Hands-on Electronics – Signal tracing a simple transmitter
Or, How not to be an appliance operator

Is ham radio still about electronics?  If you think so, then this posting is for you.

You may want to read our nearly related article on the Heathkit radios (Collecting Heathkit Models SB-101,102 & HW 100,101 ).  That posting contains a high level conceptual explanation of how  the transmit section of those radios work.  We think that the Heathkit folks missed an opportunity in the education market. 

Heathkit had a great platform in the SB and HW series of transceivers to serve as a course in electronics – learn as you build.  But that was not to be.  Perhaps an objection is that there were high voltages in the Heathkits – 800 volts on the plates of the tubes. So, sticking fingers in the wrong place in a Heathkit is going to get you zapped.   So maybe that would undermine ones joy of learning.

A learning strategy

If the goal is to learn about electronics there are many ways to go about it.  Too much theory and not enough practice is sub optimal.  Too much hands-on, and not having a clue as to what you are doing from a theory and design perspective is just as bad.  A good balance of theory and practice might be the best way to get you there.

So, here’s the pitch.  Get yourself a simple working radio, match it with theory and design models, and have at it.  That is, get your fingers in there and see what’s going on.  Read the theory, see how this is applied to a design in practice in a real radio, and then inspect a working example. 

From there you should be able to use what you have learned in troubleshooting a non-working (simple non-working) radio and see if you can apply what you know to get it working.

And from there, use what you know to make changes to existing circuits to fit your needs.  And from there you are on your way to designing from scratch or modifying an existing design.

This is one view of the progression of learning.  You may have your own strategy.

Choosing a representative transmitter (or, finding a victim)

So, what do you start with?  You need a simple radio where there are a limited number of things going on.  You want a simple working model which does not make things overly complex which frustrates learning.  Oh, and you need the radio to be cheap; if you break it it should not really matter, and you don’t want to play with a tube rig ( like the Heathkit ) which can bite you with 800 volts  if you put your fingers in the wrong place.

The poor beleaguered CB radio

Old CB radios are easy to come by.  You can sometimes find a guy at a hamfest with a box of CB’s that he is willing to part with for $5 to $10 each.  “Does it work?  Yes, the last time I used it” – 40 years ago.  If you don’t want to wait for a hamfest then go on eBay.  If you have a CB sitting in the basement then you might go for that.

To be the least frustrating learning experience you should start with a known working radio.  Even if you had to buy one that works from eBay they can be had for $30 or so – your mileage may vary.

Meet the Guest Radio – PACE CB144  (uh, the victim)

We dug up a bunch of old working CB radios.  The one we picked for this posting is an old 23 channel CB radio from the 1970’s.  Why did we pick this radio?

1. Its crystal-controlled.  That is, no IC’s so you can see the electronics in the raw.  No mysterious black boxes (chips) for this posting.  This radio has all discrete components.
2. It was available.
3. It works – mostly – enough for this posting
4. We could get the full schematics for the radio
5. We could get the service manual for the radio

The latter is important.  Without the schematics and service manual you are not going to have a pleasant time.  So we don’t recommend you do our “hands on” with a radio for which you do not have the schematics and service manual.

For CB tinkering, there is a great archive site of 1,000’s of service manuals and schematics at
http://cbtricks.com

Meet the test equipment

1. Frequency Counter
2. Oscilloscope

And these items come in handy

1. Magnifying glass
2. Good lighting
3. Alligator clips
4. “grabbers”
5. Dummy Load
6. A large workspace
7. Limited interruptions
8. Nylon tuning tool (if you want to mess with the alignment)

Preparation

I suggest that you enlarge  the schematic so you can easily see it and mark it up.  We assume that you have the service manual as a JPEG or PDF for the radio you are working on.  If you have it as a JPEG then you can use Microsoft Paint (standard as part of windows) or the image processing program of your choice to enlarge the schematic.  I made mine 6 pages (3×2) and taped it together so I could easily see it all at once and mark it up.

Print the manual if you don’t already have it as hardcopy.  You will want to mark it up with notes.  Keep a notebook.  If you are going to do a learning exercise then write things down – for yourself or to share with others so they can learn from what you found out.  If you have open questions – then jot those down as well so you can follow-up later.

Getting to know the radio

Most service manuals have an introduction that gives you a brief overview of all the sections of the radio.  Generally they start with a block diagram to show you how everything is related.  Then, depending on the manufacturer, the manual may give you a detailed description of each of the functional blocks.  Once you understand the functional blocks you can map this to the schematic.  And, from the schematic to the parts in the radio.

Other parts of the manual you will need are:

1. Board layout.  This will show you how to map schematic to the parts layout on the board and identify any Test Points that the manufacturer has supplied.
2. Board X-ray.  This is useful as it will show you the board traces and the parts in one view.  Its like you are able to “see through the board” – like an X-ray.  You will need this to get to test points that are not specifically called out on the board by the manufacturer.  If you don’t have this, and the board is thin, you can hold the board up to a very strong light and see the “X-ray” – components and traces from the solder side so you can identify test points of your choice.

Hands-on Tracing the signal in a simple transmitter

Strategy

1. Read the  conceptual section in the service manual
2. Mark out the relevant section in the schematic
3. Using the component layout in the service manual, find the components of interest on the board.
4. Identify Test Points identified by the vendor in the service manual – or your own.
5. Check the service manual alignment procedure for the section in question and be prepared to validate/inspect or make a change.
6. Follow the signal front to back checking/inspecting the signal as it gets processed in each functional block.  If a functional block test fails, be prepared to subdivide the block into smaller chunks and do sub testing.

Conceptual overview of the transmit section

For the PACE CB144 23-channel radio these are the functional blocks in the transmit section

1. Master Oscillator
2. Transmitter Oscillator
3. Transmitter Mixer
4. RF PreDriver
5. RF Intermediate Power Amp
6. PI Output Filter into Antenna Jack

In an AM radio like CB the modulator is a separate and distinct section.  For this “hands-on” we’ll just trace how the carrier is produced.  At the end we will show how the modulation of the carrier takes place – but this is not the subject of this posting.

Physical aspects of the PACE CB144

Old School, no chips.  This radio is “old school” (but not as old school as “valves”) and this is why we picked it.  This radio has no CPU, no memory, no programmed EEPROMs, and no fancy integrated chips of any kind.  This is full-on discrete electronic component radio.  No magical black boxes.  All the electronics that make this radio work are in the raw for you to see and mes with.

Crystal Controlled.  The Pace CB144 is  23-channel – crystal controlled (no PLL). Notice that there are two banks of crystals. Each bank of crystals plays a role as will be discussed below

Channel Selector Rotary Switch (23 channels).  Notice that the rotary switch on the front panel.  This rotary switch has two wafers, or sets of contacts. When you turn the rotary switch a finger runs around the wafers and makes or breaks contacts.  The rotary switch has two independed wafers.  One wafer controls the master oscillator and the other wafer controls the transmit oscillator. As you rotate the rotary switch the fingers on the two wafers switch in/out different crystals from the two crystal banks

Description of Functional Blocks

Here is a handy copy of the schematic

Master Oscillator. The master oscillator is build around transistor Q16 and a bank of eight (8) switchable crystals.  The master oscillator runs all the time and is used for receive as well as transmit. The eight (8) crystals are switched in and out of the circuit through one of the two wafers on the channel selector rotary switch on the front panel.

Transmit Oscillator.  The Transmitter oscillator is built around transistor Q20 and a bank of six (6) switchable crystals.  The six (6) crystals are switched in and out the circuit through one of two wafers on the rotary switch on the front panel.

Mixer.  This is where interesting things happen.  One frequency from the Master Oscillator and one frequency from the Transmit Oscillator will be “mixed” (Q21) in a non-linear way to develop one of 23 channelized frequencies in the CB band.  (See our two previous articles on the non-linear mixing process and what goes in and what comes out)

Band Pass filter.  The output of the mixer will go through a bandpass filter to select only one of the mixer products.  This selected frequency will be in the CB band 26.965-27.255 (23 channel band plan)

RF Driver, RF Intermediate Power Amp, and Final RF Power Amp. This section amplifies the signal from the output of the Mixer.  This is made up of transistors Q22, Q23, and Q24.  Q23 and Q24 are heatsinked and easy to spot on the board.

Output Filter.  This is a PI Filter to filter the final output into the antenna.  It is made up of coils L9, L10, and L11 (and caps).  Coils L9 and L10 are adjustable via a ferrite tuning slug.

Special note on the mixing process

Its essential that you understand how the the final frequency is developed by mixing two oscillator frequencies together.  Study these two tables imaged below.  The first table shows what is in the crystal banks.  The second table shows how the master oscillator frequency and the tranmitter oscillator frequency is combined (mixed) to produce the final transmit frequency.

The front panel rotary switch has two wafers.  One wafer chooses the crystal for the master oscillator.  The other wafer chooses the crystal for the transmit oscillator.  Turning the rotary knob selects 1 of 23 channels and thus a crystal from each back to be used by each of the oscillators.

Crystals X1-X6 are on one bank on one wafer; (37 MHz frequencies)
Crystals X7-X14 are on the second bank on the other wafer; (10 MHz frequencies)

This is what is in the radio  – Note the 2 banks of crystals and the rotary switch.
The manufacturer has provided a handy sticker to show you the frequency of each crystal in the bank.
All crystals are socketed and have the frequency written on the case.  We pulled one at the end of the bank.
Click to enlarge the images.

This table shows how the frequencies mix to produce one of 23 channelized frequencies.
As an example, for channel 14 (= 27.125 MHz)
The rotary swich selects crystal X4 on one wafer and crystal X8 on the other wafer
Mixing  these freqs produces ( 37.750 – 10.625) ) = 27.125

Connecting all the parts – Hands-on Inspection

Here is the Pace CB144 with three test points.  These test points are provided and identified by the manufacturer in the service manual as part of the service/troubleshooting process.  We put colored “grabbers” at each test point.

Here is a handy copy of the Pace CB144 Service Manual

The three test points are as follows:

1. Red: TP1 – We expect to see the master oscillator frequency at this TP for each of 23 channels
2. Yellow: TP3 – We expect to see transmit oscillator frequency at this TP for each of 23 channels
3. Green: TP4 – We expect to see the mixed and final  filtered frequency at this TP for each 23 channels

Click to enlarge any image
 

The signal path is straight forward.  When the microphone key is pressed these circuits come alive.

1. Check/Inspect the Master Oscillator.  The two wafers on the front panel rotary switch select one crystal from each bank in the crystal bank.  With the particular crystal selected from each bank, the Master Oscillator and transmit oscillator each generate a particular frequency. 

Here is the schematic fragment for the master oscillator (Q16) and the transmit oscillator (Q20)

Master Oscillator at 37 Mhz
Note the rotary switch selects the crystal.
The output is on the secondary of T9 and is accessed via TP1 (see full schematic at point B in RX section)

So, lets see if Q16 master oscillator is running.  We hooked up the scope and the frequency counter to the red grabber on Test Point (TP) 1.  The channel selector is set to channel 14.

Checking the mixing table above – if the oscillator is running correctly – we expect to see a master oscillator frequency of 37.750 ( rotary switch will switch in crystal X4 (37.750 MHz)

So, lets see, “close enough for government work”

Extended Tests

At this point you can check the oscillator through all the 23 channels.  Each of the positions on the channel rotary switch will select one of the six crystals in the 37 MHz crystal bank.

If this test fails you can suspect a faulty rotary switch wafer, broken connection, bad solder, bad crystal and so on. You can do a lot of troubleshooting here.

This is a very basic and fundamental test.  If the master oscillator is not running or not running at the correct frequency then functional blocks down the line will not produce the right outcome.  We are tracing “front to back”.

On the PACE we found that one of the positions on the rotary switch was intermittent.  After 30+ years these contacts may have oxidation on the contacts.  A spray of Contact Cleaner (De-Ox-It) did the trick.

2. Check/Inspect the Transmit Oscillator (Q20)

Transmit Oscillator at 10 MHz
The output is on T10
This is Test Point 3 – the Yellow grabber

 On channel 14 we expect to see (check the mixing chart) 10.625 MHz

“Close enough for government work”

If you have a scope you can look at the signal

Extended Tests

As above with the master oscillator, the transmit oscillator will run at different frequencies depending on the position of the channel selector rotary switch.

Run through all 23 channels, check the mixing chart, and make sure the oscillator is running at the correct frequency.  There are 8 different frequencies depending on which channel you select.

As far as troubleshooting at this point, if you can’t get both the master oscillator and transmit oscillator running at the correct frequencies consistent with the mixing chart and the channel select rotary switch then… “stop, do not pass go, do not collect $200″ before you fix the oscillators.

The two frequencies, one from the Master Oscillator and the other from the Transmit Oscillator are mixed (non-linear) in transistor Q21.  Frequencies generated will be F1+F2 and F1-F2.

3. Check/Inspect the mixer and band pass filtering.  This next test will test many things at once.  It will test the mixer (Q21) and the bandpass transformers ( T11,T12, and T13).  The transformers act as a band pass filter and will select the mixing products in the 23 channel CB band and reject the others.  (There will be a mixing product at about 47 Mhz (Master Osc + Transmit Osc) and this must be rejected).

This is TP4 (Green grabber).  On channel 14 we expect to see the final synthesized frequency of 27.125

“Close enough for government work”

In the schematic fragment below the output from Q20 (transmit oscillator) is fed into the emitter of the mixer Q21. 
Note the convenient test point that the manufacturer had supplied !!
The Master Oscillator frequency  (Q16) is fed into the base.
T11,T12,T13 select only the difference frequency of the mixing products.

If you don’t see the final frequency at TP4 – then there is no sense in going any farther.  Suspect the mixer transistor or the transfomer chain. To identify the fault you will have to break up the mixing function and the bandpass function and test those separately.

