“We’ve never done it that way before.”

Following is my review of Gordon Morrison’s latest book, Breaking the Time Barrier. This book may present the most important breakthrough to enhance the efficient development of software in the history of the industry.

The seven last words of the organization: “We’ve never done it that way before.” Embrace them and you’ll stifle innovation, creativity and sustained profitability.

What kind of company would self impose limits, ignoring possibilities simply saying, “We’ve never done it that way before?” My experience with thousands of companies proves that the practice is so common as to make it a proverb. To add insult to injury, the very companies that maintain the practice would deny they do it.

The result is something I call “Hidden Inefficiency Virus,” or Business HIV. This is the practice of embracing inefficiencies as unavoidable conditions within a process or a business, and then building expectations which anticipate and accept them. And counter to logical expectations, the practice is nowhere more evident and profit robbing than in the engineering of software. The industry most outwardly committed to creating efficiencies and innovation is its own worse enemy.

Gordon Morrison should know. He’s been developing software and systems for years. Frustrated with the amount of time and programming energy needed to constantly fix hyper-complex programs, Gordon traced the problem back to its origin, the “spaghetti codes,” the non-sequential code writing methodology used by software engineers since the beginning. Then, simply including a logical temporal element to that mess, he is able to untangle the gnarled lines of spaghetti code, making software easier to trace, debug, validate and reuse. Then he published his invention in Breaking the Time Barrier.

Not only does his COSA process reduce the time to develop and maintain software by as much as 50%, but it maximizes the value of the very individuals responsible for writing it by enabling them to focus on improved applications rather than on internal operational minutia of existing products.

Breaking the Time Barrier is short, to the point, and loaded with examples and illustrations of all kinds, perfect for the advanced engineers to which it is intended. For the non engineer, such as I, the book offers a unique and original philosophical landscape which can lead to new and necessary solutions for overworked and under productive people in today’s hyper-dynamic and accelerating world. We all need that.

There is no logical reason for a software producer to resist the elimination of the “HIV” in their business. There is no logical reason a CEO would resist the elimination of “HIV” by failing to embrace outsourcing, either. Well, no reason except, “We’ve never done it that way before.” And that, my friends, is illogical.

CJ is a popular keynote speaker, and a regular contributor to HRTools.
Fine his book, The Squaredime Letters. The feedback has been phenomenal. If you want to get your head around the real forces behind our current recession, you must read this book. Check out some content on Amazon.

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Administaff sponsored the 3rd and 4th place overall award prizes at the prestigious Rice Business Plan Competition in 2009. I was privileged to present these awards to Tendix Development, LLC, from Johns Hopkins University, (Winner also of the Tech Transfer Award, sponsored by DFJ Mercury) and Integrated Diagnostics, from Carnegie Mellon University, (Winner also of the earth/Space Life Science Innovation Award.)

I had less than 2 minutes to speak, and I wanted to use that venue to impact on this audience of talented entrepreneurs from around the world.

Following is the longer version of my talk:

“On the occasion of this grand and prestigious event, with some of the great current and future business minds assembled together, I share wisdom from a great mind of the past. Though he may not have contemplated the activities of the past several days when he spoke, you will most certainly make the application easily yourself. “

“Albert Einstein said, “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” “

“What Einstein realized in experience was that there is a difference between mathematics and reality. There is a difference between theory and practicality. One is clean, neat, orderly, predictable and certain; the other is not. On paper, one always works; in reality, it may not. “

“It is as Almanas wrote to Squaredime in my latest book, The Squaredime Letters, “The real world of organizations is much different than what my textbooks led me to anticipate. It is complex, fuzzy, irregular, asymmetrical, random, and in continuous disequilibrium, much different from the orderly and sterile world represented in my early plans.” “

“So, in accordance with the experience of Einstein and Almanas, your business plans, as spectacular, as innovative, as creative and complete as they may be, do not a business make. “

“They now need infused life. And that life must come in the form of inspired, motivated, creative, and innovative people all voluntarily aligning to help create your vision and mission. That life, that unique assemblage of people will be your company’s most valuable, most important, and most critical asset. “

“How well you develop that asset will determine whether even a mediocre business plan becomes an outstanding business, or whether even an outstanding business plan, becomes but another mediocre one. “

“Today, in the end, outstanding or mediocre can make the difference between success and failure. “

“Your most important asset is at the heart of the Administaff mission. Administaff exists to stand shoulder to shoulder with you as our client, to strengthen your ability to best develop your human assets, maximizing your profitability and making life better for everyone involved. “

We could all benefit from this message. It is our people and our people systems which create the greatest opportunity for our companies to succeed. Everything else is just paper.

