The Pygmalion vs. The Golem Effect

There are two kinds of self-fulfilling prophecies. They are broadly defined by wiki as follows:

The Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, is the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they perform.

On the other hand is the Golem effect, in which low expectations lead to a decrease in performance.

In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The theme was in the main stray of many English literary works during the victorian era. One of which is George Bernard Shaw's play titled "Pygmalion" from which Rosenthal effect gets its name. In Shaw's play, the protagonist, a professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. (The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the time and a commentary on women's independence.)

When read along with Hawthorne effect, the two behavioral effects above become even more interesting. The Hawthorne effect (commonly referred to as the observer effect) is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve or modify an aspect of their behavior, which is being experimentally measured, in response to the fact that they know that they are being studied, not in response to any particular experimental manipulation. (Of course, without much doubts the key-words and the theme thus far may have already reminded you of the Quantum double-slit experiment, which in itself is a topic for a new Bubble-game. Meanwhile, try here if you must.)

These effects, among others, constitute the broader macro psychology theory of human motivation and personality called "Self-Determination Theory" which concerns with people's inherent growth tendencies and their innate psychological needs, and attempts to study the motivation behind the choices that people make with/out any external influence and interference.

When applied to modern-day study of the economy, it brings us to the ongoing work by MIT professor Dan Ariely in the field of "behavioral economics". The following TED talk captures his ideas rather nicely around prevalent biases in human decision-making process and the term that he coined to describe the behavior: "Predictably Irrational". (My short book-review of the namesake shall follow as a future post.)

[Dan Ariely: Are we in control of our own decisions?]
NB: This blog entry is an example of "Bubble-game Theory"

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George Sugihara On Early Warning Signs

Earlier this month SEED magazine published this very interesting article by George Sugihara, theoretical biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, on how deep mathematical models tie the events of climat change, epileptic seizure, fishery collapses, and risk management surrounding the global financial crisis. Excerpts:

[...] Economics is not typically thought of as a global systems problem. Indeed, investment banks are famous for a brand of tunnel vision that focuses risk management at the individual firm level and ignores the difficult and costlier, albeit less frequent, systemic or financial-web problem. Monitoring the ecosystem-like network of firms with interlocking balance sheets is not in the risk manager’s job description.

A parallel situation exists in fisheries, where stocks are traditionally managed one species at a time. Alarm over collapsing fish stocks, however, is helping to create the current push for ecosystem-based ocean management. This is a step in the right direction, but the current ecosystem simulation models remain incapable of reproducing realistic population crashes. And the same is true of most climate simulation models: Though the geological record tells us that global temperatures can change very quickly, the models consistently underestimate that possibility. This is related to the next property, the nonlinear, non-equilibrium nature of systems.

Most engineered devices, consisting of mechanical springs, transistors, and the like, are built to be stable. That is, if stressed from rest, or equilibrium, they spring back. Many simple ecological models, physiological models, and even climate and economic models are built by assuming the same principle: a globally stable equilibrium. A related simplification is to see the world as consisting of separate parts that can be studied in a linear way, one piece at a time. These pieces can then be summed independently to make the whole. Researchers have developed a very large tool kit of analytical methods and statistics based on this linear idea, and it has proven invaluable for studying simple engineered devices. But even when many of the complex systems that interest us are not linear, we persist with these tools and models. It is a case of looking under the lamppost because the light is better even though we know the lost keys are in the shadows. Linear systems produce nice stationary statistics—constant risk metrics, for example. Because they assume that a process does not vary through time, one can subsample it to get an idea of what the larger universe of possibilities looks like. This characteristic of linear systems appeals to our normal heuristic thinking.

Nonlinear systems, however, are not so well behaved. They can appear stationary for a long while, then without anything changing, they exhibit jumps in variability—so-called “heteroscedasticity.” For example, if one looks at the range of economic variables over the past decade (daily market movements, GDP changes, etc.), one might guess that variability and the universe of possibilities are very modest. This was the modus operandi of normal risk management. As a consequence, the likelihood of some of the large moves we saw in 2008, which happened over so many consecutive days, should have been less than once in the age of the universe.

Our problem is that the scientific desire to simplify has taken over, something that Einstein warned against when he paraphrased Occam: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Thinking of natural and economic systems as essentially stable and decomposable into parts is a good initial hypothesis, current observations and measurements do not support that hypothesis—hence our continual surprise. Just as we like the idea of constancy, we are stubborn to change. The 19th century American humorist Josh Billings, perhaps, put it best: “It ain’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that just ain’t so.”

Among these principles is the idea that there might be universal early warning signs for critical transitions, diagnostic signals that appear near unstable tipping points of rapid change. The recent argument for early warning signs is based on the following: 1) that both simple and more realistic, complex nonlinear models show these behaviors, and 2) that there is a growing weight of empirical evidence for these common precursors in varied systems.

A key phenomenon known for decades is so-called “critical slowing” as a threshold approaches. That is, a system’s dynamic response to external perturbations becomes more sluggish near tipping points. Mathematically, this property gives rise to increased inertia in the ups and downs of things like temperature or population numbers—we call this inertia “autocorrelation”—which in turn can result in larger swings, or more volatility. Another related early signaling behavior is an increase in “spatial resonance”: Pulses occurring in neighboring parts of the web become synchronized. Nearby brain cells fire in unison minutes to hours prior to an epileptic seizure, for example.

