The idea that men hate shopping while women love it is probably the most defensible among all gender stereotypes. Economics would be very different if Adam Smith had been Eve Smith. Male-driven economics is largely about the stuff the seller wants, money. This is by definition as featureless and abstract as possible. On the buying side though, there is a great deal of complexity, variety, and delight in leisurely and nuanced selection. Let me offer a speculative evolutionary origin myth: all economic activity derives from the original two: hunting and gathering. Men did most of the former, women did most of the latter. That gives us the starting point for telling the tale of this evolution of real, physical markets. The ones where we actually shop.
Bay’s Conjecture
A few years ago, I was part of a two-day DARPA workshop on the theme of “Embedded Humans.” These things tend to be brain-numbing, so you know an idea is a good one if it manages to stick in your head. One idea really stayed with me, and we’ll call it Bay’s conjecture (John Bay, who proposed it, has held several senior military research positions, and is the author of a well-known technical textbook). It concerns the effect of intelligent automation on work. What happens when the matrix of technology around you gets smarter and smarter, and is able to make decisions on your behalf, for itself and “the overall system?” Bay’s conjecture is the antithesis of the Singularity idea (machines will get smarter and rule us, a la Skynet – I admit I am itching to see Terminator Salvation). In some ways its implications are scarier. [Read more…]
The Discovery of Money
Money shares with things like time and space the sort of obvious-mysterious quality that can utterly puzzle us. Do we need a philosophy of money? I think we do. Today’s financial crisis reminds me of the case of Bill #240 introduced in the Indiana legislature in 1897, which attempted to define Π (pi) as having the value 3.2, a kind of deep silliness that arises from understanding mathematics technically without understanding it philosophically. Imagine if we’d lacked an intuitive visual understanding of the idea of a circle, and the wheel had evolved like money in a universe where the Indiana episode was not a historical joke:
Ribbonfarm at the Crossroads
Talk about a recession. Ribbonfarm is off to a very slow start in 2009, going by posting frequency. Between January 1 and May 5, I wrote a total of just 15 posts. Or less than a post a week. In 2008, I was posting twice as frequently, with 80 posts, or about 1.5 posts a week. The last couple of weeks were the slowest. Thanks to a hectic and messy apartment move, I posted nothing for 2 weeks, the longest break I’ve taken since I started in July 2007. There’s a mystery behind this slowdown that I’ll share, which I solved by looking at some numbers. The answer revealed some uncomfortable truths about my blogging. This led me to realize that a change has gradually been creeping up on this blog and that I have to make some key decisions soon, most of them rather unpleasant for me to even consider. I have an idea of where I want to go next, and I expect a few of you might have some thoughts to add. More on the ‘whither ribbonfarm?’ questions later. First, an overdue roundup.
How to Draw and Judge Quadrant Diagrams
The quadrant diagram has achieved the status of an intellectual farce. If you, as a presenter, do not make an ironic joke when you throw one on the screen, you will automatically lose a lot of credibility. For some very good reasons though, the diagram is an indispensable one for the presenter’s toolkit. As a listener, if you have a default dismissive attitude towards the thing, you will have to sit out far too many important conversations with a cynical, superior smile. So here’s a quick tutorial on quadrant diagrams. I’ll tell you both how to make them, and how to evaluate them. Here’s a made-up one to get the basics clear. You basically take two spectra (or watersheds) relevant to a complex issue, simplify each down to a black/white dichotomy, and label the four quadrants you produce, like so:
This particular one is nonsense, and falls apart at the slightest poking (we’ll poke later in the article), and I made it up for fun. Let us discuss three real examples from business books before we develop a critical theory and design principles. The three I will use are from The Power of Full Engagement
Coworking: “I’m Outta Here” by Jones, Sundsted and Bacigalupo
I’m Outta Here: How coworking is making the office obsolete by Drew Jones, Todd Sundstead and Tony Bacigalupo is a curious counter-cultural book about the emerging future-of-work movement called “coworking.” Ostensibly, the movement is about practical workday logistics for the new rootless worker, whether he/she is a virtual traditional employee or a free agent, looking for ways to avoid going nuts working alone at home. The movement is about building ‘Spaces’ like this one, CitizenSpace in San Francisco (Creative Commons picture, taken from their website):
Dig beyond this surface value proposition though, and there is a very definite philosophy at work within the movement. A philosophy anchored by an uneasy mix of primary-colored, bubblgum communitarian values, economic bets, and ideas about the business of making a living and living a life. The philosophy has a lot of potential, but also some limiting self-perceptions which could end up being fatal flaws. Can it cross the chasm, and go from being a marginal counter-cultural trend to a mainstream model of work? At the moment, I would offer 3:1 odds against, barring some critical re-engineering of the movement’s DNA.
