Glut: A book review by Bob Morris

Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages
Alex Wright
Cornell University Press ((2007)

How and why “the torch song of technological transcendentalism has passed from the visionary fringe into cultural mainstream”

Alex Wright explains that in this volume, he approaches the story of the information age “by squarely looking backward” and along the way, he (and his reader) will “traverse a number of topics not usually brought together in one volume: evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology, mythology, monasticism, the history of printing, the scientific method, eighteenth-century taxonomies, Victorian librarianship, and the early history of the computer, to name a few.” It is an especially exciting journey during which he explores separate but related subjects such as these:

• Creation and subsequent development of language and information
• Corresponding increase of information sources and documentation (e.g. papyrus, codex, printing press)
• Corresponding increase of difficulty with managing information (i.e. accessing, processing, organizing, updating, and distributing it)
• Emergence of communities that accelerate communication, cooperation, and collaboration
• Process by which the human race has reached a “precipice” between “the near limitless capacity of computer networks and the real physical limits of human comprehension”

Wright challenges his reader to ask: Have the nature and extent of information (i.e. its scope, depth, and volume) exceeded our ability to process it, much less manage it? Here’s a related question: If so, will the need for hierarchical control systems preclude man’s “deepest rooted social instincts”? Wright asserts — and I agree — that those instincts are returning to the fore, “as people adapt new technologies to invoke the ancient emotional circuitry that carried us through the age before symbols. The future of memory may lie not in our heads but in our hearts.” I prefer to think that what we have is not a glut of information but, rather, a glut of as-yet unrealized potentialities. By reading Alex Wright’s book, we gain a much deeper understanding of where we have been and thus are better prepared for what has yet to be achieved.

Just How Gullible (And Wrong) Can Randy Be? – (In Which I Admit To A Rather Embarrassing Mistake)

So, this morning I was presenting my synopsis of Prescription for Excellence, a terrific book about customer service excellence by Joseph Michelli.  In the midst of my presentation, I was talking about UCLA Health System’s commitment to innovation.  From the book:

“Innovation distinguishes between leaders and followers.”  (Steve Jobs).
The battlefield of business competition is littered with the remnants of once-great companies that failed to adapt or innovate.

And then, out of my mouth came the story about IQ and web browser preference that I had read earlier in the week – the story that people who use one internet browser have a lower IQ than people who use other browsers.

After the presentation, one of our regular participants nicely told me that he had heard about the study on NPR, and the next day, NPR apologized and recanted.  So, it turns out that the study was a hoax, that I, and apparently a whole bunch of journalists, bought into.

Here’s the report reporting that it was a hoax:

Internet Explorer IQ study was a hoax!
Widely reported research by a Canadian firm purporting Internet Explorer users tend to be less intelligent apparently is a hoax.

Now I could tell you that I read the story on more than one web site.  (I did).  I could tell you that at least one of the web sites was quite “legitimate” (in other words, not some obscure blog.  And, it was).  I could tell you that I should not be held accountable.

But – I  repeated a story that was not based in fact.

And I apologize.

So – this is my apology to our participants; this is my mea culpa.

I really should remember the advice of Ronald Reagan – “trust, but verify.”   

Paula Marantz Cohen on how to make books spark to life for college students

Paula Marantz Cohen

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Paula Marantz Cohen and featured by The American Scholar magazine. As you probably know already, The American Scholar is the venerable but lively quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932. In recent years the magazine has won four National Magazine Awards, the industry’s highest honor, and many of its essays and articles have been selected for the yearly Best American anthologies.

“Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous speech, “The American Scholar,” delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College in 1837, the magazine aspires to Emerson’s ideals of independent thinking, self-knowledge, and a commitment to the affairs of the world as well as to books, history, and science.”

To check out all the resources, sign up for email alerts, and obtain information about subscribing to this superb magazine, please click here.

