Implementation Gap Quotes

Intellect without implementation is ignorance, not intelligence. By definition: intellect is understanding objectively, implementation of intellect is intelligence, knowledge is a branch of intelligence (intellect plus implementation) and ignorance is lack of knowledge which is a branch of intellect (understanding but not implementing). Further, this is why we call academics “intellectual” and knowledge workers “practitioners.” One could be both of course. From a scriptural perspective, “If any man will do his will, he shall know” (John 7:17). Vast difference between learning and knowing. The gap is in the doing (implementation vs ignorant to the doing).

Baldwin's words can sound harsh, as if he's throwing away millions of Americans and declaring them irrelevant to the life and future of our democracy. It's easy to read him that way, and sometimes, when his rage boils, he might actually mean it. But in the end, he wanted us to see that whiteness as an identity was a moral choice, an attitude toward the world based on ugly things. People can, if they want to, choose to be better. We need only build a world where that choice can be made with relative ease. If we--and I mean all of us who are committed to a New America--organize and fight with every ounce of energy we have to found an America free from the categories that bind our feet, implement policies that remedy generations-old injustices, and demonstrate in our living and political arrangements the value that every human being is sacred, we can build a New Jerusalem where the value gap [between whites and people of color] cannot breathe.

In January 2004 President George W. Bush put NASA in high gear, heading back to the moon with a space vision that was to have set in motion future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The Bush space policy focused on U.S. astronauts first returning to the moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020. Portraying the moon as home to abundant resources, President Bush did underscore the availability of raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air. “We can use our time on the moon to develop and test new approaches and technologies and systems that will allow us to function in other, more challenging, environments. The moon is a logical step toward further progress and achievement,” he remarked in rolling out his space policy. To fulfill the Bush space agenda required expensive new rockets—the Ares I launcher and the large, unfunded Ares V booster—plus a new lunar module, all elements of the so-called Constellation Program. The Bush plan forced retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 to pay for the return to the moon, but there were other ramifications as well. Putting the shuttle out to pasture created a large human spaceflight gap in reaching the International Space Station. The price tag for building the station is roughly $100 billion, and without the space shuttle, there’s no way to reach it without Russian assistance. In the end, the stars of the Constellation Program were out of financial alignment. It was an impossible policy to implement given limited NASA money.

As I write this, I know there are countless mysteries about the future of business that we’ve yet to unravel. That’s a process that will never end. When it comes to customer success, however, I have achieved absolute clarity on four points. First, technology will never stop evolving. In the years to come, machine learning and artificial intelligence will probably make or break your business. Success will involve using these tools to understand your customers like never before so that you can deliver more intelligent, personalized experiences. The second point is this: We’ve never had a better set of tools to help meet every possible standard of success, whether it’s finding a better way to match investment opportunities with interested clients, or making customers feel thrilled about the experience of renovating their home. The third point is that customer success depends on every stakeholder. By that I mean employees who feel engaged and responsible and are growing their careers in an environment that allows them to do their best work—and this applies to all employees, from the interns to the CEO. The same goes for partners working to design and implement customer solutions, as well as our communities, which provide the schools, hospitals, parks, and other facilities to support us all. The fourth and most important point is this: The gap between what customers really want from businesses and what’s actually possible is vanishing rapidly. And that’s going to change everything. The future isn’t about learning to be better at doing what we already do, it’s about how far we can stretch the boundaries of our imagination. The ability to produce success stories that weren’t possible a few years ago, to help customers thrive in dramatic new ways—that is going to become a driver of growth for any successful company. I believe we’re entering a new age in which customers will increasingly expect miracles from you. If you don’t value putting the customer at the center of everything you do, then you are going to fall behind. Whether you make cars, solar panels, television programs, or anything else, untold opportunities exist. Every company should invest in helping its customers find new destinations, and in blazing new trails to reach them. To do so, we have to resist the urge to make quick, marginal improvements and spend more time listening deeply to what customers really want, even if they’re not fully aware of it yet. In the end, it’s a matter of accepting that your success is inextricably linked to theirs.