Design and Architecture
This is a modern nail clipper. It was invented, it appears, by Chapel Carter in 1896. Ask yourself, which elements of this object reflect design, and which elements represent architecture. I am going to offer a fairly clean distinction for you to ponder, but I’d like you to make up your own mind first. You don’t have to be a mechanical engineer or any sort of engineer, architect, artist or designer to answer. Just go with your intuitive sense of those terms, and apply them. These ideas also apply to organizational and social design and architecture.
This piece grew out of an interesting bit of crossfire on Twitter a few days ago. It began when I said:
“Am realizing I enjoy design, but not architecture. Design is the ‘play’ subset of ‘architecture.'”
This provoked an instant response from @jrdotcom, a software guy I know:
@vgr In software, there is no difference between design & architecture. They are just words that non-programmers have invented.
After a bit of back and forth thesis-antithesis, another guy I know, @jbsil01, also a software guy, offered a partial synthesis:
@vgr as a programmer, design can mean the same thing as architecture. as a user, architecture should be irrelevant to design.
Reflecting on the exchange, I realized that all three positions bother me. My own remark is too flippant, clearly. But @jrdotcom’s position, that there is no substantive distinction, that this is all pointy-haired-boss-speak, at least in software (and I have heard similar views from other sorts of engineers) is too dismissive of the importance of language. And finally, @jbsil01’s reliance on subjective user experience as a fundamental filter to tease the two apart is too pragmatic and operational. So let’s dig deeper. I’ll frame my discussion in terms of engineering, but this applies, mutatis mutandis to other synthesis fields which mix utilitarian intents with aesthetic ones.
The Slash Effect
My reading tends to be very random-access; sometimes it takes me years before I figure out the most rewarding perspective with which to read a book. I bought and began browsing Marci Alboher’s (@heymarci) oddball career-guide, One Person/Multiple Careers
The Tragedy of Wiio’s Law
The game-break is to 1:1 interpersonal relationships what the “Aha!” moment is to individual introspection. The rare moment, shortly after meeting for the first time, when two people experience a sudden, uncontracted moment of connection, shared meaning and resonance. A moment that breaks through normal social defenses. I call it uncontracted, because I mean the kind of moment that occurs when there isn’t an obvious subtext of sexual tension, or a potential buy/sell transaction, limiting behavior to the boundaries of an informal social contract. The best examples are the ones that happen between people who aren’t trying to sleep with, or sell to each other (at least not right then). I call it a game-break, because you momentarily stop playing social games and realize with a shock that there is some part of an actual person on the other side that perfectly matches a part of you that you thought was unique. A moment that elevates human contact from the level of colliding billiard balls to the level of electricity or chemistry. It is the moment when a relationship can be born. Our fundamental nature as a social species rests on the anatomy of this moment. Here is a picture: lowered masks, a spark breaking through invisible shells.
Succession Planning: Marshall Goldsmith vs. Eric Raymond
There is such a thing as a single, powerful litmus test of management and leadership ability. It is your handling of succession. As I read Succession: Are You Ready?
