There was no doubt. The Spaniards were the better team on Sunday. They played a brilliant game, deserved to win and were fun to watch. From Iker Casillas
“What we do is difficult, but we make it look easy.”
You can say that again.
Stephen Hawking answered the question “what would it take to make time travel a reality?” He started his answer this way - we are already traveling forward in time if you haven’t noticed.
The question is whether we will be able to change the speed at which we experience time. To step out of time, so to speak. He said
I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible. I gave a party for time-travelers, but I didn’t send out the invitations until after the party. I sat there a long time, but no one came.
Hmmm …
I think that this quote from NYT sums it up pretty well.
Chase Carey, the chief operating officer who had long been pushing for the change, put it more piquantly, saying the decision would give the company’s print assets — The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London and The Sunday Times, The Sun and The New York Post, among others — “the impetus to grow and fulfill their potential.” Which is a little like the engineer of a locomotive unhitching the caboose and telling the people marooned there that they were now free to travel toward any destination they desired.
Lolong (a recently captured crocodile) measures 20.24 feet (6.17 meters) and weighs more than a ton, Guinness spokeswoman Anne-Lise Rouse said in a statement seen Sunday. The reptile took the top spot (as the world’s biggest in captivity) from an Australian crocodile that measured more than 17 feet (5 meters) and weighed nearly a ton.
That is one big croc! I wonder how you weigh something like that. Obvious answer - very carefully.
On Sunday I started a short thread of posts about some cultural baggage we still carry around from the 1960’s. The first post was about a new storyline that appeared in the sixties starting from the sensation of loss. But where does the story go from there?
Stay tuned! Tomorrow I reveal all. Errr … well as much as I can anway.
Smart people, I mean really smart people, do incredibly stupid things. Like starting the first world war. How could they have been so dense? Well, in that case no one imagined how horrific the war would be. The best and brightest could not do so because they were trapped in a false premise. They were sure that the war could be managed. It was just politics by other means. Part of the grand game. Like wars of the late 19th century. Oops.
So false premises are dangerous. Peter Drucker thought a lot about that and he wrote a few books on the subject. He was interested from a business perspective. Business is about the future - what clients will want to buy tomorrow. Entrepreneurs cannot know for sure what clients will want tomorrow and therefore face inherent risks. Drucker thought that the worst presumption one could make is that tomorrow will be exactly like today. This is not so smart because there are factors at work now that will force change at some point. And so things will stay the same until they suddenly won’t. Then it is too late to change. Worse still, people will tend still to deny even then that they have to change. Bruce Schneier has a lot to say about why. So once again, there are grave risks in embracing a false premise.
Fred Wilson wrote yesterday about trends and business models in the tech world. Wise words
In technology the more things change, the more the stay the same. You cannot ever rest. Because the big change that is going to upset your nice apple cart is right around the corner. Today that is mobile. Tomorrow, who knows? I am trying like hell to figure out what that will be and jump on it. Because that’s how you play this game.
Paul Krugman writes today about how European leaders may get blindsided by a false premise about public finance.
BTW, we all face a rather interesting inflection point ourselves. It is a truism that the rate of societal change is accelerating. That means the risk of hanging onto false premises is bigger than ever and growing still. So what institutions help us understand these inflection points? Education? Politics? Journalism? Entrepreneurs? Professional advisory services? Researchers? Artists? Are these reliable?
My best sense is that one finds the best thinking about the future from people who are connected to more than one of the above groups. Is this a paradigm for success in the future? Albert Wenger talks about the future of network based solutions. And check out Ellen Levy’s story from FC. There you will see a success story based on interconnection.
I like to think about this challenge in terms of institutional reform. For institutions to work better in this environment, they need to embrace strategic learning. This learning comes from using communication and partnering. Open innovation? Integrated Marketing? yes, yes. And more.
FOLLOW - BTW, the comedy of Douglas Adams flows from expanding the gap between incredible tech and flawed advice on how to handle it. Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - very funny stuff.
2d FOLLOW - Cringely seconds Fred Wilson’s comment about mobility as the next growth market in computing - and the conclusion that those firms that can’t get beyond the PC market (like Microsoft) are headed for irrelevance over time.