Strangers in Blood or Decision Making for Technology Executives

Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country

Author: Jennifer SH Brown

For two centuries (1670 - 1870), English, Scottish, and Canadian fur traders voyaged the myriad waterways of Rupert's Land, the vast territory charted to the Hudson's Bay Company and later splintered among five Canadian provinces and four American states. The knowledge and support of northern Native peoples were critical to the newcomer's survival and success. With acquaintance and alliance came intermarriage, and the unions of European traders and Native women generated thousands of descendants. Jennifer Brown's Strangers in Blood is the first work to look systematically at these parents and their children. Brown focuses on Hudson's Bay Company officers and North West Company wintering partners and clerks - those whose relationships are best known from post journals, correspondence, accounts, and wills. The durability of such families varied greatly. Settlers, missionaries, European women, and sometimes the courts challenged fur trade marriages. Some officers' Scottish and Canadian relatives dismissed Native wives and "Indian" progeny as illegitimate. Traders who took these ties seriously were obliged to defend them, to leave wills recognizing their wives and children, and to secure their legal and social status - to prove that they were kin, not "strangers in blood." Brown illustrates that the lives and identities of these children were shaped by factors far more complex than "blood." Sons and daughters diverged along paths affected by gender. Some descendants became Metis and espoused Metis nationhood under Louis Riel. Others rejected or were never offered that coursethey passed into white or Indian communities or, in some instances, identified themselves (without prejudice) as "halfbreeds." The fur trade did not coalesce into a single society. Rather, like Rupert's Land, it splintered, and the historical consequences have been with us ever since.

Books about: Memo to a New President or Organize for Disaster

Decision Making for Technology Executives: Using Multiple Perspectives to Improve Performance

Author: Harold A Linston

Become a more effective decision-maker, communicator, and manager by using the valuable techniques described in this unique book. It's designed to help you break away from the constraints of the technologist's "analytical/scientific" viewpoint and employ broader organizational and personal perspectives that strengthen your decision-making ability and leadership skills.

Decision Making for Technology Executives shows you how to utilize this multiple perspective approach to problem-solving and systems development in real-world, outside the laboratory, situations. You learn how this three-dimensional approach has been applied successfully to a wide spectrum of complex systems tasks: from system forecasting to technology assessment, from industrial catastrophes to facility siting decisions, from corporate strategy to acquisition.

Through valuable case studies, such as the Exxon Valdez and Bhopal accidents, you learn lessons on improving technology and risk assessment, forecasting, and crisis management. And through ready-to-implement, practical guidelines you see how to become a more effective decision-maker and manager, while improving communication between technologists and others involved in the decision process.

A one-of-its-kind look at the multiple perspective concept, this guide helps to increase your understanding of complex sociotechnical systems, boost the technologist's effectiveness as an executive, and improve technological risk management, forecasting, and planning.

Booknews

The technological quick fix mentality still dominates US organizations according to Linstone (emeritus, systems science, Portland State U.). In this update of his (North-Holland, 1984), the author dissects the flaws of traditional attitudes toward problem-solving and offers his methodology for sociotechnical systems based on complexity science. He includes examples from the private and public sectors and guidelines for executives and engineers. Appends further guidelines on such topics as interaction mapping, multiattribute/ multiparty decision structure, and the Delphi Method. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
	Preface
1	Introduction	1
2	The Usual Perspective and Its Limitations	11
3	Our Proposed Perspectives	31
4	Illustrations from the Public Sector	77
5	Illustrations from the Private Sector	111
6	Technology: Risk and Assessment	149
7	Technology: Forecasting and Planning	215
8	Looking Ahead: Complexity Science, Chaos, and Multiple Perspectives	243
9	Guidelines for the User	263
A.1	Interaction Mapping: Digraphs	277
A.2	Multiattribute/Multiparty Decision Structure	280
A.3	Assumptional Analysis	282
A.4	Delphi	284
A.5	Additional Guidelines for O and P Development	290
A.5.1	Basic Procedure	290
A.5.2	On Interviewing	291
	Acknowledgments	300
	References	300
	About the Author	303
	Index	305