Great Speakers

Last week I found a great page on the university of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business website that contains video of many of the business leaders who come to speak at the business school. When I was an MBA student, I often attended many of these events. Watching these the polish and poise of these speakers really encouraged me just like it did when I was a student. I hope that the University continues to make video of these presentations available on the site so that alumni and other interested people can benefit from them.

I have already spent a couple of hours watching and listening to
Tom Mendoza,
Jack Welch, and
Charles Phillips.


These gentle men are great examples for everyone in the business community to emulate.

Sullivan vs. Krauthammer

In recent weeks, many people have debated the legality and morality of United States Government agents torturing enemy combatants in the hopes of gaining critical information. While I certainly believe that torture is morally wrong, the real existence of people in the world who endeavor to destroy the United States along with my moral system makes the limits on interrogation techniques that we place on our government an important question. Last week Charles Krauthammer published an essay in the Weekly Standard arguing that the government agents should have the flexibility to employ torture in a couple of extreme conditions. Today Andrew Sullivan published a response in the New Republic in which he insists on an absolute ban on torture by the government. These two essays present the best cases that I have read on both sides of this issue.

My sense is that Krauthammer gets the better of this argument. Sullivan's strongest point is that totalitarian instruments have no place in a war for freedom. However, I think that this is overwhelmed by the real need for the government to have complete flexibility to defend its citizens from foreign enemies with out facing presidential impeachment.

CPR: It Could Save a Life

Travis pointed me to this article about changes to the recommendations for CPR. It seems that chest compressions are relatively more important than had been previously known and that the efficacy of second and third AED shocks is lower than experts thought. The key quote from the article is:

Chest compressions must be deep and the rescuer must allow for complete recoil of the chest after each compression. The panel said this 'back-to-basics' approach should help boost uniformity in emergency care, which has included too many ventilations, too may interruptions, and not enough focus on chest compressions.

Another interesting data point on the subject: My girlfriend Lori, works in an intensive care unit and has to perform chest compressions on coding patients from time to time. In an ICU setting, the medical staff can monitor the patient’s heart rhythm while performing the compressions. According to Lori, rescuers need to perform the chest compressions much harder and deeper than most people simulate in CPR instruction in order for the monitors to indicate acceptable circulation. In fact, if CPR is preformed properly, the rescuer should be very tired after five minutes of compressions.

Another Defender of the BCS

Dan McGowan has a good post arguing that the BCS, while not perfect, is certainly preferable to a playoff in NCAA D-I football. Dan hits on the fact that even though a tournament would allow more teams to participate, there would still be some very good teams left out. To me, the even better point is that the presence of a tournament for the top 8 or 12 teams would likely mean the end of some of the lesser bowls. Without these bowl games, many above average teams would not have an opportunity to participate in post season play, which would hurt college football as a whole.

I did not think of this argument when I wrote this post defending the BCS, but it certainly strengthens the argument.

Race to the Rose Bowl

I like this animation of the Race to the Rose Bowl. Too bad that I just found it at the end of the football season. Also it is too bad that the Volunteers had such a tough season this year.

Update: Here is the final version.

BCS Unfair?

Mike Celizic begins a post about the upcoming Bowl Championship Series' Fiesta Bowl by stating that, "Notre Dame is probably going to the Fiesta Bowl, and this Domer will be the first to agree that's not fair."

Fair? When has college football ever been about being fair? College football and especially post season bowl games have always been explicitly about making money not about determining the best team. If the organizers of the Fiesta Bowl or any other bowl believe that they will earn more money by inviting Notre Dame than another team then they should invite Notre Dame.

As I have stated before, I think that a playoff system is unrealistic for a variety of reasons. All that I have ever seen in response to criticisms of a playoff system is that either the alternative is unfair, that it causes people to hope that only two teams remain unbeaten at the end of the season, or that it gives additional teams the opportunity to play for the championship even though they did not have very good regular seasons.

