No Man is an Island

Imagine the first fax machine: A machine of which we know the capabilities today. What about the first one, though? What is the usefulness of this machine that can send a facsimile to other fax machines…when there are no other fax machines?

The point of a single fax machine is moot.

Now…add another fax machine. What is the usefulness of your fax machine now? Common sense indicates that it would double. This isn’t exactly true: The effect of these two fax machines is directly proportional to the number of fax machines—instead of being an arithmetic proportion, it is a geometric proportion. In other words the net result of the utility of these two fax machines is not 1+1, but rather 2^2, or 2 squared. The increase is so great because each user can either send or receive a document instead of the fax machine offering just a single purpose in relation to each other fax machine in the world.

In fact, there is a mathematical formula depicting this relationship: n * (n − 1) / 2 whereas n is the number of fax machines in the network.

Network. Networking. Networks. Thirty years ago this word meant much less than it does today. The man behind the power of this simple word, Robert Metcalfe, was half the man behind the technology called Ethernet. Ethernet, in short, is the largely the technology behind our home and business networks and the entire connectivity of the “wired” portion of the Internet (in contrast to the “wireless” portion). In selling his wares, Metcalfe grasped to his background as a trained engineer and businessman to inform his customer of the simple economies of scale involving his new networking peripheral. While their work may be able to take their businesses to a certain point, in order to grow past this point of critical mass, they would need something revolutionary—a force multiplier—to realize any newfound value.

This brings us to a more generalized definition of the network effect. From Wikipedia: “A network effect is a characteristic that causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer which depends on the number of other customers who own the good or are users of the service. In other words, the number of prior adopters is a term in the value available to the next adopter. One consequence of a network effect is that the purchase of a good by one individual indirectly benefits others who own the good — for example by purchasing a telephone a person makes other telephones more useful. This type of side-effect in a transaction is known as an externality in economics, and externalities arising from network effects are known as network externalities. The resulting bandwagon effect is an example of a positive feedback loop.”

How does this apply as wisdom? Think about applying such economics to your daily life. As I’ve said before, we can each consider ourselves a good wishing to perform services with other people (some more than others, sure) and from whom we look to offer our services—exchanges in the free market economy of life. Just as the 17^TH century poet John Donne wrote “no man is an island, entire of itself,” as individuals we have little value to anyone but ourselves, if that is to be of any real value at all. When we are able to offer our services to another, then our value as an individual increases because we are able to both offer of ourselves and receive what things of value the other person in this exchange can offer. The more people that we have in our lives, to whom we are able to offer something of value, the more we are able to use the networking effect—those things which we can accomplish, thusly, can grow as a square of the people in our lives with whom there can be reciprocating value.

At a glance, it might seem like a complex concept, but think of it in this way: It is often said that a fraction of total jobs available in a given market are advertised through traditional sources—newspaper, Internet, radio, job service, etc; whereas most jobs are assumed through “connections” that a person might have. This is a direct result of the networking effect.

Ever get a tip from a friend? Can you say that you’re a better person because of the people in your life? How about what you are able to offer to other people?

This falls in line with a quip of wisdom I’ve held for several years. Take two ice cubes: One in the shape of a cube, the other with the same amount of mass in the shape of a thin sheet. Which will melt first? Why? Certainly the ice sheet will melt before the cube because it has more surface area exposed to the environment. If we make the assumption was the preferred result of this process, wouldn’t your preferred result of your life be the success that you’d like from it? Increasing your “surface area” to the world, that is to increase the potential for interactions which you have, can thus increase your potential for reaching critical mass and, with help of the networking effect, geometrically grow into and past your hopes and dreams.

Today’s Gamer, Tomorrow’s Strategic Leader

An interesting article caught my eye through one of my news aggregators over at myadsl.co.za. From the article:

“Video games have become problem-solving exercises wrapped in the veneer of an exotic adventure.”

Certainly a first line that intrigues and piques one’s curiosity, let alone the affect the headline has on someone. Reading on:

“Video games have become problem-solving exercises wrapped in the veneer of an exotic adventure. In today's fast and rapidly-changing business environment, the strategic skills they teach are more important than ever.”

The article goes on to debate, through the perspective of the two authors of the book Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever. The authors state that instead of being like television where people are the bystander, gaming offers a suspension of disbelief and includes the gamer into the world of the game—they become a willing participant.

As such, the gamer must think strategically in interacting with their environment, propelled to win.

These skills, the article states, are indispensible to the business world. These traits are even more accentuated in multi-player online environments—the MMOGs like World of Warcraft—such that small team leaders need to leverage the abilities of their teammates in the execution of success.

This culminates in an important point:

“Games teach by trial and error. Consequently, gamers learn that failure is a necessary and unequivocal part of the path to success. This is a message that is often lost in the real world, because repetitions are few and far between and therefore the stakes are too high during each attempt. In games, repetition is high and immediate feedback is provided to the gamer. While failure in the real world is disheartening, in games it serves as an encouragement to try harder. This attitude towards failure eventually permeates life outside of the game. The result is that the gaming generation is willing to take more risks and be more entrepreneurial than previous generations.”

The kicker?

“80 percent of managers in the US under the age of 35 had significant video game experience and that gamers had a more positive outlook on life than non-gamers. Gamers tended to prefer multitasking to individual assignments, to stave off boredom.”

Food for Thought

What separates the winners from the losers?

"I'll try means I'll fail."

What Printers Taught Me about Me

While I’ve been working with computers since before the fourth grade, I’ve only been working in the realm of printer repair for about a year and a half. While I came into the job with a background for the mechanical—I served as an engineer in the U.S. Army and spent many of my formative years on a farm—I was coming into what is now my current position in which I repair printers and work with other aspects of Information Technology from what was part administrative, part support, part customer service position with Cingular (now the new AT&T) and my level of confidence in conducting my job was lower than when I had started other job roles.

