Starting my own radio show

When asked what do you want to do when you grow up, some people say they want to be pilots, and some say they want to be firefighters.  I was a strange kid and said: I want to work in the radio,  

The years passed and I have gone into computer programming and then into other areas around information technology and gave up my childhood dream, but did not forget it.

A few months ago I discovered that there is a regional radio station located in the campus of the college I am working in. I approached the station manager with the idea to have my own radio show in which I am hosting interesting people talking about technology, societal activities, and the bridge between them.   She agreed to record a pilot and take it from there.    I have recorded three  sessions, and then an opening session, interviewing me (in the picture), and then this week the program went live.    Until this year I have never participated in a radio program, neither as host nor as a participant. Earlier this year I have been interviewed twice in two different radio stations about the activity of the Institute of Technological Empowerment,  Actually I prefer the role of host, it is a lot of fun!. 
Here is a picture in which I am hosting my first interviewer, Rami Gazit.

It is never late to fulfill the childhood dreams....

For those who can read Hebrew, all details are in the Facebook page of the program.    

Is philosophy dead?

I recently followed some discussion threads that started a couple of years ago with Steven Hawkings' assertion: "Philosophy is dead", Hawkings asserts that the truth about the universe is in the hand of the physicists, and philosopher don't keep up with science.   Well, reading it I thought of taking out my BA in Philosophy diploma and hide it, since with the death of philosophy this diploma becomes worthless (maybe I should also retroactive loose my graduate studies, since the acceptance was based on that diploma!).    Some philosophy professors make  defensive claims restricting the death to certain subsets of philosophy.  

My view is that philosophy deals with meta issues,  it does not deal with scientific experiments, but in trying to understand what is a valid argument about the world, and how conclusions are derived from assumptions and assertions.  Many of the concepts we use in computer science: class, object, event, instance and many more actually exist in philosophy much earlier than the invention of computer science.  The recent discussions about causality vs. correlation has long time roots in philosophy literature. 

During my academic studies I have taken courses in various departments: computer science, business school, education, mathematics, but as I have written several years ago, I value the studies in philosophy most.  I think that the study in philosophy has trained  me in both creative thinking and out-of-the-box thinking. I realized early in the studies that this is what you are expected to do in order to get really good grades.   

So I'll trust Hawkings and his colleagues when they talk about physics, and proudly live the philosophy diploma on my virtual wall.  

On Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand had a significant impact on me when I was young.  I read her books while being a teenager, and was captured by her ideas.   Recently, her two famous books "The fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" gained new translations to Hebrew, which was a good opportunity to read them again after many years.  

In retrospect, there was something naive in my attitude to Ayn Rand's book as a young person, there is also a lot of misinterpretations of her ideas in the universe, one of them is the claim that this is a basis for conservative thinking. Ayn Rand was far from being conservative in the political sense.    

However, two things I have taken from Ayn Rand, escorted me all my life:

The ability to "swim against the current"  and take what other people think of me with a grain of salt (including my managers over all  the history),  and the strive for excellence in the mediocre culture around us.  

These two are blended together in Ayn Rand's books. 

 She puts the individual in the middle, rather than the society, and puts in the center of her stories individuals with some kind of excellence. 

Our current society seems to prefer mediocre people that meet metrics, rather than individuals who break out of the box (thus the metrics don't follow them).      A food for thought.

getting back from New Zealand

I have not written in this Blog for over a month - I spent a relatively long vacation in New Zealand.  In the picture above you can see me in front of Huka Falls in the North island,  below it is a picture of Doubtful Sound, one of the fiords in the south island. 

New Zealand has many types of views -- beaches, fiords, alpine mountains, glaciers, rain-forests and more.

You can view a full album (actually two - one for the north island and one of the south island) in my facebook account (I made it public, you don't have to be my FB friend to view it).  

The people of NZ call themselves "kiwis" after a strange bird that they adore,  there is also a big effort, seen everywhere to restore some of the original ecology of NZ before the human race destroyed it when introducing foreign animals and trees.  

Got back a week ago and catching up on other things, and will resume professional blogging soon.

