Category Archives: The thoughtful manager

Chandler: Scale and Scope

I am teaching a doctoral class on Al Chandler’s Strategy and structure this week, so I thought I should dig out and clean up my notes on Scale and scope. And publish them here while I am at it. Caveat emptor, of course.

Continue reading →

Education as a way out of poverty

Found this video of my former classmate Sarah Mavrinac giving an impassioned speech on the need for education as a way out of poverty for migrant workers – and a plug for aidha, the charity she leads:

There is one person with the fortitude to put her money where her mouth is, I say…

Reflections on Accenture’s Technology Lab

I am writing this from Accenture’s Sophia Antipolis location, where I am visiting with a group of executive students taking a course called Strategic Business Development and Innovation (the second time, incidentally, last year’s notes are here). Much of this course is around how to use technology (in a very wide sense of the word) to do innovation in organizations. To turn this into practice, my colleague Ragnvald Sannes and I run the course as an innovation process in itself – the students declare an innovation project early in the course, and we take them through the whole process from idea to implementation plan. To further make this concrete, we collaborate with Accenture (chiefly with Kirsti Kierulf, Director of Innovation in Norway) to show the students some of the technologies that are available.

Accenture Technology Labs is a world-wide, relatively small part of Accenture’s systems integration and technology practice, charged with developing showcases and prototypes in the early stage where Accenture’s clients are not yet willing to fund development. While most consulting companies have this kind of activity, I like Accenture’s approach because they are very focused on putting technology into context – they don’t develop Powerpoints (well, they do that, too) but prototypes, which they can show customers. I see the effect on my students: I can explain technology to them (such as mobility, biometrics, collaboration platforms) but they don’t see the importance until it is packaged into, say, the Next Generation Bank Branch or an automated passport control gate.

Making things concrete – telling a story through hands-on examples – is more important than what most companies think. When it comes to technology, this is relatively simple: You take either your own technology, if you are a technology provider, and build example applications of it. If you are vendor-agnostic, like Accenture, you take technology from many vendors and showcase the integration. If your technology is software-based, or consists of process innovations, then you showcase your own uses of it. Here in Sophia we have seen how Accenture uses collaboration platforms internally in the organization, for instance. (Otherwise known as eating your own dog food.)

Having a physical location is also very important. At the Norwegian School of Management, we have a library that we like to showcase – a "library of the future" where the students have flexible work areas, wireless access to all kinds of information, in an attractive setting. This looks nice on brochures, but also allows us to highlight that the school is about learning and research, and allows us to tell that story in a coherent manner. I see Accenture as doing the same thing with their labs – they develop technology, but also showcase the activity and its results to the rest of the world. The showcasing has perceived utility, generating the funds and managerial attention (or, perhaps, inattention) necessary to sustain the prototype-producing capability.

Quite a difference from slides and lunch meetings, I say. And rather refreshing. An example that more companies should follow.

What is Technology Strategy?

I run a research center called Centre for Technology Strategy at the Norwegian School of Management. Inevitably, the question comes up – what is technology strategy?

In my mind, the question is simple and comes down to two things: The realization that most changes in the world are due to changes in technology, and, hence, it is vitally important for managers to understand how technology evolves and how this evolution impacts their companies.

I like to illustrate this with a diagram of such mind-boggling simplicity that it is almost embarrassing to present it here. On the other hand, it seldom fails to inform when I use it in presentations – and a number of my collaborators through the years like it enough to use it in theirs:

image

In words: Technology drivers – i.e., changes in how we do things – changes the business environment, which again imposes changes in strategies on companies. Technology strategy aims to enable companies to understand the technology drivers to be able to change their strategies before they are forced to by the business environment.

This is by no means easy. It may be hard to understand what the drivers are – if you were a producer of travel alarm clocks, would you have foreseen the use of cell phones as alarm clocks? And though the drivers may be easy to understand, you may under- or overestimate the time it takes before your business environment changes. Lastly, it may be easy to understand both the change and the timing, but just hard to deal with the change itself. Newspapers and book publishers, for instance, can easily see what is happening to the music industry, understand how the business environment is changing, yet find themselves repeating the errors of the music industry because the changes necessary goes against the norms and values of those of power, as well as their technology and their business model.