“Arm yourself because no one else here will save you.”
—Chris Cornell, “You Know My Name”

It took me several months for a printer not to become daunting, while I gathered my courage and developed my confidence. When confronted with an issue with a printer I found myself, sometimes, reacting like a child struggling in the water, thrown in for one of his or her first times. It wasn’t until I learned to stop panicking and rely on myself to solve the problem.

Because, that’s one of my core competencies: The ability to solve a problem.

Of course, the best way to do this, in my experience, is to learn as much as possible about an issue and the all bodies of knowledge surrounding it until such time that you can come to a resolution. Appearing contrarian to my perspective of “perfect information” on the surface, this has developed itself over the years in that I try to find the “perfect amount of information” surrounding an issue instead of going in with so much information as to develop prejudices about conclusions that might not be the case. In any situation, however, I develop a core set of scenarios in which I ensure that I have parts available to be able to repair things on sight.

Yeah, something the Boy Scouts taught me: Always be prepared.

There are those situations, though, that I found where I would be confronted with an unruly piece of equipment which would require repair while I was there, even if it worked only partially or temporarily, so that the primary users would have the printer or other piece of equipment at their disposal to print checks, do reports, or whatever else their hearts or jobs desired. I started learning “field expedient” fixes which would carry something until such time that I could see to a proper repair.

That was something the Army taught me.

After I got it through my head something of my own advice—That I am not much more or less than the sum of my experiences—I realized that the best way to solve a problem was to have me be part of it. Why rely on fate, outside circumstances, chaos, or random circumstances dictate what the variables in a given situation would be? Why should I allow for something to turn out in a fashion that was counterintuitive—and counterproductive—to the way which I wanted a situation to turn out?

I learned that in any given situation—be that an office machine or a land war in Eston—if I made myself the determining piece in the situation, then I would have a much better chance of resolving it into my favor.

Rely upon yourself, because you’re the element in your life which makes the most difference.

Shovel the Snow, Form the Habit

Tonight we’ll be taking a look at some wisdom from elsewhere: How forming a walking path through snow is much like self-engineering a set of favorable habits.

“The process of forming habits [is] as walking home through fresh snow. The first person to go through the snow has to forge a path through the snow, and it’s difficult … but others will follow in that path and it gets easier and easier.

Forming a habit is a matter of forging that initial path until it’s harder not to take the path. Who wants to forge a new path through the snow?

But let’s take that concept a little further: what if you engineered it so that even the initial person forging through the snow would rather take that path than another, because it would be harder not to take the path.

Engineer your habit change so that it’s harder not to form the habit.”

Read the full article here.

The ebook, though not free, can be found here.

It Doesn’t (Necessarily) Take an MBA

Many people in recent decades have been incessantly taught that college is the right way to go: Get a good job, retire, so on and so forth. While in this conventional wisdom lie some very valid points—education is completely worthwhile, there are diminishing returns in some scenarios. The classic picture of an Ivy League education being responsible for making one’s way up the corporate ladder and into the corner office isn’t necessarily the one that is based in reality.

In fact, the Wall Street Journal reports:

“Most CEOs of the biggest corporations didn't attend Ivy League or other highly selective colleges. They went to state universities, big and small, or to less-known private colleges.”

In fact, I know for a fact (as the article reports), went to Pittsburg State University in the small community of Pittsburg, KS: A place where I resided for a small time. An accounting major there, H. Lee Scott ascended to the top spot in the world’s top corporation: Certainly no small feat.

In fact, the “Oracle of Omaha,” the third-richest man in the world Warren Buffett, is quoted as saying “I don't care where someone went to school, and that never caused me to hire anyone or buy a business.”

Following the line of logic that this allows, let’s take a look at Gabriel Hammod, a Johns Hopkins student who had his mind set on law school. During the course of his undergraduate years there, however, he traded stocks, placing $1000 on Caterpillar. Finding he had a knack for it, Gabriel decided to join Goldman Sachs as a stock analyst. Instead of going to business school for an MBA, like many of his colleagues, he chose to raise $5 million and start his own hedge fund, Alerian Capital Management. Three years into it, his company now manages $300 million from New York and Dallas. Gabriel, on the other hand, at the age of 28, enjoys a seven-figure salary.

What was his logic?

“Like other young people on the fast track, Mr. Hammond has run the numbers and figures that an M.B.A. is a waste of money and time — time that could be spent making money. “There’s no way that I would consider it,” he says.”

The finance world is rife with these sorts of stories.

“At funds that manage $1 billion to $3 billion, people with just a few years of finance experience will make $337,000 this year, Mr. Zoia says, and those with five to nine years of experience will average $830,000, up 6 percent from last year. These estimates include analysts and researchers but not portfolio traders, who can make much more because they sometimes share in profits.”

The moral of this story is clear: While extrinsic qualifications such as college degrees and other pieces of paper are good, intrinsic qualifications such as leadership skill, are the make-or-break critical factor in success.

A Great Start!

Today: Let's start with a way to start your day as positively as possible with an outside blog article:

“The way that you start the day nearly always sets the tone for the rest of it. If you begin in a rush, feeling frazzled and harassed, it’s very likely that the rest of the day will go the same way—or worse. It’s well worth a little planning and care to start each day well. It may still go downhill, but at least you won’t have begun in a foul mood.”

Read the article here.

E-Money, Part 2

The introduction of the Euro is an example of progression in the classic economy toward an all-digital economy. On the first of January 2002, the Euro became the standard currency of the member countries of the European Union. The Euro was introduced because the barriers to trade created inefficiency and waste and current systems created less value in each of their monies. This affected European countries when conducting business with the remainder of the global marketplace. Standardization of the Euro as the single currency in 12 countries of the European Union reduced the cultural barriers to trading with one another and unified at least 12 separate markets. The unified European marketplace is making it easier for other major markets in the world to do business with them, as well. Despite earlier doubts, the Euro has gained market value to be nearly of the same value as the U.S. Dollar, the most compared-to currency in the world.