On family vacation in Malta

I have not disappeared, spent most of the previous week in a family vacation in Malta.   Malta is a small country consists of several islands in the  Mediterranean sea  The climate is similar to the one we have in Israel.  The local language is also a Semitic language like Hebrew, it is actually a descendant of the Arabic language mostly. Like any other Mediterranean people - they are nice, friendly, and take their time.  We lived 5 minutes walk from the capital city of Valletta, which is a small city surrounded by walls and looks somewhat similar to the old city of Jerusalem.  In the evening it looks like a deserted place, nobody is walking in the street, and besides a few restaurants it looks like a ghost town. 

Some highlights:

There is a prehistoric site which has limited visitation (10 per hours), we made reservation 2 months ahead to get inside. 

Malta is a catholic country, and have a lot of ancient churches, we have visited some of them. 

We decided to rely on public transportation, which is cheap but time consuming, some of the lines have low frequency --- not really a good choice.

We took a day trip to Gozo, the northern island which has nice beaches.  

The Maltese people like to celebrate - we have watched too separate celebrations, one of them in the honor of the national fish, called Lampuki,   the other in Valleta  is the Valleta white night.  I am not sure what the celebration is about, but it was crowded and noisy, which is a contrast to the regular silent in Valleta.

Hope that my daughters will post pictures on Facebook soon. 

In general:  nice place for vacation.

I'll continue with professional blogging, hopefully tomorrow.

The professor's hat

Sometimes people ask me what hat am I wearing now, since I have a reputation of wearing several hats and sometimes switching hats in the middle of a sentence.   

Today I added additional hat - the professor hat.      How did I get this hat?  -- 

around a year ago I was asked to serve as academic adviser to the MIS department in the Yizreel Valley College,  I decided to do it, on top of all other things I am doing, as a kind of contribution to society, contributing to higher education in the periphery, the college resides in a green area in the countryside, around 45 minutes drive from Haifa (depends on the traffic).

 I supervised students seminars and projects, and started a work on help re-design the curriculum.  I have been teaching over the years at the Technion as adjunct faculty member,  but in the college I am in the status of a "real" faculty member (part-time), so I needed academic appointment.   To anybody not familiar with academic processes - academic appointment procedures are inherently long, go through multiple phases, with non-deterministic results, the nominee is totally passive and does not know (unless somebody leaks) who is evaluating, and what the status is.

Since the process is long, I started with temporary appointment, and the process started.   

Today the college president, Aliza Shenhar, called me  (actually I was swimming and she left me a message, I called her back later) to tell me that she is now driving back from the committee of the higher education council (colleges are not authorized to grant professor ranks, so the final decision is within a committee consists of professors from various universities appointed by the higher education council).

It turns out that this committee's meeting was the last milestone in the way to the professor hat (the process took almost a year E2E).   So I can borrow the hat from Professor Dumbeldore (in the picture above).

As the academic hat is a hobby and not my main occupation at the current state, this appointment is not as dramatic as promotion for an academic person,  and everybody (including undergrad students) are calling me by the first name anyway...  

More on doing what one is inspected to do instead of what one is expected to do

I have already written last year about the seminal phrase of Lou Gerstner cited in the title of this post,  about the negative side of addiction to metrics as behavior controllers.      Today I found a blog posting by one of my IBM research colleagues, Matthias Kaiserwerth, the director of the Zurich Research Lab, entitled: Big data analytics - why delayed flight makes for more satisfied customers.    In this posting  Matthias quotes a talk by Andy Neely that indicates some of the phenomena associated with metrics.   

One example is that when a measure in a call center is to resolve a client's issue within 2 minutes, the agent starts to close the call after 1:45 minutes, regardless if the client' issue is resolved, since the agent is measured on length of the call and not on results.   Actually I saw such cases in which some administrators who are measured on time of handling requests preferred to find some reason to close the request and not handle it since the time exceeded their metrics.  

Another example that landed its name to the cited posting 

One of the major  metrics for airlines is "friendly staff",  using analytics techniques the results show that their is a positive correlation between flights being delayed and the friendliness of the staff, since the staff is very nice in trying to calm down angry passengers that become nervous about missing flights (and sometimes promise things that their colleagues in the destinations don't really accomplish),   taking this ad absurdum - the flight company should deliberately delay flight to enable the staff to maximize their friendliness metrics.

