Paul Licker

Parents: Gerald B. Licker (Accountant extraordinaire) (1918 (NYC) - 1991 (Richmond, Va.)); Charlotte Sobel (Domestic engineer) (1922 (NYC) - 1987 (Richmond, Va.))

* There is some small reason to believe that I am actually Italian and that my parents were actually foster parents, or even worse, baby-nappers. Unbelievably, at the exact time of my birth, in Park East Hospital another baby boy was born whose surname was Liquori. It seems, too, that both boys were dark-haired (and handsome, naturally). And, as the story related to me by my "parents" goes, the bracelets were switched somehow at birth. So the error was discovered (how?) and the bracelets switched back. Now, it seems to me, what if there were an odd number of switches, eh? I could be Italian. Andrew, my oldest son, is convinced he is Italian, and he certainly talks with his hands, likes pizza and is fond of Italian cars.

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Education

Wiley Elementary School (Winston-Salem, N.C.) 1950-1953; reports are that I loved it. God has been good to me and has blanked out my memories of this time.

Whitaker Elementary School (Winston-Salem, N. C.) 1954-1957; really did love it; learned table tennis and became a neighborhood champ. Fell in love with trivia and girls with red hair.

Reynolds High School (Winston-Salem, N.C.) 1957-1962; really really did love it; a profoundly wonderful place to learn at a profoundly wonderful time to learn. Special thanks to Ms. Hazel Stephenson, whom none of us appreciated enough, and almost everyone else there who were dedicated to education at a time when there was little payoff, to Charles Fulcher and many others whose names I've forgotten, including Mr. Peters, who flunked me in my first algebra test, a lesson I never forgot and never repeated. When I found out how little the taxpayers of Winston-Salem paid these educational heroes and heroines, I was ashamed...but that came later, much later.

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Early Life

These are archived with stunning clarity on 8 mm currently housed at the Eugene Licker Library in New Rochelle, NY. where, for a modest fee, my brother will set up the projector and provide you with a low-fat snack and fifteen hours of reels that will leave you reeling and still hungry. Suffice it to say that I survived these days, also reeling and still hungry. The house I grew up in was next to a creek that overflowed with regularity every summer (which will explain my aversion to muck) at the bottom of a hill (which will explain my desire to live on top of hills). But I did learn two important things: it's easy to cycle home when you live at the bottom of a hill and I forgot the other one. My past times in those days were coin collecting (thanks to inflation I now collect bank notes and stock certificates), basketball, cycling, and reading. Growing up in the small town South was a maturing experience. It helped that my sister had blonde hair, I'll tell you. My family valued learning above everything, except washing the dishes after dinner; we combined the two and that's why I have learned to love washing dishes. Oh, yes, and trivia, especially from the World Almanac. One of the important things I learned from watching my father was woodworking, but I didn't learn it very well; he believed in learning by example, but unfortunately I couldn't produce too many good examples. As a child I developed two important philosophies. "Always aim for second; you'll never be disappointed" is the second and "Don't look back, it may be gainin'" is the first. Otherwise you'll see who's in second place aiming for first.

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Teen Years

This is a public document so the least said, the best. If being sullen, withdrawn, underweight, shy, arrogant, self-centered and obnoxious is what one is supposed to be, then I was a success. I'm informed that I did have other qualities. I studied hard ("So who got 100% Mr. 99%?" is quite a motivator, I'll have you know) and figured that academic excellence was the truly important thing in life. Little did I know.... On the other hand, I excelled at ping pong and bowling, two sports which, we all know, are crucial for success in later life. Ping pong taught me that whatever goes out comes back with spin on it. Bowling taught me that you sometimes have to let go of things to achieve your goals. My friends joined me in most of my pursuits. The Reynolds Retorts were feared greatly at Expressway Lanes, not only for our bowling prowess, but because even if we couldn't bowl successive strikes, punning was right up our alley. Here are some other memories:

Ice cream cake with hot chocolate fudge at Farmer's Dairy Bar
Drives out to the country on hot summer nights
Graduation day
The way the air feels in the South in the summer
The optimism that one can feel best in a progressive city that is building an expressway through itself in the 60s.

People who were important to me in this period whom I'd like to hear from (contact me and I'll link your web page to this site right here)

Jim Ballard
Scott Blackwell
Karl Clauset
Jody Crawford (nee Thompson)
Eric Goodman
Liz Hain (nee Silverberg)
Beth Kirsch
Leslie Hyatt (nee Maddocks)

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University Years

At the risk of being repetitive, if being sullen, withdrawn, underweight, shy, arrogant, self-centered and obnoxious is what one is supposed to be, then I was a success. Add to that homesick and intrigued with big city life. It was a "learning experience". I learned mathematics and science according to plan and learned that plans are, as a colleague later in life described them, "fictional history one writes in advance." I moved from being a mid-sized fish in a relatively small pond to being one of several hundred high-school valedictorians at the University of Pennsylvania (No, NOT Penn State).

Philadelphia was the only big Eastern US city in the late 60s and early 70s that opted out of the student- and hippie-revolution. Sit-ins were organized but somehow people failed to show up. There were only two big demonstrations. We showed up en masse to save a tree (the University cut it down anyway, and hundreds like it in subsequent years in an orgy of self-construction that awed even architecture and city planning students and built structures that will stand, hopefully not for a very long time, as monuments to the bad taste of the 60s and 70s.) The other was a massive march to protest the bombings in Cambodia. It was great fun and I noticed that we were effective. Nixon listened, stopped the bombing and on command resigned. I became a pointy-headed intellectual, a nattering nabob of negativism, convinced that mass action was effective. It sure is.

