“To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.”
—Sir Isaac Newton

Times change; everyone knows this. Change is that great constant that coincides with the passage of time. I used to work in a call center for the wireless phone industry: Starting as a vanilla agent in the receivables management department, I became one of the fastest employees to move into the “resolutions” department where the duty du jour was to assist agents in doing their jobs and assist customers in escalated situations. Just as any high technology industry, the wireless industry changes quickly. If something didn’t change (at least) on a weekly basis, something was wrong…and the next change would often be much bigger than the changes that would have normally occurred over the course of the last week or more that had not had change.

The easily-learned, but difficult to adapt to principle is that things change. Each day, all around us, we see things changing. However…what is the propensity for people to change along with the changing times?

There are conventional wisdoms abound here. Conventional wisdoms, as anyone whom as read here any time in the recent or distant past, understands that this sort of wisdom is often nothing more than convenient. The short answer is that people can change, but it can be difficult for them to do so.

The longer answer: Sir Isaac Newton, the guy that once proverbially had an apple fall onto his head, then determined that for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction and developed a brand new system of math to describe the phenomena that he had discovered in the universe. Among his definition of the brave new universe that was coming to know the world was the concept of inertia. This principle of classical mechanics dictates that an object at rest will stay at rest and, likewise, an object in motion will tend to stay in motion. People don’t change because they are often held back by inertia such that they have behaviors which hold them back. While I can’t cite the research, I recall hearing once that after a couple weeks of “staying home, holed up in the house,” doing little to nothing productive, a person’s brain chemistry changes fundamentally, such that they are more apt to continue in that mode of living: I’ve witnessed this around me over the years and experienced it myself once, during a down period. I have often asked myself about the madness in the minds of these people.

It seriously requires a person to force themselves to get off of their behind and go out and do something.

An interesting corollary to this: How does one deal with the constant of change?

Most of the time people are resistant to change. Going back to my days in the call center business I learned one critical thing: The people that resist change often get left behind. The people whom grasp onto the change, ride the wave, and become a part of the change, “change agents” and “change warriors,” often find themselves benefiting from the change rather than becoming a casualty of it. However, I have a caveat coupled with a case study: Be careful not to become a casualty of the change

Quote: Extraordinary People

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”
—Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923

To commemorate the last address Bill Gates will give at the Consumer Electronics Show as the Chairman of Microsoft, a quote from one of the biggest visionaries of our time:

“If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 MPG.”
—Bill Gates, Chief Software Architect and Chairman, Microsoft

Quote: They Can't Get Away Now!

“All right, they're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us... they can't get away this time.”
—Lieutenant General Lewis "Chesty" Burwell Puller, U.S. Marine Corps

Quote: Judgment and Experience

"Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment."
—Unknown

Monkey Mondays: Happy New Year Monkey!

The Knowledge Paradox

“When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.”
—Andrew S. Grove, Co-founder of Intel

In other words, “it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.” It is a paradox such that as our collective knowledge increases, such does our expertise, our creativity and innovative ability will tend to plateau or decrease. It is the classic “thinking inside a box,” and the walls thicken with our experience over time.

An essay appearing in the 1989 Journal of Political Economy called this the “curse of knowledge.” Experts in their respective disciplines learn through their daily activities the jargon of their subjects and perform their routine tasks in the ways in which they have always been done. While it is efficient and possesses a concept of utility, it can stifle innovation by taking the path much-taken.

People see the world how they want to see it, since the world revolves around each individual person, through the filters with which they perceive the rest of the world. I’ve written about this before in a few posts. This is why this curse is so pervasive: It can be difficult for people to imagine what the world is like outside their own universe and their own paradigm. As an aside, this is why it can be so difficult to find really, really good trainers and teachers.

Imagine your remote control at home: Anything from your television or stereo remote control to your $1000 remote control. It probably has many more buttons than a reasonable person would need, but they all exist on that remote control because an engineer somewhere in the research, development, or production process determined a use for that button; as described by Chip Heath in a book him and his brother Dan co-wrote in their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Mr. Heath says of this: “People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and they can’t imagine what it’s like to be as ignorant as the rest of us.”

How can a person fix this?

Cynthia Barton Rabe proposes bringing in a team of outsiders, “zero-gravity thinkers” in order to add creativity and innovation to the development mix in her book Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It. “I would ask my very, very basic questions,” making mention of the initial frustration, however transient it may be, with this approach, “it always turned out that we could come up with some terrific ideas.” She finishes her wisdom with: “Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work in a related area but not in your specific field…Make it possible for someone who doesn’t report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.”

