Troubled capitalism: The corporate entity

Iain M. Banks sticks his ideas into his fiction as digressions. They're often quite interesting digressions.

Transition is one of his books with several digressions. It's a powerful book, but it's not an easy book (my fave reviews: 1, 2, 3). It reads like a mixture of his literary fiction (written as Iain Banks) and his science fiction (written as Iain M Banks).

Since Transition came out in 2009, after the great crash of 2008, and since Banks is a critic of capitalism, it's not surprising that one of his digressions concerns the problems of a world with American style capitalism [1] ....

... this was a Greedist world, a world where the untrammelled pursuit of material wealth and the virtues of money itself were extolled, venerated and even worshipped...

... There are as many types of capitalism as there are types of socialism – or any other ism for that matter – but one of the major differences – a major difference founded on what appears to be a minor detail – between whole bundles of ostensibly fully capitalist societies centres (indeed, depends) on whether commerce is governed by private firms and partnerships, or by limited companies.

... the invention and acceptance of the limited company means people can take big risks with money not their own and then – if it all goes wrong – lets them just walk away from the resulting debts, because the company is somehow regarded as being like a person in its own right, so that its debts die with it (not the sort of fairy story a partnership is allowed to get away with).

It’s a piece of nonsense, really, and I used to wonder that legislatures anywhere bought into this blatant fantasy and agreed to give it legal house room. But that was just me being naive, before I realised that there was a reason why it always dawned on all those ambitious, powerful gents in all those various legislatures that this ludicrous hooey might actually be quite a good idea.

Anyway, limited company worlds often progress faster than other types, but always less smoothly and reliably, and sometimes disastrously. I’ve looked into it and frankly it just isn’t worth it, but you can’t tell that to anyone caught up within the seductive madness of the dream; they have the faith, and are forever relieved by the invisible hand...

I'm sympathetic to the general idea that there's something broken with the publicly traded company. I haven't, however, taken that to mean that there's also something broken with the very idea of the corporation personified.

I'll have to give it some thought.

See also:

• Llamas and my stegosaurus: Artificial Persons (Supreme court decision 1/22/10)
• What Is the First Amendment For? - Stanley Fish - NYTimes.com (2/1/2010)
• Gordon's Notes: Beyond the first cause: Deepwater Horizon and the publicly traded company (2010)
• Gordon's Notes: The perils of compensation plans: housing market version (Nov 2007)

Footnotes

[1] I started typing from the book, then it occurred to me to Google some key phrases. That's how I discovered that there is a Russian web site that contains transcriptions of at least this book - and probably others. It is, of course, completely illegal. The site is entirely in Russian, but Google found the book within it, including this digression.

Public education in America - Primary and Secondary

On the same day Gail Collins tells us about American aristocrats seeking power, Bob Herbert reminds us (yet again) of an inconvenient truth [5] ...

... The Schott Foundation for Public Education tells us in a new report that the on-time high school graduation rate for black males in 2008 was an abysmal 47 percent, and even worse in several major urban areas — for example, 28 percent in New York City....

...More than 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers... Black men ... have nearly a one-third chance of being incarcerated at some point in their lives...

...White families are typically five times as wealthy as black families. More than a third of all black children are growing up in poverty...

Those are bad numbers on several fronts, though it's worth noting that 66% of Icelandic infants are born to unmarried mothers and in 2007 60% of babies born to all American women in their 20s were out of wedlock.

Black Americans are not unique on the educational front either ...

The Dropout/Graduation Crisis Among American Indian and Alaska Native Students — The Civil Rights Project at UCLA

... Data from 2005 is drawn from the seven states with the highest percentage of American Indian and Alaska Native students as well as five states in the Pacific and Northwestern regions of the United States ... On average, less than 50% of Native students in these twelve states graduate each year.

Public education isn't even working that well at our above average elementary school and state of Minnesota (in 2007 the St Paul school District was ... "30 percent Asian [2], 30 percent black, 26 percent white and 13 percent Hispanic" [1]) ...