Neely has his own version of Gerstner's phrase:  doing the right things rather then doing things right.  

As I noted in my original post --  the metrics oriented culture is in many cases damaging and we should go back to the basics --- understand what are the right things.

More - later

On the right education for enterperneur

I came across an interesting discussion on the topic what is the right education for entrepreneurs.

According to the study cited in this article,  most of the entrepreneurs don't have degrees in computer science or engineering but in various other disciplines.   This echos the debated between Bill Gates who thinks that engineering education is the only one matters, and Steve Jobs who said that in Apple the DNA is mixed between engineering and liberal arts.

I have some perspective on this issue since I have enjoyed a diversified education. I did BA degree in Philosophy,  then went for MBA studies and learned the basic of business concepts, and then did PhD in Computer Science.  

More than 10 years ago I participated in the "basic blue" management course of IBM, this was a "private course" given for new managers in IBM Haifa Research Lab, since due to organizational changes, and addition of one more level of management, many new managers were appointed within a short period of time to justify bringing the course to us.   As a preparation of the course, the participants fill a substantial questionnaire, and there are also 360 view questionnaires form managers, peers and direct reports.  When showing the results the course's instructor said that he was surprised to see that 16 of the 18 participants had very similar personality profile.  The common denominator:  all of them studied in the Technion computer science or computer engineering, I was one of the two exceptions.    

While generalizations never properly work,  it seems that there is something in the engineering education that drive people to concentrate on the technical details and see their challenge in doing strong technical work, there is nothing wrong with it, any company small or big in the technology domain requires strong technical people.   

 Entrepreneurs require something beyond the technical skill,  they need the passion to change the world, to believe that they are doing the "next big thing".  This is another mode of thinking.  I have never been an entrepreneur (perhaps it is still not to late), but I have written about intrapreneuring   (trying to do "start-ups" within a big corporate) before. 

   

 If I need to reflect upon my past studies and see what contributed most to me, I view my studies as complementary.  The MBA studies contributed understanding of the basics of the business concepts,  the computer science studies contributed to the understanding of technology and the content of what I've been doing,  but the passion to change the universe, and the contribution to thinking out of the box was definitely been of the philosophy studies.  In retrospect they were most influential on shaping my personality.  

I am not surprised that many entrepreneurs are not engineers, there is something inherent in engineering education that makes people think in boxes.

Back to the Holocaust day, my father and King Alfred

I typically don't publish the same post twice, but today, due to the holocaust day, I am returning to something I published in this blog 3 years ago (and got many reactions upon it), the reason is that according to the statistics, during these 3 years the readers population for this Blog has grown significantly - so while old readers might remember it, I also want to share it with the newer ones,  This day is very much associated  in  my mind with my later father who was the only survivor of a big family.   Here is a picture of my father late in his life: 

I don't have any picture of him until after the  war, but here is a picture of the kitchen the  

Lodz Ghetto, where he worked at the beginning of the war (he said that he might be the person in the middle, but was not sure about it)

My father survived the war, while his parents and 7 brothers and sisters did not.

He never talked much about this period in life,  saying that this was on another planet, and cannot be described.  Once he told me that immediately after the war a relative found him in the survivors list and send him a letter asking him to describe whatever occurred to him during the war, my father answer was:

I will not tell you about what happened to me in the war, instead I will tell you the story of King Alfred  

King Alfred has escaped due to some revolt and was hiding in a farm, when the rebelling soldiers looking for him got there, the farmer hid the King below a big pile of straw; the soldiers started to look at the straw, they nearly removed all of it, and then decided to move on. At later time the King succeeded to overcome the mutiny and returned to his throne. At some point the farmer came to visit him and he said to him -- you save my life, I can give you whatever you wish, the farmer said: I am a modest person, don't need anything, have one question to you, what did you feel when the soldiers almost got all the straw removed. The king has shown an angry face and said: this is a very rude question, hang this man immediately. The farmer was about to be hanged, a rope was already tightened to his throat, and then the king said: stop, now you see what I felt.

Is computer science a science or engineering?

I remember years ago a heated discussion in a conference whether computer science is a science or engineering, my daughter had a "science day" in the high school that she'll attend next year, and while they teach computer science they don't view it as a science, for them science consists of biology, chemistry, physics and some of their derivatives.   


