Untitled

A Grand Forks Observation on UND Aerospace, Aviation Leadership, and the People We Trust With the Cockpit By Joe Cozart  Living in Grand Forks has taught me that some of the most important things happening here are easy to underestimate precisely because we see them every day. Aircraft moving across the sky become part of the landscape. Students in aviation programs become part of the…

What a Wastewater System Reveals About the Distance Between Demonstration and Deployment  By Joe Cozart  When I read that NASA had selected the University of North Dakota to test a mobile wastewater treatment system built at Kennedy Space Center, I did not see a wastewater story. I saw a deployment story. That distinction matters because there is an enormous difference between developing a…

What We Give Our Sons Without Knowing What They Will Carry Forward By Joe Cozart  In October 1991, my 10-year-old son, Joe Jr., and I went to Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium for something that had never happened before. The Atlanta Braves were playing in the World Series, and for the first time in the history of the city, a World Series game was being played in Atlanta. We didn’t have…

We spent decades worrying about organizations that did not know enough. Artificial intelligence may give us the opposite problem—organizations capable of knowing almost everything and understanding remarkably little. By Joe Cozart  For most of modern business history, information was scarce enough to possess value simply because it was difficult to obtain. Companies paid for research because…

Why Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes—and an old sixty-cent paperback—still explain the world I am trying to understand By Joe Cozart  I suppose there is a reason I can pick up an old, battered copy of Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way and feel almost immediately that I am not reading about something ancient. I am reading about something unfinished. I have always been drawn to Sophocles,…

What I Recognized When I Picked It Up Again By Joe Cozart  There was something about The Catcher in the Rye that felt familiar to me before I could quite explain why. I knew the reputation of the book, of course. Holden Caulfield. The phonies. The alienated young man wandering through New York, irritated by nearly everyone he encounters and seemingly unable to find a place in the adult world.…

What I Look for When I Enter an Organization By Joe Cozart There is one room I am always interested in entering. It is your conference room. If I were working with your company, I would begin there, although perhaps not in the way you would expect. I would not arrive assuming that your company is broken. I would not begin with a predetermined framework looking for places to impose itself. I…

Joe Cozart, GMJoe™, GMJoe™ Consulting Every organization eventually reaches a point where additional information no longer produces better decisions. Reports become thicker. Meetings become longer. Data becomes more abundant. Yet clarity becomes increasingly difficult to find. The problem is rarely a lack of intelligence or effort. More often, the organization has reached the limits of its…

A GMJoe™ Consulting observation on counter-UAS, autonomous interception, and the emerging architecture of low-altitude defense By Joe Cozart  I have increasingly come to believe that the next consequential phase of the unmanned systems market will not be defined by the proliferation of drones. That phase is already underway. The next phase will be defined by the architecture required to defeat…

The Distance to See — Recursive Passage: The Stadium By Joe Cozart  The first circuits teach us how to survive inside the game. They teach appetite, fear, territory, status, belonging, language, obedience, rebellion, identity, and the thousand negotiations required to remain alive among other human beings. They are indispensable because they operate close to the ground, where consequences are…

What Happens When the Description of the World Becomes More Powerful Than the World Itself By Joe Cozart  There was a time when ignorance meant simply not knowing, an innocent enough condition that could usually be remedied by travel, education, conversation, or experience. We now inhabit the stranger condition of knowing an enormous amount about things we have never actually encountered. We…

By Joe Cozart Perhaps nowhere is this confusion between naming and knowing more easily concealed than in the ordinary things surrounding us. Extraordinary phenomena announce their mystery. A black hole appears mysterious because it violates ordinary intuition. Consciousness appears mysterious because no one can adequately explain how subjective experience arises. The beginning of the universe…

The Oldest Mystery  By Joe Cozart ~ “Always looking for the truth that neither side is aware of possessing.” Every generation has been tempted to believe that it stands at the threshold of final understanding. Each imagines that the great mysteries have been reduced to a manageable number and that the remaining questions are merely technical problems awaiting better instruments. History has…

By Joe Cozart Every so often, I come across a piece of writing that causes me to stop reading and simply think. This was one of those moments. An old friend’s husband shared a reflection on his thirty-second wedding anniversary. His wife, Amy, my ikr friend, is in the advanced stages of frontotemporal dementia. She no longer recognizes him. The woman he married has, in so many ways, already…