The Right and Left Brains of Enterprise 2.0

December 16, 2009 By

As some of you know, I occasionally (very occasionally in recent times) guest post over at the Enterprise 2.0 blog. I just posted a combo-pack review of two recent books there: Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 and Fraser/Dutta’s Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom.

Click on over and read. There are also a few links scattered in the piece, to my older E 2.0 theme articles. At some point I’ll make an E2.0 trail, but for now, you might also enjoy this trail on the “Enterprise 2.0: What A Crock” debate that has recently been brewing (start reading or go to the Trail Map)

I’ll be out on vacation for the next couple of weeks, so I won’t be posting new material till January. If I have time, I might set up a couple of “rerun” posts on older popular pieces before I leave.

Happy Holidays!

Random Promotions and the Gervais Principle

December 13, 2009 By

The New York Times has a section in the most recent magazine called the Ninth Annual Year in Ideas. Divya Manian (@nimbupani) alerted me to  the second idea in the business section: random promotions.

In 1969, the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter posited the “Peter Principle”…Eventually the entire economy becomes like the paper company Dunder Mifflin in “The Office” — clogged with incompetence…Is there any way to avoid this trap? Yes, by promoting people at random.

It’s a short piece, and is based on organizational dynamics simulations by a trio of Italian scientists. Go check it out. It is an intriguing thought: that random promotions might break the Peter Principle. Do they break or validate the Gervais Principle? 

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Social Objects: Notes on Knitting in America

December 7, 2009 By

I recently bought a classic, cherry-finish  River City hourglass. It was the first time I deliberately bought something to serve as a social object, which I’ll define as any tangible entity that can catalyze a characteristic social chemistry. In this case, the hourglass helped me tweak the ambiance of a writers meetup I run in the Washington, DC area.

hourglass

I’ve wondered for years about how people connect over particular elements of their environment, ranging from water coolers and YouTube videos to parrots. We are currently in the thick of social object season:  turkeys, Christmas trees, mistletoe.

Social objects are a complex idea. We need a theory that can provide a conceptual framework and vocabulary, suggest conjectures that might become laws, and distinguish between social objects and related but distinct creatures such as memes, social signals, brands and ritual objects. A good theory should also shed light on specific questions, such as “why have so many hip young American women taken up knitting in recent years?”

I am finally beginning to see the outlines of such a general theory. The first useful inference I have been able to derive is this: when communities digitize, social objects replace walls. I call this the first law of social objects. Let’s work our way up to that. (before more people yell at me… yes, this is an early beta stab at a new theme, so apologies for the length and looseness of editing).

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Pricing in Pay-It-Forward and Gift Economies

December 1, 2009 By

Thanks to this site lurching up a notch in traffic and visits, with a corresponding lurch-up in various revenue streams (coffee, Amazon Affiliate sales, Google AdSense), an interesting set of economics questions has been on my radar. Over the last two months, ribbonfarm.com made a few hundred dollars (mainly due to the Gervais Principle articles). That’s still pretty much a rounding error in relative terms, compared to my real job, but in absolute terms, it is actually worth thinking about. Here is the main question: what percentage of revenue should someone like me devote to contributions to all the fantastic open-source infrastructure that makes this blog possible? So far, I’ve behaved pretty randomly. Last month, I donated $20 to the guy (Ankesh Kothari) behind the “Buy me a beer” plugin (which you see on this site as “Buy me a coffee”). I also donated another $20 to Wikipedia. But I’d like to think about this more systematically, and figure out how much to contribute, how, and who gets it. Here are my opening thoughts.

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Morality, Compassion and the Sociopath

November 21, 2009 By

Again, the response to the Gervais Principle II seems to require a response to key themes that have emerged. There are several that I am going to touch upon in the next part, and some I am not touching, ever, but one deserves note and a serious response, since I hadn’t planned on addressing it. This is the question of good and evil. For those of you who want the elevator-pitch version, the short position is this: my entire thesis is amoral; there are good and evil sociopaths; more sociopaths is a good thing; the clueless and losers are exactly as likely to engage in evil behaviors as sociopaths. Details follow. Keep in mind that this is a very rough sketch, and a sidebar to the main series that I really don’t want to pursue too far.

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The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk

November 11, 2009 By

We began this analysis of corporate life by exploring a  theoretical construct (the Gervais Principle) through the character arcs of Michael and Ryan in The Office. The construct and examples provide a broad-strokes treatment of the why of the power dynamics among Sociopaths, the Clueless and Losers.

