Author: JP

Mother of Invention

I met an old colleague, Malcolm Dick, for a cup of tea this morning, and he pointed me towards a story that’s been going around for about five years or so.

It’s about Frank Zappa, and about an article he is apparently credited with writing in 1983, headlined A Proposal For a System to Replace Ordinary Record Merchandising. You can see a copy of the article here.

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Did he write it? I don’t know. I’ve ordered a copy of the book it is meant to be included in, so that I can tell for sure. In the meantime, whether he wrote it or not, it’s worth reading just for the sentiments in the article.

It matters to me because I’m intrigued by all manner of things to do with piracy: the arguments, the characters, the rumours, the downright lies, the posturing and gaming.

Take Rolex watches for example. Not the ones you buy from Rolex, but the ones available in China and Hong Kong and Singapore. The ones that cost you maybe $20.

Let’s figure this out. First, let’s take the person that pays $20 for a “Rolex”. Does he think he’s really buying a Rolex? Come on. So now think about Rolex the company. Does Rolex think that a buyer of a $20 “Rolex” is really in the market for a Rolex? I hope they’re smarter than that. So a person buys a product which he knows is not a Rolex, at a price which he knows is not a Rolex price, from someone who is not Rolex, and all the time Rolex knows that the buyer is not ever ever ever likely to become a customer for a real Rolex.

There’s even a replica Rolex market, selling stuff like this, for pretty stiff prices:

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The kind of fakes sold by Fancy Fakes retail at around 3-4 iPhones; that’s real money in any language. But it’s not Rolex money.

Sometimes I’ve thought that people like Rolex should take a leaf out of Paolo Coelho’s book (pun intended):

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Paolo is a great guy. Not just a great read, a great guy. The first time I met him, he told me all about Pirate Coelho, the “pirate” site for his blog. How he got into trouble for helping people run the site, and for recommending the site to people. In fact, he goes so far as to link to pirate download sites from his official site.

Somehow, I don’t think that Rolex will try and quantify each fake Rolex sold as Rolex revenue lost. I think the same is true for a lot of “pirate” films. People pay for quality. Does someone who pays $5 for a pirate DVD really count as being in the market for a $40 version. Perhaps, but I’m not that sure. I’ve never bought a pirate DVD. Nor do I intend to. I can afford to pay the going rate, and if I don’t like the rate I won’t buy it. Full stop.

When film piracy takes place in the Far East and in India, at least part of the reason for the piracy may be the economic one; a false market created by a false price. But I tend to think there’s a deeper reason, one of “artificial abundance”. I have maintained for some time that every artificial scarcity will be met by an equal and opposite artificial abundance. I have, similarly, maintained that the most retrograde and fundamentally stupid invention I have seen in recent years is the region code on a DVD. Which customer was that for? Which customer finds that useful? Puh-leese. Nothing more than a futile attempt to extend the life of a yesterday geographical business model at the expense of the customer.

Which brings me to the kernel for this post. A few days ago, I read an unusual article on BBC. Headlined Top 40 faces new digital shake-up, it contained the following chart:

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30.89m singles sold in 2003. 115.14m singles sold in 2008. This, despite recession and despite alleged piracy on gargantuan levels. Such levels that people are prepared to criminalise large swathes of humanity to stop the “crimes”. Intriguing, no?
I’ve seen some interesting stats for book publishing as well, stats that suggest that we would all do well to absorb Kevin Kelly’s majestic Better Than Free article.
There’s a lot of hype out there about “piracy”. There are a lot of people out there who are not pirates. There are a lot of people who spend a lot of money buying legitimate goods; there are some people who don’t. There are also a lot of broken business models out there, and the dialogue needs to change. People like Terry Fisher have been trying to change that dialogue for a while now, and need to be read and understood.

There’s an ant on your southeast leg

I’ve just finished reading Lera Boroditsky’s recent Edge essay “How does our language shape the way we think?”.

