Category Archives: In Memoriam

Re-imagin-ing

David West Keirsey (August 31, 1921 – July 31, 2013)

frame work

Frame
Work

re-: Latin – ‘again
imagin-: Latin imaginari – ‘picture to oneself,’
ing: Germanic -ung – Gerund – ‘continuing action

david west keirsey self portrait 2

My father died on July 30th, 2013 and I intend to honor him, if I can, by writing a blog about him and his ideas every year.  First year,  Second Year, Third Year

His ideas still have use because his ideas are slow ideas. Moreover, his ideas have wider applicability if re-imagin-ed, judiciously.

Only the educated and self-educated are free.

“… Up to that time I had learned a lot, but not at school. I began reading when I was seven. Read (most of) a twelve volume set of books my parents bought, Journeys through Bookland. Read countless novels thereafter, day in and day out. I educated myself by reading books. Starting at age nine my family went to the library once a week, I checking out two or three novels which I would read during the week. Then, when I was sixteen, I read my father’s copy of Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. I read it over and over again, now and then re-reading his account of some of the philosophers.” [Turning Points, David West Keirsey, 2013]

Klein Dual Inside Out

“I mention Durant’s book The Story of Philosophy because it was a turning point in my life, I too, become a scholar as did Durant, thereafter reading the philosophers and logicians—anthropologists, biologists, ethologists, ethnologists, psychologists, sociologists, and, most important, the etymologists, all of the latter—Ernest Klein, Eric Partridge, Perry Pepper, and Julius Pokorny—of interest to me now as then.” [Turning Points, David West Keirsey, 2013]

When I arrived on the scene (about 30 years later) upon which my father and I started debating about ideas. He was well educated, and more importantly self-educated, in Philosophy and Psychology.  He considered himself to be the last of the Gestalt Psychologists at the end of his life.

Being a “hard” science kind of guy by nature but always being questioned by my “Gestalt” psychologist father, I always, in the back of my mind, questioned the basic assumptions taught to me in school — like the physics concept of “mass.” I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what was wrong or what issues were being finessed, for I figured that I was either ignorant or not bright enough to know better.

“If you don’t understand something said,
don’t assume you are at fault.”
— David West Keirsey

My father was called Dr. Matrix by his staff at Covina School District. He considered himself as an self taught expert in Qualitative Factor Analysis, because he had to have six semesters of statistics (quantitative and correlative) as a PhD requirement for psychology, and found that those techniques missed important factors and meaning.  Rather, he looked for systematic (and wholistic) patterns in human action, using the principles of Gestalt psychology.  I often would be his sounding board on his tentative propositions in characterizing the observable action patterns.

Temperament Framework Productive Action
The Temperament Framework for Productive Human Action

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Transformation: Swimming Across the Universe

A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.”  — Andy Grove

In Memoriam: Andy Grove
2 September 1936 – 21 March 2016

Andy Grove was noted for making sure that important details were never missed.  Having a strategic vision helps in recognizing the important factors.

He had survived by getting things right in the long term and transforming himself.

“By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint. . . [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them.

Even though he arrived in the United States with little money and not knowing English, Grove retained a “passion for learning.”  He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the City College of New York in 1960, followed by a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963.

“Probably no one person has had a greater influence in shaping Intel, Silicon Valley, and all we think about today in the technology world than Andy Grove.” — Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware

Continue reading Transformation: Swimming Across the Universe

Observant

She was very observant.
She was very determined.

“I never gave up and I never let anyone or anything get in my way.”

vernon1

“It was very difficult when we came to New York because I spoke no English. We moved to a neighborhood with many other German and Jewish immigrants but I mostly befriended Americans since that was the easiest and quickest way to learn the culture, language, and customs of my new homeland.”

“She seems to be able of growing enormous by sheer force of will,”

Continue reading Observant

It’s Over

It ain’t over, until it’s over.

In Memoriam

Yogi Berra [May 12, 1925 – September 22, 2015]

They call them Yogi-isms.

1. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

2. “You can observe a lot by just watching.”

3. “It gets late early out here.”

4. “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

Lawrence PeterYogiBerra, Performer Artisan, (May 12, 1925 – September 22, 2015) was an American professional baseball catcher, manager, and coach who played 19 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) (1946–63, 1965), all but the last for the New York Yankees. An 18-time All-Star and 10-time World Series champion as a player, Berra had a career batting average of .285, while compiling 358 home runs and 1,430 runs batted in. He is one of only five players to win the American League Most Valuable Player Award three times. Widely regarded as one of the greatest catchers in baseball history, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.

5. “No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.”

6. “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.”

7. “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”

Berra was also well known for his pithy comments, malapropisms, and witticisms, known as Yogi-isms. Yogi-isms very often take the form of either an apparently obvious tautology or a paradoxical contradiction.

8. “Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.”

9. “We made too many wrong mistakes.”

10. “Congratulations. I knew the record would stand until it was broken.”

