Rick Ladd & Associates

A throwback to my early days at Rocketdyne and my comparison of W. Edwards Deming's 14-points of Total Quality Management and my analysis of what I then perceived as Rocketdyne's 14 counterpoints.

Deming and Rocketdyne A comparison of W. Edwards Deming’s 14-point of Total Quality Management with the management realities of Rocketdyne when I was beginning my nearly quarter century employment there.

After ~25 hours of training, 5 hours of setup today, I will be working a voting center in Ventura, CA for 11-12 hours on Sat, Sun, & Mon, then 17-18 hours on Tue. I'll be 77 soon and 3/8 is the 1-yr anniversary of my pacemaker implant. I know I'm going to be whipped on Tue, but I consider it an honor to serve ALL my fellow citizens.

You'd think the scumbags of SCOTUS could put themselves out to let the electorate know if Trump is guilty or not.

Freaking cowards!

Today I complete the very basic 5.5 hours of training I'm receiving as a Lead Election Worker here in Ventura County, CA. Next week I will be receiving 20 hours of hands-on training before I cover the over 40 hours my polling station will be open.

I've staffed the polls before, but never at this level. Have to say I'm impressed with the attention to detail and the efforts to ensure everyone's vote counts and nobody votes more than once or if they're not eligible.

This is a "gift" link to WaPo from a friend who is a subscriber. Not sure it will work for all, but giving it a go.

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Why millions of job seekers aren’t getting hired in this hot job market Job seekers increasingly want higher pay, more flexibility, and remote options. Meanwhile, companies continue to favor candidates with several years of experience, availability to work evening or weekend hours, and willingness to work in-person.

This is my first encounter with "Think With Google." This collection is mostly aimed at marketing efforts and how digital transformation can help organizations become better at serving their customers' needs and fulfilling their mission. At first I found it a bit too generalized, but there's a bit more detail than noticeable at first blush. At the end of this collection of shared experiences, there is an opportunity to take a deeper dive into what these snippets hint at.

Route to Ready: Digital transformation leaders - Think with Google Google’s Official Digital Marketing Publication. Browse digital transformation tips from agency leaders to learn to adapt to consumer behavior changes.

I wrote this a little over seven years ago, posting it to my blog-Systems Savvy-and to Medium. I think it still resonates.

All Hail The Beneficent, Ubiquitous Keyboard There’s a little sort of game going on in Facebook lately. Someone is challenged to list three things they’re thankful for for seven days…

I posted the following to LinkedIn yesterday and thought I would share it here as well:

Hey everybody. Well, at least the people who know me and, perhaps, have wondered where I've been. Two years ago, my youngest daughter announced she wanted to drop out of school. She was a sophomore in high school at the time.

Needless to say, I dropped everything I was doing and concentrated on helping her deal with the issues that were causing her to feel like giving up was the best course of action. As an older, internationally adopted toddler, she was saddled with some difficult learning issues and has struggled to get through her classes. Fortunately, she has an IEP (Individualized Education Program) which allows her teachers and the school to take those issues into consideration.

She is now a senior and is attending a school that is an independent learning academy. During the pandemic lock-down of our local schools, she thrived working at home. She has a problem with other children and having to work with dozens surrounding her has always been a challenge.

Her new school, coupled with a new medication for depression she started taking (and which seems to be working) has tamped down her anxiety, which means I'm not living moment-to-moment awaiting her next trauma and having to deal with it.

So - I'm just coming up for air after two years of trauma, exacerbated by the pandemic and my having been infected at the beginning of this year. I am still experiencing some long-haul symptoms, but am doing remarkable well for someone my age, with my comorbidities.

I may not be fully functional until next June, when she graduates (God willing and the creek don't rise,) but I'm working on it and will be spending more time on LinkedIn (and here) as I seek a few clients/gigs. I'm deeply thankful I was in a position to spend as much time as I have with her, but I'm really looking forward to having more time to spend on myself and my continuing desire to be useful to others.