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After years of favoring the endurance-test approach to teaching literature, a professor focuses on how to make books spark to life for her students

Although I have been teaching for almost three decades, I feel I have only recently begun to teach. For years, I was doing what was expected: preparing detailed syllabi, grading piles of papers, and pontificating in front of a class about the importance of the subject matter that I had assigned. I thought I was teaching, and some of my students thought so too. But they were the diligent, receptive ones, and lately I’ve come to feel that diligent, receptive students don’t need teachers. The ones who do are the ones I used to gripe about: those who went directly to the Spark­Notes, who didn’t proofread their papers, and who gave rote responses in class. They were the students whom I traditionally wrote off as not belonging in college—or at least not in my classroom.

Why did my thinking change? I suppose the precipitating factor came when I had children of my own. There is nothing more humbling to one’s self-esteem, more profoundly disruptive of one’s established worldview, than children—those creatures who know nothing of convention or tact, who speak truth to power (that is, their parents) because they haven’t yet learned to pretend or been cowed into doubting themselves. My children, though like me in some respects, were unlike me in others, and I eventually came to see myself through the lens of their difference. Their stubborn individuality forced me to acknowledge otherness in a new way and to question some of my most cherished assumptions. Watching them develop their tastes and interests spurred me to recall how I developed the tastes and interests that define me.

What I realized was that my reverence for books and learning had a dubious beginning. I began reading very young because it pleased my parents and I liked pleasing them. I continued to be studious because I wasn’t a particularly athletic or popular child, and getting good grades was something I could do with relative ease. Those who were like me— “the library crowd,” as we called ourselves—used our book knowledge to feel superior to our peers—and to rationalize the fact that we weren’t invited to the prom. Many of us went on to become college professors and thus gained power in the classroom, where we could lord it over those who were not like us. Louis Menand in a recent book on the stagnant state of the American university, The Marketplace of Ideas, makes the same point indirectly: “The [undergraduate] major is set up in such a way that the students who receive the top marks are the ones who show the greatest likelihood of going on to graduate school and becoming professors themselves.” In other words, most professors aim their teaching at people who resemble them—which is to say, people with the same sort of intellectual proclivities and learning styles that they have. Thus, the profession reproduces itself.

You may argue that there is nothing wrong with this. Whatever the reasons that people become readers and scholars, it is important that they come to do these things well. That may be so, but an inbred, homogeneous learning community is bound to be detrimental both to the knowledge circulating within it and to those who are not part of it. It means that many people are left out of the academic mix: they are never encouraged to discover the joys of reading and scholarship; their ideas never gain authority. Over the past 50 years, education has sought to be more inclusive of minorities formerly left on the margins of serious learning. But the seemingly “deadbeat” college student, viewed apart from his or her affiliation with a disenfranchised group—that constituency has been overlooked

Until recently, I supported the method of teaching that was used in the undergraduate and graduate institutions where I received my degrees. In each case, the courses were designed as endurance tests to see which students would be able to muscle through the requirements: read a ton of books and write a slew of papers without cutting corners. I will never forget my first day in my first English class in 1971, where the professor handed out a syllabus that was 10 pages long. It included a list of required reading, a list of recommended reading, and a list of assignments, plotted out for each of the upcoming classes, so complicated that I felt myself grow faint at the sight of it. Even I—rumored to have read Pickwick Papers at the age of 8 (not true, but a great spur to my subsequent achievement)—even I was intimidated.

The experience of that English class affected my own teaching. It conditioned in me the idea that I had to be comprehensive in what I gave students and what I expected of them. If the process was painful, so be it—everything worth doing was painful.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Paula Marantz Cohen is a Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University where she teaches courses in literature, film, and creative writing. She is the author of four nonfiction books and her essays and stories have appeared in The Yale Review, Raritan, The American Scholar, Boulevard, The Hudson Review, the Southwest Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. She is the host of The Drexel InterView, a cable TV show based in Philadelphia, and a co-editor of jml: Journal of Modern Literature. She holds a B.A. from Yale College and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

 

5 Reasons Why Middle Children Make Great Employees

Here is an article written by Donna Fenn for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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If you’ve ever uttered the words “troubled middle child,” you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of The Secret Power of Middle Children:  How Middleborns Can Harness Their Unexpected and Remarkable Abilities by Catherine Salmon, PhD., and Katrin Schumann.

