ideas lab

Humor lubricates reason

2012-01-27T12:54:00.001-08:00

POWER

2012-01-27T12:36:00.000-08:00

POWER is that resource that can be transformed in other resources in the absence of markets.

Creativity comes at a price

2011-11-24T21:59:00.000-08:00

On the other hand, the past is a cadaver. Experience is a limited tool only. Also, it can make you sterile or distract you. I really believe that one must annihilate experience. Get free of it. Otherwise it lures you, ties your hands, makes you a victim of false promises. It robs you of that instinctiveness which to me is the most beautiful thing in human behavior.

(Excerpt from an interview with the almost 70 years old Michelangelo Antonioni)

Joseph Tainter on Anthropological Complexity

2011-07-18T18:11:00.000-07:00

Keynote talk (in 7 parts) delivered to the 2010 International Conference on Sustainability: Energy, Economy, and Environment organized by Local Future.

Any explanation of political collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all complex societies in both the present and future. Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses.

Tainter argues that societies collapse when their investments in social complexity reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. According to Tainter, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. Social complexity can include differentiated social and economic roles, reliance on symbolic and abstract communication, and the existence of a class of information producers and analysts who are not involved in primary resource production. Such complexity requires a substantial "energy" subsidy (meaning resources, or other forms of wealth). When a society confronts a "problem," such as a shortage of or difficulty in gaining access to energy, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge. Eventually, this cost grows so great that any new challenges such as invasions and crop failures cannot be solved by the acquisition of more territory. At that point, the empire fragments into smaller units. Source: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/The_Collapse_of_Complex_Societies

On discontinuities

2011-07-16T10:19:00.001-07:00

Via Flickr:

Ludwig designed every window, door, window-bar and radiator in the noblest proportions and with such exactitude that they might have been precision instruments. Then he forged ahead with his uncompromising energy, so that everything was actually manufactured with the same exactness. I can still hear the locksmith, who asked him with regard to a keyhole, "Tell me, Herr Ingenieur, is a mllimetre here really that important for you?" and even before he had finished the sentence, the loud, energetic "Ja", that almoust startled him."

Excerpts from chapters V and Vi of Family Recollections; written by Hermine Wittgenstein in early 1940s, Originally uploaded by bg&emese

wittgensteinhaus

Wittgenstein must have sized up language in relation with us when he wrote, Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen, which in translation reads, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent or About what one can not speak, one must remain silent. Our world is over-filled with morphemes, of one sort or another, but that doesn't make it for more or better. I have suspected for some time now that silence could remedy the situation.

wittgensteinhaus

Thirty spokes meet in the hub.

Where wheel isn’t is where it’s useful.

Hollowed out, clay makes a pot.

Where the pot’s not is where it’s useful.

Cut doors and windows to make a room.

Where the room isn’t, there’s room for you.

So the profit in what is

is in the use of what isn’t.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 500 bc

(from Le Guin, 1997: 14)

Recently I have discovered Valery Afanassiev, a Russian-born living in France who, among several other interesting preoccupations, plays piano. Here's an extended quote from this practitioner of one of few eternal languages, music.

Nowadays silence has become a rare phenomenon that is energetically set upon by various machines, machine guns and the twittering of human voices. Silence is out of our reach because we have forgotten how to listen to it. As if brushing it aside, we fill in the pauses that turn up here and there. Silence withdraws into itself, punishing us for our nonchalant scorn. The instrumentalists who opt for fast tempos seem to apprehend the absence of notes. All the time they move their fingers or vocal cords to sidestep the chasms at the bottom of which there lies the source of music, its eternal mystery. I often say that silence is the foundations of music. Recently I found a similar thought in a work of the writer who remains, however, beyond the scope of my usual readings—François Mauriac. I was not surprised in the least: my idea is perfectly banal. I am rather surprised that musicians do not express it in every interview. All you have to do is guard against any noise without stopping to listen to yourself and the world. And gradually music comes into existence.

Like nobody else, Emil Grigorievich [N.B. Gilels, another pianist] knew how to worship and handle silence. Even his way of speaking testified to this knowledge, for he often interrupted his speech to let the people around him meditate on what had been said and also listen to silence. Not only did he speak musically but music literally spoke through his voice, his manners, his thoughts, it never forsook him, not for an instant—a beautiful example of requited love. Even in his jokes one could hear music—something akin to the technique perlé which was one of his numerous fortes.

According to my Japanese friend, there has been no pianist like Emil Grigorievich in the history accessible to us. Indeed it is not difficult to reach such a conclusion upon analysing all available recordings. No pianist seems to have had such a command of the instrument, without insufficiencies and blind spots. One of the giants in this field, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, did not have the dynamic range comparable to what I heard once at the Big Conservatoire Hall. That night Emil Grigorievich rounded off his programme with Liszts Spanish Rhapsody. I have never heard such a forte either at the Conservatoire or elsewhere. Even the Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan's baton did not make the air resound so mightily. As for the use of the pedal, Gilels' only rival was again Michelangeli; and only Rachmaninov's recordings disclose to us the inner essence of rhythm so implacably, with the same determination. But, I repeat, no pianist has had at their disposal all these qualities: the refined pedal, an incomparable dynamic range that seemed to include both six pianos and six fortes, the divine sound that had no counterpart in nature, perlé, octaves, trills. I once asked Emil Grigorievich how to play trills. He said they should be played slowly: even in trills one should be able to hear silence, its serene, unruffled presence. Garrulous trills are obnoxious. The way Emil Grigorievich practised the instrument also reveals his intimate bond with silence. In contrast to Richter, who repeated the same passage over and over again, he never made his neighbours wonder, Will he ever drop with exhaustion? Whenever I go away from the piano and sit down on a divan to hear the piece I am learning with the inner ear, I remember my teacher, his habits, his sonorous silence. He taught me to hear not only music but also life itself; or rather, he taught me to hear music in life. I wish I could say there is nothing in the world except music. Whatever happens in it is music. Even death is music.

Some maintain that Gilels was above all a virtuoso. He was a virtuoso in the highest and noblest sense of the term, being different in this respect—in all respects that is—from contemporary virtuoso pianists, dubbed by promoters the athletes of the piano, who just play fast and have no inkling of how the instrument should sound and how to use the pedal. These so-called virtuosos are not acquainted with many components making up the notion of virtuoso playing. And since they violate silence as soon as they sit down at the piano—and before, and after—often their fast tempos produce no effect. What these spectacular tempos boil down to is a lump of notes you are supposed to like. These pianists do not listen to the music they perform and consequently hear no silence in it. One should play Gilels' recording of Chopin's Etude in F Minor, Opus 25, to learn what piano-listening amounts to, when demonstrated by a great pianist. And what about the way he listened to Mozart, Brahms and Grieg? Can one, upon the testimony of his recordings (and concerts), affirm that he was the greatest musician among pianists, all the more so if one put on the list of his composers Beethoven?

Many had the feeling that Emil Grigorievich was a restrained, unnatural person. But how could a man who played so naturally turn out to be unnatural in everyday life? Why confide in strangers anyway? Our drawn-out conversations which often lasted far into the night seemed to prove that I was no stranger to him. Does music depend on the ways and characters of the people who are professionally involved with it? Perhaps not: Wagner's example is sufficient to deter one from prying into composers lives. When prying into Gilels' life, however, one is sure to be struck by his natural approach to everyday events—as if his musical style were spreading around him. A lot can be said about his humanity, but I am prevented from doing so by his own modesty, by his unwillingness to display his generosity in public.

I cannot refrain, however, from revealing a story told by his son-in-law, Peter Nikitenko. Several times a year, Emil Grigorievich asked Peter to depose flowers on the tombs of the composers buried at the Novodevichye Cemetery in Moscow. I know several people who, upon arriving in a city they have never visited, rush towards the nearest cemetery: they are tomb collectors. But those who can hear cemeteries, their silence and music, are few and far between.

If a bell is struck, the sound reverberates into the distance. Similarly, if a point filled with mental energy is painted on a canvas (or a wall), it sends vibrations into the surrounding unpainted space...A work of art is a site where places of making and not making, painting and not painting, are linked so that they reverberate with each other (Lee Ufan).

European entrepreneurs

2011-07-08T08:38:00.001-07:00


This illustration was published in the magazine Europe Efficient/Europa Effekt, which is distributed in Sweden, Germany, Wales and Portugal. You may download it as a PDF here: www.entreeprojektet.se/

LinkedIn exchange about European entrepreneurship

Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture Seen as Europe’s Biggest Obstacle

Europeans are not hungry enough, don't want success and are not prepared to take the risks, claimed a panel of European VCs and entrepreneurs.

fCh: "Europeans are not hungry enough, don't want success and are not prepared to take the risks, claimed a panel of European VCs and entrepreneurs."

Since when is hunger a virtue that's somehow leading to more entrepreneurship? Ask some African country, or the state of... West Virginia. Outside few places in the US, in which the mix of nationalities is anyway as diverse as you'd find in any international airport, where else do you see people taking the risks we like to call entrepreneurial?

At the end of the day, I'd redirect the question back to the European panel, What are the risks they've undertaken?

BTW, risk is actuarial, uncertainty is entrepreneurial.

Standing in Line at Chinese Embassy in SF

2011-07-07T18:05:00.000-07:00

On LinkedIn, to the Director of Stanford Media X

Director: Sometimes the reality of the world comes to you in strange places and without even looking for it. Waiting for my Visa. Long lines. No air conditioning. Bored. So I decide to talk with the guy ahead of me.
Although born in Shanghai, he came to the University of Minnesota as an exchange student in EE on a program initiated through the Microelectronic and Information Sciences Center. He moved to Austin Texas to work in the emerging semiconductor sector catalyzed by Sematech and the Microelectronic Computer Consortium. From there, he took the Silicon Valley leap and worked for several years at one of the Valley’s IC design firms. Now a US resident, he was at the Chinese Embassy getting documentation to take his family to Shanghai, where he was launching a company making chips for the cleantech industry. His new company is financed by both US and Chinese investors. In an instant his story is the metaphor of our future.
Media X at Stanford University, in responding to this challenge, has put together a remarkable group of global thought leaders and practitioners to unpack these frontiers and initiate new perspectives. Come join the discussion and share new visualizations of competitive advantage in the networked global economy. With a focus on ICT, mobile and greentech, the July 11 Innovation Ecosystems Summit provides insights about the new systems and networks. The program is structured to keep us all ahead of the game. The world is watching - not only at Stanford, but all of us - and looking for solutions that leverage knowledge-based solutions!
We've priced this workshop so you can come with a friend or colleague, because we know there will be a lot to talk about after the Summit. So, even though the early bird registration is closed, we’re giving you the opportunity to add an associate to your registration at a special guest rate of $95. Use Code: IEN2011. Contact me for group rates.

Media X at Stanford University: mediax.stanford.edu

eScience Network

From data shared by Matthijs, whom I met at the eSocial Science conference. This shows a bipartite network of people and projects funded by the UK eScience initiatives; the people are circles and the projects are squares, or maybe it's the other way around... The color and size of the nodes indicates degree; redder and bigger nodes have more connections than smaller and yellower nodes.

Source: http://www.fli...

fCh: I think we've done alright about innovating. Yet, we lost the ability to harvest the fruits of our innovation. Believing in a networked world, which is indeed an apt metaphor for commodities and capital, we cared not about the innovation driven by, and from within, the production-process itself.

You write, "The program is structured to keep us all ahead of the game. The world is watching - not only at Stanford, but all of us - and looking for solutions that leverage knowledge-based solutions!" No, we cannot be all ahead, unless we buy Friedman's 'flat-world' platitudes. We have to compete for resources, seeds and harvest alike. Yes, of course all eyes are still on Stanford, but that's because there are few places left in the US to show leadership of any type.

What is my suggestion for your gathering? To encourage 'contrarian' voices and/or start looking at how we can keep innovating while re-building our capabilities. Perhaps, several meetings would be necessary just to assess the situation and then start planning ahead.

If we continue to level our advantage through networks, the benefits of the innovation will level too, sooner or later. At most, we might consider innovation networks as mechanisms of explicit knowledge creation and sharing, provided that we complement them with our own production whereby tacit knowledge is created (read, sticky). Then, I could see a hope for economic sustainability in the whole process. As innovation stands today, there is little hope for sustainability at any level of analysis.

Good luck, for we can all use it now, fCh

“Designers’ power in organizations”

2011-07-07T17:53:00.000-07:00

This is a LinkedIn conversation, among SIP, fCh, and JvB

SIP: “The Prince”, by Machiavelli, has been the definitive textbook on power for the last 500 years. Last year Jeff Pfeffer wrote “Power”, the definitive book on the subject for our generation. Apart from maybe torture and killing, not much has changed. However it is definitely more readable and has many more contemporary cases. How are designers doing in these 21st Century games of corporate power and what is the outlook for their future?

SIP: The power distribution in firms has changed over the past hundred years, according to what the various challenges were. When moving from crafts to industrial manufacturing, engineering and manufacturing became important. Then when markets started to saturate, marketing became key. As this field matured, financing then took over. As we move into a time where innovation is important, one could well imagine the influence of designers being on the rise. The question now becomes, what factors determines this?

fCh: SIP, your inferential sequence is not without problems. Political economists have warned that in history, each time finance takes over, the end of the game is near.

How can one put power in games? Simply let the players be and power rises to the top.

As for a world ruled by design-ers, I'm not sure what dystopia that could be, but I suggest one re-consider the history from Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto.

SIP: Hi fCh, - Thank you for the insights! I was unaware the when finance people are in control it ends in catastrophes. Can you recommend any papers or books addressing this? Yes power rises to the top, I guess that is the definition of power, - right? I agree with you having designers in absolute power may not be ideal and will read Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto. Thank you for the tip. Sincerely, - SIP

SIP: As we move into an experience economy, intangibles are becoming increasingly important. Intangibles now represent the majority of many a firm’s value. With markets being increasingly dynamic, old static economic models fail and management strategies have to be frequently updated. Strategies are now a dynamic capability. To create intangible value, you need . . . well, creative people. Of course the value of your creativity depends on the level at which you contribute.

fCh: SIP, in modernity, the observation about the increasing role of finance, towards the end of the capitalist cycle, was made by Marx. Neo-Marxists, in our post-modern times, have shown how the 4 capitalist cycles follow Marx's idea (Venetian, Dutch, British, and now American). For a book, though you may be better off with a summary, have a look at Govanni Arrighi's 'Adam Smith in Beijing.'

My interest in this line of thought stems from wanting to place entrepreneuring in a larger/historical context.

P.S. Schumpeter himself had some views...

FYI:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finance_capitalism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_capitalism

fCh: I used to think highly of intangibles too. However, how do you fight inflation of intangibles? Of course, I'm assuming you take for granted their arbitrariness.

SIP: Hi fCh, - Thank you for the book recommendation and web links, I am familiar with Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” and look forward to expand my knowledge. Sincerely, - SIP

SIP: Button sizes and corner radii, though important, by nature contribute less than creating a new design philosophy for an organization. Of the many recommendations in his book on power, Jeff Pfeffer mentions the following areas on which to focus: Powerful departments have cohesion. Create resources others need and remember perception is reality. Designers may be naturally weak in these areas, however their position has huge potential. How can this potential best be mined?

SIP: To gain a sense of what designers think, we turned to LinkedIn’s Industrial Design Group and posted the question: Are any designers’ in positions of power in the corporate structure? The gist of the comments were that although designers may not have formal authority they have the attention of management.

SIP: Let us examine the general credibility of these statements by comparing them in turn with the three top power indicators.

Powerful departments have cohesion! Designers need to have their designs selected in order to have successful careers and they are in competition with their colleagues in a zero sum game. This cultural structure is in no way conducive to cohesion.

SIP: The second power indicator was the ability to create resources others need. Does anybody inside of a corporation need industrial design and how do they know the designers have delivered? Engineering and marketing can measure their performance and back up their claims with data from calculations, simulations, tests and studies. When a new product fails in the market, they can show that they did their job and point their fingers at design. Designers are unable to point back. Since thirty to forty-one percent of new products fail, design is at a clear disadvantage.

JvB: Maybe "power" should be replaced by "influence", or influential efficacy. Power in itself utilized unwisely, even if sustainable (like long-term dictators), maybe is not an indicator of success.
WSJ had an article on Cadillac, Monday, the article criticized GM for not having "product guys" in power. It sort of touches on the failure of a business- centric approach, in relation to delivering the product.

Thinking about the finger pointing comment...there is fundamental fallacy in just doing that. This may be pervasive organizational dysfunction, a failure of adequate reflective analysis. I think the general level of critical thinking is steadily declining, to where saying the alleged prudent thing may eclipse the reality. I can suppose product market failure in one sense almost always a marketing issue (exception may be a physical/material failure or force majeure). Since looking forward is inductive, right data can support a theory of the future, but not determine or guarantee success. Your study of risk reduction by broader design involvement is compelling. This can tie in with the idea of "creative" processing occurring more often from beginning to end

SIP: Hi JvB, - Good to hear from you. I completely agree with you. My book, “Profit from Design, - leveraging design in business” which is now available for friends, contributors and fellow designers on: http://www.ingo... , addresses these issues. It would be good to catch up in the near future! Yours, - SIP.

SIP: This brings us to the third power indicator, “perception is reality”. If designers are viewed as failing one third of the time, it is difficult to project a perception of a positive and reliable contribution. Studies show you need to provide about three positive experiences to make up for one negative experience. With the current hit rate and little documentation supporting design performance, it would seem designers would not be able to get ahead in the corporate environment.

SIP: Based on literature and personal observations the conclusion appears to be that designers are not well equipped for a position of power in an organization. Whether future changes in society and its needs and/or the actual design education program will change this remains to be seen.

Please let me know which topics you like to be addressed the coming months. Here are some suggestions:

- What is "Design Thinking”
- Can art and design create monumental change
- How to establish creative communities in metropolitan areas?
- Application of design in entrepreneurial enterprises

JvB: vonB asks the universe- just what is this Design Thinking? Certainly not a power play...

fCh: SIP, the limited power of design comes from the limited opportunities for design. I'm talking in practical terms, not some norms driven academic conversation.

That being said, power is where the money is. As long as the money people see that you can spend on, say, advertising to push crappy product out, why take a chance with design?

Another thing is that you can talk about advertising budgets, relate them to sales quotas, and life goes on as long as you stay afloat. Design is not something you talk about, at least not in those terms.

Design is performance, anywhere between function and seduction. Power is that side effect accountants measure in dollars.

SIP: Hi fCh, - Very succinct, I couldn’t have put it better myself. The catch, is design offer twice the ROI of marketing. The way I see it, - we can leave the world unchanged or be proactive and see if we can better measure and communicate the value we can create. Do you have any ideas? Sincerely, - SIP

fCh: I'm probably too old school, but I think design is better done than talked about. The executive suite ought to be sensitive to its merits, or else.

Good design should be related to moral values, not dollar value. It's as simple as that. And that's why instances of good design don't abound.

For better or worse, we've cultivated too much the idea that we can outsmart design by populating a meta-space whereby numbers and other similar abstractions rule. In contrast, design is material.

How do you get to good design? Harder and harder in the US, but times are changing for us as well. We'll rediscover its virtues when will have exhausted all other alternatives.

If you need to make a numbers case, just grab any piece of good design (from Braun to Bosch/Miele and on to Apple, B&O and beyond) and see what a premium it commands in the market--as far as diffusion, price, loyalty and all that.

SIP: Hi fCh, I sense that many designers feel like this. Do you think this is holding us back from contributing real value to the world? Sincerely, - SIP

fCh: SIP, I'm not sure I understand your question.

However, I think that there are several things holding good design from materializing in the US. It's cultural, education, managerial values--it's many things as in zeitgeist.

Good design starts with staring at the problem and confronting it. It ends with closing your book on it. In our world, where more consumption follows consumption and that becomes good consumption, bad design can be good practice as in planned obsolescence. Even the mighty darling Apple is guilty of this...

SIP: Hi fCh, - Though I agree with you to a some extent, I meant to say, do you think the beliefs and attitude you expressed is holding designers back? Sincerely, - SIP

fCh: ...I don't see how. For one, I'm not sure my beliefs are that widely held to make a difference, for the other, I'm not in any position to direct design--other than voting with my wallet.

P.S. One should distinguish between my beliefs and what I report the state of the world to be.

SIP: Hi fCh, - Sorry, I thought you believed your belief was common. Do you think designers’ beliefs are holding them back? Sincerely, - SIP

fCh • Dear SIP there's nothing to be sorry about.

What I mean to say is:
1) Designers are not always as trained or talented as to command respect through their work--in the world of everything goes, it's difficult to make one come up with inspiring solutions within give constraints;
2) Their bosses are even more clueless--in matters of design, that is.

