Of parasites and pests ….. and regulators?

A couple of days ago I read a headline in the Financial Times (strange, the things I get up to on vacation!):

Airlines and their regulator too “collaborative” says watchdog

You can find the article here. [For some reason, the headline in the print copy is not the headline in the linked article, but the change of headline is not germane to this post.]

The juxtaposition of the airline, regulator and watchdog took me on one of my traditional flights of fancy, and I thought I’d share it with you, and learn from your comments and links.

Many years ago, I worked at Silwood Park, an Imperial College research campus near Ascot, Berkshire. I used to travel in on the White Bus from Windsor (where I still live), serenely passing through the Great Park against the grain of the traffic before getting off the bus approaching Sunninghill.

Most of the passengers were regulars, as was Alan, the pipe-smoking genial driver. [I still see Alan in WIndsor every now and then, though he’s retired now]. Most of the passengers were forty years older than me, going about their morning errands and chores, shaven, shorn and dressed for the day; theirs was a generation of immense discipline and courage, and it showed in their retirement.

There was only one other passenger anywhere near my age, long-haired, bejeaned and Jesus-bearded. I cannot recall his name (this was over 20 years ago) but I do recall what he said he did.

And what he did was this: Using formal research methods, he sought to identify the parasite and the pest that went with a particular plant. Apparently, as human migration continued through the ages, we took our plants with us. And, usually accidentally, we took the related pest or parasite as well.

But rarely both. Since we didn’t know what we were doing, we tended to take plant+pest or plant+parasite, all by happenstance, and as a result the plant turned out to be unstable in the ecosystem it was transplanted into.

So this guy, and his colleagues, spent all their time trying to locate the precise pest or parasite that had been “disembarked”, with a view to repairing the ecosystem imbalance.

I found all this fascinating, and have spent time reading up on the different forms of symbiosis as a result, seeking to understand the difference between pests and parasites and their relationships and interactions with the “host”.

Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s because I’m on vacation, but the first thing that occurred to me when I saw the “…regulator too collaborative…” headline was: plant: parasite: pest.

We have much we can learn from biology, but until now I did not consider regulatory models to be part of that set. Now, having considered this for a few days, I am intrigued.

Can we come up with a market model where participants are “hosts”, regulators are “parasites” and watchdogs are “pests”? Can we learn to model these things objectively, without reacting to negative connotations of the terms themselves?

Well, aqualung, (since you tweeted the question) that’s what I’ve been thinking about. How to create a better model for market regulation, one that creates a balanced ecosystem. How to learn from nature in doing this, in conceptualising it.

I won’t bore you guys with the rest, I’ve been working on quite an elaborate model: what I will say is that there is scope to build out many related concepts: the obligate relationship between the host and the parasite, the lack of an obligate relationship between the host and the pest; how the pest keeps parasite numbers down; how the parasite protects the plant from the pest.

Just the kind of stuff I like thinking about on vacation.

Comments welcome.

Musing lazily about visualisation

I guess most of you have seen this by now, it’s been doing the rounds these past few days. (My apologies, I can’t actually remember where I first saw it and saved the diagram. When I remember I will make sure I give credit appropriately.):

 

It reminded me of the Indexed blog, where Jessica Hagy has been entertaining us with wonderful charts for some time now. Here’s an example:

By the way, her book’s pretty good as well. She has a searing wit about her, she touches many diverse subjects, and she does a great job showing how charts can be used to actually convey information. Strongly recommended. 

We have so much to learn about visualisation.

Musing about artificial scarcities and abundances

Artificial abundances.

I’d spent quite some time thinking about artificial scarcities, but never really considered the possibility of abundances being artificial as well.

That’s the problem with being on holiday, your mind goes off in all kinds of tangents. This post is actually the result of my reading the following article in today’s FT: US steps up piracy battle. [Intriguingly, when I went to look for the article via Google, I found a number of articles with the identical headline, all in the past three weeks or so].

The more I think about it, the more I realise it’s time we had a First Law of Scarcity and Abundance:

If you create an artificial scarcity, then be prepared for someone else to create an artificial abundance

A hundred years ago, it might have been reasonable for someone in Hollywood to plot the release of a film in time-slices across geographical areas. Even fifty years ago it might have been reasonable. I’m no expert; but if I were to guess at the reasons why a Hollywood studio would want to release the same film at different times in different locations, I’d come up with economic ones. Like producing a finite number of copies of the original master, and then releasing them one market at a time, reusing the same copies.

The trouble is, somebody went and built a whole distribution model on the past practice, and now it’s being imposed on a digital environment where it’s completely unnecessary.

Digital “content” has zero transmission and reproduction cost. Any attempt to control the release of digital content, across geographical areas, at different times, is tantamount to creating artificial scarcity. And when this happens, people will find ways of getting around the artificial scarcity, creating an artificial abundance.

That’s why people unlock locked phones.

That’s why Region Coding on DVDs was such an appalling idea.

If Hollywood is now only considering reducing the time-lapse between geographical releases, it is missing the point. Zero time lapse leads to zero piracy.

Something to think about

 

Legitimised?

Most of you are aware of my consuming interest in how Facebook creates value for the enterprise. Over the past eighteen months or so, I’ve written a large number of posts on the subject, and am currently in the process of converting them into a book. [Before you ask, the book will be a free download.]

The interest is not just academic; where I work, we have well over 10,000 people on Facebook, learning by watching and doing, and we continue to fashion and build tools that embrace and extend that learning.

Those who know me well would also be aware of the high regard in which I hold John Seely Brown and John Hagel, ever since I read  The Social Life of Information (written by JSB in conjunction with Paul Duguid). The Only Sustainable Edge (written by the two Johns) is a book I delve into frequently, and I’ve had the privilege of knowing both the authors personally for some time now. In fact I was with John Hagel earlier this week.