The global financial meltdown illustrates the phenomenon of critical slowing and spatial resonance. Leading up to the crash, there was a marked increase in homogeneity among institutions, both in their revenue-generating strategies as well as in their risk-management strategies, thus increasing correlation among funds and across countries—an early warning. Indeed, with regard to risk management through diversification, it is ironic that diversification became so extreme that diversification was lost: Everyone owning part of everything creates complete homogeneity. Reducing risk by increasing portfolio diversity makes sense for each individual institution, but if everyone does it, it creates huge group or system-wide risk. Mathematically, such homogeneity leads to increased connectivity in the financial system, and the number and strength of these linkages grow as homogeneity increases. Thus, the consequence of increasing connectivity is to destabilize a generic complex system: Each institution becomes more affected by the balance sheets of neighboring institutions than by its own. [...]

Try here for the full article. The article was originally published on Dec 10, 2010.

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Our Decision-making Process That Short-circuits Reality

From Ivo Velitchkov's Enterprise Architecture blog - "Beliefs and Capabilities": [try here]

"From the observable data and experience we select some and affix meaning to it. This forms the basis of our assumptions. And then we come to conclusions which in turn influence our beliefs. Our beliefs are the basis of our actions which bring more data and experience from which we select some, affix meaning and so on. We tend to believe that we affix meaning to the observable data, oblivious of the selection we always make. In a similar way we believe that we draw conclusions by clear reasoning, while we actually always apply some assumptions."

Beliefs and Capabilities:

The Inference Cycle:

See also:

• Go here for Chris Argyris's Harvard paper: Teaching Smart People How To Learn [PDF]
• Go here for SystemWiki entry - Ladder of Inference: Short Circuiting Reality
• Go here for Argyris's theories of action, double-loop learning and organizational learning

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Humor: Scott Adams, The Hypnotist

This blog entry is a fan-post about choosing the three best blog entires that Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has posted over the month of March '12. Arguably, this is also a lazy task. Understandably, this will need some explaining.

Scott Adams is a genius with hypnotic calibre. He can even prove it by producing a certain Certification in Hypnotism that hangs on his office wall, and about which we, the ardent followers of his humor blog at Dilbert.com and elsewhere such as his occasional NYT and WSJ columns, have heard more often than perhaps the issuing authorities themselves. That a certain obscure yet timely reference or reminder of being a certified hypnotist can turn his otherwise benign looking paragraphs into mesmerizing wand of a wizard is something only a certified hypnotist can do (I agree that this logic defeats itself, but I never claimed that hypnotism has anything to do with logic. If you have read Scott as regularly as he writes you have already learned that the secret of his success lies in mixing the two with a secret formula for proportions). If those holding Harvard and Oxford degrees, for instance, were to extracte the similar amount of clout value from those certificates hanging on their walls, they would be owning most of us, all of the land and seas with potential oil rigs by now. But you need to be a good hypnotist to extract value from where there is none.

[Source: wikimedia.org]

It is my belief that in a hypothetical scenario where Dilbert.com and Scott's other restaurant businesses were ever to get into trouble, here lies the promise of a bright alternative career for him. Of course, this is subject to him first deciding to abandon his bid for the American presidency before he actually succeeds. Even if it means American will have to wait longer for a certified hypnotist president.

It is highly likely that there is a scientific term for the approach and process that Scott has mastered over the years for distribution of his verbal as well as pictorial ideas. If you are an expert in linguistics, literature or forensics, feel free to comment. As a layman -a claim that an engineer may make only in exceptional circumstances- the whole product has an experience similar to having a butterscotch pastry. Let's examine how.

Humor is the cake which may sound the least important ingredient, but in fact it is the base of the structure of the pastry. The paragraphs that build the argument in cascading manner are like digging into layers of cream that confirms the flavor in a gradually increasingly reinforcing manner. Clever word play are those crunchy burned sugar nuggets confusingly called butterscotch in spite of them having no intoxicating properties. A sly spin of rejection of a popular belief is the icing and cherry on the top which is the lure for you to dig in. The overall simplicity of the package makes it suitable for many palates. And at the end of it all, depending on your own perception of your mental and physical health, if you end up having a feeling of guilt over a creamy rich diet, you can easily blame it onto being hypnotized to indulge in the first place.

If you are also a regular follower of Scott's journey over the past decade this narration may sound familiar in two ways. In terms of the message as well as the bottle. The later being the style in which the message is being delivered. Internet is silent on any attempts of writing about Scott the way Scott does it. If this blog entry appears to be doing so, it is purely an accident. My limited knowledge about hypnotism suggests that it is all about doing according to the mimes of the hypnotist.

Which now brings us to the main business today of the three best blog posts that Scott has published over the last month. Apparently, the list of all the great ideas that Scott has aired through the giggling belly of the cosmos over the years may become too large to be handled under a single spell on a lazy summer Sunday. Here are my picks:

1. Mar 29 - Gerardo and the Mob: "The public fight starts when the word "responsible" enters the conversation. Responsibility isn't a natural element of the universe. It's a useful but artificial concept, like fairness, that society uses to control its members."
2. Mar 19 - The War on Parents: "Sometimes it feels as if our school system is at war with parents, and winning. The kids are just the ammunition."
3. Mar 9 - The Unaware: "Imagine you're a detective, and you have to solve the case of how incompetent you are. What evidence can you find to support the assumption you have about your own incompetence?"

The other dozen or so totally unmissable Dilbert blog entries from March are here. 

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Humor: Sheldon's Prayer

Theoretical Physicist Dr. Sheldon Cooper Sc.D. has hardly anything to do with this post except for an optimistic allusion toward his positive delight at throwing a monologos tantrum such as this in any of The Big Bang Theory episodes preferably not named as the same suggested title.

