The Makers of Modern Schooling

borrowed from John Taylor Gatto--->

The real makers of modern schooling weren't at all who we think.

	Not Cotton Mather
or Horace Mann
	or John Dewey

The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like:

	Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron...
John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil...
	Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty...
and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance...

Men like these, and the brilliant efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor, who inspired the entire "social efficiency" movement of the early twentieth century, along with providing the new Soviet Union its operating philosophy and doing the same job for Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; men who dreamed bigger dreams than any had dreamed since Napoleon or Charlemagne, these were the makers of modern schooling.

The Business of Schooling

If modern schooling has a “Fourth Purpose,” there must be an earlier three. Traditional forms of instruction in America, even before the Revolution, had three specific purposes: To make good people To make good citizens And to make each student find some particular talents to develop to the maximum. The new mass schooling which came about slowly but continuously after 1890, had a different purpose, a "fourth" purpose.
	The fourth purpose steadily squeezed the traditional three to the margins of schooling; in the fourth purpose, school in America became like school in Germany, a servant of corporate and political management.
We should reveal the mechanism of mind control training, habits, and attitudes.
The secret of commerce, that kids drive purchases, meant that schools had to become psychological laboratories where training in consumerism was the central pursuit.

Since bored people are the best consumers, school had to be a boring place, and since childish people are the easiest customers to convince, the manufacture of childishness, extended into adulthood, had to be the first priority of factory schools. Naturally, teachers and administrators weren't let in on this plan; they didn't need to be. If they didn't conform to instructions passed down from increasingly centralized school offices, they didn't last long.

In the new system, schools were gradually re-formed to meet the pressing need of big businesses to have standardized customers and employees, standardized because such people are predictable in certain crucial ways by mathematical formulae. Business (and government) can only be efficient if human beings are redesigned to meet simplified specifications. As the century wore on, school spaces themselves were opened bit by bit to commercialization.

These processes didn't advance evenly. Some localities resisted more than others, some decades were more propitious for the plan than others. Especially during and just after national emergencies like WWI, the Depression, WWII, and the Sputnik crisis, the scheme rocketed forward; in quieter moments it was becalmed or even forced to give up some ground.

But even in moments of greatest resistance, the institutions controlling the fourth purpose—great corporations, great universities, government bureaus with vast powers to reward or punish, and corporate journalism—increasingly centralized in fewer and fewer hands throughout the twentieth century, kept a steady hand on the tiller. They had ample resources to wear down and outwait the competition.

The prize was of inestimable value--control of the minds of the young.

School Becomes a Dangerous Place

After 1900 the new mass schooling arenas slowly became impersonal places where children were viewed as HUMAN RESOURCES. Whenever you hear this term, you are certain to be in the presence of employees of the fourth purpose, however unwitting. Human resource children are to be molded and shaped for something called "The Workplace," even though for most of American history American children were reared to expect to create their own workplaces.

In the new workplace, most Americans were slated to work for large corporations or large government agencies, if they worked at all.

This revolution in the composition of the American dream produced some unpleasant byproducts. Since systematic forms of employment demand that employees specialize their efforts in one or another function of systematic production, then clear thinking warns us that incomplete people make the best corporate and government employees.

Earlier Americans like Madison and Jefferson were well aware of this paradox, which our own time has forgotten. And if that is so, mutilation in the interests of later social efficiency has to be one of the biggest tasks assigned to forced schooling.

Not only was the new form of institution spiritually dangerous as a matter of course, but school became a physically dangerous place as well. What better way to habituate kids to abandoning trust in their peers (and themselves) than to create an atmosphere of constant low-level stress and danger, relief from which is only available by appeal to authority? And many times not even then!

. Horace Mann had sold forced schooling to industrialists of the mid-nineteenth century as the best "police" to create moral children, but ironically, as it turned out in the twentieth century, big business and big government were best served by making schoolrooms antechambers to Hell.

