21st Century Skills & the University:
“They need to be agile, creative problem solvers who draw their knowledge from multiple perspectives both domestic and global, who approach the world with empathy, and who are ready to act with others to improve the quality of life for all.
“Another name for these graduates is democratic citizens.”
A National Call for Action: A Crucible Moment
National Association of Colleges and Employers: Ranked List of Important Candidate Skills and Qualities
1. Ability to work in a team structure
2. Ability to verbally communicate with persons inside and outside the organization
3. Ability to make decisions and solve problems
4. Ability to obtain and process information
5. Ability to plan, organize, and prioritize work
6. Ability to analyze quantitative data
7. Technical knowledge related to the job
8. Proficiency with computer software programs
9. Ability to create and/or edit written reports
10. Ability to sell or influence others
Job Outlook 2012 Survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (the full report, unfortunately is almost $50 for non-members)
“I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the conditions, promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man.”
Thomas Jefferson to Cornelius Camden Blatchly 1822
I have to credit Ken O’Donnell for assembling the above quotes (the cited material from the talk is available on Google docs if you click the link on his About page.
Why is service design important?
According to one IBM report, today more than 70 percent of the U.S. labor force is engaged in service delivery. New technology has enabled internationally tradable services. We are at a tipping point. A huge portion of the economy is now focused on knowledge-based information services. I believe that as we shift to this service-centered society, it won’t be good enough to view services from a purely management or operations-based perspective. Companies will need to turn to service design and innovation to differentiate themselves in increasingly competitive markets and to create opportunities that address new challenges in the service sector.
How is designing a service different than designing a product?
When designing a product, much of the focus is on mediating the interaction between the person and the artifact. Great product designers consider more of the context in their design. In service design, designers must create resources that connect people to people, people to machines, and machines to machines. You must consider the environment, the channel, the touchpoint. Designing for service becomes a systems problem and often even a system of systems challenge. The elements or resources that designers need to create to mediate the interactions must work on all these levels and at the same time facilitate connections that are deeply personal, open to participation and change, and drop-dead stunning.
(link)
Bringing design thinking to health care services will enable the creation of customer-centered innovations for health care and provide the skills needed to explore new organizations, business models, and health care service delivery.
Shelly Everson, School of Design @ Carnegie Mellon University
Core concepts of design thinking in the health care context:
Understanding
Integration
Openness
Attention
Exploration
Envisioning
-Shelly Everson, School of Design @ Carnegie Mellon University
Explanation of design thinking concepts as applied to health care services:
Understanding (in the small and large) a focus on deeply understanding people’s expressed and latent needs viewed in the context of broader social, economic, and technical trends.
Integration the ability to organize and integrate disparate information into something many stakeholders–with different viewpoints–believe is better.
Openness fearless with regard to listening to another person
or learning from another discipline or division’s perspective
Attention respect for emotion and its importance in driving rational choice and satisfaction.
Exploration letting creative extremes take you into ever richer solutions spaces.
Envisioning leaps of faith as to what might work and creating quick, tangible examples of it,
while being unafraid to discard design options along the way.
-Shelly Everson, School of Design @ Carnegie Mellon University
3 Big Needs:
New methods for modeling customer experience.
New models for skilling everyday people to become active participants in their care.
Innovative prototyping for exploring new healthcare service delivery systems
-Shelly Everson, School of Design @ Carnegie Mellon University
You can learn more about design thinking in the medical context at the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation here.
Service design is part of the emerging fields known as design thinking & social innovation. Here is an example of the service design process:
Finding out and learning
Learning about clients, contexts, the service provider, & providing insights.
Giving strategic direction
Strategic and analytic tasks the that help identify, plan, set, review, & analyze and give project direction.
Developing concepts
Developing relevant, innovative ideas and concepts. Creating solutions
Selecting the best
Selecting ideas and combining concepts. Evaluating results and solutions.
Enabling understanding
Sensualization and mapping. Making concepts tangible, showing future possibilities, and giving overview.
