Are we intelligent as a country?

How intelligent are we as a country when we compare ourselves with other people. I would say, our own intelligence is acting against our favour. We are quite a mass of intelligent people. Each one of us, are smart (even shrewd), but as a nation we are quite dumb. Its like the electrons. If all of them move in one direction we have a current flowing, else maximum we can have is minor static charge.

Actually this was something I have been thinking, and lo and behold, I found Scott Adams writing about it in his blog but altogether in a different context. He says -
"... military studies done years ago where researchers compared the performances of small groups that had different compositions of intelligence. They found that the groups with the highest percentage of bright people performed the worst. Apparently all the smart people insisted they had the best ideas and nothing got done. The best performing groups were the ones where there was one smart person and the rest of the group deferred to him. Therefore, I would argue, too much intelligence ruins everything."

I don't know how real this is, but I think it definitely makes sense.

Thoughts

Being a father, I automatically tend to feel that I have rights or command over what I have created. I want him to be a cardiac surgeon or a pilot or this or that. All those things that I might have secretly wanted to be myself, but then again he is not what I created. Children are souls given a body through me and hence I dont have control over them. May be moms have better control if at all, since they helped create the body more intimately, what I gave is just like a part of the seed. Simple truth! but I guess so many dads waste their cycles over this. All we dads can do is hope and help. I wish my dad realizes this. This will make him more happy. As the FORUM gurus say, I "hope" he creates and goes behind bigger problems that will make his life grand.

"The rung of ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher"

- Thomas Henry Huxley

After thought: One should then not consider their carreer as a ladder, since one can never rest. One might then never be able to enjoy the journey, since one will be always thinking of finishing climbing the ladder.

Reading Peopleware

[This is a very old writeup - some notes and thoughts I gathered while reading the book. This is posted here so that it can be saved for later]

By Srinivas Yermal
Sunday, February 17, 2002

Peopleware
Productive Projects and Teams
By Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, 2nd edition, 1988

"Most of the managers are prone to one particular failing: a tendency to manage people as though they were modular components."

Parkison's law:

In 1954, the British author C. Northcote Parkinson said that the work expands to fill the time allocated for it. This "law" might apply to people who don't enjoy what they do. Or Tom and Timothy note that - organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.

Seven False Hopes of software management -

1. There's a new trick you've missed that could send productivity soaring.
   
2. Other managers are getting gains of 100% or 200% or more.
   
3. Technology is moving so swiftly that you're being passed by.
   
4. Changing languages will give you huge gains.
   
5. B'coz of the backlog, you need to double productivity immediately
   
6. You automate everything else; isn't it about time you automate away your software development staff?
   
7. Your people will work better if you put them under a lot of pressure.

Gerald McCue with the assitance of IBM area managers designed a study which revealed that -

• 100 sq feet of dedicated space per worker is important
  
• 30 sq feet of work surface per person
  
• noise protection in the form of enclosed offices or six-foot high partitions

"Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring at all." - Tom Gilb

More important than any gimmick you introduce is a change in attitude. People must learn that its okay sometimes to not answer their phones, and they must learn that their time - not just the quantity but its quality - is important. Because once you are out of the flow, you will take close to 15 min. at an average to get back into the flow. And being in the "flow" or "zone" is the most important thing that any intellectual worker needs to get any work done at all.

Management, at its best, should make sure there is enough space, enough quiet, and enough ways to ensure privacy so that people can create their own sensible workspace.

Christopher Alexander's book Notes on the synthesis of Form is considered a kind of holy book by designers of all kinds. Alexander codifies the elements of good architectural design in his three volume set entitled The Timeless Way of Building. Alexander proposes a meta-plan instead of a master plan. It has three parts -

• a philosophy of piecemeal growth
• a set of patterns or shared design principles governing growth
  
• local control of design by those who will occupy the space

Four patterns to improve the institutional space

1. Tailored workspace from a kit - allow people who use it to design it.
   
2. Provide windows
   
3. Indoor and outdoor space
   
4. Public space - At the entrace of the workplace should be some area that belongs to the whole group. An age-old pattern of interior space is one that has a smooth intimacy gradient as you move toward the interior.