When in doubt, seek the perspective of others to forge your own wisdom in this often-chaotic world! However, in the end know that the decision is your own, and the responsibility of that decision is your own to bear, so weigh each perspective with the value with which it is truly worth!

The Not-So-Conventional Wisdom

Following World War II America went through a period in which the government, or the public sector, was growing poorer in relation to the private sector which was becoming wealthier. This is the outline offered by Harvard economist John Galbraith in his book The Affluent Society. It is also the origin of the term “conventional wisdom.”

We’ve all heard it: Conventional wisdom, rules of thumb, and urban legends. What is the problem with such “wisdom?” Not only is it “easy” wisdom but it also tends not to be true, just accepted by enough people in order for it to seem true. It acts as an obstacle to the truth, to new ideas, and is only fueled by the inertia of so many people believing in such bad information. This inertia is fueled by convenience, emotion, and assumption.

Common sense, on the other hand, is largely practical: Less of the abstract and more of the “collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen,” according to Albert Einstein. In the same train of thought such practicality can have its limits when it comes to the progression of society: “Similarly, common sense has been invoked in opposition to many scientific and technological advancements. Such misuse of the notion of common sense is fallacious, being a form of the argumentum ad populum (appeal to the masses) fallacy.”

So, we return to our original premise: If so many people believe in it, it must be true, right? Logic dictates otherwise with a concept known as Argumentum ad populum. Translated from Latin it is “appeal to the people;” placed into a more concise context “if many believe so,” or “if many find it acceptable, then it is (acceptable or so).”

Alright, let’s test it.

It has been reported in the mainstream media that more than 1/3 of Americans believe there was a government conspiracy surrounding the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. As of 1 July 2007 the population was about 301 million individuals in the United States; 36 percent of 301 million people equals about 108.3 million people. More than 100 million people believe that the U.S. government was complicit—either actively or through negligence—in the horrible attacks of 9/11. Certainly more than 100 million people, statistically, can’t be wrong! Right?

I can’t help but look at the world from the perspective of an economist, believing in some bits of logic. Sociology teaches us that while the person might be intelligent, rational, and calculated, putting many of them together and their behaviors tend to move towards the irrational. Additionally, just because the many believe something…it doesn’t mean that it’s true.

How about looking at it this way: Have you ever voted in an election? Did the person whom you voted for win or lose? Doesn’t matter, because the majority of individuals voted for the person who got into the office; that means that he or she was good in their elected position by virtue of most people voting for them! Politicians are good by virtue of how many people voted for them…right? How about at any certain time when most people think that a particular company whose stock is a good place to invest? History and your favorite Internet finance site can tell you how this is a failed notion.

So, in the end the masses aren’t necessarily correct, conventional wisdom isn’t necessarily wisdom and tends to be more convenient than possessing any utility and your own experiences should be all that draws you towards a more thorough wisdom about the world.

A Look Back: The Science of 2007

Updated!

Science is arguably the single set of disciplines which propels the human race forward, drives culture, and increases our collective utility. The state of science can also be used to determine, via a snapshot, the state of the human condition; art and other elements of interdisciplinary studies flow from science. Just as this is so, I like to look back at the previous year’s scientific accomplishments.

Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs, courtesy Wired News

Top 10 Science Breakthroughs of the Year, courtesy Science News

Top 25 Science Stories of 2007, courtesy Scientific American

Craziest Science Stories of 2007, courtesy Live Science

Top 100 Science Stories of 2007, courtesy Discover Magazine

Now We're Elite!

Now we're elite, or as is the popular vernacular amongst the die-hard Internet community: We're "leet."

The number "1337," as in one thousand three hundred and thirty seven, in "leet speak" dictates "eliteness."

Yeah, we're ending the year becoming "leet."

Keep on visiting and we'll see which mark we can hit next!

Help Wanted

It’s well-known that we live in the Information Age. Once upon a time it was the power of industry—great pieces of equipment operated by countless laborers working countless hours. As economies of scale developed, so did the assembly line and the furtherance of the manufacturing-based economy. As the industry-based landscape matured, the economy advanced to the point where specialization became increasingly important. As the twentieth century closed we had harnessed the power of the Internet. Combined with all other elements of the day our manufacturing-based society in the United States and other locales converted into an information-based economy.

Industry-based economics seemed to be a stepping stone to where we, in the west, are now; just as other places in the world go through this phase of their development we are shifting away from such and into a paradigm based around information, services, and facilitation. This information-based economy is revolutionizing old models and paradigms and changing the way that the various agents in each component of the economy interact with one another.

