The Persuasive Wizard

One of my readers asked me to discuss how to “fire an employee.”  Not because this particular reader needed to fire someone, but because he, himself, had been “fired.” The reality was that his company just ran out of work, but in practice, the implementation of his termination was handled so poorly as to create uncalled for emotional and financial damage.

As managers, terminating an employee is one of the most difficult tasks we face.  Especially, those of us who are in charge of technology groups; dealing with people is not our strongest suite.  So, let me offer sage advice, some of it learned the hard way but much of it gleaned from others whose mistakes I observed and from whom both you and I now benefit.

As a new manager of a technology group, your first statement may be, “I thought the Human Resources Department took care of all that.”  No.

In my experience, I have not found the Human Resources (HR) department to be overly sensitive to the human side of life, either mine or the employee’s.  I have, though, found HR to be annoyingly insulated from any direct responsibility and robotically wired to company procedures and legal safeguards.  Nevertheless, somewhere along the line, read the company procedures or you will have them read to you.  What the procedures say is only part of the problem.  The bugaboo is implementation.  And that is where I can help.

I do not intend for this to be a treatise on all personnel issues so I will pick and choose those that affect most technology organizations.  I am not addressing union-controlled jobs.  (Technologists are too unorthodox to join unions.  They are not joiners or followers).  I am not addressing technology positions under contract.  I am addressing those technology jobs where you pay an employee for performance, assess that performance, and act accordingly.

First of all, remember that when you terminate an employee, for whatever reason, you are forcing a major change in the sea-state of that person’s life.  The employee will be affected financially for weeks and months.  He or she may be affected emotionally forever.  You can mitigate and minimize both the financial and emotional aspects by taking the right steps.  You cannot make them zero.  Remember that.  You cannot make them zero.  There is a right way and there are many wrong ways to go about terminating an employee, but there are no ways that do not impact the lives of both you and the employee.

Now, for those people who are unaffected by the plight of human suffering and are just happy to be rid of the employee, for those people who enjoy firing people, this article is not for you.  Neither is my company or any company I know.  The situation I address is the legitimate need of a technology manager to terminate an employee.

There are two major classes of problems I plan to address:

1. You have run out of work for this employee
   1. There are no other jobs available in the company because you are already long on people everywhere and the company is downsizing.
   2. There are no other jobs available in the company because the person you choose to terminate does not have the skills necessary for transfer to another job.
2. You need to terminate for cause.

Let us start with the first scenario, the easiest (it’s all relative) for you, the manager.  The company has simply run out of work and can no longer pay the employee.  There are no other jobs in the company because you are downsizing and are already long on personnel.  The question the employee will inevitably ask is, “Why did you pick me for termination?”  usually adding, “Why didn’t you pick Susan or John?  They don’t do half as much work as I do!”  Expect considerable graphics.

Sometimes it is obvious why you picked Richard for termination. Richard paints the boxes and you have decided to not paint the boxes.  The job no longer exists.  There are no other jobs in the company because you already have every position filled to capacity.  That makes it easier for you, the manager, because the reason is straightforward and the person you selected is obvious. It is never obvious, though, to the employee and, regardless, no amount of explanation makes it easy for the employee who is blindsided.  So, what to do?

Step one is to care about the welfare of the employee and the emotional baggage you want that person to carry away from you  and the company.

Step two is to read the company procedures.

Now if you are like 99.99% of the technology managers I have ever known or managed, you will discover at this point that you cannot go to step three because you just decided this morning to fire the employee and now discover that it is not reasonable, sometimes not even possible, to do so.

Oops.  As a technology manager, you overlooked some things you must do.

Therefore, in order to fix the problem we have to go back six months and do what we should have done in the beginning.  Of which, more later.

The American Physical Society recently posted an article that resonated with my theme on technology persuasion.  It turns out that the seductive actress Hedy Lamarr once applied for and received a patent for a Secret Communication System that used an early type of spread spectrum mixing.  She subsequently took on the role of a technologist trying to persuade decision makers to fund her idea.  She encountered the usual suspects.

If your first question is, “Who is Hedy Lamarr?” then permit a brief introduction.  Hedy Kiesler was born in Vienna  in 1914.  At the age of 20 she married Friedrich Mandl, an arms merchant whose lavish parties were graced by no less than Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler.  She participated in her husband’s business meetings and learned a great deal about guided torpedoes and radio-controlled weapons.  She had a love for mathematics and an uncanny ability to put technology ideas together.  She also was drop-dead gorgeous and irresistibly alluring.  Actor George Sanders said she was “so beautiful that everybody would stop talking when she came into the room.”

