Spero Consulting

Archive for December, 2009

The Joy of the Season… is Lost on Him

The chil­dren are all snug in their beds with visions of Wii’s danc­ing in their heads, and after four weeks, we finally have the chance to fin­ish a post that we started on Thanks­giv­ing Day, when we read a very silly col­umn by George Will.

His col­umn was enti­tled, “No gifts, please.” In it he dis­cusses (and approves of) a pam­phlet called Scrooge­nomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Hol­i­days by Joel Wald­fo­gel. Based upon both Mr. Will’s col­umn and the book’s title, it seems that Mr. Wald­fo­gel believes that buy­ing Christ­mas gifts destroys value, i.e., the col­lec­tive sat­is­fac­tion in the econ­omy (and per­haps the world) would be greater if Christ­mas gift-​givers spent the money on them­selves instead of on loved ones and others.

Before crit­i­ciz­ing that con­clu­sion, we do want to men­tion a few caveats:

1. We’re not sure if Mr. Will wrote the col­umn in a tongue-​in-​cheek man­ner, but there is no indi­ca­tion that he is any­thing but seri­ous, and the col­umn was pub­lished on Thanks­giv­ing, not April Fool’s Day.¹ Also, we do real­ize that he is con­strained to only a cer­tain num­ber of words per col­umn, and that rel­a­tively low num­ber may make com­plete and clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion dif­fi­cult. Or, maybe a dim edi­tor unknow­ingly hacked the wit out of the column.
2. We didn’t and don’t have the time or inter­est to locate, buy, and read Mr. Waldfogel’s book, so it may be more nuanced and sophis­ti­cated than Mr. Will under­stands it or cares to explain it. If that’s the case, then we apol­o­gize to Mr. Wald­fo­gel for group­ing him with Mr. Will.
3. Sim­i­larly, Mr. Wald­fo­gel may have writ­ten the book in either a tongue-​cheek-​manner or – using rhetoric and exag­ger­a­tion – in an instruc­tive way to edu­cate his stu­dents. If that’s the case then, again, we are sorry for crit­i­ciz­ing him, and we note that Mr. Will did him no favor by pub­li­ciz­ing his work in such a poor manner.

That being said, using com­mon sense and a lit­tle knowl­edge of eco­nom­ics, there are at least four ways to negate their conclusions:

1. Revealed pref­er­ence of gift-​giving actions..
2. The pref­er­ences, includ­ing the risk pref­er­ences, of gift givers and receivers and what that means for col­lec­tive satisfaction.
3. The exis­tence of uncer­tainty as it relates to the level of enjoyment.
4. Whether one truly knows ones own tastes and how they will change through time and if oth­ers know better.

The first three can be dis­cussed within the con­text of stan­dard micro­eco­nom­ics and util­ity the­ory, while the fourth one involves the vio­la­tion of one of the most com­mon and basic assump­tions in economics.

Revealed Pref­er­ence

This is the sim­plest argu­ment to fol­low. Revealed pref­er­ences means that actions speak louder than words – i.e., what peo­ple do is what mat­ters – not what they say.

The fact that ratio­nal folks vol­un­tar­ily buy presents for oth­ers means that they have con­cluded it is the best use of their money (or credit). Oth­er­wise, one must assume that those being stud­ied are irra­tional and/​or that fac­tors other than their own con­sump­tion affect their well-​being or sat­is­fac­tion. Both are easy to believe, but once an econ­o­mist assumes irra­tional­ity it becomes very dif­fi­cult to draw any conclusions.

In fact, if they are irra­tional, telling them so isn’t likely to have much of an effect on them or their behavior.

For exam­ple, if folks are irra­tional, then what can Mr. Wald­fo­gel say? “Many peo­ple can’t think clearly and waste money.” We have no doubt that it is true, but that’s not very insight­ful or new. In that case, they don’t just waste money at Christ­mas but dur­ing every other sea­son. (Per­haps they waste less at Christ­mas than they oth­er­wise would (with­out the empha­sis on peace, love, and joy and shop­ping for others).

Now it is pos­si­ble that Mr. Wald­fo­gel has a game the­o­retic model – sim­i­lar to, say, the Prisoner’s Dilemma – in mind, where some “bad” equi­lib­rium of gift-​giving obtains by every­one behav­ing ratio­nally. But, for a vari­ety of rea­sons, every Christ­mas peo­ple stop buy­ing presents for other folks. So, unlike a text­book prob­lem that involves incar­cer­a­tion or com­mit­ment, it seems that real peo­ple can and walk away in the mid­dle of the “game” if they want.

Thus, when he states that value is destroyed, given the fact that folks con­tinue to do it, it may sim­ply be the fact that Mr. Wald­fo­gel may have mis-​measured the over­all sat­is­fac­tion folks get from giv­ing and receiving.

Risk Pref­er­ences

Pre­sum­ably, to con­clude that value is destroyed by Christ­mas gift giv­ing – and to assign a dol­lar amount to it – some mea­sure of sat­is­fac­tion, like util­ity, must have been assumed – at least implic­itly. More­over, that mea­sure, e.g., util­ity func­tion, must be invert­ible (from sat­is­fac­tion to dollars) .

Again, with­out read­ing the book, there seem to be a num­ber of ways to defeat the asser­tion that value is destroyed. Here are a few.

First, col­lec­tive sat­is­fac­tion can be aggre­gated and weighed any arbi­trary num­ber of ways. For every set­ting that shows value is destroyed, one can weigh the sat­is­fac­tion of recip­i­ents in such a way that val­ued is created.