I'm still a liberal. NEO-liberal, that is. Only my banker knows for sure. Oh, yes, incidentally I majored in math, learned quickly that it's a game only for those who peak at 17 and quietly slipped over into the new field of computer and information sciences, one of the many career shifts I've made. Who knows, I might YET become a brain surgeon. My favorite courses in university were literature, drama, history, and linguistics, notwithstanding my major in mathematics. Courses in German and French prepared me for a the disappointment of knowing I wouldn’t have a career as a simultaneous translator (continued to this day with my laudable, but thus far vain, attempts to become a Xhosa fundi). My undergraduate specialization was abstract algebra and topology, which I found useful when I wanted to maintain his personal space at beer parties, which was so easy that I became an expert at it. In later years, I honed this skill to a fine point, merely by saying "I'm a computer programmer" but while an undergraduate I had to go to the trouble of showing people my pocket liner, my slide rule and the propeller on my beanie.

Major memories of my undergraduate years:

Hatred of the Iggles, whose fans parked up the neighborhood and annoyed us undergraduates
The heat of Philadelphia summers
The cold and damp of Philadelphia winters
The beauty of Fairmount Park
The Italian market
The fact that Philadelphia lived in an alternate universe, one that didn't have a New York or a Washington in it.

People who were important to me in this period whom I'd like to hear from (contact me and I'll link your web page to this site right here)

Tom Anderson
Arthur Harris
Ross W. Hopkins III
Martha Jaffe (the source of the famous Chess move known as the "Grand Jaffe")
David Jahn
Gary Lampert
Lorraine Klevansky (nee Serotta)
Carol Love
Breyne Moskowitz
Linda Rothschild (nee Preiss)

After graduating, I decided that it really wasn't in the cards for me to be a burger flipper (to Barry Shane, to whom I already owe so much, I owe this piece of knowledge: what are the five words that absolutely guarantee a university graduate a job? Answer: "You", "want", "fries", "with", and "that?" [but see note below]), so my last "summer" job was in Poughkeepsie, NY, then home to IBM, as an assistant something or other in a department charged with programmer training. Unknown to me, this group was training the programmers who would eventually program the IBM System 360's star-crossed time-sharing operating system, TSS/360. Here, in lower east central upstate New York, I met computer "people" for the first time, and began to understand the incredible hubris that seems to characterize people who don't deal with people. (The incredible hubris that characterizes people who do deal with people became obvious later, and the incredible hubris of people who don't deal with anything only became apparent when I became a parent). Here I acquired one of my two major skills (the other is typing): reading and interpreting computer manuals. On the basis of this I got my first full-time permanent job (see later). But then it was on to graduate school.

[Note: Recent bad profit news from McDonalds and Enron ("You want a shredder with that?") indicate that there are no longer any magic words. Actually, that's not quite true. I've found "please" and "thank you" still work their magic)]

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Graduate School

I had problems finding the road out of Philadelphia. To be sure, there were other places to be, but, apologies to WC Fields, I seem to have won something far worse than tenth prize: how about 575 weeks in Philadelphia! And all at the same university!

So I took a master's degree in "Computer and Information Science", surely one of the first such degrees on earth. In graduate school, I posed as an electrical engineer long enough to get a masters degree in computers (actually in Electrical Engineering), taught by the same men who created ENIAC, the first stored-program computer and the last successful attempt by Americans to claim primacy in computer design. I found out why they built computers, because they surely didn't much like having interaction with students. Interestingly, having one of the first degrees in computer science I was being educated about the same time as microprocessors were being developed. These were heady times, but I seemed to have missed them.

At the same time, I took a job programming (with exactly one FORTRAN course of three weeks' duration under my belt) at the University of Pennsylvania Computer Center. My first job was translating a program from one version of an IBM assembler language to another; of course it didn't work. Nonetheless, I fell in love with programming. My master's thesis was something to do with string Transformations, not completely unrelated both to what goes on on the left-hand side of an orchestra and the Unified Theory of It All in Physics, but that's a topic for another venue. Eventually U of P awarded me a masters degree and I slipped into the calm of my employment as a programmer.

However, that didn't last long. Having fallen under the spell of the cybernetician-scholar Prof. Klaus Krippendorff, I proved the adage that hope springs eternal in the nerdly breast by quitting my programming job (which then paid me more money in pre-inflation US dollars than any job I've had since, including my current one!), enrolling in the Communication program at the Annenberg School of Communication also at Penn. Ostensibly to study computer-assisted instruction, the eventual Dr. Licker sat at the feet of Prof. Sol Worth (BFA), a sculptor-turned-filmmaker-turned-anthropologist. Over the course of several years, Sol and I shared ideas, each moving on to an appropriate reward: me to the Ph. D. and Sol to his early and undeserved death within days of signing off on my dissertation. Just before he died, he asked me to be a colleague of his, but I had no idea then just how celestial a college he had in mind.

The title of that dissertation tells the whole story: The Role of Structure in Communication and Interaction, a landmark, but then that’s what they said about Gondwanaland, after all. Or was it Laurasia? This paper concerned how it is possible for people to understand silent film, a burning question that’s been around since, well, since Leland Stanford won his bet about how horses run and which now can be answered in the affirmative: people can understand silent film, but it depends….

