Tag: Gemini

What exactly should managers manage?

At Facebook, moving into management is not a promotion. It’s a lateral move, a parallel track. Managers are there to support people and to remove barriers to getting things done. Managers focus on building a great team, creating a vision for how that team will execute its goals, and helping the people on that team develop in their careers. They are put in those positions because of their strong people skills. They aren’t there to tell teams what to do. This viewpoint has become so effective that some managers at our company have even gone so far as to stop saying things like “my team,” instead opting for things like “the team I support.”

I forget exactly where I found this, but here is one source: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/3-tricks-facebook-uses-to-shut-down-toxic-office-politics.html

I really like this idea and it supports this general notion I have that concentrating power at the top with direction flowing down is the wrong way to run an organization. At my organization, managers used to propose projects, evaluate which we could and should do, and then worked to form teams that carried them out. We’ve grown a bit since then in that we accept project proposals from all staff, but we still let a small group of executive managers decide which we should do. There’s a tacit understanding that executive management has to set the strategies, and therefore the tactical plans, for the organization.

Our next growth step, I hope, is to allow staff themselves to select which projects we execute. Managers, then, would have the job, as at Facebook, of creating environments where people can work effectively, and where staff understand the observatory’s strategies and operating constraints well enough to make the right decisions. As Ricardo Semler explained in his book, Maverick, this means management has to make the organization’s finances, regulations, governance and other constraints accessible to the staff. Educate them in the nature of the business so they can use their experience on the lines to develop new solutions and projects that propel the organization forward. (Ricardo even went so far as to hold accounting classes that taught employees how to read and understand the company’s income statements and balance sheets.)

The next step would be to consider who owns and develops the organization’s strategies. Is it executive management or the staff? Do executives make the strategy, then educate staff so they can figure out the best way to implement it, or do executives explain to organization’s environment so that staff can both develop and implement the appropriate strategy? What is the role of the visionary leader executive if not to develop clever strategies that when efficiently executed by employees lead to industry success?

My answer to those questions involve removing the word “executive” from my last question. Why does the visionary leader have to be an executive? Furthermore, why does the visionary leader have to be a single person? Don’t we get more opportunities to develop clever strategies if we reach out to all our staff and give them the ability and access to chart the organization’s future? Isn’t that the role of management – to maximize the value each employee adds to the organization? If a line employee has a compelling vision, there is no reason to stifle it just because the originator is not in executive management!

That’s the organization I’d like to see. Management that creates environments in which employees can work effectively and that educates staff on the organization’s business so that good ideas, tactical or strategic, can come from anywhere within the organization, producing staff that all have the ability and knowledge to identify and carry our their best ideas.

4 November 17
Is being “busy” a good thing?

Ask people from Gemini how they’re doing and the response you’ll most often
hear is “Busy”. This response begs the question: Are we really busier than
other observatories, or do we just like to think we are? I suspect it’s a
little bit of both. (I’m picking on Gemini and exaggerating a bit here,
but the same thoughts apply to many workplaces, I’m sure.)

http://inspacesbetween.com/insights-inspiration/declaring-war-on-the-busy-epidemic/

It’s true, people are busy, but it’s more than that. Being busy is part of
our culture. There’s an advantage to that. If you’re busy, you’re working
hard and progressing your company. On the other hand, if you’re busy, you don’t
have time for everything on your plate; you’re more free to select items
you want to do and discard the rest. If you’re busy, you don’t have to
take the time to think about long term goals and strategies; you’ve got
plenty on your plate that’s due now. If you’re busy, you don’t have to
take the time to communicate and explain your plans; people who need to
know will know; the others don’t need to be distracted.

Clearly there’s a tactical advantage to having a culture of being busy.
Yet, as I hope is obvious, there is a strategic price to pay for this cultural state
as well. Some tasks don’t get done and there can be little control of
which ones do and which ones don’t. Tasks that seem important now often see
more activity than tasks that might make the observatory a better place in
the future. Sometimes easy tasks that can be done now get worked on before
harder tasks that have a later payoff. People stop informing others about
what they are doing and there is therefore less alignment and buy-in for
some activities than there might otherwise be. People who facilitate
communication and joint problem solving through significant social
interactions can find themselves under-appreciated and often leave to find
a place where they can work to bring people together as a team.

