kaiyen: pepper

kaiyen: pepper

the life and times of Allan Chen

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the new (scarier?) conservative

The front page of the San Francisco Chronicle a few days back included a story about Carly Fiorina’s bid to oust Barbara Boxer as one of the US Senators from California.  Actually, the article is more about how Carla is part of a “new” breed of pro-woman, pro-life voters.

This article struck me for a number of reasons.  First, there is an immediate concern that people will be so wrapped up in the Whitman-Brown gubernatorial race that they will forget about the one for Senate between Fiorina and Boxer.  While I am worried that Whitman is going to grab me off the street and tell me I’m an immigrant and try to send me to China (can’t send me “back” if I was born in New Jersey and have never been to the “homeland”), I am also concerned about Fiorina’s platform.

The other and perhaps more important aspect to Fiorina’s run is that she is apparently representative of this new group of women voters that are feminist and fight for women’s rights, yet are also pro-life.  I must admit that I had a hard time separating the two – that a woman can believe fiercely in her own rights, yet no in having the choice on the issue of abortion.  One can be pro-choice but anti-abortion.  But specifically pro-life, which means taking away the right to choice, is striking.

This brings me around to several articles that emerged when the Obama administration took over and the Democrats seemed to “control” Washington (ugh – what a mess that all is now, including Obama’s recent moves regarding the oil spill in the gulf, compromises on health care reform, inability to bridge the gaps even within his own party, etc) about how young, moderate conservatives no longer had a party to call their own.

As the Republican party has become more and more conservative and, if you listen to Limbaugh and Palin, rather extremist (IMO), it seems that there are many that identify themselves as right of center (sometimes significantly so) yet are not comfortable with what the party has declared to be its values.  I used to think I was a bit right of center.  I’m a centrist, but maybe a bit conservative.  But now, as I look at how far to the right the Republican party has swung, I look at my opinions and realize I’m decidedly on the Democratic side.

But this is in terms of beliefs.  I don’t necessarily want to label myself as a Democrat, but if I go by positions on various issues, that’s where I am.  In comparison, there are many mild conservatives that have beliefs and positions that leave them too far to the center of current Republican ideals and therefore with nowhere to go.

I believe in Keynesian economics and, more specifically, that the only financial entity that can “afford” to make massive, nation-wide fiscal changes is the federal government.  I believe that the only way to fund such stimulus is by deficit spending.  I can easily place myself within the Democratic camp on this one.

In comparison, what if there is a conservative who believes that the government has to intervene, has to spend to grow, and must put in regulations on the financial sector yet also is pro-life, generally small-government-oriented, and in accordance with other Republican positions?  Well, based on the rhetoric that comes out of the right-wing camp about the stimulus package alone, I have a few friends that feel left out in the cold, with no party to call their own.

hm.

June 22, 2010 Getting Political, Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts 0 Read more >

Does Fiscal Austerity Reassure Markets? – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com

Does Fiscal Austerity Reassure Markets? – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com.

My favorite line from this article is the last one:

“But hey, what are you going to believe: what everyone knows, or your own lying eyes?”

Krugman spends all this time basically analyzing whether it’s a good time to move away from deficit spending and more towards some kind of balanced approach to spending.  I have always thought this was one thing that was ignored by all of the critics when the stimulus package and budget were first being rolled out by the Obama administration.

Specifically, that this deficit spending and all of the activities by the Treasury and the Fed had to happen now, but also had to be temporary.  That the monetary base of the Fed would decrease as it wound down and that the Treasury had no desire to be the owner of AIG or GM forever.  But we had to do this for a while, at the least.

After all of that, Krugman then says that those who push for “fiscal austerity” now have “blind eyes.”  Way to go, Paul.

June 16, 2010 2008 Economic Crisis, Articles from the Web, 0 Read more >

the land of the lost

Some organizations are monolithic and distant.  Huge, hulking, single-minded set of drones that present an impenetrable barrier to two-way communication.  Messages within are often top-down.  Big Brother tells you what to do, and all you have is a memory hole at hand.

Should messages be top-down, from the organization but emanating out to the rest of the world, then hostility and autocracy comes into play.  The Borg have arrived. Resistance is Futile (and nanites really, really hurt when they take over your blood cells).

