Wedding site
May 15th, 2005It’s live - our wedding web site! For those of you thinking of coming, we hope you find this useful.
Changes…
April 27th, 2005It’s amazing to look over my blog for the last year and see how little I’ve captured here about the enormous changes in my life. So I guess I have a bunch of announcing to do.
First, foremost, and most exciting: I GOT ENGAGED! Alaka Ray and I are getting married on December 23, 2005 in Kolkata (Calcutta), India. I can’t even begin to talk about how excited I am.
Alaka went to Harvard undergrad (Freshman when I was a Senior… did we pass each other on the paths in Harvard Yard?). She is a third year at Harvard Medical School now, doing rotations and preparing for a reseach year. Alaka grew up going back and forth between Kolkata and the states, hence the wedding location. She sings like an angel (at least I think so, and this blog entry has a recording attached), and always keeps me laughing.
Our getting married will also mean a change in residence. We’re looking for a condo in Boston that I can move into in the next few months and where she can join me after we’re married.
The second big news: I’m going to MIT!
I’ve been admitted to the Ph.D. program in Organization Studies at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Starting in September, I’ll be shifting my center of gravity from Dialogos to MIT, and working part-time/occasionally on consulting projects for Dialogos.
I’ve had a lot of different emotions along the way. Even after I got into Sloan, I found myself feeling a bit nervous about leaving Dialogos (a job I’ve absolutely loved) and launching into the very challenging territory of doctoral work. But with some moral support and cheerleading from Alaka and some amazing conversations with Sloan profs, I am ready to go!
Hopefully as I get back into academic mode I’ll be in the habit of writing and blogging more. No promises though. =)
Lakoff, conservatism, liberalism, and dialogue
April 27th, 2005I just wanted to send a link to an article that I found fascinating, and I think is one of the most important I’ve read in a while. It has been passed around several times in my group of friends and I finally took a look at it.
http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html
Lakoff is a cognitive scientist at Berkeley who has looked closely at the metaphors for morality that liberals and conservatives use. I think he has touched upon the “source code” of the difference between conservatives and liberals. He also articulates very well why conservatives are so much more unified and coherent politically, and why liberals keep getting in their own way.
The quick summary is that Conservatism draws on a “Strict Father” view of morality and a Nation-as-Family metaphor that draws on that foundation. A complex of metaphors and policies built around a notion of “Moral Strength” comprise their basic ethos. Liberalism works from the same Nation-as-Family metaphor but works from a “Nurturant Parent” model, with “Morality as Nurturance” and “Morality as Empathy” at the core. The trouble is that liberals don’t understand this underlying unity, and therefore have composed their political system as a hodge podge of fragmented interest groups. To the extent that liberals can understand their own coherence, articulate it, counter the attacks from conservatives, and highlight inconsistencies and flaws in the conservative system, they will be much stronger politically.
Of course, all of us draw on a mix of these, and I think ideally there is a Yin-Yang synthesis to be had. What interests me most is the kind of personal and collective inquiry that this line of reasoning promotes - to examine our own deep mental models and habitual uses of language about morality, love, strength, empathy, family, power, and politics.
How are my views of the state and the family connected?
What are my own experiences as a son or daughter? As an aspiring or actual parent?
How has my own moral development been affected by people holding these different models? How have others I know?
Are my views based on my prejudices about these different models, or based on mindful, empirical evaluation of their results in society?
I think from a place of this kind of self-awareness, we might actually be able to engage in some dialogue across the lines.
Application Essays for Ph.D.
February 1st, 2005Justin Olmanson, in a comment on my last entry, requested that I post my Ph.D. application essays. So here they are.
The first was for Harvard. Can’t seem to stay away from my double alma mater, and they have a very strong program. I applied to the track that joins the GSAS Psychology Department with the Organizational Behavior group at Harvard Business School. Here is my Harvard essay in PDF form.
The second is for the MIT Sloan School, where I applied for a Ph.D. in Organization Studies. Here is my MIT essay in PDF Form. This would be a natural evolution from working with Bill Isaacs, since he is a lecturer at Sloan and I have gotten to know several of his colleagues there. I’m also a huge fan of system dynamics, which is hard to study anywhere else.