Series Home | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | ebook

 

This helps us understand how the world works, but not how to work it. So let me introduce you to the main skill required here, mastery over the four major languages spoken in organizations, among Sociopaths, Losers and the Clueless. I’ll call the four languages Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk. Here’s a picture of who speaks what to whom. Let’s use it to figure out how to make friends and influence people, Office style.

langsTom

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One Good Thing About the ‘Flu

November 5, 2009 By

I have been down with the ‘flu for the last few days. It has been quite a while since I’ve been sick enough that I’ve had to mostly stay in bed, and I am writing this in the couple of hours of Advil-created non-feverish semi-coherent lucidity the Viral Gods have granted me today. So after catching up with emergency work emails and deferring/rescheduling everything else, I thought I’d dash off a quick post sharing an interesting thought that occurred to me.

Here’s the thought: I feel almost guilty admitting this, but there is an aspect of flu-like mild-to-moderate short-term illnesses (knock on wood) that I actually enjoy. I don’t know if others experience ‘flu the same way, but in my case, I usually suffer through a few cycles of alternating fever/body pain and cool clamminess. For most of the fever part of the cycle, your body is rebelling enough that both thought and sleep are nearly impossible.  Your head and eyes ache too much to allow reading or TV watching. Thoughts are feverish and half-hallucinatory. If you do manage to fall asleep for an hour or so, the dreams are hallucinatory. But then comes the reward: during the second half of the cycle, when you sweat and your skin turns cool and moist and the body pain recedes for a while, you are too exhausted to think, but cool and pain free enough that you feel utterly relaxed.

It is a kind of deep relaxation that is becoming increasingly hard to find for most people. It takes a virus to slow us down enough that the million anxieties that routinely bother us are held at bay for a while.

On an unrelated note, I had nearly finished the sequel to the Gervais Principle post when the ‘flu struck. I’ll get to it when I recover, but in the meantime, enjoy this Chekov short story, one  of my favorites: A Defenceless Creature.  It is actually relevant.  Anyone in the story remind you of Michael?

Baital Pachisi: An Indian Vampire Meta-Story

October 30, 2009 By

Pondering the glut of vampire fiction and television dramas this Halloween, I thought I’d share a fun-scary piece of my childhood. This is the traditional Indian meta-folktale, Baital Pachisi (The Twenty Five Tales of Baital). It concerns the wise King Bikram and a rather strange philosopher ghoul-vampire, a Baital (sometimes spelled Betaal or Vetal). I have no clue about its historical origins, but Wikipedia attributes the tales to the 8th century poet Bhavabhuti, and identifies the hero, the fictional King Bikram, with the real King Vikramaditya of Ujjain (102 BC to 15 AD). Here is a depiction of the core premise of the folktale by Harshad Dhavale (public domain):

439px-Vetal

The stories are curiously interesting because they set philosophical, moral and ethical conundrums in the context of a life-or-death struggle between Bikram and the baital. Here’s how they run.

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Fear of Improvisation (and Clunkers)

October 26, 2009 By

Late Saturday afternoon, I headed out from my apartment to pick up my wife from the airport, about 30 miles away. It was pouring and cold. Traffic was heavy and slow as I caught 395 North into the district. Just as I was about to enter the tunnel that leads into Washington, DC, I heard it: a loud, ugly CLUNK! followed by the jarring tinny racket that tells you that your car is dragging something metallic along. A minute later, I heard the harsh throb of an unmuffled engine. I took the first exit I could, which unfortunately, dumped me right into the heart of Washington, DC. I found a parking spot and stepped out. As I’d suspected, it was my exhaust. A bracket had broken and the exhaust assembly was being dragged along. Here’s a picture of the fix I improvised with my belt, before driving back home. I expect it will hold up fine for the additional mile or so to my repair shop on Monday.

exhaust

The fix, as you can see, is not a particularly clever one. What struck me though, as I thought of it, was how just how long I spent on dumb, unproductive by-the-book “call AAA” thoughts before giving myself permission to figure out this obvious fix. It strikes me that quite often, what holds us back from improvising creative options is not lack of creativity or ingenuity, but a vague fear of improvisation itself. So I poked around the idea a little bit and realized that the fear of improvisation is really the fear of death. Here’s why.

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Hello to Slashdotters, Gervais Principle Follow-Ups

October 14, 2009 By

I don’t do many meta posts, but yesterday’s slashdotting (thanks @kdawson) of the Gervais Principle post, complete with a couple of hours of server-choking,  certainly demands one. The day easily broke all traffic, comment and coffee-buying records on this blog. So, a “Hello!” to everybody who found ribbonfarm.com through Slashdot, and I hope you sign up for the RSS feed or email list. I am posting this to introduce you to the rest of this blog and do a quick initial reaction to the comments (here, on Slashdot, Twitter, and on Hacker News).  So here goes.

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