Politics

Where is Minneapolis?

June 11, 2020 By Tom Mungavan Leave a Comment

Most of our international clients have no idea where Minneapolis, Minnesota is located. Even some US clients are not quite sure. I explain, “The Mississippi River runs through the center of the US starting from near the Canadian border in Minnesota in the center of the country. The river runs south to the Gulf of Mexico. Minneapolis is in the north-most state along the Mississippi River.”

Minneapolis and St. Paul are called the “Twin Cities.” They are home to 18 of the companies listed on The Fortune 500 Companies. The population is highly educated and high income. The schools are some of the highest-rated in the country. The “happiness score” for Minnesota is second only to Hawaii. It is the top among the healthiest states.

The Twin Cities has the largest population of Somali and Hmong refugees in the country. We have a Somali US congresswoman, a Muslim State Attorney General, the mayor of St Paul is black as is the Chief of Police in Minneapolis.

Most people are proud of the city and OK with people not knowing where we are located. We think of ourselves as open to diversity. That all changed on Memorial Day.

George Floyd Touched the World

The world saw a policeman put his knee on the neck of George Floyd for over eight minutes as Floyd defenselessly died. The incident occurred close to where I grew up. The stores that burned are in the neighborhood I shopped in as a child.

My brother lives a few blocks from the location of the standoff on the bridge. The demonstrators running from the police ran past my brother’s home. The world has been outraged. Minneapolis is now a city name that most people recognize.

The rosy picture I painted of Minneapolis is from a white man’s perspective. It is very different for many black people in Minneapolis. Racist policing has continued in minority neighborhoods. The public school performance gaps are some of the largest in the country. There has been much angst, but no solution.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Inflection Point

What does it take to significantly change an organizational structure? Companies go bankrupt or get purchased if they are dysfunctional. Democracies have elections. Dictators face revolution. What about police departments?

Minneapolis has tried changing the police culture from the top with the last two reform-minded Chiefs of Police. It hasn’t worked.

A crisis can be an opportunity. If there is enough political will for change, it can create opportunities. Intervention is a bit like a corporate takeover. Part of a takeover is to determine who should stay and who should go to build the future of the organization.

“Senior management” of the state and city government is committed to reform. Perhaps a few years from now, Minneapolis will be known as the city that addressed the problem culture and successfully moved toward their ideal.

50 Years Ago

August 1, 2019 By Tom Mungavan Leave a Comment

Man landed on the moon 50 years ago. It was an amazing feat. It was an aspirational and inspirational accomplishment that was watched by 20% of the world population. That was probably close to everyone who had a television.

What made the accomplishment even more amazing at the time was the rudimentary tools available. The computers had very little capacity compared to even our Fitbit or iWatch. The interfaces from the computer to the physical world were very unreliable. NASA would have loved the gyro or the ability to monitor your heart rate in your watch today.

I may be the only person you know who was programing computers 50 years ago. (There were not many of us.) I was a systems engineer for IBM in 1969. I was not putting people on the moon at that time. I was helping companies run their entire business on computers with as little as 8K processors and 5 meg of disk memory. IBM was revolutionizing companies and processes. The fears at that time were that computers would obsolete workers … much like the fears today about robotics in the workplace.

President John F. Kennedy showed the vision and executive presence to inspire an entire nation to get behind an audacious goal of going to the moon.

You probably have seen movies that show computers with blinking lights and levers. Fifty years ago, those lights and levers allowed a programmer to stop the computer program at a certain point and change the program and data using the levers to replace the “0” and “1” (that instructed the computer and represented the data). Much more rudimentary capability than your Fitbit or watch.

There was so little computer memory that programmers recorded years in two digits rather than four (1969 = 69) to save space. It was always assumed that the programs being written at that time would be replaced before the year 2000. Many old programs were not replaced and thus there was the “Y2K” crisis at the turn of the century. Another way to look at the capacity in 1969, capturing one average photograph today would have exceeded all the computer capacity for an entire medium sized company.

In 1969, people wrote letters by hand or typewriter and mailed them. Delivery was measured in days and weeks.

In today’s dollars, long distance phone calls (on landlines) cost $5 to $50 per minute with the help of a phone operator. There were no answering machines or VCR’s. People used cash and checks. Most stores were not air conditioned. Most stores were closed on Sundays and evenings. In addition, Vietnam protesters were setting off bombs in restrooms. It was a very different time.