Other organizations are smaller, agile, and quick to respond to opportunities and threats.  Kind of like a a fox, except without the whole “killing rabbits” schtick.

When these nimble groups do get aggressive, however, you’re more like Jurassic Park Velociraptor food if you get in the way.  And I’m not talking Jurassic Park 3, where you can trick them by blowing air into an old skull (as if Sam Neill knew exactly how much air a raptor used to communicate with others).  I’m talking the first movie, where they figure out how to open doors.

But let me describe yet another organization.  Somewhat less together, and harder to describe.

Tribes exist on separate islands.  Some islands are bigger than others, and many are clustered and somehow related, but are separate islands nonetheless.  Many islands have not yet established communications with others.  Some tribes have not even invented means of communication.  Jungles as dense as those on Papau New Guinea, where entire civilizations are still being discovered each year, cover many of these land masses.  The tribes are competitive – this isn’t just Survivor, but Survivor:  The Villains.

The islands and sets of islands are floating on a giant set of tectonic plates on the most seismically active planet ever.  Volcanoes erupt between islands, cutting them off from each other and sending giant plumes of ash that serve to annoy if not disrupt operations on other islands.  What’s worse –  various well-meaning people die horrible deaths trying to save others that have strayed too close to the edge.

The planet is so active that, like Jupiter’s Titan on seismic steroids, it actually changes shape with eruptions and quakes.  At times, the planet becomes almost cubical in shape.  It is also like a giant balloon – if you try to poke it with too sharp of a stick, with too much energy, in an effort to elicit a specific response, you just set off more eruptions and discontent.

Welcome to my land of the lost.

note:  in no way is my group the fox, the raptor, Big Brother or the Borg (though we could certainly use transwarp tunnels now and then).  We are far from perfect and sometimes the messages we send are so mixed that it’s like we just fell from our own tower of Babel.  And sometimes I am the one doing the talking.  At the least, I am absolutely the one responsible for what we say and do.  My comments above do not mean that we are better and perhaps we’re not any different, either.

June 16, 2010 Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, Work-related 0 Read more >

pissing off one group at a time

With my recent graduation from business school, many colleagues, peers, friends, and family have been asking me what’s next, and how work is going.  They kind of go hand in hand (though a negative answer to the latter doesn’t mean that I’m rushing forward to something in the former).

At work, the biggest development has been that we have started moving away from the status quo and just building up our resources and onto actual new, (hopefully) meaningful initiatives.  I have learned a couple of valuable lessons already in doing so.

The first one is rather obvious – no matter what you do, you’re going to piss someone off with whatever it is you’re trying to get done.  If it’s new, then at the very least the status quo folks will be unhappy.  My goal is to piss off just one group at a time.  Furthermore, I try to keep the effort sufficiently segregated that one will not be pissed off either on behalf of someone else or out of sympathy or some other weird connection.  This is more than the “you can only please 80% of the people 20% of the time” or whatever the saying is.  I’m challenging the status quo, and impacting (and therefore potentially upsetting) 90% of an entire group at a time.

The second part is that it takes perhaps even more political guile than I had realized to piss off only one group at a time.  The issue is that these groups are layered.  Some layers are cooperative and open-minded, some are less so.  And it’s important to keep the more receptive layers happy.  In a way, they end up being allies against the less friendly sub-groups, but at the heart it’s just about keeping good relationships on solid footing.  I like to think I’m pretty good at dealing with politics, but I don’t try to manipulate as a standard method of operation.  It’s just simply illogical to burn bridges with potential allies.

The dangerous thing about these layers and sub-groups is that other people know that they are the receptive ones, too.  Which means they often get inundated with calls, e-mails, etc trying to get them to help because others are less tractable.  Even when I employ alternative means of communicating – offers for lunch, coffee, stopping by randomly – they can be less than receptive due to simple overload.  This is especially problematic at a small organization, such as Santa Clara.  So in one’s efforts to be friendly and reach out, it’s possible you might start to singe some bridges.

The point of this post is not to “educate” readers (do I even have a dozen?  who knows) that one cannot make everyone happy at the same time.  It is a little bit about how one should often forget happy and be willing to accept controlled annoyance.

