The Decay of Society: The Sickness, Part 1

“I can see inside you, the sickness is rising”

—Disturbed, The Sickness

It’s all the same, but only the names will change. As time marches forward, we are faced with the inevitable truth that history repeats itself, and those who fail to look beyond the façade of the so-called “real world” are doomed to repeat that history, oftentimes at the expense of the integrity of society. What is it that decays at the fabric of the society and sends the world we live in towards the downward spiral towards complete dissolution of those core values which should be the glue, holding things together?

A quick search of a dictionary defines glamour as “alluring beauty or charm.” However, another definition not far from the same breath follows: “casting a spell over something or someone.” From the first impressions of childhood we are exposed to a world that is bombarded by a false construct of who we are supposed to be, what image we are supposed to present, and ultimately the values which we are supposed to hold. No matter how strong our upbringing glamour juxtaposes onto our world a skewed reality of what should be: Conformity that permeates and threatens our individuality. “You are an individual, just like everyone else,” in the words of a greatly humorous poster. In my lifetime I have come to see the shift of individual personalities away from a norm to a point where that is the norm.

Let me take a step back. Glamour a sickness of what I speak. Armed with good intentions as they may be, most of us fail to see past the draw that this sickness has on us. Even as the geek that I am, I seek to define it with a glamorous edge. I can often be seen wearing a button-up shirt and tie, dress slacks, and a nice set of dress shoes. To myself, I have constructed this image based on what I’ve perceived as what I should be. Years ago I surrounded myself with a mentality and an image that I wanted to become. After enough time of living and immersing myself in it, I became it. Behavioral modification at a fundamental level caused my emergence of who I am today. However, with discretion, discipline, and sound judgment I learned to take the good with the bad and mold myself into the person that I wanted to become sans the negative aspects that could come with it.

Such is the world we live in, but lacking the respect, discipline, and good judgment that make their way into the person. People have taken their cues from idols ranging from the Material Girl to all the other creations that Hollywood, for instance, has been able to manufacture over the years. They have manufactured a set of morals and values that, when duplicated, seem to leave a person empty in the end. From this emptiness we often find our worlds slipping away in little pieces and becoming increasingly less fulfilling. We are left with a shell of a reality that, as glamour would have it, lacks substance, but sure can look good on the outside.

Each day in our life we are faced with choices to make. Life is a journey, certain parts are destinations, but in the grander picture it is nothing more than a series of choices. Partly our environment and partly our makeup allow us the vantage from which to make these decisions. In a world that emphasizes the power of the flash, but doesn’t readily show the long-lasting ramifications of making good decisions, we are faced with a conundrum that few can rise above and see the grander picture in all the true glory that it holds, without the sickness showing on the outside.

It is often said that we are the sum of our experiences. I tend to think that we should strive to be nothing less than the sum of our experiences, but the efficiencies of synergy could, in fact, help us to strive for better. Should we allow such faults as pride tear apart at our “somethingness,” eventually leaving us feeling empty inside. At the end of the day, each person needs to know that they aren’t alone on this journey, even though bouts of loneliness will often speckle an otherwise healthy existence. We aren’t how much money we have in the bank, we’re not the job we have, and we’re not the stuff that we have, nor are we the projection of what the world wants us to be. At the end of the day we are the effect of what we put out into the world. If you add value to it, it will, in turn, add value to you. This is the basis for risk.

A true, hearty analysis of risk and how it applies to decision making is outside the scope of this current discussion, let it be summed down to this: For every action, there is an opposite reaction—and when viewed in linear and non-linear payoff terms (immediately realized benefit and “down the road” payoff)—that is not necessarily equal in its return. That is, sometimes the right risk is worth taking because it can offer more benefit to you than you could possibly realize.

However, in order to harness this great power of risk and reward, we need to set aside the false assumptions that we make about the world, based on irrational data that is implanted into ourselves from the earliest days of our youths.

“Is it really me? Mirror mirror gotta know just what you see”

—Def Leppard, Mirror Mirror (Look into My Eyes)

Although many may comment otherwise, life doesn’t really have an instruction manual. This chore is left to fools, philosophers, and anyone in between. We sometimes have the occasional epiphany about ourselves, the world, someone else, or our interactions with it. I think, sometimes, that this is why I look at life the way I do: The art of life stems from the interactions of everyone in it. Decisions dictate behaviors and, in a simple way, life is just a collection of all those behaviors in concert. In this way, physics is the study of the interactions between matter and energy. These elements are analogous to people exerting energy (or, removing it in some cases) into (or from) the world around them.

The Role of Decision in the Enterprise, Part 2

Decision-making is like any other great process: Part science, part art. The science that goes into a decision, however, is quite the feat: Including probability theory, risk assessment, and information theory, just to name a few disciplines that go into something that each of us practice each and every day.

Whereas just a generation ago information was usually consumed in discrete pockets: Morning newspapers, evening newscasts, and perhaps hourly news on the radio, for instance. Today, though, the amount of information in our everyday lives is only limited by our willingness to ingest it—or block it from our lives. The Internet, for instance, has democratized the access to information: Everyone with news facts to present or an opinion to offer has an outlet to readily remove barriers to getting this information to the widest audience possible.