This introduction of the Euro has been indicative as a case study of what evolving several markets into a unified marketplace can do to an economic system. Unifying markets can be defined as unifying resources, however, there are the structural changes that need to take place including infrastructure, demand, and a single currency. The infrastructure, as noted earlier, exists in the current capacity of the Internet. Further redundancies, such as more “backbone servers” that operate the core of the Internet, are necessary; as is the need for more bandwidth increases and the standardization of the languages and protocols that transport data. The demand exists because of increased efficiency involved with international transactions, thus relieving some of any trade deficit or increasing any trade surplus: This effect alone would sell the governments of the world to the idea, keeping in mind that the U.S. Government accounts for roughly one third of all monetary transactions in our $10 trillion economy. The single currency in this new, all-digital system would be simple: The “credit.” If all national markets were to utilize this “credit,” it would decrease the amount of waste in the world today. A major problem that critics are likely to point out is the problem plaguing individual currencies today is inflation. The best way to arrange this is to mimic the way that the European Union dealt with introducing the Euro to member nations: Rules were enacted to impose a strict level of fluctuations on the Euro. These rules were strict, since countries who wished to participate in the euro and be a part of "Euroland" had to pass some economic tests referred to as convergence criteria:

• “The country's annual government budget deficit (the amount of money it owes) cannot exceed 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP, the total output of the economy).
• The total outstanding government debt (the cumulative total of each year's budget deficit) cannot exceed 60 percent of GDP.
• In order to push down inflation rates and encourage more stable prices, the country's rate of inflation must be within 1.5 percent of the three best performing EU countries.
• The average nominal long-term interest rate must be within 2 percent of the average rate in the three countries with the lowest inflation rates. (Interest rates are measured on the basis of long-term government bonds and/or comparable securities.)
• The country's exchange rates must stay within "normal" fluctuation margins of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) for at least two years. “ (Howstuffworks.com)

With such controls in place, it is likely that a universal “earth credit” would be an attainable standard.

Now that the theoretical groundwork has been laid, how is this somewhat evolutionary, somewhat revolutionary system going to change the way individuals and businesses buy and sell goods and services? Every time that a consumer purchases a good or service a small stream of credits will flow from one place (the consumer’s bank account) to another (the business’s merchant account) through cyberspace; every time that a business takes their margin of the profits gained from that sale to the consumer, and spends that on providing more, better items for the consumer, their account will see a decrease of funds while the business that they purchased the goods from sees an increase in their account. Imagining the endless flow of goods from their manufacturers to the consumers, and the endless flow of credits from them to the companies that serve them, a seamless flow develops between the consumer and the business. This shortens the metaphorical distance between the two, and makes the relationship that the business has with the consumer stronger. This will allow a better product for the consumer and better customer relationship management by the business. It will also allow for the business to better understand the consumers that it serves, and produce better products based on the changing needs of the consumer. By changing the system by which everyone makes their transactions with one another, everything is streamlined and people grow closer and understand one another better.

The forthcoming e-economy will change the way that the world does business in every respect. It will make money worth more, easier to purchase any item in any country, and make relations between businesses and consumers better, streamlined, and more beneficial to both parties. The true question of the e-economy, as I have implied earlier, is rather a question of when as to how: Already the amount of money that passes through “automated clearing houses,” or ACH transactions, each day numbers in the billions of dollars. Even though the governments of the world distribute most of this money, the government has always acted as a catalyst for change in a society.

E-Money, Part 1

Bob is a normal, average, everyday person that everyone seems to know and like. Deciding that he needs to stop by the grocery store on his way home after a rough day at the office only to pick up a few items, Bob grabs a few more items than he expected, as he always seems to do. While making his way to the cashier, Bob does a mental scan for to see if there is more cash in his pockets. Remembering that his efforts are futile, Bob stops his search: Cash money has ceased to exist. The world of the future calls for a more efficient economy: One that works on your schedule, by your rules. You are glad when you are paying for your items, because all you do is electronically transfer the necessary credits from your account to the grocery store. This transfer of credits ensures that a person does not need to hunt for cash. In the near future this will be a very plausible scenario, as economic systems move into existing in a purely electronic form. The effect of converting the current classic economy into an all-digital economy will increase the amount of funds in the system. Based on a general understanding of the mechanics of economics, this will have significant impacts on the efficiency of monetary transactions, unification of different economies, and ultimately streamline the spending habits of businesses and consumers worldwide.

Economics, in simplest form, is the “study of how people use their scarce resources to satisfy their unlimited wants,” (McEachern, 2). Resources are those things that go into producing or buying something. These include labor (the work put into it), land (someplace to do it), or time (arguably the most scarce resource of all). The ability of combining these resources and get an end product to the consumer has been what has kept modern-day society buoyant since the Industrial Revolution. This transformation in the way that countries produce goods and sell them to the consumer was felt worldwide between the years of 1760 and 1860, with the more intuitive societies feeling the full impact of the revolution (among them England and the United States). Even today, the rest of the world classifies countries on a first, second, or third –world basis. Although the global economy progressed in quantum leaps throughout the last 250 years, it was not until just before the turn of the millennium that the economy was once greatly altered.

The Internet Revolution started to transform the economy in the latter half of the Twentieth Century with the concept of the electronic data interchange entwined into the backbones of most businesses. This eventually warranted the introduction of the World Wide Web to the masses around 1990 when a group of physicists developed a graphic user interface that would have a profound impact on the masses. The group of physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics center, had the foresight that would bring the Internet to the masses and change people’s quality of life and the way everyone purchases goods and services. The Industrial Revolution changed the way we did business by streamlining many of the classic economic principles around the world—paper money, demand and supply, centralized economies; this new Internet Revolution would further streamline these principles of economics by preparing for the e-Economy.

One principle behind paying bills is the act of not paying them until shortly before they are due, otherwise known as the present value of a dollar concept. This model states that a dollar today is worth more than that same dollar tomorrow, dictated by inflation—“a persistent increase in the level of consumer prices or a persistent decline in the purchasing power of money, caused by an increase in available currency and credit beyond the proportion of available goods and services” (Dictionary.com). The problem with tangible money is finding the balance between “available currency” (aggregate money supply) and “available goods and services” (aggregate product supply), and therefore, increasing the effects that inflation will have on the economy. Inflation is the real purchasing power of an individual or a business to purchase a good or a service: A dollar today is worth more today than it will be tomorrow.