The most anti-design aspect of our consumerist society I find to be planned-obsolescence.

SIP: Hi fCh, - Thank you for clarifying, your experiences reflects my own. I also have a hard time with planned obsolescence, though eventually most things become obsolete. Personally, I purchase items with a long life span. Sincerely, - SIP

Maps of Facebook ego-"universes"

2011-06-25T20:28:00.001-07:00

Map of my Facebook "universe"
Originally uploaded by Porter Novelli Global

Via Flickr:
"This was one of the earliest network maps I worked on in Q1 2008 -- rather solipsistically, it's a map of my own Facebook friends (with my own node removed, so that it pulls apart a little.) It attempted to map two degrees of separation; what you see here is my friends and their friends. I think I removed the pendants." [...]

Would you sign a blanc check, not knowing who or when is going to cash it? In effect, that's what people are doing when handing over all their stuff to Facebook.

I guess, the answer to the above would be YES, in case you discounted your future indefinitely to, well,

( 0 + the_use_value_of socializing )

from now on

2011-06-25T19:43:00.001-07:00

Heidegger by aeneastudio

Don't think, live! You'll be richer in memories/happier.

After Heidegger/quantum mechanics, thinking has nowhere left to go.

You also may be an entrepreneur

2011-06-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

In many discussions I see the category "entrepreneur" being used to mean many a concept. Usually, "entrepreneur" is employed in its heroic version, as defined by Schumpeter and usually associated in the common conversation with innovation, creativity, or those light-bulbs. However, there is so much more to it, and we seem to have recurring types of entrepreneurs, depending on the time, place and state of the technology. With these I mind, I'm citing here an excerpt from Peter Nijkamp's paper, Entrepreneurship in a modern network economy, summarizing the known types of entrepreneurs:

In their standard work on ‘The Entrepreneur’ Hebert and Link (1982) make the following typological classification of the ‘species’ of entrepreneur:
1. The entrepreneur is the person who assumes the risk associated with uncertainty (e.g. Cantillon, Von Thtinen, Mill, Hawley, Knight, Von Mises, Cole, Shackle)
2. The entrepreneur is the person who supplies financial capital (e.g. Smith, Bohm-Bawerk, Pigou, Von Mises)
3. The entrepreneur is an innovator (e.g. Bentham, Von Thtinen, Schmoller, Sombart, Weber, Schumpeter, Shakle)
4. The entrepreneur is a decision maker (e.g. Cantillon, Menger, Marshall, Wieser, Amasa Walker, Francis Walker, Keynes, Von Mises, Cole, Schultz)
5. The entrepreneur is an industrial leader (e.g. Say, Saint-Simon, Amasa Walker, Francis Walker, Marshall, Wieser, Sombart, Weber, Schumpeter)
6. The entrepreneur is a manager or superintendent (e.g. Say, Mill, Marshall, Menger)
7. The entrepreneur is an organiser and co-ordinator of economic resources (e.g. Say, Wieser, Sombart, Weber, Clark, Davenport, Schumpeter, Coase)
8. The entrepreneur is the owner of an enterprise (e.g. Quesnay, Wieser, Pigou, Hawley)
9. The entrepreneur is an employer of factors of production (e.g. Amasa Walker, Francis Walker, Wieser, Keynes)
10. The entrepreneur is a contractor (e.g. Bentham)
11. The entrepreneur is an ‘arbitrageur’ (e.g. Cantillon, Walras, Kirzner)
12. The entrepreneur is an allocator of resources among alternative uses (e.g. Cantillon, Schultz).

For more, google the names in the parentheses. Is this all entrepreneurs can be? For sure not, so think ahead, which is another way of saying, be entrepreneuring!

[ I Am An Entrepreneur ]

along the diminishing returns of social science

2011-05-16T15:12:00.000-07:00

Doing social science research in an established discipline such as strategic management, is akin to preparing a feast with the crumbs from an orgy. Before considering some recipe, think of the 5th labor of Hercules, to clean the Augean stables.

Now, that's what I call diminishing returns. As alternative, why can't social scientists open up today's newspaper and think about fixing some wrongs?

Intangibles: What about?

2011-05-16T07:32:00.000-07:00

Intangibles is one of those shortcuts outsiders employ to eat and have the cake of expediency, lest one gets accused of lack of rigor and/or sophistication.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about them, and this is how they come out in one form of communication.

The question I raise about intangibles should not connote exclusive anchoring in the materialist ontology as much as an invitation for a more adequate repositioning:

How do we fight inflation of intangibles? Of course, I'm assuming we take for granted some level of their arbitrariness, and the reader's general aversion for inflation.

Another similar concept is complex adaptive systems, or simply, complex systems. The treatment of this complexity is better postponed for now.

Dieter Rams' ten commandments

2011-03-18T07:09:00.001-07:00

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design helps a product to be understood.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is durable.
Good design is consistent to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.

When is enough

2011-03-13T12:11:00.000-07:00

From the Motley Fool article by Morgan Housel:

Enough.

That's the title of Vanguard founder John Bogle's fantastic book about measuring what counts in life.

The title, as Bogle explains, comes from a conversation between Kurt Vonnegut and novelist Joseph Heller, who are enjoying a party hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager. Vonnegut points out that their wealthy host had made more money in one day than Heller ever made from his novel Catch-22. Heller responds: "Yes, but I have something he will never have: enough."

The relevance of this quote is that it should not be confused for the sour grapes syndrome, but taken as a sure and overall better way out of the logic so many subscribe to, yet only for the benefit of the chosen few. Capitalism without virtues is worse than theft.

The money machine(ry)

2011-03-05T13:50:00.001-08:00

A recent comment to a NYTimes article about the a possible change in the legal profession, due to automating the work now given to junior employees, as the ones in the images, made me think the following describes the fate of many of the newly minted graduates, regardless of their choosing Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Accenture, or some law firm. It's the way character starts being tested/built, for there are not typically that many prior opportunities. And, by the way, it's also how the big houses generate a sizable chunk of their profits.

Alberta Romeo

NYC

I am an attorney, and think that this is a great idea. I know that law students are worrying, "What about my job as a first-year at Cravath, Davis Polk, or S&C?" Will I have that job? The answer is that, in a few years, those firms will need to recruit fewer "bodies" to do low-level work such as discovery. And that will be better, not worse, for the legal profession, and for you.

Big firms are slave camps. The large firms hire 50 or 60 new associates each year, usually top students from elite law schools. The firms then proceed to work those young lawyers virtually to death -- 60 to 80 hours a week, 2000 to 2800 hours per year (I know someone who billed that many hours). After three or four years, most of these young attorneys have quit, and of the 20 or so who are left, all but a few are fired ("asked to leave"). The big firms, in other words, are blood-suckers who exploit young attorneys, albeit at high salaries, to do their worst, most boring, lest productive work. A young lawyer will finish his stint at a big firm exhausted, sick, disillusioned and -- this is the point -- with virtually none of the skills that he or she actually needs to practice law. Oh, he or she will have written memos and parts of briefs, reviewed a few hundred thousand documents and maybe carried the litigation bag to court a few times. As a corporate associate, he or she will have drafted a few credit agreements and spent upteen nights rereading the same documents. The real practice, however, occurs at higher feeding levels -- senior associates and partners. The lower ranks are worse than soldiers; they are pack horses.

The big firm plantation culture is a disgrace to the profession and survives chiefly because big deals and big cases need grunt labor. Someone who comes of Columbia, Harvard, NYU, Stanford or U of Chicago -- the big schools -- should not start his or her career as a slave. Many people who go through this mill are scarred for life by the experience, and many leave the profession entirely. This is not a system for "training" young lawyers, but rather one for protecting corporate America, using young lawyers as commodities.

So great that we now can do the work via computer. Corporate America will still be fed, but not with young brains and flesh. The recruiters who swarm campuses will make speeches about seeking "only the best," but that most of the best -- one would hope -- would have incentives to go elsewhere. What those incentives will be, and how the profession will grow, no one knows. When I graduated from law school however, the admission's director of my top-4 school described what was going on at the big firms as "immoral." Money knows no value other than money, but now that the business value appears to be in technology, maybe human values will step in to rescue the legal profession from itself.

The analytical solution to some crisis

2010-12-27T16:23:00.000-08:00

VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization

2010-07-22T20:50:00.001-07:00

I'd like to talk to you today about the human brain, which is what we do research on at the University of California. Just think about this problem for a second. Here is a lump of flesh, about three pounds, which you can hold in the palm of your hand. But it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity, ask questions about the meaning of its own existence, about the nature of God.

And this is truly the most amazing thing in the world. It's the greatest mystery confronting human beings: How does this all come about? Well, the brain, as you know, is made up of neurons. We're looking at neurons here. There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain. And each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain. And based on this, people have calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.

So, how do you go about studying the brain? One approach is to look at patients who had lesions in different part of the brain, and study changes in their behavior. This is what I spoke about in the last TED. Today I'll talk about a different approach which is to put electrodes in different parts of the brain, and actually record the activity of individual nerve cells in the brain. Sort of eavesdrop on the activity of nerve cells in the brain.

Now, one recent discovery that has been made by researchers in Italy, in Parma, by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues, is a group of neurons called mirror neurons, which are on the front of the brain in the frontal lobes. Now, it turns out there are neurons which are called ordinary motor command neurons in the front of the brain, which have been known for over 50 years. These neurons will fire when a person performs a specific action. For example, if I do that, and reach and grab an apple, a motor command neuron in the front of my brain will fire. If I reach out and pull an object, another neuron will fire, commanding me to pull that object. These are called motor command neurons that have been known for a long time.

But what Rizzolatti found was a subset of these neurons, maybe about 20 percent of them, will also fire when I'm looking at somebody else performing the same action. So, here is a neuron that fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. And this is truly astonishing. Because it's as though this neuron is adopting the other person's point of view. It's almost as though it's performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person's action.

Now, what is the significance of these mirror neurons? For one thing they must be involved in things like imitation and emulation. Because to imitate a complex act requires my brain to adopt the other person's point of view. So, this is important of imitation and emulation. Well, why is that important? Well, let's take a look at the next slide. So, how do you do imitation? Why is imitation important? Mirror neurons and imitation, emulation.

Now, let's look at culture, the phenomenon of human culture. If you go back in time about [75,000] to 100,000 years ago, let's look at human evolution, it turns out that something very important happened around 75,000 years ago. And that is, there is a sudden emergence and rapid spread of a number of skills that are unique to human beings like tool use, the use of fire, the use of shelters, and, of course, language, and the ability to read somebody else's mind and interpret that person's behavior. All of that happened relatively quickly.

Even though the human brain had achieved its present size almost three or four hundred thousand years ago, 100,000 years ago all of this happened very very quickly. And I claim that what happened was the sudden emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system, which allowed you to emulate and imitate other people's actions. So that when there was a sudden accidental discovery by one member of the group, say the use of fire, or a particular type of tool, instead of dying out this spread rapidly, horizontally across the population, or was transmitted vertically, down the generations.

So, this made evolution suddenly Lamarckian, instead of Darwinian. Darwinian evolution is slow; it takes hundreds of thousands of years. A polar bear, to evolve a coat, will take thousands of generations, maybe 100,000 years. A human being, a child, can just watch its parent kill another polar bear, and skin it and put the skin on its body, fur on the body, and learn it in one step. What the polar bear took 100,000 years to learn, it can learn in five minutes, maybe 10 minutes. And then once it's learned this it spreads in geometric proportion across a population.

This is the basis. The imitation of complex skills is what we call culture and is the basis of civilization. Now there is another kind of mirror neuron, which is involved in something quite different. And that is, there are mirror neurons, just as there are mirror neurons for action, there are mirror neurons for touch. In other words, if somebody touches me, my hand, neuron in the somatosensory cortex in the sensory region of the brain fires. But the same neuron, in some cases will fire when I simply watch another person being touched. So, it's empathizing the other person being touched.

So, most of them will fire when I'm touched in different locations. Different neurons for different locations. But a subset of them will fire even when I watch somebody else being touched in the same location. So, here again you have neurons which are enrolled in empathy. Now, the question then arises: If I simply watch another person being touched, why do I not get confused and literally feel that touch sensation merely by watching somebody being touched? I mean, I empathize with that person but I don't literally feel the touch. Well, that's because you've got receptors in your skin, touch and pain receptors, going back into your brain and saying "Don't worry, you're not being touched. So, empathize, by all means, with the other person, but do not actually experience the touch otherwise you'll get confused and muddled."

Okay, so there is a feedback signal that vetos the signal of the mirror neuron preventing you from consciously experiencing that touch. But if you remove the arm, you simply anesthetize my arm, so you put an injection into my arm, anesthetize the brachial plexus, so the arm is numb, and there is no sensations coming in, if I now watch you being touched, I literally feel it in my hand. In other words, you have dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. So, I call them Gandhi neurons, or empathy neurons. (Laughter)

And this is not in some abstract metaphorical sense, all that's separating you from him, from the other person, is your skin. Remove the skin, you experience that person's touch in your mind. You've dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. And this, of course is the basis of much of Eastern philosophy, And that is there is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are in fact, connected not just via Facebook, and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons. And there is whole chains of neurons around this room, talking to each other. And there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else's consciousness.

And this is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy. It emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience. So, you have a patient with a phantom limb. If the arm has been removed and you have a phantom, and you watch somebody else being touched, you feel it in your phantom. Now the astonishing thing is, if you have pain in your phantom limb, you squeeze the other person's hand, massage the other person's hand, that relieves the pain in your phantom hand, almost as though the neuron were obtaining relief from merely watching somebody else being massaged.

So, here you have my last slide. For the longest time people have regarded science and humanities as being distinct. C.P. Snow spoke of the two cultures: science on the one hand, humanities on the other; never the twain shall meet. So, I'm saying the mirror neuron system underlies the interface allowing you to rethink about issues like consciousness, representation of self, what separates you from other human beings, what allows you to empathize with other human beings, and also even things like the emergence of culture and civilization, which is unique to human beings. Thank you.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow

2010-07-22T20:42:00.000-07:00

I grew up in Europe, and World War II caught me when I was between seven and 10 years old. And I realized how few of the grown-ups that I knew were able to withstand the tragedies that the war visited on them -- how few of them could even resemble a normal, contented, satisfied, happy life once their job, their home, their security was destroyed by the war. So I became interested in understanding what contributed to a life that was worth living. And I tried, as a child, as a teenager, to read philosophy and to get involved in art and religion and many other ways that I could see as a possible answer to that question. And finally I ended up encountering psychology by chance.

Actually I was at a ski resort in Switzerland without any money to actually enjoy myself, because the snow had melted and there was -- I didn't have money to go to a movie, but I found that on the -- I read in the newspapers that there was to be a presentation by someone in a place that I'd seen in the center of Zurich, and it was about flying saucers he was going to talk. And I thought, well, since I can't go to the movies, at least I will go for free to listen to flying saucers. And the man who talked at that evening lecture was very interesting. And it -- actually, instead of talking about little green men, he talked about how the psyche of the Europeans had been traumatized by the war and now they're projecting flying saucers into the sky, kind of as a -- he talked about how the mandalas of ancient Hindu religion were kind of projected into the sky as an attempt to regain some sense of order after the chaos of war. And this seemed very interesting to me. And I started reading his books after that lecture. And that was Carl Jung, whose name or work I had no idea about.

Then I came to this country to study psychology and I started trying to understand these roots of happiness. This is a typical result that many people have presented, and there are many variations on it. But this, for instance, shows that about 30 percent of the people surveyed in the United States since 1956 say that their life is very happy. And that hasn't changed at all. Whereas the personal income, on a scale that has been held constant to accommodate for inflation, has more than doubled, almost tripled, in that period. But you find essentially the same results, namely, that after a certain basic point which corresponds more or less to just a few 1,000 dollars above the minimum poverty level, increases in material well-being don't seem to affect how happy people are. And, in fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources do not increase happiness.

So my research has been focused more on -- after finding out these things that actually corresponded to my own experience, I tried to understand now, where in everyday life, in our normal experience, do we feel really happy. And to start that -- those studies about 40 years ago, I began to look at creative people -- first artists and scientists and so forth -- trying to understand what made them feel that it was worth essentially spending their life doing things for which many of them didn't expect either fame or fortune, but which made their life meaningful and worth doing.

This was one of the leading composers of American music back in the '70s. And the interview was 40 pages long. But this little excerpt is a very good summary of what he was saying during the interview. And it describes how he feels when composing is going well. And he says by describing it as an ecstatic state.

Now ecstasy in Greek meant simply to stand to the side of something. And then it became essentially an analogy for a mental state where you feel that you are not doing your ordinary everyday routines. So ecstasy is essentially a stepping into an alternative reality. And it's interesting, if you think about it, how, when we think about the civilizations that we look up to as having been pinnacles of human achievement -- whether it's China, Greece, Hindu civilization, or the Mayas, or Egyptians -- what we know about them is really about their ecstasies, not about their everyday life. We know the temples they built so -- where people could come to experience a different reality. We know about the circuses, the arenas, the theaters -- these are the remains of civilizations and they are the places that people went to experience life in a more concentrated, more ordered form.

Now, this man doesn't need to go to a place like this, which is also -- this place, this arena, which is built like a Greek amphitheatre, is a place for ecstasy also. We are participating in a reality which is different from that of everyday life that we're used to. But this man doesn't need to go to there. He needs just a piece of paper where he can put down little marks, and as he does that, he can imagine sounds that had not existed before in that particular combination. So once he gets to that point of beginning to create -- like Jennifer did in her improvisation -- a new reality, that is a moment of ecstasy. He enters that different reality. Now he says also that this is so intense an experience that it feels almost as if he didn't exist. And that sounds like a kind of a romantic exaggeration. But actually, our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 110 bits of information per second. And in order to hear me and understand what I'm saying, you need to process about 60 bits per second. That's why you can't hear more than two people. You can't understand more than two people talking to you.

Well, when you are really involved in this completely engaging process of creating something new, as this man does, he doesn't have enough attention left over to monitor how his body feels, or his problems at home. He can't feel even that he's hungry or tired. His body disappears, his identity disappears from his consciousness, because he doesn't have enough attention, like none of us do, to really do well something that requires a lot of concentration and at the same time to feel that he exists. So existence is temporarily suspended. And he says that his hand seems to be moving by itself. Now, I could look at my hand for two weeks, and I wouldn't feel any awe or wonder, because I can't compose.

So what is that telling you here, but in other parts of the interview is that obviously this automatic, spontaneous process that he's describing can only happen to someone who is very well-trained and who has developed technique. And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can't be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical knowledge immersion in a particular field. Whether it's mathematics or music -- it takes that long to be able to begin to change something in a way that it's better than what was there before. Now, when that happens, he says the music just flows out. And because all of these people I started interviewing -- this was an interview which is over 30 years old -- so many of the people described this as a spontaneous flow that I called this type of experience the "flow experience." And it happens in different realms.

For instance, a poet describes it in this form. This is by a student of mine who interviewed some of the leading writers and poets in the United States. And it describes the same effortless, spontaneous feeling that you get when you enter into this ecstatic state. This poet describes it as opening a door that floats up in the sky -- very similar description to what Albert Einstein gave as to how he imagined the forces of relativity when he was struggling with trying to understand how it worked. But it happens in other activities. For instance, this is another student of mine, Susan Jackson from Australia, who did work with some of the leading athletes in the world. And you see here in this description of an Olympic skater, the same essential description of the phenomenology of the inner state of the person. You don't think it goes automatically if you merge yourself with the music, and so forth.

It happens also, actually, in the most recent book I wrote, called "Good Business," where I interviewed some of the CEOs who had been nominated by their peers as being both very successful and very ethical, very socially responsible. You see that these people define success as something that helps others and at the same time makes you feel happy as you are working at it. And like all of these successful and responsible CEOs say, you can't have just one of these things to be successful. If you want a meaningful job and successful job -- Anita Roddick is another one of these CEOs we interviewed. She is the founder of Body Shop, the cosmetic, kind of natural cosmetic king. It's kind of a passion that comes from doing the best and having flow while you're working.

This is an interesting little quote from Masaru Ibuka, who was, at that time, starting out Sony without any money, without a product -- they didn't have a product, they didn't have anything, but they had an idea. And the idea he had was to establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society and work to their heart's content. I couldn't improve on this as a good example of how flow enters the workplace.

Now, when we do studies, we have, with other colleagues around the world, done over 8,000 interviews of people -- from Dominican monks, to blind nuns, to Himalayan climbers, to Navajo shepherds -- who enjoy their work. And regardless of the culture, regardless of education or whatever, there are these seven conditions that seem to be there when a person is in flow. There's this focus that once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity, you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other, you get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once those conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.

