Nobel prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) because the scientific group had become dogmatic on global warming. Their 2007 National Policy Statement on Climate Change emphasized two sentences by placing them apart in their own paragraph:

The evidence is incontrovertible:

Global warming is occurring.

“Incontrovertible” means “not open to question.” Professor Giaever’s letter of resignation noted the irony of their word choice.

In the APS, it is okay to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is ‘incontrovertible’?

The APS reiterated its support for the language in 2009.

A letter from 16 eminent scientists published the Wall Street Journal on January 27, 2012, noted that treating global warming as incontrovertible was stifling scientific inquiry by, for example, making it nearly impossible for a young scientist to conduct research that might call the dogma into question because to do so eliminated their chances at publishing, tenure, and funding.

 

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One pattern I noticed while reading about the physicists and mathematicians who invented quantum mechanics and built the atomic bomb was the number of key insights that came to them while hiking and walking. At first I thought this might have been a mere cultural coincidence. Many of these scientists were turn-of-the-century central Europeans; perhaps walking was just a common hobby amongst this group? I have since noticed that Read the rest of this entry »

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This latest podcast is part five of a funny and useful conversation between top executive coach Tony Mayo and his longtime client Ron Dimon. Ron is an expert on the use of information by executives of large organizations. Listen as two experienced business people play with useful ideas in this episode including;

• Commitment exists only in language
• Useful reminders vs. empty affirmations
• The power of choice
  • Banishing “I have to..”

• Holding a Space vs sccumbing to ovewhelm

Just click here and either listen through your computer or subscribe through iTunes to have this and all new episodes placed on your device as they become available.

You may also set up an automatic “feed” to non-Apple devices by using this link: click here for other devices.

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This latest podcast is part four of a funny and useful conversation between top executive coach Tony Mayo and his longtime client Ron Dimon. Ron is an expert on the use of information by executives of large organizations. Listen as two experienced business people play with useful ideas in this episode including;

• Low stress mindset for high performance on a variety of unstructured and unpredictable tasks
• Meditation & centering for executives
• Transforming overwhelm into flow
• Procrastination
• Creating vs. fixing
  • “Something’s wrong, & it’s me!”

Just click here and either listen through your computer or subscribe through iTunes to have this and all new episodes placed on your device as they become available.

You may also set up an automatic “feed” to non-Apple devices by using this link: click here for other devices.

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You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going because you might not get there.

–Yogi Berra

Happy New Year!

Or so we have been saying. But will it be happy for you? Will it even be all that new? Or is it just the same stuff on a different date? Is 2012 your future or just a rearranged version of your past?

Try this quick exercise. Pretend it is now January 1, 2013. How are you feeling about 2012? Was it a year of satisfaction or disappointment, growth or decay, health or decline, contribution or frustration? One year from today, what will you wish you had done sooner?

Like most of the people I ask, you have probably retired from the “New Read the rest of this entry »

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In the first year or so it wasn’t just about proving how tough I was, I had to be tough. I was pretty sharp with people. But I’d learned in the classroom, the last thing you want to do is put somebody down because then they freeze, and not only do they freeze, but the whole class freezes. I had to relearn that lesson as a manager. … Early on I didn’t know how to delegate things. I was always trying to do other people’s jobs. I learned that first of all, you’ll drive yourself crazy doing that, and secondly you won’t have very good people working for you very long.

…

I found it useful to remember that most institutions don’t want to change. They’re institutions because they’ve developed a certain set of traditions and norms and expertise, and change is hard. A lot of the work I’d done as an academic affirmed that usually institutions change when they’re failing. It’s very hard to make them change when they’re succeeding. They take the cues too late from the environment.

 

I found three things helpful.

1. One is that you have to paint a picture of other times that that institution has responded to change and difficulty successfully.
2. Secondly, [it helps] if you can find in the institution a counter-narrative that supports the direction of change.
3. And finally you have to look to see whether there are impediments to people doing the right thing. Mostly in good organizations, and the Department of State was certainly one, and I found this at Stanford too, people want to do the right thing — they don’t want to be obstructionist — but sometimes there are things that make it hard for them to do the right thing.

– Condoleezza Rice
On being Provost of Stanford University
& Secretary of State
in Harvard Business Review

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