We have many technological things that we now take for granted. It is difficult to imagine how major the accomplishment was to land on the moon and return. A number of people (including my 85-year-old grandfather) found the accomplishment so hard to believe that a they were convinced it was done in a movie studio and we actually did not land on the moon.

Fortunately, the national news was more trusted than it is today so most people accepted the truth of the accomplishment. Landing on the moon 50 years ago is certainly a tribute to what a nation working together for a worthy vision can accomplish. It is worthy of celebration.

Paid To Be Political

June 25, 2019 By Carol Keers Leave a Comment

Politics are the relationships that help you get things done in a way that deals with the reality of the way people are … not how you would like them to be.

You are paid to get things done, so you are paid to not ignore politics. Accept that managing politics is just a part of the job. If you don’t, you will only hurt yourself and your team.

Executive Presence Tip – Carol Keers

Surveillance

November 27, 2018 By Tom Mungavan Leave a Comment

Tim Cook, Apple CEO, said “If we get this wrong, the dangers are profound…

“Platforms and algorithms that promised to improve our lives can actually magnify our worst human tendencies. Rogue actors and even governments have taken advantage of user trust to deepen divisions, incite violence, and even undermine our shared sense of what is true and what is false. “Our own information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency.”

Cook’s hook line for this message is strong. He is advocating for legal constraints similar to those in the European Union. There are two key points that affect us on a more personal basis. What has been already collected?… and how do you make adjustments that you feel you need to make to what is continuing to be collected?

Google

Google is one of the largest collectors (and users) of search data and phone tracking. They are also transparent about what they are collecting about you. You can go to see what data Google has collected on you at Google CHECKUP. It will show your searches, videos watched on YouTube including any “likes” and comments. Google Maps and Android phones show everywhere you have been on a specific day. You can also adjust what you want Google to be able to collect about you.

They will argue that all the data history helps them help you. It is true. It also allows them to send advertising that is more relevant to you. Google only gets paid when someone clicks on an ad, so customizing increases their revenue and their value to advertisers.

Google dominates the internet data as the:

Biggest browser company in the world.
Biggest video host.
Biggest email service.
Biggest search engine.
Biggest mobile operating system.
Biggest server of digital ads.

Google controls 42% of the digital advertising market which is vastly more than anyone else. It is significantly larger than Facebook, which is the second largest. Google’s tracking codes appear on three quarters of the top million sites on the web. Google has a vested interest in tracking people to serve them ads which deliver 86% of Alphabet’s (Google’s parent company) revenue.

Unfortunately, this puts Google at odds with the interests of its users’ privacy. Their Chrome browser was the last to include the “do not track” function. Many knowledgeable technology people refuse to use Chrome.

Facebook

If you go to Facebook’s Accessing Your Facebook Data page, you can download all the data Facebook has collected from you. It also has all the contact information of your friends, including phone numbers etc., for the contacts you are connected to, those you deleted, and those you turned down. Photos are obviously there, too, and they can recognize faces. When you use a Facebook or Google sign-in for other websites, information is shared in both directions.

There is data that they collect on you that they don’t share. Many sites have tacking pixels that keep track of what you do on those sites and send the information to Facebook. Your messages to your congressman about political issues are often collected. Facebook has a patent pending that will connect you to others because their location data says you were in the same place at the same time. You don’t have to be connected or even know the person’s name.

Which is why it was such a big deal that Cambridge Analytica gave information to the Trump campaign and others. There is little doubt the Russians and Chinese have the data, too.

All mobile applications

When we check the box to accept terms and conditions without reviewing them, the implications are significant. That is a broader topic. There are some helpful insights on Ted Talks on data collection and artificial intelligence.

What can you do?

Most people do not know what data they agreed to give away. Above are two of the big data collectors you can check and adjust if you are concerned. There are a number of people deleting Facebook or significantly restraining it’s use. If you don’t want them to track your location, sign-out when you are not actively using the app. (That is not just closing the app; you need to log out.)

There are knowledgeable people who say it’s too late. The concept of privacy is gone. Just as you cannot collect the feathers of a pillow once you have released them to the wind, the data already shared will not go away. I do believe we can make the choice to be more aware and to actively manage how many feathers are in the wind.

Tim Cook is raising the issue because it is important and because there is still time to have impact, on a personal and global level.