People who were important to me in this period whom I'd like to hear from (contact me and I'll link your web page to this site right here)

Klaus Krippendorff
Barry and Elaine Gittlen
Alan Jones Rembert III
Amanda and John Poor
Father Ken Sieberz
Celia and Josh Diamond
Mrs. Stewart, teacher extraordinaire of West Philadelphia
John W. Lubin III

Thus began a decades-long love affair with human communication (and occasionally inhuman or even inhumane communication) which lasts to this day. Not much of a practitioner of communication (introverted academic, eh?), I'm still fascinated with the idea that two human intellects can connect over...well over something other than a battlefield, a bed or a bottle. Thomas Sebeok once opined that the ultimate question (leaving aside the afore-mentioned Theory of It All in physics, the mind-body problem in philosophy, and the human genome as well as the question all over-fifties have but won't voice: where did I put my glasses down?) is how meaning or intention is turned into action or words. I studied this day and night and meant it. Eventually, all things had to end and when my courses finished (it would be another four years before I completed the research for the actual dissertation), off I went to the tundra of eastern Ontario to work for Bell-Northern Research, Ltd. as "Member of Scientific Staff", which is as close as I ever want to get to being described as a supercilious prick. So now it's time to talk about working.

Major memories of my graduate years:

No decrease in my intolerance for the Iggles, although I lived then in West Mount Airy, perhaps the greatest neighborhood in America
An increase in my love of Philadelphia, which despite its despotic mayor, continued to be the most human and humane major city in America
How easy it is to fall asleep in a library reading semiotics
How hard it is to explain semiotics to normal human beings
The thrill of research and learning and actually feeling it all come together
The Annenberg School of Communication
My 1968 red VW beetle, sic transit gloria mundi

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A Work in Progress

But not directly yet. First let's return to those thrilling days of yesteryear when the Lone Licker rides again. My work experience mirrors my eclectic background. In the 1950s I mowed lawns for spending money and got used to the idea developing an allergy to grass might not be a bad thing. Not being very handy, it wouldn't have done to found the Black Hand society, so I founded the Black Thumb society instead.

I worked my way through undergraduate education as a typist for other students, which had three advantages: I never had to read the books my clients were writing reports on; I honed my skills in typing; and got used to the idea that while I would never be a concert pianist (my mother was an excellent pianist), I could get paid even more making the keys of a typewriter sing.

In the early 1960s my summer jobs were at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine of Wake Forest College (now University) as a lab assistant killing mice, running chromatography studies and getting used to the idea that I would not be a doctor. My mother was, of course, devastated, but there was still a chance I would be a dentist or at least a banker. Unfortunately the fates were not to be so kind and the World Bank is the richer for it (and your teeth are safer!).

Finally I found my métier as a programmer for the University of Pennsylvania Computing Center, where I became proficient in just about every programming language available in the late 1960s and where I became used to the idea that I had better never ever be a "computer user."

Later, when I went to the Annenberg School, I paid for a lot of my education by working as a computer consultant for Computer Command and Control Company where I worked on contracts, some in Harrisburg (home of Three Mile Island!) and learned lots of lessons. Run by a prof at U. of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, CCCC (or 4Cs) went belly-up when the Prof fired his VP who had all the contacts which meant all the contracts. I learned two things: never entrust your business to anyone else and if you have to commute to work, never commute from Philly to Harrisburg. But I did learn COBOL programming for the sales tax system of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. This stands out as the most stultifying of my experiences. Did you know that in the early 1970s, approximately one dollar in eight heading to the sales tax coffers in Pennsylvania never made it there? After writing my programs, only one dollar in eight DID make it there. Nonetheless I taught COBOL seven years later! Those who can, do; ....

While studying for my doctorate, I also worked as Instructor at the Annenberg School, teaching PL/1 to graduate students. However, I never got over my disappointment when I found out that PL/1 wasn’t named after me. (Notice how there never was a PL/2)?

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Paul Meets Dudley Dooright

OK, so after finishing coursework toward the Ph. D. in 1973, I, like ABD (all-but-dissertation) Americans before me, invaded Canada, thinking to take the country by storm, not having taken into account the fact that since Canadians endure 10-month winters, what’s a few more or less Americans? I went to work for Bell Northern Research (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, south-central north polar region), the R&D arm (and tax write-off) of Bell Canada, where I conducted studies in human factors engineering and cable-based mass information retrieval systems, and learned that I would never been a marketer. Notwithstanding this insight, this soon-to-be-doctorated nerd learned meeting facilitation techniques and became the first sworn introvert ever to conduct a meeting successfully.

But all good things have to come to an end, so I quit BNR after a dustup with my boss (Jim Gale, RIP, who later turned into a good friend). Jim was a gritty Brit, a pain in the neck, and by far the wisest manager I've ever worked for who told me that my only reason for existing was to make him a hero, which I persistently failed to do. I then consulted with BNR for an additional five years, learning a myriad skills, paying off my mortgage and generally having great fun with technology.

But those who can't, teach; and so in 1975 I became an Assistant Professor of Communication at St. Paul (no relation) University, formerly known as a seminary, but more recently engaged in teaching Communication to all manner of priests and nuns and not a small number of undergraduates at the University of Ottawa. There (and later), the department was indeed transferred whole cloth (without most of the men of the cloth, although our new Department Head was a Jesuit) to the University of Ottawa. The clever among you will discover that I've worked for U of P, U of O, U of C, VCU and later UCT and then OU, not a very wide range of consonants or even letters) I taught courses in communication theory, public opinion, psychology of communication and audio production. This last course was my favorite and culminated in my greatest unpublished book: Acoustic Imagination, a 500-page tome that even my mother failed to read. Other courses included research methods and one called "Proseminar of Synthesis", the subject of which I never really understood, which was clearly communicated to the students.