Not being  overly disposed to the institution of marriage, Lamarr disguised herself as one of her maids, made her escape to Paris, and divorced Mandl.  In London, she was signed on to MGM as an actress under the name of Hedy Lamarr.  She would eventually made 36 movies and star in films like Ziegfield Girl and Samson and Delilah. Photographs of her show an extremely interesting woman.

In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and set in motion the machinery that would bring about the second world war and cause the death of more than 60 million people.

While Hitler was rolling his Blitzkrieg across Europe, what was the technology like in the entertainment field, on the stage where Lamarr worked?

One of their problems was to choreograph a large musical, all of which had to be done in real time.  A very complex scene from one movie required the synchronization and simultaneous playing of 16 player pianos.  Each of these player pianos used a paper roll that played the piano keys as the roll was rotated by a motor and fed across a reader.  There are 88 keys on the keyboard so the roll provided for that many rows of perforations, plus an additional mechanism for synchronizing the 16 pianos.

Lamarr came up with the ingenious idea of using this technology for guided torpedoes and dirigibles.

Her idea was to spin a roll at high speed and thereby digitally create 88 different “frequencies,” one on each row.  (These did not have to be sine-wave frequencies, just digital signals.)  The transmitter and the receiver, in this case the ship and launched torpedo, would each have all 88 frequencies.  The synchronized pair would hop frequencies while in transit.  Decryption by the enemy was virtually impossible, certainly not in the several seconds needed to implement countermeasures.  Using digital frequencies and simultaneous band-hopping was ingenious, techniques still broadly in use today in the telecommunications industry.

Lamarr filed for a patent in June, 1941.  Seven months later, Pearl Harbor was bombed.  The patent was awarded in August, 1942.

Her next problem was to convince the military to use her invention.  Here, she faced the same problem as all technologists – convincing non-technical decision makers to invest and implement.  The US Navy declined to implement her invention because they felt the clockwork mechanism was too bulky and unreliable to use in a torpedo.  (The idea was picked up in 1957 by the Sylvania Company, but they used the recently invented transistor instead of the roll of paper.)

Perhaps the Navy was correct in their assessment, but clearly they were dissuaded by being able to see Lamarr only as the sexually charming actress and not as a mathematician capable of ingenuity.  Lamarr once remarked, “My face has been my misfortune.  It is a mask I cannot remove.  I must live with it.  I curse it.”  Those are strong words, but they emphasize how difficult it is to get around stereotypes.  I am certain that when the US Navy reviewed her idea, they talked more about her phenomenal beauty than about her intellect and invention.  Their mistake.

Another quote from Lamarr regarding her beauty was, “Any girl can be glamorous.  All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Again, the Navy may have been correct in not implementing her idea, but the situation brings home a point I emphasize in my book, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers (due out the end of August).  That problem is that technology wizards are stereotyped.  In the case of Lamarr, she was stereotyped as being a beautiful and charming actress; she could not possibly know about weapons, mathematics, or technology.

Most technologists are not plagued with her share of beauty or charm, but they are inappropriately stereotyped, nonetheless.  No matter how much you know about business, once you put up that first equation, once you mouth that first acronym, once you explain using any technical terms whatsoever, you are stereotyped as a technology nerd.  Reality exits.

It is important, then, that technologists make every effort to sidestep the stereotyping.  You cannot extirpate it, but you can mitigate it and not make it the fatal distraction.  The recommendations in my book will make a huge difference in your persuasive results.

Lamarr serves an example of the difficulty, though, of trying to persuade decision makers to enable and enact your technology recommendations.

The wonderful and beautiful Hedy Lamarr left us January 19, 2000.

Facial-recognition software has taken years to mature: I investigated the technology almost 10-years ago and it was not new then.  Now, it appears that about 40 law enforcement agencies across the country will be taking delivery of some 1,000 systems from B12 Technologies, to potentially screen persons they have reason otherwise to detain.  The Wall Street Journal took the expected tack of questioning the purported violation of civil rights and coined the term facial profiling.

Facial recognition, fingerprinting, iris scans, body odors, thermal mapping, and similar technologies come under the general heading of biometric identifiers. The Department of Defense created its own Biometric Identity Management Agency (BIMA).  Apparently, they took delivery of 7,000 facial recognition devices from L-1 Identity Solutions to use in Afghanistan and Iraq.  At today’s estimated cost of $3,000 – $5,000 per unit, this would put the entire number of fielded units at under $50 million.  Economists state the market as over $500 million, but I often look askance at their purported valuations.  To me, that would seem to be how much is spent  on R&D, development, and the like, not how much is sold as product.

The law enforcement version of the facial recognition uses a camera attached to an iPhone.  The system supposedly interfaces to a database that is still being populated.  A facial database is considerably more complicated than just scanning a page of mug shots from the Law and Order Criminal Intent files.  Creating and maintaining a quality and broad database is an expensive asset.

