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Next year, wish everyone you know a Nifty Newton’s Birthday and a Pleasant Perihelion.

Lauren Eve Pomerantz, a regular correspondent, suggested these as tongue-in-cheek alternatives to the usual and strangely controversial choices for well-wishing during the interval between Thanksgiving and early January. Sir Isaac was born 12/25/1642, and “Remember,” she points out, “if it hadn’t been for Newton discovering gravity, we would all have to be tied down to the Earth, like people in olden days.”

The Perihelion — January 3rd, the day the Earth most closely approaches the sun — isn’t as notable an event, but at least it has astronomical significance, in contrast to the New Year, which celebrates the Earth passing an entirely arbitrary point in its orbit.

But I’m sure plenty of Americans would take offense, just as almost a third do when they hear “Happy Holidays” (at least according to Newsweek). Taking offense is a growth industry.

Following this year’s “Holiday Card to the Industry,” which discussed this subject, the floodgates opened. I received even more mail about “Happy Holidays” vs “Merry Christmas” than I did in response to my columns about corporate dress codes and global warming (separate subjects — I haven’t tried to link dress codes and global warming, although it’s tempting).

For the record, most agreed with the column’s position that getting steamed at the phrase “Happy Holidays” doesn’t make much sense, and encouraging Christians to become angry about it is reprehensible. Among the minority who wrote to chastise me, quite a few focused on my having embroiled KJR in political issues (again) and for taking a liberal position in doing so. Both challenges are worth responding to.

So I will.

Second one first: If I’m a liberal for encouraging you to take no offense when someone wishes you well using secular phrasing, that means encouraging people to take offense when offered good wishes is the mark of a loyal conservative. I’m pretty sure, though, that neither political party claims sole ownership of bad manners.

First one second: Whether I extended KJR beyond its scope and my expertise to cover a political issue. It’s a fine opportunity to make an important distinction — between political issues and issues that have become politicized.

Here’s the difference. Imagine Senator Bill Frist made a speech on the Senate floor decrying the trend toward casual garb in the workforce, and that Senator Ted Kennedy responded in favor of neck-tie-less attire. Does anyone think this would immediately make it inappropriate for KJR to take a stance on corporate dress codes, or that being against mandatory neckties would make yours truly a liberal?

The contrast is clear: Were KJR to run a column taking a position on how to deal with the conflict in Iraq, whether the U.S. should defend Taiwan militarily in the event of invasion by mainland China, or whether the United States should reduce the federal deficit through revenue increases along with cost reductions and deficit spending, those would be political columns that exceed its scope and my special competence.

But dress codes, global warming and how to wish friends, co-workers and customers well are not political issues, although two of the three have become politicized. Were I to consider politicized subjects off limits, it would silence this column on subjects that are of great importance to IT executives and managers.

Bad idea. For that matter, some issues that are clearly political matter greatly to an IT audience: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, offshore outsourcing and the “in-shoring” of foreign IT professionals are high-profile examples. They’re in bounds as well.

As it happens, the question of whether to offer a secular or non-secular greeting during the Holiday Season is just one ramification of a serious issue IT leaders deal with every day. Next week’s column will dig into it; here’s a preview to get you thinking:

In many companies and probably most, employees celebrate each others’ birthdays. Probably, as an IT manager, you’ve participated, and wished employees “Happy Birthday,” too.

Now imagine one of your employees is a Jehovah’s Witness, and therefore considers the celebration of birthdays to be sacrilegious since the tradition’s origin traces back to Roman polytheism and the celebration of various gods’ days (or so a Jehovah’s Witness missionary explained to me many years back). How do you handle the situation?

* * *

I’ve been writing this column in its various incarnations once a week for ten years now. When it started, as InfoWorld’s “IS Survival Guide,” I wasn’t sure I could come up with 50 strongly held opinions, let alone the 500 that a decade required. I’d ask you to be more impressed, except that Isaac Asimov published that many books in his lifetime.

Still, ten perihelia have passed since I started these musings, and that’s a milestone of sorts. Welcome to the start of the next ten.

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Among the many books I’d like to write but probably won’t, Selling Strong Engineering To Executives is high on the list. I probably won’t write it because even the best techniques aren’t reliable enough to be worth codifying. But you have to try.

Regular correspondent Jon Lee pointed out the relevance of the Challenger disaster to this topic. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was on the Rogers Commission that investigated the tragedy. His personal observations are worth reading in their entirety. A very short version goes like this: NASA’s engineers assessed flight risks to be 1,000 times greater than the managers who decided whether missions should fly.

I’ve coined a term for this mathematical transformation: Direct Reduction In the Value of Engineering Likelihoods (DRIVEL).

NASA’s managers were, and probably still are under tremendous political pressure to get the shuttle in the air. People being what they are, they persuaded themselves the engineers were exaggerating the risks. They rationalized their DRIVEL with this “logic”: “It hasn’t happened yet.”

Publicly held corporations justify bad decisions with DRIVEL too, and they do it all the time. Every professional project manager knows this, because every one has been put in charge of at least one project whose launch has been delayed due to executive dithering but whose deadline, scope and budget remain fixed.

If it’s an internal project, the executives rationalize the DRIVEL by telling themselves the estimators padded the original schedule (guaranteeing, of course, that they’ll pad the next one). If it’s an outsourced project, they rationalize it by telling themselves it’s someone else’s problem — the company contracting to perform the work.

The contracting company applies similar DRIVEL to its computations, because it gets the revenue now. By the time the future gets here anything can happen — everyone in a position to blow the whistle can find a way to get promoted out of harm’s way or hired by a competitor. If the project manager or account manager protests, you know what happens. That’s right — the senior decision maker says (all together now, with feeling): “If you can’t do it, I’ll find someone who can.”

It’s always the same equation: Sound career management trumps sound engineering.

You’d think those responsible for the health of the organization would take steps to keep DRIVEL out of the decision process. You’d be wrong, because … and this insight is crucial to understanding the situation … in most large organizations the owners don’t want them to.

That isn’t the case in companies with a single owner or whose ownership is closely held. Those owners run the company, make the decisions, and will be around to be damaged by the fallout of bad engineering. Privately held corporations have their flaws, but DRIVEL-driven decision-making isn’t often among them.

Government certainly isn’t like that. We citizens have come to think of ourselves as government’s customers, not as its owners. We want the best deal, that’s all. When it comes to the public sector, many have given up entirely on the concept of a healthy organization. Few consider government’s health to be their responsibility.

In this, they are exactly the same as the owners of most publicly held corporations. They, the shareholders, don’t think as owners do either. Their stock is just a commodity, to be bought low and sold high. The board of directors and chief executive officer, who run the company on their behalf, are their agents, obliged to subordinate personal preference to the shareholders’ will. And we wonder why many are paid enough in one year to retire. (It would be interesting to compare the level of DRIVEL in companies whose shareholders care more about dividends than growth. I’d guess it would be lower, but I have no evidence either way.)

The situation isn’t entirely hopeless. Many Wall Street analysts do pay attention to planning and decisions that pay off in the longer term. They have to. Today’s profits and the next-quarter forecast are already reflected in the stock price. It’s longer-term planning that will cause a share of stock purchased today to be worth more in the future.

It is possible to sell superior engineering to executives. It isn’t easy, and you just have to remember: The engineering itself doesn’t matter to them. In the end they only care about four issues: Increasing revenue, decreasing cost, reducing risk, and how achieving one or more of these goals will affect them personally.

That’s how they define strong engineering. Your job is to help them recognize it when they see it.

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