Aesop’s “The Farmer and the Snake”*

Posted by jlubans on May 31, 2023  •  Leave comment (0)

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“ONE WINTER a Farmer found a Snake stiff and frozen with cold. He had compassion on it, and taking it up, placed it in his bosom. The Snake was quickly revived by the warmth, and resuming its natural instincts, bit its benefactor, inflicting on him a mortal wound. ‘Oh,’ cried the Farmer with his last breath, ‘I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel.’"

“The greatest kindness will not bind the ungrateful.”
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Recent events in the news
move me to repost, from May 30, 2014, this classic fable.
Humans have had it in for out slithery friends since the Garden of Eden.
Unfairly so, I would say.
When living in the southeastern USA on a large forested lot with much ivy ground cover we were always alert to copperheads lurking beneath the verdant cover.
Did I kill them?
No, when doing yard work I made plenty of noise and moved cautiously. Bridger, our wonder dog, never was bitten – she was too bright to poke her nose at a snake.
And, I like to think the snakes knew we were OK and meant them no harm.
Many neighbors annually went into a snake-panic and were all for their annihilation.
Fortunately, one neighbor, a herpetologist, offered to come gather up any sighted snake and release them into a nearby forest.
He knew snakes were very important creatures in our eco-cycles.
To return to the fable.
The fable’s snake betrays his Good Samaritan.
Is this really a betrayal or is it the snake being a snake?
In brief, nature or nurture?
If nature, what else do you expect when you bring a poisonous snake into your house?
If nurture, then yes, this would be betrayal.
Betrayal, among humans, comes in many forms.
A person you promoted and defended at work turns on you, without explanation.
A reasonable young person goes to college and comes back a brain-washed radical who then wants to burn down everything that paid for his/her education. That’s nurture.
And, that is the most hurtful kind of betrayal.
You put your trust in that person and now they seek to harm you.
In my first iteration of this fable I cited a professional associate with a reptilian reputation. A predator at convention "happy hours", he would use his position as the head of a major public organization to entice young professionals into “friendships” with promises of employment. Fortunately, he was often “falling-down-drunk” so he rarely consummated those so-called friendships.
Was his behavior nature or nurture? Nurture, for me. Most jerks are products of nurture rather than nature.

*Source: AESOP'S FABLES By Aesop Translated by George Fyler Townsend (probably from this edition): “Three hundred and fifty Aesop's fables”. Chicago, Belford, Clarke & Co., 1886.
Available at Gutenberg.

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My book, Fables for Leaders, is available. Click on the image and order up!

And, for the snake bitten corporate worker, there’s,
Buy here.
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© Copyright commentary by John Lubans 2023


@Copyright all commentary by John Lubans 2014 and 2023

Bees and Brainstorming

Posted by jlubans on May 22, 2023  •  Leave comment (0)

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“Office Brainstorms Are a Waste of Time.”
That’s the headline for a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. Instead, “giving workers alone time could yield more innovation than getting everyone in a room”.
It depends.
If your work group is all on board, thoughtful, and trusting of each other, I can see where good ideas get even better in a group discussion setting.
If your group features sore losers or high-fiving winners or is unable or unwilling to think about options, or harbors mistrust, then the brainstorm indeed will be a waste of time.
In the 147 comments to the WSJ article some individuals claim they make better decisions than any group. I call them soloists.
Here’s an example:
“After my 36 successful years in corporate America where group think and collaboration was typically mandatory (and very ineffective and unproductive,) I am glad to see that someone has finally stated the obvious!
While branded a "lone wolf" on occasion, much more often than naught, my individual ideas/strategies produced better results (i.e. higher revenue, higher profit, greater share and high levels of client satisfaction) than an(y) idea initiated in a collaborative manner.”
Narcissism? Maybe not.
Soloists – including me – may well be on target much of the time but, now and then, we mis-fire or miss the bull’s eye by a mile.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize there’s a positive need to allow other ideas and judgements to get a fair hearing.
When that’s missing, this unhappy brainstormer's comment will resonate for many:
“I loathe (brainstorming), partly because of the blowhards with little ideas, but mostly because those same people are very quick to denigrate others’ ideas. I’m basically shy and when they do that, it makes me keep my ideas to myself.”
For me, the most disappointing part of b-storming is the final step – the act of choosing democratically among the options listed out for action.
I’ve been part of what seems like a very successful listing out of options and then we falter; we fail to make choices. We have a long list but appear unable to “separate the wheat from the chaff”. We run out of time and enthusiasm and that inevitably leads to dismay with the whole process.
We fail, resoundingly, at the winnowing and threshing out among the listed ideas.
Another wasted brainstorming session!
Bees Do It Better.
No, not a bumper sticker for anti-brainstorming but a collaborative lifeline for us from “humanity’s greatest friend among the insects”, the honey bee.
When I teach about team collaboration and the need to hear from those who rarely speak up, I offer up an example from when I was working with MBA students as a group facilitator.
We’d taken a large group into the forest and were using a variety of games to underline what they’d been learning about team work.
One of the games had my group stymied.
It involved about 20 or so students and required them to extract something from the middle of a circle.
Each person was at least ten feet away from the center. A couple of the students were adamant on what to do and were vociferous in letting the group know their’s was the best and only feasible idea.
My co-facilitator and I saw this as an opportunity to see what happens when the loudest voices get shut down, so we muted the two students.
We told them they were not to speak for the duration of the event and then turned to the group and opened up the discussion.
As luck would have it, the quietest and most thoughtful-looking of the group finally spoke up.
To the chagrin of the two muted students (biting their tongues and red in the face) her idea was implemented by the group and the object retrieved.
The muted students may have learned something, or nothing.
But, we had made clear to the other students that those participants who don’t speak up all the time may have something of value to offer and it is a leader’s role to help get those ideas out.
Bees, when selecting a new hive, display some fundamentals for effective group decision making:
1. No dominating leader
2. A strong incentive to make a good decision (survival)
3. One problem to solve.
4. An agreed upon process.
5. Use “quorum responses” for cohesion, accuracy and speed.
(A quorum response is an antidote to endless debate. Once a threshold number is reached among bees for where to nest, that is a quorum and those bees that have yet to be persuaded, now stop advertising and sign on to the chosen nest. When humans require buy in among a group, one way to winnow down the ideas is to do periodic anonymous straw polls. As participants cluster around ideas, the hold-outs begin to concede.
Research shows that in the bees’ life and death decision about a new nesting site, the winner is often, impressively so, the very best site for the new hive!)
The bees’ quorum response technique might well have rescued the several brainstorming sessions, in which I was a participant, that went nowhere.

