Author: JP

Yesterday I quoted extensively from Drucker, labouring his point that we no longer have unique technologies for a given industry, nor unique end uses for a given product or service.

This is important to bear in mind when we look at Four Pillars.

We should not constrain the tools we have, nor constrain the tools we have yet to see, by placing anchoring and framing qualifiers before the word “tool”, or by appending the word “tool” to Pillars.
Search is a meaningful term. Tool is a meaningful term. But search tool runs the risk of constraining our thinking.

Over the last year or so, I have regularly used blogs to initiate searches via conversation. [Today, after many years of looking, I found out that Big Mo was Moe Norman, see earlier post and comments. ]

There have been many occasions when I have used search to refine or cleanse information.

Wikis can be very useful for structured note-taking, a graphics-free mind map tool of sorts.

At conferences I use blog software to make my own notes, save links and even comment on things, without any real intention to use that material in situ as a post.

Even if I do use parts of the material later.

The point is to allow the tools to have as much value as possible, and this can’t be done if we pigeonhole them too early.

One of my favourite Fowler quotes is “All right is quite right; quite right is all right; but quite all right is all quite wrong.”

And that’s the way I look at these terms in Four Pillars. Search is all right; Tool is quite right; but Search Tool is all quite wrong.

You should be used to my twists and turns by now. But cricket and DRM? That’s not just any turn, I hear you say.
It’s been a lazy weekend for me, spending time with my family, watching some sport, catching up with some chores, some reading, some listening to music, and the occasional blog post.

[An aside. In some northern areas of the UK, they use the word “messages” to mean chores. They’ve been doing this for a long time. Well before e-mail. How did they know?]

After the disappointment of watching England crash out of the World Cup yesterday, it was with some trepidation that I turned on the cricket after everyone else had gone to bed. Wikipedia entry for the convenience of readers who haven’t come across this glorious game. Would India win the Test and the series in the West Indies tonight, or would they be denied again by resolute tail-enders? Well, Denesh Ramdin nearly pulled it off, but in the end Rahul “The Wall” Dravid implacably led India to their first overseas victory over the West Indies since 1971.

And it made me reminisce. Of famous victories over the West Indies. And 1983 came to mind, when India won the cricket World Cup, after setting the Windies a paltry target. And wandering down memory lane, I remembered watching Kapil Dev score 175 not out, his highest one-day score, to rescue India against Zimbabwe that year, in an earlier World Cup match. He came in when India were 17 for 5, so that took some doing. Amazing innings.

Many years later, I was with some other cricket-loving friends, and the conversation moved to that Zimbabwe game. We were there together. And someone remarked that the BBC had lost the tape of the game, so it had never made it to DVD or similar. Now I think I have a tape of the game, if only I can find it.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Suppose something is in copyright, but for some reason the copyright holder has no copy. Suppose there is only one “copy” in existence. And further suppose there is a lot of time and care and effort that has to go into retrieving and restoring the sole existent copy. Does the owner of the copy have any rights, according to the DRM and IPR gang? Does the restorer have any rights?

If I find the tape, I will give it freely to the BBC for them to restore and to make money from. Naturally. I’d probably expect that they give me a free copy on DVD in exchange, though :-)

The point is, in this particular instance, the copyright holder (BBC) has no copy, the copy owner (me) has no rights, the effort needed to retrieve and restore the copy is high (like wading through a garage of junk for individual videotapes and playing each one in order to find the right one). What will the pro-DRM pro-Mickey Mouse Act pro bad IPR people make of this? :-)
It just made me wonder. Is some of this pushback against digital freedom perversely a consequence of sharply reduced costs of reproduction? When the product is physical, are there some copy rights attached to the copy, especially if it becomes the only one? I remember reading about the great efforts people went to in order to find an original of Moore’s Law in article form. Does Moore have rights to it? Does the magazine? What happens when a title is “deleted”? Can Google make copies of all “deleted” titles? Why ever not, if the title holder has chosen to abdicate?

Just musings. Googlies and doosras.

So said Peter Drucker in one of his last books, Management Challenges for the 21st Century.

