Astromanager LLC

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Tag: International

  • What can science bring business?

    Although I normally think and write about what the commercial business (aka the real) world can bring to astronomy management, I thought I would take a new look at the subject and consider what science can bring the (real) world of business management. Are there aspects of  science and astronomy  that can be applied to the business world?  In short,  yes.

    A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to visit the Vietnamese company, Viettel. Viettel is one of the fastest growing telecommunications companies in the world and I was very impressed with their leadership and their company’s vision and culture.  The company has 8 very visible values that seem to directly reflect the marriage of the scientific approach within the commercial world framework.  The translations I found differ, but their 8 basic values can be summarized as:

    1. The data decide the right answer.
    2. Learn through success and failure.
    3. Change is the norm; adapt quickly.
    4. Innovation is life.
    5. Think about the system, not just the parts.
    6. Combine the East and the West – look at things from different perspectives.
    7. Exploit the military tradition and manner: discipline, unity, perseverance, decisiveness, thoroughness.
    8. Viettel is a family.

    I really can’t think of a better way to put it. These principles capture the data-based, experimental, innovation driven approach from science with a systems engineering, multiple-perspective, disciplined outlook in an organization that treats its employees as family. That sounds a lot like the marriage of science and business, fairly consistent with my own management and leadership goals as mentioned in a previous post.  Some benefits of the scientific approach, which Viettel seems to understand, include the objective competing of different ideas and different solutions in order to find the best solution.  The search for the truth is more important than any one person being right.  In working together to explore multiple ways of solving a problem, we create alignment in purpose and a focus on providing the best results for the organization.  We do not make decisions based on opinions, but on facts and data.

    Viettel also acknowledges that learning comes from failures as well as successes.  Combined with their focus on objective data, I imagine they explore why their successes worked as well as why their failures failed, and learn from each.  My personality type, I’ve read, typically views failures as incomplete successes. That characterization may have been meant a bit facetiously, but the Viettel principles show the value of such a world view.  If we use the data at hand, make an objective decision that ultimately proves wrong, we have learned something valuable – perhaps as valuable or more than we would have learned had we got it right instead. We try, we fail, we learn, we improve, we move on.  (The downside to that approach of course arises if you fail to learn from the failure, and simply reclassify it as a success. That is not what I am advocating.)

    I think this ties into a concept I have been hearing more and more about lately of radical transparency, but more on that in a future post.

  • VWs in China and building relationships

    Combining my interests in German cars, international relations, and general management, I recently read the book, 1000 Days in Shanghai, by Martin Posth.  The book is about Volkswagen’s initial journey to become the first international automobile manufacturing partner in China.  I found several interesting themes in the book, particularly the patience and vision which the VW crew exhibited when things didn’t go as planned.  When factory workers appropriated factory supplies shipped in from Germany meant for the new joint venture factory and instead used them in their own Chinese car factory, for example, Posth philosophizes (and it was probably easier doing so years later in his book than it was at the time) that when the Chinese workers saw the potential success of their new company, these kinds of behaviors would stop.  Time after time, the Germans felt the Chinese violated the terms of their contract agreement while the Chinese felt the Germans weren’t living up to their word and doing what they could to improvise in a changing environment. Yet both side persevered and the VW/Audi story in China is a huge success.

    Then, in a recent airplane ride, I read a brief article in the in-flight magazine that was offering advice about doing business in China. The article echoed a theme I’ve also uncovered in working with the Japanese astronomy community:  the Japanese/Chinese business relation is built first on personal relationships (giri on / guanxi), then on the written agreement, whereas in the West/USA, the contract is the basis of the business relationships.  The people may change, but the contract remains. Our contracts are often very detailed and precisely worded.  Their contracts are broader and talk more about intentions and partnerships.  We use contracts to tell us what to do when conditions change. Our Eastern partners view changing conditions as natural reasons to renegotiate the contract.  Both approaches make sense, but both are fundamentally different and ripe for misunderstandings if these differences aren’t recognized up front.