Sec­ondly, obvi­ously indi­vid­u­als may have dif­fer­ent pref­er­ences for dif­fer­ent goods and ser­vices, and they may have dif­fer­ent pref­er­ences for the same good or ser­vice at dif­fer­ent lev­els of (their own) wealth and con­sump­tion. Most eco­nomic mod­els keep things sim­ple and assume that indi­vid­u­als have rel­a­tively con­stant pref­er­ences, i.e., that they are either risk-​neutral, risk-​loving, or risk-​averse for the entire range of consumption.

For a sim­ple world where there is only one good, econ­o­mists gen­er­ally assume that sat­is­fac­tion increases (or at least doesn’t decrease) as more of that good is con­sumed. So, in a “sin­gle period,”

• Risk-​neutral means that pref­er­ences are lin­ear with respect to the good. That means that regard­less of the num­ber of units con­sumed, each addi­tional unit brings the same level of sat­is­fac­tion, i.e., the 31^st ham­burger is as sat­is­fy­ing as the first.
• Risk-​loving means that pref­er­ences are con­vex with respect to the good, i.e, the more units con­sumed, the greater the mar­ginal sat­is­fac­tion. It is very rare to see such behav­ior. It means that in a world con­sist­ing only of ham­burg­ers, eat­ing the 31^st burger brings more sat­is­fac­tion than eat­ing any pre­vi­ous one, includ­ing the first one.
• Risk-​averse means that pref­er­ences are con­cave with respect to the good, i.e., the more units con­sumed, the lesser the mar­ginal sat­is­fac­tion, i.e., the 31^st ham­burger eaten is the least sat­is­fy­ing – although still pos­i­tively satisfying.

Now it is pos­si­ble in multi-​period, over-​lapping gen­er­a­tion mod­els, for folks to get sat­is­fac­tion from both con­sum­ing and giv­ing – by fol­low­ing the Golden Rule of giv­ing this period in exchange for receiv­ing in the future, but that’s not what Christ­mas is about. The young don’t give presents to the old in hopes of get­ting presents when they are old.

With­out pre­sent­ing any­thing close to a for­mal model, con­sider a case where every­one is risk-​averse. If they have the same util­ity func­tion, then wealthy indi­vid­u­als for­sake less sat­is­fac­tion (from, say, the 31^st ham­burger) by giv­ing or donat­ing to less wealthy folks who gain by receiv­ing such ben­e­fits. (Remem­ber with similarly-​preferenced, risk – averse agents, wealthy folks give up less (mar­ginal) sat­is­fac­tion or util­ity than poorer gain. Draw an increas­ing, con­cave func­tion, like a square-​root func­tion to con­vince your­self that sat­is­fac­tion increases with con­sump­tion but at a decreas­ing rate.))

The last time that we checked, there were not a lot of mod­els that incor­po­rated dona­tions and giv­ing, but even if the net spenders lose some sat­is­fac­tion by con­sum­ing less due to their gifts – let’s say they are com­pelled to con­sume less or donate – then those acts do not destroy value if the recip­i­ents are par­tic­u­larly grate­ful and derive more sat­is­fac­tion from the gift than to givers lose by not behav­ing selfishly.

Of course, Mr. Will and Mr. Wald­fo­gel may be sur­prised that indi­vid­u­als enjoy giv­ing of them­selves and their resources – whether to fam­ily, friends, or strangers. The fact that such acts are out­side of many eco­nomic mod­els, doesn’t make such peo­ple irra­tional, it makes them kind and generous.

More­over, if econ­o­mists have a dif­fi­cult time mod­el­ing such behav­ior, that’s not a short-​coming of gen­er­ous indi­vid­u­als, it is a short-​coming of eco­nom­ics (and note that we are extremely sym­pa­thetic to the dif­fi­culty of mod­el­ing such social phenomena).

Now, par­si­mo­nious read­ers may dis­agree with our con­clu­sion that net sat­is­fac­tion is higher because of Christ­mas gift-​giving and exchang­ing because they may argue that the giver may not know what the recip­i­ent wants. We’ll rebut that posi­tion with two related, but sep­a­rate points: (1) in uncer­tain envi­ron­ments, you don’t always get what you want or pay for, and (2) in real-​life, you don’t always know what you want – i.e., what makes you happy or what’s best for you.

The Pres­ence of Uncertainty

Who knows? It may sim­ply be the case that no one cares enough about Mr. Will to have given him a present that he wanted, and that may have caused his Scrooge-​like col­umn, or maybe he was told one too many times that “you’ll shoot your eye out.”

That scene from A Christ­mas Story of the ric­o­chet­ing BB break­ing the Ralphie’s glasses per­fectly illus­trates that in real life, ran­dom, uncon­trol­lable events affect the enjoy­ment of any every good and ser­vice consumed.

So, when com­bined with bad luck, get­ting exactly what you want can be dis­as­trous, and far worse than get­ting a safer, less-​desirable ver­sion of the good or ser­vice or a sub­sti­tute. For exam­ple, think of the teenage boy who would pre­fer a sports car to a large sedan, but is far more likely to harm him­self and/​or oth­ers in a new Corvette as com­pared to a new Suburban.

So, before one can con­clude the net value is destroyed, one must be able to aggre­gate the actual sat­is­fac­tion received rather than the expected sat­is­fac­tion when the gift is received. In other words, it is impor­tant to know the range of out­comes and their prob­a­bil­i­ties – when they are know­able – to mea­sure how things worked out.

