letters

1.1 Bill Anderson

1. on his birthday
   
   • 8/29/15

   and i have copied you on a letter to Alaska Airlines investor relations. I was meaning to write it yesterday, but, on pat's birthday, i devote the day to her needs and wishes.

   at computer consoles, i believe we came to understand that companies exist to first provide meaningful work for their employees, then to satisfy customers, and then to return a profit.

   while this burdens the waterfall model – priorities too often are viewed as time-sequenced – one does have to have a hierarchy of principles to help the struggle through the compromises.

   i think, as best i now recall, that some of my ideas on a company's purpose were also focused by early years at AT&T, where "everyone has to have a customer focus" was a common chant. this, to overcome the "you can have internal customers" awareness. the idea of the "real" customer focus was, of course, to help people see their efforts in terms of the ultimate user of one's own work-product. but my push-back was "surely there are a number of employees – i.e. the sales force – who have a special focus on that real customer?" so i thought that principle (focus on the real customer) couldn't be that high on the general list. so, if not, what then?

   if every employee then has meaningful, satisfying work, then the company must, of necessity, have satisfied customers, and therefore a profit. managers, whom we trust, focus the effort of the productive workers, to drive the second objective, and hence the third.

   since i'm not an entrepreneur, i can only imagine, but thinking about the few times i've entertained those thoughts, (there are two distinct) the principles fall along the chain of the argument: i've got to like (if not love) what i'm contemplating, someone will find it useful, helpful, if not necessary, and, oh yes, can i earn a living doing this.

   now to the news, that was the opinion page.

   i'm really into shell functions, now for pat's and my needs, managing our portfolio, bottom line, i fell like i've never learned more about the shell, and how to use it, than at any other period in my life. and i do recall other lessons i've learned from your advice. chief among them, the need to generalize is the first temptation to resist.

   as a teaching tool, i've kept a shell diary for going on two years, and will be posting it publicly in the not too distant future. an idea about two months ago, and gaining some attention as the time allows, is to "curate" my work, going over all the entries of progress and ideas put into practice, then harvesting by those surviving practices. so the diary will have two dimensions: the historical trace, and the current practice. Since it will be on-line, the reader may choose either first.

   to wrap this up , there are two ideas worth mention here. the first, which helps this curating effort, is an annotation i call FOTD – function of the day. so picking up those threads makes the curating easier. the very latest, picked up last week on "stack overflow", has made my shell programming most productive, the ability to trace to a spot in the code, this code fragment:

   $ trap read debug
   

   is the means. It stops code execution : trap … debug until the "…" executes, in this case a "read". which usually means just hitting a C/R at the terminal.

   As ever, Bill,

   Thanks for the friendship, now Happy Birthday, and "Hi" to Susan, as hers arrives.

1.2 Steve Politi, Newark Star Ledger

will wilcox:  67 + 76 = 143, +3   and
chris kirk:    76 + 68 = 144, +4

1.3 Prof Hugh Gusterson, GWU

1.4 David Brooks, NYTimes