Herbert is right that American blacks, and especially black men, are in serious trouble. At least when it comes to education though, they're not alone. Their trouble is a leading indicator for a lot of others.

So maybe we should beat up on the teachers? I can think of many ways reading and math [4] education and student assessment could be improved, but, at least for the particular St Paul school in the above graphic, I believe the teachers are pretty good to excellent. Some teacher-kid-parent combinations work better than others, but those teachers aren't the problem.

Ok, maybe we should beat up on the parents? Oh, wait, I'm a parent. Skip that one.

Maybe we should get better students? That does work. They used the better student method to improve test schools in Bush era Houston and in Mississippi. Health providers have long used similar techniques to improve health care outcomes. True, this is the same way wolves contribute to the health of caribou, but we don't eat the losers. We house them.

Hmm. So we can't beat up the teachers, we can't pummel the parents, and eliminating the weak kids is kind of cheating. So what's left?

Maybe we need to rethink the goals of our educational enterprise. Maybe, in a turbulent world of rapid change, we need to have different options for different kids. In 2020 it's not hard to imagine that a skilled gardener might have better employment opportunities than an accountant or a dermatologist.

Maybe we need to restart with the end in mind.

See also (my stuff):

• Fake graduation rates and other predictable outcomes of no child left behind (2008)
• The secret of great 10th grade school test scores (2003)
• Pay for performance in health care and teaching - we know how this ends (2010)
• The college bubble goes critical (2010)
• Employment in the Great Stagnation (2010)
• Post-industrial employment: adjusting to a new world (2010)

Footnotes

[1] In Minnesota white flight is often to "Charter" schools.
[2] Large Hmong population.
[3] A nonsensical statement since skills are relative to teacher, student, class topic and so on.
[4] Die Everyday Math, Die!
[5] Glenn Loury, writing for the Boston Review in 2007 about American imprisonment, said much the same thing ...

... a central reality of our time is the fact that there has opened a wide racial gap in the acquisition of cognitive skills, the extent of law-abidingness, the stability of family relations, the attachment to the work force, and the like. This disparity in human development is, as a historical matter, rooted in political, economic, social, and cultural factors peculiar to this society and reflective of its unlovely racial history: it is a societal, not communal or personal, achievement....

Update 9/4/10:

This post on how bad statistics led to a blunder in evaluating small schools is very relevant. With most Pay for Performance initiatives mall schools are randomly rewarded and randomly punished for normal fluctuations in the composition of the student body. The same thing will happen to small health care facilities.

How we know humans have not yet adapted to the digital world

I still often read that "young people" are naturally "digital".

Writing as a definitely-not-young person I don't see it. I've never seen it.

I did see, before phones had qwerty keys, that teens were very good at texting using numeric keypads. In the later tactile qwerty era they were very good at typing with two thumbs. Young motor cortices and cerebella just pound geezer brains - even if we don't mention gaming. (In the iPhone era, however, the keyboard advantage seems more modest.)

What haven't seen are major improvements in the abstract domain of interacting with knowledge, information, and early AI systems. If young people were naturally digital then sheer demand would force Gmail to let us edit subject lines. Hasn't happened.

They are certainly not better programmers than the geezers I know. Coding used to be something of a young man's game, but now it takes so long to learn that it's becoming almost a middle-aged game.

Our brains evolve much more quickly than we used to think, but they don't switch tracks in a generation. Computer adaptation is cultural, and we're still in the early stages. We have a lot of cultural evolution to go through before we get maximal benefit from the IT infrastructure of even 2010 -- much less the infrastructure of 2020.

Which means that we'll be in a whitewater world of technology transition for decades to come.

Lessons from a wrecked Toro Personal Pace recycler lawn mower

I'm not a motor guy. I prefer bikes, skinny skis, kayaks, skates, feet - most anything else. Even so, I've kept my usually pre-owned lawn mowers going for a few years.

