Back toward the end of last year, I’d posted a short piece about the book Three Cups of Tea, profiling Greg Mortenson’s work building schools in remote parts of Pakistan. NY Times Op-Ed Columnist Nicholas Kristof just wrote a column about Mortenson — It Takes a School, Not Missles. Kristof also extends the discussion and a chance to comment to his NY Times blog On the Ground.
This is one of those bits and pieces posts. Being almost two months out from being sacked in the LLNL layoffs has added both to my learning curve and to my lists of tasks done. Last Sunday marked the fourth of four weekly required newspaper publications of my filed fictitious business name “Ramblemuse Associates”. What remains on that front is to receive the notification from the newspaper that publication is complete and then file it with the county registrar. What started the process was to file the name with the county and to get their notice of filing to give to the newspaper. Along with that was another copy to use with banks for opening a business account.
Taking a concept from John McWade’s graphic design book, Before & After Page Design, I put together a one-page flyer-style web-résumé. McWade had done this is page publishing software while I used some ideas picked up from the CSS Zen Garden to play with it in CSS.
I’ve slowly been building my connections on LinkedIn. Part of this has been reestablishing contact with former colleagues. Part has been expanding in new areas, including a few people I’ve met via the National Association of Science Writers. A LinkedIn connection places the responsibility for updating contact information on the person who owns it which is useful enough in its own right. The other ways of using the system to increase connections are by joining interest groups and by asking or answering questions. Interest groups often come with discussion forums on other group-based networking facilities such as Ning or CollectiveX. Using the LinkedIn question capability increases visibility and can be used to show expertise — both useful outcomes for freelancers.
The paper on massage therapy guidelines that I’d posted on earlier, came back from the reviewers in mid-June with a new deadline of 30 June. That took a lot of editing and reformatting on my part, but we got it back to the journal and into their online system by the deadline. I also, in writing more about the creation of guidelines as a knowledge management function, came across a quote in Gary Klein’s Sources of Power (p. 170) that brought me back to the LLNL diaspora.
In organizations, much of the knowledge is held within the heads of the workers and is never shared. This is tacit knowledge. In most organizations, the culture seems to ignore the expertise that already exists, to take it for granted. If a skilled worker retired after thirty years on the job and tried to leave with a favorite personal computer, some programs, or a set of tools, he or she would be stopped. The organization knows the value of the equipment. But the organization lets the worker walk out with all of that expertise, which is worth far more than some minor equipment, and never says a word, never even notices the loss. Yet in an organization, knowledge is a resource and should be treated as such.
In current times, forwarding a science career is a much about business as it is about knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs). This statement is not about the business of the institution or company you work for at any given time, but about treating your career as an individual, entrepreneurial business. You need both a business plan and the ability to make hard-nosed decisions about your career/business. Two key questions are: “Is there high potential for carving out a post-postDoc career in a scientific domain?” and “Does a position you are considering substantially further that career or simply postpone a portage to a new knowledge area?”
The first question, aimed at avoiding spending years working toward a career that has dismal employment projects beyond postdoctoral positions, is well-motivated by the NY Times article by Jennifer Lee on the Postdoc Trail: Long and Filled With Pitfalls. The second question is more about periodic reevaluations of the growth or decline of funding and the likelihood of winning the competition for limited resources in specific research areas.
Does a potential work position further your abilities or lead to becoming “eddied out” of the current of research flow? Evaluating compensation for the latter sort of project, requires including the eventual costs of retraining yourself and rebuilding your marketability when the project ends. This is particularly true if there is limited marketability and limited employers for the expertise you would develop and use in such a project. The compensation (or tail-end insurance) you require to work in an area should increase as the general marketability of skills and expertise goes down. Your evaluation needs to included the downtime and costs of rebuilding a career to the same level of professional standing should the project terminate. In short, market comparisons of total compensation need to include comparisons of expertise marketability.
In their book Consulting for Dummies, Bob Nelson and Peter Economy warn about the volatility of today’s job market. The paragraph is flagged in the book by an icon for a bomb with a lit fuse; the symbol used for something that can “blow up in your face” if you don’t pay attention.