There is clearly a cultural reason for Gemini’s busyness, but is there
another cause? Are we simply doing more with fewer people than are other
observatories? Gemini’s staff size is larger than those of other
observatories by some measures, comparable, by others. Our queue system and
need to support two facilities on two significantly different locations
might justify some increase in staffing compared to other similar
facilities. As a result of the UK pullout from Gemini, we are reducing our
staff size and this effort will certainly mean some people are asked to do
additional work while our transition to a leaner operating state is
underway. So, there may be some truth to the idea that our staff is
imply too small, but I want to consider what alternative explanations might play a role as well.

It might also be that Gemini staff are simply doing (or attempting to do)
too much. Comparing Gemini to other facilities, though, it’s not obvious
that we are doing a whole lot more than anyone else is. Yes, there’s the
queue and our dual-site support need, but this effort is pretty much
accounted for in our staffing levels. (Although it is possible we aren’t
staffing as much as we need to do in these areas.) If we assume, though,
that we’re not staffed too small and we’re not doing more than other
observatories, is there another possible non-cultural cause for our
busyness?

One key difference between Gemini and the other 8-10m telescopes is its
ownership. While the users of the other telescopes are largely dependent
on that telescope, Gemini’s communities either have access access to other
comparable facilities or a small enough percentage of Gemini’s time that
they don’t feel they own the observatory. With no direct sense of
ownership of Gemini, the external Gemini community is less involved with
the observatory than they might otherwise be. The fact that our governance
is complicated and areas of relative responsibility can be poorly defined,
makes it even more difficult for Gemini users to know how to contribute to
the observatory, even if they wanted to.

Gemini’s procurement structure also inhibits our community from feeling
ownership of Gemini. We end up partnering less with our community members
than we do working as a customer of their services and products. As a
result, our development efforts require more internal resources than they
might if we had more in-kind support form our community.
New instrumentation for Subaru and Keck, for example, are often initiated
by the universities that use the telescopes – not normally the case for
Gemini. Instrument teams for the other telescopes often support instruments
in operation and write reduction software for end users – all things Gemini
usually does itself.

The cultural aspect of Gemini’s busyness has a good side – a dedication to
the observatory and a willingness to work hard. If we could keep that
aspect of our culture and add long term strategy formation, efficiency
improvements, and community, communication, partnership, and engagement,
then you have a pretty exciting observatory.

In addition, to better leverage our strong community, the next partnership agreement
could be structured with in-kind contributions and direct in-kind
community investment in Gemini, rather than cash contributions and a Gemini
obligation to distribute development money back to the partners in the same
percentage as it was contributed, as we do now. This approach would help
build a sense of community ownership of Gemini and will allow more work to
get done for Gemini, but not directly by Gemini employees. This approach
will also engage our community more fully with our staff and encourage more
communication and strategic thinking. Gemini can lead its class, but we have to not only modify our culture of busyness, but find better ways to leverage the utility of our community.

31 July 12
Resource Management: Focus on the workers, not the managers.

Inspired by the Norm Smith talk I recently heard (see previous post), I purchased his book Got Progress? and highly recommend it. I now have words to describe some of the unease I’ve been feeling about my workplace’s current project management and resource allocation approaches.

The brightest light bulb went off when Norm bold-faced (and I’m paraphrasing): Build project management structures for the people doing the work, not management. In particular, Norm revealed that he rarely found a resource-loaded project plan very useful and integrated master plans even less so. Why? Part of the reason, is these things are usually done for management, not for team members.

