Quickthink

I thought the idea of Bling was old hat. But apparently, it is just getting going. In a few new movie releases, bling is king. A.O. Scott reviews them. He calls them “fables of acquisition”.

Acquisition stories are old as the hills. These are stories of the sublime pleasure of getting rich. Remember, for example, King Midas? And bling is our current popular word for exultation in acquisition — whether the gains are earned or not. From the films, it appears that it may be preferable that they are not. Bonnie and Clyde redux.

So what is going on? Part of it is media hype. Hollywood needs to break taboos to sell its schlock. So it broke all taboos with respect to sex and violence. Like the alien impregnating Sigourney Weaver — hope she took home a nice fee for that one. Yech! By now these topics are boring. There are only so many times we can see someone’s head getting ripped off before we lose the shock value. So why not try stories of the sublime pleasure of sudden and “easy” acquisition of luxury? Errr … as Nike would say “Just do it!”

And to what effect on the rest of us? On the plus side, there is nothing inherently wrong with liking great things. The good life. So acquisition stories remind us that the good life can be sweet.  And according to Csikszentmihalyi, we start our quest for meaning in life by taking on a goal. Like the good life, or like being like Gatsby. Indeed, it doesn’t matter so much if we make a mistake in selecting our goal as long as we commit to learning. So far so good.

On the minus side, and this is a whopper, we all know by now (or should) that shopping — including shoplifting — gets boring after a while. As does showing off the latest acquisition. They give a very ephemeral sort of pleasure. They can keep psychic entropy at bay for a while. But at the end of the day, they are distractions and they do not deliver meaning.

Do we dare tell stories about meaning? Sure … but using Hollywood’s logic, we can do that as long as they are naughty. Naughty life learning? Sort of like a mischievous buddha? That might be a tough movie pitch, if it meant no product placements and no broken taboos.

And presto! Because of the limitations of the story telling that Hollywood can do with any degree of competence, Hollywood resorts to “dumbing down” those foolish enough to take it in its silly messaging.

Can’t we disrupt this somehow?

Yesterday, I was pleased to attend the Tartu Smart Startup event at the Ahhaa center and it was loads of fun.

One of the focus points was about “positioning”. This is a critical strategic concept that surprisingly, really smart people sometimes have difficulty with. So, what the hell is positioning?

It is one of those things that is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Here is one view.

All start ups face the same challenge. They believe that they have something new to offer. But there is the catch — “new” is only better when potential clients see the new thing that way. And they won’t see it that way just because the starter upper believes passionately in the new thing. He or she has to position the new thing in such a way that it looks like a solution to a big hairy problem (I take the phrase from Andrew Scott’s presentation).

BTW, as Andrew Scott also said, it is not important whether the clients know in advance that they have such a problem. But it is important that they discover it when they see the new thing. That the see a new potential that had been blocked.

And why is this difficult? There are several barriers to doing positioning well. First, entrepreneurs tend to fall in love with what they are doing before they fall in love with their clients. And when they do that, they can be blinded to how their potential clients see things. Second, there are often communication gaps (poor channeling) between the people making new thing and their potential clients. So entrepreneurs who don’t put on their agenda building channels can be surprised that they their relationships are not adequate

But ok — getting this right is not brain surgery. We can do better if we understand the issue. And one way is to get people who have start up ideas to stand up and pitch. And the first pitch question — so what is the big, hairy problem here?

Many years ago, a few really, really smart people began talking about how mankind should explore space. NASA ended up using the model proposed by one of those really smart guys, Werner von Braun. And the result was the space programme that we recognize as history and that now confounds us.

Why does it confound us? Because von Braun’s ideas are really expensive to implement and they are limited.  They got us into space in a hurry and to the moon but  they did not give us much leeway to figure out how to stay there and what to do there. And more than a half century later, we still have only one space station —- a thing that itself seems rather more of an after-thought than a magnet for people and ideas.

In other words, von Braun adapted to short term priorities, but he may have been less successful in embracing long term needs. Ron Miller tells this story rather well. Did a guy by the name of Darrell Romick actually have better ideas? Ooops.