Absolutely riveting. Just the sort of thing I like reading on a Sunday night, get my brain into a different kind of gear altogether before I set off into the normal week. Professor Boroditsky seeks to resolve an age-old question: Does language play any part in the way we view things, analyse things, think about things? Are linguistic differences alone enough to drive a difference in the way we are?

As is often the case with such questions, we’ve had people come up with angels-dancing-on-heads-of-pins answers forever and a day; there’s been no shortage of hypotheses, the problem is with proof. Or, more precisely, the lack of proof. In that respect, the empirical tests devised by Professor Boroditsky and her team are fascinating in their simplicity and elegance: the tests appear to concentrate on how a particular language deals with descriptions of space and of time.

The case of the Kuuk Thaayorre, briefly detailed in the essay, struck me as wonderful. It’s interesting enough to have a community that speaks of direction strictly on a north-south-east-west basis, as in the case of “There’s an ant on your south-east leg”. What makes it move from interesting to spellbinding is when they apply the same principle when describing time. They show temporal motion on an east-west basis, so much so that the “direction” of time depends on the way they are facing at that particular instant. Fascinating.

Read the rest of the essay, it’s worth it. I’m elated because I’ve found one more thing to interest me, one more thing to delve deeper into.

Instinctively I think that while space and time are valuable starting positions for such analysis, there are actually two more. Relationships. And food.

On a strictly amateur basis, I’ve been consistently intrigued by how different languages describe relationships. For example, in many Indian languages, there isn’t a word for “uncle”. Well, there isn’t one word for “uncle”. Instead, you have words that describe “father’s younger brother”, “mother’s elder brother” and so on. So you don’t just say uncle, the word you use describes the position of the person in the family pecking order. I’ve just given a couple of examples, the entire spectrum of relationship is covered in terms of age and sex.

I tend to think that the detailing of the relationship in this way is indicative of something deep within the culture and represented by the language, similar to the way Eskimos have 12-20 words for snow. Why 12-20? Because Steven Pinker says so and I trust his work in this regard. In fact it was through reading Steven Pinker that I first started dabbling in this question of language and thinking.

Space and direction. Time. Relationships. And food.

Why food? I think that the words for food quite often show themselves to be singular or plural, to be individual or shareable. Like there’s a difference between “stew” and “chops” when it comes to lamb. Stew you can share easily, just add water or some vegetables. Chops you can’t, they’re designed to be counted out. The language of food used by a community quite often shows whether the basis of the community is an individual or a group. My gut tells me that a person’s ability to share or not-share is itself a cultural thing. Language is often a window into culture and values, so much so it can shape them. There’s a Chandler’s Law in there somewhere, in terms of the relationship between language and culture.

There’s probably a line to be drawn into Chomskyist debate at this stage, but I’m not going to go there. Not yet anyway. Nor am I ready to walk the Lakoff plank as yet, despite its obvious relevance. For now, I just want to play around with my instinctive reaction, to add “relationships” and “food” to the “space” and “time” put forward by Professor Boroditsky, whom I must thank for waking me up this evening.

Ignore Hugh MacLeod

When I was at university, one of the topics that fascinated me was that of long-term business cycles. I was held in thrall by the theories of people like Kitchin, Juglar and Kondratieff. Particularly Kondratieff, whose Halley’s Comet-like long business cycles mystified and haunted me.

In turn, that passion for Kondratieff led to my spending some time reading the works of Joseph Schumpeter; I was introduced to the concept of creative destruction and, almost as a corollary, to the essays of Ronald Coase and his views on transaction costs. All of which really formed the foundation of my views on the theory of the firm, a lifelong passion of mine.

Many years later, it was with that perspective that I read Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, and found similar themes playing out: the impossibility and yet the inevitability of creative destruction in the face of the established, the status quo.The idea wasn’t new, but the treatment was.

Some time before Schumpeter, Albert Einstein is reputed to have said “If at first an idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”. A fine sentiment, serving to encourage many entering, with trepidation, their personal infernos of creativity, striving not to abandon hope.