The days of having a job for life are long gone. Today’s economy is one of rapid change and movement. As companies continue to search for ways to cut costs, they increasingly turn to hiring temporary workers or contracting work out to consultants. Having a job today is no guarantee of having one tomorrow. When you work for a company — no matter how large — you can be laid off at any time, for almost any reason, with little or no notice. If you’re lucky, you get a severance package of some sort — maybe a few weeks’ or a few months’ pay. If you’re not so lucky, your last day is just that, and you’re on your own.
In his 1995 book JobShift, William Bridges cautions that, “All jobs in today’s economy are temporary.” I’ve a penciled notation in my copy of the book that, in an NPR interview, Bridges expanded this to, “100 percent of today’s jobs are temporary, it’s just that 75% of us are still in denial.” Bridges then defines the concept of employment (not job) security.
Employment security is going through one of those fundamental redefinitions that marks a societal turning point. Now security resides in the person rather than the position, and to a cluster of qualities that have nothing to do with the organization’s policies or practices. From now on, you will have a harder and harder time finding security in a job. In the future, your security will depend on your developing three characteristics as a worker and as a person.
Employability — Your security will come first and foremost from being an attractive prospect for employers, and that attractiveness involves having the abilities and attitudes that an employer needs at the moment. Ironically, the employer’s need is likely to be created by the very changes that destroyed traditional job security.
Vendor-mindedness — Being a traditional, loyal employee is no longer an asset. It has, in fact, turned into a liability. So stop thinking like an employee and start thinking like an external vendor who has been hired to accomplish a specific task.
Resiliency — Organizations today operate in such a turbulent environment that no arrangement serves them for very long. What you will need (both for the organization’s sake and for your own) is the ability to bend and not break, to let go readily of the outdated and learn the new, to bounce back quickly from disappointment, to live with high levels of uncertainty, and to find your security from within rather than from outside.
College and university classes provide a conceptual foundation, but skills and expertise come from doing rather than listening. It’s estimated that expertise in an area requires about 10,000 hours — hours spent involved in tackling real-world research. Getting in that 10,000 hours and then applying them implies stability of funding in a focused area. Getting the hours in efficiently, means being able to apply yourself without continual distractions. Advice on price setting for consultants indicates that it’s realistic to expect about 200 active “business” days per year. If you’re putting in about 10 hours per day, that’s about 2000 hours per year, or five years to expertise. That provides at least a rough estimate of the meaning of “stable funding”.
Reevaluate how your current situation matches your longer term goals every 3-5 years. Compare your current situation to what’s available elsewhere. This is business—your business—treat it seriously. Rather than seeing yourself as a scientist at some institution, see yourself as a scientist at large in the world floating on a sea of institutional possibilities. Float to the high ground. If the sea of possibilities in a particularly area starts to dry up, find another sea with long-term potential and portage quickly into it. There’s a substantial advantage to being an early entrant into a new and growing area of research. In business, this is currently referred to as the “blue ocean strategy”.
In evaluating retirement plans, look toward maximizing immediate offerings. What an institution offers to long-term, post-decadal employees is likely irrelevant in a short-term world. If an institution has a tier, consider your entry-point, particularly as you mature in your career, to be negotiable. This tier will effect benefits such as length of vacation and corporate defined contributions to 401(k) retirement plans. Weigh the deal you can negotiate in defined contributions as part of the entire business package you’re being offered. The 14-20 June issue of The Economist, has some valuable observations on retirement plans in the article Falling Short.
If you’re a student considering entry to an area, do your homework on the expectable job future. Look at postdoc forums and sites such as PhDs.org. Practice negotiating for your needs, using techniques such as the Noel Smith-Wenkle Salary Negotiation Method. Most of all, think of yourself as an independent business and have plans for career development and career risk management.
I’ve now brought my more general bibliography to at least a temporary stable point. In essence, that means that I’ve included enough content to hopefully make it useful, without so much that it becomes cumbersome. I’ll let go of it for awhile and move my focus on to other endeavors.