I just posted this on LinkedIn, where I have been inactive for far too long. It explains why I've not been too communicative for the past couple of years. Please read if you have a mind to. Thank you.

Rick

Rick Ladd on LinkedIn: Hey everybody. Well, at least the people who know me and, perhaps, | 11 comments Hey everybody. Well, at least the people who know me and, perhaps, have wondered where I've been. Two years ago, my youngest daughter announced she wanted... 11 comments on LinkedIn

Have a need for custom tools, but don't have the capability of developing them yourself? Check out this concept.

Review these 9 low-code use cases and industry examples Is low-code right for your environment? Consider the following low-code use cases to see if this development approach makes sense for your business needs, and what elements should be at the forefront of your decision-making process.

Though short, this article does address what is the most critical aspects of an organization's attempts at digital transformation of their operations:

1. How is it affected by (as well as how it affects) the organization's culture, and

2. Does it improve the organization's ability to achieve its primary strategic objectives in improving customer experience.

One object that isn't mentioned is that any attempt at transformation should not confine itself merely to improving efficiency but, more importantly, it must improve effectiveness.

Digital Transformation is not all About ‘Doing Digital’ - EnterpriseTalk Although digital transformation is a trendy topic, most business leaders are unaware of the entire depth of what it entails.

As someone who introduced a "tool" (we called them "enablers" back then) almost two decades ago to do what this article describes Glean as being capable of doing, I find it exceedingly frustrating that so little seems to have changed in the interim. Actually, that tool (it was called AskMe) was abandoned several years ago, much to the chagrin of those of us who worked so hard to implement it.

I have no doubt Glean is more powerful than AskMe was. After all, nearly 20 years have passed since it was first rolled out for the Space Shuttle Main Engine team and, ultimately, for all of Rocketdyne. Had the company continued using it, we can be reasonably certain AskMe would have been updated and improved as time went by. In the nearly a decade we had it, there had been many upgrades and improvements.

I left the following comment at the Valdosta Daily Times:

It is hardly the "first time" workers have been able to take advantage of the tools that are available outside the firewall. The Space Shuttle Main Engine team at Rocketdyne rolled out a tool called AskMe in 2002, nearly two decades ago, that connected experts (and expertise in the form of documents, URLs, etc.) to people who needed it, when they needed it. It's frustrating to learn that we're once again "reinventing the wheel" and acting like we've just discovered the value of managing our knowledge wisely. Also, the article mentions "efficiency" twice, but doesn't mention "effectiveness."

As the late Dr. Russell Ackoff, Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School, used to say, "“All of our social problems arise out of doing the wrong thing righter. The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter! If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better!”

Nevertheless, and despite it appearing to take the involvement of elite technocrats to move the needle on knowledge management, it's heartening to see some are taking advantage of current technologies and the move toward a greater realization of the digital transformation the Coronavirus has driven.

Glean Debuts with Launch of an Intuitive Work Assistant That Puts Knowledge Of A Company In the Hands Of Its Workers PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 15, 2021--

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Opinion: As Delta Variant Surges, Small Businesses Must Embrace Digital Tools Although the COVID crisis threatens many businesses with an onslaught of challenges, it also points to opportunities for innovation and growth with modern digital tools.

We've been talking about technology disruption for at least a couple of decades, yet many (if not most) of our organizations seem incapable of trusting their employees with the tools available to accelerate the process.

It's been over eleven years since I accepted an early severance package and retired. I know from former colleagues who are still working that things have hardly changed and, in some ways, they've deteriorated.

Organizations need to embrace change, recognizing its inevitability. Stop fighting your employees and empower them to work together to share what they know and how they know it.

Staying Ahead of Technology Disruption With business disruption now the norm, brands are reconsidering how they respond, particularly in the design and delivery of customer experiences (CX).

