Category: Four pillars

I quote from the Economist’s leader on recent events in the UK banking sector:

….This debacle holds lessons for the way Britain regulates its banks. As Mr King pointed out, defending his performance in front of a House of Commons committee on September 20th, the law prevents the Bank either from staging a covert rescue operation or from engineering a swift takeover; and flaws in the protection of depositors mean that, once an overt rescue operation is under way, depositors will flee. Mr King defended the separation of powers between the Treasury, the Bank and the FSA, but he was wrong to. It has exacerbated the system’s flaws; nobody was in charge of the operation.

Nobody was in charge of the operation. 

Somehow, over the last decade or so, this has become true in so many places, in so many ways. Multinational organisations, governments, public sector companies, the private sector, everywhere. The story is the same. Quango-ed and committee-d to a point of gridlock, decisions are often glaringly visible only in their absence. Accountability becomes a word reserved for matrix charts and consultant-speak. And when something actually happens, almost everyone heads for the hills. A few remain to shoulder the blame and to mop up.

Nobody was in charge of the operation.

I saw a recent report in the UK suggesting that there’s been ballistic growth in the number of quangos here since 1997; the cost of such quangos was described at around £188 bn, which is over twice the NHS budget or, for that matter, the Defence budget. I hear that similar things are happening in many other parts of the developed world. [Who knows, maybe it’s time to come up with a new term “artificial employment”.]

Northern Rock. Katrina. Terrorist actions. Enron. Worldcom. Whatever else you want to add to the list. So many committees, so little time.

We need to think hard about what’s happening. We seem to be sprouting whole armies of intermediaries everywhere, lost in the vegetation of modern jurisprudence and legislation, creating something far worse than just the nanny state; a state where it is no longer possible to lead or to “govern”. A domino-effect house of cards where so much effort is made to manage risk that the risks themselves intensify into something new and infinitely more dangerous.

Small print and get-out clauses overshadowing and dominating the space, drowning the valuable, yet vulnerable, voice of professional opinion.

Nobody was in charge of the operation. The natural consequence of our becoming ever more part of a world driven by The Risk Management of Everything. [I definitely need to catch up with Michael Power.]

Some of you may have been surprised to see the Byte Night “advertisement” appear in my sidebar. I haven’t suddenly changed my mind and started allowing ads to be placed on the blog, nothing like that.

It’s something far simpler. Along with four of my colleagues, I’m spending the night “sleeping rough” on the 5th of October, to try and raise funds for a children’s charity; the particular focus is to provide shelter, succour and support for homeless youth, reaching out to them during what is perceived to be a critical time for them. Byte Night is a peculiar UK tradition, focused on the IT community, and this time I felt it was time for me to do my part.

You can read up on them by following the Donate link. Of necessity this type of action is local and regional in context, my apologies to readers farther afield. The blogosphere, as part of the web, remains the most effective way to connect with people and get such messages across. And I’m always keen to find ways to help charities keep their administrative costs as low as possible, so that the funds reach the people and the causes they need to reach.

Here’s how an article I was reading started:

WHAT do a bicycle that goes faster over bumps, a lever that allows car pedals to be operated by hand and a pedal-powered washing machine have in common?

I know, I’m easy that way. I was hooked, so I read on. You can find a stub to the article here, the New Scientist is not yet new enough to let me share the whole thing. [Are you listening, New Scientist?]

The article itself makes a simple and oft-repeated premise, that necessity breeds invention.

For some time now, I’ve tried to express the premise in today’s context. And it goes like this:

Opensource people don’t ask “What’s the business plan?”, “What’s the exit strategy?” “How shall we make money with this?” Opensource people build things to solve problems that they see and understand. Opensource people intuitively get the Because Effect: they don’t expect to make money with the solutions they build, they expect to make money because of those solutions.

Incidentally, there’s a YouTube video showing one of the inventions quoted, so it will give those who are paywall-blocked some idea of what the article is about. Like most other inventions, I am sure it didn’t happen in a vacuum, and that similar ideas sprung up in similar times all over the place. But that’s not the point of this post.

What this post is about is three things:

One, the article was about “deviant research”. And you know something? I took some time thinking about precisely what I would enter into Google as my search term. I took some time to make sure all my filters were DefCon Five. I thought about it, then decided that all I needed to do was to enter “deviant research” with the quotation marks.

Two, I thought about the headline I would associate with the article. Somehow I did not relish the idea that someone else entering the term “deviant research” would be led to my site. So I decided to leave the term out of the headline. Sure, someone may tag it that way and still foil my plans, but that’s what folksonomies are for. And I will live with the outcome.

Three, I thought about ways to expose more of the article. I would normally not do that, but I was spurred by reading another article in the same issue. Can you imagine the irony of someone sticking an article headlined “Information Wants to Be Free” behind a paywall? [As Don Marti said,  Information does want to be $6.95]

Worrying about the search terms you use. Thinking hard about how someone else might index your post. Scurrying around behind paywalls. I wonder what people in the 22nd century will make of all this. Fossil fools, Chris?

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

I’ve always loved that quote from The Merchant of Venice, I can almost see the face of Godrej Engineer, my form teacher (and English teacher) from way back in 1973, the first time I heard those lines delivered by someone who knew how to.

Talking about marking the music: a reader, commenting on my Victor Wooten bass post, pointed me at yet another incredible Wooten video, a true slap guitar battle; the way Victor redefines the sounds his instrument makes brought something else to my mind: what John Mayall did in Room to Move many many years ago. And, not surprisingly, there’s a video out there of the Mayall session (though not the studio version, which if I remember right was done without any percussion).

These things, like the proverbial London bus, tend to come in threes. And so it came to pass, that while checking out my Facebook news feed, I noticed that Laurel Papworth had posted something that fit right in with Wooten and Mayall, at least insofar as unusual sounds and instruments were concerned. So take a look at Daft Hands to complete the set. [My thanks to Laurel].

By now regular readers of this blog should have become used to my referring to Doc Searls’ Because Effect; more recently, I essayed a simple definition as well.

Last night I stayed up to read Dov Seidman’s HOW, a fascinating book. While I am still going through it on Pass One, I cannot resist sharing an excerpt from the preface to Dov’s book:

A new vision of HOW requires a new way of embracing why we get up every morning and go to work. I believe the inspiration to do so lives in the thought that there is a difference between doing something so as to succeed and doing something and achieving success. I am in the business of helping companies and their people do the right things in the right way. The mission of my company is to help others and we make a living so doing. We do not help others so as to make a living. The latter speaks to a journey of intermediate gain and the former to a journey of significance, something of long-term value that makes not just money, but a difference. Significance lies in the ability to see one’s endeavours in terms of service to others, to be guided by a desire and ability to connect. In the  vastly different conditions of our hypertransparent and hyperconnected world, I believe success can no longer be pursued directly, that it can best be achieved — and only achieved — through the pursuit of something larger and deeper.

And versus so as.  The Because Effect is all about And. And not at all about So As.