Author Archives: Rick Ladd

About Rick Ladd

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I retired over14 years ago, though I've continued to work on and off since then. Mostly I'm just cruising, making the most of what time I have remaining. Although my time is nearly up, I still care deeply about the kind of world I'll be leaving to those who follow me and, to that end, I am devoted to seeing the forces of repression and authoritarianism are at least held at bay, if not crushed out of existence. I write about things that interest me and, as an eclectic soul, my interests run the gamut from science to spirituality, governance to economics, art and engineering. I'm hopeful one day my children will read what I've left behind.
10 February 2010

So many places to “be” – I’m so cornfuzzled!

By Rick Ladd

Copyright 2010 GoogleWith the release of Google’s Buzz yesterday I have added yet another platform/channel to my ever-growing arsenal of social tools with which to engage and, especially, to learn from a long list of wonderful and generous people who willingly offer their intelligence, passion, and wit by freely sharing what they know. I don’t know about others, but even with locations that federate, or aggregate (oh hell, I’m not sure which it is), many of the places I “am”, I still find it difficult to completely see the larger landscape of the social  network I’m entwined with. Dion Hinchcliffe hints at Buzz portending a change in the way the “knowledge” of who we are, what we like, who we know, etc. is treated in his “First impressions of Google Buzz: Smart, useful, long road ahead“, posted yesterday. If I understand him correctly, Google is using algorithms that can draw context from the web, associated specifically with what our (singular and collective) behavior, connections, and interests are evidence of, and serve up relevant and (one would hope) useful information for us.

I hope this turns out to be the case. I’m reserving judgement for now, as it took  me at least six months after signing up for Twitter before I could see any use for it that made sense to me. If Buzz is anything like Twitter (only better) I plan on being a bit more ahead of the curve than before. Only time will tell, but the thought of having some help in making sense of all the chatter (including my own) is pretty exciting to me. We may end up with a half-dozen different “suites” (which will, no doubt, find some overlap in the apps used) for us to choose from and I’m torn over whether or not I would prefer some sort of standardization. Nevertheless, the reality for now – for me – is that I’ve been using Gmail and other Google platforms for many years and am unlikely to pass up a chance to get (and put) most of my info into their hands.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Business

14 January 2010

Where’s the Anger?

By Rick Ladd

Listening to only minor excerpts (and some exceptional analysis on KPFK Pacifica Radio) I find myself absolutely incensed at the arrogance of the people who caused the financial meltdown and who gladly took our tax dollars, ostensibly to keep the economy afloat, and are now proceeding to pay themselves handsomely for their indiscretions.

Listen . . . I’m doing OK. I didn’t get caught up – at least not directly – in the mortgage fiasco and I’m lucky enough to have a job that probably isn’t going anywhere, but what about all the people who’ve lost so much? Even if they were a bit greedy (or where they just reacting logically to a society that preaches the ethos of looking out for oneself and the hell with everyone else?), I don’t think they deserve this kind of disrespect and the uncertainty that so many face right now . . . with no end in sight.

But I have to ask, where’s the anger? Why aren’t people really paying attention to how we’re being played. Though I think Phil Angelides probably has the best of intentions, I think his commission is going to end up toothless and, once again, the high-rollers of Wall Street are going to scoop their ill-gained winnings off the table and we’re going to be left wondering what happened? Where are the pitchforks? Why aren’t more people demanding accountability? Where’s the call for bringing back the guillotine?

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Economics, Politics, Random Thoughts

9 January 2010

Learning From Those who Know

By Rick Ladd

I continually struggle with how best to share here on this blog. Guess I’m trying to find my voice, which is difficult when one’s personal life is so thoroughly enmeshed with one’s professional life and the company you work for needs to keep much of what it does close to the vest. So I need to work on separating those things that are mine (my thoughts, that is) and those things that are my company’s.

Credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

There are a couple of bloggers whose thoughts I really respect and I am learning a bit from them on how to go about doing this and growing my ability to share and connect. There are others as well, but the two I’m speaking of are Euan Semple and Gil Yehuda. Euan has a blog he calls “The Obvious“. Here’s what he says in the section “About this blog”: “This is my personal blog which I began in February 2001. I called it The Obvious? when I wrote anonymously and chose the name to reflect the fact I have to overcome my inhibitions about stating the obvious!” This resonates so strongly with me as I have always felt that anything I saw had to be obvious to everyone since it was so obvious to me. I’ve learned that’s not necessarily the case, but I have yet to fully convince myself it’s true. Reading Euan and, especially, the method he uses in his blog, is very instructive to me; might be to you as well.

Gil Yehuda’s blog is a bit different, as he writes a great deal about Enterprise 2.0. In fact, the title of his blog is “Gil Yehuda’s Enterprise 2.0 Blog“. Gil doesn’t write quite the same as Euan. Most of his posts are a bit longer, though short enough to not be tedious to anyone who’s used to the rapid-fire reality of today’s online world. Since my greatest interest – indeed, my job – is centered around Enterprise 2.0 capabilities and design principles, I appreciate Gil’s clarity and constancy of purpose in sharing his thoughts. His latest post, “What to Contribute: Thoughts of a Blogger“, is a great read on how to deal with the issues I find myself pondering each time I set out to write. I have to admit I have waaay more ideas than I manage to write about.

I intend on learning all I can from these two. I’m hopeful that time will find me opening up more and engaging with greater frequency and, hopefully, clarity as I follow how they do it. There are others – in fact Gil’s latest blog (link above) points to a lot of them, the majority of whom I follow on Twitter – and I will write about them as well as time goes on. Each has a voice worthy of listening to, even if your interest isn’t Enterprise 2.0, as they have firmly established themselves in the “blogosphere”. Check ’em out.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Collaboration, E2.0, Enterprise 2.0

21 December 2009

Reflecting on Some Other Reflections

By Rick Ladd

Two posts got me thinking today. I’m not usually one to see the year as abruptly changing when December rolls over into January; I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions and stuff like that and I am more prone to celebrate the Winter Solstice than to celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah. Yet, it is the end of a calendar year, and there is some sort of change that always seems to take place when the year rolls, so I thought I’d take a crack at looking back just a bit at the previous 12 months. Having said that,  I’d also like to look a little forward as well, but that will come just a bit later.

The two posts I’m referring to are by Andy McAfee and Susan Scrupski, two people I have come to know better this year due to my work as an internal evangelist on Enterprise 2.0.  Andy’s writings on E2.0 and Susan’s tireless work on establishing and greasing the skids of the 2.0 Adoption Council have made my job much easier. I have learned a great deal from them and expect next year to bring even more knowledge, enthusiasm, and innovative ideas and practices I will no doubt benefit from. The post I refer to by Andy is very upbeat and strikes an optimistic note. The one by Susan is more hopeful than optimistic, but is definitely upbeat. Nevertheless, they’re both wonderful posts that look forward to bigger and better things. You can read them here (Andy’s) and here (Susan’s).

This last year has been a year of transition for me. Our fairly new President (I’m talking about where I work, not the country) recognized the value of E2.0, as well as numerous other efforts I was engaged in, and began leading the company in a new direction at the beginning of the year. He even christened our direction PoWeR 2.0 (PWR is an acronym for Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. Since our main business is Rocket Engines and Energy Systems, PoWeR is a decent way to characterize who we are internally). In addition to E2.0, PoWeR 2.0 includes the continuing integration of Program  Management, Knowledge Management, and Enterprise Thinking, the latter of which is our approach to the Systems Thinking propounded by people like W. Edwards Deming, Russell L. Ackoff, Peter Senge, and Edward de Bono, to name a few. To my way of thinking it will ultimately (I can dream) result in a relatively holistic, portfolio approach to the management of the entire enterprise, ridding us of silos of knowledge and performance in order to more efficiently and effectively meet the challenges of a fast-moving and demanding economy.