The third application, submitted today, was for Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. There I applied to the Organization Studies program, which posed four distinct essay questions. I have included all of them in this PDF of my BC essays. BC is a special place - it seems to me that the Jesuit heritage creates an undertone of spirit-in-action that shows up as a strong commitment to action research and socially conscious scholarship.
Here on my own blog I can speak a little more freely than I do in the essays and use the language of “organizational wholeness,” which is probably the best way to frame my true interest. For the academic audience, however, I framed this in the language of sustainability, ethics, and social responsiblility, which are more widely accepted in those circles.
I think the progression through these essays is that my thinking has gotten increasingly concrete, from thinking generally about the challenges of organizational health to thinking about it in specific contexts. Namely, I am considering focusing my research on family-managed businesses. The MIT and BC essays both discuss my experience with Jay Medical when I was growing up, a company where my father was president, my mother was vice president, and my brother was director of marketing. I use this as a stepping-off point for talking about my interests in organizational wholeness and in the psychological challenges of organizational development. My conundrum at the moment is whether to follow that line even further, and actually specialize in the study of family-managed businesses.
This would be a fun progression, considering that Dialogos, where I currently work, derives its theory from the integration of family systems therapy (via David Kantor) with organizational learning and change. In some ways it would be natural to really dive from there into the particular challenges of family-managed businesses. Although this is a fairly specific domain, it has huge relevance, particularly cross-culturally (family businesses are highly prevalent in Asia and Europe).
To get a little deeper and more speculative about this, I could frame my question as, what is the role of love in organizational life? We tend to think of these things as disjunct, of corporations as machines, and of business transactions as occuring on a fundamentally different level from the intimacy we know among family and friends. At the same time, we know that true passion and sense of connection to one’s work can yield phenomenal commitment and achievement. We also know that the quality of relationships in organizations, particularly the quality of exchange and mutual development, has huge impact on the flow of knowledge and the energy of innovation.
It’s a subtle territory and a tricky one. It’s also one that I have always grown up with. Brock USA is the third business my family has created, with my father as Chairman of the Board and my brother as president. They were my first consulting client when I joined Dialogos, and I continue to be the resident family mediator and advisor for these business/family questions. So to some extent a focus in this domain is unavoidable.
We’ll see. I’m learning that when speculating about future directions like this it’s valuable to take things slow - put some thoughts on the page, let them settle for awhile, see how the universe responds. So now that this application process is complete it’s a matter of just waiting. Tick, tock.
Published!
December 15th, 2004In writing up my application to Harvard’s Organizational Behavior Ph.D. program, I came to a question about my publications. Other than this weblog, I have not gotten a chance to publish any articles… or so I thought. It turns out that a piece of design research I did at the MIT Media Lab in 1999 (and a paper I edited with my colleagues) has managed to find its way around. The full citation:
Weinberg, G., Lackner, T., and Jay, J. (2000) “The Musical Fireflies - Learning About Mathematical Patterns in Music Through Expression and Play”. Proceedings of XII Colloquium on Musical Informatics 2000. A’quila Italy.
Here is the full article on the primary author’s web site.
It turns out that the paper has been cited a few times:
Google Search
This is, of course, only a baby step. Can’t wait to get my “real work” on organizational studies out there.
Coining a proverb
August 23rd, 2004I think I may have come up with a proverb. I can’t find it anywhere on the web. So I just want to put it on the web to claim it as mine.
You can make flapjacks (pancakes) out of cow pies, but they’ll still smell like bullshit.
In other words, you can try to “turn bugs into features,” dress up mistakes as “learning experiences,” or label nuclear weapons sites (Rocky Flats) as “environmental research facilitities,” but unless it’s truly authentic… it’ll start to stink.
Postmodernism, objective value, and… architecture?
June 6th, 2004Alireza just sent me a link to an essay called Postmodernity goes to war.