How much did your baby weigh when you first held her? Eight lbs.? Mine weighed a little over 25 lbs. She was small for her age. She was 14 months; I was 55. You can read about my journey to fatherhood via adoption by helping me finish writing it. Here's how. TY! Pls share.

Help Me Share My International Adoption Story, organized by Rick Ladd Being a first-time parent isn't an easy thing. Yes, there are manuals and stor… Rick Ladd needs your support for Help Me Share My International Adoption Story

A while back I decided to give up on working with organizations on knowledge management issues or social media marketing, which was my intent on starting this page.

However, the reality is I still need to bring in a bit of income to supplement my meager retirement income. I decided to see if I can't drum up some income from writing and this is the first project I'm approaching seriously toward that objective.

Please consider merely sharing this post in case others I can't reach directly might be interested in hearing what it was like to become a first-time, adoptive father at the age of 55 ... then again at 59. It's been an interesting journey and I'd like to share it.

Thank you.

Help Me Share My International Adoption Story, organized by Rick Ladd In 2002, after two years of waiting, and at the age of 55, my wife Linda and I… Rick Ladd needs your support for Help Me Share My International Adoption Story

Thought I would share my latest post from Systems Savvy, apropos of nothing other than my younger daughter and I stopped by Rancho Simi Community Park's duck pond to feed the waterfowl . . . and some pigeons.

Geese & Ducks & Coots, Oh My! Some photos from my daughter and I feeding the ducks, geese, and coots at Rancho Simi’s duck pond.

Something brought my attention back to two posts I wrote over eight years ago and I wanted to share them again, as I believe they're even more pertinent than when I shared them back then.

Understanding Empathy A concatenation of two posts I published over eight years ago regarding empathy that are now more pertinent than when I first wrote them.

I posted my first blog entry on February 23, 2006, not quite 15 years ago. I had been introduced to the concept of blogging some time before that, but didn't see the value in it for a little while. That blog was called "The Cranky Curmudgeon," and I authored 105 posts, many centered on what as****es there are in this world. I think I was foreshadowing the advent of the MAGA world, but didn't quite realize it at the time.

I recall being aware that selfishness and self-absorbtion were becoming predominent in our world, and it bothered me greatly. Here's a link to the first blog at that now dormant site - https://bit.ly/3euzwSO.

Not quite two years after starting that blog (01/01/08) I moved to WordPress and began the blog I am still adding content to. This site I named "Systems Savvy" and I originally had the idea I would use it to explore what I saw as the similarities and juxtapositions of Systems Thinking and Dialectical Materialism. It's grown into far more than that - currently there are now a total of 629 blog posts, though a few dozen (give or take) are nothing more than sharing a meme (perhaps with a few words of explanation thrown in) or somewhat of a test at functionality, etc. My very first blog at this site can be found at https://bit.ly/2JMC5Fh.

I'm bringing this up because, as I transition to this new "career" of mine—authoring and, perhaps, some other things, e.g. editing, again—I'm going to share some of my favorite blog posts, many of which I am currently folding into the memoirs I've been working on. Hopefully, this will help me both make my work more accessible and will help me hone my skills and further develop my voice, which I'm concerned isn't terribly marketable as it stands. We shall see!

Once More Unto The Breach, Dear Friends Blogging is an interesting occupation or, in my case, avocation. For me it has allowed mostly venting, though I started with a blog about my family that was anything but. I finally gave up on that,…

While I'm no longer engaged in the field of knowledge management in a large organization, as I once was with Rocketdyne (in all its various incarnations) nor am I specifically looking for consulting engagements re KM, my interest in it remains rather keen.

Furthermore, because I remain in touch with some of my former colleagues, including a few who were in my KM Masters cohort at CSUN, I'm aware that little has changed in terms of how (at least Rocketdyne) KM is being implemented. Did I say "implemented?" I meant "ignored."