Is the database information private?  If Julian Assange avoids extradition to Sweden for his hormonal ambitions, he can focus on a follow up to Wikileaks and call it Facialleaks.

Facebook tried its own application for facial recognition, purportedly used to find your friends.  I’m getting to the age where all my friends show pictures of themselves taken 20-years younger; that will challenge both the database and the software.  My neighbor had cosmetic surgery.  Now, she looks much younger than me.  However, all those cosmetically reproduced faces have a certain similarity that make differentiation more difficult.  Seeing a stranger fresh off the knife can produce one of those I-think-I’ve-seen-her-somewhere-before moments, when, of course, you have not.

The facial recognition algorithm requires measuring some 100+ points on the face, distance between eyes, angles, etc.  This can scarcely be done with a single photograph so multiple shots are taken and put together in a stereo fashion so that 3D measurements can be extracted.  I would expect that a good algorithm would permit new photographs to be added to the old ones and thus improve the learning; deciding which photographs to use for the database could require a whole new department.

My dad claims that he never forgets a face.  Most people have this ability, but a small percentage of the population does not.  (It has nothing whatsoever to do with the ubiquitous problem of forgetting names.)  There is a special part of the brain that is wired just to recognize faces.  It develops at a very young age.  If for some reason it does not develop adequately, either through psychological or physiological obstacles, then that person has what is known as prosopagnosia, face-blindness, from the Greek, a “face-doubter.”  The prosopagnosic cannot reliably recognize faces.  I am faced with this problem, I suspect, because at a young age I had debilitatingly poor vision that was not corrected until much later in life.  It produces great difficulty in reliably recognizing even people I know very well, particularly if I encounter them in an unexpected aspect or environment.

Facial recognition should be a hot market in a few years, for the technologists, the end users, and the lawyers.  Expect more lumps and bruises though before the technology is ready for prime time.  It is in the wings, however, ready to walk on stage.  This should be an interesting technology to watch.

I depart from my usual theme of technology persuasion to wish a happy 98^th birthday to a great woman, Willie Lee (Scales) Darter.  I assure you that when Ms. Darter enters your life, warmth, grace, and spirit accompany.  She is a rare individual and it is no exaggeration to say that having known her, you are noticeably the better for it.

Born in 1913, the oldest of six children, she cradled life in the oil town that is Electra, Texas.  That region possesses some of the finest farm dirt and receives some of the least rain.  Her father struggled with sharecropper farming and then moved the family in a covered wagon to Pueblo, Colorado to “live out a claim.”  Willie Lee was four years old.  They “made do” in a dugout he shoveled out of the dirt side of a mountain.  The attractive brochures that lured them to Pueblo failed to remark on the unfitness of the terrain for any sustenance.  Fending off mountain lions and starvation, her father loaded what was now a family of five back into the wagon to journey homeward to Electra.

Half-way there, in Amarillo, they met a man in a Model T Ford who was chugging up to Colorado.  Afraid his car would not pull the steep grade of Raton Pass, the man desired a wagon.  He showed her father how to drive the car (“About three or four blocks,” she said), and the trade was made.  Everything they owned went in, under, and on top of that car.  “Mamma cried to see the horses go,” Willie Lee remembered, “but she had to do what Papa said, I imagine.”

At the age of twelve, Willie Lee attended a cottage prayer meeting.  That event changed her life, forever.  In her own words, “The Spirit of God began to move in my heart and I was gloriously saved.”  She would spend the rest of her life focused on service for her Lord.

When Willie Lee was sixteen, her mother died unexpectedly, leaving the six children with a father who was seldom around and Willie Lee the oldest.  The youngest was nine months.  The next few years were tumultuous and divided the family.  Willie Lee finished High School, but not a single person attended her graduation to “stand up for her.”  She made board by keeping children for a family.  At age 18, she decided to get an education. She heard about a couple that was driving to Tennessee, so she asked if she could go along.  Her destination was Cleveland, to what is now Lee University.  My grandmother made her three dresses and as they were departing she gave Willie Lee $1.75 with the admonition, “Here’s some money to buy stamps so you can write us.”  Willie Lee told me years later, “Little did she know that those dresses and that $1.75 was all I had in the world.”

Willie Lee worked her way through college, odd jobs, evening shift in a hosiery, and whatever she could find.  Then, she was offered a position at the Pathway Press publishing house.  She became acquainted with the executives of the Church of God who owned the press.  They loved her, as would everyone she encountered.

She returned to Electra at age 21 and married Ed Darter.  They started Darter Furniture Store, which would operate for the next 29 years.  Willie Lee was the brains behind the business and it became very successful.  She attended college again at what is now Midwestern State University.  She and Ed bought an airplane and Willie Lee learned to navigate.  She took the test and received her pilot’s license.  Quite an accomplishment for a woman in the 1940’s.  Her first solo flight lasted 7 hours and 15 minutes.

