Quickthink

It was Dickens’ idea. I am just repeating it.

One of the ongoing threads in this blog is about how the accelerated pace of information flow via internet is changing institutions. The main cause of the change is that empowered with more relevant information, individuals gain leverage in initiating and seeing through great projects on their own. We don”t have to wait for the the great and mighty (institutional gatekeepers) to allow things to move forward.

Except, of course, when it comes to law. Law making, for example, remains a rather dismal and secretive bit of alchemy that by and large is still done behind closed doors. As I recall, in at least one country, drafts of law qualify as state secrets.

But the recent dust up about SOPA may be changing this. Techies have caught onto the risk they face that IP rights holders do not support more information flow if it appears to conflict with their business models. And IP rights holders have a lot of power in influencing law making. It was a bit of a shock to IP rights holders that the techies won the battle to stop SOPA. But a bigger shock may be on the way. One of the unexpected offshoots is a new focus on law making itself. Why isn’t the process more transparent? Fred Wilson wrote about how these questions are being raised the other day,.

This is interesting for folks who have a stake in the balancing of IP rights and internet platform providers. But it is also evidence of a new type of institutional learning. A new question has emerged. Can the internet improve law making? And the question may go viral.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time in meetings. It was exhausting and when it was all over I found myself wondering “What made it so tiring?”  It was not due to any sort of physical exertion. There was none. Nor was there a huge amount of stress. Just a lot of chit chat about things coming up.  One more odd thing. I didn’t notice how tired I was until I got back home and plopped down in my favorite chair with a glass of plonk.

So why was I so tired? I think it boils down to this. Thinking is hard work. And when you need to think, put your thoughts into words and track how well the dialogue is going, it gets a lot harder.  Do it over four hours to address complex problems in groups and you get pretty darned tired.

But this isn’t a post about getting tired or how to rest. BTW, Jim Loehr has a lot to say about how we under-value getting proper rest after intense engagement. The link takes you to a post I did a while ago about the value of teaching kids self-control. I embedded a video of Jim talking about stress and rest in the follow up. He is a good presenter.

Oops. Back to the main point. This quickie post will not get into stress and rest issues again. Instead, this is about how the internet extends our capacity to engage — to connect to great thinking more easily — and how, over time, this will make possible new types of lifestyles. More fun and less tiring meetings.

Very funny. When I re-read the last sentences, my eyes nearly popped out. That is a huge topic. Way too big for one blog post. So instead trying to lay this all out in words, I will just link to an article that illustrates what I am talking about.   It is an article from BI about how Michael Williams built a blogging career around a lifestyle niche.

A blogging career? Recalling the wisdom of Dan Pink and Simon Sinek, we should first ask, why someone would want that? How about this answer. Imagine a job that would allow you to focus on and learn about something you are passionate about and offer you a huge amount of autonomy in your work. Hmmm … sounds pretty good to me.  The question then is how to do it.

The thing to remember is that we are just starting to see how this could work for all of us. Not just for Michael Williams.  That , as they say, “floats my boat”.

The way we live these days

Assumptions are tricky little buggers. Just when you think you know what you believe, you find out that you believe more than you know.  And Bruce Schneier is right, you have to trust even if you don’t know everything in order to live in our modern world. Why? Because none of us have the capacity to figure out all of the risks involved in what we do. We have to trust in models that other smart folks worked out and improved on. For example, when we step on a commercial aircraft, we just have to trust the system that reduces the risk that it will suddenly take an unwelcome nose dive. Passengers don’t debate on the plane whether wing de-icing is needed.

That is what makes debates about fundamental beliefs difficult. Like whether we are slowly strangling ourselves by injecting too much carbon into the atmosphere.  We don’t usually do this sort of thing. And we do it only reluctantly. But …. and this is a really big but, why would we throw overboard a model that we know works? A model that saved our parents or grandparents from unnecessary hardship? Like suddenly shouting out from the passenger seat that de-icing is a waste of time.  That is really hard to figure out. But that is just what our fearless leaders have done recently. Go figure.

What am I talking about? I refer to the learning from the great depression.  Economists learned back then that cutting government spending to reduce deficits during a recession can lead to worse recession and bigger deficits. It is called a liquidity trap.  Very simple. The reason is also simple. In a deflationary setting (when prices are falling or stable at lower than perceived normal levels) it makes more sense for actors in the private sector to hold onto cash than to spend it. Somebody needs to start spending to get things moving, and that somebody is government. No one else has the motivation.

So let’s see. We are in an extended recession. Check. So why do we hear endless prattle these days about the supposed benefits of austerity? It has nothing to do with economic theory. Krugman has dubunked this myth again and again, and he does so again today.  It has everything to do with our politics.

A long time ago, people got fed up with the idea that kings and dukes knew better. So with some difficulty, our forebears got rid of that lot and took a shot at figuring out self-governance. As Churchill said, this is the worst form of government except for all the alternatives.  Why? Because we don’t have a way to discipline political chit chat to adopt and implement learning.  And apparently, while we now have a lot of media and the internet to boot, we still do not have this.