School Becomes An Arena of Meaningless Pressure

	School became jail-time to escape if you could, arenas of meaningless pressure as with the omnipresent "standardized" exams, which study after study concluded were measuring nothing real.
For instance, take the case of Bill Bradley. . .
	and George W. Bush,
two of the four finalists in the 2000 presidential race. Bradley had a horrifying 480 on the verbal part of his own SATs, yet graduated from Princeton, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and became a senator; Bush graduated from Yale, became governor of Texas, and president of the United States—with a mediocre 550. If you can become governor, senator, and president with mediocre SAT scores, what exactly do the tests measure?
Perhaps they sort out good scientists from bad? If so, how is it that both the scientists principally involved in the Human Genome Project have strange scholarly backgrounds to say the least!
	Francis S. Collins, the head of the public portion, was home-schooled, never followed any type of formal curriculum, and is a born-again Christian.
Craig Venter was a very bad boy in high school, a surfing bum who nearly flunked out, and he didn't go to college after graduation, but into the U.S. Army as an enlisted man before being shipped off to Vietnam!

School As a Place of Bewilderment and Boredom

	As you'll learn when you read The Underground History of American Education the new purpose of schooling—to serve business and government—could only be achieved efficiently by isolating children from the real world, with adults who themselves were isolated from the real world, and everyone in the confinement isolated from one another.
Only then could the necessary training in boredom and bewilderment begin. Such training is necessary to produce dependable consumers and dependent citizens who would always look for a teacher to tell them what to do in later life, even if that teacher was an ad man or television anchor.

For further edification go to –

http://www.world-prosperity.org/

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com

Read this, if you dare!

AGAINST SCHOOL

How public education cripples

our kids, and why

By John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the

Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American

Education. He was a participant in the Harper's Magazine forum "School on a Hill,"

which appeared in the September 2003 issue.

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover t~at all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insightsimply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.(the NWO like their sheeple dull and docile-DH)

Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to render the populace "manageable."

It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

Tre you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.

Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."

It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

Energy Policy Overview

russell wagner

Any sane energy policy must be an integrated effort, resulting in integrated energy production, distribution and usage frameworks. Point solutions, like those in existence today, will not cut it. To that end, the policy implementation will go forward in phased steps of 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 year increments.

The viability of promulgating a comprehensive plan all the way through to the 50 year mark will not be addressed in this document, but personally, I don't believe that a Mega-giganto “Battlestar Galactica” style plan is necessary. Many technologies will have to be developed ad-hoc, as they were during the Manhattan Project and the moon race (Apollo Program). Also, all implementations will, of course and by necessity, be done with respect to SANE concerns for the natural environment. However, any implementation will be executed with the concept of the primacy of the human species and it's survival foremost in mind. The age of radical environmental extremism will be permanently put to bed, with the harshest of legal penalties for obstructionists.

To that end, I propose the following -

1. Use of hardware/software technologies to ramp up efficiency in the use of current fossil fuels, both in production and end use. Fossil fuel is not going away anytime soon, but it is imperative that we make the most efficient use of what we have. CONCURRENT WITH THIS EFFORT -

2. Ramp up government incentives (tax credits, direct investment in entrepreneurial efforts, subsidies, even new Federal agencies) for the following technologies -

• Solar Thermal (NOT photo-voltaic. Let the free market handle that mess.).

• Geo-couple (sink large thermocouple units in existing dormant oil wells)

• Fuel cell power generation (mated to geo-couple).

• Tidal and Hydro-electric (Massive units...no small point solutions!).

• Nuclear, using the French model for production and disposal of reactor waste.

• Massive wind power farms (located where the wind is – the Midwest, Gulf coast, etc.).

As alt.energy output rises, fossil fuel output will become less important, and will eventually drop off completely. When that economic crossover occurs, then H2 (hydrogen fuel) and ethanol (from biomass) can be produced in accordance with the economies of scale (at that time extant) with respect to the alt.energy output. This will hasten the abandonment of fossil fuel usage, as it will be replaced by H2 and biomass EtOH. Right now the ratio of fossil fuel required to produce an equivalent volume of alt.energy fuel is too far above unity (1/1) to be economically practical. (See graph below).

