Fantasizing in the Information Economy with The "Art of War "Cult (1)

The Cult of The Art of War are in love with the concept of preaching and teaching the principles from Sunzi The Art of War (AoW).  ... They reminded me of a Sunday school's bible class where the teachers constantly recite the individual quotes without ever discussing the specifics behind the quotes in terms of a particular situation. 

An inspirational message can only go so far. ... Heaven helps those who are following these idiots. 

Beside not knowing the approach to connecting the right practices to the principles, these pseudo experts do not know how to assess a situation in terms of risk, uncertainty and volatility. 

Q: So, why are they teaching this fluff to their flock? 

A: No one cares about their reasoning. They just wanted to inspire their flock.

Side Notes

We have personally felt that there are numerous bogus experts who have tainted the true message of the Art of War.

Some of these bogus experts believed that the Art of War essay (or The Prince essay) is the absolute answer to outwitting their competitors. They also spent an abundance of time, emphasizing on the message of  "rah-rah" leadership  and self-empowerment while presenting an amateurish view of planning. 

This perspective indirectly means that these people could barely assess the predictability and the complexity of a situation without ever knowing how to assess its disposition, its momentum of change and the reality from the abyss of illusions.


Some of the serious strategy professionals quietly viewed this perspective as a moral hazard.  . . . However, these "thoughtless carbos" have served the immediate wants of the mindless masses. 

Why do some of these pseudo experts claimed that they know the Art of War when they do not comprehend the process of assessing their strategic settings?  After awhile, we stopped wondering about the reasons of that behavior.  ... In the information economy, deception is the norm.  ... The masses love the message of a "simple but irrelevant"  solution in a complex world.   ...  The flock that followed these pseudo experts, deserve the obvious  

Happy April Fools Day!

The Answer (3)

Lets begin this post with the question. It is an interesting question for those who are competitive.  Now, click here for part one of the answer (This post offers the perspective from the Art of War).  If it does not make sense, then click here for part two of the answer (This post offers another viewpoint from the game of Go (Weiqi).)

The Next to the Final Stage of the Answer
This is not a game theory situation, where there is a direct contest between two principals and everything is near-obvious.  In a competitive situation where there are many involving strategic factors.  Depending on the quality of information,  the situation could be quite complex.

The clues to this approach can be found in the first two sections of Jiang Tai Gong (JTG's) Six Secret Teachings and chapter one of the Art of War.

Step One: Understand the scope of the situation.  
By being two steps ahead of the game,  the successful strategists can play the Jiang Tai Gong approach of pre-positioning and luring.  You can find a good example in the 2010's Samurai movie classic "The 13 Assassins" where the protagonists knew the route, the strategic power and the tendencies of their target. Then, they altered their target's grand setting for the purpose of influencing him toward their lethal trap while transforming other portions of their own setting for the purpose of gaining a higher state of strategic power.

Sun Bin at Mai Ling is a good historical example.  ...  We will post the additional steps in the future.

Minor Jottings
Unlike what the Cult of the Art of War tells their followers, one cannot learn this skill from reading the Art of War.  It offers to the novices a mere glimmer of hope.   As many of us know, that hope is not a strategy or a destination.  Good strategic assessment begins by knowing the Big Tangible Picture of each principal in terms of their objectives, their approaches, the means and the modes.  ... Understanding the complexity, the connectivity, the consistency and the continuity of a Big Tangible Picture are some of the key points to a good strategic assessment.  

Those who are competitively ambitious, could build this exotic skill through the game of Go (weiqi) where misdirecting and luring are the norms.   He or she might get lucky in understanding the mechanics of these grand concepts after playing a minimum of 10 thousand games.  

So, how did we learned it?  We spent time talking to the various no-name experts who indirectly revealed the clues to us.   ...  Humorously, those who know, don't really say. They only offered their hints to us through their actions.

If your in-house strategists do not possess this unique skill, they will fail you in a chaotic competitive situation.


Sun Bin was a student of Wang Xu. In his school, he and his classmates were first instructed to the concepts of Jiang Tai Gong's Six Secret Teachings .  Sun Bin was later given a copy of Sunzi by his instructor. We wagered that he re-learned the approach of "baiting and luring" from reading chapter one and two of that essay and practiced it a few times before ever implementing it in a macro situation. 