    So, besides knowing a bit more to expect when partnering with some of our Eastern colleagues (something increasingly common these days), this situation reminds me of another simple, obvious, yet valuable point.  Any time you’re interacting with another person, whether from your own culture or one very different, it’s important to understand their environment; it’s important to state and understand each other’s expectations and assumptions.  Without this understanding, there would never be a Volkswagen in China. Without this understanding, it is much harder to reach true harmony and agreement in any of your human relations.


    When negotiating one international agreement, Scot remembers being frustrated while his negotiating partners complained they didn’t understand a certain passage of text. After failing at multiple attempts to figure out what wording was confusing and getting maybe just a little bit frustrated, Scot remembered that not everyone is as direct as Americans. What “we don’t understand” really meant was “we don’t like”. He could have spent all day going through the text word by word without addressing the real issue at all. With that bit understood, the problem was recognized and then fairly quickly dealt with and resolved. International negotiations are full of such fun opportunities to learn how others think.

  • The never-ending battle between big and small science in astronomy

    When you hear the thundering herd behind you, it’s time to move on to a new field. That’s advice I often heard from my graduate advisers. While you might call this a “small science” mindset, they went on to found the Whole Earth Telescope (WET), an international collaboration of astronomers at more than a dozen observatories around the world that coordinated observations to follow variable (white dwarf) stars continuously for up to two weeks at a time, clearly a “big science” approach. The WET was initially very successful, and began to falter only later as it struggled to transition from a bunch of astronomers doing what they needed to do to get their science addressed, to an institution looking to continually justify its funding and purpose.

    I recently finished Giant Telescopes by Patrick McCray, a book basically about the origins of the Gemini Observatory. I was struck at how many of the same arguments that were in the community decades before Gemini, persisted up to and through its construction and are still being debated today. Principally, the question of private vs. public and big science vs. little science. In my earlier posting about The role and need for an international observatory, I gave some of my thoughts on the first question so here, I want to at least introduce the latter.

    A few years back, Simon White and Rocky Kolb submitted a set of papers, each championing for the big science or little science models for astronomy. There was even a pseudo-debate between them at the 2008 AAS meeting (http://aas.org/taxonomy/term/27 – session 87 – where you can see a video of the discussion). Simon White’s paper was Fundamentalist physics: why Dark Energy is bad for Astronomy while Rocky Kolb’s, issued in response, was entitled A Thousand Invisible Cords Binding Astronomy and High-Energy Physics. The context for this particular discussion was Dark Energy, but the underlying issue was really whether or not astronomy should be done in a big science or little science approach.

    An artistic interpretation of the crystallized white dwarf star, BPM 37093, observed by the WET.BPM 37093 is so massive, that theory predicts its core, mostly carbon and oxygen, is crystallized. Here on Earth, crystallized carbon is called diamond. Observations of the oscillations of this star with the Whole Earth Telescope were consistent with this interpretation and placed strong limits on the amount of crystallization within the star, a diamond in the sky.

    I don’t think this argument will ever really die since we will always have competing projects that are each done best under a different model. The solution is going to be to continue to adapt and be aware of the compromises and needs necessary to keep both approaches viable. One interesting moment in the 2008 AAS “debate” was when an audience member asked what each would like to adopt from the other side. Simon White said of high energy physics “managing large projects” while Rocky Kolb said of astronomy “making data public”. What I liked about this question and its responses was that it acknowledged that we don’t have to simply emulate the high energy physics big science model, nor steadfastly stick to astronomy’s traditional small science mode, but we can learn from both and make something better than either alone. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), like the WET, is a good example of this kind of approach. A core group of people inspired and really implemented the survey, with formal management and technical support partially adopted from the particle physics world. The SDSS used both public and private funding and made all the data publicly available after a short proprietary period. This melding of approaches helped make the SDSS one of the most successful projects of its type and certainly helped pave the way for even larger projects like the LSST and PanSTARRS.

