Well it’s Christmas day. I was going to do my blog Friday, but just now I am finally sitting down.  Watching my children dance to "Beat It" on the Just Dance. I am having a cup of coffee and enjoying some down time.  The only individuals to not get a technology related gift were the dog and I.    But the dog’s toy has a special website for additional related toys.  Lots of Ipods, Kindle, and video games today. I love my gifts. A flannel shirt, candy, coffee gift card, and a cap from the private college that gets lots of tuition money a year. They should send me a box of caps. But I do have a great gift in Discovery Machine had a wonderful year.  I/ITSEC was a great show for us.  We have a lot of interest coming out of the show.  Our team did a great job. We were the only vendor, that I saw, that had AI which you could speak to in natural language and it would talk back to you.  Lots of people have told me how well the Discovery Machine demonstrations showed how far AI has come. Just think how some AI technology improved your holiday?  Did it make your travel smoother?  Was there in a game you gave your children? I feel AI is at a point where it will positively improve everyday life in a dramatic way.  Discovery Machine is here to help make that happen. Let’s hope 2011 is an even better year. I hope everyone has a good New Year.  I have to go find some more AA batteries.

I have been thinking about how important it is to be caught doing things right. Some people think you have to be careful; you don’t want to praise people too much, because they’re going to get a big head. People don’t get a big head by getting caught doing things right. People get false pride and big heads because they’re not praised enough. And they start to crave it, and they need it, and they start to push and shove for credit. When I was a kid, I was so fortunate, no matter what I did there was always somebody there—my mom or dad or my sister—to give me an "attaboy" and tell me that I did great. I think one of the reasons why I’m able to keep things in perspective, if I happen to achieve anything, and laugh about it, is because I’ve been told I’m okay all of my life. So I don’t really need or crave it or need to push or shove for it. So I just wanted to say to you how important, again, it is to help people who are important in your life and give them an "attaboy" or "attagirl" and tell them that you love them and you care about them. Because what really makes people feel good in the long run is the belief about that. False pride comes when nobody pays any attention to you and you start to wonder if you’re okay. Everybody needs that pat on the back once in a while.

As the ability to create virtual environments has evolved, we have witnessed a dramatic growth in their use through training simulations. At the same time, the commercial game market has enjoyed explosive growth, becoming one of the largest entertainment industries today. These two sectors are beginning to come together, with technology developed for one being used by the other. Now there exists the notion of "serious games", which attempt to leverage concepts from gaming in order to provide useful training experiences. When viewing various training simulations, it’s easy to see the similarities to computer based games. User interfaces are often similar. Environments are rendered in three dimensions, and the user can manipulate and move throughout these creations. However, many people believe that a simulation and a serious game are the same thing, and I believe they are not. Suppose, for instance, I wanted to train someone in how to work as a bartender. I could construct a three dimensional environment depicting a bar and enable the player to go about the daily routine of a bartender. But this on its own is not a game. What I would have created would have been a bartender simulation. Compare this to the old classic video game, Tapper. Aside from the very abstract concept of a bartender, it’s really nothing like the actual job of a bartender. It’s merely a game. It’s an entertaining diversion, but it’s not actually going to teach you how to tend a bar. We cannot ignore the value of its entertainment, though. The fact that it is actually fun to play is what made it a popular game back in the 1980′s. It was engaging to the extent that people were willing to pay money to play it. And playing it certainly taught you something, in that if you played it over and over you would get progressively better that serving little digitized mugs to rowdy digitized customers. When it comes to "serious games", we need to find some way to merge these two ideas. We need to capture the essence of a successful game that makes it fun to play, and use that to achieve the same level of engagement in a training environment.  If we can do that, imagine the scenario where  the same kind of dedication that caused kids to pump quarters into arcade games is focused learning useful skills.

Although the U.S. unemployment rate is estimated to be 10%, if you look at the age groups of our talent base that’s out of work, it is far higher among recent college grads and estimated to be 20% or more among those between the ages of 20-30.  Many people have proposed a "job corps" like the Peace Corps, where young people would serve their communities for a year or two, and their education debts would be forgiven based on the duration of their service. There is so much energy and passion among this age group just entering the workforce, and so much social entrepreneurship happening from this new generation.  It is a shame that we may be facing a "lost generation" of new workers due to the economy! My friend Harvey Mackay has a new book called Use Your Head To Get Your Foot In The Door: Job Search Secrets No One Else Will Tell You. Whatever age you are, if you are frustrated with your job search, or you’re facing a career change, you will get some very practical insights. People are more discouraged than ever.  But stay positive! Finding a job and advancing a career is tough work.  People need an inspirational force behind them and Harvey will share that journey with you. This is a great book, and everybody today, whether they have a job or are looking for one, will find a lot of useful information.

