WHAT IS STOICHIOMETRY?

WHAT IS STOICHIOMETRY?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 31, 2009

Most upsetting to me in the afternoon of my long life is how many people I meet that quander their inherent talents then suffer for it by never climbing the LADDER OF LIFE to rise out of the swamp of depression and disappointment.

Recently, I had occasion to be in the company of a young man who has a facility for languages. He is already tri-lingual, and could easily master other languages if immersed in any of them for six months. This is a talent he has never exploited.

He is a person who treats life whimsically careful not to press himself too hard. There is little sense that the clock is ticking and that one-day he will wake up an old man. All that talent, that ability will be lost, wasted.

If there is sin in life, it is waste. There is good and evil, but they are in everyone, two sides of the same coin. The side that more often surfaces is a matter of choice. Make no mistake the other side is always there. You can never be too vigilant, too certain of goodness.

This young man, now thirty-three, has never caught hold. I’m not sure how much education he has, but it is obvious he is quite intelligent.

He was talking to my grandson, a sophomore in high school, asking him about school. My grandson mentioned he is taking advanced algebra and chemistry.

“I took chemistry in high school,” the young man said, “we made stink (hydrogen sulfide) bombs and stuck them in guys lockers.” He laughed. Stink bombs smell like rotten eggs but are otherwise not harmful. My grandson didn’t laugh nor did his grandfather. Science and mathematics are not laughing matters.

I wanted to ask the young man: “Do you know what stoichiometry is?” It would give me a sense if he got anything meaningful out of chemistry. But I didn’t.

Every chemistry student knows that stoichiometry deals with chemical equations and the substances that go into chemical reactions. Chemical compounds are combined, called mole fractions, sometimes with the introduction of a chemical catalyst, to produce a chemical reaction to completion.

For example, when the hydrocarbon gas, methane, undergoes union with oxygen in complete combustion, 16 grams of methane will require 64 grams of oxygen, with the resulting reaction producing 44 grams of carbon dioxide and 36 grams of water.

CH4 (16 grams) + 2O2 (64 grams) = CO2 (44 grams) + 2H20 (36 grams)

This is presented here not as a chemical lesson but to show chemistry is basic to us all, as we are microbiological chemical factories operating stoichiometrically.

Like mathematics, chemistry cannot be denied or ignored. It is not a joke. It is not something to misuse or fail to understand. Of late, we have become familiar with its misuse.

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Chemistry is being used to kill as suicide bombers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Earlier, it was used in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 when Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building with a truck bomb. It took the lives of 168 children and adults, destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 buildings, causing $652 million damage.

What motivated McVeigh and Nichols was the FBI’s handling of the Waco Siege of the religious Branch Dravidian sect at Ruby Ridge in 1993.

Chemistry, like life itself, is a two-edged proposition capable of doing wonders to extend life or take it in an instant. It is something to understand and respect.

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STOICHIOMETRY OF LIFE

We are chemical equations. We are in fact human chemicals. As such, we take our talent and find a connection, hopefully, where that talent will reach fruition or completion. Otherwise, we are an unbalanced equation requiring some catalyst to complete the reaction, which we might call “motivation” or drive.

Like the chemist in the laboratory, we have to experiment with how we present our talent, how we program our talent, and how we make it a value added component to society.

The most important aspect of this equation is connecting with the right people in the right culture to drive our ambitions to completion.

The best minds don’t necessarily graduate from Harvard, Yale and Princeton elite (HYPE) schools, but such graduates do make the best connections, and that is likely with others with a similar HYPE pedigree. It is the nature of things. In terms of chemistry, it represents the optimum conditions for completion.

People with connections run society. They are elected to public office. They operate banks, brokerage houses, Forbes Corporate 500 Companies, and are the unelected but appointed members of Congress and the Executive Branch of Government. They play a prominent role in the state houses of legislation across the nation, and make up a good percentage of those euphemistically called “lobbyists” at all levels of enterprise. Most generals and admirals, who graduate from military institutions, employ HYPE personnel to the equation as strategists.

These people have put American society into the current sinkhole of despair.

We assume in this capitalistic economy if a degree cost $150,000 that that degreed person must be superior to a graduate from a state university at one-fifth the cost.

What is clear is that the connections the $150,000 graduate has compared to that state university graduate are at least ten to twenty times greater, and so perhaps the degree is worth the expense if not in terms of value added.

We are a classless society that is obsessively class conscious. It shows in media, which is enamored of the expression, “the best and the brightest” when calibrated in terms of what they are not what they do. It is the “best and the brightest” that have put us in the soup.

Culture is a mindset and this is ours.

Notice when HYPE people are interviewed on television they always make reference to how “smart” their colleagues are, not how effective they are, as if being smart is an apology for not being effective.

They represent stoichiometry as an unbalanced equation.

Talking heads speak of Obama’s “bold leadership” when he has not shown leadership at all. True, he is not a bungler as Bush was, but his finesse is in speech not in action. Afghanistan is becoming as much an embarrassment as was Vietnam. Our mindset is wrong for the times. People who should be following are leading us.

We see this in the HealthCare Reform fiasco, in the attack on Medicare and Social Security, on blaming Bush for his preemptive war, while escalating the Afghanistan War, and projecting a $9 trillion deficit in the next ten years, which will have little impact on HYPE or the class society running things, but will have great impact on most other Americans, including all those state university graduates.

Life is stoichiometry. It becomes a problem when it defies Nature, and the limits of things.

