Create Comprehensive Plan, Get to Root Causes

Muslim leaders and scholars in the U.S. have issued an open letter refuting the ideology championed by Islamic State.

This is a short but crucial clip that the Wall Street Journal posted on September 25th.  I have had the privilege and pleasure of traveling to, and living in, the Middle East over the past decade:  first, as a management consultant, then as a Dubai resident in the United Arab Emirates.  I can tell you that Islam is a religion of peace and kindness.  I shared the clip on Google+ with the note:

Any extreme or radical group can commandeer any religion to serve its destructive purpose. 

Therein lies the issue, I believe, with the Islamic State.  I greatly appreciate what Ahmed Bedier and his fellow leaders and scholars relay, which I reiterate here: (a) The plan to resolve conflict must be comprehensive.  Singular, destructive approaches, such as bombings and killings, will ultimately not work, whether by the Islamic State or coalition forces.  The plan must mirror the complexity and depth of the conflict, and thereby adopt a multidimensional tact.  (b) This comprehensive plan must adequately address root causes.  What are the fundamental grievances of people in the Islamic State movement and in segments of the Muslim world?  How well can we understand these grievances, and what do we need to do to resolve them effectively?

It is a simple rule of gardening, that I learned from my mother and my wife: That to eradicate weeds, I must get to their root and remove it. 

Peaceful Protest as Hallmark for Change

In today’s video, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services are providing a new guide to law enforcement officers that compiles information, tools, and best practices to maintain public safety while safeguarding constitutional rights during First Amendment-protected events. Attorney General Holder reiterated that the Department of Justice encourages law enforcement officials, in every jurisdiction, to work with the communities they serve to minimize needless confrontation. And he reminded all individuals that—while demonstrations and protests have the potential to spark a positive national dialog and bring about critical reform—history has shown us that the most successful and enduring movements for change are those that adhere to non-aggression and nonviolence.

This is a fine message from the Attorney General.  It seems at times that people, and their communities, are so easily inflamed when wrongdoing, injustice or offense takes place.  Emotions are part and parcel of human nature, and so is the will to survive and to fight when threatened.  But while aggressive or violent action may stop wrongdoing, it inevitably begets more aggression and violence.  Such action may also convey the message that any injustice will not be tolerated, but if the action itself is against the law and creates more harm, then the message is dangerously twisted: It becomes a matter of injustice vs injustice.  A momentary win-lose scenario inevitably becomes a lose-lose scenario, if the root causes of the original wrongdoing, injustice or offense aren't addressed adequately or resolved effectively.  So I cannot emphasize enough what the Attorney General relates:  Peaceful protest as a hallmark of change, as are dialogue and debate and earnest problem solving. 

The new guide for law enforcement officers is available here: Department of Justice Releases Resource Guide to Help Law Enforcement Strengthen Relationships with Communities.

Call You Creative, Maybe?

Call Me Maybe is, of course, the runaway 2012 pop hit from Carly Rae Jepsen, and this clever gentleman fashions a business card that is endearingly contemporary and delightfully clever.  Business people, and the like, can be positively droll, can't they.  I know, because I am one of them.  But if it suits any of them personally, and their business can appreciate something different and something funny, then why not?

I have networked widely over the past decade, and I have my business cards on hand at all times and certainly welcome them in turn from my colleagues.  The majority of them are well designed but straight laced, but one of hem kept it simple but as clever as David Coppini's (above):

This card certifies that you had a charming experience meeting...

I certainly had a good experience meeting this dude, and I count him as one of my friends now.  

So give it a try, if it suits you.

By the way, Jimmy Fallon, a TV host, talent and all-around funny guy performed Call Me Maybe with Jepsen, and proved that one piece creativity can indeed beget another piece of creativity:

The Tao of Project Management

Perhaps you've seen this telling cartoon on project management, or some variation of it, on social media timelines.  There's no such thing as flawless communication or understanding, but that's no excuse for neglecting the paces of clarifying, agreeing and planning a project collaboratively.  This cartoon uses humor, even ridicule to convey a point:  That sometimes 10 of us will witness the same exact event, and come away with 10 different observations and interpretations.  Of course this point is a hyperbole, but while there may actually be agreements among us about this event, there are bound to be some disagreements as well.  So one of the key things I've learned to do in consulting projects is to check regularly with my clients, just to make sure we were truly on the same page and on track with our efforts.  This way, we keep any mistakes to a minimum and at manageable levels.  This is the way (Tao) of project management.

Personal Vision and Creative Destruction

Transcript:

Disruption is always the mechanism by which real economic growth is generated.

I am Clayton Christensen -- a professor at the Harvard Business School. I had spent my academic career studying the problems of innovation, and in particular: What is it that makes success so difficult to sustain? The economist, Joseph Schumpeter called it, "creative destruction."

The economy and innovation kept going; but, the mechanism by which it kept going was, it destroyed the old, as it created the new. And, I think my contribution is a model called, "disruptive innovation" -- that is, the causal mechanism, by which creative destruction occurs.

The advent of sophisticated communications technology really has facilitated disruption, so that it happens at a faster rate.

