Contacting the Sweet Spot

Never been a fan of management metrics – it’s all too easy for lazy managers to measure what is easy to count, and not deal with what really matters. Even Einstein said “not all that counts can be counted”. However this Forbes piece by James Slavet nails five valuable “metrics” worth assessing subjectively – starting with “Flow”.

[M]ost managers only measure outputs, not inputs, which is like telling a Little League team to score more runs, rather than actually explaining how to swing a bat and make contact with the ball.

BTW I couldn’t believe that the “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” adage could have originated with Peter Drucker, at least not outside some particular context. Good to see I’m not alone in seeing that message as alien to Drucker’s style. I certainly couldn’t find it as an attributable quote – sounds more like an adage created to justify Taylorism to me.

Good to see the actual quote (in a comment response):

“What you measure is what you get.”

As Ed says, “that is very different from the attributed quote. In fact, it is right on target. If you measure billable hours, you will get more billable hours”. You treat people like children / monkeys, you get children / monkeys. (I recall my Master’s thesis concluding something about the need for multiple objective and subjective measures in order not to skew behaviour towards narrow measures.)

Also like this from another actual Drucker quote:

Reports and procedures should be
the tool of the man who fills them out.

A particular bug-bear of mine is reports like time-sheet and expense report systems with UI’s that are formatted the way the report user wants to see things, not the way that is useful to the reporter – eg allocation to cost-centres or breakdown-codes before recording as line-items is a common fault designed to make form-filling twice the chore it needs to be. Reports should always be – this is what I did from my perspective as I report it – with the tools automating the re-presentation of the same information in whatever format management requires.

I only “rediscovered” Drucker relatively recently, since his death in 2006, and largely because I was taken by his debt to Mary Parker-Follett.

Specialization

Succinctly summarised by Kenneth Williams back in 1987. (On Aspel btw, not Parky)

No Students Were Harmed

In the making of this film. MML The Movie created as a promo for Modern & Mediaeval Languages at Cambridge Uni. Good to see the old lanes and backs, but also to realize I recognized most of the quotes. Thanks to Andy Martin’s blog Ink (Blog parked. Follow Andy at The Independent) Most recent quote – Steve Pinker:

Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like an apple.

Must seek out some other of Andy’s books. It was his Beware Invisible Cows that caused me to link to his blog.

[Post Note: Interesting to see the press and comments linked in Andy’s blog, regarding the film. Sad and mean opinions varying from pretentious (life’s not really like that) to desperate (Cambridge must be slipping in the Oxbridge rankings). Interestingly, as an 18 year old I’d have struggled to fit in at Cambridge, I was put-off by (and unsurprisingly failed) the selection interview way back then. My appreciation for it (and places like it) is the result of mature, wiser experience of the place and its output. The film ? – quite right, even in modern languages, love is all. Education is (can be) wasted on the young.]

Lynn Margulis

Died a couple of weeks ago, though I didn’t notice until I saw the pieces in the current edition of The Edge.

I like Dawkins comment:

I greatly admire Lynn Margulis’ ….  theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology ….

She was Carl Sagan’s first wife (of 11 years). I find myself pretty well aligned with Sagan as a Spinozan.

Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Others”for example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein”considered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws.

When it comes to Gaia, Dawkins is ruthless in pointing out the fallacy in seeing progressive Darwinian processes at the level of the whole earth as organism, even though any number of complex adaptive systems could be explained that way – provided they are subject to selection pressures as part of a larger competitive environment. Dennett is more balanced – sure, evolution involves collaborative processes, important processes in the long run, clearly, but they cannot be the primary process.

And Gaia again in Margulis own words …

Lovelock would say that Earth is an organism. I disagree with this phraseology. No organism eats its own waste. I prefer to say that Earth is an ecosystem, one continuous enormous ecosystem composed of many component ecosystems. Lovelock’s position is to let the people believe that Earth is an organism, because if they think it is just a pile of rocks they kick it, ignore it, and mistreat it. If they think Earth is an organism, they’ll tend to treat it with respect. To me, this is a helpful cop-out, not science. Yet I do agree with Lovelock when he claims that most of the things scientists do are not science either. And I realize that by taking the stance he does he is more effective than I am in communicating Gaian ideas.

If science doesn’t fit in with the cultural milieu, people dismiss science, they never reject their cultural milieu! If we are involved in science of which some aspects are not commensurate with the cultural milieu, then we are told that our science is flawed. I suspect that all people have cultural concepts into which science must fit.

I’d say, Gaia is a useful analogy, but not a scientific explanation. And I’ve said before, science is its own cultural belief system. Some excellent corollaries in there, not least that not all helpful things in the world need be amenable to science. And of course mitochondria organelles are the focus of Margulis key work in evolution, coincidentally the subject of the Hunter Gatherer diet piece below.

(Quite a few straw men to disagree about about what she says other evolutionary biologists believe in her “Gaia is a Tough Bitch” piece. Why do people feel the need to use that kind of rhetoric to set up a fight ?)

Forget the Facts

More good advice from Peter Drucker (via HBR and David Gurteen again). Facts can always be made to fit, so better to understand subjective differences of opinion.

Phantom Limbs

Lots of examples in Sacks, and in Ramchandran and in Damasio if I recall. (Ram is mentioned in the story in fact.)

Scientific Denial

Amazing that so many scientists are reported as denying Darwinian evolution. Steve Jones in The Telegraph.

The growing tide of fact‑denial is a statement of failure, not by students but by their teachers, up to and including those at university level. We do our best, I think, but faced with schools or faith groups that get their ignorance in first, we seem to be fighting a losing battle.

Well, I’d say they need to start by teaching quality, rather than claiming to be “right”. Science is always incomplete and contingent, but there are places where science has no value (first-cause) or limited value (psychology, for short, or any metaphysical philosophy of science).

Even theist Francis Collins says:

Evolution is as solid a theory as gravity.

Hunter Gatherer Diet

Impressive case. “Minding Your Mitochondria” – Large quantities, but minimal grain or pulse-based carbohydrate.

Thanks to Dave Gurteen for reposting Robert Paterson’s blog.

Inbred to Destruction ?

Interesting. I remember thinking when I saw John Gosden explaining reassuringly “freakish, but it happens (painlessly?) all the time” as he tended to Rewilding, being put-down at Ascot in July, that race horses must have fragile cannon-bones. In fact not being interested in horses I had to look up cannon-bones on-line at the time. (Only interested because son-of-a-friend William Buick won the particular race on Gosden-trained Nathaniel.)

No-one wants to be watching the Derby, Kentucky Derby or Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in 2018 and to see another horse fall, broken under its own weight and heritage.

To avoid such problems in thoroughbreds, and to maintain the genetic health of these most athletic of animals … the thoroughbred industry should periodically, every 5-10 years, re-check to see what the levels of inbreeding are.

Yes & No

Should they illuminate Stonehenge at night ? Why does this have to be a dichotomous, binary question ? Why not illuminate it Wednesday to Friday nights, in darkness with minimal starlight pollution Saturday to Tuesday ? Or alternate nights, or … before and after midnight, or …