Nine Shift co-author endorses a CyberCIRM

California Politics Today™ #295

River Falls, Wisconsin
February 21, 2005

By Marc Strassman
Reporter
California Politics Today
Etopia Media News Networks

This page and its contents are copyright © 2005 by Etopia Media News Networks. All rights in all media reserved.

William A. Draves, President, and Julie Coates, Vice President for Information Services, Learning Resources Network (LERN), co-authors, Nine Shift

Nine Shift, by William A. Draves and Julie Coates, chronicles and analyzes the transition from the Industrial to the Internet Age

William A. Draves is the President of the Learning Resources Network (LERN) and the co-author (with Julie Coates) of Nine Shift, an important new book that describes and discusses the current and on-going transition from the Industrial Age that dominated in the 20th century to the Internet Age that will characterize the 21st.

Among the trends highlighted in Nine Shift are those relating to working at home instead of commuting to the office and the emergence of the virtual organization as such groupings increasingly replace bricks-and-mortar-based organizations. These, and other changes described and discussed by Draves and Coates in their book, flow from the increasing presence, and the growing power, of the broadband Internet as a technological, economic, political, social, cultural, and personal force in world affairs and everyone's life.



A proposal for siting the CIRM that accords with the basic operating principles of the emerging Internet Age

In a live, audio-conference-mediated presentation to California's Independent Citizens' Oversight Committee (ICOC)'s Site Search Sub-committee on January 25, 2005, and in several online articles, this reporter has proposed putting the $3 billion California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) established by the passage last year of Proposition 71, not in Fresno, or Davis, San Jose, or Sacramento, San Diego/La Jolla, Los Angeles or Palo Alto, but in cyberspace, as a way of saving money, avoiding embarrasment to the locations not selected, increasing the CIRM's operating efficiency, speeding up the investigation of stem cell cures, saving CIRM officers and staff the wasted time and helping them avoid the frustration of sitting in gridlocked traffic on the way to and from work, and establishing and extending the principle, enunciated as the slogan of his 1980 Silicon Valley Congressional bid, that we all ought to "Compute, not commute."

Nine Shift's Bill Draves thinks a CyberCIRM makes 21st century sense and says so publicly

This reporter brought his proposal for a CyberCIRM to the attention of Nine Shift co-author Bill Graves by phone and e-mail, and asked if he'd prepare a short document cataloging the ways, according to the basic 21st century, Internet Age, operating principles that he elucidates in his book, in which putting the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine in cyberspace is just common sense.

Bill Draves was kind enough to do so and now you can read what he said, in the February 21, 2005 e-mail reproduced below, as he makes the case for speeding up the development and application of the promised embryonic stem cell-based medical cures through the creation of a CyberCIRM:

"Dear fellow Citizens:

"This is to support having the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) having a virtual structure instead of having a central physical building.

"Along with Julie Coates, I am co-author of Nine Shift: Work, life and education in the 21st century. Our interview with the BBC was recently aired worldwide on the radio.

"As the CEO of a virtual organization, and one who has trained around 5,000 faculty in higher education, cyberspace is the only location that makes sense.

"Here are our top five reasons why CIRM should be virtual:

"1. Recruit the best people.
The best people often do not want nor need to move. You will have a competitive advantage over other organizations in that you can recruit the best professionals and scientists to CIRM without making undue relocation demands that impact productivity, family and friendship communities.

"2. More productive.
People who work from home are 15% more productive than people who work in an office. Workers can be better managed online than in face-to-face environments, and your most talented people can spend more time in productive work rather than supervision. People who work from home are more creative, happier, and are thus able to do better knowledge work.

"3. Redirect limited funds.
You can redirect limited funds from costly and unproductive buildings and building maintenance into technology and human resources, thus gaining a competitive edge and devoting resources into productive work instead of maintenance.

"4. Team research is enhanced.
Working together online, virtual teams composed of the best people for that particular task or project outproduce individual achievement. As tasks and projects are constantly changing, a CyberCIRM is able to form and reform networks of workers to maximize performance.

"5. Save 2-3 hours a day.
Time is too valuable today to be wasted. Commuters waste from 2-3 hours a day of productive work time, time that can be reallocated in productive work, family time, or both. A competitive organization in a "race against time" as well as other organizations can ill afford to have 25% of its human resource time wasted.

"You are to be commended for considering a CyberCIRM. It is the only organizational structure of the 21st century.

"Sincerely, William A. Draves, CAE
President
Learning Resources Network (LERN)"

An interesting application of the Draves/Coates analysis to the selection of a site for the CIRM

As mentioned in Point 1 above, and as discussed in more detail on page 94 of Nine Shift:

"The best people won't move.
Compounding the issue is the biggest reason of all: the best people won't move. Companies will need the best people to remain competitive. The best people don't have to move. In fact, their high level of output and outcomes would probably fall if they were taken out of the environment in which they are most productive. So you don't really want to move productive people anyway."

This is precisely the point underpinning a dilemma faced by the members of the ICOC as they try to recruit a new president for the CIRM while simultaneously trying to decide where to put the CIRM itself, a conundrum that can only be resolved by putting the CIRM into cyberspace.

Here's their problem, as reported by Sharon Simonson in last Friday's Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal, in an article tellingly entitled, "Stem cell chief key to site pick":

"...a substantial concern...of several board members, including ICOC Vice Chair Ed Penhoet, is that the site be chosen with strong regard to hiring the very best president the agency can find and with the understanding that the site in-and-of-itself will likely limit those presidential choices. '... (T)o some degree the location ... will drive the staff decisions because there are people who have real constraints about where they can live and work,' [he said].

"Philip A. Pizzo, dean of the School of Medicine at Stanford University...argued, the permanent site selection and the presidential search should be executed to a large degree in tandem.

"...at least one board member implied...that it might be worth waiting to choose a site until after a president is chosen.

"'(C)ertainly all of us often find in trying to recruit people into leadership positions that geography matters a lot, and we (don't) necessarily want to within the next 30 days fix the site, and then find out that the site we chose precludes the very best person that we would want to recruit to be head of the institute,' said Robert Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California-Berkeley."

The next meeting of the ICOC Site Search Sub-commitee will be held between 2 pm and 5 pm PST on Thursday, February 24, 2005

Leichtag Building, UCSD------ Millberry Conference Center, UCSF------ Doheny Eye Institute, USC

The next public meeting of the ICOC's Site Search Sub-committee will be held on Thursday, February 24, 2005, between 2 pm and 5 pm, PST. The primary site of the meeting will be the Golden Gate Room in the Millberry Conference Center at the University of California, San Francisco. Remote communications with this primary site will be made available by the ICOC at the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California, the Leichtag Biomedical Research Facility on the School of Medicine Campus of the University of California, San Diego, and in Room G-300 at the Sacramento Medical Center Patient Support Services site on V Street in Sacramento, California.

You can take a look at the ICOC Site Search Sub-committee's "most recent RFP--it's the same one that was distributed at the last meeting, very much a draft," according to ICOC spokesperson Melissa King, by clicking here.

ICOC spokesperson King has indicated that "there will be an updated version of the RFP distributed for the meeting on 2/24."

An exclusive interview with a member of the ICOC's Site Search Sub-committee

You can listen to an exclusive interview with ICOC Site Search Sub-committee member Dr. Phyllis Preciado, recorded on February 17, 2005, by clicking here.

 



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