Some expertise follows the Pareto principle; 80% of the benefits come from 20% of the effort.  I find that home improvement expertise generally falls in this category.  Weekend warriors can often do a reasonable job without spending a career becoming an expert craftsman.  The trick here is to get started with a job the right way with the right tools.  Tool rental stores often have just what you need, but many novices don’t even know what to ask for. For instance, years ago I hired some guys to remodel a bathroom.  Three large men spent 3 days with sledgehammers pounding out old tile and concrete in order to demolish the old bathroom.  It seemed like a lot of hard work and at the time, I was glad I didn’t try to do it myself in a weekend.  What I didn’t realize was that these guys didn’t get started with the right tools and were far from experts in this field. This past weekend, a friend and I knocked all the tile off the walls of a similar bathroom in my current house in just six hours.  The difference was I extracted knowledge from an expert beforehand and discovered the right tool - a 40lb demolition hammer.  This heavy duty tool knocked the tile off the wall with much less effort than a chisel and hammer or sledgehammer and saved many hours of hard work and mess.  I’m sure someone with experience using this demo hammer could have done the work even faster than me, but getting that little bit of knowledge about the right tool saved me well more than 80% of the effort. So how did I obtain this expert knowledge?  I failed to find it by searching the internet and reviewing DIY books.  Some "experts" even told me there was no shortcut for just pounding the tile off the wall.  I finally found the right advice by talking to a reputable expert who knew just what to do. This is the type of knowledge we can easily capture and deploy in a Discovery Machine model.  We would start by identifying one or more experts in the area.  Then we use our knowledge capture methodology to uncover the tacit knowledge of the experts to encode it in a visual hierarchical model.  The model would contain details for specific situations.  In my case, the expert model would have known that a demolition hammer was the right choice, but the size of the hammer depended on the type of wall the tiles were set in.  The model could easily be deployed as a web app for use by any weekend warrior. Do you have knowledge within your organization whereby just a little key information can make people a lot more efficient at their jobs?  If so, you can easily make your own knowledge models from your own experts and deploy them in an app on your intranet in a matter of days.  You just need our core software, the Discovery Machine Modeler, some basic training and access to your own in house experts.  It’s a small investment with large returns that will make your workforce more efficient and free up your experts to do what they’re best at.

Occasionally Margie and I lead a couples’ workshop that lasts a day and a half. It’s really interesting—you might say, "What does leadership training have to do with couples in a marriage relationship?"  It is such a powerful thing, we found out, because as a lot of you know, we define leadership as an influence process. Anytime you’re trying to influence the thinking, beliefs, or development of another person, you are engaging in leadership. When you ask people about the most influential people in their lives, they don’t normally mention bosses at work. They talk about their mother, father, grandfather, uncle, or a coach or teacher. There is a lot of life role leadership that goes on, informally, in families and in friendships and all. Leadership in the home is life role leadership. It’s probably the most important leadership role you could ever have. In our work, you know we say that leadership is a transformational journey starting with self leadership, then moving to one-on-one leadership, then to team leadership, and then to organizational leadership. And as we look at families, it becomes really clear that self leadership really starts with just finding out who you are and whose you are, and getting perspective on your life. Then you move to a marriage relationship, and that’s when you’re trying to influence each other, one on one. Then when kids come along—now we’re talking about team leadership. How do you build a community? How do you get people to recognize that none of us is as smart as all of us, and really create that team environment? And then the organizational leadership of a family would be the extended family. What do you do with your in-laws and outlaws and cousins and that whole thing? That’s something most people don’t think about as a leadership position, and yet in a family, it’s a whole different element. So it’s kind of fascinating. Through our training we realize that these concepts apply at home as much as they do in business. So learning how to be a good leader is good for everyone.

We have all seen the news of the wave of Baby Boomer retirements. At Discovery Machine I have been watching it closely and waiting for commercial corporate America to wake up.  Kathleen Casey-Kirschling is recognized as the first baby boomer to file for social security. Baby boomers are anyone born from 1946 until 1964.  I am a baby boomer along with 80 million people in America.  Everyone is talking about the tsunami of social security and healthcare costs.  But I believe people are missing the big cost, the lost knowledge of that baby boomer worker.  Knowledge is a commodity but if it is not captured, it walks out the door when that baby boomer retires. This question always raises the paradox of knowledge valuation.  How much is that knowledge worth?   How much is the knowledge worth of individuals who are responsible for a few of these events?: -          The first Walmart, Kmart, Pizza Hut opens -          The US lands a man on the moon and the Hubble telescope -          Woodstock -          Martin Luther King says "I have a dream" and the Civil Rights Act is passed -          The Berlin Wall goes up and comes down -          The first heart transplant and numerous other medical accomplishments that would go on for pages -          The Soviets invade Afghanistan and two decades later the US invades Afghanistan -          The Chunnel, the Y2K scare that never happens, the 9/11  response………… Do you think there is some valuation to the people who did these things.  All baby boomers. There have been many attempts at a price estimate.  Professor Baruch Lev, of New York University, in 1999 put it at a value close to a company’s Market Valuation.  How much is the knowledge of 35-40% and all the senior members of your work force worth? Easily millions, billions, and probably trillions? More companies need to capture that knowledge before it retires to train the next generations. Do you think you can call Frank while he is fishing and ask: should we buy this company?, use this material?, try this way of doing it? You get the point, no you cannot call Frank twice a day for the rest of his life.  The funny thing is it was baby boomers that came up with the technology to do it.  Here at Discovery Machine we have used Artificial Intelligence to come up with a software solution and methodology that can do this.  We are doing it for critical skills in the DoD.  We are just starting to do it for commercial entities.  "Wouldn’t it be great if we had an intelligent model on how Frank made decisions based on his knowledge?"  It is possible, a baby boomer figured out how.  I just would like more commercial corporations to figure it out and call Discovery Machine before it is too late.