For the consumer part of this is that the Internet has had a tendency to democratize everything. eBay, with its online auctions, and Wal-Mart, with its harnessing of technology to make its business processes more efficient have collectively acted as the “invisible hand” of economics and made marketplaces more efficient: There is arguably not much profit to be made from these two businesses short of selling in volume. Wal-Mart posted a net profit margin of 3.6 percent in 2005, down to 3.2 percent in 2007. eBay has epitomized the low- or zero-profit margin on the Internet: In an online sense I firmly believe that eBay is as efficient as a market gets.

Each of us goes through our days selling our time to other people: For most of us that means selling our time for a wage or a salary, and maybe some benefits. Whether that means flipping burgers at the local fast food restaurant or bagging groceries for minimum wage or being a vice president with a bank, you are effectively selling your time to your employer for a price which you and the market will handle. In essence, you are a product which you must develop, market, and sell to employers seeking you and your product. This is simply a new way at looking at an old paradigm, though. I’ll breach that topic at another time. For now, however…

Imagine an extension of the above premise with the basis that you are a product such that you, instead of selling your services to your employer, could sell the services you provide to your employer directly to the customers which you already serve. Cut out the “middle man,” and eliminate inefficiencies at that level. Instead of being tied down to the policies, protocols, bureaucracies, and whatever else you don’t like about the time which you’re selling to your employer, you would be your own boss. You would be in control of your own destiny in the marketplace. You wouldn’t have to worry about performance reviews or a supervisor validating you: The marketplace which you serve would instead be the entity which validates your abilities and efforts.

There are a few, however, which can’t fit into this model. This does not mean, however, that you can’t work within this new paradigm, however.

Each person has not only the “hard” job skills and the “soft” ones they sell to their employer: They also have skills which they apply to hobbies or other “extracurricular” activities that occupy the time which they are not working for their employer.

This is where the famous adage “do what you love and find a way to get paid for it” enters. This is the ideal route. Find a way to do that which you love and make an occupation from it. Obfuscate the traditional definition of “work” so that it seems like play to you, particularly if you are that type of person who differentiates between “work” and “play.”

A lot of these hobbies-turn-jobs can be done as a sole proprietorship: Being in business for yourself, using yourself as the sole business entity. Although it is less difficult to deal with than its more sophisticated brethren, it is also just that: Less sophisticated. Not offering any liability protection is the greatest disadvantage of this form of business organization.

The next higher form of business organization is the partnership. There are multiple types of partnerships, but the key factor in choosing a partnership is that it offers a level of protection against liability inasmuch as it spreads liability amongst a group of partners. General partnerships, limited liability partnerships, and limited liability companies are the fundamental organizational forms which they take. For more, read up on them!

Next up are the corporations. The most sophisticated form of business organization; it is also the most powerful. A corporation is considered its own separate legal entity: In other words local, state, and federal governments consider it to be its own person. As such all liability taken on by a corporation is the responsibility of the corporation. Each “co-owner” or shareholder of a corporation is only liable for as much as they invest in the corporation. Put another way if you invest $1000 into a corporation and the corporation completely tanks, you only lose your $1000. The “classic” corporation is the “C-Corporation:” This organization type is typically unlimited to the amount of shareholders it can take on but can be taxed as a corporate entity (corporations are taxed as such in U.S. states; not at individual rates) and the shareholder is responsible for their financial gains from their investment in the corporation as well. Corporations are wonderful things for making money; as Ambrose Pierce humorously defined a corporation: “Corporation, [noun]. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."

The other corporate entity is the “S-Corporation.” While some consider it a “glorified partnership,” the government still considers it a type of corporation. The name is derived from the portion of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax code that allows for the existence of this entity, “Subchapter S Corporations.” Essentially, the Subchapter S style of corporation allows for tax liability to be “passed through” the corporate veil such that each shareholder is responsible for paying them: While a regular C Corporation is double taxed (corporate plus individual), the S Corporation doesn’t pay corporate taxes, instead the individual shareholders are responsible for paying taxes on their individual investments in the enterprise. Subchapter S Corporations are typically corporations that are originally formed as C Corporations in their respective states, then paperwork is filed with the IRS in order to gain recognition as an S Corporation. An example of an S Corporation? My own.