More pre­cisely, for risk-​averse indi­vid­u­als, it’s not just the mean that mat­ters, but the dis­tri­b­u­tion mat­ters, too, and oth­ers may under­stand (or have bet­ter infor­ma­tion about) that dis­tri­b­u­tion than the recip­i­ent. That means that their gifts may be more appro­pri­ate, and have a higher con­di­tional expected value.

Does that mean that oth­ers always give bet­ter presents than items pur­chased by ones self? Of course not, but it means that in some cases, the dif­fer­ence might be smaller than sup­posed or negative.

Know Thy­self, or Not

We’ll read­ily admit that our three counter-​arguments are not very pre­cise. How­ever, each implic­itly assumes that (at least) the recip­i­ents, know what’s best for them­selves.²

As we men­tioned above, with uncer­tainty (and dif­fer­ent pri­ors and sig­nals, which gen­er­ate dif­fer­ent pos­te­ri­ors) it is pos­si­ble that givers may have bet­ter knowl­edge of the envi­ron­ment, i.e., the dis­tri­b­u­tion of (pos­si­ble) out­comes, and, there­fore, they may be able to select the most appro­pri­ate gift for the recipient.

In this sec­tion, how­ever, we have some­thing a bit dif­fer­ent in mind. It is pos­si­ble that on cer­tain dimen­sions, oth­ers know you bet­ter than you know your­self. Thus, they may be able to select more appro­pri­ate (use­ful, val­ued, appre­ci­ated) gifts than the recip­i­ent could have selected for him or herself.

We sus­pect that like us, most read­ers didn’t always get what they asked for, but on some of those occa­sions ended up lik­ing the sub­sti­tute bet­ter than the orig­i­nal. We also sus­pect that sen­si­ble read­ers will agree that until a cer­tain age, par­ents def­i­nitely know bet­ter than their chil­dren what will max­i­mize the child’s expected, dis­counted, satisfaction.

The ques­tion is: at what age does that change? Is it when a twelve-​year-​old wants a Wii, or is into adult­hood, when the child wishes to marry. (In some cul­tures, with arranged mar­riages, it is at least that age.)

In most math­e­mat­i­cal mod­els of pref­er­ences, indi­vid­u­als know their own pref­er­ences. Oth­er­wise, it is dif­fi­cult to sole the indi­vid­u­als max­i­miza­tion prob­lem, i.e., what does one max­i­mize or optimized?

In real-​life that isn’t always true. More­over, pref­er­ences do change. Do you, dear reader, eat the exact same foods that you did as an infant; as a high-​metabolism teenager; as a col­lege stu­dent? While some folks are sur­pris­ingly con­sis­tent, most aren’t, and a favorite restau­rant one day is no longer vis­ited the next.

So, if one is will­ing to admit that one doesn’t always know what one will like in the future and one can­not com­pletely spec­ify how to order likes and dis­likes (pref­er­ences) today, is it that much of a stretch to imag­ine that oth­ers may know cer­tain aspects of your pref­er­ences (and behav­ior) bet­ter than you, your­self, espe­cially how those pref­er­ences may evolve through time? We don’t think so.

Thus, is it that dif­fi­cult to believe that the net result of informed gift-​giving increases col­lec­tive hap­pi­ness despite the fact that many inap­pro­pri­ate gifts are received (and regifted)?

Merry Christ­mas!

Now we men­tion our objec­tions to Mr. Will’s silly col­umn in the spirit of true Chris­t­ian gift-​giving, espe­cially as we belat­edly pub­lish it on this Christ­mas morning.

There’s another small book – very thin and short – that both Mr. Will and Mr. Wald­fo­gel may wish to read. It takes an hour or two for most adults to com­plete, or a few hours more if read to a child (pre­sum­ing that the men like and/​or have chil­dren or grand­chil­dren). It’s called A Christ­mas Carol by Charles Dick­ens. Our read­ers may have heard of it, and it is avail­able free on-​line at many sites.

We strongly encour­age all our read­ers to read it every year so that they don’t end up like old Mar­ley, er, we mean Will.

God Bless us all, and we wish you a Merry Christ­mas and a Happy New Year.

–Andy, Jill and the gang

P.S. It’s late and there are prob­a­bly sev­eral typos. We will cor­rect them tomorrow.

There is an excel­lent col­umn in today’s edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal enti­tled, A Dark Mat­ter Breakthrough?

In it, the physi­cist Lawrence Krauss writes about dark mat­ter, which may or may not exist. It does exist in many the­o­ries that seem to require it to elim­i­nate oth­er­wise incon­gru­ent obser­va­tions, and there may be empir­i­cal evi­dence that sup­ports its exis­tence, or not.

If it does exist, it may have a mass that is ten times greater than vis­i­ble matter.

When we read arti­cles like his, a few things come to mind.

First, although Mr. Krauss makes no men­tion of God, it’s dif­fi­cult not to think of Him when some­one men­tions mas­sive, unseen forces that influ­ence every­thing in the Uni­verse. More­over, we sus­pect there are many (athe­ists) who believe in dark mat­ter because it is from “sci­ence,” but not God, because they can­not find evi­dence of Him. That reminds us of two things: (1) the absence of evi­dence is not evi­dence of absence, and (2) do they appre­ci­ate the irony?

Sec­ondly, Mr. Krauss writes:

For the the­o­rist work­ing at his desk alone at night, it seems almost unfath­omable that nature might actu­ally obey the del­i­cate the­o­ries you develop on pieces of paper. This is espe­cially true when the the­o­ries involve ideas from so many dif­fer­ent areas of sci­ence and require leaps of imagination.

We’re not really dis­agree­ing with Mr. Krauss, but it does depend upon ones perspective.