CJ Coolidge is a regular contributor to HRTools.com.
Get your own copy of his groundbreaking book, The Squaredime Letters.
Visit CJ online at www.cjcoolidge.com.

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Please help me find somebody who can easily create Wikipedia entries!

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This is better: The Organic Business Model Process: Compelling Vision –> Motivated Employees –> Employee Creativity –> Innovation –> Profitability.

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Compelling Vision attracts Motivated Employees which contribute Creativity leading to Innovation which create Profits. The Organic Model.

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Democrat and former Hillary supporter, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, rejected Barack Obama, the class warfare elitist, to offer sincere support for John McCain. Her intelligent and well explained decision turned heads.

One of those heads belonged to none less than CNN’s Campbell Brown. Brown determined to take Rothschild to task. In an exercize of utter futility, Brown used her “unbiased” news reporter platform in attempt to confound Rothschild’s impeccable logic.

Watch how Campbell herself can only resort to ad hominem attacks, using the labels like “bitter” in effort to support her obvious distain for Lady Rothschild’s conclusions that Barack Obama, and current democrat political posers, attempt to foster class warfare in America. This is their only hope to remain electable.

The piece is titled, “Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild gets schooled on CNN” but this title is just another example of pure political posturing. Watch this piece yourself and you’ll see that it was actually Brown who “got schooled.”

As I have written, and Lady Rothschild has supported in this interview, there can be no benefit to the American Ideal or prosperity to be gained dividing social and economic classes.

In my post from Sunday October 5, 2008, Capitalism’s Potential for Income Inequality: Scourge or Benefit, I wrote about the problem Obama and Campbell believe Democrat policies will improve, that is the problem of increasing income inequality.

You can see that elitism and class warfare as practiced by Obama and Democrats are actually the forces that feed the very problem they “claim” they want to address. This is pure myth because they have no intention of producing a solution. By improving the incomes of their “so called” lower class effectively, they would erode the very voting block they depend on to hold on to the power they really want.

Recognizing individual productivity and the delivery of value as the key to improved income will eliminate the “need” for government programs to protect underproductive and potentially unnecessary workers. It would foster a productivity revolution which would undermine the income redistribution principles upon which Democrat platforms are founded.

Democrats themselves would be forced to resort to productive ideas and policies. Their productive constituency would require it.

Sounds like a timely idea.

CJ Coolidge is a regular contributor to HRTools.com.
Get your own copy of his groundbreaking book, The Squaredime Letters.
Visit CJ online at www.cjcoolidge.com.

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(This is the 6th and final installment in a series of articles about the problems associated with government’s attempts to ignore free market principles in a free market world ecomony.)

The solution for all the economic and social woes we face will naturally occur with the improved understanding of value.

The World of Employment Will be Enhanced by Understanding Value.

Let me describe an entirely new relationship between a business owner and the employee which will raise everyone’s standard of living, and reduce the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots.” As I have said, everything revolves around the understanding of value. Value can no longer be associated with time, with products of services as ends in themselves. Value must be aligned with the realized ability of a product or service to improve the life conditions for the buyer.

Value for an employee must be seen in the same way. An employee, recognizing the responsibility to provide value as the foundation for determining a worthy wage, must realize, then appropriately communicate, how his participation does just that.

The Employee Approach to Job Search will be Changed. Earnings will be Improved.

Employees will no longer be interested in merely trading time for money. They will be more concerned that their companies, and their company’s customer, are able to be positively and recognizably impacted by what they do. “Getting a job,” as though an employee is taking something from someone, will be replaced by rendering a service, as though an employee intends to make a real and recognizable contribution on his company and on the company’s customers.

The Employer Approach to Recruiting will be Changed. Earnings will be Improved.

Employers will stop recruiting for positions, too. Instead, they will be communicating their vision and mission, their reason to exist, and will be seeking good people who can align themselves to the completion of those missions.

Employers will not be looking for people to put in positions, so much as looking to discover the impact of having a particular person at work to fulfill the company’s mission, and to serve its customers. Employers and employees alike will not want to exchange money for things done, so much as for measurable impact of the things done. This will automatically raise the earnings for an employee’s service as he or she is able to raise the profitability of the employer. Job security will be of little concern.

