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For SpaceNut ....
Strategic Planning is a department category in corporations that reach a certain size ...
I checked the topic list for Meta New Mars and a topic containing the words "strategic" and "planning" did not exist ...
NewMars forum is either tiny (based on active contributors) or huge (based on potential contributors already present).
Either way, the new period of the life of the forum we have entered, thanks to the "contributions" of our Russian friends (not to exclude any one else who contributed spam over the last 20 years), deserves investment of some thought in how this forum can contribute to the success of the Mars Society.
A category of person we might consider inviting to join the active membership would be someone with years of experience doing research and providing studies to management of a large organization.
In this case, the objective would be to see how this forum can help Mars Society to achieve its strategic objectives.
If someone is interested in this new topic, a contribution that I would welcome would be to investigate to see what the objectives of the Mars Society are as of their latest review.
The success of their 2020 Convention may have inspired a recent review.
This topic would be a good place for that information to appear.
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Last edited by tahanson43206 (2021-01-04 14:18:20)
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The are well on our way towards making NewMars better and more of an important arm to the Mars Society as well as for going to Mars one day.
We have taken steps to shut out the spamming to gain control once more to the very important aspect of wanting to get the best minds to work on the problems in an open format.
The steps being taken to reclaim and utilize the forums functions for good rather than for spam content is and will be completed one day in the future with the excellent efforts of those here involved in that action. Thank you by tahanson43206 for the email service to help clear those that do want to be a part of something unique and special.
We are on the path to fixing the may conversion errored posts from the many versions of software that and of the great crash has created for clean up. Also the many posts are said to have been reclaimed but due to the forums alignments it will take some time to move and merge them back in to make the many parts of our topics whole once more.
The roads not taken so far are on the outreach and growth paths of which some of this is laid out and just needs more volunteers to bring the many ideas into flourishing. That out reach is to start an email campaign to write for those that either were locked out or lost desire in the old Newmars website to come back and join in once more as we can help to solve the technical aspects of posting once more.
More outreach to try and add real Mars Society members that right to post and join in with the many topics and conversations as they did pay for being members for the dream of going to mars. Open thinking can sometimes lead to unexpected testing and of fleshing out of the possibility from the not possible for Mars.
The last outreach is from advertising which I hope would be cleared to call for the expertise that we need in the many fields to help with those technical and just thoughts of what we might think will work to gain new members for NewMars. Hopefully we can as well from the many topics get university and research to invest and bring our thoughts from just conversation and dreams to reality.
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For SpaceNut ... you are most likely to be the only member of the forum who reads this post ....
I'm hoping you like the idea that is at the heart of the article, because (it seems to me at least) the NewMars forum is an excellent model for the kind of human network that will exist widely on Mars and in the Solar System away from Earth.
Face to Face meetings ** used ** to be the ** only ** way that humans conducted business, with the occasional dispatch sent by Caesar to trusted lieutenants.
With Covid and the arrival of Zoom, suddenly corporations, groups and even governments suddenly took on the character that NewMars has had from the beginning;
In particular, I'd like to draw your attention to the paragraph where an ** INCREASE ** of productivity was noted, against the general background noise of reduced productivity.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters … ket-newtab
Work in Progress
The Biggest Problem With Remote WorkCompanies need a new kind of middle manager: the synchronizer.
By Derek ThompsonA statue of Socrates sits at a desk and ponders a laptop.
Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty
July 11, 2022Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.
Remote work seems fully entrenched in American life. Offices are more than half empty nationwide, while restaurants and movie theaters are packed. Housing prices in suburbs and small towns have surged as white-collar workers take advantage of the demise of the daily commute.
But if the work-from-anywhere movement has been successful for veteran employees in defined roles with trusted colleagues, for certain people and for certain objectives, remote or hybrid work remains a problem to be solved.
First, remote work is worse for new workers. Many inexperienced employees joining a virtual company realize that they haven’t joined much of a company at all. They’ve logged into a virtual room that calls itself a company but is basically a group chat. It’s hard to promote a wholesome company culture in normal times, and harder still to do so one misunderstood group Slack message and problematic fire emoji at a time. “Small talk, passing conversations, even just observing your manager’s pathways through the office may seem trivial, but in the aggregate they’re far more valuable than any form of company handbook,” write Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel, the authors of the book Out of Office. Many of the perks of flexible work—like owning your own schedule and getting away from office gossip—can “work against younger employees” in companies that don't have intentional structured mentorship programs, they argued.
