Michael C Hogan

Agile Product Development & Innovation Strategy

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“The Trouble with Dilbert”

Norman Solomon critiques the cartoon “Dilbert” in this series of essays collected as “The Trouble with Dilbert”.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040218235653/http://free.freespeech.org/normansolomon/dilbert/book/

Solomon investigates the hypothesis that companies allow Dilbert to be successful, and pay Dilbert’s author to speak at company events, because the cartoon conditions employees to accept a certain set of working conditions as normal so that they will not seek change. Who knows if it’s true, but it’s pretty interesting.

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Warren Buffet on Choosing a Career, the Relative Value of Wealth, and Social Security

Asked at 11:00 how he would advise people that aren’t necessarily going into high paying fields Buffet recommends people do what they love. He makes a few notable observations:

  • A market system does not pay as well in some activities as might seem appropriate given the value of those activities to society
  • Many people make a fundamental choice between doing something they love or doing something to make money
  • He can’t recall speaking with someone who spent their whole life doing something they loved and wished in old age they’d made more money instead
  • The day-to-day reality of how he lives his life really isn’t that different from how most people in the United States live, except for the notable example of traveling by private jet (listen to him explain it because he’s more convincing on this point that I expected)

Asked about Welfare and Social Security at 51:51 (2nd to last question), Buffet challenges the students to think of the world as a lottery they’re born into and to think about what rules it might be worth having in place to take care of the people who draw an unlucky ticket.

Watch the full lecture and Q&A on YouTube

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Vaccination is safe. About as safe as sending a child to school in the United States.

This week, the anti-vaxer movement hit home as I found myself in a conversation with someone who is against vaccines. I did some research so that I could respond to this anti-vaxer’s false claims and hyperbole. In the end, it turns out that getting a child vaccinated is no more risky to that child’s health than being sent to school in the United States. In the state of California, no one is forced to get a vaccine against his or her will, so please choose to vaccinate.

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How are Mayan-influenced cultures really celebrating 2013?

I went to a Belesian celebration of the 14th Mayan baktun on San Pedro island in Belize. Here’s what happened….

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5 Questions, 5 Integrated Issues

Sunday, April 15, 2007 I attended the Music Center Speaker Series in Los Angeles. President Bill Clinton spoke for two hours and I found his speech engaging. It provided both a framework for approaching strategy and an overview of a former president’s assessment of our world. This is my summary of his speech.

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Sequoia Time

Originally published November 28, 2001 for USC Writing 140. Updated December 6, 2001.

Towering nearly one-hundred feet above me, and below an additional two-hundred feet of living wood, grew a single branch larger in diameter than any tree east of the Mississippi River. As massive as that branch itself was, in comparison to its supporting structure, a giant sequoia, its size seemed insignificant. Even more impressive, the branch’s bearer, in its vast age, had seen the surrounding wood arise over a period spanning three millennia. The first time I gazed upon that astounding limb, my eyes having traversed the journey from the sequoia’s base skyward, I was struck with a sense of awe which I have felt few times before or since. Standing in the shadow of such a giant, I remember feeling small– existing as a current burden on the sequoia’s roots, one among a long succession of fleeting observers.

The awe that I felt in response to the sequoia arose from my musings as to who those observers might have been: heroes, presidents, and kings among them in the preceding two-hundred years alone. Considering this question, and also the varied conditions with which such observers might have existed, I drew upon the sequoia’s ability to serve as a connective tissue transcending the traditional boundaries of the human life span. As a result, my concept of time and my understanding of human action began to radically change.

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Selecting Environmental Wallpaper

Originally published September 14, 2001 for USC Writing 140. References are to two full page advertisements cut from the pages of GQ Magazine.

As a graphic designer assembles an advertisement for print, numerous details must be taken into consideration in order to ensure a powerful impact upon the reader. The fonts, white space, copy, and images must all be intermingled to emphasize corporate brand. Each aspect of an advertisement has a direct impact upon the readers who view it, influencing how a given product and its producer are evaluated. Much as consumers are enticed to purchase Michael Jordan’s shoes because of the enchanting feeling aroused through the experience of sharing a trait with a global icon, so, too, is a consumer likely to select a product advertised as being essential to an environment the consumer yearns to experience.

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