Where I work, we spent a lot of time developing a system to let management know if we have enough resources to do the projects we want to do. We’ve evolved from rough estimates to complicated spreadsheets to an online project task and resource tracking tool to a interwoven combination of all these tools. We have reports that go from project managers to a resource review committee to upper management. In short, we have a very complicated system that ensures resource estimates and allocations are properly conveyed from project mangers to upper management. The problem is, the average employee would agree with Norm Smith in saying it’s great the management knows (or at least, thinks they know) where resources are allocated, but wouldn’t it be nice if the project team members (also called Project Implementation Specialists, in PMBOK speak, I just recently discovered) also knew where they were allocated?

We’ve built a very details system of resource tracking mechanisms for management, not for project members. We have tools that tell management that every staff member is fully allocated to the necessary projects, yet when I talked to several random project members recently, they admitted to not knowing everything they are supposed to be doing. Clearly, the complex system derived to let management know that everyone is properly allocated to the projects to which they should be allocated, is failing to make the resources themselves aware of what’s expected of them.

Crazy idea: develop the system so that project members each have a clear understanding of what their tasks are and let over-allocated resources (conflicts) rise from below. If employee-X knows what tasks are expected of him and doesn’t have a problem getting everything done on time, what more does management need? Similarly, if employee-Y realizes she can’t do all of her project work on the schedule required, she can raise her concern upstream without complicated structures and calculations put in place to detail her exact level of loading.

Our goal is to get the work done. It does no good for management to look at an integrated master plan and see that everyone is assigned the right percentage of time for the right tasks if the employees themselves don’t know what’s expected of them. Build a system that makes it clear what is expected of them (and that system would ideally be tailored to the individual, team, and particular project), and you have a system that has buy-in, accountability, and self-policing. If the work is getting done and conflicts are identified and highlighted by those doing the work, management can focus on only the conflicts that arise, and the project implementation specialists can concentrate on getting their projects implemented!

Speaking of project implementation specialists, Scot found Norm Smith’s book so useful partially because it clearly represented real-world experience with project management. Textbook project management, like the PMBOK, for example, provides a fine framework for project management, but needs to be implemented while taking account of real project complexities and not treating each project as if were the ideal project. Like the frictionless pulley, Scot suspects the idealized PMBOK project doesn’t exist.

22 May 12
Musings on the future of Astronomy

The future of astronomy seems clear to me right now. It goes through ESO.

That’s not particularly bad, especially if you’re an ESO member, but if you’re not, things may be a little less good. With the addition of Brazil, ESO has begun its expansion beyond Europe and it’s no secret that several other non-European countries are currently considering joining ESO. ESO stands to gain even more attention if one of the competing Giant Segmented Mirror Telescopes (GSMT: TMT/GMT) do not take off or appear to get the critical national support they need to attract and hold new funding partners. The world’s astronomers may have no choice – join ESO or stay out of the large telescope game.

Now, I have nothing against doing science with “small” (< 8m) telescopes. There is a lot of attractive and compelling science to be done there. The “smaller” telescopes offer more opportunities to innovate by using new observing techniques and equipment, having access to larger amounts of telescope time, and affording the opportunities for high-risk, high-gain projects that couldn’t be assigned time at the larger telescopes. But if you want a balanced national program, you are going to want access to the world’s largest telescopes, as well.

In the thirty meter telescope era, funding and general support for the 8-10m telescopes will decrease. No problem for ESO – it has a full house of telescope of different apertures and functions, working in conjunction to support one another and produce a well-balanced suite of capabilities for its user community. It is more of a problem, however, if you’re a single (or even dual) 8m telescope owner like Gemini, Subaru, or Keck, for example. Mauna Kea astronomy is some of the best in the world, and yet, without a GSMT for its community, and in the face of shrinking budgets as its telescope owners either divest themselves from the Mauna Kea telescopes to invest in a GSMT or ESO or simply to reduce their commitment to astronomy, Mauna Kea telescopes will decrease in relevance. ESO is great, but for the good of astronomy, we can’t let Mauna Kea, we can’t let non-ESO astronomy, fade away.