I was happy to do this until asthma (probably induced by breathing in my parents’ second-hand smoke as a child, where I got used to the idea I would never be a smoker) forced me to seek employment in warmer climes, bringing along a subsequent move to Richmond Virginia. This had two happy and one unhappy correlates. My children (the "A Team" more on them later) could grow up near (about 1 km away, in fact) the aforementioned parents (and learn to enjoy cigarette smoke); I could reenter the information systems field as an Assistant Professor of Information Systems at Virginia Commonwealth University; and I could renew my unresolved conflict with my parents at close range.

Major memories of my years in Ottawa:

The Civil Service Thunderstorm, timed to catch everyone leaving on time from June through August in Ottawa...leave work early or do overtime!
Winter, which officially began in December, but we all know actually started just after Labour Day, and that closed-in feeling that began in October and never really went away
Skating on the Rideau Canal
The Byward Market, rich in calories and gustatory adventure
Montreal, because after all, Montreal really IS the best thing about Ottawa
Pomp and circumstance, something Americans lust after but never really achieve, but Canadians come by naturally
The Central Canadian sense of humour, mostly represented by the extraneous "u" in humour, eh?
The wonderful network of parks, canals, bike paths, and green spaces that the taxpayers of Canada generously donated to those of us who thought, even briefly, that we ran the country.
My French-Canadian friends, some of whom were separatists, but all of whom were passionate about something, maybe their music, which made the 70s worth living.

People who were important to me in this period whom I'd like to hear from (contact me and I'll link your web page to this site right here)

Louise Carreau, who taught French to Civil Servants, and who refused to teach me French
Denis Desharnais, a close friend of Louise's
Hilary Horan (now at the University of Regina)
Hilary Williamson (no relation to Dr. Horan)
Cathy Woodcock
Ted Grusec

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Yes, Santa Claus, there Is a Virginia

OK, it was brief and to the point. Virginia, although standing out in my memory as a place that supplied us with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington (two of my heroes, I'll admit it) and shoppers who came to N. Carolina to buy food because N.C. didn't have a sales tax on food, was never really a place I thought people lived and it wasn't a state of mind either, became a state of mine, so to speak. Home to John W. Seidel III (he of blessed -- or stronger -- memory) who taught me a slightly risque ditty about Norfolk (I'll leave this to your imagination; just remember, though, slightly risque of 1962 is what you'd tell your Aunt Sophie in 2004), I never envisaged me or any other sentient being actually living there. But I did, for exactly 365 days between August 1, 1980 and July 31, 1981. I did everything in my power to enjoy it: I took walks in the evening humidity and counted fireflies and chiggers; I shopped until I dropped at Regency Mall; I read in the Richmond Times-Distress about how our wonderful intellectual President Reagan was going to whomp those godless, abortion-favoring, criminal-loving, pinko liberals; and I ate ribs at Victoria Station (yum, my apologies to animal-rights activists). But somehow it didn't work. Despite liking my job and my colleagues, my "other half" couldn't find work and besides I learned that living a mile from your kids' grandparents is good PR, but I wasn't cut out to be that close to my parents (we became much better friends at 2000 miles!). We made some friends, but not a huge number; my sons went to day care, but not willingly (though Andrew did develop a hearty hillbilly accent, much to my horror), and we sought relocation to another place where I thought nobody lived: Calgary.

However, I did have some wonderful job experiences. I taught telecommunications, as mentioned later, combining my two fields neatly and efficiently. I had a student who got around in a wheelchair, wheeling in EIGHT MILES each day via Monument Avenue (and it was monumental; Richmond has some of the most beautiful boulevards and neighborhoods I've ever seen, and that includes five years of living in Cape Town). I think his name was Gary, but never mind, if you've met him, you'll never forget him. I got down to Winston-Salem once, I think, and once up to Washington and if distances traveled define parochialism, well then I had a parochial year; Calgary seemed like the moon. Maybe it was...

Major memories of my year in Richmond:

Magnolias, gardenias: my two favorite floral experiences -- they grow WILD there!
The beautiful neighborhoods in Richmond
Heat and humidity, after a winter of cold and humidity
Trees, trees, trees...where is the SUN?
New neighborhoods going up everywhere
My son Andrew greeting me as "Dayadee" after only THREE DAYS at the YMCA family play school
The religion of St. Ronald and the fact that every time I vote a Republican wins

People who were important to me in this period whom I'd like to hear from (contact me and I'll link your web page to this site right here)

Joyce Forest (who is responsible for teaching me Forest's Law: the computer/printer will go down/break the day before the paper/program is due)
Laurel Bennett
Jim Wynne

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Yee-Haw

So, despite thoroughly enjoying myself in my new field (teaching the first offering of Telecommunications, designing and running the first large-section intro to IS course) and enjoying my colleagues immensely, this lasted a year, a predictably short period of time. It was time to leave, and ever-desirous of testing the limits of human endurance for cold, and highly suggestible as the father of two (soon to be three) young children that Canada was the best place to raise politically correct, robust and safe offspring, off I went to Calgary. It helped that my then-spouse said she was going whether I was or not. You've all seen the movies and read the books that explore the "what if I had said 'No'" scenario, so I won't repeat that; we'll leave it as an assignment.

Dr. Licker (for I was doctor Licker by this time) had accepted a position of Associate Professor at the Faculty of Management of the University of Calgary in Alberta (which has no sales tax) in western Canada, presuming I'd stay there a short period of time until my asthma flared up again or until western Canada joined the US, as everyone has always predicted it would.