"Without communal eating, no human group can hold together. Give each a place where people can eat together. Make the common meal a regular event. In particular, start a common lunch in every workplace so that a genuine meal around a common table (not out of boxes, machines or bags) becomes an important comfortable daily event... In our own work group at the Center, we found this worked most beautifully when we took it in turns to cook the lunch. The lunch became an event; a gathering: something that each of us put our love and energy into."

--A Pattern Language

Formula for success -

1. Get the right people
2. Make them happy so that they dont leave
3. Turn them loose. (This includes the fact that you will coordinate(only) the efforts of the team)

"Popcorn is not professional" - The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. So making and eating popcorn in office cafeteria is unprofessional.

SECOND THERMODYNAMIC LAW OF MANAGEMENT - Entropy (levelness and sameness) is always increasing in the orginization. So your organization may have rigor mortis, but your little piece of it can hop and skip.

Why People leave?

• a just passing through mentality: Co-workers engender no feelings of long-term involvement in the job
• a feeling of disposibility: Management can only think of its workers as interchangeable parts (since turnover is so high, nobody is indispensible)
  
• a sense that loyalty would be ludicrous: Who could be loyal to an organization that views its people as parts?

The insidious effect here is that turnover engenders turnover. People leave quickly, so there's no spending money on training. Since the company has invested nothing in the individual, the individual thinks nothing of moving on.

The best organizations are striving to be the best. This is the common goal that provides common direction, joint satisfaction, and a strong binding effect. There is a mentality of permanance about such places, the sense that you'd be dumb to look for a job elsewhere- people would look at you as though you were daft(?). A common feature of companies with the lowest turnover is widespread retraining. No job is (should be) a dead end.

The Self-healing system

When you automate a previously all-human system, it becomes entirely deterministic. The new system is capable of making only those responses planned explicitly by its builders. So the self-healing quality is lost. Any response that will be required must be put there in the first place. If the business policy governing the new system has a sufficient degree of natural ad hoc-racy, its a mistake to automate it. Determinism will be no asset then; the system will be in constant maintenance.

Thinking about workflow here, we have to be able to automate the processes in such a way that it complements the human effort not replace it. The automation of only those human tasks which normally form one single unit has to be done, so that we still preserve the self healing capacity in case of failures by allowing the system to side step and the human intelligence to take over.

The reason that non-deterministic systems can often heal themselves painlessly and elegantly is that the humans who make up the system have an easy familarity with the underlying goals. Someday it may be possible to teach computers the goals of the system instead of the actions expected to achieve the goals (talking of predicate rules and business rule engine?).

THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN PARTS

The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.

TEAMICIDE - Ways to kill a team. Most organizations dont set out conciously to kill teams. They just act that way.

• Defensive management
  
  You cant protect yourself against your own people's incompetence. Once you have decided your group, your best tactic is to trust them. People who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team.
• Bureaucracy
• Physical separation
• Fragmentation of time
• Quality reduction of the product
• Phony deadlines
• Clique control

Open Kimono - A person you cant trust with any autonomy is of no use to you. The team has something meaningful to form around when it is trusted. They're are not just getting the job done. They're making sure that the trust that's been placed in them is rewarded.

Skunkworks - People at all levels know whether some sensible insubordination is acceptable or not. People look out for their open kimono managers. They're determined to make them look good, even though the managers may botch an occasional decision.

Employment audition - The project members who listen to the audition are not just an audience; they have a say in whether the person gets the offer. In addition to technical judgement, they're supplying a team perspective on how well the candidate will fit in.

An insecure need for obedience is the opposite of natural authority (the one that exists between a master and an apprentice)

Chemistry for team formation:

• Make a cult of Quality - The best quality prevails and the team gets joint satisfaction out of providing perfect quality work
• "I told her I love her when I married her" - reassurance comes from what psychologists call closure. Divide the work into pieces and make sure that each piece has some substantive demostration of its own completion.
• The Elite team - People need a sense of uniqueness to be at peace with themselves.
• Dont break up the Yankees (the jelled team)
• A Network model of Team behavior - Teams are made up of peers, equals that function as equals. No one is the permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would begin to break down.
• Selections from a chinese menu - A little bit of heterogeneity can be an enormous aid to create a jelled team. The saddest example of the overly homogenous work group is the all-male team :( Whatever the heterogenous element is, it takes on symbolic importance to team members. It is a clear signal that its okay not to be a clone, okay not to fit into the corporate mold of uniform plastic person.