The Dao of the Unorthodox Play (5)

The following article is something that most businesses can learn from the "Russian Blitz" that occurred in the 17th of August 2008. ... The outcome can be described as the immediate effect of properly implemented strategic power

Military Analysis
Russian Blitz Meld Old-School Onslaught With Modern Military Tactics
By Thom Shanker
WASHINGTON — Russia’s victorious military blitz into the former Soviet republic of Georgia brought something old and something new — but none of it was impromptu, despite appearances that a long-frozen conflict had suddenly turned hot.

The Russian military borrowed a page from classic Soviet-era doctrine: Moscow’s commanders sent an absolutely overwhelming force into Georgia. It was never going to be an even fight, and the outcome was predictable, if not preordained.

/// Finding even parity in any "real" competition, is quite rare. The 2 on 1 is the minimum standard in most extreme street fights. ///

At the same time, the Russian military picked up what is new from the latest in military thinking, including American military writings about the art of war, replete with the hard-learned lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan.

/// The emphasis of most strategic classics is to provide the direction and the tactical view for  completing one's own objective.  ...  Most strategic readers (chief decision makers) faltered on their reading of the situations.   They usually become too entrenched with their obsolete belief. ///

So along with the old-school onslaught of infantry, armor and artillery, Russia mounted joint air and naval operations, appeared to launch simultaneous cyberattacks on Georgian government Web sites and had its best English speakers at the ready to make Moscow’s case in television appearances.

If the rapidly unfolding events caught much of the world off guard, that kind of coordination of the old and the new did not look accidental to military professionals.

“They seem to have harnessed all their instruments of national power — military, diplomatic, information — in a very disciplined way,” said one Pentagon official, who like others interviewed for this article disclosed details of the operation under ground rules that called for anonymity. “It appears this was well thought out and planned in advance, and suggests a level of coordination in the Russian government between the military and the other civilian agencies and departments that we are striving for today.”


/// In our modern society,  securing the political-social support of spectators has been a high priority for any relevant competitors.  ///


In fact, Pentagon and military officials say Russia held a major ground exercise in July just north of Georgia’s border, called Caucasus 2008, that played out a chain of events like the one carried out over recent days.

“This exercise was exactly what they executed in Georgia just a few weeks later,” said Dale Herspring, an expert on Russian military affairs at Kansas State University. “This exercise was a complete dress rehearsal.”

///  We presumed that the Russians spent much of their time preparing and rehearsing their implementation. They knew their Big Tangible Picture and were able to perform well-devised scenario modeling sessions.   In summary,  these activities increased their strategic effectiveness.

Russian special ops are famous for their synchronized offensive tactics. ///

Q:  Do you know how to perform scenario modeling?

Compass Rule of Preparation: 
The time that it takes to deploy one's plan is inversely proportional to the time that is spent planning your plan and preparing your team.

Our Compass AE process requires the project implementers to review and rehearse their recently-built Tangible Vision process before connecting to it. ///

Russian commentators have countered that more than 1,000 American military personnel were in Georgia for an exercise last month. But that exercise focused on counterinsurgency operations to prepare a Georgian brigade for duty in Iraq, a different mission than the seizing of territory or denying an aggressor a new stake on the land.

Even as the Russian military succeeded at its most obvious objectives — taking control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, humiliating the Georgian government and crippling the republic’s army and police units — serious shortcomings on the Russian side were revealed during the brief fighting, Pentagon and military officials said.

To the surprise of American military officers, an impaired Georgian air-defense system was able to down at least six Russian jets. The Sukhoi-25, an aging ground attack plane, appeared to be the most vulnerable.

Georgia never has fielded an integrated, nationwide air defense system, and those ground-to-air weapons that survived early Russian shelling operated without any central control — and some without battle-command radars, as they were destroyed by Russian strikes.

That they bloodied the Russian air wing was taken as a clear sign of poor Russian aircraft maintenance, poor Russian piloting skills — or, most likely, years of insufficient funds for adequate flight training.

Russian-language media and unofficial national security Web sites in Moscow, which since the days of the disastrous Soviet foray into Afghanistan have developed a skeptical independent streak, also noted other shortcomings.