Seventeen years later I woke up one day and discovered I was still at U. of C., only now a full (or fool, depending on your proclivities, whatever they are) Professor, with sabbaticals at Cambridge and the University of Cape Town under my belt, shoe-leather, and hat. And an additional son, of course. Research interests in managing programmers, systems analysis techniques, and information systems theory resulted in three books (The Art of Managing Software Development People (Wiley, 1985); Fundamentals of Systems Analysis with Application Design (Boyd & Fraser, 1987); and Management Information Systems: A Strategic Leadership Approach (Dryden, 1997)).

Overcoming my inherent nerdly fear of other people, I had specialized in "Group Support Systems", running meetings by computer and published extensively in this area. In 1988 I became a department head and by 1990 I was a full professor, a complete one, not the partial, associate professor I'd been. One thing led to another, and in 1995 I found myself teaching (and loving) accounting. It's so logical, so systematic, so so so obsessively compulsive. Maybe I'll return to accounting when I retire. But that was after the ennui had set in. You know it, it's called "midwife crisis", the feeling that you'd like to be born again and do it right this time!

I had the privilege of coaching two doctoral students, both from southern Asia, towards their degrees. One of them, (now Dr.) Prachit Hawat completed her studies in 1998 and now teaches at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok (where I visited twice, once for a day in 2000 and once for three months as a visiting lecturer in 2001). Prachit worked under the double burden of a foreign language and 10-month winters but eventually succeeded in producing the definitive work on adoption of CASE tools by IT professionals. If you want to know about this topic, and many others, I urge you to contact her. One thing I learned from working with Prachit is that if you put your mind to something, you can do it, even if people like me try to dissuade you!

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Dr. Livingstone, I Presume

By 1994, I had become dis-enamored of ten-month winters, decision-making by consensus, latent anti-Americanism, provincialism and all the other charms of western Canadian life and applied for a position in a more exciting, dynamic place, namely Cape Town. In a lightning set of decisive moves, stunning in their speed, I applied in late 1994 for, was interviewed in early 1995 for, offered in early 1996, accepted in late 1996 and actually took up the job at UCT in January of 1998.

If you think moving out of Calgary, which as everyone knows is located about 4 mm from the North Pole, on January 11 is going to be traumatic, well you've guessed right. Over seventeen years of living in an icy climate, I had managed to avoid almost every cold-induced catastrophe other than a few skiing accidents (OK, a LOT of skiing accidents; that's what happens when you learn to ski at age 48, but it's worth it). But while moving out I let my guard down for 6 msec. and, with bare hands freshly snowed upon, I grasped the outdoor knob of the front door and, presto-change-o, I experienced instant bonding with the built environment. Yes, my hand had frozen to the doorknob. You see, although I was leaving Calgary, Calgary was not going to let me leave. On that fateful morning, I left a little bit of me in Calgary and took the rest off to South Africa.

After a deceptively brief two-and-a-half-year period of settling in, our erstwhile academic found his niche running graduate programs in the Department of Information Systems at UCT and acting as doyen of research in the relatively young (if not youthful – average age of his colleagues was over 50) department. In 1999 I launched UCT’s first taught doctoral program, concentrating on Information Systems and National Development (social, economic, political, cultural, human resource) which grew to twelve students, two of whom were pursuing the degree by distance education. In addition, I lectured on the full-time honours course and was briefly in charge of the part-time honours course. My plans were to expand the doctoral program to a global program involving universities on each continent (I was going to be -- and still hope to be -- the first into Antarctica on this, you heard it first here) and to raise the research profile of the department before everyone retires. While it’s clear that four years of a doctoral program failed to change the economic, social, etc. standard of South Africa, it’s a long-term thing, isn’t it? After all, five years might be a long time to a hamster, but galaxies don't even notice these eye-blinks. Over five years, I trained to varying standards thirty students in masters programs and around fifteen at a doctoral level. Unfortunately you can lead a graduate student to the clear refreshing waters of academe, but making them drink when there's almost free beer elsewhere is rather hard, no? I did see about half a dozen students achieve a masters degree, but only one (but WHAT a one!) got his doctorate. Alemayehu ("Ale-x" or simply "Alex" to his friends) Molla graduated on 11 December 2002, the first Ph. D. in the Department in 15 years and probably the only Ethiopian male to have earned a Ph. D. from a South African IS department ever. His dissertation, on the relationship between e-commerce readiness and e-commerce success is a model of quantitative research, an outstanding piece of work. We still collaborate on research and I'm honored to be his mentor.

While not working, I explored South Africa, Africa and the world. In the short space of just over four years, I visited (in no certain order) Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia (briefly, while boating along the Zambezi River near Victoria Falls), Tanzania, Zanzibar (the Zanzibarians think they have an independent country, but rumor has it that the Tanzanians think otherwise), Ethiopia, Egypt, the UK, Holland (changing planes in Schippol Airport), Thailand, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong (changing planes, again), Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand. And the independent republic of Hout Bay, a Cape Town suburb that has no ego problems at all. Six months were spent in the US, while on sabbatical at Long Island University (in 2002, just a few months after Sept 11, 2001) where I learned what it means to live in one's car and that the archetypical Nassau County greeting only looks like a sneer, and if it also sounds, smells and feels like a sneer, that's only a coincidence and what's it to you anyway, you think you own this place, go on get outta here and don't come back you bum! Not exactly my place, even though I was born not far away in Manhatten (oh wondrous place, oh fascinating font of fantasy!). That was early 2002.