    So the question isn’t big science vs. small science in astronomy, but how do we create an environment where both can exist, cooperate, and thrive? With 30m telescopes, 8m surveys, and pushes to build large, wide-field survey imagers and spectrographs, astronomy must learn to embrace big science, although we can do so on our own terms, not necessarily on those laid before us by other fields and previous projects. This debate is similar to the one on public vs. private facilities. A true strength of the astronomy community is that both public and private facilities have been successful. That both are continuing to debate why they each need more resources than the other means the community is relatively healthy. The next hurdle in both these arenas will be how to ensure the appropriate levels of cooperation between each community. How do you motivate private funding when the data become public to all? How do you (or do you?) justify public funding when the resulting data remain private? How do you make sure individual contributions are visible and not an anonymous contribution to a juggernaut project? How do you handle risk in a extremely delicate, risk-adverse, funding environment, especially in a field which traditionally pushes at the outer limits of available technology, a fundamentally risky task?

    I’ll try to address some possible answers to these questions in future posts.

    Starting off with the Whole Earth Telescope, then onto the SDSS, Subaru, and now Gemini, Scot has been involved in increasingly “larger” science, but has always managed to come away with his own “small” science projects within each. He particularly enjoyed doubling the number of known white dwarf stars from SDSS data of largely failed attempts to find Quasars!

  • The Role and Need for an International Observatory

    One immediate natural outcome of the UK’s withdrawal from Gemini is that until/unless another partner is found, the existing partners will likely divide up the UK’s share and the USA, now a 50% partner in Gemini, will become a clear majority stakeholder with over 60% of Gemini time. At that point, Gemini essentially becomes a US institution with some international partners for added flavor. This situation would certainly give the US community something it wants and needs: more 8m-class telescope time and more control of Gemini’s instruments and plans, but I think it ultimately misses out on the incredible opportunity that is Gemini.

    There are numerous advantages to keeping Gemini a truly international endeavor:

    1) value for the money increases as we leverage off a greater partnership

    2) we increase the pool of available knowledge, skills, and innovation contributing to the observatory

    3) we set a path for even larger more expensive collaborations to follow and learn from

    These are all pretty obvious advantages, but there’s another: we bring people from diverse communities together. Gemini unites the world through astronomy, or at least its small corner of it. This unification happens on social, political, economic, technological, and of course scientific fronts. Gemini’s partnership is based on agreements at the highest levels of government for all its partners. We continue to reach out to our fellow mountain-top neighbors as well, in efforts to increase exchange time and collaborations – particularly with our Japanese neighbors at Subaru. What a great example astronomy(and Gemini) can set for other collaborative efforts in the future. Gemini is an important trend-setter in international astronomy collaborations.

    With the US as a majority shareholder, it’s not obvious to me that the other current partners will want to remain and grow with Gemini. Without any real voice in how Gemini operates, I would certainly start looking elsewhere for collaborations where I could have a stronger voice if I were one of the minority partners. The future of the partnership itself is threatened by having a single majority stakeholder.

    Gemini Hilo Base Facility with partner country flags.

    A telescope and its suite of instruments are ultimately only as good as the people who use them. The goal of any observatory time allocation committee is to help ensure the best science gets done on the telescope. The larger the community of scientists, the larger pool of talent from which to obtain the best science. And yes competition, even between countries within a partnership, can also help promote the best science and the best instruments.

    Ultimately, though, it also comes down to money. US astronomy has not been good at getting national-level funding large enough to build the largest telescopes that compete on the international frontier. On the other hand, the US has been better than any other country in the world at getting private funding for large telescopes and that is an important strength for the US community, but ultimately, these resources go to the privileged universities or small consortia which operate them – and not to the general national community, creating a system of astronomy haves and have nots. In order to keep the US community strength of having both a large public and private set of facilities, we must keep the public funding coming and since the US obviously couldn’t get enough money to build Gemini by itself, why should people think there’ll be more money for future large projects? The non-privileged US community needs an international partnership, ironically, in order to stay competitive at the world level -and to keep astronomy from becoming the domain of the wealthy universities only.

    That an international facility not only solves the financial problem, but brings along other benefits in terms of more potential for better science, better instruments, better use of shared experiences, and an example of uniting multiple countries in a joint mission, is simply the icing on the cake. Now, realizing this potential is a lot easier said than done, but that’s the challenge we face, and probably fodder for a future post.

    Scot loves to travel and experience different cultures and environments, trying to get a sense of what it’s like to live in each place he visits, not just pass through as a been-there, seen-that tourist. Perhaps this is another reason he wishes to keep Gemini international – more international trips!

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