Never say no to someone that is looking for a mentor. Most of the time, the limitation is not your time, but the ability of the protégé to consume the coaching and advice you impart. Almost always there is time between when you listen and share to when they come back looking for more. I also believe that it is the job of everyone to support others, regardless of their relative position in the community. Often people filter that they are willing to mentor, as to prefer only the absolute top talent. If we spent more time developing everyone, we might have better talent all around.
There is no shortage of ideas. This is one of those statements most do not agree with. Maybe we do not all come wired with this confidence, but I know it to be true. Being free with your ideas is the simplest way to enable the best thinking to flow into innovation. It also makes it irrelevant who owns which ideas – there are so many more it really does not matter. Secrets are the same way. There is no shortage of secrets to learn and sharing them does no harm.
Almost always, a protégé needs to have a certain level of experience to understand and make use of relevant secrets. It takes some time to make sense of the words you use or the situations you share. As a mentor you likely cannot practically compress everything for easy digestion. In fact, the simplest of lessons is often distilled to the point that it needs dilution. In the end, more often than not, the protégé is the gas pedal. When that pedal gets stuck, it will be your own inability to communicate at high enough bandwidth – help these folks get strapped to the fastest rocket ship you know.
People think that if they share what they know they will lose their power. This is the absolute wrong way to think about things. Creating a legion of individuals everywhere that grow to be giants is the ultimate in success and likely power. It transcends the walls of your organization and is the right thing to do for humanity. We need to take better care of each other.
The shortest distance between a person becoming aware and buying – the act of exchanging currency at a higher rate than the service or product costs to produce – is the marketer’s benchmark. As such their motives should inherently be held suspect and yet we believe what they want us to believe.
Time is one of the key battles marketing message fight. Given enough time, anyone can sell anything (ideas or products), some better than others. People have been told time is money and usually that is true for the other person – your time is someone else’s money. Someone else’s time is likely yours. As such, marketing messages are short and repetitive – visually and aurally. It gets cleverer when the messages appear genuinely – products placed in unassuming ways that relate activity or quality to the product or service. Simplified messages attack the largest audience to force an action – thought or behavior. How much of what we know is fabricated?
Science and technology folks are all about details and complexity. One cannot fully appreciate wonders without understanding the complexity – one of the reasons we know less than we should. Scientists strive for truth or work with it to change it. Exactness is important. Any fudge work is noted and already calculated to be insignificant in the context of a more import result. They are biased, but their motives are purer. Of course corruption exists everywhere, so absolutes are tough to swallow. Scientific evidence is often positioned to accentuate the beauty but hid the wrinkles. We hold beliefs that are not always proven by a scientist or better yet ourselves-we call this faith. What do you have faith in?
I am not as interest in what people have faith in as much as that they do so readily. With good marketing, people believe and behave under the influence. People are generally anxious about mind control yet almost everything has been fabricated and more importantly specifically for you and people like you. As much as we are individuals we are actually more alike than not – scarily alike when it comes to what you think, what you believe and what you buy.
We are all participants in being under the influence
It is no wonder that so many people in the fields of communication, branding and marketing feel so powerful – their message in total create so much of the world. They start as the rock falling into the pond allowing ripples to hit us as they may. They drop more pebbles at the right times reinforcing messages, creating relationships and intimate richness. They are the origin and orchestration of the following conversation in what appears to be naturally occurring ripples. As individuals we faithfully internalize, reform and repeat – generating thoughts and actions that others listen to. These messages become defining attributes. Many people like fine wine, food, clothes, automobiles and the latest personal technology. Many desire upgrades to their current lifestyle in those ways and aspire for private jets, multiple homes in multiple countries and more. People consume what is made consumable. The rate of new content production for the individual is slower than the rate of content an individual produces based on someone else’s content. How much of what you think is new? When you talk, how much of what you say is something someone else said? How much of what you feel is yours?
