognize them and to keep them visible before one throughout the process.  A final decision or course of action can then be made in full knowledge of the disadvantage rather than by glossing over defects and hiding them.

([pause])
Having all the assessments that enter into a decision visibly set forth is a major advantage in itself.  For one may readily go back to reexamine the judgements made and consider corrective actions that can be taken to improve an already good alternative.

     © 1965 by Charles H. KEPNER and Benjamin B. TREGOE

     (The Rational Manager : A Systematic Approach to Problem Solving and Decision Making, Charles H. KEPNER, Benjamin B. TREGOE, © 1965, p.202, p.203)

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[p.229]
<the follow itemized list is presented in a round circle evenly spaced out>
 1.  Number of people making comments
 2.  Variety of ideas suggested
 3.  My fear of embarassment
 4.  Amount of horsing around in group.
 5.  Number of ideas I think of
 6.  My willingness to volunteer a comment
 7.  Quality of ideas suggested
 8.  My self-consciousness
 9.  My understanding of material that is presented
10.  My feelings of boredom.
11.  Amount of group concentration on problem
12.  My irritation at speaker   

<somewhat like the following>
          1.   2.

      12.          3.

   11.                4.

     10.              5.

       9.          6.
   
          8.    7.

FIGURE 4.16: Diagram for an exercise for the reader to analyze the events of a discussion or meeting; used by Weick to motivate a discussion of positive and negative feedback.  Source: Weick (1979, p. 70).
     Weick, Karl (1969/1979).  The Social Psychology of Organizing (New York: Addison-Wesley). 
       *  (Richardson, George P., Feedback thought in social science and systems theory, copyright © 1991 by the University of Pennsylvania Press)
(Feedback thought in social science and systems theory / George P. Richardson (1991), 1. social science--methodology., 2. feedback control systems., p.229)

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George M. Prince, The practice of creativity, 1970            [ ]

p.3
   When we began our research, we originally thought of the group as a mean of making the creative process visible so we would examine it; the meeting itself, the way people worked together, grew in importance in our concerns until it more than equaled the procedures for developing ideas. Because of what we heard and saw happening, we have had to question many basic assumptions about meetings and, in particular, meeting leadership. Many observations surprised us; their sum strongly suggests that the traditional problem-solving meeting is a blunt instrument, not an incisive one.
    One of the first handicaps is that meetings are often used casually so that either there is only a vague notion about the objective or the objectives are mixed. The chairman may want to give information, get ideas, and see how members react to some ideas of his own. None of these objectives may be wrong, but without precise knowledge of what is expected of them, members easily get confused. An agenda alone does not solve this problem.
   Second, meetings are frequently used to solve problems, to plan, and to help make decisions. Creativity is a vital component because it develops alternatives, enriches possibilities, and imagines consequences. There is evidence, however, that chair[person] unwittingly discourage creativity and free speculation.
   Third, leaders use their power unwisely. The leader is often the senior member or boss and has influence that transcends his importance in the meeting. It is accepted practice for him to use this power and for other members to play to it. Thus the leader's prejudices can get in the way of open proposals of alternatives.
   Fourth, common hinderance is antagoism toward ideas. 

p.4 

pp.4-5
   We find it useful to assume that every participant unconsciously perceives a meeting as a competition between himself and everyone else. The rules of competition apply: if someone else wins, he will lose. To make life even more hazardous he brings with him into the meeting a delicate image of himself. Any disparagement or put-down will damage this image. When this happens (given the competition, it is very likely), his total attention and skills are devoted to repairing and refurbishing his image, preferably at the expense of his rival. 

p.5
   A good leader with this model in mind sets top priority on the defense of each person's image of himself. He knows that each member cherishes his own individuality above any problem to be solved. If this quality is threatened, the member not only stop cooperating, he becomes dangerous to the purposes of the meeting. To prevent this the leader repeatedly demonstrates that in this meeting no images will be damaged, no one is going to lose. 

p.6
   <skip the first two sentences of this paragraph> Very few leaders of traditional meetings are able consistently to sort out helpful responses from damaging ones. Further, it seems that most of the time the leader (and the manager) does not specifically know what his role should be. He has general goal: to get things done. He assumes that the present structure of chair[person], agenda, and guided (or perhaps free-wheeling) discussion is effective. These assumptions go unexamined because things DO get done, goals ARE accomplished. But our observations suggest that an uninformed meeting leader wastes his own and his group's talent by allowing destructive behaviour to subvert and blur the meeting's focus. Such waste is expensive. Boredom and impatience are familiar symptoms; less obvious to the unawakened eye are hostility and rivalry. 

p.7
   <skip the first sentence of the first paragraph of page 7> Relieved of the burden of self-protection, a member can wholeheartedly devote himself to speculating, imagining, and supporting and considerating far-fetched notions--in short, producing the rich variations out of which fresh alternatives and exciting decisions are made. 
   This may suggest permissiveness and acceptance of irresponsible ideas in hope of culling a good one. However, the meeting (or managing) problem cannot finally be solved simply by permissiveness, politeness, or irresponsiblity; each of these qualities is appropriate and valuable only if properly used. By themselves they are not the answer.