The previous year I'd sabbaticalled (yes, it's now a verb and, yes, I managed to have two short sabbaticals) at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Bangkok is a wonderful city, full of sound, lacking in fury, and signifying living in one's car, though in quite a different way (i.e., not moving). The Thais have it right, their mai pen rai philosophy (everything will come out all right) is fantastic and they share my love of food. It seems the Thais can't be without food, or eat least without eating, for more than ten minutes, because food is for sale everywhere. Thailand is a tourist mecca for a lot of reasons, but certainly the kindness of the Thai people, the food, the wonderful warm (if somewhat humid) climate, and the fascinating things to see and do top the list. Teaching at Chula in an elite English-language management program was a privilege (even if the students saw themselves also as privileged having nothing to do with being taught by a world-class instructor but more closely tied to their socio-economic status) and a great experience. My friend, colleague and former doctoral student Prachit Hawat played sheep-dog to us in the nicest possible way, making sure we were never lonely, lacking for information, or hungry. Thailand was the ideal jumping-off place to visit S. E. Asia, enabling us to see, in a three-month period, Angkor Wat, the Great Wall of China, and the Pyramids (this last visited from S. Africa), not to mention the fabulous sites and sights in Thailand itself. I also fed my hunger for learning about cultures while there.

In summary, five good years of travel, friends, entertainment and above all learning. This was brought to an end abruptly on December 11 2002 when we departed for North America via New York, New Orleans, New Toronto (OK, I just slipped that one in) and onward to Oakland County, Michigan (New North Wales) where I transmogrified myself (back) into a Department Head in time for winter (and I do mean WINTER) semester at Oakland University. It's a suburb of, heh heh, Ann Arbor! My friend Erik Goodman, who lives and works in East Lansing (at MSU, naturally) professed astonishment at how cold it was here in January of 2003 ("coldest winter I remember..."), but one thing I've learned is that ALL winters are the coldest, snowiest, nastiest winters in living memory; I'm waiting for summer ("...hottest summer in living memory...").

And here's the update. Michigan has the most AMAZING autumns in the world. It starts with a hint in September and goes like gangbusters until almost December. Reds, yellows, oranges, leave in profusion everywhere. Warm days, and not particularly cold nights either. It's probably the influence of the lakes, but autumn just goes and goes and goes. It's not like Ottawa, where winter comes in a day (usually November 22, as I recall), or Calgary, where winter never really leaves (it sort of hibernates for Stampede). It shows its true colors, all 2,364,878 of them on every tree, bush, and vine around. Of course there is a down side, a geometrically down side, and that is removing all the used leaves from one's property. This is a generally impossible task, made feasible by only two phenomena. The first is called "wind", which there seems to be a great deal of here in Michigan. On November 4, 2003, I was in a high state of alert (orange? yellow? maybe red?) about the impending impossible task of gathering up trillions of leaves and putting them out for the trash people to pick up when, miracle of miracles, a three-day wind came up (from Canada, no doubt) and blew all the leaves around and around and wouldn't you know it, deposited THEM ALL in front of my garage door. This was less of a tragedy than you might imagine since I could simply kneel as in prayer, but more likely as in WORK, before the altar of the garage and scoop the leaves into leaf bags more or less as Henry Ford ordained them to be scooped...as an assembly line. Lickety-split (or more accurately Lickerty-split) something like 50 bags of leaves were made available for the landfill of Oakland County. Since then, I've discovered two things. The first is that the same wind can spread all those leaves statistically unlikely but almost inevitably evenly over one's entire lawn (and, of course, into the garage, where they seem to like the warmth) and the second is that while it's not necessarily cheaper, it's much better for the economy to hire someone else to do this work. In fact, in a economic and ecological activity stunning in its simplicity, my wife and I have outsourced almost every aspect of "taking care of the property" to a phalanx of workers to mow, sow, and tow just about everything going on out there, except gardening. Gardening is something that people imagine older folks (I'm getting towards that end of things) like to do. Nope, gardening is something that older folks really hate to do but can't afford to outsource, unless their (adult) children or (energetic and intellectually challenged young) grandchildren can be coerced into doing! Anyway, back to meterology....

The second phenomenon is called "snow", a product similar to what I experienced for 17 years in Calgary. So far as I am concerned snow has two purposes. The first, and major one, is skiing. The second, and only recently discovered, purpose is to cover the leaves left behind by the wind, which decided to blow a fourth day, just as I was lickertysplitting the leaves, to spread them back around the yard. This was actually successfully pursued during the winter of 2005-6 when I contracted to have my frozen leaves picked up in...January! Very satisfying, although local trash collectors wouldn't pick up the leaves until April, by which time they had turned to compost or slime or something in between.

Anyway, after the gentlest autumn I've ever experienced (let's face it, autumn is not South Africa's strong suit), came one of the coldest, snowiest winters ever experienced here, but that's a topic for another blog. The old timers say we've got wimpy winters now and, come to think of it I'm an old-timer now, I disagree. ALL winters are the coldest and snowiest ever. Meanwhile, winter has come and gone five times (thanks to the great lakes, of course, winter lingers on until April and May, but who can complain when autumn is only a few months behind) and so far summer is cool and damp, ideal for not watering the lawn and garden.

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Miss-Again

So here we are now in Miss-Again, perhaps the most northern outpost of the 1950s left in the USA. There's something about blue collar work that is both ennobling and clock-stopping. Everywhere I go I have reminders of my childhood: SUVs, cellphones, the Internet. OK, it was an odd childhood, I'll agree; like Merlin, I'm living my life backwards, you see. In 2003 I was sure that He-who-must-be-obeyed (aka GW Bush) was preparing for the Korean War or maybe even WW2 (curious isn't it that world war III never happened, only the wwweb! There must be some law of conservation of acronyms, eh?). What will transpire here? Trees transpire, men perspire, women glow. Stay tuned.

