On Reflection (again)

 Well, as you might expect, thoughts lead to more thoughts.   Last month, I posted a small squib about early graphics, and meeting Ivan Sutherland, and a few thoughts re Alan Kay and etc.

And then, my daughter and her husband went to Bogota, Colombia where his son is managing a small chocolate factory.  And Jenny, at dinner, said, "Isn't Colombia the place that killed the Colorado carnation buisness?"   And I had one of those 'senior moments' that resolved fortunately after a few minutes.  And yes, it was Colombia that killed the Colorado cartel.   

And, ironically, it was from flying to MIT to meet Ivan Sutherland that led me to a chance luncheon with Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert, Nick Negroponte, and a Colombian, Rodrico Arboleda Halaby.   Here's a picture of those folk then, and NOW (two, sadly, have passed away).

The story, told briefly, is that I met Halaby some 17 years later (1982), and recalled his name from earlier, but had no idea what he was doing.  Today, he is known as the long-time leader of the One Laptop per Child project, started by Nick Negroponte, his senior year room-mate (they were both architectural students at MIT).  A little-known factoid is that the fabled Media Lab at MIT was started and led by Negroponte, IN THE ARCHITECTURAL SCHOOL, not the CS or EE schools.  Whew!  With Papert and Minsky's aid.

I asked him what he'd been doing (the Media Lab didn't yet exist until 1985, and the OLPC 3 years later) and he said he'd, among other things, started a cut-flower business in Colombia, and he proudly said he'd 'Broken the CO carnation cartel in 4 years".  Irony of ironies--I not only knew the President of the CO Carnation Cartel (they called it an Association), I'd worked with him for 2 years on the Colorado Air Pollution Control Commission 1970-1972.

I'd even had a nursery and greenhouse during that period, but we didn't grow carnations.  1,000 greenhouses, with 7.5 million square feet of glass, did grow carnations, and they controlled 85% of the carnation business in America.   They'd built this over nearly 100 years, including starting FTD to have a distribution and delivery mechanism.

Halaby's senior professor in economics in 1965 asked the students to find a niche that was vulnerable to price dislocation, and Halaby found that these greenhouses used a huge amount of nateural gas for heating.  High altitude Colorado, not well known, has like 330 days of sunshine along the Front Range (Denver and Colorado Springs, for example), and carnations need ultraviolet sunshine to thrive.  So, with heat for the winter, almost the best US growing site for carnations.

Well, natural gas was regulated, to $0.10 per thousand cubic feet, from a 1945 Supreme Court case against Philips Petroleum, and there was noise that the cap might be removed.   Estimates were that it would quadruple, to $0.40 per thousand cubic feet, which would put a big economic hit on the Assoc.

And he reasoned that Colombia, on the equator, didn't need heating, and also had low labor costs, low land costs, and good sunshine.  But transportation?   Well, when the third version of the DC-9 came out in 1969, the economics of small jets swamped out the DC-6 and DC-7 and those planes were 'practically free' to purchase.  Moreover, jet fuel was now at a premium, and regular aviation fuel was at a glut, also very cheap.   

Buy 6 planes, go to FTD, and offer 7 cents a dozen cheaper, and 18 hours fresher, and a full color palate.

Bingo.    By 1980, a third of Colorado's greenhouses were gone; and 75% of those left had shifted to other flowers.  

And I knew 'both sides' of the story.  He didn't know the Colorado side, and they didn't know his.  talk about serendipity.

By the way, I wound up years later running MediaX@Stanford, a knock-off in part of the Media Lab story, but I never again met most of the others in the picture from 1965.   Colombia today has something like 60% of the worldwide cut-flower market, from carnations to roses to gladiolas and whatever.  The entire Rocky Mountain region has less than 15%.

Journaling, Memory, and Reflection

Memories . . . clear in the moment, but episodic,  and then . . . fleeting and fading over time.

And even "At the Time", subject to error and mis-understanding.  Think, for example, about multiple conflicting accounts of an accident by "eye-witnesses".

Memories are 'not what they used to be' is a finding we all come to appreciate.  And memories can get embellished.  My dad said, about his mother:  "She can remember things that never even happened."

