Category: Four pillars

I’m a caper novel nut. My life has not been the same ever since I discovered Donald E Westlake many decades ago. And every time he comes up with a new Dortmunder novel, I make sure I get the time to savour it; I start preparing to get underneath that bough, with a jug of wine and a loaf of bread, ready for that wilderness that is paradise enow.

And so it was with What’s So Funny. As enjoyable as ever. While reading it, I began to sense that Westlake was becoming more luxurious, almost Wodehousian in his use of similes. Here’s a taste:

with such studied nonchalance he looked like a pickpocket on his day off

what he looked mostly like was the part of the rocket that gets jettisoned over the Indian Ocean

the voice sounded as though it were coming from a bicycle tire with a slow leak

his right knee twitched constantly, as though remembering an earlier life as a dance band drummer

Delightful. And no, I don’t have any stock in Donald E Westlake Inc either. [Incidentally, one or two of you appear to think that every time I make a recommendation, I must have some vested interest. Not everyone works that way. For the last 20 years, the only stock I’ve ever held is in the companies I’ve worked for. It’s easy to criticise. Go on, make yourself vulnerable. Recommend something instead.]

I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain

I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end

I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend

But I always thought that I’d see you again

James Taylor, Fire And Rain

One of my favourite artists and one of my favourite songs; the drums alone make it worthwhile. You’re right, I’m one of those soppy sentimental guys who loves the “soft” rock that oozed out of the late Sixties into the Seventies, part folk-rock part acoustic-ish harder stuff. Where Traffic and Crosby, Stills Nash and Young and Buffalo Springfield and America and The Mamas and the Papas and Donovan live happily ever after side by side with Dylan and The Band and the Dead and Cohen and Jethro Tull, touching Renbourn and Jansch, through to Carole King et al, on to Delaney and Bonnie and the softer acoustic side of Hendrix and Joplin and Clapton and Stealers Wheel and Loggins and Messina, with a little bit of Poco and The Flying Burrito Brothers and Fotheringay and Lindisfarne and the supergroups of Bloomfield/Kooper/Stills and Blind Faith , against a strong backdrop of Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot and John Martyn and Van Morrison, slowly dribbling into the mid-Seventies and The Doobie Brothers and Queen and Police and Jim Croce and Steely Dan and Supertramp. Come on, I even like Neil Diamond. Really. Always did, still do. [Isn’t it nice when you get to that age when your tastes are genuinely your own?]

Incidentally, if you haven’t tried it, go and visit liveplasma, feed in the names of some of your favourite bands and watch what happens.

And now for something completely different. Triggered by this article I read in the Times yesterday.

They’re re-making Sholay. With a prequel and a sequel and an animated version. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, Sholay is the highest-grossing Bollywood film ever, and one of the few (maybe 50) that I’ve actually seen. And you know what, I really enjoyed it. Even thinking about the way people used to spurt out Gabbar Singh one-liners brought a smile to my face. Now that’s what I call the power of Wikipedia, where I can link to Amjad Khan’s lines. Amazing. Thank you Jimmy Wales.

You must be wondering just where this post is going by now. Don’t worry, I just happen to have a circuitous mind.

You see, I can remember actually queueing in the rain for cinema tickets only once in my life (with Gary Martin, in Calcutta). The film I was queueing for? Sholay…. translated as Fire. In the Rain. Fire And Rain. And so the story goes.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner,
That I love London so.
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner
That I think of her wherever I go.
I get a funny feeling inside of me
Just walking up and down.
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner
That I love London Town.

Hubert Gregg, 1946 

I’m consistently bemused by some of the things I see happening in large organisations; bemused sometimes to a point of morbid fascination. Over the last few years, one of the things that has captured my attention is the enterprise approach to “collaboration”. Now, before I begin….

Cambridge Dictionaries Online (selected by me as at random from the Google results) has the following definition:

collaborate (verb): to work with someone else for a special purpose

collaboration (noun):  when two or more people work together to create or achieve the same thing

It’s one of those words that means many things to many people, with the capacity to create vast emotional and even political overtones and undercurrents. Before I go any further, let me share with you what I mean by collaboration.

To me, collaboration is more than just “working together” (in fact, far too often, colleagues who “work together” can be seen working against each other, not everyone has grasped the concept that the competition is best kept on the outside); collaboration implies that multiple people produce something that the individuals involved could not have produced acting on their own. In its simplest sense, a collaborative act is a bit like making a baby. It takes two people with somewhat different characteristics and abilities to produce one. Neither is capable of producing the output without the assistance of the other. Technology advances have meant that some level of time-shifting and place-shifting is now possible, reducing the simultaneity inherent in the original scenario.