You see,

All metaphysics, of/for every
sectarian-/semi-/secular-/pseudo-/anti-religion's theory seems to thrive
on this evolutionary blindspot
in the cognitive process;
Hit by unreferenceable 'knowing';
And admixed with confused human imaginations.

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SKR, Education, Three videos, and "3 idiots"

EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE THERE COMES AN IDEA THAT has at least three beautiful things together: holistic relevance, sincerity towards applicability, and honest and bold presentation. Such ideas carry an element for illumination and invokes belief in the audience.

Let's listen to Sir Ken Robinson (SKR). The Professor of Education has thus far given two of the best and most popular TED talks (see below). His ideas on the challenges of modern Education systems across the world, and possible solutions through paradigm shift have been path-breaking (including, earning the professor his knighthood).

When the idea is larger than life, it is often easy to miss the whole picture while focusing on the point if delivery of the idea, beautiful that it mostly is. For this reason, RSA Animation has done a great job in the video below in creating a sort of "skeleton key" based on SKR's RSA speech - Changing Education Paradigm. Within a couple of minutes into the animation, it is most likely that one gets reminded of some of the ideas that got reflected in Raju Hirani's recent bollywood script "3 idiots", that made the film immensely popular.

• See also:
• Go here for the official website of Sir Ken Robinson, and here for his wikipedia entry.
• Three videos: 1) TEDtalk-Do schools kill creativity? (Feb 2006, Monterey CA, ~20:00m), 2) TEDtalk-Bring on the learning revolution! (Feb 2010, LA, ~20:00m), 3) RSA lecture-Changing Paradigms (~55:00m)
• Go here for various publications, and here for the list on Amazon.com

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Sachin Tendulkar’s Stock Market Run

AUSTRALIA, THE DOMINANT SPORTING powerhouse among the 71 the Commonwealth countries, have invested into researching India’s cricket performance and how it relates to equity trading at Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange of Dalal Street in Mumbai, India. The market cap of BSE stands close to USD 1.4 trillion, and NSE, with market cap of nearly USD 1.5 trillion, is the third largest Stock Exchange in the world in terms of the number of trades in equities.

Australia were dethroned by India from #1 spot for ICC test cricket ranking earlier this year, and are being challenged for their spot for the ODI ranking as the contest is on. And their desperation is evident on the field while the Test Series between the two national sides is currently under way.

As Sachin Tendulkar, the cricketing legend goes on to slam his sixth double century for India, his second against Australia, (and the only International player to ever score a double hundred in the ODI format of the game), the report by the economists goes on to suggest that when Sachin is playing in good form and ends up on the losing side, the stock-market takes an additional 20% hit on the negative side.

Russell Smyth, Head of Economics department at Monash University of Australia and economist Vinod Mishra have the following to say:

"While a win by the Indian cricket team has no statistically significant upward impact on stock market returns, a loss generates a significant downward movement in the stock market.

India's main index, the CNX Nifty, shows that the Nifty index was generally flat the day after a win, but the day following a loss, the index dropped by an average of 0.231 per cent. The drop following a loss was more than seven times greater than the movement following a win.

In the 100 matches in which Tendulkar played and India lost, the average return the day after the match was 0.328 per cent, an 18 per cent higher drop compared to the average drop after losing a match (which Tendulkar did not play).

A feeling of sadness might make investors withdraw from the world and the stock market, thus resulting in reduced trading for a while, whereas anger might make them behave in an impulsive manner, which might involve selling of a lot of the stocks."

Edit: included score details from the 2nd Test match between Australia and India.

• See also:
• Related post: Sach Is Life
• Go here for Financial Times coverage on the Smyth & Mishra report, here for Indian Express coverage and here for Deccan Herald take on the topic
• Go here for report on Tendulkar, 37, and after 21 years on the international pitch, clinching yet another ICC Player of the Year
• Go here for a similar report at cxoadvisory.com linking American NFL Super Bowl with Stock market

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Gartner: 10 Changes in the Nature of Work in Next 10 Years

"ORGANIZATIONS WILL NEED TO PLAN for increasingly chaotic environments that are out of their direct control, and adaptation must involve adjusting to all 10 of the trends (listed below)", observers Gartner fellow and VP, Tom Austin.

In a report published earlier this year titled "Watchlist: Continuing Changes in the Nature of Work, 2010-2020", Gartner says that organizations will need to determine which of the 10 key changes in the nature of work will affect them the most, and consider whether radically different technology models will be required to address them.

The other key message that emerges out of the report's overall analysis says:

Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyper-connectedness, 'swarming' and by 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization's work will be "non-routine," up from 25 percent in 2010.

Later next month, Tom Austin is scheduled to speak in London on these trends:

1. De-routinization of Work: Non-routine skills are those we cannot automate. The report argues that the core value that people add is not in the processes that can be automated, but in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words such as discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning.
2. Work Swarms: A kind of work pattern involving a flurry of collective activity by anyone who is available and who could add value, is defined as Work Swarms. The report indicates two phenomena within the collective and apparently unstructured activity: One is that Swarms form quickly, attacking a problem or opportunity and then quickly dissipating. And secondly, Swarming is an agile response to an observed increase in ad-hoc action requirements, as ad-hoc activities continue to displace structured, bureaucratic situations.
3. Weak Links: Members of a Work Swarm may not 'know' each other in the classical sense, or even have a strong or moderate reference. There relationship remains largely temporary, and the report labels it as Weak links. They are indirect indicators which partially rely on the confidence others have in their knowledge of people. Social Networking comes into play at personal as well as professional level that would contribute to Work Swarms.
4. Working with the Collective: "the Collective" are external forces, mainly disparate groups of people tied together by common interests, that are not controlled by the organization but who could impact the success-rate of the organization. Their potential for influence is very high. The report suggests that smart and powerful business executives who live within the business ecosystem which they can not control, will do the market research and come up with ways to work with "the collective" to wield influence in their organizations for their benefit.
5. Work Sketch-ups: Most non-routine processes that could not be automated will also be highly informal and non-standard. The process models for most non-routine processes will remain simple "sketch-ups" which are created on the fly. The practice will evolve over time to be able to identify meaningful patterns of these processes and structure them.
6. Spontaneous Work: Spontaneity implies more than reactive activity. The report says that as in Work Swarms, spontaneous and proactive activities would also emerge, forming its own patterns such as seeking out new opportunities and creating new designs and models. 

7. Simulation and Experimentation: Interface with virtual environment will increase many fold, where technologies such as 3D interfacing with data (akin to the Spielberg film Minority Report) will replace spreadsheets and traditional number crunching. The contents of the simulated environment will be assembled by agent technologies that determine what materials go together based on watching people work with this content.
8. Pattern Sensitivity: This is Gartner's forward looking management strategy approach called "pattern-based strategy". The report argues that the business world is becoming more volatile, with far less visibility into the future than ever before. Organizations will have to create focus groups to identify divergent emerging patterns, to evaluate those patterns, and to develop various scenarios showing how the disruption might play out.
9. Hyper-connected: Organization have complex inter-relationship of networks, with multiple overlaps for a single function. For instance, an IT support function might work well in delivering a service while working in dedicated and isolation mode, but in shared and complex environment with multiple overlaps, networks, and stakeholder, the same dedicated resources may largely under-perform and underachieve, resulting into additional work. The report calls this Hyper-connectedness, and argues that it will lead to a push for more work to occur in both formal and informal relationships across enterprise boundaries, and that has implications for how people work and how IT supports or augments that work.
10. My Place: There will be job roles which are always on-duty. For them, the traditional segregation of personal, professional, social and family matters, along with organization subjects, will disappear. They will work in virtual Work Swarm environment, all the time, across time zones and organizations, and with participants who barely know each other. But the employee will still have a "place" where they work, called "My Place".

• See also:
• Go here for the report on Gartner website (User login required)
• Go here for details on the upcoming summit in Spetember '10 in London where Tom Austin will be presenting these trends.

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Fitts’s Law and Usability of Gmail

Fitt’s law (Simplified):

"Put commonly accessed UI elements on the edges of the screen. Because the cursor automatically stops at the edges, they will be easier to click on. [And then] Make clickable areas as large as you can. Larger targets are easier to click on."
The law is rather simple (or, one might argue, too simple to follow all the time). This is basic common sense. Human Interfaces of computer system typically are a subject matter of Fitts’s law.

A FEW YEARS AGO I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY to attend a workshop with Mr. Aaron Marcus. The veteran man is an industry expert on usability and the designer of the original Nokia cell phone’s user navigation system. Cell phones were a niche product in early 2000's and not much data was available to ascertain how users would react to such an operating system of such a hand-held device.

Mr. Marcus had a variety of ideas and principles to talk about at the workshop on the subject of Software systems and their usability aspects. He began his presentation with some of the photographs that he had captured in the fruits and vegetable markets of Africa. He argued that the rural ladies selling these goods were very less likely to have got primary education. However, looking at the grouping and arrangements of goods that they were selling – lemons, figs, chewing sticks and others – one could observe that all of it adhered to some of the basic though indigenous design patterns. The largest objects were kept at arm’s length; groups of smaller objects were kept at the centre; there was a hierarchy around freshness of the goods; and finally, the whole arrangement was then utilized in bargaining and negotiations. There may not be primary education, but there was some common sense.

Mr. Marcus argued that the same basic senses also drive ergonomic of products and systems.

More recently, a few days ago when Scott Adam smacked Google design team for their unintuitive and flawed design of their web-based emailing system Gmail, there was a lot of hue and cry from die-hard Google fans. Dilbert blog was swarmed with protesting comments, unthoughtful that they were in most cases.

Last week, Jeff Atwood picked up the similar thread and did an interesting study with illustrations by citing two examples from Gmail, and one from Facebook. The point is well made. The eject button is surprisingly lost in the woods of the so called Google Operating System. As one of the friends put it, to log onto Gmail after pubs on weekends is asking for trouble – the arrangements and margins between buttons leave no margin for error and your mailbox could be messed up pretty badly when you notice next morning.

A recent illustration by National Geographic Magazine argues that the success of Google Orkut social networking website in India and Brazil was primarily based on is simple design. While the larger user-base in these geographies use low bandwidth connectivity, it is also to be considered that these are non-native English speaking users where simpler layout of the website design shall work better. A lesson the rest of product team at Google may be overlooking.

Mr. Marcus had concluded that in the years to come, the primary selling point of products would be ‘emotional’ triggers and attachment towards that object. “I love this watch”, shall supersede form and function, utility and usability, value and cost of the watch. And that indeed is coming out to be true, for here we are, with Social Media, declaring our likes and dislikes and associating our choice of products around it.

• See also:
• Go here for the clomplete post: The Opposite of Fitt's law
• Go here for NGM survey of Social Media tools
• Go here some of the best Usability tools that employ eye-tracking for current rich media contents of Web 2.0
• Go here for a very interesting series by Smashing mag on Story-telling as User experience. Note that while there is no direct relation to Usability per say, it has the final inkling from the user's side.

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"The Right Thing To Do" - Harvard Lectures on Moral Philosophy

PROF. MICHAEL SANDEL OPENED HIS FAMOUS CLASS ON "JUSTICE" and Moral and Political Philosophy at Harvard University, USA, with the following (cautionary) address:

If you look at the syllabus, you would notice that we read a number of great and famous books. Books by Aristotle, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and others. [...] We will read these books, and we will debate these [philosophical] issues, and we will see how each informs and illuminates the other [school of thought]. This may sound appealing and interesting enough, but here I have to issue a warning:

To read these books, in this way, as an exercise in self-knowledge, carries certain risks. Risks that are both personal and political. Risks that every student of Political Philosophy has known. These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us, and unsettles us, by confronting us with what we already know. There is an irony: the difficulty of this course consists in the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what we know from familiar unquestioned settings, and making it strange. [...] Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing.

But, and here is the risk, once the familiar turns strange, it is never quite the same again. Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'. What makes this enterprise difficult, but also revetting, is that Moral and Political Philosophy is a story, and you don't know where the story would lead, but you do know that the story is about You. Those were the personal risks.

Now, about the political risks: one way of introducing a course like this is to promise you that by reading these books, and debating these issues, you would become a better, more responsible, citizen. You will examine the presuppositions of public policies, you will hone your political judgement, you will become a more effective participant in public affairs. But this would be a partial and misleading promise. Political Philosophy, for the most part, hasn't worked that way. You have to allow for the possibility that Political Philosophy may make you a worst citizen rather than a better one. Or at least, a worst citizen *before* it makes you a better one. And that is because philosophy is a distancing, even debilitating, activity. And you see this going back to Socrates [and his dialogue with his friend Callicles who tried to talk him out of philosophising]. [...] Philosophy distances us from conventions, from established assumptions, and settled beliefs. Those are the risks - personal and political.

And in the face of these risks, there is a characteristic evasion. The name of the evasion is skepticism  It's an ideal. [It goes something like this] we didn't resolve, once and for all, either the cases or the principles we were arguing about when we began [with the case studies]. And if Aristotle, Locke, Kant and Mill hasn't solved these questions after all these years, who are we to think that we can resolve them? So, maybe, its is just a matter of each person having his or her own set of principles, and there is nothing more to be said about it. No way of reasoning. That's the evasion of skepticism. To which I would offer the following reply:

It is true, these questions have been debated for a very long time. But the very fact that they have recurred and persisted may suggest that though they are impossible in one sense, they are unavoidable in another. And the reason they are unavoidable, the reason they are inescapable, is that we *live* some answers to this questions everyday. [...]

The aim of this course is to awaken the restlessness of reason, and to see where it might lead...

[Transcript-ed from the actual lecture. Emphasis added. Official transcript could not be resourced.]

Prof. Michael Sandel's class has commanded one of the highest enrollments at Harvard Business School of a thousand plus in a given semester at times. It is one of the most famous of all management classes at Harvard where Sandle is teaching since '80s after returning from Oxford, England. Recently, one such series of lectures was video-recorded and has been placed into (international) public domain [see details below] where one can virtually participate in the proceedings of Prof. Sandel's lectures. It is as much relevant as it is rewarding.

The foundation here is primarily of Western Philosophy. However, when one gets familier with the contents, it may emerge that many of the fundamental ideas debated by Utilitarianism with/against Categorical moral principles in these discussions have also been acknowledged, contemplated, and commented upon by eastern scholars at India's ancient established "Business-Political" schools such as Taxila. Folklore has it that (management) gurus like 'Chanakya' (sometimes, also 'Kautilya') of these times were entrusted with the mentorship of the princes. Where, arguably, Utilitarianism is more akin to Kutil-niti (Diplomacy) and Arthashastra (Economics). Categorical moral philosophy can be referenced with Chanakya's tactics on Raj-niti (Governance).

[Edit: P.S. A follow-up post may appear on this blog after studying the available lectures.]

• See also:
• Related post: Kantian ethics and the German case of torture
• Go here for more on Michael Sandel and his online classes at Harvard website.
• Go here for more on Utilitarianism, go here for Deontology, and here for Socratic dialogues.
• Go here for more on 'Chanakya'.

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"Jugaad" - More Than A Fad?

BusinessWeek RAN A STORY LAST MONTH that focused on "Jugadh" and termed it as the new mantra for innovation. Colleagues and clients not too familiar with the Indian culture tried seeking second opinions on the word. Observers commented on the topic from the world over. Some compared the term with Quality techniques such as Lean and Keizen - doing more, with less. Others saw it as the new Agile. Jugadh or Jugaad was considered by the Economist as the latest cost-cutting technique in Asia. WSJ wrote that Jughad is the primary reason why Indian economy remained insulated in the recent Global economic down-turn. Someone else commented that ISB at Hyderabad conducts special workshops to tool executives with Jugadh, also citing the inclusion of the term in the management consulting arsenal. The original title of the article looked at "Jugadh" as the next big export from India.

After due considerations and with due respect to all the views, "Jugadh" is a fad of a business model on the face of hard-core and global requirements for sustainability. To put is into the right perspective, it is rather unfair to model Jugadh either as a new form of innovation or as a path breaking and business changing technique.