In our studies, we represent the everyday life of people in this simple scheme. And we can measure this very precisely, actually, because we give people electronic pagers that go off 10 times a day, and whenever they go off you say what you're doing, how you feel, where you are, what you're thinking about. And two things that we measure is the amount of challenge people experience at that moment and the amount of skills that they feel they have at that moment. So for each person we can establish an average, which is the center of the diagram. That would be your mean level of challenge and skill, which will be different from that of anybody else. But you have a kind of a set point there which would be in the middle.

If we know what that set point is, we can predict fairly accurately when you will be in flow, and it will be when your challenges are higher than average and skills are higher than average. And you may be doing things very differently from other people, but for everyone that flow channel, that area there, will be when you are doing what you really like to do -- play the piano, probably, be with your best friend, perhaps work, if work is what provides flow for you. And then the other areas become less and less positive.

Arousal is still good because you are over-challenged there. Your skills are not quite as high as they should be, but you can move into flow fairly easily by just developing a little more skill. So, arousal is the area where most people learn from, because that's where they're pushed beyond their comfort zone and that to enter -- going back to flow -- then they develop higher skills. Control is also a good place to be, because there you feel comfortable, but not very excited. It's not very challenging any more. And if you want to enter flow from control, you have to increase the challenges. So those two are ideal and complementary areas from which flow is easy to go into.

The other combinations of challenge and skill become progressively less optimal. Relaxation is fine -- you still feel OK. Boredom begins to be very aversive and apathy becomes very negative -- you don't feel that you're doing anything, you don't use your skills, there's no challenge. Unfortunately, a lot of people's experience is in apathy. The largest single contributor to that experience is watching television, the next one is being in the bathroom, sitting. And then, even though sometimes watching television about seven to eight percent of the time is in flow, but that's when you choose a program you really want to watch and you get feedback from it.

So the question we are trying to address -- and I'm way over time -- is how to put more and more of everyday life in that flow channel. And that is the kind of challenge that we're trying to understand. And some of you obviously know how to do that spontaneously without any advice, but unfortunately a lot of people don't. And that's what our mandate is in a way to do. OK.

Thank you.

Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory

2010-07-22T20:20:00.001-07:00

Everybody talks about happiness these days. I had somebody count the number of books with "happiness" in the title published in the last five years and they gave up after about 40, and there were many more. There is a huge wave of interest in happiness, among researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier. But in spite of all this flood of work, there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness.

And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps. This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness, and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness, because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is. The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity. It turns out that the word happiness is just not a useful word anymore because we apply it to too many different things. I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it but, by and large, this is something that we'll have to give up and we'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is. The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory: basically it's between being happy in your life and being happy about your life or happy with your life. And those are two very different concepts, and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness. And the third is the focusing illusion, and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance. I mean, this is a real cognitive trap. There's just no way of getting it right.

Now, I'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question and answer session after one of my lectures reported a story. [unclear ...] He said he'd been listening to the symphony and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound. And then he added, really quite emotionally, it ruined the whole experience. But it hadn't. What it had ruined were the memories of the experience. He had had the experience. He had had 20 minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep.

What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves. There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. It's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches -- you know, when the doctor asks, "Does it hurt now when I touch you here?" And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, "How have you been feeling lately?" or "How was your trip to Albania?" or something like that. Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self and getting confused between them is part of the mess of the notion of happiness.

Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. And that really starts with a basic response of our memories -- it starts immediately. We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story. And let me begin with one example. This is an old study. Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure. I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days, but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s. They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds. And here are two patients. Those are their recordings. And you are asked, "Who of them suffered more?" And it's a very easy question. Clearly, Patient B suffered more. His colonoscopy was longer, and every minute of pain that Patient A had Patient B had and more.

But now there is another question: "How much did these patients think they suffered?" And here is a surprise: And the surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B. The stories of the colonoscopies were different and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends -- and neither of these stories is very inspiring or great -- but one of them is this distinct ... (Laughter) but one of them is distinctly worse than the other. And the one that is worse was the one where pain was at its peak at the very end. It's a bad story. How do we know that? Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and much later, too, "How bad was the whole thing, in total?" and it was much worse for A than for B in memory.

Now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self. From the point of view of the experiencing self, clearly, B had a worse time. Now, what you could do with patient A, and we actually ran clinical experiments, and it has been done, and it does work, you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient A by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much. That will cause the patient to suffer, but just a little and much less than before. And if you do that for a couple of minutes, you have made the experiencing self of Patient A worse off, and you have the remembering self of Patient A and lot better off, because now you have endowed Patient A with a better story about his experience. What defines a story? And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of the stories that we make up. What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. Endings are very, very important and, in this case, the ending dominated.

Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other. And you ask: What happens to these moments? And the answer is really straightforward. They are lost forever. I mean, most of the moments of our life -- and I calculated -- you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long. Which means that, you know, in a life there, are about 600 million of them. In a month, there are about 600,000. Most of them don't leave a trace. Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self. And yet, some how you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life. It's the finite resource that we're spending while we're on this earth. And how to spend it, would seem to be relevant, but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us.

So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self, and they're really quite distinct. The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time. From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two week vacation is twice as good as the one week vacation. That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self. For the remembering self, a two week vacation is barely better than the one week vacation because there are no new memories added. You have not changed the story. And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self. Time has very little impact on this story.

Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories. It is actually the one that makes decisions because, if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose, then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad, and that's the surgeon that will be chosen. The experiencing self has no voice in this choice. We actually don't choose between experiences. we choose between memories of experiences. And, even when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories. And basically you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn't need.

I have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case, that is, we go on vacations, to a very large extent, in the service of our remembering self. And this is a bit hard to justify I think. I mean, how much do we consume our memories? That is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self. And when I think about that, I think about a vacation we had in Antarctica a few years ago, which was clearly the best vacation I've ever had, and I think of it relatively often, relative to how much I think of other vacations. And I probably have consumed my memories of that three week trip, I would say, for about 25 minutes in the last four years. Now, if I had ever opened the folder with the 600 pictures in it, I would have spent another hour. Now, that is three weeks, and that is at most an hour and a half. There seems to be a discrepancy. Now, I may be a bit extreme, you know, in how little appetite I have for consuming memories, but even if you do more of this, there is a genuine question. Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences?

So I want you to think about a thought experiment. Imagine that your next vacation you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed, and you'll get an amnesic drug so that you won't remember anything. Now, would you choose the same vacation? (Laughter) And if you would choose a different vacation, there is a conflict between your two selves, and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict, and it's actually not at all obvious because, if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer. And if you think in terms of memories, you might get another answer. Why do we pick the vacations we do, is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves.

Now, the two selves bring up two notions of happiness. There are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply, one per self. So you can ask: How happy is the experiencing self? And then you would ask: How happy are the moments in the experiencing self's life? And they're all -- happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process. What are the emotions that can be measured? And, by the way, now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time. If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self, it's a completely different thing. This is not about how happily a person lives. It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life. Very different notion. Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions, is going to mess up the study of happiness, and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being, who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way.

The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years, and there are now efforts to measure the two separately, the Gallup Organization has a world poll with more that half a million people have been asked questions about what they thing of their life and about their experiences. And there have been other efforts along those lines. So in recent years, we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves. And the main lesson I think that we have learned, is they are really different. You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life, and that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they're living their life, and vice versa. Just to give you a sense of the correlation, the correlation is about .5. What that means is if you met somebody, and you were told, oh his father is six feet tall, how much would you know about his height? Well, you would know something about his height, but there's a lot of uncertainty. You have that much uncertainty. If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten, you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self. So the correlation is low.

We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self. We know that money is very important, goals are very important. We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like, spending time with people that we like. There are other pleasures, but this is dominant. So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves, you are going to end up doing very different things. The bottom line of what I've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being. It is a completely different notion.

Now, very quickly, another reason we cannot think straight about happiness is that we do not attend to the same things when we think about life, and we actually live. So, if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California, you are not going to get to the correct answer. When you ask that question, you think people must be happier in California, if, say, you live in Ohio. (Laughter) And what happens is when you think about living in California, you are thinking of the contrast between California and other places, and that contrast, say, is in climate. Well, it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and is not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are. But now, because the reflective self is in charge, you may end up -- some people may end up moving to California. And it's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to California in the hope of getting happier. Well, their experiencing self is not going to get happier. We know that. But one thing will happen. They will think they are happier, because, when they think about it, they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio. And they will feel they made the right decision.

It is very difficult to think straight about well-being, and I hope I have given you a sense of how difficult it is.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Chris Anderson: Thank you. I've got a question for you. Thank you so much. Now, when we were on the phone a few weeks ago, you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result came out of that Gallup survey. Is that something you can share since you do have a few moments left now?

Daniel Kahneman: Sure. I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number, which we absolutely did not expect to find. We found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self. When we looked at how feelings vary with income. And it turns out that, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans, and that's a very large sample of Americans, like 600,000, but it's a large representative sample, below an income of 600,000 dollars a year...

CA: 60,000.

DK: 60,000. (Laughter) 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. I mean I've rarely seen lines so flat. Clearly, what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that misery very, very clearly. In terms of the other self, the remembering self, you get a different story. The more money you earn the more satisfied you are. That does not hold for emotions.

CA: But Danny, the whole American endeavor is about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. If people took seriously that finding, I mean, it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about, say for example, taxation policy and so forth. Is there any chance that politicians, that the country generally, would take a finding like that seriously and run public policy based on it?

DK: You know I think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public policy. The recognition is going to be slow in the United States, no question about that, but in the UK, it is happening, and in other countries it is happening. People are recognizing that they ought to be thinking of happiness when they think of public policy. It's going to take awhile, and people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness, or whether they want to study life evaluation, so we need to have that debate fairly soon, How to enhance happiness, goes very different ways depending on how you think, and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self. This is going to influence policy, I think, in years to come. In the United States, efforts are being made to measure the experience happiness of the population. This is going to be, I think, within the next decade or two, part of national statistics.

CA: Well, it seems to me, this issue will, or at least should be, the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years. Thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics. Thank you Danny Kahneman.

What I wish I wroteon innovation

2010-04-06T15:28:00.000-07:00

Steve Wozniak developed the Apple computer. Steve Jobs, et al, were business partners. Read the Wozniak history. He did not develop the hardware and software because of a "culture of moral materialism," honed with complicated drama queens. For openers, he learned how raster scanning worked in a TV service class and he used that knowledge to control the scanning electron beam. He also figured out how to make the compact disk drive and even offered it to his employer, Hewlett Packard, who declined interest in it. The Apple Computer growth really began to bloom when users heard about and than ran VisiCalc spreadsheet program on the computer. That program, also required a lot of seat-of-the pants learning and then implementation.

The thesis my thesis adviser wouldn't let me do in grad school was on how Americans were beginning to believe their myths; how we were deifying our great inventors instead of learning how they actually did it. Productive innovation is the result of learning all you can, parking the seat of your pants in a chair and mastering the intricate and subtle details, doing experiments, keeping records and constantly asking what step to take next to achieve the desired goal. It typically means developing a wide-ranging knowledge.

Those who fail usually lack the self-discipline to stay focused. You make it sound like the keys to success in innovation are paisleys, long hair, incense, sandals and the right groove.

Author: Jumper from South Carolina

On the limitations of empirical studies

2010-02-20T12:59:00.000-08:00

Here's an excerpt from a blog entry by James Kwak, co-author with Simon Johnson at the Baseline Scenario:

I finally got around to listening to Planet Money’s interview with Russ Roberts from December. Russ Roberts and I are pretty sure to disagree on almost any actual policy question. But what I liked about his interview was that he basically admitted that policy questions cannot be settled by looking at the empirical studies. On whether the minimum wage increases or decreases employment for example, he says that he can poke holes in the studies whose conclusions he doesn’t agree with, but other people can poke holes in the studies he agrees with. In Roberts’s view, people’s policy positions are determined by their prior normative commitments.

I don’t completely agree. I don’t think that these questions, like the one about the minimum wage, are inherently unanswerable in the sense that the answer does not exist. But I agree that empirical studies are unlikely to get to the truth, particularly on a politically charged question, because there are so many ways to fudge an empirical study. As one of my professors said, there are a million ways you can screw up a study, and only one way to do it right. But I agree with the general sentiment. We are living in an age of numbers, where people think that statistics can answer any question. Statistics can answer any question, but they can answer it in multiple ways depending on who is sitting at the keyboard.

The drama of most consultants

2010-02-03T20:14:00.001-08:00

As the economy keeps pushing people into consulting, let me share this thought:

Usually, a consultant can only be as smart/[descriptor] as his dumbest/[opposite-descriptor] paying client.

2009-12-22T07:33:00.000-08:00

What's in between mathematics and politics? Humankind.

What's politics? Applied religion.

How many Destroy&Rebuild Cycles it takes?

2009-12-09T12:22:00.000-08:00

How many times have you said/been told, NO!, It doesn't work this way!, Neither that!, Nor the other!?

Few, a few, a hundred?

Check out to see what the late conductor Sergiu Celibidache had to say:

From the comments, submitted by one of his students:

What a great fortune and honor has been for me studying with him, even if briefly!

Every time I see this video I remember how many times he told me to quit smoking ...

How many memories. Thank you, Maestro, to have existed. And thanks for letting me meet the fate.

He was a man who could destroy you in the most violent and terrible ways. But he never did with malice, he did it to destroy your beliefs that were almost always wrong, and then rebuild. And when you rebuilt, he did it with love and dedication that was really touching. One minute he spoke sternly terrifying, the next minute we were close and I smiled with great love. He lives until today; I feel his love in me.

Sergiu Celibidache -- Teaching Session

Transcribed from Audio Recording Conducted in English, Curtis Institute of Music, February 1984

This is a small glimpse of what happened during the classroom sessions at Curtis in 1984. There were two sessions each day, each lasting two to three hours. And this went on for about ten days. Even so, this short excerpt presents some points fundamental to Celibidache's teaching. In particular, it was essential to understanding Celibidache to distinguish between sound as an acoustic phenomenon and sound asexperienced by the human mind. The fact that these two things are not the same is now completely uncontroversial. However, it is amazing the degree to which music students continue to find it a baffling thought!

-- Paul Henry Smith

Celibidache: If you look in an encyclopedia under phenomenology, it is sixty pages long in order to explain it. But what we intend under phenomenology is the approach to the sound and all its aspects. What is sound? Not the physical definition of sound, or the acoustical definition. This is of no value for us. Secondly -- the main object of phenomenological study -- how does sound work in the human mind? And in order to make it less abstract, yesterday I gave an example of repetition. There is not such a thing like repetition. When we hear something we got already fecundated. Our sensibilities are engaged; the second time it's different. So, the third time it does not interest us because a repetition is not a fact in itself. It finds itself in a context. So, what about the third time? It depends what comes. The most critical object of that view is the fact of sequences. Bach said that more than three sequences will let anything down. This did not stop Vivaldi from making eleven sequences! He was a man who didn't have any idea of harmony or whatever his style understood under harmony. He had no idea of music.

So, on one side: the study of sound. On the other: how does sound work on us? And the results are away from any form of individualism. They work on you as they do on me. For example, we have a melodic interval [descending minor third]. It is definitely so that I hear the second phenomenon [i.e., note] in function of the first. For the first has left already an impression on me. This is "priority in time." You, me and him -- it makes no difference -- we all hear the first note first.

Due to Husserl we came away from the idea of an objectivity in itself. And we came higher by the following idea: I have to find myself in you and you have to find yourself in me. The only tie that makes that objective is the fact that it's not dependent only on me, but on you also. He calls it, "intersubjective Betreffbarkeit."

Questions please.

Q: You spoke of the necessity to empty our minds. I recall having read about the alpha waves from the human being from birth to adulthood and that from birth to about age six these alpha waves are the slowest --

C: Yes, but it's not the same process. No, alpha waves cut you away. They dominate you and cut you away from the world. You are nearly asleep when you are in that state. It's not it at all.

Q: That's not the emptiness you were -- ?

C: Not at all! My emptiness -- "my" ... I cannot call it "my," but -- the emptiness we're thinking of is the highest activity. When Brentano says "every consciousness is a consciousness of something" and we learn every day through yoga that there is a consciousness that is a consciousness of nothing, it does not make sense intellectually. You're away. You do not want. No, no, no, no -- in order to say a perfect yes.

Myself, for instance: Before we start a concert, if I do not succeed in emptying myself, it will be memory. "I know the horn starts. I know the ..." No. This is against me. It will materialize out the function of memory. Music hasn't got anything to do with memory. Memory is related to the past. Hope is related to the future. Music is not related to anything. It is a spontaneous process of creation. The performer creates. What has the composer done? Shown you the way: "Look, if you go over those stages, those conflicts, you might come to this point."

Q: So, basically you're saying that you have to put yourself --

C: Yes, but if you say, "you have to put yourself" it looks like an act of will. It is not. The more you want to get empty, the less you are. You are possessed by a strong wish: to be empty. That is wrong. How one comes to it nobody will ever be able to explain.

Q: Could you describe the difference between spirit and all the bunches of experience that make our consciousness?

C: Very complicated approach. I hate to talk about spirit because in Germany there is nothing but spirit. And nobody knows what spirit is. What is spirit in your idea?

Q: Well, you can relate some of my idea if you read the bible where it says, "God created man in his own image." Which image? Is it the nose, the hair or the eyes? Well, not in MY mind.

C: But you still do not answer my question. What is spirit?

Q: [no reply]

C: You see, in the whole philosophical generation (I cannot speak about the States) there is not one who will find out what it is. We all talk about spirit. "You should think in the spirit of Washington." "You are a man without spirit." "A performer who sticks the visible aspect of music is not in the spirit of Beethoven." What is spirit, finally? This is the most devalued notion philosophically and also in the field of phenomenology. Yes, but if I relate the facts and if I go through the whole devaluation of that notion, everybody is right. This is what is spirit. And when the French say "vous avez de l'esprit," they mean you are very funny.

So, again, the consciousness in exercise of its absolute freedom. Now, why freedom? Because any other approach will be influenced by your personal bunch of aversions and acceptances. It is then that you will be able to follow the creative processes of the composer. You know, there is no definition for it. There is no definition for so many other things.

Q: What sort of preparation is necessary before a performance for one to be free and have a successful performance?

C: Before I will find an answer for you, I will be God in heaven! I cannot tell you more than how I do it myself. And this is not a method to be tried! "I sleep. I do not eat. I --" This will not touch it.

Q: I'm speaking in terms of the music and the instrumentalist or performer, conductor or --

C: Yes, but you can apply it on any field. So, when we do music, we must bring those people out of the state of "receivers of orders." Everyone in the orchestra is a performer accompanied by all the possibilities of that task. If they are not free, the whole performance will be an imitation of something --either the idea of the conductor, or the idea of the score. "For me the clarinet is important there." What is not important!? All the degrees of importance obey a state of priority. So, I can't tell you how we should prepare, but I can tell you one thing: the whole study of phenomenology will show you what music is not. What is a rehearsal? A series of no's. "No, you are too loud." "Too quick." "Not at the point." "No, no, no!" We never say what it is. We never say, "yes." A yes is what he does when he matches the exigences of the piece. The whole study is nothing but, "no, no, no, no."

Q: Is that necessary?

C: No, it's not necessary. I contend that people have never performed the 9th of Beethoven yet, and I'm going to prove that to you with the score. Are you content with that? Are you content that an idiot like Toscanini ruled sixty years long above everybody else? I am not. I am not content that the world has not discovered that music is not an amusement or a source of joy or satisfaction. It is much higher than that.

Q: But what I'm trying to get at is instead of saying "no," if you do what you did last night, then ...

C: You do not say "no," you open all the doors to a definite and eternal "yes." You do not say "no."

Q: Well, I'm talking practically now --

C: Yes, practically!

Q: Rather than say "no," say what the positive things are that you want in order to get your ...

C: What which is positive? "I want you to be spiritual." How does he manage that? But, if I tell him,"Look, you are the third part of a string quartet. If you pull on the D too much bow, the harmonics disappear. They stay in the air. They do not mix with the others." How could he know when they do mix? "You should play less and on the top of the bow ... Yes, can you hear something? Once again, 1st violin and 2nd violin alone ...Can you see what they do? The 2nd violin contradicts a little bit the 1st, then neutralizes, and then finally they go together. So, you are the third part which is supposed to back, to influence, and to put into value this little quartet. If you pull your bow (considering your heart is alright and the bow is not rough) and you do not hear how much damage is done by your individual position, I could offer you any theory and you will not buy it. But if I say, "A bit more. No, that's too big." (All of a sudden something comes out). Have you heard it? "Yes!" "Who played that?" Nobody did. But you structured so perfectly well that those values came out.