Last week and this week we are having a "Blanchard March Madness" tournament here at the corporate office. Last week we had some individual competitions including HORSE and a Sharpshooter tournament, and this week we are having 3-on-3 games. Well, on Thursday we had the finals of the individual competitions, and do you know who won the sharpshooting contest? Yours truly! Ha! I made 16 out of 20 shots from the foul line. What a great time we had, and I couldn’t believe I beat all the youngsters here at the office! It was interesting. I’m proofreading the second edition of The Mulligan that I wrote with Wally Armstrong, about golf and faith. There’s a lot of mental stuff in there too. Tony Robbins said that if you want to perform well, there are three aspects. One is focus—you have to see yourself doing well. And you know, I used to be a great foul shooter when I was younger, so I just saw myself pouring the shots in. Then Tony said you have to have the physiology—you have to walk like you know what you’re talking about. So when it was my turn, I just walked there like I knew what I was doing. And then Tony said you have to have a routine. So I bounced the ball and tossed it around the same way every time before I went for the shot. So I made 16 out of 20 at the line, which even surprised me. I also read in there what we wrote about playing NATO golf—Not Attached To Outcome. So you’re not worried about your outcome, you’re just going with the flow. Last week we were at a program called Inspire San Diego. The guy who put it on was Greg Reid, who cowrote a book called Three Feet from Gold, which really built on the ideas from Think and Grow Rich, the classic book by Napoleon Hill. Just listen to this line from Napoleon Hill:  "There are many things you cannot control, but you can control the only thing that really matters—your mind and your attitude. External forces have very little to do with success. Those who program themselves for success find a way to succeed even in the most difficult of circumstances. Solutions to most problems come from one source, and one source alone: yourself. You can do it if you believe you can. You control your destiny. Decide to live life to the fullest. You may be three feet from gold." That was fun. Life is a very special occasion, don’t miss it!

Since Tuesday’s State of the Union Address is still on our minds, I wanted to take a moment to discuss the concept of innovation which President Obama mentioned during this year’s speech. One major component of the address was the discussion on innovation and how successful innovation is needed to revitalize the American economy. By investing in biomedical research, information technology, and clean energy technology the United States can combat our economic woes, said Mr. Obama. As support of this statement, Mr. Obama referenced America’s innovative history by saying, "We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices, the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers, of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It’s how we make a living." Many of you are probably asking yourself, "What does innovation really mean?" I agree it is sort of a vague notion, but I believe innovation is pioneering a new pathway and dreaming of a new way to do something. Innovation is not about leaving the world behind, it is about inspiring others to innovate themselves. Innovation is not a series of ideas that are to be kept in a box for no one to learn from but a new way of doing something that launches a wave of future thought. As the United States did in the industrial revolution, innovation is a force which enacts changes not on a small scale but worldwide. Now the question becomes, "How do we inspire innovation?" It is my opinion that lack of innovation is not due to lack of desire, but that it is more accurately due to the fact that people with expertise in the areas where innovation is possible are in short supply or do not have time to investigate their own ideas and bring them to fruition. Lack of innovation is not due to lack of brilliant ideas but to the burden of society on our brightest minds. Discovery Machine has a way of combating this dilemma. Every day our company hears from corporations and small business about how they wish they could harness the human capital of their workforce. The issue is not that companies cannot innovate because they have no good expertise but instead that their top experts are too busy to pursue those ideas. Many business owners echo the story, "We have a few key experts, if only we could capture their expertise somehow and reproduce it we could free up their time to pursue some of their own great ideas. If only we could clone people so they can innovate new solutions and make us more profitable." Discovery Machine’s software and methodology are capable of walking an expert through their thought process, documenting their knowledge, and deploying it so it can be leveraged by the company. Once the knowledge is deployed, the expert no longer has to do the mundane day to day tasks because they can be automated. This in turn frees up the employee so that he/she can investigate new avenues of research and innovate new products and solutions. Discovery Machine has had numerous success stories reporting exponential time and financial savings as a result. Innovation is not dead in the United States; it is simply stifled by corporate and societal time demands on our top experts. With software like Discovery Machine’s Knowledge Service Modeler, we can foster research and accelerate innovation. Whether the next great innovation is true artificial intelligence or cars that can fly, Discovery Machine can help Mr. Obama to reach his goal to "win the future". I leave you with this question: Are your key experts living up to their true potential or is their innovation stifled because they are bogged down and have no time to investigate and explore new avenues?