Recently I came across an  article in "Scientific American",   about U.S. science degrees.   In this article, as you can see in the picture below,  computer science is neither classified as science nor as engineering,  it is actually classified as technology.   Interesting -- I think that computer science is not monolithic, and various sub-disciplines may be classified differently.

Top ten reasons why large companies fail to keep their best talent

I have written earlier this year about the Plato vs. Aristotle conflict - in the organizational aspect, putting the organization in the middle, and the employee serves the organization goals vs. putting the employee in the middle, and having the organization as a platform to achieve the employee's goals.   When talking about top talents, they tend to be in the Aristotle side of the spectrum.  A recent article by Forbes discusses ten reasons why large companies are not good at retaining their top talents.  I still work at the big blue (IBM Haifa Research Lab), so I probably not qualified as top talent, but I heard all of these arguments before from people who left big companies.  The ten reasons relate to large companies' red tape; failing to find a project that matches the top talent's passion; annual reviews and career developments issues; lack of patience from the company's part to the top talents' initiative which can be longer term; lack of other top talents around, and mediocre management that don't know how to manage top talent -- very interesting! 

Orson Scott Card's empire

I have been sick and stayed home for a few days,  which gave me an opportunity to disconnect from the professional work and read "empire" and its sequel "hidden empire", both by Orson Scott Card, one of the my favorite writers, whose books are always thought provoking.  The story is around the 2nd USA civil war, between right and left,  where an history professor from Stanford, who dreams about American empire, following the step of the Roman empire, and concludes that like the Roman republic, the American democracy should be eliminated to achieve the empire, thus he orchestrates chaos, civil war, and some other actions, and takes over as an agreed upon president that both democrats and republicans nominate to restore order, later in the second book he takes advantage of a crisis to reshape some of the world and take another step in the empire vision.    There are some questions behind the plot - whether the goal justified the means, since many of the book's hero characters, lose their life as a result of some of the actions,   whether democracy is indeed a value (and if it is - whether today's political system is really democratic).  I think that the clash between the ancient Plato's outlook that the individual exists to serve the society  (Orson Scott Card's president is modeled after Plato's philosopher king as he writes in his epilogue to the books), or Aristotle's outlook that puts the individual in the middle and make society as means to serve the individual.
My own observation is that we gradually move from Plato's universe to Aristotle's universe, and that the current young generation puts the individual in the center.    Societies of all types (including high-tech companies) will require to adjust to this new world.    I have already written about the distinction between these two Greek philosophers, and will revisit this topic again. 

Pura vida

Pura vida  - means "pure life", is an expression that is being used in Costa Rica as: good morning, hello, response to the question "what's up?", general statement that life is good, thank you - and some others.  It is the motto behind life in Costa Rica.   We spent in Costa Rica 10 days (1 less than we planned),  and here are some impressions:

1.  Costa Rica is an excellent place for a trip in the nature - it has nice rain forests, rivers and volcanoes, as well beaches of the two oceans.
2. Animals -- you see them everywhere in nature.   There are various tours in foot, car and boat to see animals.   
3. The Parador hotel we stayed in the last 3 days of the trip is the best hotel I've ever been to (and I traveled all over the world). The picture above is the view from  the hotel room, it was elected several times as best hotel in central america (including Mexico), and best spa (I got there the best massage since my visit in Thailand in 2007), t it is located within a forest on a mountain overlooking the pacific  ocean in Manual Antonio,  it has various animals on site - a hawler monkey provided wake-up call in one of the days in 5am, with extremely loud voice, on the tree in front of the hotel room; a raccoon entered the daughters' room, when they did not close the balcony's door, and scared them a bit, other raccoons visited us at the dinner table,  and were scared away by the hotel staff.  An iguana caught some sun in the middle of the mini-golf course, and frogs have settled at night in the swimming pool. 
4. The local people in Costa Rica eat the same food - breakfast, lunch, dinner -- rice and beans and tropical fruits (in each they might have some supplements).   At the end we got tired from this food and escaped to the sushi menu at the Parador.
5. Rain -- Costa Rica has a lot of rain, especially in this season. It has a four day heavy rain storm at the pacific side, we had there in the last two of these in Monteverde, but we did most activities in the rain; luckily when we got to the beach the rain storm was over.
6. The road infrastructure cannot cope with the quantity of rain, thus many of the road have lot of holes, some of the main roads are not paved, and they call travelling in them as the "Costa Rican Massage".
7. Tourism has become the biggest industry in Costa Rica, over the last 25 years, which directed the education system towards this goal.   Most people can speak English.
8. The amount of Israelies we met was incredible given the distance and cost to get there,  it seems that it is now quite fashionable among Israelies who already explored Europe and USA to visit Costa Rica.
9. Iberia is the worst airline company I have ever used ---  in all aspects (including food),  the worst thing was that they did not let us get on the connection flight from Madrid to San Jose, Costa Rica, though we got to the gate 15 minutes before the scheduled flights, due to the fact that our flight from Israel was late 1 hour, and they decided they'll not have enough time to load the luggage, though we were 20 passengers coming on that flight, and the fact that they have 1 flight per day to Costa Rica, they did not agree to make any effort to get us on the flight.   They told us that since ELAL was responsible for the late flight - it is not their problem (we purchased the ticket from Iberia, and used Iberia ticket with code share).   We had to spend 24 hours in Madrid before getting on the next flight -- and lost the first segment of the trip (which is non-refundable as anything else in Costa-Rica).  I'll check if it is possible to sue Iberia for damages.   The attitude of their agents in Madrid was also very unfriendly - a big difference between the nice people of Costa Rica everywhere, and those of Spain). 
10. And on positive aspect --- Pura vida --- is a motto of positive thinking!

For more picture --- I am waiting that my daughters will put all the pictures taken on facebook. 

Now it is a lazy holiday -- back to work early next week, and already a business trip to Europe!

On "All my sons" and the western culture

Yesterday I spent the evening in the theater, watching "All my sons" again (in Hebrew).  The first time that I watched this play was in the age of 19,  I have tagged this play as the best theater play I have ever seen and the actors who played there as the best actors I have seen on stage.   These two assertions have not changed over the years,  it is still the best play I've ever seen, and the actors who played first time I saw it are indeed the best actors I've seen on stage.  The actors played yesterday are good, but not in the same league of the two giant actors from the past.


"All my sons"  is now in Israel plays to the popular sentiment.  It talks about taking the greed, and making the "business' and profits in the center of the universe.  In this play it takes it to extreme. shipping damaged airplane parts to "save the business" and causing many people to die is considered as extreme behavior, but the principle of putting profit in the center, is one of the cornerstones of the western culture.   Israel is now experiencing mass demonstrations with the slogan "the people demand social justice". In Saturday night there was the biggest demonstration that the country has experienced.  This wave challenges the western culture thinking, talking about "swinish capitalism", where cost of living for much of the population is too high since a relatively small group of people who are very rich, control most of the branches of the Israeli economy, with monopolies or oligopolies, and keep the cost high.   


Maybe in a social utopia, big corporations would say:  "we earn a lot of money, we can give up some profit in order to raise the standard of life for the common people, either by offering some cheap products if they are in the retail business, or sell directly to common people,  or if they sell to such businesses, do it indirectly,  by reducing price and in return ask them to reduce prices of some products to the end consumer, or if the customer is a government,  use the reduction to offer more social services",  


Of course, social utopia has nothing to do with reality,  the companies work in the real world of Wall Street analysts, executive bonuses linked to accounting metrics, and stock prices.   I wonder how many companies that would face the Joe Keller's dilemma from "All my sons" -- do something morally wrong, or risk losing the business,  would resist the temptation.    No wonder that Arthur Miller's play was accepted in unease in the USA in the 1940-ies, and earned him the title of communist.   But I think it is good as a food for thought. 

Doing what one is inspected to do instead of what one is expected to do

Lou Gerstner, the now mythological CEO of IBM that many still miss,  wrote an excellent book about his tenure as IBM's CEO, much of it is dedicated to his organizational culture battles.    The most famous quote from Gerstner's book is:  people are doing what they are inspected to do, not what they are expected to do. 


This is indeed true in IBM until today, but IBM is just a reflection of the western culture, in which anything is weighed and measured,  the metrics are intended to achieve some goals,  but get a life of their own, often not keeping close contact with the original goals.   Furthermore, people find creative ways to satisfy the metrics in ways that have nothing to do with the original goals, since satisfying the metrics become the goal.


