Since it’s been more than week since my last post, I thought I’d do a quick meta-post for those of you who don’t follow my off-ribbonfarm blogging gigs. The next original ribbonfarm post will have to wait till next week, since I am in the middle of a rather hectic trip. So here are two selections that seem to have sparked interest.
Fools and their Money Metaphors
March 2, 2009 By
This has always puzzled me: why do people with similar backgrounds and intellects vary so widely in their effectiveness in dealing with money? One guy goes to work straight out of college, saves strategically, quits and starts his own SAP consultancy in 5 years, and is worth a few million by age 30. Another gets an MBA, gets sucked into a high-class lifestyle of expensive suits and dinners, and ends up with a BMW and barely $50,000 saved by age 30. And yet another, for reasons obscure even to himself (ahem!) goes off into a PhD program, and emerges, blinking at the harsh sunlight, at age 30, with exactly $0. Last weekend, I finally began to understand. Here is the secret: depending on your direct experience of the money you manage, you think about it with different metaphors. Your metaphors, not your financial or mathematical acumen, determine the outcome of your dealings with money.
The Solemn Whimsies of Larry Morris
February 21, 2009 By
I haven’t done a blog post about art since I wrote about Amy Lin’s “Dot Art.” I stumbled upon Larry Morris’ metal sculptures at the same place, the Torpedo Factory in Old Town, Alexandria. Here is an example, titled “Meditation.”
"Meditation" by Larry Morris (used with permission)
So what’s interesting about this sculpture, other than the fact that it instantly brings a smile to your face? Where Amy’s art is inspired Outsider Art, Morris’ is clearly a good deal more informed by the mainstream art world, and admits a lot more interpretation. Pondering Morris’ pieces led me to an interesting idea I call “solemn whimsy.” The pieces may look like sculptural gags welded with a straight face, but you can definitely find more than just laughs in his pieces. Once I had the solemn whimsy concept clarified in my head, one other good example occurred to me: Demetri Martin’s new sketch comedy show, Important Things (brilliant, but uneven).
The Training of the Organization Man
February 17, 2009 By
Recap: In the first two parts of this series, I introduced William Whyte’s 1956 classic, The Organization Man within a modern context, and covered the governing ideology that led to the rise of this worker archetype. Last time we learned how the collectivist corporate values — togetherness and belongingness — bolstered by a culture of ‘scientism,’ created the main pathologies of Organiztion Man culture, such as blind conformity, unjustified belief in ‘team’ creativity, an anti-leadership culture, and extreme risk aversion.
In this post, I’ll cover Part II, The Training of Organization Man (Chapters 6-10). The theme in this section is Whyte’s big worry: that through a pathological pair of complementary dysfunctions in universities and businesses, perfect-storm conditions were emerging (remember, this is the 50s) that would lead to a takeover of the business world by Organization Men. Were Whyte’s fears justified? Did the Organization Man truly die with Apple’s 1984 ad, or has he merely taken on a new and more subtle guise? Let’s find out.
Health and the Happy Hamster
February 10, 2009 By
Two months into my new work-from-home lifestyle, it hit me: having my elliptical machine right in my office is not making it easier to be healthy. It is just locking me more securely into an approach to health that does not work. Like Robin Williams, I feel exactly like a caged hamster. One particularly lousy-body-day a couple of weeks ago, watching the Discovery channel for inspiration, realization dawned: we are an ape species that evolved into perfection outwitting and killing huge mammoths. And then we got too clever for our own good and turned ourselves into caged hamsters. Thinking got us into this mess, and only thinking can get us out. Hamsters of the world, follow me to freedom. I don’t have my blockbuster fitness DVD idea yet, but I’ve got a few attitude-fixing principles that I’ve been trying out, and they seem to be working.
[Read more…]
Who: The A Method for Hiring by Smart and Street
February 3, 2009 By
Who: The A Method for Hiring
The book almost lost me with its opening premise (a scorecard method to define roles), but recovered and finished solidly. More than once I found myself cringing a little as the authors pointed out lazy, stupid and sloppy elements of common interviewing practices, many of which I personally have been guilty of. Overall, as a tactical manual for hiring, particularly around disciplined interviewing, it is excellent. The process is structured but not bureaucratic. It is natural, intuitive, information-driven and requires creativity and intelligence to apply.
The broader hiring strategy it advocates though, should be used with caution. Given the chaos of layoffs and hiring freezes we are living through, you would do well to follow the model in this book if you want to get the most bang for your remaining payroll bucks. The book should be valuable to interviewees as well, both as interview-prep, and as an aid to identifying and avoiding bad opportunities (for those who aren’t yet at ‘will take anything’ levels of desperation). It won’t help you ‘game’ the recommended hiring process though, since it isn’t a blind, checklist-driven or aptitude-test driven process.
Trust in the Age of Twitter
January 30, 2009 By
One of the most interesting problems around today is modeling trust levels in a relationship. The NY Times today has an article on the ettiquete of “unfriending” on Facebook for instance. Facebook has a binary 0/1 solution. eCommerce sites have a narrow, transactional rating model that works well enough in a limited context in the aggregate. Requests for references ask the blunt question: would you hire this person again? But all these approaches are blunt instruments. We need better approaches for the age of Twitter. Here’s my first stab. What do you think?
nk
Enculturation Recapitulates Civilization
January 23, 2009 By
When I was a kid, we lived in a big, drafty bungalow-style house, verandas, mango trees and all. The dining room floor was some sort of dull red matte-like surface. It worked perfectly as a chalkboard. I would frequently cover the entire floor with chalk drawings. It strikes me that the way I drew back then was rather caveman-like. Atavistic mixes of symbols, metaphors and icons. Here’s a scene I drew frequently. Not quite a buffalo hunt.
The Cloudworker, Layoffs and The Disposable American
January 18, 2009 By
(warning, this post is much longer than usual, so here is a PDF version)
It has been bitterly cold here in the Washington, DC metro area for the last two days. Experiencing cold as ‘bitter’ is as much a cultural and emotional reaction as it is a physical one. This is my first winter in the DC area, which likes to think of itself as the ‘South,’ creating expectations for itself that nature unsympathetically shatters. An appropriate setting for trying to write a sober article on cloudworkers, their relation to layoffs and Louis Uchitelle’s 2006 book, The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences
His note on the picture: “I have no desk, I have no office, I have no schedule, I have no home. I have a small family that is far away, and a few friends that I see rarely. I travel the United States all year, and collect inspiration to make the next reason to continue traveling.” Terse and unaffected romanticism worthy of the landscape that inspired Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac, and ideally representing the paradox of cloudworking: individualism that is at once radical and socially situated. The picture is a perfect American cloudworker backdrop: Big Sky, green grass and a hint of modernity in the electric cables. Perfectly proportioned.
Allenism, Taylorism and the Day I Rode the Thundercloud
January 7, 2009 By
Today, January 7th, was a brutal bitch of a day, and it was a great day. Every grim reality of the cloudworker lifestyle, the dark side of everything from mobility and laptops to eating on the run and elite car-rental status, hit me with full force. Both my New Year’s resolutions were hammered by gale-force winds. The business of life hit many potholes, and the game of work threatened to fall apart on me. But I not only survived, I actually made it a better-than-average day. I made it all work. Truly, it was the day I rode the thundercloud (I stole the phrase from a really old Reader’s Digest article I read as a kid).
And that’s why as my first post of 2009, I will offer up a meditation on the life-work of David Allen, he of Getting Things Done (GTD) fame, and his new book, Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life
Here’s the short, illustrated version. In 1911, Frederick Taylor invented the management model of Taylorism
You doubt that GTD is the future of work? The original GTD book has been seeing increasing sales every year since publication and is currently at an astronomical #53 on Amazon. With MIAW, a tipping point has been reached. The future of work is now here.
But to understand it, we have to zoom down from these century-level dynamics, what Allen would call the 50,000 foot level, to the runway level: 8:00 AM, the morning of 1/7/09, Wednesday, hump day, when the thundercloud hit me.