Until I got fancy and bought a new, monstrous, Toro "guaranteed to start" "Personal Pace" self-propelled "recycler" mower with a "Briggs and Stratton" engine. I used it for about 1 season before I confirmed this chap's experience:

Toro Personal Pace Recycler Mower 20073 Reviews. Buying Guides & Consumer Product Reviews - Epinions.com

Pros: Easy to move around not much more to say about Pros.

Cons: Check the oil often. I'm leaving this one at the curb and buying a Honda!

I purched my Toro a year ago. Make sure you check the oiloften I checked it once in the year I owned it (like I did with my Honda I have had for 15 years) and the engine seized. save your money and buy a Honda!...

I probably used it about 8 times. Did I mention I'm not a lawn guy? I'd have probably checked the oil come the fall, but it never got there.

So I'm out $400 or so for the mower, - plus $35 for the checkup because lack of oil isn't quite covered by warranty. The manual, by the way, says to "check oil before each use or daily". I kind of missed that bit.

I get annoyed when I waste $10 on a bad book, so I'm definitely looking for lessons from this one. The one silver lining was I despised the mower. It was heavy, clumsy, lousy on hills, and overall it was designed for cutting estate lawns rather than our weeds.

Here are my early lessons. I'm still looking to add more ...

1. Never buy anything from Toro or Briggs and Stratton. I think I can remember that one.
2. Don't buy anything without research. I'm used to researching bikes, cameras, cars and so on, but I thought I could go to a reputable place and just pick up a mower. Wrong.
3. Buy the simplest stuff possible. I didn't need the "personal pace" feature, I didn't need the recycler. I did need a minimal maintenance device. The store I went to didn't have anything simpler.
4. Never buy anything over $50 in a hurry. I should have left the store when I didn't see what I wanted, instead I bought what they had.
5. I'm really not an engine guy.

Now I'm researching the alternatives. I like the look of this Gardena LiOn mower (high-end cylinder motor with LiOn boost), but I'm definitely doing my research first ...

Update: My Amazon review. Most of the reviewers do like this mower.

Why I like Krugman ...

I like Krugman because he makes testable predictions ...

Liquidity Preference And Loanable Funds, Revisited - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com 

A brief revisiting of the issues I raised more than a year ago regarding alternative views of interest rates.

This was never a question of simply forecasting what was going to happen to rates. It was about what would drive rates.

The view of Ferguson and others, back then, was that government deficits would drive up interest rates, choking off recovery. I and others argued that this was bad macroeconomics: interest rates would rise if and only if recovery took place. More specifically, short-term rates would stay near zero as long as the economy was deeply depressed; long-term rates would depend on expectations about the future of short rates, and hence on prospects for recovery.

So the key point is not the fact that rates are now considerably lower than they were when that debate took place; it’s the fact that rates have fluctuated very much with optimism about recovery, never mind the deficits.

In fact, if you had a naive loanable funds view, you’d expect the recent downgrading of expectations to drive rates up, not down — after all, a weaker economy means bigger deficits. But the opposite has, in fact, been happening.

The bottom line is that events have utterly confirmed one view, utterly rejected the other. Too bad such things don’t count in politics.

Testable predictions are a fundamental distinction between science and mere scholarship.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Taliban and Patriarchy

Family and friends of a young Afghan couple stoned them to death. Did the girl's father throw a stone? Will his sleep be forever tortured?

Humans are revolting. We should really start over with dogs.

Pending a better sentient animal, however, while stonings, whippings, and mutilations of women are momentarily in the public eye, it is worth resurrecting the old question ...

What fraction of the Talib/Afghan/Saudi/Wahabi cross-gender resistance to the American agenda comes from a desire to maintain extreme patriarchy and male power?

There are, of course, many reasons for anyone to resist the (fungible) American agenda, and many reasons to question the value and expression of that agenda. Those are good discussions, but they don't change my question. (Note that the resistance I'm referring to is cross-gender; women in these cultures are often strident supporters of their current cultural milieu.)