To understand technology strategy, of course, you need also to understand the current business environment – in terms of the technology currently used – and how it shapes current strategy. And you need to have an understanding of technology evolution in general and the evolution of technology in your industry in particular. Lastly, you need an understanding of how to change technology inside organizations – something which requires an understanding of not just changing technology, but also organizational structures, incentive systems, and norms and values.

(part I of a series of short and rather irreverent articles on various aspects of Technology Strategy)

Solving problems in the public sector

In Norway, we have a serious problem in the public sector, namely the merging of many social services (work, health benefits, etc. etc.) into one large organization (well, large for Norway, anyway) called NAV, which simply does not work. I have always thought that this could be solved by using technology to centralize information, then make it available to the case workers, could be the way to go. This presentation by John Seddon, I think, makes the same point, but with less focus on the technology and more focus on understanding demand and tailoring the organization for it:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4670102&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Cultural change is free from Mindfields College on Vimeo.

Interesting not just for the content, but also for presentation style – though I think the severe criticism ("He’s a wanker.") would be hard to do outside England and with less of an Oxbridge enunciation.

Notes from Cory Doctorow talk in Oslo

Cory was here to launch the (New) Norwegian version of his book Little Brother, but, of course, this meeting is not as much about the book as about issues of intellectual property, DRM, legislation thereof, as well as the future of information industries such as publishing.

Cory started with “his usual talk” – interesting, as always – about how encryption works, how it is really strong but easily broken from the outside since the key must be distributed, and then on about how the publishing industry is locking up the work of artists in complicated and, given the technology evolution, largely self-defeating.

Cory structures this around three claims by the industry – that DRM works, that extensions of copyright is necessary to preserve artist’s income, and that the industry should have extra-judiciary powers to shut people out from the Internet upon accusation of copyright infringements. The last one is rather interesting, given all the things people do on the Internet today.

The issue is that we are all copyright infringers, because the rules are arcane and really geared towards the relationship between industry and professional artists, with lawyers and everything. That means that we are all vulnerable to capricious accusations, especially given today’s search technology.

(Not really a point in writing this down in detail, I guess, it will be all over Youtube and other places anyway.)

The debate featured Bjarne Buset, Bente Kalsnes, Eirik Newth and Cory. Bjarne Buset, head of digital strategy at Gyldendal (a large publisher) had the hardest task, since he argues in favor of DRM. Bente Kalsnes from origo.no, an online community, pointed out that the publishing industry has been very slow in developing alternative business models. Eirik Newth talked about how we need to sit down and do a typical Scandinavian solution, stepping off the rhetoric and focusing on privacy, users’ rights, and creators’ right.

I tried to make the point that this debate is getting too politicized. The market will fix this, it is called a disruptive innovation, and there will be a lot of noise and then some of the players will make it across and others won’t. secondly, the the debate is being polluted by a lot of idiots who say that stealing is OK, because music should be cheaper or Microsoft is evil. Like some of my (business school!) students, who copy Microsoft Office and justifies it by saying that Microsoft makes so much money and the product is too expensive.

Anyway, I had an interesting discussion afterwards with some of the usual suspects as well as Bjarne Buset. At some point him and I need to enter into a highly publicized bet as to the future of the publishing industry. In the meantime, it is rather depressing to watch the publishing industry go down the oh-so-noble road to self-destruction, just like the record industry.

Update Sept. 17: Forteller has a good post and a recording of the debate (86Mb mp3).

Update Sept. 20: Here is a (rather fuzzy) video of Cory’s talk, as usual he speaks (seemingly) ex tempore:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6657959&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Doctorow @ Litteraturhuset from Veslebror Serdeg on Vimeo.

Gödel, Escher and Bach’s Crab Canon

This piece of youtubery illustrates the fascinating properties of Johann Sebastian Bach‘s Crab Canon (or, more precisely, the first of ten canons in The Musical Offering) where he takes a complicated theme and then proceeds to play it backwards, forwards, and both in unison.

This little piece is well known to anyone who has read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid, which should be required literature on, well, any course, really. As my old boss Erling Iversen used to say, there are two kinds of IT people: Those who had read Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach and those who should. Consider yourself tapped.

(Hat tip to Joho).

Take a few pills and fake it

An excellent article in Wired article points out a rather complicated trend: Placebo effects seem to be increasing. Placebo effect vary with location of trial, observers, and involvement: Pain killers work less well for Alzheimer patients because they can’t anticipate the treatment and mobilize their dopamine, for instance.