If one views sci­ence and sci­en­tific knowl­edge as a proper sub­set of rea­son – the empir­i­cal, ver­i­fi­able part of rea­son – and if via the first chap­ter of the Gospel of John, one equates God with rea­son (logos, the word, thought) then one shouldn’t be sur­prised that, regard­less of ones moti­va­tion, one can learn more about God’s cre­ation through thought alone.

We think that Saint Thomas Aquinas said it best:

“The final hap­pi­ness of man con­sists in the con­tem­pla­tion of truth…. This is sought for its own sake, and is directed to no other end beyond itself.”

That’s why it is the first quote on our Quotes page.

By the way, inter­ested par­ties can read the lit­tle that we know about epis­te­mol­ogy in Uncer­tainty Man­age­ment or scan our reli­gion archive. Unearthly Dis­ci­pline and Freewill is the most closely related post.

Merry Christ­mas.

For the last six weeks or so, we’ve seen a huge increase in the num­ber of inter­net hack­ing attempts of our site.

We don’t take it per­son­ally, and we doubt those attempts are related to any­thing that we do or say, but we have very nice ways to track both “eye­balls” and robot vis­its to this site; so, we notice such things. We’re sur­prised that the trend at our site, which we first observed in the begin­ning of Novem­ber, seems to be accel­er­at­ing in recent weeks. (If we did take it per­son­ally, we’d be a bit flattered.)

Here’s a sam­ple from one of our sta­tis­tics pack­ages from early this morning:

While there are a few legit­i­mate queries on the list, notice the attempts to access data­bases and upload files.

The best that we can deter­mine, and we’re no expert on the sub­ject, most of those attempts come from bots in China. (If they are not from China, then some­one is spoof­ing Chi­nese addresses and host­ing ser­vices because when we click on the blue num­bers shown above, we get “whois” reports, and they all spec­ify Chi­nese locations.)

To us, it is a reminder to keep strong pass­words, run server and appli­ca­tion exploit scan­ners, and deal with a qual­ity host­ing firm that’s look­ing out for us, in our case that’s Fused Net­work.

Mak­ing Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy Work for You…Finally

We’re not sure if our vague title is a good one because regard­less of the for­mal­ity of their other “infor­ma­tion” sys­tems, every firm and orga­ni­za­tion already has at least one rel­a­tively inex­pen­sive, web-​based, man­age­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tem (MIS). That sys­tem is e-​mail, includ­ing the mes­sages and the myr­iad of hideous, incon­ve­nient, and awk­ward Word, Excel, and pdf doc­u­ments that are so often attached to said messages.

The low cost of e-​mail-​as-​information-​system isn’t the issue. At issue, is whether greater ben­e­fits can be real­ized by using more appro­pri­ate web appli­ca­tions that can be imple­mented at very low mar­ginal cost: both finan­cial and human-​effort-​related costs. The systems/​applications are cheap and easy-​to-​learn.

E-​mail as the Cen­tral Ner­vous System

It’s our con­tention that most man­agers, includ­ing “IT” man­agers, don’t rec­og­nize e-​mail for what it is.

It is the metaphor­i­cal cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem of their firms and orga­ni­za­tions. (We have in mind the somatic ner­vous sys­tem, whereas trans­ac­tion pro­cess­ing and data-​processing, in gen­eral, remind us of the auto­nomic ner­vous sys­tem.)

With­out that recog­ni­tion of e-mail’s cru­cial role, there is no rea­son to search for a sub­sti­tute that is supe­rior at cer­tain infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing, trans­mis­sion, reten­tion, and retrieval func­tions. (Oh well, we guess we’ll con­sider it our lit­tle secret, share it with that hand­ful of peo­ple who read blogs on the inter­net, and con­tinue to profit from that realization.)

We ask: if senior man­agers both in and out of “IT” did rec­og­nize the true use of their firms’ e-​mail sys­tems, how would they jus­tify silly, fear-​of-​litigation-​based, 60-​day e-​mail “reten­tion” poli­cies? We don’t think that they would. In which case, they might stop toss­ing the prover­bial baby with the bathwater.

By that we mean senior man­agers under-​estimate or com­pletely ignore the long-​term ben­e­fits of reten­tion because (1) the seem­ingly pri­vate, per­son­al­ized nature of mail, (2) the form of those mes­sages obscures their infor­ma­tional con­tent, or (3) they may con­clude that the attach­ments are saved; so, what’s to lose.

We argue that vol­umes of qual­i­ta­tive infor­ma­tion, includ­ing valu­able insti­tu­tional details and his­to­ries and assump­tions, are lost when mes­sages are deleted or when Word doc­u­ments are deleted or purged when an employee quits, is fired or is trans­ferred or when oxymoronically-​named “reten­tion” poli­cies are ruth­lessly applied to mes­sages on a mail server.

No, we don’t think that would hap­pen if those mes­sages were viewed for what they are: an inel­e­gant, qual­i­ta­tive infor­ma­tion sys­tem and data­base, rather than mere correspondence.

Of course, almost all orga­ni­za­tions – par­tic­u­larly large, multi-​locational ones – have other sys­tems that col­lect and trans­mit enor­mous sets of data over the inter­net. Some­times those sys­tems trans­mit infor­ma­tion, too, but trans­mis­sion of valu­able infor­ma­tion is prob­a­bly a much smaller activ­ity than most assume). In that sense, we would dis­agree with those who argue that mod­ern times present some dan­ger of infor­ma­tion over­load, because there is rarely infor­ma­tion overload, but with­out a bit of expe­ri­ence and a clear thought-​process and a bit of self-​confidence, it is quite easy to become over­whelmed with irrel­e­vant data, (or so we’re told). That “over­load” that some folks face is sim­i­lar the old adage about “not see­ing the for­est because of the trees.” With respect to irrel­e­vant data, it’s more of an issue of not being able to see the beau­ti­ful maple for­est because of all the weed sumac trees.