This notion of creativity as lonely and transient absurdity is at the heart of Hugh MacLeod’s latest book, Ignore Everybody, due out later this week.

It’s a punchy, concise book, containing 40 simple lessons, expertly articulated and deftly illustrated by Hugh’s trademark back-of-business-card cartoons. I’m loath to quote too much from it, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But here are some tasters:

“`Of course it was stupid. Of course it was not commercial. Of course it wasn’t going to go anywhere. Of course it was a complete waste of time. But in retrospect, it was this built-in futility that gave it its edge.”

…

“Your business card format is very simple. Aren’t you worried about somebody ripping it off?” “Only if they can draw more of them than me, better than me”.

…

“Your wee voice doesn’t want you to sell something. Your wee voice wants you to make something. Your wee voice doesn’t give a damn about publishers, venture capitalists or Hollywood producers. Go ahead and make something.”

There are a host of other gems: the warning that corporations attract “nonautonomous thinkers” who wander around in infinite loops of what-do-you-think, Baldrick-like in their lack of originality, their family brain cell paucity; the futility of trying to stand out in a crowd, the preference to avoid crowds altogether, evoking memories of Yogi Berra’s “Nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded”.

And the powerful, powerful exhortation towards the end: “There is no silver bullet. There is only the love God gave you”.

Hooked? It’s a great little book, covering a lot of ground in a short space, applicable to a whole slew of professions: artist, writer, software developer, filmmaker, photographer….. and cubicle warrior. As long as there’s a creative urge in you, there’s good advice to be found in the book. A lovely little read, easy to absorb all the way through in a single sitting, yet suitable for delving into for little tidbits later.

So go ahead and buy the book, it’s due out Thursday.

And ignore Hugh Macleod. At your peril.

[Disclosure: I’ve known Hugh for a long time, I’m delighted to count him as a friend, and I am completely unashamed at giving the book such a glowing review. The book deserves it. Hugh deserves it.]

Thinking about innovation and business models

I’ve always maintained that people who “think opensource” work on useful things, solve problems, create value; they don’t focus on the business model at the outset but instead concentrate on the value they create.

In Peter Drucker’s words, “people make shoes, not money”. Make something that is worth while and people will pay you for it. Figure out what shoes you’re good at making and then make them well. You will make money as a result.

Knowing in advance how you’re going to make money from snake oil may sound like you have a business model; what you have is snake oil. And that’s the problem you need to concentrate on first, the fact that you’re not creating anything of value.

And sometimes the process of calculating and measuring benefits can come in the way. Many years ago, when I worked for Burroughs Corporation, I learnt this the hard way. This was the early 1980s, and software/services was just emerging as a business. Until then, all the margin was in hardware, so we ‘shifted tin”. We gave away the software and the services in order to sell the hardware. Then, as the cost of human capital rose, and investable capital became scarce, this equation began to shift. It became more and more important to understand the true cost of software projects before starting them.

So we instituted something called the Phase Review Process, borrowed from the US Navy if I remember correctly, and implemented it within the firm. Every project had to undergo a phase review at inception and then at each phase.

Which was all fine and dandy. Unless you were just about to start a project that would cost a total of £25,000 inclusive of everything. Which was less than the lowest possible total cost of the phase review process. But I was lucky, my management understood this issue, and it was mandated that projects had to exceed £100,000 in total planned cost before they needed to be put through the Phase Review Process.

Why am I writing all this? Well, some years ago I remember reading about something called the polypill; the newspaper articles referred to this paper which had been published in the BMJ in 2003.

The principle was simple. Six tried and tested medications to be combined into one pill that could cut potentially reduce cardiovascular disease by 80%.

When I first read the articles, I was intrigued. But I didn’t know much about the drugs involved. I knew nothing about statins, other than some vague notion that they were wonder drugs that combated high cholesterol with some wonder side effects. I knew even less about ACE inhibitors and beta-blockers, though I may have come across the beta-blockers as something to do with performance enhancement. Folic acid was something pregnant women took; and diuretics meant you had plumbing problems.