And Reflections?  Gazing back over the past, thinking and pondering even about things from yesteryear, is not all that easy in late life.  It takes time, actually sorting and putting things in context, trying to recall just when this or that happened, and how several things interacted.   Too often, such efforts are skipped, the person feeling perhaps "Who would care, not even my grandchildren would care."   Others who might start, hear phrases such as "Are you trying to re-write history, is this just self-serving?"

All too aware of my own proclivities to recall selectively, I have long jotted down thoughts, impressions, and feelings while on trips or doing things that were hard exercises.  Call it Diarying or Journaling, it at least captures the mood of the moment.  And given that we just moved (in what my wife Jenny calls a "downsizing"), I found a sizable collection of papers, scribbles on envelopes, or on mostly blank pages torn from an airline magazine when I lacked paper.   Almost all have dates, but the piles are extensive, and very unorganized.  So, is that a treasure, or something to be gathered and tossed?

Historians often cite some version of the Confucius phrase, "The palest ink is more reliable than the most powerful memory."   The fact that this isn't probably one of Confucius' phrases--it likely traces to the Qing dynasty two millennia later--doesn't diminish the point.

Reflections have the advantage of 'hindsight' or more accurately, of placing the event(s) in context.  In the moment, you know the specifics, but none of the surrounding story.   As a simple example, when we introduced the HP 1300A, the X-Y-Z Display that served as HP's first graphical computer display monitor (an amazing four years before IBM did so; and eleven years before DEC), I knew of some great early examples.   I had shown a prototype to Information International Inc, which got excited about using it for movie graphics.  Who'd suspect they'd use that to begin work on Tron?   The AP Wire Photo news service picture of Dr. Denton Cooley using our HP 1308A for the first artificial heart transplant was great.  https://www.texasheart.org/50th-anniversary-of-the-worlds-first-total-artificial-heart/

Al DeVilbiss and I designed the modification of the Z-axis to permit 80 MHz signals to handle space video so that the world could see Neal Armstrong's foot land on the moon July 20, 1969.  I'd also shown a prototype to Doug Engelbart for what became the "Mother of all Demos" 

But it wasn't until 34 years later that I was interviewing Alan Kay and the topic happened to come up, to which he said, roughly, "the HP 1300A was the ONLY possible display for me to use for the FlexWriter in late 1967 and early1968 at U of Utah."   Imagine--he is doing his PhD there under Ivan Sutherland, who with Dave Evans is about to start Eans and Sutherland, which gets "the credit" for the first computer graphics company".  

 https://www.ksl.com/article/36039333/utah-inventions-the-birth-of-computer-graphics 

The irony is that I had visited Sutherland at MIT in 1965, after his inspiring talk at the IBM SHARE Design conference in May, 1965 in New Orleans.  There's a whole story here, which cements in my mind that the HP 1300A was indeed pioneering--yes, even the Medal of Defiance notwithstanding.

Anyway, the point isn't to revisit that story here, but just to illustrate that the Paul Harvey "Now you know the rest of the story" often can't be constructed, let alone appreciated, without adequate time to discover "the rest of the story:

So, dear reader, if I get going on all those piles and scraps of notes, who knows what might turn up?

How did the book do, and How are we Doing?

Wow, a mere nine years ago is when I finished the book about "Preserving our Digital Revolution Heritage" coupled with some lamentations about the ennui surrounding such history by those who created the revolution.   What happened in the meantime?  How come I never came back to the topic, or indeed, HOW DID THE BOOK DO?

Well, truth be told--we've made some progress, or at least I would define it as such.   In 2012, the Computer History Museum basically eschewed doing video or audio interviews because 'true historians' disdained such imperfect or even self-serving anecdotal material.   They had 43 captured interviews over a 30 year period, not quite one and a half per year.  WHEW!

Since then, due to some somewhat surprising circumstances (for which I might claim partial credit), they now have over 1,600 published interviews publically available, and a trove still in preparation.  And Steve Smith, then interim director for CHM, called my book's back cover the best statement he'd read.  

In addition, I personally have done several hundred interviews, for the Cisco Foundation, for CHM, and for the ACM Award Archive.   Such fun, to be sure, and it is amazing that people are willing to talk, even if they don't want to 'donate' for history.  And the stories are priceless.   I'll maybe spend some time in a few blog posts describing some key findings.