My guess is that maintenance of patriarchy is the strongest single reason for resisting American interventions including education and health care. If we could quantify contributing factors, I bet 2/3 would fall under patriarchy.

I wonder if there's any way to objectively measure this. It might be important to understand, as we enter Year 10 of the Long War.

Another nail in the coffin for the Alzheimer's amyloid hypothesis

Researchers bet careers, and pharmas bet billions, that amyloid plaques caused neuronal dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease. If the plaques could be prevented, you could prevent the disease.

Those bets have been going bad over the past four years. Today Lilly lost another bundle ....

Lilly Halts Alzheimer’s Drug Trial - Prescriptions Blog - NYTimes.com

... semagacestat, did not slow progression of the disease and was associated with a worsening of cognition and the ability to perform the tasks of daily living....

... The failures, and particularly this newest one by Lilly, could raise questions about the validity of the prevailing theory about Alzheimer’s, which is that the disease is caused by the accumulation of so-called amyloid beta plaques in the brain. 

 Lilly’s drug was designed to reduce the body’s production of the plaques by inhibiting the activity of an enzyme, called gamma secretase, that is believed to play an important role in formation of the plaque...

The contrary hypothesis was that the characteristic amyloid plaques of Alzheimer's disease were either a consequence of the disease process, or perhaps even some sort of protective measure. That hypothesis has been getting more support.

This latest result is just one example of all the recent bad news on delaying age-related dementia in general, and Alzheimer's disease in particular. We now know that "mental exercise", "social prophylaxis" and so on don't delay disease onset. We have shown that most treatment medications are, at best, marginally effective and poorly tolerated. We have no preventive meds -- estrogen, statins, non-steroidals and so on all are unimpressive.

We do know that head injuries are bad - worse than we imagined. Not only are concussions associated with Alzheimer's dementia, they're also associated with motor neuron disease. Most contacts sports, including American football and "soccer" will look very different in 10 years.

We believe, bizarrely, that exercise really does preserve the brain. We don't have a solid mechanism for that.

We also have tests that can diagnose Alzheimer's early, which is a good way to ensure you'll never be able to buy long term care insurance. Otherwise the tests look pretty pointless.

We need some good news. Forget the blather about social security -- that's not the crisis. That's just a GOP distraction. The crisis is pre-dementia and dementia in an aging post-industrial America.

Lessons from Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters

I learned a very valuable lesson from Meg Meeker's book "Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters".

Always read the 1 star reviews (mine). [1]

Always, always, always.

Sometimes my lessons need to be painful.
--
[1] Incidentally, Amazon's "most helpful" and "least helpful" filters are worse than useless -- they're misleading. Readers of ideological books like this one routinely mark negative reviews as "not helpful". That's way the "most helpful" critical review on this book has 3 stars.

Into the Wild

I skimmed Krakauer's Outside article on Alex McCandless decades ago, but I've only recently read his 1996 book Into the Wild. It's recommended for parents with restless idiot kids, and for idiot kids to remind them of the people who love them.

Of course I say that having been, as a kid of 21, self-centered and fairly idiotic. And I say it after losing my even less sensible kid brother into the wild [1].

That's Krakauer's point -- a lot of feckless and reckless boys grow up to be good, even wise, men. Others die young and leave shattered hearts. The difference between dying from bad choices like Alex McCandless, and surviving equally bad choices like young Jon Krakauer, is often mere chance.

The true tragedy is not, in the end, the young life cut short. For these men that, at least, was a choice. The tragedy is all the broken hearts left behind. I feel for Alex's parents and loved ones.

Good book.

[1] It's unfair to claim Brian was less sensible than me, since we really don't know what happened to him after he left the Whistler Youth Hostel in the summer of 2002. Maybe he did fall in a crevasse atop the Rainbow Mountain glacier. Maybe not. We don't know.

Managing the Google-Apple war: keeping options open, expecting the Android bicycle computer

The Google-Apple war continues, with a new front opening last week. The notorious Larry Ellison, close ally of the infamous Steve Jobs, has attacked Google from the left flank. With Schmidt, Jobs and Ellison business is personal. They are more like feudal kings than the mythical servants of the board imagined in business schools.