Whenever I used the word “Facebook” in the same sentence as “enterprise”, I used to get quizzical looks. Sometimes those looks went beyond quizzical, marauding into the territory of “he’s old, he’s past it, let’s just humour him”.

Which is why I have this sense of being “legitimised” when I read this article in BusinessWeek, by the two Johns, on what executives can learn from Facebook. 

An aside. How did I know about the article? Because it showed up on my Facebook news feed as a post by JSB. Seems fitting, somehow.

They make a number of points really well, points that I have written about before, but without the crispness and coherence they bring to the table:

  • Innovation happens at edges
  • Youth shouldn’t be discounted, their demographic group has edges as well, edges where innovation takes place
  • We need to build platforms that sustain many open edges in order to foster innovation
  • When building the platforms, we need to ensure that the time/money costs of edge innovation are kept low

The “lessons” piece at the end, while succinct, is really worthwhile. Don’t dismiss it lightly just because you may have come across variants before:

  • Create more edges
  • Provide better ways to connect at the edge
  • Demographic edges are fertile grounds for business innovation
  • Experiment and iterate rapidly
  • Social, technologic[al] and economic are inextricably intertwined

And, of course, the paragraph at the end.

“Social interaction often precedes economic activity.”

Otherwise known as cluetrain. Markets are conversations. Relationship before conversation before transaction.

More later.

 

Unintended consequences

]I was due to meet my family at Miami airport earlier this evening; we had these wondrous plans that involved me driving from Sundance to Salt Lake City, flying from there to Denver and on to Miami, reaching there just in time to collect my wife and children as they flew in from London.Â

I made sure there were no mice involved, but that didn’t stop the ganging of my plans agley (and keeping the aftness average high). And so it was that I found myself with a few hours to kill. Once I’d finished checking my mac mail, my facebook, my twitter; once I’d finished reading my feeds and checked the blog comment/spam queue; once I’d freshened up from the day’s travel….. I went fossil surfing.

Fossil surfing is the term I use to describe the time I spend looking for things on the web that are themselves older than the web. Like the time I found a description of mealtimes at my grandfather’s house in the mid 1940s a few weeks ago.

This time around I found another gem:

Â

Â

Some of my key childhood influences

The photograph above is of a number of Jesuit priests that formed the St Xavier’s community in the 1960s and 1970s. I spent fifteen years with them while at school and college, years I remember with intense pleasure.

The debt is to many, but for me there was a giant amongst them: Father Camille Bouche (fifth from left, second row from the front). I owe him a huge debt of gratitude.Â

Looking back more than three decades later, catalysed by the photograph, I realised just how much the whole community affected me:

Fr Goreux, who was rumoured to be a very early pupil of Einstein’s, and who kindled some of my early interest in mathematics; Fr Bonhome, who interviewed me in 1965; Fr Cordeiro, who was headmaster for a while; Mr Joris, who made sure the B.Com morning classes worked like clockwork (and who belied his size and age when he came after school students creating a ruckus near his classes at 7am); Fr Desbrulais, who epitomised kindness and fatherly advice to all and sundry; Fr Verstraeten, who could be seen reading at all hours, part priest, part academic; Fr Leeming, who towered over us when we needed towering over; and Fr Huart, who shepherded me through college; Fr Vetticad, whom I shall say nothing about other than to record that he was headmaster for a time; and Fr Mairlot, of course, with his wry humour.

Sadly, the photo does not have Fr Sassel, who was a key influence on me between 1966 and 1969.

Â

Â

Â

Fr Bouche (first from left, above) was my Prefect of Discipline from 1970 to 1975, critical years that fashioned the person who later became me; I was 12 when I met him and 18 when I left his care. Besides the discipling role, he also took our “moral science” classes in senior school, classes that influenced me greatly. I can remember them with surprising clarity even today.

Here’s an example of Fr Bouche’s amazing humanity and wisdom. In 1971, when I was in Patrick Vianna’s class, one of my classmates brought in a hundred rupee note to pay his school fees. Now this was a class of 12 and 13 year olds, most of us had rarely seen a 100 rupee note much less touched one. So the note became a major object of attention, passed on from hand to hand, scrutinised from every angle, metamorphosed into airplane and tennis ball, you get my drift.

Sometime in the afternoon, it all went horribly wrong. The note went missing. The boy who’d brought it in was obviously distraught (I remember very clearly who he was, but his name is not germane to the story. I last met him in Calcutta less than a decade ago, he’s still there!).

I think the teacher at the time was our class teacher, Mr Vianna. He did the only thing he could; he sealed the classroom (7A on the ground floor) with all of us in it, and called for Fr Bouche.

When he came in, you could see the sadness in his eyes. He looked at all of us, and then proceeded to give us some very simple instructions. Each of us was to walk to the window nearest the front of the class (which looked on to what we called the Hostel field in those days); when reaching the window, each of us was to put his hand in his pocket, come out with a clenched fist, extend that fist out the window, drop the fist below the line of visibility, and bring the fist back unclenched.

We did it, one by one.Â

When we had finished, he poked his head through the window, and the 100 rupee note was on the grass outside.

Years later I came to know who took that money; the boy confessed to me shortly after we finished our Senior Cambridge.

His name is irrelevant. What is relevant is the soft-touch discipline, the humaneness and humanity of Camille Bouche.

My thanks to John De Ridder for providing me with the excuse to be nostalgic about my school. I’ve linked to his site, that’s where I found these amazing photographs.

Â

Â