Management

Imagine No Internet

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There has been a lot of commentary about the downsides of the Internet generally and of social media in particular…lowered attention spans, on-line bullying, growing narcissism, rapid spread of untrue information, etc–even, perhaps, inhibiting the assimilation of immigrants…and many of these concerns are indeed valid.  However:

Imagine that there is no Internet.

In this alternate history, the traditional media still rule  They may choose to provide online access to some of their content, but user-generated content will be enabled only in the form of ‘letters to the editor’, which, like their print prototypes, are published online very selectively and at the total discretion of the major media organizations. In the sphere of commerce, large corporations may offer some form of online ordering, but there is no such thing as just putting up a website and seeing what you can sell.

Would this no-Internet world really be an improvement?

I’ve previously quoted something said to me once by a wise executive:

When you’re running a large organization, you aren’t seeing reality.  It’s like you’re watching a movie where you get to see maybe one out of a thousand frames, and from that you have to figure out what is going on.

If this is true about running large organizations,  it is even more true for the citizen and voter in a large and complex country.  The individual can directly observe only a small amount of the relevant information, for the rest–from the events on the border to international and military affairs–he is generally dependent on others.  And that gives those others–those who choose the frames and the sequence in which they are presented in the movie analogy–a tremendous amount of power. This is especially dangerous when those controllers of the information all have similar backgrounds and worldviews.

Some may argue that we managed without the Internet, not so many years ago, and that that absence didn’t lead to disasters. And some have argued that without a feeling of threat from increasingly-dominant Internet competition, the legacy media would be more balanced and responsible, would not have become so one-sided and tendentious.  As a guide what an Internet-less world would be like today, though, I think these arguments don’t apply. Thirty or forty years ago, local and regional networks and broadcasters were more common and more significant than they are today, and journalists were more diverse (in a professional and background sense) than they are today. (And even back then, there was plenty of group-think and lack of coverage of important issues and topics.)  My own view is that a non-Internet world would be conformist, intellectually stifling, and very dangerous in terms of the evolution of national policies.)

Not to mention the malign effect on economic dynamism.

Yet I get the impression that a lot of people would prefer, or think they would prefer, such a world.

And European countries do seem determined to use censorship and threats to try to simulate a pre-Internet world as nearly as they can. We will see how that works out for them.

Your thoughts?

Related posts:  Betrayal, also Starvation and Centralization.

The Squirrel, the Raccoon, and the Bureaucrats

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The sad story of Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon has inspired many people to think about the nature of bureaucracy.  I’m reminded of a few stories:

When the fire alarm went off at Como Park High School in Minnesota in 2013 , a 14-year-old girl was rousted out of the swimming pool–dripping wet and wearing only a swimsuit–and was told to go stand outside where the temperature was sub-zero and the wind chill made it much worse. Then, she was not allowed to take refuge in one of the many cars in the parking lot because of a school policy forbidding students from sitting in a faculty member’s car. As Bookworm noted:

Even the lowest intelligence can figure out that the rule’s purpose is to prevent  teachers  from engaging sexually with children.   The likelihood of a covert sexual contact happening between Kayona and a  teacher under the actual circumstances is ludicrous.   The faculty cars were in full view of the entire school.   There was no chance of illicit sexual congress.

But the whole nature of bureaucratic rules, of course, is to forbid human judgment based on actual context.

Fortunately for Kayona, her fellow students hadn’t had human decency ground out of them by rules: “…fellow students, however, demonstrated a grasp of civilized behavior. Students huddled around her and some frigid classmates [sic], giving her a sweatshirt to put around her feet. A  teacher  coughed up a jacket.”  As the children were keeping Kayona alive, the  teachers  were  working their way through the bureaucracy.   After a freezing ten minutes, an administrator finally gave permission for the soaking wet, freezing Kayla to sit in a car in full view of everybody.

As Bookworm notes, this sort of thing has become increasingly common. In England in 2009, for example, a man with a broken back lay in 6 inches of water, but paramedics refused to rescue him because they weren’t trained for water rescues. Dozens of similar examples could easily be dredged up.