Marketing messages create physiological changes in our understanding of reality – they are not artificial impacts. What is suspect is the initial message we chose to have faith in. If we inspected every message for such qualities we would crawl to a halt. It is not practical and, for better or worse, we are unavoidably consuming. This is excellent news for those who actually know how to communicate. The power to create the world’s thought and behavior is in the hands of those that strike clear and simple messages, rooted in fact and garnished in fashion.
Among the publications of Moses King is a curious postcard titled N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers”. John Timberman Newcomb, teacher at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wrote a piece titled The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems citing it as being published sometime in 1913-1918. I picked my copy up at a local store that sells old and used postcards.
N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)
The back reads, “Future New York will be pre-eminently the city of skyscrapers. The first steel frame structure that was regarded as a skyscraper is the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, a ten-story structure 129 feet high. There are now over a thousand buildings of that height in Manhattan, and hundreds in course of construction. The best known skyscrapers are the Singer Building, 612 feet height the Metropolitan Building, 700 feet high, and the Woolworth Tower which towers above them all at rises to a height of 790 feet. The proposed Pan-American Building is to be 801 feet high.”
N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)
For comparison, The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet including the spire, doubling what the 1900’s regarded as towering. It remains one of the tallest buildings in America and is currently number 15 world-wide. An impressive iconic structure, the Empire State Building is far from the vision that this postcard imagines.
Modern futuristic movies reach out into space (2001, Star Wars), explore extraterrestrials (ET, Alien) and robotic life (Short Circuit, Terminator). Others imagine close calls with the end of humanity (I Am Legend, Men in Black). Others yet explore genetic (Gattaca) and psychic phenomena (Minority Report). To make these movies commercially accessible they are kept edgy-plausible. In comparison, the minds of the 1900’s went far more radical imaging a metropolis of buildings stacked upon buildings with rail cars at high elevations and the possibility that a person’s world may be contained within one building. Movies have riffed on these concepts but at 750 ft, the Woolworth Tower was a far from the futuristic city New York was thought to become.
In general, the current state of futuristic thinking lacks radical imagination. The fiction has become too accessible offering probable possibilities instead of the kind of “what if” thinking that raises the societal consciousness – what could be beyond what we think.
There was a time that my work focused on managing technology diffusion and amplifying the volume on innovative activity at IBM. It is a space where there is literally no shortage of work to be done at every level. While people tended to focus on the tangible build out of infrastructure or web experience that facilitated innovation access, most failed to see how important the dream was. For example. “what if 30,000 employees were always running the n+1 version of the IT experience?” Dreams are lenses that provide a critical filter and check point as things naturally evolve and depart from the original motivations.
Making innovation accessible is an important part of the Darwinian selection. A more interesting topic is pushing innovation beyond current understanding. Quite simply, the majority of innovation today is incremental or copy cat – applying something from one domain to another in hopes it might be useful in a different context. Certainly interesting exploration, but not what I would call transformative. It seems real innovation comes in the form of individuals and when they move on for whatever reason, so does the dream. Who in your world is a dreamer that has started many fires but whose fires seem to be smothered or worse yet have burned the wrong forest?
Consider what is still an impressive demonstration, Jeff Han’s demo at TED in February 2006. It is 2009 and the best we have seen of gesture based and multi-touch, pressure sensitive computer screen technology and the best we can point to is Apple’s application in their mobile devices. More importantly, notice the first demo Han shows exploring human lava lamp interactions – more sophisticated than current interaction experiences that exploration is relegated to research scientists. The few hundred of audience members, purported to be some of the most connected in the world, were impressed and unmoved to imagine a different computing world, or if imagined selfishly horded.
What is beyond web-based anything, micro-blogging, social flows and the constant meme generation? I am not tired of the world we live in, but who is imagining the world beyond. If we simply evolve from here, the future will fall short, just like the New York and cities that never became. Some cite the state of the economical climate as the reason for such underwhelming thinking. I think it has been here for many years and it would be a good time to shake it up. If you are a dreamer, a futurist, a creative thinker, why is your volume so soft? The future is here and we need bigger thoughts.