Along the way of working out the technical details, I renewed my distaste for Internet Explorer 5.5-6 and could at least see some improvement with IE 7. Implementing the CSS drop down navigation menus with the former required the JavaScript augmentation described by Mark “Tarquin” Wilton-Jones. The JavaScript isn’t used to create the menus, but to force a CSS class change to a “hover” class; something handled automatically by FireFox and IE 7. I’d already been using this methodology since the redesign of my home page last year. There was a new wrinkle, however, in the bibliography.
IE 5.5-6 has an interesting design “feature” relating to forms. In particular for the bibliography, a form select item will always be rendered on top, independent of the CSS z-index. The implication was that the menu would drop down over the top of a bibliography page, but that the category select window at the top of the page would bleed through the menu. Mike Hall provides an example of this bleed-through on BrainJar. My solution was to add to the behavior coding for the JavaScript class change for the menu hover. For IE 5.5-6.0, when the menu drops, the class for the form is changed to include “display:none” and that for a blank line is changed from “display:none”. The effect is to replace the form with a blank line of the same height, dodging the bleed-through error and avoiding a vertical “jitter”.
The final technical glitch with IE 5.5-6 (if one can ever say “final”), involved an image in an “iframe” at the bottom of the page. If I had this as
<iframe>…</iframe><p>text</p>,
the image would start to load then disappear, leaving the correct space blank. When I changed to
<p><iframe>…</iframe>text</p>,
everything displayed okay. Go figure.
Chet Richards, a protégé of the late military strategist John Boyd, recently wrote the book Certain to Win applying Boyd’s concepts to business competition. It’s a book well worth the reading. In a blog post titled “Can Boyd be implemented?“, Richards makes some profound comments on environment; comments that any institution dedicated to accomplishment, and particularly to innovation, should consider carefully. The comments come in the context of why attempts to emulate the Toyota Productions System (TPS) have met limited success.
The reason, as Jeffrey Liker points out in The Toyota Way, is that Toyota has evolved an organizational climate that supports the physical procedures. Perhaps its most important element is its emphasis on keeping employees engaged in the system. As one of the system’s originators, Taiichi Ohno, insisted, the TPS is fragile. It works only because people have to engage their gray matter and use their initiative and creativity. The company describes the kanban “pull” system, for example, this way:
The paperwork is minimal. The efficiency is maximal. And the employees themselves [as opposed to a centralized production control system] are completely in charge.
That is, if the employees didn’t commit to making the system work, it wouldn’t move at all. The Toyota Way is why they do it for Toyota and don’t for most other manufacturing companies. The other important point about the Toyota Way is that the system is always getting better at whatever it does. As one Toyota exec put it, whatever we do this year is baseline for next year. A lot of companies talk continuous improvement (kaizen), but few achieve it. Their organizational climates are why.
You can lock-down a research institution with numerous rules and procedures. But ultimately, you won’t end up with a research institution, merely a tightly controlled business. If there isn’t buy-in and a sense of control from those actually creating ideas and innovation, the entire system will be leak-free as much from the lack of anything worth containing as from impermeability. There’s another pertinent quote from John Sterman, that I’ve had on my home page for a while.
“Accelerating economic, technological, social, and environmental change challenge managers and policy makers to learn at increasing rates, while at the same time the complexity of the systems in which we live is growing. Many of the problems we now face arise as unanticipated side effects of our own past actions. All too often the policies we implement to solve important problems fail, make the problem worse, or create new problems. Effective decision making and learning in a world of growing dynamic complexity requires us to become systems thinkers—to expand the boundaries of our mental models and develop tools to understand how the structure of complex systems creates their behavior.” — John D. Sterman, Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World.
Sterman also notes that often the full effects of a policy implementation are several years down the road. Once the hand is dealt, however, sooner or later the consequences get paid.
In a column in the June 7th edition of the newly revamped Science News, Harvard University Provost Steven Hyman points out the disparities in attitudes between trends in research funding in the U.S. versus those in Singapore and China.