This is not a rant against democracy. To the contrary. It is a complaint that the public needs better tools to keep our leaders in line. Letting them stray too far from wisdom can get dangerous when they tinker with models that work. Like they are doing now.

A trip down memory lane

To quell any speculation, yes I was too young to remember the Eisenhower years (1952  - 1960). But I know enough about them to realize how different they were to our era now in 2012. How to capture the difference? I think it best comes out in how we view the value of being “understated”. Back in Ike’s day, this was a rather strong cultural norm. And it was a core conservative value. One was expected to be understated in order to fit in. These days, it is perceived to be a recipe for obscurity. One wonders, for example,  what Ike would think about the flock of bombastic candidates frantically vying for the nomination of the republican party this year. They may be many things, but understated, they are not.

Ross Douthat makes the case that Ike’s understated leadership embodied a lost sort of greatness. Why? Ok, he was a war hero and no one can take that greatness away from him. But for Douthat, it is more important that Ike kept the pot from boiling over during his tenure in the White House. In other words, we should celebrate his understated methods and stable results.  As a fan of the Disraeli political style, I am not without sympathy. But was Ike truly great in this way?

It is difficult to argue that keeping water in the pot was a bad thing. Though perhaps Anthony Eden might give it a try if he were still around. After all, Ike did destroy Eden’s initiative to prevent the Suez Canal from Nassar nationalization, thus ending Eden’s political career, not to mention British power in the Middle East. Ike was no fool. Those were desirable objectives from his point of view, that he achieved in elegant fashion by not lifting a finger to support his allies in a moment of crisis.

But was this greatness? Looking back, I think Ike was clever in his use of understatement. But I also believe that he failed in the so called “vision thing”.  Pragmatism rather than connection to a great purpose? In fairness, Ike would argue that the great purpose had been handed to him — containing communism. But here I think he overstated the ideological problem which led to tragic consequences. Using hindsight, we can see that American prolonged obsession with communism led to much greater follies than Ike would ever thought possible. While Ike did not send combat units to Vietnam, he set the strategic stage for it. American arrogance did the rest.

Back to 1955, Graham Greene wrote with passion about how this odd sort of arrogance  played out in Vietnam, in his novel, “The Quiet American“.  At the time, some Americans were annoyed with Greene for writing such a critical book. Good Lord! It was an assault on the core American value of understated self-confidence! But this episode was largely forgotten in the harsh light of the nasty war that followed. And anyway, by the 1970’s “understatement” no longer seemed so important. American cultural norms had veered in very different directions.

FOLLOW -  Here, Greene responds to the criticism of his book.

2d FOLLOW -  More American cultural baggage - Well before the 1950’s, Hemingway got all tied up in knots about the value of understatement.  His heroes are all obsessed with the problem that expression gets in the way of feeling. So they stay quiet because they aspire to be authentic to their rather volcanic feelings. And heaven help the faker — like Robert Cohm in The Sun Also Rises! Well before the second great war, Bogart played this type of hero in his films very well. So in a sense, we might think of the 1950’s as the last decade where understatement reigned supreme in the US. Stars like Rock Hudson were at the peak of their careers.

3rd FOLLOW -  One should not conclude that America is the only great power that has had issues with arrogance. Simon Schama offers a sobering view of how the drive for empire compromised British values in the 19th century.  The episode is called “The Wrong Empire”.

4th FOLLOW -  Writing from Tartu, I am sure that I will be criticized for my argument that America was overly obsessed with communism. After all, Estonians argue that the west should have tried to roll back Stalin’s domination of northern and eastern Europe after the war. I agree that this should have been a high strategic priority. And it is a tragedy that the Soviets imposed their troglodyte system on the region. But the real issues were liberty and self.-determination, with foolish ideology the symptom of rotten values. Not the other way around.

Seth Godin has a great post today  that argues for attempting the impossible instead of just defending what’s perfect. And of course, in terms of story telling, he is right.  Just because a business model works perfectly for those lucky enough to benefit from it, doesn’t mean that it is perfect for the rest of us.  And anyway, let’s face it. Once something is already perfect it becomes boring. It is no longer part of a story that is going anywhere. BTW, that is precisely George Bernard Shaw’s comic appraisal of what happens in heaven (from Man and Superman)

On the other hand, dreaming the impossible starts off an irresistible storyline. An adventure. And thanks to the internet, we can connect with these adventures more easily than ever before.

Case in point, check out my earlier post about helping to starting up a cafe in Kampala, Uganda that will be run by handicapped persons. The video in my post tells the story so far.  For non-Estonian speakers, there are subtitles in the video and to see them, after you start up the video, click on the “cc” at the lower right hand side of the YouTube clip.

Impossible? You bet! And one hell of a great story that is jut getting underway. Care to join in?

Enjoy!

Science is an adventure, my friend!

In a sense, I think that we all are looking for adventure. We need to be part of a bigger story in order to give meaning to our lives. This is what makes history so absorbing - it helps us reconnect to the adventures that brought us here in the first place.