Well, I would not be surprised because this type of thing happens again and again. Humans are very adaptable and we think this is great. We think it is our trump card to cope with a chaotic external environment. But adaption is a short term strategy. To go beyond short term thinking we need to embrace new environments. And that is really hard to do.

Don’t believe me?`Consider how Europeans adapted to the new world —- the early colonies were all failures because they tried to adapt to rather than embrace what it meant to live on a different continent. The results were gruesome.

Or if you want a more recent story, go ask NYT - Om Malik offers a very interesting tale about NYT and their very belated “snowfall” project. The venerable newspaper, full of really, really smart people seems to be just now (more than a decade late) embracing the internet rather than trying to adapt its old content generation model to it. Oops.

Is there something to learn here? Yes. Strategic thinking fits into a “one step at a time” implementation regime. No matter how grand the goal, you achieve it by taking a next step. But here is the kick in the pants. If the next step is a mere adaption to changing circumstances, we better hope that the needed change is minor. If it aint, we are bringing a knife to a gun fight.

This is not a blog about economics or economic theory, though from time to time, I do comment on economic policy issues. I do so as a dilettante, with just enough training in the field to know my limitations. When I have commented, my focus has been on austerity policy. And the reason has less to do with theory than politics. Perhaps I should explain.

Going back to 2008, there has been an ongoing debate about how to cope with the financial crash. Even though the crash presented a new and urgent situation, the debate about what to do by and large, continued the thread of a political debate about the size of government and its spending. Fortunately, the Bush Administration held its nose and did the right thing, saving the US banking system and preventing an all out meltdown, They deserve credit for that.

But even then, some argued that government action distorted markets and made the problem worse. I thought then and think now that this is beyond the pale - a chance to score political points rather than enhance the nation’s welfare. My comments have followed Paul Krugman, who argues that if anything, the US government policy response was too small. Unemployment rather than deficits should have been the main focus.

Well, one need not be a genius or even a PhD in economics to understand that attempting to balance budgets during a recession is a fool’s errand. There are no good examples of this working and there are good examples of austerity not working. But that is exactly the policy mix that austerians have pushed and pushed and pushed - despite the growing and growing evidence that austerity brought no economic benefits and turned massive unemployment into massive long term unemployment. Never mind! One must balance the budget!

More recently, there has been a bit of a wake up call when it turned out that data relied on by austerians to prove that we must cap the debt was the product of a coding error. Oh dear!  So, is it yet time for a reckoning?

If you don’t think so, consider the recent behavior of prominent austerian Niall Ferguson.  In response to a question at an investment conference, Prof. Ferguson blurted out that John Maynard Keynes (who first theorized about the liquidity trap) didn’t care about the future. And he had no such care because he was gay and childless. Outrageous! Ferguson’s gay baiting is offensive enough. But suggesting that Keynes didn’t care about the future is the economic policy equivalent of saying that the Pope is Muslim.

Austerians like Ferguson have argued for years that our responsibility to the future requires an “either, or” approach to spending. Either we spend now and pile up debt that our children must pay or we are responsible to our children and pay down debt, supposedly freeing them from the burden. Keynes and others pointed out that this is a false choice. During a liquidity trap — as we have now — austerity does not lead to prosperity in the future. It is the irresponsible choice, not the responsible one. In this weird policy context, the government is the only actor on the stage that can keep people employed until markets wake up again. And government can borrow very cheaply, paying back the debt when society can better afford to do so.

Perhaps there is a silver lining to this rather sordid event. To his credit, the good professor apologized for his comment. But we might consider as well that this incident shows that he has no better arguments to offer.

In other words, this “emperor” undressed himself in public.

In the old days (I mean a couple hundred years ago) one could get trapped in obligations to do physical labor. The daily chores took time and effort. And they drained energy too. These days, for most of us, living is easier — at least from a physical labor point of view. Chores don’t require as much time or effort. That is the good news.