This very positive direction came at a time when our parent company announced our merit increases would be postponed by six months and that we would be given five days of unpaid “furlough” during the year. To their credit, when the six months expired we were given increases and the furlough days were designed mostly to intersect with holidays so we would get four day weekends. The financial hit was also spread through the remainder of the year once the decision had been made. This made it a bit more palatable and easier to assimilate financially. For that I am grateful. I’m not blind to the difficulties of the economy and we’re in a sector that can be hit pretty hard. Frankly, I’m pretty happy to still be employed and have a challenging and exciting job to do.

This year I also managed to complete my Masters Degree in Knowledge Management at CSUN. For me this was a major accomplishment. Not only was I working 46 – 50 hours most weeks, but I also have two young children and I’m no spring chicken, having arrived in this world back in 1947. It was sometimes grueling work, especially the last trimester when all I wanted was to get on with my life and put more attention into what I was doing at work. Nevertheless, I now have another degree to add to my accomplishments. Maybe some day I’ll get a Baccalaureate as well.

I’m almost embarrassed to say I became a Cancer patient and survivor all within the space of less than a month. I say embarrassed because I didn’t suffer at all. I must admit to being a bit concerned when I discovered I had a malignant melanoma on my back, especially after doing a little research and coming across descriptions that referred to it as the deadliest form of Cancer. Nevertheless, it was caught early, surgery was successful (and proved it hadn’t metastasized), and the Doctor’s say the chance of recurrence is around 3% – less than the chance I’ll have a heart attack or stroke in the next decade or so.

So, for me this has been a pretty upbeat year – all things considered. My kids are healthy; my wife, though still unemployed, is doing a great job of organizing the children’s education and extra-curricular activities, and (for the most part) I’ve been pretty healthy. Now for next year.

I’m really looking forward to next year. I believe I will be involved in some very exciting and innovative activities at work and, through the 2.0 Adoption Council, will be learning more and more about how to help my company reap the benefits I believe the development of what Andy calls emergent social software platforms (here for more info) will provide for any company willing to work at their adoption and profitable use. I have made plans to attend the next Enterprise 2.0 Conference, though I have already been working on methods of using social software (like Twitter) to allow others to virtually attend many conferences and possibly provide for far greater participation while saving money on travel expenses.

If I don’t post before the New Year I wish everyone a wonderful, joyous holiday season shared with friends and family in relative peace and comfort, as well as a happy and healthy new year. BTW – Susan, 2010 is the end of the decade. It won’t be over until 2011, but who’s counting?

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Business, E2.0, Knowledge Management, Random Thoughts

17 December 2009

2.0 Adoption Council One of the Best Stories of Year (says Dion Hinchcliffe)

By Rick Ladd

Well, I’ve spent the better part of two years now learning about Enterprise 2.0 and how it can be applied at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. I have been practicing Knowledge Management for over 10 years there and it has been a constant struggle to get people to see the value in sharing knowledge, learning from our mistakes (though we pay great lip service to it in the form of never-quite-realized attempts at collecting “lessons learned”), and not re-inventing the wheel.

I first became aware of E2.0 after reading Tim O’Reilly’s seminal paper, “What is Web 2.0“, and it started me thinking about how we could use the design concepts he laid out so well to our inside-the-firewall efforts to increase our communication and collaboration capabilities. I actually thought I was in the forefront of the effort and was somewhat chagrined when I discovered Professor Andy McAfee had been writing about it for at least a year prior to my discovery. He was the one who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and, after my initial disappointment with NOT being actually in the vanguard, I was thrilled to find there was a body of work out there I could learn from.

I also soon found Dion Hinchcliffe, who wrote prolifically and lucidly about E2.o, as well as created lots of excellent graphics that made sense of how the connections worked and what, in fact, should be connected. I have a large collection of Dion’s graphics gathered together in a rather large PowerPoint presentation that I drag out and look at now and again to remind of why I’m doing what I’m doing and how it all fits together.