p.7
   We are here particularly concerned with helping the leader increase his capability of bringing out the best from the members of his group and with helping the individual group member improve his capacity to contribute. We will emphasize the leader's responsibilities, but with the understanding that the Synectics approach is for the whole group to use and cultivate. Recognizing what the leader is trying to do is the foundation of successful participation by each member of the group. 

p.7
   <skip first sentence of the last paragraph of page 7> Our research has greatly changed my own view of creativity. I used to think of it as an extraordinary act that produced something new and useful to mankind. I now see it as less cosmic and more common, an everyday affair, a mode of thought and action that is intimately associated with learning and changing not only oneself but one's situation. Though less cosmic, creative behaviour matters a little more than anything else, for it is consistent with the deepest purposes of life: to develop and use one's capacities for compassionate accomplishment. An experience will illustrate my thought. 

   ( The practice of creativity : a manual for dynamic group problem solving, by George M. Prince, Harper & Row, publishers, 1970, )

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FIVE FALLACIES IN BRAINSTORMING
Vincent Nolan

     Over the last 30 years, I have seen Brainstorming move from a rather specialised activity, practised in advertising agencies and a few other environments, into more general use as a management technique. Or at least the word brainstorming has; the practice is another matter

     Brainstorming has become a generic term for any attempt to generate new ideas in an environment of suspending judgement. It tends to include elements of other techniques, such as de Bono’s lateral thinking and Synectics (a much more powerful set of techniques). The semantic confusion may not matter (except to specialists like me!); however, what is actually done in the name of brainstorming often falls far short of the standards established by its founder and developer (Alex Osborne and Sidney Parnes)

From my observation of a large number of brainstorming sessions, I have identified five underlying fallacies that commonly undermine its effectiveness. They are: 

   1. Suspending Judgement is Easy

   2. You Have to Define the Problem Correctly
  
   3. You need to Understand the Problem before you can Contribute Ideas 

   4. The Purpose of Brainstorming is to Generate Instant New Solutions

   5. After Brainstorming you Screen the Ideas Into Good/Bad - or 
      Cluster Them in Groups of Similar Ideas 

Each of these is examined below

  1. Suspending Judgement is Easy 

     It sounds easy, but making judgements (in the form of decisions) is such an integral part of everyday life that it is not easy to get out of the habit even temporarily. With a good facilitator acting as a referee, it is relatively easy to prevent public judgements and that is certainly beneficial in providing a relatively safe environment in which participants can offer ideas without fear of criticism

     However, participants do not suspend judgement internally – they continue to think and listen judgementally. If, at the end of a period of brainstorming ideas, you ask the group “Did anyone have any other ideas which were too impractical/illegal/immoral or just plain crazy to put forward, almost invariably someone will respond hesitantly “Well I thought of…”. Others will quickly follow, starting of a new round of ideas, which will have more originality than the first round. Similarly, if idea stimulation techniques such as Synectics excursions are introduced, a fresh batch of new ideas will emerge People tend to assume that they should only offer sensible ideas, but these are unlikely to be new They are known to be sensible because they have been tried before and therefore cannot be new! As Einstein says “if at first an idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it”

     Of course there may be situations where a known solution can be transferred from one member of a group who knows it to another who does not and this can be useful, but it is more in the realm of advising than idea generation

  2. You Have to Define the Problem Correctly

     This is true when tackling a closed-ended problem (a ‘deviation from the norm’ as Kepner and Tregoe describe it) to which there is a known solution. If the car will not start and you want to get it going, you need to find out whether the problem is lack of fuel, faulty connections, flat battery, dirty spark plugs, etc. Once the problem has been identified, the solution is usually obvious

     However, in open-ended situations, where the objective is to create a new solution, it is inappropriate to seek to identify a correct definition (which is essentially a judgmental activity, in conflict with the suspending judgement principle of brainstorming). Instead, it makes sense to brainstorm alternative views of what the problem might be and generate ideas to solve any or all of them

     De Bono’s story of the problem of waiting times in the lobby of a multi-storey office block is a case in point. Engineers were trying to speed up the lifts or re-program them to increase the throughput. After a large mirror was installed on one wall, complaints about waiting times ceased. With hindsight, it could be said that the real problem was not the waiting time but the boredom, which was relieved by the mirror! But that could not be known in advance of the experiment

  3. You need to Understand the Problem before you can Contribute Ideas 

     The perceived need to understand the problem stems from the urge only to contribute ‘good’ ideas. It is another facet of the tendency to make internal judgements and filter out any ideas which might attract criticism or ridicule

     However, the whole purpose of suspending judgement is to open up the topic to all ideas – by definition, there are no good or bad ideas in an idea generation session run under brainstorming conditions. An approximate understanding of the problem is all that is needed to trigger approximately relevant ideas, all of which have the potential to open up new lines of thought, which may develop, ultimately into feasible, attractive and new solutions. 