An inefficiency of coinage lies in the time it takes for the markets to catch up with centralized economic policy. One of the major factors in how well a nation’s economy does is the rules and regulations put onto it by the governing body at the time. In a centralized economy the government closely monitors and regulates monetary flow. If the economy is decentralized, local or regionalized markets impact monetary flow more than any governing entity. In the United States, for example, the Department of the Treasury was granted a $14.705 billion for the 2002 (U.S. Treasury 2002 Budget Summary) budget. The reason why it is attractive for governments to impose fiscal regulations is because of taxation and ultimately a good economy benefits from the amount of money that the government is going to see out of the citizens that it presides over. Of their nearly fifteen billion dollar budget, roughly 63 percent of that is earmarked for the administration of taxation activities. There are billions of dollars of waste when taxing the population under the current economic system in the U.S. According to the “Waste-O-Meter” of Freedom Works, the IRS has wasted $18.1 billion to date on such things from U.S. Postal Service waste ($1.1 billion) to Housing and Urban Development (HUD) waste ($968 million) and approximately $550 million dollars in a failed education audit. Reduction of all monetary activities would help to eliminate this waste by streamlining the centralized bureaucracy surrounding fiscal policy. Better controls would also result as the system goes completely digital. Through the utilization of an information technology infrastructure evolved from today’s infrastructure the effects of the present value of a dollar model will be made up for by the amount of waste saved. In the end all monetary transactions will be far more efficient. By ensuring that the effects of present value are negated by the effects of increased efficiency, attaining buy-in from die-hard economists will be easier. Efficiency must start, though, within the bounds of a single economic system. The European Union’s example of the Euro is an excellent concept of increasing efficiency within the boundaries of a culture.

The Decay of Society: The Sickness, Part 2

“Life's wheels are spinning, ‘gonna be one bumpy ride”

—Hardline, Life’s a Bitch

The five stages of grief are often put forth when discussing grieving. While we typically couple grief with loss, the dictionary will expand it to mean “The process of feeling distress or sorrow.” High school health classes taught me that there are two kinds of stress…eustress and distress. The first is supposedly the good kind of stress: The type of anxiety that prepares you to do better in a given task: It’s what separates apathy from achievement. Distress, however, is the more famous brother.

Stress is so often something that permeates our lives: From the anxieties that arise in the morning hours through our lying awake in bed at the end of the day worrying about tomorrow. In this endless cycle of waking and sleeping stressors, we often find ourselves with a dose of escapism: Watching the latest celebrities in Hollywood or elsewhere live their lives of misery and take great opportunities and waste them away on the frills, passions, and benefits of the moment. We find ourselves reveling in this misery, most individuals not going past the latest celebutante’s turmoil du jour and failing to get the latest news on how local, national, or world events are shaping the world in which we live.

So often these lives of ours are in the vacuum of a padded bubble in which we have access to so much information, but I’ve seen so many people only go so far as is necessary to make themselves comfortable in their castle, hiding behind a moat, and isolating themselves from any reality that means listening to someone other than a celebrity or comedic news program in order to take in the information that is relevant in some way, shape, or form to their immediate world.

All this arrives to us from a world that has been crafted to be the glamorous one. As a song from a recent movie dictates: “Watch the whores parade for the price of fame,” most everyone in this society clings to some semblance or personal meaning of having glamorous aspects in their lives: From the status symbols of cars, houses, and boats to the bohemian styling of a person that supposedly goes their own way. Living in the bubble, entrenching oneself in the comfort zone, and striving to someone’s definition of glamour and fifteen minutes of fame might be the fun and easy way out, but in the end does it offer the fulfillment that we each want and need in our lives, or does it simply leave us feeling cold and empty as are a majority of the other people that follow this path?

The Decay of Society: The Miscellaneous Rants

As the week of “doom and gloom” comes to a close, I’d like to take this opportunity to point out a few of the various odds and ends of which I find society becoming more entropic by the day. Among these are cultural divides, moral opportunism, and apathy.

Have you ever walked into a situation and felt entirely out of place, as if you were from a different world compared to the other people there? How about driving along the road, seeing the automobile that’s been modified in ways that you can’t quite understand: Non-stock body parts of different colors, rims worth more money than is probably prudent, and a spoiler that looks like it could be paid for with a $20 out of my pocket and which definitely “spoils” any other augmentations of beauty that the vehicle might have. I was walking out of the local mall the other day, having recently finished servicing a customer there. Ahead of me I saw a young man, a teenager of some vintage, who had an oversized shirt and excessively baggy pants. I tried to review the situation further by determining if he was trying to hold them up or not. I kept thinking to myself “why on earth would I want to see your underwear?” Maybe the whole baggy pants thing is the latest fad, but I don’t see the utility in it. Utility that is strictly and solely for status or otherwise to fit in is lost on me, perhaps, but I can’t help but thinking about all the other places that I can look and see things of a similar nature. Take the girls, for instance, that have the provocative tattoos on their lower backs, something which has been given the term “tramp stamp” coined to describe it due to the commonly-held generalities of the types of girls getting this sort of body art. While what a person does to their own bodies is of their own concern, and it isn’t my place to judge them based on it, they do tend to play into what seems to be a cultural norm.

Think about it: When you speak to one of those kids with the earrings, baggy pants, or similar styles about him or her…what is your expectation? Our expectations will be colored by our biases and our prejudices, but there are certain standards which the culture should be held to: Without resorting to corrupting it. Recently, while I was at work, a college-age student dressed much the same fashion—minus the baggy pants, I believe, came in looking for a job. I recall something being mentioned to the effect after the fact that “I don’t care what people wear when they’re not at work, but if I’m going to offer a job to someone, I don’t think they should be dressed like that.” The rest of the team offered the same sentiments.