A Russian general in command of the 58th Army was wounded in the leg when he led a column of 30 armored vehicles toward the capital of South Ossetia, apparently without sufficient intelligence from scouts on the ground or surveillance aircraft overhead to know a Georgian ambush was awaiting.

The Russians also suffered losses as they came through the Roki Tunnel, which connects South Ossetia to the neighboring region of North Ossetia in Russia proper. Russian national security analysts said there was no air cover to protect Moscow’s forces in their first minutes on Georgian soil outside the safety of the mountain tunnel.

Despite these failings, the Russian military was able to coordinate infantry advances with movement of airborne troops, simultaneously with the deployment of armor and artillery. To be sure, they only had to travel short distances, but Russia was able to inject 9,000 to 10,000 troops, 150 tanks and 700 other armored vehicles onto Georgian territory in the first weekend of fighting, officials said.

Russian warships moved off the coast of Georgia, and Russian special operations forces infiltrated into Georgia through Abkhazia, according to Pentagon and military officials.

“This was not the Russian Army from the humiliation of Afghanistan, and it’s not the Russian military that had to flatten Chechnya to save it,” said one Pentagon official knowledgeable of how the fighting unfolded. Another said: “The Russian military is back. They are to be contended with.”

Despite a recent increase in Russian long-range bomber flights along old, cold war routes near United States airspace, the offensive into Georgia gave little indication of a renewed capacity or renewed interest in global projection of power by the Russians.

But Moscow’s military is wholly capable of pressing the Kremlin’s designs on hegemony over the formerly Communist states along the border that Russian leaders call “the near abroad.”

Russia prepared the battlefield in the months leading up to the outbreak of fighting.

In April, Russia reinforced its peacekeeping force in Abkhazia with advanced artillery, and in May it sent construction troops to fix a railroad line linking that area with Russia.

Georgia’s overmatched army of about 30,000 was able to field four combat brigades of about 3,300 soldiers each.

At the start of the fighting, the Georgian Army’s First Brigade was in Iraq, and subsequently was airlifted home aboard American aircraft — but without their war-fighting gear. The Fourth Brigade was in training for the next rotation to Iraq. The Second and Third Brigades were in western Georgia, closer to Abkhazia than to South Ossetia, where the fighting started.

The American military training for the Georgian troops has been described as involving counterterrorism for domestic security and counterinsurgency for the Iraq mission, with little emphasis on taking ground, holding ground or defending against invasion.

The influx of American training and American support might have left the Georgians feeling that their far smaller military could stand up to Russia in asserting sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

But Georgian command and control withered quickly under the Russian attack, and army and police units were operating on their own, often at cross purposes or overlapping missions.

/// Opposing operational responsibilities usually create internal conflicts. It also wastes time and resources. Poor leadership culture is the usual cause.

With our Compass AE strategic process, the implementers always know their operational objectives and how each objective is connected to each other in a sequentially mode.   ///

Although the Georgian units had been taught that speed of operations brings a mass all its own to the battlefield, and that improving accuracy in firepower brings a mass all its own, the lesson of the conflict is that, in some cases, mass has a mass all its own.

Russia easily smothered the smaller Georgian force.

The Importance of Momentum:
"When torrential water tosses boulders, it is because of momentum; ... When the strike of a hawk breaks the body of its prey, it is because of timing. ... Thus the momentum of one skilled in war is overwhelming, and his attack precisely regulated. His potential is that of a fully drawn crossbow; his timing, the release of the trigger. ... " - Art of War, 5

Source: NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/world/europe/17military.html?pagewanted=all


The Compass View 
Successful professionals of this caliber are usually capable of coordinating and implementing multiple processes in a parallel order.

With a Big Tangible Picture, one can coordinate multiple processes sequentially while anticipating the next step. This reduces the competitor to the stage of grinding one objective at a time. This standard of performance does not always happen when competing against a competitor with greater resources and manpower.

Any project team can achieve this level of performance. They must build a strategic overview  that allows their implementers to view the "multiple process" in a geometric order. By understanding how everything is connected strategically, the team knows how to respond in certain circumstances. 

A project team that connects to their Big Tangible Picture, increases their efficiency while eliminating their redundancy. They are usually pre-positioned to move with momentum. 