The physical practice of writing, drawing and doodling is at the heart of constructing high-bandwidth content for low-bandwidth fluid consumption. Yet, there are few people that actually practice these methods. Of those that do, the technology mediated construction of content vaporizes the artifacts associated with the experience. People still benefit from keeping a digital diary, but all the edits typical of pen are erased to leave a final pristine form.
Simplicity is often thought of as minimalism, however there are plenty of complicated things that appear simple – look into biomimicry for examples and inspiration. Simplicity is possible with more thoughtful design. Being thoughtful requires clear understanding of evolving thinking – a reason people love to study the work of others to help define their own.
Zack Arias has become a wonderful source of thoughtful content. Recently he posted a photograph of his whiteboard where he was thinking through the end-to-end experience that his clients have when working with him. It conveys an enormous amount of information that clearly transpired of a much longer period. The final product is something the viewer has the honor of appreciating, while Zack had the hard work adding and editing the realities of his business and priorities. Zack gets the transformation in how he thinks about his business, while the viewer simply gets to peer onto the artifact.
Dr. Michael Wesch has been working with the LiveScribe SmartPen which records the audio and markings of the author in digital form. It can then be explored and shared in video progression with others. The author gets additional benefit being able to play audio associated with any note by tapping. What is wonderful is that Dr. Wesch is also sharing how he filters, structures notes and draws relationships with his content, all in the context of the presentations of his students. This is an improvement over the whiteboard where the viewer is regulated to one state of a product. While a lot can be teased out with Wesch’s smart pen experiment, we do not in fact understand what he is thinking. We do not know his transformation.
A sample of what the action pad looks like.
Behance is a company that creates products and services that help provide order to what can seem like creative madness. In fact, they help bring simplicity – clarity – to the numerous aspects of thinking. They break things down into preparation, actions steps, back-burner thoughts and unlined but dotted work spaced that facilitate diagrams and writing the same. This is an example of encoding a structure to help replicate behavior. It comes from patterning after a methodology that mediates the structuring of creative thinking. As a tool, this method and its papers facilitate – we hope – more clarity and hopefully more simplicity. Again, there is no way to capture someone’s transformation, except possibly in his or her progression through the framework.
Now, if only more people took a pen to paper to write, draw or doodle. There is no shortage of content creation, but we lack the records of the experience. We snap endless photographs and videos to simply flood and archive the world. People love to say it is the journey and not the destination. What if there is no destination and not enough people are journeying?
Consider the complexities in your art or business. What are your most complex challenges? Can you gauge from your work products how evolved your thinking is? What we present is a direct representation of how clearly we think and evolved our thoughts are. Yet, the majority of examples of slides and diagrams show the garbage dump yet to be wade through. When was the last time you saw a white paper? When was the last time you read one? There is a class of people that know, writing anything at all puts you in a position of leadership. There is another class that actually reads it and sees the mess. The only way to come to deep understanding is to work though it, be it with a whiteboard, a SmartPen or Behance pad, and allow the transformation to occur with your thinking. It can be done digitally, but there is something more impactful in picking up a pen and placing it to paper, that captures the evolution as you think that represents to the author the journey and to all others, the result.
Sophisticated organizations construct relationships with the people that enable the group. Even if all you do is punch the time clock at work, part of your identity is associated with your job, the building you work in, the company you work for and the people you work with. If you actually like what you do, have skills that help you deliver in meaningful ways and the stomach to deal with the human condition, then it is in your organization’s best interest to retain you – even better if they get you to retain you.
It takes an incredible amount of clarity to both understand what is important and why it is important. A few years back an executive offered some mentoring advice to help structure the conversation of what was important to me. Consider money, recognition, visibility and content. Assign a percentage to each of these according to the contributing importance to what drives you. This and other techniques help someone understand what is important, but not why. What in the absence of why is dangerous. Deriving insight from the what is certainly possible, in fact powerful. Investigating why someone feels a certain way can be even more transformative.
Incentives are a common method of influencing behavior. The most powerful of which communicate social or professional status – titles or black credit cards. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be an executive with a fancy title, but the meaning of such a label has power within the organization and possibly with other groups that identify with similar notions. Everyone else, especially an indigenous tribe in a far away land, has no idea what it means. Creative workplaces often poke fun at organizational structures encouraging titles to be fun – Guru of Internet happiness. It is easy to not realize why what you desire is fabricated. Ensuring the “why” of “what” comes from you and not someone else is the key to freedom.