To be clear, there’s a time and place for and value to data pro­cess­ing, but too often folks – who should know bet­ter – con­flate data pro­cess­ing sys­tems and infor­ma­tion sys­tems. In fact, most firms don’t refer to data pro­cess­ing as “data pro­cess­ing” any­more – many call it “infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy” or “IT” or some such thing. Our point is that not all data and records are informative. In fact, we would argue that most records in such mis­named “infor­ma­tion sys­tems” are irrel­e­vant for the typ­i­cal and impor­tant oper­at­ing and invest­ment deci­sions that mid­dle– and senior man­agers make. (In our expe­ri­ence, that infor­ma­tion comes from e-​mails and attach­ments and not through either silly, eso­teric dash­boards or the mass of details recorded via mil­lions of transactions.)

Again, data-​processing is valu­able for a vari­ety of pur­poses, pri­mar­ily record-​keeping and book-​keeping pur­poses, but “pro­cess­ing” data doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily con­vert it to infor­ma­tion – if it is never con­sid­ered as a fac­tor in a deci­sion. (One our pet peeves involves that fact that few sys­tems design­ers begin their projects by ask­ing: what deci­sions do you make and what deci­sions could you make (or make bet­ter) with more refined information?”

We men­tion data pro­cess­ing because we think that if a man­ager can’t dis­tin­guish between data-​processing pro­ce­dures from infor­ma­tion sets and sys­tems, then it likely that such a per­son may also ignore the impor­tance of e-​mail as the cen­tral infor­ma­tion sys­tem because the con­tent of those mes­sages aren’t viewed for what they are: fields and records in a large, unwieldy, and self-​deleting data­base. (Self-​deleting where such reten­tion poli­cies exist.)

We are very inter­ested in help­ing firms and orga­ni­za­tions make opti­mal deci­sions with the “opti­mal amount” of rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion, and we’re espe­cially inter­ested in devel­op­ing con­trol sys­tems that sys­tem­atize, facil­i­tate, and moti­vate such decision-​making by sub­or­di­nates. (FYI: in our mind, infor­ma­tion sys­tems are a type of con­trol sys­tem. When they are well-​designed, they help orga­ni­za­tions accom­plish their goals; so, they meet our def­i­n­i­tion of con­trol. Also, note that we put “opti­mal amount” in scare quotes because that deter­mi­na­tion of opti­mal, in and of itself, is a very sub­tle issue that has strate­gic, tac­ti­cal, and oft-​ignored behav­ioral impli­ca­tions.) The cru­cial man­age­ment issue is: when given the organization’s goals and strate­gies and resources and con­straints, what sys­tems – includ­ing infor­ma­tion sys­tems, and mech­a­nisms are avail­able to effi­ciently and con­sis­tently imple­ment those plans to max­i­mize the organization’s long-​term value. Unfor­tu­nately, the MIS por­tion of that prob­lem is often del­e­gated and not prop­erly con­sid­ered, e.g., “I don’t know much about com­put­ers. That’s an IT issue.”

It is also unfor­tu­nate that because e-​mail serves other pur­poses like com­mu­ni­ca­tion to assist with imple­men­ta­tion and coör­di­na­tion of plans, etc., and because it is the default and de facto key man­age­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tem, we con­tend that lit­tle con­sid­er­a­tion is given by any type of man­ager to find­ing “bet­ter” replace­ments for e-mail’s infor­ma­tion trans­mis­sion role, includ­ing the easy stor­age and retrieval of all of the insti­tu­tional knowl­edge and details found in mes­sages sent and received among peers, supe­ri­ors, and subordinates.

But, no wor­ries, we have a solution.

A Bet­ter MIS than E-​mail

That above-​mentioned lack of con­sid­er­a­tion is shame­ful because nowa­days, sur­pris­ingly afford­able, very user-​friendly, open-​source soft­ware and web appli­ca­tions exist that bet­ter serve the MIS purpose.

Those appli­ca­tions allow orga­ni­za­tions of any size to very effi­ciently and effec­tively cre­ate and use internet-​based infor­ma­tion sys­tems, and those surprisingly-​inexpensive meth­ods have the poten­tial – nay, the high prob­a­bil­ity – to pro­vide tremen­dous long-​term benefits.

• The best part is that there is very lit­tle – actu­ally, noth­ing for most employ­ees – to learn. If they can write e-​mails, cre­ate MS Office doc­u­ments, and attach files, they already have the exper­tise that they need to use a dif­fer­ent plat­form. (We’re amused by the fact that it doesn’t seems that most devel­op­ers of those sys­tems appre­ci­ate their use­ful­ness of them as the front-​end of data­bases because they tend not to be employed by large organizations.)

Note: we’re not rec­om­mend­ing the whole­sale elim­i­na­tion of e-​mail. Instead, we rec­om­mend replac­ing it for cer­tain func­tions with web-​based pub­lish­ing sys­tems that, for exam­ple, will auto­mat­i­cally notify intended recip­i­ents that new con­tent is avail­able, which if you think of it, is very sim­i­lar to receiv­ing an e– mail mes­sage. (Here’s one sign your firm may need a dif­fer­ent sys­tem: if impor­tant top­ics gen­er­ate an nearly end­less chain of mes­sages and replies. Those chains should be com­mu­ni­cated and stored out­side of an e-​mail sys­tem but we don’t mean in MS Office-​based doc­u­ments. We mean web-​based pub­lish­ing systems.