One possible solution has been discussed for ages, but never fully endorsed or implemented. It is starting, however to reappear in several different forms for different, but related reasons. We must somehow unite the telescopes on Mauna Kea into something greater than the sum of the individual observatories. There is a VLT right now on Mauna Kea, but we just don’t operate it as such. Actually, when you consider the unique strengths of even just the 8-10m telescope on Mauna Kea, we have a potential uber-VLT in our midst. Add community access to Gemini South and you have a facility which could conceivably span both northern and southern hemispheres – a very worthy competitor to the VLT.

Establishing some sort of Mauna Kea Federation has several advantages: 1) it would allow each observatory to concentrate on what it does best, reducing the costs incurred in trying to provide each independent community access to the entire spectrum of wavelength and resolution coverage on the sky, 2) it would allow each facility to offer a capability in its strong suit that is currently beyond anything it can currently afford to do, 3) it would form a natural community to not only fund, but properly feed and support, a non-ESO GSMT, and 4) through shared resources, it would provide each community with better access to tools and facilities than any community currently has.

In the inevitable funding cuts that will certainly come to the current Mauna Kea telescopes, the disparate Mauna Kea communities must join together if they are going to continue to have access to the level of infrastructure they are used to. It is unlikely that any existing Mauna Kea observatory will be able to offer the same range of wavelength and resolution in cutting edge instrumentation with the high levels of support that it currently does. Downgrade your capabilities or unite. There will be no other choice.

So, given all this, how do we unite the current Mauna Kea telescopes? I don’t at all claim to know the detailed answer to that one, but I think the path includes the word federation. We must find a way to allow each observatory to retain its current identity and functional systems while allowing each observatory to develop capabilities that both play to its own strong suit and are attractive not only to its own community of users, but to the communities from the other telescopes as well. I don’t think this task is all that hard (the large Mauna Kea telescopes have some natural complements to each other already), but it will take a change in mindset to implement. In the meantime, I think each facility ought to be increasing its strengths and planning for a future where these strengths are traded for high-level capabilities at the other facilities. Playing to our strengths is a good strategy even in the absence of a Mauna Kea Federation. As each facility further develops its strengths, though, it will find that not only is its community enjoying the new benefits, but other communities will start looking for ways to get access themselves. By making our facilities the best at what we can each do best, we will start driving the demand for some sort of federation at both ends: our own communities will start wanting access to capabilities in short supply at our facilities and other communities will start wanting our unique capabilities to complement theirs as well. If we do this right, need and desire from both sides will help us find a way form our more perfect union.

Realtime demand is a more effective motivator for change than is forward thinking and long term planning, however accurate and omniscient it may be.

Scot has nothing against ESO, and actually thinks they have a great facility and approach to fulfilling their communities’ needs, but for the good of astronomy, he thinks a little friendly competition and rivalry is a good thing. He’s pretty sure the ESO community would say the same thing, if asked.

31 October 11
Balancing Two Boards

Gemini has two Boards – the Gemini Board from the international partnership agreement and the AURA Board. It’s actually a bit (well, OK a lot) more complicated than this. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is Gemini’s Executive Agency. They collect and distribute the funds for Gemini from the Gemini partnership. They also provide the funds for the US part of Gemini. AURA is our Managing Organization and is basically responsible for the management of Gemini. They have their own board and a specific oversight committee for Gemini, the AOC-G. The Gemini Board is basically our governing body, being the representatives of the partner countries to Gemini’s operating board. If each of these agencies, boards, and committees wants a review twice a year, Gemini would (and quite nearly does) end up with a major review a month. This would be bad enough, but as you can imagine, with so many organizations, boards and oversight committees, it can get a little confusing figuring out who is responsible for what and to whom. The lines of control and authority are blurred and complicated. The Gemini Board sets Gemini’s direction, yet Gemini’s Director takes home a salary provided through AURA. The reviews from the different groups in the observatory’s governance structure often end up commenting on the same aspects of the observatory while leaving other aspects untouched. In some areas, everyone wants their piece of the action, to have their say, while other aspects escape without much scrutiny at all. Overall, it’s a recipe for confusion and disorder.