You’ll get your fill of Drucker quotes in this post, but I want to bring one more of his quotes into the front and centre of your attention:

The American regulation of business rests on the assumptions that to every industry pertains a unique technology and that to every end use pertains a specific and unique product or service. These are the assumptions on which antitrust legislation was based.
These are interesting times. Many would say the Net Neutrality debate is over, the incumbents have won. Many would say the same about Intellectual Property Rights and Digital Rights Management. Many would say that my views on identity and confidentiality and privacy are utopian and impracticable.

It would appear that the three Is that I have spent time arguing about are no longer worth arguing about: the internet, intellectual property and identity.

Time for dinosaurs like me to go quietly to the grave. Or so it would appear.

At times like these, I read. And think.

So I delved into Drucker. And chanced across something I hadn’t read for a while, entitled Technologies and End Uses. For those who haven’t read it, Drucker makes some very simple and worthwhile points:

• The assumptions about technology and end uses to a very large extent underlie the rise of modern business and of the modern economy altogether. They go back to the very early days of the Industrial Revolution.
• …..it was assumed — and with complete validity — that [each] industry had its own and unique technology.
• By now this assumption has become untenable…. In the nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, it could be taken for granted that technologies outside one’s own industry had no, or at least only minimal, impact on the industry.
• Now the assumption to start with is that the technologies that are likely to have the greatest impact on a company and an industry are technologies outside its own field.
• Today’s technologies, unlike those of the nineteenth century, no longer run in parallel lines. They constantly crisscross.
• Constantly, such outside technologies force an industry to learn, to acquire, to adapt, to change its very mind-set, let alone its technical knowledge.
• Equally important…. was a second assumption. End uses are fixed and given.
• This was accepted as obvious not only by business, industry and the consumer, but by governments as well. The American regulation of business rests on the assumptions that to every industry pertains a unique technology and that to every end use pertains a specific and unique product or service. These are the assumptions on which antitrust legislation was based.
• But by now it is clear that it is not just one material moving in on what was considered the “turf” of another one. Increasingly, the same want is being satisfied by very different means.
• It is the want that is unique, and not the means to satisfy it.

These two lock-in layers are fundamental. One that says every industry has its unique technology, the other that says end uses relate to unique and specific products/services.

These two lock-in layers have coloured our thinking, our investment processes, our valuations, our regulations.

These two lock-in layers are dead. Defunct. As in the Python Parrot.

It does not matter to me just how entrenched the incumbents and their lobbies are, it will not be possible to protect the lock-ins ad infinitum.

The ability to transfer disruptive technologies from one market to another, and the ability to vary end-use way beyond what the “inventors” ever dreamt of, these abilities are as American as motherhood and apple pie. They are the essence of innovation, something America has excelled at. And will excel at again. I’m not American, but I love innovation, and believe that the US of A got many things right in supporting and enhancing innovation. Now it looks like there are going to be a few backward steps taken. Tough. Frustrating for all concerned. But ultimately unsustainable.
It is these abilities that will be held back if the battle for the Three Is (Internet, Intellectual Property, Identity) continues the way it seems to be continuing. Held back, yes. Suppressed, no.

It is the want that is unique, and not the means to satisfy it.

It is the customer that does the wanting. The signalling of his intentions.
In markets that are conversations.

[Note: quotations from Drucker and the illustration from Monty Python appear here on a fair use basis; my thanks to the copyright holders]

Consider this article by Donna Bogatin courtesy of ZDNet. She quotes from the New York Times:

The bulk of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done by a geographically diffuse group of 1,000 or so regulars, many of whom are administrators on the site. The administrators are all volunteers, most of them in their 20’s. They are in constant communication — in real-time online chats, on “talk” pages connected to each entry and via Internet mailing lists. The volunteers share the job of watching for vandalism, or what Mr. Wales called “drive-by nonsense.” Customized software — written by volunteers — also monitors changes to articles….It has a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control, delete unsuitable articles and protect those that are vulnerable to vandalism.

Then consider this article on Feedback Loops and Modelling Risk by Donald Mackenzie in the latest issue of Risk and Regulation. I quote from his conclusion:

Rather, the story of option theory’s effects on markets indicates good reason to be cautious about situations in which large numbers of participants are all using similar models to guide their trading and to control its risks – perhaps because market regulators are pushing them in this direction in respect to risk management. In such a situation, models may sometimes be performative – they may help shape reality to their contours – but the danger of counterperformativity will always lurk.