I enjoyed this piece by Philip Hammond, which critiques descriptions of Gulf War 1 and 2 as “postmodern” simply because they use information technology. In so doing he draws out the deeper postmodern political currents present in the elaborate image-making, propaganda, and discourse around 9-11 and the Iraq conflict.
One thing that really stood out for me in the article is an uber-concise definition of postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” It’s actually a bit more open than some conceptions of postmodernism which is that metanarratives are simply impossible and there is no absolute truth or value. It just means that you have to approach such metanarrative ideas with a critical eye, particularly toward the role of power in their construction. I see clear space in this definition for a “post-postmodernism,” “reconstructive postmodernism,” or “integral” culture, where metanarrative currents emerge out of a field of deep, collective, reflexive inquiry (dialogue) that crosses boundaries of hegemonic power systems. Without that, postmodernism simply fragments any shred of moral clarity by discarding the possibility of discovering objective value and disabling any use of power to achieve the greater wholeness or good. I’m not a big fan of that form of “deconstructive” postmodernism that effectively disables right action.
A lot of my thinking about these things of late has been influenced by reading Christopher Alexander, an architect who has written a 4-volume series called The Nature of Order. He proposes a theory of wholeness and life in architecture that makes a profound case for the existence of objective value in geometric configurations. In fact, he takes the step from architecture to cosmology and argues that life and value are inherent to space itself, and are intensified through the creation of living structure. The worldview Alexander ends up describing is deeply harmonious with mystical conceptions but is also well informed scientifically (see this article for more).
I’m finding Alexander’s ideas absolutely captivating, because he manages to transcend many of the problematic dichotomies of of the Cartesian era - mind/heart, ornament/function, fact/value, science/art. There are a lot of people who describe the need to transcend these dichotomies in the next step of human intellectual development (esp. Ken Wilber). But Alexander is the first person I’ve actually DOES “integral” theory.
A lot of Alexander’s ideas have been composed through research in which he shows people pairs of photographs of objects, scenes, and buildings and asks questions like “which of these has more life?” and “which of these is more like your self?” In working with these questions, he finds that there are two layers of people’s answering the questions. There is one layer that he often calls “opinion,” which is based on a kind of idiosyncratic sense of what is “interesting” or “contemporary” in aesthetic, and often has all kinds of intellectual justification. When people answer at that level there’s not much consonance between people’s opinions, and you get sort of a postmodern pluralism of value conceptions. This ends up permitting all kinds of architectural monstrosities in the profession (like Mather House, my own undergraduate dorm).
But there is another level where he gets people to answer the question from the heart, from a place of their own humanity and deepest understanding of their own self, the kinds of buildings people would actually want to live in. At that level there is unbelievable consonance in what people feel to have more value, across cultural and class boundaries. To get beyond this as merely a psychological phenomenon, he then goes about uncovering fifteen properties of living structure that are common to the things people identify as having more life (e.g., strong centers, boundaries, symmetry, alternating repetition, non-separateness). Each of these have clear intuitive and geometric reality, even if they leave a bit of mathematical precision to be developed by subsequent thinkers. So in the end, he articulates this lovely conception of value that is harmonious with people’s deep intuitions but also has objective geometric correlates.
One thing that this body of work has helped me see is that a lot of postmodern discourse is actually quite disingenuine. People have become so afraid of the exercise of power and clean discernment of value that we permit and justify things that in our heart we know to be wrong. We’ll work at that brainy “opinion” level and say “to each his own” or “we can’t judge them in their context” in response to stories about female genital mutilation, hard core pornography, suicide bombing, etc. while knowing deep down that there is something unhealthy and unbalanced about the phenomenon.
At the same time, I’m trying not to revert to modernism or premodern conceptions of absolute truth that carry their own arrogance and holier-than-thou morality. It’s an easy trap, because I have cultural blinders as anyone does. I haven’t grown up in a culture with a strong sense of ritual and initiation, and so there are aspects of female genital mutilation ritual in its cultural context that have wholeness I can’t see. But I have faith that there are ways to carry out what Alexander would call a “structure-preserving transformation” on the structure of the ritual that preserve its cultural meaning while increasing its wholeness and life. My impression is that such tranformations are, in fact, happening, as a result of the kind of deep, collective, reflexive inquiry and dialogue between Africans and foreign activists that I mentioned earlier.
