Knowledge as Weapon

http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/

Reading this article, it occurred to me that one of the reasons I am so unhappy in my job is that nearly everyone is averse to learning from anyone else. It’s a frustrating phenomenon, particularly since I work for a public education agency.

Case in point: Last week I went to a workshop with several other co-workers. Back at the office one of those co-workers asked me my impression of the session. I told her I thought it was useful information and I could see how I’ll need to be able to use the information in the future. Her response was that even though her job doesn’t require in-depth knowledge in this field, she already knew most everything presented in the workshop but was pleased to have gone for the 10 minutes of new information that she did glean.

Are you kidding me?

In a workshop that is peripherally related to her job, was it really the case that she already knew everything except 10 minutes of information? Did she mean to tell me that she knew more about this topic than the people our organization pays to do the job that this workshop was about? And if so, why isn’t she the one doing that job? It’s not enough that she thought she knew everything there was to know about the topic before she went to the workshop—she then had to then articulate that knowledge to me upon her return to the office? Aside making this colleague look like an elitist with a superiority complex, what productive goal could this action have served?

But it’s not just this person—it’s everyone in the organization. They are all impervious to learning from others. None of them leave our guest speaker series having gleaned anything applicable from the speakers. The employees complain that our guest speakers are lousy, unprepared, and do not speak on relevant topics. These speakers are carefully vetted, selected, and prepared and they are experts in their fields. Okay, let’s just say for argument’s sake that the employees are correct and the speakers suck. Shouldn’t they be able to find something worthwhile from the presentation? As educators, we expect students to learn a lesson from nearly every conversation and instructional module. Shouldn’t these same educators be creatively engaged enough to be able to find at least one nugget from a 60-minute talk?

This resistance to education is rampant. Managers refuse to attend mandatory trainings unless executives personally tell them to do so. Employees talk over each other during meetings to offer insights that are often completely unrelated and inapplicable. People talk. A lot. But no one listens, and hardly anyone learns.

I long for a place where employees want to learn from each other. For a place where people don’t walk into an educational session intending to teach the course while attending as participants. I long for a place where people do not protect their own knowledge for fear that sharing information makes them less valuable to the organization. And I long for a place where managers don’t use their own knowledge as a weapon against others.

Facebook Latest Victim of Wall Street ADHD

More from Kevin Drum:
 
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/08/facebook-latest-victim-wall-street-adhd
 
Not that I care much about Facebook's future or keeping Zuckerman at the reigns, but this money quote sums up precisely how I feel about all corporate shareholders:
 

Did this "siphon extra profit for the company"? Sure. But contrary to the febrile expectations of Wall Street executives who think the world guarantees them a quick profit every time they lift their eyebrows, that's what an IPO is for: to raise money for the company, not to give a guaranteed pop to early buyers. Zuckerberg would have been negligent not to squeeze every penny he could from the IPO.
 
As for the current slide in the stock: boo hoo. Early investors made a mistake. (Maybe.) That's their problem. They knew perfectly well that buying into Facebook was a risk, and they knew perfectly well that there was a chance the stock would drop when lockup periods expire. That's a risk with every IPO.

Honestly, I just cannot get my panties in a knot over private investors who expect to never loose on an investment risk, and who expect their profits to increase year after year.  While the middle class watches their costs of living increase without raising salaries to match, these folks are screaming because their stocks are earning only 3% rather than the 12% to which they have grown accustomed?!  Cue the violins...

When will we ever learn?

