Another gamified copy doing the rounds.
The Four Kinds of Economies
June 29, 2011 By
I don’t normally do straight-up reblogs here, but the new post, Unifying the Value Universe from Greg Rader at onthespiral.com is very relevant to some themes we are starting to attack here. It divides up value exchange into four types of economics: gift, transactional, relationship and attention that can be neatly arranged in a 2×2. As with any 2×2, the identification of the axis variables to use is key, and I think the ones Greg has picked really might be the right ones: relatedness of the parties and refinement of the value-add being exchanged (in the sense of rough vs. polished). Click on and read. He has a more detailed analysis of how this diagram works and in particular, of transactions that cross quadrant boundaries.
Semi-Annual Roundup 2011 and Highlights for New Readers
June 24, 2011 By
Since A Brief History of the Corporation has gone unexpectedly viral (it’s been featured on kottke.org, andrewsullivan, boingboing (via Cory Doctorow) and paulkedrosky.com among others) there’s been a bit of a jump in new readers, from 3000 to 3300 or so RSS subscribers (damn, I really am threatening to break out of the D-list here). So I thought I’d do a semi-annual roundup covering the posts from the last 6 months or so to give new readers a chance to do a Vegas-style buffet over the weekend. I usually only do annual roundups. Here are the 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007 roundups. For the new readers, I’ve also included a highlights reel of selected older posts that give you a taste of what ribbonfarm is about.
So here we go.
Kindle Edition Status, Glossary, Global Availability, Road Trip Contd.
June 24, 2011 By
Hi folks:
I’ve been busy with background stuff for the last month. I’ve mainly been evaluating different approaches to growing this site and tried a few experimental ideas that didn’t work out well enough to post.
But I finally have a sense of where I want to take this, so expect to see much more steady action on this blog from now on.
Updates on some routine stuff:
- The book is now available in most corners of the world via the Book Depository. In the US, Canada and UK of course, it is probably easiest to get via Amazon (click here for links).
- Yes, yes, I am working on the Kindle edition. That’s one of the back-end things that’s holding up this blog. It’s not hard, but it IS an annoying typesetting chore (I basically have to re-typeset the LaTeX source into html, a pain).
- I am also working on a glossary which many readers have asked for. I’ll post it here when it is reasonably complete, and include it in the next edition, whenever that happens.
- I’ll be continuing my road trip to promote the book starting approximately July 11. I’ll be in LA for a few days, the Bay Area for a few weeks, and Portland/Seattle/Vancouver, BC for another week or so. Stay tuned for further details, which I’ll post on ribbonfarm.com
In the mean time, thanks for your support of the book, and do let me know what else you’d like to see on this site. My overall goal is to use this site to take the book to a whole new level rather than just adding marginal value. In fact, if things go according to plan and the book turns out to have enduring value for enough people, my plan is to gradually shift the center of gravity of the conversation from the book’s future editions to this site.
The Las Vegas Rules II: Stuff Science
June 16, 2011 By
In lifestyle design, your relationship with your material possessions — “stuff” — is perhaps the central issue. Digital stuff is stuff too, since it has to physically live somewhere. Stuff is the locus where theories meet reality. It is not particularly hard to think about money, careers and investments in reasonably clear-eyed ways. If it weren’t for stuff, execution on those fronts would also be easy.
Stuff is different. Even thinking about it is hard. We don’t even have a good word for it. If you’ve been living on your own for at least a couple of years, getting a clear sense of all the stuff in your life takes an intense, draining and intellectually demanding exercise like a GTD Sweep (the first stage in getting on the GTD wagon; just spending a weekend making sense of all your stuff). By comparison, developing situation awareness of your finances is as simple as logging into your major accounts. Stuff diseases, such as extreme hoarding, seem to me to be much worse than financial diseases like being over-leveraged.
In lifestyle design discussions, I find that people vastly oversimplify the stuff side. They pick unexamined philosophies about stuff, like “minimalism” or “go local,” without ever looking at how the stuff in their life actually works. This is like deciding to save $1000 a month without actually looking at your income, debt and expenses. Worse, they try to pitch their unexamined “stuff religion” to others.
So a few months back, I decided I needed to understand stuff and start experimenting with doing things to it, before getting all caught up in pretty lifestyle theories. Understanding stuff is Stuff Science.
A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100
June 8, 2011 By
On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company’s shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock ruined his plans, and he skipped town leaving £550,000 in debt. Much of this was owed to the Ayr Bank, which imploded. In less than three weeks, another 30 banks collapsed across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill. On July 15, the directors of the Company applied to the Bank of England for a £400,000 loan. Two weeks later, they wanted another £300,000. By August, the directors wanted a £1 million bailout. The news began leaking out and seemingly contrite executives, running from angry shareholders, faced furious Parliament members. By January, the terms of a comprehensive bailout were worked out, and the British government inserted its czars into the Company’s management to ensure compliance with its terms.
If this sounds eerily familiar, it shouldn’t. The year was 1772, exactly 239 years ago today, the apogee of power for the corporation as a business construct. The company was the British East India company (EIC). The bubble that burst was the East India Bubble. Between the founding of the EIC in 1600 and the post-subprime world of 2011, the idea of the corporation was born, matured, over-extended, reined-in, refined, patched, updated, over-extended again, propped-up and finally widely declared to be obsolete. Between 2011 and 2100, it will decline — hopefully gracefully — into a well-behaved retiree on the economic scene.
