Destructive Heroes and Brilliant Jerks

Great article in today's Times about someone we sometimes run into at work: 'Destructive Heroes'. These are the people who are effective at their jobs but abusive to their co-workers. Because of their effectiveness their obnoxious personalities are tolerated by the organization, to the detriment of their colleagues.  

Scott McGohan, chief of McGohan Brabender, has dealt with a destructive hero — a persona that once described him. CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Rather than just complaining about these people, the article discusses the negative effect these people have on their companies. In one case the company totaled up the hours spent cleaning up the messes created by this high-flier and found that the "Brilliant Jerk' (another name for this type) cost the company more than he made. And that didn't even count the cost to employee morale.

 In his training seminars, Mr. Sullivan, president and managing partner at the Shamrock Group, a management consulting firm in Denver, could count on two things whenever he asked, “How many of you have had a destructive hero in your midst?” About half of those in attendance would raise a hand. And of those, “Almost 100 percent said the same thing: ‘We waited too long to deal with it, and it cost us a lot.’ ”

“Get rid of the brilliant jerk as fast as you can,” said Cliff Oxford, founder of the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs in Atlanta, who has registered the URLwww.brilliantjerk.com and is writing a book to help companies deal with such employees (Mr. Oxford also wrote about the topic for The New York Times’s You’re the Boss blog.)

“Teaching over 100 courses,” Mr. Sullivan said, “I’ve never had one person tell me they converted a destructive hero.”

I have had my own experience with these people and they are not always men or in sales. In my current position, a highly intelligent QA Director who won't suffer fools has intimidated the entire staff until she doublechecks everything done and belittles every small mistake made. The end result is that projects drag twice as long as needed.

Americans should obey Russian rules while visiting.

 

The opening ceremonies in the Sochi Olympics held a few entertaining moments. The German team came attired in rainbow colored uniforms to protest the anti-gay rules imposed in Russia. And the Olympic rings failed to open completely, leaving the ring that is traditionally red unopened. Was this a failure of Red communism or the failure of pink to bloom in Russia.

 

 

All this hoopla about the no gay-propaganda during these olympics demonstrate a basic difference between Russian and American culture. Americans culturally are individualistic while Russians are collective. While both countries have minorities, Americans believe that anyone can become whatever they want so there is a feeeling that everyone should be given a fair shake. Members of minority groups can protest and be awarded equal rights in this country. From religious freedom to the civil rights movement to the current gay marriage question, the majority has yielded to the minority and granted equality.

Not so in Russia. There the culture is that the majority is paramount and that minorities can be quashed. Gay rights marches are met with protestors who feel free to disrupt the demonstrations with support from the police, government and church. Putin stands behind this policy that the majority shall not be bullied by the 'obnoxious minority.' That is the Russian way.

Is this right? Not from an American perspective. We all believe in equal rights for all. But we are not Russians. They look at our system and scoff that we should cave our feelings to the minorites that are 'destroying our culture.' It all depends on one's perspective.

It is not our place to criticize other people's cultures, just as we bristle when other people criticize ours.

But what happens when an international event like the Olympics takes place in a country where rules differ from those at the visiting country? I believe the host country should make concessions to the visiting countries' tastes such as providing food and lodgings acceptable to them but they shouldn't to change their way of life completely. Part of the allure of traveling is to experience different cultures.

While traveling I try not to be the ugly American. I take off my shoes in Japanese restaurants and businesses. I refrain from drinking alcohol in Muslim countries. I'm respectful in other religions' temples. I don't stick my thumb up when hitch-hiking in Italy.

The American athletes are guests in a country with certain rules. While they shouldn't actively discriminate against gays, I believe they should respect the rules in Russia and not actively propagandize for gay rights during the two weeks they are being hosted by a country with that rule.

It is fine to send Billy Jean King as a representative to Sochi, but if she starts raising banners and encouraging homosexual behavior, she is breaking the local laws and being that ugly American. Just behave. We don't allow Russians to drink in public when they come here, we should obey their laws while in their country.