4. Check/Inspect three stages of RF amplification.

Push the final frequency  through three stages of amplification.  The pre Driver, the Intermediate Power Driver, and the final power amplifier. – Q22, Q23, and Q24

For this test the manufacturer has not provided test points.  You have to make your own if you want to check each stage.  You can test at the Collector to Base coupling at each stage – you should see an increased clean signal at each stage.  To find the right point on the board look at the parts layout and find the location.  If you can get a grabber on your test point from the top of the board then good for you.  If you can’t you can get to a test point at the bottom of the board – solder side.  To find the right place on the bottom of the board you need the board X-ray – which the service manual does not supply.  You have to discover this for yourself.

If the next test works then you can skip testing each stage of amplification.

5. Push the amplified signal through a PI filter (harmonic rejection)

This is L9,L10, and L11 (and the caps).  From here its out the antenna jack via the TX/RX relay.  Your test point is the antenna and your wattmeter into a dummy load.

Let see what we get at the final test point (antenna jack)

Wow.  That’s nearly 4 watts – just what it should be.

If you did not see anything at the antanna jack then you are going to have to work backwards.  If you are following along then you can see we tested (“forward traced”) up to the output of the mixer and got good results.  We skipped testing each of the RF amp stages since the manufacturer did not supply a convenient test point.

If you got no RF output at the antenna jack you should continue with you tracing.  To trace back see if you have RF before the PI section.  If you do, then you know the problem is the PI section.  If there is no RF into the PI section then you are going to have to dig into the RF driver, the intermediate power amp, and the final power amp.  This is not a lot of components.   Break them down into each stage and check each individually.

I hope it doesn’ work in your case.  This means you got some nice exploratory work to do and if you isolate the problem then you learned a lot.   You can often learn more from what does not work than from what does work and this builds your diagnostic skills.

6. The whole transmit strip.

This is the whole transmitter strip (lower section) .  Click to enlarge

So what’s next?

On AM what you have now is 4 watts of carrier.  How do you modulate with intelligence (your voice)?. 

(Amplitude) Modulation in this radio is accomplished via an audio amplifier which modulates the collectors of the RF IPA and power transistor via a transformer.  Your voice into the mic drives the amplifier.  The output of the amplifier goes into transformer that can drive a speaker (PA setting on the radio) or modulate the RF collector voltages of the TX section.  The lower winding on transformer T17 modulates the RF Amp and thus modulates the 4 watt carrier

We won’t discuss this, we’ll just post the relevant part of the schematic.  This is a classic push/pull amplifier design.  Q12 is the preamp, Q13 is the driver, T16 splits the signal (180 deg out of phase), Q14/Q15 are the push/pull amplifier pair, T17 combines the signal; the lower winding of T17 modulates the RF amps Q23 and Q24. (see full schematic)

Here is the full Schematic of the Pace CB144 23-channel crystal controlled radio

Where is the power in AM

An unmodulated  4-watt carrier when modulated at 100% by a sine wave adds 2 watts of power to the carrier.  There is one watt in each of the two sidebands which makes a total of 6 watts.  Power is proportional to the square of the volatge (or current) which means that 1/4 of the power of the carrier is in each sideband. 

So, expect the audio amp to generate at least 2 watts of audio for AM modulation of a carrier at 100%.

Here is an excellent discussion on AM Modulation by WA5BXO, WA3WDR, W5TOB, and K4KYV

Conclusion

The goal of this positng is to get you to stick you fingers in a real working radio and find out what’s going on in there.  For this posting we picked an “old school” crystal-controlled transistorized radio for these reasons: a) these old CB radios are cheap, or free, and thow away and the financial investment in minimal; b) these radio are running on 12 volts so you will not get zapped by high voltage required by a tube rig; c) this particular radio is of a vintage before PLL so all the electronics of what makes the radio work are out in the open – no black boxes of magical integrated chips; d) Users guides, schematics, and service manuals for these radios are readily available for free on the Internet.

So, get in there and understand how things work – none of this appliance operating stuff – no excuses.  Use this as a stepping stone to understand more complex circuits.  For example, a PLL-based (Phase Locked Loop) radio will have much of what you see in the Pace CB144 design integrated into a single chip.   So, learning acn be incremental and what you can learn on a crystal controlled radio can be applied when you conceptually tackle the PLL.

How much can you learn?  The limit is only yourself.

Resources

We have a book recommendation: Understanding and Repairing CB Radios: For the Professional Technician

If you have some old CB radios to play with – as a learning exercise – this is an excellent reference. 

The reason we like this book are: a) this book is laser focused on real circuits of real CB radios.  That is, it is not a general purpose book on theory – it does contain theory but only in the context of practical use.  b) It is written at a level that asumes a minimal amount of electronics knowlege.  It’s takes a “teach as you go” approach.  c) the book is comprehensive (400 pages).  d) the author, Lou Franklin, knows how to communicate (teach) to a audience of “hands on” technicians and has the right balance of theory and practice.

This posting assume you know some basic electronics.  If you don’t know basic electronics you can do a self-paced, self-study course compliments of the US Navy.  Here is Module 7—Introduction to Solid-State Devices and Power Supplies

You can get links to the full Navy Electronics Training here – http://cbtricks.com/miscellaneous/tech_publications/neets/index.htm

You can find 1,000’s of schematcis and service manuals here -
http://cbtricks.com/radios/index.htm

Building Teams:

Prescriptive Advice for Building Great Teams

Read the following previous parts to catch up on our journey.
Amateur Radio Clubs: Good to Great; Good to Gone; Lost in Mediocracy
Good To Great Part II: The Gift of Governor Rod Blagojevich
Good to Great Part III: Building the Team
 

In Collins book  Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t he gives some pretty simplistic advice – First who, then what. 

That is, the priority of the right people over starting with direction and building the team around an already determined goal.  Get the right people on the team first and they will figure out the rest – and be able to compensate for changing internal and external circumstances.   In a word, “agility”.

The second part of Collins advice about teams– get the right people on the team,  get the right people in the right roles, and get the wrong people off the team.

Beyond Collins on Teams and Team Dynamics

Collins book is at a high corporate level.  He does not drill down into the more specific questions about how to find the right people or what the characteristics are of those individuals on great teams.  It really does beg the next set of questions.

How do successful teams function?  What are the signs of dysfunction on teams?   If you do find dysfunctions on a team then what are the mitigation strategies and tactics that you can put in place to remedy these dysfunctions?  In building a new team, can you some up with a prescriptive set of guidelines – ground rules – calibrations – on how the team will function given the common pitfalls that a team may encounter?  

How can one benefit from what one can learn by studying cases from the success and failure of real teams?  There is no benefit in repeating the mistakes of others.  It’s all in the name of continuous improvement learned from past experience – yours and from other organizations.   “We don’t have time to make other peoples mistakes.”

The above questions are the theme of this posting.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

Patrick Lencioni has written a book: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team:  A Leadership fable.

The book is told as a narrative, or story.  Some authors decide to communicate in this way.  For me, it was a difficult read since I have a preference for real stories about real companies and real people and how the behaviors, actions, decisions, processes, and so on led to certain outcomes for organizations.  These then become models to emulate, refine, or avoid.

I would not be writing about Lencioni’s book if I could not validate what he says by my own experience in the real world of corporate and team behavior.    The dysfunctions mentioned in this book are common.  It takes hard work to build a competent, efficient, and results-oriented team and Lencioni gets to the heart of the matter.

For the casual reader of this blog the goal of this posting is just to summarize what Lencioni has to say – mostly in his own words and add my comments – to perhaps get you interested.  Almost eveyone works on some sort of team in some time of their life – either now or in the future.  So, to the extent that everyone is a team member perhaps at some point  this posting will help facilitate understanding what is happening on your team – the good, the bad, and the consequences.

For team leaders I would recommend you read the book and apply what Lencioni has to say about teams in two ways.  First, use it as a diagnostic tool to evaluate your team against the Five Dysfunctions and appy the mitigation strategies that Lencioni recommends.

Second, if you are building a new team, use what Lencioni has to say as prescriptive advice at the outset – as a sort of proactive calibration – for all team members so you can avoid the dysfunctions that Lencioni identifies. 

In both instances, benefit from the experience of others.  The team dynamics that Lencioni mentions are very real and very prevelent in all types of organizations.

Summary of the Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Dysfunction 1: Absence of (vulnerability-based) Trust

Trust lies at the heart of a functioning, cohesive team. Without it, teamwork is all but impossible.

Lencioni points out that there are two definitions of trust.  One definition of trust is the trust of predictability.  In this use of the word, trust it means being able to predict a person’s behavior based on past experience.  That is, trust as predictability that if a person makes a promise they will deliver.  This is trust insofar as a person’s behavior is predictable with a high level of confidence based on past experience.

The definition of Trust that Lencioni wants to use goes far deeper than the definition above.

In the context of building a team, trust is the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group. In essence, teammates must get comfortable being vulnerable with one another.

It requires team members to make themselves vulnerable to one another, and be confident that their respective vulnerabilities will not be used against them. The vulnerabilities I’m referring to include weaknesses, skill deficiencies, interpersonal shortcomings, mistakes, and requests for help.

In my opinion, this is right on and it’s a tough one.  In my experience this is easier to achieve depending on the management level of the team and how long the team members have known each other.  The higher people are in the organization the more they understand team dynamics and how to work with each other – simply based on past experience and leaning by past mistakes and outcomes.

The key is to understand a team as a set of interlocking competencies.  So, knowing the “deficiencies” (that is not really the right term to use) of each of the team members is key such that other team members can compensate or perhaps mentor team members relative to their weaknesses.  One must not be “attacked” of diminished by thier weaknesses.  Use it as a learning and growth opportunity.

To be successful on the team that Lencioni is describing one must leave their egos at the door, admit their mistakes, admit their weaknesses, and engage the team where there competencies are strong, and rely on others to help team members where competencies are deficient.  This can be a challenge.  Especially for those with team members with big egos and the inability to “fail forward” using failure as an opportunity – or even admit failure.

Lencioni offers these characteristics of a team that lacks trust:

• Conceal their weaknesses and mistakes from one another
• Hesitate to ask for help or provide constructive feedback
• Hesitate to offer help outside their own areas of responsibility
• Jump to conclusions about the intentions and aptitudes of others without attempting to clarify them
• Fail to recognize and tap into one another’s skills and experiences
• Waste time and energy managing their behaviors for effect
• Hold grudges
• Dread meetings and find reasons to avoid spending time together

How to overcome Absence of (vulnerability-based) Trust

If the team is new and the team members have little knowledge of each other, then to achieve vulnerability-based trust is going to be a long road.  It’s going to be a long road since people generally come to a new team with their “guard up”.  That is, most people want to size up the situation first before they want to disclose their  “weaknesses, skill deficiencies, interpersonal shortcomings, and mistakes”.  This only makes sense.  If the team is composed of individuals who know each other’s “life histories” then the team has at least  a good start.

In either case, the goal of achieving “vulnerability-based trust” would be transformative or prescriptive.  That is, the team members who know each other’s histories would have to take those histories into account and work to transform the team into this ability to have “vulnerability-based trust” with each other if this type of trust does not already exist.

For a new team “vulnerability-based trust” is prescriptive.  It should be set out as a goal to be achieved and made a personal commitment by everyone. Then the team members can demonstrate this commitment by telling stories about their history about their strengths, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, mistakes, successes, and so on. 

To “open up” to “strangers” about these aspects of mistakes, vulnerabilities, weaknesses is one of the most difficult things new team members will have to do with each other.  But, if you set the expectation that these will not be used against each other – that this is a prescriptive exercise with the goal of determining  interlocking competencies -   then this exercise of telling stories of one’s life history of strengths, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, mistakes, and successes in their career becomes easier.

Here is a summary of a few of Lencioni recommendation – from least intrusive to most intrusive.

Personal Histories Exercise. In less than an hour, a team can take the first steps toward developing trust. This low-risk exercise requires nothing more than going around the table during a meeting and having team members answer a short list of questions about themselves. Questions need not be overly sensitive in nature and might include the following: number of siblings, hometown, unique challenges of childhood, favorite hobbies, first job, and worst job. Simply by describing these relatively innocuous attributes or experiences, team members begin to relate to one another on a more personal basis, and see one another as human beings with life stories and interesting backgrounds.

Team Effectiveness Exercise. This exercise is more rigorous and relevant than the previous one, but may involve more risk. It requires team members to identify the single most important contribution that each of their peers makes to the team, as well as the one area that they must either improve upon or eliminate for the good of the team. All members then report their responses, focusing on one person at a time, usually beginning with the team leader.

Personality and Behavioral Preference Profiles.   Some of the most effective and lasting tools for building trust on a team are profiles of team members’ behavioral preferences and personality styles.  These help break down barriers by allowing people to better understand and empathize with one another.  For example, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

360-Degree Feedback.  They are riskier than any of the tools or exercises described so far because they call for peers to make specific judgments and provide one another with constructive criticism.

 
Dysfunction #2 – Fear of Conflict

This is a huge problem due to the desire of many people to protect social relationships.  What individuals and team sacrifice in this dysfunction of “Fear of Conflict” is coming up with the best decision, solution, or outcome for the organization.   The solution is, in part, to calibrate the team to understand that the goal is the best outcome for the organization.  And in this process some team members may have to submit thier personal egos and desires to a different perspective than what they desire.  And then these folks have to “get on board” and support the team decision.

A key phrase to look for in meeting notes is “… and there was a ’spirited debate’”.  There is always a good story behind the ’spirited debate’ and its a positive sign that the team is passionate about their teamwork.

Here is a tie back to Collins Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t 

Collins tells the story of CEO Ken Iverson as a transformational leader. 

… Iverson dreamed of building a great company, but refused to begin with “the answer” for how to get there.  Instead, he played the role of Socratic moderator in a series of raging debates.  “We established on ongoing series of general manager meetings and my role was more as a mediator,” commented Iverson.  “They were chaos. We would stay there for hours, ironing out the issues, until we came to something… At times, the meetings would get so violent that people almost went across the table at each other… People yelled.  They waved their arms around and pounded on the tables. Faces would get red and veins bulged out.

If you read the books and interviews of Jack Welch when he was CEO at GE you will find the same sentiment.  The value of open debate and lack of a fear of conflict on great teams.

According to Lencioni

Unfortunately, conflict is considered taboo in many situations, especially at work. And the higher you go up the management chain, the more you find people spending inordinate amounts of time and energy trying to avoid the kind of passionate debates that are essential to any great team.