In its 400+ year history, the corporation has achieved extraordinary things, cutting around-the-world travel time from years to less than a day, putting a computer on every desk, a toilet in every home (nearly) and a cellphone within reach of every human. It even put a man on the Moon and kinda-sorta cured AIDS.
So it is a sort of grim privilege for the generations living today to watch the slow demise of such a spectacularly effective intellectual construct. The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two. They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.
It is not yet time for the obituary (and that time may never come), but the sun is certainly setting on the Golden Age of corporations. It is time to review the memoirs of the corporation as an idea, and contemplate a post-corporate future framed by its gradual withdrawal from the center stage of the world’s economic affairs.
Bardic Mystique: Maastricht, Netherlands
June 6, 2011 By
Stefan King's copy is starting its journey in Maastricht.
Towards Thick Strategy Narratives
June 3, 2011 By
Narratives are getting to be a hot topic, so you’d think I’d be pleased that I’ve just published a book where they play a central role. A few people have even congratulated me on my timing. They think it is deliberate. Sadly, I am not so smart. In fact, if I’d seen this coming, I’d probably have picked something else to work on.
You see, I don’t like working on popular, trendy things. I get anxious and irritable when I discover that others are working on the same ideas that I am. Call it intellectual agoraphobia, being an unsociable jerk, or just plain lack of competitive drive. So I haven’t exactly been happy about narratives suddenly becoming a hot topic. It feels like I just went on a lovely solitary hike through some beautiful wilderness, and arrived at a great camping spot, only to discover that a whole noisy, partying crowd had also gotten there by a different route.
Yeah, these are mean, turf-grubbing, selfish, uncharitable thoughts. It’s not like I own Narrative National Park.
Fortunately for my sanity, the big crowds seem to be headed along trails that don’t interest me. In business and politics, much of the attention is on marketing and motivational narratives. In the broader cultural sphere, there’s a lot of interest in identity narratives. There is also an anti-narrative movement focused on the problems of narrative approaches. If any of these topics interests you, here are some good starting points:
- Marketing narratives: Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
- Motivational narratives: Squirrel Inc. by Stephen Denning
- Identity narratives: The Redemptive Self by Dan McAdams
- Anti-narrative movement: The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Tyler Cowen’s blog
My own interest is pretty narrowly focused on decision-narratives. The raw stream-of-consciousness story you tell yourself as you actually live through an experience and make your live, real-time decisions.
The book is primarily about the fundamentals of the idea, but in this post, I want to explore an application of those fundamentals to the problem of crafting strategy narratives (the post is stand-alone; you don’t need to have read the book). In particular, I am going to examine the limitations of existing varieties of strategy narratives, and argue that we need a new variety, thick strategy narratives.
The Las Vegas Rules I: The Slightly Malevolent Universe
June 2, 2011 By
Update: Greg Rader pointed out over email that my diagram was messed up in Economics 101 terms: the production frontier is usually convex and the utility/indifference curves concave. I had things the other way around. Total sloppiness on my part. In fixing the picture, an additional insight struck me: the normal outcome of such diagrams usually the achievable optimum somewhere in the middle, where it can “kiss” the most valuable concave utility curve. The interesting thing is that it is much easier to gamble with a surplus of money or a surplus of time, than it is to gamble with an optimal mix. This suggests WHY lifestyle design may be hard: you have to move away from your current optimum in order to gamble effectively. The normal way is to work harder than you want to, in order to accumulate the surplus money to gamble with. Lifestyle design moves away from the optimum in a different direction.
I’ve been thinking and writing about the idea of lifestyle businesses and lifestyle design for several years now, and attempting to actually play the game for a few months. It is not easy, and I have not been satisfied with how others have been framing the subject. In particular, I have been disturbed by the “anyone can do this, guaranteed” attitude of cheery optimism around the subject. Unqualified optimism of any sort immediately makes me skeptical. Perhaps this is because I am an engineer both by training and philosophical inclination. Engineering knowledge is usually expressed in terms of fundamental limits, conservation laws and constraints. So it was natural for me to frame the challenge of lifestyle design for myself with this time-money Pareto frontier diagram. 
I’ve been criticized in the past for talking a lot about lifestyle design, and critiquing others’ ideas, but never actually adopting a definite position myself. So I am about to start taking one. In honor of my new home and the central role of gambling and risk-taking in my model, I am calling it the Las Vegas Rules.
I am going to bite off one little piece at a time, and point out differences compared to other models as I go along. This time, I just want to talk about the role of gambling in lifestyle design.
Review at Zenpundit.com
May 31, 2011 By
Mark Safranksi at zenpundit posted a review of Tempo.
TEMPO is in my view, an important book that deserves to be widely read in the community concerned with strategic theory, professional military education and operational campaign design. Not everything Rao discusses in TEMPO fits with the manner in which strategic discussions are commonly expressed or has immediate application to all questions of tactics or strategy faced by all ranks of soldiers or statesmen. No book could do that and Rao’s scientific background and interests preclude that kind of subcultural intimacy, but TEMPO will sharpen the reader’s awareness of their own thinking and the situational dynamics in which strategic and tactical decision making must occur. TEMPO seeks to clarify and succeeds.
Strongly recommended.