In other words, the placebo effect is real, physical and not self-delusion. If that is the case, it can be used in hybrid healing strategies. All well and good – so why is it rising? One reason may be the geographic expansion of trials:

The contractors that manage trials for Big Pharma have moved aggressively into Africa, India, China, and the former Soviet Union. In these places, however, cultural dynamics can boost the placebo response in other ways. Doctors in these countries are paid to fill up trial rosters quickly, which may motivate them to recruit patients with milder forms of illness that yield more readily to placebo treatment. Furthermore, a patient’s hope of getting better and expectation of expert care—the primary placebo triggers in the brain—are particularly acute in societies where volunteers are clamoring to gain access to the most basic forms of medicine. "The quality of care that placebo patients get in trials is far superior to the best insurance you get in America," says psychiatrist Arif Khan, principal investigator in hundreds of trials for companies like Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb. "It’s basically luxury care."

Another reason – which I think is a challenge to pharma in general – is that we are beginning to exhaust the one-factor solution maladies. Most illnesses with clear symptoms and known causes are now fixed, and what remains are those that are complicated, either because the symptoms are the same as many other things, or because they are caused by interactions between many factors and it is very difficult to establish causality. (Much like, in the airline industry, plane crashes tend to be caused by complicated, multi-factor coincidences rather than banal errors, which have largely disappeared.)

The answer lies in better control of experiments (e.g., drug administration without the patient knowing it) and in massive and collaborative data analysis, as the industry now seems to be moving towards. And, perhaps, in the recognition that health care provision is an exercise not only in having the requisite tools and techniques, but also knowing how to combine them so that the sum is bigger than the parts.

GRA6821 Fifth lecture: Technology in value networks

(Update: Moved to October 2nd. Note assignment)

In this lecture, we will continue to investigate value networks and how technology plays a part in establishing a company that mediates between customers – be it a telephone company or a Facebook, a bank or Craigslist.

Please read and be prepared to discuss:

Further reading (for the specially interested):

  • Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, Yale University Press. Available as a wiki at benkler.org
  • Shirky, C. (2009). Here comes everybody.

Study questions to aid your preparation:

  1. What is the ownership structure of Schibsted – and what are the implications of it – for the strategic outlook?
  2. Visit Google News – is this type of service a threat to Schibsted? Why or why not?
  3. How does Google’s business model differ from Schibsted’s?
  4. What implications do the last statement – about the cathedral or stock market approach – have for Schibsted’s future?

Assignment 2, to be handed in in Blackboard before October 1 at 2000:

Write a short memo to Kjell Aamot and explain to him why he should (or should not) allow the other parts of Schibsted (such as Sesam) crawl finn.no’s ads. Maximum 400 words, use of theory and good examples important. NOTE: Please limit the discussion to things that are in the case, and at the time of the case. Things have changed at Schibsted later – but that discussion we will take in class.

I am looking forward to a lively discussion and interesting assignments.

(For a list of all the classes, see here.)

A wave of Google

This presentation from the Google I/O conference is an 80-minute demonstration of a really interesting collaborative tool that very successfully blends the look and feel of regular tools (email, Twitter) with the embeddedness and immediacy of Wikis and share documents. I am quite excited about this and hope it makes it out in the consumer space and does not just rest inside single organizations – collaborative spaces can create a world of many walled gardens, and being a person that works as much between organizations as in them.

Google wave really shows the power of centralized processing and storage. Here are some things I noted and liked:

  • immediate updating (broadcast) to all clients, keystroke by keystroke
  • embedded, fully editable information objects
  • history awareness (playback interactions)
  • central storage and broadcast means you can edit information objects and have the changes reflect back to previous views, which gives a pretty good indication that the architecture of this system is a tape of interactions played forward
  • concurrent collaborative editing (I want this! No more refreshes!)
  • cool extensions, such as a context-aware spell checker, an immediate link creator, concurrent searcher
  • programs are seen as participants much like humans
  • easy developer model, all you need to do is edit objects and store them back
  • client-side and server-side API
  • interactions with outside systems

I can see some strategic drivers behind this: Google is very much threatened by walled gardens such as Facebook, and this could be a great way of breaking that open (remember, programs go from applications to platforms to protocols, and this is a platform built over OpenSocial, which jams open walled gardens). This could just perhaps be what I need to be able to more effectively work over several organizations. Just can’t wait to try this out when it finally arrives.