The Hindi word Jugadh or Jugaad (de: जुगाड़) literally means a noun referring to an improvised or jury-rigged solution. Wiki traces the root of the term to the farmers of northern India employing indigenous ways to make use of the domestic small diesel engines for multi-purpose transport and similar make-shift usage. There are indigenous ideas like these which can be categorised as Jugadh, but they are by far a minority. In the broader sense of the practical life, however, Jugadh can be described as what Bear Grylls does on his reality TV show "Man vs. Wild" on the discovery channel: some cleaver survival tactics, a desperate measure but with some spin of intelligence, the basic human instinct of improvisation over the most rudimentary of the tools. That is Jugadh; a poor desperate man's innovation, where: Dependence on luck or accidental favours is too great; Against the rewards the risk is usually too high; And measurability, predictability, controllability and repeatability are too low. And it does not matter who opens a "Jugaad" office in Electronics City, in Bangalore.

I am not sure if Tata Nano is the right example of a Jugadh - it just happens to be one very cheap car from India. Neither it is fully agreeable that people in India are risk-averse - historically, India has one of the most risk taking trading and entrepreneur communities in the world. Likewise, considering Jugadh cleaver without appreciating the risks associated with it is but a mistake. A "Jugaadoo" arrangement - by its very application and circumstance, is only a temporary measure. A hope, if you may, largely thanks to Darwin, of doing better by using inherent human intelligence while the resources are scarce. And then, there are ethical issues when short-cuts and cutting of corners become integral parts of "Jugaad-ovative" solutions.

• See also:
• Related article: Santa's "Jugaad" over Euro tunnel project.
• Related article: Catch Phrases of Consulting.
• Image courtesy: outlookindia.com.

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Consulting and Creative (un)commons

Santa and Banta submitted the tender for digging the second underwater Euro Channel Tunnel connecting England with France and continental Europe. This was perhaps the first time that a bid for such an extreme engineering project was coming from India, and apparently so it raised a few eyebrows and steered interest. An outsourcing relationship with India was not a new thing, but bidding for second Euro tunnel - that had got to be special...

Mr. Santa and Mr. Banta, the proprietors of Santa Banta & Co., were also among the main invitees to present their ideas describing their technology, tools, budget and time-lines to the consortium presiding over the project. As it turned out S B & Co had the lowest quotation, the shortest time-line for the project, the simplest possible plan and most straightforward execution using the most standard of tools: Santa would take one team (of a few hundred thousand labourers) digging from England towards France, and Banta would do the same from the opposite direction. The consortium was now specifically interested in the technology that S B & Co would employ like Global Positioning GPS for estimation and co-ordination of their efforts and meeting midway through the English Channel.

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Change, Catch Words of Consulting II

Continuing from the previous post, following are a few more Catch Words of Consulting:

Q x A = E : Quality of Solution x Acceptance = Effectiveness of Change. Q is good most of the time. The Key differentiator is Acceptance and Adaptability for a successful Change management.

Passive Resistance: is nodding the head, but not actually going to participate in change; civil disobedience of a personal kind; dragging the feet with a smile.

Planning vs Plans: D. Eisenhower once said, "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." Planing is so important that PMBOK devotes the largest of its five process groups entirely on planning.

• See also:
• Related post: Change, and Catch Words of Consulting I

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Change, and Catch Words of Consulting I

"CHANGE IS THAT BIG FAT PINK ELEPHANT that drunkenly roams around this large organization, stamping on people, without anyone having any idea what to do about it." This is how the elderly consultant illustrated in his concluding report to the senior management of [an organization] that was undergoing post-Outsourcing blues. (Do notice elephant as a hidden reference to India as the low-cost location.)

It indeed was a significant experience to participate in a professional forum in Australia with such Consulting veterans and alumni of the global consulting 'Big 5' sharing their vivid experiences.

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Peter Principle and Promotions

Peter Principle: "Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence." [try here for more]

IT IS PARADOXICAL, SOUNDS UNREASONABLE, AND DEFIES COMMON-SENSE. But that is how it works, realistically and evidently, for any hierarchical organization where the way of promotion rewards the best members and where the competence at their new level in the hierarchical structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level, usually because the tasks of the levels are very different between each other. Since about 50 years ago when a Canadian psychologist named Laurence J. Peter published his studies to this effect in 1969, there has been many changes in the way organizations and it workforce operate in relation with each other. There has been multiple experimental models across various industries, including Role-based organization, Competency-based designations, (A fusion of sorts of these two), flat-structures, circular organizations, and alike. Peter principle seem to have remained steadfast among all of these nonetheless.

In their study published a few days ago on Organization Efficiency titled "The Peter Principle Revisited" Prof Alessandro Pluchino and two other colleagues of the Universita di Catania of Italy argue that the long term consequence of Peter principle seems to imply an unavoidable spreading of the incompetence over all the organization and would be in danger of causing a collapse in its efficiency. The team presents a numerical study of Peter principle (arguably for the first time) which they presented as "agent based model" of managing organization efficiency.


[Above: Agent Based Model -- The computational study of the Peter principle process applied to a prototypical organization with pyramidal hierarchical structure having 160 positions across 6 levels. On a lighter note, a colleague recently came up with his idea on the progression within the pyramid structure that the "lighter" the person in terms of work-load, the "higher" she floats towards the top of the pyramid.]
The "Common Sense strategy" is to promote the most efficient person up the hierarchy. However, the study argues that the best strategies to improve, or at least not to diminish, the efficiency of an organization, when one ignores the actual way of competence transmission, are those of promoting an agent at random or of randomly alternating the promotion of the best and the worst members.