An aside: When I went to look up “collaborate”, the dictionary actually had two entries. One pointing to the phrase “work with”, the other pointing to “support an enemy”. How true that can be, albeit inadvertently,  in the petty politics that characterise many large organisations.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Calcuttan, but for some reason or the other I’ve tended to feel that there’s a very thin line separating collaboration from group or collective action. And I’ve been fascinated by both. If anything, my exposure to people like Howard Rheingold and his thinking in Smart Mobs (the site and the book) have served to enhance that fascination.

Collaboration (and its cater-cousin, collective action) depends on a shared concept and vision and a willingness to share per se. In many enterprises the concept of collaboration breaks down when the traditional barriers are met, the barriers of tribalism (don’t you dare help anyone who works for him!) of departmentalism (not my job), of selfishness and greed (I’m all right Jack).

Not surprisingly, most examples of social software tended to fail in the past, because there was more effort expended on creating and maintaining the complex barriers and walls that exemplified the guts and innards of the institution.

As is my wont of late, I intend to write a more detailed post about this, mentioning the F-work. So, Facebook and the Enterprise, Part 9:  will focus on collaboration.

In the meantime, let me leave you with this story in today’s Times, subtitled:

Banking giant scraps plans to charge interest on graduate overdrafts, bowing to campaign launched on social networking site

Yes, the site was Facebook. Collaboration or collective action? Your call.

There is a social revolution taking place, and it’s coming your way. In schools and colleges; in public service institutions; and now, even in the vast and august bastions of private enterprise.

We’ve been talking a good story for some time now, about how human beings are our most important asset, how knowledge management is important, how teamwork and collaboration are core values. Now, with the assistance of social software, these terms have the opportunity to start meaning something outside of textbooks and the hallowed halls of academe.

Recently I was reading an article in First Monday headlined Rearchitecting the Music Business: Mitigating music piracy by cutting out the record companies.

I haven’t had the time to read the article in its entirety, nor for that matter have I really done the whole issue the justice it deserves. But something stood out in what the author was saying, something that gave me that a-ha moment I always look for.

And that something was this paragraph, right at the end of the summary:

A key assumption in this presentation is that the costs associated with the current model of oligopolistic intermediation — as well as the artist lock–in that is its consequence — is at the root of the crisis in music distribution. The problem cannot be fixed without a major effort to break the grip of the music distributors over the system. If that rings a death knell for the music companies, so be it. Musicians and listeners, the core creators of value in the music business would gain enormously and a measure of economic justice would be attained. Using powerful Web tools has successfully disintermediated airplane ticket sales and may well do the same in residential real–estate sales and in both venues buyers and sellers can and will save considerable money and develop much more powerful ways to develop information links between those parties.

You must have heard that vile phrase by now: “Content is king”. I’d never quite assimilated the causal connection between “oligopolistic intermediation models” and “the artist lock-in” adequately before, and as a result I feel I can understand more about why people say things like “Content is king”.

Maybe the phrase needs reworking a la In the Kingdom of the Blind The One-Eyed Man is King…..

So said Clay Shirky in  this article over four years ago. I remember reading it shortly after it came out, and feeling excited about the promise that social software held. Headlined Social Software and the Politics of Groups, here are a few extracts to try and encourage you to read the original:

Because there are so many patterns of group interaction, social software is a much larger category than things like groupware or online communities — though it includes those things, not all group communication is business-focused or communal. One of the few commonalities in this big category is that social software is unique to the internet in a way that software for broadcast or personal communications are not.

……

The radical change was de-coupling groups in space and time. To get a conversation going around a conference table or campfire, you need to gather everyone in the same place at the same moment. By undoing those restrictions, the internet has ushered in a host of new social patterns, from the mailing list to the chat room to the weblog.

……

The thing that makes social software behave differently than other communications tools is that groups are entities in their own right. A group of people interacting with one another will exhibit behaviors that cannot be predicted by examining the individuals in isolation, peculiarly social effects like flaming and trolling or concerns about trust and reputation. This means that designing software for group-as-user is a problem that can’t be attacked in the same way as designing a word processor or a graphics tool.

……

Earlier generations of social software, from mailing lists to MUDs, were created when the network’s population could be measured in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of millions, and the users were mostly young, male, and technologically savvy. In those days, we convinced ourselves that immersive 3D environments and changing our personalities as often as we changed socks would be the norm.

……

Any system that supports groups addresses this tension by enacting a simple constitution — a set of rules governing the relationship between individuals and the group. These constitutions usually work by encouraging or requiring certain kinds of interaction, and discouraging or forbidding others. Even the most anarchic environments, where “Do as thou wilt” is the whole of the law, are making a constitutional statement. Social software is political science in executable form.

While we have all this kerfuffle about usage and abusage of social software, while we have Blefuscudian polarisations all over the place, it is worth remembering that we have barely begun the journey. There is a lot for us to learn about how we operate as virtual groups, how we use social software; there is even more for us to learn about how to build and deploy social software.

Some of this learning will draw from ancient history; some of it will rely on the recent past; and some of it we will experience for the first time as we try things out. It is important for us to support all this experimentation with an open mind.