In Sweden, also in 2013, there was rampant rioting that included the torching of many cars.  The government of Sweden didn’t do a very good job of protecting its citizens and their property from this outbreak of barbarism.  Government agents did, however, fulfill their duty of issuing parking tickets…to burned-out cars.  Link with picture. 

The behavior of these bureaucrats is very similar to the behavior of a computer program confronted by a situation for which its designers did not explicitly provide. Sometimes the results will be useless, sometimes they will be humorous, often they will be harmful or outright disastrous.

Here’s an essay written by a Spanish naval official in 1797, on the subject ‘Why do we keep losing to the British and what can we do about it?’  The pathologies that Don Domingo Perez de Grandallana saw in his country’s naval operations are now disturbingly present in many American organizations.

Thoughts from Peter Drucker, the great writer on management and society, on the nature of bureaucracy.

An old SF story, “Dumb Waiter,” by Walter Miller, is very relevant to the subject of mindless and destructive bureaucratic behavior.  (Miller is best known for his philosophical/theological novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.)

In the story, cities have become fully automated—municipal services are provided by robots linked to a central computer system.  But when war erupted–featuring radiological attacks–some of the population was killed, and the others evacuated the cities. In the city that is the focus of the story, there are no people left, but “Central” and its subunits are working fine, doing what they were programmed to do many years earlier.

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Book Review: Rockets and People (rerun)

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Since Friday marks the 67th anniversary of the Sputnik earth satellite, I’m reposting my review of Boris Chertok’s wonderful memoir Rockets and People.

Chertok’s career in the Russian aerospace industry spanned many decades, encompassing both space exploration and military missile programs. His four-volume memoir is an unusual document–partly, it reads like a high school annual or inside company history edited by someone who wants to be sure no one feels left out and that all the events and tragedies and inside jokes are appropriately recorded. Partly, it is a technological history of rocket development, and partly, it is a study in the practicalities of managing large programs in environments of technical uncertainty and extreme time pressure. Readers should include those interested in: management theory and practice, Russian/Soviet history, life under totalitarianism, the Cold War period, and missile/space technology. Because of the great length of these memoirs, those who read the whole thing will probably be those who are interested in  all  (or at least most) of the above subject areas. I found the series quite readable; overly-detailed in many places, but always interesting. In his review American astronaut Thomas Stafford said “The Russians are great storytellers, and many of the tales about their space program are riveting. But Boris Chertok is one of the greatest storytellers of them all.”  In this series, Chertok really does suck you into his world.

Chertok was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1912: his mother had been forced to flee Russia because of her revolutionary (Menshevik) sympathies. The family returned to Russia on the outbreak of the First World War, and some of Chertok’s earliest memories were of the streets filled with red-flag-waving demonstrators in 1917. He grew up on the Moscow River, in what was then a quasi-rural area, and had a pretty good childhood: “we, of course, played ‘Reds and Whites,’ rather than ‘Cowboys and Indians’ … swimming and rowing in the river and developing an early interest in radio and aviation–both an airfield and a wireless station were located nearby. He also enjoyed reading. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn met with the greatest success, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave rise to aggressive moods: ‘Hey–after the revolution in Europe, we’ll deal with the American slaveholders!’ His cousin introduced him to science fiction, and he was especially fond of  Aelita  (book and silent film), featuring the eponymous Martian beauty.

Chertok remembers his school years fondly–there were field trips to study art history and architectural styles, plus a military program with firing of both rifles and machine guns but notes “We studied neither Russian nor world history….Instead we had two years of social science, during which we studied the history of Communist ideas…Our clever social sciences teacher conducted lessons so that, along with the history of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, we became familiar with the history of the European peoples from Ancient Rome to World War I, and while studying the Decembrist movement and 1905 Revolution in detail we were forced to investigate the history of Russia.”  Chertok pursued his growing interest in electronics, developing a new radio-receiver circuit which earned him a journal publication and an inventor’s certificate. There was also time for skating and dating.  “In those strict, puritanical times it was considered inappropriate for a young man of fourteen or fifteen to walk arm in arm with a young woman. But while skating, you could put your arm around a girl’s waist, whirl around with her on the ice to the point of utter exhaustion, and then accompany her home without the least fear of reproach.”