At the end of July of this year I was fortunate enough to become a member of an organization of E2.0 practitioners, the 2.0 Adoption Council, dedicated to advancing the acceptance and application of Enterprise 2.0 design principles. Rather than tell you much about it, I want to point to Dion’s latest post entitled “Enterprise 2.0: The 2009 Year in Review, where he has the following to say:

Communities of practitioners began to form. One of the best stories of the year was the formation and rise of the 2.0 Adoption Council. Founded by my good friend, the tireless Susan Scrupski, the 2.0 Adoption Council is a practitioners-only community (no vendors or consultants allowed) that has developed an impressive following. Well over a hundred companies are now represented on projects from the quite small to the quite large. It’s also one the very best sources of data — their latest report is packed full of useful information — for what’s taking place with Enterprise 2.0 today. If you’re engaged in Enterprise 2.0 work, I urge you join the council and increase our collective knowledge of what’s happening with enterprise social computing.

If you are at all interested in how your business can perform better and be more effective – not merely more efficient – you owe it to yourself to understand what E2.0 has to offer you. If you are working now to get your company to adopt these practices, consider doing what Dion suggests, joining the Council and learning from some of the best practitioners in the world. You can read his entire post here.

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Collaboration, E2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge Management

14 December 2009

Russ Ackoff, Systems Thinking, and Enterprise 2.0

By Rick Ladd

I posted another “tribute” to Russ Ackoff in my blog at the 2.0 Adoption Council’s collaborative site and thought to share it outside the Council as well. Our site is enabled by Jive SBS and is private, so I’d like to share it with others. What follows, then, is the post as I wrote it the other day:

I am of the opinion it takes a certain kind of sensibility to understand how and why Enterprise 2.0 fits into an organization and, more importantly, how it can increase the effectiveness of everyone and everything with respect to how that organization realizes its goals. In my mind that sensibility was understood well (if not best) by people like W. Edwards Deming and the man I’d like to reflect on just a bit in this post, Russell Lincoln Ackoff. I am writing this because Russ just died last October 29 and the resonance of his passing has yet to settle amongst the community of people who knew him – either personally or through his writings and teachings. Just today I received an email from John Pourdehnad, Director of ACASA at UPenn, with a link to another tribute to Russ, which I urge you to read. I have written about his passing also, as Russ affected me profoundly. I was hoping to visit with him once again next month. Alas, that was not to be. You can read my feeble attempt here, and you can read the latest blog I received from Johnnie here. If you aren’t aware of who Russ was just Google his name and you’ll find plenty out there to inform you.

I raise this issue for several reasons. One is my feeling that, much like so many great people, the full impact of Russ’s influence will only be felt now that he is gone. Whle he was alive he was the spokesperson for his thoughts; nobody could convey what he had to say as well as he could and few tried. Absent his presence it now falls to those of us who stood at his feet to now stand upon his shoulders and try our best to carry on his work. Make no mistake about it, Russ was an important figure in contemporary thought. Not merely in business, but also in education and life in general. No less than Peter Drucker held Russ’s work in high esteem. Drucker once wrote a letter to Russell, which he proudly displayed on the wall of his office. In it, Peter had this to say:

“I was then, as you may recall, one of the early ones who applied Operations Research and the new methods of Quantitative Analysis to specific BUSINESS PROBLEMS — rather than, as they had been originally developed for, to military or scientific problems. I had led teams applying the new methodology in two of the world’s largest companies — GE and AT&T. We had successfully solved several major production and technical problems for these companies — and my clients were highly satisfied. But I was not–we had solved TECHNICAL problems but our work had no impact on the organizations and on their mindsets. On the contrary: we had all but convinced the managements of these two big companies that QUANTITATIVE MANIPULATION was a substitute for THINKING. And then your work and your example showed us–or at least, it showed me–that the QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS comes AFTER the THINKING — it validates the thinking; it shows up intellectual sloppiness and uncritical reliance on precedent, on untested assumptions and on the seemingly “obvious.” But it does not substitute for hard, rigorous, intellectually challenging THINKING. It demands it, though — but does not replace it. This is, of course, what YOU mean BY system. And your work in those far-away days thus saved me — as it saved countless others — from either descending into mindless “model building” — the disease that all but destroyed so many of the Business Schools in the last decades — or from sloppiness parading as ‘insight.’” (I took this from a comment by Steve Brant – a friend – to Michael Trick’s Operations Research Blog. I have personally read the letter as well, in Russ’s office earlier this year)

Another reason I wish to point to Russ’s work is my belief it can – and should – play a significant role in our understanding the implications of Enterprise 2.0. As Andy points out so saliently in his book, and as I would hope most of us have already come to realize, our work is not merely to theorize about the efficacy and implications of adopting E2.0 principles, but rather to apply them to the conduct of our respective organizations such that they improve their day-to-day operations and assist them in achieving their strategic goals. I think that can best be done by also understanding the systemic nature of the organizations within which we operate, and Russ had unique understanding and insight into how this was so.