On the main front Apple continues to block iPhone customers from delicious Google (Android) Apps (emphases mine) …

Practical Traveler - Google Maps Add a Feature for Bike Riders - NYTimes.com

… “For Google Maps not to have bike directions is like the Gap not selling underpants,” said Eben Weiss, the author of the BikeSnobNYC blog. “Even though it’s not 100 percent reliable, it’s still better to have it than in no form at all.”

Yet the reviews within the biking community, notorious for its outspokenness, have been mixed at best. There are the technical glitches, like its unavailability on the iPhone (it’s available only on BlackBerrys and Androids) …

At the moment my family is still best served by the iPhone/iTunes/App Store/OS X ecosystem, but between iOS weaknesses and Android strengths the balance continues to shift towards Google. I can imagine the day when I’ll call on resolution 242 and write-off the sunk costs of our FairPlay investments for the entire family.

Towards that day we keep our family domain in Google Apps, and use only Google’s Calendaring, Contacts and Mail services. MobileMe is the enemy, Microsoft’s (!) ActiveSync is our friend. I track my Apple dependencies, with a close eye on Apple’s Data Lock.

I’m also expecting to see an Android showing up in special purpose devices, such as Android bicycle computers and Android car computers. I’ll be favoring those as a partial end-run around Apple’s failures.

Life would be a lot easier if Jobs and Schmidt weren’t replaying the 10th century. Given Jobs undeniable genius, I’d love to see Schmidt take early retirement.

When Microsoft ruled the earth ...

Paul Graham used to work for Yahoo!. He's written about why Yahoo! failed. One reasons, he says, is because they were paralyzed by fear of Microsoft ...

Paul Graham - what Happened to Yahoo 

... It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them. Yahoo watched them crush the first hot Internet company, Netscape. It was reasonable to worry that if they tried to be the next Netscape, they'd suffer the same fate. How were they to know that Netscape would turn out to be Microsoft's last victim?...

"...several times the power Google has now, but way meaner" - yes, that's about right. In those days there was a trade press, and any rag that crossed Microsoft died.

Even now I find myself imagining Microsoft will rise from the dead and again crush the innovation from the tech industry. It's an irrational fear, but it's common in my generation. There's nothing today to compare to Microsoft 1994. Neither Apple nor Google has anywhere near the power they had then.

Graham claims Yahoo's other great mistake was to treat its geeks badly. I think if you substitute the word "Creatives" for geeks it's a true statement for many industries. Creatives can be a pain to manage. They're always trying to work around things they don't like. Most companies pay them much less than senior managers. I can understand why that happens -- but it's a mistake.

Cloud data: Should I trust (Simplenote) Simperium?

My memory prostheses got a nice upgrade when I integrated my Outlook and Palm/Toodledo "notes" into a single Cloud based repository with powerful OS X (Notational Velocity), Win (ResophNotes), and iOS (Simplenote.app) Clients.

I'm loving this ecosystem. There's speed, simplicity, data freedom, multi-platform and integration with Spotlight and Windows search (both ResophNotes and Notational Velocity can create local stores with each note a simple text file available for indexing and editing).

Did I mention Speed and Data Freedom? Just wanted to check. I'm copying a pasting notes from various scattered sources, building a single searchable repository of my memory extensions. It's a good complement to the memory stores distributed in my blogs and google reader shares and integrated via my Google Custom Search Page.

It's all good fun - until someone gets hurt. Tonight Simperium, the creators of Simplenote, had a single ominous blog post:

Simplenote will be unavailable on the App Store for (hopefully) a short period of time. We apologize to our potential new users. You're welcome to create an account in the meantime and we'll let you know when we're back.

Right. Simplenote, you see, owns that Cloud repository I mentioned. They've evidently been booted from the App Store. Their too-brief posting lends itself to grim interpretations.