From surfing the net to surfing the waves….

Update: Here is the Google Blog entry describing Wave from Lars Rasmussen.

Fixing the US economy

Since everyone else has an opinion on this, I’ll make it brief: Three ways to vastly improve the US economy:

  • Federal gas tax. The fuel-efficiency rules recently put in place will spawn lots of innovation into ways to get around them (engine upgrade kits, anyone?). A federal gas tax is easy to apply, forces all automakers to do something with their engines, reduces the demand for transportation (hence, stimulates local production) and reduces dependence on foreign oil and foreign loans.
  • Federal calorie tax, to apply not just to sugar-sweetened drinks (again, something that encourages all kinds of fiddling), but to any high-caloric, non-nutritional food substance, including high-fructose corn syrup. America is dangerously overweight, and one reason is that good food is expensive and junk food is not only cheap, but in many cases subsidized. Taxing to reduce the consumption of obviously bad and unnecessary stuff makes all kinds of sense. I am less certain whether it makes sense to subsidize the good stuff – too much bureaucracy, and too many discussions.
  • Encourage house-buying immigrants. Granting VISAs to a million families or two, provided they buy a house, should be a much needed shot in the arm. The USA is not even close to being overpopulated, and a fresh new crop of resourceful immigrants is just what the doctor might order. Get to it.

There, that was easy. The rest is a small matter of implementation, which I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

And, as Piet Hein said, if you take humor only for laughter and seriousness only seriously, you have misunderstood both….

Fixing and fixability as attribute and philosophy

Matthew Crawford’s The Case for Working With Your Hands has made the top of the NY Times website, and well deservedly so. His argument is that physical work, especially diagnostic worked involved in solving technical problems, are as fulfilling and intellectually stimulating as any desk job, though the hours may be longer and your fingers dirtier. For instance, you have think about your angle of attack not just in terms of the likelihood of being right, but the cost of finding out:

The attractiveness of any hypothesis is determined in part by physical circumstances that have no logical connection to the diagnostic problem at hand. The mechanic’s proper response to the situation cannot be anticipated by a set of rules or algorithms.

There probably aren’t many jobs that can be reduced to rule-following and still be done well. But in many jobs there is an attempt to do just this, and the perversity of it may go unnoticed by those who design the work process. Mechanics face something like this problem in the factory service manuals that we use. These manuals tell you to be systematic in eliminating variables, presenting an idealized image of diagnostic work. But they never take into account the risks of working on old machines. So you put the manual away and consider the facts before you. You do this because ultimately you are responsible to the motorcycle and its owner, not to some procedure.

Sounds like a good consultant to me. And the right kind of academic.

Buying an old Mercedes has certainly taught me something about expertise. I first tried taking it to the largest Mercedes dealer in Boston, whose reps took in the car wearing white coats and were utterly useless: The customer service rep had never heard of this particular model (it was the flagship at the time,) the computer system could not deal with cars before 1982, and come to think of it, the rep didn’t know much about cars in general. The mechanics seemed to be looking for a place to stick the computer diagnostic tool, nearly destroyed the suspension and tried to solve problems by "Easter Egging" – i.e., replacing parts until the problem disappears. Eventually I found a company that had both the knowledge of the car and the diagnostic philosophy required – to listen to the problem and determine what it is based on the few symptoms a car really has to give. What a relief – and what a fulfilling job it must be to work like that.

A colleague of mine remarked, a few weeks ago, that "nobody repairs anything anymore." A few years ago I bought my wife a nice everyday watch, a Seiko with a stainless steel chain. The chain broke, she took it in, and was told that the cost of fixing the chain would be so high that it would be better to just replace the watch. The watch was not designed to be repaired.

What little work I have been able to do on my old Mercedes has been joyful, since the car is designed to be fixed – the screws are solid (no plastic clips that rot over time) and accessible, everything is laid out with some logic, and if you sit down and think about it, you can figure the technology out (with, for me, the exception of the automatic gear boxes, which I don’t understand and wouldn’t have the tools and space to do anything with anyway.)

Crawford continues:

Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given symptom may have several possible causes, and further, these causes may interact with one another and therefore be difficult to isolate. In deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you, and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.

