I just got a copy of Peter Schwartz’s book The Art of the Long View on the recommendation of Brooks Jordan. It’s about scenario planning and contingent thinking. I’m looking forward to reading it even if Condi Rice said this today:
“It’s bad policy to speculate on what you’ll do if a plan fails when you’re trying to make a plan work.”
I’ve written before about my friend Josh who is doing good defending Bahranian’s detained at Guantanamo by our commander-in-chief. His client Jumah al-Dossari has an op-ed in the LA Times that was pulled together from letters he’s sent to his lawyers.
Here’s a passage from his letters:
At Guantanamo, soldiers have assaulted me, placed me in solitary confinement, threatened to kill me, threatened to kill my daughter and told me I will stay in Cuba for the rest of my life. They have deprived me of sleep, forced me to listen to extremely loud music and shined intense lights in my face. They have placed me in cold rooms for hours without food, drink or the ability to go to the bathroom or wash for prayers. They have wrapped me in the Israeli flag and told me there is a holy war between the Cross and the Star of David on one hand and the Crescent on the other. They have beaten me unconscious.What I write here is not what my imagination fancies or my insanity dictates. These are verifiable facts witnessed by other detainees, representatives of the Red Cross, interrogators and translators.
5 years in Guantanamo, with no end in sight. We’re holding him there, not Pinochet or Suharto or Pot. No charges, no contact, no hope.
If I die, please remember that there was a human being named Jumah at Guantanamo whose beliefs, dignity and humanity were abused. Please remember that there are hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo suffering the same misfortune. They have not been charged with any crimes. They have not been accused of taking any action against the United States.Show the world the letters I gave you. Let the world read them. Let the world know the agony of the detainees in Cuba.
We must resist this war and the unlawful practices that hang off it like dangling electrodes. Speak up. Say no to your representatives, say no to the media, speak up. Enough with this madness.
I am currently experiencing flaky login success with Salesforce.com. The Dataloader failed on login, and logins to the website failed even when I was successful in using a database on the na4 server. It’s been going on for about 5 minutes. The trust site shows all greens…
Update: While the trust site still reports no problems, I think Salesforce.com is having problems with their single-sign-on system. Once logged in to Salesforce.com, I’m able to use the system, but if I try to log in I’m getting flakiness–sometimes in sometimes not. An integration running on servers outside my control (though also in Seattle) are experiencing problems logging in as well. So different locations using different log in methods are both having problems. Anyone seeing similar behavior?
By the way, the 3rd-party integration I’m using hasn’t fine-tuned their notification system, so I’m getting an email every 30 seconds that Salesforce.com is unavailable. That’s fun.
Update: Here’s a work around for logging in when the single sign on system isn’t behaving: log on directly to your instance at https://na4.salesforce.com/. You’ll have to insert your own na number. You’re most likely on na1, na2, na3 or na4.
I wrote the other day about how when interacting with people, good listening can often make problem solving unnecessary. Ed Batista wrote today about some key points to making relationships work. It reminded me of another insight given to me by the Becoming Parents Program–notice and avoid escalation.
When you’re talking about your relationship with another person (spouse, coworker, anyone really), comments will be made that aren’t received as flattering. Some examples:
You get the point. These comments may be valid–maybe I did promise to get the database done by today–or they may be misguided. Either way there are two ways to respond to comments that you perceive as challenging. You can get to the bottom of the issue and talk about it, or you can escalate.
Escalation can be thought of as the comment that starts, “Oh yeah? Well you did ______!” It is an offensive response to a perceived criticism. I didn’t get your database done? Well, you never call me back when I leave messages! So there!
Escalation does not lead to resolution. My wife and I now call each other on escalation when we see the other doing it. Just noticing it and calling it out has caused us to stop doing it most of the time. And that’s led to much more fruitful discussions, without big hairy arguments.
So notice your response when other people make comments you think are critical of you. Did you escalate? Did that help strengthen your relationship with the other person, or did it harm it? And remember, never be critical of your database guy.
At the end of 2006 I read Critical Mass by Philip Ball. It’s an award winning book (that has tons of reviews online) about how the tools of the science of physics have been used to look at human systems. I was a biology major in college and have always loved science and the scientific method. Ball tells a fascinating history of how science has been looking at “non-scientific” questions of human behavior for centuries.
Critical Mass was a riveting read. Fascinating work has been done in studying the economy with statistical-physics-based tools. Turns out the economy is complex. But the most interesting part of Critical Mass is how research has been looking into what that complexity looks like.
Economists have been talking about the business cycle just about as long as capitalism has been around. It’s the periodic up and down of the economy–boom and bust. The word cycle is pretty disingenuous–no one has been able to identify any pattern in the ups and downs. There is no way to predict what the economy will do tomorrow, and there is also no way to predict the size of change from day to day. But it’s not random, either. Turns out the economy appears to be in “self-organized criticality”. It is stable, but continually on the edge of major change. It appears to be like a pile of sand with new sand grains dropping on to it. Will the next sand grain add gently to the pile or cause an avalanche of thousands or millions of grains? It’s impossible to tell.
Self-organized criticality is a fascinating concept that’s being seen all over nature and society. It explains why things can seem incredibly boring and then change overnight, only to become boring again.
Another cool point in Critical Mass is that these complex systems which are impossible to predict can be modeled in a computer. Researchers have been able to create computer models that result in these self-organized critical systems. These models aren’t the real world, but they look like the real world. More amazing is that these crazy, unpredictable, real-world-looking systems can be faked with just a few simple rules. Turns out it may be that the most complex social interactions and intractable problems really arise from just a few rules of human behavior. Those rules may be understandable, and that could help us better understand the interactions we see.
I found the book changed the way I view the world and think about social interactions and systems. Plus I really love well-written science books. Telling a technical story in a compelling way is hard to do and watching a master like Ball is a joy. For similar mastery of the genre also check out John McFee and my favorite science book ever, Bascom’s out of print Waves and Beaches.
I mentioned earlier that Winter ‘07 has more changes than I’ll be able to incorporate any time soon. But as my first customer site was upgraded yesterday I found there were some quick wins that took almost no time at all:
So just like that, in 10 minutes, I have forced my users to create new Contacts only in the way I want them to, and I’m tightening down how they create Opportunities–about 2 hours of work and I’ll have that completely done as well.
This is incredibly important. Enforcing business practices is what good CRM is all about, and without data quality eveything can fall apart. The inability to lock down how Users entered data has been a real drawback of Salesforce.com to date. But no more. They now give me the control I need and make it easy to implement.
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