THE GREATNESS OF THE COMMON GOOD

It is no accident that people who take life seriously raise the bar only to have those in power drop it. Expertise is not enough. It must be translated into action, into results, into something that completes the reaction to benefit the common good.

Today, tens of thousands of young graduates of state universities are having difficulty finding jobs at the level of their skills and with suitable compensation for those skills. Many of them are no longer looking.

To get hired today the person has to have a mindset to make a difference, but with a caution. Remember this equation when you interview. It is how the interviewer thinks:

(1) Am I comfortable with this person + (2) will this person fit with my team + (3) is this person qualified = (4) should I hire him (her)?

The equation is always in this order of importance with qualification, the part most emphasized by professional consultants the least important in the equation. This is true of HYPE but it is also true of every other hiring situation. Let us examine these in some detail.

(1) The threshold behavior of the interviewee is critical. It is important that the interviewee dress properly but neutrally to raise no flags. Questions should be answered succinctly and candidly with no more information than is asked for.

The interviewee will be asked if he or she has any questions.

The interviewee should be careful to ask questions in the light of an assessment of the interviewer in terms of his or her dress, manner, speech, diction, expression, as well as an assessment of his or her comfort level, and competence.

An accurate assessment of the interviewing climate is key.

Either the interviewee has been made comfortable or put on edge. Whatever the case, the interviewee should not step over the threshold of good sense, or make false assumptions.

The place of the interview is important. Is it a neutral place or the workplace of the interviewer? This tells the interviewee how personal or impersonal the interview is likely to be. It also gives a clue as to the nature of the place of employment.

The appurtenances of the office tell a story, if it is the interviewer’s workplace, about the person who is doing the interviewing.

How the interviewer handles interruptions and deals with others that may step into the office indicate the level of comfort and competence. This is all important because the interviewee does not want to be threatening, does not want the interviewer to think the interviewee is out to take the interviewer’s job.

(2) It is a godsend if the interviewee has to wait. This gives the person a chance to assess how work is done, and what the people doing the work seem to be like, how they get along, how they work, the quality of the banter between them, how they are dressed, their age, health, and efficiency, what their workstations are like, and the general climate-culture of the workplace.

Workers will be sizing up the interviewee as he or she is sizing them up. Mainly nonverbal, it gives a sense of fit from both perspectives.

(3) One of the greatest mistakes interviewees make in reading an ad for employment is seeing themselves as a “perfect fit” for the job no questions asked. They take this cockiness into the interview and are shot down and they have no idea why.

They assume because they have the education, experience, success, and moxie to do the job “right now” without any orientation or training that being hired is a matter of formality. Not!

This is a huge mistake because if you are successful with (1) and (2), whatever your qualifications and expertise, the interviewer is already trying to justify making (3) come out positive for you and the employer.

Conversely, if you have failed to convince the interviewer that you satisfy (1) and (2), he or she will be at the ready to punch holes into (3).

Remember, interviewing is likely to be a team process, each interviewer seeing you as he or she sees him or herself.

If you are truly over qualified for the position, and the interviewer doesn’t like you, chances are you will be written up as under qualified. It happens.

Most interviewers are recruited because they know the job being offered. They aren’t especially qualified to interview or assess the person being interviewed. It is a catch as catch can proposition. The person who must be professional, however, is the interviewee, and that means to tread lightly, carefully and weigh the process moment to moment and not proceed with guns blasting.

Let us say, you the interviewee is scheduled to a series of four interviews. Each is likely to be different because each interviewer operates in a private culture with a hidden agenda that is liable to be felt rather than expressed.

If the interviewer is placing more attention on (3) or qualifications when the interviewee feels this is self-evident, trouble could be brewing. It means that (1) and (2) have not been sufficiently satisfied. So, while the attention is on qualifications, the actual stone in the shoe is (1) or (2) or both.

If the interviewee catches this early enough, he or she can gauge their answers on qualifications in the rhythm that might best resonate with the interviewer. It is necessary to be careful here because the interviewee does not want to appear to be mimicking.

CASE IN POINT

This was expressed as a “cold call” interview but most interviews are conducted within companies with employees already in the system. Some rather spectacular things have happened in such an arena, and I was beneficiary of one such instance.

When I was twenty-five and a chemical sales engineer with Nalco Chemical Company, I developed a natural rapport with the Industrial Division Director, who had been, like me, a chemist in research and development. It was home to him but a foreign country to me. Moreover, he was reserved and cautious while I was aggressive and brash. He once said, “We make a complete person.”

The year I led the Industrial Division in sales he came out to travel with me. He saw how I adjusted my approach from account to account and person to person. I was now an area manager still selling but with men under me. He started to shuttle men from across the country to travel with me, and become acquainted with my style. He also arranged for me to make presentations at regional meetings.

Five years later, he was elevated to vice president of international operations. Nalco was growing more than 25 percent per year. He called one evening, and asked if I would like to come to work for him. “Doing what?” I asked. “Being my roving ambassador about the globe. Come to Chicago and we can discuss it.” I said, “You come to Louisville and discuss it with my family.” He came. I wanted him to be on my turf, not his, and to see how sincere he was.

“Aren’t you worried about promoting me over so many veterans?” I asked. “I’m hardly qualified for this assignment.” Then he reminded me of us “making a complete
person.” It was not so much that I was qualified but that my aggression complemented his hesitancy. We became a team. I was thirty-years-old.

It would eventually bring me to South Africa in 1968, and as many of you know, a period which now consumes me as I’m writing a novel about it.

There is a certain serendipity to this, which I didn’t see coming but which was consistent with my stoichiometry. In any case, it was a matter of chemistry and we are all human chemicals.

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