Note from August 2003: We've just lived through the great power cut of 2003. Well, the second. People ask me what's it like to live in South Africa. I tell them being at the top of the feeding chain is great. If I were a rich man, die-di-die-di, etc., I'd want to be rich in some place where everyone else isn't rich. Then I'd have electrical power, water, etc. every day. In five years in S. Africa we were without electrical power for a grand total of about 18 hours. In about 225 days here we've had no power for 4.5 DAYS. Where's the third world? It's all around us. Of course the difference is that MOST of South Africa has been without electricity, water, etc. roughly forever; it's only the privileged few at the top of the food chain that have electricity at all. The lesson here is too complex for this blog. More important to note is this news, just in. The past summer was COOLER than normal. Global warming? Fat chance!

Note from July 2004: Yes, I've bought a generator. It's adequate to keep my fridge, a fan, and a reading light going for up to 8 hours on five gallons of gas. So bring it on, as someone used to say.

Notes from November 2005: Nope, I haven't used the generator. Haven't needed to, since our power outages (there have been dozens, usually attributable to wind -- the electrical utilities are on poles here, unlike western Canada) and are susceptible to "sway") usually last less than 1 second each. So I've learned that it's better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, but it's even better to bury the utilities to keep the lights on. Somehow that philosophy works its way into my MBA courses: it's better to light a fire in the brain of one student than to curse the curriculum. Anyway, its very easy to light these fires because the crop of MBAs I teach is probably the second brightest bunch of people I've ever taught (other than my doctoral students in Cape Town). International, accomplished, and eager to learn, what more could a professor ask for in a classroom full of students?

And did I mention that Michigan is oh so fifties? Last week Susannah and I went to a "sock hop", really a charity "ball" (now THAT is an odd term, isn't it?). Everyone dressed up in late 50's style, there was even an Elvis there. Nothing unusual here; these sorts of retro events are common enough. Not nearly as exciting as a medieval feast where it's OK to eat with hands (especially one's own, of course) but understandable. What was most poignant about Saturday night was not the way everyone looked (cute), danced (creakily) or even ate (hot dogs, hamburgers, fries and ice cream sundaes) but how everyone took this in stride and acted "normally." Most people acted as though they'd just been out to see "Rebel without a Cause", had cheered Al Kaline and Whitey Ford (but not in the same breath, of course), and had just voted for Eisenhower, John Cabot Lodge and Vice President Nixon. Not only is everything old new again, but the recently old are behaving as if we'd had a change in calendar, skipping roughly 45 years of history. Well, gotta run shine up my Thunderbird and get ready to cruise on down to the strip and take my gal out for a milkshake. Shaboom!

Note from July 2007. Almost five years here. It's been instructive for a business professor to watch the deindustrialization of Michigan. I seriously proposed that we make this the theme of our business school. The blank stares I received were probably awe mixed with a bit of shock. In order to understand this deindustrialization better, I've been making it a point to visit a lot of the industrialized world and the third world to do a comparison. So far, the research is incomplete. The following observations form part of a paper I'm preparing:

1. Deindustrialization can include tourism. All that is needed in terms of industry is a series of fleecing machines which turn the tourists upside down and shake them, gathering loose coins, cellphones, cameras, just about anything of value. This has the side benefit of rattling their brains so that they have an explanation of why they cannot think and why they've abandoned their healthy diets of lettuce and carrots for fast food and $5 coca colas;
2. It's true people die younger in the third world, and live nastier, too, in general. What's not clear is whether we are happier being industrialized.
3. Michigan used to be part of Canada. Back then there were lots of trees and no cars. We are in transition back to trees again. Does that mean we'll return to Canada?
4. There doesn't seem to be any correlation between peace and prosperity. The world's most prosperous country is engaged in two nasty wars against smaller countries, saving them from themselves. The least prosperous countries (mainly in Africa) are in a state of perpetual civil war. The Europeans are mostly at peace, but it's taken 1000 years or more just to shake out religious warfare and I'm not imagining that they are through with this (Ireland, Bosnia are counterexamples).
5. It doesn't take much for the thin veneer of civility to wear off and for people to bellow for authority to save them from freedom and allow them to oppress their weaker neighbors. The Patriot Act isn't too far removed from King George's edicts and it seems that most Americans approve. I don't think France, Germany and the UK will be far behind.
6. Italian trains do run on time, without help from Mussolini. Well, OK, they're not on time at all, but the people are dressed stylishly. Come to think of it, this may describe Montreal, too.
7. I've always felt that all predictions will be wrong, including this one.

Note from January 2008: It's fun to read the summer notes, gazing out at the snow that falls (or rather gallops sideways, because the wind here can be fierce). The bad news is that Michigan's economy continues to fall like the snow, heavily, in thick layers, and basically covering the territory relatively uniformly. The good news is that now the whole US economy seems to be sliding into the same pit, with the stock market losing, what, 20% of its value since October, house prices falling to Michigan levels, and the Fed falling over itself to cut interest rates to induce Americans to BORROW EVEN MORE MONEY. There must come a time when there are no more greenbacks left to borrow. Oh, hey, LET'S PRINT SOME MORE!!! What a wonderful idea. And the war continues. And I don't mean the war on poverty.