Chertok wanted to attend university, but “entrance exams were not the only barrier to admission.” There was a quota system, based on social class, and  “according to the ‘social lineage’ chart, I was the son of a white collar worker and had virtually no hope of being accepted the first time around.” He applied anyhow, hoping that his journal publication and inventor’s certificate in electronics would get him in.” It didn’t–he was told, “Work about three years and come back. We’ll accept you as a worker, but not as the son of a white-collar worker.”

So Chertok took a job as electrician in a brick factory…not much fun, but he was soon able to transfer to an aircraft factory across the river. He made such a good impression that he was asked to take a Komsomol leadership position, which gave him an opportunity to learn a great deal about manufacturing. The plant environment was a combination of genuinely enlightened management–worker involvement in process improvement, financial decentralization–colliding with rigid policies and political interference. There were problems with absenteeism caused by new workers straight off the farm; these led to a government edict: anyone late to work by 20 minutes or more was to be fired, and very likely prosecuted. There was a young worker named Igor who had real inventive talent; he proposed an improved linkage for engine and propeller control systems, which worked out well. But when Igor overslept (the morning after he got married), no exception could be made. He was fired, and “we lost a man who really had a divine spark.”  Zero tolerance!

Chertok himself wound up in trouble when he was denounced to the Party for having concealed the truth about his parents that his father was a bookkeeper in a private enterprise and his mother was a Menshevik. He was expelled from the Komsomol and demoted to a lower-level position. Later in his career, he would also wind up in difficulties because of his Jewish heritage.

The memoir includes dozens of memorable characters, including:

*Lidiya Petrovna Kozlovskaya, a bandit queen turned factory supervisor who became Chertok’s superior after his first demotion.

*Yakov Alksnis, commander of the Red Air Force, strong leader who foresaw the danger of a surprise attack wiping out the planes on the ground. He was not to survive the Stalin era.

*Olga Mitkevich, sent by the regime to become “Central Committee Party organizer” at the factory where Chertok was working…did not make a good first impression (“had the aura of a strict school matron, the terror of girls’ preparatory schools”)..but actually proved to be very helpful to getting work done and later became director of what was then the largest aircraft factory in Europe, which job she performed well. She apparently had too much integrity for the times, and her letters to Stalin on behalf of people unjustly accused resulted in her own arrest and execution.

*Frau Groettrup, wife of a German rocket scientist, one of the many the Russians took in custody after occupying their sector of Germany. Her demands on the victors were rather unbelievable, what’s more unbelievable is that the Russians actually yielded to most of them.

*Dmitry Ustinov, a rising star in the Soviet hierarchy–according to Chertok an excellent and visionary executive who had much to do with Soviet successes in missiles and space. (Much later, he would become Defense Minister, in which role he was a strong proponent of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.)

*Valeriya Golubtsova, wife of the powerful Politburo member Georgiy Malenkov, who was Stalin’s immediate successor. Chertok knew her from school–she was an engineer who became an important government executive and the connection turned out to be very useful. Chertok respected her professional skills, liked her very much, and devotes several pages to her.

*Yuri Gagarin, first man to fly in space, and Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman.

*Overshadowing all the other characters is Sergei Korolev, now considered to be the father of the Soviet space program although anonymous during his lifetime.  Korolev spent 6 years in labor camps, having been arrested when his early rocket experiments didn’t pan out; he was released in 1944.  A good leader, in Chertok’s view, though with a bad temper and given to making threats that he never actually carried out.  His imprisonment must have left deep scars–writing about a field trip to a submarine to observe the firing of a ballistic missile, Chertok says that the celebration dinner with the sub’s officers was the only time he ever saw Korolev really happy.

Chertok’s memoir encompasses the pre-WWII development of the Soviet aircraft industry…early experiments with a rocket-powered interceptor…the evacuation of factories from the Moscow area in the face of the German invasion…a post-war mission to Germany to acquire as much German rocket technology as possible…the development of a Soviet ballistic missile capability…Sputnik…reconnaissance and communications satellites…the Cuban missile crisis…and the race to the moon.

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Book Review: Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford (rerun)

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Quillette has a piece on George Orwell and the fact that he never got past being a socialist.  Reminded me of this book and my review.