     The initial briefing on the problem is intended to trigger ideas, not to bring the participants to the same understanding as that of the problem owner. If they see the problem in the same way, they are less likely to produce ideas that are new to the problem owner – a different perspective is an asset not to be wasted

     The attempt to understand the problem ‘correctly’ usually takes the form of a series of questions to the problem owner. Like any interrogation, it can become uncomfortable for the person on the receiving end of the questions (even though they may be intended helpfully). The questions often mask ideas, as participants try to protect themselves from potential criticism or rejection of their ideas, by checking in advance that the idea is feasible

  4. The Purpose of Brainstorming is to Generate Instant New Solutions

     New solutions are the ultimate objective of brainstorming. Instant new solutions can happen, but they are very rare – like a hole-in-one in golf. Sometimes, as noted above there can be a transfer of a known solution from one person to who knows it to another who does not, but that should not require a brainstorming session

     The assumption that instant new solutions are required has the effect of restricting the flow of ideas – participants are reluctant to voice any idea unless they feel it might be a solution

     New solutions are usually ‘grown’ from a starting idea that is no more like the finished article than a caterpillar looks like a butterfly, or a seed looks like a plant


  5. After Brainstorming you Screen the Ideas Into Good/Bad - or 
     Cluster Them in Groups of Similar Ideas 

     This practice is another facet of the belief that it is possible to brainstorm instant new solutions. Though possible, it is very unlikely. So the screening process is likely to yield a short-list of good ideas, which turn out not to be new. It is hardly surprising, since the ‘good’ ideas are those that are known to work – by definition, not new! And the end result is disappointment with brainstorming: “we generated all those ideas and at the end of the day we didn’t get anything new”

     The alternative is to view the brainstormed ideas not as end points but as starting points for the exploration of new avenues (they are called Springboards in Synectics and it is a good metaphor for a taking-off point). The selection of which avenues to explore is not a logical but an intuitive choice – there is no way of knowing in advance where a new avenue will lead to (because it is new and therefore there is no past data to work with)

     So the criteria for selection are newness and appeal – if it feels good, pursue it. Bill Gordon, co-founder of Synectics, calls it the ‘hedonic response’, that pleasurable feeling of “I think I might be on to something here”. The choice is followed by the Synectics process of Idea Development, in which ideas are evaluated constructively in terms of what is attractive about them and how they need to be improved or replaced to move them towards a solution.  (A full description is given in the Innovators Handbook, pp. 60-67)   

The practice of clustering ideas into groups of similar ideas (often using post-it notes) is similarly an attempt to introduce logic and order into what is essentially an intuitive and possibly disorderly process. It has the further disadvantage of burying potentially news ideas in a generalised cluster of ideas in the same area (‘new wine in old bottles’). Sometimes newness is achieved by breaking down existing categories

One objective of clustering is to ensure that no ideas are lost. My experience is that if you follow the intuitive route, most of the ideas (or useful elements of them) will be picked up anyway in an organic, not mechanical process. And at the end of a session, you can always go back over the initial ideas to check that nothing important has been overlooked 


Vincent Nolan

Vincent Nolan is the retired Chairman of Synectics Ltd. (now Synectics Europe) 

Copyright © Vincent Nolan, 2004

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Clifton Leaf, The truth in small doses : why we're losing the war on cancer ── and how to win it, 2013 

p.93
The plan was simply to do morphological studies──that is, to observe the way leukemic white blood cells appeared under the microscope.  That meant getting samples of patient blood (often drawn hours earlier at a hospital across town), separating the leukocytes from the masses of red blood cells, carefully drying the cells of interest onto glass slides, and staining them with dyes that highlighted various cell structures.  The next steps were to watch and wait and watch some more to see if anything interesting popped up.
p.93
   One day something did. 
p.93
   After staining his cultured cells, he rinsed off the slides in tap water.  Later, when he looked at the strip of glass under microscope, he found dividing cells with visible chromosomes──strands so clear he could count them.  The tap water had the effect of diluting the salt content in the culture solution, causing the DNA innards of the cell nuclei to swell.  The chromosomes were still a jumble of tiny, bent hash marks and even tinier blotches, but they weren't clumped together.  The individual strands were distinct.  Nowell had never seen anything like it.  
‘’“”──
pp.93-94
p.93
   Without knowing it, he was reliving the accidental discovery made seven (7) years earlier in the lab of the cell biologist T. C. Hsu. 
pp.93-94
One morning, Hsu had likewise found himself staring at human chromosomes that were “suddenly beautiful”, as he put it.  Doggedly, he had retraced the steps leading up to the miracle:  Someone, presumeably a lab technician, had diluted a rinsing solution used to pretreat slides with distilled water, lowering the concentration of salt.  With less salt in the rinse, the cells on the slide sucked up more water, causing the chromatin fibers in the nucleus to bloat.  The unknown assistant never owned up to the mistake.  Hsu went on to publish the new “hypotonic” technique in the Journal of Heredity, ushering in a new golden era in human cytogenetics, as the study of chromosomes began to be called. 
p.94
   If Nowell had known the lesson of Hsu, however, he had forgotten it.  While his reaction to the clarity of the chromosomes was the same as his predecessor's ──“Beautiful!”──there was one problem:  Nowell wasn't a cytogeneticist. 

