Andy Rector, a candidate for the master of science degree
at the Center for Information and Communication Sciences (CICS),
sent this link to a Washington Post obituary
on the death of business theorist Peter Drucker--
"Management Visionary Peter Drucker Dies."
Peter Drucker died 11 November 2005, aged 95.
Andy Rector and I and other CICS people
have had some rich discourses about Drucker
and his influence in business theory.
Peter Drucker is someone every contemporary professional needs to know.
For example, it was Peter Drucker who invented and developed the term
"knowledge worker." Virtually all the people at
the Center for Information and Communication Sciences
are educated as knowledge workers, and knowledge managers.
Wikipedia has one of its better brief essays on "Knowledge Worker"
linked here.
I'll finish my post on Peter Drucker
with the following quote from Andy's Washington Post article,
which shows Drucker to be the kind of "renaissance man" thinker
I see as essential in our era:
Mr. Drucker's extraordinary professional longevity took him from the rise of Hitler to the excesses of Enron. The Austrian native wrote for a mass business audience, but he studded his books with unusual references -- from Tang-dynasty China to seventh-century Byzantium to his heroine, novelist Jane Austen. In 1981, he said the best-run organization in the United States was the Girl Scouts of America.
While Peter Drucker's time is gone, his influence will live on.
You will find ideas and approaches in his work and history
that will be useful to you in yours.
There is justice.
There are different kinds of justice:
--compensatory justice,
where people get what's coming to them,
reward or punishment
--punitive justice,
a variant of compensatory justice
where punishment is exacted
for actions taken
--contract justice,
where people get what they agree on
The concept of justice is ancient,
and has deep roots in human language.
It seems to be "what is due,"
or "what is merited."
So you can see there are positive and negative
aspects to what is due,
or what is merited.
Professionals deal with justice
all the time.
What is due the job?
What is due the customer?
What do my actions or the actions
of my colleagues merit,
positively or negatively?
The one thought I am positive about is
There is justice.
It's said that Michelangelo
declared, at age 87 of his 89 years,
"ancoro imparo"
translated as
"I am still learning."
A good motto for us all.
Half of learning a field, or a trade,
is learning its vocabulary, its language.
That's why in our
Center for Information and Communication Sciences,
we make much use of language dictionaries, and our
recommended technology dictionary,
Newton's Telecom Dictionary.
Here is some journalism technical vocabulary
I am still learning:
the spelling of a story lead,
(a term I used in one of my posts
on the Information Renaissance blog),
spelling story lead as "lede."
Here's an explanation from a good Wikipedia
article on News Style:
Journalistic prose is explicit and precise, and tries not to rely on jargon. As a rule, journalists will not use a long word when a short one will do. They use subject-verb-object construction and vivid, active prose. They offer anecdotes, examples and metaphors, and they rarely depend on colorless generalizations or abstract ideas. News writers try to avoid using the same word more than once in a paragraph (sometimes called an "echo" or "word mirror").The most important structural element of a story is the lead —namely contained in the story's first sentence (sometimes spelled lede to avoid confusion with the typographical term "leading" or similarly spelled words [2]). The lede is usually the first sentence, or in some cases the first two sentences, and are ideally 20-25 words in length. The top-loading principle applies especially to ledes, but the unreadability of long sentences constrain its size. This makes writing a lede an optimization problem, in which the goal is to articulate the most encompassing and interesting statement that a writer can make in one sentence, given the material with which he or she has to work. While a rule of thumb says the lede should answer most or all of the 5 Ws, few ledes can fit all of these. If they did, they would either be tedious, opaque with jargon, or too long.