Many of the situations that we face are well understood … or, at least, we think they are! Then someone comes along with a different approach and breaks through into a new regime.
This can be unsettling, but then the new approach becomes the norm. What was previously obvious is now ridiculous; and what was previously ridiculous is now obvious! No wonder these things do not happen often, because, if they did, they would not be so unusual!
Eli Godratt has had an enormous impact on many businesses through his approach to understanding business processes. Some of his most effective works are novels! How many business consultants write novels to help people to learn? “The Goal” was his first and captured the main elements of his approach which he termed the Theory of Constraints. He has gone on to describe new approaches to project management, which he calls Critical Chain.
Three of the authors on Learning from Dogs are or have been pilots although only one, Bob Derham, is a real pilot! I.e. he does it for a living!
Most pilots and many wannabes love the atmosphere of a good air show but after a few visits they can become rather predictable and that applies as much to the flying displays. After all there is only so much that one can do to an aeroplane.
Here’s a YouTube video showing Kyle Franklin ‘stealing’ a Piper Cub. As a past owner of a Piper Super Cub, I have to tell you that the skills being used in this display are supremely clever.
Like most people if most western nations, for many years I had a cell phone, or a mobile phone as they are known in the UK.
I can recall a few years ago there being a scare in the UK about the microwave radiation hazard involved in using a cell phone but it certainly passed me by in terms of not really worrying about it.
Now a recent report in GQ Magazine seems to be gathering some momentum: once again, it’s about how your cell phone may be hazardous to your health. It would be too easy just to dismiss this as just another poke at a very successful technology but something about this article caused me to write this Post – make of it what you will.
Here’s an extract:
Earlier this winter, I met an investment banker who was diagnosed with a brain tumor five years ago. He’s a managing director at a top Wall Street firm, and I was put in touch with him through a colleague who knew I was writing a story about the potential dangers of cell-phone radiation. He agreed to talk with me only if his name wasn’t used, so I’ll call him Jim. He explained that the tumor was located just behind his right ear and was not immediately fatal—the five-year survival rate is about 70 percent. He was 35 years old at the time of his diagnosis and immediately suspected it was the result of his intense cell-phone usage. “Not for nothing,” he said, “but in investment banking we’ve been using cell phones since 1992, back when they were the Gordon-Gekko-on-the-beach kind of phone.” When Jim asked his neurosurgeon, who was on the staff of a major medical center in Manhattan, about the possibility of a cell-phone-induced tumor, the doctor responded that in fact he was seeing more and more of such cases—young, relatively healthy businessmen who had long used their phones obsessively. He said he believed the industry had discredited studies showing there is a risk from cell phones. “I got a sense that he was pissed off,” Jim told me. A handful of Jim’s colleagues had already died from brain cancer; the more reports he encountered of young finance guys developing tumors, the more certain he felt that it wasn’t a coincidence. “I knew four or five people just at my firm who got tumors,” Jim says. “Each time, people ask the question. I hear it in the hallways.”
I was waiting for a flight to London one day in January, a spare seat opposite me at the table in the lounge.
A middle-aged German woman asked to sit down. She was she stopping briefly in Dubai on her way back from Australia and it seemed from the conversation that her month long trip had been some sort of possible life changing experience. By her simple back pack and even her shoes I could tell she was an individual with character.
In the minutes that passed by she talked about Tasmania and how different life was there from the one she knew at home. I don’t recall exactly what I said to share the pleasure of her trip but did agree that it was possible to make major changes in one’s life; it obviously struck a chord.
Not so long after this brief meeting, I received an email. She had made those big changes and she sent me a picture that she took in Tasmania as a thank you.
A Tasmanian bird greeting the morning sun
You never know how sometimes people just need someone who can see that their dreams are possible!
My daughter turned 17 years of age on 4th February, and has been excited about the possibility of being able to drive for some time, apart from a period of concern when the British Government hinted at raising the driving age to 18. Fortunately that passed.
I likewise always wanted to drive and at age 17 moved from two wheels to four and in 10 days had passed my test. The car insurance giving nearly minimum cover was £26 a year, my first car having a 2.6 litre engine. The next was a Jaguar 2.4, and the third, another Jag, this time a 3.8 XK 150S, for which I probably had to pay an extra £10 a year, all while I was 17. (1969 ) Continue reading “What a con!”→
Back in 1955, air travel was an adventure and the age of the jet airliner had already dawned in the UK, albeit with some major setbacks along the way.
As the US prepared to enter the market that summer, there is the well known incident of Boeing test pilot “Tex” Johnston rolling a prototype Boeing 707.
From today’s perspective, under those circumstances , the integrity of the people involved was impressive. As the pilot describes, he was called into the office of the president of Boeing to explain his actions. For me, the most telling comment is his final line:
Here’s one person who doesn’t agree with the President.
The President seems to believe that he can say whatever he wants and no one will hold him accountable. He now claims that “every economist, from both sides of the aisle, believes that the stimulus program created jobs.”
I am an economist, Mr. President, and I know, based either on simple first principles of economics, or on a more rigorous controlled study of labor markets in each major sector of the economy, that the unemployment rate would have been much lower today had the stimulus program never occurred.
You are either woefully unaware of the facts, Mr. President, or are purposefully distorting the facts. Neither is good. When are you going to realize that just because you say something does not make it so? The world does not contort itself to support your version of the truth.
Some little time ago I wrote about the word “fair”, which I tongue-in-cheek referred to as a Word of Mass Destruction (WOMD) insofar as if one REALLY put into place practices that were truly “fair” then western capitalism would break down completely. (The story of the CEO of Goldsmiths and his $100,000,000 bonus is for another day ….)
Well, my OTHER WOMD is “rationing”.
I was drawn to this topic by the words of a British minister about the desirability of introducing rationing into AIR TRAVEL. The thinking goes (and to be honest it is in fact obvious, isn’t it?) that IF we are serious about reducing climate change (a VERY BIG IF!!) then we cannot continue to hope to fly where and when we want to as in the past. For aviation is a growth industry despite the current crisis, and as people in developing economies in Asia in particular grow more prosperous they will want to travel more and more. I have seen estimates to suggest that within a decade ONE HUNDRED MILLION Chinese will be travelling to Europe EVERY YEAR.
This is of course totally incompatible with any hope of doing anything serious about climate change. The logical conclusion is that (until some boffin invents an emission-free jet) we MUST reduce flying. This is likely for most adults to be about as palatable as denying burgers and chips to British teenagers, but I really cannot see the alternative IF Global Warming is to be taken seriously (which it probably won’t be until it’s too late).
But let’s for the moment remain positive …. supposing it is decided by some courageous government (are there any?) that we must reduce flying then there are two ways to do it.
A) TAX it so highly that only the rich can afford it
B) RATION it – everyone has a quota of air miles per annum.
Now option A is the usual free-market/capitalist way. After all, Ferraris are rationed by their price; otherwise all males over 18 would have one, or in my case several. But – much as I recognize what the free market has done in terms of wealth creation – we are in a new scenario, aren’t we? Can we really hope to say that only the rich can fly? I think not, and therefore rationing is the only way to do this.
Now, there is a minority of people that abuse anything, and no doubt rationing would be abused by some, somewhere, somehow. But it is the only FAIR way to go about it, isn’t it?
In London and other big cities we are now seeing a TAX imposed on driving into the city centres. Yes, very sensible, but of course, the RICH aren’t bothered. In effect, schemes like London’s are simply a way of excluding the masses from the city centre. The same idiocy is seen on French motorways, which are becoming increasingly expensive. The rich are not bothered by the tolls but the less well-off certainly ARE and so drive on other roads which are less safe; survival of the richest …….
No, the free-market is not going to work in the Brave New World which we are entering. If you have a birthday party for your kids then EVERYONE gets an equal share of the cake. This principle is going to have to be applied in other areas of life, otherwise we are going to get serious social unrest. Besides, any other way is just not FAIR, is it?
Of course, once you concede the point on AIR TRAVEL there is – in a world of increasing populations and diminishing resources – no way of limiting the concept purely to air travel, is there?
I am just old enough to remember my Mother’s WWII ration card, which she used up to the very early 50s I believe. Will we soon start to see a modern reincarnation, and not only in carbon credits?
The unacceptable face of the big agricultural businesses
Another wonderful link from Naked Capitalism. This one refers to the way that the definition of ‘organic’ as in organic milk is being twisted and distorted to favour the huge indoor milking herds, up to 10,000 cattle, that in any sensible mind could never be regarded as the organic production of milk.
This to me is a picture of organic production of milk:
An English meadow
This to me is NOT! Yet the milk from these cows is defined as organic!
Organic milk?
This last picture is courtesy of The Cornucopia Institute, another web site worth a visit whether or not you take an interest in farming – after all, one presumes that you do eat!
The debate about the Christmas Day Bomber continues. The pundits continue to define “success” in this case as finding him guilty in a court of law. They go on and on, repeating over and over again, how the evidence is so strong, how the civilian court system is so reliable, how the shoe bomber was tried in civilian court, and how a guilty verdict is virtually certain.
This is so wrong. The definition of success is not whether we find the Christmas Day Bomber guilty in a civilian court. This man intended to blow himself up on Christmas Day, and take hundreds of innocent Americans with him. The fact that he is alive today, facing a jury or a judge and possible jail time or, at the worst, the death penalty, is a mere footnote to him.
Has it occurred to anyone that if the military had interrogated the shoe bomber as the failed terrorist that he was, that the odds of the Christmas Day Bomber getting on that plane with those explosives would have been diminished? And interrogating the Christmas Day terrorist instead of shipping him off to the local prosecutor — for reasons Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General, has yet to articulate– diminishes the odds of some future terrorist act?
Eric Holder
We are at war!
These people attacked us as part of the ongoing war with terrorists. No one should “rest easy” because some lawyer is going to sleepwalk through a trial that may or may not successfully reach the painfully obvious conclusion that the Christmas Day Bomber is guilty! On the contrary, it makes me very uneasy that he is in the civilian court system at this point in time at all, because every moment spent reading this man his rights is a moment that could have been spent gathering intelligence from a terrorist. His punishment will come in due time. In the meanwhile, we have to extract as much information from his as we can in order to defend ourselves.
Learning from Dogs 