With some days behind me now, from the trip to the Bay area re folks and their interest (or lack thereof) in historical topics, I've begun to appreciate more the context of Jenny's answer. It isn't that history needs to be abandoned in order to chase "current problems" but rather than it needs to be woven into context so that the Lessons Learned feel relevant to today's challenges. Duh....
It led me to reflect on a conversation many years ago with Debbie Ogden, a young woman engineer in our HP Colorado Springs lab (mygawd, that must have been a while ago). She asked, "What did you do differently that led to your becoming our Engineering Manager?"
I hadn't stopped to think about that--but the answer came pretty easily. Three things--
(1) I opened a retail plant nursery 'on the side' and found out through that experience that cash matters, when I couldn't make payroll one month. As I checked at HP, it turned out that they had similar issues, I'd just never thought about my job in terms of how it affected HP's cash flow
(2) I got a history degree to add to my physics and electrical engineering degrees. No other candidate had a history degree, and while it wasn't in the job spec, the perspective of having history training was powerful in terms of appreciating that 'nothing new happens under the sun' and if you can learn from the previous mistakes of others (or their successes), it might be cheaper and faster than having to repeat the same stumbles.
(3) I joined the Colorado Air Pollution Commission, a task which presumed a lot more knowledge in a lot of fields (e.g. atmospheric photochemistry, and pulmonary epidemiology) than I had, or for that matter, that any other member had. The conclusion I reached was that to be effective you not only had to learn to ask intelligent questions in a field about which you were a novice, but you had to be able to discern good answers from bullshit. This is a most valuable skill to acquire for lots of life, and while I wasn't all that good at it (then or now), I began to have much more appreciation for the value of approaching problems from this standpoint.
I recall Debbie's jaw dropping, and her eyes staring at me as though I had three heads. She said, "Wow, how did you think to do all that?" And for that, I had no answer. I still don't.
But, tonight (actually early this morning, sitting in Albuquerque during the annual Balloon Races because our SHOT (Society for the History Of Technology) annual conference is here right now, the question posed by Jenny seems ever more relevant--how do you weave the value of history's lessons with the issues, situations, and challenges of today in a way that helps give insight and actionable steps? That would be the magic elixir.
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Thursday, October 8, 2015
History doesn't matter compared to our worries about tomorrow
I just returned from a "fact-finding" trip to the Bay, sometimes known as Silicon Valley (yes, I know I'm 'up there' weekly for various reasons, and I love returning to 'the ranch' more and more these days)--and this trip was edifying, which is a big word for "oh jeez, Charlie, you knew that, dammit."
The question I posed in some sixteen separate individual interviews was around the value, worth, and interest in the history of high-tech firms, technologies, and concepts, and in particular their impact on our world.
The results were that eleven of the sixteen interviewees were dismissive, some even downright blatant about it, saying that they couldn't be less interested, either for their own work or for that of their field, company, industry, etc. And these were not just 'man-in-the-street' interviews, but instead they were ex-CEOs, or C-level execs, or other prominent Silicon Valley personages.
The other five varied from pensive, to worried, to clear that it was a shame, but they too agreed with the findings--history doesn't matter, even for (or maybe especially to) those who created it. Three of these five were/are historians.
My unintended seventeenth interviewee was my wife, on the four hour drive home. "Whaddya find out?" she queried. Summarizing the interviews with pungent commentary about my disappointment did not elicit sympathy or consoling words. Instead, the rejoinder was, "So how long are you going to pursue this will o' the wisp?"
Her advice--"you need to talk to people about something THEY care about. They have jobs that are impossible, no time to breathe or reflect on anything, and YOU want them to get enthusiastic about stuff that happened a long time ago, in different circumstance--what's that got to do with their needs?
We drove on in silence for quite a while. Los Banos isn't exactly one of those towns that stimulates creative thought anyway. And then she said, "Don't you have a blog about Intrapreneuring? And isn't that something you always teach at Stanford, and at HP, and in Brazil and HongKong? Why do they invite you back? Maybe you're overlooking something there."
This is that blog she referenced. And it gets ... umm ... spotty, as in SPOTTY readership. Especially compared to my blogs about HP (HPPhenom.blogspot) or InnovaScapes Institute (Innovascapes.blogspot). The HP blog has 157,000 page views (many created whenever we have a new CEO--lots of opportunity there in the past few years), and InnovaScapes has 11,000+. This one is a mere 2,300 in two and a half years, hardly enough to 'pull Granny off the pot' so to speak.
So, maybe I've been seduced into thinking this is not a very popular topic, when it may well be that it is not presented well, or advertised at all, or ....
Food for thought?
The question I posed in some sixteen separate individual interviews was around the value, worth, and interest in the history of high-tech firms, technologies, and concepts, and in particular their impact on our world.
The results were that eleven of the sixteen interviewees were dismissive, some even downright blatant about it, saying that they couldn't be less interested, either for their own work or for that of their field, company, industry, etc. And these were not just 'man-in-the-street' interviews, but instead they were ex-CEOs, or C-level execs, or other prominent Silicon Valley personages.
The other five varied from pensive, to worried, to clear that it was a shame, but they too agreed with the findings--history doesn't matter, even for (or maybe especially to) those who created it. Three of these five were/are historians.
My unintended seventeenth interviewee was my wife, on the four hour drive home. "Whaddya find out?" she queried. Summarizing the interviews with pungent commentary about my disappointment did not elicit sympathy or consoling words. Instead, the rejoinder was, "So how long are you going to pursue this will o' the wisp?"
Her advice--"you need to talk to people about something THEY care about. They have jobs that are impossible, no time to breathe or reflect on anything, and YOU want them to get enthusiastic about stuff that happened a long time ago, in different circumstance--what's that got to do with their needs?
We drove on in silence for quite a while. Los Banos isn't exactly one of those towns that stimulates creative thought anyway. And then she said, "Don't you have a blog about Intrapreneuring? And isn't that something you always teach at Stanford, and at HP, and in Brazil and HongKong? Why do they invite you back? Maybe you're overlooking something there."
This is that blog she referenced. And it gets ... umm ... spotty, as in SPOTTY readership. Especially compared to my blogs about HP (HPPhenom.blogspot) or InnovaScapes Institute (Innovascapes.blogspot). The HP blog has 157,000 page views (many created whenever we have a new CEO--lots of opportunity there in the past few years), and InnovaScapes has 11,000+. This one is a mere 2,300 in two and a half years, hardly enough to 'pull Granny off the pot' so to speak.
So, maybe I've been seduced into thinking this is not a very popular topic, when it may well be that it is not presented well, or advertised at all, or ....
Food for thought?
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