Much of everyday Artisan speech is far more lively, more filled with vivid, unorthodox terms, though not much more abstract. Artisans like to use colorful phrases and current slang in their speech, and they pick up hip phrases quickly (“I’m outta here,” “no way,” “ya know what I’m saying?”). When they reach for images, they tend to use quick, sensory adjectives (“slick,” “cool,” “sharp”), or they say what things are like, using rather striking similes, “drunk as a skunk,” “like taking candy from a baby,” “goes like a bunny.”

Performers are smooth, talkative, and witty; they always seem to know the latest jokes and stories, and are quick with wisecracks and wordplay-nothing is so serious or sacred that it can’t be made fun of. [Please Understand Me II]

11. “You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.”

12. “You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you.”

13. “I usually take a two-hour nap from one to four.”

14. “Never answer an anonymous letter.”

15. “Slump? I ain’t in no slump… I just ain’t hitting.”

16. “How can you think and hit at the same time?”

17. “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

18. “I tell the kids, somebody’s gotta win, somebody’s gotta lose. Just don’t fight about it. Just try to get better.”

19. “If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.”

20. “We have deep depth.”

21. “Pair up in threes.”

22. “Why buy good luggage, you only use it when you travel.”

23. “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.”

24. “All pitchers are liars or crybabies.”

Other Performer Artisans include: Robin WilliamsMickey RooneySid CaesarSteve MartinBrittney GrinerJanis JoplinGene KrupaLouis ArmstrongAlex KarrasKim Jong UnPhyllis DillerJim CramerMagic JohnsonJosephine BakerWhitney HoustonMarilyn MonroeMichael Jackson and Elvis Presley.

A Turning Point

David West Keirsey: Self Portrait
David Keirsey self portrait(August 31, 1921 – July 30, 2013)

My father died on July 30th, 2013 and I intend to honor him, if I can, by writing a blog about him and his ideas every year.  First year.  Second Year.

“I regard myself as the last living Gestalt Psychologist”
— David West Keirsey

Gestalt: German word for form or shape

He wrote a short autobiography at the bequest of us, it was titled: Turning Points.  It chronicles some of the turning points of his life.  I want to write “an intellectual history” of him using some of that material plus my fading memory about the ideas we discussed in those many years, since it might be instructive to see how and why his ideas were formed and evolved.  Moreover, I think that his developed “methodology” of qualitative factor analysis and synthesis can contribute to the progress in science.

Continue reading A Turning Point

Character

“Character is what you know you are,

not what others think you have.”

She knew what to do.

“Determination and perseverance move the world; thinking that others will do it for you is a sure way to fail.”

She did not fail, in the long run, despite all the obstacles.  Just ask her numerous, successful, students.

Continue reading Character

Mastermind

It’s Trade, Stupid

He was kicked out.

They had no natural resources: except a natural harbor and being in a central location of the poor South East Asia.

It was a mismash of cultures: Chinese, Malays and Indians, under the British colonial rule, made from the flotsam and jetsam of the Chinese Diaspora and local Malays with a sprinkle of Indians.

Exhausted by World War II, the British wanted out of the colonial business, so they tried to give Singapore to the newly formed Malaysia.   Singapore joined neighboring Malaysia, another former British colony, in 1963. The following year riots between ethnic Chinese and Malays broke out, and Singapore and Malaysia split into separate nations in 1965.

No go there, there was Tunku, he had enough problems with his Chinese. Too many Chinese and Lee was not a weak leader, not easily manipulable.  

Kicked out of the Malaysian Federation, Lee Kuan Yew, leading a newly independent Singapore from 1965, with overwhelming parliamentary control, oversaw the nation’s transformation from a relatively underdeveloped colonial outpost with no natural resources into an Asian Tiger economy. In the process, he forged a widely admired system of meritocratic, clean, self-reliant and efficient government and civil service, much of which is now taught at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

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California’s Gold

All that is Gold, does not glitter.

He wasn’t even from California.

But he was The Best of California’s Gold, for thirty years.

In Memoriam

He was the same on camera as off camera.  He was a people person.  “Huell Howser, who turned his folksy reporting style featuring an unrepentant Tennessee drawl and gee-whiz approach into television gold.”

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On Being an Individual of.

“It’s always consciousness — of

I can see and hear him very distinctly now in my consciousness, even though he is gone.

My father had said it to me, on quite of few times, and it’s full impact has finally come home

Because of another person, who I was barely conscious of … most of my life.  And I never met the man.

But James and Sharon know him.    There is the two degrees of physical separation.

But the abstract connections are deeper.

It is called the Gestalt.

For my father and Nathaniel Branden had at least two things in common…

Continue reading On Being an Individual of.

Can We Talk

She sure could.

“I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.”

“People say that money is not the key to happiness, but I always figured if you have enough money, you can have a key made.”

“I’ve had so much plastic surgery, when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware.”

And her friend Barbara Walters accused her of “Frankly, she did almost anything for a laugh” — but Joan would definitely disagree, for she said of herself “I will do Anything for a laugh.”

In Memoriam
Joan Rivers
[June 8, 1933 – September 4, 2014]

Continue reading Can We Talk