I originally published this post three days after I became officially retired from (as we called it) The Rock. I revisited it recently because I saw someone had read it and I wanted to remind myself of what I had said. Unfortunately, the graphic I had linked to was no longer accessible, so I had to do something else. In doing so, I also had to do a tiny bit of re-writing so the change made sense, as I had referred to the graphic in the text.

If you're at all interested in how your organization handles what it (and its people) know, you may find this interesting, especially if you read all the way through the comments. BTW - I know there are organizations that are doing it right. I'm just afraid they're still too few, when we need to transform the way things get done . . . immediately, if not sooner.

Has Knowledge Management Been Bad For Us? Rob Paterson makes a point about the web and communal information and knowledge sharing I think says a lot as well about how organizations should spend their precious resources on “managing& #…

The last innovative product I was involved in, I was advocating for this approach, but the guy with the money saw otherwise. The concept was powerful and desperately needed, IMO (it was an app that used ML/AI to facilitate political canvassing) but the MVP went from "minimum" to "maximum", in terms of requirements, and the whole thing collapsed under its own weight. Maybe it would have gone nowhere anyway, but it seemed to me like it never had a chance.

I hate MVPs. So do your customers. Make it SLC instead. Product teams have been repeating the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) mantra for a decade now, without re-evaluating whether it’s the right way to maximize learning while pleasing the customer. …

Inasmuch as I'm going down a somewhat entirely different path than I've previously followed, I'm going to start sharing some of my writing elsewhere in an effort to publicize my work and to put myself out there for feedback and criticism.

This is a poem I wrote just last week. It's actually the first poem I've written in quite some time. I will likely take me a while to re-acquire some of the skills I've developed over the years, but I'm reasonably confident I can improve with time and practice. It's not the easiest thing in the world to do, but I've always been the kind of person who seeks change.

Please consider leaving a comment or liking either this post or the blog post it links to. Much appreciated. It's not like I'm asking for money . . . yet. 😉

How Long? Another free verse poem contemplating my navel.

Something weird is happening with my blog, Systems Savvy. I'm not exactly real prolific (I've posted an average of once every 3.5 days this year) and I've never tried to promote myself much, so I don't get a lot of traffic. In the past month, I've averaged about 30 - 35 views/day from about 25 - 30 visitors/day. Today—so far—I've had 337 views from 238 visitors, and it keeps growing. Despite all that traffic, no one has "liked" anything and no one has commented on anything. This isn't that unusual for me, but it means I have absolutely no insight into why I'm getting this much traffic. Furthermore, almost all the views have been of the home page/archives so, unless that means everyone's reading my latest post on originalism in the SCOTUS, I have no idea (for sure) what's bringing this many people to my blog.

Don't get me wrong. I like the fact so many people are visiting today, but I have a hard time believing it's real, unless people are reading my mind. I say that because I'm in the process of making a drastic career change. Now . . . I suppose that sounds odd coming from a 73-year-old, mostly retired man, but I've reached a point where I believe I can concentrate on my writing in a way I've not been able to accomplish before.

I'm already deep into the process of writing two memoirs and my autobiography. In the past, I've been haunted by my perceived need to earn supplemental income to ensure we don't raid what little savings/investment principal we have. However, I've come to realize I can take a year or two to work on my writing and to find ways to earn a little from doing so. By then, Alyssa (my youngest) will be out of High School, and Aimee will be well on her way to either finishing college or building her career.

So . . . if you don't see me on social media as much as I have been in the past, it's because I really need to make this work. I'm going to rework my blog (http://rickladd.com) my FB page (https://www.facebook.com/RLaddAssoc/) and my website (http://rladdassoc.com/), all of which have been geared toward Knowledge Management and Machine Learning. I'm not letting those two things go; merely redirecting my energies to be a more prolific and, hopefully, useful and respected voice through my authoring efforts, some of which I'll be offering for sale.