The bad news is that we are drained in another and perhaps more dangerous way - by distractions. They are everywhere in the home, at work, and in our common spaces. Psychologists are just now beginning to research how dangerous these distractions are and NYT offers some interesting results

Clifford Nass, a Stanford sociologist who conducted some of the first tests on multitasking, has said that those who can’t resist the lure of doing two things at once are “suckers for irrelevancy.” There is some evidence that we’re not just suckers for that new text message, or addicted to it; it’s actually robbing us of brain power, too. Tweet about this at your own risk.

But there is an interesting nuance. When we learn how to protect ourselves from distractions, our brain performance gets a lot better. As Steve Jobs said “focus is about saying no”. Well, perhaps it is also about preparing ourselves to say nyet.

There is a lot of head scratching going on these days about what is the next big thing coming to the web. Social networking (Facebook style) is already old school. But what is new school? No one knows for sure, but there are a few trends out there that are suggestive.

The first trend relates to video. Video platforms that free us from TV are growing at a stunning rate.This makes sense as they give more options to viewers. Put another way, viewers don’t want to be force fed content that Hollywood chooses. So, over time we will see more experiments in how to deliver more video options.

Like what?  The first revolution is in finance and it is already happening. Kickstarter et al will get better at merging financing and marketing for new shows. With more financing, we will see more producers emerging in different places. Some will strive to look like Hollywood and some will strive to be anti-Hollywood. But we will see an explosion of styles if we see an explosion of financing. With more styles, we will need better curation. We will get more opportunities to get behind the scenes and connect with stars, directors and producers.

The second relates to chat. Commenting has gotten very old school. It doesn’t stimulate connectivity and we want more options to get into the flow. Twitter and Facebook are not bad. But they don’t make it easy enough to add value to a thread of thinking. They are not close enough yet to enjoyable conversation. Podcasting and media connections around podcasting may offer more potential. Or some other way that we can seamlessly add layers to content.

So two trends to watch - more video related options and better conversations. What do you think?

From Giga - Google announced that people are watching around 6 billion hours of video streamed from YouTube —- every month. That is a lot of video streaming and I think the number will get a bigger. BTW, the number doubled from last year.

That’s a story worth tracking. And BTW, this is not just about YouTube. Check out this quote from BI

TV ratings have declined -1.2% since 2010. Meanwhile, Netflix subscriptions grew nearly 70% during the same period.

Streaming seems to be replacing TV.

Taking over an idea from Caillois, Csikszentmihalyi writes that there are four classes of games. These are games of competition (agon), games of chance (alea), games of extreme sensation (ilinex) and games of alternative reality (mimicry). Games in each category offer opportunities for us to go beyond the boundaries of our ordinary experience, and of course, we crave all of them.

The first three categories are well known as distractions:for example, agon in competitive sports, alea in gambling, and ilinex in amusement park rides. But the fourth category - mimicry -  seems much broader and more nuanced. The arts in general fit in here but especially story telling. And this type of game is more than a mere distraction. To the contrary. one can argue that mankind cannot make meaning outside of the context of story lines.

How does it work? Stories transport us to a time and place that is in some respects better than our own where we meet heroes. So, for example, we thrill to tales of Viking exploits not because of the savagery they imposed but because of their bravery and curiosity.

I find it a bit odd that while we instinctively warm up to stories, we tend to be leery of  real world adventures. Csikszentmihalyi offers a plausible explanation. To feel the thrill of the game, we must avoid being overwhelmed by the challenge it imposes. In life, the risk of being overwhelmed is too real for many of us. We don’t feel protected enough to master ever greater challenges. One might say that we play the game of life as defense rather than offense.

Why go on about this? Because I sense that next generations will fear reality less than I did when I was young. They will play more real games with life. And that means they will gravitate to mentors who can help them level up.

Schools don’t do this. Careers? Well, not in the sense that I mean. To see that, check out this video of a very young guy, Taylor Wilson, who wants to build small nuclear reactors. The video is not so much that young Mr. Wilson has this idea.What is interesting is his confidence about realizing this adventure before he goes to university. This is an example of the gaming generation.