Providing alternatives to the CS approach for promotions, the study illustrates two alternative strategies inspired by Peter Hypothesis wherein either a random person is promoted (incidental, which is also in line with Game-theory), or the best and the worst persons are promoted alternatively.

• See also:
• Go here for more fun with Dilbert Principle.
• Go here for the research paper "Peter Principle Revisited" at Cornell Uni Library.
• Go here for MIT Technology Review blog "Why Incompetence Spreads through Big Organizations"

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NRN: Percepts of Being a Respectable Leader

Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood; the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
-- Theodore Roosevelt

NR NARAYANA MURTHY OF INFOSYS delivered the opening lecture at Columbia Business School's Khemka Distinguished Speaker Forum at Manhattan on May 26, 2009, where the above quote from Roosevelt were the closing lines.

Mr. Murthy began by describing Capitalism as an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange of wealth is made possible and is maintained chiefly by the private individuals or corporations. It is a system that incentivises individuals to use their enterprise, drive, hard-work and innovation to create wealth for themselves and the society.

Mr. Murthy argued that capitalism is also a system most conducive of creation of jobs and elimination of poverty and no other social or political system has succeeded as much as capitalism in benefiting the society at large. Providing his reactions on the issue of things going wrong with capitalism in recent months - especially the disproportional funds and bonuses claimed by executives of organizations going bankrupt, billions worth of fraud funds, and leaders cooking up accounting books - Mr. Murthy, who was declared by The Economist in 2005 as one of the top 10 most admired global business leaders, called for looking inward and for cultivating better ethical qualities to become a respectable leader. Following are the eight of them as he recounts.

Percepts of being a Respectable Leader:

1. Create a good culture around you: Decent behaviour stems from a good culture surrounding a person. It is required to have the culture of openness, fairness, honesty, decency, transparency and accountability in a corporation. This task has to start from day one, and can not wait till you become a CEO.

2. Cultivate simple and inexpensive habits: The best way to overcoming greed is to derive pleasure and spend time on small, simple and inexpensive habits in life. Every decent town has a modest library. And, the government (still) does not tax having a good conversation.

3. Do not equate success with money and power: Success is your acceptance by the circle of you family, friends, your officemates, and your community that you are indeed valuable. Success is also about having good sleep every night.

4. Create an environment of happiness around you: A happy leader has a circle of supportive family and friends. Building such a circle requires a lot of emotional investment on your part. I do not know of anybody who is a demon at his office and an angel at home.

5. Don't get fixated on extreme desires: Desire is the root cause of all sorrows, said the Buddha. Extreme fixation with material things leads to greed, fraud and acts that we would later regret.

6. Shun jealousy: Jealousy is a rationalization of your failure vis-a-vis another's success or achievements.

7. Maintain transparency and develop a sense of humility: When in doubt, disclose (with your family, friends and at workplace). Humility is admitting that there could be other people better than me, and helps cultivate team-spirit.

8. Take part in charitable activities in your spare time: The opportunity of meeting other generous people outside the hierarchy of your organization is a sure way of escaping the orbit of jealousy.


[Above: NR Narayan Murthy delivering speech at Columbia. Go here at YouTube.]

• See also:
• Go here for the related article on Columbia website.
• Go here for more on Mr. Murthy on the official Infosys website.

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TED, Memes, Metaphors, but no Economics?

TED: IDEAS WORTH SPREADING is the welcome line at ted.com - an intellectual platform blending Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and almost attaining a cult status. Who's who of the world have marked their presence at its annual conferences starting 1984. This is the stage where Prof. Stephen Hawking urged mankind to colonise neighbouring planets; where the UN peace ambassador Jane Goodall spoke about her 45 years old chimpanzee studies; where Bono won the price of expressing three wishes in a bid to change the world; and where Bill Gates opened a jar of mosquitoes to the audience to spread (with them) awareness about malaria (later, when the panic subsided it was declared that the mosquitoes were harmless for they were cured of the germs. I am not entirely sure though which anti-virus was used by Mr. Gates.)

A meme is an information packet with an attitude. For the current young generation world over, and those leaning towards entrepreneurship, TED is the "in thing". So also for the Darwin look-alike scientist-philosophers such as Daniel (Dan) Dennet, who is deliberately mistaken by his followers for a living personification of the old Greek philosopher statues of Delphi museum. In the video clip that follows Canadian professor Dan Dennet, during his presentation on the stage at TED, spoke about the subject he is famous as well as controversial for: Memes and Atheism.

In a interesting spin to the subject, Dan places Creationists, Terrorists, Memes, and Viruses in the same basket. What comes out is a curious argument surrounding memes (pronounced meem, as in theme), presented in a rather entertaining and gently forceful manner. You are free to disagree with it, that may prove to be the harder part though.


[Above: Prof. Dan Dennet on stage of TED talking about Memes and their power.]

A few points that shall immediately stick an observer:

• Where is Economics? There is no apparent stab against commerce and economics, but there is no explicit mention of it as being one of the driving forces for T / E / D either. (Do have a look at the list of sponsors. After all, running TED is not without large commercial help.)
• If memes are all about spreading ideas, would you call TED's slogan a good meme? (Apparently, Dan seem to have taken a frown at all kind of memes.)
• Spending a good amount of time on Google wasn't that helpful in trying to ascertain the definitive difference between what Richard Dawkings coined as Meme in 1976, and what historians, philosophers and priests over the millennia have traditionally called a Metaphor.
• The viral social media seem to provide the perfect medium for meme concept; it remains unclear, however, how far and deep it take the impact of meme theory into the social fabric already. And what, where and who are the checks and balances?
• Dan and Dawkings may take offence on the use of the word coincidental on their part, but coincidental it might be that Meme and the social media moto of "Me, me, me..." sounds so alike. (If it was intentional on Dawkings' part, he is surely a visionary. And should belong to the Social Sciences rather than Biology.)