A major difference between the United States and Singapore and China is the rapid growth rates in these countries, inspiring optimism. In all Singapore’s science sectors, and especially Shanghai’s industrial sector, there is a palpable sense that infrastructure and funding will be available, and that what is limiting are talented people and ideas. Such people are being actively recruited as governments attempt to build modern knowledge-based economies. A marker of the sense of scientific opportunity in Singapore and China is the migration of mid-career scientists from the United States, England, and Australia to Singapore, and the return of talented Chinese scientists who had been educated in the United States to permanent research positions in China. Their return resulted from the perception of greater opportunity.
Having watched at couple of colleagues in the LLNL climate program return to India, from the sense of being able to pursue a scientific career rather than merely a path of survival, Hyman’s perspective is a more widely traveled verification of my own, more local, observations. The larger issue, however, is not just where scientists will pursue careers, but if they will even enter science. As Hyman concludes:
Ideally the new [next] administration will craft policies to produce steady growth in federal research budgets, more welcoming immigration policies for foreign scientists and respect for science. Without such policies, many of our most talented students will gravitate to endeavors other than science, and Americans will increasingly read of breakthroughs coming from other shores.
In short, if entering science isn’t a viable career, if there’s little or no career future beyond supporting the academic structure by being a postdoc, why go there at all?
An additional question is whether or not, particularly at national labs, the environment being created is one that will be attractive to the next generation of potential scientists. This time I turn to Infoworld editor Eric Knorr’s blog, as he talks about technology and culture change.
Forks in the road
If you’ve been watching the technology industry as long as I have, you may like to think you can detect an historical turning point while it’s happening. The big picture stuff is the most fun. Today, for example, as the Internet generation grows up and achieves Twitter velocity, I’m convinced we’re on the brink of a cultural transformation that will go way, way beyond the effects of the Web’s first decade. But sorry, my sixth sense lacks the power to get much more specific than that.
Knorr isn’t alone in his observations. USA today ran a series of articles a bit ago on Generation Y, the generation now entering the workforce.
Knorr’s comment about “achieving Twitter velocity” may become very pertinent to recruitment and retention. How willing will the first Internet generation, the “Twitter velocity” generation be to moving into a working environment, such as what’s being implemented at LLNL, where electronic connectivity is severely limited, where access to personal email is limited, and YouTube is blocked? The latter has occurred despite a number of scientists and journals, as for example, New Scientist, using YouTube as a distribution medium for visualization.
In short, video has become just another tool by which scientists communicate results. Communication in the outside world of research moves at speeds approaching Knorr’s “Twitter velocity”.
It will be interesting to see what evolves between a stated desire to “recruit the best and the brightest”, an emerging environment of “we can’t help you unless you have an explicit programmatic justification”, and the career outlook and desires of the best and the brightest of Generation Y. My expectation is that, unless there is an environment that facilitates their career and communication, young scientists simply won’t go there, except as a last resort. Why bother with a lagging world?
At just over two weeks since my lay-off from LLNL, the lab is already starting to seem a memory seen through the aerosol-induced haze of distance. By focusing and working intensely on other endeavors, such as networking (
) and the general bibliography, I’ve deliberately accelerated my own psychological perception of the passing of time. Simply because my current rate of endeavor isn’t sustainable over the longer haul, it changes my normal perception of events occurring and thus of time itself. Yesterday, my membership card for the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) arrived, providing another new door to walk through.
Yet, in running into former colleagues, some laid off and some still at LLNL, a further reflection has emerged. Quite obviously, with 500 flex/term employees laid-off earlier and another 100 coming in June, LLNL is balancing its budget partly at the expense of eating its current “seed corn”. At least some of these flex/term employees were positioned to become part of the next generation of career employees. It’s hard to project the long term losses to scientific capabilities, but they will likely be far from insignificant.
If seed corn is the genesis of productive output, legumes are often part of the almost untraceable infrastructure. In agriculture, legumes have a unique ability to fix nitrogen, being used as a fallow crop to make the soil more productive for a subsequent primary crop. In looking around me at the “transition center”, in talking with people, I realized that LLNL also has razed many of its “legumes”, scientists with substantial background and experience whose efforts in aiding colleagues are often untraceable in terms of specific accounts and short-term implementations. In effect, LLNL has removed a significant number of informal, internal consultants; those who save others from making old mistakes or from having to reinvent the wheel.