Breaking free from your organization makes you a more effective contributor. It is impossible for your relationship with an organization not to contribute to your identity. The longer you groove over the same mental and physical paths the more efficient traversing these passageways become. Realizing any path is possible often means breaking some of the psychological and physiological habits associated with the current context – the more deep the groove the more resistance and pain involved in changing. This can be an emotional break up where the individual is reorganizing and reestablishing the relationship with the organization. People tend to change organizations instead of changing their conception of the organization – guaranteed to repeat the pattern. Your organization defines you, but you can define the organization and leave and define something else somewhere else if need be. The terms of your contract are not to be a hamster in a running wheel. That is just what happens when people accept things as they are.
The last day of the Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Whitney delivered many surprising moments of genius. Visionary and inventor, Buckminster is an innovator’s innovator. He saw the value of drawing upon interdisciplinary fields to inform a unique and faceted view of the world. His work is grounded in helping people with a do “more with less” attitude that extended to environmental impact. While it is easy to hand wave this exhibition as an old time futurist, his philosophy alone was worth absorbing.
There are many ways to go about change. Over the last couple of years, innovation has become all the rage. It is seen as the fundamental approach to growth. Companies exist to deliver value to customers through the creation of products and services. Through the innovation contributed by products and services companies compete for higher sales, larger market share and if they are lucky the hearts of their clients and customers.
Companies also consider innovating on their business a key model for transformation. Many change makers push against the system to get it to change, to innovate and evolve. In the end, the fastest and most exciting opportunities are those that usurp the existing establishment. They politely and subtly thumb the current way of thinking, in favor for an alternative approach, one that could change the landscape completely. Apparently, Buckminster Fuller saw this approach as the only viable approach to change.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
The resistance to change, even from the most progressive is an adversary that drains the innovator directly. More time is spent talking than doing. People argue about subtle points to maintain the current course and speed. My father taught me at a young age that if you always do what you always have done, then you always get what you have always gotten. What is difficult here is that it takes the majority of workers to deliver on today; after all, it brings in the money to create for tomorrow. In order to remain viable companies need to invest just as heavily in inventing and innovating for tomorrow. Traditional R&D organizations are no longer the primary source of innovation and there is lots of research that suggests answers is in the masses. This is an area where maybe only a few are required to institute change.
Never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.
No one wants what he or she has today, but if that is all the people of a company spend time doing, then how could any expect anything more than a game of catch up? Something far more radical would be to create an organizational structure that enabled the pursuit of both present and future with equal vigor.
Change is a critical part of business. Fuller’s attitude toward creation, focused on his contribution without regard to if the world was ready. The world catches up and regardless of success is influenced by the doing.
ICANN is loosening the rules around domain suffix at the detriment of having any meaning and comprehension embodied in a hostname. URLs need more thought, not freedom. Even ICANN’s CEO brings the move down to vanity plate level contribution. Apparently, the Internet was running out of space.
The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net,” said Dr Twomey. “It’s a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of the Internet.
Some schools in some states attempt to teach safe sex. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children have sex at around age 17. Include other forms of sex and those polled report almost 50% of males having received oral sex and 39% gave. So kids are sexually active and there is a movement to focus on not having sex, not how to do it safely or how to be smart about it. An NPR story reported…
If we are in such agreement, we should start measuring how many of our children’s decisions around sex are well informed. Remove the issue of if their decision is something we personally agree with and simply ask if they felt they were informed.
No one disputes, though, that many were delighted to discover they were pregnant. “Sweet!” one of them shouted in the school nurse’s office. The school superintendent admitted: “They were not trying very hard not to get pregnant.”
Prescription drugs seem to be all the rage. Some might naively interpret that the war on drugs must be almost over if kids are turning to medicine cabinets. Or we could simply be inspired by Dr. Twomey and say that we have a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of drug market.