Daniel Dennet's book, Kinds of Minds, is as entertaining as it is serious and thought provoking.

• See also:
• Go here for the above video of Dan Dennet on YouTube, and here for more on memes.
• Go here for Ted.com and its various links, and here for subscribing to TEDtalk videos.

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Atlas' Second Coming, and the Shrugs

THE FINANCIAL MELTDOWN MIGHT HAVE MADE THE ATLAS TICKLE, or so it may have seemed if one takes the metaphor literally. But Atlas, in spite of shrugs, is going strong on its part.

Interestingly, Audacity of Hope by President Obama was overtaken by Atlas Shrugged on the sales charts for a while just before the presidency change. This is the second coming of Ayn Rand that started in 2007. Honestly though, I never got this book right. There was always something ultra-right about the acceptance and success of her (cold-war incubated) concepts of having a platonic state of a democracy (where one would be expected to demonstrate as much dexterity with the left hand as the right. Over the past ten years or so I must have gifted her books, selectively and carefully, to at least three people of my immediate reckoning -all of whom fell out of touch. Not so carefully, after all!).

Ayn Rand's rendition of the perfect world —much more vividly worded in her previous notoriety, The Fountainhead— could only be realised by finding the means of fitting the world within mathematical formulas (or vice versa), something refuted at its very basis most recently by professor and mathematician Stephen Hawking through his commentaries on quantum mechanics (also, try here). There is no room for spirit in Rand's 'predictable world', nor for an experience of it (except perhaps in nakedness, which is to be perceived without sensitivity: ask Mr. Wynand, who, according to a female friend, is the real hero of the story for her). Even though they claimed to keep the torch burning when the oil ran out.

The storyline of The Fountainhead, as well as the fiction of Atlas Shrugged are nonetheless entertaining provided one can handle a thousand pages each.

The Economist argues today that the current financial crisis, and various bail-out announcements, have a direct correlation with unit sales figures and sales rank of Atlas Shrugged (see chart. source: ecomonist.com). The author attributes the pattern to mass social media -- such as Facebook, and certain user groups aiming at personifying the storytelling as if "Atlas Shrugged is happening in real life" (try here). Above all, it is believed that Alan Greenspan is a fan of Rand's work, and thus his every recent move was like a stimuli to the book's gift-wrapping counters at Amazon.com.

However, it is to take it too far to compare Rearden's (one of the book's characters who invents a unique metal) visit to the senators in Washington DC with that of the Banking CEO's meeting with the US congress these past weeks.

I am at a loss of expectations from the movie based of Rand's works which is in the making for a 2011 release. I can only shrug for the moment. As a fan of Rand's work, however, it actually makes sense, for it largely belongs to the fairyland.

Let's wait and see who is John Galt?

Update: Have you read "The Driver" (try here) by Garet Garrett? Arguably, Rand lifted a few key concepts and phrases from this rather obscured 1922 work. His first work in 1911 was titled "Where the Money Grows and Anatomy of the Bubble".

• See also:
• Go here for WSJ.com jumping in the bandwagon with "'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years".
• Go here for Amazon.com bestselling list among Classics where four out of top 10, including the first three, are Rand's books as of this week (Feb 28, 2009).

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Wordle: Measuring Yourself Up in Your Own Words

REGULAR BLOGGERS USE TAG-CLOUDS, and the sincere ones use them wisely. Whilst on one hand the tags help organise and categorise the posts and thoughts therein, they also help the author not to stray too much away (a cluttered tag-cloud is most likely an apparent symptom of this) from the topics and interests the blog is intended for and targeted towards in the first place.

On the other hand, the blog posts are made up in real language using real words that make up the composition by the author. And since the author has his/her own style with grammar and sentence construction, it forms a pattern or trend of words used to produce those thoughts marked under the given tags.

Wordle.net offers this beautiful applet utility that instantly creates a "word-cloud" by consuming your blog feed. Taking it one step further, one can then match this world cloud with the tag cloud of the blog, and make interesting inferences.

[Above: Word-cloud from the recent posts of this blog by Wordle.net]

I also found this word-cloud very useful for literary purposes as well: one could feed in the speeches of Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain on the topic of Economic policies, for example, and figure out how much do they agree or, apparently, disagree "figuratively". And also, where they agree (or match up word-by-word) could give the indication where the American Economy needs desperate help - or atleast they way any new leadership is most likely looking at it.

Paul Kedrosky already did such an experiment by comparing US Federal Reserves Chairman Ben Bernanke's speech this year with that of one year ago. The results are really intuitive. Here, take a look.

[Go here to make your own Wordle word-cloud.]

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ImagineCup 2008 - Runnup

"Achieve What You Can Imagine." --imaginecup.co.uk

invention, innovation, inspiration, imagination...

If any of the i's tantalise you, entertain yourself with this cute little 1.5 minute teaser video, which in fact is a runnup to the ImagineCup 2008 due this month.

"Great innovators don't imagine things in the future;
They imagine them in the present,
and change the future..."

Go here for a list of Software Project designs that made it to the semi-finals of the innovation competition this year.

[The video above is one among many created by the students of Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication. Go here for the video on YouTube, and here for other possibilities from Microsoft.]

Edit: The '08 finals will be held in Paris between July 3 and 8, 2008.

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