Some examples:  In Israel the traffic police guys are measured by the quantity of traffic violation ticket they get credit for.  I remember many years ago that I've committed some traffic violation (turned left in a place in which turning left was forbidden between 7-9am, it was indeed a few minutes before 9am),  a police car that was quite far saw me, and then started a movie-style chase, the police car not only turned in the forbidden way, but traveled in the opposite side of the road, turning the traffic to stand in the side, and drive in a way that was very dangerous to the traffic, and when they caught me they wrote on the traffic violation ticket" -credit  XXX(name)".    Hope that the reward for the credit was worth the effort! 
Other examples:  One of the previous "legal advisers to the government", a position that in Israel is among other things that head of the state prosecution, wrote in his autobiography that he had again and again to remind the prosecutors that their goal is to ensure justice, however, since they are measured by the percentage of conviction, while they have decided to prosecute a person, they cannot back off, it will spoil the statistics.   More examples from the education system:   I have talked once with somebody who dealt with admission of graduate students in one of the best business schools in the USA,  he told me that sometimes they miss students that some indications (and faculty members) show they can be exceptional, but their score in the GMAT is not that great,  it is virtually impossible to pass these candidates through the admission committee, since it would spoil the statistics of minimum and average of the admitted students, and this is a metric that the business school measures itself against other business schools.  More in the educational system -   My long term observation is that for many of the students the goal is maximize the GPA, and gaining useful knowledge becomes secondary,  thus elective courses popularity is often determined according  to the past statistics about grades distribution.  One of my students had a special talent to know how to learn to exams, get very high grades, and not remembering much a week later.   According to the metrics he won -- he was on the president list.  This talent still helps him in his life.   Getting to the business world,  the fact that corporations that are traded in the stock market, are measured by Wall Street analysts quarterly on accounting measure (Earning per Share) has a major impact on how the business world behave,  first considerations are often short term (due to the quarterly metrics), and second, accounting thinking is not always consistent with economic thinking, furthermore, it enforces some low common denominator in the behavior of the business world and reduce variance in goals and natures of companies.
While metrics are not necessarily bad,  there are two observations about them:

1. There should be constant check whether the metrics still reflect the goals, and whether those who satisfy the metric do it in a way consistent with the goals - and adjust the metrics (or the goals) to avoid misuse (same kind of thinking as "fraud detection").
2. There are cases in which goals are not translated well to metrics, or there are exceptions that are consistent with the goals, but not with the metrics -- people should be brave enough to stick to the goals and ignore the metrics (or handle them later).  

I started with quote from Lou Gerstner --- which I see as one of the cornerstones of my own behavior, over the history I had several times "motivation talks" with people instrumented by metrics to advise me how to behave,  and I'll end with another phrase I like , which I use for this people:  My behavior is driven by a  a compass and not by a weather wane"

On tents and demonstrations in Israel

This is typically a professional Blog, with some off-topic deviations;  this posting is one of them.
Nowadays nobody that lives in Israel can ignore the phenomenon of the last couple of weeks:  mass protest in term of people demonstrating by living in tents in various places, mainly central Tel-Aviv, and the demonstrations all over the country last night (see picture above from the Tel-Aviv demonstration).    What is the demonstration about? -- it started as protest about the cost of housing both purchase price and rental price, and accumulated other reasons for protest - talking generally on "social justice".    In Israel the political focus as well as the major voting pattern is determined according to the war-and-peace decisions. Thus there is some abuse of the terms "right" and "left" in the Israeli politics, where (in gross generalization) typically "left" is referred as those who believe that Israel should take active steps towards peace, and support the establishment of Palestinian state, and "right" is referred as those who don't believe that peace is possible in our generation, and are against the establishment of Palestinian state.  Since many of the people are frustrated from the "peace process", there are more in Israel who voted for the "right" block in that sense, and currently we have the most extreme-right coalition ruling the country ever.     However the politically right administration happens also to possess social and economic right ideology, and it seems that this is the break point between the government and the people.
There are two types of socio-economic systems: the American system in which there are relatively low taxes, and relatively low social services; and the system of some of the European countries - with high taxes and high social services. It seems that gradually Israel adopts the bad aspects of both -- taxes are high (used to maintain the enormous defense expenses as well as supporting sectors that are part of the current coalition), social services are gradually decreasing.  On top of it,  the "free market competition" ideology that the current Prime-Minister imported from the USA in its extreme form, does not seem to work here. The reason is that the country is too small to have real competition, thus in each branch of the economy (banking, communication, food...) there are a small number of players who realize that it will be good for all to divide the market and maximize the revenues from its market share, and not really compete.  The Cartel oriented market and high sales taxes in various forms results in the fact that the prices of everything in Israel are now more expensive than almost anywhere else in the universe. Those who suffer most are the young people that try now to establish themselves, and discover that even with relatively high salaries, they get to financial difficulties, this is the population that started the protest, and this is the root cause of the current protest.   The required solution -- total change in the priorities and returning to the socially-based country.  Is it going to happen under the most right-wing government ever?   Will this become a social revolution or just phase out?  we'll have to wait and see. 