The Gemini Partnership Agreement specifies the general roles of the Gemini Board, the Executive Agency, and the Management Organization. but of course not those of each of their boards and oversight/review committees. So, even if everyone read and understood the Partnership Agreement, there would still likely be confusion. The Partnership Agreement and Management Organization’s contract will be up for renewal soon (~2015) so we have an opportunity in a few years to simplify this whole structure and come up with an organization that has clearer and cleaner lines of authority and responsibility. In the meantime, though, we still have to make things work a little better than they do now. The unclear lines of communication and authority are hindering us from becoming a true high performance organization with a single team able to focus on a common mission.

Balancing Gemini's Boards takes some care and thought, but should not be too difficult if can agree on a clear division of roles and responsibilities.

In their book, Corporate Boards: New Strategies for Adding Value at the Top, authors Conger, Lawler, and Finegold define the primary roles of the corporate board as follows:

1) giving strategic direction and advice
2) overseeing strategy implementation and performance
3) developing and evaluating the CEO
4) developing human capital
5) monitoring the legal and ethical performance of the corporation
6) preventing and managing crises
7) procuring resources

With only a little study, these 7 roles divide up fairly nicely to those potentially of the Gemini Board and those of the Managing Organization. The Gemini Board represents the partnership’s interest in Gemini. AURA and its boards/committees represent Gemini’s management and staff. A natural division, therefore of these roles would assign #s 1, 2, 6, and 7 to the Board and #s 3,4, and 5 to AURA. This division of roles lets the Gemini Board concentrate on strategy and resource procurement (partners, development funding, etc.) while AURA concentrates on human resources and legal operational issues. Allowing AURA the time and focus to concentrate on developing, evaluating and supporting Gemini’s human resources would be a nice benefit to this approach and would help Gemini develop and keep its best home-grown talent for future roles within the Observatory.

This division of roles also allows the opportunity for the Gemini Board to review AURA’s performance and, if we’re really being open to new ideas, to have the AURA Board, or even better, an NSF (our Executive Agency) review committee, evaluate the Gemini Board’s effectiveness. Each Board reviews Gemini in the areas of its domain, and each Board (and/or the NSF) reviews the other Board to keep everyone honest and help ensure everyone is working as optimally as possible, together, to push the Observatory forward. This sort of separation of powers is very consistent with the responsibilities of the Gemini Board, Executive Agency, and Managing Organization detailed in the partnership agreement. The Board is given the fiscal and strategic responsibilities for the Observatory as well as oversight/review of the Managing Organization. The Managing Organization is given the responsibility to develop management plans, employ key Gemini staff, and carry out Board decisions. They are thus also the likely choice for the roles of top personnel development and review within the Observatory. The roles I’ve defined could easily be agreed upon now with only a slight extrapolation necessary from the partnership agreement, and formalized, after some time to see how it works, in the next partnership agreement.

These are interesting times for Gemini, perhaps even more so than on average. Scot hopes discussions like this one happen often and broadly while we discuss and form the structure and organization of Gemini into the next decade.

19 May 11
Is Work Supposed to be Fun?

Well, it’s almost the end of January and I do want to get something posted before the month’s out. Let’s see if I make it in some time zone, at least.

Our work recently had an employee satisfaction survey taken, the results of which are a treasure trove of ammunition for someone like me who believes we can do better at the things we’re already good at and that there’s low hanging fruit in the areas where we aren’t doing so well. One of the questions we scored low on went something like: My supervisor makes this a fun place to work. While I don’t want to make a big issue out of this particular question, I did find it ironic that some of our leaders didn’t really understand the question. To these people, work is work and fun is what you maybe get to do when you’re not working. They didn’t seem to understand the point of the question and even said so publicly. I guess that alone says something about why we scored so low here.