N. B. I write this from Latvia, a land of bee keepers and farmers. Left alone, Latvians would all be farmers and live off the land with honey and beer in abundance.

_______________
My book, Fables for Leaders – with plenty of bee wisdom - is available. Click on the image and order up!

And, for the democratic worker bee, there’s,
Buy here.
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© Copyright commentary by John Lubans 2023

3AM Reading

Posted by jlubans on May 13, 2023  •  Leave comment (0)

Adjusting to a ten-hour time difference keeps me up at night, or what my brain thinks is day.
I turn to e-books to bring on a doze, but to no avail.
In the process I come across some mighty good writing. Most recently, several mysteries by A. Fielding*.
Who was he/she? No one knows. Some suggest an Agatha Christie connection, but no literary detective has yet to lift the veil.
At one time A. Fielding was as popular as Dame Christie, but over time has faded into obscurity.
Regardless, here is a bit I came across at 3AM that is purely lyrical, as keen as something written by that master scene setter, P.G. Wodehouse:

“Pointer (the chief inspector and lead detective) and Wilmot (a crime journalist) walked to the house. The sun was shining.
A rather apologetic sun, as though begging spectators not to ask
too much.
To remember that this was November—and England.
His rays, faint and pale, seemed to cool rather than warm.
Yet their touch spelled beauty. They brought out the thrushes' song.
They lifted the lark.
They set free the strain of wren and robin in a clump of
evergreen beside Richmond Bridge.
Plaintive and sweet notes.
Joyous and pearly.
A blind man might have thought it spring, so mild was the day.
But the trees knew better.
They were only waiting for the coming of a wind with which to wrestle.
Like giants stripped for a fight, their old clothes, the withered
leaves, lying in tumbled heaps below them, they could now give
back as good as they got.
Beautiful to look at, fine and firm, they swayed aloft.
Concerned solely with their own affairs, till
the burden of giving shade and shelter should….”

And, then in the midst of all the clue sifting and red herring laying, A. Fielding offers up an author’s rationale for reading mysteries, why people can’t get enough:
“It's the charm of the word, of course,” mused Wilmot, “that's why people read detective stories. For that and—the love of the chase."
"The love of justice," Pointer spoke for once with real
warmth, "it's because they satisfy that—I suppose the
deepest passion of every one's heart, but a criminal's—that
people read, and write, detective novels."
"I read 'em for facts, helpful facts," Haviland (an assistant to Pointer) volunteered.
"Really, some of the dodges these writers get hold of—"
"You're wrong. Both of you." Wilmot, as usual, spoke with
certainty (as absolute as any Chat-Bot spewing derived conclusions). "The same thing makes people read, that makes you, Haviland, a policeman, and you, Pointer, a detective. And that is for the sake of the thrill. Of the manhunt. There's nothing else in the world quite like it.
Why, even I begin to get the whiff of it in my nostrils."
Pointer was silent. Only his friends knew the Chief
Inspector's dislike of that common phrase, and point of view.
To himself, Pointer was but a keen, impartial keeper of the open
road, the path of law and order. The only path by which
civilisation, to his mind, could march on
. (Emphasis added.)

*Both excerpts From A. Fielding, "The Footsteps That Stopped," American edition, James A. Knopf, New York, 1926

How the (Fortune) Cookie Crumbles

Posted by jlubans on May 03, 2023  •  Leave comment (0)

20150921-worms_turn.jpg
Caption: Vengeful chat-bots confront their distraught creator*.