Make Sustainability a Part of Your Overall Corporate Strategy A One Minute Interview with Anastasia Kellermann, co-founder of 2LEAD4US, a Netherlands-based consultancy and training company (part of Blanchard International Netherlands) that challenges and equips leaders to integrate sustainability strategies into their organizations. Q. Can you tell me a little bit about the research that you are currently conducting? A. Our research project has been focused on sustainability and what kind of leadership is necessary to integrate sustainability into companies. We started with this research in Holland and we are expanding it to other countries worldwide. We are looking to get a deeper insight into how companies are integrating sustainability into their day-to-day core business and what the role of leadership is in that process. We also wanted to identify best practices among some of the early adopters. Our goal is to use the information for publication in a future book with Ken Blanchard on sustainable leadership. Q. When you use the term "sustainability," what do you mean by that? A. When I am talking about sustainability, I am referring to what I call the 4 Ps—Person, People, Planet, and Prosperity. In addition to environmental sustainability, I’m talking about all of the decisions people make that impact both their immediate environment and the environment far away. For example, if you buy a cup of coffee and it is made from fair trade then you are also having an impact on people who are in South America. Another important aspect is what we call "prosperity." And the distinction here is not only the profit of the organization in the short term but also the profit that we make in the long term. How can we take the current structure where we incentivize people "to make a really quick buck" and also take into account how that impacts the way that our organization is going to continue in the future? Q. So what you’re talking about is how to create an organization that is socially responsible and that has a plan beyond just being in business for the short term. A. Yes, if you look at business, you’ll see that no one really looks much farther than about five years. If we are able to look at least 10 years ahead then that already gives us a really different picture for the decisions that we make today. So, if we are able to look ahead 10 years, or 20 years, then we start making really different decisions. A lot of companies are not yet realizing that they will face huge talent shortages in a couple of years and that demographics are heavily influencing HR: aging/retiring workforce, lack of talent, Generation Y versus needs of older workers, etc. Some companies, however, have already adopted very smart workforce planning methods to address these challenges. Deloitte is one example. This is why we see a need for integrating sustainability in human resource management. And it is taking that perspective into account. It’s true that you need to succeed in the short-term in order to even be able to get to the long term. But what we have done until now is focus just on the short-term, and not so much on what does that mean over a five-to-ten-year period. Q. What motivated you to get started on this research project? A. I’ve always been passionate about sustainability and I’ve been working on it for a long time. I have always wondered what triggers people to act sustainably, to take good care of the environment-or not? What causes us to make the decisions that we make, including what we choose to eat, how we clothe ourselves, and what kind of jobs that we take? If we want to create a sustainable world where we are doing good for the environment, and for others, and in our own economic interest in both the short and long term, then how can we invite people to take a different role and to specifically take a different leadership role? That’s the basis behind the research: how can we trigger people to make that change so that they can think in terms of sustainability and not just focus on that short term? I’ve always been looking for what kind of leadership is needed to make this change. I did a similar research project before in The Netherlands for 24 CEOs on sustainability. I wrote a book on it called The S Factor, A Personal Guide to Sustainable Leadership. And that is how this research started. From my original focus on the Netherlands, I wanted to see what is going on worldwide in terms of sustainability. Is it just a sort of "greenwashing" with a quick treatment in a sustainability report, or are companies actually integrating it into their day-to-day business? To what extent are they taking that longer-term perspective into account and translating it into their decision-making? What drives certain companies and certain leaders to act sustainably while others do not? And we also wanted to find out, what are the success factors that make one leader do it, or what is in the system of the company that makes it possible? For example, if people are evaluated for taking sustainable decisions, then of course you’re going to get a different behavior within the company than if people are constantly evaluated on short-term decisions and don’t take the longer term into account. We also wanted to get a picture of what kind of challenges companies are facing. I think that’s really relevant because a lot of companies are going through hard times during this economic crisis. Q. So to summarize, you’re looking at the traits of leaders that adopt a sustainability mind-set, the factors that encourage a sustainability strategy, and the barriers that get in the way from organizations doing that. A. Yes, and when we look at success factors we look at those different traits, behaviors, and mind-set which has a lot to do with leadership and then we’re also looking at what kind of systems you can put within your organization so that it makes it easier for that behavior to develop. Because you always have believers within organizations—those who believe in sustainability—along with a more skeptical group of people who need to be challenged to find new ways instead of doing things as usual. We see a lot of similarity with change management in that you have a couple of people who really want to change and move on to something that has more to offer than the old system while there are always people who don’t want change and who want to keep things the way they have always been. Put this against an economic background where we’re seeing so much happening around the world and companies are facing a lot of different factors coming into a play. So, there is the environmental issue, the economic issue, combined with what does the company want to do, and then of course all of the normal challenges with implementing any type of change within a company. And sustainability really asks you to fundamentally change a lot of things. We are using the research to identify the drivers for why companies would do this and the opportunities for these companies in the short and long term. Q. What have you learned from the research project so far? A. What we learned from the original Netherlands research is that the biggest drivers promoting sustainability are cost and efficiency, which is interesting. Most people would say that sustainability is more expensive, but among the companies we’ve worked with they see a lot of advantages in how sustainability can cut costs. For example, what we are all spending on energy bills could go down significantly if we are able to tap into alternative sources of energy—solar instead of oil, for example. So, that is a driver for a lot of people who maybe are not a believer in sustainability, but they are a believer in the bottom line. What we’re also seeing is companies looking at sustainability as opportunities for new markets and new products. Look at the car industry, for example, and how much of that has been changed with the introduction of electric vehicles. It’s seen as a new market and it means investing. And you can see how all of the other car companies are now starting to follow the leaders to try and develop the best electric car that they can manufacture. We are seeing in China that they are moving towards sustainability, especially because of new markets and products. That’s one of the surprises from the research. We originally thought that regulation might be the first reason why people choose to go on a path of sustainability, but I’ve found that the search for new markets is considered a bigger reason—at least in Holland—than regulations. Regulations are still a factor, but the new markets are even more of a trigger. One other finding is that personal mission, among top leaders, but also among change agents in other parts of the organization, play a vital role. What we are seeing is people aligning their personal mission and finding a way to incorporate it into the sustainability story. People are also doing it for a certain sense of pride and the self esteem that comes from getting behind something you can be proud of. Also being a preferred employer is another reason for a number of organizations to also embrace sustainability because you can get and attract highly qualified and motivated personnel—especially among some of the younger students that are coming from universities who are looking for a challenge. While they might not choose sustainability for purely idealistic motives, we are still seeing that some want to find some fulfillment in their work and sustainability can provide that fulfillment. It also gives them a challenge, something that they can get their teeth into, and to do things really differently than before. Also, the younger generation tends to be more conscious about social and environmental aspects and a better sense of work-life-balance. With regard to human resource management, we have found that these characteristics are addressed in companies that are frontrunners in sustainability and hence become preferred employers. Q. Any final thoughts or advice for companies looking to integrate sustainability into their organization? A. Align sustainability as much as possible with the core business and strategy of the organization and with the personal motivation of people. If you see sustainability as a side project, or as just as occasional volunteer work in the community, that is not really going to lead to sustainability being integrated within the organization. That is a great start, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the way that the organization does business. Sustainability is really asking us to think longer term and let it come back and impact what we are doing today instead of seeing it as something separate. Would you like to learn more about this research project? You can contact Anastasia Kellermann at www.2lead4us.com  You can also meet Anastasia at this year’s Blanchard Summit 2010 where she will be a featured speaker.

