Mark W. Shead

I’m seeing a lot of schools scrambling to try to offer online courses and degrees.  In particular I’m noticing community colleges are trying to ramp up their online degree programs as quickly as possible.  Community colleges are seeing a huge influx in demand for classes and degrees so they are trying to do their best to accomodate all the potential incoming students.

The problems is that you can’t just create a good online experience overnight. They are people who are are willing to sell you the technology you need, but a good online degree program requires an experience that doesn’t come from just having good software running the online interactions.  It takes time for people to get use to online classes.  This is usually less of a problem for students–many are very digitally savvy and interact with their friends more online than in real life.  However, teachers who are struggling to adapt to using the Internet often find that running all of their communications through a computer is a very difficult adjustment.

Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them. ~ Paul Hawken

This management quote advocates what I’d call Tom Sawyer leadership. People are most motivated when they want to work and are excited about what they are producing.  This is very different from approaches that are just focused on controlling people or “herding” them toward what needs to be done. Jack Welch has another management quote that advocates a similar style although he is focused more on getting the right people than making the problems interesting.

If you pick the right people and give them the opportunity to spread their wings—and put compensation as a carrier behind it—you almost don’t have to manage them. ~ Jack Welch

In Welch’s management quote the focus is on getting the right people in and making sure they are adequately rewarded.  This is true for most companies, but I think the management quote by Paul Hawken hits on a very important point–not everything is done for money.  There are organizations that are extremely well managed where people aren’t paid or are paid very little. Interesting work is a very important part of getting things done in those organizations.

If you want good results you either have to pay very well or have very interesting problems.  Ideally do both.

I’m kind of disappointed we don’t have flying cars by now.  Technology doesn’t ever seem to advance as fast as we expect in the areas we expect it.  On the other hand, as I type this, I’m watching my son sleep using a wireless monitor that is receiving a transmission from an infrared camera that lets me watch him in the dark.  That wasn’t exactly something they were predicting in 1950 and it is still pretty advanced.

Still I’d like the flying car.

I ran across an interesting asset protection idea the other day.  I’m not sure this would work, but it was interesting enough to share.

Someone takes money that is in their retirement account and switches over to a self-directed IRA. They then get a waiver that allows them to give themselves a loan (from the IRA) to purchase a house and the IRA has the first position on the property.

The idea was that the house would now be protected from bankruptcy in the same way that the IRA funds are protected.  Any further liens on the house would come after the IRA’s position.

Another interesting idea was to basically put all of your money into an LLC in a setup called a checkbook IRA LLC.  The idea is that if someone wins a lawsuit against you they can get a position from the IRA LLC, but they can’t take control of it.  So basically any income shows up as phantom income for them on which they must pay tax.  You don’t pay any tax because the gains are tax free for you. The checkbook IRA LLC setup looks intriguing, but it doesn’t appear to be very well tested in the tax courts, so it might not be the safest setup.

As I said, I’m not sure either of those strategies would work, but they are interesting possibilities that I hadn’t ever heard of before.

It appears that my initial thoughts on the Stuxnet Worm in Iran were wrong. Originally I stated that as easy as it seems to be to make a worm that infects Windows, it seemed odd to try to blame this on a country or someone with large resources going specifically after Iran.  However, now that some additional facts about the program have come to light, it appears that Stuxnet is quite a bit more complicated.

• It is designed to change the rotation speeds of specific convertor drives made in Iran.
• It is designed to modify their spin frequency in ways that would be difficult to detect.
• It only becomes active when there are more than 33 of these convertor drives on the network. (Something that would be likely in Iran, but unlikely anywhere else in the world).
• It specifically modifies convertor drives that are operating at a frequency that could be used to create weapon’s grade products.
• It appears that someone would have needed to steal two cryptographic keys from a company in Korea in order to make the worm.

So at this point, it no longer looks like something a few high school kids could have pulled off as a prank.

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting interview with David Yoffie talking about Harvard’s push into China and India with executive education.  It sounds like these aren’t typically  full executive MBA programs but rather customized courses dealing with a specific business need. Some interesting points from the article:

• The average business financial literacy is lower among CEOs in China than in the US. Harvard is having success offering what appear to be fairly basic financial courses to CEOs in China.
• While both India and China seem to value education, China is willing to pay significantly more than India.  India is only willing to pay about half of what people are willing to pay in the rest of the world for Harvard’s courses.
• Businesses in India appear to have more formalized training in place than China and this may account for a greater willingness to pay more for education in China.
• Right now Harvard is offering classes in India at a steep discount compared to other countries, but they hope to raise the prices in the future.

The question I have is, “why does it have to be so expensive?” Obviously if Harvard is losing money in India, they are going to need to raise their prices, but it doesn’t sound like that is the case.

It doesn’t look like it passed, but there was a ballot initiative in the State of Washington to put a tapeworm on the state seal.

This measure would require the Seal of the State of Washington to be changed to depict a vignette of a tapeworm dressed in a three piece suit attached to the lower intestine of a taxpayer shown as the central figure. The seal would be required to be encircled with the following words: “Committed to sucking the life blood out of each and every tax payer.” The illustration would be selected from submissions submitted by taxpayers. (source)

I’ve started seeing a huge number of people looking for proof of time travel. I asked a few friends if they had any idea why and we came up with a few theories on why so many people are suddenly looking for proof of time travel.  Here are some of the suggestions.

1. Digg and My Space employees are looking for a way to go back in time.
2. My future self is trying to send me some type of message.
3. The Charlie Chaplin movie that appears to show someone talking on a cell phone has sparked an interest in other “proofs of time travel”.
4. The 25th anniversary of Back To The Future is getting people thinking about time travel.

The idea of sending a message back in time was intriguing, but I’m afraid items 3 and 4 are probably what is driving the interest in time travel proof.  Item 2 would make for an interesting movie though.  Maybe the plot could revolve around being able to send messages through versions of websites that are stored on archive.org or something…

Photography use to be a pretty stable career choice.  Everyone was going to need pictures and events like weddings typically go forward regardless of what the economy is doing.  However, high quality, low cost cameras are causing career problems for professional photographers as amateurs and hobbyists are now able to compete with similar quality, but much lower costs. This represents a significant change in the photography industry and  photographers whose only skill is taking wedding photos are starting to see their profits drop rapidly.

If you pick the right people and give them the opportunity to spread their wings—and put compensation as a carrier behind it—you almost don’t have to manage them. ~ Jack Welch

This management quote by Jack Welch make an interesting point that most of the activities involved in management is about optimizing for mediocre employees. Management is what you need once your organization gets beyond the point of a small group of the brightest and best people for each position.  When you have an imperfect matchup between an employee and their job you need management to help keep everything running smoothly.