Author: JP

On rebels and deviants and counterculturals

Malcolm was talking to me about an article he’d read in the Times; since then he’s blogged about it. And something about it made me feel uneasy. And it wasn’t what he said or thought, just something I could’t pin down.

Then today I was doing my usual trawl around the blogs of people I like reading. While I have my netvibes set up the way I want, and I love it, I still like an old-fashioned wander every now and then. RSS aggregators are great at showing “latest” and “today” and “now” and “unread” and all that jazz, but sometimes I want the apparent serendipity of walking across to someone’s blog and just wandering around. Following links almost randomly.

Today it was Steven Johnson’s turn. And through his blog, in a roundabout way, I went to Rebel Sell, with a small diversion to SquareSpace and to Nollind Whachell then back.

And reading reviews of Rebel Sell, my unease returned. I began to understand why I felt the way I did when I read the Times article referred to by Malcolm.

It’s simple.

I think we make a big mistake when we use terms like counterculture and rebel and deviant loosely. They’ve had it as terms. Defunct. Finito. Past their sell-by-date.

Because every time we do that, we paint a big red X across the backs of the people we so describe and put the firm’s immune system on full alert. And the rebels are toast.

Which is often a shame. Because they weren’t rebels. Or deviants. Or counterculture whatevers.

They were doing their job. Trying to find a better way of doing things. [In a strange way, I think that Malcolm’s feeling for consultants is related. When a “consultant” finds a better way of doing things firms roll out the green carpet, papered with spondulicks; when someone in the organisation quietly does the same thing,  he’s a deviant…]

  • When I was 15, we had a new maths teacher. He walked into class and stated first off that he would personally award the Nobel Prize to anyone in his class who managed to fail GCE O Level Mathematics-With-Additional-Mathematics. Then proceeded to ask us “What is the maximum number of electrons in the nth orbit of an atom?”. Hands went up, the answer was provided. He then gave the answerer a piece of chalk and said “Prove it”. The proof, based on permutations and combinations and induction, was provided.
  • He then looked at all of us and said “You think I’m impressed? Not one bit. You want to impress me, don’t give me the right answer. Ask the right question. From today you will be judged not by the answers you give, but by the questions you ask.”

Asking questions is important. Asking the right questions is even more important. And sometimes, asking the right questions requires some investigation, some experimentation.

And we let everyone down when we start labelling people adept at doing this as rebels and deviants. Or by labelling that class of activity as counterculture. Because the terms have been hollowed out and trashed.

Call it emergence. Call it democratised innovation. Call it something. Probably not even opensource any more, because the six-degrees-of-meaning approach has already connected opensource with pinko and lefty and rebel and deviant and counterculture.

Just don’t call it deviant.

Generation M is not innately rebellious or deviant or even countercultural. They have new tools they understand better than we do. They don’t have some of the shackles and frames and anchors and tunnel vision we have. And they are asking why? in a number of ways and in a number of places. And they need to be encouraged.

The act of downloading music off the Net is in no way rebellious or deviant. Just a better way of accessing and acquiring music. Buying books, ordering groceries, looking for cheap flights and hotels, watching homemade videos, these are not intrinsically deviant or rebellious activities. Combining things and seeing (or hearing) what happens is not fundamentally rebellious.

We have to be careful. Words have power. Let us use them wisely.

Thinking more about innovation and path pollution: A long post

I’ve never driven a car in my life. I need to learn how to. I will, soon.

In India, when I was growing up, if you were rich enough to have a car, you were rich enough to have a driver. So I didn’t drive. My father never drove, neither did my grandfather.

But my daughter does. My wife does. My other children will, when they come of age. And I will. Soon.

Even though I didn’t drive, I spent hours fascinated by Indian car mechanics. Many of them didn’t speak English that well, I was used to hearing words and phrases like “radiowater” and “jugger-bugger” and wondering what they meant. It took me a while (well, I was eight at the time) to figure out they meant “radiator” and “shock absorber”.

They made cars work. Without manuals or directions or even spare parts. They cannibalised and adapted and fashioned from scrap and made from scratch. Amazing stuff. So, although eight cars in ten in Calcutta in the 1960s were Hindustan Ambassadors (modelled on the Austin Ambassador of a decade earlier) I grew up with the following:

1940-41_plymouth_-_dodge.jpgstudebaker.jpgherald_13_60_07.jpg
A Dodge Plymouth. A Studebaker Commander. A Standard (not Triumph) Herald Station Wagon. (Note: these are not the cars we owned, just sample images of the models we had, and not in the right colours either. Nevertheless my thanks to the image providers who hold all the copyright and golden keys and title to the jpegs.)

What’s all this to do with innovation and path pollution? You may well ask. Let me try and share what’s going on in my head.

It all started with LifeKludger commenting on a recent post of mine. (Thanks, Dave!). Then, while I was mulling over what Dave was saying, I happened across something Nolind Whachell wrote recently, on Perfect Equals Rigid.

Here’s a quote from Dave:

Contexts and Clues.