A word about the importance of integrating these efforts. The focus on systems integration, especially with regards to modular approaches, derive from the fact that most efforts of significant scales are composed of a multitude of processes and/or utilize multimodal inputs and outputs. For example, during the moon race, the Soviets built rockets bigger by simply strapping on more and more boosters. This led to the Energia N-1 moon booster, which had 72 rocket motors on the first stage. In an age prior to the development of microchip based computing power, this is obviously not practical. Three launches were attempted, all failed, with the booster having to be destroyed. Meanwhile, Werner Von Braun's' team at NASA developed the Saturn V booster. It had only five rocket motors on the first stage, but all fuel systems, pumps, servos, etc were totally integrated. Good system integration can make the difference between going to the moon, and having to blow your rocket up.

Other benefits -

Stopping the huge flow of money going to countries that do not share our belief in democracy and free markets -- Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

Those petrodollars would be reinvested right here at home. I believe that alternative energy would be a future source of economic growth. It would create new industries and American jobs.

I am not a socialist who wants to regulate markets. I prefer a variety of incentives for both businesses and consumers. I also firmly believe in free markets ( we don't have a free energy market today) and I expect that corporations will lead the way on technological innovation, once they smell a dollar.

--Possible Benchmarks--

1) By 2030, reduce U.S. oil dependence by 50%;

2) Increase efficiency and renewables in the electricity and natural gas markets;

3) Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% (probably 30%) by 2030, 50% by 2040, 80% by 2050, and 90% by 2060;

“My client is looking to get directly connected with IT Directors, IT Managers and IT Purchasing.

His goal is to drive his business forward and increase his overall Sales Effectiveness by creating an IT Purchasing network. As I said in my question, my client is the Vice President of a Value Added Reseller. We have created a strategic plan to grow his segment of revenues by 20% over the next 6 months. It is an aggressive plan and one that requires the right contacts. Do you have any ideas how we could grow the IT Purchasing list for him to increase his client base? I am open to presenting all ideas to him and would appreciate any ideas that you have to offer.”

Let’s set the tone -

I believe that most practitioners of enterprise technology planning are asking the wrong questions. Because their questions are largely about technology, the results of these questions are answers dominated by the logic of technology itself, rather than by the mission or methods of the organization.

Many observers will agree that common complaints about technology projects --resistance to change, long sales cycles, inappropriate technology, unexpected costs, and unused tools -- are often the inevitable result of this techno-centric planning. The only way to unravel this problem is to go to the source and challenge the questions we ask.

In this point paper, I will touch on three questions of my own: In general, what kinds of questions should planners/providers be asking? What kinds of questions are they actually asking, in the field of business technology planning? How can we fix this?

First of all, growing the purchasing list and adding platinum-plated contacts to the bucket will prove futile at best and implode the company at worst (cost death spiral). I think your client needs to step back and look at what his company is actually offering to prospects. Otherwise they end up as just another discount IT warehouse, like CDW. Nothing wrong with CDW, but that low-ball baseline pricing with heavy/cute adverting is a saturated effort. Let’s change the experiment.

My overview will deal with what is the “As-Is” framework that outsourcers look at, and what should be the “To-Be” model? IOW, how will your client distinguish or differentiate from all the rest? The answer, I think, does not lie in the pricing model (maxed out) or the purchasing network (not unique enough) but in service delivery.

Most outsourcers have gravitated to one of three models for service delivery, and their subsequent reputations reflect the service delivery model. These approaches are:

1. Tech Centric – EDS is the best example, even to the point of changing phone numbers of the re-badged employees or physically moving them out of the geographical area.

2. Customer Intimacy – CSC is the best proponent of this approach. Account executives are ALWAYS available 24/7, meetings are called whenever the client contact point(s) desire, and SLA’s are as flexible as Jello.

3. System Integration – SAIC, period. ALL processes are blueprinted first, then technology and IT governance is applied. Great approach IMHO.

Of course one could say a proper mix of these approaches would be best but what %, and who determines that mix? All are valid concerns.

Let’s use CSC as our example outsourcer and General Dynamics as our client, I was part of this team as a Senior Project Manager and boss of the PMO, so I know a little about this dynamic. CSC, like almost ALL sourcing agents, used a variety of vendors for providing software and hardware, but the governance of how these assets were deployed, occurred with CSC personnel under the managerial aegis of CSC. So we dealt with IBM, HP, Compaq, 3com. Gatorbox, Cisco, etc. This incurred a large management and paperwork burden, All configuration management, change control, asset tagging, et al, occurred with CSC.