Again, my emphasis. Next, take a look at this article by Kim Krieger in the latest New Scientist. Questions being asked about the validity and significance of power-law patterns that suggest “scale-free” networks.

Somewhere in the dark recesses of my head, all three are related. Communities will always have moderators. Things that communities build will always be moderated. If you use things that communities build, then you need to have community sense. A sense of that which is common.

Common sense. Not rocket science. Opensource communities have always known this. So when the New York Times says that the bulk of Wikipedia is edited by a thousand-strong group of volunteers, and not ten million, I am not surprised.

I am elated. Because a core of a thousand is a very large core, a 1,000,000lb gorilla. Which is great news.

When the gorillas scale, everything scales. As long as you use community sense when using community products and services. Common sense.

• Markets are conversations, as per Cluetrain.
• Markets contain risk.
• Conversations can help you manage that risk.
• Social software can help you extract what you need from those conversations and thereby help you manage the risk.

I was reading the latest issue of Risk and Regulation, published by the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). I’ve read the publication ever since I had lunch with Michael Power, the author of The Risk Management of Everything. If you haven’t read that pamphlet yet, I can do no more than recommend as strongly as possible that you do. It is as fundamental to Four Pillars as Cluetrain and Social Life of Information and Emergence.

An aside: Here’s the description of Risk Management of Everything:

We live in the age of the risk management of everything. Paradoxically this still leaves organisations that diligently engage in risk management exposed to what Donald Rumsfeld called ‘unknown unknowns’ which, by definition, are out of reach of risk management.

This warning about the escalation of the risk management of everything should be taken seriously. In his first Demos book, The Audit Explosion, Michael Power warned against that companies and governments preoccupation with measuring what is measurable – the now discredited ‘targets culture’.

Power traces the start of the risk management of everything back to 1995 – the year of the collapse Barings bank Shell’s Brent Spar PR disaster. Those events illustrated the two key aspects of the new obsession with risk management: internal control and reputation.

The ability of a rogue trader to bring down a bank has prompted organisations to redouble their efforts to use internal control systems to manage risk. But the danger is that the focus on internal controls to manage risks of ‘known unknowns’ leaves organisations vulnerable to ‘unknown unknowns’.

“Reputation has become a new source of anxiety where organisational identity and economic survival are at stake And if everything may impact on organisational reputation, then reputational risk management demands the risk management of everything.”

The anxiety about reputation means that experts and professional bodies are increasingly taking defensive steps to protect their own name, rather than managing risks on behalf of the public. One example of this the proliferation of ‘small print’ as professionals ranging from doctors to accountants attempt to hand risk back to customers, clients or society as a whole.

Now if that doesn’t get you to read the pamphlet, nothing else will. I will explain later why this is fundamental to Four Pillars.

Back to the magazine. As usual, there were a number of thought-provoking articles. All its authors should blog. Are you listening, LSE?

One of them, titled Harnessing Hindsight, looks at how, for example, near-miss incident reports are used to improve risk management in aviation.

I quote from the conclusion to the article:

What implications does this examination of practice hold for current theory? First, it suggests that current models of risk management, and methods of risk analysis, could be productively extended by more fully attending to the ‘positive’ face of operational risk – the organizational practices and social processes that underpin organisational resilience – so moving beyond the current focus on predicting and avoiding failures, errors and harm. Second, it emphasises the central place of knowledge – and its dark side, ignorance – in dealing with risk. Assessing small moments of operational failure is an interpretive process that draws on forms of knowledge that are not readily quantified or formalised, such as the particulars, specifics and details garnered from practical operational experience, or vicarious knowledge of similar events experienced by other organisations. And identifying signs of ignorance, in the form of suspicions that arise from subtle relations and mismatches between current knowledge and organisational events, equally appears to offer a useful proxy for identifying latent risks. Third, it points to the importance of institutional designs that balance the tensions between central oversight and local participation and action, and that establish organisational spaces for collective enquiry and sensemaking around risk events.

Emphases mine. I couldn’t have written a better rationale for the use of social software in risk management. Collective enquiry and sensemaking around risk events.

More later on this theme. Do read the article, even if you have zero interest in aviation. Consider how powerful social software and emergence and P2P models are in this context.