None of these arguments convince me that either the BCS or its predecessors have fundamental flaws. I don't think that we need an undisputed champion of college football. The experience and the dispute are part of the fun.

Java Hound

My friend Rob Miller just published an article titled Fitnesse Testing for Fast-passed Agile Web Development on java.net. In the article, Rob describes methods of Fitnesse testing, which allow web developers to shorten their testing cycle. Testing usually accounts for a significant portion (often the majority) of any development effort. So if web developers can shorten their test time they will gain the ability to rapidly release new versions of their product, perhaps as often as every day. Planned rapid software releases allow companies to quickly respond to their customers changing needs, which contributes to increased customer satisfaction. Good work, dude!

School Choice in DC

The Club for Growth pointed me towards this article about some early results of the school voucher program in Washington DC. In general, I am in favor of allowing parents to choose where to send their children to school, even if that means sending public tax dollars to private schools. It appears that many of the parents in Washington DC share that opinion.

Quote of the Day

“Businessmen owe it to themselves and owe it to society to hammer home that there is no such thing as ‘profit.’ There are only ‘costs"’ costs of doing business and costs of staying in business; costs of labor and raw materials, and costs of capital; costs of today's jobs and costs of tomorrow's jobs and tomorrow's pensions.
There is no conflict between ‘profit’ and ‘social responsibility.’ To earn enough to cover the genuine costs which only the so-called "profit" can cover, is economic and social responsibility--indeed, it is the specific social and economic responsibility of business. It is not the business that earns a profit adequate to its genuine costs of capital, to the risks of tomorrow and to the needs of tomorrow's worker and pensioner that ‘rips off’ society. It is the business that fails to do so.” Peter Drucker in “The Delusion of Profits”, published in the Wall Street Journal Feb. 5, 1975.

Peter Drucker, who died Friday at the age of 95, was perhaps the greatest commentator on the state of business in the United States. His extensive collection of articles and books will continue to inspire. I intend to reread The Effective Executive in his memory.

Big Government Conservatism?

Well just one day after I noticed and commented on the Progressive take on individual choices, the Weekly Standard published an article by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam with a conservative take on where to go after confronting the realities of entitlement reform. Douthat’s and Salam’s realization is that:

This is the Republican party of today--an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement. To borrow a phrase from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Republicans are now "the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club."

Given these political realities, the authors recommend fleshing out the Big Government Conservatism that President Bush seems to have adopted as the new Conservatism. Douthat and Salam would seem to agree with Paul Glastris’ vision of reality in which Americans cannot succeed by themselves but actually need the government to help them. Then they do exactly what Glastris accuses them of doing, by putting forth proposal that enshrine small government ideals in big government programs.

The jist of most of these proposals is, well if we have to spend so much money on the poor we might as well spend it on wage supports instead of just giving it to welfare recipients. I guess that this stuff is a step in the right direction…

As a side note the article mentions a really interesting study by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press that breaks down the American citizenry into nine political segments. They also have an online quiz so that you can categorize yourself. I turned out to be an Enterpriser. Interestingly enough, much of the commentary published in political magazines and blogging on the internet seems to be a contest between educated enterprisers and educated liberals, but of course both of these groups combined represent less than 30% of the electorate.

The Catholic Church and Evolution II

I was pleased to see Cardinal Paul Poupard recently comment on the relationship between religion and science that the evolution debate currently raging in many parts of the world has highlighted. Cardinal Poupard reiterated John Paul II’s assertion that there is no fundamental conflict between the theory of evolution and the Roman Catholic faith. A few months back I posted my concern about comments made by another Cardinal, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, who hinted that there might in fact be a conflict between science and religion. Thankfully, the Church is engaging the modern world, science included, instead of retreating into an isolated fantasy. I like Cardinal Poupard’s description of the interoperation of science and religion:

We know where scientific reason can end up by itself: the atomic bomb and the possibility of cloning human beings are fruit of a reason that wants to free itself from every ethical or religious link, but we also know the dangers of a religion that severs its links with reason and becomes prey to fundamentalism.