Professionally I'm now involved in three very interesting projects. They're putting me into contact with practitioners in IT (you know, the people who don't read our research reports because they're not relevant) and entrepreneurs. As the newly knighted "Director" of the Strategy and Leadership Research Group here at the SBA, I get to think and talk about the kinds of things people my age are expected to think and talk about: where we're going and who's going to carry us. And speaking of travel, after a two-month sojourn in Europe and Jordan last summer, you'd think my wife and I wouldn't want to set foot on an airplane. Other than two trips to Canada in December (Montreal and Calgary, to visit our kids and do some academic stuff) and seven other visits to Ontario between August and October, we've only got plans for maybe the British Isles in June, perhaps a wee trip to Ethiopia in March and a dash or two to South Africa, preparing for a sabbatical there in 2009. So, rather inert, eh?

Note from December 2009: Nothing new to report; didn't really go anywhere: a sabbatical, numerous visits to places like Ethiopia, the Seychelles, Italy, the UK, Canada multiple times. Same old boring stuff: children getting married (and unmarried), earning MBAs, changing countries. America changed administrators (and the whole rest of the world, which I experienced a part of between Jan and July, cheered). I no longer have any (at all) administrative duties, not a director of anything except maybe aspects of my own destiny. Given the state of the economy (actually, the economy of the state, although it looks like the playing field is being leveled a bit, mostly by the bulldozer of recession) I should be thankful I've still got a job at all. Enrolments continue to fall, especially at the MBA level, which is one reason I'm thankful I'm no longer involved in that stuff. Research is picking up as my colleagues and I explore the idea of organizational IT maturity (no coincidence there, is there, given that the three of us are maturing at a rapid rate ourselves!). Recently I've become rather interested in democracy, its history and development, as a way of explaining what's happening in IT as the "children" become digital ecofreaks while the more "mature" of us get phased out or maybe fazed out, who knows? This is starting to sound like Susannah's annual Christmas newsletter, although one person, who interviewed here for a position as Associate Dean (now who would ever want that job?) referred to it as a blog. Well why not? It gives me a chance at least to comment on my travels.

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I Wonder as I Wander

Just as aside, I sat down to think of all the countries, principalities, or commonwealths I'd visited or lived in. Excluding places to change planes, or, as in the case of Jamaica, places my boat had docked but I was too lazy to get out and walk upon, this includes

N. America
Canada
USA (incl. Hawai'i and Alask'a)

South America
Colombia

Central America and Caribbean
Mexico
Barbados
US Virgin Islands
Puerto Rico
St. Lucia
St. Barts
Cayman Islands

Europe
Wales
Scotland
England
France
Greece
Croatia
Slovakia
Czech Republic
Germany
Switzerland
Italy

Africa
Namibia
South Africa
Zimbabwe
Botswana
Seychelles
Tanzania
Ethiopia
Zanzibar
Egypt

Asia
Thailand
Cambodia
Hong Kong
China
Israel
Jordan
Malaysia
Singapore

Oceania
Australia
New Zealand

...and the Republic of Hout Bay, of course.

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And Now for Now-Now*

OK, that brings us just about up to date. There's lots more, personal stuff about my wonderful wife, my kids, my artistic side, samba and rumba, intimations of baseball, literary delusions, my tendency to exaggerate and other things but let's put all that aside for now. What has our hero learned from all these experiences? First, youth isn’t wasted only on the young; the elderly know how to waste their youth, too, and the youth of many other people. Have you ever tried to have a conversation, a real give-and-take conversation with someone over 60?. Even more critical, we seem to be able to waste the youth of the youth, very effectively. Second, it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, but electric light is even better. Third, while it may be true that you shouldn’t look back because it may be gainin’, the major reason for not looking back is that directly in front of you are far more important things, like potholes in the pavement and dinner. And at our age, if you walk forward while looking back, you're almost certain to strain something, pull something, or insult someone. Still quite alive and ticking, I am certain to be survived by Susannah, my splendid, esteemed and incomparable wife and a world-class brain and beauty with a Celtic temperament and the moral character to follow through on it; three fascinating, handsome and accomplished sons (one lives in Vancouver, which he will never leave, working for the an urban planning firm, doing their Geographic Information Systems stuff, one lives in Calgary, selling IT services for ADP -- he's just earned his MBA, a third pursuing (and almost certain to catch!) a doctorate in English at the U. of Montreal (go figure; it's a francophone university!). One will be a professor; another, an entrepreneur; and the third, a city planner or President of the Universe); and two intelligent and ravishingly beautiful stepdaughters, probably in some phase of transit to the UK or Australia (one seems to be engaged to a Chicagoan, the other to yoga). Most of these people want to live in the UK or British Columbia (is there a theme here?). I simply want to live in a location where I can order up snow when I feel like a skiing break from sunshine, warm tropical breezes, and gentle surf, which is why I live in Michigan (that's the snow part). Well, we're off to ski in December, perhaps friends' daughter's wedding in Costa Rica in January, almost surely a break in February to Mexico, a son's wedding in Vancouver in May and, phew I'm breathless and we're only up to May! Oh, there's a fourth aphorism I need to put here: your grandmother knew more about nutrition than she let on; it's just that she knew a lot of stuff that wasn't true, too! I should know, I'm about her age!!

* "Now" in South Africa means sometime in the next week. "Just now" cuts that down considerably, providing a window of opportunity of about twelve hours. "Now now" means within sixty minutes. There is no word that means "immediately" in South African English. Another useful phrase is "That's Africa Baby", which all travelers to Africa need to learn as a mantra.

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This webpage was last updated on July 16, 2007, but that doesn't mean that it's up to date, if you get my snowdrift.

♥