So, prior to about 1990, if I needed to call you, the electrons actually travelled on a physical circuit, to the telephone company's switching gear. And then, it switched, and went on a physical circuit to your phone. And so, when we talked to each other, the electrons actually travelled on a single physical line.

And, Cisco came up with this concept, called a router. And, what a router did was, it took the data -- whether it was voice, or information -- and, it packetized it, in these virtual envelopes; wrote the address on each virtual pocket; and then fanned it out over the Internet.

At the beginning, the router -- with its packet switched technology -- could get information from here to there, with about a four second latency delay.

And, that meant, if I wanted to do voice with you, over a packet switch network, it was just very frustrating. You had to be a desperately poor graduate student to do voiceover IP. So, Cisco and the network of companies that worked with it, didn't try to address voice -- they went after data, because packet switching, with a four second latency delay, was infinitely faster than first class mail.

Lucent and Nortel, that made circuit switched equipment, looked down at the router; and, they couldn't see value in it, because it couldn't be used for voice. And so, they kept investing in bigger and better circuit switching equipment, to make the quality of voice conversations better and better. But then, coming at the bottom, Cisco just kept improving the safety, and the speed, and the accuracy of its packet switching technology, until today -- you really can't tell the quality difference between a packet switch call, and a circuit switch call.

And, voiceover IP just pervades the world. Nortel is gone; because they listened to their customers; and, their customers needed faster and better voice. They didn't need data transport. So, the fact that we can shift data, in such extraordinary ways, in terms of volume and speed, is really attributable to the fact that, Cisco disrupted circuit switching.

CEOs ought not stop listening to customers, at least not categorically. But they also ought to know when not to listen to them. No CEO can be like a Steve Jobs or Henry Ford, and think he or she can just eschew market research. But Jobs and Ford have important lessons to learn: Some CEOs may have those moments when they need to see their own personal vision and listen to their own inner voice. 

That vision and voice can alert the CEO that a creative destruction may be, or is, underway and it affects the business, industry or market in some way.  So it's a call for him or her to act accordingly.

Business Model of Alumni Solicitation

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So picture this: A lady comes on the line who is friendly, very polished and articulate.  She peppers her remarks and queries to me with "Dr."  She conscientiously checks to make sure my contact details are accurate.  I am annoyed that for the fifth or sixth time, I find that a previous employer from eight years ago is still on their records as my work place.  This, after I've corrected it each time.  She's peddling an alumni directory, and I ask her point blank, "What is the fee for it?"  She hesitates a moment, probably not expecting me to ask so soon or so straight, and she mentions it.  When I say no, she drops down to the next lower-priced product: a CD ROM (huh, I haven't heard that in a long while).  When I say no again, she drops down yet a third time to something even lower-priced:  I don't even remember was it was, as I was, at that point, turned off. 

You see, I graduated from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and nailed down a PhD in clinical psychology.  I was out of touch with them for nearly 20 years, mainly because was abroad.  In 2012 I gave it a good year of reconnecting, but ultimately and terribly felt disappointed.  I won't unload, at least not now, my complaints about the unprofessional, unresponsive, and unsophisticated behavior I ran into, but suffice it to say that I have no intentions of reconnecting or giving back.

The context that gave rise to that sales call was this:  I received e-mails and postcards about the importance of my calling back on a toll free number.  The e-mails were official alumni business, so Gmail had no reason to flag them as promotion or spam.  Interestingly, though, the postcards came in drab yellow-brown, which made them stand out in the mail and made them look official and urgent.  It was curious that they had to verify my contact details, when they already had all of it (except for my work place).  Even the last postcard had "Final Notice" on it.

But the call made all of that clear, and I was disgusted at their backhanded effort at sales.

Business Model of Internet Connection

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Our internet connection seemed to have slowed down the last couple of weeks, so I visited the Comcast website to check not just on our account but also on speed offerings.  Within a couple of minutes, a person named "Chris" popped up in chat format.  I'm back and forth with him (maybe it's a her), and he suggests a site for checking download and upload speeds.  Apparently those speeds are right where they should be for the package we've signed up for.  So I asked if he thought the issue was more of a computer one than a connection one.  He demured, and gave me a link to their Technical Support.

While I had him on chat, I though to ask about the next increment of speed and cost, and he gave this bit to me. Then, the business model emerged: I said I had to check with my wife, before deciding on that next increment.  He asked, if my wife was here, as he would wait.  This way, he could sign us up right away.  I said, I'll have to get back to Comcast.

I read an article or two before about how internet service providers did little to upgrade the infrastructure for connections and how, it seemed, they were a veritable oligopoly.  Comcast costs so much a month for relatively little in return.  The thrust of my work, projects and networks runs via online conduits, so reliability and speed are crucial for me.  When I have persistent difficulty, it becomes accumulated frustration and time wastage.

Anyway that pop-up, unsolicited chat was a relatively new one, as far as direct sales efforts are concerned and as far as such a major company like Comcast is concerned.  The chat was actually a pleasant, helpful one, but now I am more wary, indeed informed of such tactics.