Beautiful.

Contrast that with Evangelical Christian Pat Robertson commenting on a recent school board election in Dover, PA where voters ousted school board members who supported the teaching of intelligent design.

I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there.

Oh Brother…

Individual Choices

Andrew Sullivan pointed me towards this article in the Washington Monthly by Paul Glastris, which offers a critique of President Bush’s Ownership Society initiatives and the conservative political agenda on choice. In his article Gratis attempts to carve out a progressive position between one-size-fits-all liberalism and the conservative ideal of reducing the size of government. I think that he does a good job of laying out the obstacles to increased individual choice, but I differ in the way to overcome these challenges.

Glatris outlines the conservative position as follows:

Talk to scholars at the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation or to movement organizers like Grover Norquist, and they'll walk you through the strategy. Big government and individual freedom, they'll explain, are opposed to each other; more of one means less of the other. The three big areas of non-defense-related government spending are retirement (mainly Social Security), health care (mainly Medicare and Medicaid), and education (mainly K-12 public schools). For political reasons, it is practically impossible to cut spending in these areas. But it is possible to dismantle the government bureaucracies that administer them in a way that enhances personal freedom and makes possible big cuts down the road: privatize the benefits.

He goes on to describe the circumstances of some of the areas where conservatives and President Bush have attempted to insert individual choice into government programs and have either failed or achieved at best mixed results. Examples include school choice in Washington DC where less then ten percent of parents opt to send their children to another school, low participation rates in a Medicare prescription drug discount card program, and the falling public support for privatizing a portion of Social Security. Each of these initiatives seem to fail due to a combination of the apparent complexity of the choices offered, the natural tendency of people to procrastinate, and the individual’s propensity for risk aversion.

Undoubtedly those are the three reasons why some people would prefer to have others make their choices for them as opposed to making the choices themselves. In the particular case of Social Security, people who truly believe that the government will take care of them would never want to switch to a complex system where they have to make choices and bear the risk of failure. However, for people like myself who do not expect to see any return from the payroll taxes that we send to the Social Security system the real risk is leaving our security in the hands of the government.

The three hundred million people living in the United States make countless decisions every day without the influence of government. The aggregate of these decisions results in the economic output, social service, and personal development of our nation and in general these decisions have resulted in the highest living standards in the world. Individual citizens just do not need government intervention in their decision making process to be wildly successful.

What is interesting, however, is that in areas where government has encroached into the ability of individuals to make their own decisions the capacity of individuals to make their own decisions has atrophied. Where individuals can make decisions about what career to pursue, they cannot make decisions about how to save for retirement. Where individuals can make decisions about where they live, they cannot make decisions about where to send their children to school. Where individuals can make decisions about what car to buy, they are unable to make decisions about their health care. The objective of increasing opportunities for individuals to make choices should not be primarily about the role of government but about the decision-making capability of individuals. We will never achieve utopia because of the inherent flaws of human nature so living in a society where individuals are capable of meeting and overcoming adversity, even if it means making choices, raises the quality of life for all.

Glatris concludes his article by stating:

There are plenty of good reasons, then, for progressives to embrace the idea of designing more choice and individual control into government programs. But doing so means facing down some major opposition—from corporations that don't want tobe regulated to liberal interest groups that often oppose choice initiatives. Liberals also have to stop accepting the right-wing proposition that choice and empowerment are somehow inherently conservative ideas.

But it's conservatives who face the bigger obstacle. They are committed to a strategy of using choice as a Trojan horse to undermine government, yet it's impossible to
make choice work in the real world without strong measures from government. With choice, as with so much else, conservative have mastered the art of winning
elections with abstract language voters agree with, even as they push policies
voters don't much like. They can't pull that trick off forever. At some point,
conservatives themselves are going to have to make a choice.

