Category: Four pillars

Do you remember LIFE magazine as it was in the 1960s? Amazing photojournalism. I was fourteen when it closed, and since it was one of my favourite reads and I was one of those fourteen-year-olds, I asked my father why.

And he said “It grew too big and too successful“. Now that’s an extreme summary of the answer he gave me, and I have learnt much about it later, but his words stayed with me. And continue to.

[An aside. Sometime in the late 1960s, LIFE published a photograph of an orphan, possibly from Central or Eastern Europe, probably about six or seven years old, sitting on the steps in front of the entrance to a building, hugging his first-ever pair of new shoes. I think it was in black-and-white. It’s one of my favourite photographs, hauntingly beautiful and a great antidote to materialism. Is there someone out there who (a) remembers the photograph and (b) knows how I can get a paid-for copy or print….?]

That conversation with my father in 1972 was probably the first time I considered that something could fail by being too successful. I hadn’t yet got deeply into economics or sustainable development or related politics or philosophy, I hadn’t yet read stuff like Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, nothing like that. I was just bemused at the idea of success begetting failure.

A few years later, I lived in a different India for a while. A state of emergency had been declared sometime in 1975, and the country was under central rule; there was considerable censorship of media, the emergence of something that looked and felt pretty much like a police state, opposition leaders were languishing in jail, reports of dissidents being shot in “police encounters”, that kind of thing.

Then, sometime in 1977, elections were called and some of the jail-languishers were freed, and the stage appeared set for a classic central-control any-vote-you-like-because-it-really-doesn’t matter election.

What would you do if you were an opposition leader in those circumstances? Shout “Foul” and “Fix” and “Unfair” and “Mommy”. So they did.

The results poured in.

The opposition kept up their chants of “Fix”.

And they were wrong.

The ruling party lost. The only party ever to have been elected to office since Independence, the party associated with freedom and Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru and the dynasties that followed, that party lost. The Prime Minister lost her own seat, which was akin to the Kennedy family being declared personae non grata in Massachusetts.

Funny fix that.

And again it made me think, what happened there? How come the incumbent party couldn’t game the system, couldn’t fix their own election? Were they so big that they couldn’t control it?

Not long after that, I sort of fell into information technology, and have been there ever since. And twenty-six years ago, people were talking about why big project teams don’t work, why Seven was a Magical Number, why man-months were mythical. But guess what? I’ve probably seen more large project teams than all other types put together since then. Large project teams. Large budgets. And often, large failures. And I wondered to myself. If big equals control failure, then why does big carry on? [Told you I was confused :-) ]

Then, many years later, I was talking to Professor N.Venkatraman about the things to look out for in setting up an in-house incubator function at the bank. This was 1999, maybe early 2000. And Venkat said something about Microsoft, which I interpreted as “They can’t promise the growth, so they don’t have the equity-currency to attract and retain the best talent any more”. My words not his. [So apologies, Venkat, if I’ve misinterpreted or misquoted you.] And I wondered again about sustainable success and scale, and the role of control in setting that scale target. And I still wonder.

With all that buzzing around in my head, I was skimming the waves of information this past week. Laptops and battery problems. Airport operators finding it hard to cope with the new security requirements at UK airports, with the airlines screaming at them. [Of course, customers were not part of the debate :-) ] And I wondered some more.

And somewhere along the line, I read that somebody thought Doc Searls was a gatekeeper and a censor. That bemused me. I know Doc well and can’t begin to understand that argument, so I won’t go there. But it made me think. And it felt a bit like Steven Johnson’s slime mould discussions in Emergence. Were the people calling Doc a gatekeeper the same sort of people who couldn’t accept that there were no slime-mould-leaders, who can’t believe that emergent self-organisation does take place. I began to wonder. Is the blogosphere made of slime mould, with similar characteristics. Mouldy snowballs? Hmmm.

So I went into Google and took another look at the LIFE shutdown story. And found these quotes, apparently from the day that staff were told that LIFE was shutting down in 1972. They are both taken from Dirck Halstead’s Platypus Papers Part 1, via The Digital Journalist:

• Carl Mydans, who had photographed the very first photo essay for the magazine, a study of depression-era Texas, mistily said, “I never thought that I would outlive my profession”.
• As one senior official at NGS told Fred Ward, “35 years ago when I first came to the magazine, we had 35 photographers and one Vice President. Today we have 42 Vice Presidents, and 2 staff photographers.”

Where’s all this leading to? I’ve said before that it’s all about Trust. Now I think it’s more than that, it’s also all about Losing Control. Gracefully. Which sometimes becomes an issue of size. And then you have problems that only size can bring.

