ManagementSpeak: That’s a work in progress.

Translation: We plan to ignore this for as long as we can.

Don’t ignore this week’s translation, even though this week’s contributor, quoting and translating his manager, wisely decided to remain anonymous.

I just finished Leonard Susskind’s The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. If you enjoy having your mind explode, you need to read it, because your mind will detonate at least three times while you do. Probably more.

The Black Hole War re-introduced me to grok — Robert Heinlein’s term (from Stranger in a Strange Land) for understanding something deeply and intuitively. Susskind used it to explain why people have so much trouble with quantum-mechanical and relativistic concepts … they have no way of grokking them.

It’s also a reasonable way to understand why many IT departments loathe a technology that might solve two long-running business challenges.