Bricklin on Technology

5.2. Learning About Cooperation from the Navy

The next set of interviews is with Vice Admiral (Ret.) John Morgan of the U.S. Navy. I became acquainted with John at a series of conferences hosted by Diamond Management and Technology Consultants. I am a "Diamond Fellow," which means I can go to these get-togethers with senior corporate executives along with other Diamond Fellows, such as computer pioneers Alan Kay and Gordon Bell, MIT Media Lab's Andy Lippman and Dan Ariely, and University of Chicago Graduate School of Business professor Marvin Zonis. In recent years, some senior people in the U.S. Navy have also been attending, joining the corporate executives.

As I did with Dan Ariely, earlier in the chapter, I recorded an interview with John Morgan during a break in one of the conferences. (I routinely travel to such things with podcast-recording equipment just in case I find an opportunity to share my hallway discussions with the readers of my blog.) A year and a half later, after he retired from the Navy in the summer of 2008, I recorded another interview with John over the phone to take a longer-term perspective.

It's nice to talk about theories of cooperation, but you do also have to look to real-world experiences. Instead of thinking how in the future we might communicate in the control room of the Starship Enterprise in science fiction, here I get to ask questions of someone who actually commanded the USS Enterprise in war. As Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, he was involved ...