Marist Update

I received my admissions packet from Marist yesterday. Not only have I been accepted to the MBA program (which is not all that surprising), but I have been awarded a Graduate Scholars Award of $250 per class (this was unexpected). It doesn't sound like much when 1 credit is $695, but when you consider that I'll be taking 5 classes a year, that $1250 that I will not have to put out for my MBA. I'm a big believer in self-education, but it's difficult to communicate my efforts to improve my management skills on my resume without a formal program to reference. My goal is to get an MBA for as cheaply as possible with as little disruption to my life as I can manage. The graduate award is one more step to minimize the foot print of my MBA studies on my life.

Saying that I want my MBA to have a minimal foot print on my life is not a statement about the seriousness that I have in approaching this process. I want to extract as much useful knowledge and experience as I can from my classes, professors, and classmates. At the same time, I don't want to take attention away from my career or my family while doing this. These may sound like contradictory aims, but think it's more of a challenge to displine myself and use the time that I have for school work to my greatest advantage. If I have 30 minutes to read or study, I need to maximize the value of that time. Efficiency and focus will be the name of the game.

It's too bad I don't have a man cave. It would be great to retreat into a space like these rooms to focus on my school work for 30 minutes or so. I have been thinking about where I am going to do this intense studying. We have a guest room. Our old desktop computer is on a desk up there just collecting dust. I could ditch the computer and make that my work space. I would like to work at a desk rather than our kitchen table so I can keep my materials out for quick access rather than taking them out and putting them away every time I study, especially on the weekends. The room shares a wall with my daughters room so I would have to be careful about how much noise I made while I was working. I'm sure it will be a trial and error process to see what kind of arrangement works best for everybody. The process begins August 30.

Progress

I had a very big moment at work this afternoon. I didn't see the import of the event until I starting thinking about it earlier this evening. The low key nature of the exchange denied the event of a dramatic flavor, but the mundane nature of the exchange doesn't change the fact that 20 minutes in a colleague's cubicle justified an approach to laboratory problems that I have been promoting for three years. I have spent a good deal of my time the last couple of years digging into the details of some developmental data. I've read (or skimmed) dozens of research papers, spent hours trying to get data to fit equations, and expended a considerable amount of cognitive surplus to understand how the data and the equations all fit together. Some people would probably consider this wasted time as it was time not spent advancing a project toward a well-defined goal. I justified the time by arguing that understanding the process in this prototype will help us understand the data when we apply similar formulation strategies to other prototypes.

I looked at some data from a similar system this afternoon and was able to provide an explanation for some contradictory trends by applying the insights that I gained during my struggles with my developmental data. I predicted that a certain analysis would yield a straight line for one compound and a curved line for the other. My prediction was accurate. I have to promote my accomplishment, but the fact that I was able to apply something that I learned by using the research literature is immensely satisfying. This small incident proves (to me at least) that taking the time to understand some data rather than simply rushing on to the next stage of a development project can facilitate future development projects. My vision of a successful research lab is partially based on this premise. It is very nice to see that it has some validity.

New Motivation

My HDL levels are borderline high. Seeing that I'm only 34, now seems the right time to address this issue rather than brushing it aside. After a quick online search into what causes high cholesterol, my plan is to get back on track to lose my gut. Losing weight (which will involve more exercise and better eating habits) will bring my HDL down a few points, hopefully. Maybe this not great news will get the scale going down again.

While I'm commenting on my losing the gut resolution, I'll give an update on another neglected resolution, reading a Dickens book. I have been focusing my reading time on Nicholas Nickleby. I'm almost half finished. I want to get it wrapped up by the time my online classes start at Marist (assuming they accept me of course). I have no idea how much time I will have to read once my classes start so I figured I should take care of that resolution now rather than trying to squeeze a fat Dickens book into the last couple weeks of December. I'm reading 25-30 pages a night before I workout (or pass out like I did last night, that's one way to go to bed earlier).

I've been thinking about which two foundations classes to take this semester. Should I tackle one of the subjects that I do not find particularly appealing (like accounting or finance) or should I pick something interesting (like economics)? I guess I'll have an advisor that is supposed to help me make this decision, but I'm sure I'll get a stock answer. I have to take them all eventually so it probably doesn't matter in which order I take them, and it's not like I have to pick a time that works for me. I'm currently leaning towards economics (or analytical tools, I may be able to use some of that in my job) and management. We'll see what my adviser says, assuming I get accepted of course. (Yes, I will count school books in my books read for the year.)

I have always been amazed at how the things I read end up being related to one another. I don't know if they're really related to one another, or I just invent connections between them, but my most recent chain of associations started with this post over at the hbr blog site. The post is about the vulnerability of entrepreneurs. They are taking a risk by starting a new business. Any time you take risk, you open yourself to criticism and failure. That kind of exposure can be pretty scary. Later that night I was reading a chapter in a book about problem solving in the context of creativity. The chapter is just a review of other work, but one of the studies that they discuss identified personality traits of creative people. Creative people tend to be more willing to take risks, are open to new experiences, they are persistent, and are tolerant of ambiguity. Both the blog post and book chapter reminded me of this manifesto over at changethis.com.