• The other best part is that every­thing that employ­ees write or com­ment upon is search­able (by them­selves and oth­ers) because it is stored in a well-​protected, cen­tral­ized, free, open-​source data­base. (We use MySQL to store our musings.) If per­mis­si­ble, that access is imme­di­ate and per­ma­nent. So, what is assumed and dis­cussed today is not lost in the future. That means that insti­tu­tional knowl­edge can be saved and cheaply re-​used thereby mit­i­gat­ing the age-​old prob­lem iden­ti­fied by George San­tayana: “Those who can­not remem­ber the past are con­demned to repeat it.”
• The other best part is that form of the qual­i­ta­tive data and infor­ma­tion and the result­ing data­base is dynamic and adap­tive (and infor­mal) so that infor­ma­tion cre­ators and providers, say, finan­cial ana­lysts or sales­men, can (rather uncon­sciously) add to and change the struc­ture with­out any inter­fer­ence or delay by “IT” depart­ment admin­is­tra­tors. Respon­si­ble users with the cor­rect level of per­mis­sion can re-​categorize con­tent and add new key­words or fields (as eas­ily as they add new “records” that fit exist­ing fields, top­ics, and categories).

Note that the last bul­let is enough to send most “IT” man­agers into apoplexy.

The sad fact that many such “IT” man­agers would never per­mit such evo­lu­tion­ary processes when learn­ing occurs and/​or as the envi­ron­ment changes is the huge oppor­tu­nity cost of their rigid, bureau­cratic nature and processes. (We ask as an aside: how many “IT” folks start projects by ask­ing: “what deci­sions do you make?” or how many con­sider the behav­ioral impli­ca­tions of sys­tem struc­ture and design? How many pro-​actively ask whether infor­ma­tion require­ments have changed with­out prod­ding or requests by oth­ers? Maybe they should write the acronym, “iT” or just plain “T” because in our mind, there is lit­tle empha­sis on pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion – lots of data, to be sure, but not much info.)

Despite our well-​reasoned and con­vinc­ing prose, we’re skep­ti­cal that large, bureau­cratic orga­ni­za­tions would ever con­sider using such excel­lent sys­tems as a replace­ment for some cur­rent func­tions of e-​mail. (So, we’ll focus our mar­ket­ing efforts on small and mid-​sized firms that, with any luck, will grow into intelligently-​managed, prof­itable, grate­ful, and gen­er­ous large firms.)

Obvi­ously, many large orga­ni­za­tions spend mil­lions if not hun­dreds of mil­lions if not bil­lions of dol­lars on data pro­cess­ing, but, again, we don’t data col­lec­tion and trans­ac­tion pro­cess­ing. We mean the actually-​used man­age­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tems, and are we writ­ing about intel­li­gently gen­er­at­ing, sav­ing, and access­ing both qual­i­ta­tive and quan­ti­ta­tive infor­ma­tion. That means mak­ing every word that would have otherwise-​appeared in an erst­while MS Word doc­u­ment is imme­di­ately search­able by any­one (with per­mis­sion) by post­ing it to a cen­tral data­base using a web form/​editor that looks very sim­i­lar to Word. The future is now – if your firm and staff is ready for it.

If fact, the rec­om­mended pro­ce­dures aren’t much dif­fer­ent than writ­ing this post or read­ing this post or search­ing our site or receiv­ing an RSS feed on par­tic­u­lar cat­e­gories or top­ics or tags.

That’s why we see the cap­ture, trans­mis­sion, reten­tion, and retrieval of both stan­dard and non-​standard qual­i­ta­tive infor­ma­tion as a huge ben­e­fit to firms hooked on some­thing as inef­fec­tive as e-​mail.

With inex­pen­sive form-​generation soft­ware and with (auto­mated) scripts, it is quite easy (and cheap) to cap­ture quan­ti­ta­tive infor­ma­tion as well as stan­dard­ized, qual­i­ta­tive infor­ma­tion and data. How inex­pen­sive? You would be amazed!

Con­tact us for more information.

We’ll likely add to this post and con­tinue to revamp it in the near future.

Copy­right © Spero Con­sult­ing 2009

We have been exper­i­ment­ing with new graph­ics soft­ware and fil­ters and decided to up-​date our template/​theme at Spero Consulting’s web site.

The theme is mostly blue on 80% of the PCs at world head­quar­ters but has a strange, pur­plish cast on our other screens.

We will make changes as we find items that annoy us, and we ask reg­u­lar vis­i­tors and friends for feed­back and to report any prob­lems. Thanks.

William McGurn has an excel­lent col­umn in today’s edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal. It is enti­tled, “My Big Fat Gov­ern­ment Takeover.”

In the col­umn, he decries those in favor of gov­ern­men­tal solu­tions to all man’s ills, and he men­tions that lack of humil­ity of those like Pres­i­dent Obama and his ilk, who believe that a few “smart” peo­ple with cen­tral­ized power can solve the nation’s (and the world’s) prob­lems. (Yet, they can’t pre­vent party-​crashers to a state din­ner. Good luck with that.)

We want to empha­size the hubris (and the mis­guided and mis­placed faith in them­selves) because it is the per­fect mes­sage on this date, Decem­ber 8, the Feast of the Immac­u­late Conception.

Whether know­ingly, by coin­ci­dence or through the Grace of God, Mr. McGurn’s col­umn relates well to the bible read­ings (and we’re sure to many of the hom­i­lies) on this Holy Day of Oblig­a­tion for Catholics.