She and Ed felt that God had blessed them abundantly; they needed to “give back.”  So, they flew their plane back and forth from Electra to San Antonio and set up a school to train missionaries.  At that time, most churches were training Caucasians and sending them to Latin America as missionaries.  Willie Lee was years ahead of her time.  She felt the most effective missionaries were the natives.  They brought native pastors from Latin America to San Antonio, trained them, and then returned them to their own country.  Willie Lee and Ed began to visit Latin America, themselves, donating time and thousands of dollars to build churches.

In 1967, a customer, leaving late from the furniture store, failed to extinguish a lighted cigarette.  During the night, the store and its contents burned, damaging the building and destroying all the contents.  A lesser individual would have called it quits.  Not this woman.  Hearing about the fire, and seeing an opportunity, the Church of God, a six million member, 150 nation organization, called her and laid out a proposal.  At age 55, Willie Lee was appointed Executive Secretary for the Church of God, its highest position for a woman.  She and Ed moved to Cleveland, Tennessee where she produced what she later considered her crowning life’s achievement, an international Christian training program for young girls.  She also modernized the women’s movement within the Church of God and, with help from Janice Givens (my mother), and others, published a book with illustrative Bible lessons for young children.

In 1978, while Willie Lee and Ed were on holiday, Ed suffered a fatal heart attack.  It was Christmas Day.  This hastened Willie Lee’s decision to retire as Executive Secretary from the Church of God after fulfilling a noteworthy ten years.  She stayed seven more years in Cleveland and moved back to Texas at the age of 72-years, thinking maybe it was time to retire.  Her work had taken her many times across the US and to Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, Israel, England, Germany, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Argentina, Venezuela, and other countries – always with the same message – the glorious saving power of Jesus Christ, the same message she had received as a young girl.

Perhaps it was not time to retire, after all.  She went to work, again.  She established a ministry for the Navajo Indian reservation in New Mexico. She garnered the support of local churches, set up way-stations, paid for trucks, enlisted volunteers, and shipped tons of clothing, supplies, Bibles, and Christian literature to help the Indians, both materially and spiritually.  She went, herself, to oversee much of the work and then set up volunteers.  She made her last trip to the reservation at the age of 90, and when she could no longer travel to the reservation, continued to garner support, encourage others, and champion the cause of Jesus Christ.

I remarked once to her that not many people could go through all that she had and still be so upbeat and optimistic about life.  She responded, “I guess it is true that I’m not easily discouraged.”

I take that gem of wisdom and share it with you.

Willie Lee quit driving three years ago.  Until a few months ago, she lived without assistance.  Still today, she lives in her own house, bright and vibrant, full of the grace and beauty that served her a lifetime.  Happy Birthday to a great lady

Over half of the almost seven billion people living today were not even born in 1977.  In that year, NASA launched Voyager I and sent her out to explore our solar system.  She weighed about as much as the Volkswagen Bug of that year.  Today, at 34 years of age, she has lost some weight (burned up the hydrazine fuel), and is moving along at a steady 38,000 mph.  On this, our 4^th of July, she, and her sister ship, Voyager II, mark a freedom never before encountered in the history of mankind.  They are leaving our solar system.

The original plan was to take advantage of a rare arrangement of the outer planets during the 1980’s and send these satellites to tour Jupiter (1979) and Saturn (1980).  They happened to visit Jupiter’s moon, Io, just as a volcano was exploding, and they caught the event on camera.  They discovered that Jupiter also has rings.  They mapped details of the rings of Saturn, first observed by Galileo Galilei in 1610.  Skillful navigation allowed the two spacecraft to add a tour of Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989).  Then, they headed for the great beyond.

Each Voyager carries a gold-plated audio-visual disc in the imagined event that the spacecraft is found by intelligent life-forms (a standard PR ploy of NASA).  A Star Trek movie ran with this notion and, in the projected year 2273, had a Voyager 6 evolve into the intelligent, but errant, V’Ger life-form.  The disc contains recorded greetings from earth VIPs (now scarcely remembered) and a medley of sounds that includes a whale, a baby crying, waves breaking on the shore, and music far better remembered than the VIPs.  It would be interesting to know how many garage sales you would have to visit to find a player for that 34-year old disc.

Now, the Voyagers  are poised at the edge of our solar system, 116 times farther from the sun than our mere 93 million miles.  This is the farthest any man-made object has ever traveled, but that distance is not even a nanonanonano-dot in God’s vast universe.