It is important to distinguish productive ideological conflict from destructive fighting and interpersonal politics. Ideological conflict is limited to concepts and ideas, and avoids personality-focused, mean-spirited attacks.

It is important to distinguish productive ideological conflict from destructive fighting and interpersonal politics. Ideological conflict is limited to concepts and ideas, and avoids personality-focused, mean-spirited attacks.

It is also ironic that so many people avoid conflict in the name of efficiency, because healthy conflict is actually a time saver. Contrary to the notion that teams waste time and energy arguing  those that avoid conflict actually doom themselves to revisiting issues again and again without resolution.

Suggestions for Overcoming Fear of Conflict

Mining: Members of teams that tend to avoid conflict must occasionally assume the role of a “miner of conflict”—someone who extracts buried disagreements within the team and sheds the light of day on them. They must have the courage and confidence to call out sensitive issues and force team members to work through them. This requires a degree of objectivity during meetings and a commitment to staying with the conflict until it is resolved.

Real-Time Permission: In the process of mining for conflict, team members need to coach one another not to retreat from healthy debate. One simple but effective way to do this is to recognize when the people engaged in conflict are becoming uncomfortable with the level of discord, and then interrupt to remind them that what they are doing is necessary.

Dysfunction 3: Lack of Commitment

In this dysfunction Lencioni is referring to lack of commitment to clear and concise decisions on a timely basis – and we’ll add buy-in, support, and commitment by all the team members to decision through execution and followup.

There is another aspect of commitment that Lencioni does not mention.  And this is commitment if individual team members to the team.  In the real world, people get on teams because “they are available” – not because they have the requsite skills, competencies, of personal attributes to work as part of a team.  Simply, they are available.

If this is the case, then follow Collins advice – get those people off the team.  If your team is understaffed – keep looking.  One way to surely degrade a team is to have people who are not committed to the team, don’t have the skills or competencies to be on the team, and worse – don’t have the behaviors to cooperate in a team environment.

Here is what Lencioni has to say about commitment of the team to decisions.

In the context of a team, commitment is a function of two things: clarity and buy-in. Great teams make clear and timely decisions and move forward with complete buy-in from every member of the team, even those who voted against the decision.

The two greatest causes of the lack of commitment are the desire for consensus and the need for certainty:

Consensus.Great teams understand the danger of seeking consensus, and find ways to achieve buy-in even when complete agreement is impossible. They understand that reasonable human beings do not need to get their way in order to support a decision, but only need to know that their opinions have been heard and considered. Great teams ensure that everyone’s ideas are genuinely considered, which then creates a willingness to rally around whatever decision is ultimately made by the group. And when that is not possible due to an impasse, the leader of the team is allowed to make the call.

Certainty. Great teams also pride themselves on being able to unite behind decisions and commit to clear courses of action even when there is little assurance about whether the decision is correct. That’s because they understand the old military axiom that a decision is better than no decision. They also realize that it is better to make a decision boldly and be wrong—and then change direction with equal boldness—than it is to waffle.

Regardless of whether it is caused by the need for consensus or certainty, it is important to understand that one of the greatest consequences for an executive team that does not commit to clear decisions is unresolvable discord deeper in the organization.

Suggestions for Overcoming Lack of Commitment

Cascading Messaging: A team should explicitly review the key decisions made during the meeting, and agree on what needs to be communicated to employees or other constituencies about those decisions. What often happens during this exercise is that members of the team learn that they are not all on the same page about what has been agreed upon and that they need to clarify specific outcomes before putting them into action.

Deadlines: As simple as it seems, one of the best tools for ensuring commitment is the use of clear deadlines for when decisions will be made, and honoring those dates with discipline and rigidity. The worst enemy of a team that is susceptible to this dysfunction is ambiguity, and timing is one of the most critical factors that must be made clear. What is more, committing to deadlines for intermediate decisions and milestones is just as important as final deadlines, because it ensures that misalignment among team members is identified and addressed before the costs are too great.

Contingency and Worst-Case Scenario Analysis: A team that struggles with commitment can begin overcoming this tendency by briefly discussing contingency plans up front or, better yet, clarifying the worst-case scenario for a decision they are struggling to make.

Dysfunction 4: Avoidance of Accountability

This dysfunction is closely related to the dysfunction of  “fear of conflict”.  Fear of conflict is going to naturally exacerbate this necessary and unavoidable task of holding people accountable for their behaviors, results, deliverable, and commitments. 

Fear of conflict and avoidance of accountability is going to form a deadly synergy that will reinfornce both dysfunctions.  Who will really lose?  The organization in which this team resides.  In this, not holding team members accountable trades personal comfort of not holding folks accountable in favor of undermining the organization.

Here is what Lencioni has to say

In the context of teamwork, however, it refers specifically to the willingness of team members to call their peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the team.

The essence of this dysfunction is the unwillingness of team members to tolerate the interpersonal discomfort that accompanies calling a peer on his or her behavior and the more general tendency to avoid difficult conversations. Members of great teams overcome these natural inclinations, opting instead to “enter the danger” with one another.

In fact, team members who are particularly close to one another sometimes hesitate to hold one another accountable precisely because they fear jeopardizing a valuable personal relationship. Ironically, this only causes the relationship to deteriorate as team members begin to resent one another for not living up to expectations and for allowing the standards of the group to erode.

As politically incorrect as it sounds, the most effective and efficient means of maintaining high standards of performance on a team is peer pressure. More than any policy or system, there is nothing like the fear of letting down respected teammates that motivates people to improve their performance.

Lencioni  makes a big assumption here.  That is, that peer pressure is an effective method of making people accountable.  This presupposes that team member respect other members on the team.

In actual practice, in teams that are ‘assembled” based on availability and little else, it is a leap that team members respect each other unless this is tested and validated. 

Peer pressure does not work if team members do not respect each other.  Whether peer pressure works or not on a team could be used as a measure of the respect of team members to each other, how much a team member is committed to team decisions, and whether the “unaccountable” team member has the best interest of the organization as the highest priority over self-interest.

Suggestions for Overcoming Avoidance of Accountability

Publication of Goals and Standards A good way to make it easier for team members to hold one another accountable is to clarify publicly exactly what the team needs to achieve, who needs to deliver what, and how everyone must behave in order to succeed. The enemy of accountability is ambiguity.

Simple and Regular Progress Reviews. Team members should regularly communicate with one another, either verbally or in written form, about how they feel their teammates are doing against stated objectives and standards. Relying on them to do so on their own, with no clear expectations or structure, is inviting the potential for the avoidance of accountability.

Team Rewards. By shifting rewards away from individual performance to team achievement, the team can create a culture of accountability.

Dysfunction 5: Inattention to Results

If you watched the TV series The Apprentice with Donald (“You’re Fired!”) Trump then you know Carolyn Kepcher.  Kepcher was Trumps (“She’s now fired!”) assistant.  Carolyn wrote a book: Carolyn 101: Business Lessons from The Apprentice’s Straight Shooter (Paperback)

In this book she tells the story of a mid level manager hired by the Trump organization that was so fascinated that he had a business card that showed that he worked for the Trump Organization that he forgot that he had business responsibilities.  In essence, this person, first and foremost, wanted a status symbol – to be part of, and tell people, he was working for and with Trump.  Hard work was apparently not in the picture.  From Carolyn 101:

During my decade with The Trump Organization I have observed a curious variation of this physhological phenomenon.  I call it “kissing the gold-lettered business card.”  This is a reference to the fact that on all Trump Organization business cards, the word TRUMP is embossed across the top in gold capital letters… I’ve seen people get so carried away by the fact they work for Trump that they actually forget to work.  Needless to say they don’t last long.”

I’ve observed a similar phenomenon when meeting people in all high-end, top-notch organizations.  Some of them fall so in love with the prestige of the organization that they view it as simply an extension of their own egos. 

Rather than regard themselves as being in service of the organization, the regard the organization as being in service to them.

Here is what Lencioni has to say:

The ultimate dysfunction of a team is the tendency of members to care about something other than the collective goals of the group.

But what would a team be focused on other than results? Team status and individual status are the prime candidates

Team status. For members of some teams, merely being part of the group is enough to keep them satisfied. For them, the achievement of specific results might be desirable, but not necessarily worthy of great sacrifice or inconvenience. As ridiculous and dangerous as this might seem, plenty of teams fall prey to the lure of status.

Individual status. This refers to the familiar tendency of people to focus on enhancing their own positions or career prospects at the expense of their team. Though all human beings have an innate tendency toward self-preservation, a functional team must make the collective results of the group more important to each individual than individual members’ goals.

Suggestions for Overcoming Inattention to Results

Public Declaration of Results. For most teams, however, it can be helpful to make public proclamations about intended success.  Teams that are willing to commit publicly to specific results are more likely to work with a passionate, even desperate desire to achieve those results. Teams that say, “We’ll do our best,” are subtly, if not purposefully, preparing themselves for failure.

Results-Based Rewards An effective way to ensure that team members focus their attention on results is to tie their rewards, especially compensation, to the achievement of specific outcomes

The Synergy of Dysfunctions

A real value of Lencioni’s analysis is how he shows how these dysfunctions act in a synergy  That is, the the sum of any number of these dysfunctions is more than the sum of its parts.  There is a sort of multiplicity effect where one dysfunction leads to another and multiplies the effect.

Here is how these dysfunctions work in synergy for exponential effect.

1. The first dysfunction is an absence of trust among team members. Essentially, this stems from their unwillingness to be vulnerable within the group. Team members who are not genuinely open with one another about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation for trust.
2. This failure to build trust is damaging because it sets the tone for the second dysfunction: fear of conflict. Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate of ideas. Instead, they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments.
3. A lack of healthy conflict is a problem because it ensures the third dysfunction of a team: lack of commitment. Without having aired their opinions in the course of passionate and open debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy in and commit to decisions, though they may feign agreement during meetings.
4. Because of this lack of real commitment and buy-in, team members develop an avoidance of accountability, the fourth dysfunction. Without committing to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that seem counterproductive to the good of the team.
5. Failure to hold one another accountable creates an environment where the fifth dysfunction can thrive. Inattention to results occurs when team members put their individual needs (such as ego, career development, or recognition) or even the needs of their divisions above the collective goals of the team.

And so, like a chain with just one link broken, teamwork deteriorates if even a single dysfunction is allowed to flourish.

The Role of the Leader

“Be a yardstick of quality.  Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
 
– Seve Jobs from Inside Steve’s Brain by Leander Kahney

We can tie all this back to what Collins found in sustainable great companies.  It’s about leadership and people.  It’s about the culture in which this is all embedded.  The right people in the right roles and the wrong people out of the organization. 

If too many of the wrong people get  into leadership positions the culture can be come a poison.  What happens when good people get into bad corporate cultures?  There is a saying:  There are no bad apples, just bad barrels”. 

People with weak character often get caught in bad barrels and are taken down.  One may see this phenonemon played out in the Blagojevish scandal in Chicago.  How many good people are going to be taken down as part of a culture of scandal and underhanded political dealings?

For the matter at hand and the Five Disfunctions of a Team that Lencioni identifies – what is the role of the team leader?

In all the cases, the leader has to model the way.  For the dysfunction of lack of vulnerable-bases trustthe leader has to create an environment that does not punish vulnerability, admission of weakness or failure.  For the dysfunction of fear of conflictthe leader has to encourage productive conflict ensuring that all opinions are on the table and discussed to closure – then get buy-in and commitment from everyone through execution and followup.  For the dysfunction of lack of commitment the leader has to ensure that expectations are clear.  For the dysfunction of avoidance of accountability the leader must create a culture of accountability of team members to each other.  The test of the success of this is when members feel obligated to each other and are accountable driven by the desire not to let the team down as opposed to being driven by an external force of punishment.  For the dysfunction of inattention to resultsthe leader must set the tone for focus on results, reward individuals on the basis of team (not individual) results, and make a clear commitment to publish team accomplishments to stakeholders and other constituencies.

The “Get”

The “get” on this posting is this.  Strong leadership is critical to the success of an organization be in a profit or non-profit organization.  To the extent that leadership fails to establish trust, eliminate fear of conflict, avoids issues of commitment, fails to hold people accountable, and does not attend to results the organization will fail.  Who are the victims?  In a non-profit the victim is the organizations mission and constituency – at the convenience of leaders that do not have the strength of character to confront, head on, organizational dysfunctions and persist to resolution.

Maybe it a hard message to hear.  But to the extent these problems are not addressed in a timely manner the problems grow to the point that these dysfunctions become endemic to an organization.  There may be a point of no return.

This blog is being written near Chicago, Illinois.  There are several major corporations that are headquartered in or near Chicago.  We keep track of some of the “local talent” (CEO’s) that come and go.  Crains Chicago Business has many interesting stories to tell.  In the Resources section below you will find the story of CEO Ed Zander when he took over Motorola and what he found in the corporate culture and the changes he put in place.

So, Good to Great?  Only possible with strong leadership.

Resources

Crains Chicago Business: Ed Zanders Motorola: How a brash new CEO tore down walls – and much of Moto’s musty culture
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team:  A Leadership fable.
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t 
Carolyn 101: Business Lessons from The Apprentice’s Straight Shooter (Paperback)
Inside Steve’s Brain by Leander Kahney

Good to Great Part III: Building the Team

Read the following previous parts to catch up on our journey.

Amateur Radio Clubs: Good to Great; Good to Gone; Lost in Mediocracy
Good To Great Part II: The Gift of Governor Rod Blagojevich

The Case Study Approach

A compelling aspect of Jim Collins books Good to Great and Built to Last is that they are both based on empirical research of real companies over an extended period of time.  Books based on real companies, real data, and an established methodology certainly have an advantage over theoretical ideas on prescriptive organizational behavior that have not been tested or validated. 

This approach of real world analysis of real companies, real people, real events, real data, and so on is one of the defining characteristics of the Harvard Business School case method of learning that has been copied by many other schools.  Such an approach keeps ones feet on the ground and avoids the risk of one propounding elegant idealistic theories that really don’t work in reality.

