I sat next to Dr. Ride on a flight from Atlanta to Washington DC in the mid-1980s (it was Eastern Airlines, to give you an idea).
Idiot me, I didn’t recognize her–one does hate to stare, although the NASA briefcase should have given it away–until as we were getting off the plane, she was greeted by a NASA team at the door.
One of the greats, at the early age of 61.
Today, in case it escaped you, is the centenary of Alan Turing, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century and who contributed substantially to such fields as artificial intelligence and cryptography.
Google’s search page today features a working example of the famous Turing Machine. Way beyond cool.
Ibis raised an interesting question in one of his comments: If Fingerspitzengefühl can be taught, why do so few people have it?
Two points: First, Fingerspitzengefühl is a skill, so although most people can get better at it, some are going to get a lot better.
Second, it’s a strange kind of skill, not for performing complicated or even dangerous tasks mystically well, but for sensing what is going on among groups of people in conflict and then influencing what happens.
If you learn juggling, for example, and get so good that people go “Wow! How did she do that?” the clubs still obey simple laws of motion, pretty much f=m•a. You may do amazing things, but it’s all predictable, at least in theory, and you can learn them yourself under good coaching and maybe a practice partner to help.
The first problem in learning Fingerspitzengefühl is that you can’t learn it by yourself. You have to have at least two groups of people to practice with — your team and some opponents. And to develop this skill, you have to practice a lot, because people, unlike clubs, don’t obey laws as simple as f=m•a. And you have to practice influencing your own team — call that “leadership” — while also influencing the opposition — call that “strategy.” And you have to learn it in increasingly unstructured and even threatening situations, under varying time constraints. This is the concept behind Vandergriff’s adaptive leader methodology, which I’ve referred to before.
If your conflict is business, not war, then it’s even more complex because you have to influence both customers and competitors (and the relationship between the two), not to mention your own team.
So you can see that Fingerspitzengefühl is hard to practice. Many military organizations just don’t provide the opportunity to hone it as a skill (my military training in the 1960s and ’70s offered virtually none) or enough for people to get good at it. On the other hand, some companies do this quite well, particularly in those sales training organizations that stress role playing.
Here’s Boyd quoting Blumentritt (Patterns, 74):
… an officers training institution which allows the subordinate a very great measure of freedom of action and freedom in the manner of executing orders and which primarily calls for independent daring, initiative and sense of responsibility.
or as he put it in Organic Design (23):
Arrange setting and circumstances so that leaders and subordinates alike are given the opportunity to continuously interact with external world, and with each other, in order to more quickly make many-sided implicit cross-referencing projections, empathies, correlations, and rejections as well as create the similar images or impressions, hence a similar implicit orientation, needed to form an organic whole.
It’s important to note that while you’re building Fingerspitzengefühl, you’re also building Einheit, that is, mutual trust and a common outlook. That statement has a lot of implications …
This post picks up on one of my favorite themes from my previous blog at chetrichards.com, namely that the US airline industry is working as hard as it can to put itself out of business, and this generates opportunities for someone else.
First, to recap, the “legacy” carriers, those who were here before deregulation in 1978, appear to have only one business strategy: wring maximum revenue out of their product, while reducing its cost wherever possible. Thus, distance between seats becomes smaller, planes are fuller (though there are fewer of them — available seat miles are down about 6% from 2000) — and hardly anything except the seat itself is included in the price. Classic description of a commodity.
Is this the way it has to be? Consider a few points:
Now, I’m typing this on my MacBook, so you may be able to figure out where I’m headed.
Why not? Speaking of Virgin, Sir Richard Branson leveraged his way from a record shop to an airline empire. I’ve flown their Australian service, which is as good as it gets in the discount airline business. But he’s still offering the same service as everybody else and is still competing on price for most of his product. Commodity.
Key point: But Apple has already established that people will pay more for its brand. Is there a way to transfer that willingness to pay more to the transportation business? Here’s my guess as to what it would have to be:
An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently named Ole Miss the “most appealing” college.
As the current chancellor of the university put it:
These respected authors spent years visiting colleges and universities. They cite 11 outstanding colleges and universities that are doing a good job, including MIT, Notre Dame, Arizona State University, the University of Colorado at Boulder and others. But they note “we have found Ole Miss THE MOST appealing.”
The authors highlight a transformation at Ole Miss and appropriately attribute much of the progress to the leadership of Chancellor Robert Khayat. Early in his tenure as chancellor, he said that “The University of Mississippi should strive to be and be perceived as a great American public university.” In many ways, this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education fulfills that vision.
Just thought you might want to know.
Defense and the National Interest, the real one, not the faux site now at d-n-i.net, has relaunched courtesy of our friends at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).
For the time being, it’s an archive — new content isn’t being added — and we’re still in the process of tracking down some of the original files. Please let POGO know when you find broken links.
When DNI launched in 1999 it was unique: The only site devoted to furthering the concepts originated by the late USAF Col John Boyd, and its original mission was to house Chuck Spinney’s commentary that applied Boyd’s strategy, and his own insightful analysis, to issues concerning national security. Today, there are any number of sites that provide cutting edge commentary, including zenpundit, John Robb, Tom Barnett, and Fabius Maximus. Please visit them and contribute.
POGO’s press release announcing the reposting of DNI follows after the fold.
From Today’s New York Times, the wisdom of sage Joe Queenan:
Thus, I was thrilled when my son decided to attend Franklin & Marshall College, founded in 1787 with £200 ponied up by Franklin, even though the tuition nearly bankrupted me. I would not have footed the bill had he decided to attend, say, Ole Miss or Central Connecticut State or Oral Roberts. I just wouldn’t have.
So, what did your son get for this budget-busting tuition? The ability to critique Ben Franklin as does his old man? Joe, for example, hammers Ben Franklin for being an idiot:
Why would the wise man walk, not run, when escaping from fire, a woman or an enemy? I’d run.
Well, Joe, perhaps as this Ole Miss graduate can explain to you, you might walk, rather than run, for several reasons:
Yes, Joe. Amazing what you can learn at a state land grant university, in this case one offering more than 40 accredited doctoral programs, with the active research programs that support them (compare to F&M’s … zero). And you didn’t want to write a check to Ole Miss because …
[John Boyd, the person whose work inspired my short list, had degrees from the University of Iowa and Georgia Tech, both state-supported schools that would not have “nearly bankrupted” Queenan. Guess that he wouldn’t have written a check to them, either.]
I have no connection with the site now posting at http://d-n-i.net. The domain name registration expired a couple of months ago, and somebody else has bought it and pointed it to their site.
Latest in a series.
For an example of how it’s done, read the Guardian’s series on Christopher “Dudus” Coke, a gang lord from Jamaica:
Coke is described as one of the world’s most dangerous druglords by the US justice department.
…
To the residents of Tivoli Gardens, the poor west side of Kingston where his gang has immense support, he is the benefactor who provides them with food, acts as mediator in disputes and even sends their children to school. They call him Presi, Bossy, Shortman or, most commonly, Dudus.
Residents, not affiliated with the gang, have erected their own barricades:
In the centre of Kingston today, residents could be seen standing behind roadblocks on street corners. Several barricades appeared to have been erected not by gunmen or gang members, but by ordinary residents seeking to protect themselves, or to obstruct the police, who often have a poor reputation for corruption and brutality.
A similar situation erupted in Brazil in 2006, when a gang called the First Command of the Capital shut down Sao Paulo for several days.
What could happen in Jamaica is that the government takes such losses in combating the gangs that its police and security forces refuse to engage. At this point, the state has failed, and it will probably require massive and expensive intervention by the US to prop up some semblance of a government. The alternative, that Jamaica, like India, works out a modus vivendi with the mini-state in its midst, was foreclosed when the US decided to force Jamaica to honor the American request to extradite Dudus to New York. We should be careful what we wish for.
Support for the guerrilla cause can quickly dry up:
The continued agonizing over the May 5 killings was apparent during Greece’s latest general strike on Thursday. Roughly 20,000 union members marched through Athens, a fraction of the more than 100,000 who took to the streets the day of the murders. In the end, the anarchists also took part in Thursday’s protests, but turnout was modest, and those who did participate were peaceful.
“It’s a shock. We always thought of ourselves as people who are victims, not people who create victims,” says Panagiotis, an edgy 30-year-old who helps organize cultural events within the anarchist scene and condemns the killings. Like most members of the movement, he would only gave his first name. “In Greece, Anarchy Yields to Soul-Searching,” Marcus Walker, Wall St. J., 22 May 2010.
As I noted in COIN, tight integration of guerrillas and people is critical if the cause is going to survive. Otherwise, the public will — correctly — view the guerrillas as thugs and criminals.
Slightly East of New 
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