Save a deeper analysis of the subject and any agenda I have for a later blog post of my “professional manager” bent, so let’s continue to the next: Moral opportunism.

I am the type of person that means what he says and says what he means. I typically don’t like game playing in my interpersonal relationships and I adhere to a strict code of moral standards: Ones that do not change based on the situation which I find myself to be in. For some years now, I’ve been playing an online roleplaying and strategy game called Battlemaster. I’ve found some staggering truths about life from it, as I firmly believe it to be a macrocosm of the rest of the world. I’ve found that people who have military experience are the best to lead armies, for example. I’ve found that there are certain types of people whom you can rely upon and others that are shaky at best. There are many people that I play Battlemaster with whom I would go onto the battlefield alongside and fight in a foxhole with—this being the highest litmus test that I can offer a fellow human being—and just as many people as I wouldn’t trust to be in that situation with and not have to worry about them looking out for themselves. In this world there are people that you can count on and people that you can count on to practice situational ethics: A moral code which adapts to the situation found in front of the practitioner. My experiences on Battlemaster, just as in other parts of life, have proven to me that there are profiles of the types of people that are this way, and likewise there are profiles for the types of people that you can rely on to be there for you in your time of need.

Why doesn’t anyone do anything about any of this? By and far, I’d have to say that many people in this society, and others, are just apathetic. To the tone of the Bystander Effect, people expect that someone else will always be there to fix things, or that it might just go away on its own. Apathy is the general malaise which fuels entropy, causing things that are already in the trash only to get worse.

Is this really the world that you want to live in, or would you rather live in one that was better? Let your amount of apathy be the judge of that.

The Decay of Society: Power Hungry, Dumb Governments

Government: “From the Greek Κυβερνήτης kubernites - steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder—is an organization that has the power to make and enforce laws for a certain territory. There are several definitions on what exactly constitutes a government. In its broadest sense, "govern" means the power to administrate, whether over an area of land, a set group of people, or an association.” What happens when the administrators of a group of people stop acting the way that they should and, instead, start acting in such a way that it is a broken entity?

Take America’s neighbor to the south: Mexico. With restrictive socialist elements in its government, it cannot produce enough jobs. The result: A phenomenon known as labor dumping. Since it ranks so low at being able to employ its own potential workforce, the people must venture elsewhere to find gainful employ—even if it is illegal for them to do so in the country that they escape to work in, their actions sanctioned by their own homeland. Estimates of how many Mexicans are working in the U.S. range from 15 percent to 30 percent of Mexico’s labor force. The amount that they sent home in 2006 was $23 billion. Money sent to Latin America from workers in the United States is speculated to be as high as a record $45 billion this year. This same sort of story can be found in other parts of the world, too: President Sarkozy of France doesn’t want Turkey to enter the European Union, in part, due to fears that Turkey will do much the same thing to Europe as Mexico is doing to the U.S. A similar situation happened in Yugoslavia under Marshal Josef Tito in 1948.

While the governments of Mexico and the rest of Latin America are to blame for their ineptitude in running their governments in such a not-so-free market, socialist manner, the government of the United States also is to blame for their much botched handling of the situation. Instead of enforcing immigration laws on the books, it seems that most politicians look at the situation as one of more tax revenues for the government. Politicians love taxes. Seeing the opportunity to increase the amount of spendable bucks in their treasury, it seems that Washington, D.C., and many state and local governments have started waging a war on the laws that exist and have tried passing new laws to “reform” the situation of illegal aliens and immigrants coming into the country.

This isn’t where the United States government ends with its stupidity. They are in the business of punishing behaviors with taxation in its various forms. Virginia will fine you from $750 to $3000 for excessive speeding and other driving offenses. If you live in a high tax state or have too many children, you’re punished with the monstrosity known as the Alternative Minimum Tax. Live in Boulder, CO, and like to “warm the planet?” Try the “Climate Action Plan Tax” on for size.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for immigration: Legal immigration. The type of immigration that has forged nations since the formation of nation-states: One where people come, adding their culture to the melting pot, but assimilating themselves into the culture of the whole. What we face today is a double-culture wherein when someone calls many automated phone lines, I must press “1” for English to be spoken. Se hablas Espanol is a feature that many businesses in the southwest United States advertise. The tension created by this entire fiasco has created a polarizing tension amongst the people in the United States: Ask 10 people about their stance on the immigration debate and I’m willing to bet pie that at least 8 of them—if not more—are going to stand on one side of the argument or the other with very few, if any, being somewhere in the middle and apathetic of the situation. Heck, I even recall a situation recently at the local college where a Spanish class was told on their first day that they needed to request permission to speak English in the class—a common tactic of many foreign language classes. One kid stood up and went ballistic about needing to ask permission to speak his language in his country.

What else is wrong with governments? Let’s take a last look at the United States government. How about a Congress that is apt to pay itself more while dodging its (constitutional) responsibilities by creating new federal agencies and delegating an increasing amount of authority to make rules and laws to them, instead of doing it themselves? In 2006 Congress passed 321 bills into law. How about federal agencies? They issued 3,718 rules. All of this with “regulatory costs—“that is costs associated with operating this alphabet soup of agencies on a daily basis—of $1.142 trillion, or 9 percent of the United States’ GDP. That all compares with estimated 2006 personal income taxes of $1.044 trillion and corporate income taxes of $354 billion.

What is the solution to this set of quandaries? Government needs to enforce the laws that are already in place. They need to get this message by congressional constituencies—i.e., you—contacting them and letting them know your sentiments. The general rule of thumb goes that if just one person of who the congressperson represents contacts them, then they are representing at least 10 people: Just think what 100 or 1,000 contacting constituents could send for a message. People need to elect those into congress that have proven track records of not increasing the size of government and spending more than the government has available to them. In this instance, you need to ask yourself if you want the government to completely take care of you from cradle to grave, or if smart, efficient, smaller, and effective government services and agencies could replace the over-bloated offices seen today. Ultimately, you would get more from your each and every paycheck with which you could determine how you took care of yourself—your healthcare, your insurance, your retirement, etc.