Making it happen
Implementing and delivery. Providing guidelines and plans.
Based on Practical Access to Service Design
Suggested Readings
Selected Bibliography for Design Thinking in Management from Richard Buchanan & Fred Collopy
Readings will be assigned from time to time and distributed in class or placed on the class Blackboard site.
The following books are recommended for your study during and after the course. Life is long. Learn to read widely.
Matteson, Michael T. & John M. Ivancevich, eds. Management and Organizational Behavior Classics.
Shafritz, Jay M. & J. Steven Ott, eds. Classics of Organization Theory. Natemeyer, Walter E. & Jay S. Gilberg, eds. Classics of Organizational Behavior.
Design, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation
Boland, Richard J. & Fred Collopy, eds. Managing as Designing.
Buchanan, Richard & Victor Margolin, eds. Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies.
Diller, Steve, Nathan Shedroff, & Darrel Rhea. Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences.
Drucker, Peter F. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Martin, Roger, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive
Advantage. Pine, B. Joseph & James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work is Theater & Every
Business a Stage.
Schon, Donald A., The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action.
Verganti, Roberto, Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean.
Management & Organization Theory Drucker, Peter F. The Practice of Management. ________. Concept of the Corporation. George, Claude S. The History of Management Thought. [Excellent brief history]
March, James & Herbert Simon. Organizations.
Senge, Peter M., The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.
Wren, Daniel A. The History of Management Thought. [More detailed and sophissticated than Claude S. George’s history, but also more academic and theoretic in emphasis, minimizing some practically important figures.]
Economics Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
Visualization
Buxton, Bill. Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design.
Harris, Robert L. Information Graphics: Visual Tools for Analyzing, Managing, and Communicating: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference.
Horn, Robert E. Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century. Hyerle, David. Visual Tools for Constructing Knowledge. [Useful overview of tools] Novak, Joseph D. & D. Bob Gowin. Learning How to Learn. [Highly recommended]
General Themes Whitbeck, Caroline. Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research.
You can find the rest of the syllabuses here from the re-thinking the MBA book from the Harvard Business School (Buchanan also sees design entrepreneurship as important in addition to design as management or vice versa).
10 Things I’ve Learned to Be True: Novogratz
1. Dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth.
2. Neither grants nor markets alone will solve the problems of poverty.
3. Poverty is a description of someone’s economic situation, it does not describe who someone is.
4. We won’t succeed in the long term without cultivating local leaders, local money, and strong local communities.
5. Great people, every time, no exceptions.
6. Great technology alone is not the answer.
7. If failing is not an option, you’ve ruled out success as well.
8. Governments rarely invent solutions, but they can scale what works.
9. There is no currency like trust, and there are no shortcuts to earning it.
10. Patient capital investing is built upon a system of values; it is not a series of steps to be followed.
You can read the full report here which explains her methodology and philosophy for BOP social change. [Note: its a PDF download]
Here is a quick list of questions which might help you make a decision between competing organizations. In order to think about value in non-profit organizations you have to think about it like an investment–because thats exactly what it is. What are you investing in?
1. the people
2. the community
3. the methodology & systems
4. results
How do you best check how you are investing in these areas?
Credibility of Organization:
Do I know the person running or working at the organization? How long have I known the person? *
Have I seen and heard the stories of real people effected by their programs?
Impact Evaluation & Data Transparency for Results:
Can they track results? Do they track results?
Are they transparent about results?
Can they provide data input & output (ie effectiveness and/or impact evaluation)?
Do they have a track record of success?
Are they a high impact organization? Is there a big ripple effect?
Goals, Objectives & Personal Sync:
Do I have multiple goals for my investment?
There may be better ways to evaluate organization….but I though these questions could be focused into 3 to 4 core questions for each individual–and provide a credible and effective criteria for impact investment in non-profit organizations. I hope this list can help you provide a criteria to increase the impact of your investments. I’ve also included this article on evaluating nonprofit organizations which I published earlier on Compassion in Politics.
