Breaking the Code

Thank God We Chose to Go to the Moon

Over the past few weeks I've tried to explain the significance of the Apollo 11 Moon landing to my three children in the run up to the 40th anniversary. Unfortunately, surrounded as they are by technology and bombarded as they are by CGI animation it is as hard for them to appreciate the impact of this event.

40 years on my daughter, who is exactly the same age I was back in 1969, has a mobile, DSLite, Apple Macbook & iTouch plus sundry other gadgets and takes all this for granted so grainy pictures of guys "floating in a tin can" to paraphrase David Bowie's Space Oddity are about as interesting and relevant to her as our wedding video or Top of the Pops.

Even now it is hard not to be moved and inspired by JFK's speech We Choose to go to the Moon, delivered at Rice University in Houston, Texas fully seven years earlier in June 1962.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It doesn't matter that the space program was in place and well underway before this speech or that the backdrop was the Cold War because what JFK did was crucial - he inspired a generation of engineers to work on what is still ranked as the most complex project ever undertaken and, at the same time, crafted a coherent vision that lasted just long enough to enable them to succeed.

Whatever the political motivation at the time, thank God we chose to go to the moon not only because it was and is an audacious engineering achievement but because of its undoubted impact on our view of ourselves and our planet.  (For more on this check out Exploring the Moon, Discovering Earth from NASA.)

The text of JFK's speech is worth re-reading in the next few hours ahead of the anniversary of the moon landing at 20:17:41 GMT this evening and the Neil Armstrong's small step at 02:56:15 GMT tomorrow morning.  (If you are wondering why I am using GMT these timings were taken from the official NASA Apollo 11 Timeline.)

Fortunately for us, JFK worked with great speech writers not management consultants or masters of spin otherwise his speech would have sounded very different. To illustrate this I plugged his most famous lines into that MBA "must have" the Dilbert Jargonator and dialled in "Make it Sizzle" and "Punch it up". Here are the edited highlights of the resulting mission statement.

I and others opt for to go to the natural satellite of Earth in this decade in addition to do the optional things, not for the reason that they are easy, but in light of the fact that they are hard, whereas that objective will serve to organize and in addition to measure the optimum of our energies ... in light of the fact that this challenge is one that I and others are disposed to accept or agree to acquiesce ... in addition to one which I and others prospectively mean to to win ... This is of central importance to strategic management because it can either buttress or inhibit our commitment to excellence.

And the coup de grâce -

We should use these objectives to transform our strategic thrusts and investment programs into short-run targets and action programs.

On that - ahem - note, I'll leave the last word to REM & The Boss -

With that I'm off to see Moon at the Cameo Picturehouse. See you on the other side. Over and out.

Where has all the snow gone?

I'm taking a few days off to meet up with some old buddies for our annual First Friday Chapter Skiing Trip.  This is a key event in our social calendar and the only legitimate excuse for not turning up is that you are no longer with us ;-)

Anyway we are in Davos for the second year running and the question du jour is "Where has all the snow gone?"  Even though it is the first week of Feb the lower slopes are almost devoid of snow (apart from runs that are maintained artificially) and it looks more like April here.  Of course this could be due to all the hot air at the WEF last week but I somehow doubt it!

This coupled with the fact that when I was in California last week everyone was reeling from news that
Freeze destroys 70 percent of California orange crop got me thinking about the need for a new metric for technology innovation Return on Environment (ROE).  The point being that this needs to be factored into any overall ROI calculation.

I did a quick Google and to my surprise the only reference I could find to ROE was in a paper entitled LCA Methodology in the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).  The good news is that while this was being used in a specific technical context - to evaluate the impact (positive or negative) of a production process - it has exactly the right definition to be employed more broadly.

The authors also introduce the concept of an Environmental Management System (EMS) which is neat.  So, for example, the value of datacenter management is not just about efficiency defined as improved utilization but is also about improved power and thermal management - hibernating hardware when it is not needed even if this increases the response time.   The latter is not a problem if you factor it into your overall policy.

This all begs the question is California Citrus industry a victim of its own success?  It has become a world economic powerhouse by shipping product around the globe without any thought for the ROE but has this now come back to bite it?  Of course, the equation is far more complex than this but you get the point.