The spacecraft’s power systems should live a few years longer and the girls will continue to talk to us, notwithstanding a 16-hour time delay from transmission to reception.  (It’s a long ways out there and light only travels at 186,000 miles per second).  When their power systems finally fail, we will not be able to communicate, but obeying Newton’s First Law, (a body in motion or at rest will continue in linear motion or at rest unless acted upon by a force), they will continue traveling at the same speed, forever.

Oh, they might encounter a random star and be burned up, but the stars on the average are about 6 trillion miles apart (a nominal light year), although the nearest star to our sun is over 4 light years distant.    One would have to be either very unlucky or a very poor driver to have that happen.  In the year 40,272 AD, the Voyagers will careen within 1.7 light years of the star Ophiuchus in the Little Dipper constellation, their first “close encounter.”

There are molecules in space (it’s not a complete vacuum), so the Voyager sisters will slow down a little running into those molecules and exchanging momentum.  However, at a rarefied density of only a few molecules per cubic meter, it will be eons before that will be noticed.  There is some warmth for those two girls.  (They’re only 34-years old and they will live thousands of years, so they could hardly be called women.)  It is not absolute zero in outer space.  The left-over heat from the Big Bang keeps outer space at about 3 degrees (Kelvin) above absolute zero (thus, -270 ^OC, -454 ^OF).

So, smooth sailing and happy 4^th of July to the Voyagers from all their friends here the United States of America, the greatest country in the solar system.

“Take me out to the ball game.  take me out with the crowd.  Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks, I don’t care …  for it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out at the ol’ ball game.”

Baseball gets criticized as being too slow: none of hard-hitting dynamics of football, little of the athleticism of basketball, and a shadow of the endurance of soccer.  Those critics do not understand baseball.  Baseball is a game of nuances: the rotation, the distribution of the outfield, the depth of the infield, the double-play, lefty-lefty, righty-righty, the breaking ball, the fast ball, the change up, the distraction of the man on base, the steal, the sacrifice, the bunt, the bullpen, the closer, and so on.  You don’t watch baseball like you watch football.  Baseball is more akin to a poker game.

In baseball, the home run batter is the hero, but the pitcher determines who wins the game.  Rarely can the swinging bat overcome the flailing arm.  The statistics kept on pitchers can make you a better technologist.  Here’s how.

A starting pitcher has to pitch at least five innings of the game for the baseball governing board to label him the winning or the losing pitcher.  Suppose a top-notch pitcher pitches five innings and his team is winning big time.  The relief pitcher comes on and the team subsequently loses the game.  What statistic is given to the starting pitcher who was way ahead when he was called out of the game, perhaps through no fault of his own?  He is not called the winning pitcher; he is given a no-decision by the governing board.   He does not get credited with a win unless his team wins, no matter how far ahead they may have been when the starter left the game.  Baseball statistics are strongly tied to teamwork.

Learn a valuable lesson here and realize that technologists are forced to play by the same rules.  A win is a win.  A no-decision is a loss.  If you do not get the decision makers to agree to your technology recommendations, you lose.

Making a successful technology presentation is all about getting the decision makers to enable and enact your recommendations.  As I emphasize all the time, spin, duplicity, and deception are not even to be considered.  My emphasis is that many excellent and profitable ideas are canned, not because the ideas lacked sufficient merit, but because the technologists lacked sufficient preparation or failed to understand what the audience of decision makers required.  If the decision makers decide to not enact or to not enable your recommendations, they may not say so directly.  They may just label it a no-decision.  For the technologist who needs to move forward with the research, staffing, or garnering of capital equipment, that is tantamount to a loss.

Most technologists are part of a team.  You may do extremely well with your individual part, but if the team fails to convince the decision makers, everyone loses.  What should you do about it?  Here is how to turn a no-decision into a win.

Start by avoiding the technologist’s tendency to isolation.  Be open with your own work.  Learn what your associates are doing and how their work and yours fit together in the overall plan.  Look for areas that might be weak and then work as a team to shore up those deficiencies.  If you see where the work of others can be improved, learn how to instruct them in a positive manner.  Be receptive to having your own work critiqued, challenged, and changed by others.  Anticipate and be prepared for skepticism by the decision makers.  Be prepared to address any perceived shortcomings in a factual (usually natural for a technologist) and succinct (usually unnatural for a technologist) way.  Think about budgets, cost, profit, and schedule.  These are important to the decision makers.  Make them important to you, in your decisions and in your presentations.

Bring out the best in your team and you will convert those no-decisions into forceful wins.  You will be the persuasive wizard.

For reasons that are obscure to me, I invested some of the last 18 months learning ancient Greek.  That exercise had no practical value (not a criterion for physicists) as anything I would ever want to read was already translated by multiple authors.  The importance of learning a language, as all polyglots know, is that no translation carries the cognition, the impact, or the nuances of the original.  Translations can be poor, controversial, vague, ambiguous, and even misleading.  (There are how many English translations of the Bible?)