I do so love the Cloud.

We must hope that Simperium "simply" violated an API rule with a new release, and that they'll be back soon -- hopefully with a longer news post. For now, however, a comment on my tech blog is especially relevant ...

Blogger:Migrating Notes comment: Martin: "... how can I trust the 'Simperium' entity without any further information available?"

Cough. Good question. How do we know, for example, that Simperium isn't a KGB front mining data to be used by Russian crime syndicates paying for Putin's personal submarine? Maybe "sImperium" is a clue.

The short answer is I don't trust them. I don't trust Google or Apple either Simperium, so it's nothing personal. Or, more correctly, I trust these companies to do what's best for the people who control them within the limits of what they think they can get away with.

So I don't put anything in my Simplenotes that I wouldn't put in my blog. I keep my passwords in 1Password, not in my Simplenotes. I also don't put anything in Simplenotes that I can't afford to lose. All my notes are synchronized by Notational Velocity (open source, the superb ResophNotes does the same thing for Windows) to a local store on my personal hard drive, where the UTF-8 plain text files are also backed up hourly.

I also know that Simplenote is used by some serious geeks, including the notorious John Gruber and the authors of ResophNotes and Notational Velocity. It it should vanish something like it would be recreated.

So I don't trust Simperium, but I'm not worried about them either.

Or at least, not panicky.

PS. All of this stuff is basically free. Simplenote.app is very cheap, and ResophNotes and Notational Velocity are free (donations accepted and encouraged - I gave!). The Simplenotes cloud service is normally free, I paid for premium service. This, by the way, is a bit worrisome. I'd rather Simperium had a clearer revenue stream.

Update 8/13/10: Simplenote responds in comments. They took themselves offline to fix an error in how they configured their update. I expect next time something like this happens their blog post will be more informative.

Update 8/23/10: Simplenote update just appeared in the App Store. So they're back at last.

--My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Inline Skating (rollerblading) Foot Pain and Suggestions

I promise, this is the last post tonight from my 1990 web page archives. I wrote this one back when inline skating was new and popular in Minnesota. It was about managing foot pain ...

Inline Skating (rollerblading) Foot Pain and Suggestions

In trying to help a colleague who experiences mid-foot pain while skating, I posted a newsgroup query to rec.sport.skating.inline. I received many helpful suggestions. They are listed here for others who may be looking for ideas. Thank you to all who have passed on their experience.

Skating associated foot pain has many causes. A podiatrist would likely have a comprehensive list. Much pain is related to strain and vibration along the ligaments (plantar fascia) that maintain the arch of the human foot, and to unaccustomed workload on some of the small muscles of the foot. Compression of the mid-foot is a significant issue for many other skaters. General solutions include: better fitting skates, decrease vibration, better support, warm-up, and less mid-foot compression (substitute ankle compresson for mid-foot compression).

Some pain decreases with skating, other types may increase. A common pattern is pain after 3-4 minutes that may decrease after 30-40 minutes. The pain can be quite severe. There is a market niche here for a skate manufacturer!...