Out Of Office - The Big Problem And Bigger Promise Of Working From HomeCharlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen, Knopf
The Visible Hand - The Managerial Revolution In American BusinessAlfred D. Chandler Jr., Harvard University Press
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.Second, remote is worse at building new teams to take on new tasks. In 2020, Microsoft tapped researchers from UC Berkeley to study how the pandemic changed its work culture. Researchers combed through 60,000 employees’ anonymized messages and chats. They found that the number of messages sent within teams grew significantly, as workers tried to keep up with their colleagues. But information sharing between groups plummeted. Remote work made people more likely to hunker down with their preexisting teams and less likely to have serendipitous conversations that could lead to knowledge sharing. Though employees could accomplish the “hard work” of emailing and making PowerPoints from anywhere, the Microsoft-Berkeley study suggested that the most important job of the office is “soft work”—the sort of banter that allows for long-term trust and innovation.
Other major studies have come to similar conclusions. In 2022, researchers from MIT and UCLA published a map of face-to-face interactions in the Bay Area made using smartphone geolocation data and matched it to patent citations by individual firms. They were looking for empirical evidence to support the old Jane Jacobs theory that cities promote innovation as people from disparate walks of life bump into each other and cross-pollinate ideas. They concluded that the Jacobs theory was right. The groups and firms with the most face-to-face interactions also had the most unique patent citations.
Third, and relatedly, remote work is worse at generating disruptive new ideas. A paper published in Nature by Melanie Brucks, at Columbia Business School, and Jonathan Levav, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, analyzed whether virtual teams could brainstorm as creatively as in-person teams. In one study, they recruited about 1,500 engineers to work in pairs and randomly assigned them to brainstorm either face-to-face or over videoconference. After the pairs generated product ideas for an hour, they selected and submitted one to a panel of judges. Engineers who worked virtually generated fewer total ideas and external raters graded their ideas significantly less creative than those of the in-person teams.
The Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom—a famous defender of remote work’s potential—told me that this study presented the “best research” on how in-person interactions foster complex, free-flowing discussion. “There are definitely situations, including mentoring new employees and innovative activities, that require some time in the office,” he said. “For me, that does not mean that [work from home] is bad, but that it cannot be 100 percent of work.”
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MastercardWhy might the quality of ideas degrade when people collaborate remotely? My favorite explanation is that collaboration requires trust, and trust implies a kind of intimacy, and it’s hard to build true intimacy via Zoom and chat. One of the most profound things that I’ve heard in my two years reporting on remote work is the idea that digital communications can be a minefield for trust.
“Whenever we read a sentence on Gchat or Slack that seems ambiguous or sarcastic to us, we default to thinking, You fucker!” Bill Duane, a remote-work consultant and former Google engineer, told me. “But if someone had said the same thing to your face, you might be laughing with them.” In many contexts, remote work without physical-world reunions can flatten colleagues into simplistic caricatures and abstractions. It sounds hokey but it’s true: To see our colleagues as whole people, we have to literally see them as whole people—not just two-dimensional avatars.
The work-from-anywhere revolution has something of a kick-starter problem: It’s harder for new workers, new groups, and new ideas to get revved up.
So how do we fix this? One school of thought says face-to-face interactions are too precious to be replaced. I disagree. I’m an optimist who believes the corporate world can solve these problems, because I know that other industries already have.
Modern scientific research is a team sport, with groups spanning many universities and countries. Groups working without face-to-face interaction have historically been less innovative, according to a new paper on remote work in science. For decades, teams split among several countries were five times less likely to produce “breakthrough” science that replaced the corpus of research that came before it. But in the past decade, the innovation gap between on-site and remote teams suddenly reversed. Today, the teams divided by the greatest distance are producing the most significant and innovative work.
I asked one of the co-authors of the paper, the Oxford University economist Carl Benedikt Frey, to explain this flip. He said the explosion of remote-work tools such as Zoom and Slack was essential. But the most important factor is that remote scientists have figured out how to be better hybrid workers. After decades of trial and error, they’ve learned to combine their local networks, which are developed through years of in-person encounters, and their virtual networks, to build a kind of global collective brain.
If scientists can make remote work work, companies can do it too. But they might just have to create an entirely new position—a middle manager for the post-pandemic era.
In the middle of the 19th century, the railroads and the telegraph allowed goods and information to move faster than ever. In 1800, traveling from Manhattan to Chicago took, on average, four weeks. In 1857, it took two days. Firms headquartered in major cities could suddenly track prices from Los Angeles to Miami and ship goods across the country at then-record-high speeds.
To conduct this full orchestra of operations, mid-1800s companies had to invent an entirely new system of organizing work. They needed a new layer of decision makers who could steer local production and distribution businesses. A new species of employee was born: the “middle manager.”
“As late as 1840, there were no middle managers in the United States,” Alfred Chandler observed in The Visible Hand, his classic history of the rise of America’s managerial revolution. In the early 1800s, all managers were owners, and all owners were managers; it was unheard of for somebody to direct employees without being a partner in the company. But once ownership and management were unbundled, new kinds of American companies were made possible, such as the department store, the mail-order house, and the national oil and steel behemoths.
