The following is a post stolen from the Nivi Blog.  Nivi in turn stole it from Ackoff.  If it’s something you’ve never heard before and it totally opens your mind and changes your world view it probably came from Ackoff.  He is also known as the Einstein of Management, or as some Buddhists might say, Kundun, Ocean of Wisdom.  Okay, that’s the Dalai Lama and the title of a Martin Scorsese film about the Dalai Lama. 

A wise man once said that the purpose of human existence is to learn.  All other parts of life, be it love, experience, joy, pain, all exist to facilitate the learning process.  Maybe, the wise man said this because it is only through learning that we can change, grow, improve and better know ourselves and our universe.  That said, if we are not changing, growing, improving and better knowing ourselves and our fellow man, aren’t we already dead anyways? Ok, let’s assume I’m right, what then is learning?

Learning is the acquisition of data, information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.

And what are those things?

Data consists of symbols that represent objects, events, and their properties. For example, the speedometer in a car presents data.

Information is data that has been made useful. Information answers who, what, where, when, and how many questions. Information is helpful in deciding what to do, not how to do it. For example, the information that you are driving at 120 mph will help you decide whether to speed up or slow down. But information won’t tell you how to do it.

Knowledge consists of instructions and know-how. Knowledge answers how questions. For example, your driving knowledge tells you how to control the car’s speed.

Understanding consists of explanations. Understanding answers why questions. For example, you understand why you are in the car in the first place: because you are driving your kids to get ice cream.

Wisdom is the ability to perceive outcomes and determine their value. It is useful for deciding what should be done. For example, the wise may decide that driving recklessly may lead their children to do the same in the future.

If it isn’t obvious by now, an ounce of wisdom is worth a pound of understanding, an ounce of understanding is worth a pound of knowledge, and so on. For example, it is more important to understand the value of what you’re doing than it is to know how to do it. More to come.

Note: This series of articles is paraphrased and stolen from Russell Ackoff’s Re-Creating the Corporation.

You can check out the original post here.

In a time when MBA programs are a dime a dozen, when applicants and schools are struggling to find the right match, and when some schools are slapping together MBA programs just to get a piece of the action, there stands the Yales and Stanfords breaking new ground in the world of MBA programs. 

You’ve surely read our earlier post on Stanford’s cutting edge program.  Add Yale to the list of schools that are redefining what an MBA program could and should be.  You can read a full story here on the changes that take effect starting this January 2007.  Here are some highlights from the Business Wire story.

• All MBA students will be required to Study Abroad in one of eight programs in Argentina, China, Costa Rica, India, Japan, Singapore, England/Poland, or South Africa/Tanzania.

• “The heart of the new curriculum is a series of eight courses, called Organizational Perspectives, that are structured around the organizational roles a manager must engage to solve problems or make progress. These roles are both internal to the organization—the Innovator, the Operations Engine, the Employee, and Sourcing and Managing Funds (or CFO)—and external to the organization—the Investor, the Customer, the Competitor, and State and Society.”

• Students have started a campaign to purchase Certified Emissions Reductions to balance out the carbon emissions that their travel will create.

Yale’s School of Management was founded in 1976, it is the youngest of Yale University’s professional schools. The SOM offers a two-year full-time MBA degree, an MBA for Executives focus for health care professionals, a Ph.D. program, and also an executive education program.
You can check out the SOM’s new curriculum here.

Sure there is LinkedIn and Monster.com and Indeed and a host of other places to find jobs on the Internet.  They are all, however, a poor man’s version of Doostang.  By combining social networking with jobs, the team at Doostang has made a winning combination.  How do I know it’s winning?  Easy just look at the jobs and, more importantly, the caliber of people on the site.  We are talking Top Jobs and graduates from Top Universities.  In this way, Doostang is not just jobs, but also connections and the opportunity to make real relationships within a real community.  What are you waiting for?  Sign up HERE.

