"the real utility of 7 Habits and 12 Disciplines and 50 Ways is that they create the illusion of progress simply by adding another layer of busyness."

Now, where did I put that PDA?

Excellent article by the always readable David Warsh on how patenting has gone overboard, with various companies patenting things that are a) obvious, old hat or both, b) patented just for the sake of suing people who want to create real products, and c) limits real innovation.

Tom Evslin has previously written about a peer-review patent process, which is especially important for software patents, where it is relatively easy to demonstrate prior art, if only people know about it. 

I read somewhere recently that someone was thinking about patenting a method of patenting obvious  innovations (particularly in software) just to get at the patenters. Excellent idea, if I only could remember where I saw it…. 

(I am giving a talk called "Intellectual property – an anachronism in a digital age?" next week and am putting together pointers. Yochai Benkler seems a great starting point….)

Bob Cringely, as usual, has the most original and insightful take on Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo.

Google prediction trading and proximity. This graphic sure is interesting – read the article for explanations:

Wait a minute….I live in Norway, waaaaay out in the boonies – this explains a lot! 

Interesting discussion: What happens to Silicon Valley as the dollar exchange rate falls even further. According to Nat Torkington, there is enough money in SV already, so foreign capital influx will not change much. And given the cluster characteristics, outflow of talent will be slow. But the exit procedure – the IPO – might move from NYSE or NASDAQ to stock exchanges abroad.
I don’t know about the outflow – much of the innovation in SV has been due to a diaspora of talent from Asia and to a certain extent Europe. It is only natural that some of those people will want to move back home and bring a little bit of the left coast with them. The question is rather – what is the critical size of an innovation cluster like SV, and how important is the VC part of it? If the answer to both is “large”, the SV will maintain its dominance for a very long time.

Paul Krugman complains that his colleagues write like theater critics rather than critical journalists. I have seen the same thing happening here in Norway. The reason, of course, is that actually figuring out what is going on and explaining it to the public is hard work, requiring understanding, a facility of explanation, empathy with the audience and, most importantly, the need to change your physical location to somewhere less pleasant than press conferences.

Side note: I blog about Paul Krugman because he is no longer behind the NYT paywall. Modern media can in essence choose between relevancy and payment, and NYT took the longer-term view. Good. 

Jon Udell has an extremely interesting post about Ed Iacobucci and the reinvention of air travel, essentially moving from a hub-and-spoke routing model (which is akin to line switching of a telephone network) to a model that more resembles packet switching. Instead of holding routes constant and let the passenger’s time be a variable, this approach allows the passenger to price his or her own time, and have the airline (with smaller and more flexible jets) respond accordingly. Very interesting, especially in relation to the concept of free flight, where air planes choose their own routes (and, implicitly, manage their own security envelopes) from one destination to another.

My long-time boss in Concours, Bob Morison, is a commentator on NPR’s Nightly Business. Here is one comment:

I amy be preconditioned, since I just read Blink, but notice what Reynolds says here about a patient he took to the hospital because he "there was something about him that set alarm bells ringing".

That’s experience speaking.

I think experience like that takes at least 5 years to develop, to the point where you get a "feel" for how a number of complex variables interact without knowing it. I have some of that feeling myself: I spend a lot of time walking into companies to do presentations or interviews for research projects, and end up getting a "feel" for what the issues are in the company almost as I walk in the door. Other people within consulting and research – that is, problem solving activities – that I know have described the same experience. Of course, you have to do a lot of documentation and testing and so on, just as Reynolds runs the ECG. But very often, the first feeling you get when you arrive somewhere ends up being your conclusions and recommendations also.

Of course, I may delude myself, and engage in on-the-fly evidence distortion and theory confirmation rather than theory falsification. But I wonder… 

Wired has an interesting 25-page article on how FBI did a sting operation involving a "flipped" card scam bulleting board operator. Reminiscent of Markoff’s books about the various hunts for Kevin Mitnick and other mistfits.

I can’t help but notice what sad sacks these "hackers" and "cyber criminals" turn out to be. Not much of Al Capone over them, just overweight and pale board jockeys sitting up all night hammering out badly spelled instant messages. 

Cringely speculates about what Google is going to do with all those data centers, and how to counter the strategy he thinks they are following by creating an intra-ISP P2P network. His description of why Microsoft won’t compete with Google even though they can is a pretty good example of disruptiveness in action.

(To be updated, I hope. Suggestions?) 