I recently heard a wonderful speaker named David Cook, who is one of the great sports mental coaches in the country. He had a really interesting theory about goal setting that I thought was worth sharing with you. He said when you go to set up a goal, whatever it is, you should try to see that goal in your own mind being accomplished. You need to see the outcome. Then you need to feel what it will be like once you’ve accomplished that particular goal, and get that feeling in mind. And then you need to trust that you’re going to be able to get there. He said the power is in the seeing it and the feeling it, and then just trusting the thing. So if you have a goal, whether it’s a business or personal goal, try to actually see yourself accomplishing it and feel like you’re going to feel once you’ve accomplished it—the smile on your face, the applause from other people, whatever—and then just trust it and set your sights on that goal. I think that is really interesting.  In golf, he has a whole bunch of people who have "SFT" on their ball, so when they’re playing golf, they try to see every shot—what kind of shot are they going to hit, where is it going to go, how high and all—then get up and feel it, and then just trust the process. He said it really is amazing how it works on all kinds of goals. I was thinking about the great athletes competing in the Olympics—the ones who win have seen themselves crossing the finish line and accomplishing their goal ahead of time. Then they make their actions consistent with what they are seeing and feeling. I think it’s a really fascinating process:  See it - Feel it - Trust it. Isn’t that interesting? Try it on one of your goals today.

"Be a scientist, save the world."  Richard Smalley, Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Smalley Technology Futures of North Central Pennsylvania is hosting a Family Math and Science Night on February 24th at Cochran Elementary School from 6:00pm - 8:00pm in Williamsport, PA.   http://www.williamsporttechregion.com/ Math and science night is an opportunity to bring Williamsport area businesses and students together to talk about careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.  According to Dr. Ray O Johnson, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, our education system is simply not graduating enough engineers to keep the U.S. competitive.  He believes that science fairs have long been a grassroots way to excite kids about careers in STEM fields. Dr. Ray O Johnson quotes -  "We hope that the festival is a lot of fun, but make no mistake - this is also serious business. Innovation has been the cornerstone of U.S. economic growth throughout our nation’s history. Never have the global security challenges been greater, and never have we needed a STEM-educated workforce in the U.S. more than we do today…. Our education system is simply not graduating enough engineers to keep the U.S. competitive." "Ultimately, we think that enticing kids to study math and science is an easy sell. It is as simple as this - students need to know that engineers and scientists, like those in my corporation, create the future. They work on high-tech projects that make a profound difference in our world: space systems, high-performance airplanes, clean energy solutions, cyber security, and national security technologies that I can’t even talk about. Great careers await them if they just sign up for those tougher courses in calculus, chemistry, and physics." http://www.usasciencefestival.org/images/files/press_releases/Dr_R_O_Johnson-STEM_Op-Ed-FINAL.pdf

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I’ve written previously about Charles Handy, a friend of mine who’s a great management thinker from England. During one of his presentations he said, "Most of you are not going to remember much what I say in this session, but I will remember everything. The person who learns the most is the one who speaks the most." I think that’s really a powerful thing. In the course that Margie and I teach for the Master of Science in Executive Leadership program at USD, sometimes there’s a complaint that they would love to hear more from us and our thinking. We try to integrate some of that, but the course is really about the students and their thinking and their learning to communicate their leadership point of view. It’s really so reinforcing to watch people where the real learning is happening. Because they are doing the talking. Very often we get fascinated by our own words; even as we try to teach our kids and other people things we think they ought to learn. If we realized that if we listen more than we speak, probably more learning would take place in the person we are trying to teach. Ha! That’s kind of a relearning for today—the person who speaks the most probably learns the most. The rest are going to forget what you have to say anyway. So let other people speak up. Facilitate their thinking through issues. Don’t always be the problem solver. Have a wonderful day. Life is a very special occasion when you let other people speak.

The National Geographic Daily News (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/) recently published an article: "Watson Wins Jeopardy!—6 Artificial Intelligence Milestones" that has some very interesting observations. These observations are important to those of us here at Discovery Machine, Inc. for many reasons. The example milestones offer a nice historical style glimpse at the history of artificial intelligence (AI) and contextual opinions on the potential long term influence and impact. Discovery Machine, Inc. applauds the growing attention and realization of the potential uses of AI.  We have taken a disciplined approach to implementing useful AI based solutions from our very earliest beginnings at Georgia Tech. Discovery Machine sees much of the true long term value of AI to be the enhancement of people’s expertise in many and varied computer based settings. The core product for this is our Discovery Machine Modeler, a knowledge articulation and leverage development and deployment environment. If needed the Discovery Machine Modeler  can be customized to speak the language of a particular expert’s world. These domain specific Custom Consoles offer an environment where all types of people can amplify their own expertise and the expertise of others to create all kinds of "Wins" in the commercial and government arenas. "Wins" that are not for a computer, but for the people who will greatly benefit from AI based knowledge leverage. These benefits are evident in such varied fields as medicine, education, national defense, space exploration, computer gaming, financial services, etc. Winning at Jeopardy is a great way to help cast products like the Discovery Machine Modeler in a new and welcome light, thanks Watson! The National Geographic Daily News article: " Watson Wins Jeopardy!—6 Artificial Intelligence Milestones"  is linked at: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/pictures/110217-watson-win-jeopardy-ibm-computer-humans-science-tech-artificial-intelligence-ai/#/jeopardy-watson-computer-winning-gary-kasparov-deep-blue-chess_32328_600x450.jpg

Have you ever noticed how you can look forward to something for so long, and then all of a sudden it’s upon you, and then it’s gone? I think that should teach us that life is to be lived one day at a time, and in the present. My friend Spencer Johnson had a great message years ago in his book The Precious Present. He said that we need to learn from the past, but not live there. Plan the future, but don’t live there. Because we are at our happiest when we’re living life in the present - one day at a time. So if you look forward to something for a long time, and then it’s gone, now you’re back to your regular life - what are you going to do about that? It’s interesting and powerful to recognize that life should be lived in the present. Time flies. We’re here for such a short period of time. So enjoy every single day. And reach out and tell someone you love them and you care about them, because when all is said and done, as I’ve said many times, the only thing that counts is who you love and who loves you.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock you have probably heard the news that IBM’s Watson beat the two best Jeopardy! players of all time, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.   It is important to see this achievement for what it is and for what it portends for the future.   Yes, Jeopardy! is a game, and yes it has quirky rules, and yes it is limited to questions and answers.   But, it is also unconstrained.  The questions can address any topic and rely on the full panoply of human experiences from jokes and puns to complex knowledge based relationships.  This is something new! Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made numerous unkept promises over the years.  As early as the 1950’s researchers made claims that computers would "soon" match or exceed human beings in their ability to reason.   This misplaced enthusiasm emanated from successes in games such as checkers and then chess with a series of wins culminating in IBM’s Deep Blue beating the reigning grand master, Gary Kasparov, in 1997.   In specialized disciplines, expert systems demonstrated great aptitude for decision making in narrow areas.   In the 1970’s and 80’s it was presumed that these successes would be combined into a general intelligence.  Again, this promise went unkept.  Why?  Efforts in combining these systems through interchange languages and common-sense ontologies proved to be as hard as the AI problem itself.   So through the 1980s and 90s, AI was left with a set of practical systems (some quite successful) that were expensive to build, limited in their application, and completely incompatible with each other. In the 1990’s other paradigms of intelligence emerged, such as case-based and model-based reasoning.  These paradigms challenged the notion that heuristic rule-based search (the underlying engine of most expert systems) form the basis of general intelligence.   The role of experience, the retrieval of stored memories, and the adaptation of these memories to present problems proved useful to additional classes of problems.   Still, experience-based systems were limited to the range of experiences provided to them.   As AI researchers like to say, all these systems were "domain specific." What Watson now shows is that an artificial intelligence system can succeed in a "domain independent" problem space covering wide ranging questions of subtlety and nuance. Given the computational power of 2,880 processors and some 14 terabytes of memory (not disk space mind you), Watson can answer questions in under three seconds that stagger the imagination. How does Watson do this?   Aside from the raw computational power, Watson uses many different strategies all at once to come up with the answers and selects the best answer from those uncovered.  This multi-strategy approach is one that we at Discovery Machine Corporation have embraced at a smaller scale for use on your desktop machine.   Intelligence does not come from a single strategy such as heuristic search or CBR, but rather from a combination of strategies.   The strategy used for puns is not the same as that used for determining historical dates.   At Discovery Machine we capture the many and varied strategies of experts and combine them to form intelligent behaviors.   What Watson portends, is that as computational power increases, domain independent AI will be available on your desktop or even your phone in the not too distant future.

There is a Positive Psychology course that Margie and I have been taking that is really interesting. We ran into a guy named Nathaniel Branden, who wrote about the six pillars of self-confidence. His big theme is nobody’s coming. If you are thinking about someone who is going to get you out of a situation, and you’re waiting for them to take all the action, the reality is that people can do things, but nobody is really coming. What are you going to do?  One thing that’s interesting is the difference between passive victims—people who are in a situation and immediately go to self-pity—"This is really tough." Then they want to point fingers and blame other people. This leads to frustration, and eventually anger, and things kind of spiral down that way. This is the passive victim that somehow thinks their fate is in somebody else’s hands, versus the active agent who takes action—"Okay, this is tough, but what am I going to do? What can I do in my area? What ideas do I have?"  They are willing to take responsibility, which is being able to respond, and give suggestions that will help. They have a feeling of confidence—"Somehow we’re going to make it through this thing together." This leads to hope and optimism. We all need to take action—what can we do to help?  Let’s work on responsibility. I have confidence and hope. What is it that makes some people be able to pull out of tough times? It’s all about resiliency. So remember—we’re all responsible somewhat for the condition we’re in. So be an active agent, not a passive victim. Life is a very special occasion. Don’t miss it with a lot of negative energy.