There is not one orchestra where two instruments will go together from this spiritual point of view. Together rhythmically ... no problem, and America is perfect. Technically, pitch ... perfect.

What's it all about? What is the second movement of Eroica? Is it a march? This is good for the press and for young, unsatisfied girls. What are you looking for, the pleasure of C minor with G major? It is a pleasure. Nobody will be able to destroy it. Even a military band will get it. Even a child playing the piano gets that primitive stuff. But how are they related to each other? From C
minor to G major what happens to the tension? Does it increase, or does it stay the same, or does it go down? Who taught us this? Nobody. Who taught us to find the end in the beginning? How does that happen? Who taught us that the essence of it is simultaneity?

Q: It seems to me that part of what you're saying related very closely to a sculptor who is involved with chipping away everything that doesn't belong in order to arrive at what does.

C: Yes, but what does not function is that the sculpture appears to you statically, and music doesn't. Music originates in time (whatever you understand under "music"). This is a static idea when I say "a landscape." "Every piece of music has a landscape." This is not correct, but I don't have another possibility to illustrate to you that there IS something which you cannot touch.

Q: But, perhaps it is not static to the sculptor, only to the person who is perceiving it. So, if it is not static to the sculptor, how would he bring the person who looks upon it to look upon it the same way he sculpted it?

C: Yes, for the sculptor it's not static because the whole process, the whole biography of how the piece comes into being is a time condition. He starts somehwere. This after that. Each alternative a time condition. For us it is "yes, I like it" or "yes, I do not." I cannot have the same approach to music. Where is the fifth of Beethoven? You think on the records? My goodness, this is the wrongest falsification of any musical truth. There is no substitute for space. So, what you've got is a kind of photography on the record. And then, who makes the record? How far is that man, concerning the structure of music? Most all of them are out. They stick to the notes because they do not know what else to do.

So, about the static: Music hasn't got a single static element. Even a constellation of different sounds is not static. So, what is finally the question? The sculptor's creative work is in time. But when he chops away the first piece, he knows how the head should lie at the end. So, it's identity -- end in beginning. But not for us, because we see the final result. (But there is an American, McClosky[?], who said that the whole biography of the scrap of hair is alive and that you should find out where it started and where it ends.

Q: What would be an ideal performance for you? Do you try to communicate anything to the audience?

C: I do not have any intention to communicate anything.

Q: Why perform for an audience, then? Why are they there?

C: Because they want to do the same as me.

Q: You would like them to experience music as you would?

C: No, no, not at all. I cannot think for them. I am one consciousness only. If they want to do the same as I do, they can. I cannot control what brings an individual to a concert. But, if I judge from the short span of my life, they try to find something which I already know. Many of them do. Like the Queen of Hanover who said "Maestro, it IS so." If she made that perception, then she was as free as I was. So, I cannot animate myself by the desire to give them something. Through my concentration (or whatever it is) something comes into being, and they might get it.

Q: So you are just presenting them with something?

C: What is there to be presented? That's static. Something, with your help, my help, and the musicians' help might come into being. I follow the recommended line of the composer and I could feel, more or less, what moved him to do so. So, if you (the audience) can do the same, it's all right. But I do not do it for you.

Termites and Towers

2009-11-15T07:41:00.001-08:00

Termites and Towers
Originally uploaded by jurvetson

Follow the link for some notes, taken by Steve Jurvetson, from a brain spa at the Santa Fe Institute, a weekend symposium on the multi-dimensions of evolution.

For an early taste, check out:
The trickle down theory of creation was “obvious” to people.
The bubble up theory of creation provides one unified perspective, one elegant synoptic model.
Darwin and Turing present a strange inversion of reasoning.
Turing showed that the computer does not need to know what arithmetic is. Computers have competence without comprehension.
Understanding is the effect, not the cause.
Natural selection is an automatic reason-finder. It doesn’t have to know what it is doing. The “Need to Know” principle in the intelligence community has an analog in the biosphere, driven by thrift rather than security.
We attribute more understanding than there needs to be. We lack a familiar conceptualization of semi-understood quasi-representations.
Like life being made of non-living parts, comprehension can be made from non-comprehending parts.
Our brains are more like termite castles than Turing’s computers.
Italian newspaper headline, translated: “Yes we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.”
Branching neurons are descendants of free-swimming organisms.
When running cultural software, brains become minds.
It’s not magic; it’s teamwork.
Words are memes that can be pronounced.
For evolution, you need high-fidelity copying, but it can’t be perfect copying.
The sea shapes the designs of Polynesian boats. If the boat makes it back home, copy it.
Memes are software viruses.
We are the first intelligent designers in the tree of life.

In response to my question about inscrutability of evolved artifacts:
“Yes, reverse engineering the brain may prove infeasible.”

This was Daniel Dennett quoted by Steve Jurvetson

Barbara Liskov on helping the mind go the distance

2009-11-15T07:27:00.000-08:00

During the question-and-answer session that followed the talk, Liskov was asked the secret of her success. Part of her answer — which must have chagrined some members of the audience — was that “I don’t work that many hours a day.” “I always went home at night, and didn’t work in the evening,” she said. “I always found that downtime to be really useful.” She also, however, emphasized the importance of pursuing research that’s interesting — rather than, say, the research that will generate the most publications. That way, she said, “at the end, if you fail, at least you did something interesting, rather than doing something boring and also failing.” After the laughter died down, she added, “Or doing something boring and then forgetting how to do something interesting.”

Barbara Liskov, winner of the Turing Award, instrumental in laying the foundations for today’s programming languages

roadmap for tough times

2009-10-28T07:04:00.000-07:00

TK Sung
San Francisco, CA

Yes, life is but a chemical dream in your 3 pound universe. Just enjoy the ride without clinging to delusions. That will keep your head from drying up of dopa/sero in tough times.

never misunderestimate the power of narrative

2009-10-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

.

.

The Other Minds

2009-09-12T17:11:00.001-07:00

on learning

2009-08-15T13:05:00.001-07:00

You sure do know a lot!
I'm rather thirsty for learning.
Amazing, how do you do that?
I only live once, I don't want to come back!

anselm23 said:

Two of the things I learned at the Learning & The Brain Conference at Avon Old Farms this year was the importance of learning cycles, and the value of face-to-face time. The brain takes in 4,000,000,000 bits of information per second through the sensorium of hearing, touch, taste, smell, sight, and kinetics.

The RAS processes this information (compresses it or filters it, we don't know) down to 2,0000 bps, and then the Amygdala analyzes it for stress or danger. If there's no stress or danger, the brain turns on its own reflective mode, and learning can occur, as the brain releases dopamine and seretonin, and a host of other neuro-chemicals to activate first working memory, and then long-term memory.

However, that cycle is short; you only have about 6-8 minutes of time before the neurotransmitters get re-absorbed and the mind begins to become bored. The only way to stimulate it is with a new burst of novelty that is neither stressful nor dangerous (to keep the Amygdala placated and happy).

Hence, the need to use Visual (V), Auditory (A) and Kinesthetic (K) methodologies to create novel, happy experiences so that the brain remains in a relaxed, happy, multisensory mode for a 40-minute period — the average length of a class at my school. Furthermore, there must be a priming — through homework, through classroom modification, through exposure to art, and through exposure to vocabulary — beginning a month to six weeks before the material is taught in the classroom.

Once in the classroom, this chart comes into play, quite literally. The priming feeds the cloud of energy that could/should occur in the classroom. Novelty initiates the first lesson, which encourages the students to learn by playing with, and then reviewing, a new concept every six-to-eight minutes. In a 40-minute class, this should happen 5-6 times. Furthermore, by combining this path of learning in the classroom with Ned Hallowell's FIVE STEPS of learning, any student (EVERY student) can in fact connect-play-practice-'master'-and-be-recognized in a 40-minute period. If I as the teacher am aware that the first 8-minute period is devoted to trying to get everyone to connect to the classroom's Daily Main Idea, then everyone should get connected. The second 8-minute period is about playing with a new concept or skill. The third is about practicing that new skill; the fourth is about working that skill to become much better at it. The last 8-minute period is about reviewing the day as a whole, and recognizing each student for what they have accomplished that day.

Then there follows a period of reflection or fermentation, where the student isn't in your class, but is interacting with and connecting to other ideas. The ideas bubble into long-term memory, and then have a chance to re-emerge during that night's homework. With luck, the ideas explored in class and in homework then are explored in dream that night — when we do a substantial part of the processing of information and data. Further, the homework ideally contains some element that primes the learning for a lesson in the next week, and the next month.

How long/deep is a crisishistorically informed perspective

2009-08-14T05:56:00.000-07:00

Broadly speaking, financial crises are protracted affairs. More often than not, the aftermath of severe financial crises share three characteristics.

First, asset market collapses are deep and prolonged. Real housing price declines average 35 percent stretched out over six years, while equity price collapses average 55 percent over a downturn of about three and a half years.

Second, the aftermath of banking crises is associated with profound declines in output and employment. The unemployment rate rises an average of 7 percentage points over the down phase of the cycle, which lasts on average over four years. Output falls (from peak to trough) an average of over 9 percent, although the duration of the downturn, averaging roughly two years, is considerably shorter than for unemployment.

Third, the real value of government debt tends to explode, rising an average of 86 percent in the major post–World War II episodes. Interestingly, the main cause of debt explosions is not the widely cited costs of bailing out and recapitalizing the banking system. Admittedly, bailout costs are difficult to measure, and there is considerable divergence among estimates from competing studies. But even upper-bound estimates pale next to actual measured rises in public debt. In fact, the big drivers of debt increases are the inevitable collapse in tax revenues that governments suffer in the wake of deep and prolonged output contractions, as well as often ambitious countercyclical fiscal policies aimed at mitigating the downturn.

The Aftermath of Financial Crises
Carmen M. Reinhart
University of Maryland. NBER and CEPR
Kenneth S. Rogoff
Harvard University and NBER

2009-08-12T09:08:00.001-07:00

...ever get amazed by how far wrong idea(s) can lead us before changing course? People even build systems round such ideas and congratulate themselves for their (temporary) internal consistency.

On the other hand, has it ever been anything but (later-proven as) wrong ideas leading us from here to there?

2009-08-02T19:15:00.001-07:00

… Because being alone

Has penetrated the bone,

I have misplaced the meaning

of pleasure; displaced

the measure of its loss.

Because being lost

has become my treasure,

daily I grow more flagrant

in my courtship of vagrant nowhere …

Louis Nordstrom

2009-05-01T06:01:00.000-07:00

Each time, I try to tell a brief story revolving around a raw material that I transform and a journey.

À chaque fois, j’essaie de raconter une histoire courte autour d’une matière que je transforme et d’un voyage.

Jean-Claude Ellena

Alessi Creativity Marketing Risk

2009-04-03T12:15:00.000-07:00

McKinsey publishes an interesting interview with Alberto Alessi, the 3rd in family line at the helm of the Italian design house Alessi. From that interview, here's an excerpt about how Alessi quantifies the odds of a new product success, testing, and how marketing informs decision making:

When I tried to explore the reasons for each product’s life, I came out with four parameters. All four were equally important for the final customer, but only two were central parameters for Alessi; the other two were peripheral for us.

1. The first central parameter is the degree to which people say, “Oh, what a beautiful object,” which represents the creation of a relationship between the object and the individual. We call this SMI, which stands for sensation, memory, imagination.
2. The second is the use that people can make of an object in order to communicate with other people. By this I mean that objects have become the main channel through which we convey our values, status, and personality to others—fashion is a typical case in point. Because people freely choose certain objects from the ones they come across, they tend to charge them with social meaning, as signs for communicating—in a visible, intelligible way—their distinguishing values. Objects can have status value or style value. By way of example, a gold Rolex watch is a status symbol, which suggests economic wealth, whereas a style symbol may be exemplified by an Aldo Rossi teapot, which reveals cultural sensitivity and familiarity with the architectural domain. Jean Baudrillard, a French sociologist, brilliantly expounded concepts like these.

3. The peripheral parameters are function and price. Each of these parameters has five degrees.

The formula doesn’t work for everything. But when we have a long history with a product, it works perfectly. If I have to evaluate a pot or a coffee maker or a kettle, for example, the score indicates exactly the number of pieces that we can sell.

When we are exploring a new area—for example, when we were designing a pen, which was completely new terrain for Alessi—then it becomes more difficult. The formula needs to be tuned in a different way. But the principle is the same.

The Quarterly: How does the formula differ from traditional consumer testing or market research?

Alessi: Testing isn’t really appropriate as a description. Unlike typical market research, which is often conducted by outside experts, this is organized by us, drawing on our experience. Our reactions to the test are very different too: a lot of companies would develop a prototype and test it with consumers, and, if the initial consumer reaction was negative, they would pull the plug on that product.

On the other hand, we and our designers are extremely interested in understanding, in advance, what the reaction of final customers would be—but not necessarily to help us decide what to produce or not produce. If I believe it is a good project and that it has to be done, I will support it. But negative feedback can be useful in helping the designers to modify something. Not all the time, but sometimes.

Fundamentally, we use the formula so we can afford more risk. I don't want to reduce the risk. Given my business, it makes no sense for me to reduce risk. I just need to determine where I am in order to have the opportunity to take a bit more risk.

2009-03-28T17:09:00.000-07:00

“If you don’t brand yourself, Google will brand you.”

Sherry Beck Paprocki

Sense making amidst loss of control, or Why randomness naturally fools so many

2009-03-11T18:46:00.000-07:00

Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception
Jennifer A. Whitson & Adam D. Galinsky

We present six experiments that tested whether lacking control increases illusory pattern perception, which we define as the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli. Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions/u>. Additionally, we demonstrated that increased pattern perception has a motivational basis by measuring the need for structure directly and showing that the causal link between lack of control and illusory pattern perception is reduced by affirming the self. Although these many disparate forms of pattern perception are typically discussed as separate phenomena, the current results suggest that there is a common motive underlying them.

On choice

2009-02-21T07:48:00.000-08:00

When you try your best but you don't succeed
When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse

too many meetings, and far too many poorly designed

2009-01-19T19:37:00.000-08:00

When I used to earn my living as a corporate employee, I would react to the too many meetings syndrome by asking if there was a vaccine against meetingitis, the virus whose vector is e-calendaring. I also remember when visiting Intel, there was a brief list on a wall in each conference room, a leftover from Andy Grove, reminding employees to keep meetings on topic, short, and with deliverables associated to individuals at the end.

Here's a set of recommendations from Reid Hastie, professor at the University of Chicago, who contends that “every organization has too many meetings, and far too many poorly designed ones.”

Whoever calls a meeting should be explicit about its objectives. This means specifying tangible goals and assigning responsibility for creating, summarizing and reporting on them. Ask yourself this question: Specifically, what do we want accomplished when we walk out of the room?
Everyone should think carefully about the opportunity costs of a meeting: How many participants are really needed? (Almost all business teams and committees are too big.) How long should the meeting last? Set a definite ending time. Anyone who doubts that the meeting is necessary, or thinks it’s too long, should speak up.
After productive or unproductive meetings, assign credit or blame to the person in charge. Then, if people have track records of leading ineffective meetings, don’t let them lead future sessions. When their expertise is essential, make them subordinate to an effective meeting leader.

Happy Meetings!

on democratically run organizations

2008-11-24T11:49:00.000-08:00

Democratically controlled orchestras are very good at getting rid of the best players and not very good at getting rid of the worst ones.

Neville Mariner in interview with Norman Lebrecht

on the finer points of branding

2008-09-18T05:25:00.001-07:00

Microsoft, as if to counter Apple where it thinks it stands a chance, is running its own ad-campaign, “Windows. Life without walls.” Now, if that's so, I am replaying someone's thought:

So “Windows. Life without walls” is the campaign slogan. I can already hear what a Seinfeld not paid by Microsoft would say in his monologue: "If you live a life without walls, why on earth would you need windows?" Jan, Mississippi

unsung heroes

2008-08-04T20:02:00.000-07:00

By looking at the architectural output of big names like Frank Gehry and Daniel Liebeskind, one realizes that the unsung heroes of today's habitats are the structural engineers. In music this was sorted out once the institution of the conductor was established--late in the 19^th century with the likes of Rubinstein, Nikitsch and Mahler. Architects are the equivalent of composers while structural engineers are of the conductors'. Then, we have those individuals who embody the best of two worlds, such as Santiago Calatrava, or Gustav Mahler.

In your profession, who are the unsung heroes? Moreover, what will you do about it?

comparative perspectives to professionalism

2008-07-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

Here are two answers to a question asking about paths to a career in quantitative finance:

Stand out of the crowd.If you are really looking for a HF quant career, go for a Master in Math or Physics, learn to program in C++ and mastering the Mathematica software.
Get an extra interest in Radioastronomy (wave theory is very related to financial markets), try to go to work with Prof Henry Lo at MIT Finance Lab.
and add some studies in Behavioral finance aimed at building behavioral quant elements in algos.
But don't go for another MBA (there are dozens out there..with experience) and don't bother for a CFA, unless you really have extra free time and don't know how to use it better.
CAIA may be culturally interesting, but still a young quali to have weight...

I am hiring a Civil Engineer with an MBA, yes, but a an extra Master in Math and C++ programming skills. I would have hired him without MBA...but not without the Math and programming skills.

Stand out of the crowd...MBAS are becoming too common to carry weight, at least that's what my colleagues are saying.

[the previous answer] hit it on the head, stand out from the crowd. But I would lean towards a communication approach instead of a “smart-person” approach.

The quant world is chock full of smart people, it feels like every genius with a PhD has already left academia for the siren call of six-figure salaries. When you talk to investment bankers, what they want today are two things; 1) People who can communicate effectively and concisely, and 2) answers - not more models.

Five years ago, hedge funds were trying to ramp up sophistication because there was a lot of easy money chasing “new ideas”. Researchers got to play with wave-form models and random forests to predict market movements. The recent financial crisis made people take a step back and ask some honest questions. First, how does GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) play into these models? Second, what is the value of these unbelievably fancy models? Can we still support or use them when our researcher with a 190 IQ gets poached by a different fund? Are simple to maintain GLM models good enough? Do our models account for rare events, or are they ignoring the Black Swan? How do I explain this stuff to an investor?!

A good approach to take in today’s environment, is a background in effective communication and illustration of how you can get answers for people. Your background is in marketing, so you should have a leg up on communication skills over pure modeling expert. I would start with an MBA from a top 50 (preferably top 15) school, a CFA is a nice add-on, but school quality is worth more. Make sure and focus on math/statistics/finance/programming, you must have these skills, but IMO, they play second-fiddle to communication these days. Focus on networking at school and lead every group project and every presentation. If you can hack that, you’ll be able to sell yourself as a communicative leader that can manage quant-analysts and get answers.

One is hiring, one is European, one is not working in the US; Go figure!

more randomness than admited by those paid to work to manage it

2008-04-03T17:29:00.000-07:00

From a recent Financial Times Lunch Interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Although most attention tends to focus on “bad” Black Swans, there are also good Black Swans, he says, for instance in scientific research and drug discovery. “There is a lot more randomness in biotechnology and any form of medical discovery. The role of design is overestimated. Every time we plan on trying to find a drug we don’t because it closes our mind. How are we discovering drugs? From the side-effects of other drugs.” Researchers very often “change their story” when they discover something by accident to give the impression it was by design. “The biggest discovery in cancer came from a mustard gas accident in Italy, not from the 130,000 compounds systematically tested by the National Cancer Institute. They were not looking to improve the lives of older men when they discovered Viagra.”

Isn't it so with (some) business models and other types of corporate behavior? Indeed, has anyone figured out Facebook's business model? In fact, this is not as new as the low(ered) costs of trying. And, since we are talking about Facebook, the risk for its kind comes from some startup that's studying all the shortcomings of the Facebook-genera (read, limitations of an ad-driven model at the expense of annoying the hell out of its users) and looking for better ways to connect Jane and Joe.

got innovation?