If you have been following along with our previous parts you know that Jim Collins set out to study the phenomenon of companies that made and sustained the transition for Good to Great.  His books describe what he found.

First Who, Then What

When we began the research project, we expected to find that the first step in taking a company from good to great would be to set a new direction, a new vision and strategy for the company, and then to get people committed an aligned behind that new direction.

We found something quite the opposite.

The executives who ignited the transformation from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there.  No, they first got the right people on the bus ( and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.  They said in essence “Look, I don’t really know where we should take this bus.  But I know this much: if we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.

Get the right people ON the Team

Collins argues that it is better to assemble a cohesive team of “A players” with perhaps differing perspectives on organizational direction and strategy than it is to have a predetermined direction and then assemble a team that is (already) committed to that direction. 

The reason that the fist approach has an advantage has to to with the obvious reality of uncertainty and change.  If the external circumstances change and you have an executive management team dedicated to a established purpose which is no longer relevant then the organization is at a distict disadvantage – the organization may continue on a losing path due to the dedication of these team members to a specific goal, or the team may not be able to adapt to the new circumstances and direction.

Collins quotes Wells Fargo CEO Dick Cooley

… he and chairman Ernie Arbuckle focused on “injecting an endless stream of talent” directly into the company.  The hired outstanding people whenever and wherever they found them, often without any specific job in mind. “That’s how you build the future”, he said.  “If I’m not smart enough to see the changes that are coming, they will. And they’ll be flexible enough to deal with them.

Get the Wrong People OFF the Team

The other side of getting the right people ON the team in the righ roles is to get the wrong people off the team.  According to Collins and many others, getting the wrong people off the team takes rigor, not ruthlessness.

To be rigorous in people decisions means first becoming rigorous about top management people decisions.

Indeed, if we’re honest with ourselves, the reason we wait too long often has less to do with concern for that person and more to do with our own convenience.  He’s doing an OK job and it would be a huge hassle to replace him, so we avoid the issue.  Or we find the whole process of dealing with the issue to be stressful and distasteful.  So, to save ourselves stress and discomfort, we wait.  And wait.  And wait.  Meanwhile, all the best people are still wondering, ” when are they going to do something about this?  How long is this going to go on?

Bottom line, it takes a commitment to the organization above all else – above personal relationships, above social relationship, to make these difficult people decisions.  Being decisive on these matters is a hallmark of strong leadership and commitment to the organization.  Not making such decisions undermines the organization.  From Collins:

Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people.  Worse, it can drive away the best people.  Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.

 Summed up one Wells Fargo executive: ” The only way to deliver to the people who were achieving is to not burdened them with people who were not achieving.”

Jack Welch – Tough Love and the Vitality Curve

General Electric, founded by Thomas Edison in 1876 (Edison General Electric Company) and still going strong is arguably one of the most successful companies in history.  In its modern incarnation, GE owes much of its continued success to Jack Welch.  Welch was named a vice president of GE in 1972, became senior vice president in 1977, vice chairman in 1979, and CEO in 1981. Welch retired in 2001 handing over the reigns to Jeff Immelt.

To the degree that Jim Collins is an academic, Jack Welch is “in the trenches”.  There are many things that Welch is known for during his tenure as CEO  at GE.  One of those relevant to this posting is how he dealt with people decisions. 

Welch differentiated people into three categories based on performance – the Top 20%; the vital 70%; and the bottom 10% (A, B, and C people).  He called this the Vitality Curve.

The A people (Top 20%) are those that make things happen and energize people around them.  They have the four “E”s of GE Leadership: high Energy Levels; the ability to Energize others around common goals; the Edge to make tough decisions; and the ability to Execute and deliver on thier promises.

The B people (Vital 70%) are at the heart of the company and are critical to its operational success.  According to Welch, “the managers job is to make B people into A people.”

The C people (Bottom 10%) are those who can’t get the job done.  The undermine others rather then energize them. They procrastinate rather than deliver.  According to Welch, “You can’t waste time on them, although we do spend resources on thier redeployment elsewhere.”

Welch confirms Collins – from the Trenches

Welch confirms what Collins has to say about getting the wrong people off the team.  That it is a painful act and it takes a commitment to the organization to do it.  From Jack: Straight from the Gut

Managers will play every game in the book to avoid identifying their bottom 10 [percent].  Sometimes they’ll sneak in people who were planning to retire that year or others who already have been told to leave the organization.  Some have stuck on these lists the names of employees who are already gone.

One business even went to the extreme of putting into the bottom 10 category the name of a man who had died two months before the review.

This is hard stuff.  No leader enjoys making the tough decisions.  We constantly faced severe resistance from even the best people in our organization.  I’ve struggled with this problem myself and have often been guilty of not being rigorous enough.  Every impulse is to look the other way.  I’ve fought it.  If a GE leader submitted bonus or stock option recommendations without identifying the bottom 10 [percent], I’d send them all back until they made differentiation real.

Are we adopting an Entitlement based culture over a merit based culture?

If you are paying attention to the news then you have probably heard how some High Schools have done away with grades.  Letter grades of A-F which provides differentiation is now being replaced by Pass and Fail.  The thinking is that students who get a lesser lette grade would lose “self-esteem” or would it may appear that one set of students – those getting a A – were “better” than those who did nto get a letter grade of A. 

Some High Schools have gotten rid of the Valedictorian-   an academic title typically conferred upon the highest ranked student among those being graduated from an educational institution.  Why?  For the same reason.  To try to eliminate differentiation and ranking.

Some High School sports teams are eliminating keeping score.  There are no winners and losers.   Again, to eliminate differentiation among people.  Somehow, we should all be equal and  “to lose” would be a blow to our egos.

President-elect Barack Obama in a 2001 interview on WBEZ in Chicago talked about the basic issue of Political and Economic Justice.  Economic Justice?  That is the redistribution of wealth.  So we can all be equal without differentiation?  This idea of economic justice or economic equality is consistent with what Obama told Joe the Plumber in an offhand comment: “I just want to spread the wealth around.”

The end of achievement and fall into mediocrity

Whereas Obama wants to “spread the wealth around” how about this as an alternative – “spread the opportunity around”.  That was the response from the McCain camp.  The difference between Obama and McCain is the difference between socialism and capitalism.  Inherent in Capitalism are winners and losers.  The free market economy rewards winners and punishes losers.  The goal of socialism is to converge to equality.

There is this term “American Exceptionalism” and it is built on the concept of differentiation.  Great companies are great-not-good companies for the reason that Collins points out.   From good to great requires differentiation.  This is the Vitality Curve of Jack Welch of differentiating people 20/70/10.

Many of the things that Welch mentions below are under attack – grading, honor societies, Valedictorian, and other differentiators. 

The argument that Welch makes (2001) is that individuals have been differentiated all through school – the first twenty years of life.  So why shouldn’t this continue in the workplace?  In a sense, Welch wants to “grade on a curve” – always eliminating the bottom 10% of the workforce – no matter how well you do.  This places one in competition, not against an absolute, but against each other.

What happens when we are not “graded” (differentiated) for the first 20 years of our life?  Does this mean that organizations should not differentiate  their employees for fear they would be demotivated or be a blow to thier ego if they get a poor evaluation? 

From Jack: Straight from the Gut

Some think it’s cruel or brutal to remove the bottom 10% of our people.  It isn’t.  It’s just the opposite.  What I think is brutal and ” false kindness” is keeping people around who are not going to grow or prosper.  There’s no cruelty like waiting and telling people late in their careers that they don’t belong-just when their job options are limited and they’re putting their children through college or paying off big mortgages.

The characterization of a vitality curve as cruel stems from false logic and is an outgrowth of a culture that practices false kindness.  Why should anyone stop measuring performance when people leave college?

Performance management has been a part of everyone’s life from the first grade.  It starts in grade school with advanced placement.  Differentiation applies to football teams, cheerleading squads, and honor societies.  It applies to the college admissions process when you’re accepted by some schools and rejected by others.  It applies at graduation when honors like summa cum laude or cum laude are added to your diploma.

There’s differentiation for all of us in our first 20 years.  Why shouldn’t stop in the workplace, where most of our waking hours are spent?

Our vitality curve works because we spent over a decade building a performance culture with candid feedback at every level. Candor and openness are the foundations of such a culture.

Six minutes with Jack Welch

Identifying and grooming leaders, growing others, differentiating employees in the organization, and “winning is everything”.

Conclusion

Both Collins and Welch take it for granted (unquestioned) that a performance based organization and a performance based culture is what is desired.    Why should this be?  Why not have an entitlement based culture?  Why not encourage a “false kindness” as a sort of politeness to each other?  We could eliminate the openness and candor that might hurt people’s feelings about their ability and competency.

It’s not hard to buy into an ideology at the opposite extreme of Collins and Welch.  In school why should anyone try to achieve an A when a C is good enough?  Why should anyone work hard at work when one can work at a level just enough to get by?  Why prefer Harvard or Yale over a junior college?  Why go to college at all?

Collins and Welch may be two folks whose time has passed – espousing ancient and archaric ideas of differentiation of good and great.  Why even be good if mediocracy is an viable and acceptable option?

Resources

Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t

Good to Great and the Social Sectors

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

Jack: Straight from the Gut

Redistribution of Wealth “Basic Issue of Political and Economic Justice

Links on opinion of eliminating tests and grading in schools

“The practice of teachers assigning students letter or number grades to illustrate how students are performing is an outmoded method, left over the times when schools were regarded as factories, teachers were supervisors, and students were workers. Not only is grading just outdated, research has shown that grading students is damaging as well. Researcher Alfie Kohn has found that grades can cause students to regard learning as a chore; avoid challenging tasks; think less deeply; fall apart when they fail; and to value ability more than effort. In today’s society the process is as important as the outcome; schools should reflect that.”
http://www.freechild.org/grades.htm

Uncle Eddy: the black sheep of the family that Amateur Radio does not talk about

It’s all in the family

If you have seen the movies National Lampoon Vacation or National Lampoon Christmas Vacation then you know the characters Clark Griswold played by Chevy Chase and Uncle Eddy played by Randy Quaid. 

If you know who these two characters are then you get an idea of the relationship of Amateur Radio to CB radio. 

Clark Griswold is to Uncle Eddy as Amateur Radio is to CB radio.  Or so that is what it would seem from the perspective of Clark Griswold.  How Uncle Eddy feels about this – we don’ t know.  But if CB radio was to exchange Christmas gifts with Amateur Radio, Amateur Radio would be in possession of some fine white shoes.

Amateur Radio seeing CB radio as Uncle Eddy might be the “Pot calling the Kettle Black”.  Don’t forget that the popular media identified Ham Radio as an embarrassing hobby like stamp collecting.

History as objective ?

Those who record and write the history of a cultural phenomenon simply record and write the history and defer judgement to others.  History is supposed to be “objective” – as much as this is possible; history is written by the winners – don’t forget that.  “Just the facts madam” as is the ideal.

CB radio is as much a part of radio (wireless) communication as is any other part of radio – Broadcasting, Pirate Radio, special uses of radio as in the military, and Amateur Radio – to name a few.  To not recognize that CB was a part of the american popular culture in the 1970’s is to miss out on a rich American phenomenon.

Serendipity Strikes Again

As is the case many times, while searching on the Internet for one thing one finds another thing that was not at all what one set out to find.  So was the case when I stumbled upon some CB radio web sites.

The Internet as nearly primary source material for History of CB

Some folks have put up tribute sites to the heyday of CB radio in the 1970s preserving pictures of old radios, recorded conversations from 30 years ago, remembrances to “characters” (CB personalities) from those old days, QSL cards, and various other artifacts. 

The work of these folks is almost to create a museum of days gone past of the phenomenon of CB radio.  Without the Internet, the knowledge of this era would be not nearly be as accessible  as it is and would be lost history to the majority of regular people.

The Remnant

There is still a remnant of CB radio out there and there are web sites with products and advice to CB’ers.  It’s an interesting culture of illegal linear amplifiers, radio modifications, and language. 

Certainly these terms cause one to wonder what they are missing - “Super Swing Kits”, “Top Gun Modulation”, “Outlaw Kits”, “Sliders” – as in frequency sliding between CB channels, “kickers”, and many more.  Of course “Pimping out” a CB with LED’s in the panel meter so that they slowly change among 7 different colors is part of the panache of CB as well.  One must have panache.  It’s all about fashion and style.

Exploring the world of CB Radio

We’ll provide some URLs that we stumbled upon so you can explore this part of Americana from the 1970’s and how it is today.

QSL Cards

Probably one of the most interesting sites we found was a image archive of about 1300 QSL cards from CB Radio.  At one time the FCC did issue CB call signs and folks did QSL.  This site has an interesting slice of life from CB QSL’ing.  This site takes a long time to load, so be patient.

http://www.barovelli.com/qslcards/

CB Gazette

An archive of equipment, Advertisements, Photos, manuals, bootleg rigs, freebanding, Videos, radio reviews, and much more.  Check out Woody’s Video version of the Gazette ( http://www.cbgazette.com/wmv/video.html )

http://www.cbgazette.com/gaz2.html

Night Ranger’s Radio Communication Page

A great collection of Vintage CB radio photos, stories, CB personalities, and recodings.

http://www.shadowstorm.com/cb/

Illegal Linear Amps

What is more a part of CB than illegal Linear amps ?

http://www.davemade.com/mobile.htm
http://www.amateurlinearamplifiers.com/cgi-bin/cart.cgi

CB Radio Manuals, Schematics, Service Manuals, and mods

http://www.cbtricks.com/
http://www.geocities.com/y40002000/plowboy.html

Conclusion

Amateur Radio and CB are brothers – its undeniable.

Poem found in “Maxwell’s Elementary Grammar” school book copyright 1904.

“Oho!’ said the pot to the kettle;
“You are dirty and ugly and black!
Sure no one would think you were metal,
Except when you’re given a crack.”

