Archives for 2011

Tempo Review on BoingBoing by Cory Doctorow

October 13, 2011 By

Cory Doctorow has a thoughtful review of the book up at BoingBoing.

But I’ve just picked it up again, and finished it. Why? Because I kept on referring to it in discussions — all sorts of discussions. A critical analysis of a friend’s manuscript for a new book on security; a talk with my agent about the plot of an upcoming novel; a discussion of economics and bubbles; a practical political planning session for an upcoming debate at a party conference. Tempo had stimulated a lot of thinking for me, and I thought it deserved finishing.

So I’ve finished it, and while I very rarely bother to post about books that I can’t wholeheartedly recommend (see “life’s too short,” above), I find myself driven to post a rare mixed review. Tempo may be the most fascinating book whose thesis I couldn’t entirely grasp and whose author I couldn’t wholly follow that I’ve ever read.

Like many other readers, Cory appears to have found the book rather dense, but worth finishing.

New Forbes Blog, Economist Video

October 6, 2011 By

A quick heads-up on a couple of off-site items. First, I just signed on as a contributor at Forbes, and booted-up my new blog there, on technology issues. I’ve posted two pieces in two days (I don’t plan to maintain a daily-posting schedule, but I felt Steve Jobs’ passing deserves a reaction on any technology blog).

You’ll see some familiar ribbonfarm themes evolve in more focused ways on Forbes.  I am hoping to keep up a weekly schedule of posts there. They will be on the shorter side (for me). I’ll be aiming for 1000-1200 words at most, probably fewer.

Hope to see you in the comments there.

Second, the video of my talk on the Gervais Principle is now available on the Economist site. Now that I am writing in so many different places (here, the Tempo blog, the Be Slightly Evil list, occasional high-effort Quora answers, Information Week and now Forbes), I think I need to figure out some sort of roundup strategy. I’ll see what I can do. Perhaps a monthly roundup?

The Stream Map of the World

October 4, 2011 By
This entry is part 3 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

For most of the last decade, Israeli soldiers have been making the transition back to civilian life after their compulsory military service  by going on a drug-dazed recovery trip to India, where an invisible stream of modern global culture runs from the beaches of Goa to the mountains of Himachal Pradesh in the north.  While most of the Israelis eventually return home after a year or so, many have stayed as permanent expat stewards of the stream. The Israeli military stream is changing course these days, and starting to flow through Thailand, where the same pattern of drug-use and conflict with the locals is being repeated.

This pattern of movement among young Israelis is an example of what I’ve started calling a stream. A stream is not a migration pattern, travel in the usual sense, or a consequence of specific kinds of work that require travel (such as seafaring or diplomacy). It is a sort of slow, life-long communal nomadism, enabled by globalization and a sense of shared transnational social identity within a small population.

I’ve been getting increasingly curious about such streams. I have come to believe that though small in terms of absolute numbers (my estimate is between 20-25 million worldwide), the stream citizenry of the world shapes the course of globalization. In fact, it would not be unreasonable to say that streams provide the indirect staffing for the processes of modern technology-driven globalization. They are therefore a distinctly modern phenomenon, not to be confused with earlier mobile populations they may partly resemble.

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Mental Models and Archetypes Explained

October 3, 2011 By

I spent several thousand words in the book talking about mental models and archetypes, but this awesome satirical graphic conveys the essence of the idea in just one picture. From the Global Nerdy blog, though it apparently has a longer history and originally appeared in French first. Thanks to Jean-Luc Delatre for pointing this out.

Ubiquity Illusions and the Chicken-Egg Problem

September 29, 2011 By

I enjoy thinking about chicken-and-egg problems. They lead to a lot of perception-refactoring. Some common examples include:

  1. You need relevant experience to get a good job, you need a good job to get relevant experience.
  2. You need good credit to get a loan, you need to get loans to develop good credit.
  3. You need users to help you build a better product, you need a better product to get users.

This post is about one particular way to solve the problem, using what I call a ubiquity illusion. It is one version of what is colloquially known as the fake-it-till-you-make-it method.

Creating a ubiquity illusion is the most readily available method for solving a chicken-egg problem. It is, to be perfectly honest, not the best method. There are other methods that are superior, but they are generally not available to most people.

Ubiquity illusions are like the sculpture above (The Awakening, by J. Seward Johnson, photograph by Ryan Sandridge, Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution). It is actually five separate pieces strategically buried to give the impression of a much larger buried sculpture, of which three are visible above.

Let’s talk magic.