The coronavirus crisis has led to much discussion of modeling. One of the largest modeling projects in human history was the Soviet Union’s attempt to manage its entire economy on a top-down basis, including the use of sophisticated and then-state-of-the-art mathematical tools.

Red Plenty…part novel, part nonfiction…is about the Soviet Union’s economic planning efforts as seen from the inside. The characters include factory managers, economic planners, mathematicians, computer scientists, and “fixers.” Published in 2010, the book is now quite timely in view of the current vogue for socialism in American political discussion and also of the increased visibility of mathematical modeling as a decision-making tool.

The idea of centralized economic planning is a very seductive one. It just seems to make sense that such planning would lead to more efficiency…less waste…and certainly less unnecessary human suffering than an environment in which millions of decision-makers, many of them in competition with one another, are making their own separate and uncoordinated decisions, resulting in pointless product redundancy, economic cycles driving unemployment, and lots of other bad things.

Marx drew a nightmare picture of capitalism, when everything was produced only to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. The alternative? A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all.

How might this actually be accomplished? Stalin mocked the idea that planning an economy required much in the way of intellectual depth or effort. Get the chain of command right, Stalin seemed to be saying, build it on the right ideological principles, and all that was left was a few technical details, a little bit of drudgery to be carried out by the comrades at Gosplan with the adding machines. But it turned out to be a little more complicated than that.

Maksim Maksimovich Mokhov is one of the lords of the Gosplan file room, in which there are hundreds of folders, each tracking the balances and plans for a particular commodity. A good man, who takes his job seriously, Maksim has risen as high as you could go at Gosplan before the posts become purely political appointments..his was the level at which competence was known to reach its ceiling…Not just a mechanical planner, he realizes that the file folders cast only the loosest and most imperfect net over the prodigious output of the economy as the whole, and has worked to understand the stress points, the secret path dependencies of the plan. His specific responsibility is the chemical and rubber sector, and he is particularly concerned, at the time when he enters the story, about problems in the viscose subsector.

Arkhipov, Kosoy, and Mitrenko run one of the most important plants in the viscose supply chain, and they are three worried men. The plan goals aren’t being met, and they know that the path to career death is separated by only a few percentage points of plan fulfillment from the other one, the upward path, the road to glory and local fame. (A couple of decades earlier, it wouldn’t have been just career death on the table.) This plant makes two viscose-derived products, yarn and tire cord. The yarn line works fine, the tire cord line, not so much…but no problems with the machine can be found. There is no prospect of getting a replacement machine in any relevant timeframe.

Arkhipov and his associates come up with a plan to solve their problem…read the book to see what it is and how it turns out.

Nikita Khrushchev, in September 1959, told a crowd that “the dreams cherished for ages, dreams expressed in fairytales which seemed sheer fantasy, are being translated into reality by man’s own hands.” Modern technology, combined with the benefits of a planned economy would make it possible.

Because the whole system of production and distribution in the USSR was owned by the state, because all Russia was (in Lenin’s words) ‘one office, one factory’, it could be directed, as capitalism could not, to the fastest, most lavish fulfillment, of human needs.

The American exhibition in Moscow in mid-1959 (site of the “kitchen debate” between Khrushchev and Nixon) was attended by 3 million Soviets (including some of the characters in this book), and although many of them thought that the American claims of broad-based prosperity were exaggerated or worse, the experience surely helped feed the longing for a better life for the Soviet Union’s ordinary people.

Leonid Vitalevich Kantorovich pioneered the application of mathematics to the optimization of economic activities…these methods surfaced as a possible toolkit for the planning organizations circa 1960. Could these methods help achieve Khrushchev’s stated goal of broad-based prosperity?

For example, consider several factories, producing a common set of products but with different efficiency characteristics. Which products should be made by which factories in order to optimize overall efficiency? A set of equations can be constructed representing the constraints that must be observed–labor, machine uitlization, etc–and the relative weighting of the variables to be optimized. Although these techniques have been used to a considerable degree in capitalist countries, they would seem tailor-made for a starring role in a planned economy. Selling the new methods in the Soviet Union, though, could be tricky: the linear-programming term “shadow prices”, for example, sounded like something that might have politically-dangerous overtones of capitalism!