All of the business school methods and techniques about management, inter-office politics, etc really start to take useful shapes when the MBA is done and the real world starts to envelop one’s actions (before it’s kind of a blend – learn something new tonight, try it out tomorrow.  Now it’s “assimilate everything you’ve learned and apply it all at once”).  Sometimes they are “useful” in demonstrating how tough things can be.

June 15, 2010 Work-related 0 Read more >

fighting complacency

I had a conversation with a classmate of mine recently, discussing various issues of interest at our school, the university at large, and educational technology in general.  We quickly moved from the specific – technology that we have seen implemented ourselves – to the general.

We spoke, essentially, about how one must approach educational technology.  Academic Computing, academic technology, instructional technology – they all refer to the same thing.  Servers, switches, computers, projectors, even dry-erase boards and the types of walls that surround a room – any kind of technology, hardware, software or otherwise, used to improve teaching and learning.

This topic has come up a bit since I completed by MBA, as well.  People ask me what my plans are next.  I have no intentions of leaving my current job for the time-being, but it has put a renewed emphasis on what it is I want to accomplish in my job.

What drives me is, in one way, the desire to fight complacency.  The flip side of fighting complacency, of course, is the pursuit of innovation, to ask why and why not at the same time, and to always pursue the best, even when better will do.

I hope that I will be able to stick to this path.  I hope that I will not succumb to complacency, losing my desire to always pursue the continued improvement of services and tools that the students, faculty, and staff at the school can use.

Not quite the post I wanted it to be, but it gets to the point…

June 13, 2010 Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, Work-related 0 Read more >

the endless pursuit of…complacency

This is a post about differing perspectives on technology and support of student learning here at SCU, so I must preface things a bit.  Any administrator at any academic institution, especially in “these tough economic times” (a phrase that I am so sick of…yet I use here in this post) has to make tough decisions about how to invest one’s money.  Especially if expenses have trended and gone generally in one direction for many years, it’s hard to suddenly say “let’s spend more money, in a different way!”  I know this, even as I put together initiatives for new projects and programs that either change my budget or require additional funds.  So I can empathize with the mentality that I’m describing below.

Doesn’t mean I agree with it, though.

Santa Clara has a great program that supports innovation in technology.  The Tech Steering Committee offers up grants to those that are pushing forward with technology in the use of teaching, learning, and/or research.  It’s meant, at the least, as seed money to see if something will be useful.  Ideally, it’s to get a project off the ground that will, with proven success, turn into an ongoing operation.

I have applied for a grant each year I’ve been at SCU with the latter goal in mind – I want to start something that will last for years into the future.  As part of a larger roadmap of where I think the law school should be headed.  And I have received 2 grants in 2 tries, totally over $24,000.  I applaud SCU for this program, which was offered even during the especially lean 2009-2010 budget year.

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June 12, 2010 Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, Work-related 0 Read more >

tips for Capstone

In my recent review of Michael Fern, my professor in the final course in the MBA program (known as Capstone), I mentioned a few tips on surviving the class.  I thought they might merit a post on their own.  So here they are…

6 person teams – The most important part of the entire class, IMO, is finding the right team.  Find the right people, the right mix of skills, and the right set of personalities to be as productive as you can be.  If that’s 4 people, great.

Having said that, you’ll want to try to get to 6 people if you can find the right ones.  Just think about the roles that are needed and/or the sections to be covered:

  1. Integrator (and make sure you have 1-2 others that will look over things at the end, too)
  2. External Analysis (this might be 2 people easily)
  3. Financial Analysis (need a 2nd set of eyes here, too)
  4. Corporate Strategy (linked to Business Level)
  5. Business Level Strategy (linked to Corporate)
  6. Exhibits (collecting, making them look consistent, etc, which requires a single person at the end)

So I indicate 6 people there, but note that some areas will need more people and help.  Imagine doing all of that with fewer than 6.  Also, this doesn’t even consider the Intro section, the Synthesis or Recommendations.  The last part really needs to be done as a team, then written up by 1 person.

Collaboration tools – One of the biggest issues I’ve had with the Leavey School of Business over the last 3 years is that the school doesn’t really provide anything that aids collaboration.

