B. Chen: Don’t be surprised that MIT does not have too many black female PhD graduate. By far the most popular doctorate sought by black women is in Education and MIT does not have an Education school. (The macho scientists at MIT would, of course, sneer at a PhD in Education as being insufficiently challenging. Assuming they get through their grueling PhD program, they’d be sneering from their 80 hour/week $35,000/year postdoc while the PhD in Education would be pulling down $140,000 per year as a civil servant, working 40 hours/week in public school system.)

Oh, that article is: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/02/26/women_scientists_on_wish_lists_for_harvard/

According to the Boston Globe, minority status and (especially) female status are the most important things to look for to run the most prestigious university in American, if not earth. I loved this quote: “There were numerous calls for a strong female or minority candidate, someone bold like Summers but more perceptive about people…” They really like Shirley Ann Jackson, first black female to get a PhD from MIT, which surprisingly was only awarded in 1973. MIT gets a woman, I guess Harvard wants one, too! It’s surprising that affirmative action goes so high up the food chain (and that’s not a generalization about the qualifications of these women: people specifically said they wanted a female or a minority to run Harvard).

The interesting thing here, surely, is that Harvard (a large place, home to many smart people) has been hijacked by a single smallish division (humanities). And alumni, students, business law and research faculty did nothing (or at least not enough) to stop it.

Down-hill for Harvard for a few years would have to be the prediction.

Honestly I think that comparing Harvard to UoP is a little disingenuous. I mean, comparing a staid, established institution with a 300+ year history to a fresh start-up that isn’t even one tenth as old.

The founder of UoP, John Sperling, is alive, kicking and more than willing to piss off people with his opinion. While the founder of Harvard College may ahve been a rebel in his day, any rebelious spirit has surely been outdated in the mean time….

So, some brash ‘leader’ showed up at thehallowed institution, pissed offthe status quo, and got ousted…

I suppose that we could only hope that some of the quality of education that exists in Harvard manages to find its way into the faster/wileyer new breed of education institutions.

Consider also role and accountability for managers administering government projects and services, along with the contractor managers supporting them.

On the one hand, many Department of Defense type programs/projects have managers who rotate in and out of a given program/project every couple of years. Their main focus is often on minimizing schedule and/or budget slips on their interim watch, not in uncovering and solving fundamental problems or in revising the program/project to be more cost/effective over the longer term if the result impacts their shorter term schedule/budget responsibilities. After all, they will move on to some other program/project in a couple of years, and if the program/project collapses after they leave, it becomes someone else’s problem.

On the other hand, many other government positions, like some corporate positions, have better than average job tenure. Does this make managers who have what amounts to tenure, more or less motivated to do really fix things and maximize cost/effectiveness? There is also the aspect of political cover for many government management positions and projects/services — presumably sometimes providing insulation from accountability, and sometimes (less often) providing increased sensitivity to criticism by opposing special interest or political forces. It seems the more millions/billions that have been allocated, the less likely are those involved to admit failures and the more likely they are to declare success, regardless of the reality. Look at the Vietnam War, Missile Defense Program, IRS Modernization, etc. The program’s contractors don’t want to raise too many criticisms for fear their contracts might be canceled, along with the inept program. Similarly in corporate management, there seems a strong impetus to optimize disruptions to quarterly and fiscal year plans, often at the expense of longer term performance — retirement defined benefit and healthcare plans are examples of this; corporate managers avoided near-term dissatisfaction by workers and disruptions, but pushed out the mounting financial consequences to years after the original managers had departed.

Ultimately, it largely comes down to personal values and integrity. Are we as individuals willing to sacrifice personal short term security/benefits for the greater good?

stolen from CT, but true & to-the-point, I think : -

“basically, the extent to which Harvard picked up Shleifer’s legal bill was viewed as controversial, and then not disciplining or firing Shleifer. Also, Summers had a number of opportunities to settle the case which he didn’t take, and almost certainly made the eventual disaster worse than it needed to be by taking a high-handed approach to the authorities”

There’s leadership, there’s decisiveness, there’s plain-speaking.

Perhaps risk is a term much misunderstood or abused. Looking at it thoroughly, ‘risk’ belongs to the imbecile mass, which is rather large in any concentration of population — not noticeable enough because their dormant state of existence. Lest you incurred their wrath, do not coerce them out of their state. Perhaps Larry Summers has a story to share.

Striding out of the cocoon is leadership — which for one is also much misunderstood. Leaders parlaying casual happiness over golf courses incurred the expense of a nation’s worth.

Leadership is nothing to be happy about (not in our casual imagination) — it is a called vocation.

Chris,

Thank you for presenting one of my points more briefly. Prius, Asimo, and HondaJet, though not “bet the farm,” are good internal R&D projects, but EDS was an MBA’s funky trick play. GM’s Saturn division was kind of a big risk, and may have been initially successful, but seems to have been left to wither.

“creative men and women like Larry Summers” I like that you’ve learned the lesson from this: don’t offend any women!