* This is not to discourage investment in overseas organization–but just to think through those decisions to ensure you are working with a credible organization. I primarily am interested in avoiding political orgs/non-profit orgs that are basically sales letter driven but can’t effectively demonstrate impact, transparency, data, or credibility.
Fifteen reasons neuroscience can’t prove absolute determinism or destroy free will
“We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”
— Stephen Fry
1. Influence versus control distinction lost on scientists. This distinction is important (and much of the neuroscience and philosophical theory from determinists around free will likely can’t tell the full scope of the nuance). Further, to suggest that Da Vinci, Einstein, Bach, Lincoln, and the rest of the heros of history are just molecules bouncing around and don’t have meaningful selves….seems to belie both history and fundamental notions of rationality and common sense.
2. Burden of proof on the scientists or philosophers who suggest we are 100% determined, with no meaningful free choice or agency. How much 10%, 25, 50, 75, 85, 95, 100% influenced/controlled by external forces? (how many types of human behavior can we predict? how credible or reliable are those predictions?)
3. Question begging–science isn’t meant to find agency (this is huge–aka the data don’t prove anything about agency)
4. Not mutual exclusive to have atoms bouncing around and for those same atoms to have free will. Like seeing a ship and assuming things about the engine room or the captains chambers without seeing, hearing, and feeling the experience first hand.
5. Determinism destroys ethics and personal responsibility. This is not only meaningful for our notions of retribution and punishment, but also our internal capacity to deal with the world. Without a system of punishment and reward–and one thats “worked” for 2000+ years–we’re left with cultural, social, and personal anarchy.
6. Your studies are flawed. Ask Alfred Mele. And there are many models of human behavior short of absolute determinism (chart here, which emphasizes a high burden of proof for absolute determinists).
7. Your conclusions are flawed. They fit the data like bad suits. The map doesn’t fit the territory (also see #1 and #3). If anything they prove that the universe works in a cause and effect way. Also Thomas Kuhn in the “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” answers your argument (its sometimes difficult for 2 worldview modes to dialog).
8. Quantum mechanics answers your misguided neurobiology arguments.
9. Performative contradiction. The act of science is an act of free will.
10. Determinism is a no-win solution. Free will is just better. You have to act like free will exists–its best for action, sanity, purpose, meaning, ethics, and everything human. Humans without prioritization and meaning can’t function (its almost humans without math).
11. Determinism is non-falsifiable. (similar to are we in a dream….as such its not a productive discussion. Or for instance, you could use the allegory of the fish in a stream and have the fish project what they think is outside the stream. this mirrors the boat metaphor ).
12. Motivational & Biases [worldview bias]:
a. money
b. control
c. media and book sales
d. publish or perish
e. agnosticism, atheism, or need to prove the lack of a self or a soul.
13. You give too much credit to science and underestimate the ability of other disciplines to create knowledge. This unicausal framework (particularly when wedded with the bad suit metaphor) isn’t a good way to try to address the most important questions–of human value and sacredness. Plus its toolbox is limited. Would you use a woodworkers tools to attempt to perform mental health or medical health? Generally, in 99% of cases thats probably a bad idea (nails, hammers, and screwdrivers aren’t appropriate or even optimal for solving these problems–and at a bare minimum any solution would come from a fusion of ideas and knowledge–not just carpenter knowledge. My guess is many engineers profit from expanding their wings beyond just the sciences for knowledge, insight, and perspective.)
14. Personal experience verifies the self and choice. The contrast between choice and control and addiction is rather distinct. Disregarding this experience based data is a terrible error, because its the most verifiable. (the feeling and experience of free will is ethically important. and we understand ourselves as selfs. whether you can chart that out like a chemistry chart doesn’t deny that we are selves, and meaningfully so)
15. Brain mapping & fMRI studies are imperfect and flawed (fMRI stands for functional magnetic imaging).
a) Measures indirectly–oxygenation flow–not the actual brain firings:
fMRI is a decidedly indirect measure of brain activity, as it does not measure “thinking” processes or even neural changes directly, but merely oxygenated blood flow. Scientists have even discovered that blood flow through astrocytes, glial cells that are thought to play a largely supportive role in the brain, are the main source of the fMRI signal, not neurons. In other words, the BOLD signal may not be the unquestionably valid representation of cognitive processes that researchers sometimes claim it is.