Put differently, mechanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street. Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate.

This is one reason I sometimes envy people who do "mere" programming for a living – the ability to have problems that have solutions, tell you when they are solved, and reward the laser-like focus both on the detail and the broader reflection (and abstraction) necessary to see the bigger picture. The problem-solving I am involved with on a daily basis is less a question of understanding what to do than it is a question of finding a way to express the solution in a way that convinces those who hold the key to it to actually do it. Assertiveness certainly helps, but, boy, would I love to just tinker for a while.

Anyway, I have but scratched the beginning of Crawford’s argument, but hey, I think I have gotten the gist of it. The rest I leave you to read on your own.

The datacenter is the new mainframe

From Greg Linden comes a link and a reference to a very interesting book by two Google engineers: The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines (PDF, 2.8Mb) by Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle. This is a fascinating introduction to data center design, with useful discussions of architecture, how to do cooling and reduce power use (it turns out, for instance, that getting computers that use power proportionally to their level of use is extremely important).

I suspect that even highly experienced data center designers will find something useful here. The book is written for someone with some degree of technical expertise, but you do not need a deep background in computer science to find much here that is interesting and useful.

One of my recurring ideas (and I am by no means alone in thinking this) is that the Norwegian west coast, with its cool climate, relatively abundant hydroelectric energy and underused industrial infrastructure (we used to have lots of electrochemical and electrometallurgical plants) could be a great place to do most of Europe’s computing. Currently we sell our electric energy to Europe through power lines, which incurs a large energy loss. Moving data centers to Norway and distributing their functionality through fiberoptic cables seems a much more effective way of doing things to me, especially since that region of the country has a reasonable supply both of energy engineers and industrial workers with the skill set and discipline to run that kind of operation.

Now, if I could only find some investors…

Gladwell on Goliath vs. the ever striving, socially unacceptable David

The New Yorker has a great article by Malcolm Gladwell on how David beats Goliath, largely by working harder and exploiting unanticipated weaknesses in the opponents defense. Examples include basketball, Lawrence of Arabia, Doug Lenat using an expert system, and, of course D vs. G.

The interesting point here, of course, is how Goliath reacts when David substitutes effort for talent and rule-bending (or, rather, rule exploitation) for tradition: By declaring that this is an unacceptable way of playing. During the 1990s, under the truly eccentric coach Egil "Drillo" Olsen" (pictured), the Norwegian national soccer team employed a strategy of putting the whole team in defense, and scoring all their goals on the occasional breakaway, when a long pass would find a single player (usually Jostein Flo) plugging a goal against a surprised defense. This strategy was highly effective (at one point, Norway beat Brazil and was ranked as number 2 in the world by FIFA) but raised the ire of commentators and players everywhere, because they were seen as destroying soccer as a spectator sport. Just like the protagonists in Gladwell’s article, Olsen was an analyzer and a highly controversial character.

Incidentally, after many failures on the field, the Norwegian national team has employed him as a coach again. And they have started winning. Just wait for the accusations to start…

(Come to think of it, the great Swedish Alpine skier Ingemar Stenmark was subject to the same mechanism: He never did downhill races (thinking them crude and dangerous), but won every slalom and grand slalom event on the tour, and thus the overall World Cup title (as well as a total of 7 Olympic medals). This led the powers that be to institute a rule that to be eligible for the overall title, you had to participate in at least one downhill race. Which Stenmark did, in an upright position like a Sunday skier. He finished dead last, and, of course, took the overall title. Again.)

Think about your own industry – what are the equivalent to Olsen strategy there? I am sure it involves something socially unacceptable which will allow the weakest player to win. May you find it before someone else does…

Stephen Wolfram talk on Wolphram Alpha

Enough said, watch it. As a colleague twittered: This will change computing.

(That being said, this is a very poor filming – there are no pictures of the screen, aside from a glimmer now and then.)