   (Clifton Leaf, The truth in small doses : why we're losing the war on cancer ── and how to win it, 2013, ) 

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M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine, 2001                [ ]

p.127
Miller, George A.
pp.128-133
p.128
And as these young researchers applied the theory to more and more aspects of human perception, they found more and more evidence for the same kind of “channel capacity” that Miller had found in the perception of words. 

p.128
But as the number of alternatives increased, the subjects inevitably began to falter and make mistakes at the level of roughly seven choices, or slightly less than three bits of information.*

* Strickly speaking, this limit applies only to high-level, conscious perception. Unconscious neural processes such as perception handle vastly more information, with the retina alone taking in visual information at a rate measured in billions of bits per second. 

p.129
But the number turned up so consistently that in 1956, when Miller reviewed the evidence for human information-processing limits, he would entitle his article, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two”--and begin it with one of the most memorable laments in the scientific literature: “My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For 7 years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assulted me from the pages of our most public journals.... There is, to quote a famous senator [the rabidly anti-Communist Joseph McCarthy], a design behind [the persistence of this number], some pattern governing its appearances.”20 

p.129
   The type of memory in question was “short-term” or “working” memory, the mental scratch pad where we keep the images and concepts that we're focusing on at any given moment. As the name suggests, says Miller, the contents of working memory are volatile in the extreme: look up a telephone number, for example, and your memory of it evaporates almost as soon as you've finished dialing (if not before). But much more interesting for his purposes, he says, was that the capacity of working memory is very limited: like the perceptual parts of the brain, it can handle no more than about seven pieces of data at a time.*  That's why a seven-digit telephone number is easy enough to remember, while longer sequences are much harder. 

* The brain also has a totally separate, long-term memory, which is what we usually mean by the word memory. This type of storage is effectively infinite in capacity, easily capable of holding the experiences of a lifetime and retrieving any one of them in an instant. The brain mechanisms underlying these two forms of memory are still something of a mystery and are among the most active research areas in modern neoroscience.  

p.129
   Miller had tacitly assumed that this was just another example of the magical number 7. As he investigated, however, he quickly verified what Hayes had found--namely, that what limits the capacity of short-term memory is not just the AMOUNT  of information but the KIND  of information. For example if you try to remember a list of random words, you do indeed begin to falter at about 7. But if those words form a meaningful sentence, then you can repeat them verbatim out to about 16 words. “So information wasn't a constant in memory”, says Miller. “Instead, we cooked up this notion that the amount of information you can hold is measured in ‘chunks’,” or meaningful clusters of items that you can remember as units. That's why sentences are easier to remember than words listed at random: you can remember them as phrases, or chunks of meaning. 

pp.129-130
And it's why a 12-digit sequence such as 149217761066 is very difficult to remember until you see it as three famous dates--1492 + 1776 + 1066--at which point it suddenly becomes trivial.   

p.130
... led to an even deeper confirmation of the phenomenon: the magical number was 7, all right, but seven chunks, not just seven items. 

p.130
Not only did the data prove the existence of mental states--namely, concepts in memory--but they showed that these mental states have STRUCTURE.  Indeed, says, Miller, chunking implied that our minds are capable of organizing whole hierarchies of data: each chunk in short-term memory can hold several pieces of information and perhaps several other chunks; these in turn can point to yet more information and yet more chunks, and so on. 

p.130
   Still, admits Miller, for all of that, he retained a funny blind spot: he'd been so intent on measuring information flow that it hadn't yet occurred to him to think about information processing--the notion that perception, problem solving, memory retrieval, and every other mental function could be understood as types of computation. 

   (Waldrop, M. Mitchell.; The dream machine : J. C. R. Licklider and the revolution that made computing personal / M. Mitchell Waldrop., 1. Licklider, J. C. R., 2. microcomputers--history, 2001,   ) 

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Chistopher R. Hill, Outpost, 2014                 [ ] 

p.148
    On January 29, the Contact Group foreign ministers summoned representatives of Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians to attend peace negotiations at Rambouillet, France, a château  just outside Paris, and to appear by February 6.  The Contact Group set the time parameter at seven days, with an option to extend for another week.  "Where did that [the time frame] come from?" I asked Phil Reeker, recalling that at Dayton we never set a time frame.  "They have to know how much food to order," he responded.

