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Leadership topic - DEI

Picking up on the start of Black History Month, what exactly is this? And how do we bring into everything and harness its real power?

Much will be written about Diversity over the next 28 days. At the risk of trying to focus on that in a Diverse way, let’s think about what it really is – in every aspect of our lives. What do you do to ensure that you are seeing all of the possible perspectives available, and not get laser-focused and miss important contributors?

Paralleling my first real professional role at IBM on the Space Shuttle, we will learn about the father of Swing music, and how that would start to turn the world upside down both musically and Diversely. It as exactly that laser focus on being the best that would show up with great contributions, and equal challenges in both storylines.  We will also begin to assess my first views of career success, and failure… a Diversity that I hadn’t counted on learning so early.

Diversity engaged

Diversity engaged

Jan 31, 2022 | , ,

This evening, as I was working my way through the records, I stumbled across a double album of Jazz. It was my daily visit to Peaches – a huge grocery store remodeled to house huge stacks of records, including those that had been sentenced to the trash heap of music. “Cutouts” were just that – albums that had the corner clipped, along with their price. To keep me engaged in my major goal of graduating in only 12 weeks, I would buy 5 records, come home, listen for 3 hours until they were finished, and hopefully, I had finished enough homework to repeat it the next day…

managing Diversely

managing Diversely

Feb 1, 2022 | , ,

As I was standing in the shower, where most of my clearest thinking comes from, suddenly it hit me. I yelled out to no one in particular – “DPAT – Data Processing Aptitude Test!!!” I had driven down to Clear Lake, Texas for an interview with IBM’s group that was working on the Space Shuttle. A lovely dinner with a person my age had managed to calm my nerves, but now, I realized the very first thing this morning was a test…

partnering Diversely

partnering Diversely

Feb 2, 2022 | , ,

“You have learned how to learn. It is not about the topics or the subject matter. With these tools, anything can be understood”. This framing of Diversity is one that my parents had enforced with all of the IBM swag around the house. I thought it was sorta corny, and also sorta redundant – why do you need a sign that says “THINK”. Isn’t that the thing that differentiates us from the animals – another phrase that rang out often. As I started to work with new partners, it was clear this may actually be needed…

Diverse observation

Diverse observation

Feb 3, 2022 | , ,

From my days in Debate, I observed that you could follow links between documents. Remember this is LONG before hypertext and the web, but at the end of papers are the references. You start to see the same papers referenced many times, and you find there are typically only 10 real papers you need to understand. Here I found a couple on a model of what happens in space, a couple about measuring devices in a cyclotron, and a couple about an experiment that actually flew in space. And I observed that none of them had worked together…

wonderful Diversity

wonderful Diversity

Feb 4, 2022 | , ,

The lack of cooperation and coordination in business shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Today it was very clear as I was talking with the lead investigator of an experiment that had already flown in space. Sponsored by the part of NASA that was dedicated to non-manned flight, they literally hated those of us working on Manned Space. They had, in fact, put the first United States satellite in space, but since the Astronaut crew was announced, their budgets and centrality to the NASA mission was dwarfed. It was no wonder that he was very hesitant to even talk with me…

Diverse execution

Diverse execution

Feb 5, 2022 | , ,

So, no problem. I had to get the facility that thought they were the center of ALL radiation knowledge in our division to work with the other facility that manufactured ALL the equipment we could build. And both thought they were the pre-eminent facility in our Division… And did I mention by this point, I had executed repeated railings about how behind the times both organizations were? And not in small ways – in a couple of cases taking on older and wiser leaders with both memos and in-person indictments of the lackluster execution from both…

renewing Diversely

renewing Diversely

Feb 5, 2022 | , ,

My real job for this season was to design a memory card for the Display System of the Space Shuttle. Our funding was to prototype what a newer computer and color display could do to help automate the very manual ways the Space Shuttle actually worked. If you have ever used an HP calculator, their Reverse Polish Notation approach to math was very similar to what the astronauts did to command the vehicle to fly. It was very labor-intensive, and our mission was to renew that technology from a mid 60’s torpedo computer into the 80’s…