Young male Russians drink, whore and fight themselves to death

This rather frightening article by Nicholas Eberstadt from World Affairs looks into the causes of Russian depopulation and falling life expectancy over the last 50 years or so. Russia is depopulating at a rate only found in really troubled countries in Africa, and the cause is the high mortality, in particular, young men:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base for 2007, Russia ranked 164 out of 226 globally in overall life expectancy. Russia is below Bolivia, South America’s poorest (and least healthy) country and lower than Iraq and India, but somewhat higher than Pakistan. For females, the Russian Federation life expectancy will not be as high as in Nicaragua, Morocco, or Egypt. For males, it will be in the same league as that of Cambodia, Ghana, and Eritrea.
In the face of today’s exceptionally elevated mortality levels for Russia’s young adults, it is no wonder that an unspecified proportion of the country’s would-be mothers and fathers respond by opting for fewer offspring than they would otherwise desire. To a degree not generally appreciated, Russia’s current fertility crisis is a consequence of its mortality crisis.

The reason is binge alcoholism (on average, one bottle of vodka per week, according to some experts), HIV, tuberculosis, accidents and violence: "No literate and urban society in the modern world faces a risk of deaths from injuries comparable to the one that Russia experiences." The consequences are dire:

In the contemporary international economy, one additional year of life expectancy at birth is associated with an increase in per capita output of about 8 percent. A decade of lost life expectancy improvement would correspond to the loss of a doubling of per capita income. By this standard, Russia’s economic as well as its demographic future is in jeopardy.

So, how to mitigate this – as the author sees few and recommends no solutions?

Management is fundamentally an oral culture and analytics a literate one

Great stuff from my old pal Jim McGee: Bridging managerial and analytic cultures, part 1 and part 2.

From part the first:

Technology professionals have long struggled with getting a complex message across to management. In our honest and unguarded moments, we talk of "dumbing it down for the suits." But the challenge is more subtle than that. We need to repackage the argument to work within the frame of oral thought.

And second:

In addition to helping the analytically biased see the value of creating a compelling story, you need to help them see how and why story works differently than analysis. The best stories to drive change are not complex, literary, novels. They are epic poetry; tapping into archetypes and cliché, acknowledging tradition, grounded in the particular.

…which, of course, is why personalized examples work so well. (And work so badly when not connected to a logical argument or important point.)

In other words – there should be plenty of work for all those laid-off journalists in companies, trying to find le mot juste that will transform the numbingly complex into the directionally intuitive.

Read the whole thing – if nothing else, for the language.

Steroids for the flighty-minded

An excellent and truly scary article by Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker about the use of neuroenhancers by people who are not ill. Which is comparable to recreational plastic surgery, which I don’t like either.

Is it just me, or is cheating seen as more and more normal and not to be punished or even held in contempt? When I catch students plagiarizing (which happens with a depressing frequency, partly because the tools for doing so have gotten so much better) their defense is more and more that this is normal, that you cannot expect them to come up with something original when everything is available out there on Google and Wikipedia. My retort is that I need to judge them on their own work, not others’, and that they therefore need to make it clear to me what they have done themselves and what they have found somewhere else. And their answer is that they put "Source: Wikipedia" at the bottom and therefore they are scot free, so there.

I would get angry if this wasn’t so depressing and so pointless. I am tempted to just fail them. Not for plagiarism – which entails disciplinary committees and all sorts of make-work. Rather an F for outright stupidity.

It is some consolation that creativity is one area where neuroenhancers don’t seem to work. But they might, as the article finds,  help these modern-day multitaskers concentrate on one specific task (hoping that it is a productive one and not, say, obsessively alphabetizing your library.) But neuroenhancers won’t make your ideas better – they won’t assist in spotting the prey, only in bringing it home. In the most dreary way possible:

Every era, it seems, has its own defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy. And they have a synergistic relationship with our multiplying digital technologies: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, and the more we need help in order to focus. The experience that neuroenhancement offers is not, for the most part, about opening the doors of perception, or about breaking the bonds of the self, or about experiencing a surge of genius. It’s about squeezing out an extra few hours to finish those sales figures when you’d really rather collapse into bed; getting a B instead of a B-minus on the final exam in a lecture class where you spent half your time texting; cramming for the G.R.E.s at night, because the information-industry job you got after college turned out to be deadening. Neuroenhancers don’t offer freedom. Rather, they facilitate a pinched, unromantic, grindingly efficient form of productivity.

If you find that tempting, be my guest. I am sure you can find directions via Google.

Health care is about driving science forward, too

Virginia Postrel makes an excellent point in this article in the Atlantic: The US health care system, for all its flaws, drives research forward in a way that no other country can do:

Looking at the crazy-quilt American system, you might imagine that someone somewhere has figured out how to deliver the best possible health care to everyone, at no charge to patients and minimal cost to the insurer or the public treasury. But nobody has. In a public system, trade-offs don’t go away; if anything, they get harder.