As many Catholics know – and all of them should know – today is the Feast of the Immac­u­late Con­cep­tion, which cel­e­brates Mary’s con­cep­tion and per­pet­ual state of grace. (A fair num­ber of Catholics con­fuse the Immac­u­late Con­cep­tion with the Annun­ci­a­tion, when Mary is vis­ited by the Angel Gabriel, and learns (and accepts) that she is to be the mother of our Lord. That’s partly their fault for not pay­ing atten­tion and partly because the Gospel read­ing for today is, in fact, the Annunciation.)

The first read­ing, from the Book of Gen­e­sis, recounts Man’s Fall from Grace, while Luke’s Gospel of the Annun­ci­a­tion gives the Angel Gabriel’s greet­ing, “Hail, full of Grace! The Lord is with you.”

The fail­ure to con­sider and appre­ci­ate that dis­tinc­tion between her grace and the Fallen Nature of every other per­son is why big-​government solu­tions always fails – either in the short-​term due to bureau­cratic inep­ti­tude or in the long-​term due to total­i­tar­i­an­ism (or both). In the extreme cases of total­i­tar­i­an­ism, when the gov­ern­ment attempts to get rid of the imper­fect true-​believers in it, there is no short­age of imper­fect folks to elim­i­nate. That, of course, is the impe­tus for the gulags and the killing fields.

Because we attended this morning’s Mass for the parish school’s chil­dren, our excel­lent new Parochial Vicar – who recently replaced our excel­lent and trans­ferred Parochial Vicar and friend, Fr. Sean – tried to empha­size that dis­tinc­tion between the grace of Mary and every­one is the Church– and the world, for that matter.

He asked the stu­dents three ques­tions: (1) How many of you always lis­ten to your par­ents and do as they ask? (2) How many of you always lis­ten to your teach­ers and do as they ask? And (3) How many of you always lis­ten to God and do as he asks?

Either out of (1) hubris or (2) incor­rectly antic­i­pat­ing the answers that he sought or (3) con­sid­er­ing which of Santa’ lists they hoped to be on so very near to Christ­mas, many of the younger chil­dren answered affir­ma­tively to all three questions.

Our priest then asked sim­i­lar ques­tions to the par­ents and other adults present, and no hands were raised. In fact, like every other priest that we know, he admit­ted to being a sin­ner and noted that he could not raise his hand for any of the questions.

That’s makes us won­der why those seek­ing cen­tral­ized solu­tions would (likely) answer in con­cert with first-​graders in the pews rather than with the adults?

By itself, there’s no prob­lem think­ing that you’re bet­ter than oth­ers. In many sit­u­a­tions, a healthy self-​confidence in one’s God-​given abil­i­ties is often a nec­es­sary con­di­tion for success.

The prob­lem is that much of the empir­i­cal evi­dence one observes about one­self often doesn’t sup­port that hypothesis.

So rather than inter­nal­iz­ing those flaws, an eas­ier way to main­tain the dis­tinc­tion or mirage of supe­ri­or­ity is to demo­nize oth­ers and attribute the basest of motives and behav­iors to them. In other words, imme­di­ately believe the worst that you hear about them, while main­tain­ing skep­ti­cism when you’re told good things about them.

A friend of ours men­tioned that prior to serv­ing as the head of a rather con­tentious orga­ni­za­tion, he would often view those with oppos­ing view­points as being either evil or stu­pid or both. After being lob­bied by both sides of var­i­ous issues for a few years, he real­ized that folks can have dif­fer­ent opin­ions and per­spec­tives and objec­tives with­out nec­es­sar­ily being evil or stu­pid. (We joke that those who dis­agree with us need not be evil or stu­pid, they may sim­ply be igno­rant and not know any better.)

In that regard, we would hope that both the faith­ful and non-​believers could agree with the first phrase of Alexan­der Pope’s famous quote: “To err is human…”

And, like Mr. McGurn, we would hope that indi­vid­u­als with respon­si­bil­ity for var­i­ous social, polit­i­cal, and eco­nom­ics orga­ni­za­tions would take their own flaws and the flaws of oth­ers into con­sid­er­a­tion when design­ing insti­tu­tions and poli­cies for those insti­tu­tions. After all, that type of orga­ni­za­tional and man­age­r­ial con­trol is one of our spe­cial­ties at Spero Consulting.

Today, we went to a funeral Mass for a friend’s father, and the priest had an excel­lent homily. It was the kind that one can only give if he well knows the dece­dent, and in this case, it seemed that the priest had known our friend’s dad for over twenty years due to the latter’s deep involve­ment in the parish.

Dur­ing the ser­mon, the priest merged details and anec­dotes of the man’s life with the typ­i­cal (and very use­ful) Catholic empha­sis on hope and redemp­tion, rather than sor­row and despair, e.g., that it is the begin­ning of the next step of a jour­ney and not the end of everything.

In fact, the good Father men­tioned that through­out the New Tes­ta­ment, Jesus states 125 times for his dis­ci­ples and oth­ers to be not afraid. (He said that he didn’t actu­ally count those instances him­self, but that’s com­pared to eight times when Jesus men­tions the top two com­mand­ments: (1) love God above all oth­ers, and (2) love (and treat) oth­ers as you wanted to be treated yourself.)

Per­haps it is because our own demise seems so far removed – but who really knows – we thought that his advice was excel­lent: be like our friend’s father – live life to the fullest and fear not death.