The problems inherent in this model are obvious – scattered accounting (cost and responsibility), co-ordination of ALL IT Governance functions (asset management, change/control, PM, etc) is impaired. An integrated, systems approach offering would be better. Why? Let me tell you a little story…

The focus on systems integration, especially with regards to modular approaches, derive from the fact that most efforts of significant scales are composed of a multitude of processes and/or utilize multimodal inputs and outputs. Now for the English translation - during the moon race, the Soviets built rockets bigger by simply strapping on more and more boosters. This led to the Energia N-1 moon booster, which had 72 rocket motors on the first stage. In an age prior to the development of microchip based computing power, this is obviously not practical. Three launches were attempted, all failed, with the booster having to be destroyed. Meanwhile, Werner Von Braun's' team at NASA developed the Saturn V booster. It had only five rocket motors on the first stage, but all fuel systems, pumps, servos, etc were totally integrated, mutually supporting the others. Good system integration can make the difference between going to the moon, and having to blow your rocket up.

So what would be a good, solid workable offering to these IT Pros you want to hook? And it would have to be sellable, understandable. How about –

Now the client accountants have just one line item to track, one set of reports to read and archive (throw in the trash), and the account executive can get some sleep!

I’m not saying this is an end-all / be-all plan… just an idea to keep in your back pocket “just-in-case”.

I admit, I have no idea what your strategic plan is – I’m not a salesperson, and all my contacts I could provide you with are either dead, or have moved on professionally. But I believe that by “cutting the Gordian Knot” process-wise, your client could:

1. Expand current revenue steams b offering this approach

2. Expand his client base with a unique product

3. Get his own Wikipedia entry for taking credit for this innovation (it’s OK, he can have it - or you – whatever).

Appendix A

Integrating the Help Desk

Behold!

A New Model for The War on Terror

russell wagner

How Did We Get Here?

“only the dead have known the end of war” - Plato

September 11, 2001 – WTC II

Kobhar Towers, US Embassies in African and USS Cole bombed (1996 -2000)

WTC bombing (1993)	Fatah Party disbands PLO (1995)
Desert Storm (1991) – US troops in Saudi Arabia	Mujahideen folded into Al-Qaeda (1992)
Taliban take over Afghanistan (1990: Benezir Bhutto)	(1989) Al-Qaeda est./ Arbusto/BCCI scandal. Funded Taliban/ al-qaeda (1990)

(1979) Soviets invade Afghanistan

Wahabbist “Talibs” in Pakistan

1981 - Mujahideen in Afghanistan

1964 – King Saud deposed in S.A. / Wahabbists in Saudi Arabia

1966 - Sayyid Qutb hanged in Egypt

Dr. Abdullah Yusuf Azzam begins teaching in Pakistan (star pupil is Usama Bin-Laden)

1953 – In Iran, Moseegah assassinated, Shah Ras Palavih installed in Iran	the U.S. - 1948	PLO- 1964
	1954 -1964 Sayyid Qutb publishes “Milestones” and “In the Shade of the Koran”.

Oil Concessions (1921)

Ascent of Grand Mufti Al-Hassani (1931-1945)

Franco-British Colonial Period in ME (1922 - 1951)

1948 -1962 Post WWII Colonial Liberation

Lawrence/Faisal – Pan Arabism (not Islamism!) 1919

Post- WWI Mid- East

(1925) Gertrude Bell & Sunni Hegemony in Iraq

(1927) Al-Bana & The Muslim Brotherhood -/- Pan-Islamic Alliance proposed

World War One 1914-1919CE

Gallipoli/Attaturk Lawrence/Sykes Pincot

Ottoman Empire – 1100 – 1922 CE

Seljuk Empire (post-caliphate) 1030 – 1199CE

Post-Ali Caliphate @840 - 1029CE

Arab Imperialism @624 - 839CE

Ethical Dilemmas in Fighting Terrorism

"Muslims cannot be defeated by others. We Muslims are not defeated by our enemies, but instead, we are defeated by our own selves." Dr. Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, founder of Al-Qaeda

• When a person wearing a nail bomb vest enters the food court at the mall, shouts “Allah Akbar” and detonates the thing killing and maiming dozens pf women and children, there are two things I know for certain – it was not a strictly military act subject to the Geneva Convention, nor was it a conventional criminal act, subject to Western Legal frameworks. We need a new model of action to deal with this.