• High performance skates, with carbon/glass frames and aluminum frame clips and light boots transmit a lot more road vibration. I tried some K2 Escapes for a while, and while I loved the speed and agility the transmitted road vibration was much worse than with my boat anchor Rollerblade Fusions.
• On the other hand, the standard K2 skates, with their partially nylon fabric uppers, have helped some people. The Flight 76 is perhaps the best skate for its price on the market ($200)
• Relaxing the toes and arch. Many novice skaters curl their toes to "grip" the skate. This is a primate falling reflex -- very important for tree dwellers. When skating the muscle strain produces pain. Try to constantly move the toes about and resist toe curling.
• Strong ankle support and a firm ankle retention may secure the foot, and reduce foot strain and mid-foot pressure during skating.
• Limit skating to very smooth surfaces which produce less vibration.
• Use softer wheels (78A). Note they will wear faster. I don't know how wheel diameter affects vibration.
• Try Thorlo Inline skating socks. These $10.00 a pair socks have extra padding at contact areas. I really like them. Campmor (http://www.campmor.com/) sells them mail order. The relatively thick socks may make a close fitting skate too tight however, and thereby worsen foot pain.
• The Technica skates come with "Anti-Vibration System Technology" that is supposed to reduce discomfort from vibration. I don't know if it works. These are very nice but high end skates ($250-$320).
• Use spenco gell arch supports or other vibration absorbing support. In some cases, however, arch supports increase mid-foot compression and produce more pain. In this case you may want to replace a boot's insole with a thinner insole.
• Instead of full arch supports, try silicon heel supports (heel cups) alone. These are typically used for heel pain, but in some people they help with midfoot discomfort.
• Stretch the foot and calf muscles prior to skating.
• Skate for the first 15 minutes with very loose laces, or with the mid-buckle unlatched. Then gradually tighten the skate as the foot warms-up. Some persons feel an actual lack of blood perfusion to the distal foot from a tight mid-boot.
• Persons with wide feet may prefer Ultra Wheel skates, which have a wide last. The wider UltraWheels are, per the manufacturer: The Great One, UltraAir, Infinity and Vision.
• Some persons with foot pain buy a longer skate than their foot sizing would suggest. It's possible to fill the empty toe space with some foam. It's possible that the longer boot has more vertical room in the mid-foot area. Mid-foot compression seems to be a significant problem for many skaters.
• Some ski boot retaillers do custom fitting and insert design. This is expensive, but some folks say it helped a lot.
• People with "duck feet" (feet point outwards in a relaxed position, this may actually have to do with tibial or femur orientation) may experience discomfort from twisting the feet forwars. Try adopting a less "proper" skating style for the first 10-20 minutes of skating until the foot muscles stretch a bit.
• Try keeping the feet in motion, and avoid prolonged gliding. Doing regular gentle curves and easy constant foot motion may decrease discomfort.

--
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Pay for performance in health care and teaching - we know how this ends

It seems pretty clear that if you want better quality healthcare, or better teaching, then you should pay professionals for the results they obtain. "Pay for Performance" is one of the mantras of healthcare reform. We saw the same arguments in 'No Child Left Behind', where paying principles to lower failure rates has worked so well.

There's been a lot of research in many industries about how well Pay for Performance schemes work in practice, but this historic statement from my archives says it best ...

(Thanks to Google, I didn't have to retype this ..)

... The planners tried various expedients,” wrote Alec Nove in his economic history of the Soviet Union. They issued instructions that user demand should be met; they modified bonus systems so that it was not enough to achieve purely quantitative targets; they experimented with value-added indicators. “Each of these “success indicators” had its own defect, induced its own distortions. Thus, insistence on cost reduction often stood in the way of the making of a better- quality product. A book could easily be filled with a list of various expedients designed to encourage enterprises to act in the manner the planners wished, and the troubles to which each of them gave rise...

Update 8/19/10: See also Fake graduation rates and other predictable outcomes of no child left behind

Reengineering the Corporation: A summary

I was browsing my archives, when I found a post where I promised to go through my old pre-blog blog-like web page fragments. I then forgot about them again.

Here's the second in the series. Sixteen years ago, as America tried to forget the dreary eighties, two consultants got rich "reengineering" corporations to be better suited to the high tech world ahead. Most corporations ended up using the concept as cover for big-time downsizings, so it got a real bad rap. I remember the book as being more interesting than that. If nothing else, it's a marker of a historic transition as corporations became fully dependent on networked computers.

So, in honor of our recent reenactment of the 1980s, here are my 1996 notes, copied and pasted from a web 1.0 page (btw, the Amazon link is the original from the late 90s. It still works.) ...

Reengineering The Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution

Introduction and Citation

Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering The Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. Harper Collins 1993.

