Rudy Starkermann | Bulldozer00's Blog

Unexplained Resurrections

August 26, 2012 bulldozer00 3 comments

If you dive head first into the work of Bill Livingston and/or Rudy Starkermann, you’ll find it easy to either develop or maintain a doomsday mindset of a future increasingly dominated by bigger and more inhumane institutions. Their rigorously developed physics and control engineering-based theories of institutional behavior can seem ironclad and 100% irrefutable. BD00 has drunk the kool-aid, but not the whole glass.

According to BD00’s interpretation of Livingston’s D4P, once an established institution encounters a novel and identity-threatening situation, annihilation is sure to follow because it is incapable of learning and adapting at the expense of losing its identity. I think that to be true in general, but not in the absolute. There are too many counter-examples of resurrection in the real world that go unacknowledged in his work:

IBM was on its deathbed stuck in a “mainframe hardware” mindset, but it recovered under cookie-man Lou Gerstner by transforming itself into a software services company.
Apple was on its deathbed, but it recovered under Steve Jobs and a financial bailout from Microsoft (yes, Microsoft!).
My company, which was consistently losing money, heavily in debt, and arguably on its deathbed, is now debt-free and making money in a wickedly brutal economic environment.

I’ve had the privilege of e-interacting with both Bill and Rudy over the past several years. Bill sends me his draft work regularly for feedback/review and he’s very inviting of criticisms and challenges. However, I’m not satisfied with his answers when I pose cases like those listed above to counter those examples in his books that promote his theories.

When all is said and done, Livingston and Starkermann are two genuine social science originals and much of what they say is true. I highly recommend delving into what they have to say.

Yin And Yang (bulldozer00.com)
From The Ground Up (bulldozer00.com)
Building The Perfect Beast (bulldozer00.com)
Cross-Disciplinary Pariahs (bulldozer00.com)

Categories: technical Tags: linkedin, organizational behavior, Rudy Starkermann, William Livingston

From The Ground Up

August 11, 2012 bulldozer00 4 comments

In developing their feedback control system-based models (see below) for exploring the nature of human behavior, both Bill Powers and Rudy Starkermann really did start from the ground up.

By “the ground up“, I mean that their theories started with the basic building blocks of the brain and nervous system. The diagram below shows examples of Powers’s and Starkermann’s underlying neuronal models.

Unlike classical Skinnerian “behaviorists“, whose theories are founded on more abstract, “black box”, empirical findings, BD00 believes that Bill and Rudy’s theories are much more closer to the “truth” (whatever the hell that may be) behind what motivates human behavior. What do you think?