“Not so! not so! kettle said to the pot;
” ‘Tis your own dirty image you see;
For I am so clean -without blemish or blot-
That your blackness is mirrored in me”

Amateur Radio folks who pass judgement on CB Radio shoud remember this mass media opinion

Amateurs Demand Apology By TIME Magazine: Amateurs around the U.S.A., and in other nations as well, have been writing to TIME Magazine. They are demanding an apology from TIME for failing to edit out a slur against Amateur radio in TIME’s December 31, 2004 issue. That edition featured an article by Lev Grossman about Internet blogging. At one point, Mr. Grossman wrote this:

“Before this year, blogs were a curiosity, a cult phenomenon, a faintly embarrassing hobby on the order of Amateur radio and stamp collecting.”

For those who do not pass judgement on Class  ( Excuse Me. Your Class is showing ) then check out the links above and enjoy a part of American popular culture from the 1970’s.

We’ll give the final word to Amateur Radio operators.

Excuse Me. Your Class is showing

See our related posting:  Things not going too good?  Maybe you need a Second Life

Serendipity. Or, an accident of the Dewey Decimal System

It was an accident of the Dewey Decimal system at the local  library.  I went looking for a book, found it, turned around to leave, and facing me in the stacks on the opposite shelf was 646.77 LOW. 

I wasn’t particularly interested finding 646.77 LOW – but it found me.  646.77 LOW was UpDating: How to Date Out of Your League (Paperback) by Leil Lowndes . How could one not pick up a book with a title like that? So I did. Paged through it. Looked interesting. It’s mine for two weeks.

Why do we do what we do?

In a book about the early life about Apple CEO Steve Jobs ( Steve Jobs, the Journey Is the Reward ) the story is told about his relation to his father.  Jobs father was in the used car business -sort of.  His father was a shade tree mechanic that bought cars, fixed them up,and then sold them out of his used car lot which happened to be the the family driveway.

Steves father tried to get him interested in repairing cars. Steve was not interested. Steve was more interested in who would buy cars like this. That difference in focus – a focus not on the car but on the person who would buy the car probably made all the difference in the world for the future of his career.

The “other Steve” – Steve Wozniak co founder of Apple with Steve Jobs – was more like Steves father – interested in the “thing” and not the “person” who would buy the thing. The history of Apple shows the very divergent paths that the two Steves took. One to CEO of Apple, CEO or Pixar, and CEO of NeXT; the other Steve ( Wozniak) remained mostly a technologist.  The divergent paths of esch was based on the fundamental difference in focus of these two Steves.  One with a primary focus on the desires of people; the other with a primary focus on technology.

The point is this. It’s sometimes interesting to ask why people do things.  Why would a person buy one type of car and not another type of car? Why would one spend time in Second Life rather than their First Life? Why would one want to “UpDate” – date a person out of their league?  All this gets to the underlying question that marketing folks ask – what motivates people to desire/consume a specific product or service?  How can this desire be fulfilled?  Or, perhaps, how can one create a desire or demand?  All this comes down to understanding the person and not the thing.

Is the desire to be what we are not, or have what we do not have,  based on Class?  Why do some people want to be of a “Higher Class” or have a mate of a “Higher Class”?

How different classes define Class

When I asked students in my relationship seminars, “Who is your ideal partner?” or “What type of superior person are you seeking?” the answer that shot out of their mouths most often was, “A higher class of person” or “Someone with class”.

Now herein lies a problem. We live in a country that pretends class doesn’t exist. A sociologist Paul Blumberg wrote in The Predatory Society, class structure is “America’s forbidden thought.” In fact most of us think it’s classless to even admit that classes in our democratic country exist. (The irony of it is that those at the rock bottom and those at the tip top of the class ladder openly and shamelessly proclaim, “Of course class exists!”

But here’s where it gets interesting. Each class defines it differently. Ask someone at the bottom of the social ladder what class is, and here she will ruefully say, “It’s the haves, the big shots who are rolling in it, the fat cats who live on Easy street.” In short, they think class is simply how much money you have.

Ask someone in the middle, and the word so horrifies them that they stutter and stammer. After an abject denial that class exists in our democracy, and that of course they are not in the least bit conscious of it, they reveal (in hushed tones lest someone over hear them) that they think money has something to do with it. But they suspect that education and profession are also involved.

Now, at the top of the heap, like at the bottom, the upper class says unabasahly, “Surely class exists.” The difference is that the uppers define it in terms of values, taste, style, behavior and ideas. Naturally, they admit it,it helps to have money in education to be included in the designation “high class”. But it’s hardly a crucial element.

“Fake it until you can make it”

It is the argument of the book that “birds of a feather flock together” and to snag a high class person you need to be a high class person – or appear to be one. The author is a proponent of “Fake it until you can make it”.  The book is filled with examples of the “values, taste, style, behavior and ideas” of upper class people with the goal that you can “make it” after “faking it”.  There are various exercises in the book to see if you can “spot the mistakes” of someone who is “faking it” on the road to “making it”.  Why would a person be on this path?

What you watch says about your Class

For example, what about your watch?   What does it “betray” about your social class?
Start with 10 points. Then subtract as follows. The lower your score the farther you are away from upper class

Its digital -8
It displays the time in Paris, London, Rome, or Kuala Lumpur -5
It has the number of days elapsed in the year -4
It has a second hand -1 (the leisure class does not need to track to seconds)

According to the author, “The classy watch of preference for both men and women is the Cartier tank watch with the black lizard strap.”  Got that? 

http://www.bgrayjewelers.com/CartierTankWatches.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartier_Tank_watch

What you read says about your Class

Was that fun and revealing? 
Try another one.  How does what you read “betray” your social class?

Low class

National Enquirer
Girlie magazines
Popular mechanics or any magazine having to do with cars
Cosmo, Good Housekeeping, and almost any other woman’s magazine
Any sports magazine with the possible exception of those on golf or tennis

Middle class

Reader’s Digest
Martha Stewart Living
National Geographic
Golf, tennis, or boating publications
Scientific American
The Yew Yorker
Most all travel magazines with a few exceptions describing exotic destinations

Upper class

Atlantic Monthly
New York Times Book Review
Town and Country
New York Review of Books
Times Literary Supplement
Paris Match
Hudson Review

The disparity of our lives

The question before the first question is this:  ”Why would you want to date out of your league?”  What is it about people that they are not comfortable in their own skin? Why do 16 million people need a Second Life? Why aren’t they working on their First Life?  Have they given up?  Thorn in the towel?  Admitted defeat?

Can this apply to organizations? Who are these people that want to be Directors, Vice Presidents, Presidents, and so on in 501 (C)(3) charities? The question only becomes interesting when there is a discontinuity between individuals in their First Life and their Second Life role in an organization. The greater the disparity the more interesting the question and the more revealing the answer about human nature.   Does Paris Hilton need a second life? No. Her First Life seems sufficient and it is unlikely that you will find her embedded in Second Life as a replacement of her First Life.  Does Steve Jobs need a Second Life where he is CEO?  No.  He is already CEO in his First Life. 

Is the ferocity of those who go after Second Life roles in charitable organizations – where the barrier to entry is low – proportional to the discontinuity of what they are in Fist Life and what they desire to be but have not achieved?  More on this phenomenon in a later posting.

Your Class is showing. 

The book is a fun read. The author provides a test whereby one can determine social class based on answers to questions about what is in your home.  If you walk into someone elses home you can apply this test to see where they stand in social class.  The test is at the end of this posting.

The most accurate class indicator

The question of the disparity of our lives aside, the author subscribers to the “Fake it, until you can Make it” approach.  However, there is one area that is hard to fake.  It’s hard to fake your language. 

No matter how you dress, how you wear your hair, or how you furnish your home, the moment you open your mouth, your social class will show.  In the seventeenth century Ben Johnson gave us wisdom for the ages. He said, “Language most shows a man.”Speak, that I’m may see thee.”

Seven Deadly Seconds

 The authors says that upon meeting someone of the upper class you have about 7 seconds.  When you start to speak, the first seven seconds can give you away.

Refined people are extremely sensitive to the words you choose and the way you pronounce them.  Unfortunately, one verbal slip could fracture a relationship with an upper and you’d never know the reason…

Likewise, you get about 7 seconds when you meet someone to prove whether your permanent mate material or not.  Well educated ears are finely tuned to pick up subtle mistakes.  There are sensitive to subtleties that seem perfectly OK to most people

Men or women with “Trophy Spouses” of a different class may face this problem of language at dinner parties or social gatherings.  “Mixed class speak” can be deadly.  It can reveal the incongruity between what one appears to be and what one is in reality.

Conclusion

This posting was provided for entertainment purposes only – a serendipitous accident of the Dewey Decimal system and the layout of a particular public library which cause me to pick up a book I would have never looked for. 

No person of any class was injured in the creation of this writing.

Resources

Check out “Class Matters” in the New York Times to interactively explore the components of social class
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_01.html

UpDating: How to Date Out of Your League (Paperback) by Leil Lowndes
See our related posting:  Things not going too good?  Maybe you need a Second Life

 How Classy is your Home

Begin with a score of 100. For each of the following in your living room ( or those of friends or acquaintances ) add or subtract points as indicated. Then ascertain social class according to the scores at the end.

Floors and floor covering

Hardwood floors solid wood +4
Parquet floor solid wood +8
Stone floor +4
Laminate floor -4
Vinyl floor -6
Wall to wall carpet +2
Shag carpet -4
New oriental rug or carpet -2 each
Worn oriental rug or carpet +5 each
Threadbare rug or carpet +8 each

Fireplace

Working fireplace +4
Gas log fireplace -5

Ceilings

Ceiling 10 feet high or higher + 6
Cathedral ceiling with or without skylights -5

Wall Coverings

 Original painting by internationally recognized practitioner + 8 each
Original drawing, print or lithograph by internationally recognized practitioner + 5 each
Reproduction of any Picasso painting, print, or anything -2 each
Original painting, drawing or print by family members -4 each

Window Covering

Windows curtained, with rods and draw cords + 5
Windows curtained, with no rods or draw cords + 2
Window blinds, mini, plastic -2
Window blinds, mini, metal -1
Window blinds, mini, wood + 1
Window blinds, vertical -3
Wooden Venetian blinds -2
Metal Venetian blinds -4

Lighting

Genuine Tiffany lamp + 3
Reproduction Tiffany lamp -4

Art

 Any work of art depicting, cowboys -3
Professional oil portrait of any member of the household -3

Furniture

Any display of collectibles -4
Transparent plastic covers of furniture -6
furniture upholstered with any metalic threads -3
Cellophane on any lampshade -4
Ashtray -4 each
Refrigerator, washing machine, clothes dryer in a room for living -6
Motorcycle kept in living room -10

What do you read

National Enquirer -6
Popular mechanics or any vehicle related periodical -5
Reader’s digest -3
National geographic, time, Newsweek, life, etc. -2
Smithsonian -1
Scientific American -1
Town and country + 2
New York review of books + 5
Times literary supplement + 5
Paris Match + 6
Hudson Review + 8
No periodicals -5

Photographs

Family photograph black and white -2 each
Family photograph color -3 each
Family photograph in sterling silver frame + 3

Plants

Potted citrus tree with midget fruit growing + 8
Potted palm tree + 5
Fresh cut flowers + 3
Artificial flowers plastic -5
Artificial flowers silk -3

Misc furnishings

 Bowling ball carrier -6
Fishbowl or aquarium freshwater -4
Fishbowl or aquarium saltwater + 1
Fringe on any upholstered furniture -4
Identifiable naugahyde anything usually made of leather -3
Any item exhibiting words in an ancient or foreign language +7
Tabletop obelisk of marble or glass + 9
Fewer than five pictures on walls -5
Furniture more than 50 years old + 2 each
Bookcase full of books + 5
Overflow books stacked on the floor, chairs, etc. + 6
Hutch bookcase displaying plates, Pots, porcelain figurines, etc. but with no books -4
Wall unit with built in TV, stereo etc. -4
TV, stereo, etc. -6
Piano-grand or baby grand + 4
Piano-upright -1
Computer -3
Fax machine -4
Work of sculpture, original, but not made by householder or any family member + 4 each
Work of sculpture made by householder or any family member -5 each
On coffee table, tiny object from funny or anomalous place + 1
Item alluding specifically to the United Kingdom + 1
Item alluding, even remotely, to Tutankhamen -4
Framed certificate, diploma or testimonial -2 each
Laminated framed certificate, diploma, or testimonial -3 each
Item with a tortoise shell finish, if only made a Formica + 1 each

Chairs

Eames chair -2 each
Recliner -3 each
Recliner sofa -4 each
Sofa with hidden compartments -5 each
Anything displaying the name or initials of anyone in the household -4
Curved moldings visible anywhere in the room +5

Your Class Score

Things not going too good?  Maybe you need a Second Life.

Under the Pixel Sun

What is Second Life?

If you don’t know what Second Life is… well, you should.  And we’ll give you a helping hand in that.

From the http://secondlife.com web site

Second Life^® is a 3-D virtual world created by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe.

• From the moment you enter the World you’ll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you’ve explored a bit, perhaps you’ll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business.
• You’ll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow Residents. Because Residents retain intellectual property rights in their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other Residents.
• The Marketplacecurrently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the inworld unit of trade, the Linden™ dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online Linden dollar exchanges.

Welcome to the Second Life world. We look forward to seeing you inworld.

Immersive world of creation and destruction, fantasy, social networking, commerce, and more…

Note: First, a little about the language.  The aggregate of SecondLife is called the Grid.  Inworld is where you are when you are in second life.  You are reading this in your First Life or RL (“Real” Life)

Second Life is all of the aspects as cited by the Linden Labs quote and more.  It is an immersive virtual world of creation and destruction, fantasy, social networking, and commerce.  It has its own three dimensional space and physics similar to First Life – but not exactly.  The physics of Second Life is believable to a point with a slight suspension of disbelief as you would allow while watching a movie and yet being intellectually and emotionally attached to the plot and characters.   A day in the surreal virtual world of Linden Labs Second Life is only two (2) hours in duration as counted in RL.  Tempus Fugit in Second Life

How big is Second Life?

At the time of this writing in Q3 of 2008

1. There are approxiamtely 16 million residents of Second Life. 
2. Typical number of residents inworld at any one time is about 60,000. 
3. Residents lived inworld for about  100 million hours.
4. As regards the economy $100 million US dollars of transactions took place. 
5. The amount of land owned by residents is about  65,000 acres.