What idea path did these random associations lead to for me? Well, let me tell you. At it's heart, creativity is really just deviating from the status quo. Something is creative when it defies somebody's expectations, expectations that have been established by experiencing the normal, average, mundane, experiences of everyday life. Creativity is just the willingness to reach beyond the everyday for something different and new. To be creative, you have to be willing to take a risk that the new thing will not succeed, what ever criteria that you have put in place for success. A status quo education/developmental experience does not challenge us to defy expectations and find ways to change the way things are. If anything, we are actually taught to be afraid of putting ourselves out there for fear of being ridiculed or mocked when something doesn't work as hoped. People never practice creativity so they just think that they aren't creative.

Creativity is really just a willingness to fail. If you are willing to put some crazy idea out there for other people to evaluate, you are being creative. When somebody says they don't have a fresh idea, do they not have an idea or are they not willing to share the ideas that they are having? Building creativity is just getting in the habit of offering new ideas. Not every idea needs to be fully evaluated and fleshed out prior to proposal. Just get it out there.

Creativity isn't purely a talent. It's a skill. Building that skill requires the willingness to open yourself to criticism, to being vulnerable. We all have the power to do that, we're just not all equally willing to act in that manner. The more I read by Ericsson, the more I realize that our limitations are largely self-imposed. So much achievement is attributed to talent and innate ability that we just figure that certain acts are outside of our ability. That's not true. Achievement is more about how we choose to apply our energies and direct our focus. It's easier to say that creativity is a natural ability that I lack. It's much harder to pursue actions that may make me more creative (or thinner, or more athletic, or a better parent, or whatever skill I happen to have in mind at a given moment).

The more I recognize that my achievements are the result of consistent effort and focus on a particular task, the challenge becomes determining how I should spend my time. That's the really tricky question...

Strategies

By strategies, I mean both implemented and in development. For those that have been implemented, my effort to get below the average 1000 m time on the Concept 2 rowing machine took less than a few weeks. I managed to get below the average time when I went to the gym yesterday. After I recovered from that effort, I got back on and did a couple more miles. I figured out some form stuff on that second workout so I'm pretty sure that I can get my time down by another few seconds when I try again next week. I'm going to stick with my current workout of goblet squats and push-ups, with a few elements of the Spartacus workout thrown in for variety. I need to work on my lower body endurance so I'll try to do more reps with lighter weights and maybe work in some incline work on the treadmill.

Using design principles to figure out problems that I have in the lab has also been a fruitful strategy. I had a breakthrough in my current project on Thursday night and Friday morning. After spending a month trying to put my data into some kind of context to help me use the literature to find an explanation for my observations, a Google search on "adsorption equilibrium" led me to the Langmuir isotherm. I've heard of the Langmuir isotherm several times, but I have never made an effort to figure it out. I took the time to think about it on Friday. That little session gave me an idea for an experiment that could give me more than the random points that I've been looking at for weeks. I also got smart and added my old data to the more recent data. Both data sets agreed (which is very good), and I could make sense of some outliers based on how I did the experiment. I made a couple of other experimental modifications to reduce some experimental variability. I was starting to feel like the project may stall on me again, but the introduction of the Langmuir isotherm has given the experiments a real boost. My formal project is entering a very important phase of development in the next couple of weeks. Once that aspect of the project gets going, it will be much harder for me to get the resources to keep generating data on my side project (which could is actually starting to yield insight into a problem in my formal project). I want to have enough data to put a paper together before that new process gets initiated. It will be close, but I am confident that we will get it done.

Seeing that I'm going to be laying out a few grand of my own money on my MBA, I have been thinking of what I really want out of the degree. I want the credential, but if I'm going to spend the time and money to get the credential, I might as well maximize the return on my investment. I have already decided to use the "learning environment" idea discussed in Barker's HBR piece to find people whose experience I can use to accelerate my management expertise. My natural tendency would be to do the minimal discussion and interaction required of the class, but I'm going to step outside of my comfort zone and try to find a nucleus of three or four people to work closely with this semester. I also read about a way to implement deliberate practice into management training. I should have access to business case studies at some point in my MBA. Whether that happens during my foundations classes or once I'm in the more advanced aspects of the program remains to be seen, but I will start using them to develop my skills as a manager as soon as I can.

Random Configuration Expertise

I have expanded my readings in psychology to K. Anders Ericsson. He writes about how elite performers in a variety of domains reached their achievement levels. The foundation of his framework in the idea of deliberate practice. Experts become experts because they spend a tremendous amount of time and effort on training excercises designed to improve their performance. In his model, the source of very high achievement is not a function of innate ability but a consequence of an accumulation of skills and mediators that have been developed during hours and hours of concentrated effort.