Here is a post entitled Hire People for Their Strengths (You Can’t Fix Their Weaknesses).  It’s from my brothers business blog.  You can check out his blog here.  Randomly, this post of his relates to our last post.  Enjoy.

Marc Hedlund found a great quote about hiring people for their strengths:

Russian clown Yuri Kuklachev has a troupe of cats who do
handstands, crawl along high wires and balance on balls and he says the
secret to training them is realizing that you can’t force cats to do
anything.

[…]

“Each cat likes to do her own trick,” said Kuklachev […].
“Maruska is the only one who does the handstand. I find the cat and see
what they like to do and use that in the show.”

The hypothesis here is that you should hire people for their
strengths (even if they are drunks) and you shouldn’t try to fix their
weaknesses (there is no time and it won’t work anyway). Part of the
purpose of organizing people into organizations is to make weaknesses
irrelevant and combine strengths into more than the sum of their parts.

As usual, Peter Drucker discovered this principle about 40 years ago in The Effective Executive:

“The effective executive fills positions and promotes on
the basis of what a man can do. He does not make staffing decisions to
minimize weakness but to maximize strength.

President Lincoln when told that General Grant, he new
commander-in-chief, was fond of the bottle said: “If I knew his brand,
I’d send a barrel or so to some other generals”… Of all the Union
generals, Grant alone had proven consistently capable of planning and
leading winning campaigns. Grant’s appointment was the turning point of
the Civil War. It was an effective appointment because Lincoln choose
his general for his tested ability to win battles and not for his
sobriety, that is, for the absence of a weakness.

Lincoln learned this the hard way however. Before he chose
Grant, he had appointed in succession three or four Generals whose main
qualifications were their lack of major weaknesses. As a result, the
north, despite its tremendous superiority in men and materiel, had not
made any headway for three long years from 1861 to 1864. In sharp
contrast, Lee, in command of the confederate forces, had staffed from
strength. Every one of Lee’s generals, from Stonewall Jackson on, was a
man of obvious and monumental weaknesses. But these failings Lee
considered — rightly — to be irrelevant. Each of them had, however, one
area of real strength — and it was this strength, and only this
strength, that Lee utilized and made effective. As a result, the
“well-rounded men” Lincoln had appointed were beaten time and again by
Lee’s “single-purpose tools,” the men of narrow but very great
strength.”

I hope you enjoyed that.  We’ll be posting more selections from his blog but you should probably sign up for his blog’s feed.

Don’t try and fix your weaknesses.  Just use your strengths to make up for them.

I have a friend that was telling me how showing outward appreciation for the acts of others was not natural for him.  He considered it a weakness.  Now, this friend had always aspoused the theory that people should fix their weaknesses and make them strengths.  He used himself as an example.  He explained that he had conquered his ‘weakness’ and was now congratulatory and outwardly thankful towards people.  I asked him how he had done that.  He explained that he conciously created mechanisms to remind himself, rationally, to be outwardly appreciative towards people in the various scenarios that life brings.  Now, the explanation of how he overcame his ‘weakness’ is at odds with the idea of ‘fixing’ weaknesses.  What he did was use his strength (rationale, discipline) to make up for the undesirable consequences that his weaknesses created for him. 

Don’t try and fix your weaknesses.  Just use your strengths to make up for them.

The Magna Carta, The Constitution, The Declaration of Independence, The Gettysburg Address,  We Are The People, and From Mechanistic to Social Systemic Thinking, by Russell Ackhoff, are must reads for anyone that considers themselves a citizen of Earth, much less a transformational business leader.

I’ll keep this post short so you can get on with the reading.  If you have any interest in "design and quality and learning", Ackoff’s 1993 speech at the Systems Thinking in Action Conference will change the way you see the world.  If it doesn’t, read it again.  I’ll give you twice your money back if you don’t agree.  You can download it for free here.

Download from_mechanistic_to_social_systemic_thinking.pdf

What your company will be doing tomorrow is more important than what it is doing today.  What your company is doing today is a product of who you had.  What your company is doing tomorrow is a product of you have.  You are nothing but your people.