Structured naming lets us work and communicate meaning. Our world works in abstractions. We cannot possibly consider the totality of our own lives, the community, the nation or the world without coming to a screeching halt. Abstractions allow us to consider just enough of reality to work with it. Loosely regulated naming is not a good thing. One lesson we can apply from corporate life is that things done by committee often fail or are fraught with issues. It lacks leadership and puts the idiocracy into the lead.
A recent article in the Atlantic, Is Google Making us Stoopid? by Nicholas Carr, talks about our increasing reliance on the intelligent Internet and our own asymptotic tendency away from our rich, educated and thoughtful past. One can only hope that Internet naming is just a fluke, that this is not just another data point of stupidity.
One of the magical things about grassroots computing – grassroots anything probably – is that any success is decided by the participants. This basic rule is what ensures support but perplexes companies who want to make money from the productive application of technology. Users of technology do not overtly care about the monetary value of technology which is what makes it even harder – we are all quite content to use something we deem useful even if – and often even more if – we are delighted by it.
One of the challenges companies fall into is trying to create a community or an online social experience where there is no compelling groundswell. Online community development and certainly grassroots computing are not about technology, so building something rarely begets either.
Web 2.0-ifing existing applications is often a sure way to move further away from productive. The only time it helps is when the existing solution has a decidedly undesirable experience and the aspects of grassroots activity might result in better outcomes. Adding a set of widgets tells people you acknowledge and recognize the movement, designing or conceiving business with social computing as a core heartbeat tells people you are the movement. If you are successful, you did it right otherwise you learned a lot.
If the barrier to progress focuses on a framework articulating the values of the past or present, then the outcome will be one that follows instead of leads. There is plenty to be done meet the expectations of traditional returns on investment, but they will necessarily either limit innovation or shape the potential successes. To be really leading edge new measures and values are required that articulate the future state. Without this it is all smoke and mirrors.
Clippinger turns to Robin Dunbar and colleagues to show that there is a correlation of neocortex development (thinking and problem solving) and membership size in social groups.
…the evolutionary success of Homo sapiens can in large measure be attributed to its ability to manage complex social relationships.
Clippinger pulls a great passage from Dunbar that describes the notion that what challenges an individual animal is tracking the societal groups in which it partakes. Dunbar then offers another view that maybe it is not the quantity, but the quality of the relationships. The following page explores the famous statistic that people successfully organize informally at groups of 150-200.
This book continues to have botox on the brain moments with the occasional brilliant series of pages. It is as if Clippinger started with a fantastic 80-page paper that inflated to fill a book. Regardless, the gems make you want to commit concept to memory.
One behavior that continues is the incessant friending activity on social sites, regardless of the site’s purpose. Sites even suggest other people you might know and connect. As interconnections grow, the network inherently diminishes in quality. The notion of identifying a connection with another person, community or organization is a simple enough activity. Maybe adding the need to classify those connections beyond a binary state was an inhibitor to adoption. Was this something FaceBook noticed, or was it simply that the creators never had higher intentions?
Moving beyond high-level classification, the next useful articulation is quality – how connected are we? There is plenty of work and math that can analyze these issues, however it all presumes having access to the data. Moreover, are my behaviors in online social spaces reflective of connected I am to my network? The data analysis is inherently reliant on the accuracy and relevance of the data. Might I love someone dearly that I hardly interact with online? Again, this level of analysis introduces yet another step to organizing our view of the societal graph and might be prohibitive to adoption.
On a related but separate note, some interesting user experience work is being done in the MIT Media Lab around visualizing and managing the adhoc face-to-face social network. Check out the project called Snap N’ Share by Nadav Aharony, Andrew Lippman and David Reed.
This brings us back to the point that humans are able to execute each of these tasks – identification, classification and qualification – without trouble. Short of disease, it is safe to assume that forgotten people accurately reflects their status on our societal radar. The hope of the articulated social graph being leveraged by technology is that maybe we will finally see what we are missing.
What is beautiful about the notion that humans have been so successful because of our ability to manage relationships is that it is startlingly not about being an individual. At an individual level, it is the quality of the relationships we create, but it is the group that benefits. What would we even do with an optimized view of society and is that discussion really absent from society?
