This article is about a number I call the optimal crucible size. I’ll define this number — call it C — in a bit, but I believe its value to be around 12. This article is also about an argument that I’ve been unconsciously circling for a long time. Chris Anderson’s Free provided me with the insight that helped me put the whole package together: economics is fundamentally a process driven by abundance and creative-destruction rather than scarcity. The reason we focus on scarcity is that at any given time, the economy is constrained by a single important “bottleneck scarcity.” Land, labor, factories, information and most recently, individual attention, have all played the bottleneck role in the past. I believe we are experiencing the first major bottleneck-shift in a decade. “Attention,” as an unqualified commodity is no longer the critical scarcity. Collective attention is: the coordinated, creative attention of more than 1 person. It is scarce and it is horrendously badly allocated in the economy today. The free-agent planet under-organizes it, and the industrial economy over-organizes it. That’s the story of C, the optimal size of a creative group. There are seven other significant numbers in this tale: 0, 1, 7, 150, 8, 1000 and 10,000. The big story is how the economy is moving closer to C-driven allocation of creative capital. But the little story starts with my table tennis clique in high school.
Cloudworker Board Game Revisited
In October last year, I sketched out a concept for an open-source board game that I tentatively titled “Brandhood” (I think I’d now want to call it just “Cloudworker”). The idea was picked up by the NY Times and went mildly viral.
I haven’t done much with it, since I have no idea how to actually make a board game at the detailed level. Well now, my buddy from work, @poinky alerted me that there is a new start up called Game Crafter that allows self-publishing and selling of board games. So the question: anyone interested in collaborating with me to make this happen? I got a lot of interest/curiosity, but few actual volunteers last time around, but maybe this time, with a path-to-publication opening up, we can make it happen. We’ll sell the thing on Game Crafter and also release the source material free for people who want to make their own version. Check out the game’s home page to get the details, and connect if interested! Seems to me we mainly need Photoshop/Illustrator skills and someone with deeper detailed/technical understanding of board games than I have. I will, err…, supervise. It appears that all that is needed is the artwork for the game, a document with rules, and indications of what game play pieces (dice etc.) are to be provided.
p.s. since coming up with the concept, I have learned about Robert “Rich Dad Poor Dad” Kiyosaki’s board game, Cash Flow, which seems to have a few similar ideas.
p.p.s. This revival is also partly inspired by a discussion I participated in yesterday at copyblogger.com, about freelancing, online markets, the role of big corporations vis-a-vis little guys, etc.
The Epic Story of Container Shipping
If you read only one book about globalization, make it The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
40 foot container (from Wikimedia Commons, GFDL license)
There are no strained metaphors (like Friedman’s “Flat”) or attempts to dazzle with overworked, right-brained high concepts (Gladwell’s books come to mind). This is an important story of the modern world, painstakingly researched, and masterfully narrated with the sort of balanced and detached passion one would expect from an Economist writer. It isn’t a narrow tale though. Even though the Internet revolution, spaceflight, GPS and biotechnology don’t feature in this book, the story teases out the DNA of globalization in a way grand sweeping syntheses never could. Think of the container story as the radioactive tracer in the body politic of globalization.
The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink
The hyperlink is the most elemental of the bundle of ideas that we call the Web. If the bit is the quark of information, the hyperlink is the hydrogen molecule. It shapes the microstructure of information today. Surprisingly though, it is nearly as mysterious now as it was back in July 1945, when Vannevar Bush first proposed the idea in his Atlantic Monthly article, As We May Think. July 4th will mark the second anniversary of Ribbonfarm (I started on July 4th, 2007), and to celebrate, I am going to tell you everything I’ve learned so far about the hyperlink. That is the lens through which I tend to look at more traditional macro-level blog-introspection topics, such as “how to make money blogging,” and “will blogs replace newspapers?” So with a “Happy Second Birthday, Ribbonfarm!” and a “Happy 64th Birthday, Hyperlink,” let’s go explore the hyperlink.
Image from Wikipedia, free license
Neurotic Leaders, Paternalistic Managers and Self-Absorbed Workers
Pondering the A. G. Lafley HBR piece that’s been doing the rounds lately, I think I’ve finally really figured out the difference between managers, leaders and workers. The title, and this cartoon I made up, capture the essence of my argument: all three archetypes within the world of business are defined by how they self-destruct. This has been unclear for millenia because it is only in the last two years, thanks to technology, that the last of the trinity: the individual worker bee, has become fully defined. So let’s reconstruct the whole picture from the ground up. 
Marketing, Innovation and the Creation of Customers
Recently, one of my projects went through a rapid, but nearly imperceptible phase change. It went from being an “innovation-first” project to being a “marketing-first” project. The marketing hat feels at once comfortable and uncomfortable, familiar and unfamiliar. It feels like listening to unfamiliar lyrics set to a familiar tunes. This disconcerting feeling of being caught up in the dance of a yin-yang pair has had me pondering the best-known Drucker quote (from The Essential Drucker
“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.”
Marketing and innovation define each other in yin-yang ways. Thinking about the fundamentals of this dual pair of concepts led me to a curious definition of the most important word in business: customer.
Zen and the Art of Google Wave Mechanics
Much of the discussion around Google Wave so far has been down-in-the-weeds prosaic and business-like. So I decided to seek out physicist turned Zen Master, Roshi Tsu Nami, and historian of technology, Prof. Sophius Trie, in order to get to some deeper insights. Here is the transcript of our conversation. Warning: all three of us are ridiculously enamored of tech-geek-mysticism references, but I hope you can follow our thinking.
Me: What is Google Wave?
Roshi Tsu Nami: 47.
Me: 47? Ha ha! Don’t you mean 42?
Roshi Tsu Nami: Yes, I was referring to the Hitchhiker’s Guide, but I do mean 47, not 42. Google Wave is the ultimate answer, to life-streaming, universal communications and everything. But it is about 10% wrong.
Me: Clever. I don’t suppose I get to look smart in this dialogue. I expect I should ask next: what is the actual question?
The Hunter-Gatherer Theory of Markets and Shopping
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:
