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Traveling music - Tom Cochrane
Volume Up. Way up. On the roads between Nashville and Murray, Kentucky, I could see some of these fine people. If I do, I'll snap a pic and share it via Twitter (to your left):
Light posting alert
Traveling over the next couple of days. Smell ya' later. Saturdayish.
A must for your meetings
A one-hour hourglass. Walk in, turn it over and start. Amazing what can be accomplished. Next upgrade to this one. Dare we?
Thanks, Brian.
The Articles - Microcosm
Large or small businesses? Command and control or a thousand million individual decisions? This is the heart of George Gilder's seminal 1988 Harvard Business Review article, "The Revitalization of Everything: The Law of the Microcosm".
Gilder, who authored Wealth and Poverty in 1981, focused of how enterprises start and grow in his 1984 book, The Spirit of Enterprise. This Harvard Business Review essay promoted Gilders technological tome, Microcosm.
Think history doesn't run in cycles? How about this excerpt from the article?
"Intel Chairman Gordon Moore denounced the venture capital financiers and the 'vulture capitalists' of Sand Hill Road, . ."
Remove Solyndra and we have a twenty-four year old discussion about Silicon Valley and Sematech:
"For Silicon Valley patriarch, the remedy was intervention by the U.S. government to reshape and subsidize their industry. Their ideas bore fruit in Sematech, a chip manufacturing research and development consortium to be funded half by industry and half by government."
At least the Sematech vision of industrial policy stayed afloat.
Gilder parallels chip technology breakthroughs with society as a whole, noting that lessons from the microchip can be applied to society: "The American strength derives not from the law of complexity but from the law of the microchip." Leave the chip, Gilder explained, and production cost increases, complexity increases, the world becomes muddy:
"In volume, anything on a chip is cheap. But as you move out of the microcosm, prices rise exponentially, A connection on a chip costs a few millionths of a cent, a wire on a printed circuit board is ten cents,. . ."
What does this mean for government and society? Decentralize. Command and control is useless in spite of government and big business's futile attempts to apply it effectively:
"Beyond a certain point comes the combinatorial explosion: large software programs tend to break down faster than they can be repaired. For communications, connections may multiply. But coordination and command impose impossible burdens on centralized systems."
More:
"Rather than pushing decisions up through the hierarchy, micro-electronics pulls them remorselessly down to the individual. That is the law of the microcosm. This is the secret of the new American challenge in the global economy."
I wonder what the cloud does to Gilder's theory? Nonetheless, The Law of the Microcosm is a great and important article read well worth your time. So here it is for you in tasty marked up PDF form.
Gilder, who authored Wealth and Poverty in 1981, focused of how enterprises start and grow in his 1984 book, The Spirit of Enterprise. This Harvard Business Review essay promoted Gilders technological tome, Microcosm.
Think history doesn't run in cycles? How about this excerpt from the article?
"Intel Chairman Gordon Moore denounced the venture capital financiers and the 'vulture capitalists' of Sand Hill Road, . ."
Remove Solyndra and we have a twenty-four year old discussion about Silicon Valley and Sematech:
"For Silicon Valley patriarch, the remedy was intervention by the U.S. government to reshape and subsidize their industry. Their ideas bore fruit in Sematech, a chip manufacturing research and development consortium to be funded half by industry and half by government."
At least the Sematech vision of industrial policy stayed afloat.
Gilder parallels chip technology breakthroughs with society as a whole, noting that lessons from the microchip can be applied to society: "The American strength derives not from the law of complexity but from the law of the microchip." Leave the chip, Gilder explained, and production cost increases, complexity increases, the world becomes muddy:
"In volume, anything on a chip is cheap. But as you move out of the microcosm, prices rise exponentially, A connection on a chip costs a few millionths of a cent, a wire on a printed circuit board is ten cents,. . ."
What does this mean for government and society? Decentralize. Command and control is useless in spite of government and big business's futile attempts to apply it effectively:
"Beyond a certain point comes the combinatorial explosion: large software programs tend to break down faster than they can be repaired. For communications, connections may multiply. But coordination and command impose impossible burdens on centralized systems."