(Source).
b) Suffer from circular logic:
The problem arises when researchers then go on to provide their readers with a quantitative measure of the correlation magnitude measured just within the voxels they have pre-selected for having a high correlation. This two-step procedure is circular: it chooses voxels that have a high correlation, and then estimates a high average correlation. This practice inflates the correlation measurement because it selects those voxels that have benefited from chance, as well as any real underlying correlation, pushing up the numbers.
(Jonah Lehrer in Scientific American from the article “Voo Doo Correlations in Neuroscience” available here–to be fair the truth may lie a bit in between)
c) For instance, the fMRI data doesn’t meet lie detection standards yet:
Elizabeth Phelps, a neuroscientist at New York University, agreed there is little evidence that fMRI is more reliable than previous lie-detection methods.
“When you build a model based on people in the laboratory, it may or may not be that applicable to someone who has practiced their lie over and over, or someone who has been accused of something,” Phelps said. “I don’t think that we have any standard of evidence that this data is going to be reliable in the way that the courts should be admitting.”
(Link)
d) Its application to criminal justice may be more hype than not (particularly with current crude science in its early stages) (link):
Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather he determines himself whether he give in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.
By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. Therefore, we can predict his future only within the large framework of statistical survey referring to a whole group; the individual personality, however, remains unpredictable. The basis of any prediction would be represented by biological, psychological, or sociological conditions. Yet one of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them. Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.
What he becomes–within the limits of endowment and environment–he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. Therefore, we can predict his future only within the large framework of statistical survey referring to a whole group; the individual personality, however, remains unpredictable. The basis of any prediction would be represented by biological, psychological, or sociological conditions. Yet one of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them. Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.
What he becomes–within the limits of endowment and environment–he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
Victor Frankl, Professor in Neurology and Psychology
Using life experience, including living in 4 concentration camps as his evidence
Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 131 to 134
What did Einstein think of those who (mis)applied his theory to ethics?
“Philosophers play with the word like a child with a doll…It does not mean that everything in life is relative.”
Stanford professors Chip and Dan Heath point out in Switch:
“In fact, its actual meaning was essentially the opposite. The theory was designed to explain how the laws of physics are identical in every frame of reference. From Einstein’s view, things’ don’t look unpredictable; they look surprisingly orderly.”
*David Bodanis, E=Mc 2 A Biography of the Worlds Most Famous Equation
The following is a critique of Lisa Randalls recent book “Knocking on Heavens Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World” which is materialist & agnostic/neo-atheist in nature (although she does admit that religion serves a purpose). Lisa Randall is an author and professor of physics at Harvard University which is available here and written by Emile Piscitelli a professor of philosophy from northern Virginia:
Science is not philosophy. I have no problem generally with Lisa Randall’s explanations concerning the state of knowledge in the field of physics today. It is her field of expertise. I have no problem with her claim that empirical science is about the material universe. My problem is with her jump into the area of philosophy or as R.G. Collingwood put it: the field of absolute presuppositions.
Proposition: The material universe is all there is to reality. That is a metaphysical presupposition not a scientific question. Science cannot resolve it.It is true that empirical scientific knowledge is restricted to conclusions that are dependent on sensible consequences. Scientific explanations are ruled by the canons of parsimony and sensible consequences. But if there are realities that do not produce sensible consequences, then they elude empirical scientific knowledge. Empirical science is restricted to first level questions and cannot deal with second level issues like What constitutes scientific knowledge? In what sense does it attain the real?
