December 23, 2006: What Business Schools SHOULD Teach about Service Science

During this week's escape to Death Valley (where even a dial-up connection to the Internet is not very reliable), I took along my used copy of Decision Support Systems: An Organizational Perspective, by Peter G. W. Keen and Michael S. Scott Morton. The more I looked into this "time capsule" from the mid-seventies, the more I realized that the service science evangelists were doing themselves a great disservice by ignoring it. The authors even go so far as to say that decision support technology should not be viewed as a product that a technical team installs and then goes on to the next client. Instead, the team has a service obligation to the client to familiarize the client with the technology, bring the client up to speed on how that technology may best be used, and even update the technology to accommodate newly discovered client needs. Could it be that we knew more about service 30 years ago than we do today (and may I be contentious enough to suggest that we owe our "acquired ignorance" to the social beings we have become by virtue [sic] of the Internet)?

One passage in the final chapter of this book has stuck with me with regard to all the quibbling over creating an "academic discipline of service science." It is in a paragraph in which the authors discuss how those managers who are most likely to benefit from decision support technology should learn about that technology:

The best education for them is the building of a relationship with an effective DSS developer and, most importantly--the insistence on being committed and involved in the design an implementation process. A skilled manager who has flexibility of mind can and almost certainly should play a major role in the design of any DSS that she or he sponsors.

In other words what counts most on the managerial side is that "flexibility of mind" that will support a rich and profitable engagement with the developers trying to bring a new technology into play. This is as true today as it was thirty years ago. You would think we would know this by now; but, as the cliche keeps saying, "The Internet changes everything." Perhaps that crack about "acquired ignorance" has more to it than fiesty contentiousness!

December 18, 2006: Another Triumph for Virtuality

It would appear that Time has now lined up behind all of the other lemmings trying to escape reality. They have drunk the Kool-Aid of Web 2.0 propaganda and named as Person of the Year the new Digital Everyman who locks out reality with his iPod earbuds, neverending cellphone activity, and a desperate search for companionship on Second Life. To reflect on a much older cover of this magazine, the question is not whether God is dead but whether, at least in the Time view of the world, reality is dead!

December 14, 2006: An Economist for the Age of the Service Economy

As we continue to debate the question of whether or not service is a "science" and what sort of academic curriculum (if any) provides the necessary foundations for study we would do well to check out the resume of Deirdre McCloskey in Alan Ryan's New York Review article about her recent epic volume, The Bourgeois Virtues. McCloskey is, in Ryan's words, "a professional economist, trained in the Chicago School;" and, back when she was Donald McCloskey, he was one of the key economic advisers to the Reagan administration. (The "pronoun shift" was documented in her book Crossings, briefly cited by Ryan and excellently reviewed by Maxine Kumin in the November 14, 1999 New York Times Book Review.) With both Ronald Reagan and a sex-change operation behind her, McCloskey is now a distinguished professor of economics at both Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is also a professor of rhetoric and English and has published knowledgeably in the areas of history of ideas, social theory, and philosophy. Given that both the theory and the practice of economics now has to contend with the rise of the service economy (not to mention globalization), I can think of no better combination of academic disciplines to meet this challenge!

December 13, 2006: World Bank Optimism

Some (all?) stories are best read in context. Today's Financial Times ran a story under the headline "World Bank offers robust global outlook." Here are the lead paragraphs:

The World Bank's annual global economic prospects report, released on Wednesday, is a rare thing these days: a study glowing with optimism about the future for globalisation.

The report not only says that the global economy should do well in the next two years, but that globalisation between now and 2030 will proceed apace.

This is one of those articles I had to read all the way from beginning to end, just to see if anywhere in this rosy account was any column space devoted to the more pessimistic account from the World Bank's own independent assessment arm. Sure enough, any evidence of the World Bank's own exercise in self-criticism was missing from this story; but then that assessment was yesterday's news (actually from December 8)! Have we come to the point where the annual report from the World Bank is about as credible as the annual reports from Enron used to be?

Alternative, it this just evidence of the extent of our addiction to optimism? The other day I was watching La Haine on the Sundance Channel. There is a running gag about a guy who has been pushed off the roof of a skyscraper. As he passes each floor, he says to himself, "So far, so good!" The punch line is: "It's not how well you fall but how well you land!" The independent assessment of the World Bank seems to be asking questions about how this institution will land, but the annual report would rather talk about how well they are falling!

December 10, 2006: Two Banks

In one of those rare ironies of coincidence, the Nobel Peace Prize was just presented to Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank in the wake of a report highly critical of the World Bank released by its own independent assessment arm. Here are some specific numbers from the account of this report in Friday's SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE:

Among 25 poor countries probed in detail by the bank's Independent Evaluation Group, only 11 saw reductions in poverty between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, while the other 14 suffered the same or worse rates over that term. The group said the sample is representative of the global picture.

