California Visit: July 11 – Aug 4, including a 4th Anniversary Field Trip

June 30, 2011 By

On July 4th, it will have been FOUR years since I started ribbonfarm. It’s also been about a year since I started the Be Slightly Evil email list and 3 months since I published Tempo, which I started writing nearly 3 years ago. This is also the first ribbonfarm birthday since I quit my job in February. So somehow between 2007 and now,  I transformed myself from a solid, working engineer-citizen with a real job and a writing hobby, to a blogger/writer/random unemployed person.

So there’s a lot to celebrate, and ou’re all invited to The Ribbonfarm 4th Anniversary Field Trip, on Sunday July 17 at 10:30 AM. It consists of a tour of the Sausalito Docks and houseboats followed by lunch and a hike in the nearby Muir woods (apologies to non Bay-Area people, had to pick some location and the Bay Area has the highest concentration of ribbonfarm readers).

The field trip is free and I’ll be providing lunch, but you have to grab one of the limited tickets at the eventbrite listing linked above.

Sponsor and long-time reader Sam Penrose will be hosting. When Sam offered me a personal tour of the houseboats and docks using How Buildings Learn as a lens, the idea seemed to hit on so many high-frequency ribbonfarm themes (legibility, boats and water, aging organizations, urban infrastructure…) that I figured I had to share it.  There are some links with more background information in the eventrbrite listing.

And since the Muir woods, which inspired my going-rogue Wild Thoughts, are right there, I had to tack on a hike. We’ll pick an easy trail so it won’t demand peak physical condition. I am hardly in great shape myself anyway.

We can only handle a limited number of people. I haven’t set a precise limit yet, but it’s basically “the number of people who can troop around on the docks following Sam without him having to shout to make himself heard.”

So sign up now. We do need an RSVP so we can plan lunch. Please only sign up for extra tickets if you know for sure you’ll be bringing a friend/significant other.  Email me if you need/can offer carpooling.

The field trip is one of several open events I’ll be doing during my 4 week couchsurfing trip through California. I’ll be in the Los Angeles area July 11-14 and Bay Area July 15 – Aug 4.

Details are on the new Upcoming Events page on ribbonfarm. The other scheduled open events are two Tempo themed talks in LA (July 12, hosted by sponsor Pascal Pinck) and Santa Clara (July 19 hosted by longtime reader Sean Murphy) respectively. I am also doing a Slightly Evil improv-game party in Palo Alto hosted by sponsor Jane Huang.

All these events are open, but with limited capacity. I also plan to hang around area coffee shops in San Jose, Palo Alto, Berkeley and downtown San Francisco during my weeks in the Bay Area, and I hope some of you can drop by to chat. I’ll post details as/when on the Upcoming Events page and also tweet out locations/share on the Ribbonfarm Facebook page. I’ll also have some availability for 1:1 meetings.

I am really looking forward to this.  While I’ve traveled a lot to the Bay Area and LA for work and conferences in the past, and squeezed in the occasional off-ribbonfarm meeting, I’ve never done an extended trip like this with an open calendar, purely to meet new people.

Happy 4th of July and wish me a Happy Anniversary here :)

Never Stop Marketing, Silver Spring, MD

June 29, 2011 By
Double_time

And the indefatigable Jeremy Epstein sends his copy off on its journeys :)

H.M.S. Cock-Robin, Cambridge, UK

June 29, 2011 By
Tempo_fitzwilliam

Another gamified copy doing the rounds.

The Four Kinds of Economies

June 29, 2011 By

I don’t normally do straight-up reblogs here, but the new post, Unifying the Value Universe from Greg Rader at onthespiral.com is very relevant to some themes we are starting to attack here. It divides up value exchange into four types of economics: gift, transactional, relationship and attention that can be neatly arranged in a 2×2. As with any 2×2, the identification of the axis variables to use is key, and I think the ones Greg has picked really might be the right ones: relatedness of the parties and refinement of the value-add being exchanged (in the sense of rough vs. polished). Click on and read.  He has a more detailed analysis of how this diagram works and in particular, of transactions that cross quadrant boundaries.