Back in 1989, Peter Drucker published a book called “The New Realities“. The basic idea of the book is that the societal changes we will see in the future are based on current trends that are pretty well known now. In other words, we know the issues (the “realities”), we just are not sure about how to address them yet — but we will figure this out over time, even while the media and our political systems are distracted by a million other things.

He wrote this about organizational structure of the future

The typical large organization, such as a large business or a government agency, twenty years hence will have no more than half the levels of management of its counterpart today, and no more than a third of the number of “managers.”

Why? Because these organizations will be “information based”.  I don’t know if Peter’s prediction about the size of management has come true yet. I suspect that it has not. But the trend is moving in that direction. Dave Cashen offers some visions about how some organizations are ditching “command and control” hierarchy for new structures that are less top heavy.

These are examples of “distributed expertise” systems. Rather than concentrating power in one place (like the top of the organizational pyramid), power is dispersed through a system that uses it as needed. This trend has been at work since societies started experimenting with “social mobility” back in the 19th century. Wider access to education made it viable in the 20th century. And as the pace of societal learning accelerates in the 21st century, distributed learning systems are likely to further gain, while command and control based systems do less. BTW - as the Steve Jobs story shows, this does NOT mean that we don’t need leadership. To the contrary, we need new types of leaders.

So what is needed to make this happen? Drucker suggested we focus on the following

• improving rewards, recognition and career paths
• strengthening unified vision
• improving management in an organization of task forces
• ensuring a flow of new top managers

I think this is almost right. The one quibble that i have is with the third bullet point. I think that cooperation between organizations will lessen the coordination tensions within any single organization.

So how does this look? Another way of asking this, is where is the starting point? And my vote is for better “unified vision”. The bigger the agreement on an essential goal, the more focus we can bring to bear on the issues involved. For a really big “unified vision” check out Amery Lovins TED talk on “reinventing fire. The type of vision that Lovins offers goes way beyond any one organization - it is about building an “ecology” around solving an urgent problem facing humanity in the 21st century.

Cool stuff.

Elvis Presley versus Godzilla?

 Well, there is actually a short YouTube video spoof on the subject. But that is not where the idea for this post came from. That idea came from how we (humans) react to seemingly trivial games.

According to Csikszentmihalyi, there are 4 classes of activities that stimulate gaming enjoyment. They involve (1) competition (as in sports), (2) chance (as in gambling) (3) distortion of the senses (as in a roller coaster ride) and (4) alternate realities (as in theatre) . For the game to be fun, it must challenge our skills just enough to get us interested to improve. Too little and we get bored. Too much and we get discouraged.

But there is another trick here. We are motivated to take up the challenges in games based on our perceptions of the value of the rewards that are offered. Dan Pink offers some ideas about this motivation: (1) being connected to a great purpose (saving the world), (2) achieving mastery (kung fu master), and/or (3) achieving autonomy (becoming the boss rather than the slave). I saw one other highly motivating reward - achieving membership (as in a club).

In the real world, this explains why real life sporting events go to such great trouble to create and enhance “tradition”.  Doing this helps give meaning to winning beyond just hedonistic pleasure. And here there is ample room for showing off trophies (from the green jacket to the super bowl ring). They are symbols that connect us to an alternate reality where mastery of a skill means all. This works. The ultimate example? Perhaps it is the Olympics.

And it is no surprise that we have such a tsunami of video games about saving the world in competition with our fellow gamers; mastery oriented fighting games and one on one shooter games; and status games (where we gain badges, virtual money or other status enhancers as we get better).  And they tend to use one of the four above challenge enhancers to make enjoyment easier.

My point - It doesn’t matter how fake this stuff is if the elements work right together. Indeed, being obviously fake can be fine. So Elvis and Godzilla could work together. Hmmm …. Perhaps Elvis needs to join forces with Godzilla to stop Doctor Moriority from ruining the masters tournament? Well, something like that, I guess.