I disagree that we need government in order to make choices. I believe that the government has an obligation to provide an environment where citizens can flourish, but part of flourishing is having the confidence and ability to make their own choices. This is not about government, it is about people, their dignity, and the quality of their lives.

BCS: Working OK

I noticed this article in the Washington Post the other day describing how Virginia Tech's loss to Miami on Saturday makes more likely that the BCS will work the way many people want it to: matching up two undefeated teams to play for the national championship. I wrote this post a few weeks ago to describe the benefits of the current BCS and Bowl system over a playoff. So, it looks like it is likely that this year we will have an undisputed College Football Champion and everyone calling for a playoff system can take a breather.

Also interesting at the end of the WaPo article are some of the quotes from Miami coaches and players. Quite a few of my fellow Notre Dame fans really hate Miami for what they describe as a lack of class. I certainly do not hate Miami. In fact I think that they bring something special to college football. In the NCAA there is room for both Notre Dame and Miami and that is what makes college football great!

Go Irish

Beat Cougars!!

This is Pretty Ridiculous

James Taranto (last item) pointed me to this article in the New York Times and this follow up article in the Boston Globe regarding Anheuser-Busch’s promotion of a “Bud Pong” game and their subsequent retrenchment in the face, apparently, of perceived public pressure.  What is going on here?  We see college administrators and the president of MADD saying that adults at bars are not able to take responsibility for their own actions.  

Are there lots of positive aspects to beer pong or any other drinking game?  Are their associated risks?  The answer to the first question is probably not many, but at least the individuals who participate have fun.  The answer to the second question is yes, but there are risks associated with any activity including sitting on the couch.  

It is sad to see Anheuser-Bush, Miller Brewing Company, and Coors Brewing Company all have so little faith in their customers’ ability to take personal responsibility for their actions.  It is sad that university administrators and advocacy groups want to limit the freedom of adults to make their own decisions about their personal conduct.  But most of all it is sad that A-B still has 50% market share because their product is terrible.

Book Reviews The Kings Depart

I just finished reading The Kings Depart: The Tragedy of Germany Versailles and the German Revolution by Richard M. Watt. The Kings Depart describes the people and events that influenced the end of World War I and its aftermath. This thoroughly researched story provides the reader with great insight into what events transpired as well as how and why they transpired. Watt certainly believes that each of the actor’s backgrounds, personalities, and interpersonal skills played an important part in these events. Before describing many of the events and interactions in this period, Watt provides bibliographic sketches of each of the important players such as Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau, as well as Friedrich Ebert Germany’s first socialist Chancellor. Watt uses each player’s biography to place their interactions with others and their reaction to events within the context of their lives. I have long believed that individuals have great power in influencing events so I really appreciated this mixing of biography and more classical history.

The Kings Depart certainly depicts a few battlefield conflicts, but more importantly it depicts the negotiations that lead to the Versailles Treaty and the Socialist Revolution in Germany. Watt clearly understands how negotiations work and did an excellent job of depicting each person’s individual negotiating style. In particular, Watt details Woodrow Wilson’s failure in his negotiations with George and Clemenceau over the form of the peace treaty, which ultimately reflected George’s and Clemenceau’s desire for revenge more than Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Watt attributes this to Wilson’s propensity to become mired in details, his refusal to delegate to his team, and ultimately his failing health.

The piece of history that I knew almost nothing about was the revolution that occurred in Germany once it became apparent that Germany would lose the war. Essentially almost every unit in the Imperial Army and Navy mutinied against their officers and took up the red flag of socialism and almost the entire country went on strike to protest rule by the Emperor. Watt describes the various states of anarchy that prevailed in many of Germany’s cities during this period and the various attempts that the government made to restore order. This story alone gives new meaning to the words order, discipline, and organization because it illustrates their polar opposite. Also interesting are the fissures that formed when the opposition Socialists found themselves actually running the government. These fissures formed between those who took responsibility to try to establish some sort of order and the true socialist believers whose concept of reality was actually utopian. In my lifetime, socialism has been more of a slur than a political ideology so this portion of the story helped to illustrate the various intellectual schools that once existed.