Do you remember Singularity? Not long ago, IT people were reverential about the word, often prefacing it with “The”.
“The singularity refers to the point in time when the development of robotics and intelligent machines will become uncontrollable. In this scenario, artificial intelligence will be able to surpass the brain power of humans and will be able to evolve on its own.”
Parenthetically, IT’s hubris is revealed in its use of a term deliberately aligned with the far more weighty and time-tested terms of subsidiarity and solidarity!
Recently we’ve heard a lot about AI; not only will you lose your job but you may be enslaved or eradicated by the bots.
Karel Capek’s 1921 play, R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots) ends just so, but ironically, with some aspiration among the surviving robots to become more human a la a Garden of Eden re-do.
Most of those making these dire predictions do not see it as exactly imminent; rather the end date is from a few years to a couple of decades off.
But doomsday is nigh, be assured.
Indeed, take a look at the fortune cookie industry. It is now divided between those saying only humans can write fortunes and those who are all on board with chat bots spewing out fortunes like “Beware—the machines are coming for your job.”
Permit me to put on my tinfoil hat.
AI has already begun it’s elimination of humans.
Take a look at recent job layoffs for the IT industry. “More than 140,000 U.S. tech employees were laid off in 2022. As of March 2023, more than 100,000 U.S. tech employees have lost their jobs this year.”
That’s nearly a quarter million people without jobs.
Some will bounce back into lower paying work, others will endure the vicissitudes of unemployment. Some may not.
Were these workers in fact redundant, never needed? Who’s making the decisions and does AI play a role?
I now remove my tinfoil hat.
As early as the mid 1990s I was acutely aware of AI’s insinuation into my field of work, research libraries.
In 2015, I looked back on it in my essay “The World’s Information Desk”.
By that time libraries of all sorts, not just research libraries, had lost to Google well over a quarter to a third of their information desk business.
Back in 2000, Google’s co-founder, Sergy Brin had some lofty aspirations: “In five years I hope (search engines) will be able to return answers, not just documents.” “… Google will be your interface to all the world’s knowledge – not just web pages.”
Looking back, Mr. Brin does appear to have attained much of his target to become the World’s Information Desk.
For many years libraries were the only show in town. Often, we held a region’s unique copy of a book - only accessible through our card catalog - and if you needed help even with simple informational questions you came to or phoned the library.
Librarians were genuine intermediaries or gatekeepers.
With the introduction of e-resources libraries began to lose their monopoly on information.
Preceded by the World Wide Web experimentation of Mosaic, Yahoo and Google soon made information (and sometimes, answers) readily available to anyone with an Internet connection. One student observed back in 1998, “(The Internet’s) moved library resources to my desktop.”
So, how did libraries respond to this erosion of what was clearly the bread and butter of their business?
A colleague told me: “It seems like all we did (at her library) was to re-act to whatever came our way.” My colleague was yearning for action, not reaction.
So, how did leaders respond? Initially there was denial. As I said earlier I was one of a few who observed that the long lines at the reference desk were no more. Even though there had to be fewer questions along with less demand for our services, we continued to staff the desk as if nothing had changed.
When I did a simple calculation showing that the costs in answering those decreasing questions were now increasing, that still did not garner much support.
Or, maybe our denial was attributable to simply not knowing what to do, either at the service level or in the executive suite. In any case, I got the feeling back then that this was a taboo topic, only to be aired at some very real personal risk.
Let’s be clear.
I am not hyperbolizing the Internet’s role in information finding and using. It’s swell, up to a point. But, to test googling’s limits, type in a complex question.
Unless you intend to always keep life simple, you will not get instant answers to your questions. There’s an avuncular bit of advice passed on by bright college seniors to college freshmen: “befriend a librarian.”
That’s still a very good idea whether you are on or off campus. If libraries have lost the bread and butter piece of their business, they still have the main course – the meaty part. That’s the ability to help users navigate and find answers to complex questions.
Such was my thinking in 2015. Now in May of 2023 with predictions of imminent doom and gloom from AI and its chat bots, I am less than sure.
But, I am not hopeless. There is plenty of evidence that chat bots are less than stellar and that, now and then, they fail utterly.
Much of that failure may have something to do with IT people’s attitudes and that there’s some amount of biased data in the metaverse.
Anonymity among many internet users has led to some horribly tainted certainty in their “truth”. That bias and negative attitude is in much of the data in the metaverse.
The bot can’t figure it out – what’s legit, what’s biased, what’s fake, etc. - so will humans have a mediating role?
I hope so.

* Actually this is a still photo from Karel Capek’s R.U.R, 1921 which I referred to my blog in September of 2015, "I wish I was managing robots."

_______________
My book, Fables for Leaders – with more wisdom than in any fortune cookie - is available. Click on the image and order up!

And, for the human worker yet not made redundant by AI, there’s,
Buy here.
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© Copyright commentary by John Lubans 2023