Why such the long blog post? Because, at this time of year it seems that everyone is thinking about what moves to make in the year ahead: The obligatory New Year’s Resolution. Why not, in the upcoming year, figure out how you can break the “tyranny of the 9 to 5,” get away from the “dungeon of the cubicle” and figure out how you can become one of the successful string of businesses that drive innovation and contribute to society? Maybe it is for you, and maybe it is not for you. I strongly urge you to consider, however, this option.

While these steps take a skill set that is general and diverse in nature, one of my string of topics in the forthcoming year will be to develop the skill set required for a business owner, small business operator, or even CEO of one of the large multi-nationals. However, if you’d like to request a topic, please feel free to email me a question, your suggestion for a topic, or your feedback at this address!

Engineering Through It

Engineering is a fine discipline.

Albert Einstein was once quoted as saying that “scientists investigate that which already is; engineers create that which has never been.” Most of my life I have fashioned myself a scientist, however I have served in many a role in which solutions needed to be engineered. Indeed, any practitioner or student of any field surely applies to it skills which are inherent to the engineer; as Leonardo da Vinci said: “He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.” Engineering is the practical portion of any sort of theoretical study.

Rewind to my earliest days in the military. I served as a combat engineer when its military occupational designation was still 12B, “twelve-bravo.” The Army taught us in horizontal and vertical construction, mobility and counter-mobility, bridge building and destruction and—in order to facilitate the former—demolitions. All of these were trade skills: As obedient privates in “this man’s Army” we were drilled with the motions, methods, and repetitions which would work their way as sets of skills which would be applied to a team, a squad, a platoon, or a company in the execution of a task that fit into a mission which dictated which drills we would use to get the mission completed. Yeah, this was the monotonous portion of what was otherwise a glamorous career choice for a grunt.

What I would go on to learn, though, was that this particular style of engineering in combat forces many a practitioner to think on his or her feet. Any good combat or technical engineer that had served for long enough in the career field, enlisted or officer, could tell you that there are at least three ways of doing things: The right way, the long way, and the field expedient way. For engineers in the army there is a constant barrage of problems to be matched with a solution. My two years serving as a combat engineer and four years after that supporting engineer units taught me that theory may say one thing, but it is nothing short of human ingenuity that often succeeds in breaching the otherwise arbitrary limits of when said theory meets the contact of the battlefield.

While a battlefield can be a harsh place, so can our daily lives. The realities which we call our own have good guys, bad guys, fires to extinguish, and battles with which to contend. While there are countless books out there that can help us with the theory of dealing with it, the bottom line is looking within ourselves and to our environment to find the tools—mental and otherwise—to aid us in adapting to our world. We must take the theory which we know from our pasts and apply them with an eye towards “how can I better adapt in this moment to make the most of my situation?”

On the flip side of this coin, American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck points out: “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

That which ensues are thoughts about comfort zones and expanding them in such a fashion that you’ll be ready for the big moments to happen: Engineer your life for what you want it to be.

Monkey Mondays: See Monkey Teach Economics

See monkey teach Fairtrade.

Article here.

Monkey's game here.

Breaking News: Artificial DNA

I thought that this was good enough to include in these virtual annals.

Although this is a natural extension of the Human Genome Project, something that I figured about a decade-and-a-half ago would happen, it is amazing nonetheless.

A brief couple paragraphs from the full article.

"I see a cell as a chassis and power supply for the artificial systems we are putting together," said Tom Knight of MIT, who likes to compare the state of cell biology today to that of mechanical engineering in 1864. That is when the United States began to adopt standardized thread sizes for nuts and bolts, an advance that allowed the construction of complex devices from simple, interchangeable parts.

If biology is to morph into an engineering discipline, it is going to need similarly standardized parts, Knight said. So he and colleagues have started a collection of hundreds of interchangeable genetic components they call BioBricks, which students and others are already popping into cells like Lego pieces.

Keep in mind: From here on out the progress being made isn't arithmetic in nature, rather it is a geometric progression: In other words, instead of "1, 2, 3, 4..." so on and so forth, it is more akin to "1, 2, 4, 16..."

History in the making, right in front of our eyes!

Opportunity

I am a firm believer in the notion that we each know, at each point in time, that which we need to know. Yes, this is a point of view in which destiny is a key factor, something more than a random consideration.

I have stayed fairly busy as of late: Secretary and Treasurer on a couple nonprofit boards as well as taking on key managerial roles with each, running and operating in an executive capacity on a nonprofit which is my brainchild, a for-profit company, and other volunteer work in the discipline of IT consulting. This is not to mention my regular “9 to 5” job, as I refer to it. Also of note is that next month I begin college again towards a degree in Finance.