There’s lots of people on planet Earth doing lots of things for lots of reasons…or no reason at all. All this activity takes place in a context of the person’s life. The persons life itself is in the context of being on this planet.

All this activity leaves clues. This blog will try to look outside of the contexts the activity is in for clues on how it could be applied in a different context. To get from one context to another takes a Kludge!

And here’s a quote from Nolind:

When I looked at what I was doing I laughed at myself. What an idiot I was! In trying to create this “perfect” vision of what I wanted to achieve, instead of sharing this information with others, I instead ended up building a dam that not only blocked the flow of information to those who really wanted it but also built up my stress and frustrations as well, since I was trying to produce something “perfect”. When I saw what I was doing, I immediately said the following to myself:

Stop trying to be perfect. Don’t let things build. Let things flow.

And while I was mulling over all this, I started thinking about some of the problems Indian mechanics will face soon. [The kernel for this particular bit was a World Bank report on servicing of baby taxis in Bangladesh, where the writer observed that emissions didn’t always reduce after a service. And he found out it was because the mechanics kept using second-hand spark plugs out of sheer habit….)

Which brought me sharply back to the present, and I started thinking about what all this means.

Here’s where I am at present…..

1. One of the things we have lost as a result of miniaturisation and modularisation is the ability to “get under the hood” of many electro-mechanical things. Sometimes because we don’t understand it, sometimes because we can’t (everything is sealed), and sometimes because the manufacturer says Don’t Go There.

That’s not progress. Progress is when the things in the sealed units work, and we can continue to experiment at the edge of the seal. What we have today is sealed units breaking down and a frustrating inability to get in under the hood. This is as true of software as for hardware, when we place ourselves in proprietary lock-in contexts.

So Rule 1: Allow Us to Get Under the Hood

2. Similarly, even in places and states where we can get under the hood today, the edge is too structured and rigid. Our challenge is to allow edge innovation to take place without sacrificing the quality and reliability of what’s under the hood. And that means open toolkits rather than just APIs. Machine tools rather than machines. Opposable thumbs.

Which makes Rule 2: Toolkits not tools, elastic not rigid.

3. This is me wandering a bit further afield than is my usual wont. Since the issues to do with global warming aren’t going to go away, we have to find ways of letting people under the hood of things without having to replace things all the time. The disposable approach won’t scale, we have a problem with PCs already. There are probably more discarded PCs on earth than Sarbanes-Oxley consultants. We have to be able to fix things not discard-and-replace. Make replacement cycles longer by adaptation and extension.

Which makes Rule 3: Fix, don’t replace.

Some of this reminds me of Cat Stevens and Where Do The Children Play. [No he wasn’t Yusuf Islam then,  not on my LP…]

And that brings me to my coda.

Our children are denied a lot in terms of experimentation and kludging and adaptation, because we have gone and miniaturised things and sealed things and built a disposable approach to life. We need to leverage the right values from all this, in terms of safety and security and biodegradeability and lower emissions and renewable-ingredient product and all that jazz, but while we do all this we need to let play continue. Because play is learning. And learning is life.

I speak of “us”. But vicariously. Us is not me. Us is Generation M. So what stops them getting under the hood? What stops them experimenting at the edge? What stops them adapting and extending things?

Bad IPR. Bad DRM. Because they’re a digital generation. And that’s why they don’t like our attitude. We’re taking away their screwdrivers and soldering irons and microscopes and test tubes and magnifying glasses and telescopes and what-have-you.

We can’t do that. 

Four Pillars: Thinking more about the consumer and innovation

I’m a big fan of Richard Corrigan, and of the Lindsay House. I’ve known him for more than a decade now, and think his attitude and approach to food, to cooking, to the entire experience of eating food in a restaurant, it’s something close to my heart. A passion for what he does, the talent and flair to do it, yet the ability to avoid taking himself too seriously while he does it. He so obviously enjoys what he does, it’s a pleasure to watch him at work.

What does this have to do with innovation? Here’s a sideways look, akin to my long-ago post about the Meringue Moment. Something serendipitous and creative takes place when a consumer seeks to apply someone else’s innovation.

Think of an innovation as a recipe. It has some ingredients, some directions, some advice. And an expected outcome. Of course, when the innovator is as talented as a Richard Corrigan, the outcome is worthy of a Fritz Brenner. [BTW, thank you Wikipedia. Only Wikipedia could possibly have given me a reference to Rex Stout’s fictional detective Nero Wolfe’s cook, the man of 289 cookbooks. Bravo!]

Many years ago, I intended to have a number of close friends over for dinner, and wanted to cook them a Sea Bass with Coriander a la Corrigan. I really wanted to cook that particular dish, had done it a few times, but that particular time I had a problem. I knew that two of the guests didn’t like coriander, which they called cilantro, while the others absolutely loved it.