Working for deeper understanding of the systems they work with, “legumes” take the risk of lowering their own short-term, measurable productivity. In return, they are able to answer colleagues’ questions from this phase-space of deeper understanding. In a commencement address, John Seeley Brown talked about the value of such mentors and the intellectual capital of the dialog they bring. Color them gone. I am reminded of the origin of the symbol for zero; the mark in the sand indicating the void where a counting stone has been removed (Miranda Lundy, Sacred Number: The Secret Qualities of Quantities).
Finally, a poem I recently ran across capturing well the paradox of transition and the uncertainty it brings, yet also that the same uncertainty brings the potential for new opportunity, growth, and knowledge.
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthilyto maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravelybut much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a doorAdrienne Rich (Prospective Immigrants Please Note, 1962)
Last post I mentioned starting work on a bibliography more general than my bibliography for massage practitioners. I’ve now got a gateway page and a limited number of content entries for the general bibliography up and running. The listings in so far are mostly on freelancing and writing but that will expand with a little more time. To a large extent, I’m simply cataloging my personal library.
The gateway page has a number of links to external resources.
One of the books I’d gotten when I’d started thinking seriously of freelance writing a couple of years ago was Media Bistro’s first book — “Get a Freelance Life” by Margit Feury Ragland. I didn’t note it when I mentioned Media Bistro a few days ago, but the website includes sections for jobs and profiles, and also information on resume creation.
This morning, also, my periodic email update from Harvard Business School’s free newsletter “Working Knowledge” hit my inbox. The Working Knowledge website includes a section on entrepreneurship. I also ran into a NY Times small business article, Getting Paid, One Way or Another, part of the NYT’s small business resources. These include, Marci Alboher’s blog on Shifting Careers.
Also, back in February, the New Scientist had an article on science specific MBA’s: Science entrepreneurs need better business skills. My own mucking around in learning theory would indicate that the bottom line is to pick an efficient means of learning the concepts, vocabulary, and ability of use. There was also an article on Physics and Entrepreneurship in the February 2001 issue of The Industrial Physicist (no longer in publication).
Yesterday, I picked up two books, Consulting for Dummies
There’s also a good series of business and finance books put out by The Economist. Among them are:
About a year ago, I resurrected my Bibliography for Massage Practitioners. Last night, I started merging some of the technology in my homepage with that in the bibliography. The massage bibliography, which was created just prior to implementing my current homepage design, will also get an update to include the navigation menu. The home page uses server side includes a lot while the bibliography uses PHP and XSLT to translate the underlying XML to HTML. Last night I worked out the bibliography template, using PHP includes and replacing the server LAST_MODIFIED option with the PHP SERVER_['PHP_SELF'] and a call to ‘filemtime’.
The motivation for all of this isn’t just to improve the massage bibliography. I’ll be bringing up a more general bibliography to include sections on consulting, web development, … It will also have in it the various books given above. In the meantime, the business section of the current bibliography does include a number of general books on entrepreneurship — material on networking, working a room, running a one-person business, writing business plans, …
As a final note, for those looking for short term assignments, Craigslist has a section called “Gigs” toward the bottom of the page, with subsections on writing and computer tasks. Here’s the SF Bay edition.
My prior comment on the infungibility of scientists reminding me about the work of economist W. Brian Arthur that I’d read about in Mitchell Waldrop’s book “Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
The point for the individuality of scientists is that their influence will depend both on when they entered an area of research and the network connections of concepts and colleagues in which they are immersed. In short, being a scientist is the kind of context-dependent economy/network described independently by Arthur and Barabási. This has profound implications on the type of environment required to both produce and maintain the “best and the brightest” in science. It is not a commodity market, nor is it a military, rule-based environment. In the much discussed push for U.S. competitiveness in the global arena, this may be a lesson only learned the hard way by those creating the current national laboratory environment.