The intent I had for my personal blog, which I link to above, was to work on reconciling Systems Theory – as taught by Russ and others – to the philosophy of Dialectical Materialism; perhaps a bridge too far given the demands on my time and energy. I do, however, wish to continue understanding how the principles of E2.0 (here‘s a great overview Dion linked to in Twitter) can be best understood from the viewpoint of Systems Theory. To that end I will continue attempting to reconcile what Russ had to teach us with the work we are all engaged in with respect to this council. It is my hope many of you will asssist in this endeavor. I believe it is extremely important to our success. Actually, I believe it is a valuable component of the continuing development of human thought and organization – economically, politically, and socially. I welcome your comments.

Respectfully,

Rick

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Business, E2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Systems Thinking

4 December 2009

Are We Failing to Fail?

By Rick Ladd

Today I attended an hour and a half, lively, funny presentation by a man I had never heard of before, but who I intend on paying at least a little more attention to in the future. His name is Terry Paulson. He’s been described as the Will Rogers of Management Consultants and he pretty much lives up to that description. He was invited as part of a series of ongoing events put on at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne called Passport to Leadership. This series is always open to anyone who wants to attend. Due to space limitations there is online registration available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Most of the time, unfortunately, the room (generally it’s held in an auditorium that can seat about 150 people) isn’t quite full. Sometimes it’s overflowing; depends on the speaker, the time of year, and what’s going on in the company at the time.

I chose to attend this particular event not because I had any idea who Terry Paulson was, but because of the title of the event – “The Innovative Leader’s Challenge: Inventing the Future in a Cost-Containment World”. Intriguing. Surely, anyone paying attention nowadays knows just about everyone is paying attention to costs more so than usual. What I really liked about his approach was its level of (in the words of his website) optimism, resilience, and hope – not to mention a good dose of animated humor. He made it clear he wasn’t talking about being a Pollyanna,  full of false promise and glittering visions of the future, but of being a realist; of looking at things and seeing them for what they are and being willing to face them head on. Interestingly, though he didn’t say it, his home page talks about something I heard many years ago from a radio psychologist by the name of Dr. Toni Grant. I used to listen to her on KABC radio here in Los Angeles when I was driving a truck in my family’s wholesale food business back in the late 70’s. She talked about the propensity many people have to be perfectionists, and she said perfectionism was the beginning of what she called “The Three Ps” – Perfectionism, Procrastination, Paralysis. Many people who read this recognize how frequently this is the case. I know I’ve experienced it at times in my life.

Here’s a quote from his website that kind of sums up the presentation he gave: “Most get an ‘F’ where it counts the most. They fail to fail! Too many get stuck in the Three P’s: Perfection, Procrastination, and Paralysis. They are so worried about making a mistake that they end up doing nothing at all. Most mistakes are not terminal; they become stepping stones to success. Get moving!”

At any rate, here are some of the takeaways I have from this presentation:

  • Frequently ask people questions like “What are you doing differently” or “What have you learned lately?” or “What’s working for you?”
  • When you attend a conference or a presentation don’t sit with people you know (they’re “used”)
  • Don’t wait for direction; get busy inventing the future by capitalizing on emerging opportunities
  • Continually use your quality processes and innovation as a strategic advantage to create the new “good old days”

Here are a few other concepts he discussed . . . and passed out in a nice handout I can easily copy them from 🙂

  • Claim the optimism advantage by using setbacks as stepping stones to progress
  • Build a learning organization in support of strategic innovation
  • Use bridge building strategies to make collaborative innovation work

One of the things I found most amazing about his presentation was every slide he showed was a quote by someone else. Normally I would find this abhorrent but, in his case, he supplemented every one of them with his own stories and anecdotes and his spin on what the message of the quote was. Even the way he read them was entertaining. He was very animated, very funny, very entertaining, and pretty damn enlightening. Like many presentations I’ve attended, he didn’t necessarily tell me anything I didn’t already know. Nevertheless, his style – and his substance – reinforced many of these things, either reminding anew of those things I perhaps needed to strengthen my skill at or providing some positive reinforcement that I’m heading in the right direction.