Proposition: Science can refute the objection of reductionism by appealing to “scales” of explanations. The problem the criticism of reductionism makes explicit is the philosophical problem of what constitutes a THING which in turn is about different viewpoints not just different “sizes.” For example are the things physics investigates and explains the same things that biology investigates and explains? While living things are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry, the laws of biology are not reducible to more complicated laws of physics or chemistry because the sciences are determined by the viewpoint that they take on THINGS. A thing is a unity identity whole understood from a determinate point of view and is accessed through judgments based on evidence appropriate to the viewpoint of the science.
Proposition: Science and religion are opposed in principle. Is it true and in what sense? A philosophical question not a scientific one. When science is set up as the ultimate criteria of all knowledge, science becomes scientism, an ideology. Ideologies are forms of dogmatism. Science cannot answer questions concerning the existence or nature of God. They are philosophical or theological questions. For example if God is transcendent to the universe that does not imply God is external to it. External/Internal are not categories applicable to a Being that creates reality out of nothing and holds it in existence every moment. That proposition can be rejected as untrue because it lacks empirical evidence, but the quest for appropriate evidence cannot be explained by science without the explanation falling into a vicious circle or the fallacy of begging the question. If there is a transcendent being who accounts for why there is something rather than nothing or the mystery of existence and if such a being is said to be a cause, then its causality would transcend space and time. Does the universe depend for it’s existence on something beyond itself? Or is it ultimately unintelligible? That is not an argument from design which presupposes an intermundane version of causality. Why do human beings seek explanations if ultimately existence is no different than nothing and order is no different than chaos or total randomness? These are philosophical questions not scientific ones.
Proposition: Lisa Randall is a brilliant professor of physics who should stay within her expertise.
Granted. Her reference to scientists who are naive fundamentalists prove nothing concerning the conflict of science and religion. What makes humans religious is the fact that we cannot avoid the question of ultimacy: Is human existence a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing ultimately. If the answer is YES, then the atheist is taking a religious position.
In his biography of another great physicist Walter Isaacson’s description of Albert Einstein’s cosmic religion captures something of the assumptions of the first philosophers: “A spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble,” Einstein wrote. “In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort.”For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God’s existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the cosmos is comprehensible, that it follows laws, is worthy of awe. This is the defining quality of a “God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.” Einstein considered this feeling of reverence, this cosmic religion, to be the wellspring of all true art and science. It was what guided him. “When I am judging a theory,” he said, “I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such away.” It is also what graced him with his beautiful mix of confidence and awe..”
1. Category Power
2. Company Power
3. Market Power
4. Offer Power
5. Execution Power
This occurs at 3 levels:
Top = Vision
Middle = Strategy
Bottom = Execution
* They are all potentially relative to your competitive set or marketplace.
You can watch the full video here. Here is the short version of the video of Geoffry Moores talk at the Stanford Business School. (6 minutes versus 60 minutes)
1 University of Pennsylvania (The Wharton School) 321 173.08 USA
2 Duke University (The Fuqua School of Business) 241 125.72 USA
3 University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (Ross School of Business) 235 120.72 USA
4 New York University (Leonard N. Stern School of Business) 250 119.51 USA
5 Harvard University (Harvard Business School) 194 115.62 USA
6 University of Maryland at College Park (Robert H. Smith School of Business) 219 114.62 USA
7 University of Chicago (Booth School of Business) 213 113.98 USA
8 Stanford University (Graduate School of Business) 195 106.34 USA
9 Columbia University (Graduate School of Business) 209 99.79 USA
10 University of Texas at Austin (McCombs School of Business) 201 97.82 USA
11 University of Southern California (Marshall School of Business) 179 96.33 USA
12 Northwestern University (Kellogg School of Management) 184 95.29 USA
13 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan School of Management) 171 88.45 USA
14 Pennsylvania State University at University Park (Smeal College of Business) 153 76.50 USA
15 University of Texas at Dallas (School of Management) 142 74.99 USA
16 University of Minnesota at Twin Cities (Carlson School of Management) 153 74.53 USA
17 University of California at Los Angeles (Anderson School of Management) 140 71.64 USA
18 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (College of Business) 122 62.88 USA
19 University of California at Berkeley (Walter A. Haas School of Business) 121 61.92 USA
20 University of British Columbia (Sauder School of Business) 119 58.08 Canada
21 Arizona State University (W.P. Carey School of Business) 122 58.07 USA
22 Washington University at St. Louis (Olin School of Business) 109 57.73 USA
23 Indiana University at Bloomington (Kelley School of Business) 117 57.68 USA
24 Michigan State University (The Eli Broad College of Business) 119 56.64 USA
25 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler Business School) 123 56.13 USA
26 Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper School of Business) 114 55.98 USA
27 University of Florida (Warrington College of Business) 100 54.39 USA
28 Texas A&M University at College Station (Mays Business School) 116 53.88 USA
29 Emory University (Goizueta Business School) 108 53.78 USA
30 Ohio State University (Fisher College of Business) 123 53.14 USA
So far, Outliers is my favorite Malcolm Gladwell book and having the opportunity to listen to Gladwell read it gives a bit of extra-flavor. It focuses on themes of community (context), commitment (persistence), and luck in the journey towards excellence (success).