I have had at least a couple people worry about me stretching myself too thin in the last week. One had mentioned that the comment was made to them that perhaps I “am setting myself up for failure.” I have thought long and hard about this, trying to perceive it from an unbiased and logical, rational perspective.

I subsequently came across a quote in a movie:

"When a person prays for patience, do you think that God makes them patient, or gives them the opportunity to be patient? If he prays for courage, does He give him courage or the opportunity to be courageous?"

I applied this singular thought to my own situation. What I decided upon was that right now, right at this time, I am being challenged and simultaneously offered the opportunity to prove myself and to succeed in that which I have been working towards for years.

“Sometimes it seems so long, yeah, but his passion is so strong; and something makes him carry on… He'll do what he has to do, to be part of the game. Yeah, he knows what he'll have to go through, till the world knows his name.”

Part of what I’ve learned, so far, along this journey; something that’s just been reaffirmed for me, is that you get back that which you give: The more you give to other people, granted that they don’t “screw you over,” the more that you will receive in return. If you give to the absolute, you will receive in kind. If you are apt to take in the absolute, then you can expect the same of others.

Like a Good Bartender

For years I have held that, from a purist’s perspective, there are two types of functional individuals: Subject matter experts and professional managers. One should aspire to become one or the other or both in whichever industry they are in.

A subject matter expert, commonly referred to simply as SME, is one that is just that: An expert in the subject matter of their discipline. If this means that you are flipping burgers, be the best burger flipper than you can be. Subject matter expertise insists that you become technically proficient in a particular discipline or subset thereof. As a young soldier I found my expertise in the subject matter of soldiering, engineering, administration, personnel, information technology, and others. One by one, I knocked out the learning that was necessary to become practically proficient in each piece of subject matter as to create a promotion pathway for me. By the time I left the military I was working as a key individual in a personnel and administration section of an engineer headquarters.

The notion of subject matter expertise didn’t hit me as much, however, than it did when I worked with Cingular, now the new AT&T. As a receivables management agent, I took inbound calls from wireless phone customers using a handful or two of different systems. I was told that in order to progress, I needed to memorize policies and procedures for receivables management.

So, that’s exactly what I did. In between calls I spent my time going through the company’s knowledgebase and memorizing policies and learning procedures. As I progressed in these studies over a few weeks I started to learn how the system worked, how the system thought, so to speak. I became, at the time, the quickest-promoted person in history of the call center in which I worked. To this day I hold second place—a good friend of mine beat me by a matter of weeks; he entered the call center in which I worked from another division of the company which was even more empowered and difficult. We both rose to positions of prominence in the same call center because we took paths that others were not willing or able to travel, went the extra mile, and stood out amongst our peers.

We became subject matter experts in our field.

The professional manager, by contrast, is less focused on specific technical details and more focused on being a generalist. However, this isn’t exactly what it seems. In an earlier blog post I point out the fallacy of the “conventional wisdom” of the “jack of all trades, master of none.” It is my personal sentiment that this phrase was constructed by those more apt to be SMEs rather than the generalist that is more suited to being a professional manager.

If a subject matter expert is much like the Army’s warrant officer program—a special subset of the officer corps that was established and exists to operate and maintain the specialized technical systems of the modern military, the professional manager is a manager that adheres to a code similar to that of the Bushiddo—the warrior code that the samurai used in feudal Japan, not unlike portions of the code of chivalry used by the samurai’s European counterparts.

A professional manager uses the sub-disciplines of business and organizational theories and practicum and applies them to any situation: Accounting-Finance-Economics, Management, Information Systems and Information Technology, Sales-Advertising-Marketing, Human Resources, Law, Organizational Psychology, so on and so forth.

Like I said, the professional manager can apply managerial skills to any circumstance. In this regard they are akin to “Special Forces” of the managerial world: For the situations in which they find themselves will often only find it smelling like roses after they have entered themselves into the equation.

That is not to be said that subject matter experts aren’t like Special Forces. In fact, what each SME and Professional Manager should aspire to is to become both: Subject matter experts should learn the “soft skills” of management and associated disciplines to give them a broader perspective when it comes to the performance of their duties and professional managers should heighten and hone their component subject matters as well as others.

What does this mean for the rest of us? Basically just to start down one path or the other and find the other path along the way!

Monkey Comes Home

Following a successful campaign, Armani the pet capuchin monkey, is being returned to his home in Maryland!