One of my favorite quotes (at least a portion of one) comes from Barbara Waugh, a personnel manager and change agent at Hewlett-Packard. She has talked about “amplifying the positive deviants”. I like to think she was talking about me when she used that term.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Business

23 November 2009

Are We Really Communicating All That Better?

By Rick Ladd

In my over twenty years of experience at the large, very successful aerospace company where I labor, I have spent a great deal of time trying desperately to get the IT people to talk to the Engineering people. I haven’t, for the most part, been all that successful. Back in the day IT was truly an empire unto itself and it was pretty blind when it came to listening to the needs of the Engineering community. Furthermore, many of the systems that were used by various programs were dictated by the customers who were paying for our services and our products, basically NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and DOE.

This resulted in some very interesting problems with respect to systems, tools, and their use and subsequent development. What used to happen was Engineering would get an itch for a certain type of functionality but, since it hadn’t been contemplated in the original contract and since it might be some time before it could be renegotiated in order to get some money for developing the code required, Engineering would take it upon themselves to develop what they needed. You can imagine what happened many times. Though not an Engineer myself, I believe all Engineering students study one or more computer languages . .  . I’m fairly certain most of them  do.  Well, they would just get on the problem themselves, either writing code or – even worse – creating a tool in Excel.

So now we find ourselves in the interesting position of having something like a couple hundred tools, many quite useful, many overlapping in functionality. Many of them are unwieldy and kind of out-of-date, yet we don’t quite know how to get rid of them. This does seem to be changing somewhat as the tools of Enterprise 2.0 are gaining traction, i.e. blogs, wikis, user-generated content in general. Regardless, there are still numerous choices for how to deal with each of these as well. What wiki should we use? What about Open Source? (Anathema, btw, in my company – at least for now).

So the beat goes on. We keep adding tools, if at a slightly slower rate than previously (I think), and we seldom shed any. I suspect, as more and more content gets generated through the use of social media, and the ability to organize and make sense of it improves, we will eventually move away from many of the tools we’ve kind of grown up with. Data, too, will probably migrate toward a common format that can be accessed easily by anyone who wishes to and has authority to do so. It would be nice to see everyone on the same page, rather than pockets of people talking about the same thing in slightly different, and frequently incompatible, formats and locations.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Business, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Systems Thinking

17 November 2009

Not Even a Drizzle!

By Rick Ladd

I stayed up last night to see if I could catch a couple of Leonids. After all, some of the news stories were predicting the possibility of a half storm (as many as 500/hr). Well . . . truth to tell, by the time yesterday rolled around the reality was that if it was going to be that strong anywhere on the planet it would be in Asia, but they were still saying there should be 25 – 30/hr in North America, with the possibility of as many as 200/hr. I don’t live in the darkest part of the world, but Simi Valley is a somewhat sleepy little town and my back yard is reasonably dark.

My first experience with a meteor shower was about thirty years ago, out in the Mojave Desert where some friends and I had gone to view the Perseids, one of the more spectacular showers that usually peaks on or about the morning of August 12. It’s a good time to view them – the weather at night in the desert can be quite pleasant and it was. I saw some beautiful bolides; a couple being bright enough to cast faint shadows on the desert floor. Spectacular! Wondrous! Unfortunately, life intervened and I was never able to get out to that spot again, but I’ve attempted viewings many times since; just never in a really dark location. Now that I have more time, or at least my time is more flexible than it’s been for the last couple three decades, I’m beginning to wonder if my eyes are giving out. Surely my patience is wearing thin.