It is easy enough to be glib about the fact that Grameen is doing everything right and the World Bank is doing everything wrong, and that would obviously be a specious generalization. Nevertheless, it might be worth considering what differentiates these two lending organizations besides the magnitude of money involved. I would like to propose the hypothesis that, because of its magnitude, the World Bank operates on an institution-to-institution basis (a generalization of the B2B concept that has become part of our technical jargon). Grameen, on the other hand, was conceived by Yunus to operate on an individual-to-individual basis. It is only by thinking of a loan applicant as an individual person (subject) that one can consider the value of advancing a $2 loan (an example given on the radio the other day). This is not to say that the world would be a better place without institutions, since there are clearly situations in which we benefit from them. However, poverty and related disasters, such as flood and famine, are, as I have previously tried to articulate, problems of individual subjects; and institutions that can only deal with those people as objects inevitably make matters worse, just by virtue of that institution-to-institution thinking. Since I am still basically a Hegelian, I would certainly like to see a dialectical synthesis of these two perspectives; but I doubt that we can arrive at such a synthesis before beefing up the individual-to-individual side of the argument. Also, while there is no doubt that Yunus' efforts have advanced the cause of peace, the Nobel Committee could have made an even more powerful statement by also awarding him the Economics prize!

December 06, 2006: The Digital Highway just got more Hazardous!

Last month it was motorists wearing iPod ear buds while driving. In the American tradition of one-upmanship, we now have a CNET report of a motorist in Washington tapping into his BlackBerry while driving on Interstate 5 (presumably at Interstate speeds). Paying more attention to the BlackBerry, this motorist failed to notice that the traffic in front of him had stopped. Caroline McCarthy delivered the punch line for CNET News.com as follows:

The result was a five-vehicle crunch that included a 28-passenger Community Transit bus and a car that was carrying a woman and her 5-month-old son.

As of this writing, seven indignant comments have already come in for Ms. McCarthy's report; but one has to wonder how many of those indignant writers are fully focused on driving when they are behind the wheel!

December 02, 2006: Psychoanalysis at the Opera

Following the final matinee of their current production of Puccini's Manon Lescaut, the San Francisco Opera is joining forces with two members of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute & Society, Linda Lagemann and Milton Schaefer, for "an exciting psychoanalytic discussion" of the opera. Now I am in favor of anything that helps opera audiences to pay more attention to what is happening (either on the stage or in the pit); so I would have preferred such a discussion to take place before the final performance. However, where this particular opera is involved, it is worth asking these analysts just whose psyche they plan to analyze.

Opera fans know that two operas in the standard repertoire have been written about Manon. The really rabid fans probably also know that Puccini's publisher went to great lengths to make sure that Puccini's project would be substantially different from the earlier opera by Massenet, since that earlier production had become a major hit in the opera world. Anyone with this background probably knows that Manon was the creation of the Abbé Prévost. What is probably less well known is that the "novel" Manon Lescaut is actually Books V through XI of Mémoires d'un homme de qualité qui s'est retiré du monde. I have never encountered this work in its entirety, nor met anyone who has done so. I am not even sure of the total number of Books in it, but I think I found one source that said it was twelve. The general consensus it that the whole thing is a rather tedious autobiographical meditation (confessional?), which would have been totally forgotten had not the Manon portion been extracted and become one of the most heavily-sold books of all time in France.

This is where things get interesting. First of all it would appear that Manon is based on one of Prévost's own (probably unhappy) memories. She may even have been the reason he decided to withdraw from the world. Secondly, Prévost's text, because it is autobiographical, is a first-person narrative. The account of Manon is told by the young "man of quality" who was smitten by here, the Chevalier Des Grieux. So, if we are going to talk about psyches, the first question we need to ask is whether or not Des Grieux is a reliable narrator. My guess is that he is not. I would bet that Prévost lusted after some peasant girl in his callow youth, never mustered up the courage to talk to her, and wove an elaborate story around her instead. In other words Manon stands in relation to Des Grieux/Prévost somewhat the way Dulcinea stands in relation to Don Quixote. However, Prévost is more interested in the primrose path to perdition than in chivalry; so Manon becomes the instrument of his cautionary tale.

I would now guess that Puccini never bothered to think about such details. Indeed, the documentary evidence seems to indicate that he was a smitten with Manon and Des Grieux was. So here he is taking on the fictitious product of an unreliable narrator (and, while this was one of his earlier works, I find more depth in the music than in his more warhorse-like operas). So who belongs on the analyst's couch?

Puccini is my number-one candidate. Anyone who can get that wrapped up in an imaginary character has got to have a psyche worth investigating! I would even argue that, at the end of the day, Puccini is probably a far more interesting figure that either Des Grieux or his creator Prévost. Indeed, if we could get to the bottom of Puccini's obsession with Manon in youth, we might have a better understanding of why, at the end of his life, he decided to take on the suitor-killing Turandot!