Semi-Annual Roundup 2011 and Highlights for New Readers

June 24, 2011 By

Since A Brief History of the Corporation has gone unexpectedly viral (it’s been featured on kottke.org, andrewsullivan, boingboing (via Cory Doctorow) and paulkedrosky.com among others) there’s been a bit of a jump in new readers, from 3000 to 3300 or so RSS subscribers (damn, I really am threatening to break out of the D-list here). So I thought I’d do a semi-annual roundup covering the posts from the last 6 months or so to give new readers a chance to do a Vegas-style buffet over the weekend. I usually only do annual roundups. Here are the 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007 roundups. For the new readers, I’ve also included a highlights reel of selected older posts that give you a taste of what ribbonfarm is about.

So here we go.

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Kindle Edition Status, Glossary, Global Availability, Road Trip Contd.

June 24, 2011 By

Hi folks:

I’ve been busy with background stuff for the last month. I’ve mainly been evaluating different approaches to growing this site and tried a few experimental ideas that didn’t work out well enough to post.

But I finally have a sense of where I want to take this, so expect to see much more steady action on this blog from now on.

Updates on some routine stuff:

  • The book is now available in most corners of the world via the Book Depository. In the US, Canada and UK of course, it is probably easiest to get via Amazon (click here for links).
  • Yes, yes, I am working on the Kindle edition. That’s one of the back-end things that’s holding up this blog. It’s not hard, but it IS an annoying typesetting chore (I basically have to re-typeset the LaTeX source into html, a pain).
  • I am also working on a glossary which many readers have asked for. I’ll post it here when it is reasonably complete, and include it in the next edition, whenever that happens.
  • I’ll be continuing my road trip to promote the book starting approximately July 11.  I’ll be in LA for a few days, the Bay Area for a few weeks, and Portland/Seattle/Vancouver, BC for another week or so. Stay tuned for further details, which I’ll post on ribbonfarm.com

In the mean time, thanks for your support of the book, and do let me know what else you’d like to see on this site. My overall goal is to use this site to take the book to a whole new level rather than just adding marginal value. In fact, if things go according to plan and the book turns out to have enduring value for enough people, my plan is to gradually shift the center of gravity of the conversation from the book’s future editions to this site.

The Las Vegas Rules II: Stuff Science

June 16, 2011 By

In lifestyle design, your relationship with your material possessions — “stuff” — is perhaps the central issue. Digital stuff is stuff too, since it has to physically live somewhere. Stuff is the locus where theories meet reality. It is not particularly hard to think about money, careers and investments in reasonably clear-eyed ways.  If it weren’t for stuff, execution on those fronts would also be easy.

Stuff is different. Even thinking about it is hard. We don’t even have a good word for it.  If you’ve been living on your own for at least a couple of years, getting a clear sense of all the stuff in your life takes an intense, draining and intellectually demanding exercise like a GTD Sweep (the first stage in getting on the GTD wagon; just spending a weekend making sense of all your stuff). By comparison, developing situation awareness of your finances is as simple as logging into your major accounts. Stuff diseases, such as extreme hoarding, seem to me to be much worse than financial diseases like being over-leveraged.

In lifestyle design discussions, I find that people vastly oversimplify the stuff side.  They pick unexamined philosophies about stuff, like “minimalism” or “go local,” without ever looking at how the stuff in their life actually works. This is like deciding to save $1000 a month without actually looking at your income, debt and expenses. Worse, they try to pitch their unexamined “stuff religion” to others.

So a few months back, I decided I needed to understand stuff and start experimenting with doing things to it, before getting all caught up in pretty lifestyle theories. Understanding stuff is Stuff Science.