The success of social spaces rests in their ability to create and support meaningful relationships. The proliferation of week ties in the social graph is noise in what could be a high fidelity signal. In the end, meaning is embodied in the people and the technology is just an enabler. What might these spaces be like if the only goal was to support meaningful connections?
Philip Zimmermann’s Pretty Good Privacy was a critical platform for educating the world on secure communication. PGP encryption is so good, that even the most determined agencies can essentially go pound sand–it is pretty good privacy to be humble, not to disclaim. An impressive concept with PGP is the public and distributed nature of key management. Often, Public Key Encryption systems rely upon Public Key Infrastructures where there is a central authority. The genius of Zimmermann is in the notion that keys have an associated trust level. That your personal key can be trusted by you, implicitly. Your friend’s key, depending on how you came into position may have a high level of trust associated with it, that this key is in fact his or hers. Furthermore, you can sign other people’s keys, an endorsement of the validity of that key. You see, public keys are what the system uses to encrypt secure messages that only the key holder knows how to decrypt using their private key. By introducing the notion of trust and the digital signing of keys, Zimmermann started what has to be seen as an early social web–a social graph of the people you could not only securely exchange email with but a social confidence of the key itself and by extension the individual’s digital identity.
In A Crowd of One: The future of individual identity, John Henry Clippinger starts working through how much society defines good and bad. Simply put, one person’s radical is another person’s hero. The examples are uncanny and for each of us there is one with which to resonate. If you make it past the prologue and the bulk of chapter one, you will be delighted by page just prior to chapter two, which lays out where you hoped the book would go. There are heavy-eye moments in chapter one where you think Clippinger is too smart for you and his messages are going to be far too academic to appreciate–page 24 turns it around.
Clippinger talks about how biological evolution is particularly challenging in that generations of “sexual selection and reproduction” need to pass to accomplish the natural order. Societal evolution on the other hand can happen quickly and most participants in the modern world can attest, things they are a changin’.
Furthermore, it will become possible to have governance by algorithm—that is, have computer-based rules assign reputation scores, rate the performance of members of a social network, identify and expel free riders, and maintain the requisite checks and balances between competing interests.
We’re largely digital, we just haven’t appreciated what it can tell us about ourselves.
Participation is often a key aspect of reputation in online venues where almost everyone is anonymous. An active forum participant rises through the ranks having established a history and dedication among participants accruing digital karma. E-Bay and Amazon have similar reputation models where the number of successful interactions connotes some degree of comfort in interacting with strangers or new products. Other social spaces like FaceBook display social graphs, implicit endorsements. Almost all of these cases either require a human to judge the content or trust in very week measures of past interaction. Regardless, as participants we leave an endless trail of social data, something Google is more than happy to store forever and bring together. Our infatuation with the social graph and the affiliation with social spaces is rooted in the quest to see our own reflection. Other people help manifest our identity (or identities) and in reflecting on our connection, attitudes and culture we participate in societal evolution. We are largely digital and while we have not yet appreciated how much of our web teaches us, we are far more ignorant of what it could tell us that we cannot see or do not know.
Some cultures have teachings of how painfully alone we are as beings, that we are very much isolated, despite our unquenchable desire to connect with others. As children moving through years four to six, we develop self-consciousness at a very specific point in time – at one point it is another child in the mirror and then suddenly we know it is us. Humans are unaware of themselves and then once aware struggle to manage their identity. We construct much of our reality as a means for creating our identity and look to others to reflect and locate how far we have come. In a digital world where the social network is out in the open, how does a more sophisticated notion of trust, identity and security come about? Is it the culmination of all I do online? Who is I? Which email address? Which identity? How many social connections do I need before I am trusted? At what cost do we ascertain identity?
Zimmermann was on to something–decentralizing authority, driving validation into the network and ensuring confidentiality. Clippinger brings us full circle, showing us that our digital fingerprints and the systems that judge us will be equal actors in constructing who we are. If the rest of this book is as good, we are in for a treat!