Here are some very basic highlights of Second Life.  We have provided a number of links in the Resources Section at the end of this posting so you can find out more on your own.

The Act of Creation

Everything in Second Life is created by residents – everything.  Every resident in Second Life has the ability to bring objects into existence (and destroy their own creations).  A resident can create a tree or a flower; a resident can create a building – from a skyscraper to a personal residence; residents can create a horse or a fish…

And the Residents said …

Let the water teem with creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.  So the Residents created the great creatures of the sea and every moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And the Residents saw that it was good.

Get the idea?  And before the Residents could create anything Linden Labs created the Grid.  In the beginning Linden Labs created the Grid –  the heaven and the earth; the sun and the moon.  Linden Labs divided the light from the darkness.  Linden Labs called the light Day, and the darkness they called Night…

Anything is possible in Second Life

This video is a travelogue exploration through the Bogon Flux, a wonderfully strange, self-assembling, self-destructing, steampunky city comprised of rusty pipes and metal chambers.  This is a City creation in SL.  Take a look at the first 5 minutes or so.

 The Avatars in Second Life

Linden Labs did not create the Residents, but they did give the residents the ability to have a form (of their choosing)  in Second Life.  Residents are a sort of disembodied intelligence.  Residents can take on various forms called Avatars.

Avatars are the external representation of intelligent presence in Second Life – and they can change form at will.

This is Sugar Sellers.  She can move through the 3-D virtual world as one might expect in First Life.  In some places in SL you can hear her speak as if someone was sitting next to you.

Our course you would want to get some  nice clothes in Second Life.  There many places to buy clothes.  The fashion industry in Second Life is big business.  The form of currency in Linden dollars.  Check the exchange rate to see what $1 US Dollar will buy in Linden Dollars.  Total economic transactions among residents  in SL in Q3 2008 was about $100 million US dollars.  These economic transactions were Residents buy and selling virtual goods and services using very reall US dollars.

There is a link to a SL fashion show in the Resources section.

 What to do in Second Life

There are thousands of places to go in SL.  Through the magic of teleportation you can get from here to there in an instant.  Like angels or ghosts, every Resident has the ability to fly – appear and disappear.  So the preferred mode of transportation for long distance is teleportation.  For short distances, flying is preferred.  Cars and other vehicles are there for amusement and a legacy of RL residents before they entered SL.

You can check SL Buzz for a current calendar of events – http://events.slbuzz.com/search

 Here is a sample at the time of this writing.

You are on your own

Our intention is simply to get you to go to Second Life and try it out.  SL is free for non-land owners and free to explore as mch as you like.  Follow the links in the Resources section and download the SL client software.  Watch the intro video to get a feel for what you will experience.

How disturbing can this get?

There are some interesting parallels between real life (First Life), Second Life, the questions about the perception of Reality, and God. 

Think about this.   A group of innovative people (Linden Labs) created Second Life – its concept and its implementation – the Grid.  Second Life has a physics engine that understands how objects move in 3 dimensional space.  Second life has a 3-D rendering engine that can draw 3 dimensional objects in space.  Combine the physics engine and rendering capability and one can watch objects move through 3 dimensional space in a way that a traditional human being would recognize as close to “Reality”.

What about the beings inside second life? At the time of this writing there are about 16 million residents of Second Life and about 60,000 people inworld  in Second Life at any one time.  First Life people are behind the avatars that are the actors in Second Life.  First life people are the intentional beings in Second Life that animate the avatars and make things happen.  In a sense, FL people are a sort of “soul” that animates each of the individual Avatars – if we can borrow that concept (soul) from medieval philosophy and theology.

First Life pushing Second Life Avatars

People in First Life pushing the Avatars around in Second Life are terraformingthe landscape, creating objects, and building things of value.  The Avatars are communicating and collaborating with each other.  What if you didn’t need people in First Life to push these folks (avatars) around in Second Life?  What if they can animate themselves?  That is, what if the avatars in SL had intention in their own right?

The concept, approach, and technology that most closely resembles the way a human brain functions is neural networks.  Traditional computers are basically digital sequential processors; neural networks are massively parallel and highly interconnected – they are analog and not digital.  The human brain contains approximately 100 Billion neurons and weights about 3 pounds. 

That’s 100 Billion neurons that fits in the space of less than .5 cubic ft (your head) and weights less than 3 pounds.  In the book: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil  Kurzweil estimates that massively parallel machines that implement neural networks will be able to emulate the human brain and human intelligence by the year 2030. 

Second Life Avatars pushing Second Life Avatars = Avatar First Life ?

So what if the 16 million people in Second life were replaced with 16 million neural network “black boxes” and then let them go explore their physics based 3-D world of the Grid?  What might these 16 million “black boxes” of simulated human intelligences create and build in Second Life?   What life would they make for themselves in Second Life and how much of that would be “in OUR image” – the creators of these self-animated intentional Avatars?   Would these avatars be conscious of themselves as beings?  Or, would they be pure actors more like we understand the consciousness of animals?

Playing God

After we let these 16 million Avatars loose in the 3-Dimensional of Second Life, each with the (artificial) intelligence of OUR 3-pound brain, then would we look in on them from time to time to see how they were doing?  Would we intervene in their First Life ( our Second Life) world to save them if they got themselves in trouble?  If we did intervene in their First Life world, what form would we take and how would we appear to them?

Suppose that with the Moore’s Law increase in computing power the Grid could simulate time 10, 100, or 1,000 times faster than what we experience in First Life.  To the extent that we could get the 100 Billion neuron simulation “right” could we not predict our own future?  If we could further get the World right and the physics right and set initial conditions and then “press the button” of simulation could we not follow our own evolution in limited but well defined scenarios?

How do we know we are not some sort of simulation in out First Life?  That is, how do we know that our First Life is not some other beings Second Life where they have achieved a sort of ultimate Linden Labs Grid where intelligences and physics can be simulated at will, tweaked and refined, into a never ending play of  a ‘God”. 

God could bring the world into existence (as perceived by us) with a push of a button on the ultimate Grid and stop it just as fast.  This gives a possible new interpretation to … In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…  Grid-style ala Linden Labs.

Professor Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. 

Dawkins has an interest in SL in a few interesting areas.  Dawkins suggests that we are already living a Second Life insofar as we precievereality only though our (limited number) of five senses which operate in a certain limited way.

This simply reiterates the philosophical question from the 1700’s  asked by David Hume in An Enquiry concerning  Human Understanding and ImmanuelKant in Critique of Pure Reason.  Its a question of epistemology. 

That is, how to do we know what we know?  For Kant,  a question was How can we know the “thing in itself” without the mediation of the senses that may distort Reality?

So to Dawkins point, we already live in a virtual world as generated (constructed) by our senses.  We can’t know the thing in itself since our reason is  always  mediated and (mis/represented) by our senses.  For Dawkins, God is what is outside Reality and in a priviledged postion to see the things in themselves without the mediation and intervention of perception as we know it.

W James Au is an embedded jouralist in Second Life.
His book is: The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World
His blog is here http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/

 Au writes about an inteview with Dawkins

But there’s also fascinating things,” Dawkins continues, “for example, I think it’s reasonable to say that when you and I think we see the real world… what we’re really seeing in a sense is a simulation in our own head. And the evidence for this is the way we see visual illusions, which are just what you would expect to see if we are simulating a virtual reality in our heads.  A virtual reality which is steered and guided by the real world through our sense organs.  

And that’s pretty much like Second Life, it is virtual, but it’s steered by everybody in there… steering their avatars.  And so this virtual world is getting constant input from the outside real world, from people steering their avatars about, and even building, I mean every house down there, every edifice, every golf course, whatever is down there, has been built by humans from outside controlling their avatars and controlling the bricks and virtual mortar that they use to build things.” 

The reporter wonders if SL could become a kind of laboratory to observe “evolution in action”, and Dawkins assents:

I’ve been thinking about that.  I think that certainly there’s very scientific research you could do in Second Life… I mean sociological research, psychological research, it could be very interesting. 

I suppose you could imagine some science fiction scenario in the distant future when people live in SL so much that they hardly even know there is an outside world and it becomes a matter of theological speculation of what goes on in the outside world.”  Interestingly, many of the ideas Dawkins casually throws out here are very much aligned with Philip Linden’s ultimate vision of Second Life

 You can watch a commentary by Dawkins on Second Life here:

Conclusion

 The wind that cannot touch our faces
Wand’ring through virtual places
What then is there in here for you?
Or should I ask you, perhaps, who?

 What is Linden Labs Second Life?  And, “what in there in here for you” ?

Technology people will be interested in the SL in its 3-D rendering, physics engine, and the Linden Labs Scripting Language that animates objects in Second Life.

The mass of people will see SL as a form of Social Networking with a strong (and dangerous) pull into a immersive Virtual World of unReality.  SL can become a dangerous fantasy.  In SL almost anything is possible.  SL may be redeeming.  That is, if you are overweight in RL you can have an athletic build in SL.  If you are not good looking in RL you can be handsome or beautiful in SL.  If you can’t strike up a conversation with the opposite sex in RL you have more of a chance in SL.  If you can’t dance in RL you can in SL – all you need to do is go to a SL Dance Club, ask a partner to dance, and then go to a “pose ball” on the dance floor – your SL avatar knows all the popular dance moves.  The non-redeeming aspects of SL – the places you can go in SL to live out fantasysof your choosing – we won’t mention them here – you can find those places for yourself.  The unofficial estimate is that 30% of the economic transactions in SL are for goods and services in these latter mentioned areas.

Academics like Dawkins will endlessly speculate… “I think that certainly there’s very scientific research you could do in Second Life… I mean sociological research, psychological research, it could be very interesting”

Playing God. Linden Labs Second Life is no different in principle than what has passed for 2,000 years of theology – whether theologians in any generation have recognized their work as this or not.  The work of theology has been to create symbolic worlds of meaning and value into which human beings can embed themselves to give meaning and value to human existence and to understand the “human condition”.  The success, multiplicity, and longevity of religious and theological systems demonstrates the ease at which human beings can embed themselves  into symbolic worlds.   In SL the embeddedness is via the Grid.  In ”RL”  the embeddedness is words and symbols carried religion, theology, and by social systems

You can read more on this latter interpretation  in The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann

Resources

http://secondlife.com/

A short intro to SL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frgnjySjNOw&feature=channel_page

Watch a decent Second Life Documentary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a9ve_L1wQs

Inworld events calendar at Second Life http://secondlife.com/events/

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann

How to create a car in second life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWcrVVwmNi4&feature=related

Ohio University Seond Life Campus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuNFRie8wA

Watch a Second Life fashion show- clothes for your Avatar.  You want to look good in SL – don’t you?  Take advantage of the exchange rate of US dollars to Linden dollars and get some nice clothes.  “You have only one chance to make a first impression”.

Watch a Second Life Wedding.  Do you have trouble finding a wife in your First Life?  Maybe you should get a Second Life wife and a Second Life Wedding ceremony

See you under the Pixel  Sun !! – Or maybe NOT!

Good To Great Part II:
The Gift of Governor Rod Blagojevich

… I see my work as being about discovering what creates enduring great organizations of any type.  I’m curious to understand the fundamental differences between good and great, between excellence and mediocre.  I just happen to use corporations as a means of getting inside the black box.  I do this because of publicly traded corporations, unlike other types of organizations, have two huge advantages: a widely agreed upon definition of results and a plethora of easily accessible data.

That good is the enemy of great is not just a business problem, It is a human problem.  If we have cracked the code on good on the question of good to great we should have something of value to any type of organization.  Good schools might become great schools. Good newspapers might become great newspapers.  Good churches might become great churches.  Good government agencies might be great agencies.  And good companies might become great companies.

Jim Collins – Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t

Blagojevich – A Christmas Gift to the News Media

We are writing this one day after the arrest of the Illinois Governor Rob Blagojevich on corruption charges.  This event, on a slow news cycle, was a gift to the media.  The corruption charges and the publication of the 78 page list of charges against Blogovich are not a local storyto Chicago or Illinois –  its a national story.

To wrap your mind around what leadership and its affect on organizations and governments, one has to look at the positive attributes of the hoped for (expected) outcomes of individuals in leadership positions but also study closely leaderships failure modes.  For this latter endeavor, Blagojevich is a gift.

Empirical data trumps theoretical ideas

We already wrote one posting on Jim Collins book Good to Great.  We like Good to Great because it’s based on empirical researchof real companies over a long period (30 years) of time.  If one comes up with a model of leadership that can’t be validated with real world data – that is, that it works and this can shown using accepted methodology and data – then its not worth much. 

Collins approach is to start with the data and produce a model of Leadership as opposed to starting with a model and then validating it.  This is like any empirical research in the sciences where one lets the data take you whereever it might lead.  The key is letting the data take you where it’s going to take you – even if it does not validate common wisdom on the subject or preconceived ideas.

Commonly held ideas that were NOT validated

Collins found that these commonly held beliefs did not hold.

1. Celebrity CEO’s.  Larger-than-life, celebrity leaders who ride in from the outside are negatively correlated with taking a company from good to great.
2. The structure of executive compensation.  The idea that the structure of executive compensation is a key driver in corporate performance is simply not supported by the data.
3. Strategy.  All companies had well defined strategies and the there is no evidence that good to great companies spent more time on long-range strategic planning than comparison companies.
4. Technology.  Technology has nothing to do with good to great transformation.
5. M&A.  Mergers and Acquisitions play no role in going from good to great.
6. No launch event.  Good to great companies had no name, tag line, launch event, or program to signify their transformation.
7. Not industry dependent.  The good to great companies wer not, by and large, in great industries, and some were in terrible industries.

 We pulled these out for special attention

1.  What not to do and stop doing. The good to great companies, in addition to focusing on what to do equally  focused on what not to do and what to stop doing.
2. Commitment, alignment, motivation.  For good to great companies, unlike no so great companies, these area do not need much attention – they take care of themselves.
3. Greatness is largely a matter of conscious choice.

