Author Profile - Paul W. Smith, a Founder and Director of Engineering with INVENTtPM LLc, has more than 35 years of experience in research and advanced product development.
Prior to founding INVENTtPM, Dr. Smith spent 10 years with Seagate Technology in Longmont, Colorado. At Seagate, Dr. Smith was primarily responsible for evaluating new data storage technologies under development throughout the company, and utilizing six-sigma processes to stage them for implementation in early engineering models. While at Seagate, he was a proud member of the team that brought the world’s first notebook disk drive with perpendicular recording technology to the market.
Dr. Smith holds a doctorate in Applied Mechanics from the California Institute of Technology, a Master of Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
If you think your boss (assuming you still have one these days) is a micro-manager who constantly has you under the microscope, you can probably summon up some empathy for President Obama. One of the most visible “new hires” of these trying economic times, he survived a strenuous interview process to land a prime position, relocation and benefits included.
Politics aside, Obama began his new job in an unprecedented time, bringing his charisma and promise of change to an American people who were hammered by looming bank failures, double-digit unemployment, and the escalating expense, in dollars and lives, of at least two overseas wars. It comes as no surprise that the clothes he (or his wife) wears, the amount of grey on his temples, the wrinkle-count of his face, the words he utters, and even the status of his jump-shot are chronicled daily in great detail.
Analysts with sophisticated computer software and nothing better to do have discovered that Obama’s favorite phrase is “Let me be perfectly clear.”
Even ordinary citizens follow certain rhetorical patterns; we all know someone who prefaces every third sentence with “To be honest …”, leading us to assume that statements lacking this lead are untrue. Another strong contender for most-used might be “You know what I mean?”, somehow implying that the listener may be a bit slow.
The President consistently uses his own signature phrase to season public statements on nearly every topic, from health insurance to the Nobel Peace Prize. At first glance, this seems a bit unusual in politics, a profession where ambiguity is a treasured skill. Is the President merely punctuating his rhetoric according to a comfortable habit, or is he actually launching a campaign – in defiance of all political traditions – against ambiguity?
Each of us has his own mental associations with the word “clarity”; one of mine is filed in the gray-matter with the tab “Sternberg’s Desk”. Eli Sternberg was my professor of Elasticity Theory at Caltech, and a member of the “Gang of Five” who held my doctoral aspirations in his grasp. He was a tall man with a measured, melodious voice – both imposing and inviting – a brilliant scholar with that rare talent that enabled him to craft customized explanations of the most difficult mathematical topics for any student bold enough to engage him. The examinations in his graduate courses were oral, conducted in an empty classroom with the petrified student standing at the blackboard armed only with a piece of chalk, and Prof. Sternberg seated casually in the front row. He was a memorable part of my graduate education, and the image that lingers most is the desk in his immaculate office.
College professors, as a rule, are not known for the neatness of their desks. The working explanation involves the highly active nature of the brilliant mind, mostly incapable of dealing with such trivia as matching socks, timely appearance at appointments, or organizing an office. Prof. Sternberg was a rare exception. The books on his shelves were neatly arranged according to size and color, and his large wooden desk was completely barren save for a single note pad, centered and squared with the edges.
Parallel to the edge of the pad, and displaced slightly to the left, lay his fountain pen. To this day, I am in awe of people who do complex mathematics with a pen. Prof. Sternberg’s professional environment, like his amazing mind, was crisp, clutter free and economical. In my personal dictionary, the word “clarity” sits next to a picture of Eli Sternberg behind his perfect desk.
While clarity may be a defining trait for great minds and an oratorical refrain for our nation’s leader, it is not a noun well-suited to our experience of this past year. As a nation that loves to set anchor with a solid statistic, we have struggled to find one that offers encouragement. Seen through the corrective lens of government analysis, the unemployment figures, hovering around 10% , can be spun optimistically (9 out of every 10 people have jobs), or viewed as a historically dangerous peak by those standing in line at the Department of Labor.
Another measure of unemployment lurks in the shadows; it is known as “U-6” and it attempts to include “discouraged” workers (who isn’t discouraged these days?). Studies show that one in three unemployed people have been looking for a job for more than six months and still haven’t found one. Depending on how you measure discouragement, at least one unemployment index soars to an astounding 20+%.
One thing I’ve learned in this past year is that it’s far too easy to rely on the future as an escape hatch for the present. A foggy, softly focused view of tomorrow separates the optimists from the pessimists, and leads me back down the path toward the denial phase of my journey. The beauty of “standard” government statistical figures is the rich variety from which we can select one that supports our own imaginative pretense. The dictionary will cite “ambiguity” as the antonym for “clarity”, but a choice more relevant to the times might be “apathy”. Like the apathetic contributors to the “true” unemployment figures, those who have lost their clarity for the future will find that their drive to get there will also soon vanish.
The President has launched enough jump shots to know that clarity and focus are also important on the court. In basketball as in other sports, body mechanics rule and successful athletes seek to isolate the preciseness of muscle memory from the competing arguments of intellect and emotion. Just as over-analysis of the process of shooting a basketball will ruin the shot, so does my mental number crunching of 2010 job projections submerge me in murky waters.
Emotional torpedoes threaten to breach the resolve of players and job-seekers alike, flooding each with hormones which beg for release. A flood of adrenaline conveniently equips us to run out of the gym after missing a critical shot. This is generally not a good choice, any more than running away (mentally or physically) from the fears of the job market.
The story of 2009 has taught me this. As I stop wrestling with and cross-checking the government statistics, take control of the fears which try to derail me, and trust my 35 years of muscle-memory-like experience as a technical professional, the clarity – and excitement – of my future is returning.
-Paul
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