While government exists to provide for the basic needs of a society, it can reach a mass at which it is apt to corrupt and take everyone else down with it. In democratic societies, at least, we are privileged with being able to vote those out of power which do not concur with our manner and method of thinking and living. If we do not, then we are doomed forever down the road of societal decay.

The Decay of Society: Frivolously Litigious

Look around. The society that we know is decaying from within because evil is allowed to prosper when good people do nothing; a notion deriving itself from a quote most often attributed to Edmund Burke, 18^TH century Irish statesman and philosopher. One of the easiest routes for any sort of thing to decay—such as a right or privilege offered—is for people to abuse it and for others to allow them to get away with the abuse.

I am willing to bet that everyone is familiar with the famous McDonalds coffee-burning case. Many people, however, misunderstand the suit as simply being of a frivolous nature. Heck, I even thought it was your standard “corporate greed” story passed from person to person to perpetuate the myth that the institution of McDonalds is evil. Instead, some facts:

“A jury…awarded $2.9 million to an 81-year-old woman scalded by McDonald's coffee…McDonald's lawyers [however] went on to dismiss several opportunities to settle out of court, apparently convinced that no jury would punish a company for serving coffee the way customers like it. After all, its coffee's temperature helps explain why McDonald's sells a billion cups a year…McDonald's [had given] the opposing lawyer its operations and training manual, which says its coffee must be brewed at 195 to 205 degrees and held at 180 to 190 degrees for optimal taste.”

Is nearly 200 degrees for your coffee too hot? Not according to Mr. Coffee, the people behind the machines that make, well, lots of coffee:

“A spokesman for Mr. Coffee Inc., the coffee-machine maker, says that if customer complaints are any indication, industry settings may be too low - some customers like it hotter. A spokeswoman for Starbucks Coffee Co. adds, "Coffee is traditionally a hot beverage and is served hot and I would hope that this is an isolated incident."

So, while some lawsuits are legitimate but portrayed incorrectly amongst individuals who likely do not know any better, there are plenty of lawsuits which don’t quite live up to the litmus test of being worth it. In the business and legal professions, it is an old adage that lawsuits are simply a negotiation by other means. Take the McDonalds incident, for example: The company had been given ample opportunity to negotiate to the satisfaction of the afflicted party; having not properly done what was perceived as due diligence on the plaintiff’s part, the “negotiation” went into a courtroom.

There are people who will happily sue people throughout this country and its legal system. In fact, according to an organization known as HALT, the number of people who have chosen to represent themselves pro se has increased 6 percent—from 21 percent to 27 percent in federal district courts. In the state courts of California, however, this number has tripled. What is he frequency of repeat abusers? According to an article in the September 3, 2007 issue of Forbes magazine “Nearly half of the study's 765 pro se litigants filed at least one previous suit in that court, including one who filed 57 complaints in one year.”

A great example of this abuse starts with Holli Lundahl and her repeated litigation against Eli Lilly and Company. The company has spent $1 million in defending against this “serial plaintiff.” A quick Google search shows that she has had many more than her fair share of her days in court, too. Of course, she has responded in such a fashion to her critics by stating that she has been abused by Eli Lilly and Company and the courts system—going all the way to the Supreme Court, even. I don’t know, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, chances are that it’s not chicken.

The best for last: Amanda Ajuluchuku claims that Bank of America lost a $200 check of hers. According to court filings is caused her to suffer “panic and anxiety attacks, severe dizzy spells, headaches, and cold chills.” I’ve had much worse money problems, including the one time that the military didn’t process my paycheck properly—which amounted to no less than 7 times the amount Ms. Ajuluchuku claims that BOA lost of hers—and I didn’t sue anyone. Oh yeah: She sued—Claiming $5 billion-with-a-“b” in damages. The suit was eventually settled for $3,000 but she just kept on going. Alleging “discrimination, contempt, and acts of terrorism,” she filed at least 219 suits in federal courts over the course of 4 years. No legal team here, though: She represents herself, on a mission to use the proceeds of her litigious nature “to cater to the needs of the underprivileged children globally.”

While these examples show what seem to be some awfully extreme behavior, think about the case of Bart Ross: When federal Judge Joan Leflow dismissed his pro se suit regarding a malpractice suit of an Illinois medical center, he went ballistic and killed the judge’s husband, mother, and later himself.

Can’t stand the manner in which the society that we are living in is deteriorating? All it takes is for good people to do nothing; the apathy of each individual who just shrugs these matters off and moves on with their lives only goes to allow the fires of entropy to continue to burn.

Decision Making: An Overview

It has been said that our destiny is not shaped by how our circumstances mold us, but by the decisions that we make to mold our circumstances. This, I have some level of certainty, is the basis for “there are [insert number here] of kinds of people in this world” pearls of wisdom. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity, driven by information, and forged by the decision-making process. As Newton once postulated, every action has an opposite but equal reaction. When you exert force onto something, that object will push back with the same amount of force, per inertia, with the excess energy that you put into the system being used to propel the object onto the trajectory that you want it to move.

In a manner of speaking, you live in an open system: You are part of a community, a larger whole, following your world-line throughout a daily routine, interacting with the world based on your innermost values and behaviors. Behaviors are extensions of values, by way of self-discipline—selective training of thoughts, words, and actions. Self discipline is a deliberate set of actions that can have linear and non-linear payoffs; one’s personal investment in self-discipline, however, is much less than the price of not having self-discipline in many circumstances.

The opposite of self-discipline, by contrast, is impulse. If rational decisions are to be strived for, decisions made impulsively are the introduction of chaos into the decision making process, enough to make them an irrational behavior. Irrational behaviors often add unnecessary entropy to a system—read, your world—and thus form the other end of the continuum from disciplined decision making as a rational, intelligent and deliberate act to the other end of being impulsive, often irrational, and lacking distinct and quality information to justify the action with.