So, what does this question mean? Is work supposed to be fun, or is it supposed to be just “work”? First off, I don’t think the question is referring to how many parties or Friday nights at the pub, we have. The question is asking if the time you spend at work is enjoyable (and does your supervisor help make it so). It is aiming at the question of whether you get up for work every day and dread coming in the office, or if you sort of look forward for a new day at the office, doing something you enjoy doing.

My initial reaction to this question is, this is astronomy, it better be fun! A (only) slightly deeper response is we spend so much of our lives at work that if it is not fun, we should be doing something else. I’m sort of shocked that some of our managers don’t seem to get that. Fun at work to me doesn’t mean a laugh a minute or always joking with my colleagues. No, it means, to me personally, being involved in a team, furthering a goal I believe in, and contributing my best talents to help us get there, while working with others contributing their’s. That kind of environment makes work seem less like “work” and more like “fun”. I’m sure others have different visions of what would motivate them to want to come to work every day besides to collect a paycheck, although I bet the responses will be fairly similar to my own.

Does my supervisor make this a fun place to work? = Does my supervisor create an environment where I can use my talents to my greatest ability and contribute to a shared, desired goal?

The idea that work is work and fun is what you do after hours is not only outdated, but is guaranteed to get you an unmotivated workforce looking for the next passing party barge with an opening. Therefore, as managers, we have the responsibility to make sure our employees are getting something positive out of their work besides a paycheck. Work is more than sharing the pain, distributing the load equally, and getting the job done. To creating a growing, thriving, dynamic organization, we all need to create a place where people feel their talents are being used, their skills are being developed, and they are contributing to something worthwhile, bigger than themselves. At Gemini, we scored very highly in some of these areas, even some of the harder ones like sharing a common mission, working on something bigger than ourselves, yet feeling a part of it, but we missed out on the part about making all of it fun. We’re thus missing out on the part that will eventually take us places we don’t even dream of right now – the part that that will let people’s imaginations loose to find ways to work within our current constraints to reach heights previously thought out of reach.

We can’t forget about fun.

Scot loves astronomy and acknowledges its many benefits, both direct and indirect, to society, but realizes that in the end, it is just astronomy. If it weren’t fun, he wonders why he would be doing it.

31 January 11
To fix a problem, first look in the mirror, define it, and own it

There is an interesting discussion starting from a post I made on an internal work blog. So, I thought I’d repost a slightly edited version of it here.

I attended a rather disheartening informal lunchtime meeting recently at work. One of the issues that came up involved a recent communication lapse where one group of stakeholders was not informed about a decision made by another. This kind of thing happens all the time, but it is of course instructive to evaluate what happened after the fact and see what changes can be made to help prevent future repeats.

It took me a little while to realize, but what I found so disheartening from the meeting was an apparent lack of desire to really work together to learn to communicate better. What I saw were people establishing how they were victims of someone else’s poor communications and people looking for the solution that would get the other guys to behave. In that kind of environment, it is impossible to explore solutions. That didn’t prevent many people from proposing solutions, but fault was found with all of them and the meeting ended, I thought, with general bad feelings about the apparent inaction to correcting our problems. No proposed solution solved all the identified problems, so why try any of them?

I will grant that there is no single solution to improving communications. There are tools that can be used, procedures that can be changed, attitudes and actions that can be rewarded and condoned, but no single one of these is a cure-all (yes, even archived mailing lists). Some of them will even fail, or make things worse. But what bothered me the most at this meeting was that there was no desire or commitment to try these things at all. True – each attempt might not work and nothing we can do on its own will solve all our problems, but if we try something new and learn a bit about what works and what does not, about how we communicate and expect to be communicated with, then we gain and we are more likely to eventually arrive at a package of solutions which does work. If we are too busy blaming each other, we will never be open to exploring what each of us can do to create an environment where communications and information flow freely and easily.

