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.
27 February 2009

Discounting Twitter

By Rick Ladd

A little while ago I was at a meeting with reps from an advertising agency that specializes in creating web presence for organizations. They’re pretty well known and have won a webby for one of their campaigns. My organization has never advertised by itself, though it has benefited marginally from ads by parent organizations (and there have been a few . . . organizations, that is).

I was impressed with the web savvy and the general tenor of the presentation these guys gave. Equally, I was happy with the direction our executives went in when discussing this stuff and their overall approach to moving in this direction. There was, however, one item that came up which disturbed me somewhat, and that was a discussion of Twitter in which they were summarily dismissive . . . which I think is a big mistake.

Now I’ll grant this – a business such as ours is not interested in tweets like “Just finished my croissant with black currant jelly. Starbucks is so yesterday”, or “Just finished walking the dog. Back with large bag of poop. Weather looks to be quite comfortable today”. Neither do we care about monetizing Twitter or some similar product. It’s not what we do. However, and this is true whether Twitter finds a way to monetize themselves of whether they just flat out go out of business, the concept of micro-blogging is NOT going to go away. It has too damn many use cases to be ignored.

One example I can think of off the top of my head (and I believe NASA is using this very model to prepare orbiters for missions) is for a geographically dispersed team to stay in contact with each other with respect to the completion of critical items that impact downstream activities. I have experienced numerous situations where the lack of communication regarding the completion of a step in a complicated series has resulted in the loss of a day or half day in the completion of the project. This is not trivial.

At any rate, I really think there are lots of use cases for Twitter within the enterprise. Dismissing it out-of-hand is foolish and short-sighted in my opinion.

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

26 February 2009

Learning & Innovation

By Rick Ladd

Can a group of people, using a process designed to stimulate lateral thinking specifically targeted at very difficult engineering design problems, find new and innovative solutions to them (especially when their bellies are full of salad and pizza courtesy of the company)? That’s just what we sought to answer today. A few dozen of the best and brightest at our company, which makes them some of the best and the brightest in the world at what they do, were brought together to be presented with 10 difficult problems our current or past customers would like to have solved.

They were then introduced to a process designed to stimulate consideration of solutions not necessarily within the discipline these engineer/scientists are accustomed to dealing with. We set up a wiki specifically for the purpose of enabling ongoing discussion and collection of data and information, presented them with the problems (and the salad and pizza), showed them the tool, let them play with it a bit in search of some quick brainstorming, then set them loose.

I’m not sure anything will come of this. Obviously, we’re looking for solutions we can sell (can you guess the government – in one form or another – is our ultimate customer?), but will we be able to come up with novel solutions to itches that have wanted scratching for some time? It’s precisely because these are difficult . . . really difficult problems, that we’re trying an approach we’ve only come close to attempting once before and that was somewhat different than this iteration.

The prospect of a very stodgy engineering company kicking up its heels a little bit is very exciting to me. I can’t wait to see if these guys can take to the wiki. I suspect it’s going to be a bit painful, but they’ll have a little help from some of the younger involved engineers, as well as the business development and program management people who were there to supplement the teams.

We’re not looking to solve interesting problems for the sake of their solving, though there certainly is a large component of curiosity and wonder that infuses the people who attend these kinds of sessions. What we’re really after though is contracts; contracts to give us the opportunity to move forward on securing some truly commercial contracts. This is going to be a major transition for us and I know it’s not going to be easy for some of these guys. I’m hopeful the transition won’t be too painful, but having some quasi-commercial contracts will ease some of that pain I think.

Leave a comment | posted in Business, Collaboration

25 February 2009

Coming back online

By Rick Ladd

OK – So I’m going to start posting again. However, my intent now is not so much to follow the line of thinking I originally intended but, rather, to just start increasing my presence in the blogosphere. I, like many, feel I do have things to say . . . some of which might actually be useful to others. Perhaps not, but most of us don’t write fully expecting what we have to say will be universally accepted. So I will blather and pontificate some here. I won’t rant, though. I have another blog for that.

Leave a comment | posted in Business

7 January 2008

Once More Unto The Breach, Dear Friends

By Rick Ladd

Blogging is an interesting occupation or, in my case, avocation. For me it has allowed mostly venting, though I started with a blog about my family that was anything but. I finally gave up on that, believing it really wasn’t my place to put out our personal details for everyone to see. I am considering doing just that in a book, which requires some personal investment and input (like moolah) from the reader; something to salve my family’s wounds for having made our foibles public. That, however, is another venue I will explore. For now we are about blogging.

I propose, for this blog, to explore the symmetries, similarities, and synergies of the philosophy of the Dialectic and the teachings of Systems Theory. I propose to explore the writings of people like Karl Marx, W. Edwards Demming, and Russell Ackoff, as well as others who have studied and written on either of the subjects. As far as I can tell, this is a novel approach; some may say strange or even dangerous. Nonetheless, I find it interesting and quite valid, i.e. the juxtaposition of the two seemingly disparate concepts.

I say disparate because the philosophy of the Dialectic (actually Dialectical Materialism) espoused by Karl Marx, Fredrich Engels, and (yes, even) V.I. Lenin is irrevocably and inextricably entertwined with the Soviet Revolution and State no longer extant in Eastern Europe, while the teachings of Systems Thinking took root in post-war Japan and have flourished in the deeply entrenched Capitalism of the United States and elsewhere.

I don’t expect my analysis to proceed quickly, nor do I expect to be able to post all that frequently. The exigencies of my real job, coupled with my attendance in an online Masters program at CSUN – not to mention the fact I have two quite young daughters who demand a lot of my attention – will make it difficult to attend to this blog. Regardless, I think it a worthy objective and, God willing and the creek don’t rise, I’m hopeful it will be the precursor to either a Doctoral Thesis, or – at the least – a serviceable essay on the subject. Who knows? I guess that’s one of the beauties of blogging. I can put forth ideas and, if I’m lucky, I’ll even get some feedback. At the very least I get the opportunity to blather on about something that interests at least one person in this world.

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Economics, Politics