This power of choice and free will, coupled with the other assets provided by the human mind makes it the most powerful tool in the universe. The most important thing that we can do with our minds is to make calculated and rational decision with it. There was once someone who said that the secret to engineering is not asking what more you can add to something, but that there is nothing left to take away. We can draw from this that the best decisions are made deliberately with quality information, but not too much of it. I get ahead of myself, though: Let’s re-visit this point later.

Back to the continuum for a moment: Oftentimes the most calculated of decisions can take the most time, as copious amounts of information are required for it; on the other hand, we often have very little (if any) information to support the decision that we have made, making rationality a function of the amount of information involved, right? Not necessarily. The quality of the information, along with the quantity, comprise a crucial factor in the decision making process. Oftentimes make what they feel are the best decisions, based on a good amount of information…but they are basing decisions on bad information. The cause for this can range from personal biases to disinformation.

So, to the previous point: When are the best decisions made? Bayes Theorem is a mathematical powerhouse of a formula which introduces the concept into the decision making process of re-evaluation once there is a change of the amount of information in the decision-making process. The best decisions don’t rely on the quantity of information, but the quality. While it is unlikely that a single bit of intelligence…information, as it were, could offer you the necessary impetus for you to make a decision, it’s just as possible as receiving far too much information on your required decision and thus having your judgment be clouded with too much information.

How do we attain this elegance in decision making abilities? Understanding the decision making process and experience are the best guides in this: Understanding the process allows one to comprehend the proper framework for which sound decisions are made, while experience develops what is better known as instincts. Instincts are simply our visceral reaction to data that we have seen in the past. In the hands of the logical minded person, proper instincts paired with the application of the never-ending cycle of processing decisions, achieving consistent elegant decision making will only take a matter of time.

Combat Leader's Guide to Decision-Making, Part 1

“Warfare is a great matter to a nation; it is the ground of death and of life; it is the way of survival and of destruction, and must be examined.”
—Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”

In combat and business, there are many roles filled by many people: They range from the soldier on the front line conducting a series of drills on the frontlines of combat up through the chain of command. Just as the infantry is the branch of the Army that produces the result of liberating land from the enemy, just are those that produce for the organizations which we want to succeed. Staff positions and aides can be found at all levels, also, but ultimately all answer to the business leader that commands all of these assets.

This business leader, or commander, does more than just manage and lead. Whereas managing is the art of conducting and directing resources, leading involves influencing and directing the performance of group members towards the achievement of organizational goals. However, all of these are driven by his or her ability to make decisions. This can often be a monumental task, even for the most experienced leader.

Intelligence

Intelligence drives forces on the battlefield of business—industries, markets, etc. It tells you where your resources are needed and in which amounts.

All probable battlefields on which you could do battle with your opponent and their respective maneuver areas are considered to be part of the battlespace. This battlespace is a two-dimensional, multi-faceted environment with very specific geometries about it. The role of intelligence in the battlespace is to give depth of data for each portion of the battlespace: The more data in a given portion of the battlespace allows for greater opportunity for success in it: Success being defined as a function of opportunity meeting preparation.

People Mechanics – Part 2

You might be asking yourself: “Which is better…episodic or procedural memory?” The simple answer: Procedural. I recall hearing an interview of a psychologist in which he took an Alzheimer’s patient to a golf course once. This patient was, once, a very avid golfer. Upon getting to the golf course and getting his hands on some golf clubs everything about golfing came back to the man. However, on the way back from the golf course the gentleman saw the golf course and the beautiful day and remarked how “beautiful the day was” and that they should go golfing.

I’ve long held to the belief that this is the reason that the military emphasizes battle drills. Just as you have probably seen soldiers, marines, sailors, or airmen march (although it is more likely to be one of the first two), you probably noticed that everyone performed a series of precise, discrete series’ of movements along with other members of their formation that can amount to some very spectacular sights to see. The same can be said for rifle drills: Everything in these drills and ceremonies is nothing more than a number of actions, one after the other. They can be repeated until perfect, able to be memorized to the point where someone can do it in their sleep.

The concept of drills does not stop at simply marching troops or inspecting their arms: Battle drills are used for many team maneuvers from building a bridge to constructing a mine-laying system. The more that drills are repeated and “drilled” into memory, the less a person needs to think about them when it comes to doing them. The concept of drilling removes the need to consciously thinking about performing a task when it matters, rather it is made a “second nature.”

Now, the talk about the emotional component earlier is not lost to the battle drill. The feeling of being a part of a team, that one has purpose, a sense of urgency: These are both satisfying emotions, adding to the effectiveness of the battle drill and why it can be remembered so well.

So, memories are often not simple bits of information stored in your brain. Rather, they are often embedded in a web of context. Data coupled with more data, random bits of different memories and types thereof comprising a larger set of data, eventually linking all thoughts in the brain together to form the sum of your experiences. Context is the key.

I’ve met people who have difficulty, for one reason or another, learning new data because of the lack of context it has in their everyday life. Of course, not everyone is going to find an essay on “Ode to a Grecian Urn” important, or even satisfying or pleasurable, to fit into their worldview. A person who has an affinity for history, art, literature, teaching, or to just broaden their perspective on the world at large is, however, going to take note of the Keats piece. People are often not compelled to expand their horizons with new sorts of information that don’t directly apply to their immediate world, though. How is one to combat this?

Of course, there is the “Knowledge is power,” contrasted with “ignorance is bliss.” I always think that a mediocre individual came up with that last saying. The first statement, however, holds some interesting ramifications with it…if we look a bit deeper.

Human Mechanics: Awareness, Learning, and Context - Part 1

I have recently found myself picking apart the mechanics of fundamental human processes: Decision-making, learning, adapting, dealing with change, etc. To mention nothing of the psychology involved, it certainly has been a multi-disciplinary approach. Fields ranging from Information Theory to physics have found their way into my process and analysis of this academic study: One that I hope will have practical applicability.