Take air travel. All based on a hub-and-spoke model consistent with Big and Assembly Line. We now live in a world where it is becoming increasingly possible from a technical viewpoint to fly from the A you are at to the B you want to get to. Smaller airports, many more of them. Smaller planes, many more of them. Smaller queues, shorter delays, the possibility of more efficient fuel consumption both on roads as well as in the air, and maybe even less attractive targets for terrorists. But there’s a lot of pushback. Loss of control by the incumbent “scale players”.

Take manufacturing. I’ve read reports that the laptop battery problem is actually one of scale and the need for greater efficiency as demands on the industry grow. Now if I was cynical, I would say “That’s the kind of reasoning that created Mad Cow Disease”, but I won’t say that.

I could make similar arguments for hospitals and schools and even government, but I’ve spent long enough on this post.

Cluetrain is about the failure of centralised control and the success of empowered individuals. So is Small Pieces Loosely Joined. So is Emergence, in a roundabout way. So are the attempts at freeing up individual identity a la Dick Hardt and SXIP. So is Hugh Macleod’s Global Microbrand, in its own way.

This is not a rant against Big. Just an attempt to further the debate on how to make Big actually work. And what it will look like. There will be new and successful Bigs, but the control process will look different as will the structure of the organisation. And therein lies the difficulty. A difficulty exacerbated by the battles between professions as lines between professions blur faster and faster, as Andrew Abbott surmised.

The only Bigs that will work will be Because Of companies, because they’re fundamentally infrastructure, commoditised, high on trust and low on control. [Take a look at Doc’s presentation at reboot if you want to know more about the Because Effect in tomorrow’s markets].
You can have many Smalls operating as With companies, competing with each other. They too will be high on trust, but probably higher on control. Which is fine, because the consumer has a choice. Caveat Emptor.

What we are seeing today is that there are With people and Because Of people. And the With people are still looking for the leader cells in slime mould. In their worldview, they must exist. Gatekeepers must exist. Censors must exist. Crowds don’t have wisdom. Prediction markets don’t work. Their worldview. Not mine.
Otherwise they would not have control.

It’s all about trust. And losing control. Gracefully.
We need to get these things sorted out from the perspective of information and its enabling technologies, so that we can work harder on things like mobility and identity and simplicity and convenience and enfranchisement and accessibility and affordability. Because they can make a real impact on the world we live in.

This post was triggered in part by a story in today’s Wall Street Journal, where an apparently biased survey suggested that millions of teenagers were buying alcohol online in the US.

The phrase “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” appears to be well over a century old, so I’m not treading new ground here; I think it’s more like combing through fossil remains. There are many attributions; the earliest published reference is in the late nineteenth century, and received wisdom suggests that the originator of the phrase was Disraeli, while it was given currency by Twain.

It is instructive to watch what’s happening with web statistics; the more I look at it, the more I feel that we need new ways of measuring what happens on the web.

I think the web is disaggregating something that has always been a centralised processes of collecting relevant numbers; I think the web is often disintermediating the central specialised body that produces the numbers as well. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, since they lose the ability to preview and massage the numbers. And I think something else is going on; Chris Anderson’s Long Tail is not something that sits well with central-minded people either.

Let’s take a few examples:

Some months ago, RageBoy was commenting on how the geographical distribution of his readership seemed to vary according to the tool used, with some tools showing hits in the most outrageous places. And remember this is RageBoy I’m talking about, so I mean outrageous when I say outrageous. [Couldn’t find the original post. Chris?] I have seen some evidence to support this, and all I can say is that we’re not very good at this right now. Sure, new and better tools are coming along, but my perception is that Web 1.0 does not make this easy, the infrastructure can be gamed by accident or design.

Maybe a week ago, Miss Rogue commented that it was all a farce anyway, talking about how ranking and hits were being gamed; when she comes back from the film, she’d probably say these numbers are like Counting Snakes On a Plane :-)
And then today Doc Searls gave a Harry Frankfurt response to some noise on the web to do with A-list bloggers and traffic and hits and search engine optimisation and all that jazz. I quote:

Nick also says,

As the blogophere has become more rigidly hierarchical, not by design but as a natural consequence of hyperlinking patterns, filtering algorithms, aggregation engines, and subscription and syndication technologies, not to mention human nature, it has turned into a grand system of patronage operated – with the best of intentions, mind you – by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite. A blog-peasant, one of the Great Unread, comes to the wall of the castle to offer a tribute to a royal, and the royal drops a couple of coins of attention into the peasant’s little purse. The peasant is happy, and the royal’s hold over his position in the castle is a little bit stronger.

Bullshit.

Want to succeed in the blogosphere, or the Web in general? Easy. Do search engine optimization. Here’s how:

Write quotable stuff about a lot of different subjects. Do it consistently, for months if not years. Link a lot, as a way of giving credit and of sending readers to other sources of whatever it is you write about.

That’s it.