One of the first applications involved potatoes, the distribution of same. The BESM (computer) is using Leonid Vitalevich’s shadow prices to do what a market in potatoes would do in a capitalist country–only better. When a market is matching supply with demand, it is the actual movement of the potatoes themselves from place to place, the actual sale of the potatoes at ever-shifting prices, which negotiates a solution, by trial and error. In the computer, the effect of a possible solution can be assessed without the wasteful real-world to-ing and fro-ing, and because the computer works at the speed of flying electrons rather than the speed of a trundling vegetable truck, it can explore the whole of the mathematical space of possible solutions, and be sure to find the very best solution there is, instead of settling for the good-enough sollution that would be all there was time for, in a working day with potatoes to deliver.

And even in the planned Soviet economy, there is still a market in potatoes, right here in Moscow, the leftover scrap of capitalism represented by the capital’s collective-farm bazaars, where individual kolkhozniks sell the product from their private plots…The market’s clock speed is laughable. It computes a the rate of a babushka in a headscare, laboriously breaking a two-rouble note for change and muttering the numbers under her breath…No wonder that Oscar Lange over in Warsaw gleefully calls the marketplace “a primitive pre-electronic calculator.”

So put the BESM to work minimizing distance that the potatoes have to travel..a proxy for efficiency and freshness: price is not a consideration, since the state selling price of potatoes has been fixed for many years. But BESM can only work with abstract potatoes: Not, of course, potatoes as they are in themselves, the actual tubers, so often frost-damaged or green with age or warty with sprouting tublices–but potatoes abstracted, potatoes considered as information, travelling into Moscow from 348 delivering units to 215 consuming organizations…The economists recognize the difficulty of getting a computer model to mirror the world truly. They distinguish between working at zadachi, ‘from the problem’, and of fotografii, ‘from the photograph’…This calculation, alas, is from the photograph. It deals with potato delivery as it has been reported to Leonid Vitalevich and his colleagues. There has been no time to visit the cold-stores, interview the managers, ride on the delivery trucks. But the program should still work.

The author notes that “the idea that the computer had conclusively resolved the socialist calculation debate in socialism’s favour was very much a commonplace of the early sixties.”

But despite all the planning paperwork, despite the attempts at computerization, people like Chekuskin remain essential to keep the Soviet economy functioning at all. He is a fixer, he works the system to ensure that his customers–factories, for the most part–can get the parts and materials they need in order to keep operating. Before the revolution, he was a salesman: now, the economic problem is not selling, but buying. Chekuskin explains what a real salesman was, back in the day:

You’re thinking of some fellow who works in a sales administration, sits by his phone all day long like a little king, licks his finger when he feels like it, and says, “You can have a litttle bit”…That’s not a salesman. You see, the world used to be the other way up, and it used to be the buyers who sat around examining their fingernails, hard enough as that is to imagine. A salesman was a poor hungry bastard with a suitcase, trying to shift something that people probably didn’t want, ’cause back in those days, people didn’t just get out the money and buy anything they could get their hands on. They had to be talked into it.”

But with Communism, the things changed. Back then, people didn’t want to buy. Now, they don’t want to sell. There’s always that resistance to get past. But the trick of it stays the same: make a connection, build a relationship.

Volodya, is a young propagandist recently assigned to the huge locomotive plant in Novocherkassk, a dismal town that also features a university. Unfortunately, it was classified by the planners as a “college town”, in need of the calorific intake required to lift pencils and wipe blackboards, but there were forty thousand people living and working in the industrial zone out by the tracks now, and between the students and the loco workers, a locust would have been hard put to it to find a spare crumb. White bread was a distant memory, milk was dispensed only at the head of enormous queues. Sausages were as rare a comets. Pea soup and porridge powered the place, usually served on half-washed plates.

Eventually, people can’t stand it anymore–and decisions by two separate planning organizations have the result that on the very same day, food prices are increased and so are the production quotas at the locomotive factory. There is a raucous mass protest, featuring signs like MEAT, BUTTER, AND PAY and CUT UP KHRUSHCHEV FOR SAUSAGES. The loco plant manager, Korochkin, does not handle the situation well, and the rage grows.