That’s coin­ci­dent with what we con­sider to be the best line in the three Pirates of the Caribbean movies. It was uttered by Cap­tain Teague, played by Keith Richards, as he rebukes his son, Cap­tain Jack Spar­row (played by Johnny Depp) in the third movie, At World’s End.

Jack Spar­row had just turned to his father, and quipped, “That’s the trick, isn’t it, to survive?”

And Cap­tain Teague replies with a very Catholic:

“It’s not just about liv­ing for­ever, Jackie, the trick, is liv­ing with your­self, forever.”

Of course, the beauty of it is that while it is com­pletely con­sis­tent with our own reli­gion, it is also com­pletely con­sis­tent with what we know of every other reli­gion, too.

Like our friend’s father, may you, dear reader, live to an age when and behave in a way that you have no regrets.

So, we’ve seen the pre­views for the new “Sher­lock Holmes” movie. (Note that we are not using the quo­ta­tion marks in the pre­vi­ous sen­tence just to denote a movie title. No, we’re using them dou­bly in an ironic way, too, as “scare quotes.”)

For many years, we have thor­oughly enjoyed read­ing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short sto­ries and nov­els (novel­las, what­ever) regard­ing the remark­able detec­tive, his pow­ers of infer­ence and deduc­tion, and his faith­ful and obser­vant side­kick, Dr. Wat­son. (Remem­ber, it is the doc­tor who relays the occur­rences, events, and facts of the cases.)

We also enjoyed var­i­ous movies and shows fea­tur­ing the detec­tive, par­tic­u­lar the PBS series star­ring the late, great Jeremy Brett. That series was extremely – though not com­pletely – loyal to the orig­i­nal sto­ries. That fidelity, along with the excel­lent cast, made many of those episodes some of the best in the his­tory of television.

Sher­lock Who?

Based upon the pre­views that we’ve seen it seems that other than (1) the names of the two main char­ac­ters, (2) the late Vic­to­rian time period, and (3) the Lon­don loca­tion, there is lit­tle in the movie that was in Conan Doyle’s stories.

• Holmes hand­cuffed naked to a bed? No, we don’t remem­ber that.
• Holmes in a ver­sion of late 19^th cen­tury fight club? No, we don’t remem­ber that, either.
• How about Wat­son punch­ing Holmes in the nose while they sit in a coach because Holmes insults him? No, maybe its our bad mem­ory, but we don’t remem­ber that, either.

Per­haps the movie’s director(s) and producer(s) rewrote the sto­ries because they believe that they are far more clever and enter­tain­ing than Conan Doyle.

If that’s the case, then based upon the evi­dence that we’ve seen, their the­ory doesn’t fit the facts. That bad taste isn’t crim­i­nal, but it is egregious.

P.S. We won­der if the sequel will be named Sher­lock and Hooch or maybe Holmes and Scooby Doo Inves­ti­gate the Haunted House?

We have com­pleted the re-​design and the devel­op­ment of Insight Rising’s web site, and it is live and look­ing good – if we do say so ourselves.

Insight Ris­ing is a sus­tain­abil­ity con­sult­ing firm based in Pitts­burgh, PA. Its motto is: Busi­ness Con­sul­tants for Sus­tain­able Prof­its.

The firm takes a common-​sense approach to sus­tain­abil­ity and “going green,” i.e., that the intel­li­gent choice of sus­tain­able poli­cies and pro­ce­dures are both short-​term profit– and long-​term value-​maximizing.

Its founder and CEO, Bob McNe­ice, believes that because of the wealth-​maximizing effect of such poli­cies, their adop­tion is inevitable; so prospec­tive client firms and orga­ni­za­tions should “go with the flow” to a sus­tain­able and prof­itable future. That’s why the rotat­ing header shows var­i­ous pho­tos of water – mostly flow­ing, although a few are thrown in just because they’re beautiful.

The var­i­ous shades of blue through­out the design tem­plate evoke feel­ings of water and the earth when viewed from afar, i.e., the “Blue Mar­ble,” and the green high­lights com­ple­ment the scheme and remind one of the link between sus­tain­abil­ity and good envi­ron­men­tal prac­tices and… profits.

The firm’s new logo is based upon the famil­iar, Apollo-​era photo of the earth ris­ing above the moon’s sur­face: stark, alone, self-​sustaining, but clearly ris­ing. In our ren­di­tion, the prac­ti­cal, no-​nonsense motto replaces the moon’s hori­zon. We like it! (Thanks NASA.)

While the tem­plate design is the most obvi­ous change to a return­ing vis­i­tor, the state-​of-​the-​art content-​management sys­tem (CMS) and easy-​to–self–man­age back-​office fea­tures will pro­vide the largest long-​term ben­e­fit to the firm, i.e.,

• Adding or edit­ing text, or post­ing pho­tos, graph­ics, or videos, is now as easy as attach­ing them to an e-​mail mes­sage or insert­ing them into a Word document.
• Chang­ing the menu struc­ture or hier­ar­chy can accom­plished with a few clicks of the mouse.
• Search engine opti­miza­tion is built-​in, and the site’s rank­ing within a search results page is avail­able with a mouse click or two.
• Track­ing vis­i­tors and refer­rers is sim­i­larly easy and straight-​forward.

And, as we explained in last month’s announce­ment of Spe​r​o​Con​sult​ing​.mobi, vis­i­tors on cell phones are auto­mat­i­cally redi­rected to a sim­pli­fied, cleaner, smaller, phone-​optimized tem­plate at InsightRis​ing​.mobi.

We think that the entire pack­age is very cool and very sophisticated.

It’s like Bob said, “You’re right. It’s want every­body wants” (in a web site).