I can’t promise royalty, because there isn’t any. But I can promise a rewarding relationship with the readers you’ll get, regardless of how many there are.

Wonderful stuff.

Update. Here’s Hugh on the Carr piece:

These are serious issues, I will come to the reasons shortly.

But in the meantime. Maybe many of us know that the numbers are not that reliable, but maybe many of us don’t care too much about it. I look at my Technorati rank, sure. And I learn something about how it works and what it means. And yes I get a kick out of being in the top 10K, but not that big a kick. Because I don’t blog for my technorati ranking. What I really use Technorati for is first and foremost to find stuff in the blogosphere. And then maybe learn a little about the wisdom as well as the madness of crowds, by looking at what appears to be popular, but only at the tag level. It is rare that I delve deeper. And I also use Technorati to find out who’s linking to me. If markets are conversations (which they are) and blogs are the opensourcing of ideas (which they are) then it seems to make sense to find out just who you’re talking to. Relationships not transactions. Covenant not contract.

Now to the meat. And why I wrote this post.
Traditional thinking, pre-web, pre-Long-Tail, liked to use surveys and sampling techniques and normal distributions and a bunch of other stuff in order to define something they called audiences and traffic. Traffic they liked to measure in order to figure out something called hits. Hits that denoted their incredible ability to market something called content.

Sampling. Traffic. Hits. Content. Stanchions of the past. Pillars that are the lychgate to the churchyard of an obsolescing age.

They just don’t get micromarkets and microconversations and non-broadcast-mode and non-centrally administered and not content and not audience and not hits.
An age that is not yet obsolete. An age where attempts will be made to maintain, even strengthen, these stanchions.

And how will this strengthening take place?

With numbers. Numbers that you and I know are, shall we say, weak. Numbers that will nevertheless be used to “educate” people, particularly those that create legislative support. Which translates into lock-ins and protection and “advertising” and annuity revenue streams and all that jazz.
So next time you see numbers that tell you just how many gazillion illegal downloads happened while you read this sentence, how many gazillion dollars it will take to provide the infrastructure for all this live TV that is clogging up the tubes and slowing down someone’s internet, how many multigazillion illegal copies of software already exist on consumer desktops, or for that matter how much of the internet is dedicated to filesharing, next time you see all this, don’t be surprised. Don’t ask “How can it be?”. You have to be able to measure the problem in order to get the protection.
When you see bloggers being called A-List against their wishes, don’t ask “How can this be?”. You have to have hits.

When you see web sites with unbelievable links and hits and distribution, don’t ask “How can this be?”. You have to have audiences and traffic.
But don’t worry. The Emperor Has No Clothes On. People will get wise to this. As the numbers get better. Which they will.

I used to be bemused, confused, even slightly irritated, decades ago, when I read stories about broad all-encompassing patents given on things that were patently public domain for millenia. Examples are attempts to patent the curative properties of turmeric, or the name and style and quality of basmati rice. Read this and related stories if you want to know more.

Some of you may be aware of the recent debates and lawsuit involving Blackboard and Desire2Learn, and possibly dragging in opensource providers Moodle and Sakai. You can find the BBC coverage quoting Michael Geist here.

I quote from the BBC article:

Interestingly, open source and internet tools are emerging as the first line of defence against the Blackboard patent and lawsuit. Angry educators have launched an online petition calling on Blackboard to drop the lawsuit and to agree to forego any future patent suits.

I am not sure whether open source information has been used as a defence before, but this becomes a case to watch and to learn from.

One of the other sites referred to, noedupatents, looks interesting, but I have not yet had time to research it.

This whole story is yet another reason why the current IPR regime needs changing.

Dannie, Clarence, any comments?

I’m still reading Pip Coburn’s The Change Function, where, amongst other things, he tips a number of winner and loser technologies.

It must have been over twenty years ago when I read William Murray’s Tip on a Dead Crab. In those days, if you were into sporting mystery, the only choices you had were Dick Francis or Dick Francis. There wasn’t even a Stephen Dobyns around. [Yes I did take my mystery reading seriously in those days, and still do.]
One of the things I really liked about Murray’s story was the story behind the title. Forgive my memory, it’s been a long time, but what I remember goes like this. Somewhere, maybe it was set in Australia, they used to bet on crabs. The bet was simple. Each crab had a number on its “back”. All the crabs were in a basket. The basket was emptied in the centre of a large circle on the ground. After n minutes, the crab nearest to the centre at the time was declared the winner.

I don’t know much about horse racing, but I was always under the impression that professional gamblers were interested in horses guaranteed to lose; there were never any guarantees about winning. So it was with a wry smile I read about Tip On A Dead Crab, since the tip, despite being on a dead creature, actually guaranteed a win.

And it was with all this in mind that I read Pip’s statements on future winners and losers. Which were the more valuable tips, the winners or the losers? I’m still working my way thru the book, so comments will only follow later.