Aspirin I knew about, although I had no idea it could be obtained in cardio doses.

But that was in 2003. Since then, as many of you will know, I have had reason to get to know this particular cocktail of pharmacology quite intimately. Nevertheless, I’d forgotten all about the polypill.

Until a few weeks ago, when I read this on the BBC web site. The polypill could become reality in five years’ time, it said. And then I remembered what i’d read all those years ago, when they said … that the polypill could become reality in five years’ time.

And that made me think. Slowly. Very slowly. And my thoughts went a little like this:

One, cardiovascular disease is the single biggest cause of death facing humans.

Two, people had come up with a cheap and effective way of reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease by 80%.

Three, this had happened six or seven years ago.

Four, with a little bit of luck and a following wind, we may see something happen in five years.

Of course I’m oversimplifying, but I don’t believe I’m exaggerating. A strange world we live in.

I’m not by nature a conspiracy theorist. I believe man landed on the moon nearly forty years ago. I don’t believe in little green men or UFOs. Neither do I believe that Big Oil makes sure that substitutes for gasoline never surface.

But here is what I believe. I believe there is some evidence that the polypill does not exist today because it’s hard to make money from it.

Why? Because the ingredients in the polypill are all out of patent, all “generic”. Because the way drugs are trialled, it’s prohibitively expensive to bring a new drug to market unless you have some monopoly rents to come, patents to exploit and exhaust.

So it is possible that the cost of trialling a cocktail of generic drugs exceeds the potential income from selling the cocktail. And so no polypill.

No mention of the number of lives potentially saved and minor stuff like that.

Now I take statins, beta blockers, ACE inhibitors, diuretics, blood thinners and anti coagulants daily. You could say I have an amateur interest in all this. A passion, even, given that the medication has worked wonders on my heart and on my life expectancy.

This is not meant to be a diatribe against doctors or the medical profession or even the pharmaceutical industry: they have all treated me really well, and I owe them a debt of gratitude.

What I am trying to do is to point out that sometimes we hold up innovation by concentrating on the wrong thing at the start. And sometimes it’s because of the anchors and frames of the way we do things.

So I was thinking. Opensource people solve generic problems. Is there a way to opensource the trials of generic drugs, to change the mechanics and dynamics of drug trials for generics? Is there a way to adopt the opensource principle of “privatising losses and socialising gains”, the exact opposite of what happened during the credit crunch?

I wonder.

Views?

Musing about books and covers and “judging” and reading

I read a lot of books. For decades I used to average ten books a week, but nowadays it’s probably closer to two or three. Nevertheless, I read a lot. And I’ve been reading a lot for over forty years.

When it comes to choosing what I read, I have a variety of techniques:

1. Past-predicts-future: This is by far my most common technique. When I read someone for the first time, and I really like the book, the author goes into my unmemorised unwritten “look-out-for” list. Then, whenever I go to a bookshop and browse around, that author’s name is stuck in my head as I traverse the aisles, and if I see something new by that author, I pick it up. Both aisle-traversal as well as pick-newer are themselves techniques which I describe later. Past-predicts-future is an unordered list of authors I like whom I then look out for when wandering past any collection of books.

2. Aisle-traversal: Whenever I go to a physical bookshop (and here I mean a real bookshop, not a newsagent masquerading as one), I have a simple plan. I go through new releases, shop recommendations, signed books. Then, if time permits, I wander across to mystery/thriller/crime/detection. Once that’s done, if I still have time, I shuffle past the literature section. And then it’s science/nature/mathematics/physics. Which tends to lead me towards computing, and then I settle for a while in business/management. If I still have time on my hands, I get to biographies, then poetry, then art and history, finally humour. Aisle-traversal is an ordered list that defines my journey within a physical bookshop, very sensitive to the time I have available.

