Interesting piece in Harvard Magazine, as a sidebar to an article on The Marketplace of Perceptions. Thanks to Muzeview for pointing it out to me.

I have to confess I’d never even heard of Harvard Magazine until I read the post on Muzeview. Only goes to show.

 

I guess it’s fashionable to knock the education systems of today in comparison with prior ones, and every generation does it. In which case there is no point my joining in.

I do think that things have changed. And the change that most intrigues me here, which affects individuals, companies, schools, healthcare, even software, is to do with our motives. We spent a long time believing that Maslow ruled, and there was no better theory for the bulk of the 20th century. Until Driven. Which I read just about as often as I read The Social Life of Information and The Cluetrain Manifesto and Emergence and The Borderless World.

Nohria and Lawrence make many good points, but there’s one thing about their four-driver model that has never ceased to intrigue me. [The drivers are: The drive to acquire, the drive to learn, the drive to bond and the drive to defend].

As with Maslow, three of the drivers, to acquire, to learn and to defend, can be made to work in hierarchical as well as non-hierarchical models. But my gut feel is that the drive to bond does not.

Bonding is a lateral thing to do, a sideways activity.

And ever since I watched Joi Ito’s HeckleBot in action, I have wondered about the use of something similar in education. Particularly in inner cities (you can take the boy out of Calcutta but you can never take Calcutta out of the boy) youth are pretty disenchanted with everything and everyone. The only thing that drives them is peer respect and recognition. They feel disenfranchised from anything else.

What would happen if every class had a hecklebot-blog standing alongside the teacher? I wonder.

…there’s gonna be some changes tomorrow, it’s gonna be a brighter day

Jim Croce, 1943-1973, “Tomorrow’s gonna be a brighter day”

Again, one of my favourite singer-songwriters. I can still remember my shock at learning of his death the very day I bought my first Croce album. It was 29th September 1973, and as I was walking out of the record shop the manager said “Did you know he died a week or two ago? “. I was devastated.

Sometimes people tell me that I’m too optimistic, that my ideas and thoughts and beliefs are too utopian, that I look too often for good in people.

And guess what, I’m going to stay that way. Rock on, Jim.

I was taken there in usual blog-serendipity mode while reading Amy Jo Kim. Definitely worth it. The SMS revenues piece alone made it worth while. So I’ve linked to it. Thank you Amy Jo and Ajit.

That’s a quote from Wernher von Braun, and one of my favourites. This post was, yet again, triggered by one in Accidental Light, about choosing the least wrong. [And yet again, Malc, I should be co-commenting, I know, and I will be, soon. When I install it]

Investment in R&D is something very few people seem to get right. Yes, you get all the usual pap about people being our most important resource, and intellectual capital being highly valued, and and and. And then, every time the going gets tough, training budgets get trashed, graduate entry programmes go into black holes, and attending conferences is an absolute no-no. I’ve worked for large corporations most of my life, with many intelligent and talented people, and always wondered why this was so. Fossilfools again.

And it’s not as if this was ancient history. I sense there are people the world over who want Google to fail. Not because they’re young. Not because they’re smart. But because the 20% skunkworks that Google admit to doing openly is far too dangerous, too offensive to the current world organisation order. “Decent people don’t spend time doing “stuff”, where would the world be if we allowed that to continue?” And all that jazz.

We know how to deal with risk. But not with uncertainty.

Getting back to the point Malc makes in his “non-axiomatic” post. There was a guy called (Howard?) Schneiderman who ran R&D at Monsanto in the 1980s, who said something along the lines of:

When a board turns down a request for R&D funding, they’re right 90% of the time. Since this is a higher degree of accuracy than they achieve in any other class of decision, they feel good. But. And it is a big but. The 10% they get wrong? They lose the company.

So, while it is good to be less wrong in cases where being right is difficult, we need to be careful. It doesn’t work for some classes of decision. Particularly R&D.