The good thing about a decentralized, largely private system like ours is that health care constantly gets weighed against everything else in the economy. No single authority has to decide whether 15 percent or 20 percent or 25 percent is the “right” amount of GDP to spend on health care, just as no single authority has to decide how much to spend on food or clothing or entertainment. Different individuals and organizations can make different trade-offs. Centralized systems, by contrast, have one health budget. This treatment gets funded, and that one doesn’t.

In other words, markets drive innovation – sometimes in directions not deemed to be in the (whole) public’s interest, such as plastic surgery – in a way centralized coordination cannot. It is wasteful, but effective. And somewhere in the world there needs to be some slack for new things to come up, which can then be cost-effectively (or, rather, cost-efficiently) be implemented other places.

Which reminds me of Peter Drucker’s statement: "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." Not unknown in public health care systems…

(Via John Tierney)

Search and effectiveness in creativity

Effective creativity is often accomplished by copying, by the creation of certain templates that work well, which are then changed according to need and context. Digital technology makes copying trivial, and search technology makes finding usable templates easy. So how do we judge creativity when combintations and associations can be done semi-automatically?

One of my favorite quotes is supposedly by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: "There are only two books written: Someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town." Thinking about it, it is surprisingly easy to divide the books you have read into one or the other. The interesting part, however, lies not in the copying, but in the abstraction: The creation of new categories, archetypes, models and templates from recognizing new dimensions of similarity in previously seemingly unrelated instances of creative work.

Here is a demonstration, fresh from Youtube, demonstrating how Disney reuses character movements, especially in dance scenes:

Of course, anyone who has seen Fantasia recognizes that there are similarities between Disney movies, even schools (the "angular" once represented by 101 Dalmatians, Sleeping Beauty and Mulan, and the more rounded, cutesy ones represented by Bambi, The Jungle Book and Robin Hood. (Tom Wolfe referred to this difference (he was talking about car design, but what the heck, as Apollonian versus Dionysian, and apparently borrowed that distinction from Nietsche. But I digress.)

This video, I suspect, was created by someone recognizing movements, and putting the demonstration together manually. But in the future, search and other information access technologies will allow us to find such dimensions simply by automatically exploring similarities in the digital representations of creative works – computers finding patterns were we do not.

One example (albeit aided by human categorization) of this is the Pandora music service, where the user enters a song or an artist, and Pandora finds music that sounds similar to the song or artist entered. This can produce interesting effects: I found, for instance, that there is a lot of similarity (at least Pandora seems to think so, and I agree, though I didn’t see it myself) between U2 and Pink Floyd. And imagine my surprise when, on my U2 channel (where the seed song was Still haven’t found what I’m looking for) when a song by Julio Iglesias popped up. Normally I wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Julio Iglesias, but apparently this one song was sufficiently similar in its musical makeup to make it into the U2 channel. (I don’t remember the name of the song now, but remember that I liked it.)

In other words, digital technology enables us to discover categorization schemes and visualize them. Categorization is power, because it shapes how we think about and find information. In business terms, new ways to categorize information can mean new business models or at least disruptions of the old. Pandora has interesting implications for artist brand equity, for instance: If I wanted to find music that sounded like U2 before, my best shot would be to buy a U2 record. Now I can listen to my Youtube channel on Pandora and get music from many musicians, most of whom are totally unknown to me, found based on technical comparisons of specific attributes of their music (effectively, a form of factor analysis) rather than the source of the creativity.

imageI am not sure how this will work for artists in general. On one hand, there is the argument that in order to make it in the digital world, you must be more predictable, findable, and (like newspaper headlines) not too ironic. On the other hand, is that if you create something new – a nugget of creativity, rather than a stream – this single instance will achieve wider distribution than before, especially if it is complex and hard to categorize (or, at least, rich in elements that can be categorized but inconclusive in itself.)

 Susan Boyle, the instant surprise on the Britain’s Got Talent show, is now past 20 million views on Youtube and is just that – an instant, rich and interesting nugget of information (and considerable enjoyment) which more or less explodes across the world. She’ll do just fine in this world, thank you very much. Search technology or not…