But what kinds of adventures can we connect with that relate to our future? To answer that question, we need to ask where humanity should be headed. in the long run One answer is that we should  “reach for the stars”. Too difficult? Well, the folks at the Icarus Project think not, They argue that if we commit to a hundred year project, we could find ourselves settling on planets that orbit a neighboring star.

Check out this interview to find out more.

Barney Rosset was the founder of Grove Press. And Grove Press was his great adventure. It was an engine of freedom. Of counter-culture. Of lots of stuff. And it was fun. Barney made it happen. I love this line

“Should we have had more of a business plan?” he said, looking back on his years at Grove. “Probably. But then the publishers that did have business plans didn’t do any better.”

NYT gives a peek at Barney’s story. Among many other things, he was a fearless adventurer.

 Just what do you say to a naked lady?

That was the title of a rather charming movie made in 1970 by the folks who did the Candid Camera TV show. BTW, Candid Camera was a popular TV show back then.  But a more recent news story creates a rather different context. for considering the ladies in the nude … errr … issue.

By way of background, Henri Leclerc is Mr. Dominique Strasss-Kahn’s lawyer. Yes, the great man is in a wee bit of legal difficulty again.  According to Mr. Leclerc, Mr. Strauss-Kahn thought he encountered classy ladies in the nude at a party at the Carlton Hotel. It would appear that he encountered not just one naked lady, but a cadre … or shall we say a bevy of beauties. And how would this come about?  Ever the lawyer, Mr. Leclerc throws down the gauntlet

People are not always clothed at these parties. I challenge you to tell the difference between a nude prostitute and a classy lady in the nude,

I confess that no one has presented me with this type of challenge before. But perhaps my inexperience is of some value. I am ready to take it up if Mr. Leclerc is ready to guide me to the proper trysting … errr … I mean testing grounds.

But seriously.  People are not always clothed at these parties? Doesn’t that let the cat out of the bag, so to speak? Dear me. Just when I thought that the Americans had unfairly injured the poor Frenchman’s reputation, too.

FOLLOW -  I must confess, I am reminded of the rather hilarious scene  at the nudist colony in the second of the Pink Panther films, A Shot in the Dark. “Do Do is Dead?”

We finished the second day of negotiation training yesterday and spent the day discussing negotiation strategy. It is a challenging topic because negotiating brings into play so many unknowns. But if you don’t have a strategy in the first place, it is like trying to walk through a mine field blindfolded.

One of the core ideas of strategy building is to confront the worst case. Will you bump into Godzilla when you turn the corner? And what then? The odd thing is that we often put Godzilla there ourselves  inadvertently, and then forget about it.

Using Bruce Schneier’s model, in the normal course of things, we accept models of seeing risks that have internal contradictions. And it hurts facing up those contradictions. So we usually don’t do it until we hit a crisis point. Godzilla suddenly shows up demanding our attention.

Not all of us live this way. And we admire those who take huge risks for the public good. It is right that we do that.  People like journalist Marie Colvin accept the risks associated with their jobs as normal. They have their eyes open. And why live with the risks? They are passionate about the value of their work. BTW, Marie was just killed in Syria. It is sad. But it is not a sad story. She was much to brave a person for us to think of her story as just sad.  Inspiring, I would say.

FOLLOW -  if there is a moral to this post, it is that the value of our strategic choices depends at least in part on our appetite for risk. That, in turn, hinges on whether we feel connected to a great purpose. The greater the purpose, the more risks we gladly take. But in our day to day lives, it can be challenging to see the great purposes that are in fact driving us. So we react, rather than create.

Yesterday we finished the first day of negotiation training for a new group. What happened? A lot of things. But one thing in particular fascinates me.

People come to negotiation training with a lot of fixed ideas about what they need and what they  already know. And by the way, this is true of how we approach most of the challenges that we face in life. It is a painful first step to let go of assumptions that are not useful. That hurts because it seems to threaten our identity. But we have to do it if we want to open our minds to creative thinking.

So what are some of the fixed ideas that people have about negotiation? People think that success in negotiation is about becoming powerful. Why? Isn’t that how we can get what we want or what we think we need? With this assumption, people want to learn tricks of the trade. The magic that unleashes the genii from the bottle. Sure, there are tricks. But based on my experience, understanding the tricks is less important than understanding the process. And in the first day, we get our first look at the process — for what it really is.

I can’t describe that process in a single blog post. But I can give you a glimpse of it. Negotiations tend to be stressful. Why? Because we don’t know how they will work out. The negotiating process is about managing that stress to our advantage. Not just to your own individual advantage. But to the advantage of  the group that you identify with. That you want to strengthen. Sometimes that means protecting the group from an outside threat. Sometimes it means opening up to a new idea. Deciding which is needed in a given context is an important strategic choice. Once we make that choice, we then take on the role of the caveman or the genius.

If this interests you, come to the course. There is a lot, lot more to talk about.