The inventor of the Internet and the computer mouse dies.

Douglas Engelbart, the computer visionary who changed the way we use computers died this week.

In a single epiphany in 1950, he envisioned the way computing should be done. At this time, huge computers were fed punch-cards by a single person trying to solve one problem at a time. According to this recent NY Times obituary, this is what Dr. Engelbart envisioned back then:

In his epiphany, he saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different symbols — an image most likely derived from his work on radar consoles while in the Navy after World War II. The screen, he thought, would serve as a display for a workstation that would organize all the information and communications for a given project.

Looks similar to what we do now doesn't it? (Al Gore was 2 years old at the time) But Dr. Engelbart didn't just leave it there. He went ahead and created the elements of this vision.

A decade later he established an experimental research group at Stanford Research Institute (later renamed SRI and then SRI International). The unit, the Augmentation Research Center, known as ARC, had the financial backing of the Air Force, NASA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the Defense Department.

The SRI is widely acknowledged as the founder of the Internet. 

In December 1968, he set the computing world on fire with a remarkable demonstration before more than a thousand of the world’s leading computer scientists at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, one of a series of national conferences in the computer field that had been held since the early 1950s. Dr. Engelbart was developing a raft of revolutionary interactive computer technologies and chose the conference as the proper moment to unveil them.

For the event, he sat on stage in front of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected the computer display onto a 22-foot-high video screen behind him. In little more than an hour, he showed how a networked, interactive computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborating scientists. He demonstrated how a mouse, which he invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer. He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing.

A prototype of the first computer mouse, which was invented in 1964 by Dr. Engelbart and constructed by two of his associates.

In contrast to the mainframes then in use, a computerized system Dr. Engelbart created, called the oNLine System, or NLS, allowed researchers to share information seamlessly and to create and retrieve documents in the form of a structured electronic library.

The conference attendees were awe-struck. In one presentation, Dr. Engelbart demonstrated the power and the potential of the computer in the information age. The technology would eventually be refined at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Apple and Microsoft would transform it for commercial use in the 1980s and change the course of modern life.

Years later, people in Silicon Valley still referred to the presentation as “the mother of all demos.” It took until the late 1980s for the mouse to become the standard way to control a desktop computer. 

douglas_engelbart_1925_2013

Check out the presentation here. It's quite eye-opening to see history in the making.

New App provides Malibu beach access

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

For years the rich of Malibu have been illegally blocking beach access to the public by refusing to open up access ways and gating off those that exist. According to this recent article: There are 17 public access ways to the Malibu coastline. Under state law, there should be more than 100. 

Coming from a country (Australia) and a state (Oregon) where beach access is a public right and expectation I am shocked by this behavior.

There has been a way to find the few gates that work by buying a 300 page guide for $25. Finally technology has come to the rescue. For $2, one can buy an app that shows all the secrets. This includes such gems as which garage doors and No Parking signs are fake.

The home-owners protest that there are no facilities to service these 'interlopers' but I bet they fight the installation of bathrooms and garbage cans on 'their' beaches. I say we all get this app and raid their beaches and show them that according to California law, they must provide access. Who's with me?

One Page Status Reports

A friend of mine just asked me what I thought of the 'One Page Project Manager' status reports. Since I hadn't heard of this I did some research and I'm pretty impressed. I like efficient use of graphics. Here is an example I pulled from this blog:

There's a lot of info here so you might be better off going to the link of the blog itself so you can zoom in better. By efficient use of two dimensions, major deliverables can be identified, the owners determined, the due dates displayed and the status shown in color codes.

The owner of this system sells books and has a great website.

$35 computer

Anybody remember the movie "Computer wore tennis shoes?" In this movie the computer lent to the school for their computer training was a room-sized mainframe. By the time I went to high school, the computer we were lucky enough to have was about the size of a PC but so expensive we all had to share it.

Look at how far we have come. Raspberry Pi makes a credit-card sized computer that costs only $35. They have sold one million of these units to schools for teaching computer science students.