As I’m reading this, and disembedding myself from my own intellectual inquiry of the past few months, I’m seeing that there are some big jumps here - from architecture to cosmology to social theory to dialogue. It all makes sense in my own head, at least, and I hope isn’t too nonsensical for my audience after a long blogging hiatus.
Actually the one link I need to work on more fully is the extension of the word “structure” from architecture to social systems, and then the application of some of Alexander’s themes and ideas to the creation of wholeness in social systems. Bill Isaacs tells me that there is a rich and rigorous articulation of social structure in the family systems therapy literature, so I’ll be diving into that. For both of us, the interesting questions are about the intentional construction of social structures for work and learning (i.e., organizations), and their relative degrees of life, wholeness, and promotion of human generativity. At Dialogos I’m helping launch a research initiative in this direction, and my intention is for it to lead directly into my own doctoral studies starting in 2005.
One aspect or activity of my inquiry will be to participate in this year’s Leadership for Collective Intelligence (LCI) program. I’ll be there as a hybrid of participant and observer, making whatever contribution I can to the dialogue while collecting audio and notes in a “knowledge capture” role. I’m also building the infrastructure for an online community to surround the program. There’s a strong boundary of confidentiality around the LCI “container” (this is part of what allows a particular depth in the dialogue) but I hope to share general reflections and thoughts on my blog throughout the year. The LCI seems to be one social structure that has been able to consistently produce generative inquiry and learning among its participants for the past 6 years.
SPAMMERS BE GONE
March 3rd, 2004Those of you who frequent my blog may have noticed that I had been accumulating spam comments on my blog (no, nothing is sacred). I have now installed a lovely new tool for MovableType called MT Blacklist that automatically rejects and removes any spam comments (as defined by a central database of spammers maintained by the software author, Jay Allen, all bow to his glory). I am so pleased that my contribution to the Internet no longer includes graffiti for penis enlargement and gambling, as critical as these may be to the emerging global economy. The thing is active for all my friends using my blog system, and I recommend it for other Movable Type users out there. SPAM BE GONE.
Of course, this doesn’t solve the problem of my inbox at jasonjay dot com, in which I receive about 50 spam messages for every real message, only 15 or 20 of which are caught by Spamassassin. I think it’s at the point where law enforcement needs to get involved, levying heavy fines and some kind of mandatory spammer rehabilitation program for people who are consuming billions of dollars worth of time, bandwidth, and peace of mind.
Hmm, spammer rehabilitation program… I’m thinking of that scene in Clockwork Orange… spammers with their eyes pinned open, watching a looped clip of someone deleting messages from their inbox for 144 straight hours.
Civil Society
February 8th, 2004Yesterday I want to a conference called Developing Others, Developing Ourselves that my friend Adrian Dedomenico organized. One of the panelists, a man named Ajume Wingo from Cameroon, talked about the role of “civil society” in African development. By civil society, he meant the voluntary associations and organizations that occur outside of the commercial and governmental spheres. His argument was that civil society isn’t always a good thing - the KKK is an example of a civil association - and in Africa it often provides an escape for people who are fleeing the corruption of government and the ethnic conflicts pervading the public sphere. There is a real need for human and spiritual connection that is met by civil associations, but they can also mean the fragmentation of society.
This might sound sort of abstract and political and across-the-Atlantic, but somehow it hit very close to home for me. There’s been a running theme in my conversations with friends lately about the loneliness and dislocation we feel in our mid-twenties. Now that college (and even graduate degrees, for some of us) have slipped by, where is our civil society?
Read the rest of this entry »
The other Daily Drool
January 30th, 2004Thanks to my astute friend and reader Joseph Reagle, who discovered another Daily Drool on the net. Not everyone may know the origin of my blog’s title. My group of friends has a custom of giving everyone an animal nickname, and I have always been the “puppy.” There has been some dispute, however, about precisely what breed I might be. Perhaps this is a sign that I am a basset hound.