This image represents the result of a lot of dedicated, cross-disciplinary work in a cooperation between HIA, Gemini, and ARC. It may not look like much, but it's one of the first full three-CCD images of our new CCDs from our new controller for GMOS-N. The one dark column is a known, separate problem we are also resolving. We expect to have these CCDs available for our community to use some time in 2011.

If we had a detector controller where data were not flowing well from one channel to the other, we’d be actively debugging, swapping boards, adding ground connections, hooking up the oscilloscope to see what’s really being transmitted, etc. Why do we apply this experimental approach to our technical problems, but not our cutural ones? Why do we involve people from different disciplines to debug a detector controller, but not our communications? Learning to take shared responsibility for our communications and our communication needs is a big project, but we have ways to handle big projects. Why aren’t we applying these ways and methods to one of the most important underlying issues affecting everyone here?

(Standard disclaimer: we are making progress and our problems are a lot better ones than at many other places; it’s just that we still have a ways to go….)

Here’s an addendum I made in addressing one posted comment on the internal site:

…there are plenty of unpleasant problems that are being addressed here, but not this one. Perhaps because it is larger than the others, perhaps because it involves people and not technology, perhaps because the solutions are unknown and success not assured. It’s almost as if (which in my experience usually means it is) we are trying to outsource the solution to these problems through training, consultants, working groups, before really taking the internal look in the mirror at honestly confronting what we are doing right and wrong and owning the problem ourselves. Only after we all make an honest self-appraisal, I suspect, can we gain much benefit from these outsourced solutions. This is not something “they” need to do, but something we all need to do.

Scot realizes that no matter how good things are, there is always a biggest problem. Keeping the absolute, as well as the relative size of a problem in mind is important to maintaining perspective.

21 September 10
Who advocates for the Observatory?

I’ve been reading a book on corporate boards, so expect a few posts on astronomy governance coming up, starting with this one. I really knew nothing about how boards out in the “real world” operate, so reading this book has been a great inspiration for reflection on boards I’ve seen in astronomy. There are plenty of things “wrong” with the Board I am currently associated with (according to the corporate model, at least), but one of the common complaints I’ve heard levied against it is not one of them: that its members are also its funders.

On the surface, this complaint seems legitimate and I even bought into it for a while, since there appears to be a clear conflict of interest between someone trying to get more value for less money as a member of a funding agency while simultaneously advocating for the observatory to the funding agencies for the funds it needs to operate and expand.

The flaw in this argument, however, is the passing of the advocacy buck to the Board instead of to the Observatory. Corporate boards are composed to represent the institutions’ stakeholders and certainly an observatory’s funding agencies qualify as stakeholders. Does this make it hard for the Board to argue for more funding from the funding agencies if the funding agencies are the Board? Yes, certainly. But venture capitalists and shareholders, analogs to our funding agencies, are regular members of corporate boards as well. It is not the board’s responsibility to argue for increased funding; it’s the responsibility of the Observatory to present a case compelling enough that its stakeholders are willing to invest more to get more return. This situation is exactly what works in the corporate world and it makes sense that it can work in the astronomy world, too. The observatory, however, has to be willing to act as its own advocate, making strong, supported cases, for the funds it requests. Our Board meets twice a year; who better to understand the ramifications of increased and decrease funding than the Observatory? Who better to argue to those with the purse strings what is best for the Observatory? The Observatory, or the Board?

I think there are other issues with the the make-up of the board, but its having representatives from our funding agencies is not one of them. I’ll discuss some of the other issues in future posts.

I should particularly note here that these are my opinions, not necessarily those of Gemini Observatory, for whom I work. See my standard disclaimer to the right.

While on the subject of advocacy, Scot decided to link to the web splash of a recent result that he is co-author on: the analysis of the surface metal lines on a white dwarf star suggesting the remains of a rocky dwarf planet recently accreted onto the star’s surface. This scenario represents a possible interesting way to see the insides of extra-solar planets!

10 July 10

Tag: Gemini

I forget exactly where I found this, but here is one source: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/3-tricks-facebook-uses-to-shut-down-toxic-office-politics.html