Management

Just Unbelievable

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Barack Obama, a couple of days ago:

I try not to pat myself too much on the back, but this administration has done more in terms of the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration.

Barack Obama, quoted in a 2008 article:

I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.

Tries not to pat himself on the back too much? The man is in serious danger of breaking his arm from patting himself on the back so much.

The second comment is absolutely bizarre, even taken by itself–anyone who thinks that way is seriously dangerous in any management or leadership position, and should probably not even be allowed to operate power machinery. Put the two comments together and you have an individual whose mind functions in very strange ways indeed.

The assertion about Obama’s support of the security of Israel is of course so at variance to reality that it’s hard to imagine anyone taking it seriously except members of the hard core of Obamian true believers. Of whom there are unfortunately still quite a few.

Cleaning Up the Android Fragments

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Compare and contrast ads for Apple’s iOS/iPhone/iPad and ads for Google’s Android.

The Apple ads center visually on products themselves. The Apples ads just linger on showing the Apple hardware and software in use. Apple believes that the products speak for themselves and all Apple has to do is show the products in action. Basically, the ads just say, “Here’s our stuff. Isn’t it neat?” This works because the Apple products are finely tuned by a focused and discipline design, production and support system. There is a definitive iPhone, a definitive iPad and a definitive iOS operating system.

The Android ads by contrast don’t show the actual devices or Android itself in use. They are not Android specific at all. They might as well be snippets cut from some Sci-Fi movie or video game. The actual Android products are largely hidden. Instead of showing the hardware and software in action, they instead nearly try to associate the Android brand with cool and exciting Sci-Fi imagery.

Most Android ads, regardless of who makes them, fit this pattern. Android devices are seldom seen, when seen they seldom hold prolonged focus and are seldom seen in use.  Basically, the ads say, “Look at the girl in leather fighting robots! That’s cool right? So, Android must be cool too!”

The two different ad styles reveal the problem with fragmentation that Google faces in making Android a trusted, respected and widely adopted OS brand.

I post to StackOverflow, a site/community for answering technical programming questions. One of my highest rated answers addressed the question of which mobile OS a startup should target. Back in Oct 09  I observed:

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The Logic of Failure, redux

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Dietrich Doerner is a professor (at Otto-Friedrich University, Bamberg) who studies the thought patterns that result in bad decision-making, resulting in outcomes ranging from lack of success to outright disaster. I reviewed his interesting book, The Logic of Failure, here.

Comes now The Social Pathologist, who links my original review and adds thoughts of his own on Doerner’s work, particularly the sociological implications thereof. Interesting reading.

Searching on Doerner’s name, I ran across this analysis of Doernerism applied to the failure of a downtown mall in Columbus, OH.

Prof Doerner’s home page is here; unfortunately it seems that most of his work is available only in German.

Book Review: A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, Neil Sheehan

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A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon

The American space program, like its Russian counterpart, was largely an epiphenomenon of the ballistic missile program. A great deal has been written about the space programs; regarding the missile programs themselves, not so much. This book remedies that gap by using the life of General Bernard Schriever, who ran USAF missile development programs, as the centerpiece for a history of the Cold War’s defining weapon. Although Schriever is the central character, the book describes the roles played by many other individuals, including:

–John von Neumann, the Hungarian-American mathematician–an implacable enemy of the Soviet Union who advocated a strong American military posture and perhaps even a nuclear first strike

–The bomber general Curtis LeMay, who to put it mildly was not a Schriever fan. After Schriever received his fourth star, LeMay glared at him and said, “You realize if I had my way, you wouldn’t be wearing those.”

–Simon Ramo, who as a high school student withdrew all his savings to buy a violin in the hopes of winning a college scholarship in a music contest…he did win, and as a young engineer was chosen by GE over another job candidate because the Schenectady orchestra needed a good violinist! Ramo went on to co-found the Ramo-Wooldridge Company (later TRW) which basically created the discipline of systems engineering and was used by Schriever to address some of the most difficult technical challenges facing the missile program.

–Colonel Ed Hall–a brilliant designer of missile engines, a hard-driving project manager, and in the opinion of many associates a complete jackass to work with. To call Hall “assertive” would be putting it mildly–when his wife was giving birth (in England during WWII) and the obstetrician was in Hall’s opinion acting indecisively, Hall pulled out his revolver and gave the doctor highly specific orders as to exactly what to do.

Schriever himself was a boy from a not-very-well-off family of German immigrants in the Texas hill country, who joined the air force after first considering a career as a professional golfer. He became a protege of Hap Arnold, and after Pacific-theater service during WWII focused on the leadership of R&D efforts rather than operational command. Throughout his career, Schriever demonstrated an unwillingness to fit his views on important issues to the opinions of those in higher authority–even when higher authority was represented by someone as intimidating as LeMay, with whom Schriever clashed soon after the war on the issue of high-level versus low-level attack tactics for bombers, or Secretary of the Air Force Harold Talbott, whose order to relocate certain missile facilities (from the west cost to the midwest) Schreiver flatly refused, citing his “prior and overriding orders” to get the program done in the shortest feasible time. By then a general, Schriever stuck by his position on this even when Talbott threatened him that “Before this meeting is over, General, there’s going to be one more colonel in the Air Force!”

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The Decline of American Prosperity–Causes and Cures

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For many decades, Labor Day was a holiday on which Americans celebrated (and maybe even felt a bit smug about) our nation’s economic prowess. This year, not so much. In our current economy, many people are suffering grievously. Moreover, an increasing number believe that the problems are permanent. Surveys show a significant proportion of the population believes that their own living standards will continue to decline, and that their children’s generation will live less-well than their own. In other words, the feeling is growing that what we face in not a normal cyclical downturn, but a sea change for the worse.

The proximate cause of the current situation was the housing bubble and bust, and more generally the excessive and irresponsible use/deployment of credit in both the public and private sectors. However, there is every reason to believe that there are structural problems with the economy that go well beyond the sort of things that are usually portrayed on graphs in economic discussion.

Politicians, economists, analysts, and bloggers have asserted numerous and sometimes conflicting factors as primary causes for our economic problems. This post will summarize some of the explanations most commonly proposed plus a few more. I don’t necessarily agree with all of these, and today I’m focusing on simply stating the proposed causal factors, leaving detailed analysis/assessment for a future post.

The possible causes of the economic decline:

1)The low-hanging fruit has already been eaten. Economist Tyler Cowen, for example, argues that America’s historical prosperity has been driven largely by: (i)the availability of free land, (ii)a sequence of key technological breakthroughs, and (iii)the high return on investment offered by providing schooling to motivated but uneducated immigrants. He further argues that the free land is gone, that today’s technological improvements are not comparable to those introduced in the period 1880-1940 (electricity, automobiles, airplanes, radio, mass production, pharmaceuticals, etc), and that the high % of the population already attending college makes additional improvements from this source difficult. (Tyler’s recent book includes a graph attempting to measure the “rate of global innovation” since medieval times; it shows innovation peaking over the period 1850-1905, and having now returned to the level where it was in the early 1700s.)

2)Technological unemployment. The argument here is that the advances in technology that have already occurred, and those that are likely in the near future, reduce the need for labor so radically that full employment will never again be possible. This assertion is basically the opposite of the low-hanging-fruit argument, at least the technological aspect thereof.

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