When teams happen, the work is fun, people are energized and they like themselves. Deadline and milestones are rolled over and they look for more. They feel loyal to the team and to the environment that allows the team to exist.

ITS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN TO WORK HERE

Constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder -

• Pilot projects
• War games
• Brainstroming - As a facilitator introduce
• anology thinking ( how would nature do it)
• inversion ( how can we achieve the opposite)
• immersion (what will I do in this case)
• Provocative training experiences
• Trips, conferences, celebrations and retreats

Good sense and order are desirable components of our workday. There's also a place for adventure, silliness, and small amounts of constructive disorder.

HOLGAR DANSK - The sleeping gaint

When something is terribly out of kilter, it takes very little to raise people's consciousness of it. The gaint here is the actual working people whose patience is nearly exhausted, people who can know Silly when they see it.

Notes on the "Notes"

[This is a very old writeup - some notes and thoughts I gathered while reading the book. This is posted here so that it can be saved for later]

By Srinivas Yermal
Friday, March 29, 2002

Notes On The Synthesis Of Form
By Christopher Alexander, 1971

In the preface, christopher says "... the idea that you can create abstract patterns by studying the implication of limited system of forces, and can create new forms by free combination of these patterns- and realize that this will only work if the patterns which you define deal with systems of forces whose internal interaction is very dense, and whose interaction with the other forces in the world is very weak-then, in the process of trying to create such diagrams or patterns for yourself, you will reach the central idea which this book is all about."

(not the method which leads to the creation of the diagrams, but the diagrams themselves)

"First, the taking in of scattered particulars under one idea, so that everyone understands what is being talked about... second, the separation of the Idea into parts, by dividing it at the joints, as nature directs, not breaking any limb in half as a bad carver might."

- Plato, Phaedrus, 265 A.D

Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness betweens two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem. Good fit is a desired property of this ensemble of form and context.

If we divide an ensemble into form and context, the fit between them may be regarded as an orderly condition of the ensemble, subject to disturbance in various ways, each one a potential misfit. The state of each potential misfit is represented by means of a binary variable, 0 meaning that there is no misfit occuring. The task of design is not to create form which meets certain conditions, but to create such an order in the ensemble that all the variables take the value 0. The form is simply that part of the ensemble over which we have control. It is only through the form that we can create order in the ensemble.

If there is active stability in the ensemble then the form will always be in good fit, how many ever misfits it encounters.

The selfconcious design procedure provides no structural correspondence between the problem and the means devised for solving it. The complexity of the problem is never fully disentangled, and the forms produced not only fail to meet their specifications as fully as they should, but also lack the formal clarity which they would have if the organization of the problem they are fitted to were better understood.

Where a number of issues are being taken into account in a design decision, inevitably the ones whichh can be most clearly expressed carry the greatest weight, and are best reflected in the form, while other factors, important too but less well expressed, are not so well reflected. Unfortunately, although every problem has its own structure, and there are many different problems, the words we have available to describe the components of these problems are generated by forces in the language, not by the problems, and are therefore rather limited in number and cannot describe more than a few cases correctly. For example take the concept of "safety". As far as its meaning is concerned it is relevant to both, a highway or a tea kettle. But as far as the individual structure of the problems goes, it seems unlikely that the one word should successfully identify a principal component subsystem in each of these two very dissimilar problems.

Program

Problem here is that we wish to design clearly conceived forms which are well adapted to some given context and for this to be feasible, the adaptation must take place independently within the independent subsystems of variables.

Three possible schemes of design process-

1. Unselfconcious process - The process which shapes the form is a complex two-directional interaction between the context and the form in the world itself. The human is only present as an agent in this process. He reacts to misfits by changing them; but is unlikely to impose any "designed" conception of the form.
2. The selfconcious process - Form is shaped not by interaction between the actual context's demands and the actual inadequacies of the form, but by a conceptual interaction between the conceptual picture of the context which the designer has learned and invented, on the one hand, and ideas and diagrams and drawings which stand for forms, on the other.
   