The ensuing catastrophe is vividly described as it is observed by the horrified Volodya. Troops open fire on the protestors: 26 people are killed an 87 wounded. Death sentences and long prison terms are handed down.

This was a real event: it happened in 1962. News about the events did not appear in the state-controlled press for thirty years.

The author offers some interesting thoughts on the role of intellectuals in Czarist Russia and in the Soviet Union.  In the Czarist era, to be an intellectual was to feel that you were, at least potentially, one of those who spoke truth to power. ..These attitudes meant that while intellectuals largely welcomed the Revolution as the end of tsarism, very few of them signed up for Lenin’s brand of Marxism, even when–or especially when–it had state power behind it. Indeed, a number of scholars who had been happy to teach Marxism before the Revolution, as a way of sticking a finger in the eye of power, promptly started offering courses in religious philosophy after it, to achieve the same effect…By the end of the 1920s, however, the Party was in a position to enforce ideological conformity…the new technological intellectuals were willing to be told, were willing to believe, that the task of speaking truth to power was now redundant, because truth was in power. (emphasis added)

On the kinds of people who achieved positions of power in the Soviet Union: At the turbulent beginning of Lenin’s state, the Party’s operatives had signified their power by using the direct iconography of force. They wore leather jackets and cavalry coats, they carried visible revolvers. Stalin’s party, later, dressed with a vaguely military austerity…Now, by contrast, the symbolism was emphatically civil, managerial. The Party suit of the 1960s declared that the wearer was not a soldier, not a policeman. He was the person who could give the soldier and the policeman orders. The philosopher kings were back on top.

But there is a problem with the kingship of philsophers. Wisdom was to be set where it could be ruthless. Once such a system existed, though, the qualities required to rise in it had much more to do with ruthlessness than with wisdom…(Lenin’s original Bolsheviks) were many of them highly educated people, literate in multiple European languages, learned in the scholastic traditions of Marxism; and they preserved these attributes even as they murdered and lied and tortured and terrorized. They were social scientists who thought principle required them to behave like gangsters. But their successors…were not the most selfless people in Soviet society, or the most principled, or the most scrupulous. They were the most ambitious, the most domineering, the most manipulative…Gradually their loyalty to the ideas became more and more instrumental, more and more a matter of what the ideas would let them grip in their two hands. In summary: Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khrushchev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be government by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.

Francis Spufford is a fine writer who demonstrates considerable creativity in his work. He explains the functioning of the BESM computer from the viewpoint of an electron. His description of a character’s labor and childbirth in a Soviet hospital setting is so vivid and harrowing that I can imagine it having a measurable negative fertility effect among women reading it.

One reviewer at Amazon said: I happened to grew up in Soviet Union and actually met some of the people mentioned in this book .. It’s unbelievable how a foreigner who doesn’t even speak Russian could capture the spirit of that time with the littlest details and at the same time summarize the grandest historic forces shaping up the superpowers of the XX century.

The book includes an extensive set of notes clearly explaining which stories and characters are historical and which are literary inventions or modifications. (For example, the true story of the BESM computer and the Moscow potato market was moved from th 1966 back to 1961, for narrative reasons)

An outstanding book, not to be missed.

This review previously posted, in slightly different form, at Chicago Boyz, where there is a good discussion thread. Also, Crooked Timber (a basically left-leaning site) has a worthwhile online seminar on the book. (This post updated again 8/18/24 to fix the WordPress typography plague)

Worthwhile Reading

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Self-censorship among scientists, for ‘prosocial’ reasons…and the harm it does.

How sculpture and ornament-making has been semi-industrialized for centuries, using a device known as a pointing machine.

Selecting government officials in China –historically and at present.

Support for using violence to suppress campus speech, broken down by college major.

The growth of anti-Israel radicalism in the Democratic Party: how much of this has been due to Obama’s attitudes and associations?

The District of Columbia has established minimum education requirements (a high school diploma is not enough) for child care workers. Is there a study that validates a significant positive correlation between such training and the quality of care provided?   (What would you guess)

Katherine Boyle argues that some people are great at judging people but not great at judging systems. Others are great at evaluating systems but not people and says that it’s very rare to meet someone who is exceptional at both.

Inspirational:   A cancellation attempt that backfired.