3. Pick-newer, pick-older and its variants. Quite often, the first book I read by an author is somewhere in the middle of that person’s oeuvre. If I like that book, then I move into the past-predicts-future technique, but only picking newer books, chronological-forward. If I like the second book as well, then, depending on how much I like the two books, I go into different overdrives. The commonest overdrive is pick-older-from-the-start: I start reading everything that author has written, in chronological order. Sometimes that develops into get-whole-collection-signed-first-edition. Occasionally I don’t wait, I try and acquire the complete works signed straight after book two. This technique is really about extending the reach of an author already on my to-read list.

4. Trusted-friend: The first three techniques are all about authors who are already on my to-read list. So how does someone or something enter the list in the first place? Here I have four subcategories. The first is written reviews: I am a big fan of Kirkus Reviews: a starred Kirkus review is pretty much an order for me to go out and buy the book. I also read both New York Review of Books as well as London Review of Books, and occasionally the Times Literary Supplement as well. The Economist and the Financial Times are probably the only other “reviews” that make this cut. The second subcategory is the human trusted friend, someone I know whose reading taste I respect. I have a small number of such friends; there is a variant to this subcategory, where the friend is an author. In third place is the social web, the chatter from twitter and facebook and the blogosphere. And finally there’s the Amazon recommendation. These are my primary techniques of introducing someone new into the mix.

5. Pre-publication reviews: There are some publishers I trust enough to go looking into what they’ve come out with. I’m always relaxed about buying Dover for maths and physics and logic and number theory; I like the kind of stuff that Nicholas Brealey puts out, so I look out for the imprint; similarly I have time for O’Reilly and Penguin and Pearson for technology and management, for No Exit Press and Mysterious Press and Hard Case Crime. My sister’s a publisher, so sometimes I find out about authors from her. You get my drift. Sometimes I inject fresh blood into my reading stream as a result of the publisher’s reputation. It’s really an upstream review, when you think about it. A commissioning editor is a bit like a reviewer, only pre-publication.

6. Things-that-go-bump-into-me: This is the serendipity technique, the random element. How I discover authors I’ve never heard of, authors who don’t come recommended. Three subtypes. First, because I am known to read, I get given books as presents for all kinds of things and in all sorts of ways. Second, because I am at an airport or similar, in a hurry, with a long trip ahead, and I haven’t had the time to load up with fiction. [I have the Bible and a bunch of business/management articles always to hand]. In such cases I look at the endorsements on the cover and back of the book. Occasionally there’s a third route, a variant of the endorsement. I check out the reviews inside the book, but this is rare for two reasons: they’re not there, or I haven’t the time.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I’ve just finished reading Daniel Suarez’s Daemon. A book I bought really as an airport read, one of those “exclusive airport only editions”, bought because I’d already picked something else up and I was looking for a “2 for £20” companion.

The front cover looked vaguely infotech, so I started browsing. The tagline “Michael Crichton for the Information Age” didn’t do much for me. The back cover did have some endorsements: someone from Google, someone from the White House, someone from Time Magazine. Not quite Yawn. But close.

So I flipped to the back of the book. Two sections of interest there. One, “Further Reading”. A list of books that included Neil Gershenfeld’s Fab, Carl Zimmer’s Parasite Rex, Jared Diamond’s Collapse, Kevin Phillips’ Wealth and Democracy, the McClure/Scambray/Kurtz Hacking Exposed and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. Oh-kaay. Mr Suarez had my attention now. Anyone who recommends books like that for further reading was someone I was interested in reading.

Then I flipped back a little. Acknowledgments. The people the author wanted to thank. And there I found Stewart Brand, Don Donzal, Craig Newmark, John Robb, along with the authors of the Further Reading list.

I was hooked.

I finished the book last night.

It was excellent. Well written, consistent, different, exciting. [Thank you Daniel Suarez. I shall be looking out for more from you.]

You know something? All this made me think. Maybe it’s time for authors to put the names of their influences and mentors on some easily accessible part of their books. A bit like a blogroll, it’s one way of figuring out what the author’s about. I think this will become more important as things like the Kindle take off worldwide.

Views? Has this been helpful? Should I continue to share stuff like this. Comments welcome.