The book is a fascinating look at how the characteristics and behaviors of “middleborns” can actually lead to extraordinary success. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Michael Dell were middle kids; so were Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Madonna, David Letterman, and the Dalai Lama “There’s this image we have of middle child syndrome,” says Salmon. “But the majority are extremely successful and have gone about their success very quietly.” Middleborns also make stellar employees, she says.

[Here are the first three of five reasons that Fenn discusses. To read the complete article, please click here.]

• Flexibility. “Especially today, it’s very important to be flexible,” says Salmon. “When middleborns are growing up, they don’t get their way because they’re the biggest, and they don’t get their way because they’re the baby who was indulged.” And so middleborns learn to roll with the punches, and to get what they need by negotiating. “They also tend to be very open to experience, and willing to try new things,” says Salmon. “They tend to be moderate risk takers.”

• Empathy.  ”Middleborns generally have very good social and negotiating abilities,” says Salmon. “This comes from not being in a position of physical power, like the oldest, or having manipulative powers, like the youngest.  They tend not to be overbearing, and they’re very cooperative in terms of management style and good at working in teams and groups. We find that when they become effective leaders, they do so because of this personal style.”

• Ability to self-manage.  ”Many people complain that when people are hired as new workers, they aren’t self-starters,” Salmon notes. “Because middleborns had less parental control and more freedom, they’re used to working independently and tend to do so effectively in the workplace.  They are not overly fastidious and organized like first can be, no do they fly by the seat of their pants, as lasts often do. Much of being successful in the workplace relies on avoiding extremes.”

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Donna Fenn is the author of Upstarts: How Gen Y Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit From Their Success and Alpha Dogs: How Your Small Business Can Become a Leader of the Pack. She has more than twenty years experience writing about entrepreneurship and small business trends as a contributing editor at Inc. magazine, an expert on Business.com, and a featured expert on SBTV.com. To visit her website, please click here. You can follow her on Twitter: @donnafenn.

 

 

50 Prosperity Classics: A book review by Bob Morris

50 Prosperity Classics: Attract It, Create It, Manage It,  Share It
Tom Butler-Bowdon
Nicholas Brealey Publishing (2008)

Henry Ford was right

Note: This is one of the volumes in the 5o Classics series, each available in a softbound edition and priced at less than $15.00. In my opinion, the value of the material in each volume is worth much more than that.

Of course, throughout human history, the subject of this book – prosperity — has been defined and measured as well as achieved in many different ways. Hence the importance of the fact that Butler-Bowdon offers a wide range of perspectives from the works of an especially diversified group that includes P.T. Barnum (The Art of Money Getting or Golden Rules of Making Money, 1880), Andrew Carnegie (The Gospel of Wealth, 1889), Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom, 1962), Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor: A Book of Practical Counsel, 1949), Orison Swett Marden (Pushing to the Front, or Success under Difficulties, 1894), Ayn Rand (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966), and Adam Smith (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1778).

Note: Warren Buffett is also included. His contributions to this volume are from The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America, Second Edition, edited by Lawrence Cunningham, and published in 2008. Graham was Buffett’s idol, mentor, and eventually his business partner. If Buffett does not qualify as an “intelligent investor,” I have no idea who does.