Shakespeare, of course, wrote in English.  Consider his rendering of Hamlet’s soliloquy, as the young prince contemplates the uncertainty of death:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprise of great pitch and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of action.

A translation cannot carry the meter, the gravity, or the force of this masterpiece of writing.

Or, again, as Henry V faced insurmountable odds against the French at Agincourt,

But we in it shall be rememberèd;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile

This day shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England, now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

What does this have to do with technology and persuasion?  Everything.

If you want to persuade decision makers, you must speak in their language.

The antithesis of learning their language is to say everything in your own language, the language of the technologist.  “I calculated the electromagnetic field strength using Maxwell’s equation equating the curl of the electric field to the negative partial derivative of the magnetic flux.  But, in this case, I needed the magnetic field strength so I multiplied by the permeability of the encasing medium.”  Now, that’s Electromagnetic Field Theory 201, but it’s Decision Maker Kick-Your-Butt 101.  Decision makers have no idea what you just said, why you would say it, or why anyone in their right mind would want to know it, especially them.

If the electric field intensity is not important to them, do not bring it up.  It’s not in their language unless it affects their decision making.  If you want to be persuasive, it is essential that you speak to their needs and not to your own.

If the electric field is important to them, tell them what the field is and why they should care.  All of which must be in layman’s terms, of course.  If you say, for example, “The electric field intensity is 40 millivolts per meter,” that clearly is not in their language.  What then?

I ask you, “Is it important?”  “Yes,” you reply.  Okay, then follow with dialog that answers, “What value is too high?  What value is normal?  What difference does it make in your product?  How does it affect the quality?  What should be done about it?  How much will it cost to fix?  Is there liability?  Are there health risks?”  Do not follow with, “Here’s what a millivolt is, here’s what an electric field intensity is, here are Maxwell’s equations.”

Recall Apple’s recent iPhone 4 debacle, the human-interference-with-the-antenna problem?  The decision makers, in this case, the buyers, were not concerned about strengths of electric fields, capacitances, or dielectric constants.  The decision makers wanted Apple to acknowledge and take responsibility for Apple’s design error.  They wanted Apple to take action.  They wanted decisions.  This is the difference between speaking the language of the technologists and speaking the language of the decision makers.  The technologists want to explain every detail.  They cling to acronyms, alphabet soup, and jargon.  The decision makers want to make decisions.  They speak costs, returns, markets, and impact.

If you want to become the Persuasive Wizard, learn the language of the decision makers.

Lipitor (atorvastatin) is a well-known drug for lowering blood cholesterol.  It happens to be the biggest selling (legal) drug of all times.  The Lipitor patent expires on November 30, 2011.  That expiration will open the generic-drug flood gates and nourish profusely an already thorny patent patch.

Pfizer Inc., the owner of the Lipitor patent, is the largest pharmaceutical company in the world.  Headquartered in New York City with research facilities in Groton, Connecticut, its annual sales are $68B.  Lipitor, alone, accounts for $10B of those sales.  How would you like to be the CEO and have that problem facing you?

For sales comparison, the annual consumption of aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) amounts to about 16 tons, 80 million of those little pills consumed in some form or another each year.  Total annual sales for aspirin are about $2B.  However, that 2B$ is distributed across hundreds of companies.  And Lipitor brings in $10B annually, solely to Pfizer.  That’s a patent you might wish you had your name on.

The Lipitor patent was issued in October 1999.  Since then, Pfizer has touted  (probably correctly) that Lipitor is “the best-selling treatment for lowering cholesterol and the best-selling pharmaceutical product of any kind in the world.”   The original patent was due to expire in 2016, but in 2004, the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) prior art wherein PUBPAT claimed that the Lipitor patent was “anticipated by earlier work of other inventors and should never have been granted.”  (I discussed in a separate article the concept of “prior art” in patents.)  The Lipitor prior art case went back and forth for a year and finally Pfizer “won,” but in doing so conceded to give up its original broader claims.  (As I also explained, patent claims are decided by the court, not the USPTO.)

Ranbaxy, was the first pharmaceutical company to challenge the Pfizer patent.  Thus, Ranbaxy may get a lucrative six months deal as the sole generic manufacturer of the drug once the Pfizer patent expires.  That exclusive deal is the basis for bringing even more lawyers into the Lipitor world.

There is no end to this story.