One of the reasons one has a blog is that it is a great place to put things to refer back to. I recently hosted Dan Pink at a conference here. Before the conference, we had a conversation, and I outlined some errors I often see European management speakers make when visiting Scandinavia (or even Europe in general). It occurred to me that this was something I could put here for the benefit of others and to save myself having to repeat it. (Dan, incidentally, didn’t hit a single one of these. Excellent.):

• Don’t use big-name US companies (General Motors, General Electric) as examples without explaning who they are. Outside top management echelons, most people will only know their brand names (incidentally, for GM in Scandinavia, that is Opel) and not the companies themselves.
• Never use the US mobile telecommunications industry as an example of something good or advanced (or, at least, be very careful). Mobile communications in Scandinavia outshines the US mobile phone industry by a factor to high to compute – you can essentially get into your car in Northern Norway and drive to Rome while continually being on your cellphone. Try that in the US. (This comparison isn’t fair, there are many pockets of innovation in the US cellphone industry, but most people will judge the industry in terms of connectivity and coverage when they go to the US themselves.)
• Be very careful about using banking examples – US banking is seen as very backward by Europeans, because of the continued use of paper checks. In reality, the US banking industry probably leads the world in technical innovations, but services between banks are not nearly as integrated as in Europe – and therefore are seen as backward. Plus, European banks have a wider range of services in the payment area – services that credit card companies and PayPal do in the US.
• Be careful that you don’t talk about Europe as if it was a country like the USA. There is much more variation between countries in Europe than between states in the US – language, history, culture, attitudes, economics, etc. Check each country on Wikipedia (particularly economics if you are speaking to a business audience) and make sure you don’t say things that are wrong about a country.
• Don’t refer to going to church in your talk (for example, refer to someone as "we belong to the same church" or similar). In Scandinavia, at least, less than 10% of the population goes to church regularly, and religion is a very personal thing. You will be seen as belonging to some strange cult or something.
• In general, Europeans are less inhibited in the off-color joke department than Americans –  not that it takes much – but there is considerable geographical variation. However,  this apparent frivolity comes with subtle pitfalls: If you tell something that can be construed as demeaning to women, for instance, it will fall very flat even in an all-male audience. The telling of off-color jokes should not be attempted unless you really know your audience (or if you possess an English accent more pronouced than Stephen Fry’s.)
• In general, Scandinavian business people are less formally dressed than Americans during daytime, but they dress up (or keep their business suits) for dinner. Quite the opposite from the US, so don’t change into jeans for that after-work restaurant thing. Unless you work in software, which is thorougly Americanized. (If in doubt, ask. Preceed it with an "In the US we do this, what’s the custom here?")
• No US-only sports metaphors! (Which, incidentally, for most US speakers will mean no sports metaphors.) Though Europeans know what American football, baseball and basketball is, they generally don’t know these sports well enough to understand individual terms such as touch-down, loaded bases or rebound (though they might understand "slam-dunk" from context.) So, unless you are throughoughly familiar with soccer, handball or (in Scandinavia) cross-country skiing, ski jumping or biathlon, don’t use sports metaphors. They simply aren’t used as much in Europe as in the US. (As seen in Henrik Lindstad’s comment below, though, no rule without an exception.)
• Some opinions which are labeled "conservative" in the US, are considered fascistic or simply crazy in most of Europe. The "right to carry arms", anti-abortionist sentiments, and, quite frankly, much of what George W. Bush is doing at the moment is viewed with horror by many Europeans. While most audiences will view an American speaker as a any speaker on a specific topic, mentioning that you are a member of the NRA will (for those in the audience who knows what that is) position you as a person with a frighteningly loose grip on reality for most European audiences.
• more to come, suggestions?

I recently had the pleasure of hosting Dan Pink at a conference here in Norway. Dan is a writer for a number of august publications and made his name with the book Free Agent Nation a few years ago. His most recent book is A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the World, in which he makes the relatively simple point that because of Abundance, Asia, and Automation, all work that is explicitly defined will move to the place in the world where it can be done the cheapest. This means that competition (be it in products or services) will take place less on price (utility) and more on significance, i.e., design and emotion.

I tend to be very sceptical about professional speakers, partly because I am Norwegian (and thus a member of the most cynical group of people in the world,) and partly because 10 years on the rubber chicken circuit has given me a severe allergy to gurus giving canned speeches.

Dan turned out not only to be very solid in his analysis, but also very attuned to his audience. My job was to lead a discussion on how his ideas related to a Norwegian, as opposed to American, reality. The discussion was not necessary, because Dan and I had a couple of conversations beforehand and he took the trouble to not only read the stuff about Norway I sent him, but very carefully tailor his talk so that language and examples related to something the audience knew.

Well done, and a lesson for any speaker, no matter nationality and place. The test of your mettle is not how polished your message is, but how it is received and understood by the audience. I wish more speakers would understand this (including, incidentally, myself.)

  …seems to be the new word for what used to be called social engineering. Or lying. Brought to you courtesy of the board of Hewlett Packard.

The last word in this story isn’t said yet, but for now it looks like there will be some changes in HP’s board. HP used to be about great products (remember HP calculators and laser printers?) and innovation in its many divisions. You could trust products bought from them because of the solid engineering culture. Now it increasingly is beginning to look like a hollow shell, making most of its money on printer cartridges (for the last 8 years or so). Now the Board seems preoccupied with spying on each other.

How the mighty have fallen. And kudos to Tom Perkins for having some sense of ethics.

(Via Scoble, Techdirt, and just about everyone else)

Update: Now Perkins’ letter is available at The Smoking Gun. That’s a web site I would love to see here in Norway.