Great employees who make contributions to the profitability of their employers will be desirable everywhere. Once an employee knows his best contributions, and is able to produce them confidently wherever he is placed, he will have confidence enough to know that will eliminate his fear of serving where there is a mission to be fulfilled.

The More You’re Worth, The More You’ll be Paid. The Greater Your Impact, The Greater Your Compensation.

Once value is understood in the mainstream of our economies and our lives, it will start to make no difference what any other person is paid. It will be understood that one’s pay will be less than the contribution made. Whether you are Roger Clemens, Lebron James, Bill Gates, or John Doe, once you understand how to look for and deliver value, you will begin to earn in accordance with the value you provide, and to your heart’s desire.

This is the key to a better future. It is the solution to most every economic and social problem. It is the only way that our long and well developed capitalism can endure. It is the best way to correct perceived income inequality.

We may not remember that there is no “free lunch,” but remember we must, if we are to survive.

CJ Coolidge is a regular contributor to HRTools.coms.
You can now get your own copy of his groundbreaking book, The Squaredime Letters.
You can vist CJ online at www.cjcoolidge.com.

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(This is the 5th installment in a series of articles about the problems associated with government’s attempts to ignore free market principles in a free market world ecomony.)

There should be little mystery about why the concept of value is so far off base. From our earliest training, we were taught to misunderstand it.

It Started in School. Purpose: Produce Workers for the Industrial Machine

We built a system by which masses of people could be trained to become tools in an industrial machine. Around the end of the 19th century, John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and John Dewey aligned to create the system to produce the workers they needed to participate in the newly developing American industrial economy. And it worked wonderfully. America became the greatest industrial force the world had ever seen. By the millions, American workers entered the workforce, traded their time and their lives for paychecks, and, in doing so, forgot the central meaning of value.

Value became erroneously, acceptably, and inseparably connected with time, and with task.

For at least 2 generations, the definition was reinforced, solidified by story and culture, respected as the “backbone of the economy” as if getting and keeping a job was the prize, and the best economic contribution an American could make. People worked for 40 years, retired with a gold watch and a pension, and died within 5 years.

Generations of Americans were trained to believe that the highest contribution they could make was to have, and to keep a job. In fact, our very identities continue to revolve around this idea. The seemingly most important first question asked when introduced to a new person is, “What do you do?” The main reason parents give to support their children’s success in school is that this will enable them to “get a good job.”

We Keep Following the Model, Well Beyond its Benefit.

So things went, and so they continue. As long as America had a fairly stable, predictable demographic, and no international competitors to speak of, the system could successfully continue. We continue to follow the Carnegie/Rockefeller/Dewey education system, even better than ever. We admire it, require it, fund it, protect it, and demand it. That very system continues to produce more and more of exactly what it was designed to produce: people who believe a job to be the economic end game, people who associate time with money, and don’t understand value. The System Was Created for the World as it Existed in 1940.

The Foundations Have Changed

The basic essential conditions which enabled our education system to produce the necessary contributors to achieve American Industrial greatness no longer exist. The demographic model is completely different. Technology supports quality international competitors for everything we produce. And it is no longer beneficial to have millions of people who don’t understand value. In fact, it is detrimental to our survival. It is proverbial that America needs to improve the public education system. All politicians say it. They just don’t know why, or how. Their own models are merely copies of the acceptable ones of old, with more bells and whistles. They still motivate students with the prospect of securing a good job upon graduation.

We Will Never Change the System if We Keep Listening to its Trained Advocates

Adding to the problem is the very leaders of the educational institution themselves. These are professional educators, 2nd and 3rd generations of people educated by educators, not educated by real life, or by real economics.

The people who have such a vested interest in the preservation of the very system that creates the economic problems we are beginning to face are the same ones who haven’t a clue about the way things really work. They are so separated by time and space and education that they actually believe the unworkable utopian, anti-capitalistic solutions they are now building into the millions of Americans they touch.

Yes, America needs to improve our education system, but very few can even anticipate the extent of the alteration required. Still, at the core of the educational change, will be the understanding of value. We are far from this.

I heard a Comment by John McCain Which Offered a Glimmer of Hope.

I heard this in John McCain’s speech at the Republican nominating convention. He was speaking about some of the systems we try to preserve in our country today.

“I know some of you have been left behind in the changing economy and it often seems your government hasn’t even noticed. Government assistance for unemployed workers was designed for the economy of the 1950s. That’s going to change on my watch. My opponent promises to bring back old jobs by wishing away the global economy. We’re going to help workers who’ve lost a job that won’t come back, find a new one that won’t go away.”