Statistical discrimination explains why the police in the United States justify stopping black drivers more often. And how the Hindu majoritarian government of the state of Uttar Pradesh recently explained why so many of the people “accidentally” killed by the state police (in what are called “encounter deaths”) are Muslim. There are more blacks and Muslims among criminals. In other words, what looks like naked racism does not have to be that; it can be the result of targeting some characteristic (drug dealing, criminality) that happens to be correlated with race or religion. So statistical discrimination, rather than old-fashioned prejudice—what economists call taste-based discrimination—may be the cause. The end result is the same if you are black or Muslim, though. A recent study on the impact of “ban the box” (BTB) policies on the rate of unemployment of young black men provides a compelling demonstration of statistical discrimination. BTB policies restrict employers from using application forms where there is a box that needs to be checked if you have a criminal conviction. Twenty-three states have adopted these policies in the hope of raising employment among young black men, who are much more likely to have a conviction than others and whose unemployment rate is double the national average.31 To test the effect of these policies, two researchers sent fifteen thousand fictitious online job applications to employers in New Jersey and New York City, just before and right after the states of New York and New Jersey implemented the BTB policy.32 They manipulated the perception of race by using typically white or typically African American first names on the résumés. Whenever a job posting required indicating whether or not the applicant had a prior felony conviction, they also randomized whether he or she had one. They found, as many others before them, clear discrimination against blacks in general: white “applicants” received about 23 percent more callbacks than black applicants with the same résumé. Unsurprisingly, among employers who asked about criminal convictions before the ban, there was a very large effect of having a felony conviction: applicants without a felony conviction were 62 percent more likely to be called back than those with a conviction but an otherwise identical résumé, an effect similar for whites and blacks. The most surprising finding, however, was that the BTB policy substantially increased racial disparities in callbacks. White applicants to BTB-affected employers received 7 percent more callbacks than similar black applicants before BTB. After BTB, this gap grew to 43 percent. The reason was that without the actual information about convictions, the employers assumed all black applicants were more likely to have a conviction. In other words, the BTB policy led employers to rely on race to predict criminality, which is of course statistical discrimination.

So which country will lead in the broader category of business AI? Today, the United States enjoys a commanding lead (90–10) in this wave, but I believe in five years China will close that gap somewhat (70–30), and the Chinese government has a better shot at putting the power of business AI to good use. The United States has a clear advantage in the most immediate and profitable implementations of the technology: optimizations within banking, insurance, or any industry with lots of structured data that can be mined for better decision-making. Its companies have the raw material and corporate willpower to apply business AI to the problem of maximizing their bottom line.

One of the worst disconnects of a business software development effort is seen in the gap between domain experts and software developers. Generally speaking, true domain experts are focused on delivering business value. On the other hand, software developers are typically drawn to technology and technical solutions to business problems. It’s not that software developers have wrong motivations; it’s just what tends to grab their attention. Even when software developers engage with domain experts, the collaboration is largely at a surface level, and the software that gets developed often results in a translation/mapping between how the business thinks and operates and how the software developer interprets that. The resulting software generally does not reflect a recognizable realization of the mental model of the domain experts, or perhaps it does so only partially. Over time this disconnect becomes costly. The translation of domain knowledge into software is lost as developers transition to other projects or leave the company. A different, yet related problem is when one or more domain experts do not agree with each other. This tends to happen because each expert has more or less experience in the specific domain being modeled, or they are simply experts in related but different areas. It’s also common for multiple “domain experts” to have no expertise in a given domain, where they are more of a business analyst, yet they are expected to bring insightful direction to discussions. When this situation goes unchecked, it results in blurred rather than crisp mental models, which lead to conflicting software models. Worse still is when the technical approach to software development actually wrongly changes the way the business functions. While a different scenario, it is well known that enterprise resource planning (ERP) software will often change the overall business operations of an organization to fit the way the ERP functions. The total cost of owning the ERP cannot be fully calculated in terms of license and maintenance fees. The reorganization and disruption to the business can be far more costly than either of those two tangible factors. A similar dynamic is at play as your software development teams interpret what the business needs into what the newly developed software actually does. This can be both costly and disruptive to the business, its customers, and its partners. Furthermore, this technical interpretation is both unnecessary and avoidable with the use of proven software development techniques. The solution is a key investment.