 (Outpost, a memoir by chistopher r. hill, copyright © 2014, simon & schuster )



M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine, 2001            [ ]
p.353
APRA-style communication
..., the challenge had been to maintain a sense of common purpose among research groups scattered across a continent. 
principal investigators' meeting (PI) 
graduate-student conferences

p.353
And his solution now, at PARC, was to do the same thing, but more frequently: once a week the computer group would assemble, someone would talk about his work for an hour or so, and then the others would have at him. Taylor considered these meetings so important, in fact, that he made them mandatory, the one thing that CSL members actually HAD to do. Visitors from the other labs were welcome, but for CSL, Tuesdays at 11:00 A.M. were sacrosanct. 

p.353
He even let the speakers set the rules for how each meeting would proceed, much as a card dealer could call the game in Las Vegas; thus their nickname, Dealer Meetings. And when the arguments got heated, which they often did, the minister's son would do his best to convert a “class one” disagreement--one in which the combatants were simply yelling at each other--into a “class two” disgreement, in which each side could explain the other side's position to the other side's satisfaction. You don't have to BELIEVE the other guy, he would tell them. You just have to give a fair account of what he's saying. And it worked. 

pp.353-354
As one CSL member later explained it, Taylor's class one/class two exercise was amazingly effective at clarifying unspoken assumptions and ferreting out facts that one person knew and another didn't. 

p.354
“So by the time you get done”, he said, “you all know the same set of things, and you end up concluding the same thing.”4  
p.481
4. Quoted in Smith and Alexander, Fumbling the Future, 79. 
5. Quoted in Dennis Sasha and Cathy Lazere, Out of Their Mind: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientist (New York: Copernicus, 1995), 39. 

   (Waldrop, M. Mitchell.; The dream machine : J. C. R. Licklider and the revolution that made computing personal / M. Mitchell Waldrop., 1. Licklider, J. C. R., 2. microcomputers--history, 2001,   ) 



Robert Greene, The 48 laws of power (a Joost Elffers book), 1998
p.387
When you are dealing with the intractable willpower of other people, direct communication often only heightens their resistance. 

p.387
   This happens most clearly when you complain about people's behavior, particuarly in sensitive areas such as their lovemaking. You will effect a far more lasting change if, like Dr. Erickson, you construct an analogy, a symbolic mirror of the situation, and guide the other through it. As Christ himself understood, talking in parables is often the best way to teach a lesson, for it allows people to realize the truth on their own. 

   (The 48 laws of power, Robert Greene (a Joost Elffers book), 1998, )

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Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., Who says elephants can't dance?, 2002  [ ]

p.77
    ...  The sine qua non [Latin, without which not; an essential condition; indispensable thing; absolute prerequisite] of any successful corporate transformation is public acknowledgment of the existence of a crisis.  If employees do not believe a crisis exists, they will not make the sacrifices that are necessary to change.  Nobody likes change.  Whether you are a senior executive or an entry-level employee, change represents uncertainty and, potentially, pain.
    So there must be a crisis, and it is the job of the CEO to define and communicate that crisis, its magnitude, it severity, and its impact.  Just as important, the CEO must also be able to communicate how to end the crisis——the new strategy, the new company model, the new culture.
    All of this takes enormous commitment from the CEO to communicate, communicate, and communicate some more.  No institutional transformation takes place, I believe, without a multi-year commitment by the CEO to put himself or herself constantly in front of employees and speak in plain, simple, compelling language that drives conviction and action throughout the organization.

p.187
Stepping up to the challenge

    Frankly, if I could have chosen not to tackle the IBM culture head-on, I probably wouldn't have.  For one thing, my bias coming in was toward strategy, analysis, and measurement.  I'd already been successful with those, and like anyone, I was inclined to stick with what had worked for me earlier in my career.  Once I found a handful of smart people, I knew we could take a fresh look at the business and make good strategic calls or invest in new businesses or get the cost structure in shape.
    In comparison, changing the attitude and behaviour of hundreds of thousands of people is very, very hard to accomplish.  Business schools don't teach you how to do it.  You can't lead the revolution from the splendid isolation of corporate headquarters.  You can't simply give a couple speeches or write a new credo for the company and declare that the new culture had take hold.  You can't mandate it, can't engineer it.
    What you CAN do is create the conditions for transformation.  You can provide incentives.  You can define the marketplace realities and goals.  But then you have to trust.  In fact, in the end, management doesn't change culture.  Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.

p.188
    It was counter-intuitive, centered around social cues and emotion rather than reason.
    Tough as that was, we had to suck it up and take on the task of changing the culture, given what was at stake.  I knew it would take at least five [5]  years. (In that I underestimated.)  And I knew the leader of the revolution had to be ME——I had to commit to thousands of hours of personal activity to pull off the change.  I would have to be up-front and outspoken about what I was doing.  I needed to get my leadership team to join me.  We all had to talk openly and directly about culture, behaviour, and beliefs——we would not be subtle.