Last week, Todd discussed IBM’s new Jeopardy playing super computer, Watson. The rise of machines that continue to evolve capabilities once reserved for humans brings up the notion of a technological singularity. That is, a point in time where life on earth qualitatively changes due to technological development. There are a number of mechanisms by which such a change could occur. For instance, if medical technology develops to the point at which human lives can be extended indefinitely, this would result in a qualitative change in the way in which we go about living those lives. However, for the purpose on this discussion, we’ll talk more about the type of singularity which would occur through creation of a superintelligence which exceeds the capabilities of the human intelligence creating it. Once such an event occurs, some significant shift would take place in the way we live as humans. Such an intelligence would be able to improve itself, and do so faster than humans would be able to. What’s more, humans would likely not be able to predict such changes. A malevolent AI with such capabilities would represent an existential risk to humanity. Indeed, even an AI which is simply indifferent to humanity could represent a huge risk, because as Eliezer Yudowsky points out, "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else." Thus, Yudowsky suggests the need for "Friendly Artificial Intelligence" or FAI. In some ways, the notion of FAI relates to Asimov’s idea of the "Three Laws" of robotics, which ultimately attempt to protect humanity by hard-coding a set of rules into all artificial intelligence. However, scientists like Yudowsky suggest that such a simple set of rules is insufficient, as an entity with greater-than-human levels of creativity and resources would be able to come up with a way to circumvent or rationalize away those rules in any situation. This is, after all, what intelligent beings do; we find ways to circumvent roadblocks, and achieve our desired goals. Given that, the idea of FAI suggests that the way by which humanity can protect itself from a malevolent or indifferent AI is to make sure that the ultimate goals of that entity are in line with those of humanity. In this situation, while a friendly AI would be free to harm humans, it would choose not to because the idea of harming other intelligent beings would go against its core goals. This then brings up the question of what those goals should be. If we are to create a new kind of artificially sentient being, and we are the ones who will define its sense of right and wrong, and to what ends it should direct its efforts, this will require us to come up with answers to some very difficult questions. Interestingly, those questions will likely be the same ones which have puzzled our species since we were first able to engage in complex abstract thought. Only the stakes will suddenly become much higher. Whatever our decision about what constitutes a good and just course of action, the entities we create will carry those beliefs onward, possibly with such great efficiency and resolve that we will no longer be able to alter their course after the fact. So we may only get one shot at it, and we’ll need to make it a good one.

Jim Steffen was a graduate student of ours at U. Mass. He wrote a book called Aligned Thinking and has been helping us work through some of his way of thinking. The most important concept Jim talks about is MIN—which is "Most Important Now." He says that the way you really enjoy life the most is to decide:  What am I going to do right now? What is this hour about? How can I focus my energy so what I’m doing right now is the most important thing I can do, so I’m not in the midst of one thing and thinking about doing something else? You know, my mind is all over the place. I know a lot of us like to multitask and all those kinds of things. But it’s great if you can get in the MIN attitude and think, okay, I’m going into this particular meeting. Where does this fit into my life? What am I trying to do? How can I get into the mindset that this is the most important moment right now, and really focus in on it? It’s the same way with people. Try to just focus in on people for three or four minutes and just be there for them. This is the most important thing right now - this is a MIN relationship. So what I’m trying to do, first thing in the morning, is to look at the day and see how I can plan what I’m supposed to be doing and how I can get my mind set on the most important thing I ought to do. It’s a wonderful little concept and thought about focus in life. So I thought I’d throw it out for you today.

The Department of Labor just released the jobs report and at first glance it looks like great news.  The unemployment rate fell to 8.9%, nearly the lowest rate in two years.   Private employers added 222,000 jobs in February, near a 12 month high.  Everyone is excited about this news.  Even Rush Limbaugh focused on it during his show today (of course he claims the Department of Labor fabricated the number since no president in history was re-elected when unemployment was over 9%). So, does this news mean it is safe to start spending my savings now, maybe buy some stocks?  If you listened to the current hype, that would be a likely conclusion.  This is the type of question that a Discovery Machine model would be good at answering - or at least help you answer it. Simple rule-based AI systems would collect statistics like unemployment rate, jobs added per month, percent of underemployed people, etc , and analyze them with a deterministic algorithm.  The algorithm may filter or scale each statistic, compare them to pre-determined thresholds and then compute a weighted sum of these results to generate a final recommendation.  After some tuning, this system would likely work well for a small set of circumstances. A dangerous thing here is that statistics such as those above are only valid under certain sets of conditions.  Mean and standard deviation don’t need much if the data you are measuring doesn’t follow a normal distribution.  A system like this can produce misleading results with very high confidence. A Discovery Machine model would work somewhat different.  First our knowledge capture methodology would greatly broaden the set of applicable circumstances.  It would consider many other factors like what is the current time of year, what has been past performance after a set of similar statistics was attained, what percent of the recent jobs added are in retail or farm jobs and so on.  This domain specific knowledge is gathered from a subject matter expert. The decisions in the Discovery Machine model could be rule based, but as more and more conditions are considered, these overall decisions become more nuanced.  The result is that the model produces recommendations that apply over a larger set of conditions.  Sure, we could still use the same statistics, but would only draw reasonable conclusions if the assumptions behind the statistics are valid.  This type of knowledge embedded in the model is one way to reduce that chance that the system would make a stupid AI mistake (like some that Watson did).  