He has applied his model to scientists. As world-class scientist publish papers at a higher rate than less heralded researchers, he recommends that scientist focus on writing research papers to maximize their impact. Simonton (he wrote Scientific Genius and Creativity in Science, both of which are in my read book list) would likely agree with this suggestion as his model for successful scientists is based on publishing as many papers as possible to increase the liklihood that one of the papers will contain a significant idea.

There is another aspect of Ericsson's model that also corresponds well with Simonton's random configuration model. Simonton notes that a number of prominent scientists read widely in displines outside of their own. He notes that this provides mental elements that may combine with an element from the researchers specialty to produce a novel insight into a difficult problem. This outside reading could also serve to keep a researcher's thinking fresh. Rather than using the same ideas to solve every problem, the ideas presented in other types of scientific research forces the scientist to incoporate these new ideas into the mental models that they have established around their own research. In Ericsson's words "Expert performers counteract the arrested development associated with generalized automaticity of skill by deliberately acquiring and refining cognitive mechanisms to support continued learning and improvement."

I have never been much of a reader of the literature when I wasn't looking for ideas about my own research, but I am going to start reading non-chemistry papers every now and then. Everytime I thought about trying to read more papers, I envisioned reading chemistry papers. The ideas in Simonton and Ericsson make expanding my selections to other areas of science sound more productive. I don't want to get cognitive freeze, where my thinking around particular problems gets locked in one particular model. Breaking up my chemistry knowledge to incorporate ideas from biology, geology, or physics would definitely prevent that from happening.

You could say that I am already doing this by reading Simonton's and Ericsson's work. I have gotten a number of ideas on how to improve my performance and the performance of my colleagues by reading both psychologists. In writing this post, I have seen other ways that their models support one another. This strengthens their validity in my thinking, which makes me even more likely to incorporate their ideas into my approach to work. And to think that I always though psychology was a big waste of time...

Inverse Knowledge

I've been touting my research experience in my admission assays for the Marist online MBA. I use this experience to illustrate how my insight into the research process will make me a more effective leader in the consumer healthcare industry than an executive who lacks a similar foundation. While I was working on these essays, I realized that while my understanding of how a lab works and what it needs to be productive is useful, the real value in my research experience is knowing what the lab can NOT do.

I actually wouldn't have had this insight if I hadn't been reading Against Method while eating lunch at Chipolte on Thursday. I haven't read the book close enough to summarize the main points (this looks like a pretty good summary), but I have read enough to get the sense that Feyerabend has some issues with institutional science. I have some sympathy with the idea that science may not be the all powerful source of truth that contemporary culture has made it out to be. My own experience has made me all too aware of the limitations of our scientific knowledge. Sometimes the best answer is "I don't know." That answer should be followed up with some ideas about how to get an idea of what may be going on in a particular experiment, but every researcher knows that there are questions that just can't (and shouldn't) be answered given our current understanding of a particular problem.

Of course, going into a meeting with some executives whose experience with a lab has been largely limited to taking tours on facility visits and telling them that you can't solve a problem using the fancy lab that you proudly showed off during the tour is not wise. Nobody wants to hear why a particular problem can't be solved. They just want it fixed. (They also have no interest in things that are not directly related to a product that makes money even though knowing more about a particular molecule or material may be helpful to a real product somewhere down the line...) Having been a research scientist myself, I hope that I will still be able to look at lab problems the same way once I've moved out of the lab and into a leadership position. I know to ask whether the people closest to the problem can find a solution and if they can't (which is a valid response), what can I give them to get them closer to a solution. That's the real value of my laboratory experience in a leadership role in the pharmaceutical industry.

Concept 2

I've used the Concept 2 at the gym a few more times. Every time I use it, I get a little bit faster. Seeing that I can only get to the gym on the weekends, I started thinking about ways to improve my stamina and power using other types of workouts to get faster even though I'm not actually on the machine. It didn't take me long to realize that the Spartacus workout is a good place to start. If I do it as prescribed, I will get plenty of work on improving my explosivity while improving my cardiovascular fitness. Based on the workout I did today, I'm right around the 25th percentile of the online rankings for my age and weight for just about every distance up to 5000 meters. With a little bit of focus and effort, I think I can get to the average time for each distance in a few weeks.

I've always been intrigued by the Concept 2 because there are detailed rankings online. I have no idea how far I could get up the rankings, but having a scale to measure my performance against is a solid motivator. Anything that gets to my competitive nature will help me get out in the garage to workout. Running never did it for me because I am such a pathetic distance runner. I knew that I would never be that competitive as a runner. This rowing thing seems much more up my alley.

Besides the desire to drop some inches from my waist, I read an article in Men's Health that has got me thinking about my resting heart rate. Currently, my resting heart rate is a little below 60 beats per minute. That's alright, but I would like to get it down a few more beats per minute. That will require getting out in the garage and actually working on more than one or two nights a week. We'll see if this desire to get faster on the Concept 2 gets me back in the garage.