McCain is talking about the need to educate our people in a way that fully understands the concept of delivering value. As the world changes at hyper-dynamic speed, the old beliefs and systems that were undergirded by those beliefs need to change.

Value must be understood. People must take personal responsibility to continually update their education so that they can stay current in this ever changing world.

CJ Coolidge is a regular contributor to HRTools.coms.
You can now get your own copy of his groundbreaking book, The Squaredime Letters.
You can vist CJ online at www.cjcoolidge.com.

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I feel used, lied to, abused. . . and though I’ve been reading about it, and listening to as many of the talkers as I can stomach, I still don’t know exactly what Congress did in passing the so-called $800+B “Rescue Plan” or “Bailout.” This leaves me very uncomfortable.

Our US economy doesn’t function in a vacuum. It actually reflects the condition of the society it serves. Ours may be weakening, even cracking.

Democratic Societies have Chinks in their Armor.

Scottish historian, Alexander Tyler, wrote something like the following in the 1770s regarding the US experiment in democracy. It is worth thinking about in light of the current economic situation.

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury.

“From that moment on, the majority will vote for themselves candidates who promise the most benefit from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will eventually collapse due to loose fiscal policy.”

“The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations progress through the following sequence:

1. From Bondage to spiritual faith;
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
3. From courage to liberty;
4. From liberty to abundance;
5. From abundance to complacency;
6. From complacency to apathy;
7. From apathy to dependence;
8. From dependence back into bondage.”

Methinks that we have transitioned through the 4th, 5th, and 6th all within my lifetime. We sure seem to be rapidly transitioning through the 7th now.

Creating Crises as a Means to Consolidate Power

There was a work composed between WWI and WWII which presented a means by which individuals or institutions could successfully wrest power in a democratic, potentially populist system. It made the case that if one could create difficult situations, challenging the security of the society, and then become the “source of solution” for the situation, the voters would move to surrender their liberties in favor of the delivered security.

I can’t validate my sources at present, but I have read that Hitler followed this method in post WWI Germany to secure his position with the full support of Germany’s electorate.

I fear similar patterns are at work in the USA today.

I have considered that the Savings and Loan Crisis (1980s) was largely created through legislative fiat, and “solved” by “congressional action.” I wonder if the current situation isn’t strangely similar.

Congress pressed for a social policy to define home ownership as a “right” during the 1990s. Part of this “policy” encouraged financial institutions to embrace “less-than-prudent” lending policies, and even pressured many to create loans counter to “more prudent” credit wisdom. After a few years of this, they required other creative maneuvers in an attempt to maintain solvency. The “house of cards” couldn’t stand forever. A volitile stock-market caused liquidity to evaporate exposing the imprudent lending practices.

Yes, opportunists developed ways to maximize their own gains in light of the policy. And, yes, obfuscation, false valuations and other bad practices resulted. But for the media, the legislative and executive branches of government to place the blame wholly on financial institutions and corporate greed is, at best, incomplete, and worse, irresponsible.

Was the Bailout Just Shoved Down America’s Throat?

This absolute “in your face” created crisis ushered in rushed emergency acceptance of this $800+B “rescue plan,” a plan passed by the very institutions which created much of the problem in the first place. They shoved it down the throats of constituents who overwhelmingly asked them to consider something else. I, for one, feel taken.

Those “public servants,” individuals with the power to create, then blame, then “fix” the problems, aren’t economists. Most aren’t even businessmen. They may not even be good capitalists.

Except for that degree in law, I am as intelligent as most of our legislators. As is true for them, I can’t claim full understanding of world economic dynamics. I don’t fully understand how global financial markets interrelate. I don’t grasp the totality of the negative effects of a lack of liquidity. I don’t grasp fully the potential effect of letting the market make its own correction.

But unlike these lawmakers, I don’t believe that the principles at work are so complicated that they cannot be explained well enough for me, and others like me, to adequately understand what this new policy is, how and why it will work, leading, even me, to understand why it is acceptable and necessary.

Trust is Deteriorating Beyond Repair.

John Stossel said that a crisis creates the best opportunity for power seekers to seize power. I can’t help but think that this is exactly what has been occurring over these past several years, coming to a head over the last few weeks.

Washington needs a significant house cleaning. But that can only occur if the now complacent, apathetic masses, who seem to be becoming more and more dependent, can turn back the clock, and find the courage to lead the country back into days of real liberty.

Nobody will be happy if we continue on the path from to dependency, right into bondage. I certainly won’t.

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