• As we sought to formulate how to fight terror, we understood that the main asymmetry is in the values of the two societies involved in the conflict - in the rules they obey. We are fighting with a people that have totally different values and rules of engagement.

• How do we differentiate between terrorists and non-terrorists? Everyone who is directly involved in terror is a legitimate target. Those who are indirectly involved in terror are not a legitimate target.

• Some asked if the collateral damage was producing future terrorists. We found that because of the level of incitement, the collateral damage only raised public support for terror from 95 to 96 percent.

• In August 1998 we (Clinton Admin.) had all the leadership of Hamas in one room and we knew we needed a 2,000-pound bomb to eliminate all of them. Think about having Osama bin Laden and all the top leadership of al-Qaeda in one house. However, use of a 2,000-pound bomb was not approved - we used a much smaller bomb - and they all got up and ran away.

• We should do the job at the checkpoints ethically, professionally, and as fast as we can because we have to care about the many times the ambulance is really carrying somebody who needs help.

• The bottom line is that the U.S. has to fight terror because terror declared war on us. In the current war the U.S. has lost over 1,000 people – that is equivalent to the U.S. suffering 45,000 dead and 300,000 wounded. We can win, but we must do it as ethically as the Jewish people, as a democratic state, and as military officers who respect their ethical profession.

Updating the Concept of War

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) found it necessary to update its military doctrine in 2003 in light of changing threats to the U.S.'s security. While they were prepared for traditional war, a war in which tanks fight tanks, planes fight planes, and infantry fight infantry, the Israelis needed to update doctrine to include threats from ballistic missiles, weapons of mass destruction, and terror - in which the fighting has no clear front where armies meet.

As part of that updating, Prof. Asa Kasher, Professor of Professional Ethics at Tel Aviv University, joinedthe IDF ethics committee - comprised of field commanders, brigade commanders, division commanders, philosophers, even a lawyer - to craft principles on how to make moral and ethical decisions in the U.S.'s operational campaign against terror.

As they sought to try and formulate how to fight terror, all understood that we were all in a different kind of war, where the laws and ethics of conventional war did not apply. It involves not only the asymmetry of tanks hunting against guerrilla fighters or airplanes chasing terrorists. The main asymmetry is in the values of the two societies involved in the conflict - in the rules they obey. This is not a war between the U.S. and Russia or Germany and France, where the international rule of law is accepted by both sides. In this case, we are fighting with a people that have totally different values and rules of engagement.

In postmodern warfare, every fundamental concept of war has changed. First, who is the enemy in this case? Normally, a state is the enemy, or a well-defined organization such as the PLO. In this war, no state or organization is accountable. Second, wars in the past happened at the front line. Suddenly there is no defined front, no defined border. The terrorists are all over. What kind of rules are we to take into consideration when we plan an operation when there is no border? Third, who are the combatants? Are they soldiers with uniforms? The basic law of a just war was based on the assumption that one has to differentiate between those who fight and those who are non-combatants. There are rules of engagement based on the idea that it is possible to differentiate between the two. In the case of terrorists, however, civilians are killing civilians.

The Definition of Victory

Finally, what does it mean to win such a war? Is it putting a flag on a hill? Is it conquering territory? Is it destroying the enemy's divisions or airfields? To answer this question, it is necessary to understand the rationale of the other side.

In the current terror war Israel has lost over 1,000 people. This is equivalent to the U.S. suffering 45,000 dead and 300,000 wounded. This is more than Israel lost in the Six-Day War, a "real" war. At the start, all of Israel's strategic criteria were declining: no economic growth, no newcomers, no tourists, no hope in the hearts of people, no light in their eyes. But today the economy is growing, we see tourists arriving again, we see that people are getting back to their normal lives. This is the meaning of victory, in this case.

New Ethical Rules for the Counter-Terrorism War

A new model of warfare - the counter-terrorism war - requires a new set of rules on how to fight it. The other side is fighting outside the rules and we have to create new ethical rules for the international law of armed conflict, in keeping with the traditional IDF concept of "the purity of arms."