Here are a few of his comments about some of those whom he discusses:

“Contrary to the image of Barnum as an over-the-top impresario, this book [i.e. The Art of Money Getting or Golden Rules of Making Money] is actually a solid success manual. Some of the points may seem obvious, but it does not hurt to be reminded of them, especially the idea that personal virtue is the foundation of wealth. Without honesty and reputation, fortunes can disappear overnight; with these things, an enterprise or a service can create prosperity for all involved.” (Page 32)

“Some have viewed Carnegie’s attitude as altruistic. Yet he honestly believed that individuals, including himself, counted for little in relation to the progress of humanity overall…Carnegie set the modern standard for big-time philanthropy, and beyond the millions of lives enlightened by his libraries and other institutions, this is perhaps an even greater legacy.” (Page 67)

“Countries fashioned after the ideas of Adam Smith and Friedman should in theory be monsters of selfish consumption. But as Friedman pointed out, people want to be free not just so they can get rich, but to live according to deeply held values. Prosperity is not just about making money, but about the freedom to live the way you want.” (Page 115)

“In the Introduction to the original 1949 edition, Graham candidly notes the risk that his book `may not stand the test of future developments,’ any more than a finance book written in 1914 would be relevant to investors of the 1950s. In fact, The Intelligent Investor is considered by many people – despite many references to companies that have now faded into history – to be quite timeless. His humility only makes you trust him more, and he has a calm style and does not talk down to the reader.” (Page 13)

“The usual accusation leveled at Rand and her followers is of extremism. A more intelligent view is that she was a supreme rationalist who valued personal freedom to the highest degree. Capitalism to her was not just a system for people to get richer, but was the only system in which people were free to act according to their best interests. Today, because we take our comfortable lives for granted, we take capitalism granted as well.” (Page 237)

“The simplicity and common sense of Smith’s delineation of government’s role has largely stood the test of time. Today, governments have a tendency to grow large and bloated, moving into areas that are not really their business, but in time this inevitably makes the public poorer overall. Though they often believe in their ability to `pick winners’ in terms of subsidizing particular industries to create jobs, Smith warns that such investment tends to corrupt the natural tendency of a society to allocate resources in the best way.” (Pages 264-265)

As I work my way through the material in one of Butler-Bowen’s books, I realize again that Henry Ford was right when he asserted that “whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” However different the contributors to each volume are in terms of who they were, when they lived, and what they accomplished, all of them seem totally convinced of the importance of believing in one’s self, especially when no one else does. To them, the term “self-help” correctly suggests the importance of assuming full responsibility for one’s values, attitudes, decisions, and (especially) behavior. That said, there is much of value to be learned from others who have achieved what Butler-Bowen characterizes as “authentic and lasting success” that has enriched their own lives as well as the lives of others by utilizing “the resources of the world to the greatest effect and with the minimum of waste.”

He realizes that he is providing “only a taste of the literature (the main ideas, context, and impact of each title)” while urging his readers to “feast on the real thing.” What he offers is by no means a buffet of entrepreneurial “hors d’oeuvres.” On the contrary, the content is solid and skillfully presented. I am convinced that many of those who read this book will then be encouraged to read (or re-read) “the real thing.” If Butler-Bowdon’s efforts accomplish nothing else, that will indeed be sufficient to earn the praise I think he has earned…and rightly deserves.

How to Cope with Your Incompetent Boss

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

Everyone complains about his or her boss from time to time. But dealing with a truly incompetent boss is frustrating and exhausting.

Here are three strategies to handle the situation:

1. Have empathy. Resist the temptation to demonize. Resist the temptation to demonize, and try to see things from your boss’s perspective. Perhaps she is under extreme pressure from her superior. Or, maybe he is still learning the skills to do his job.

2. Create boundaries. Don’t let the circumstances get you down. Put up psychological limits so that your boss’s incompetence doesn’t negatively impact your health or well-being.

3. Move on. When all else fails, consider looking for a transfer to a new boss or a new employer. Don’t suffer needlessly.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “Dealing with Your Incompetent Boss” by Amy Gallo.

To read that article and join the discussion, please click here.