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A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100

June 8, 2011 By

On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company’s shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock ruined his plans, and he skipped town leaving £550,000 in debt. Much of this was owed to the Ayr Bank, which imploded. In less than three weeks, another 30 banks collapsed across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill. On July 15, the directors of the Company applied to the Bank of England for a £400,000 loan. Two weeks later, they wanted another £300,000. By August, the directors wanted a £1 million bailout.  The news began leaking out and seemingly contrite executives, running from angry shareholders, faced furious Parliament members. By January, the terms of a comprehensive bailout were worked out, and the British government inserted its czars into the Company’s management to ensure compliance with its terms.

If this sounds eerily familiar, it shouldn’t. The year was 1772, exactly 239 years ago today, the apogee of power for the corporation as a business construct. The company was the British East India company (EIC). The bubble that burst was the East India Bubble. Between the founding of the EIC in 1600 and the post-subprime world of 2011, the idea of the corporation was born, matured, over-extended, reined-in, refined, patched, updated, over-extended again, propped-up and finally widely declared to be obsolete. Between 2011 and 2100, it will decline — hopefully gracefully — into a well-behaved retiree on the economic scene.

In its 400+ year history, the corporation has achieved extraordinary things, cutting around-the-world travel time from years to less than a day, putting a computer on every desk, a toilet in every home (nearly) and a cellphone within reach of every human.  It even put a man on the Moon and kinda-sorta cured AIDS.

So it is a sort of grim privilege for the generations living today to watch the slow demise of such a spectacularly effective intellectual construct. The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two.  They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.

It is not yet time for the obituary (and that time may never come), but the sun is certainly setting on the Golden Age of corporations. It is time to review the memoirs of the corporation as an idea, and contemplate a post-corporate future framed by its gradual withdrawal from the center stage of the world’s economic affairs.

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Bardic Mystique: Maastricht, Netherlands

June 6, 2011 By
Foto

Stefan King's copy is starting its journey in Maastricht.

Towards Thick Strategy Narratives

June 3, 2011 By

Narratives are getting to be a hot topic, so you’d think I’d be pleased that I’ve just published a book where they play a central role. A few people have even congratulated me on my timing. They think it is deliberate. Sadly, I am not so smart. In fact, if I’d seen this coming, I’d probably have picked something else to work on.

    You see, I don’t like working on popular, trendy things. I get anxious and irritable when I discover that others are working on the same ideas that I am. Call it intellectual agoraphobia, being an unsociable jerk, or just plain lack of competitive drive. So I haven’t exactly been happy about narratives suddenly becoming a hot topic. It feels like I just went on a lovely solitary hike through some beautiful wilderness, and arrived at a great camping spot, only to discover that a whole noisy, partying crowd had also gotten there by a different route.

    Yeah, these are mean, turf-grubbing, selfish, uncharitable thoughts. It’s not like I own Narrative National Park.

    Fortunately for my sanity, the big crowds seem to be headed along trails that don’t interest me. In business and politics, much of the attention is on marketing and motivational narratives. In the broader cultural sphere, there’s a lot of interest in identity narratives. There is also an anti-narrative movement focused on the problems of narrative approaches. If any of these topics interests you, here are some good starting points:

    1. Marketing narratives: Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
    2. Motivational narratives: Squirrel Inc. by Stephen Denning
    3. Identity narratives: The Redemptive Self by Dan McAdams
    4. Anti-narrative movement: The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Tyler Cowen’s blog

    My own interest is pretty narrowly focused on decision-narratives. The raw stream-of-consciousness story you tell yourself as you actually live through an experience and make your live, real-time decisions.

    The book is primarily about the fundamentals of the idea, but in this post, I want to explore an application of those fundamentals to the problem of crafting strategy narratives (the post is stand-alone; you don’t need to have read the book). In particular, I am going to examine the limitations of existing varieties of strategy narratives, and argue that we need a new variety, thick strategy narratives.

    [Read more…]