Information is essential to making decisions, right? Yes. The more information, the better, right? Not necessarily.

A man that understood the science of a decision was a humble British Presbyterian Minister that also dabbled in mathematics. Thomas Bayes, known best by his theorem—aptly titled Bayes’ Theorem—is a result in probability theory whereas an event that is conditional on another happening is generally different from the second event being conditional on the first. Bayes’ Theory explores the relationship between the two: Essentially, it informs us how to update or revise beliefs in light of new evidence dependent on experience.

Can we have too little information with which to make a good decision? Yes. Is more information better when making a decision? Not necessarily. Perfect decisions are made with the perfect amount of information—that is, not too much, not too little. One of the ramifications of Bayes’ Theorem is that too much information can exist and befuddle the decision-making process native to the decision maker. My current studies into decision making are towards the end to develop a practical and reproducible process with which a decision maker can come to make the perfect decision.

Practically speaking, the perfect amount of information may not be easily achievable, for the attainment of information is something that can change from moment to moment. Take my Battlemaster experience, for example. Battlemaster is a lightweight, text-based online game which is set in the period of the middle ages; the game is part roleplaying, part strategy. I began playing mostly for the strategy elements, but have participated quite a bit in the roleplaying elements as well. Each group consists of characters, created by players, in realms. Each realm has knights, lords, dukes, and four members that are commonly called the realm council: The ruler, general, judge, and banker. Each performs duties that are commensurate with what you might think they might be—the banker is in charge of the economics of the realm, for example. When my first character became the general of the realm of the realm of Eston, he co-developed a battle doctrine with his aide de camp. The Kane-McKay Battle Doctrine was the culmination of experience in combat, producing a construct for waging wars and winning battles that created more undefeated military commanders than any other doctrine that I have ever come across in the entire game, in all my years there. The first thing that the Doctrine emphasized was:

“Combat is a fluid situation.

Strategy dictates tactics only loosely: Tactics are how strategy is adapted to the battlefield under the circumstances of the moment. As such, strong tactics drive good strategy, and vice versa.”

In other words: While staying true to your principles—don’t budge on your ethics or morals—be certain you can adapt your tactics to suit the environment of the moment. Every element of warfare may be able to be predicted down to the minutest detail; however, the entrance of the human component into any military plan renders it fluid, possibly chaotic, and definitely entropic.

So, when making decisions: Be sure to make them with the understanding that they are rarely made in a vacuum. Decisions are most often made as part of a larger context that changes with each passing moment.

The Self Concept of a Leader

The 17^TH century mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, in his Principia Philosophiae was the original skeptic. A logical and rational Frenchman responsible for the Cartesian coordinate system and analytic geometry, among several other things, posed the question in 1644 that doubt was the principle tool of a disciplined inquiry into anything. This led him to the line of reasoning that doubting was simply an extension of thinking; from this, he determined that he did, in fact, exist: Existence was a function of perception (a position that could later be posed via quantum physics some two centuries later). The mental process of perception would later develop, helped along by the great minds of psychology such as Sigmund Freud, Prescott Lecky, V.C. Raimy, Carl Rogers, William Purkey, and J. Schmidt into a fairly concrete theory of self concept depicting each and every person’s self-identity in a physical, psychological, and social sense and influenced by one’s habits, attitudes, beliefs, and ideas.

Self concept is a learned component of our self. In our earliest months we develop the foundations for self concept; over time and repeated experience and perceptions it is shaped and molded (often the most with significant others, as research suggests). Because self concept is shaped through continued social interaction, and not instinctive, it has boundless potential for development. However, the perception component of self concept presents an interesting corollary in that perception goes both ways such that you may see yourself differently than others see you. Also, since perception varies from person to person and within each person from moment to moment, our self concept evolves over time and with reinforcing experiences. Over time we may learn that there are inconsistencies between experience and our self concept: As we will typically perceive those things as threats, our self concept will organize itself more rigidly in order to maintain and protect ourselves. Furthermore, emotional problems may arise from these continued perceived inconsistencies. Aside from experiences, our self can help generate negative self concepts through faulty patterns of thought: Categorizing everything into extremes or over-generalizing, for instance.

Instead of having multiple perceptions about your personal existence, self concept maintains an orderly and organized manner so that all of these perceptions about one self are orchestrated and tied into one another. Because it is orchestrated, organized, and stable in such a manner, self consistency arises; the stability aspect, however, tends to be the reason many people resist change as they do: Change requires energy and effort to go into perception, and perception to change about the world and, therefore, about ourselves; the more closely-held the belief or fundamental the belief is about one self, the more resistant to change self concept will be. This can lead to inconsistency—one of the enemies of self concept and stable personality. Self concept, however, is not completely resistant to change: Since the organization is personality-based, this aspect of self will have its core in “I” phrases instead of “me” phrases—perceiving yourself as something to act, not simply as an object; allowing reflection to happen on information taken from the past and present and to adapt the self concept to handle and shape future experiences. If you fail in an area which you hold in high regard, your evaluation of all other areas will tend to be lowered; similarly, a success in a highly regarded area will raise your evaluations in other areas. In other words: Failures affect self concept negatively, thus affecting the rest of your world and your experiences whereas successes have the opposite, positive, affect on everything else in your world.