Terror is easier to fight in non-democratic states. King Hussein used a lot of force in 1970, with no supreme court, and without being exposed to the media, and terror stopped in Jordan. In 1982 in Hama, Syrian President Assad killed 30,000 people and he got rid of Islamic fundamentalist terror. Yet the U.S. cannot use these means; we have to do it in an ethical way.

Our job is preventing terror. Yet we face a tragic dilemma. Whatever we decide when fighting terror, some innocent people are going to get hurt. On the one hand, there are the U.S. citizens that the terrorists want to kill. On the other hand, the terrorists are hiding behind innocent civilians. It is very important when people's lives are at stake that there is a moral understanding and precise rules for moral conduct.

The duty of the state is to defend its citizens. Any time a terrorist gets away because of concerns about collateral damage, we may be violating our main duty to protect our citizens. We look for alternatives so as not to cause collateral damage, or to cause the minimum amount of collateral damage, but the main obligation is to defend our citizens. We also have an obligation towards the citizens on the other side who are under our effective control. We have an obligation to hit the terrorists. And we have an obligation toward our soldiers, to protect their lives. Who should be our first priority?

We decided we have two separate obligations to the citizens on the other side. Those who are under our effective control are almost like our citizens. When we are in a position to arrest the terrorists, there is no need for a targeted interception. But in Gaza, which is controlled by the terrorists, many people will be killed on both sides when trying to arrest a terrorist. In such a situation, interception becomes much more efficient and a more ethical choice in this case.

Under the international law of war, military necessity justifies almost everything. Yet the U.S. has limited its right to invoke military necessity by requiring additional conditions, including: Purpose - that the action is really helping to defend our citizens; Intelligence and Proof - that what we are doing is really saving the lives of people in the U.S.; Effectiveness - that if there is going to be a lot of collateral damage we have to look for another alternative.

We did not tailor this ethical code just for the IDF in its war against Palestinian terrorists. We think this code is good for the Americans or for the Russians when they are fighting terrorists - it fits any kind of hypothetical counter-terrorist scenario.

Differentiating between Terrorists and Non-Terrorists

How do we differentiate between terrorists and non-terrorists? International law says one may target any soldier. Today, everyone in the U.S. will agree that one is allowed to kill someone carrying a ticking bomb. But where do we draw the line? We know that everyone on the other side who belongs to a certain mosque may support terror because in that mosque they are inciting to terror. Everyone on the other side who watches Palestinian TV may support terror because the entire Palestinian media is supporting terror. Is it legitimate to attack them? No.

We have to learn who belongs to the operational terror chain, which includes the suicide bomber, the one who produces the explosives, and the driver. Everyone who is directly involved in terror is a legitimate target in this war on terror. Those who are indirectly involved in terror are not a legitimate target. The one who brings in money to the Hamas charity in L.A., who is indirectly involved in terror, will be arrested by the legal system and not targeted by a military action. The same holds for the preacher in the mosque who says that all Jews are pigs and monkeys.

The principle of liability also comes into consideration. How liable is it that someone who has committed ten suicide bomber deliveries will do the eleventh? Until he announces his retirement from the terror attack business, he is on the list based on liability. If he retires, the legal system will take care of him, not the military.

Deterrence is also a principle to be considered. If the U.S. is seen to be targeting every terrorist, this tells the terrorists that they have to worry about being terrorists.

In the case of preventive action based on liability or deterrence, since the prevention of imminent threat is not as clear, the bar of collateral damage is much higher. We are not allowed collateral damage when we are operating based on liability or deterrence.

The principle of proportionality in the U.S.'s actions is based on the amount of danger: How imminent? How great is the threat? Is it mega-terror? Is it a weapon of mass destruction? Is it chemical terror?

Some members of the committee asked if we weren't creating wonderful rules of engagement for fighting terror, but that the collateral damage was producing future terrorists. We looked very seriously at this issue of the long-term consequences of operations against terror and found that because of the level of incitement, the collateral damage only raised public support for terror from 95 to 96 percent, and not from 30 to 90 percent.