Meanwhile, I thought about a related topic = the role and interplay between writing things down (call it diary notes, or journaling), recalling from memory, and reflecting on 'the past'

And it is perhaps worth putting in the next post.  You decide.

New book now available

Recent posts, such as "On Reflection" bemoan the lack of interest by many in history, even their own.

Ignoring most of that imput, I finished the book entitled "Preserving Our Digital Revolution Heritage: If Not You, Who?  If not Now, When?"

Its available at LuluPress at http://www.lulu.com/shop/charles-house/preserving-the-digital-revolution-heritage/hardcover/product-22378035.html?ppn=1     Or, just type "Digital Revolution Heritage"into your browser.  Should come up from Lulu @ $9.95

The idea is that you, meaning YOU, can do your own historical collecting -- of stories, artifacts, etc -- and preserve them for some historian once they finally figure out in 30 to 50 years that what you did was significant.

Lots of tips on how to IDENTIFY, CAPTURE, and PRESERVE 'the right stuff' whitout lots of work

Good, quick read.

Try it

On reflection

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.

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?

A 2 Apple from Michael Moe

Michael Moe, one of the most respected VCs in Silicon Valley, and a fair author to boot, has a great little newsletter, titled A 2 Apple which means from an A-round of funding to a great successful company.  His August 30, 2016 GSV Media post, entitled "Follow the leader" extols Bill Campbell's 75th birthday this week, with some appropriate laudatory comments and perspective.

I'll let you read the Campbell part -- you probably know he was a great football coach before coming to Silicon Valley, and then at Apple, then CEO of Claris, and then Chairman of Intuit (among other things), he taught many of today's CEOs 'how to do it'      He's a giant in terms of human growth and development potential here in 'our town'

But the thing that caught my eye in this issue focuses on Jack Welch and his "Welch Way" of growing and developing leaders.  In particular, there is a great scorecard for the Top Ten business schools in America, their costs and time and 'payback' compared to the Jack Welch Management School.  Tuition for 5 of the 10 schools is a remarkably 'close' number = exactly $62,000 each.  Two are higher at $63,000; one is at $59,000; and two 'cheap ones' (both public institutions) are at a bargain $52,000.  The Jack Welch Management Institute though is just $20,000.

In terms of ROI, Wharton (#3) is worst, just 6% in your first year 'out of school'     Harvard and Stanford are 3rd and 4th worst; the Welch School at 20% is second, just behind Dartmouth at 21%

In terms of total payback time, the Welch School graduates earn their money back in just 2 years; none of the Top Ten can claim less than four years.

WHAT DO THEY DO DIFFERENTLY?

Well, they use what they learned at GE.  To wit: GE spends over $1 billion per year on training and education programs for 150,000 professionals around the World. Employing a variety of in-person and on demand formats, GE organizes learning around three key buckets: Leadership, Core Skills Development, and Industry-Specific Expertise.

HP does this, or at least DID THIS, for years.

I know something about the GE program--when microprocessors appeared on the scene, I had just published a book about designing with them.  GE 'found me' -- I was then a General Manager for an HP division -- and they persuaded me  (and my HP management) to let me "teach" a new course on CORE SKILLS to their engineers.  

We did this via a course, done in Videotape format with TRAIN the TRAINER methods.  I did 33 days of Hollywood filming, which created something like 80 hours of classroom time.  And then I 'trained' 24 'trainers' who worked for GE.  Over the next 24 months, they taught the course to 40,000 engineers, winning an IEEE Innovative Training Award, but more importantly, rejuvenated their engineering staffs for the new Digital Age.

Why Michael Moe is interested in all of this, among other things, is that his group, GSV Media, has invested in a new training company, CorpU.  CorpU is transforming talent development for the 21st century through research, consulting, and education. A partner with the world’s leading businesses and academic organizations, CorpU is pioneering new approaches to virtual learning communities that connect people to capture knowledge, solve problems, generate ideas, teach and learn.

I believe he's onto something.  We NEED more innovative education, and MOOCs are just one way. This might be even better, addressing the core need for leaders.