What does Lipitor have to do with the day-to-day technology wizard, other than illustrating the thorny problems of patent longevity and prior art?  Lipitor illustrates a poignant new issue: patents can be lucrative – to the company, but not necessarily proportionately to the individual.  In most cases, the individual scientist is obscured and the patent rights belong to the company that pays for the research.  It is a business model ingrained long ago by Thomas Edison who took personal credit for everything his company touched.  I know that in my own situation, five of my patents are currently used in government systems that involve billions of dollars annually.  The contributory value of my five patents is buried deep within those systems and difficult to quantify, particularly because no one wants to do so.  I received nary a dollar in royalty compensation for any of them.  Such is the fate of most technologists who work for large companies, especially those companies that retain their own staff of lawyers.

So be it.  I have no regrets.  I knew the terms in advance and agreed to them.  The company compensated me for the research and I had a great time working on every project.  I am delighted to see my patents working daily to help secure the safety of every US citizen.  Self-fulfillment pays in its own currency.  Technology wizards know this.

To discover, to be the first person in the entire world ever to do something, to document that achievement in a patent, is its own currency.  I did not go into physics for the money.  My advice?  Relish each accomplishment and keep your gyroscope fixed.  If you make a lot of money with your patent, that may be positive to you.  (Believe me, it does not always work that way.)  If you get paid adequately to do the things you love, then there is nothing wrong with that.  Patents expire, rewards are ephemeral, but the sense of accomplishment is eternal.

I love physics.  Why?  No one says it better than the stimulating Paul Davies.

Physics is the most pretentious of the sciences, for it purports to address all of physical reality.  The physicist may confess ignorance about a particular system – a snowflake, a living organism, a weather pattern – but he will never concede that is lies outside the domain of physics in principle. (The New Physics).

I would cite three underlying reasons for my devotion:

1.  The domain of interest is indeed universal.

2. Many principles are yet undiscovered, some of them fundamental.

3.  Physics is quantifiable, objective, and exact, certainly not to the logical precision of mathematics, but overwhelmingly objective as opposed to subjective.  (Physics is objective, art is subjective.)

The quote by Paul Davies applies not just to all physicists, but to many technologists as well.  Technologists are curious about everything and stimulated by the unknown.  They love a good argument.

The problem I address today is that although their domain of interest might be broad and universal, their domain of knowledge is not.  For example, Albert Einstein was arguably the greatest physicist since Isaac Newton (and the only physicist most people can name).  Einstein wrote letters and made speeches after WWII advocating that a supranational judiciary and executive body be formed to decide questions of security for the individual nations.  (Source) Einstein was a great physicist and a genius of science.  Did that also make him knowledgeable in world affairs and in the management of nations?  Probably not, but his scientific accomplishments falsely implied expertise in other, unrelated areas.

(Keep in mind that Einstein was never a believer in the interpretation of quantum mechanics, probably the most proven theory we have today: so being a genius does not necessarily make you right, even in your own field, much less outside.)

I see this same problem today with luminaries like Steven Hawking.  Often, otherwise brilliant physicists and technologists step totally outside their domain of knowledge to express their opinions about social issues, God, or philosophy, for example.  These subjects are of universal interest, but the scientist rarely has invested comparable time and research to be an authority on them.  Domain interest does not imply domain knowledge.  Yet, the populace takes these statements and uses the luminary as authority for advancing private agendas.  Clearly, you would not permit a famous astronomer’s opinion on hematology, for example, to outweigh that of an equally educated physician.  Yet, the mismatch is often foisted as authority in even more diverse fields like science and religion.

I object to this transfer of authority and so will an audience of decision makers when you present your technology ideas to them.  Decision makers are not the local press.  Decision makers in industry form a quick assessment of your expertise and its domain.

Thus, in making a technology presentation, the technologist must avoid areas that are outside his domain of knowledge.  I posit four elements to confirm in your presentations:

1. Stick to the facts, the experiment, and the data you have.  Do not drift.

2.  Keep the subject manageable.  Do not broaden it into a topic that cannot be covered in the time allotted.

3. Make rational conclusions based on the data at hand.  Do not wander into mine fields of controversy about which you have no supporting data and only incomplete knowledge.  If you do not know, then say you do not know.  A common error is to let your enthusiasm drift into unsupportable statements like, “the window of opportunity is closing, everyone will want to buy this, the company will make a lot of money, we can have this finished by the end of the month,” and so on.  If you do not have substantiating data such as pro forma, market analyses, or program schedules, do not make such unfounded statements.

4.  Do not use your scientific presence as a platform and soap box to advocate opinions outside your domain of knowledge.  It is perfectly acceptable to advance ideas.  It is perfectly unacceptable to advance them from an unsubstantiated, unrelated platform.

Follow these rules and you will be on your way to becoming The Persuasive Wizard.