2008-02-27T18:56:00.000-08:00

Recently, Rajnish Sinha, Manager- Talent Acquisition at Fiserv Global Services, has answered with a panoptic of innovation models to a LinkedIn question. Here it is:

Scholars have identified at a variety of classifications for types innovations. Here is an unordered ad-hoc list of examples:

Business model innovation: involves changing the way business is done in terms of capturing value.
Marketing innovation: is the development of new marketing methods with improvement in product design or packaging, product promotion or pricing.
Organizational innovation: involves the creation or alteration of business structures, practices, and models, and may therefore include process, marketing and business model innovation.
Process innovation: involves the implementation of a new or significantly improved production or delivery method.
Product innovation: involves the introduction of a new good or service that is new or substantially improved. This might include improvements in functional characteristics, technical abilities, ease of use, or any other dimension.
Service innovation: refers to service product innovation which might be, compared to goods product innovation or process innovation, relatively less involving technological advance but more interactive and information-intensive .
Supply chain innovation: where innovations occur in the sourcing of input products from suppliers and the delivery of output products to customers
Substantial innovation: introduces a different product or service within the same line, such as the movement of a candle company into marketing the electric lightbulb.
Financial innovation: through which new financial services and products are developed, by combining basic financial attributes (ownership, risk-sharing, liquidity, credit) in progressive innovative ways, as well as reactive exploration of borders and strength of tax law. Through a cycle of development, directive compliance is being sharpened on opportunities, so new financial services and products are continuously shaped and progressed to be adopted.
Incremental innovations: is a step forward along a technology trajectory, or from the known to the unknown, with little uncertainty about outcomes and success and is generally minor improvements made by those working day to day with existing methods and technology (both process and product), responding to short term goals. Most innovations are incremental innovations. A value-added business process, this involves making minor changes over time to sustain the growth of a company without making sweeping changes to product lines, services, or markets in which competition currently exists.
Breakthrough, disruptive or radical innovation: involves launching an entirely novel product or service rather than providing improved products & services along the same lines as currently. The uncertainty of breakthrough innovations means that seldom do companies achieve their breakthrough goals this way, but those times that breakthrough innovation does work, the rewards can be tremendous. Involves larger leaps of understanding, perhaps demanding a new way of seeing the whole problem, probably taking a much larger risk than many people involved are happy about. There is often considerable uncertainty about future outcomes. There may be considerable opposition to the proposal and questions about the ethics, practicality or cost of the proposal may be raised. People may question if this is, or is not, an advancement of a technology or process. Radical innovation involves considerable change in basic technologies and methods, created by those working outside mainstream industry and outside existing paradigms. Sometimes it is very hard to draw a line between both.
New technological systems (systemic innovations): that may give rise to new industrial sectors, and induce major change across several branches of the economy.
Social innovation: a number of different definitions, but predominantly refers to either innovations that aim to meet a societal need or the social processes used to develop an innovation.

music making metaphors for teamwork

2008-01-16T20:26:00.000-08:00

Following is an excerpt from a signandsight.com write-up on ABQ. I insert it here for its being relevant to how small teams of highly skilled professionals get to work.

Asked what has changed over the years, Pichler says the quartet's "feeling for tempo" has improved. Their sense of both security and freedom has grown too. "The freer you are, the better you breathe and the more easily you can get across what you wish to communicate." He says he does not practice much alone, "really only to strengthen my feeling of psychological security." But this is made up for by the amount the quartet rehearses together: "You can achieve 90 percent relatively quickly, the rest takes a very long time." And you can get on each other's nerves a bit in the process. How can that be avoided? For a long time they tried being polite. But that politeness was too much for viola player Kakuska, who joined the quartet in 1981. "Make rules," he said, "otherwise I feel nervous!" So that is what they did. Rule No. 1: Everyone is allowed to try playing a passage three times. If after that it's still not right, he has to go away and practice in "isolation." Rule No. 2: If someone wants to end an argument, the argument has to end – as in "Shut up…" Another rule was introduced by cellist Valentin Erben: "Please don't criticize me until I can play it!" You don't need other people to tell you about the mistakes you notice yourself. And if it isn't clear where the problem is, "you don't have to figure it out right away," says Pichler. Everyone should first try to find out: "Is it my fault? Whose is the dominant voice? Who blends in? Even if two violins play absolutely perfectly, if they don't blend together well it doesn't sound right."

Rules evolve slowly over time. Each team member is likely to insert a rule. Rules should be kept to a minimum, like everything else. When all is said and theorized, it (r-)evolves round conversations.

2008-01-09T11:41:00.000-08:00

Many models people write about are successful for they're unique not because they are general. The generality of the written model is assumed by the writer and presumed by the reader. While it's not hard to see why the former may do so, the latter's behavior is puzzling.

renewed xerox-consciousness vs. busy work

2008-01-08T12:18:00.000-08:00

Change of logo at Xerox; Where is it going with it? To build on a new type of xerox-consciousness, or busy work from and round the office of Anne M. Mulcahy? For additional clues, let's keep an eye on XRX.

This is the evolution of Xerox brand identity as expressed by its logo:

Meanwhile, here's what others are saying:

Xerox Gets a Brand Makeover at BusinessWeek
Xerox Sports A New Logo at Forbes.com
Xerox Changes Logo to Suit New Products AP
Xerox unveils new logo at CNNMoney.com
Xerox softens image in brand overhaul Reuters
Xerox Unveils Biggest Change to Its Brand in Company History Business Wire
LinkedIn Q&A

2008-01-05T22:12:00.000-08:00

In the ever changing world, human nature is the constant.

On leadership

2008-01-03T22:41:00.000-08:00

These are excerpts from de Gaulle's "The Edge of the Sword," an old opus enjoying popularity among folks interested in leadership.

Leadership in the making is attracted to achievable power, demonstrates creative instinct, and pays a price for not being popular.

This speaks to the idea that leadership is common to situations of crisis (e.g. startups as continuous crises) rather than large bureaucracies running on quasi-stationary regimes. This is not to say that leadership cannot exist within large corporate environments--in general it exists only at the top levels in case the corporation has maintained somehow something from its founder(s) culture.

...

10 principles round doing things right

2007-12-26T21:07:00.000-08:00

Dieter Rams, Financial Times
Published: Sep 08, 2007

The fundamental thinking, the design philosophy, if you like, that has influenced me and my fellow designers was summed up in the early 1980s in 10 simple statements. They are a helpful means of orientation and understanding. They are not binding; good design is in a constant state of redevelopment - just like technology and culture.

1. Good design is innovative.

It does not copy existing product forms, nor does it produce any kind of novelty for the sake of it. The essence of innovation must be clearly seen in all functions of a product. The possibilities, in this respect, are by no means exhausted. Technological development keeps offering new chances for innovative solutions.

2. Good design makes a product useful.

The product is purchased in order to be used. It must serve a defined purpose - in both primary and additional functions. The most important task of design is to optimise the utility of a product.

3. Good design is aesthetic.

The aesthetic quality of a product - and the fascination it inspires - is an integral part of the product's utility. Without doubt, it is uncomfortable and tiring to have to put up with products that are confusing, that get on your nerves, that you are unable to relate to. However, it has always been a hard task to argue about aesthetic quality for two reasons. Firstly, it is difficult to talk about anything visual, since words have a different meaning for different people. Secondly, aesthetic quality deals with details, subtle shades, harmony and the equilibrium of a whole variety of visual elements. A good eye is required, schooled by years and years of experience, in order to be able to draw the right conclusion.

4. Good design helps a product to be understood.

It clarifies the structure of the product. Moreover, the product speaks, in a sense. Optimally, the product is self-explanatory and saves you the long, tedious perusal of the operating manual.

5. Good design is unobtrusive.

Products that answer this criterion are tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should always be neutral; they must not be seen; they must underline their usefulness.

6. Good design is honest.

An honestly designed product must not claim features it does not have - being more innovative, more efficient, of higher value. It must not influence or manipulate buyers and users.

7. Good design is durable.

It is nothing trendy that might be out-of- date tomorrow. This is one of the major differences between well-designed products and trivial objects for a waste-producing society. Waste must no longer be tolerated.

8. Good design is consistent to the last detail.

Thoroughness and accuracy of design are synonymous with the product and its functions, as seen through the eyes of the user.

9. Good design is concerned with the environment.

Design must contribute to a stable environment and a sensible use of raw materials. This means considering not only actual pollution but also the visual pollution and destruction of our environment.

10. Good design is as little design as possible.

Back to purity, back to simplicity.

...without words

2007-11-21T20:39:00.000-08:00

Cognitive dissonance

2007-11-14T07:05:00.000-08:00

From NYTimes: In 1956, Jack Brehm, a Yale student of Leon Festinger, carted some of his own wedding gifts into the lab (it was a low-budget experiment) and asked people to rate the desirability of things like an electric sandwich press, a desk lamp, a stopwatch and a transistor radio.

Then they were given a choice between two items they considered equally attractive, and told they could take one home. After making a choice (but before having it snatched away), they were asked to rate all the items again.

Suddenly they had a new perspective. If they had chosen the electric sandwich press over the toaster, they raised its rating and downgraded the toaster. They convinced themselves they had made by far the right choice.

On happiness

2007-11-12T20:41:00.000-08:00

From NYTimes: Happiness seems fairly cheap to manipulate. In one experiment, subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire about personal satisfaction after Xeroxing a sheet of paper. Those who found a dime lying on the Xerox machine reported substantially higher satisfaction with their lives.

Positioning through pricing

2007-10-24T11:23:00.000-07:00

Pricing plays an important role in branding. The luxury brands have been the first to "discover" such an interplay, wholesalers cannot be too far behind either.

Consumer markets in developed economies have been facing steady dollar inflation and rise in commodity prices.

From a branding/positioning perspective, the status qvo for companies selling into the US market is being challenged.

US imports come from the following areas:

China for trinkets--whose currency is pegged to the dollar;
Europe for upscale products--since the "discovery" of (affluent)consumers in emerging markets they are no longer that dependent on the US consumer;
Japan for automobiles and electronics--pegged currency;
Latin America for agricultural products--prices have come up since such products are imported mostly by US brands.

Exporters into the US have several options:

Pass the increased costs onto the US consumer through higher prices,
Lower the quality;
Gimmicks;
Revive US based manufacturing/assembly plants.

As examples for gimmicks, consider the socks at Wal-Mart that are shorter and sell at the same price. Trash bags at Costco, sold under Kirkland Signature brand, are weaker. Import cars, due to the annual cycle of "innovation" and reduced Detroit competition have been able to play the "segmentation" game to their advantage and passed along cost increases. Moreover, sensing the market share opportunity play, automotive luxury brands are coming in with cars at lower prices.

For a conversation about this, check out the Q&A section at LinkedIn.

"New and Improved"

2007-10-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

Consider the recent blow-up at Medtronic, which "[...] estimated that about 2.3 percent of patients with the Fidelis lead, or 4,000 to 5,000 people, would experience a lead fracture within 30 months of implantation. Those patients will require a delicate surgical procedure to replace the lead, experts said.

Replacing leads on a heart device like a defibrillator is considered by experts to be far more dangerous than replacing the device itself.

The Fidelis lead has been used with Medtronic defibrillators since 2004, and most patients who received Medtronic defibrillators since then have them.

Vice President Dick Cheney uses a Medtronic defibrillator, but it was implanted in 2001, before the Fidelis lead was introduced."

I think this is just one illustration of the "new and improved" drive for revenue. Grocery or home improvement shoppers know that stuff keeps "changing" all the time.

For more on the "new and improved" tactic to branding/product positioning, check out the discussion at LinkedIn Q&A.

Belief, lubricant of capitalism

2007-09-27T22:30:00.000-07:00

"Liquidity" is a figure of speech, describing the following situation:

A is ready and able to buy an asset from B on short notice
At a price B considers reasonable
Which usually means C has to be willing to lend money to A
Which means C believes A is solvent and the asset is good collateral
And if A is a dealer, A and C both have to believe that the asset could be readily sold to D
Which means they both have to believe that there is an E willing to lend money to D.

In short, liquidity is about group belief in the solvency of counterparties and the reliability of prices, reminding us that "credit" and "credo" have the same root. When no one is sure who is broke, and there is high uncertainty about prices, we will discover that liquidity has vanished, however plentiful it may recently have seemed.

To alter Shakespeare a bit: "Tell me where's Liquidity bred, In the heart or in the head?"

At the end of the boom, in the heart, not the head, unfortunately.

(From a Letter to the FT Editor by Alex J. Pollock, Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute)

Enabling group creativity

2007-09-15T06:58:00.000-07:00

Creativity, through group interaction, can be achieved when several of the following conditions are met:

Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities).Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
Distorted sense of time - one's subjective experience of time is altered.
Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.

In fact, the above points describe the conditions for flow, as defined by Csikszentmihalyi. He goes on to say:

When in the flow state, people become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

Source: "Beyond Boredom and Anxiety," Csikszentmihalyi

First, eat your own (...) food

2007-08-15T01:37:00.000-07:00

Another great question from LikedIn reads: Do You Taste This Stuff Before You Release It? To which I replied:

I suggest an answer from a slightly different perspective than usual.

In the light of today's (lowered) numbers from Wal-Mart, I was wondering if its executives (the guys responsible for its well-being) ever shop at their own stores. Moreover, while the story about the WMT numbers was told in the background, the images where showing a scene from a store where a Wal-Mart employee, sporting the "how may I help you" message, was passing by shoppers without showing any of the solicitude implied by the message printed on their vests. I wonder if the employees even know that message (in form or meaning) since many a time I find myself lost, without any help at Wal-Mart--in contrast to Costco or Whole Foods.

To take it next to the tech-sector, anybody has any doubts as to where the internet info is coming from for Bill Gates or Steve Balmer, Is it MSN Search or Google?

So, by extrapolation, chances are that (the equivalent of) a product manager at your regular food company shops up-market.

Building a senior management team

2007-08-15T01:26:00.000-07:00

A recent question on LinkedIn reads like this: How to build a strong senior management team? To which I responded as follows:

Since there are several answers covering the competency aspects, I only add CHEMISTRY, which is just as important this early on. It's so easy to ignore that what you hire now is what your organization will look like when/if it matures--you are building the organizational DNA.

Myself, I'd look also to further define competency in terms of capability more than (only) expereince. In other words, it's not only people from targeted markets/industries I'd like to hire, but also versatile individuals who've been top achievers along their (professional) lives.

communicable misspellings

2007-06-19T14:03:00.000-07:00

You probably recall the FCUK brand--clever play on a taboo word that fueled the imagination of clients and 'pros' in subliminal advertising alike. Have a look at the following text and think what it can do for you:

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

Any idea(s)? Suggestions, as always, welcome.

A quant's view of models

2007-06-17T20:19:00.000-07:00

Q: You're a creator of models, but you also work with real live traders. How far do models go? Where does their value stop? When can you put too much trust in them?

Emanuel Derman: I've been forced to be fairly pragmatic about them. There was a trading desk head who said that giving somebody a Black-Scholes calculator doesn't make him a trader. The models give you some way of thinking about the problem you're tackling, but they don't necessarily give you the answer.

I like to think of models as a Gedankenexperiments-the imaginary experiments physicists used to try to think about something they couldn't do, like sitting on the edge of a light beam and travelling at the speed of light.

I think that's what models are good for in finance. In most cases the world doesn't really behave in exactly the way as the model you've constructed. You're trying to make a poor approximation of reality, though it has big advantages. You can ask, "What happens if volatility goes up or interest rates go down?" It allows you to stress-test your view of the world in some way and then come up with a price based on what you can understand.

No paradox here, just to make the distinction between the accuracy and usefulness of models.

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

2007-02-12T11:56:00.000-08:00

These epigrams of Alan Perlis, a computer scientist, are relevant not only for engineers in general, but also for those professionals dealing with complexity in their environments. The ones I found particularly interesting for the effective manager are in bold type-face.
: 1. One man's constant is another man's variable.; 2. Functions delay binding: data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.; 3. Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.; 4. Every program is a part of some other program and rarely fits.; 5. If a program manipulates a large amount of data, it does so in a small number of ways.; 6. Symmetry is a complexity reducing concept (co-routines include sub-routines); seek it everywhere.; 7. It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.; 8. A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.; 9. It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures.; 10. Get into a rut early: Do the same processes the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference (!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.; 11. If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.; 12. Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.; 13. If two people write exactly the same program, each should be put in micro-code and then they certainly won't be the same.; 14. In the long run every program becomes rococo - then rubble.; 15. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.; 16. Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.; 17. If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.; 18. A program without a loop and a structured variable isn't worth writing.; 19. A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.; 20. Wherever there is modularity there is the potential for misunderstanding: Hiding information implies a need to check communication.; 21. Optimization hinders evolution.; 22. A good system can't have a weak command language.; 23. To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program.; 24. Perhaps if we wrote programs from childhood on, as adults we'd be able to read them.; 25. One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.; 26. There will always be things we wish to say in our programs that in all known languages can only be said poorly.; 27. Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.; 28. Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?; 29. For systems, the analogue of a face-lift is to add to the control graph an edge that creates a cycle, not just an additional node.; 30. In programming, everything we do is a special case of something more general - and often we know it too quickly.; 31. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.; 32. Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.; 33. The 11th commandment was "Thou Shalt Compute" or "Thou Shalt Not Compute" - I forget which.; 34. The string is a stark data structure and everywhere it is passed there is much duplication of process. It is a perfect vehicle for hiding information.; 35. Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers.; 36. The use of a program to prove the 4-color theorem will not change mathematics - it merely demonstrates that the theorem, a challenge for a century, is probably not important to mathematics.; 37. The most important computer is the one that rages in our skulls and ever seeks that satisfactory external emulator. The standardization of real computers would be a disaster - and so it probably won't happen.; 38. Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.; 39. Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.; 40. There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.; 41. Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.; 42. You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.; 43. In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.; 44. Sometimes I think the only universal in the computing field is the fetch-execute-cycle.; 45. The goal of computation is the emulation of our synthetic abilities, not the understanding of our analytic ones.; 46. Like punning, programming is a play on words.; 47. As Will Rogers would have said, "There is no such thing as a free variable."; 48. The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.; 49. Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.; 50. When we understand knowledge-based systems, it will be as before - except our finger-tips will have been singed.; 51. Bringing computers into the home won't change either one, but may revitalize the corner saloon.; 52. Systems have sub-systems and sub-systems have sub-systems and so on ad finitum - which is why we're always starting over.; 53. So many good ideas are never heard from again once they embark in a voyage on the semantic gulf.; 54. Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.; 55. A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.; 56. Software is under a constant tension. Being symbolic it is arbitrarily perfectible; but also it is arbitrarily changeable.; 57. It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.; 58. Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.; 59. In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.; 60. Dana Scott is the Church of the Lattice-Way Saints.; 61. In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.; 62. In computing, invariants are ephemeral.; 63. When we write programs that "learn", it turns out we do and they don't.; 64. Often it is means that justify ends: Goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.; 65. Make no mistake about it: Computers process numbers - not symbols. We measure our understanding (and control) by the extent to which we can arithmetize an activity.; 66. Making something variable is easy. Controlling duration of constancy is the trick.; 67. Think of all the psychic energy expended in seeking a fundamental distinction between "algorithm" and "program".; 68. If we believe in data structures, we must believe in independent (hence simultaneous) processing. For why else would we collect items within a structure? Why do we tolerate languages that give us the one without the other?; 69. In a 5 year period we get one superb programming language. Only we can't control when the 5 year period will begin.; 70. Over the centuries the Indians developed sign language for communicating phenomena of interest. Programmers from different tribes (FORTRAN, LISP, ALGOL, SNOBOL, etc.) could use one that doesn't require them to carry a blackboard on their ponies.; 71. Documentation is like term insurance: It satisfies because almost no one who subscribes to it depends on its benefits.; 72. An adequate bootstrap is a contradiction in terms.; 73. It is not a language's weaknesses but its strengths that control the gradient of its change: Alas, a language never escapes its embryonic sac.; 74. It is possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as soap bubble?; 75. Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.; 76. It is the user who should parametrize procedures, not their creators.; 77. The cybernetic exchange between man, computer and algorithm is like a game of musical chairs: The frantic search for balance always leaves one of the three standing ill at ease.; 78. If your computer speaks English it was probably made in Japan.; 79. A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.; 80. Prolonged contact with the computer turns mathematicians into clerks and vice versa.; 81. In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word "frustration".; 82. We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem!; 83. What is the difference between a Turing machine and the modern computer? It's the same as that between Hillary's ascent of Everest and the establishment of a Hilton hotel on its peak.; 84. Motto for a research laboratory: What we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.; 85. Though the Chinese should adore APL, it's FORTRAN they put their money on.; 86. We kid ourselves if we think that the ratio of procedure to data in an active data-base system can be made arbitrarily small or even kept small.; 87. We have the mini and the micro computer. In what semantic niche would the pico computer fall?; 88. It is not the computer's fault that Maxwell's equations are not adequate to design the electric motor.; 89. One does not learn computing by using a hand calculator, but one can forget arithmetic.; 90. Computation has made the tree flower.; 91. The computer reminds one of Lon Chaney - it is the machine of a thousand faces.; 92. The computer is the ultimate polluter. Its feces are indistinguishable from the food it produces.; 93. When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.; 94. Interfaces keep things tidy, but don't accelerate growth: Functions do.; 95. Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.; 96. Computers don't introduce order anywhere as much as they expose opportunities.; 97. When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.; 98. In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.; 99. In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.; 100. We will never run out of things to program as long as there is a single program around.; 101. Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.; 102. One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.; 103. Purely applicative languages are poorly applicable.; 104. The proof of a system's value is its existence.; 105. You can't communicate complexity, only an awareness of it.; 106. It's difficult to extract sense from strings, but they're the only communication coin we can count on.; 107. The debate rages on: Is PL/I Bachtrian or Dromedary?; 108. Whenever two programmers meet to criticize their programs, both are silent.; 109. Think of it! With VLSI we can pack 100 ENIACs in 1 sq.cm.; 110. Editing is a rewording activity.; 111. Why did the Roman Empire collapse? What is the Latin for office automation?; 112. Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.; 113. The only constructive theory connecting neuroscience and psychology will arise from the study of software.; 114. Within a computer natural language is unnatural.; 115. Most people find the concept of programming obvious, but the doing impossible.; 116. You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.; 117. It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?; 118. If you can imagine a society in which the computer-robot is the only menial, you can imagine anything.; 119. Programming is an unnatural act.; 120. Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.; 121. In seeking the unattainable, simplicity only gets in the way.