Consistent finding of Good to Great companies – Level 5 Leaders

Collins book, Good to Great, goes on to outline what he found out about the transformation of good to great in the companies that he studied.  But he first devotes a chapter to  writing about what kind of leadership was at the executive level of a company that made and sustained a transformation from good to great.

Since we have the Christmas gift of Rod Blagojevich we will take a look at this contrast.

Collins provides a simplistic view of the levels of leadership.  A more comprehensive model of leadership created by Walt Malher when he was at General Electric, called the Crossroads model, can be found in The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company (Hardcover)

This is Collins (simplistic) model

1 Highly Capable Individual (Individual Contributor)
2 Contributing team member
3 Competent Manager
4 Effective Leader
5 Executive

The real value of Collins work is what he found as Level 5 leadership for those companies that made the good to great transition and sustained it for at least 15 years.

We were not looking for Level 5 leadership in our research, or anything like it, but the data was overwhelming and convincing.  It is an empirical, not an ideological, finding.

Good to Great Level 5 leaders…

1. Embodies a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will. They are ambitious first and foremost for the company, not for themselves.
2. They set up their successors for success.  Leaders at other levels set their successors up for failure.
3. They displayed a compelling modesty, are often self-effacing and understated.  In contrast, two thirds of the comparison companies had leaders with gargantuan personal egos that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.
4. Fanatically driven with an incurable need to produce sustained results.  They are resolved to do whatever it takes to make the company great, no matter how big or hard the decisions.
5. They show workman like diligence - more plow horse than show horse.
6. They attribute success to factors other than themselves.  when things go wrong they blame themselves, taking full responsibility.  The comparison CEO’s often did just the opposite – they took the credit for success and assigned blame for disappointing results.
7. They attribute the success to luck and not personal greatness

“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up”

With the work of Collins in mind, lets look at what happended in Chicago on December 9,2008 with the arrest of Rob Blagojevich.

Read the full blagojevich CRIMINAL COMPLAINT.
If you don’t want to read the whole complaint then read a Summary of the Criminal Complaint

 And the bottom line is here

Here is a summary as widely reported in the news.

• conspiring to obtain personal financial benefits by leveraging his sole authority to appoint a US Senator;
• threatening to withhold state assistance to the Tribune Company in its bid to sell Wrigley Field so as to induce the firing of editorial board members critical of the governor;
• and to obtain campaign contributions in exchange for official actions — both historically and recently.

And reported in the media

Meanwhile, a spokesman for House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, has taken to questioning the governor’s sanity. Spokesman Steve Brown recently twice referred to Blagojevich as “the madman.” And when asked about Blagojevich’s plans for a special session, Brown encouraged reporters to look up the definition of “sociopath.”

A Blagojevich spokeswoman responded to the Chicago Tribune: “He’s not a sociopath.

Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune has suggested that Blagojevich may be a Sociopath.

In a profile of Blagojevich in last February’s Chicago Magazine, writer David Bernstein reported: “Privately, a few people who know the governor describe him as a ’sociopath,’ and they insist they’re not using hyperbole. State Rep. Joe Lyons, a fellow Democrat from Chicago, told reporters that Blagojevich was a ‘madman’ and ‘insane.’ “

That struck me at the time as over the top. Today it strikes me as brave and prescient.

Profile of a Sociopath

We took the time to see exactly how to define a sociopath.  Read the Profile of a Sociopath

 Here are some highlighs

1. Contemptuous of those who seek to understand them
2. Does not perceive that anything is wrong with them
3. Authoritarian
4. Secretive
5. Paranoid
6. Only rarely in difficulty with the law, but seeks out situations where their tyrannical behavior will be tolerated, condoned, or admired
7. Conventional appearance
8. Goal of enslavement of their victim(s)
9. Exercises despotic control over every aspect of the victim’s life
10. Has an emotional need to justify their crimes and therefore needs their victim’s affirmation (respect, gratitude and love)
11. Ultimate goal is the creation of a willing victim
12. Incapable of real human attachment to another
13. Unable to feel remorse or guilt
14. Extreme narcissism and grandiose
15. May state readily that their goal is to rule the world

 (The above traits are based on the psychopathy checklists of H. Cleckley and R. Hare.)

 ”I did nothing wong”

 Now this is the icing on the cake

On December 10, this was widely reported in the media

Rod Blagojevich’s lawyer says the Illinois governor doesn’t have immediate plans to resign and doesn’t think he did anything wrong. 

Attorney Sheldon Sorosky says Blagojevich is asking Illinois residents to have faith in him.

One wonders if Illinois has not delivered a “text book case”

It’s all about “me”

We’ll end up with a quote from Jim Collins who, we believe, hit the mark

My hypothesis is that there are two categories of people: those that do not have the seed of Level 5 and those that do.  The first category consists of people who could never in a million years bring themselves to subjugate their egoistic needs to the greater ambition of of building something larger and more lasting than themselves.  For these people, work will always be first and foremost about what they get – fame, fortune, adulation, power, whatever – not what they build, create, or contribute.

Level 5 Leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company.  It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest.  Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious – but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.

And here we have the antithesis as charged in the criminal complaint

• conspiring to obtain personal financial benefits by leveraging his sole authority to appoint a US Senator;
• threatening to withhold state assistance to the Tribune Company in its bid to sell Wrigley Field so as to induce the firing of editorial board members critical of the governor;
• and to obtain campaign contributions in exchange for official actions — both historically and recently.

For some people in a leadership position in an organizations, it all about “me” – what can  I get?  How can I benefit – no matter what the impact on the constituencies or the reputation of the office.  And best of all, “I did nothing wrong”.  It’s an interesting issue of ethical standards.  In a sense, if you have no ethical standards, you can violate no ethical standards.

Back to Amateur Radio Clubs:
Good to Great; Good to Gone; Lost in Mediocracy

We wonder – do any of the 2,000 ARRL affiliated clubs have Level 5 leadership?   And if not, why not?

On the continuum between Level 5 leadership and leadership as exemplified by Rod Blagojevich where does the leadership of your Amateur Radio club lay? 

Starting in January 2009 we’ll start telling some stories of Amateur Radio clubs in Chicago and see what path they are on – good to great; good to gone; or lost in mediocrity – and why they are on this path.

Resources

Read the full blagojevich CRIMINAL COMPLAINT
Read a Summary of the Criminal Complaint
Read an article by Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune
Read the Profile of a Sociopath
Read an article on Blago shakedown on Jesse Jackson Jr for wifes job
Read an article from the Chicago Tribune on The Power of Power
The story and evolution of the Crossroads model of Leadership and Leadership development at General Electric can be found in this book:  The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company (Hardcover)
Jim Collins – Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t

“Blogo” in one minute

Video Battle: Twitter vs APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System)

On this side we have APRS ( Automatic Packet Reporting System )

APRS is not a vehicle tracking system. It is a two-way tactical real-time digital communications system between all assets in a network sharing information about everything going on in the local area. On ham radio, this means if something is happening now, or there is information that could be valuable to you, then it should show up on your APRS radio in your mobile. APRS also supports global callsign-to-callsign messaging, bulletins, objects email and Voice because every local area is seen by the Internet System (APRS-IS)! APRS should enable local and global amateur radio operator contact at anytime-anywhere and using any device. — http://www.aprs.org/

APRS – You guys go first

And on this side we have Twitter

Now the Twitter people

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Where did the idea for Twitter come from? Jack Dorsey had grown interested in the simple idea of being able to know what his friends were doing. Specifically, Jack wondered if there might be an opportunity to build something compelling around this simple status concept. When he brought the idea up to his colleagues, it was decided that a prototype should be built.

Twitter was funded initially by Obvious, a creative environment in San Francisco, CA. The first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Obvious. In May 2007, Twitter Incorporated was founded.  –Twitter.com

We have asked an academic to better explain Twitter to us.  She has a degree in Philology

Lets establish her credentials

Her name is Marina Orlova, she’s 27 and she’s a philologist! Now you might be asking what the heck is a philologist? Well, it’s someone who studies linguistics and etymology.. and in Marina’s case.. she has applied her Philology degrees to specializing in word origins.

Marina has two degrees – Teaching of Russian Language and World Literature Specializing in Philology and the Teaching of English Language Specializing in Philology from State University of Nizhni Novgorod Region in Russian Federation, graduated 2002 and taught English to high school students for 2 years.

We have asked an expert, Lisa Nova, to provide commentary on excess Twitter usage

Twitter expert Lisa Nova – Part 1

Twitter expert Lisa Nova – Part 2

How many people use Twitter?

One user brought up an interesting point. Every time a new account is created they get an xml feed with an ID number in it. Mine is number 5,870,022 which matches the number that Twitterholic defines as the nth person to sign up. Last week I created a new account which as the ID 14,461,298. This suggests that if Twitter is using these id’s in sequentially  that there have been nearly 14.5 million accounts created. However, what % of those accounts are actually active? That’s still an open question. –Marc Boucher

Twitter Vision

See who is twitter-ing in real time http://twittervision.com/

Conclusion

And the winner is?

Resources

Learn about the origin of words from Marina Orlova on her YouTube channel HotForWords
Watch more videos from Lisa Nova on her YouTube channel LisaNova
Check out Twitter on http://twitter.com

Amateur Radio Clubs:

Good to Great; Good to Gone; Lost in Mediocracy

“Good is the enemey of Great.

And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great.  We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools.  We don’t have great government, principally becase we have good government. 

Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.  The vast majority of companies never become great, percisely because the vast majority become quite good – and the is their main problem.

Can a good company become a great company and, if so, how? 

Or is the disease of “just being good” incurable?” — Good to Great – Jim Collins

This quote is in the opening chapter to Jim Collins book Good to Great.  Collins says that curiosity set him off along with 20 other researchers on a 5 year research effort to disoverthe answer to this fundamental question – How does a company or organization go from good to great?

Good to Great is a follow-on book to another book written by Collins -  Built to last : successful habits of visionary companies.  Built to Last is about how to take a company with great results and turn it into an enduring great company.  Built to Last was published before Good to Great.  But, in the order of things. Good to Great should preceed Built to Last.  You need to know how to make a great company first, and then ensure it is built to last – a sort of prescriptive architecure for building great companies or organizations.  This set of Collins books – Good to Great and Built to Last have nearly iconic status by management consultants and those who study organizational behavior. 

Folks who read these books started asking how these ideas that Collins et al discovered during their research would apply to non-profits and the public sector.  Collins followed up with a short monograph: Good to Great and the Social Sectors.

The Search

How did Collins go about finding companies that went from good to great?  Briefly, he looked at financial results of companies from the Fortune 500 over a 30 year period from 1965 to 1995. 

What Collins was looking for are companies that had a clear transition point from below market performance for 15 years to above market performance by at least three times the market performance sustained for at least 15 years.  Such a longitudinalstudy over 30 years would ferret out those companies that fit the model “Good to Great” adjusting for short term “one hit wonders”, sheer luck, and the average tenure of a particular CEO.  As you can see these companies also would be interesting subjects for “Built to Last”.

The Mission of this web site

If you read our mission statement of this web site you will see that it really has two missions – two basic reasons for this site to exist.  This type of bifurcation of mission is not recommended – it lacks focus.  But there is a reason for this.  First, this site is primarily a site for Amateur Radio folks – that is the segment we carved out as the audience for this site.  Second, we think we found a niche for sort of our own reseach projectinthe style of Collins books that we just mentioned and the whole corpus of books under the general rubric of Leadership, Management, and Organizational behavior.  We think that there is much to learn from non-profits such as Amateur Radio clubs for reasons we will write about in later postings.

So, bottom line on the strategy on this site.  First, you will find a lot of original content technical articles on this site.  This should attract the Amateur Radio folks.  Second, we will be writing about organizational behavior.  It is unlikely that Amateur Radio folks would come to a site focused exclusively on organizational behavior.  But, we want Amateur Radio folks to come here and tell us their stories about their clubs – good to great, good to gone, or lost in enduring and endless mediocrity. 

The intentional intended “unintended consequence” is that we expect to ferrtout other Amateur Radio folks that are also interested in our mission of “good to great” as applied to non-profits in general and Amateur Radio clubs “good to great” in particular.  The segment most likely to respond to this are those folks in Amateur Radio clubs that are on Boards of Directors, served in a leadership role such as President or Vice President, or perhaps folks who lead committees in these organizations.  More precisely, we are looking for people who have an interest in architecting organizations beyond their tenure in these leadership roles – “Built to Last”.

You never know who you might snag.  Just like looking through the stacks in a library for a particular book you come across books that may be more interesting than the book you went there for in the first place. We hope that this happens and folks coming here reading our technical articles find our postings on organizational behavior of Amateur Radio clubs interesting to the point that they can make a contribution of a story of take something back to their Amateur Radio club and get on the road of good to great.  Amateur Radio folks may not think they are interested in architecting great organizations.  But they might be after reading this site and finding that there are folks with similar goals.

Engaging the ARRL

Of course there is another expectation.  The expectation is that we can entice the ARRL (American Radio Relay League) to widen its scope as to how it engages ARRLaffiliated clubs at the local level.  At least in the Chicagoland area some Amateur Radio clubs have gone from “good to gone “or “good to ‘life support’”.  This should not happen.  The ARRL should help these clubs out as part of thie overall mission of ensuring the sustainment and growth of the Amateur Radio Service.

Casting a wide net

So how do we find folks that might be interested in our mission?  The ARRL (American Radio Relay League) makes that easy.  They maintain an affiliated clubs search.  With a little bit of hard work we now have a direct mailing list of slightlyover 2,000 clubs.  We will promote our site on a regular basis to this target segment.  If we pick up non Amateur Radio folks via google searches on our keywords – all the better.

Good to Great; Good to Gone; Lost in mediocracy

We have watched the Amateur Radio Clubs in the Chicagoland area for the past 15 years.  This is the place we will start telling stories on how these clubs work against published research of those folks like Collins that study real companies and find out why organizations are great, fail, or fall into endless meritocracy.

Kaizen

There is a word in Japanese “Kaizen”. Kaizen means “continuous improvement” and is a foundational element underlying the management and leadership philosophy the Toyota Corporation and the Toyota Production System.  Toyota is a much studied company and many believe that part of Toyotas underlying success is its leadership philosophy which includes, as one of the five original precepts, “Kaizen”.

