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I love serendipity. The other day I was following a bizarre, but interesting, trail of links and end up at the search engine ‘karto’. I did a couple of searches, but I couldn’t make much sense of the results I was getting. Pressing ahead I clicked on one of the links it threw up and stumbled across a treasure.

Continue reading The Six Cs of Capability

These are anxious times. The question is what should we really be anxious about? If we were totally rational creatures we would be more anxious about getting into a car or going into our kitchen than we would about catching a train or a plane. But we are not, and it is right that we are not. We have to accept that there is some level of risk in life. Where we become dumb is in giving exceptional events a greater weight in terms of our personal safety than they deserve.
What happened in Madrid was awful and unforgivable. The response of the Spanish in taking to the streets in solidarity was a magnificent human answer to the twisted logic of the bombers – a democratic response.
But as we have seen over and over again there is a kind of symbiosis between the people who plant bombs and the people in authority whose instincts are essential anti-democratic. The number of voices arguing that the rights won by our ancestors at a cost to their liberties and lives must be sacrificed to guard against the possibility of exceptional events occurring is rising. Moves in that direction are dangerous and, as history has shown us, ineffective. And those seductive voices that promise security should make us afraid – our freedoms are more fragile and more easily eroded than we sometimes imagine.
“So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Franklin Roosevelt, March 4, 1933. First inaugural address.

Malcolm Gladwell hasn’t put up a new article on his site for several months. So I had a real sense of pleasure when I saw that there was a new one. The title “Big and Bad:How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety”, looked reasonably promising. As I read on I saw that it subject had more and more relevance to some wider stuff I have been thinking about. (This is not that unexpected Gladwell’s pieces often have a much wider resonance than just the subject they are focussed on.) Read it yourself and see if you agree. I will be returning to this theme very soon.

Here’s a couple of links about how two creators think IP law works in practice. The first is to Roger McGuinn’s testimony to the US Senate (fortunately recorded on a blog – the Senate link seems to have disappeared). The second is to a piece in Salon by Courtney Love.

John Naughton’s blog is invariably a good read and he does a very good link. One very short entry that caught my eye recently was a link to a piece by Lawrence Lessig. This one turned out to be golden. It begins, “If piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission, then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of big media today – film, music, radio, and cable TV – was born of a kind of piracy.” And, I suspect, the same would be true of the PC industry.
As I have argued before the growing dog in the manager attitude to intellectual property is based on a misrepresentation of how innovation and invention works. In an important sense we are all free riders on the work of generations before. Now changes in IP law seem to be enabling some, mainly large, corporations to lock in parts of this common heritage and to have become the main free riders. And it is important to remember that it is they and their shareholders who are the main beneficiaries from this shift, not the actual creators or the people who use what is created.
In many areas of life this probably doesn’t matter much. People will find their ways around the obstacles or simply ignore them. But in science it does matter. In an interesting review of the issues in the New York Review of Books, Richard Horton quotes the philosopher of science John Ziman who argues that:
“the erosion of traditional scientific values?such as the principles that research should be driven by curiosity and by the desire to advance scientific knowledge?has created a new “post-academic science,” a science that seeks an immediate economic payoff. Sustaining some form of non-instrumental science?which practically means not routinely applying the litmus test of wealth creation to every new idea or hypothesis?is important not only for inquiry into fundamental theoretical questions but also because society needs a model of independent critical rationality for the proper conduct of democratic debate, judicial inquiry, and consumer protection.”

Do I hear echoes of Bruce Chatwin‘s Songlines in this extract from an interview with Michael Bull about how people use Apple’s iPod:
“… lot of people use it to go to work, for commuting. I found that they use the same music on a regular basis. They will often play the same half-dozen tunes for three months, and each part of the journey has its own tune….”

“We need to have a fundamental shift in our understanding of the nature of value. Think about it on an individual level. The reason you want to make money is to be secure to live a certain way. Simply having wealth doesn’t produce that end. It doesn’t matter if you have a six-figure salary if you can’t breathe the air or drink the water. A better question to ask would be, What are the elements of a life worth living, and how can I assemble them? Not, How much do I earn? Likewise, in our approach to value, we need to think more about the end rather than the means. The larger question is, As a civilization, what do we need to thrive?”
and
“…social relationships are a powerful predictor of happiness?much more so than money is. Happy people have extensive social networks and good relationships with the people in those networks. What’s interesting to me is that while money is weakly and complexly correlated with happiness, and social relationships are strongly and simply correlated with happiness, most of us spend most of our time trying to be happy by pursuing wealth. Why?”
and finally a thought for anyone who makes interventions in the world that may change it:
“We should be careful to make a world we actually want to live in.”

I have long felt that Ray and Charles Eames’s metaphor of the Designer as a Good Host was a good one and noticed that I hadn’t written about here. So I will make up for that now with this quote from the Power of Ten website:
“Since the Eameses felt the guest/host relationship was one of the most powerful relationships in the world, it is fitting that their most famous film, Powers of Ten, should center on a picnic. Charles and Ray argued that the guest/host relationship existed everywhere: in the tent of a nomadic herdsman, in the layout of a railroad station, in the way you are greeted by the circus. It also exists in design: how you make a chair or begin a film, and in all the subtle equations and gestures of welcoming in every day human existence.”
And this from an interview with Rolf Fehlbaum, CEO of Vitra in Fast Company:
“When I was a teenager, I served as an interpreter between Charles Eames and my father. Charles used to talk about the “guest-host relationship.” You, as a designer or a salesperson, are the host, and your customer is your guest. You have to think about how your guest will perceive whatever you’re offering him. You don’t try to please your guest because you want to sell him something. You try to please him because he’s your guest. You serve him because you respect him.”

“The problem with CRM, for example, is people assume that a company knows what to do to create value for customers. But I say no, this decision cannot be unilateral; it has to be collaborative. Consumers will not be seen as targets any longer, which is what CRM is about?how to target a single consumer with a database. Key now is how to engage them as equal problem-solvers so that we get value that is unique. And once you’ve come to this conclusion, the amazing thing is the opportunity for value creation to expand exponentially because now we have more people telling us what they want. We don’t have to second-guess and we don’t have to do shock demand forecasting by SKU. If you deliver experiences, you’re going to be producing on demand. That’s the idea.”
When I first read this passage from an interview with C.K. Prahalad & Venkat Ramaswamy promoting their new book, “The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers”, I found myself muttering in agreement. A few days later I find myself more sceptical.

Continue reading Hidden value

Thank heavens for the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. They are islands of civilization in a sea of instant opinion and soundbites. In the current issue of NYRB there is a review of Richard Perle’s phantasies about the Middle East by Thomas Powers, another by Frederick Crews about the nonsense of repressed memories of sexual abuse, and one by Richard Horton about the dangers of the privatisation of science. And, of course, much, much more.
The LRB has a long, long article by Neal Ascherson about Georgia – and if you think Georgia is a long way away and of little consequence think again, if you worry about nuclear material falling into the wrong hands look no further. Off-line there is Adam Philips on Dylan Thomas, Jenny Diski on Erving Goffman, and an intriguing piece by Bernard Porter on attitudes to cannabis in the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century.
The LRB and NYRB are treasures that need our support, so by all means read what you can on-line for free, but subscribe or buy them too, we’d be poorer without them.