Just thinking aloud. What would be more valuable for an enterprise CIO? I think it depends on the specific technologies and their entry/exit costs, but it made me think.

My father, and his father before him, were financial journalists; and for a while so was I, until my father died suddenly in 1980.

They had an unusual approach to vertical integration as practised in those days. They wrote pretty much everything in the journal (with the help of a faithful few), edited it, printed and published it. Every week, around 32 pages of comment, all in English. And all this in Calcutta from 1928 to 1980. They owned the journal, the press, an ad agency and even a restaurant for the print workers.

The “flagship” part of this journal was a weekly 1500 word essay called Clive Street Gossip. Clive Street was the financial heartland of India for many years, until the “political” capital was rudely moved to the Lutyens-designed New Delhi, I think it was in 1910. [Before you say it: I was definitely not around at the time, however old I may seem]. Over the next forty years or so, the importance of Clive Street (and of Bengal, from a financial viewpoint) slowly waned as India lurched towards Independence, and by then it was Bombay that became the financial capital of the country.

Now Clive Street is primarily to be found on eBay, in vintage postcards, interspersed amongst the depictions of the Black Hole and the Great Eastern Hotel. But that was in another country, and besides..

Clive Street Gossip was written by Eavesdropper, the pen-name adopted by my father and his father. I wrote precisely one column using that name. I cannot be sure what images the column name evokes in you, but the reality was quite prosaic. They spoke of markets and of conversations, and of the social life of that information, in something that vaguely resembled a weekly blog with three or four posts every week.

And that’s what put the food on the family table.

So you can imagine what my early years were like. And why I studied economics, why I read voraciously, why I was so struck by The Social Life of Information and The Cluetrain Manifesto. Why I still continue to be struck by them.

But all this was largely before the Information Age; I’d never seen a real computer until 1980, except for a wondrous afternoon playing some form of Star Something on a Commodore Pet in the late 1970s.

What has entranced me since then is the magic of collaboration, the sheer unadulterated joy of co-creation. That may have been influenced at least in part by my Calcutta upbringing: I have often wondered whether it is even possible to do something alone in Calcutta. Anything. [You’re right, I have very fond memories of the place where I spent 23 unbroken years].

So when I think about information, about the internet, about identity and privacy and confidentiality, about patents and copyrights and digital rights and intellectual property, it is always in the context of collaboration.

And currently, I am wrestling with two issues. Particularly as a consequence of the availability of social software at affordable price points in open architectural models, when I can see the possibility of the collaborative magic happening.
One, is there such a thing as group selection, in a Darwinian natural selection sense? Do groups have adaptive capacities? Do social organisms evolve on a natural-selection basis? The concept is not new, but fell way out of favour in the Sixties, and never really resurfaced. And I think it would be really useful to model enterprise behaviour in the context of group selection, both within and well as beyond the enterprise boundary.
Two, was anything ever truly invented by one person in isolation? Here I am not referring to the serendipity aspect, where more than one person “simultaneously” invents something. What I mean is the impact of the group operating around and sometimes under the guidance and tutelage of the “inventor”, or sometimes in partnership.
My interest in the concept of group selection comes from a number of drivers:

• One, I think it is a good way to understand cellular social organisms ranging from modern church movements through to social or professional networks, even terrorist organisations.
• Two, it best explains why we have this counterproductive Blefuscu-versus-Lilliput polarisation about everything that matters nowadays. Groups will tend to attack others and protect their own.
• Three, it allows me to consider and integrate the concepts and issues raised in Emergence and in Linked and in The Tipping Point, amongst others. On relationships and networks and flow.
• Four, it lets me work in that hard-to-find space where religion and science aren’t necessarily in conflict.
• And five, it helps me understand, define and defend altruism.

To move this forward, I am currently reading some of the works of David Sloan Wilson, amongst others; if anyone knows of other works they would be prepared to recommend, I’m all ears. Or should that be eyes? Conversations. Ears.

I am also looking as deeply as I can into the process of invention and of music/literature creation. Who did the inventing or creating. Who helped. How they learnt from mistakes. What the original idea was, and what was patented or published. What type of patent. What the time delta was between original thought, the experiments and failures, the final patent or product. Were Lennon and McCartney collaborators? An author and his/her editor? A husband and wife? Is a family a group that behaves selectively? No Man is an Iland.
To move this forward, I am busy acquiring hardcopy of original patents and a whole pile of literature ranging from scientific papers through to biographies and autobiographies. And reading them. Again, if anyone out there has some pointers to give me, I’d be grateful.

I think these two aspects are crucial to our understanding of collaboration. Does group selection exist, and if so how does it work? Is invention or music/literature/art creation a solo process or is it truly collaborative and only superficially solo?