I happened to be at Lindsay House, and late that evening, mentioned my problem to Richard. His answer was predictable. You’re not cooking it, I am. And so he did. Dinner for eight chez JP prepared by the irrepressible Richard. What he also did was to tell me how the ingredients fitted together, so that I could play with that dish as much as I liked later. Which I did, and continue to. Wish I had more time to do it, though.
In similar vein, I was watching one of those interminable Cooking-On-Television programmes over Christmas many years ago, if gentle snoring and the occasional raised eyebrow could be termed watching. And then I sat up. There was a guy talking about things to do with leftover turkey. Boring. This particular time, he was talking about making a variant of the classic takeaway peking duck with hoi sin sauce and pancakes. Also boring. If it walks like a turkey and talks like a turkey, it’s a turkey.

What got my attention was that he moved to the subject of making pancakes. And how to make them as thin as the takeaway restaurants make them. He said, Roll the flour/water into a long snakeline cylinder maybe half an inch in diameter. Nothing new there. Cut the cylinder into half-inch segments. Done that, worn the T-shirt. Cut each segment into half again. Card-carrying member. Now take each pair of quarter-inch segments, place a little oil between them and then stick them back together and roll out the compound half-inch double segment into a flat disc. Aha. He had my attention. Steam the double disc and separate into superbly thin pancakes after steaming. OK! He had solved my problem.
The point was, I wasn’t interested in cooking pancakes but chapatis. I wasn’t interested in steaming the chapatis. I wanted to cook really thin chapatis but they kept tearing, despite strenuous experimentation in the flour used, the amount of water, the fineness of the flour, whatever. And the technique worked, and my chapatis were thin rather than doorstop-like.

The technique was the innovation. As a consumer I could apply that technique to whatever I felt like, and creativity could flow. Innovation happens when the consumer applies an innovative technique to work on  purposes that were not considered by the originator of the technique.

Much of teaching maths at school works on a similar principle. The first time my maths teacher asked the class “128 players. Knockout tournament. Assume no draws or replays, that every match has a result. How many matches in the tournament?”. And the class went 64+32+16 etc etc. Then he said. “Think about it. Only one winner. How many losers? So how many matches?“. Once we’d seen the technique, we could apply it in myriad ways.

Much of innovation is in creating a new perspective on an old thing. Much of the value of the innovation is taking that perspective and applying it to unplanned horizons and landscapes. That’s what customers do.

On Innovation and Path Pollution

Some people think that issues like Net Neutrality and DOPA are confined to the US, and don’t understand why I (and many like me) think this is a global issue, and that everyone should get involved.

Let me try to explain why:

  • The internet, whatever you define it as, is global
  • The internet allows us an opportunity to innovate on a grand scale, and make a real impact on issues ranging from poverty thru healthcare thru education thru climate change thru to many other things important to all of us, including business
  • The value of innovation is derived primarily by consumers
  • US consumers are critical to the global innovation process, regardless of where the innovation is  “created”
  • Anything that pollutes the path of the end-to-end internet stifles this innovation

Now that may sound altruistic-pinko-utopia to some of you; when you read the rest of this post, I hope to have changed a little bit of your mind.
The latest issue of the Economist referred me to a fascinating paper, via this article. [Oh frabjous day calloo callay, the article has not been DRMed to death].
The article refers to a paper presented by Amar Bhide at the CESifo and Centre on Capitalism and Society Conference in Venice (I shall resist the temptation to add Italy as a suffix :-) ). You can download the entire paper yourself via this site.

I quote from the Economist article:

The most important part of innovation may be the willingness of consumers, whether individuals or firms, to try new products and services, says Mr Bhide. In his view, it is America’s venturesome consumers that drive the country’s leadership in innovation. Particularly important has been the venturesome consumption of new innovations by American firms. Although America has a lowish overall investment rate compared wih other rich countries, it has a very high rate of adoption of information technology (IT).

Read the article and the paper for yourself. There are a few things I’m not sure about, there’s much I don’t know enough about, but one thing’s for sure. Innovation is about consumers and not innovators. This is not new, it’s been a while since I first heard Michael Schrage say it. What Schrage actually said was:

Innovation isn’t what innovators do….it’s what customers and clients adopt.

The US is the biggest capital market in the world. It has the most “venturesome consumers”. It is critical to global innovation, particular web-related innovation. Global innovation is critical to our attempting to solve many of the long-standing problems we face. [Before you say it, I agree. Innovation is necessary but not sufficient to solve these problems, we have political and philosophical and spiritual and economic and cultural barriers as well. Or maybe I should just say Fear and Greed and be done with it).

So that’s why I care about doing everything I can to make sure that people understand the problems in the Net Neutrality Bill(s) and DOPA. And why we should all care.

These are not easy issues. But the consequences of getting them wrong don’t bear thinking about. So get involved.

Four Pillars: A Rose By Any Other Name….

Saw this in the Times today. A cosmetics company convinces the Dutch Supreme Court that one of its “fragrances” should be copyrighted; I can only infer that it couldn’t win the case on patent or trademark bases…. and given that the “original” retails at £40, and the “copy” at £3, I’m not meant to be surprised.

Whatever next. And people wonder why I call myself Confused.