Begin training yourself to put Hall Time between every meeting on your calendar, including conference calls, video calls, and one-on-ones. If you’re implementing Hall Time on your own, you can telegraph these gaps by scheduling meetings with the calendar default of 45–50 minutes and 20–25 minutes, respectively, for 60- and 30-minute expectations

The problem is that there are too many organizations where having a mission or values statement written down somewhere is confused with implementing those values.

Rework Your Network As you advance in your career, the advice you need changes. Preparing yourself for a new role calls for proactively restructuring your advice-and-counsel network. Early in your career, there is a premium on cultivating good technical advisers—experts in certain aspects of marketing or finance, for instance, who can help you get your work done. As you move to higher levels, however, it becomes increasingly important to get good political counsel and personal advice. Political counselors help you understand the politics of the organization, an understanding that is especially important when you plan to implement change. Personal advisers help you keep perspective and equilibrium in times of stress. Transforming your advice-and-counsel network is never easy; your current advisers may be close friends, and you may feel comfortable with technical advisers whose domains you know well. But it is essential to step back and recognize where you need to build your networks to compensate for blind spots and gaps in your own expertise or experience.

During this dizzying period of expansion [the 1950s], the Southern Cone began to look more like Europe and North America than the rest of Latina America or other parts of the Third World. The workers in the new factories formed powerful unions that negotiated middle-class salraies, and their children were sent off to study at newly build public universities, The yawning gap between the region's polo-club elite and its peasant masses began to narrow. By the 1950s, Argentina had the largest middle class on the continent, and next-door Uruguay had a literacy rate of 95 percent and offered free health care for all citizens. Developmentalism was so staggeringly successful for a time that the Southern Cone of Latin America became a potent symbol for poor countries around the world: here was proof that with smart, practical policies, aggressively implemented, the class divide between the First and Third World could actually be closed.

Think about your health, work, and relationships. Where do you find the biggest gap between your desired identity and your behavior? If you were to define your best-self identity in each of the three domains, what words would you use? List a champion proof for each best-self identity to know you’ve stepped into that identity every day. What does your ideal day look like? What does your ideal morning routine consist of? How can you restructure your days to better manage your energy and time? Remember to be creative before reactive. What is a massive goal you can set to force yourself to take massive action in your life? Don’t be afraid to dream. Commit before you’re ready. What is one thing in your life you can 80/20? Zero in on the 20% of effort that would create 80% of the results. Could you benefit from the power of single-tasking? Consider creating a timesheet to record how much time you spend on each task everyday and notice how much task-switching is costing you. What is one stat in your life you can begin to monitor to help you stay on track and feel encouraged as you see your progress? Implement a weekly review. Note your big wins, progress on your Top 3 objectives, what went well, and what didn’t. Look ahead to your appointments for next week, review your Top 3 objectives, and mark time on your calendar to do them. Which of the antifragility concepts most resonated with you? Is there a situation where you can apply that concept in your daily life?

In performance psychology, there is a concept known as implementation intentions, which is a strategy to plan for the worst—so you can perform your best.26

Another reason why we cannot combine targets and forecasts is because a good target needs to have an element of stretch and ambition. When setting targets, we cannot just sit in a dark room, or look back to last year and add on a few percentages. We need to look out the window to the world outside, to customers, shareholders, communities, and all the other external stakeholders, with expectations about our performance and behavior. While the window is open, it might be wise also to take a look at the competition and how fast it is running. When we close the window and reflect on what we have seen, it is not unlikely that what we have observed has an effect on our ambition level. Setting ambitious targets is less a decision we take and more a consequence of what is happening around us, whether we like what we see or not. At the same time, we need those good and reliable forecasts. We must understand where we are heading, how big the gaps are against our ambitions and targets, and where we need to focus our attention and energy to catch up. Forcing a target and a forecast into one number in one process is almost guaranteed to result in either a bad target or a bad forecast. Or very often both, since we negotiate and compromise and end up with a number somewhere in between.