During Capstone, you will be going through financial statements and making exhibits(documents), articles (often web pages), and communicating every which way (e-mail, phone, real-time screen-sharing).  You’ll want ways of keeping all files in one location, being able to have multiple people edit a single file, communicate with the group, and probably doing a kind of real-time, video/phone conference session with shared documents.

We utilized the following:

  1. Mailing list – we used google, but whatever will work.  This was used just for e-mails.
  2. Dropbox.com – We kept all of our relatively static documents here.  Financial statements and various other electronic sources, plus our drafts of each section.  The 2GB you get here and unlimited file size were the key factors here (Google Lists’ files section has a file size and capacity limit).
  3. Google Docs – for the few documents that we wanted to truly quickly collaborate on.  The best example is the Bibliography, which we just kept adding to as we found and entered citations.
  4. vyew.com – This was the best free tool we found where we could all talk together (they offer a conference call number for free), look at documents simultaneously, and mark them up as needed.  For instance, if we felt that an exhibit posted should look differently, then any one of us could use the pen tool and just draw on it.  The person in charge of that area could then make the real changes, share them again, etc.

Ground Rules – Set these early.  Good ones are:

  1. Citation style – MLA is probably the easiest.  Don’t let anyone cite anything without using the style, or it’ll likely slip by in the final edit.
  2. Receptivity to changes – you can discuss changes that the integrator made to a section, but you can’t be arguing about it and no one can go about feeling hurt because a paragraph was edited out or whatever.
  3. When and how often you’ll be meeting – we agreed early on that we would meet “as often as we needed, for as long as we needed” and acknowledged that during the quarter we would meet more often and for longer periods of time.
  4. What you will do in case of writer’s block, lack of data, help needed on something, etc.  How will you respond, as a team, to obstacles?

June 12, 2010 Biz School, , , , , , 0 Read more >

where is Apple going?

Companies compete on the basis of cost or value advantage over other products.  Either they make a product at a lower cost than competitors (often at the expense of value), or they offer more value (which is measurable to an extent, but is more than just the difference in willingness to pay or WTP).  A very few companies are able to compete on both – having a dual advantage over competitors.

For Apple, I truly wonder where they are in terms of strategy.  As far as computers, margins are so ridiculously low that they can’t possibly be competing on cost.  Every single bit of a computer is a commodity now – even the coolest part of any computer, whatever you may think it to be, is just a common item as far as accessibility and availability are concerned.  Apple does have a value advantage, and they utilize this by getting away with charging more than competitors for similar products.  Even so, the value difference is not enough to really make computers a meaningful source of revenue over time.

Speaking of revenue – the iPhone makes up 40% of Apple’s revenues.  That’s almost unbelievable.  And it is also a key component of Apple’s strategy over the past few years.

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June 10, 2010 Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, , , 0 Read more >

see what has become of Bill Jobs. I mean Steve Gates. I mean…

Maybe a week ago, the market capitalization of Apple exceeded that of Microsoft for the first time in history, dislodging the latter from the lofty perch that it has held for years and years.

To me, the significance of this is more about a “popularity bubble” that I think Apple is experiencing.  There are a lot of intangibles for Apple, and one could argue that it is in fact more valuable than Microsoft in the long run.  I think the value of intellectual property might be pretty close between the two, in reality, but Apple has begun moving into some markets (um…with the iPad) that are still growth markets.

The question, to me, is whether this potential for growth is worth as much as investors think it is.  I’m really not sure.  First, let’s acknowledge that the market for computers is flat and margins are basically zero.  There is no growth in the personal computer market, no matter how many Macbooks and iMacs are sold.  They just don’t make enough money off of each one.  And, while Apple’s ability to adopt technology just before competitors (USB, WiFi, among others) is at times uncanny (and its marketing teams’ ability to hype the bejesus out of those advantages is just remarkable), it is probably also more expensive for them to be introducing those features before others.

So computers are a dead end.  Portable music players are beginning to plateau, I wager (I haven’t looked at the numbers in a while), and IMO the inclusion of a video camera on the 5th Generation iPod Nano is a sign that designers are beginning to grasp at straws.

Portable media via innovative mobile devices…that’s where the iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad come in.  And it’s also why Steve Jobs is turning into Bill Gates.

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June 7, 2010 Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, , , , 0 Read more >