More:
"Rather than pushing decisions up through the hierarchy, micro-electronics pulls them remorselessly down to the individual. That is the law of the microcosm. This is the secret of the new American challenge in the global economy."
I wonder what the cloud does to Gilder's theory? Nonetheless, The Law of the Microcosm is a great and important article read well worth your time. So here it is for you in tasty marked up PDF form.
Today was not that day. . .
but I'll pick one out.
David Kanigan reminds us to "cease participation" every once in a while:
"We are the strivingest people who have ever lived. We are ambitious, time-starved, competitive, distracted. We move at full velocity, yet constantly fear we are not doing enough. Though we live longer than any humans before us, our lives feel shorter, restless, breathless…"
David Kanigan reminds us to "cease participation" every once in a while:
"We are the strivingest people who have ever lived. We are ambitious, time-starved, competitive, distracted. We move at full velocity, yet constantly fear we are not doing enough. Though we live longer than any humans before us, our lives feel shorter, restless, breathless…"
Five by Drucker
KurtSima5 has five great quotations from Peter Drucker.
My favorite:
“Meetings are a symptom of a bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.”
January 24, 1932
"This winter season is the most remarkable one in memory of any now living. January has given us scarcely any freezing weather if any. Just rainy, cloudy and cold. I saw a Japan Quince bush in bloom and a rose bush in full leaf. Dandelions in bloom and grass growing some. Most buds are observing their dormant season, winter or no winter. It has been too warm for my buried cabbage as it is nearly all rotted.
The depression is still with us. Everybody mostly in debt and hard up. Prices at low levels, office busy trying to force down wages.
Our substitutes have been taken away from us and we must take the other fellow's work when he is off. I made the Saturday 1/2 hour and Sunday 1/2 hour collection yesterday, starting our economy spell. People will be people. Away they went up to heaven on earth. Now they've all gone to hell for a spell.
Just heard a good play over the radio. I like drama.
The rivers have been flooded all week. Ritz [and I] were walking in the Height bottoms this morning. Living nature was pretty quiet. It is good to think life will all come back with the real balmy days.
During the middle of the month paid Rose $1.70 less .17 on an account the girls were paying for. He was hard up and offered 10% discount and I paid him. I asked the bank where my money is deposited for $100. I could only get out $50. They are limiting their withdrawals to each person. Some damned kind of time this is."
D.C. Richard's Journal
January 24, 1932
Conversation advice. . .
from View From the Ledge.
A friend used to explain that I went right to edge of what was appropriate to say, and then I jumped off. I'm now going to remember Jeff's advice.
A friend used to explain that I went right to edge of what was appropriate to say, and then I jumped off. I'm now going to remember Jeff's advice.
The smell
He visited regularly for the smell. It was inviting, comforting. . .intoxicating.
Wine connoisseurs could pick up hints of berries and chocolate and old shoe leather. Cigar smokers would swear that Cubans were "creamy". "Creamy", god dammit. They were right. They knew Dominicans from Nicaraguans from Mexicans. There was a difference.
He smelled O'Connor and Fitzgerald, Aristotle and Johnson.
Fiction had that crispy plastic cover smell. Newer. The good rot hadn't yet set in. . .No, that wasn't right. It was there but it was overpowered by the newer stuff. New books still had that ink smell. The finish on the paper. First floor was ink and paper and finish, but it was still there. the real smells floated down from the upper floors.
He ignored the elevator and walked up the steps. He wanted to taste the transition. Halfway up it hit him. The biographies and histories and reference stacks. The second floor was better. If it was beef it would be the 28-day stuff, right? Aged perfectly. These were the good smells. Shelves and shelves of the stuff, set in Baskerville and Garamond. Times Roman. Shit.
He walked between the stacks and took it in. His eyes stayed open but he could just have easily smelled his way through. Alphabetical. He could move quickly to his favorites or the latest interest. They waited for him. No one else around here touched them. He even checked a few just to be sure. "Idiots," he thought. They have no idea what they are missing.