3. Improvement to the second scheme is to make a further abstract picture of our first picture of the problem, which eradicates its bias and retains only its abstract structural features; this second picture may then be examined according to precisely defined operations, in a way not to subject to the bias of language and experience.

Some definitions used in the book:

• M - set of misfits (Misfit is a condition of the ensemble as a whole, which comes from the unsatisfactory interaction of the form and the context)
  
• L - set of links (non-directional signed one-dimensional elements) that describe how the misfits interact.
  
• G(M, L) - the graph that defines the problem.

Program - for every problem there is one decomposition which is especially proper to it, and that this is usually different from the one in the designer's head!

The starting point of analysis is the requirement. The end product of analysis is a program, which is a tree of sets of requirements. The starting point of synthesis is a diagram. The end product of synthesis is the realization of the problem, which is a tree of diagrams. Any pattern which, by being abstracted from a real situation, conveys the physical influence of certain demands or forces is a diagram. A diagram is constructive iff it is a requirement diagram (say a mathemetical statement for a race car design) and a form diagram (the water colour perspective view of the car) at the same time.

A good designer invents a form that penetrates the problem so deeply that it not only solves it but illuminates it.

The elements of M must have the following properties -

1. To be of equal scope
   
2. To be as independent of one another as is reasonably possible
   
3. To be as small in scope and hence as specific and detailed and numerous as possible

Solution

Given any partition Pi of a set S into subsets S1, S2.... Sn, we may establish a measure of information transfer or informational dependence among these subsets called R(Pi). The desirable partition of M is one where R(Pi) is minimum.

The Properties of the program -

1. The tree is, in its hierarchical form, the same as any other hierarchy of concepts - except that the concepts are here defined extensionally, rather than intensionally by meaning.
2. The particular tree arrived at by the method outlined gives an explicit description of the structure implicitly responsible for the success and stability of the unselfconscious form-making process.
3. The tree gives the strongest possible decomposition of the problem that does not interfere with the task of synthesizing its parts in a unified way. Each subsidiary problem it defines has its own integrity, and is as independent as it can be of the rest of the problem.
4. The constructive diagram for the set S should do two things
   As a requirement diagram:
   
   • It must bring out just those features of the problem which are relevant to this set of requirements.
   • It must include no information which is not explicitly called for by these requirements.
   
   As a form diagram:
   
   • It must be so specific that it has all physical characteristics called for by the requirements of S.
   • Yet it must be so general that it contains no arbitrary characteristics, and so summarizes, abstractly, the nature of every form which might satisfy S.

The general Rule

Every aspect of a form, whether piecelike or patternlike, can be understood as a structure of components. Every object is a hierarchy of components, the large ones specifying the pattern of distribution of the smaller ones, the small ones themselves, though at first sight more clearly piecelike, in fact again patterns specifying the arrangement and distribution of still smaller components.

Every component has this twofold nature: it is first a unit, and second a pattern, both a pattern and a unit (the nature of light and EM waves). Its nature as a unit makes it an entity distinct from its surroundings. Its nature as a pattern specifies the arrangement of its own component units. It is the culmination of the designer's task to make every diagram both a pattern and a unit. As a unit it will fit into the hierarchy of larger components that fall above it; as a pattern it will specify the hierarchy of smaller components which it itself is made of.

---

Hierarchy achieves economy of thought. The right way is the residue when all the wrong ways are eradicated. No attempt is made to formulate abstractly just what the right way involves in the unselfishness conscious.

"The timeless way"

It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves, it cannot be attained but it will happen on its own accord, if we will only let it.

Prayer

'निरायासेन मरणम, विना दैन्येन जीवनं'
- beautifully and aptly the most important things that I ask the Lord. It means to say '[final] death without struggle, and life without dependence'. Everything else is something that He will take care. Not that he will not take care of these things as well, but these are more important than the rest, something that one might want to explicitly ask for.

My son turned one. and we had a small pooja at home. The acharya who had visited our house said this... felt really true. Can truth be felt, in the pit? Even when you donot know what the actual truth is?