If there are epigrams, there must be meta-epigrams.

122. Epigrams are interfaces across which appreciation and insight flow.

123. Epigrams parametrize auras.

124. Epigrams are macros, since they are executed at read time.

125. Epigrams crystallize incongruities.

126. Epigrams retrieve deep semantics from a data base that is all procedure.

127. Epigrams scorn detail and make a point: They are a superb high-level documentation.

128. Epigrams are more like vitamins than protein.

129. Epigrams have extremely low entropy.

130. The last epigram? Neither eat nor drink them, snuff epigrams.

The leadership mix

2007-01-22T21:00:00.000-08:00

Upon his retirement from Intel, Andy Grove was asked how he kept his employees motivated. His answer was:

Well, part of it is self-discipline and part of it is deception, deception in the sense that you pump yourself up and put a better face on things than you start off feeling. But after a while, if you act confident, you become more confident. So the deception becomes less of a deception.

Idea for the purveyors of HDTV sets

2007-01-22T20:09:00.000-08:00

For the past year, and culminating with the holiday shopping spree, flat screen HDTV sets have been selling like hotcakes. Judging by how hammered the stocks of HDTV manufacturers and sellers got, one would expect a flattening of the adoption curve for a good part of 2007. Indeed, come 2008 and the obligation for HDTV programming will be fact. However, should the manufacturers want to do anything about sales in the meantime, why not offer trade-in options for the current owners of perfectly fine, yet older, TV sets? This way, the upgrade decision can be accelerated for those late buyers held back more by the psychological cost of replacing something that works than the marginal economic cost.

The mechanics of creativity

2006-12-02T22:23:00.000-08:00

From notoriously creative people, here are some insights into how they (do not) conjure up the muses:

Which of your two homes [n.b. rural Burgundy vs. urban Paris] do you find most inspirational?

Neither. No place has any inspirational importance. Ideas come in the train, during a boring dinner, watching some ridiculous television program. The mechanism of inspiration is abhorrent. One thing's for sure - I cannot find inspiration in my workshop at 9 o'clock in the morning. It will come when it comes, which is what Picasso meant when he said "je ne cherche pas, je trouve," [n.b. I don't seek, I find]. Bertrand Lavier

Whenever a design solution emerges from given peculiarities, there's a sense of inevitability about the solution. If the observation is so obvious, we feel the artist is taking a "cheap shot." In cases where the relationship between question and answer is more penetrating, the results can be very satisfying. Milton Glaser: Graphic Design

Links on Google.com?I don't think so...

2006-11-29T17:52:00.000-08:00

Henry Blodget suggests that Google "try links" on its home page. Obviously, such advice shows Henry's bias towards making the Street numbers before most anything else. In the same posting, we get a quote from Sergey Brin as saying, “What we are concerned about is that if we continue to develop so many new individual products … you will have to essentially search for our products before you can even use them.”

Instead of suggesting links on Google.com, I am strongly of the opinion that Google.com should stay as "clean" as possible, thus reinforcing its brand identity of being uncluttered. On the other hand, from a usability + business model perspective, yes, Google needs to make it extremely easy for people to aggregate/personalize their Google experience (i.e. have a starting page from where one can access all the various Google services. To go a step more in this direction, why not even have Google suggest some layouts based on the user's activity? So, Google should bring somehow front and center the ability for its users to customize their Google experience, in addition to being able to advertise for new services.

From the other point raised in Henry's posting, one should see how clever Brin is when he says that "you will have to essentially search for our products before you can even use them." Being myself involved in several web-publishing projects, I can highly appreciate the (content-, in my case, applications- in Google's) ideas visitors indirectly lead you to by their searches.

Multi-sided platforms

2006-11-06T22:06:00.000-08:00

From another interview at HBS Working Knowledge, we learn from Andrei Hagiu, assistant professor in the Strategy unit at Harvard Business School, about success factors for software platforms:

The quintessential key to success of software platforms has always been their ability to build large, well-functioning ecosystems of third-party producers who build on top of the software platform. Without them, no one would have any need for the platforms. The relevant management skills are:

Knowing the community and being able to identify and attract the third-party producers who can build the most valuable innovations.
Knowing how to manage the ecosystem: Deciding the right balance between quantity and quality; knowing when to compete and when to collaborate with partners; being able to manage the conflicts of interest inherent to such compete-collaborate relationships; knowing how to monetize the value created by the ecosystem (which member of the ecosystem is needed most—developers or end users—and how the pricing scheme must be designed to get both sides on board).
Knowing how to architect the physical design and scope of the platforms: what to do in-house vs. what to rely on others to do; which features to offer and which to forego. Knowing how to spot competitive threats early, both within the industry, but most important and difficult, in adjacent industries, where other platforms might be poised to strike (e.g., smart phones moving into the PDA industry); and conversely, spotting expansion opportunities in adjacent industries (e.g., NTT DoCoMo expanding into payment systems).

Not being sure of the practicality of the above quotation, given its descriptive rather than prescriptive nature, we'll have to read Hagiu's co-authored and recently published Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries. The value of Hagiu's approach seems to come from carefully considering the tradeoffs at several junction points along the pathway to building a platform.

Until reading the book, here's one more Hagiu-insight on platforms: a multi-sided platform trumps even a best in class product--a multi-sided platform being a platform supporting a multi-sided business. Hagiu restricts this observation to multi-sided markets, which in this case may well account for network effects. The next theoretical quest(ion) becomes: When (read after how many supported sides) does a platform enter diminishing returns?

Channels vs. Superior Product

2006-11-06T21:18:00.000-08:00

From an interesting interview with Pai-Ling Yin, assistant professor in the Strategy unit at Harvard Business School, we learn about the relative importance of distribution channels vs. technology progress in the larger context of technology diffusion. Simply put, distribution channels are twice as important as "technological superiority". Here's an excerpt:

The classical debate in economics has been whether the market always produces the "best" outcome. Best can be defined in different ways. In one stream of the debate, "best" has been defined as "technologically superior" (again, a term that can be defined differently). So, does the market always lead the "technologically superior" outcome, or can economic actors take actions to influence the market outcome so that a "technologically inferior" outcome arises?

We conclude that while both technological progress (measured by releases of newer and better versions of browsers: version 1, version 1.1, version 2, etc.) and strategic actions (distribution browsers with PC purchases) increase the rate of diffusion of browsers into the population, the strategic actions (distribution or restrictions on distribution in the case of Netscape) are twice as important as technical progress.

Read on by following this link and also learn about the importance of first- vs. second-mover advantage. It looks like there is little hope for non-IE browsers (e.g. FireFox), yet I do not want to take such conclusion for granted.

Everyone is trying to hit the lottery of attentionRichard A. Lanham

2006-06-13T07:10:00.000-07:00

Google has made it the new business religion of the internet: the money is in advertising. That Search 2.0 may not be enough even for Google itself to sustain the revenue as expected is not beyond question--see also: On advertising, The only/last business model?.

However, before deciding whether or not advertising is going to be your value-capture mechanism, ponder these two facets of the information economy:

-it is oversupplied with content and undersupplied with human attention-

Indeed, the information economy is saturated with content--80 million websites, 500 TV channels, countless blogs/podcasts/mp3s/video downloads, etc--whereas the scarce resource becomes the human attention needed to make something out of the content described above and more.

If one accepts the two facets of the information economy as premises in the quest for internet riches, the practitioner, be that web designer or business person, would do well to consider insigth from non-traditional sources--rooted in the culture of our time. Richard A. Lanham, professor emeritus of English at UCLA, is such a candidate, and in his recent book, The Economics of Attention, one can find some practical advice as though coming from the perspective of one of the American masters of attention management: Andy Warhol himself. From the chapter 2 of the book here's an excerpt:

Let’s summarize the rules of attention-economy art as Andy practiced them:

Build attention traps. Create value by manipulating the ruling attention structures. Judo, not brute force, gets the best results. Duchamp did this for a joke. Do it for a business.
Understand the logic of the centripetal gaze and how to profit from it.
Draw your inspiration from your audience not your muse. And keep in touch with that audience. The customer is always right. No Olympian artistic ego need apply.
Turn the “masterpiece psychology” of conventional art upside down:

Mass production not skilled handwork
Mass audience not connoisseurship
Trendiness not timelessness
Repetition not rarity

Objects do matter. Don’t leave the world of stuff behind while you float off in cyberspace. Conceptual art gets you nowhere. Create stuff you can sell.
Live in the present. That’s where the value is added. Don’t build your house in eternity. “My work has no future at all. I know that. A few years. Of course my things will mean nothing.”

Those who choose to ignore these points do it at their own (business model) risk.

_______________________
Another 'classic' of this genera is "The Age of Access"

Seller and Buyer Signals

2006-05-30T20:10:00.000-07:00

Often we learn from the website of some consultancy claims like this: "We have over 150 years of combined experience in..." Analogous to this type of claim we have those in the multi-channel audio amplifiers market that read: "150 Watts Total Power."

The idea behind such claims is that the consultancy has, let us say, 8 employees with 20 years of experience each, and the amplifier pumps 30 Watts in each one of its 5 channels. In both cases, the customer gets more than anyone's 20 years worth of experience, and 30 Watts coming from any single speaker, respectively. The problem with such claims is that neither work experience nor the channel power in amplifiers is an additive function--generally speaking, f is an additive function if for every two real x₁ and x₂, f(x₁ + x₂) = f(x₁) + f(x₂). In other words, nobody gets the arithmetic sum of all parts as advertised.

When it comes about people's experience, it could be redundant, irrelevant, and almost never a linear function. I, for one, would so much more welcome the advice from 5 people with 30 years of experience each than from 50 people with only 3 years. As for amplifiers, I'll take anytime a 75 Watt stereo amplifier (75 Watts per each channel) over a 5 channel-30 Watt one.

"150 years of combined experience" shows lack of intellectual rigor, whereas "150 Watts Total Power" shows unethical behavior, of those who want to sell that service, and amplifier, respectively. To me, the first type of claim is a signal about sellers and the second about buyers.

The (usually) missing view

2006-05-30T09:45:00.000-07:00

It is not often that you get to learn the fair views of an executive while s/he is still active--too much PR, and excessive 'non-confrontational' working environments. Such considerations make it that much more valuable the following comment with the MiniMSFT blog by MrMischevous, aVP in product development at a large software vendor. I'll provide context and pointers throughout the text:

I'm a VP in product development (not for Microsoft, but another major apps vendor - there aren't that many, so take your pick). Where possible, I'd like to give you the VP take on many of the issues you've raised here:

1) Curves: Everyone, including VPs, hate curves. But the alternatives aren't that pretty. What typically happens in a salary review is that senior execs, based on overall market forecasts, put aside an amount for bonuses. Each department is then given a budget (typically based on the number and level of people) that they must fit into.

Several Microsoft employees seemed to be very unhappy with the Curve ranking system at their company. At a recent company meeting, they were told that the 'curve' was gone.

This is where a curve is useful - it stops grade inflation. It is easy (and lazy) for a manager to grade all of his people at 4. But when it comes time to assign bonuses and merit increases, what should he do? Should he just give them all the same? Now look at it from the VP's perspective. She needs to review all of her managers and their orgs. How can she differentiate on people if her managers gave everyone a 4? And what happens when promotions are discussed? Too many promotions leads to title inflation (which in turn leads to bogus titles being created to slow down advancement or artificial rules limiting how quickly people can get promoted). But if everyone is a 4, how does the VP decide who gets bumped up? In this case, it comes down to which managers yell the loudest or are the best arguers. Not a good system either.

Curves themselves are not innately bad - they force people to make decisions. It's the structure of the curve and the peripheral items associated to the curves that cause the most angst, as follows:
1) Curves usually mean that the same people are always at the top: This is the biggest problem. If you're a manager in charge of a five-person group, the problem is that you will probably end up giving the same people the same scores year after year. That is incredibly frustrating to people, as it feels like nothing they do will affect their score. The only cure here is active and good management - the manager needs to promote people and rank them against their new position, which probably results in a lower score as they are being graded against a much higher set of standards, and against people who have been in the role longer. Stars will need to be told of this at the time that they are promoted or they will be unhappy also. There is no easy answer here, but there are fair answers, which result from open communication as to the standards and requirements of a title. People may not like the answers, but at least they will at least admit they come from a fair process.
2) Curves are innately biased towards management - If I'm a Senior Director ranking my group, who will be number one on my list? Me, of course. Spots 2-4 will usually be my Directors (and hopefully those rankings are warranted). Then come the individual contributors, which is not a pretty picture for them. This inequity can be solved, but it requires that the HR organization defines two curves - one for Directors and above, and one for individual contributors. This approach also tends to root out problem managers pretty quickly too.
3) Gaming of the curve - if stock and bonuses are tightly tied to position, then managers will have to start swapping people around on the curve just to make sure that there is some equity on the compensation over the years. It's far better to have a system which gives recommendations but allows the manager some leeway.

So curves going away might seem like a good thing, but now you've lost the discipline in management that comes with curves. And don't for a moment think that because the curves went away that stack-ranking went away. Every good manager has to know which people are the best, and which must be kept happy at all costs. That will never change.

2) RIFs: GE has had a "Bottom 5" program for many years. Once a year, the bottom five percent of the organization is let go. It is not a pleasant process, but in my experience the people who went were known to be the weakest link in the organizations, and the end result was better for both them and the org. However, for this program to work, the organization CANNOT be static. The first cut or two might be getting rid of the B- players, but after that you start cutting into good people, and that's when morale gets hit.

There's a second reason that most middle management is not behind a Bottom 5 program - in most cases they will not get replacement headcount. If their Bottom 5 candidate is providing any positive value at all, they will be loathe to to fire them. Good managers take a hard look at the services their groups are providing, and start whacking the work which provides the least value, and start pushing others to different organizations better equipped to handle them. A great example is tech support - engineers and PMs should be writing FAQs and doing a weekly half hour call with the tech support engineers instead of answering questions directly. Leverage is your friend.

3) Finally, I'd like to add my take on the question you posed earlier: "Let's say you walk into your office one morning. You reflect on your team before going through the morning email and have the realization that one of your reports (who perhaps has done a good job making you feel like an excellent manager) was in fact playing the system like this FAQ calls out. Or worse. What would you do?"

The person tending the MiniMSFT blog posted an FAQ, (How it works: FAQ on reviews, promotions, job changes, and surviving re-orgs), which stands as a set of basic survival skills in the Microsoft landscape.

Simple. If they weren't good at their own job, I'd counsel or fire them (and have done so in the past). But if they were good at their own job, I'd promote them.

I could hear the anguished screams of MM readers as I typed that last sentence. Why, they scream, would you allow style to to win over substance? Simple. To reach the higher levels, both style and substance is required. Despite what engineers would like to think, getting to Director is only partially a function of how technically good you are at your own job. I recently promoted two people in my own org to Director. Predictably, within a week two others came to my desk asking when they could make Director, since they had been there as long as the other guys. When I asked them why they thought I had promoted the other two, they sat quietly - they were unable to articulate why I had made the decision. I explained to them that at the higher levels, the intangible qualities are as important as the tangible ones - the ability to walk into a room and "own" it, the ability to summarize complex concepts succinctly so that senior execs can understand them, the ability to manage their own boss.

The FAQ made it sound like managing your boss is evil. Nothing could be further from the truth. I manage my boss, a Senior VP, all the time. As a matter of fact, I only speak to him about twice a week - everything else I keep below his radar. That way he has time to do the important things like consider strategy, pricing, alliances, and legal issues (something I do also, but on a smaller scale than him). I, in turn, am teaching my reports to do the same. Don't come to me with half-formed thoughts or partially digested data. Come with distilled knowledge and recommendations. Keep the small stuff out of my sight so that I can think about how to make everyone's job better. I want my reports to manage me - it means that they are beginning to think like executives and that I will be able to promote them too.

I've gone on long enough - perhaps when I have more time I will write up the executive side to that FAQ - it's always useful to know how the other half thinks. But realize that it is possible to make VP without out stabbing anyone and still be able to sleep at night. It takes a lot of work and a lot of thought about where you want both your career and your product to be. But it is doable, and it does give you the chance to make a difference, which is really why I got into software in the first place. (source: http://minimsft.com)

This comment should provide an useful (and alternative) view into the thought process of an executive. Many times, due to corporate rules or role-playing, such process is not obvious thus the corporate relationships suffer. In other words, to the extent politicking is a constant in all human activities, corporate included, most everyone would be better off by knowing it and its rules.

Generation Y

2006-05-21T20:02:00.000-07:00

Here are a few thoughts generated by encounters I had with Gen-Y members of the workforce.

By and large, upon learning about their careers, it seems that only unemployment beats the professional life of your typical Gen-Y person--workplace dynamics being so different from a life centered on education, so neatly divided, and timely shuttled between activities.

I follow up with the question: Since your company seems interested neither in your aspirations nor in optimizing your professional potential, what do you plan to do about it? To go back to grad/B-school, learn [about] business and then do something on my own, comes the answer. I figured then that s/he didn't know what exact knowledge s/he was supposed to pick up from the school, and school was a mere detour to answering the question of what you want to do in life. Then s/he goes on to the second line of defense: I have an idea about what I want to do but I don't have a business plan; I need to do a business plan and don't know how to do it. My next question is: Why do you need a business plan? Hm, you may be right, I don't think I need one either, but that's what everybody seems to say.

To the extent the above situation is not unique, please consider the following:

The main idea behind most B-schools is to keep their staff employed while imparting some information about how businesses run. With few exceptions, people don't get that much better jobs after the B-school than what they had before. In other words, there is an inflation of degrees out there while meaningful work-experience is scarce commodity. "Meaningful" as in taking initiatives, having increased responsibility, or contributing directly to the bottom line. Plus, one would do well to also consider the cost of opportunity against whatever better job prospects a business degree brings.

Secondly, the thinking has been that any idea, in its way from concept to profit, needs a business plan/model--a blueprint for a process to make money--in order to succeed. That may be the case in some instances--let us say, when you have a very well defined idea, have some professional reputation, and go to raise money--but brings little to those entrepreneurs who have already been able to match a need with a product/service offering. Those entrepreneurs would be better off by thinking of ways to bootstrap their business, ideally until profitable, and only then think of scale and business plan. On an historical note, have a look at the Intel's business plan here.

In other words, try to make the most out of your day-job, identify and co-opt the least amount of resources to take you from concept to anything people may want to consume/access, and only then worry about business plans/models and such. I have a strong feeling that the founders of Yahoo, Google, Skype and any other number of great business did just this. As a matter of fact, Skype, being so successful at what it's been doing, passed along the problem of finding a business model/plan to E-Bay.

On gut feeling as decision making tool

2006-03-01T21:38:00.000-08:00

Many a time we find ourselves agonizing over some decision. We sometimes look back and, especially when unhappy about it, say that it somehow did not feel right when deciding a certain way, despite what seemed like supporting evidence. All in all, mastering one's own gut feeling is as elusive a task as any. Only few admit to relying on gut feeling, since our society recognizes analytical skills more than something hardly quantifiable and defensible only in retrospect. In an interview with Context Magazine, Deepak Chopra lets the reader in to the high-level decision making process of a Sony executive. The following excerpt may provide some with a useful tool:

The truth is that the body responds contextually to everything that happens in the mind. The mind doesn't have a specific location in the body. It isn't just in the brain.