In summary, this "automatic blitz" is the way of usurping the competitor's position. One will see more of this approach in business and some sports.

If you are interested in knowing more about our Compass AE process, please contact us at this link.

Sun Bin: The Art of Warfare (Military Methods) (9)

The two "Questions of the Day" are:

• Do you know how to connect the tactical-based principles of Sun Bin to the Art of War?

• Do you know how to utilize the Sun Bin's concept of ruthless efficiency to your advantage?

Compass Practice: Reading What the Professionals are Reading

Seven Military Classics of Ancient China

" ... Six Warring States texts supplemented by the Questions and Replies -- a late T’ang dynasty work that essentially constitutes a reflective overview -- preserving their concepts, tactical principles, operational guidelines, and world view comprise the Seven Military Classics: T’ai Kung Liu-t’ao (Six Secret Teachings), Ssu-ma Fa, Sun-tzu Ping-fa (Art of War), Wu-tzu, Wei Liao-tzu, and Huang Shih-kung San-lueh (Three Strategies).

(Although the Art of War remains the only book known in the West, the Wu-tzu and Six Secret Teachings proved to be highly important sources for military wisdom over the centuries, and the latter continues to be held in higher esteem among contemporary PRC military professionals.)

The Question of the Day

Do you know why those two specific classics are still relevant in the area of strategic development and analysis?

The Question of the Day

For the hardcore strategists, are you able to connect the AoW principles to the conceptual framework of Weiqi and the situational framework of the 36 stratagems?

When one can do that, he/she can see the possibility of utilizing their Big Tangible Picture (BTP) in an effective mode.

The Two Questions of the Day

wikipedia

You are in your office, contemplating over the circumstances behind your latest high risk/high reward strategic situation. After a sip of your favorite beverage and a bite of your favorite muffin, you have finally identified who is your competition. You quietly looked at your competitive intelligence report. It offered an abstract on what are their weaknesses and what are their strengths.

How do you know if their weaknesses are tangible and if their strengths are just a cluster of illusions, concealed by a few layers of obvious points?

While the information economy offers a glimmer of immediate transparency, are you wondering whether that the notion of fair play resides in your business terrain?

The Question of the Day

Since you are a strategic thinker, how do you use the eight strategic classics (Seven Strategic Classics and Sun Bin {or Sun Pin's} Military Methods) to advise your friends in the area of strategic competition?

While the "Cult of the Art of War" uses the AoW principles for "quick fix" challenges, the professionals emphasize on the utilization of the Eight Strategic Classics principles for a myriad of high- reward competitive situations.
#

The Question of the Day

Ask your "loco" Sunzi readers and experts the following question- What are the distinctions and the differences between Jiang Tai Gong's Six Secret Teachings and Sunzi's Art of War?

When one can determine that connective view of Jiang Tai Gong and Sunzi, he/she is able to increase the scope of their Big Tangible Picture (BTP).

Seeing the Dao of Everything

"In planning, never a useless move.

In strategy no step is in vain. .." -Chen Hao

In the "Year of the Dragon", President Obama (and his team) made the right political move to visit San Francisco's Chinatown. ... The President presented his brand of leadership by establishing the act of credibility with some of his vast voter base. He methodically displayed the courage of leaving his car and began the process of "meeting and greeting" with some of the residents of San Francisco's Chinatown while picking up some Chinese food. This act of being benevolent, also displayed the image of wisdom to the Chinese residents. ...

# Update: The above act is a political flavor of implemented strategic power. Do you know why?

Source: KTVU

Exemplary leadership is about properly demonstrating an assortment of actions relating to wisdom, credibility, benevolence, courage and discipline to the right people at the right time. ... Smart political leaders of all sorts who are mindfully aware, usually performed this deed quite well.

Seeing the Dao of their settings usually enables one to shape their grand terrain and its "connecting" secondary terrains. ... One who consistently connects these dots, will eventually succeed in the information-based opportunity economy.

Remember, macro coincidences are usually scripted.

What is Strategic Power (Strategic Positioning)?

Source: Wikipedia.org

Compass Rule: One's position on the political-economic-social value chain is proportional to their response to the intensity of the competition.

Regardless of the competition, the key to prevailing in any venture is to establish effective strategic power (strategic positioning).

