position:professor of business administration

  • Bridging the Gap Between Leadership and Management - gCaptain
    https://gcaptain.com/bridging-gap-leadership-management

    Management is getting people to do what needs to be done. Leadership is getting people to want to do what needs to be done. Managers push. Leaders pull. Managers command. Leaders communicate.
    Warren Bennis, Professor of Business Administration at the University of Southern California.

    Sometimes management becomes the overall focus for crewing. Management is an easier metric to track. Management fits into spreadsheets – meetings are held, deadlines are met, maintenance is done, schedules are followed. Management is clean, neat and easy.

    Leadership is not so easy to track. It more difficult to rate how motivated the team is, how happy they are in their work, and how well they are getting along together.

    There exists Leadership that lacks Management, and Management that lacks Leadership. Imagine working with a team where everyone is excited to be loading the first cargo, but the management is lacking… No one knows what needs to be done, or who is doing what first… nothing is organized, the equipment that was needed hadn’t been ordered…. This is a disaster of management.

    On the other side exists the disaster of leadership – the team hates their jobs, and all the people they are working with… they undermine each other, don’t teach or care about each other – but at least they have a schedule to keep to – Neither situation is a good one.

    Avec l’exemple mythique de #Shackelton

    • Tiens, pas d’occurrence d’Ernest Shackelton ici (en dehors de la visite de sa cabane http://seenthis.net/messages/130084 )

      Donc :

      Shackleton is reported to have hand-picked his crew – using the mythical advertisement – “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success

      Even if Shackleton did not use that advertisement to attract applicants for his crew, he is reputed to have attracted many more people who wanted to be part of his team than he needed. He led them through unfortunate circumstances, and they came through all of it. Shackleton’s vessel the #Endurance sank after being trapped in an ice flow in November of 1915. He then managed to get his crew to Elephant Island, where most of the crew remained. He and five others sailed an open-boat the 720-nautical-miles to South Georgia whaling stations, to get help. In the end the crew was evacuated from Elephant Island and only three lives were lost.

  • The New Weapons of Mass Detection | Shoshana Zuboff’s Response to Martin Schulz
    FAZ 13/02/2014
    http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ueberwachung/shoshana-zuboff-s-response-to-martin-schulz-the-new-weapons-of-mass-detection-1

    #surveillance #tracking #silicon_army

    Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Summons: Our Fight for the Soul of an Information Civilization (Forthcoming, 2015), is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration (retired) at the Harvard Business School.

    The challenge I see is that, thanks to Edward #Snowden, we know that the technology revolution has once again been hijacked by the dream of perfect control. It’s being used as a Trojan horse for a still poorly understood convergence of public and private institutions that wield unprecedented power over information. This new power bloc operates outside our control as citizens and consumers. I’m calling it the military-informational complex, because its power derives from the production and deployment of what I call new weapons of mass detection composed of information and the technical apparatus required for its access, analysis, and storage.

    Eisenhower’s Message in a Bottle
    http://seenthis.net/messages/105043#message105105

    The military-information complex is a convergence of public and private expertise in the control and analysis of information camouflaged by a forest of excuses. The official story is that these growing powers are a necessary response to forces beyond control: technological requirements, digital proliferation, autonomous market dynamics, and security imperatives.

    (...)

    Rewind for a moment to 1961 and President Eisenhower’s farewell address to the American people. He had revised the speech many times over a two year period. In each draft he insisted on retaining a crucial passage, as if he was determined to send a message in a bottle to be discovered, read, and grasped by future generations. American society was under threat from a new “military-industrial complex,” he warned, and only “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” could ensure that “security and liberty” would both prosper. Guardian readers will recognize the phrase “security and liberty” as the tag line on Glen Greenwald’s now immortal series. Greenwald found the bottle.

    Five years later economist John Kenneth Galbraith, elaborated his concept of the “technostructure” in The New Industrial State. “Power,” he wrote, had “passed to...a new production function... men of diverse technical knowledge, experience or other talent, which modern industrial technology and planning require.” Galbraith’s book celebrated an industrial oligarchy at the heart of the military-industrial complex, enmeshed in state functions and protected by state power, insulated from public accountability, and innocent of responsibility. Why? Because it promoted itself as the inevitable expression of technology’s indisputable “requirements.” Galbraith had fallen under the spell of technological determinism.

    «I’m all about demilitarization»

    Demilitarization had been essential for what Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain calls the “generative” capabilities of the Internet –– the ways it lends itself to trust, interaction, invention, and creativity. Militarization is already having the opposite effect, as firms withdraw their data from cloud servers and governments explore new regulations and infrastructures that enable nation-specific privacy controls.

    Of equal concern are the economic effects of information militarization. It suppresses the creative adaptation to human needs that is #capitalism’s greatest strength . In the annals of capitalism, the production of prosperity and well-being have depended on a steady flow of commercial “mutations” that better align business with the changing needs of people.

    In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate secure portals...in some instances on company servers.” In some cases, the New York Times reported, tech company employees have national security clearance. In others, NSA agents installed their own software on company servers, and even hung out at the company for days or weeks of system monitoring.

    Had Google and Facebook learned surveillance tactics from the NSA in the first place? Or was it the other way around? The identity of the military-informational complex was taking shape along with its assumptions, attitudes, interests, and perspectives. Armaments production was well underway.

    #auto-censure

    That self-censorship is a life sentence to an endlessly repeating present. Nothing new can happen once we curb our thoughts.

    • Je parlais plus haut d’Oppenheimer. Il faut comprendre que les grandes inventions réalisées durant la Seconde guerre mondiale, le radar, la pénicilline, la bombe atomique, les microfilms, les servo-mécanismes... étaient portés par des scientifiques et des techniciens auxquels les militaires donnaient à la fois de l’argent et des objectifs mobilisateurs. Ces scientifiques n’étaient pas a priori des techniciens des armées. Peut-on imaginer Einstein ou Wiener sous un uniforme ? Les militaires avaient les objectifs, et les scientifiques les méthodes, notamment une dont on a encore du mal à mesurer l’importance, qui est l’interdisciplinarité. Mais comme toujours avec les militaires, les objectifs prennent le pas sur les acteurs. Même Eisenhower l’a souligné dans son « testament ».
      Dans l’esprit de Brand, mais aussi des autres acteurs de la Silicon Valley, et cela dès les années cinquante, la technique et les méthodes scientifiques avaient une autonomie qui permettrait de les retourner contre les objectifs premiers des militaires et de leur appareil productif centralisé. C’était réellement une utopie, et encore une fois la surveillance généralisée exercée par la NSA vient nous le rappeler. Mais elle a joué son rôle, en produisant une forme de « démocratie technique », c’est-à-dire une méritocratie, dans laquelle les individus chercheurs ou informaticiens sont évalués en fonction de leurs apports et non des objectifs assignés. Que l’on regarde la teneur du culte de Steve Jobs au lendemain de son décès.
      http://www.davduf.net/stewart-brand-aux-sources-troubles-de-la-belle