Where to start?

General wisdom through the ages has passed on the adage that people have a tendency to do two things: Seek pleasure and avoid pain. Fueled by advancements in current technology this has been challenged. Dr. Gregory Berns of Emory University has dug more into the “what do humans want?” question. If pleasure is a sensational emotion that only happens occasionally then, it stands to reason, that something more substantive must exist along the way. Take from this that the ideal place to be is somewhere between pleasure and pain: Satisfaction. Let’s first examine this by looking at the definition of pleasure with a simple “define:” search in Google.

“· a fundamental feeling that is hard to define but that people desire to experience; "he was tingling with pleasure"

· joy: something or someone that provides pleasure; a source of happiness;”

Two definitions stand out, yes: The second pointing at joy, or a source of being happy. The first one points to the simple abstraction and how difficult it is to pin down the true meaning of pleasure. Of course, it’s a subjective term, but pleasure is always a positive thing—therefore finding a definition across a sampling of many individuals, many subjectivities, shouldn’t be impossible.

Next, satisfaction:

“· The human experience of being filled and enriched by their experience.”

And:

“ · act of fulfilling a desire or need or appetite”

Imagine moving up a hill: The hilltop represents the completion of the task, winning the prize for the effort that you’ve exerted. Although this supersedes satisfaction into pleasure, pleasure—especially in this context—is fleeting. There is also the downside that exposure to too much pleasure could desensitize its recipient to all but the most intense forms of it. Satisfaction, on the other hand, is achieved as a feeling of atonement for the accomplishment of component tasks of a larger pleasure-bringing project. In the long run, the seeking of satisfaction is better than the seeking of pleasure.

As with all behavioral mechanisms—satisfaction-seeking and pleasure-seeking, for instance, there is a “spectrum” to be observed. On one side of the spectrum of satisfaction there is complacency. Complacency is the maladaptive form of satisfaction. Destructive pleasure-seeking is the maladaptive form of pleasure. We’ll re-visit this topic later.

When we are trying to remember something one way of increase retention levels is to couple the proposed memory with something pleasurable. I’ve heard this recommended as coupling things you want to remember with thoughts of sex; while this might work (especially as a pleasurable form of memory utilization) , it fails to get to the heart of the matter and how memory really functions. Research into how people store memories show that the brain doesn’t store discrete pieces of data—such as the way a hard drive stores data as “1’s” and “0’s”. Instead the human memory is contextual in nature: When a topic was brought up by a person you were having a conversation with, did it make you remember something else? People have different types of memories. Among these are procedural and episodic. As you would imagine, episodic memory deals with the types of memories from your personal experiences and your past. Procedural memory, then, is what I often refer to as “drill memory,” or the type of memory that you utilize when you are doing something that is a set series of steps like brushing your teeth, combing your hair, arming a landmine, or formatting a report.

I read somewhere that people will remember about a third of what they read, half of what they see, and all of what they feel. Why does the “remember something alongside sex” trick work so well? Sex, generally, makes a person feel good: Thoughts that are coupled with satisfying or pleasurable feelings are well-retained. That is not to say, however, that data coupled with painful feelings doesn’t get remembered: It’s just that painful memories can be more easily forgotten and replaced with bad memories or otherwise repressed.

Basic Game theory in Corporate Combat

“Do not take the first step without considering the last.”

—Karl von Clauswitz, “On War”

Anyone can be taught this doctrine for decision-making in the combat of business; but when it comes down to it, everyone makes decisions of risk using their heart: Whether this be from the rational logic of a veteran and hardened combat commander, or based on the feeling leader's passions and prejudices. In a system where multiple intelligent agents come together and the numbers of the interacting agents are small enough as that each has a perceptible influence on the others, a model can be created to describe, predict, and control these interactions. All this is done to maximize returns from these interactions, and in the case of combat: To win.

Games studied by game theory are well-defined, finite, discrete objects. Inasmuch, it consists of a set of players, a set of strategies available, and a return for each combination of strategies. Normally, each player has some information about the choices of the other players, but there are still variables involved. Again, we are trying to eliminate the risk of those remaining variables and uncover the values of all variables possible.

No matter how many variables you uncover, you may not know exactly what the enemy commander will do, for his or her "split moment" decisions are often driven by their instincts: The inherent dispositions towards particular actions; generally inherited as patterns of responses or reactions to specific kinds of situations. They are most easily observed in responses to emotions and actions, generally serving to set in motion mechanisms that evoke an individual to action and are influenced by learning, environments, and natural principles.

Moreover, the better a player's education level, it seems, the more rational their reactions and decisions tend to be.

A symmetric game is one where the returns for utilizing a particular strategy give the same returns regardless of who is playing them. Asymmetric games are often (but not always) such that there are not identical strategy sets for both players. When all strategy combinations add to zero (or, when one player benefits equally to the amount of the others' loss). This is called a zero sum game.

In our battlespaces, all games should be considered sequential games such that later players have some knowledge (but not necessarily perfect knowledge--when all players know the moves previously made by all other players) of the actions of earlier players. This allows for using the "economics of experience" to help in the decision-making process.

Determining the outcome of the geometries of the battlespace can be complex, but remember: Intelligence drives the process of good decision making. Often, the intelligence cycle often uncovers updated or new information. Bayes Theorem shows us an understanding how the probability that a theory is true is affected by a new piece of evidence. One thing that Bayes Theorem shows us is that too much information can adversely affect the decision making process. Too much information can cloud judgment and hinder the combat solution from being a process with a simple result.

This being said: Competent, trained, experienced intelligence staff analysts should be able to turn the incoherence of much information into a coherent stream of highly useful intelligence for its customers. Regardless of how complex the process as a senior combat decision-maker with your staff is, keep the input and the output of the system as simple as possible: Clear, precise, simple orders and maneuvers help to eliminate confusion in the chain of command. Competent and experienced staff advising the commander and the subsequent echelons of leadership helps ensure that the intelligence process runs smoothly, and thus, the decision-making process.