Systems Savvy Ruminations on Systems, Decision Intelligence, and Knowledge Management, as well as Thoughts on Life, the Universe, and Everything (Maybe Even Some Golf)

Although I haven't been terribly active with Quantellia lately, the issues I was dealing with that required my somewhat undivided attention are abating, and I'm getting back in the saddle.

This is a short (just under five minutes) video that explains the software tool that Quantellia has developed to assist organizations in making sense of the applicable regulations and requirements of their State, as well as the particulars of their plant shape and size in safely opening up and—just as importantly—remaining open.

If you have any questions, Please DM me.

Safe Business = Successful Business / Decision Intelligence for COVID19 Decision makers worldwide must make tough choices that affect lives of themselves and their loved ones. This is especially difficult for organizational leade...

The need to address the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic may have done more to accelerate the digital transformation many have been working towards for a long time. Five years ago I served as the developmental editor on the 2nd edition of "The New Social Learning." I had the pleasure of working with the co-author of the 1st edition, who was the principal author of the 2nd, Marcia Conner. Marcia is one of a handful of people who recognized the need for, and the power of, such a transition . . . and this book was an attempt to help leaders and organizations move forward to adopt these new ways of working, and working together.

I recommend this book highly for everyone who is now finding themselves either working at home or dealing with today's need to be more "distanced" from our colleagues. There's a wealth of good info here. I urge you to check it out. It's about far more than just learning.

"The Workplace Has Changed

"At this moment, your people are already learning through social media. They’re reaching out and connecting in powerful ways. The question is, can you recognize, appreciate, and take advantage of the power inherent in this new level of communication? Do you want to facilitate or debilitate? Do you want to play a part in what and how people learn? Or do you want to try to stop them? Will you restrict them? Or will you free them to do the work they were hired to do—and will you do it with them?"

The New Social Learning: Connect. Collaborate. Work., 2nd Edition The New Social Learning: Connect. Collaborate. Work., 2nd Edition

If I've learned nothing else in the time I've been involved in machine learning and AI, it's that the "Robot Apocalypse" is a long way off and that AI is—and will long remain—hardly capable of making many decisions on its own. Human intervention should remain necessary for quite some time. In other words, AI is good for helping us recognize and understand the patterns our data can reveal, but it's nowhere near capable of making truly important decisions over time. The issues this pandemic has surfaced point it out pretty clearly in this interesting article.

Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models In the week of April 12-18, the top 10 search terms on Amazon.com were: toilet paper, face mask, hand sanitizer, paper towels, Lysol spray, Clorox wipes, mask, Lysol, masks for germ protection, and N95 mask. People weren’t just searching, they were buying too—and in bulk. The majority of people ...

In thirty years of developing the concept of Decision Intelligence, Quantellia has discovered the elements of a decision are actually rather simple. Here is how we see them. Note the iterations that take place in the intermediate steps.

I am of the opinion that Decision Intelligence is a valuable aspect of Knowledge Management . . . or vice versa. Here's an attempt to bring the two in alignment, using Russell Ackoff's pyramid of learning.

Welp . . . don't know about all of you, but COVID-19 definitely brought much of our activity to a screeching halt. We're finally recovering and I'm pleased to announce a new offering from Quantellia, the company I represent as a Solutions Partner.

Built on top of our award-winning World Modeler™ platform, Recovery 2020 is specifically designed to help businesses and institutions re-open their doors or return to something approaching their "normal" way of doing business safely and effectively, with as little disruption as possible.

If you want a tool that can give you far more than a spreadsheet, no matter how complex the model, ours can provide a view not only over the horizon, but also around corners, i.e. it can help predict not only future outcomes based on current decisions, but also unintended consequences that would not normally be visible to humans.

Check out the attached sheet, which more fully explains what we're offering. Thank you . . . and I hope you are all doing well and are safe and sound.

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Decision Intelligence Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan) Decision Intelligence Tokyo (DIT) is a non-profit organization in Japan. DIT is dedicated to making actionable artificial intelligence (AI) for the prosperity of commons. DIT connects experts (AI, ML,