Here are pictures of Easter 2010, also known as The Kissam’s Jewish Easter.  No, The Kissams aren’t Jewish, but it seems more than half the people invited every year are.  This is probably my tenth or eleventh year celebrating Easter together.  This year Amy joked that it may as well be Fourth of July, you’d never know it was Easter-except there always is a honey-baked ham.  Anyway, it’s all about being together, drinking wine and champagne, sometimes doing our nails, and just generally having fun. The morning started with Beaner in her mismatched jammies, digging into her Easter basket (thank you, Nana!) Auntie Jinx came to town from NYC, and it was fabulous having Team Roberts in its entirety: Jinx brought the bunny paraphernalia, and Winky couldn’t wait to get her hands on all it! Here’s Lex’s god-father Sumner, hanging with Stu and Clara: I’ve been patiently waiting for Clara to grow into this dress from Grammie: Coco posing the Bunny Ears on Clara, in the background you can see Amy, Sybil’s daughter. Aren’t these little bunnies adorable?  Lex, Coco and Kimmy: Clara and her Godmother: Tough girl on Easter Sunday: It was the perfect day-warm and sunshiny in Kim’s backyard: Loving her Aunties: "Trot Trot to Boston . . ." with Sybil: Once again, we failed to get a sister, family , or group shot with all the Easter guests.  Argh!! As you can see Clara had lots of outfit changes-mostly we kept her in just the little white bloomers-it was so hot and what is cuter than a naked little baby girl?

I just heard a very interesting theory about the Golden Rule, which is in almost every faith-you know, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It’s about loving your neighbor as much as you love yourself. This theory was that you can’t really love your neighbor if you don’t love yourself. If you don’t feel positive about yourself, then it’s pretty hard for you to reach out and be positive to other people. Mahatma Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." There was a story about a woman who journeyed for miles with her son to have an audience with Gandhi. She said, "Would you help my son? He eats too much sugar." And Gandhi told her to come back in a week. She couldn’t quite understand that, but they trekked all the way home and came back the next week. They then sat with Gandhi and he told her son to stop eating so much sugar. She said, "Why couldn’t you have told him that a week ago?" And Gandhi said, "Because I was eating too much sugar myself at that time."  Ha! The other thing that’s really interesting is that if you feel good about yourself, it makes other people around you feel good. And if they feel good, they send those vibes back to you and they kind of multiply. Norman Vincent Peale said, "Every day you have a choice. You can feel good about yourself or you can feel lousy. Why would you want to choose the latter?"  If you feel good about yourself, then you’re able to reach out and help others. Helping others is about happiness. The more we reach out and help other people, the happier we get. In fact, most of the time helping other people makes you feel better than if you were doing something for yourself. So take care of yourself. If you do that, then you can take care of other people. It all starts at home. Confucius said, "It’s self, family, neighborhood, state." If you want to create a great nation, a great state, you’ve got to start with yourself. So when you’re discouraged, remember that the change we want to see in the world has to begin with ourselves. Be good to yourself.

I have been looking at the increase in the knowledge loss from Baby Boomers, as this generation starts to turn 65 in 2011.  The question is always "what is the value of this knowledge"?  A 1/3 of Americas workers are baby boomers. Born between 1946 and 1964.  I am a boomer. We generate half of the America’s consumption spending and we lead most of the companies.  But what is the value of our knowledge? What is the mistake, when people keeping telling you to capture this knowledge but you don’t heed the call? Remember a long time ago when the IT guy told you to back up to floppy disk, then CDs, then an external hard-drive.  We all have a story where we forgot at the wrong time and then we got a blue screen.  For me it was an important work proposal and a master’s paper.  I had to stay up for 2 days to trying to re-create something close.  I didn’t heed the call There have been a number of different attempts to create a price estimate for knowledge.  Professor Baruch Lev, of New York University, released a paper in 2000 that in the US knowledge assets account for 6 out of every 7 dollars of corporate market value.  A story released on ManagerNewZ in 2006 showed the turnover costs of a specialized high level employee to 400% of their annual salaries. In their study they included an estimated lost expertise cost.  My approach to value of this knowledge is simple.  Take your corporate net worth and delete your physical asset values and any liabilities. Then you are left with the value of knowledge. At Discovery Machine we use artificial intelligence to automate knowledge that we have captured using our patented methodology.  Companies need to capture critical knowledge before it walks out the door.  Discovery Machine can help you build an actionable model of your top employee knowledge. Now you would have the data/information to train the generation X and Millennial’s that will replace the boomers.  What is your knowledge capture plan for the wave of knowledge that is about to walk out the door?  What is it worth to you?  Think of the person who sits to your left and right.  Are they boomers?  When will they retire?  Do you have a knowledge capture plan for them in place?  Do you want an award winning DARPA funded AI way to help you do it?  Give Discovery Machine a call.