It begins by having a Big Tangible Picture that enables one to decide whether the act of cooperating or the act of competing or a simultaneous act of both acts is the best initial move for the moment.

Following is our conceptualization of what strategic power is about:

• Using one's competitive disposition within the terrain as an advantage;
• Anticipating the forthcoming opportunity and then timing one's potential to the best situation; and
• Displaying the illusion and the reality simultaneously during any strategic situations.

Our book project covers more on this topic. We will post more information about it later.

Assessing the Basics of Strategic Leadership

Unlike some other strategy forums, we have avoided the practice of treating the Art of War like a book of fortune cookie sayings. Not only does it demeans the essence of that book, it gives the new reader a narrow view of what strategy is about.

One key to assessing a specific situation is to study the quality leadership behind each competitor and then connecting the situation to a set of principles.

Someone sent us this news item and asked us to offer our assessment.

We viewed the situation where the vision of the leadership contradicted with the intent of the staff.

“In competition, two of the six types of organizational errors are chaotic and setback. This disaster is not caused by nature and the marketplace but by the leader's errors. ... If the leader is weak and not disciplined, unclear in his instructions and leadership; the implementers and the expediters lack discipline; and their deployment of expediters into formation is in disarray, it is termed chaotic. ... If the leader, unable to estimate the prowess of the opposition, would make a poor strategic match up decisions, it is termed setback. ... if you know the competition and know yourself, your victory will not be jeopardy. If you know the nature of your terrain and know the configuration of your terrain, your victory can be complete.” - AoW 10

Mr. Newt Gingrich misunderstood the strategic power of his competitors and the relationship with his team. He should have focused his attention on securing more political and economic capital for his team, not going on vacation with his wife. Since there are more than five candidates, the competition for the pie of GOP donors was going to be fierce. Without this capital, his campaign was grinding. In a high-risk, high reward competitive situation, a right-minded group of professionals wanted to work for a campaign that had a winning chance.

Side note: What is the probability and the possibility of his former team is now heading to the Lone Star State?

Retrospectively, Mr. Gingrich did not show the discipline to make the right strategic move. The consequence is that his credibility for making the right move has been temporarily destroyed. ...

However, Newt can always fix his image by following the legend of Wuzi. Whether he is able to do something like that, is a different story. ... You can make up your own conclusion on this matter.

We wished much success to Mr. Gingrich in his next professional move.

Compass Rule: Always assess the Big Tangible Picture before deciding on the next move.

Another Classic AoW Principle That Always Works

Our associates has reported to us that they have seen various San Francisco and Silicon Valley startups who operate on the fly while not knowing their goal and their priorities. They believed in being flexible and agile to the conditions of the marketplace. The outcome is usually a waste of time and resources. The cause is due to a lack of research and poor strategic assessment of their marketplace.

While believing that their operating process is flawless, these entrepreneurs function in a trial and error mode. Some of them do not even have a tangible business plan. Retrospectively, they are maneuvering from the seat of their pants. ... It sometimes amazes us that they have received venture capital.

“In antiquity, when the Yin dynasty arose, they had I Chih who served in the Hsia. When the Chou arouse, they had Lű Ya [ The T’ai Kung ] in the Yin. Thus enlightened rulers and sagacious generals who are able to get intelligent spies will invariably attain great achievements. This is the essential of the military, what the Three Armies reply on to move.” - AoW 13

Nothing changes then. Nothing changes now. Businesses and ventures who have succeeded in this global economy, are those who have a superb intelligence gathering system, a thorough strategic assessment process and a well-built strategic plan.

Compass Rule: Always assess the big picture before making your next move.

More food for thoughts:

• Do you assess the big picture every month?
• Are your plans based on your gathered intelligence?
• Do you have a well-built business plan?

#

Dot-com bust ripples still felt 10 years later

Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, March 7, 2010

With just $20,000 in cash but gobs of gumption, ambition and talent, Ethan Bloch and two partners are turning an idea into a Web-based business.

"I came to San Francisco to build a big company that does important things," said the 24-year-old Baltimore native.

Last year, Bloch co-founded Flowtown.com, which creates personal and professional profiles of people by gathering information from social networks, data it then sells to marketers.

"We're either going to make it big or fail spectacularly," said Bloch, who became fascinated with the region as a teenager growing up during the dot-com era.

