Seeing Clearly

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
(Jesus of Nazareth in John 8:32)

Step back, step away, re-create, re-treat, re-new, re-turn.
All the best to you, and see you again in the new year!

Perpendicular Perspectives & Alternate Realities

"When Alan Meckler, the CEO of IT and online imagery hub Jupitermedia was accepted to Columbia University in 1965, the dean's office told him he had some of the lowest college boards of any student ever admitted. 'I got a 405 or 410 in English,' he recalls. 'In those days you got a 400 just for putting your name down! Yet I was on the dean's list every year I was there, and I won a prize for having the best essay in American history my senior year.'

"It wasn't until years later, at age 58, that Meckler learned he was dyslexic. He struggles with walking and driving directions, and interpreting charts and graphs. He prefers to listen to someone explain a problem to him, rather than sit down and read 20 pages describing it…

"Many of the coping skills dyslexics learn in their formative years become best practices for the successful entrepreneur. A child who chronically fails standardized tests must become comfortable with failure. Being a slow reader forces you to extract only vital information, so that you're constantly getting right to the point. Dyslexics are also forced to trust and rely on others to get things done—an essential skill for anyone working to build a business…

"Paul Orfalea, who founded the copy-and-graphics chain Kinko's 37 years ago, has both dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. He proudly attributes much of his business success to an inability to do things most others can. 'I would always hire people who didn't have my skills,' he says. 'My secret was to get out of their way and let them do their job.' …

"Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers says dyslexia helps him step back and see the big picture… 'Dyslexia forces you to look at things in totality and not just as a single chess move. I play out the whole scenario in my mind and then work through it. … All of my life, I've built organizations with a broad perspective in mind.'

"Of course, being a misfit often lends itself to great entrepreneurship. Health-care entrepreneur and real estate magnate James LeVoy Sorenson has more than 40 medical patents to his name… He also dropped out of community college at 18, and was told by grade-school teachers he was either 'slow-witted or developmentally disabled.'

"At 86, Sorenson says overcoming dyslexia trained him to be persistent and solve problems in new ways: 'I like to add one word to the end of many sentences: yet. Instead of saying, I can't do it, I say, I can't do it—yet'."


(“Why Dyslexics Make Great Entrepreneurs.” Gabrielle Coppola. Business Week online. December 12, 2007.)

OBJECTIVE, SCIENTIFIC REALITY once again yields to subjective personal perspective. How we see and feel are the hinges upon which the tangible world swings to and fro.

Opportunity for Whom?

“The corner offices of corporate America are increasingly being filled from every corner of the world.

“Citigroup, the world's largest bank, named Vikram S. Pandit, a native of Nagpur, India, as its chief executive on Tuesday. Mr. Pandit joins 14 other foreign-born chiefs who are running Fortune 100 companies.

“The head of the Altria Group was born in Egypt, for example. PepsiCo's is from India, the Liberty Mutual Group's is a native of Ireland and Alcoa's was born in Morocco.

“Their numbers have jumped from roughly a decade ago; there were nine foreign-born chief executives on Fortune's list of the 100 largest companies in 1996. But the size of the new group does not reflect a noteworthy change -- they come from more far-flung countries now than then, when they were more likely to hail from Canada or Europe…

“Many of these foreign-born chief executives were recruited by companies like General Electric and Procter & Gamble in the 1970s and 1980s for their overseas operations. Now they hold top positions at companies that also include Chiquita Brands International, the Eastman Kodak Company and the Kellogg Company. Chief executives at Dow Chemical, Altria and Alcoa started in foreign units of their companies.

“‘Even though they're based in the United States, companies are less and less thinking of themselves as American companies,’ said Michael Useem, a management professor at the Wharton School…

“M. Farooq Kathwari, chief executive at Ethan Allen Interiors, said he had been shaped by his experience moving on his own at age 21 from the Kashmir region of India to the United States.

“‘A foreign-born person is by nature an entrepreneur,’ Mr. Kathwari said. ‘When you leave your home, leave your family and come to a different country, you have had the instincts of an entrepreneur.’ …

“Howard M. Anderson, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Sloan School at M.I.T., said change in the executive suite has come more slowly than companies' sales growth abroad. He said that some corporate boards may still not be comfortable with foreign-born chief executives because they feel they have more in common with another American.

“‘It's prejudice, but remember, when you're picking a C.E.O., it's not an equal opportunity job,’ Mr. Anderson said.


(“Seeking Leaders, U.S. Companies Think Globally.” Louise Story. The New York Times: December 12, 2007. pg. 1)

HOW AM I ADDING VALUE? Is it distinctive, or common? Am I expanding my horizons so that I can expand the horizons of others? Am I resting on my favorite assumptions? What would be the implications of change?

Discernment & Focus

“Valero Energy Corp. is considering an overhaul of its portfolio of refineries to prepare for a time when the once-flush refinery industry faces greater pressure on its bottom line.

“Bill Klesse, the 61-year-old chief executive of the largest U.S. refiner by output, has identified a group of 10 core refineries on which it will focus its investment and attention…

“‘Some of the plants that we have in this portfolio are probably worth more to other people,’ Mr. Klesse said.

“The intent: Valero hopes to be a more-efficient refiner in a time of high and volatile oil prices and rising global competition…

“Valero hopes to focus on refineries mainly on the U.S. coasts, giving them greater access to oil from more sources, and that are set up to handle oil that is tougher to refine and therefore cheaper to buy. Focusing investment on those refineries also could help reduce downtime and improve reliability…

“Valero's shift could leave it with a better portfolio of more valuable assets. ‘Our strength needs to be that we have very good, very safe, and reliable assets in this marketplace,’ Mr. Klesse said.”


(“Valero May Sell Some Refineries as It Hones Focus; Bid for Efficiency Comes as Industry Faces New Pressures.” Jessica Resnick-Ault. Wall Street Journal: December 11, 2007. pg. A.20)

UNCERTAINTY CALLS FOR both broad discernment and sharp focus. Are we in a cyclical turn, or a new trend? or both perhaps? Breadth in scale, and depth in scope may allow for penetrating insight here... Or, it may turn into escalating commitment to a failing course of action.

Execution -- The Beginning of/or The End?

“Google is a company convinced of its own brilliance and its clear vision of the future. Being a hotbed of Mensa members will do that to you. As will stumbling early onto an obscenely lucrative business model. The same thing happened to a company called Microsoft.

“But that doesn't mean that the fundamental rules of the universe don't apply -- immutable things like Newton's gravity or Murphy's Law. I bring this up because Google has just announced two extraordinarily ambitious strategic gambits in the span of a week…

“First the company announced OpenSocial, a hasty attempt to smother social-network phenom Facebook by pulling together an alliance of more than 50 of that upstart's peers and competitors…

“Then Google took the wraps off something even bigger: a grand plan to redefine the cellphone. Through the so-called Open Handset Alliance, Google will provide software and programming protocols for others to employ in building a new class of smartphone handsets and cellular information services. Once again, the unspoken goal is to create handheld billboards for blasting even more ads at us.

“Those initiatives are both what Silicon Valley calls ‘platforms’ -- standards for independent developers to write programs that extend the utility of a device or service. Ever since Microsoft and Intel defined the architecture of the PC, establishing a platform has been the holy grail of ambitious high-tech companies.

“But in reality there aren't that many genuine computing platforms around, because it is extremely difficult to design and support them in a way that pleases all constituencies. Apple has managed to establish its Macintosh platform by keeping the options for independent developers rather narrow… and is being extremely careful as it turns the iPhone into a genuine platform. Microsoft, which has huge built-in advantages because it has by far the most experience with platforms, has been working for more than a decade with only mixed success on its Windows Mobile platform for handheld computers and smartphones…

“As capable as Google is, the company has never really masterminded a platform before…

“It all sounds great... But as even Microsoft could tell you, neither platform gambit is a sure bet. Google doesn't seem to take into account the most fundamental rule of high tech: Don't mistake a clear view for a short distance.”

(“Is Google Spinning out of Control?” Brent Schlender. Fortune: December 10, 2007. Vol. 156, Iss. 12; pg. 58)


IF IT CAN BE CONCEIVED, it can be done? If I can do something marvellously well, I can do anything else? If I went where no one else had gone before, I rewrote the rules? Executing or executed?

The Art of Insight -- The Science of Oversight

“On Tuesday, Boeing Co. will give Wall Street a progress report on its 787 Dreamliner, as it scrambles to overcome a six-month delay in producing the new jet. A look inside the project reveals that the mess stems from one of its main selling points to investors -- global outsourcing.

“When the Chicago aerospace giant set out four years ago to build the fuel-sipping jet, it figured the chief risk lay in perfecting a process to build much of the plane from carbon-fiber plastic instead of aluminum. Boeing focused so hard on getting the science right that it didn't grasp the significance of another big change: The 787 is the first jet in Boeing's 91-year history designed largely by other companies.

“To lower the $10 billion or so it would cost to develop the plane solo, Boeing authorized a team of parts suppliers to design and build major sections of the craft, which it planned to snap together at its Seattle-area factory. But outsourcing so much responsibility has turned out to be far more difficult than anticipated.

“The supplier problems ranged from language barriers to snafus that erupted when some contractors themselves outsourced chunks of work… The first Dreamliner to show up at Boeing's factory was missing tens of thousands of parts…

"Boeing overestimated the ability of suppliers to handle tasks that its own designers and engineers know how to do almost intuitively after decades of building jets. Program managers thought they had adequate oversight of suppliers but learned later that the company was in the dark when it came to many under-the-radar details.

“‘In addition to oversight, you need insight into what's actually going on in those factories,’ says Scott Carson, the president of Boeing's Commercial Airplanes unit. ‘Had we had adequate insight, we could have helped our suppliers understand the challenges.’ …

“Boeing… has responded to bottlenecks by throwing both money and people at them, parachuting in dozens or hundreds of its own employees to attack problems at plants in Italy, Japan and South Carolina…

“Many of these handpicked suppliers, instead of using their own engineers to do the design work, farmed out this key task to even-smaller companies. Some of those ended up overloading themselves with work from multiple 787 suppliers, Boeing says.

“The company says it never intended for its suppliers to outsource key tasks such as engineering, but that the situation seemed manageable at the time. ‘We tended to say, They know how to run their businesses,’ says a Boeing executive familiar with the company's thinking…

“Despite the start-up problems, Boeing and its suppliers still say they believe this new method of developing planes is the model for future projects.”


(“Jet Blues: Boeing Scrambles to Repair Problems With New Plane; Layers of Outsourcing Slow 787 Production; 'Hostage to Suppliers'.” J. Lynn Lunsford. Wall Street Journal: December 7, 2007. pg. A.1)

FOCUSING TOO HARD on the science of management leads to neglecting the art of managing. A model for the future... ?

Counterintuitive -- Contrary to Intuition

“Over the next few years, the pharmaceutical business will hit a wall.

“Some of the top-selling drugs in industry history will become history as patent protections expire, allowing generics to rush in at much-lower prices. Generic competition is expected to wipe $67 billion from top companies' annual U.S. sales between 2007 and 2012 as more than three dozen drugs lose patent protection. That is roughly half of the companies' combined 2007 U.S. sales.

“At the same time, the industry's science engine has stalled. The century-old approach of finding chemicals to treat diseases is producing fewer and fewer drugs. Especially lacking are new blockbusters to replace old ones like Lipitor, Plavix and Zyprexa.

“The coming sales decline may signal the end of a once-revered way of doing business. ‘I think the industry is doomed if we don't change,’ says Sidney Taurel, chairman of Eli Lilly & Co. …

“The rise of generics wouldn't matter so much if research labs were creating a stream of new hits. But that isn't happening. During the five years from 2002 through 2006, the industry brought to market 43% fewer new chemical-based drugs than in the last five years of the 1990s, despite more than doubling research-and-development spending…

“It has never been easy to take a drug from the lab, through animal testing and into human trials. The industry estimates only one out of every 5,000 to 10,000 candidates makes it to human trials…

“But those odds seem to have worsened in recent years, prompting debate about whether the cause is government regulation, corporate structure or an excessive scientific reliance on chemicals rather than biology…

“Some say the industry's ballooning research budgets may be working against productivity. Most companies use a centralized system to allocate research money, and the growing budgets have left the decision making to too few people who are too far removed from the research.”


(“Big Pharma Faces Grim Prognosis; Industry Fails to Find New Drugs to Replace Wonders Like Lipitor.” Barbara Martinez and Jacob Goldstein. Wall Street Journal: December 6, 2007. pg. A.1)

AS UNCERTAINTY INCREASES, centralization and automation ascend; touch, feel, sense and insight decline. As discovery has been relegated to mass-produced, technology-driven search, innovation has withered.

AS IT GOES in Big Pharma, so it goes in learning everywhere. Institutionalization is a heavy-handed benefactor.

Are We Learning?

“Three scenes from the new battle for global economic supremacy:

“King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the country that sits on 25% of the planet's oil, knows that oil is not his country's future. That's why he's spending $12.5 billion to found a graduate research university, which he'll endow with $10 billion -- as big an endowment on day one as MIT has built in 142 years. The point of this project, on a grand scale even by Saudi standards: to attract the best researchers in science and technology.

“The European Union has proposed new rules to attract the world's most highly skilled workers. If they can show that they're well educated and hold an offer of a lucrative job in Europe, they can get a two-year renewable permit to live there. The problem Europe is trying to solve: 85% of emigrating unskilled workers from developing countries go to Europe, but only 5% of skilled workers do so.

“HCL Technologies, an Indian infotech services firm, has noticed a major change in its best young employees. Until two or three years ago, few of them would work for it unless they were promised an overseas assignment. Now it's just the opposite: They see India as the most compelling source of excitement and opportunity, and they don't want to be sent away…

“Companies have been battling for years to attract and keep the best people. Now countries are engaging in the same fight…

“Since this is a fundamentally new fight, no one is sure what will win it. But we can already identify some fairly deep and difficult questions the fight raises. How countries answer them will help determine national wealth and power.

“How long will any country tolerate Info Age protectionism? … No country can have world-class workers if it continually protects them from world-class competition…

“Why isn't the U.S. more serious about the key competitive advantage of the Info Age, education? How to make human capital more valuable is no mystery, yet the world's richest country still has nowhere near the world's best education system…

“This international fight for talent will get much more serious. With luck, it will lead to something new: a free market in brainpower. That may not come to pass -- but wise nations will prepare for it.”


(“The Battle for Brainpower.” Geoff Colvin. Fortune: December 10, 2007. Vol. 156, Iss. 12; pg. 34)

INVEST in your self. Invest in others. Invest in the future. Somebody else is.

Competitive Advantage

“One myth dogging the immigration debate is that employers are fibbing (or grossly exaggerating) when they claim that hiring foreign professionals is unavoidable because U.S.-born Ph.D.s are hard to come by. But a new report on doctorates from U.S. universities shows they're telling the truth, and then some.

“Foreign-born students holding temporary visas received 33% of all research doctorates awarded by U.S. universities in 2006, according to an annual survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. That number has climbed from 25% in 2001. But more to the point of business competitiveness, foreign students comprised 44% of science and engineering doctorates last year.

“‘China was the country of origin for the largest number of non-U.S. doctorates in 2006,’ says the report, followed by India, Korea, Taiwan and Canada. ‘The percentage of doctorates earned by U.S. citizens ranged from lows of 32% in engineering and 47% in physical sciences, to highs of 87% in education and 78% in humanities.’ Given this reality, is it any wonder that 40% of Ph.D.s working in U.S. science and engineering occupations are foreign-born? …

“Earlier this year Microsoft, which is the third-largest sponsor of H-1B visas, announced plans to open a new software development center near Vancouver. The decision to locate the facility in Canada was based in part on the fact that it doesn't have access to enough foreign workers state-side.

“‘We currently do 85% of our development work in the U.S., and we'd like to continue doing that,’ says Jack Krumholtz, the company's director of government affairs. ‘But if we can't hire the developers we need, … we're going to have to look to other options to get the work done’."

(“American Brain Drain.” Wall Street Journal: November 30, 2007. pg. A.16)


IN OUR WORLD, in our fields, in our organizations, in our lives, what is our nation, our industry, our company, and our selves -- what are we doing to enhance the value that we offer the world? If we are not adding value, someone else is.

PROGRESS is an uphill climb. So either we are moving forward, or we are slipping back.

Great Manager, Poor Leader?

“Morgan Stanley ousted Zoe Cruz, its co-president and heir apparent, yesterday after the firm suffered more than $3.7 billion in mortgage-related paper losses.

“The departure of Ms. Cruz, one of the highest-ranking women on Wall Street, was a surprise. While Ms. Cruz, 52 years old, had oversight of the part of the business that had suffered losses, it appeared she had survived the bloodletting brought upon by the credit crisis.

“Apparently, Ms. Cruz suffered not only from the mortgage losses but from criticism of her leadership style, which many colleagues said could be difficult, and from lingering wounds from a bruising 2005 battle for control of the firm. During that struggle, she played a polarizing role, remaining loyal to Philip Purcell, an unpopular chief executive who later was ousted. John Mack, who succeeded Mr. Purcell, stood by Ms. Cruz, but the trading losses gave him a reason to question her leadership...

“Her ascent after Mr. Mack was installed as CEO was remarkable, given the polarizing role she played in 2005…

“She was so unpopular with a number of high-profile Morgan exiles that they refused to return after Mr. Mack became CEO if she remained co-president. They included Vikram Pandit, now a candidate to lead Citigroup Inc., and star banker Joseph Perella.

“Mr. Mack, a longtime supporter of Ms. Cruz in his early days at Morgan Stanley, said he didn't want to put the firm through more trauma. While he praised her for recent positive results, he was unsure she was the right person to continue leading the firm, people familiar with the matter said, partly because some people found her hard to get along with.”


(“Subprime Sword Claims Morgan Stanley's Cruz; Heir Apparent Joins List of Wall Street Casualties; Was Polarizing Style a Factor in Her Ouster?” Randall Smith and Ann Davis. Wall Street Journal: November 30, 2007. pg. C.1)

THE WORK OF A MANAGER is the task. The work of a leader is their people. Managers work on the task through people, while leaders work on their people in the context of the task.