Six Personal Favorites for 2008

December 31, 2008 By

Yesterday I got this gentle complaint from a friend and reader, “It’s great that your cloudworker stuff is getting picked up. I’m afraid it may tear you away from your non-business interests though, and we won’t get to hear any more parrot stories out of you.”

This seems to be a recurrent theme in the feedback and criticism I get about my writing. People who like my more introspective pieces seem dismayed that I also write more sociable pieces that belong in broader business/technology/culture conversations. There have even been suggestions that my more sociable pieces are corrupting my otherwise pure and childlike soul. At any rate, I guess it is no accident that my own personal favorites from 2008 lean towards the introspective side, so if this stuff is my soul, I think it will endure at least for another year. Check out the full roundup for 2008, if you don’t like my own picks.

  1. The Blue Tunnel: the second Ribbonfarm experiment in the graphic novel form, this time more like a picture-book story in the Dr. Seuss “Oh the places you will go” vein.
  2. The Bloody-Minded Pleasures of Engineering: A tip-of-the-hat to Samuel Florman’s The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, comprising my own meandering thoughts on what it means to be an engineer.
  3. Bargaining with your Right Brain: an attempt at an unorthodox look at bargaining as collaborative-adversarial storytelling.
  4. Creative Destruction: Portrait of an Idea: we take a look at the concepts and history of the notion of creative destruction, from ancient times to Schumpeter.
  5. Towards a Philosophy of Destruction: Following up on my creative destruction post, this took a discursive look at destruction, all by itself.
  6. A look at Amy Lin’s wonderful dot art, and the trains of thought it sparked for me.

I promise I won’t sell my soul in 2009; at least not for under $10 million.

Happy New Year!

Venkat

Complete 2008 Roundup

December 26, 2008 By
This entry is part 2 of 17 in the series Annual Roundups

I wrote 80 articles in 2008, and this post contains an annotated list of links to all of them.  Ribbonfarm.com still doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. Here is a picture of how my focus has shifted, drifted and meandered since I started in July 2007 (here’s the 2007 omnibus review). Red arrows point to the blog’s ‘soul’ at various points. Yellow ‘scope’ wedges show the changing ADD levels. [Read more…]

How to Make New Year’s Calibrations

December 15, 2008 By

You read that right. Calibrations, not resolutions. Until you know a) exactly where you are, b) where you are already going, b) with how much momentum, c) and how much discretionary steering authority, resolutions are just rituals. For New Year’s party drunkards. You, of course, are a paragon of follow-through, but forward this to all those friends of yours who clearly need help. It’s an illustrated five-step program. If you start right now, you might actually be ready to make real resolutions by first-drink-time on December 31st.

Step 1: Calibrate PERSPECTIVE

Resolutions are supposed to be significant, even lofty, life-course-changing intentions. The only way you’ll know what counts as significant for you is to look back as far as you can, until your memories vanish into the foggy cloud of babyhood. For me, that means late 1974 foggily, late 1975 practically.

[Read more…]

Brain Rules by John Medina

December 3, 2008 By

If you read only two books about the brain, Medina’s Brain Rules should probably be your second one (thanks Kapsio, for the recommendation), after Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a few months, you might remember a post I did nearly a year ago called The Broken Brain Books. Let me repeat the quote from Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open that I used to start that post:

…while it is interesting to find out [the] exact addresses [of brain functions], that information is ultimately unsatisfying. Call it the “neuromap fallacy.” If neuroscience turns out to be mostly good at telling us the location of the “food craving center” or the “jealousy” center,” then it will be of limited relevance to ordinary people seeking a new kind of self-awareness — because learning where jealousy lives in your head doesn’t make you understand the emotion any more clearly. Those neuromaps will be of great interest to scientists of course, and doctors. But to the layperson, they will be little more than trivia.

By this critique (which I wholeheartedly agree with), most ‘brain’ books are a big waste of trees. Medina, thankfully, avoids this trap, and doesn’t even mention fMRIs till fairly late into the book, and when he does, he steps away lightly from pointless fMRI-pornography. That leaves us with 12 brain rules, each of which gets a chapter. The chapter on short-term memory for instance, is titled “repeat to remember.” Well Duh! you might say. Fortunately, there are deeper insights buried within. Despite appearances, the book isn’t an exercise in providing unnecessary proofs for folk-tautologies.

[Read more…]

Future-of-Work Mini-X-Prizes at Cloudworker.org

December 1, 2008 By

The easiest way to predict the future, as Alan Kay said, is to invent it. Some friends of mine, over at a stealth design/innovation startup called WilsonCoLab, decided to start a site dedicated exclusively to this task at www.cloudworker.org, which beta-launched today with a neat contest (seriously flattering to have a word you coined taken this seriously!). Cool logo, eh?

[Read more…]

The Ideology of the Organization Man

November 23, 2008 By

Recap: Last time I introduced William Whyte’s 1956 classic, The Organization Man within a modern context, and we got as far as Chapter 1. We saw that Whyte set himself the project of describing, carefully if unsympathetically, the collectivist, anti-individualist ‘social ethic’ that provided the foundations for modern corporations. In this post, I will cover Chapters 2-5 (Part 1 of the 7-part, 29-chapter book).

Here’s a short version of the argument in Part 1, titled the Ideology of the Organization Man. Intellectual culture and practical concerns conspired, between 1940-1960, to create a pseudo-scientific socialist culture within the capitalist corporation. What began as an instrument to co-opt unionism ultimately swallowed middle management, and the organization man was born. Where the previous century, 1840-1940 had been dominated by colorful figures from the top and bottom — robber barons and fiery unionists — post WW II American culture was defined and dominated by the middle layers. Whyte argues that this layer managed to suck the soul out of leadership and grassroots passion alike. Like the labor union culture, and unlike the robber-baron culture, it was group-oriented. Unlike the labor unions though, it was not primarily about unity against oppression or about worker rights. It was primarily about a corporate deification of the values of community: belongingness and togetherness. A belief in cooperation and consensus for their own sake.

Let’s do the longer version, and as we do so, keep this deja vu question in mind: are ‘social’ media falling victim to the same collectivist dangers today?

[Read more…]

The Organization Man by William Whyte: Introduction

November 18, 2008 By

William Whyte‘s 1956 classic, The Organization Man is far too embedded culturally to be ‘reviewed’ today, even as a classic. The book can only be read within its context, and reconstructed for 2008. It is also much too dense and nuanced to dispose off in a single post, like I do most books. So I am going to start my first-ever multi-part series devoted to a single book; the book that began the study of worker archetypes, 52 years ago. If you want to follow along, make sure you buy the 2002 reissue edition, with a great foreword by Fortune Magazine executive editor, Joseph Nocera. Since I have to do a bit of setup, in this first part, I’ll only get as far as Chapter 1. In future parts, I’ll try to do 3-4 chapters at once.

Let’s start by reviewing the cultural impact of the original. The best-known artifact of course, is Apple’s famous 1984 commercial (YouTube video here), which owes as much to Whyte as to Orwell for its arresting imagery.

[Read more…]

Spanning Silos by David Aaker

November 14, 2008 By

The full title of this book, Spanning Silos: The New CMO Imperative, might lead you to believe that it is a very narrow take on a particular organizational issue (silos) within one enterprise function (marketing). You’d be wrong. This is a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing book; a book about foundational issues in organization theory masquerading as a specialist read for marketers. I have previously written about silos (see The Silo Reconsidered), so this was definitely not a blank-slate subject for me. I was prepared to be underwhelmed, but to my pleasant surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It is a quick and easy read, but surprisingly substantial.

[Read more…]

Is There a Cloudworker Culture?

November 9, 2008 By

When one of my regular readers IM’ed me, “I hope you write about cloudworker culture next,” I almost panicked. All I had in my head at the time was a dark three-word post: “there isn’t one,” accompanying a sort of desperately humorous image: Alberto Giacometti’s famous sculpture Chariot, holding a Starbucks coffee cup and a Blackberry at her hip. The original sculpture suggests a sort of sombre existential loneliness. Add Starbucks and the Blackberry, and the gravitas of the original degenerates to an anxious farce. A tragic farce, because the figure is still lonely. My modest photoshop skills turned out to be up to the task, so here is the mashed-up image I started with, in my head.

Mashup elements courtesy MOMA, Starbucks and RIM

Cloudworker by Rao (2008); Mashup elements courtesy MOMA, Starbucks and RIM

Immersed in the farcical post-existential loneliness of the Cloud, the cloudworker’s cultural life just might be no more than an impoverished buzz of emoticons. The highlights of his cultural life might be fleeting, unsatisfying encounters with co-cloudworker strangers whose gaze he holds for a second longer than necessary at Starbucks, but does not engage. A condition worse than that of Chuck Palahniuk’s hero in Fight Club, who at least found connection and community by beating other men to a pulp.

If the Giacometti sculpture is too high-brow for you, consider a more popular literary image: Mark Twain’s unforgettable King and Duke characters in Huckleberry Finn, drifting down the Mississippi. Rulers of a Micro-Balkan virtual kingdom on a raft. Farce once again.

But then I figured I was being too dark, and did come up with a bunch of ideas that suggest that a cloudworker culture is emerging. I figured I’d let you ponder the question for yourself before sharing my answer.

So what do you think? Is there a cloudworker culture, or are all us cloudworkers doomed to the socially and culturally empty life suggested by my art mashup?

The Cloud President, Obama

November 5, 2008 By

If Truman was the Nuclear President, Kennedy the Space President, and Eisenhower the Interstate President, Obama will be the Cloud President. Ever since the United States assumed the mantle of global technology leader at the end of World War II, each administration has become associated with a significant technology that radically altered the world. The relationships between presidents and the technologies historically associated with their administrations have been varied. Presidents have caused, benefited from, or been out of touch with contemporaneous technology-driven socio-economic shifts. Presidents who managed to manifest the ethos of the technologies that matured on their watch have been perceived as with-it. Those who failed have had problematic presidencies. Before tackling Obama, cloud culture, green thinking and energy, let’s consult the list of post WW-II presidents for reference.

[Read more…]