Qafzeh’s algorithms—if implemented properly on a particular architecture of quantum computer—led to a net heat loss from the local universe. A cryo-arithmetic engine was in essence just a computer, running computational cycles. Unlike ordinary computers, however, it got colder the faster it ran.

Build a heterogeneous team to close three gaps in innovation management - idea gaps, collaboration gaps, and implementation gaps

Liberal democracy and capitalism remain the essential, indeed the only, framework for the political and economic organization of modern societies. Rapid economic modernization is closing the gap between many former Third World countries and the industrialized North. With European integration and North American free trade, the web of economic ties within each region will thicken, and sharp cultural boundaries will become increasingly fuzzy. Implementation of the free trade regime of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) will further erode interregional boundaries. Increased global competition has forced companies across cultural boundaries to try to adopt “best-practice” techniques like lean manufacturing from whatever source they come from. The worldwide recession of the 1990s has put great pressure on Japanese and German companies to scale back their culturally distinctive and paternalistic labor policies in favor of a more purely liberal model. The modern communications revolution abets this convergence by facilitating economic globalization and by propagating the spread of ideas at enormous speed. But in our age, there can be substantial pressures for cultural differentiation even as the world homogenizes in other respects. Modern liberal political and economic institutions not only coexist with religion and other traditional elements of culture but many actually work better in conjunction with them. If many of the most important remaining social problems are essentially cultural in nature and if the chief differences among societies are not political, ideological, or even institutional but rather cultural, it stands to reason that societies will hang on to these areas of cultural distinctiveness and that the latter will become all the more salient and important in the years to come. Awareness of cultural difference will be abetted, paradoxically, by the same communications technology that has made the global village possible. There is a strong liberal faith that people around the world are basically similar under the surface and that greater communications will bring deeper understanding and cooperation. In many instances, unfortunately, that familiarity breeds contempt rather than sympathy. Something like this process has been going on between the United States and Asia in the past decade. Americans have come to realize that Japan is not simply a fellow capitalist democracy but has rather different ways of practicing both capitalism and democracy. One result, among others, is sthe emergence of the revisionist school among specialists on Japan, who are less sympathetic to Tokyo and argue for tougher trade policies. And Asians are made vividly aware through the media of crime, drugs, family breakdown, and other American social problems, and many have decided that the United States is not such an attractive model after all. Lee Kwan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore, has emerged as a spokesman for a kind of Asian revisionism on the United States, which argues that liberal democracy is not an appropriate political model for the Confucian societies.10 The very convergence of major institutions makes peoples all the more intent on preserving those elements of distinctiveness they continue to possess.

Christensen wrote for a book titled The 4 Disciplines of Execution, which built on extensive consulting case studies to describe four “disciplines” (abbreviated, 4DX) for helping companies successfully implement high-level strategies. What struck me as I read was that this gap between what and how was relevant to my personal quest to spend more time working deeply.

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The outcome of value-oriented implementation stages circles back and exerts influence over the problem definition stages. As a result, facts and values are intertwined within a research project even if that may not be obvious in silos.

The rapidly changing global landscape invalidates even recent decisions – it is unproductive to force a rigid model on a fluid reality.

Actually putting your people first and treating them as if they matter to the organization’s success, although easy to talk about and easy to understand, is notoriously difficult to implement.

Research shows that applying implementation intentions increases your self-control, even when you’re in bad environments.27 Rather than wearing out your willpower and watching yourself fail, you have a pre-planned response that takes the guesswork out of your decision-making. When you have a pre-plan for how you’ll deal with obstacles, then you won’t get thrown off when you’re in a situation and tempted to sabotage your goals.

There are three essentials for good public health programs. The first is the conviction that the basis for public health is to achieve health equity; therefore, the bottom line is social justice in health. Second is the understanding that the science base is epidemiology. It is epidemiology that determines the gaps in social justice, identifies the groups with poor health outcomes, discovers the details of disease causation, and provides clues to how corrective action might improve health. The third essential is the need for good management for efficient implementation of corrective actions.