If you say, "I have a gut feeling about such and such," you aren't speaking metaphorically. The phrase is rooted in science. The cells in your gut make the same peptides that your brain makes when it has ideas. You probably can trust your gut cells even more, because they havenÂt yet evolved to the stage where they doubt their own thinking.

I once interviewed Masaru Ibuka, founder and chairman of Japan's Sony Corp., who was supposed to have great business instincts. I asked him, "What is the secret of your success?" He said he had a ritual. Preceding a business decision, he would drink herbal tea. Before he drank, he asked himself, "Should I make this deal or not?" If the tea gave him indigestion, he wouldn't make the deal. "I trust my gut, and I know how it works,Â" he said. "My mind is not that smart, but my body is."

So, when preparing to make a decision, if you have to reach for that Nexium, think of Chopra/Ibuka.

iBelievebold understatement

2006-02-22T23:47:00.000-08:00

available here

"Inspired by the world's obsession and devotion to the iPod, iBelieve is a replacement lanyard for your Shuffle. Constructed using the same materials and precision ball bearing closure as the standard Shuffle cap, you can relax knowing your divine soundtrack and data is safe."
Scott Wilson, Designer

Scott's design may well be the illustration of 'less is more' or minimalist design. In fact, it is so minimalist that it lacks just enough function to make it a fashion statement.

The uncontested qualities are: understated look that doubles it as a piece of jewelry; inter-play between form and function on the idea of religion; reasonably priced with 10% going to charity; reminiscent of the accessory designs that make the whole more than the sum of the parts--no small achievement considering the tall standing of iPod itself.

iBelieve will give you an excuse to be "zealously iPod."

Wearing suggestion: make sure you take it off when, say, swimming or to recharge the battery.

Consumer generated marketing(idea for an implementation)

2006-02-14T17:04:00.000-08:00

Improving your product/service offering becomes an elusive task, especially when it's been on the market for a while. Companies either focus on improving operational efficiency or add more features, not always in the most rational way. Rational in retrospective, that is.

The exit from the above conundrum is empirically sought in terms of consumer generated marketing, or listen to your customer-type of calls, yet the outcome is seldom optimal. And this is not for lack of theory since at academic level there are several frameworks in which to structure the problem (e.g. in terms of social networks: Modelling Collective Opinion Formation), whereas at a more common sense level, one can always count on books like The Wisdom of Crowds.

To the help of the practitioner comes a piece published last November in Forbes, Collective Opinion. The whole idea is to employ loaded dice in tapping large numbers of customers (tens of thousands) for new product ideas:

An online contest for product ideas is very democratic. The firm commissioning the game gets the ball rolling with some starter ideas but then lets the crowd have its way. Once the brainstorming heats up, there may be hundreds, or even thousands, of ideas in play. But it's best to have only half a dozen to a dozen choices for one player to stare at. So the software dishes out small samples selected at random from the pile. But the selection is made with loaded dice. The ideas that get the most votes in early rounds are most likely to pop up on a screen in later rounds. Over time the popular ideas float to the top of the pile.

We may conclude that online loaded dice and large crowds should be the best implementation, for the time being, of the concept: consumer generated marketing. However, as I replied to a challenge raised by Jim Heskett, consumer generated marketing becomes a source of incremental improvements whereas anything revolutionary could only come during the "breaks" in the dialogue. Indeed, it's hard to imagine the first walkman coming out of some consumer generated marketing jam-session...

Keep it simplehow about half a dozen?

2006-02-08T19:32:00.000-08:00

Many a time, product managers come across the problem of ever growing feature sets just as investors, or any professional accessing the internet for that matter, are overwhelmed in the process of decision making. Here's an excerpt from a Motley Fool comment on the need to keep things simple:

The CIA on investing
So with all of their resources, and with all the time they put into valuing these companies, why aren't the "professionals" producing more accurate results? A 1973 report written by analyst Richards J. Heuer at the CIA (yes, that CIA) suggests one answer. In this study, several of the people who set the odds on horse races were tested to determine whether having more information resulted in their making better predictions on race winners. Given 88 pieces of data to choose from, the handicappers, as they're called, were told to choose the five bits of information they considered most important ( e.g., the horse's win/loss record, the jockey's record, the length of the race, and so on). They were then asked to place bets on a race based on their preferred data and to state how confident they were of their predictions.
In part two of the test, researchers doubled the amount of data given to the handicappers. They got their "preferred five" pieces of data, plus five more statistics that they considered of lesser importance. Bets were again placed. Confidence was remeasured. This test was repeated with 20 and then with 40 statistics to work from.

The researchers then analyzed the results and concluded that the handicappers' accuracy did not improve as they were given more and more data. In fact, several handicappers got worse the more data they were fed. But while the accuracy of their predictions didn't increase with the amount of information they had to work with, their confidence in those predictions did. This despite the fact that, by their own admission, the extra data was not as useful to them as the original "preferred five" pieces of information.

Henry David Thoreau on investing
All of which suggests that Henry David Thoreau was right. If you recall from your high school American Lit class, in Walden, Thoreau wrote:

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million, count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. ... Simplify, simplify.

Is it a coincidence that Thoreau urged limiting our focus to "half a dozen" things at a time, and that the handicappers picked just as many winning horses with five pieces of essential data as they did with those five, plus 35 others? Perhaps. But coincidence or not, it works.

So, in the case of a new version for a product, bring to your customer's attention no more than a half dozen features!

A conceptual tool for customer satisfaction surveys

2006-01-25T22:18:00.000-08:00

Those toiling over some customer satisfaction survey should get a reprieve from a recent HBR article indicating a simple yet good way to measure customer loyalty by asking one question rather than a battery of lengthy satisfaction surveys: "On a scale of zero to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend us to your friends or colleagues?"

Next, the article comes up with the following classification:

Promoters are defined as customers who give the company 9 or 10;
Detractors are defined as customers who give the company anything between 0 and 6;
Passively satisfied are customers who give the company either 7 or 8. These customers are not included in the final score.

In final analysis, "net promoter scores," the difference between the percentage of promoters and detractors, correlate closely with a company's revenue growth.

2006-01-19T13:30:00.000-08:00

It's fun to get things right for the right reason.
Irving Khan, The oldest Wall Street active investor

How refreshing it is to learn such a statement. Keep in mind though, for a long time, Irving has been doing it for passion, with patience, based on daily updated information, and for no boss--as we know them.

Intel Business Plan, July 1968

2005-11-01T23:41:00.000-08:00

The US Constitution might not have seemed like much at the time it was written. Mutatis mutandis, neither this document looked like much when Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce were setting up Intel. However, it was enough for venture capitalist Arthur Rock to raise $2.5 million in less than 2 days.

Apparently the document does not resemble most today's business plans. It includes neither a financial estimate, nor a clear exist strategy. The text, however, includes many typos!

Sources: Intel Museum and Darius Mahdjoubi, October 2005

SCRUM - Agile

2005-10-31T14:38:00.000-08:00

Please, allow me to briefly (dis/at)tract your attention to the software/product development approach called "SCRUM." Yahoo and Google seem be be using it--at this time, within a limited scope.

My bias would be to say that: SCRUM makes sense when developing technologies that could be described as wide rather than deep. In other words, an ERP package won't fit the model...

According to FT, here is how Scrum works:

Scrum is a key element in the so-called Agile process revolution for software development.
The main principles are daily collaboration between business people and developers throughout the project, frequent delivery of working software and openness to frequent change of customers' requirements.
Scrum does this by creating a "product backlog" - a compilation of all the features the program needs, prioritized by the "product owner," who represents the interests of everyone with a stake in the project and results. The highest-priority items are taken for completion in a "sprint." These normally last a month and end with a 15-minute meeting where the scrum-master asks the same three questions of the team: what did you do since the last meeting; what are you doing until the next one; and what prevented you from doing more work.
The self managing aspect of Scrum also obliges team members to (learn how to) manage their own time.

What do you think:

Would you personally enjoy such an environment?
In what context and at what 'expense' could such a model be adopted?

For details, check out Jeff Sutherland's webpage

As well, a link to:

The Roots of Scrum:
How Japanese Manufacturing Changed
Global Software Development Practices

On Qualia

2005-09-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

Looking for some info online, I stumbled upon the following piece. Not being sure whether or not Mr. Mogi is associated with Sony, but knowing about Sony's high-end Qualia line, I felt compelled to read it. It makes for an interesting read, especially for those earning their existence at the intersection between aesthetics and technology. This reminds me of the ad page model, put together by Mr. Ogilvy, and some more.

Ken Mogi
A Familiar Yet Mysterious Concept

Many facts about the workings of the brain have been uncovered with the advance of neuroscience. We now know what part of the brain becomes active with which activity, and what ability becomes lost when a certain part of the brain is damaged. But one significant problem remains: we still cannot explain the nature of consciousness.

Since the late 1990s, the enigma of consciousness has been the focus of much research in neuroscience. Though it is clear that our consciousness results from activity in neurons, not much more is known about it. It cannot, for example, be understood just by looking at the discrete functions of the brain. It was in this predicament that the concept of “qualia” emerged as the key to the missing links.

The word “qualia” is a Latin plural meaning “qualities.” It is an ancient word and appears as early as the fifth century, in Augustinus’s De Civitate Dei. It was first used in the discourse of consciousness in the 1980s by an Australian philosopher, who proposed that the various elements that make up our subjective experiences – qualia – cannot be explained by existing science. This work had a significant impact on the neuroscientific world, and “qualia” has since become a central issue in cognitive science.

The concept of qualia should be familiar to all of us, since the world offers us a multitude of sensory qualities (like colors and textures) to perceive. However, in cognitive research, it remains an elusive subject.

In scientific research, “qualia” poses a perplexing problem, because qualia generally cannot be represented with numbers. Science thus far has targeted concepts that can be counted or measured. How much there is of a certain substance, how long it is, how fast it is – most things can be described using numerical representations.

But qualia –like the sting of cold water, like the sweet strains of a violin, like the perfume of a rose – are experiences that cannot be replaced by numbers. For this reason, the usual tools of science we use to solve a problem, like expressing a characteristic in numbers and using values in a formula, do not help us here.

Of course, though qualia cannot be quantified, they are still phenomena that accompany physical processes in the human brain. Yet the natural laws governing the intricate processing of qualia are still to be discovered and may pose one of humanity’s greatest intellectual challenges yet. It would probably be difficult to solve the puzzle of qualia completely. My guess is that if qualia were to be explained in a theory, it would be far more difficult than Einstein’s complicated theory of relativity. But everyone can understand the idea when it is explained. One’s view of the world changes just by being aware of it. “Qualia” has this interesting twosided quality.

Humans Seek Qualia

Often in Japan, you see groups of women taking a trip together. What do you suppose they are expecting from this trip? Some will climb a mountain, and others will explore a tourist area. Some will soak in a hot spring, and some will enjoy the local cuisine. Destinations and activities may vary, but in the end, all of them are looking for the same thing.

Human desires differ from those of other animals because of their bigger, developed brain. Desires are not limited to nourishment, longevity, or ease, for example. People additionally seek new, undiscovered qualia. Wanting to eat a manju (a sweet) particular to an area, for example, is a manifestation of this human desire. The traveler is not seeking nourishment or notable healthfulness from the manju. No, she hopes to experience qualia heretofore unknown to her.

Qualia have the quality of being unknown until experienced. The qualia of food, for example, cannot be understood until eaten, no matter how much someone tries to describe its delicious flavor. The fact that qualia cannot be ours unless experienced makes untried qualia all the more appealing. We travel, watch movies, and go to the theater to satisfy our desire for and to consume qualia.

This idea, that humans are driven by a desire for qualia, applies as well to romantic relationships. Remember how you felt when you were a teenager? You wondered what it would be like to date a boy. You wondered what it would be like to date a girl. Such feelings akin to curiosity stirred something deep inside you.

This idea also applies to our appetite for culture. We want to delight in good literature. We want to enjoy beautiful music. We want to experience new things in movies.

These desires are particular to humans. The drive for qualia does not appear to result from biological necessity and cannot be found in any other animals. Humans seek qualia.

The Qualia of the Grand Canyon

Sometimes you need to go to a particular place to experience certain qualia. That is why people travel.

The time I visited the Grand Canyon, for example, I experienced qualia that could not and cannot be experienced elsewhere. I knew of course about the Grand Canyon before going there. I had seen numerous photographs of it, and I even knew how far down it was to the river. But the experience of the Grand Canyon exceeded the sum of these bits of acquired knowledge. The qualia were indeed particular to the site.

When I actually stood there and gazed at the distance to the opposite cliff (twelve kilometers) I suddenly felt faint and had to sit down – and it was not a fear of heights. I was hit by the realization that I could not possibly throw a rock to the other side, no matter how hard I tried. The canyon was that vast. This new qualia experience, of unconquerable distance, overwhelmed me and made my head reel.

If you think about it, there are very few situations in everyday life when you can experience distances between yourself and a certain visible place that deny all possibility of your approaching it. The moon and the stars are examples of vast distances that cannot be overcome, but you are quite aware that they are celestial, not terrestrial. Thus you can make excuses for their inapproachability. The top of a city skyscraper is also unapproachable, but you can easily give up the idea because it is so high up. In contrast, the opposite side of the Grand Canyon is at eye-level, yet it cannot be walked to, and it is too far to throw a rock to. The great abyss between me and the opposite side awed me, and I felt qualia that were somewhat similar to dizziness.

It does not matter how intimate you are with the facts. The qualia of the Grand Canyon cannot be experienced unless you actually go there. It cannot be felt otherwise. People travel in pursuit of such qualia.

The Qualia of Chateau Latour

Wine, too, has qualia that cannot be perceived unless they are actually experienced. I was once at a French restaurant in Tokyo, celebrating a special occasion with two friends. On this occasion we ordered a bottle of Chateau Latour. This much-acclaimed red wine is really quite expensive, but we decided to treat ourselves this one time. The bottle was brought to the table in a reverential manner and poured. The glasses glowed a dark ruby red.

The first glass, however, did not make an impression upon me. In all honesty, I could not tell whether it was any good. Although my friends were clearly already excited with it, I did not know what to say about it, and still uncertain, I took a sip of my second glass.

Then, all of a sudden, the qualia of Chateau Latour made sense to me. It was like a once-in-a-lifetime meeting with a truly attractive, magical person. The emotion is not simply one of happiness or pleasure; your heart is in fact racing at an alarming rate. You have no idea what to do with yourself because everything is terribly exciting. It is the long-awaited arrival of spring with all the flowers bursting into bloom. That was my stunning qualia experience with Chateau Latour.

Until that moment, I had never tasted an expensive wine with any seriousness. That was the first time I realized that the qualia evoked by a really good wine cannot be described just in terms of tannin, bouquet, or acidity, as with an ordinary wine. The experience exceeds the sphere of this limited vocabulary.

Ideas that can be expressed in numbers can often be imagined to a certain extent without actually being experienced. Four meters is two meters doubled and so is probably this long. 200 km/hr is twice 100 km/hr and so is probably this fast. The comparative method works. But the qualia of good wine are not two or three times better than the qualia of ordinary wine. The analogy fails here. The qualia are of a different nature altogether.

I remember the first time that I tasted konowata, I felt that the qualia could not be compared to the qualia of any other delicacy I had ever tasted. Konowata is a Japanese delicacy on a par with caviar, and is made by pickling the entrails of sea cucumber. The taste is a little similar to pickled squid, but as those of you who have had konowata know, it has a strange and mystifying citrus fragrance.

Qualia, when new or very good, cannot be compared to that of past experiences. This characteristic is true of all qualia, not just of food.

But sometimes, even familiar qualia can suddenly become unfamiliar. For example, when we eat or drink something, we are usually prepared for what we will experience when we put it into our mouths. If completely different from expectation, qualia of even the most ordinary sort can jar.

Once, while watching a movie at home, I reached for a glass of milk thinking it was soda. With my eyes still glued to the screen, I took a gulp. The shock was great. For several moments, I could not tell at all what it was. I could only think that I had put something unrecognizable into my mouth. Then, after some time, I realized that the qualia were of milk. Perhaps this experience is similar to a baby’s experience when he first tastes milk.

My initial incomprehension upon tasting Chateau atour was perhaps due to the fact that the qualia were completely new to me. The qualia of Chateau Latour were utterly unlike my expectations of a wine.

How Do We Know New Experiences to Be Completely New?

The world is filled with an infinite number of qualia, and there are many that a person may never experience in a lifetime. Had I not had the experience of Chateau Latour, I would probably have continued to believe that wine can be described calmly, in precise parameters of tannin, bouquet, and other commonly known factors. I would never have believed that the qualia of the wine can only be described as that of meeting a dream, a wonderfully mesmerizing person.

Qualia cannot be understood unless experienced. We are driven by curiosity and are constantly on a quest for new qualia.

The ability of the human brain to recognize the newness of new qualia – that the qualia are unlike any experienced before – has yet to be explained. You may not be able to describe the uniqueness or the subtlety of the new qualia at the moment of contact, but your brain recognizes immediately that the qualia are new. This wonderful feature of the human brain has not yet been explained by neuroscience.

There are many qualia in the world that I have not yet experienced. This thought is exciting. The yearning for new qualia, for fresh, unknown qualia, is in everybody’s hearts. This is the universal desire for qualia shared by all human beings.

Qualia must be experienced firsthand to be understood. Before coming into contact with certain qualia, there is no way of knowing what the experience will be like. But still we long to come into contact with them. Qualia have this mysteriously enticing quality.

Looking at photographs and reading descriptive text of the Katsura Palace in Kyoto will not tell you what kind of qualia you will experience once you step inside the gardens. But people are drawn to the yet unknown qualia that they anticipate, and travel to the Katsura Palace to experience them firsthand. I want to see things that I have never seen. I want to go places that I have never been. I want to eat things that I have never eaten. These wants exist inside everyone. This universal desire, in other words, is a desire for unknown qualia.

The Allure of Qualia

Sometimes we are unknowingly taken by something that we cannot quite explain in words. This is true of qualia.

People are naturally drawn to qualia that are not yet fully understood. That is why we are drawn to other people, for example; other people are wonderfully mysterious to us.

The impression of a person changes slightly with every meeting – ten years ago, five years ago, two years ago, today. It is the same person, yet he is somehow different. Sometimes he is an admirable character, and sometimes he seems a bit mean. Sometimes he is interesting, and sometimes he is dull. What results from all these experiences is the qualia of this person. This person’s qualia are not borne of just one meeting, but are formed from numerous meetings, and with every encounter, the sense of this person evolves.

The same can be said of wine (though of course, its complexity does not compare to that of human beings). The qualia of Chateau Latour will probably change with every encounter. Yet there will probably be something in the qualia that will help affirm that the encounter is undoubtedly yet another aspect of the Chateau Latour experience.

Every bottle is of course different. The vintage may be different; even two wines of the same vintage will be different depending on when they are opened. A wine is also dependent upon storage conditions and the manner in which it is served. And even if two wines were exactly the same, the qualia of one would differ from the qualia of the other depending on whom you share the bottle with. In this way, the personality of a certain brand of wine emerges from the many encounters with it. After a time, you begin to understand and recognize the qualia of this wine.

The discrete qualia are different every time, but a new form of qualia appears from experiencing all of the individual qualia. This total form of qualia is perhaps the qualia that we are most attracted to, and hence, continue to pursue.

Though we receive a different impression every time, when we process these many encounters, a new kind of qualia emerges. This mechanism may be analogous to the power of brands. For example, all animated films by Pixar have a certain “Pixar-esque” feel to them, even though each film is different. Each is different; yet they share a certain quality.

Something attracts us to people and objects and scenery, but a large part of the allure disappears as soon as we think we know what that something is. People are attracted most to those things that appeal to a subconscious place. Therefore, when a person feels that she has completely understood a brand, a wine, or a relationship, the wonder is gone.

One tries to get close to it, and sometimes it seems within reach – but it can never be fully grasped. This is the kind of qualia that is most alluring to us.

I would like to live in a world where nothing less should come as expected from the intersection of (personal) technology and aesthetics...

link to Sony QUALIA

Product management / marketing functions

2005-09-07T22:50:00.000-07:00

A representation of the product management / marketing functions.

Credit is due to Pragmatic Marketing

8TH CIRCUIT AFFIRMS BLIZZARD V. BTNED.ORG DECISION

2005-09-07T17:58:00.000-07:00

8TH CIRCUIT AFFIRMS BLIZZARD V. BTNED.ORG DECISION
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed a lower court decision Blizzard vs. BnetD which ruled that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits the reverse engineering needed to create an open-source program that extended a video game for people who lawfully purchased the original. The court also affirmed that clickwrap licenses are enforceable to prevent reverse engineering.