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map

Ideological Womanizing

By Richard Cohen, published in the Washington Post July 31, 2012 My boyhood friend Jack became a doctor — and a conservative. He had gone to public schools, attended college with the help of a government scholarship, went to medical school on the Army’s dime, and learned his specialty in military hospitals. He insisted that the government had done nothing for him. In that way, he is both the soul and the wit of the Republican Party. It was in rebuttal to the Jacks of this world that Barack Obama earlier this month updated John Donne’s “No man is an island” by knocking the idea that individual success is always the product of individual qualities, such as industriousness: “Let me tell you something: There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.” This observation, so obvious you’d think it didn’t have to be stated, was then followed by what became a gotcha sound bite: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.” The entire GOP, including its claque in the press, pounced. You would have thought Obama had just belittled self-discipline and other virtues and quoted from “Das Kapital” or, even worse, a ditty by Pete Seeger. To his critics, Obama’s version of It Takes a Village was further proof of his commie creds, possibly Islamic as well. Mitt Romney found the line totally — and I mean like totally — “disconcerting.” As to the charge that Obama was being quoted out of context, Romney declared that “the context is worse than the quote.” OMG! Of course, the president has nothing but truth and history on his side. Every schoolchild in my neck of the woods learned that the Erie Canal, which made New York truly the Empire State, was government-funded — $7 million appropriated at the insistence of Gov. DeWitt Clinton. The railroads did not come from nowhere and neither did the ports or the highway system. Government played a role. Government has always played a role. If it just got out of the way, the mindless mantra of the tea party’s heavy thinkers, we would all be in deep trouble. Across the mighty ocean, the Economist magazine has taken note of this debate over the role of government and pronounced it healthy in principle but pathetic in execution. Both the right and the left have trivialized this important issue, but conservatives have gone from simplistic formulas to bravely idiotic ones. “American conservatism has grown so angry that it has become a parody of its former self,” the magazine says. “Tax cuts are always right (even if they inflate the deficit); government activism is always wrong (even if stimulus helped avert a depression). And the right’s hypocrisy when it comes to spending on conservative projects (prisons, the armed forces, subsidies to big business) is breathtaking. George W. Bush presided over a huge growth in government.” The Economist, a right-of-center publication, has it nailed. Romney’s embrace of tea-party thinking is just ideological womanizing. (He won’t call in the morning.) While in Israel, he mentioned that one of the books that influenced his thinking on foreign affairs is “Start-Up Nation” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. (Senor is one of Romney’s important foreign policy advisers.) It is a good book, mentioned favorably by me in a recent column, and it accounts for why little Israel has become such a high-tech giant. As always, there is no single answer. Large-scale immigration (mostly from Russia) contributed, and certainly the conversion from an essentially socialist economy to a capitalist one has made a huge difference. But so has the government — in particular, the army with its own culture of innovation and intellectually elite units devoted to high-tech training and warfare. Graduates of these programs, having satisfied their military obligation, populate Israel’s high-tech sector — and, to Israel’s chagrin, America’s as well. Israel is the start-up nation because the government helped start it up. As the Economist notes, this is not a trivial debate. The refusal of the contemporary Republican Party to acknowledge a role for government is linked to an illogical determination never to raise taxes. Obama may be too liberal for some, but the alternative that Romney offers by parroting the conservative GOP line is simply not credible. Prosperity may not always take a village, but it sure doesn’t take the village idiot.

way to prove your foreign policy prowess, Mitt!

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/07/yesterdays-romney-gaffe-was-real-not-fabricated

Best in Class...

Best in Class

Guns Don't Kill People...

http://mydd.com/2012/7/21/guns-dont-kill-peo?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mydd+%28MyDD%29&utm_content=Bloglines Guns Don't Kill People by Charles Lemos, Sat Jul 21, 2012 at 03:33:02 AM EDT James Holmes, the detained shooter in our latest national mass murder tradegy, bought four guns from various retailers over the last two months. Holmes bought his first Glock pistol in Aurora, Colorado, on May 22nd. Six days later, he picked up a Remington shotgun in Denver. About two weeks later, he bought a .223 caliber Smith & Wesson rifle in Thornton, Colorado, and then a second Glock in Denver on July 6th — 13 days before the shooting. A high-volume drum magazine was attached to the rifle, making that rifle an assault weapon and allowing him to fire 50 to 60 rounds in under sixty seconds. Led by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Congress passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB) on September 13 1994 and signed into law by President Clinton the very same day. But the law expired on September 13, 2004. Despite numerous attempts by Senator Feinstein and others in the Democratic leadership, attempts to renew the AWB have all failed because of Republican opposition. Guns don't kill people, Republican policies do

Canada for President!

As an answer to Iowa's GOP caucus results, the best candidate finally enters the race:
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrhA0sEkuaM&feature=youtu.be&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1