James Drogan

From Fresh Air on TUMBLR.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Ira Glass

This originally came my way via a friend on Facebook

This is a repost of an original from March 17, 2005, on a site of mine that no longer exists.

Alan Turing's 1950 paper in Mind, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, proposed a test in which a human being and a computer would be interrogated under conditions where the interrogator would not know which was which, the communication being entirely by textual messages. Turing argued that if the interrogator could not distinguish them by questioning, then it would be unreasonable not to call the computer intelligent.

In The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence Ray Kurzweil predicts that by the year 2029 "Machines claim to be conscious. These claims are largely accepted."

I propose The Cloud Test. Can Kurzweil's machine find shapes in clouds?

While I have tried to post on this blog items of interest and observations of value (at least to me), I have also tried to eschew politics.  However, I suspect one could conclude that as the global and, especially, the local political situation deteriorates I have become a bit more cynical and trenchant with regards to politics (see In the wake of...).

From John Mauldin's latest letter (September 3) comes:

What we need to do is to make it easier for businesses to start and find capital. Reduce the regulatory burden that small businesses face. When small local banks need 1.2 employees to deal with regulations and compliance for every 1 worker they have making loans (as reported in the WSJ this week), something is seriously wrong.

Politics has exclusively become about power and increasingly less about providing and managing a framework that provides for the well-being of the citizenry.  I am tarring both sides of the aisle with the same brush here.

On the way to work the other day I noticed the folowing bumper sticker:

REELECT NOBODY

...from the wise and one of my favorite blogers, Bob Sutton.  Sutton reflects on the decision of Jobs to step down as CEO at Apple.  In this there is food for thought for all organizations of all sizes in all industries.

It's worth a read, especially in thinking about what Sutton has to say in the context of your own organization

...the display of incompetence and dysfunction by the political elite and the punditry comes Neal Gabler's provocative opinion piece, The Elusive Big Idea, in today's New York Times.

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not exactly the same.

For some time now I have opined that most Americans are satisfied with a beer, a boat, and a sound bite.  We have ceded our rights and responsibilities to the aforementioned political elite and punditry.  In the words of Gabler:

We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.

The collection itself is exhausting: what each of our friends is doing at that particular moment and then the next moment and the next one; who Jennifer Aniston is dating right now; which video is going viral on YouTube this hour; what Princess Letizia or Kate Middleton is wearing that day. In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.

Gabler closes his piece by suggesting that we "Think about that."  I echo his admonition.

I tend to pass along a number of links to items in the blog of Irving Wladawsky-Berger.  He has, in my opinion, very useful and provocatve insights on a broad range of contemporary issues.

Social Reputation in the Age of Globalization is just such a post and worth a read.  It links well with the posts made on this blog concerning ethics (search on "ethics" to get a list of these posts) and provides pertinent material to the discussion of ethics I have each term with our incoming graduate students.

Without a stong ethical foundation not much else of what one possesses can be of value.  The world seems to be increasingly littered wth examples of this.

I believe that we’re about to witness what may turn out to be the last competitive frontier business will see.  It’s going to be a war over the one priceless resource.  Time.  And when it comes, trust may turn out to be the best investment anyone’s made (Jim Kelly, CEO of UPS, Remarks to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco & Oakland Chamber of Commerce, February 23, 2000).

Wladawsky-Berger underscores the value of this notion of trust (which must be based on ethics) as a prerequisite for reputation.

Per one of my students:

It's impossible now to board a plane to New York with 100K in cash without customs asking some serious questions.

It's no problem clearing customs with 100K in a bank account accessible via Smart phone in hand.

Jim

You may know Margaret Atwood.  I have heard of her, but never read any of her work.  I did, however, listen to a fascinating talk she gave at the Tools of Change Conference from O'Reilly Media  Funny and, as best I can tell from my limited experience in the field, deep insight into the changes in publishing that are being wrought by technology.  This is 34 minutes and 13 seconds that's worth a listen.

The abstract:

Author Margaret Atwood, creator of fictional dystopias, speaks on the plight of the author in the face of changes to the publishing industry today. She takes it down to first principles, in a partly historic, partly autobiographical way, how the "publishing pie" is divided. She warns the publishing industry against eliminating the author's piece of the pie in their mad rush to an electronic publishing future.

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4862.html

The title is the title of a post by Tony Schwartz on the HBR Blog Network.  While Schwartz isn't explicit about the origin of these principles, I suspect they, like Drogan's Laws, are the product of experience. 

As experience changes, so ought the principles.  "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"  John Maynard Keynes.

Be sure to peruse the comments on the Schwartz post.

The Financial Times produces excellent coverage of relavant news and often incisive commentary.

I call your attention to Kay, J. (2011, July 13). Lessons from History for Rebekah Brooks. Financial Times, 11.

Words that caught my attention are:

The extensive use of meetings, the compilation of long lists of people copied into every communication, creates an environment in which there is no personal commitment to any course of action, and everyone feels relieved of obligation to acquire the knowledge to judge effectively.

John Day, the commentor, argues that this represents bueaucarcy at its finest.  I agree.

Day then goes on to characterize the culture of "good organisations."

Day concludes with these words:

Good management means appointing good people, delegating to them, and creating an environment in which they can give their best. This is almost all that good management is about. Failure in that is a failure of management, not of subordination.