p.197
HARD STOP——A time at which a meeting must end no matter what (I grew to like this expression and use it to this day.);——Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., 2002, Who says elephants can't dance?, p.197.


p.16
    Tom Murphy, who tended to let Burke do most of the talk in our previous meetings, spoke up more frequently this time.  Murph, as he is called by his friends, was quite persuasive in arguing that my track record as a change agent (his term) was exactly that IBM needed and that he believed there was a reasonable chance that, with the right leadership, the company could be saved.  He reiterated what I'd heard from Burke, and even Paul Rizzo.  The company didn't lack for smart, talented people.  Its problems weren't fundamentally technical in nature.  It had file drawers full of winning strategies.  Yet, the company was frozen in place.  What it needed was someone to grab hold of it and shake it into action.  The point Murphy came back to again and again was that the challenge for the next leader would begin with driving the kind of strategic and cultural change that had characterized a lot of what I'd done at American Express and RJR.

p.87
    Although we implemented the new industry structure in mid-1995, it was never fully accepted until at least 3 years later.  Regional heads clung to the old system, sometimes out of mutiny, but more often out of tradition.
    We needed to do a massive shift of resources, systems, and processes to make the new system work.  Building an organizational plan was easy.  It took three years of hard work to implement the plan, and implement it well. 

    (Gerstner, Louis V., copyright © 2002, HD9696.2.U64 I2545 2002, 004.'068——dc21)
(Who says elephants can't dance? : inside IBM's historic turnaround / Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., 1. international business machines corporation——management, 2. international business machines corporation——history, 3. computer industry——united states——history, 4. electronic office machine industry——united states——history, 5. corporate turnarounds——united states——case studies, )


Thomas L. Friedman, The world is flat, 2005, 2006 
p.444
“HP bags $150 million India bank contract.” The story on Computerworld.com (February 25, 2004) ...
Natarajan Sundaram, head of marketing for HP Services India

p.495   
What in the world does Hewlett-Packard know about running the backroom systems of an Indian bank?

p.445   87 ――> 5
   Still, when the Bank of India decides to outsource its back room to an American-owned computer company, well, that just seemed too weird for words.
Maureen Conway, HP's vice president of emerging market solution

p.446   accounts payable and receivable
HP, which does business in 178 countries, used to handle all its accounts payable and receivable for each individual country in that country. It was totally chopped up. Just in the last couple of years, HP created 3 transaction-processing hubs ―― in Bangalore, Barcelona, and Guadalajara ―― with uniform standards and special work flow software that allowed HP offices in all 178 countries to process all billing functions through these three hubs.
   Seeing the reaction of its customers to its own internal operations, HP said one day, “Hey, why don't we commercialize this?” Said Conway, “That became the nucleus of our business process outsourcing service ... We were doing our own chest X-rays and discovered we had assets that other people cared about, and that is a business.”  

     (Friedman, Thomas L., The world is flat : a brief history of the 21st century / Thomas L. Friedman -- 1st rev. and expanded ed., 1. diffusion of innovations, 2. information society, 3. globalization--economic aspects, 4. globalization--social aspects, 2005, 2006, 303.4833, )

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Pankaj Ghemawat: Actually, the world isn't flat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPNn880KWfU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPNn880KWfU
Published on Oct 22, 2012
17:03
It may seem that we're living in a borderless world where ideas, goods and people flow freely from nation to nation. We're not even close, says Pankaj Ghemawat. With great data (and an eye-opening survey), he argues that there's a delta between perception and reality in a world that's maybe not so hyperconnected after all.
http://www.ted.com/talks/pankaj_ghemawat_actually_the_world_isn_t_flat/transcript?language=en

Pankaj Ghemawat
Ghemawat - "Regional strategies for global leadership"
    Oil companies, for example, consider the market for gasoline in the United States to consist of five distinct regions.
"The Forgotten Strategy" (HBR November 2003)
CAGE framework, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAGE_Distance_Framework
"Distance still matters: the hard reality of global expansion" (HBR September 2001)
Cultural, Administrative, Geographic and Economic (CAGE)
http://www.ghemawat.com/cage/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pankaj_Ghemawat
    His view contrasts significantly with many other intellectuals such as Thomas L. Friedman. In a 2007 Foreign Policy magazine article, Ghemawat argued that 90 percent of the world's phone calls, Web traffic, and investments are local, suggesting that Friedman grossly exaggerated the significance of the trends he described in The World is Flat: "Despite talk of a new, wired world where information, ideas, money, and people can move around the planet faster than ever before, just a fraction of what we consider globalization actually exists".[1]
    1.     Ghemawat, Pankaj (1 March 2007). "Why the World Isn't Flat". foreignpolicy.com. Foreign Policy. Retrieved 15 October 2014.
        http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/14/why-the-world-isnt-flat/
    Ghemawat argues that in a world that is neither truly global nor truly local, companies must find ways to manage differences and similarities within and across regions. In his book, Redefining Global Strategies, he explains how firms can grow optimally through adaptation (adjusting to differences), aggregation (combining together differences) and arbitrage (exploiting differences).

