An examined life: a tool for leading change.

As part of my work as a development consultant and therapist working with senior executives, the aim of this study is to ascertain whether the personal attitudes of senior executives who are successful at leading change impact on change within their organisations through their leadership style and behaviour. In addition, the project is to assess what are the personal qualities that contribute towards their own feelings of positivity towards change. I have sought to examine the personality profiles of 'successful' executives to look at attitude formation and development within their own psyche with regard to change through a qualitative in-depth case study approach. I worked with eleven successful senior leaders of change from the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. One of the objectives of the project was to theorise whether interventions may be made to assist senior people who are less successful at leading change to examine their own attitudes and self-concept in order to influence their resulting behaviour and hence improve their leadership performance. Ethnographic and auto-ethnographic methodologies were used with reflexive and inductive ways of researching. I carried out approximately six to eight hours of semi-structured one-to-one interviews with each of my participants and the group met together on one occasion. To analyse the data, word tables were produced which correlated through cross-case synthesis. The main correlation from the personality profiles showed that all the participants were very 'driven' in order to achieve excellence. Their motivators were mainly intrinsic and tended to derive from their backgrounds in childhood which were mostly either deprived of parental emotional affirmation, where in some way and at some point in participants' formative years, families were dysfunctional or striving to 'better themselves' from a practical perspective. Interesting aspects emerged relating to Attachment Theory, together with influences from participants' background class, education routes and role models. The main conclusion to be drawn from the project, and agreed by participants, is that a high degree of self-knowledge is essential for successful leadership. Recommendation is made that senior executives who are not particularly self-aware may, if they were prepared to accept it, benefit from development in which they examine their self-concept in an attempt to understand how past experiences influence and impact on their present attitudes and behaviour. This could then present an opportunity for them to recognise where attitudes resulting from past experiences are still affecting their present lives and perhaps to bring such experiences to conscious thought in order to deal with them and move on. It is considered that this greater self-knowledge and perhaps greater self-acceptance would benefit them through the prevention of any of their own negative issues influencing their behaviour as leaders of change. One way of enabling such a development process may be through individual coaching where the coach has an understanding of how past experience impacts on present (and future) behaviour. It has been recommended by my participants that I continue with this research post-doctorally and I am particularly keen to explore in more depth the relationship between Attachment Theory and successful leadership

Distribution of slip from 11 M_w > 6 earthquakes in the northern Chile subduction zone

We use interferometric synthetic aperture radar, GPS, and teleseismic data to constrain the relative location of coseismic slip from 11 earthquakes on the subduction interface in northern Chile (23°–25°S) between the years 1993 and 2000. We invert body wave waveforms and geodetic data both jointly and separately for the four largest earthquakes during this time period (1993 M_w 6.8; 1995 M_w 8.1; 1996 M_w 6.7; 1998 M_w 7.1). While the location of slip in the teleseismic-only, geodetic-only, and joint slip inversions is similar for the small earthquakes, there are differences for the 1995 M_w 8.1 event, probably related to nonuniqueness of models that fit the teleseismic data. There is a consistent mislocation of the Harvard centroid moment tensor locations of many of the 6 6 earthquakes, as well as three M_w > 7 events from the 1980s. All of these earthquakes appear to rupture different portions of the fault interface and do not rerupture a limited number of asperities

How do we understand and visualize uncertainty?

Geophysicists are often concerned with reconstructing subsurface properties using observations collected at or near the surface. For example, in seismic migration, we attempt to reconstruct subsurface geometry from surface seismic recordings, and in potential field inversion, observations are used to map electrical conductivity or density variations in geologic layers. The procedure of inferring information from indirect observations is called an inverse problem by mathematicians, and such problems are common in many areas of the physical sciences. The inverse problem of inferring the subsurface using surface observations has a corresponding forward problem, which consists of determining the data that would be recorded for a given subsurface configuration. In the seismic case, forward modeling involves a method for calculating a synthetic seismogram, for gravity data it consists of a computer code to compute gravity fields from an assumed subsurface density model. Note that forward modeling often involves assumptions about the appropriate physical relationship between unknowns (at depth) and observations on the surface, and all attempts to solve the problem at hand are limited by the accuracy of those assumptions. In the broadest sense then, exploration geophysicists have been engaged in inversion since the dawn of the profession and indeed algorithms often applied in processing centers can all be viewed as procedures to invert geophysical data

Efficient analysis and representation of geophysical processes using localized spherical basis functions

While many geological and geophysical processes such as the melting of icecaps, the magnetic expression of bodies emplaced in the Earth's crust, or the surface displacement remaining after large earthquakes are spatially localized, many of these naturally admit spectral representations, or they may need to be extracted from data collected globally, e.g. by satellites that circumnavigate the Earth. Wavelets are often used to study such nonstationary processes. On the sphere, however, many of the known constructions are somewhat limited. And in particular, the notion of `dilation' is hard to reconcile with the concept of a geological region with fixed boundaries being responsible for generating the signals to be analyzed. Here, we build on our previous work on localized spherical analysis using an approach that is firmly rooted in spherical harmonics. We construct, by quadratic optimization, a set of bandlimited functions that have the majority of their energy concentrated in an arbitrary subdomain of the unit sphere. The `spherical Slepian basis' that results provides a convenient way for the analysis and representation of geophysical signals, as we show by example. We highlight the connections to sparsity by showing that many geophysical processes are sparse in the Slepian basis.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the SPIE, as part of the Wavelets XIII conference in San Diego, August 200

Flexural analysis of uplifted rift flanks on Venus

Knowledge of the thermal structure of a planet is vital to a thorough understanding of its general scheme of tectonics. Since no direct measurements of heat flow or thermal gradient are available for Venus, most estimates have been derived from theoretical considerations or by analog with the Earth. The flexural response of the lithosphere to applied loads is sensitive to regional thermal structure. Under the assumption that the yield strength as a function of depth can be specified, the temperature gradient can be inferred from the effective elastic plate thickness. Previous estimates of the effective elastic plate thickness of Venus range from 11-18 km for the foredeep north of Uorsar Rupes to 30-60 km for the annular troughs around several coronae. Thermal gradients inferred for these regions are 14-23 K km(exp -1) and 4-9 K km(exp -1) respectively. In this study, we apply the same techniques to investigate the uplifted flanks of an extensional rift. Hypotheses for the origin of uplifted rift flanks on Earth include lateral transport of heat from the center of the rift, vertical transport of heat by small-scale convection, differential thinning of the lithosphere, dynamical uplift, and isostatic response to mechanical uploading of the lithosphere. The 1st hypothesis is considered the dominant contributor to terrestrial rift flanks lacking evidence for volcanic activity, particularly for rift structures that are no longer active. In this study, we model the uplifted flanks of a venusian rift as the flexural response to a vertical end load

Geoid, topography, and convection-driven crustal deformation on Venus

High-resolution Magellan images and altimetry of Venus reveal a wide range of styles and scales of surface deformation that cannot readily be explained within the classical terrestrial plate tectonic paradigm. The high correlation of long-wavelength topography and gravity and the large apparent depths of compensation suggest that Venus lacks an upper-mantle low-viscosity zone. A key difference between Earth and Venus may be the degree of coupling between the convecting mantle and the overlying lithosphere. Mantle flow should then have recognizable signatures in the relationships between surface topography, crustal deformation, and the observed gravity field