Nevertheless, we decided that from an ethical point of view, whenever possible, we must give early warning to those who are living around terrorists. Sometimes from an operational point of view this will cancel the operation because the terrorist whose neighbor is being warned will disappear. This is balanced on a scale and, if the threat is not imminent, a decision is sometimes made to let the terrorist run away and look for an opportunity to target him in a place where there will be no collateral damage.

Six Rules

“Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope “ Al-Qaeda slogan

Six Rules, based on the British experience in Malaysia, seem most the most effective:

1. Keep an achievable, realistic goal uppermost in mind. “Eliminating Global Terror” is not realistic. Containing it is.

2. Coordinate your efforts with all concerned governments. Terror organizations are extra-statist, so this is critical.

3. Intel ---> Know thy enemy!

4. Separate terror organizations from their base of support.

5. Neutralize them physically when you can.

6. Have a Post Action Plan at the ready.
   
   

What is a Terrorist Act?

• Terrorism is a term used to describe violence or other harmful acts committed (or threatened) against civilians by groups or persons for political or ideological goals (fear in latin). ...

• terrorism: the calculated use of violence (or threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious...

• means an act of violence, other than civil disorder or riot, (that is not an act of war, declared or undeclared) that results in loss of life or major damage to property, by any person acting of behalf of or in connection with any organization which is generally recognized as having the intent ...

Obviously (to me at least) when a person wearing a nail bomb vest enters the food court at the mall, shouts “Allah Akbar” and detonates the thing killing and maiming dozens pf women and children, there are two things I know for certain – it was not a strictly military act subject to the Geneva Convention, nor was it a conventional criminal act, subject to Western Legal frameworks. We need a new model of action to deal with this. To back up that model, I believe we need a new process and resource allocation of assets to counter these actions.

The central point of this force is resource-driven by mission. Their job is to never come home, that is, always deployed. Not the individuals, but the jobs, the MOS' if you like. This group would be a combination USMC Marine Amphibious Unit (3000 Marines, combat-loaded) a SEAL Team, CIA/NSA Intel asset teams, State Department personnel and Peace Corps personnel with expertise in civil engineering, agriculture, etc. The basic mission of this force is both terror neutralization by military means and by “hearts and minds” - separating the terrorists from their base of support.

I would compose this group accordingly:

One USS Blue Ridge type Command and Control vessel.

Two LHA/LHD Assault ships (Tarawa or Wasp Class)

Two LPD/LSD ships

Two LKH ships

One Mobile class oiler

One Dry stores ship

One Combat Cargo stores ship

One General repair Tender

One Aegis class cruiser

Two Burke class DDG's

Four Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates

Unlike every other unit in the USN, this one is completely self-contained. The Forward Deployed Team has its own operations, intelligence, training and supply/support departments. In addition, each SWORD (Special Warfare Operations/Rapid Deployment) Team has its own transportation systems, from a assault ships to smaller vessels. This allows each SWORD Team to act as rapidly and autonomously as possible in a crisis situation, and more importantly, provides for tighter security than most other USN units.

Adjusting Forward Deployment and Increasing Military Engagement
and Mobility

Requirements
	Make U.S. forces more "expeditionary." Adjust forward deployment by reducing Cold War heavy, permanently-deployed forces and increasing short-term deployments, exercises, training, military-to-military contacts, and engagement with foreign militaries. [pp. 42-3]
Short-term, rotational deployments, plus increased military-to-military contacts and training can serve many of the same goals as large permanent forces in an extensive base infrastructure, and that irregular, as opposed to rote, exercises can establish effective military-to-military relationships. It holds that a more flexible and agile form of forward deployment can reduce the political and other costs of the old version.

Micro-sourcing - Yeah. When you need JUST ONE THING DONE!
As a former consultant with IBM Global and CSC, I was always used to large outsourcing contracts for IT departments. I was in on 2 of the largest - DuPont and Hughes which were both over 10 billion (yes, wit a "b") and required armies of engineers, markerting pukes, MBA types and other bullshit artists to make go. But my buddy Jim has got himself involved in a new kind of business sector for the small to medium biz guys. The company he works for provides just "onesies" and "twosies" for companies here in the Bluegrass - companies that just need one guy to do one thing, usually on a contract basis. I am reading Alvin and Heidi Tofflers "Revolutionary Wealth" right now ( I LOVE the Tofflers)and he term "micro-sourcing" came to mind. A quick Google of the web drilled it down to this:

Micro-Sourcing

Definition: The practice of outsourcing a single discreet task that
would otherwise be added to the workload of someone who didn’t
necessarily specialize in that one specific discipline.