http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/14/why-the-world-isnt-flat/
    The champions of globalization are describing a world that doesn’t exist. It’s a fine strategy to sell books and even describe a potential environment that may someday exist. Because such episodes of mass delusion tend to be relatively short-lived even when they do achieve broad currency, one might simply be tempted to wait this one out as well. But the stakes are far too high for that. Governments that buy into the flat world are likely to pay too much attention to the "golden straitjacket" that Friedman emphasized in his earlier book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which is supposed to ensure that economics matters more and more and politics less and less. Buying into this version of an integrated world — or worse, using it as a basis for policymaking — is not only unproductive. It is dangerous. 

https://web.archive.org/web/20081201191332/http://www.strategy-business.com/press/16635507/08110
    Pankaj Ghemawat: ...  Even a little bit of diligence in looking at perfor-mance data can reveal major mis­interpretations of cases of apparent success — and failure.  ... [...] ...  Jean de La Fontaine’s aphorism “Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire” captures much of the utopian/dystopian quality of publications about the flat world, the death of distance, the end of history, and so forth. But a reality-based perspective on global strategy leads to different prescriptions. To which I should add, of course, that realism is not a recommendation to stay at home. Columbus managed to believe that the world was round but still took a pretty interesting trip — and discovered some unexpected things on the way!

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/faculty/pghemawat.html

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Bilderberg Meetings
Bilderberg Meetings, annual meetings attended by 120 to 150 political leaders, government officials, and experts from industry, finance, media, and academia in Europe and North America. The meetings, held in a different European or North American country each year, provide a private, informal environment in which those who influence national policies and international affairs in the West can get to know each other and discuss without commitment their common problems. After each conference a private report of the meeting is circulated only to past and present participants, and in the report speakers are identified only by their country. The meetings were initiated by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and took their name from the hotel at Oosterbeek, Netherlands, where the first conference was held in 1954. An international steering committee generally selects different delegates each year.


Grove 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Grove
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/bohemian_grove.html
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/bohemian_grove_spy.html
Who Rules America_ Social Cohesion & the Bohemian Grove.html
Social Cohesion & the Bohemian Grove
The Power Elite at Summer Camp
by G. William Domhoff, U.C. Santa Cruz


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How Do People Get New Ideas.txt
How Do People Get New Ideas?
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/531911/isaac-asimov-asks-how-do-people-get-new-ideas/
Isaac Asimov
October 20, 2014
Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?”

Note from Arthur Obermayer, friend of the author:

In 1959, I worked as a scientist at Allied Research Associates in Boston. The company was an MIT spinoff that originally focused on the effects of nuclear weapons on aircraft structures. The company received a contract with the acronym GLIPAR (Guide Line Identification Program for Antimissile Research) from the Advanced Research Projects Agency to elicit the most creative approaches possible for a ballistic missile defense system. The government recognized that no matter how much was spent on improving and expanding current technology, it would remain inadequate. They wanted us and a few other contractors to think “out of the box.”

When I first became involved in the project, I suggested that Isaac Asimov, who was a good friend of mine, would be an appropriate person to participate. He expressed his willingness and came to a few meetings. He eventually decided not to continue, because he did not want to have access to any secret classified information; it would limit his freedom of expression. Before he left, however, he wrote this essay on creativity as his single formal input. This essay was never published or used beyond our small group. When I recently rediscovered it while cleaning out some old files, I recognized that its contents are as broadly relevant today as when he wrote it. It describes not only the creative process and the nature of creative people but also the kind of environment that promotes creativity.

ON CREATIVITY

How do people get new ideas?
By Isaac Asimov

Presumably, the process of creativity, whatever it is, is essentially the same in all its branches and varieties, so that the evolution of a new art form, a new gadget, a new scientific principle, all involve common factors. We are most interested in the “creation” of a new scientific principle or a new application of an old one, but we can be general here.

One way of investigating the problem is to consider the great ideas of the past and see just how they were generated. Unfortunately, the method of generation is never clear even to the “generators” themselves.

But what if the same earth-shaking idea occurred to two men, simultaneously and independently? Perhaps, the common factors involved would be illuminating. Consider the theory of evolution by natural selection, independently created by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.

There is a great deal in common there. Both traveled to far places, observing strange species of plants and animals and the manner in which they varied from place to place. Both were keenly interested in finding an explanation for this, and both failed until each happened to read Malthus’s “Essay on Population.”

Both then saw how the notion of overpopulation and weeding out (which Malthus had applied to human beings) would fit into the doctrine of evolution by natural selection (if applied to species generally).

Obviously, then, what is needed is not only people with a good background in a particular field, but also people capable of making a connection between item 1 and item 2 which might not ordinarily seem connected.

