$7000 For Televisions?! ASCMC Blows Your Money

During Senate tonight, I learned that ASCMC's 2009 budget includes $7000 for televisions in Collins. This is a colossal waste of money, but as always, little will be done to curtail these excesses.

Josh Siegel, the VP of ASCMC, says that ASCMC will get to control whatever content is on the televisions. According to Siegel, Huang wanted to get the televisions, but was denied funding due to some fiscal prudence on the part of the administration, which is currently trying to cut back in a recession.

Did Siegel take that as his cue that maybe the televisions were of dubious use to the student body? No, he decided to bail Huang out of a boondoggle expenditure by offering ASCMC money instead.

Maybe he wants this television to be like that huge, big screen in the Coop that Associate Students of Pomona College has wasted its money on. What does that television do? Why, it just reads the headlines from the BBC and carries information that anyone could have gotten via email.

Outbreak in the Town of Claremont?

Those of you who thought Dean Jeff Huang may have overstated the case would do well to read what's going on in the Town of Claremont where a possible outbreak of swine flu occurred earlier today. 

I quote from one media report. [Emphasis mine.]

Although Los Angeles County has no confirmed cases of the potentially deadly virus, a student at Our Lady of the Assumption School in Claremont, who became ill after returning from a spring break trip to Mexico, was being tested for swine flu.

Huang's email is down below. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear CMC Students, Faculty, and Staff,

As you have probably read, Swine Flu has infected several people in the United States and Mexico. A small team of people at CMC began monitoring the situation on Saturday morning, and we will continue to monitor the situation as it evolves over the next several days.

The message below is from Student Health Services at the Claremont Colleges. It contains information about the symptoms to watch for, a list of preventative measures, and five additional resources on Swine Flu from the Centers for Disease Control. Please take a moment to review this information.

Sincerely,

Jeff Huang

VP & Dean 

Ben Casnocha on the Role of Side Projects in Innovation

My friend and erstwhile (and perhaps future) CMC student, Ben Casnocha CMC '11(?), has written an interesting take on the 20 percent time phenomenon that seems to be all the rage in Silicon Valley for what has rapidly become my favorite website, The American. 

On balance, the piece is strong, aside from some meandering references to the Founding Fathers that distract, but could have done well to mention the very first serious people to experiment with so-called "success on the side." He's right to mention 3M, but there were other companies that did similar kinds of things much earlier. One such person was Thomas Alva Edison who created Menlo Park, which history might record as really the first idea factor. Edison's experiences with Tesla might have been useful to Casnocha when studying what happens when a manager mistreats their workers' creativity or innovations. 

It was Edison who initially hired Nikola Tesla, the man who would eventually vie with him in the War of Currents. Tesla was promised $50,000 for working to improve Edison's dynamo, which he did after a year's worth of work. Edison purportedly cheated Tesla out of the money. (For more see, this Wikipedia footnote.) Tesla never forgave Edison for this slight, which Edison came to rue, as Tesla's alternating current motor replaced Edison's direct current. I bet Edison wishes he could take back his statement that Tesla's "ideas are splendid, but they are utterly impractical." I wonder just how many managers dismiss what Casnocha probably charitably calls the office "crackpot."

Returning back to Casnocha's piece, it also dodged a serious issue within companies that decide to create side project time: that of ownership. While it may be beneficial for a company's bottom line, there are serious issues associated with ownership of the ideas. Among these are: How should a company respond to someone who wants to create many different companies or side projects? Should it give him stock options? How about cash? Or is it merely enough to let someone be innovative? Every entrepreneur within a company will have a different incentive that will get them to produce still more and it is an important question for managers to know what that those incentives are so as to fully develop the company's human resources. 

The issue is of particular interest to me as my namesake and great grandfather, Charles Centinnel Carlisle, was an inventor.  (My full name is Charles Carlisle Johnson.)  My great grandfather,  despite his brilliance (or is it connivance?) did not make the most of his patents as they were owned by the company for which he worked. In fact, they still are. (He was also something of a scam artist, always looking for a quick buck, but that's another story.) My family history might have been somewhat different had my great grandfather been given an opportunity to innovate within a company that respected his intelligence. Instead, he spent most of his life trying to figure out ways to make money quick to support his family, rather than develop his full intellectual potential. (He arrived penniless from Scotland.)

His life story is a cautionary tale and Ben Casnocha deserves credit for bringing up some of the issues associated with innovation, but the real question is how do Google and other companies that practice side project time ward off the Edison-Tesla conflicts of the world, reward entrepreneurs, and foster innovation?