The top quick takeaways from Outliers in addition to J.C. Hewitt said, although with overlap:
• Daniel Levitan 10,000 hour rule for the development of expertise.
• The role of communities of practice and deliberative practice (Dr. Anders Ericcson)
• Education should take into account and group classes based on date (because thats a marker of maturity and educational attainment). Note: I think he only makes the case till age 10 or 12, because thats when things “level out” a bit.
• Extra-ordinary programs seem to be part of the special sauce, because they allow the individuals to put in that time and for a “…special time for practice.” [There is also a community of practice, mentorship, & exposure to modeling the experts are all argument to be had here.]
• Cultural difference in work ethic between East Asia and United States (and by extension anglo-centric Europe).
• KIPP Academy’s success proves that schools are doing their jobs. Issues of class cause poor students to lose their knowledge over the summer.
• Our notions of school reform should look away from the current model and to 1. increasing grit/persistence 2. increasing school day 3. education for kids during the summer (whether lengthening the school year or some other program like educational summer camp.
• Overall: Success = luck, timing, context/culture, & persistence over time (grit & resilience). Groups are absolutely critical to this concept.
Resources:
Outliers concept is very similar to positive deviance: http://www.positivedeviance.org/
Daniel Levitan & associated research on 10,000 rule: http://www.daveswhiteboard.com/archives/294
Deliberative Practice http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/08/six-keys-to-being-excellent-at.html
Communities of Practice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice
Grit and Education http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html?pagewanted=all
Dignity of the people, respect, and the value of fairness trump the ability to discriminate. Do property owners get to price discriminate too? $2 gas for the anglos, $4 gas for the African Americans, $6 gas for the African Africans, and $8 gas for all the other “brown people.” What if all the grocery store owners in a neighborhood were racist? Racism is a market distortion. It doesn’t belong. Thats what it means to be a citizen. Once you are a citizen, it means something–that you can’t take it away. That is what our 14th Amendment is all about. Our 14th Amendment is more important than Benjamins, your dime store collectibles and materialist chochkeys. How you treat people means something. The fundamental dignity of humans irrespective of race and age and geography is fundamental to what it means to be an American. You can’t tell the middle or lower castes in society they don’t deserve service because of an intrinsic part of their identity and biology (something they have no ability to change.) This is what makes America different than the Balkanization of Europe where racism is bubbling at the surface of human interactions. Hate and specifically hate for a race or a continent or a peoples….wasn’t something we would provide Constitutional cover for. Thats a principled legacy I’m glad to stand behind. Our character as a nation is something no money can purchase–especially to disparage another citizen….or human being.
*As a pre-empt-I obviously have problems which are presented by our national policy toward resident aliens, but I can’t do anything to change that in this comment on Quora (I have to deal with that reality).
