| Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 09:05:09 -0700 | 03 00050 61 99081701 |
Mr. Morris E. Jones
Director of Architecture
Intel Corporation
350 East Plumeria; Mail Stop CHP02-1
San Jose, CA 95124
morris.jones@intel.com
| Subject: | Intel Aids Discipline to Be Prepared |
Dear Morris,
We create technology to help solve problems, cited in your letter received in my record today, where a "problem" is a task that is not getting done as well as we would like, for example managers are not prepared for meetings, so time is wasted and mistakes occur that require more meetings, time and money to fix. In your letter yesterday, and again today, you mentioned discipline is the big "problem," in your letter yesterday. One aspect of "discipline" is consistency, which is addressed in my letter.
Take another look at the letter, and try to deal with the language in the letter, as a feedback "metric" showing review has occurred on the be prepared theme from the Boy Scouts training you provide. This is something you can do based on direct experience. How well does the knapsack analogy work?
What impact does time have on discipline? How about ignorance? If we don't know that something requires careful attention, we apply our discipline elsewhere?
What about level of effort. If we reduce the time and effort needed to perform a task, then does it not require less discipline? With low volition, there is still a chance people will come to the meeting prepared, if it does not take a lot of time and effort.
What responsibility does leadership have to provide tools that help people be more disciplined?
How does technology support the "plan, perform, report" management cycle set out in POIMS -- does this support Deming's "plan, do, study, act" cycle, and is it an effective analog of human intelligence cited by George Miller per the link in the letter?
How does writing relate to discipline for the management function in being prepared for meetings and other tasks?
Does the example provided on "medical history" look helpful for a doctor to prepare for a meeting on the subject addressed? Could this applied for a lawyer, engineer, or anyone else using the Internet to deliver focused "intelligence."
Etc, etc., etc., It is hard to move civilization forward with sound bites. We have to buckle down sometime and go down the list of issues to formulate constructive analysis that moves us forward.
There are 20 maybe 30 guys at Intel everyday somewhere around the world who get excited by the prospect of using technology to do something really useful. Most of these ideas don't work. Some could work, but there is no effort invested to discover how to make them useful because it requires extended experience. In our case, we have 15 years of experience using SDS that shows the ideas work when applied over time. That is a hard thing to achieve. Since we have found that this is a useful application of technology, why not deal constructively with the challenge of discovering how to grow the technology and the market, as suggested by Christensen?
Your previous letter was in blue and would not save to disk, so extra work was entailed to capture the record. This indicates you used a different kind of technology to produce the prior letter that required extra diligence, which would typically reduce the range of effective management applied to your communication that facilitates being prepared for follow on tasks. This exemplifies the impact technology has on discipline. With a little bit of discipline and the right kind of technology, you can produce much more effective management than someone with a lot of discipline, but no tools to deal with information overload.
Sincerely,
THE WELCH COMPANY
Rod Welch
rowelch@ibm.net