A good GMAT practice regimen is like that in any sport or art.  You want to use multiple drills performed in different ways, in different environments, with different controls.

So for example, you can work on question types in chunks, doing thirty math questions and then thirty sentence correction questions.  You could also alternate, one question at a time,  between math and sentence correction.  Neither drill is exactly like the GMAT test, and yet each one can exercise a different set of mental muscles.  At first it’s probably most helpful to do questions in chunks so that you can concentrate on the skills required for the different question types and engrain that skill set into your long-term memory.  Later you may try the second method of alternating questions.  In this way, you would be exercising your working memory and you ability to quickly and accurately bring to mind the information and skills you need for a particular question.

You could also change your environment.  At first, studying in a very quiet and solitary place can help you concentrate on learning something new.  Later, doing some questions in a library where there is a low level of noise and external distraction can help you exercise your ability to concentrate on your work and ignore your surroundings.

All of these practice techniques have their own time and place as well as benefit.  A good practice regimen incorporates varied techniques to not only strengthen the large muscles (Geometry), but also the stabilizer muscles (Concentration).  Are you doing the same drill over and over again?  If so, think about whether or not you’re getting the most out of your practice and maybe mix it up a bit.

I came across an interesting Blog post mentioning Grockit that asks a great question about test prep.

Here is the the question asked in the post and, below it, the comment I posted on his Blog.

Che: my question is, "when can you justify paying thousands or even
hundreds of dollars for getting taught how to do well on standardized
exams?"  Isn’ it all about practicing and time management?  Sure, I
guess there are some techniques that might help you with POE, but can’t
you learn that on your own by purchasing one of the myriad of
test-prep. books out there?

Here is my response.  Comment below to tell us what YOU think.

Farb: Here are my two cents.  The GMAT and many other standardized are about
skills based learning.  Improving your Basketball game is the same.  In
skills based learning, practice and time management are critical
factors. In addition, another aspect of skills based learning is
breaking down the set of skills required into smaller learning sets,
mastering the smaller parts and building them up into the larger
skills.  For example, a standard Basketball drill is to lie on your
back and with one hand shoot the ball straight up into the air and
catch it with that same hand.  While nobody would do that in a game,
and one would be hard pressed to discover the usefulness of that drill
on ones own, it is a typical drill to learn in Basketball practice.
Without a coach to teach it to you and watch you and adjust your skill
set, you are left re-inventing the wheel.  The GMAT is the same.  When
a student gets a question wrong, it is more important to adjust what
they were doing than to simply show them the correct solution.
Juggling the mental acrobatics of self actualization and re-learning
Geometry is not the most efficient means of learning for most people.
When you think about it, humans have been learning from each other for
as long as there have been humans.  We’ve been learning by ourselves in
a room with a book for a less than 1% of our time on Earth.  I give
human teachers a few more decades before the robots take over.

Russell Ackoff, aka. The Man With The Plan (Ok, I’m the only person that calls him that.), has put out another expose on Management and, so far, it’s not only insightful but fun as hell to read.  The book is called f-laws: 13 Sins of Management.  The book is free so I’ve attached it here for download.  Please read and share.  Some interesting things about the book…

1.   The book has an interesting organization and layout.  To quote the book…

On every left-hand page we’ve printed Ackoff and (Herbert J.) Addison’s f-Law with their commentary. Opposite, you’ll find (Author) Sally Bibb’s reply. In each case, we’ve retained their spelling, punctuation and ‘voice’. 

2.   This free book is good on its own, but it is also a teaser to Management f-Laws: How organizations really work a collection of 80 f-Laws from the same authors available from Triarchypress

3.   There is a competition mentioned at the end of this book.  The competition is to come up with, and submit, f-laws.  The best one will be chosen to receive an award from Ackoff and Bibb.

4.   And lastly, here is an example of one of the f-laws

Overheads, slides and power point projectors are not visual aids to managers.  They transform managers into auditory aids to the visuals.

Here is another link to download the book.  Enjoy.