Finally and tragically, Watt describes the deep misgivings that many members of the allied parties had with the treaty that the Allies forced Germany to sign, Herbert Hoover and John Maynard Keynes among them. Of course everyone knows how this story ends, so Watt details Adolph Hitler’s periphery role in these events and how that setup his eventual rise to power.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day: “I will never understand the stupidity of people who turn their backs on the ocean.  People who have no knowledge of the danger the ocean threatens will walk right into it backwards while snapping pictures of the family.” Eddie Aikau quoted in Eddie Would Go: The Story of Eddie Aikau, Hawwiian Hero and Pioneer of Big Wave Surfing

I have been looking for this quote for some time and only found it today using Google Print.  Wes Smith, the Lieutenant in charge of Training for the OCBP drew my attention to this quote, which neatly summarizes how too many people treat the ocean.  Every year the ocean kills people; everyone needs to realize that.

I Hate Getting Passed

Most mornings I run for about six miles on a trail adjacent to the Charles River near my building in Boston.  Usually these runs are not that exciting, but this morning I actually have something to write about.  Near the beginning of my run, I heard a group of what I later realized were three runners behind me on the trail.  These guys were pretty quick and were running a little faster than I usually run by myself (unfortunately I have not been able to run with others much, which is slowing my pace).  I never like being passed on a running trail, but for some reason I felt particularly strongly about that this morning.  These guys pushed me for most of the three miles out before turning off the trail.  On the way back I was a little winded, which my chest cold did not help, so I probably slowed down somewhat.  Nonetheless, I ran this particular course about a minute faster than my previous best.  I am still struggling to get back into form, but the having those guys behind me on the way out certainly helped.  

College Football Championship

Each year, the champion of College football is determined through a system known as the Bowl Championship Series, which ranks the top college football teams and invites the top two teams to play for the championship. In addition six other highly ranked teams are invited to play in three other highly visible bowl games. Each year the BCS ranking system generates controversy over which two teams should play for the National Championship and which teams should play in the other three Bowl Games. Unfortunately this year Notre Dame appears to be getting a bad deal in these rankings. In addition to complaints and arguments about why a particular team should have a different ranking in the BCS poll, the controversy surrounding the BCS also brings calls for a playoff system to determining the National Champion (like this article, this post, and this comment among others). Unfortunately, a playoff system in College Football is just not feasible because it is a logistical nightmare.

The idea most often proposed is to hold a single elimination tournament with either the top four, eight, or even sixteen teams to ensure that every team with a legitimate shot at wining has the opportunity to prove that on the field. The models for this playoff system are the NFL’s playoff and NCAA Basketball’s Tournament. However there are significant differences between NCAA Division I College Football and the NFL and NCAA Basketball. These differences make a playoff system to determine the National Champion difficult if not impossible to implement.

Like college football, NFL teams play relatively few games (one per week) but there are relatively few teams in the league, which is split evenly into two conferences of four divisions each. So, in the NFL most teams play each other and all teams have common opponents. In college basketball, there are relatively many teams, but each team plays relatively many games including many conference tournaments. So, although many teams may not play each other, almost all teams at least have a few common opponents. In college football, there are relatively many teams, but each team plays relatively few games so very few teams play each other and very few teams even have common opponents. This fact makes it much more difficult to objectively seed a tournament in college football than in college basketball, or the completely objectively seeded NFL. These differences in and of themselves do not constitute an argument for or against a college football playoff, but they certainly place real constraints on the seeding issue.