Momentum from the Funk

After last week’s post, I couldn’t help but to think about how closely the words initiative and inertia are alike. Anyone reading my blog for any significant amount of time understands that part of my background is in physics, and therefore I like to apply the classic Galilean notion of the simple forces involved in a given system. In this instance the simple forces involved fall onto Sir Isaac Newton.

One of Newton’s assertions as a premier physicist, natural philosopher, of the time was that an object at rest tends to stay at rest: Once there, it doesn’t like to go anywhere. Sound familiar? People, I have come to realize, are much the same way. I’ve even heard it stated to go as far as that, after a couple weeks of stagnation, a person’s body chemistry can change to feed their sloth. Furthermore, without some sort of energy applied to the system…without even trying to do something to get out of such a funk…entropy ensues, chaos reigns, and it becomes even more difficult.

About a year ago several events transpired over the course of a few months, putting me into a depression of sorts. I thought it would pass, as certain times it tends to do, however it only got worse. Taking its toll on things, I holed myself up in my little world, tucked away in a comfort zone, and only interacted with the world on an as-needed basis. I hid from the remainder of it.

Fast forward to several months forward: I knew where I was at, I knew where I had been; I realized that I was in a low point in my life and the manifestations of that state of mind had begun to take its toll on things that were close to me and held dear. What did it take?

Energy applied to a system at rest will have a tendency to move it along a prescribed force vector. In other words, a kick in the pants got me going in the right direction—anywhere that was away from my present state of mind at the time. This process to gain momentum found me first reflecting through long and deep sessions of how events would transpire. What I came up with were things that were right under my nose all along, I just needed to watch and to listen, being mindful of opportunities.

Of course, throughout my affiliation in each of these places, tapping into my initiative, momentum has started to gain: Momentum that, I feel, given enough time and energy will result in the ultimate goal of my larger dreams being achieved…the grand scheme of things.

As I said last week, a personal mantra of yours when confronted with the notion of adversity between the “here” and the “there:” “If it is going to be…it is up to me.”

Monkey Mondays: Robotic Monkey Overlords!

Would you believe that brain signals from monkeys in North Carolina can control a pair of robot legs in Japan?

Read about it here!

If It’s Going to Be…

Imagine any one of the battles during, say, the Revolutionary War. Gentleman’s wars, at the time, consisted of two uniformed military elements marching towards one another and firing inaccurate rifles, cannons, and other instruments of destruction. When I saw my first movies depicting this form of warfare I was stunned, thinking that popular military theory for engagement at that time in history was grossly inefficient.

This mode went on through the 18^TH and 19^TH centuries—the War of 1812, the Civil War and such. It wasn’t until later in the 19^TH century that a new element started to find itself into the vernacular of warfare: Initiative. “In personal behaviour, initiative is the ability and tendency to initiate: to start an action, including coming up with a proposal and giving or helping without first being requested to do so.”

I’ve always equated the development of initiative with the period that John J. Pershing served actively in the United States Army. Born John Joseph Pershing on 13 September 1860, “Black Jack,” as he would come to be known, graduated from West Point in 1886, serving in the Spanish-American War, the Philippines Insurrection, and the Mexican Expedition through his service during World War I.

It was during the period of Pershing’s influence in the U.S. military and abroad that the concept of initiative would develop. Instead of lining up in columns and rows and marching towards another military unit lined up in the same fashion, initiative dictates that you do just what it suggests—move to the enemy, to contact. Oddly enough, the underlying concepts for the military doctrine of initiative can be seen in doctrines long before its coming of age in the 20^TH century. Sun Tzu is known to teach that the commander calculates, in part, battlefield conditions prior to entering armed foray. General Clausewitz popularized the notion of battlefield geometry amongst his contemporaries. General Nathanial Bedford Forest, from the (American) Civil War era put it simply: Be there “the firstest with the mostest.”

Initiative is a force multiplier—a single person’s dedication amplifies the efforts of many in a single group of people organized for the same purpose. It also sets the stage for higher levels of economics to take effect and add to the synergy of the team.

Continuing with the analogy, initiative built into a formidable concept after The Great War and morphed into something that helped General George S. Patton command his troops through Europe in World War II and gain more ground than any other army in history. He did this, in part, because of the indoctrination of initiative into formal military education and the manifestation of initiative into the main battle tank—an awesome feat of military weaponry if ever one existed. Initiative would go on and help form the basis for the Airland Battle doctrine that reigned during the Cold War…but that is a discussion for another time.

Remember this: Take the initiative…because if it is going to be, it is up to you to make it happen.