Use: Typically practiced by organizations that are technical,
virtual, flat, and obsessed with process.

Check this shit out -of course some one on the net had the same concept!
this guy sort of gets what i talked to you about. her are some weird
character cuz i got it of a german web site, but read it all please.
russell


Micro-sourcing and micro-ISVs

Posted by bobw under Ideas

By Bob Walsh

Every so often in the software industry a new idea that creates a whole
new kind of software. I think we're on the verge of just such a new
category: micro-sourcing. I define micro-sourcing as the ability to
quickly and effortlessly access skilled services for specific
micro-tasks from within a desktop or web application. Let me give you a
couple of potential examples of micro-sourcing

* You're working in your photo application like Adobe
Elements. There's a photo you really would like to fix and all the
auto this? an auto that? commands are too much
for you to deal with. So you click the micro-source button and up
pops a dialog where you offer to pay a dollar for someone, anyone,
to correct this photo. You click OK, and a day later you have your
corrected photo for approval and your account is debited a buck.
* You're working in your RSS reader, or least trying to, but there's
still too much information. You click your micro-source button and
offer five dollars a week for someone, somewhere, who will send
you an annotated e-mail of the RSS items that based on your
discussion with them you will find most useful and valuable. Think
micro Virtual Assistant.
* You're working at Microsoft Excel, and you're trying to get a
spreadsheet to work right. Something is wrong but you just don't
know what. So you click the micro-source button, enter your
account number, mark the spreadsheet to only go to a trusted and
bonded expert, and in a few hours they then tangled the mess
you've made.
* You're working in the Microsoft Excel, and your company has signed
up with an online micro-sourcing provider who provides Excel
expertise from trusted consultants five minutes at a time. All you
have to do while in Excel is click a button, voice note what
you're trying to do, click how much you think it's worth and click OK.

If you think these are fanciful, if you think that micro-sourcing isn't
going to happen, you might want to take a look at the following:

* Castingwords.com where you can get a
transcription of a podcast for about one quarter of the
traditional cost for audio transcription. They are using Amazon's
mechanical Turk (AMT) service
to slice up the work, distribute it, pay their workers
and recombine into a
value-added product.
* âEURoeHow Amazon/AMT can change the internet economy.âEUR?

Over at bitporters.net (which got me
thinking about this subject) where the blogger sees AMT becoming
AMTSense?, and alternative to Google AdSense as a way of
supporting all the Web 2.0 sites out there by doing micro amounts
of work for each other.
* The growth/interest in microformats such as iCal and extending RSS
via SSE. (See this post , and
this post for more
info if SSE as Microsoft(TM)s Next Big Thing has not hit your
radar screen.)

Three things have prevented micro-sourcing from taking off up to now.

First the relative difficulty of dealing with micro-payments in a
trusted way. Amazon must have finally beat in the heads of the payment
processors because today you can buy for all of $.49 short original
stories and articles called Amazon Shorts. Ebay and a million other
ecommerce sites laid the groundwork as well.

The second thing that has been missing has been a general backend
market-creating service which allows people to sell their time, labor,
and judgment a few moments at a time. Amazon Mechanical Turk has filled
that gap: it is a Web service (REST/SOAP) that is being extended to work
as the back end of any Web 2.0 site. I don't think the day will be far
before Amazon offers a way to connect to AMT directly from a desktop
application. If that idea excites you, post a comment at AMTâEUR^(TM)s
blog here .

*The third thing that's missing is you. *Micro-ISVs - because we are
small, nimble and hungry - can create, launch, support and market
micro-sourcing libraries, applications and Web 2.0 sites. Since a
micro-sourcing enabled application or website is so much more then a
traditional application website, micro-sourcing gives us a powerful
secret sauce? versus traditional ISVs when bringing our
products and services to market.

I think the market for this has existed for some time, as other industries (chemical for example) have done it for decades. I will be throwing in with him on this deal, and see what happens...

russell