Self concept, as has been being built towards, is a dynamic thing: It is a guidance system that shapes the ways a person views—and therefore interacts—with themselves, their surroundings, others, and the entire world. In a sense, it is your compass always pointing to your “personal north” by allowing you to take a consistent stance in life. Instead of being the cause of behavior, however, it is the cause of personality—and thus the direction for behavior. In this sense all information that you sense about the world is viewed through the filter of your self concept and is a constant and continuous process always assimilating and expelling new ideas throughout your life. Because it is so closely tied to our fundamental belief structure, each person will have a tendency to behave in such a fashion that remains consistent with their self concept no matter how much that helps or hurts themselves or others; it will even usually take precedence over physical comfort in order to achieve emotional comfort, constantly guarding itself against losses in self-esteem and prohibiting feelings of anxiety. However, if self concept must continually defend itself against being assaulted, opportunities for growth will be limited.

While this entire field warrants much more discussion, suffice for a real world application immediately: Dr. John J. Sosik, in a paper written for The Leadership Quarterly, examined relationships among dispositional attitudes: Self-consciousness, self-monitoring, and purpose-in-life; and charismatic leadership. Dozens of managers rated themselves on the aforementioned self concept-based attributes while about three times as many subordinates rated their manager’s leadership style. Understandingly enough, there was a high correlation found between private self-consciousness, self-monitoring, and purpose-in-life.

And to think, all this from a man who was skeptic about the world around him.

Number One

“Number one is a hard time in the making
Number two is the one plane I'm not taking
Number three goes on one knee for a token
Number four is the short straw but it's broken
I'd give my all just to be number one”
—Chaz Jankel, “Number One”

Anyone with success on their minds has, at one point or another, thought (or fantasized) about being “number one:” That top spot in which you are revered and/or respected as a leader in your particular industry. The interesting thing about number one is that of the people that dream about being there, few achieve it.

Take the story of a young Ph.D. graduate of Berkeley: A brilliant young man that any corporate recruiter would offer anything they could to woo the researcher to their firm. In 1963 the firm of choice was the research powerhouse of Bell Labs. Earlier they had invented such things as the transistor, the laser, and some of the most unique and powerful calculators for their time. Certainly this solid state physics researcher would choose this behemoth to embark on what would likely become a brilliant career there. Instead, he took a risk and joined a lesser-known upstart known as Fairchild Semiconductor. Under the tutelage of a famous man by the name of Gordon Moore, the two would join others just five years later to
form Intel.

In 1987 the Berkeley graduate—Andy Grove—would succeed Gordon Moore as CEO of Intel. Instead of using conventional logic in decision making, however, he embarked, once again, on the road less traveled. Anyone who paid any attention to the computer market through the 1990s knows the “Intel Inside” logo. This campaign catapulted name recognition of Intel into a world that had long perceived other hardware manufacturers such as IBM as “movers and shakers” in the industry—even though Intel supplied more than 80 percent of the world’s microprocessors. In significant part to Grove’s conquest to expose the Intel brand to as many households as possible, Intel is a company worth $35 billion USD.

Wharton School of Business, seeing the merit in the success of these traits of unconventional thinking, creativity, and integrity, sought to identify other business leaders for which success manifested and the criteria that played integral roles in their doing so.

1. Create new and profitable ideas. This is the essential first step in the journey. Rarely does a business leader succeed from something that is not profitable. There are rare exceptions (i.e. Mark Schwartz, former K-Mart President, who bankrupted the company then decided to get a “fresh start” by opening a chain of gas station-convenience stores in South Dakota), but don’t

plan on being one.

2. Affect civic, political or some other social change through achievement in the business and/or economic world. There is a quote that a supervisor I once had displayed in his cubicle; the actual quote escaping me, the general idea was that someone truly great in their particular industry revolutionize and change it. This is true from the paradigms that he implemented in his department (which later would help him attain a promotion to operations manager) to the change that happened with Carly Fiorina merging HP with Compaq computer, creating the largest computer company in the world in the process.

3. Create new business opportunities or exploit existing ones more. “Thinking outside the box” means thinking creatively, critically, and paying close attention to the opportunities that exist from moment to moment not only in your immediate environment, but in your particular market or industry.

4. Cause or influence dramatic change in an organization or industry. Carly Fiorina speaks very thoughtfully and significantly about what goes into the process of such change. Deriving context and perspective from diversity and overcoming the destructiveness of change are just two topics that she discusses in the podcast referenced above.

5. Inspire and transform others. The greatest legacies that the most successful industry leaders leave is that which we leave in the inspiration and transformation of others to continue the great change which you have undertaken in the business of your choice.

So, the choice is yours: Take the path well-trodden and reap the easy reward—the “Bell Labs path”—or be the pathfinder and revolutionize ground that few others dare conquer and reap the potentially greater rewards—the “Intel path.”