If you are in the business of creating add-ons for, or extending, copyrighted software (for profit, open source, or both), check out this decision at:

http://www.eff.org/IP/Emulation/Blizzard_v_bnetd/20050901_decision.pdf

As well, this ruling is of interest to those who wish to protect their code from reverse engineering via a clickwrap license.

On product management performance

2005-08-22T16:55:00.000-07:00

How about a set of performance metrics to determine how a product management program is performing?

Product managers (PMs) are those individuals entrusted by their companies to make the most at the intersection of customers, internal capabilities, partners, and industry trends. The output of the PM work is the product requirements document--a document detailing the product features for the next version of a product/technology, and supporting evidence (business case or rationales). Usually, in your typical organizational chard, the PM function is between engineering and marketing. In small companies, the PM role is still a function of the executive management. The PM functions get formalized as such when growing companies are in a position to release later versions of their initial products or when new product lines are about to be released.

To start off, there ought to be different sets of metrics at a large software company compared, and a startup, respectively. Metrics will drive behavior and performance, so choose wisely, discuss with (executive) management! One gets what one measures/rewards, so make sure that's what you want!

In a mature business, product managers get measured by:

Number of recorded customer visits and/or calls;
PRD references to customer visits.

Typically, 10 visits per quarter are a good result, 7 average, and 4 below average. This is also dependent on what kind of prep goes into a visit.

This is followed by a percentage metric for the product requirement document (PRD)--how many features have named customer input. This can be tricky to formulate into a sensible measurement, but basically it monitors that product managers go through customer visit reports and mark the source of a requirement into the PRD. It has more management interest, but again it does confirm that PMs actually get requirements from the market, not from an engineering sugar high.

In case customer input is a dimension of the metric, make sure PMs get customer input on the specific value (i.e. what they will pay for it) of the feature(s) tagged as customer-driven within the PRD.

The above metrics are used for bonus pay-out, but also could work as a stoplight metric for individual managers and products.

Profits

Especially in a cost-sensitive environments, small enterprise, make sure that things like "market share" or "sales" are NOT considered. Too often organizations focus on exactly the wrong metric. Profits are what count.

Also, at a startup, you will likely want to expand your customer base, so think about a metric there also. If any operational responsibility lies with the PM (some do, some don't), think about an appropriate metric there depending on the company's production model.

Yes, a startup will have different needs from a large company. Not the least of which is strict financial discipline, managing your business for positive free cash flow. There is another one. Slightly different from profits…

Further refinements

Customer acquisition and retention are key. Worth measuring for are plan vs. result conformance (i.e. did the team do what it said it was going to and when).

In certain contexts, it may also be worth measuring the "downstream effects" of PM’s requirements on the Engineering, such as the amount of rework due to spec misunderstandings (indicates whether or not the specs contain sufficient detail), and the percentage of features that meet PM's acceptance criteria on the first try (indicates the quality of communication between PM & Engineering).

The availability of data will emerge as a difference between a start-up and a larger company; large companies routinely store quite a bit of information that can be useful on scorecards. It may be more of a task to find meaningful, measurable data in a start-up.

This is reminiscent (for some anyway) of measuring the "cost of quality" of a product, service or operation. It was always really the inverse (cost of poor quality), but it gave support for investing in doing things better. The real problem was that only big companies could afford the time/money of gathering and analyzing the data on an ongoing basis. Perhaps the better take-away is to add *concept* to the 5000 other things going on in the back of the PM's head. Then, if/when a situation arises that strongly, but anecdotally, reflects a large cost of quality, then you have a rationale and approach to analyze and document what could be institutionalized to make things consistently better.

A group can look in the right area for an important measure of performance, but still - in practice – generate "sterile metrics." A high visit *count* involving golf without shoptalk, superficial conversation without probing, talking only to users and not buyers (or vice versa), and other scenarios still amounts to poor performance. Again, it's *understanding* the craft, not just launching on the buzzwords.

Further, while Profit is definitely a critical (maybe most critical) measure, in the real world it is difficult to avoid drowning in a QUARTERLY profit mentality. Excepting start-ups for the moment, growing and large companies too often will rationalize (or simply drop) bug counts in their release criteria to get a product "out the door" to either book sales or make the cut for an analyst report. It is way too easy for that to become a pattern, and the company's true brand.

And, in several industries/markets that evolve very quickly (like telecom) it is really advantageous to have two-tiered engineering: one group reads IEEE publications and scratches their heads over requirements 2 years out, while the other group wraps and ships current product. With a good dose of the quarterly profit disease, it is, again, easy to jeopardize even a major advantage in the NEXT market cycle to make the next release date - which was probably set arbitrarily anyway. However, even this (the firm two-tiered effort) can be taken to dangerous extremes. It is still a matter of "balance."

What about the aspects of profitability that are out of a PM's control?

Counterpoint: if the PM is not responsible for ensuring a profitable product, who then?

Customer interaction and gathering market-input in product definition are critical to product success, and therefore should be part of measuring a PM's performance.

One cannot hold someone accountable for that over which someone has no control. In most companies, the PM does not manage the entire product team. For example, the product manager typically cannot hire and fire:

Sales people selling the product;
Marcom folks marketing the product;
Engineers developing the product.

Yet the profitability of the product depends on the performance of the sales, marcom, and engineering personnel over which the product manager has no authority.

So no single person can be held accountable for product profitability unless

It is a one-product company, in which case the CEO has ultimate responsibility, or
The PM has complete authority over the entire product team.

bits and pieces: On the use of PPT presentations

2005-08-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

What is the appropriate use of multimedia/PowerPoint "passive" presentations--presentations with no personal interaction?

Are people using these types of presentations to communicate product (or service)?
features or benefits?
If so, where?
On their website?
As sales collateral?
How deep is the content?
Are they used as "leave behinds" to recap a detailed sales discussion?
Could they replace that discussion altogether?

Are sales teams too reliant on these types of presentations to the extent that such presentations have replaced (quality) interpersonal discussions?

The above concerns are well known, especially through associations with sales folks in small(er) corporations.

Canned, passive presentations should be used carefully and sparingly. Of particular concern becoms their use--or even consideration--as "replacements" for detailed sales discussions altogether. Just think how much one checks out of a supposedly interpersonal discussion when the presenter shoes up with a 60-slide deck.

For passive interaction, 1-2 pager notes are able to communicate the necessary product feature/content. One can even model these notes as "product datasheets." These could be published through emails / websites / events. PPTs have a great impact during interpersonal meetings since they help manage the flow and structure of the discussions. Also, PPT presentations help people in audience to take down key points in their notes.

In a way, PPT presentations have come to embody the communication assassinator of corporate America. And, that's when they are accompanied by a verbal script. Passive PPTs are even more removed and impersonal. The next step on that slippery slope is miming. A prospect has to be pretty darn desperate to actually flip or click through an unaided PPT presentation. These days, sellers seem to default to PPT presentations when approaching a prospect because "everybody does it that way." Prospects, on the other hand, seem to be immediately turned off by the mere appearance of a PPT because, well, "everybody does it that way." While these PPTs sometimes work as a suitable leave behind in a competitive pitch, there are clearly more interesting and more effective mediums, such as a Flash presentation or just a real, live conversation.

bits and pieces: Authority, PM, Matrixed organizations

2005-08-19T10:46:00.000-07:00

In matrixed organizations one could well be accountable for product P&L with no line authority. In a case like that, authority isn't handed over like a tap from the Queen's sword, but is rather earned by establishing good working relationships with the other constributors. Success doesn't come from authority anyhow. It comes from influence more than anything. In most organizations, ultimate authority lies with the CEO/General Manager and, at the limit, if decisions are all pushed up to that level, those companies will fail in the long run, as the model isn't scalable.

Brand-manage yourself!

2005-06-20T16:50:00.000-07:00

In the 21st century multi-faceted corporation, managing your professional image amid increased variety ought to be a deliberate exercise by which you become the author of your own identity. HBS professor Laura Morgan Roberts says if you aren't managing your own professional image, others are. She proposes a strategic, proactive approach to managing your image consisting of the following steps:

Identify your ideal state.
- What are the core competencies and character traits you want people to associate with you?
- Which of your social identities do you want to emphasize and incorporate into your workplace interactions, and which would you rather minimize?
Assess your current image, culture, and audience.
- What are the expectations for professionalism?
- How do others currently perceive you?
Conduct a cost-benefit analysis for image change.
- Do you care about others' perceptions of you?
- Are you capable of changing your image?
- Are the benefits worth the costs? (Cognitive, psychological, emotional, physical effort)
Use strategic self-presentation to manage impressions and change your image.
- Employ appropriate traditional and social identity-based impression management strategies.
- Pay attention to the balancing act?build credibility while maintaining authenticity.
Manage the effort you invest in the process.
- Monitoring others' perceptions of you
- Monitoring your own behavior
- Strategic self-disclosure
- Preoccupation with proving worth and legitimacy

This is not unlike any branding exercise. The novelty could be in self-awareness informed by such an exercise.

Keep in mind: Cost, Quality, and Timeliness

2005-06-19T19:26:00.000-07:00

Harvard Business School professors Pankaj Ghemawat and Ramon Casadesus-Masanell have recently co-authored an academic paper Dynamic Mixed Duopoly: A Model Motivated by Linux vs. Windows. They explore several answers to the fundamental competitive dynamics question:

Will open source software (OSS) ever displace traditional software from its market leadership position?

In their formal economical model, they structure the problem in terms of a dynamic mixed duopoly in which a profit-maximizing competitor (Microsoft) interacts with a competitor that prices at zero (Linux), with the installed base affecting their relative values over time.

They go on further to ask what conditions are needed for Linux to take over Windows:

Is Linux's superior demand-side learning sufficient to win out?
What is the effect of forced procurement by governments and some large corporations on the long-run equilibrium?
How do cost asymmetries play out?
Can Microsoft use piracy strategically to improve its market position?

Summing up their findings, the authors say:

"We believe that there is still a great deal of confusion and puzzlement on how this competitive battle will develop."

Worth pointing out are their recommendations for Microsoft to strategically to remain competitive against a product that is argued to be of better quality, is updated more frequently, and is free:

Increase its own demand-side learning.

Listen to the demands of the user community to better exploit the benefits of demand-side learning. Microsoft must facilitate communication between the user base and the company to have prompt feedback on the performance of its products.

Make an effort to incorporate improvements in the code (fix bugs and introduce new features) as soon as possible.

Reward those who propose improvements for the code. At the very least, Microsoft could publicly acknowledge those who proposed new features or discovered bugs.

Feed its direct and indirect network effects.

Support as much as possible the independent software vendor community so that the quantity and quality of complements is substantially above that of Linux.

Encourage competition between the different ISVs. The lower the prices of applications, the more appealing the Microsoft system will be.

Price discriminate. Give Windows and applications away to schools and universities so that users build their file libraries on Microsoft, not Linux.

Minimize the number of strategic buyers.

Let governments access the source code and give guarantees that sensitive data is treated confidentially

Price discriminate. Give binary away to organizations and individuals who are not willing to spend money on Windows but who would be willing to use Linux because it is free.

Reduce costs to be able to sustain long periods of time with low prices.

Decrease Linux's demand-side learning.

Because the way to do this involves some questionable (from a legal point of view) actions, we will refrain from suggesting specifics.

Lessen Linux's direct and indirect network effects.

Make it as hard as possible for Windows applications to work on Linux.

Same for MS Office documents.

"Promote" Linux's code forking.

Infuse fear, uncertainty, and doubt into the Linux user community. For this to work, the statements must be perceived as credible. Credibility requires some past FUD announcements to be realized.

Takeaways:

The model is structured in terms of price, quality, and frequency of updates. In Competing Against Time, George Stalk, a consultant with BCG, shows how companies that respond faster to customer needs can expect to be twice as profitable as the industry average, and to grow up to 3x quicker. Stalk arrived at his findings structuring the problem in terms of supply chain, which he described along the following parameters: cost, quality, and timeliness. Not unlike those of Ghemawat and Casadesus-Masanell.

What to do when starting?

2005-05-30T09:33:00.000-07:00

You are thinking of materializing your concept into a company or simply put got tired of tiring for others? Here's where you may want to start:

What problem is being solved by your product/service offering?
Talk to potential customers to understand the problem;
Know the cost to customers of the problem you are trying to solve so that you get the price right;
Define your customers as a group linked by a common problem;
Keep the business simple and focused on one mission and one target;
Protect your ideas where possible.

If I could speak to the authors of so many business/management books...

2005-04-18T17:22:00.000-07:00

... I would ask them for a favor: write an article, don't waste precious resources on a book! Your need for money or recognition is hardly a reason for most to read your book.

Oh well, and then there are the HBS editors...

Top 50 most looked-up words in 2004

2005-04-13T22:45:00.000-07:00

advice, having held the top spot for all but two months of the year, is not surprisingly the most frequently viewed entry on Cambridge Dictionaries Online in 2004. Perhaps more surprising is the fact that the only change in the top 6 is the fall of idiom from 4th place in 2003 to 17. The lack of movement in recent monthly top 20s is possibly a result of the sheer number of searches being carried out - over 75 million in 2004, by far our most successful year ever.

While major world events are frequently reflected in the monthly top 20 charts, their impact is usually too short-lived to affect the annual top 50. However, it is interesting to note that the highest new entry to the chart is inquiry.

1	advice (1)	26	discreet (29)
2	liaise (2)	27	inquiry (-)
3	effect (3)	28	implement (25)
4	regard (5)	29	request (44)
5	comply (6)	30	oblige (38)
6	appreciate (9)	31	retain (35)
7	commit (12)	32	assume (47)
8	assess (8)	33	aware (-)
9	endeavour (16)	34	defy (32)
10	acquire (13)	35	use (39)
11	paradigm (7)	36	access (-)
12	information (14)	37	despite (45)
13	analyse (10)	38	subtle (49)
14	intend (15)	39	continue (41)
15	affect (11)	40	achieve (-)
16	provide (17)	41	concern (-)
17	idiom (4)	42	interest (-)
18	propose (22)	43	competence (48)
19	emphasize (18)	44	ambiguous (23)
20	ubiquitous (21)	45	criterion (33)
21	compete (27)	46	allege (42)
22	benefit (26)	47	schedule (-)
23	enhance (36)	48	enthusiasm (-)
24	respond (30)	49	procure (31)
25	relate (28)	50	experience (-)
This list shows the 50 entries that were looked at most frequently on Cambridge Dictionaries Online in the year 2004. The numbers in brackets indicate the position of that word in 2003's top 50.

Any lessons one may draw from outsourcing war?

2005-04-04T21:04:00.000-07:00

From the March/April 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs, we learn from P.W. Singer 5 types of problems that arise in military/defense outsourcing. To the extent such lessons, learned from the interaction of military with private military firms (PMF's,) could be leveraged by those who may consider outsourcing/offshoring in the corporate world, it's worth having a look at them:

"The first involves the question of profit in a military context. To put it bluntly, the incentives of a private company do not always align with its clients' interests--or the public good. In an ideal world, this problem could be kept in check through proper management and oversight; in reality, such scrutiny is often absent. Still more worrisome from a policy standpoint is the question of lost control. Even when contractors do military jobs, they remain private businesses and thus fall outside the military chain of command and justice systems.

The second general challenge with PMFs stems from the unregulated nature of what has become a global industry. There are insufficient controls over who can work for these firms and for whom these firms can work. The recruiting, screening, and hiring of individuals for public military roles is left in private hands. In Iraq, this problem was magnified by the gold-rush effect: many firms entering the market were either entirely new to the business or had rapidly expanded.

The third concern raised by PMFs is, ironically, precisely the feature that makes them so popular with governments today: they can accomplish public ends through private means. In other words, they allow governments to carry out actions that would not otherwise be possible, such as those that would not gain legislative or public approval. Sometimes, such freedom is beneficial: it can allow countries to fill unrecognized or unpopular strategic needs. But it also disconnects the public from its foreign policy, removing certain activities from popular oversight.

PMFs also create legal dilemmas, the fourth sort of policy challenge they raise. On both the personal and the corporate level, there is a striking absence of regulation, oversight, and enforcement. Although private military firms and their employees are now integral parts of many military operations, they tend to fall through the cracks of current legal codes, which sharply distinguish civilians from soldiers. Contractors are not quite civilians, given that they often carry and use weapons, interrogate prisoners, load bombs, and fulfill other critical military roles. Yet they are not quite soldiers, either. One military law analyst noted, "Legally speaking, [military contractors] fall into the same grey area as the unlawful combatants detained at Guantánamo Bay."

The final dilemma raised by the extensive use of private contractors involves the future of the military itself. The armed services have long seen themselves as engaged in a unique profession, set apart from the rest of civilian society, which they are entrusted with securing. The introduction of PMFs, and their recruiting from within the military itself, challenges that uniqueness; the military's professional identity and monopoly on certain activities is being encroached on by the regular civilian marketplace."

Despite obvious limitations (e.g.. when offshoring is not an option, one deals with legal contiguity,) the value of such model comes at least in marking the type of problems one is likely to encounter at one end of the spectrum.

Darwin's survival of the fittest in business

2005-03-02T14:41:00.000-08:00

It's not enough that we succeed, cats must also fail!

On economics and business

2005-02-25T17:49:00.000-08:00

The science of economics should serve the smart business person the same way Marxism has done for the left banks of our academic institutions. Not much reliance in many an object of study as much as dependence on the economics' way of building up an hypotheses-based modus operandi.

Music Making and Business Leadership

2005-02-24T13:51:00.000-08:00

Studying leadership is a very elusive undertaking. Understanding business leadership seems to be governed by the Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty: "The more precisely the POSITION is determined, the less precisely the MOMENTUM is known."

So, what is left to do for the student in business leadership, other than apprenticeship? HBR and its likes do a good job at giving one angles. Yet, few such proxies come as close to offering a meaningful metaphor about business leadership as music making. For my taste, of organization and music, jazz and classical will do. Let us proceed with some illustrations.

Take the case of a conductor. When dealing with a symphony, the conductor resembles very much your typical CEO. The metaphor changes when the conductor deals with a concert; the interplay with the soloist(s) becomes like the interaction between the CEO and the board or the CEO and a powerful president (of the board maybe.) Claudio Abbado, Herbert Karajan, and Sergiu Celibidache are just three examples of conductors--soft-, autocratic-, all encompassing-leadership, respectively.

With chamber music, you deal with a type of leadership from within. This is the case with consulting partnerships or teams with people at about the same levels of authority and experience. Dependence path is everything here.

In jazz, there are also a few models. The whole idea behind jazz--improvisation, swing, spontaneity, creativity on the move, etc.--corresponds nicely to the smaller entities (e.g. start-ups, workgroups.) Leadership in jazz comes in a few flavors. For example, Miles Davis is the all might and power derived from the authority of his knowledge and creativity. This type knows when and why to come in strongly or let things evolve on their own. John Coltrane is the ever present leader, almost a factotum of the group. This is the type that is all about his idea and ways of doing things. They turn ideas into start-ups. Mingus on the other hand is the type of leadership the exercises authority from behind, he's there only for those who know where/how to listen, he's the ultimate enabler. Jazz epitomizes, musically, the task oriented ad-hoc teams.

Obviously, chamber music and jazz usually offer metaphors applicable to smaller teams whose membership is similar in skills and culture.

For illustrations, have a look at the myriad of DVD's on musical subjects. Especially valuable, one is likely to find those that explain the mechanics of conducting by taking the viewer through a rehearsal. Click here to find a link to a wealth of sources on: Conductors and music making, as leadership metaphors!

Enjoy, and happy session-jamming out of Heisenberg-types of uncertainty!

Markets are conversations...

2005-02-23T22:29:00.000-08:00

The Cluetrain manifesto

On management frameworks as metaphors

2005-02-23T12:29:00.000-08:00

There is nothing new with how the (strategic) management frameworks or paradigms proliferate--there is a flow out there coming from academics and 'high-powered' management consultants. The utility of such flow is unquestionable for the authors , and to some extent, for the general readership as well. For a practitioner or general interest reader, I suggest the following: Look at these as mere metaphors meant to inform your decision making, and exercise your brain. When solving a problem, one may consider elaborating and deploying a hypothesis-based methodology. Such methodology ought to be informed by what one reads / learns (management frameworks included) and, more importantly, must contain elements of the following cycle: observation(s) --> concept --> testing --> implementation --> measurement --> observation. Hypothesizing should take place especially in the observation and concept phases. In the testing and measurement phases, one ought to see how good one's initial hypotheses were. Obviously, one can play with the above elements as one wishes on the condition that they all come down to hypotheses and (in)validation. Just a thought...

The CEO as Conductor or Leadership Metaphors

2005-02-20T17:22:00.000-08:00

Power and analysis, that is what conducting is about!

S. Richter, pianist