This year I’ve so far attempted both the Perseids and the Orionids and haven’t seen a damn thing! Last night (this morning) was no exception. I did see two meteors, but neither was a Leonid. One came out of the West and was bright and extremely fast. The other came out of the Northwest and was a bit slower and quite a bit fainter. However, the Leonids were a no-show for me. Perhaps I should have planned to stay out all night, but I just couldn’t afford to give up all of today. I guess I’ll have to content myself with the knowledge I have seen at least one spectacular showing and, perhaps, that will have to be good enough. I’ll probably try again; the Geminids are coming up next month. <sigh>

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31 October 2009

We Lost Another of the Absolutely Best Minds in Management This Week

By Rick Ladd

There are two Management thinkers who have influenced my life, and the lives of  many of my colleagues – even as we struggle to have their ideas embraced where I work (a titanic, long-standing struggle indeed). One of them, W. Edwards Deming,  has been gone for some time now, but the other – Russell Ackoff – just died this past Thursday.  Russ was a giant in the field of Systems Thinking. Russ proposed what I’ve seen referred to as the spectrum of learning. He believed the content of our minds could be classified into five basic catergories: Data; Information; Knowledge; Understanding, and; Wisdom.

Russ had been in the habit of visiting us here on the west coast to share his wisdom and wit at the beginning of every year. He would spend an entire day with, usually, a large group of interested people, sharing stories of his experiences over the years. One of those I remember the best is his experience with Bell Labs. He quite accidentally was involved in the design of a lot of today’s telephone system. From that experience he later would go on to develop his concept of idealized design – a method whereby one throws out everything that’s known about a product or system and attempts to design it based on what would be ideal, then work backward to where you currently are.

Another thing I loved to hear Russ say, which he would do frequently was his admonition that it was much harder for a large organization to stop something once it had started than to agree to supporting any activity that was outside their comfort zone. In other words, “It’s better to seek forgiveness than ask for permission”. Russ also pointed out that doing the wrong thing better only made what was being done “wronger”.  Russ was so full of wisdom one could easily spend days listening to his stories and the knowledge he gained from his experiences, which were many and varied. Russ spent a large part of his life helping Anheuser-Busch truly dominate their market . . . and become the “King of Beers.”

For the past two years Russ had decided no longer to travel out here to speak to us. He was having back and hip problems and dealing with the incessant screening and the long lines and waits in the airport had become too much for him. My colleague, Bill Bellows, who had for years organized monthly telecons with some of the best speakers and writers in the field of systems thinking and management, asked me each year to accompany him to Philadelphia to visit with Russ and our friend Johnny Pourdehnad, a professor of Organizational Dynamics at UPenn. I was fortunate enough to spend many hours with both Johnny and Russell. One of my last memories of Russ is spending a lovely evening with him and his wife, Helen when Bill and I took them out to dinner for Russ’s 90th birthday. At the time Russ was suffering greatly from the pain he was experiencing associated with what he called “a shredded hip”. It was late January and there was lots of ice on the ground. We had to walk to the restaurant from  where we parked and Russ was using a walker. I hovered over him like a brooding hen, scared silly he would slip and fall. He didn’t, thankfully (I had caught him once in his home office), and we had a great meal followed by a birthday dessert. I snapped a picture with my BlackBerry and now wish to share it with whoever may find themselves here.

My Last Visit With Russ

Russell Ackoff Celebrates His 90th

There are numerous posts and websites where you can learn more about Russ and his work. You found your way here; you know how to search. However, I would like to give mention to one that has been writing about Russell for some time. Ironically, because of one word in the name of this blog, my company’s web filter blocks access to it from inside our firewall. I am referring to “The Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog“, where I got the title for this post.

Russell will be sorely missed by many people. I am hopeful his ideas, his wisdom, his tremendous intellect, and his enthusiasm for understanding and application of systems thinking will find even greater voice now that he is no longer with us. It seems a sad irony of life that so many people only become truly influential after their deaths. Doesn’t say much for us . . . but that’s the way it’s been. I hope Russ’s life will be instructive to many so that we can slowly evolve away from the mundane things that seem to attract us and pay a little more attention to things that matter.

Rick

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