Undoubtedly in the first half of the 19th century, a great many naturalists had studied the manner in which species were differentiated among themselves. A great many people had read Malthus. Perhaps some both studied species and read Malthus. But what you needed was someone who studied species, read Malthus, and had the ability to make a cross-connection.

That is the crucial point that is the rare characteristic that must be found. Once the cross-connection is made, it becomes obvious. Thomas H. Huxley is supposed to have exclaimed after reading On the Origin of Species, “How stupid of me not to have thought of this.” ([ ... ])

But why didn’t he think of it? The history of human thought would make it seem that there is difficulty in thinking of an idea even when all the facts are on the table. Making the cross-connection requires a certain daring. It must, for any cross-connection that does not require daring is performed at once by many and develops not as a “new idea,” but as a mere “corollary of an old idea.”

It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable. It seems the height of unreason to suppose the earth was round instead of flat, or that it moved instead of the sun, or that objects required a force to stop them when in motion, instead of a force to keep them moving, and so on.

A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.

Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)

Once you have the people you want, the next question is: Do you want to bring them together so that they may discuss the problem mutually, or should you inform each of the problem and allow them to work in isolation?

My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it. (The famous example of Kekule working out the structure of benzene in his sleep is well-known.)

The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.

Nevertheless, a meeting of such people may be desirable for reasons other than the act of creation itself.

No two people exactly duplicate each other’s mental stores of items. One person may know A and not B, another may know B and not A, and either knowing A and B, both may get the idea—though not necessarily at once or even soon.

Furthermore, the information may not only be of individual items A and B, but even of combinations such as A-B, which in themselves are not significant. However, if one person mentions the unusual combination of A-B and another the unusual combination A-C, it may well be that the combination A-B-C, which neither has thought of separately, may yield an answer.

It seems to me then that the purpose of cerebration sessions is not to think up new ideas but to educate the participants in facts and fact-combinations, in theories and vagrant thoughts.

But how to persuade creative people to do so? First and foremost, there must be ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness. The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome. The individuals must, therefore, have the feeling that the others won’t object.

If a single individual present is unsympathetic to the foolishness that would be bound to go on at such a session, the others would freeze. The unsympathetic individual may be a gold mine of information, but the harm he does will more than compensate for that. It seems necessary to me, then, that all people at a session be willing to sound foolish and listen to others sound foolish.

If a single individual present has a much greater reputation than the others, or is more articulate, or has a distinctly more commanding personality, he may well take over the conference and reduce the rest to little more than passive obedience. The individual may himself be extremely useful, but he might as well be put to work solo, for he is neutralizing the rest.

The optimum number of the group would probably not be very high. I should guess that no more than five would be wanted. A larger group might have a larger total supply of information, but there would be the tension of waiting to speak, which can be very frustrating. It would probably be better to have a number of sessions at which the people attending would vary, rather than one session including them all. (This would involve a certain repetition, but even repetition is not in itself undesirable. It is not what people say at these conferences, but what they inspire in each other later on.)

For best purposes, there should be a feeling of informality. Joviality, the use of first names, joking, relaxed kidding are, I think, of the essence—not in themselves, but because they encourage a willingness to be involved in the folly of creativeness. For this purpose I think a meeting in someone’s home or over a dinner table at some restaurant is perhaps more useful than one in a conference room.

Probably more inhibiting than anything else is a feeling of responsibility. The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues.

To feel guilty because one has not earned one’s salary because one has not had a great idea is the surest way, it seems to me, of making it certain that no great idea will come in the next time either.

Yet your company is conducting this cerebration program on government money. To think of congressmen or the general public hearing about scientists fooling around, boondoggling, telling dirty jokes, perhaps, at government expense, is to break into a cold sweat. In fact, the average scientist has enough public conscience not to want to feel he is doing this even if no one finds out.

I would suggest that members at a cerebration session be given sinecure tasks to do—short reports to write, or summaries of their conclusions, or brief answers to suggested problems—and be paid for that, the payment being the fee that would ordinarily be paid for the cerebration session. The cerebration session would then be officially unpaid-for and that, too, would allow considerable relaxation.

I do not think that cerebration sessions can be left unguided. There must be someone in charge who plays a role equivalent to that of a psychoanalyst. A psychoanalyst, as I understand it, by asking the right questions (and except for that interfering as little as possible), gets the patient himself to discuss his past life in such a way as to elicit new understanding of it in his own eyes.

In the same way, a session-arbiter will have to sit there, stirring up the animals, asking the shrewd question, making the necessary comment, bringing them gently back to the point. Since the arbiter will not know which question is shrewd, which comment necessary, and what the point is, his will not be an easy job.

As for “gadgets” designed to elicit creativity, I think these should arise out of the bull sessions themselves. If thoroughly relaxed, free of responsibility, discussing something of interest, and being by nature unconventional, the participants themselves will create devices to stimulate discussion.

Published with permission of Asimov Holdings.

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