NFL teams all play their games in stadiums that are physically located near major population centers so the majority of an NFL team’s fans can easily attend a game. In the NFL playoff system all games except for the Super Bowl are played at one of the two team’s home stadiums, which makes home field advantage an integral part of the playoff process. Home field advantage makes the complete objectivity of the playoff seeding critically important. In College Basketball, due to the somewhat less objective nature of the tournament seeding process all games take place in neutral stadiums so that neither team benefits from home field advantage. However, very few fans actually choose to attend these tournament games, likely due to time and travel requirements. The evidence of this is that either four or eight teams play their tournament games in the same arena over the course of a weekend and all tickets are good for at least two back-to-back games. This effectively means that fans from four or eight teams, who are in the area to watch their team also attend some of the other games, which helps fills the arena. If enough fans from the two teams playing the game were actually willing to attend each of the games there would be no need to sell a single ticket good for multiple games.

The seeding of a College Football tournament would likely be less objectively seeded than in College Basketball (certainly less objectively seeded than the NFL playoff), which would demand that all games take place at a neutral site*. Of the four BCS Bowls played in 2005, only three of the four actually had attendances higher than their capacity and all three of these Bowls were held in the week following New Years when many people have an opportunity to travel. Compared with the NCAA Basketball tournament venues, the BCS venues are huge with an average capacity of 78,000 vs. 22,000 at the Savvis Center, venue for the 2005 Final Four. Of course one of the reasons that so many people attend the BCS games is that each of these bowls was seen as the final game for the teams competing, making fans were eager to attend.

Although there is certainly interest in watching BCS bowl games, the facts of the NCAA basketball tournament make it doubtful that enough fans will be interested in attending a multiple week football tournament. The likely result of a multiple week college football tournament would be partially full stadiums for at least some of the games because fans would simply not be able to afford the financial and time costs of traveling each week. Solutions to this such as selling a single ticket to multiple games would probably not work because the longer duration of a football game – not many people would be willing to spend eight or nine hours in a stadium. A tournament would certainly be good for television networks, such as ESPN, but this would come at the expense of filling stadiums to near capacity.

A playoff system for College Football is not feasible and would likely represent a worse solution than the current BCS. Although the BCS certainly stirs up controversy, this controversy is an integral part of college football. College Football is and always has been a sport contested both on the field and in the press. Although determining an objective champion in College Football is a laudable goal, the realities of the sport and its fans make achieving this goal impossible. Instituting a playoff system would change the sport for the worse.


* (Although the NCAA Division III Football Champion is determined by a tournament in which most of the games are played at one of the team’s stadiums, all of these stadiums are much smaller, which limits the home field advantage. For example the stadium for the 2004 champions, Linfield only holds approximately 1760 spectators. Update: NCAA Division IAA also holds a playoff system. I found a website that lists the sizes of their stadiums here. With the exception of six schools all of these teams play at stadiums with less than 30,000 person capacities. So again, these playoffs are held at much smaller venues.)

Sales Mistakes

I recently noticed two posts at Bizinformer regarding two of the most common sales mistakes ever made. Unfortunately, I have seen operational examples of both Failing to be Overt and Selling Past the Close in my short sales career. I agree that both of these are mistakes, but I disagree about their relative importance. Failure to be overt will immediately doom any sales engagement, while selling past the close is really just a matter of bad form.

The real issue when salespeople do not specifically ask their client if the client wants their services is the fear of hearing the word no. This fear paralyzes a salesperson in the engagement because they are not able to ask the appropriate questions to determine if they will reach a deal. This is absolutely detrimental in environments with long sales cycles because the salesperson, sales management, and the people in the business unit all have an unclear view of the client’s true intentions. Maybe the client is really interested, maybe he is really not interested, or maybe he is just talking to the salesperson to fill up his day, without overtly asking the client the important questions no one knows so everyone is wasting their time.

Failure to be overt sucks the life out of a sales engagement and causes everyone to waste time on a deal that may never materialize. Good sales people are not afraid to ask the tough questions and are prepared to change strategy and tactics if they learn that they are losing.