Archive for the ‘books’ Category

It’s time for the “Numerati” to step back

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

I’ve been reading the book “Einstein’s Mistakes” by Hans Ohanian and though it’s been a lot different from my expectations (I was looking for mistake stories and through 150 pages haven’t found many) it has proved useful in spurring some thoughts.

One such thought has been the consequences of the growth of science and logical thinking. The first part of “Einstein’s Mistakes” describes the roles of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell and others in setting the stage for Einstein’s relativity theories. What this brief physics history reinforced to me was the gradual rise to preeminence of logic and mathematics in the processes of human thought–at the expense of philosophy, sociology, anthropology.

Interestingly, even in these legendary clear thinkers there was the all-too-human urge to self-protect and rationalize. Notable was Galileo’s effort, according to Ohanian, to fudge the numbers so that his calculations would match what he knew to be correct about the heavens.

Next on my list to read (around “War and Peace“) is Stephen Baker’s “The Numerati.” I find I come to this book with loads of prejudgments. From the press and the jacket copy, the book celebrates the numerization of our thinking. Which I believe is mostly bad news.

This kind of number-worship has brought us financial risk mitigation that paradoxically increased risk, created AAA-rated bonds which were actually of junk status, and any number of other examples of solid financial and numerical logic that under examination simply failed the common-sense test. In other words, a hedge fund that studied human nature might have made a lot of money these last few years.

To me, “The Numerati” is behind the times. We’ve seen the apotheosis of the logical/mathematical revolution, and it ain’t pretty.

It’s time to put numbers into their context, and begin to shift more investment to understanding people, how they think, feel and relate to one another. This is where the money will be in the future, and this is what society needs now.

As Dave Snowden writes, “It’s not that social computing has created some completely new form of human interaction, what it has done is to enable conversations across barriers and boundaries. We can now be a global tribe (or rather tribes), if we can make the changes that the technology permits.”

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Must we give away digital creative works?

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, spurred on by the recent Fran Ten podcast, this David Pogue post, and most recently a thoughtful post by Scott Goodson based on this column by economist Paul Krugman.

The upshot of Krugman’s argument, referencing Esther Dyson’s prediction from the early ’90’s, is that digital creative works will become free, and creative artists will have to make their money from “ancillary” projects, such as touring, personal appearances, licensing, etc.

If this turns out to be true (and the music industry is approaching this state right now), then it has a lot of negative ramifications for the future of creativity.

First off is the fairness question. Here is a simplified digital media value chain:

  • Digital distributors (i.e., ISPs like Comcast) make money through subscriptions
  • Directories and aggregators (like Google) make money through advertising
  • Creators make… nothing?

While the structure of technology allows this to happen, it’s hard to look at this picture and see it as fair. I agree that DRM sucks, but is the solution “pay what you want“–a virtual tip jar?

Furthermore, if creating a work of art cannot in itself make money, it will then be difficult to invest much in that creation. While that may allow bloggers to continue (though I wouldn’t turn down a few bucks for my work if that were possible), it doesn’t bode well for musicians or moviemakers, and, soon, book authors.

If I can make money in personal appearances but not by writing, I will have to limit my writing time in order to, you know, pay the mortgage.

If a band can make money touring but not through selling CDs, they will be unlikely to spend much time in the recording studio, or to spend money on studio effects or gear. Perhaps they will instead simply tape their concerts and compile albums from the live sessions.

If a moviemaker cannot make money from her films because they are freely available on the web, she will have difficulty using any approach other than Dogme 95 in order to reduce costs. And do we want to see Dogme 95-style movies all the time?

The irony is that time put into making money takes away from time to create. Therefore, the output from our best artists is less. Is that progress?

Perhaps this is offset somewhat by the “long tail” of creators enabled by new technology. But I would trade 1000 bad “Nude” remixes for one new album by an artist I really like.

(Photo: pro-copying logo from piratbyran.org)

Related Posts:
Shop Talk Podcast #9 – Fran Ten of West Indian Girl on today’s music business
How will musicians get paid in the 21st century?

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IT Risk – platform and architecture matter

Monday, November 26th, 2007

Once, in my days running sales and marketing for a software company, the VP of Technology was growing agitated with my complaints about our product’s hardware and database architecture. “OK,” he said in exasperation, “if you don’t like [proprietary platform], what platform do you want the product to run on?”

In imitation of a Qwest ad from that time, I said, “I want it to run on any operating system, on any database, from any provider.” I then glanced at him to make sure he wasn’t winding up to smack me in the head. “You asked.”