Read this NY Times article for more details. The power is turned on by plugging in the cable. The memory is supplied by a camera-style S card. And most people spring an extra ten bucks for the plastic protective case. But it does its job quite well and, most importantly, can teach kids how to use computers for very little money.

Real people or Screen people

I just recently read two excellent books that dealt with the trend of people spending time on the Internet or texting in preference to real conversations with people.

Feed

The first one, Feed, took a fictional approach to the topic with teenagers having the Internet literally fed into their brains at all times and how their lives differed from ours, especially when the feed malfunctioned and they were back to 'normal.'

Lots of great teen speak that the author picked up by eavesdropping on kids in the mall and extrapolating into the future.

alone-together

The second one, 'Alone Together' was a non-fiction book written by an MIT Artificial Intelligence professor and it showed the types of experiments being performed that showed the trend towards people preferring robot company and moving away from face to face or even phone conversations in preference of texting and other 'controlled' conversations.

In this one the author answered the question I've always struggled with: Why do teenagers prefer to text than call? It always seemed a step backward in technology to the time of the telegraph before the telephone was invented. Her explanation is that teenagers are intimidated by the immediacy and lack of control found in a phone call and prefer to be able to massage their words before sending them.

The books got me thinking, what should we do, if anything, about these trends? Should we try to head them off? I'm all in favor of the increased efficiency brought to us by mobile technology and the Internet. Being able to complete a business deal while driving to another customer. Finding the restaurant where you want to eat and read reviews by other diners while someone else is driving to town. Then clicking on directions and the menu. These are all great advantages.

I know there are all kinds of rules about Internet safety and not texting while driving. This post won't deal with those issues. I'm just going to concentrate on social interactions with the presence of screens. What is polite and what is not. I'm thinking about rules we've imposed at home and what rules we should perhaps add to this list.

The rules are not designed to impose my old-fashioned set of norms on my children. Instead, I am keenly interested in raising my children to fit into future society. If they don’t learn how to have a phone or face-to-face conversation as children, what are they going to do when they go for an interview, try to sell their product to a customer, meet their future in-laws?

Multitasking is a skill that can work in certain situations like when you are using different parts of your brain to accomplish different tasks. All of us can walk while having a conversation, eat while listening to music, even play simple video games like Brickbreaker while listening to a book on tape. But young people think they can multitask with the same area of the brain. This has been tested repeatedly and found to be a fallacy. You cannot effectively text someone while having a conversation with another person. You can’t do your homework efficiently and correctly while maintaining seven different chat sessions and listening to loud music. If you think you are one of these rare exceptions who can do that, submit yourself to testing and you’ll be surprised.

What follows is my first draft of a set of rules. Please comment with your impressions of these rules and any additions you would make.

Screen rules

  1.  Live people are more important than people communicating to you via screens.
  2. No screens at the dinner table unless your family allowed TV there 20 years ago.
  3. If  something comes up in a conversation where the answer can be found by checking a screen, ask permission first.
  4. When spending time one-on-one with someone and your phone interrupts, answering demotes the real person in importance to the one on the screen. (That’s OK if it’s your mother or your boss, not OK if it’s just another friend.)
  5. If you’re in a group and the conversation can go on without you while you check the screen, that may be OK but be subtle.
  6. No screens while attending religious services, a concert, a show or a movie.  You can always tell people ‘gtg’ for a couple of hours and get back to them when you leave the area.
  7. No screens while attending a lecture unless the lecturer asks you to look something up as part of the class.
  8. Enjoy your time when in a special event. No need to look at it through your camera.

This last one is a personal pet peeve. Remember the opening ceremony of the Olympics? All these athletes were at the pinnacle of their career. They march into the stadium in front of billions of people and what are they mostly doing? Rather than enjoying themselves, they are recording the crowd and fellow athletes on their cell-phone cameras! People! Have your buddy at home record the show and post it on your Facebook page. Enjoy the moment! You deserve it!

What are your thoughts? I'd love to see some additions to this and we can come up with the '10 communication commandments.'