In the 1800s, new technology allowed U.S. companies to extend their distribution and production tentacles across the continent, necessitating a new class of worker. Today’s hybrid companies, similarly extended across the country and even around the world, need to invent a new role to remain competitive and sane. This role would determine what work was “hard work” that could be done asynchronously and from anywhere, and what necessary “soft work” would require people to be in an office at the same time. Based on a comprehensive understanding of total workflow and team dynamics, this person would develop and constantly update a plan of who needs to be in the office, and on what days, and where they sit, and why they are there in the first place.
Operations teams at many companies are already doing some of this work. Often these teams are spread across multiple challenges that preexisted the pandemic—like recruiting, IT, office maintenance, and normal pre-pandemic communications. For these stressed and overstretched workers, coordinating the perfect hybrid cadence is the third priority for five different people. But managing a remote or hybrid workflow is too important to sprinkle onto old positions. It’s a discrete task, with discrete challenges, which deserves a discrete job.
The synchronizer—or, for large companies, a team of synchronizers—would be responsible for solving the new-worker, new-group, and new-idea problems. Synchronizers would help new workers by ensuring that their managers, mentors, and colleagues are with them at the office during an early onboarding period. They would plan in-person time for new teammates to get to know one another as actual people and not just abstracted online personalities. They would coordinate the formation of new groups to tackle new project ideas, the same way that modern teams in science pull together the right researchers from around the world to co-author new papers. They would plan frequent retreats and reunions across the company, even for workers who never have to be together, with the understanding that the best new ideas—whether in science, consulting, or media—often come from the surprising hybridization of disparate expertise.
The remote-work debate has become deeply polarized between people who consider it a moral necessity that is beyond criticism and those who consider it a culture-killer that is beyond fixing. Like the office, remote work will never go away, and like the office, it has important problems that deserve our attention. Solving remote work’s problems is a job worth doing.
Join Derek Thompson for his next office hours session on July 12 at 11 a.m. ET, where he’ll talk with staff writer Jerusalem Demsas about housing and the real estate market and take questions from you, the audience. Register here or watch a recording any time on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel.
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Teleworking might be the latest craze for some that have a place within the home to actually do work within and for many it's a cost of travel that is the real reduction for the life's improvements. Some miss the water cooler chit chat while others now no longer have to keep looking over the back for those that step on others to get where they are for promotions.
I recently applied for a promotion but due to a weed out question for the new job title I was deigned even getting past the approval list to get an interview.
Of course, my current position requires me to be present to perform some aspects of work but for the most part I could telework as my main function is to use there many programs to make sense of the materials being ordered to arrival, for them they would be used on a work schedule. The program that orders the material has not reference for when they will be needed, and the program used to control inventory storage does not as well. The use of business objects to data mine the universe or data bases to export into excel are used to achieve a means to turn them into imported data tables in access that allow me to make unrelated data relative to the work perform.
It's the employers right to choose as to whether there is a valid reason to have the worker set to a non-office condition of which pure data entry is just one of those areas that make it lower cost for the employer.
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For SpaceNut re #4
There's a lot packed into #4....
Thanks for noting the teleworking story ... I brought it up because it is a good match for NewMars' environment.
However, your comment about how you might be able to do part of your job from home if you had the right equipment and bandwidth caught my attention!
Is there a security aspect to the situation? Would the employer be willing to provide the security front end if you pick up the tab for the home office?
Did you notice the close out on brand new desktops I showed you recently? That equipment was expensive when they first came out.
You might be able to run the numbers on commuting vs a home office, and find that you achieve a balance. You'd still have to drive into the office on occasion, but you could guarantee being on the job rain or shine (or snow blizzard) if you could telework for a few days a week.
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Disappointed to hear of the missed opportunity, but I'd like to encourage you to keep a watch for something that might be a better fit.
Plus... the weedout question itself may be an opportunity, if the issue can be addressed. Obviously I have no way of knowing.
***
Re the topic ... I think I've suggested this before, but there's no harm in reminding .... There may be some NewMars members who are not Mars Society members, and who might be willing to contribute $50 per year to help the Society. Some portion of that might be allocated back to NewMars, such as to cover the cost of a high speed Internet connection.
12 members would cover most of the cost of a high speed connection.
The Society currently has no way to allocate a membership to any particular project, but that is a capability that could be added.
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Yes, security of equipment, network ect. along with other factors that I cannot go into. The division I am in is not allow except under extreme conditions.
There may be an opportunity to leapfrog that step and level in the near future as I interact with those even above that level of command of many ranks from lieutenant to Admiral and several in between. I have been leading the way to solve problems and give solutions that are with in the current means and come up with future state ideas. It's one of those things in which they are slow to change as they give the "well we have always done it that way speech".
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