Later he would taste them. Bedside light casting an incandescent glow as he leaned against two pillows and read. His eyes devoured the pages and went back to repeat the good phrasings. He might even whisper those parts aloud. Loud enough to hear but not so loud as to wake her up.
But the smell was what kept him coming back.
"The same wind that carries them back. . ."
Historian, Niall Ferguson, looks at Western Civilization and its advantages over the rest of the world.
The advantages are classified by Ferguson as "the killer apps" of Western Civilization:
1. Competition
2. The Scientific Revolution
3. Property Rights
4. Modern Medicine
5. The Consumer Society
6. The Work Ethic
Well worth your time.
Sadly, as Ferguson speaks, the apps are under attack from within.
The Enterprise Blog is looking at each of the West's "killer apps". The first is competition.
The advantages are classified by Ferguson as "the killer apps" of Western Civilization:
1. Competition
2. The Scientific Revolution
3. Property Rights
4. Modern Medicine
5. The Consumer Society
6. The Work Ethic
Well worth your time.
Sadly, as Ferguson speaks, the apps are under attack from within.
The Enterprise Blog is looking at each of the West's "killer apps". The first is competition.
Music for a Monday - Zac Brown Band
"It's funny how it's the little things in life that mean the most.
Not where you live, what you drive or the price tag on your clothes.
There's no dollar sign on a peace of mind, this I've come to know.
So if you agree, have a drink with me, raise your glasses for a toast. . ."
Zac Brown Band performs "Chicken Fried". If you don't own The Foundation and You Get What You Give, you are missing out on some of the best new music around.
Not where you live, what you drive or the price tag on your clothes.
There's no dollar sign on a peace of mind, this I've come to know.
So if you agree, have a drink with me, raise your glasses for a toast. . ."
Zac Brown Band performs "Chicken Fried". If you don't own The Foundation and You Get What You Give, you are missing out on some of the best new music around.
Hmmmm
Thanks, Tim.
The Articles - Tom Peters Interview
Continuing the series of articles moving from my wooden file cabinet in the attic to the electronic file cabinet that is CO, here is a 1993 Forbes ASAP interview with Tom Peters. Rich Karlgaard - then Forbes contributor, now Forbes Publisher - conducted the interview on business, leadership, management, reading, productivity and other topics.
The interview is full of Peters' gems such as this one related to creativity:
"The essence of scientific creativity is unexpected streams of information crossing each other in oddball ways at propitious times. Being organized about information collection is fascist. There is something in the process of walking through library stacks and having your eye accidentally light upon some 13th-century treatise that gives you the answer to your conundrum in quantum mechanics. It's that exposure, those eclectic exposures. I mean, find me a truly significant innovator who doesn't have some form of significant eclecticism. It's a delight to hear that John Sculley and Bill Gates read - and not only the stuff they're supposed to read but a lot of stuff they are not supposed to read."
Another treat:
". . .I believe in always leaning radically in the direction of the market as far as you possibly can. The reason I get up on stage and say such wild-ass things is because I think that most of our big companies are really lousy at it. That's the goddamn scandal about the free market. Almost always, the last people who want to blow the cold winds of the market into every nook and cranny of the company are the people running the joint."
Tom Peters 1993 interview with Forbes ASAP here (in PDF format).
Balance
Pound for pound, you won't find a better source of business and management advice and writings than Execupundit.
Just one example. This one on Balance:
"Exhibit too much of any virtue and you'll plunge into a problem. You can indeed be too kind, too analytical, too bold, too tolerant, and too open."
Just one example. This one on Balance:
"Exhibit too much of any virtue and you'll plunge into a problem. You can indeed be too kind, too analytical, too bold, too tolerant, and too open."
Music for the week ahead - Biber
The other Biber: Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber. Before Vivaldi, Biber owned the violin. This is his battle piece, "Battalia". To the ramparts. To hell with the ramparts. . .charge!
Clicky clicky right here and enjoy.
Clicky clicky right here and enjoy.