Last week another politician signed up to take “full responsibility” for his actions.  This time it was Anthony Weiner, the Democratic Representative from New York whose puerile obsession with his middle-aged hormones gave him no time to enact worthy legislation, but left plenty of time to distribute lewd photos to his cell phone harem.  But, of course, “taking full responsibility” doesn’t mean he will resign, pay back, recompense, correct, or compensate in any way.  It means he will take full responsibility to continue his bilking of the voters who put him there  and anyone else he can find.  It has the all the usefulness of Janet Reno’s “taking full responsibility” for the Branch Dividian debacle, or Jimmy Carter’s “taking full responsibility” for the disastrous Operation Eagle Claw.  Words are vacuous and stagnant.  “Taking full responsibility” can only be accomplished by deeds.

Ignoring politicians, who would be no example for anyone, what does it mean for a technologist to take full responsibility?

Wrong question.

“What does it mean” is most often answered by jaded relativity – what I did was not a bad as what John or Susan did, or not nearly so stupid as what so-and-so did last year.  Recall your history.  Aristotle would not posit the question, “What does an individual do.”  He would only dilate on “What should an individual do?”

In my book, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers (to be published this summer), I make it an absolute edict that technology persuasion is not to be had by falsehood, spin, or innuendo.  Technology persuasion must be based on facts, data, good engineering, and circumspect judgement.

Notwithstanding, there may come a time when you are absolutely wrong.  You make a major mistake.  Things go awry.  Poor decisions are made.  Money is lost.  Failure occurs.  What do you do?  Step one is to identify, impersonally, what went wrong.  Analyze the problem and find out where the train jumped off the track.  Keep digging until you find the root cause of the error.  Why did the train get off tract?  You must search hard to find the root cause of why? Do not settle for superficial rationalization or the laying of blame.  What was the real reason the project went south?

Among technologists, you almost never find malfeasance or purposeful neglect.  What is common, though, is to find overbought optimism.  Technologists often get so wrapped up in their projects that they try to make the data say what they want it to say.  Technologists do not fudge the data so much as to misinterpret it based on desire and enthusiasm, occasionally ego.

An experiment that all physicists know is that of Albert Michelson (1852 – 1931) and Edward Morley (1838 – 1923) searching for the aether.  Their experiment in 1887 paved the way for Einstein‘s Theory of Relativity.  At the time of their experiment, scientists felt that all waves needed a medium of transport.  Water waves need water, sound waves need air, and so forth.  Therefore, electromagnetic waves needed something, the undiscovered aether, or so they thought.  (In truth, electromagnetic waves do not need a medium of transport; they travel through empty space.)  The Michelson-Morley experiment searched for the medium of transport.  The experiment found nothing, nothing whatsoever.  Their experiment was undoubtedly the most famous null experiment ever performed.  Lesser physicists might have found the aether because they wanted to find it, because they needed to find it, because they just knew it had to be there, somewhere.  (And why not?  Every physicist knew it had to be there?)  In the case of the aether, it was not and is not.  The point is, that the integrity and exactness of Michelson and Morley kept them from being so optimistic as to fashion results.  When training young technologists, use the Michaelson-Morley experiment as an illustration of how to be honest in collecting and reporting data.

In industry, I have found that the second most common cause of error is lack of detail, lack of follow up, lack of verification.  Everyone gets busy.  There is limited supervision.  The problems are complex.  The data are manifold.  No one wants to ask the hard questions and no knowledgeable person has the time to validate the work of others.  Yet, as a manager and person responsible, you must do this.  If you do not do this, you will find yourself like Pons and Fleischmann – announcing cold fusion and then becoming a byword for exuberant optimism without validity.

Having found the root causes of the error, looking first impersonally and then for individuals, How does a technologist “take full responsibility?”  Know that if you are in charge, it is your responsibility.  Do not lay the charge on others.  If it happens on your watch, it’s your baby.

First, then, acknowledge publicly the mistakes of your team as being your mistakes.  Quantify the mistakes as to their magnitude and impact.

Second, investigate and make a report, immediately, on the root causes.  Make this report impersonal.  Do not mention any names.  If there are individuals involved, discuss this privately and then only with select individuals in the management chain.  Do NOT discuss individuals with anyone on your team.  You are not a buddy, you are a manager.

Third, put together a recommended plan for correction and remediation.

Fourth, present it to the decision makers.  If they accept your plan, good.  If not, go with their decision.  Whatever the outcome, keep it business and technology, and not personal.  Above all, learn from your mistakes.  If you find that you have been too high-level and need to get more involved, then do so.  Change what you are doing.  The problem is that most people know their mistakes but never make a change.  Make the change.  If you are too much of a micro-manager, if you must have your hands in everything, then back off and give others some responsibility.  Change what you are doing and next time you will change the outcome.

If you lose your job or take a pay cut you still will have three things that will serve you better in the next job: integrity, honesty, and a lesson that produced a change in you.

That’s what it means to take full responsibility.