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The Milo Criterion

September 23, 2011 By

There is a saying that goes back to Milo of Croton: lift a calf everyday and when you grow up, you can lift a cow. The story goes that Milo, a famous wrestler in ancient Greece, gained his immense strength by lifting a newborn calf one day when he was a boy, and then lifting it every day as it grew. In a few years, he was able to lift the grown cow. The calf grew into a cow at about the rate that Milo grew  into a man. A rather freakish man apparently, since grown cows can weigh over  1000 lb.  The point is, the calf grew old along with the boy.

I have been pondering this story for a couple of years, and it has led me to a very fertile idea about product design and entrepreneurship.

I call it the Milo Criterion: products must mature no faster than the rate at which users can adapt. Call that ideal maximum rate the Milo rate.

It seems like a simple and almost tautological thought, but it leads to some subversive consequences, which is one reason I have been reluctant to talk about it. The most subversive effect is that it has led me to abandon lean startup theory, which is now orthodoxy in the startup world.

As a consequence, I have mostly abandoned notions like product-market-fit, minimum viable product, pivots and the core value of “lean.”  I only use the terms to communicate with people who think in those terms.  And I can’t communicate very much within that vocabulary.

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Forgivable Sloppiness: The Art of Epoch-Driven Time Management

September 22, 2011 By

I didn’t write a whole lot about time management in the book. This is because I believe it is a pretty mature field and I don’t like reinventing the wheel.  But I do have ideas about how to make your time management behaviors more robust, so you can allow for a certain amount of forgivable sloppiness in how you operate. David Allen of GTD fame once remarked, only partly in jest, that the fastest way to increase your productivity is to lower your standards. Forgivable sloppiness is my term for what it means to safely lower your standards.

The core idea is what I call epoch-driven time management: varying your behaviors based on the tempo of a project.  The idea can be generalized to your whole life, but let’s start with a single project, a thread in your life. This diagram, the Double Freytag triangle, which I discussed at length in the book, is one systematic way to carve up the time-line of your project into epochs with consistent tempos.

For the purposes of this post, all you need is your intuitive reading of the diagram. Think of the cheap trick and separation event as the psychological starting and ending points of a project (if you haven’t read the book, the choice of terms will remain somewhat cryptic, I am afraid). The height of the graph at any given point is, roughly speaking, a measure of how crazy your life is at that point. Each phase of the diagram is an epoch: it has a consistent rhythm, energy level and emotional feel.

Now that we have our terms defined (I am still working on an online glossary so I don’t have to do this for every post), let’s talk about forgivably sloppy time management.

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The Gervais Principle in New York, and Friday 9/16 NYC Meetup

September 12, 2011 By

It’s been nearly a year of procrastination since I posted Part IV of the Gervais Principle, and I am finally getting my act together. I’ll post the final part in the next few weeks. Blame hugely inflated expectations for the finale for my tardiness. But I finally decided, like Tony Hayward, that I wanted my life back. So I have legitimately started work on the finale (for those who don’t know what I am talking about: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV).  Whether it turns out to be a smooth touchdown or a crash-landing, either way the end is near.

But this post is mainly a news flash. I will be doing a 7-minute talk based on the Gervais Principle at the Human Potential conference, Sept 14-15 in New York. It is part of the Ideas Economy series of events organized by the Economist.  As far as I know, this Slightly Evil revolution is not being webcast, but the video should be available at some point. If you are attending, make sure to say hello.

I am extending my stay by a couple of days to meet people. If there is enough interest, I’d like to do an NYC meetup (or  a couple of small group/1:1 meetings) on Friday the 16th. If you are interested, let me know your availability. I expect to do any meetings somewhere midtown, 34th – 44th st or so.

Also, if you can offer me a couch in Manhattan to crash on for the night of 15th or 16th, let me know.  Thanks to my nomadic summer, I’ve acquired a serious taste for couchsurfing as a way to meet interesting new people, and have actually started to prefer it to staying at a hotel or with friends/family.

 

Fixing the Game by Roger L. Martin

September 8, 2011 By

Sometimes the difference between a good book and an Aaargh! book is a single unexamined value. Fixing the Game by Roger L. Martin is an Aargh! book. The phrase that kept running through my head as I read was so close… so close.

The book is two things: an exceptionally clear and original analysis of the question of what ails modern capitalism, and an exceptionally woolly headed prescription for how to fix it. Unlike many books that are strong on analysis, the prescription isn’t bad because it is an anemic afterthought shoved into a last chapter (here, the prescription runs through the entire book, with a goodly fraction of the word count devoted to it). It is weak because its foundational assumptions about the psychology of capitalism are hopelessly idealistic.

That’s what makes the book so frustrating. It could have been so much more. Still the book retains a lot of its value because it is relatively easy to tease apart the parts colored by idealism from the parts that are not.

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Tempo goes to Burning Man

September 7, 2011 By
Burning_book

Andrew Boardman named his copy “Burning Book.” His rule: the copy must be passed on to someone who has been to Burning Man.