A footnote:  the entire protest started within Facebook, which still serves as a major vehicle for coordination.

 

  

Who do you work for?

I came across an interesting posting by Matthias Kaiserwerth, the director of the IBM Zurich Research Lab, entitled "who do you work for?".      In this posting Matthias raises the dilemma, that it is much easier to identify with a smaller organization, sometimes until the level of a single project or department, rather than to identify with a big corporate, or any division of it.     


I certainly agree,  in the past, the department I managed had a logo, and I found that people identified much easier with this department, relative to the lab, division, or IBM.    While this had a great contribution to the people's  motivation and "unit pride", it was not popular in the environment (which I never thought it is a strong consideration).    Creating excellence requires to have identification with a goal, it is much easier to identified with goals that one feels partner in, and not of some abstract entities.  

On Bitcoin

I learned today about an interesting concept of cyberspace currency called Bitcoin that is not issued by any country and not recognized by any bank that is used for trade over the Internet.

Coins are created by people who use massive computing resources to do sophisticated mathematical computing that guarantees the security of the system. There are already various trading sites that accept Bitcoin, and its value is rising. There are many interesting details about the way it works, but the interesting phenomenon is that an alternative economic system is created, bypassing the regular financial systems, regulators, governments and financial institutes. As a person who dislike any establisment, I like this idea; I think that it is very interesting idea, and will keep following it.

La vita è bella

I have a tradition to write about the holocaust day, two years ago I have written about my father and the king Alfred,  a posting that brought me many reactions from around the world.   Today is the eve of the holocaust day in Israel, and the TV broadcasts all evening holocaust related programs an movies.   My daughters called me to watch a movie called: La vita è bella, an Italian speaking movie  (in Israel the movies are not dubbed, they are sub-titled talking about father and son, both Italian Jewish, sent to a concentration camp, and the father plays for the son as if everything is one big game, and saves him various times.   It is a great movie (three academy awards),  where besides the plot there is a lot of symbolics, the idea to view all the events in the concentration camp as a game, where in some points the child discovers the reality, and tells his father that he heard that they are doing buttons and soap from people, and burning them, and his father treats it as if it is all just a joke.   
As I have written before, my late father, who was a sole survivor of a big family, used to say that this period occurred on another planet, and people who were not there, cannot understand it.   I think that it is good that one day a year is dedicated here to educate the younger generation which is two generations removed and give them some glance on that dark period. 

On accountability

We on the Carmel ridge are still in the after-shock of the big fire,  a good article in English describing it was written by Professor Fania Oz from Haifa University.   The rain that arrived yesterday (a little bit too late) has washed away some of the smell,  but the feeling here is bitter, also due to the politicians behavior.   Even during the four days of fire fighting, the politicians became busy in sending the blames to others.   The current political culture is that nobody is accountable for anything.   Imagine that in the business world, a corporate would have suffered a major disaster, and its executives would keep blaming each other, and nobody would think he is accountable.     While I don't tend to write about politics in this Blog, I think that in general, people who takes responsibilities need to be accountable,  and when a major disaster in a corporate happens, the CEO should draw the conclusions, otherwise the board of directors spell out these conclusions. I wish this was also part of our political culture, but where is exactly the country's board of directors?