So what about organizations in general andAmateurRadio clubs in particular – do they contain a fundamental  element of “Kaizen” or do they just flounder?

“Everyone should tackle some great project at least once in life”

- Sakichi Toyoda (1867-1920), father of Kiichiro Toyota, the founder of Toyota.

To be Great you first need to want to be great.  How many of the 2,000 ARRL affiliated clubs have committed to such a goal? – or would commit to such a goal if they could get engaged with like-minded people on the same mission?

This is what we intend to find out as part of the mission and goal of our mini-research project that you can read about on this site – along with the technical articles.

How many Amateur Radio folks think like Sakichi Toyoda and want to tackle such a project for their club – Good to Great?

Or is the disease of “just being good” incurable?

Resources

Books mentioned in this article

Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t

Good to Great and the Social Sectors

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

How Toyota Became #1; Leadership Lessons from the Worlds Greatest Car Company

Extreme Toyota: Radical Contraditions that Drive Sucess at the Worlds Best Manufacturer

Who is Jim Collins?

“Driven by a relentless curiosity, Jim began his research and teaching career on the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992. In 1995, he founded a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, where he now conducts research and teaches executives from the corporate and socialsectors. Jim holds degrees in business administration and mathematical sciences from Stanford University, and honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Colorado and the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University.”

Save your life:
Review of Maxtor 1TB 4 Plus Safety Drill Software
Or – Safety Drill vs EZ Gig II

Another story from the “We wasted (invested) our money in this so you don’t have to.

“Save your life” – that is the tag line on the Maxtor One Touch 4 Plus 1 Terabyte (1,000 GB) drive and associated software.  The Plus in the One Touch 4 Plus means that it comes with Safety Drill.  Safety Drill is software that can back up and restore an image of your hard drive.

An image of a hard drive is different than a file backup.  Basically, the image is a pile of bits that represents all the data on the drive.  For some software that does image backups the image is opaque meaning that you can’t look inside the pile of bits that is the image backup and see individual files.  This is the case with the safety drill image backup that is created with the backup software supplied by the Maxtor One Touch 4 Plus drives.

Old Concept – New implementation and disappointing feature set

The Maxtor Safety Drill software derives from a long line of image backup software .  It is nothing new in concept or underlying technology.  This concept goes back at least three decades starting with Norton Ghost in the 1980’s

To get to the bottom line on Safety Drill we were very disappointed at the lack of features and sophistication of this software in a mature market of such products.

Maxtor Safety Drill

Specifically, it was disappointing against the product we got for “free” with an external drive we bought about a year ago.  Here are some specific points:

1. Safety Drill will back up your hard drive but you can’t select a particular partition.  If you have multiple partitions you have to back them all up – no choice.  Some folks have a C partition with the Operating System and use the D drive for a data drive.  You can’t pick and choose what partitions to back up.  If you have a large drive sometimes it does not make sense to image the whole disk.
2. You can’t look inside the image and restore individual files.  Image backup software going back to Norton Ghost allowed one to do this.  That is, you could do a file or folder restore from an image file.  This makes image backups dual purpose – restore the whole image of restore a particular file.  Maxtor Safety Drill does not allow looking inside the image.
3. Large image backup files.  Hey, you have a Terabyte.  Doesn’t matter.  The image created by Safety Drill was about 30% larger than the identical image backup make by another product.
4. Only works with Windows and Macs.  If you have Linux – you are out of luck
5. Image restore must restore the whole drive.  Does not allow one to restore a particular partition.  Consistent with the image backup – its all or nothing.
6. The Linux-based (Knoppix) takes a long time to boot.  There are no tools or utilities other than to restore the whole disk image.  Maxtor could have at least thrown in a utility to validate the image before restore. 
7. You always need the restore disk.  To restore an image you boot off a disk that you get with the product.  You can not image restore from the installed Safety Drill software.
8. You can’t delete the @#$%@ Safety Drill images using the Safety Drill software.  You can set a maximum amount of space on the drive used by Safety Drill but it does not allow you to manage the individual files.  This is a major disappointment.

Until we got the Maxtor One Touch 4 Plus we were using Apricon EZ Gig II – which was provided for free with an external drive that we purchased.  Generally “free” software is feature poor – not so with EZ Gig II.  Our use of EZ Gig set the standards for what expected from Maxtor Safety Drill.

Apricorn EZ Gig II

Why we like eZ Gig II better than Safety Drill

1. Choice of partitions to back up.  You can choose the individual partitions to backup or backup the whole drive.
2. Treat the image as a virtual drive and acccess individual files.  eZ Gig allows you to mount the image backup and treat it like a virtual hard drive.  In fact, that is what the image file really is.  Its a virtual drive that you can mount just like a network drive.  This allows one to drag and drop files and folders out of the image to inspect them or restore them.
3. Notes to document the image contents.  Allows you to write extensive notes or comments that are carried with the image. This is useful to describe exactly what is in the image.  If you create a lot of images this is useful.  Before you mount the image for inspection or restore you can inspect the comments.  For image restore read the comments to make sure you are restoring what you think you are restoring.
4. Choice of compression ratios.  Choices of compression ratios – you get three choices.  Higher compression takes longer but generally results in a smaller image file.
5. Integrity Checks.  You have the ability to integrity check an image backup.  Do this after a backup or before a restore to make sure the image integrity is intact.  Restore a bad image and good chance that computer will not boot.
6. Disk Clone – disk to disk.  eZGig allows you to clone a disk – that is make a copy of one disk to another disk.  A useful utility for some circumstances.
7. Backup/Restore time calculation.  eZGig calculates a time estimate (hrs and minutes) when it will be completed.  Safety Drill just provides a percent complete.
8. Can image Linux filesystems.  EZ Gig can backup many different file systems including Linux.  Maxtor Safety Drill only understands Windows and Mac file systems.
9. Image Restore without a CD.  The EZ Gig software that is installed on your PC can initiate a image restore on any drive including the C drive on a one drive system.  EZ Gig knows that the C drive is in use as the system drive but is smart enough to tell you this and then reboot your PC with the standalone software.  This is similar to Norton Ghost.  Ghost accomplishes this by making a temporary partition, changing the boot code, booting the restore software, and then cleaning this up.  We did not investigate how Apricom EZ Gig boots for image restore out of a running system without a external CD but we suspect that it works similar to the way Norton Ghost has implemented this feature.

Just as a side note on EZ Gig II, before we had this software we trial tested Acronis True Image.  Acronis is definitely a full featured product at a full-featured price.  From the look and feel of True Image it looks like EZ Gig is derivative of this product.  Perhaps there was a licensing agreement of the underlying technology.  True image is licensed by PC.  EZ Gig can be used on as many PC’s as you like, there is no license key and no activation or registration required.

Conclusion.

We were very disappointed with Safety Drill feature of the Maxtor backup software that is included with the Maxtor One Touch PLUS drives.  Our disappointment is simply with the lack of features and sophistication of this image backup software in a mature market of about three decade of such software,  Major disappointment to the point we need to give Safety Drill a grade of F minus.  “Go directly to Jail; do not pass go; do not collect $200 “

It looks like Maxtor did Safety Drill “from scratch”.  They would have done much better to license an existing mature product (like Acronis True Image) reduce the feature set (so as not to compete) and then integrate this existing technology with their Maxtor backup suite.

If you have no image backup software and the Maxtor PLUS drives are at the right price point then we could (barely) recommend this as the most basic drive imaging software.  Definitely no frills and truly low end to the max. 

We cringle that anyone has to use the Safety Drill software when there are vastly more sophisticated image software on the market.  Take a look at Acronis True Image Home (see Resources at the bottom)

Why Image rather than backup?

The real advantage of disk imaging (no matter what software you use) over file backup is for disaster revovery in the event that your operating system gets corrupted, cracked, trojan’d, whacked, snacked, or otherwise hacked – or, if your hard drives crashed due to a hardware failure or filesystem corruption.  It could happen to you when you least expect it. 

Having a recent image backup can provide you the easy capability of getting a working system back without untangling what some malware has done to your system.  These days operating systems are so complex that it is simply easier to do an image restore than to untangle a mess at the operating system level.  A typical 3 GB system restore as tested on a modern computer using EZ Gig was about 20 minutes.  You may spend ten times this untangling a malware attack.  The risk is that even if you think you have untangled a hack to your system you may never know if you got it all.

The strategy is to keep images of known good systems as restore points.  Dividing your hard drive into multiple partitions can facilitate this restoration process.  For example, keep the operating system and programs on the C partition. Put all your data files (pictures, music, documents, data, etc) on other partitions. 

This strategy keeps the C partition small which can be imaged in a short amount of time and has a small image footprint.  Backup your data partition(s) with a traditional file and folder based backup system – especially one that retains versions of files.  This is a real plus over file-based backup systems that do not keep version.  The file based backup software also included with the Maxtor drives supports versions.

With all that said  -  “Save your (digital) life” – is an essential strategy no matter what software you use.

We are going to stay with eZ Gig II.  Safety Drill?  Thanks, but no thanks.  Shame on you Maxtor!  You are way behind the curve on this one.  We expect more from the Maxtor brand.

Resources

User guide for the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus

http://www.apricorn.com/

EZ Gig II User Manual

Hardcore serious people would want to consider Acronis True Image – http://www.acronis.com/

Snagged from another site

We generally like using professional branded software.  But if you must, there are plenty of free backup solutions out there.  We snagged this roundup from:

Note:  The content between the horizontal rules are copied from another site.  When we take a chunk of original content from another site we cite that site.  We have placed a link in this posting but broken the ability to click on the link to get there. 

There reason for this is that this site dropped a ton of tracking cookies on our machine which was spotted and removed by McAffe Enterprise.  So if you want to go to that site be aware of this.  Since we removed the link you will have to cut and paste into a browser to get there.  Taking this overt act you acknowledge that you know these tracking cookies will be dropped on your PC.

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/10/12/13-great-free-backup-programs-for-windows-mac-and-linux/  (see note above before going to this site)

Making sure you’ve got a reliable backup solution is a must for any user – and more so for an administrator. Why? Well, mostly because your users probably aren’t very good at remembering to back up their own files. And so it falls to you to provide the right software for the job!

Backup software is a difficult category to tackle nowadays as the distinction between backup and synchronization apps has become a little blurred. Prices being what they are, my personal choice is to use external or removable hard drives for my backup chores – my current favorites are Bonkey and Cobian.

To make sure you’ve got plenty of options to choose from, I’ve split this list into three different categories so that you can choose from the options that are best suited to your environment.

Integrated Burning

Comodo Backup [win]
They do make than a great firewall. Comodo Backup is an excellent free solution. It has extremely flexible scheduling and notification options, supports FTP destinations, can burn multisession DVDs, and has a synchronization mode for quick realtime backups.

DFIncBackup [win]
As is the case with most backup applications, there’s a free and paid version. The free one still handles CD/DVD backups, and it also does incremental .zip jobs as well – only backing up files that have changed or weren’t present in your previous job.

SE Backup [win]
Sports a very simple interface, does CD and DVD burning and compression, and is available as a portable application. Scheduling isn’t built in, but it supports command line launching with parameters which works very well with Windows’ own Task Scheduler.

File Copy

Abakt [win]
Though it’s no longer developed, Abakt is still a great choice. It’s got a great file filtering system, supports 7zip and zip compression, file splitting, password protection, and does differential and incremental backups.

Areca [win]
Free, open source, and wicked powerful. Areca is loaded with features: compression, encryption, simulation, merging, transaction commit/rollback, filtering, and more. It’s command line interface provides excellent automation options and Areca also supports scripting of post-job actions.

Bonkey [win] [mac]
The “Backup Monkey.” If I was giving points for best mascot, this one would be a clear winner.

Bonkey runs on both Windows and Mac, and has a lot of great features. It supports email, FTP, and Amazon S3, compression, encryption, scheduling, and synchronization. It’ll even back up MS SQL server databases.

Cobian Backup [win]
Apart from being a great application, Cobian’s developer has an excellent tutorial online to help you get started. Though it is no longer open source, you may still download the last version that was (v8). There’s also a portable version.

One of my favorite features of Cobian is its ability to handle pre- and post- job events. I use it to issue net stop and net start commands to ensure safe backups of our horrible, horrible point-of-sale system. Cobian also has the ability to control and monitor all its instances on your network from your own workstation.

JaBack [win] [mac]
Allows backup to FTP and email (as well as any drive on your computer or network), and sports a flexible scheduler. It also has a file monitor function that will perform backup operations whenever changes are detected.

Mathusalem [mac]
Offers FTP/SFTP, Amazon S3, WebDav, and SMB support for backups on OSX. Mathusalem can compress to zip and dmg, will resume failed uploads, and supports scheduling and command line launching. It’s also open source.

Server-Based

Bacula [win] [mac] [linux]
Bacula is an enterprise grade network backup solution that runs on just about every platform imagineable. It’s a much more complex system than the other options I’ve mentioned, but is extremely powerful and well-suited to a medium or large scale network.

BackupPC [win] [linux]
A Linux-based, client-free enterprise solution for backing up Windows and Linux machines. BackupPC uses SMB, tar, and rsync to extract backup data from client computers. It ’s got a powerful web-based interface for administrators and users, and will even email reminders to users that have been remiss in performing backups.

It’s a very flexible solution, and is open source.

NasBackup [win] [linux]
Uses a simple Windows GUI and rsync to perform backups from client machines to a central server. It’ll do incremental backups, scheduling, compression, encryption, and the server offers useful per-client controls like limiting the number of versions to store and expiration dates. It also provides daily summaries via email.

Restore [win] [mac] [linux]
The self-proclaimed “reason backup was invented.” It’s definitely a great product, and full of terrific features. Its web interface is very easy to understand and use – and makes it easy for the mobile admin to monitor and control Restore from anywhere.

Restore supports FTP, WebDav, SSH/SFTP, and multiple revisions. It also provides powerful admin tools, making it easy to create and control users, groups, jobs, and scheduling.

The above copied from: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/10/12/13-great-free-backup-programs-for-windows-mac-and-linux/