I wrote up these notes when I was reading Hammer and Champy's book. They're reprinted here for public use. The notes are my own, and may bear no resemblance to the book. My comments are in italics, they focus on primary care. Hammer and Champy's ideas are not all original, and many people (myself included) disagree with their analysis of the costs and benefits of their particular approach to reengineering. Indeed, since I put these notes together (1996) reengineering has fallen from grace. I still think there's something to it however.

Reengineering Notes

Key Characteristics of Reengineering

• processes: process oriented (most important component)
• fundamental
• radical
• dramatic
• When I read this book, I felt that the "technocentric" reorganization of work was common to all of their successful examples. That is, changing work to organize it around inflexible but powerful technologies. It is an unfortunate truth that we humans are far more flexible than our technologies. Change for us is painful, but it is possible if the rewards are sufficient.

Themes for Reengineering

• process orientation
• ambition
• rule-breaking
• creative use of information technology: IT enables change

Characteristics of Reengineered Business Processes

• several jobs combined into one
• workers make decisions
• the steps in the process are performed in a natural order
• processes have multiple versions
• work is performed where it makes the most sense
• checks and controls are reduced
• reconciliation is minimized: reduce "accounting" procedures.
• a case manager provides a single point of contact. example: the primary care physician
• hybrid/centralized operations are prevalent. (I'm not really convinced by their arguments for this point.)

Characteristics of the Reengineered Workplace

• work units change from functional deparments (gastroenterology) to process teams (family practice).
• jobs change, from simple tasks to multidimensional work (a professional)
• roles change: "empowerment". and, inevitably, power shifts, ergo depowerment
• job preparation changes: from training to education.
• focus of performance measures and compensation shift from activity to results (what if the results are very hard to measure?)
• advancement criteria change -- from performance to ability. (How does one measure "ability"in clinical practice? By board scores? I don't think so ... By outcomes?)
• values change -- from protective to productive.
• organizational structures change -- from hierarchical to flat (Here again I'm not sure how well this applies to all settings, or how fundamental this is to the reengineering process. Does "equal" mean equally replaceable?)
• executives change -- froms scorekeepers to leaders

Approaching a Reengineering Project

1. Identify problem processes, other problems, challenges, puzzles (use standard systems analysis techniques). Look for known broken processes or symptoms of broken processes
   • data redundancy, rekeying, extensive information exchange
   • inventory, buffers, system slack
   • high ratio of checking-control to value added
   • rework and iteration
   • complexity, accretions, special cases
2. identify/note technologies: computers, systems
3. apply "inductive thinking"
   • recognize a "solution" (computer/systems technology) and seek the problem it might solve.
   • identify longstanding "rules" or limitations that a new technology can now break.
   • want to keep up on latest technologies, and evaluate opportunities. This is what has been long criticized as a solution in search of a problem!
4. start with feasible projects
5. Benchmark from the world's best, not the industry's best.

Understanding Processes

• Most companies have ten or so principal processes.
• Begin by understanding what the processes's customer does with the process output. What are the customer's real requirements? How does this compare to their self-identified needs?
• Learn the what and why rather than the how. The how will change.

How to Fail at Reengineering: Common Mistakes

• Try to fix a process rather than change it.
• Don't focus on business process.
• Ignore everything except process redesign.
• Neglect people's values and beliefs.
• Be willing to settle for minor results
• Quit too early.
• Place prior constraints on the definition of the problem and the scope of the reengineering effort.
• Allow existing corporate cultures and management attitudes to prevent reengineering from getting started.
• Try to make reengineering happen from the bottom up -- without strong top-level support.
• Assign someone who doesn't understand reengineering to lead the effort.
• Skimp on the resources devoted to reengineering.
• Bury reeningeering in the middle of the corporate agenda.
• Dissipate energy across many reengineering projects.
• Atttempt to reengineer when the CEO is two years from retirement.
• Fail to distinguish reengineering from other business improvement programs.
• Concentrate exclusively on design.
• Try to make reengineering happen without making anyone unhappy. (I think they could have said more here about identifying winners/losers and considering compensation for "losers"
• Pull back when people resist making reengineering's changes.
• Drag the effort out.