**We did provide cover for it in the 1st Amendment, but arguably thats a different function.
“The new sciences (if we may call them that) focus our attention in a fresh way on the pervasive fact of patterning. In doing so they are dealing with something as fundamental as being itself, and not with just another gap that could conceivably be filled in by fresh scientific discoveries. After all, can we really separate the deep position of thing’s existence or ‘being’ from the fact of its patterning? For anything to exist at all would it not have to possess some degree of organizing structure? Without at least some internal ordering of its components could anything even have actuality? Our position, as articulated by Whitehead, is that things simply cannot exist without being ordered in a definite way. Indefiniteness would be equivalent to non-existence.”
John Haught, Science & Religion, p. 151
“Thus, the question scientists are asking today about why there is complexity in the universe is only a hair’s breath away from the theological question concerning why anything exists at all…The very possibility of doing science in the first place presupposes the fact of patterning as science’s field of exploration…science cannot by itself explain the naked fact of patterning. True, it is discovering complex designs that it never noticed before…But can scientists ask the very deep questions as to why there is any patterning at all and pretend that they are not thereby steering perilously close to metaphysics? And when they wonder why complex patterning has the features of discovery, emergence, adaptability, and interactivity, can there pursue such inquiry to the very end without making contact to theology?”
John Haught, Science & Religion, p. 151
“There is here no knockdown argument for design and purpose, but certainly there are strong hints of ultimate realities beyond the cosmos…One of the strongest hints, in our opinion, relates to the new understanding of the creativity of the cosmos, its capacity for so-called self organization…current science leads us to look for a new paradigm, a universe fraught with creativity in the direction of cooperative and organizational processes…there appears to be a continuity of organization into novel and increasingly complex structures and relationships throughout the spectrum of transition from stardust to thinking men…From a theological perspective it is indeed tempting to see this remarkable self-organizing tendency as an expression of the intimate nature of the Creator’s activity and identification with our universe.”
Evidence of Purpose: Scientists Discover the Creator, John Marks Templeton, p. 11-12
“Nature is nothing but the plan of some art, namely a divine one, put into things themselves, by which those things move towards a concrete end: as if the man who builds up a ship could give to the pieces of wood that they could move by themselves to produce the form of the ship.”
Thomas Acquinas, book 2, chapter 8, lectio 14, no. 268
* The above quotes can be found on pages 123, 155, and 156 of “The Mind of the Universe” by Mariano Arigas
** The author points out how this quote of Acquinas anticipates science’s recent discovery of self-organization.
———–
“The fact that this rich and complex variety emerges from the featureless inferno of the Big Bang, and does so as a consequence of laws of stunning simplicity and generality, indicates some sort of matching of means to end that has a distinct teleological flavor to it.
Davies, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Science, p. 46
“Goal directed behavior (in the widest sense of the word) is extremely widespread in the organic world; for instance, most activity connected with migration, food-getting, courtship, ontogeny, and all phases of reproduction is characterized by such goal orientation. The occurrence of goal-directed processes is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the world of living organisms.”
Ernst Mayr, Towards a New Philosophy of Biology, p. 45
“Holism, functionality, and cooperativity are finalist dimensions because they imply that different components collaborate to reach a common goal. These dimension were present in the ancient teleological worldviews, because they were easily perceived in living beings. They suffered an eclipse when the mechanistic worldview, attaining greater importance than they had before. Indeed, we now understand them much better….We can conclude that, from the point of view of the present scientific worldview, the existence of teleological dimensions of the world–not only in the biological level, but also in the physiochemical–is plain fact. Until now the state of sciences did not provide sufficient grounds for it; only the scientific progress of the last decades of the twentieth century has made it possible to reach this vantage point.”
Mariano Arigas, “Mind of the Universe” p. 130
1. Ego/Identity. Desire to be free from barriers or moral culpability (as well as the possible attendant feelings of guilt).
2. Lack of depth in either debate or philosophy education (including both logic, critical thinking, and nuance). They’ve had authorities in power use these memes and they repeat them. Its the equivalent of sound-bite or bumper sticker philosophy.