"It was definitely inspirational," Bloch said.

Wednesday will be 10 years to the day that a plunge in the Nasdaq index punctured the dot-com bubble and ended the most frantic race to riches since the Gold Rush.

From its March 10, 2000, peak of 5,132.52, this index of tech and biotech stocks fell to a low of 1,114.11 on Oct. 9, 2002. The bust caused a brief recession and had longer-lasting - but not entirely negative - impacts on the region's startup economy.

Today the Nasdaq is muddling along at 2,326.35, where it closed Friday. But despite another recession and a harsh environment for raising money, the region remains an entrepreneurial mecca.

"Silicon Valley is a state of mind," said Oliver Muoto, 41, who co-founded a $94 million Internet startup in 1998 that sold at a huge loss four years later.

"People came out here knowing they would be successful," said Muoto, who now runs Metablocks, a music software company in Menlo Park. "It was a time of excess."

Nationwide data provided by the National Venture Capital Association tell part of the story.

In 1999 and 2000, Wall Street invested in 534 venture-backed initial public offerings.

Those IPOs made huge profits for venture capital firms, which plowed money back into startups. In 2000, at the peak of the bubble, VCs made nearly 8,000 investments valued at $100.5 million.

But in recent years, as Wall Street has shown less appetite for IPOs, VCs have made fewer investments in startups.

In 2008 and 2009, the association said, a total of just 18 venture-backed companies went public. So far in 2010, seven companies have delayed or postponed IPOs, while 11 others that did go public, including Hayward's Anthera Pharmaceuticals, had to cut their share prices first.

Without Wall Street to offer a profitable "exit strategy" for early stage investments, venture funds have been putting less money into startups. In 2009, venture firms nationwide made just under 2,800 deals worth $17.7 million. Silicon Valley continued to get the lion's share of startup cash - 39 percent last year - but there is far less money sloshing around the region than in the past.

"Venture capital is going through a restructuring," said John Taylor, research director for the venture capital group.

Too much money

Geoff Yang, a founding partner of Redpoint Ventures, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, said the dot-com era proved that bigger was not better when it came to funding startups.

"The venture capital industry can only absorb a certain number of dollars," Yang said, before too much money starts chasing the finite number of ideas with the home run potential that VCs expect.

Veteran entrepreneurs look back on the dot-com era as an aberration.

Steve Perlman, 48, who worked at Apple in the late 1980s and helped start many companies including WebTV Networks Inc., which Microsoft Corp. acquired in 1997 for $503 million, said the tech sector was always eccentric.

"I remember when I first went to Atari in 1982 there was a guy designing an Indiana Jones game who liked to crack a leather whip in the halls," said Perlman, who is developing a Web-based game-playing site, OnLive.com.

But many dot-com entrepreneurs lacked the personal commitment and fiscal discipline necessary for success, he said.

"During the WebTV startup, there was a point when we were almost flat out of cash and I had to mortgage my house," Perlman said. "I came very close to losing everything."

The dot-com era's stock-option millionaires created an expectation of quick riches, said Elizabeth Charnock, chief executive of Cataphora, a private firm in Redwood City that does sophisticated information sifting for law firms and investigative agencies.

Charnock, 43, who came to Silicon Valley in 1989, worked for some large companies before getting into a dot-com startup that blew up so disastrously that, when she started Cataphora in 2002, she avoided venture capital or angel financing.

"It's either revenue or it does not exist," said Charnock, who employs about 70 people and bills in excess of $10 million.

"One of the damaging things the bubble did is that everybody is still thinking that is what they should be able to achieve," she said, "to work like dogs for two years and make millions when it takes a lot longer to build a business."

But perhaps today's young entrepreneurs have learned some lessons from the dot-com excess, and from the necessity of adapting to the near drought in venture capital.

Lessons of failure

Bloch said last week he attended a standing-room-only event called FailChat, an offshoot of FailCon, a conference held last year in San Francisco. The idea is to get entrepreneurs to share the many lessons taught by failure - such as how important it is to create products, generate sales and earn profit.

"We were founded in January of last year and we turned a small profit in December," Bloch said proudly.

E-mail Tom Abate at tabate@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/07/BUK71CB0PV.DTL

This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle