Roundup of 2012 Tempoblog Posts

December 30, 2012 By

Here’s a roundup of the original posts from 2012 on the Tempo blog, not counting reblogs, announcements and such-like. A total of 28 posts. Here’s the 2011 roundup. I am quite surprised I managed this many, but I see that most of them are from the first half of the year. Things got kinda crazy in the second half. I seem to be developing a somewhat different style here on the Tempo blog, different from my main blog at ribbonfarm. I spent a lot of time through the year thinking through some of the core themes of the book in greater depth and identifying interesting patterns of ideas for incorporation into the book.

  1. The Examined Life
  2. Annealing the Tactical Pattern Stack
  3. Demystification versus Understanding
  4. Breakout Moves and Exponential Outcomes
  5. Positioning Moves versus Melee Moves
  6. Stress Failures versus Decay Failures
  7. Not Important, Not Urgent
  8. Fertile Variables and Rich Moves
  9. Analysis-Paralysis and The Sensemaking Trap
  10. Appreciative versus Manipulative Mental Models
  11. Time Lensing
  12. Forged Groups
  13. The Daily Ugly
  14. How Life Imitates Chess by Garry Kasparov
  15. Creative Desks versus Administration Desks
  16. The 6-Hour Maker-Manager Work Day
  17. Hacking Grand Narratives
  18. Trigger Narratives and the Nuclear Option
  19. The Tempo of Code
  20. The Fundamentals of Calendar Hacking
  21. Routine, but Cannot be Automated
  22. The Second Most Important Archetype in your Life
  23. Live Life, Not Projects
  24. Motifs, Mascots and Muses at Refactor Camp, 2012
  25. The Tempo Glossary
  26. Does Culture Eat Strategy for Lunch?
  27. Steer, Ready, Fire
  28. Squeakastination: The Opposite of Procrastination

Complete 2012 Roundup

December 19, 2012 By
This entry is part 6 of 17 in the series Annual Roundups

Time for another annual roundup and post-game analysis session. Here are the roundups from 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007 for new readers who want to go dumpster diving in the archives. I don’t recommend it since there is now a set of curated lists of the best posts on the “for new users” page (which are also gathered into convenient PDF/ePub compilations).

2012 has been a special year in multiple ways. Among other things, I celebrated my five-year anniversary, crossed 5000 RSS subscribers, and hit a record $3900 in sponsorships, nearly twice last year’s total (thank you, sponsors).  But perhaps the most important development was that I finally got the sense that I know what I am doing here. Every post performed pretty much exactly as I wanted it to, and the few surprises were pleasant ones. I was able to match intent to output, and predict responses pretty well. While putting together this roundup, I did some analysis of my blogging history that I think will interest other long form bloggers, as well as anyone growing any sort of business.

But first, the roundup of posts, in chronological order.

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Talk on Kool Aid, VUCA Discussion, Tuesday Nov 27 at USC (Los Angeles)

November 23, 2012 By

A quick announcement. I’ll be in Los Angeles on Tuesday the 27th to do a talk at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab titled Should You Drink the Kool-Aid?

The talk is at 12:30 PM at Annenberg (which appears to be in the heart of downtown). Details at the link above.  Hope to see some of you there. Middle of a weekday I know, but if you are are in the neighborhood and in the mood to sneak away from work, this should be fun.

It will be loosely based on interesting discussions I’ve had with various people since I wrote my somewhat controversial trilogy on Forbes, Entrepreneurs are the New Labor, mashed up with ideas from Tempo and posts like The Calculus of Grit and The Crucible Effect.

There is also another event later in the day at 3:30 PM (also at Annenberg) with the folks from the USC Scenario Lab, to talk about VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity).

I am also open on the evening of Monday the 26th, in case anyone wants to meet up for dinner.  I get in around 6:30 at LAX, and will be looking to grab a bite somewhere convenient around 7:30ish before heading to my hotel. Email me if you’d like to meet up.

Thanks to reader and unofficial P. T. Barnum of Ribbonfarm, Zhan Li, for arranging both events.

Deskless in Seattle, Future of Data Survey

October 31, 2012 By

First off, thanks to my guest bloggers in the past couple of weeks, Drew Austin and Kevin Simler, for covering for me. It’s been a crazy-chaotic time for me lately, but the dust is finally settling.

Two quick updates: I am moving to Seattle, and I need help with a Survey.  Details:

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The Guerilla Guide to Social Business

July 31, 2012 By

I don’t quite recall how it happened anymore, but in September 2008, I wrote a post for the Enterprise 2.0 blog titled Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War.  The post — probably the purest piece of deliberate flamebait I’ve ever written — went viral. Many of you found ribbonfarm via that post.

I continued writing about the Enterprise 2.0 theme irregularly after that, first on the E 2.0 blog and then on Information Week. I recently decided to wrap up my thoughts on the theme and close out this thread of blogging with a final post: The Enterprise 2.0 Backlog: 100 Ideas.

This close-out post is about as close as I’ve ever gotten to outright prescription. It is also the only significant list post I’ve done in my life (list blogging is the lowest kind of blogging there is of course, but there is some redemption to be found in epic-sized lists that cross 100 items).

Anyway, I figured I’d put together the essays into a convenient PDF collection. So here you go: about 29,000 words and 104 pages worth of slightly evil thoughts on social business: The Guerilla Guide to Social Business.

Read it, share it, print it out and leave it lying around, pass it along to friends, bosses, unsuspecting VPs with budget money to run through before year-end who might hire a consultant in an unguarded moment, etc.

It was a fun ride, the first bandwagon I rode from start to finish, through the ups and downs of the hype cycle. The ride also helped kick off my consulting business.

I think it is safe to say now that the ride is mostly over. The conversation has matured. Andrew McAfee’s well-timed phrase heralding the trend, “Enterprise 2.0,” has been replaced by the more permanent-sounding (ominously so?) “Social Business.”  The Enterprise 2.0 conference has rebranded itself (rather cryptically) as E2 and settled in as steward of a long-haul conversation.

Thanks are due to Rob Preston, Steve Wylie and Paige Finkelman at TechWeb for providing a platform and tolerating my grumpy, dystopian blogging through the hype cycle. Also thanks to Mark Masterson and Doug Neal at CSC and Daniel Pritchett, for many interesting conversations on E 2.0/Social Business. Apologies if I missed anyone.

For those of you who follow me primarily on Information Week, I’ll be taking a sabbatical from that site, until I find another suitable theme for which that’s the appropriate channel. If and when I start a new theme there, I’ll do a heads-up here.

Five Years of Blogging

July 3, 2012 By

July 4th, 2012 will mark the fifth anniversary of ribbonfarm. Now that I’ve completed a retrospective of five years worth of writing through the last month, I figured it was time to step back and put the whole thing together. Here’s the picture I came up with.

Before I give you a tour of SES Ribbonfarm (that’s “Slightly Evil Ship”), some housekeeping matters. I now have a glossary, which many of you asked for, and a For New Readers page. Links to both are on the menu bar. The latter contains links to the four roundups I did in June, as well as downloadable epubs and links to reading lists of the posts on readlists.com (you can use their app or send the lists to your Kindle or iPad).

If you’ve been reading ribbonfarm for more than a couple of years or two, and have useful thoughts for new readers, please post them as a comment on that page. This should also be a good page to point people to if you want to introduce them to ribbonfarm.

Now for the ship.

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The Mysteries of Money

June 20, 2012 By

There was a brief period early in the life of ribbonfarm when I thought the blog was about business. But I was never quite comfortable with that idea, though I do write a lot about business matters.

(2017 update: You can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

I finally realized where I was going wrong: businesses, markets, products, even society, culture and civilization itself: these are all clumsy constructs that revolve around money. Money is the most basic stuff in this universe of consensual fictions that we call civilized life.

I am terrible at making money, but I have never understood people who don’t take money seriously, and have even managed to develop a disdain for it. I suspect it is sour grapes, pure and simple. Which is a pity, since money is absolutely fascinating stuff even if you don’t have enough of it to appreciate close-up or swim around in, like Scrooge McDuck. It is the fabric of social reality — stuff that is real because we collectively believe in it — the way space-time is the fabric of physical reality.

So with that bit of purple prose, I give you: the fourth and last sequence through the ribbonfarm archives, 2007-2012.

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Getting Ahead, Getting Along, Getting Away

June 13, 2012 By

Sometimes I think that if I were much more famous, female and in Hollywood instead of the penny theater circuit that is the blogosphere, I’d be Greta Garbo. Constantly insisting that I want to be left alone while at the same time being drawn to a kind of work that is intrinsically public and social. Simultaneously inviting attention and withdrawing from it.

(2017 update: You can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

Which I suppose is why ruminations on the key tensions of being a self-proclaimed introvert, in a role that seems better suited to extroverts, occupies so much bandwidth on this blog. That’s the theme of this third installment in my ongoing series of introductory sequences to ribbonfarm (here are the first two). This is the longest of the sequences, at 21 posts, and also has the most commentary. So here you go. I hope this will be useful to both new and old readers.

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Towards an Appreciative View of Technology

June 5, 2012 By

Recently I encountered the perfect punchline for my ongoing exploration of technology: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. The timing was perfect, since I’ve been looking for an organizing idea to describe how I understand technology.

(2017 update: you can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

Looking back over the technology-related posts in my archives over the last five years, this technology-is-nature theme pops out clearly, as both a descriptive and normative theme. I don’t mean that in the sense of naive visions of bucolic bliss (though that is certainly an attractive technology design aesthetic) but in the sense of technology as a manifestation of the same deeper lawfulness that creates forests-and-bears nature. Technology at its best allows for the fullest expression of that lawfulness, without narrow human concerns getting in the way.

I will explain the title in a minute but first, here is my technology sequence of 14 posts written over the last five years. The organizing narrative for the sequence comes from this technology-is-nature idea that informs my thinking, whether I am pondering landfills or rusty ships.

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The Art of Refactored Perception

May 31, 2012 By

When I made up the tagline, experiments in refactored perception, back in 2007, I had no idea how deeply that line would come to define the essence of ribbonfarm. So in this first post in my planned month-long retrospective on five years in the game, I decided to look back on the evolution and gradual deepening of the idea of refactoring perceptions.

(2017 update: you can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

I’ve never attempted an overt characterization of what the phrase means, but over the years, I’ve explored it fairly systematically. This sequence of posts should help you appreciate what I mean by the phrase. I’ve arranged the sequence as a set of fairly natural stages. There is some commentary at the end. Here you go:

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