3. Modern worldviews (radical individualism and post-modernism) spread by a number of key societal vectors (TV, culture, music, the academy, etc..) which ignore the lessons of history both ethical (coersion is bad, violence is bad, and intentional killing and coersion are generally bad) and cultural (ie the lessons of the Romantics were still relevant in the Enlightenment era).
4. Cognitive dissonance. They haven’t fully thought out what a world where people actually believed that would look like (they don’t know what violence feels like or they’ve forgotten or intentially suppressed it via avoidance)
5. The failure to understand that relationships, trust, fairness, justice, and reciprocity have meaning and value.
6. Short hand rationalization for anti-social behavior. There isn’t anything per se wrong with the short hand, just that it can potentially be empty, hollow, and even heartless.
7. Seeming trendiness. Its a form of pseudo intellectualism.
Real job in communications (marketing/PR) + part time degree pursuit…
As someone who went straight from an undergraduate degree to a masters program, I might have done will to get some work experience under my belt if at all possible. If you can get a real gig, do the degree part time. If you can’t get a “real gig” or internship-type gig, do the degree full time.
Why this strategy bears other strategies by a long shot….
This strategy optimizes for experience, learning, and your level of debt. It also takes into account the inertia argument and the “if you don’t do it now, you won’t have time later.” Finally, it minimizes the risk and opportunity cost associated with the masters degree. If your family has money and they are willing to fund your education, it may be fine to go full time, but then hustle like there is no tomorrow to get a fantastic communications side-gig and/or internship during your downtime as well as your summer.
Second, pick a program which 1) has a national reputation 2) a track record of successful placements (ie they have a robust network) 3) practitioners, not just academics. This is incredibly important in PR ( in fact, 2 and 3 are likely more important than 1 ).
1. Sea Bisquit
2. Miracle
3. Secretariat
4. Pursuit of Happyness
5. Finding Neverland
The top nine ways to increase awareness about Bainbridge Graduate Institute:
1. Events. Hosting or sponsoring local eco-networking/eco-business events and speakers.
2. Publishing. A weekly column by one of your professors–ideally this would be both in print and digital form.
3. Speaking. Also, having your teachers/professors speak around at various events.
4. Awards.
5. Scholarship money to existing business owners.
6. Honorary positions.
7. Innovative programs and education models.
8. Partnerships.
9. Sponsorships.
Update:
I had some more ideas that might help provide strategic direction and insight:
1. Create a manifesto, a pledge, or the like. Partner with other organizations to provide additional content. Or perhaps a “State of the Union” of the green sustainability space.
2. Column in Fast Company, Business Week, Inc, and/or Huffington Post. Although you might be better served to target green, sustainability, and left-leaning publications. I’m not sure who your exact target audience (my guess is both business minded and green minded individuals–with perhaps an emphasis on the later). I don’t know how feature issues happen, but pitching that to one of the above publications might be interesting. I think there is a lot of info around green, but not all from a data driven perspective.
3. Partnership with SEA, B-Corporation, and other sustainability related organizations (not sure what that would look like, but certainly they are your allies in your mission and movement). They also have deep trust and relationships with your target audiences. Working with Net Impacts publication of their guide might be helpful. (ie an article insert about the value of a sustainability MBA which features you and perhaps other leading schools, so it tells a broad and balanced story about the issue, while offering readers of the Net Impact guide more insight). Same goes for the Aspen Institute.
4. Partner with other schools in your niche. Telling this story is important to your mission.
5. Business plan competition. Classic marketing for MBA schools. Reach out to other programs in both the typical MBA space as well as schools featured in the Net Impact Guide & the Beyond Gray Pinstripes guide. For instance, its a bit simplistic, but a $50k competition is just $5 k from 10 businesses or $10k from 5.
6. Be the go to organization in Seattle for Sustainability events.
7. Publish more data on the sustainability market (consulting, technology, and job markets) now and in the future.
8. Associate yourself with the top ideas, businesses, and thought leaders in the industry in a way that creates mutual value.