What I was trying to get across is that fighting the platform battle with customers is a certain loser. If they are a Unix shop, and you are trying to sell them Linux, or OS400, it’s a nearly impossible task. It’s better, frankly, to cut your losses and find another prospect for which your product is a good architectural fit.

Why is that so? A new book helps sort it out. “IT Risk,” by George Westerman of MIT’s Sloan School and Richard Hunter of the Gartner Group, discusses how companies can and should manage risk within their information-technology infrastructures.

And one of Westerman and Hunter’s key points is that a company’s foundation architecture must be simple and standardized. Such an architecture can be more easily protected from disaster, can adapt more quickly to changes in the business, and can limit data access to authorized parties more easily than a hodgepodge of separate systems, platforms and applications.

Like it or not, when you are trying to sell a nonconforming software product into a company that has built a simple, standardized IT foundation, you are trying to force them to accept a hodgepodge. And they won’t do it.

Product managers need to manage the lifecycle of their architectures as well as the lifecycle of their functionality. It can be painful and expensive, but not as expensive as a good product that loses its market due to an outdated architecture.

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I like the Kindle

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

…at least what I’ve seen of it. No, it doesn’t look like Apple made it (perhaps not in itself a bad thing). But it’s got lots of titles, easy ordering/buying/downloading, and an easy-to-read screen.

I also like that they bundled the network charges into the cost of a book.

I don’t like… the name. It seems nobody does. Nor the purchase price–US$399. It’s a lot of money for something that I can’t guarantee I would use religiously. Paying for blogs is weird, never mind the small selection (you mean I can’t read Shop Talk on my Kindle?). I would happily pay for single newspaper copies, though, especially when I’m traveling.

But what I like most is a portable, easily reloadable eBook. I think about that often, when I’m schlepping through an airport terminal with my backpack laden down with a laptop and two or three books. My shoulders ache just thinking about this.

I also think of every kid carrying a too-heavy backpack to school. Which is all of them.

So, something I can carry in my backpack, which holds hundreds of books, which I can reload anywhere (at least, most anywhere in the US), which I can read as easily as a printed book. That’s a beautiful thing.

Now, Mr. Bezos. About that price tag…

(Read a summary of what other folks are saying about the Kindle here.)

(See a video demonstration of the Kindle here.)

(Kindle image courtesy of Amazon.com)

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Collecting and organizing narratives makes sense of complex problems

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

When I discuss my latest project, improving organizational performance via collecting and making sense of the narratives that employees carry with them, most people are initially skeptical. And organizational development professionals are often the quickest to dismiss the approach as “more of the same.”

So why am I convinced that narrative collection, selection, and sensemaking will work better than existing methods of gathering and acting on metrics, surveys and executive intuition?

It’s all about complexity. By now, we’ve ERPed, Six-Sigma’ed, Re-engineered, Rightsized, Business-Intelligenced and Job Sculpted our companies. Basic problems, such as systematizing processes, ensuring consistency of actions, enforcing policies and procedures, have largely been solved.

The problems that remain are messier, stickier, and more ambiguous, because they are more about people and their innate complexity. Difficulties in communicating, understanding each other, managing egos. Problems of company strategy, culture, management of change and managerial decisionmaking. Identifying and making use of organizational wisdom. These problems don’t have rote solutions. They don’t even have optimal solutions. In fact, there may be many outcomes that work well and equally many that are undesirable.

So, back to narrative. Creating stories about ourselves and our surroundings has been used since the beginning of history to make sense of and help us deal with our messiest, most daunting problems (check out this bestselling book for some examples).

One example I know of perfectly demonstrates the narrative technique. Underground, by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, intends to make sense of the senseless–the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995.

It does so by collecting and presenting stories. Thirty-four victims of the attack describe the day and its aftermath, in moment-to-moment detail. Eight cult members talk about their involvement and their feelings while perpetrating the atrocity.

The author is invisible, except for a brief prologue and small essay midway through. His task was to interview the survivors and cult members, select and edit the stories, and lay them out.

Reading this book is as close to being there that day as you could imagine. And the series of narratives, one laid on top of another, greatly illuminates the surprise and panic, the lingering fear and dread and perseverence, that being part of such an event brings on.

It’s indescribable, unsummarizable, this book. And that’s the point. A carefully-collected, organized collection of stories can bring an understanding of the most complex situations in a way that can’t be summarized by a consultant, or a graphic, or a PowerPoint presentation.

Enter that in your SAP system.

(Photo by fuzzcat via flickr)

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