"Nothing ages faster than the future"
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What I Mean by Bozo
A bozo is someone who thinks they are much smarter and capable than they actually are. They constantly over-estimate their abilities and under-estimate the risks and threats around them. They typically don’t keep an open-mind. They look instead for data that confirms a previously held bias.
Focus
Focus
Benedict Evans
This is how Nokia saw the world in Q1 208, a year after the iPhone launched. I could comment, but I think the image speaks for itself.
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"While critical theory has narrowly come to define the Frankfurt school that begins with Horkheimer…"
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Ito’s Nine Principles
Ito’s Nine Principles
Stowe Boyd
Michael Copeland of Wired interviewed Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab, getting past the techno-utopianism and down to an almost Taoist set of principles for thriving in the postnormal world, a time of mounting uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity, and volatility. After chatting about the falling cost of innovation, and Schumpeterian disruptions in hardware, genetics, and healthcare we get down to the meat:
Michael Copeland, Resiliency, Risk, and a Good Compass: Tools for the Coming Chaos
Wired: And in the face of that we ought to do what?
Ito: What you need to do is understand these changes are happening, and build systems and governments and ways of thinking that are resilient to this kind of destructive change that is going to happen. It’s a kind of change that is really hard to predict, it’s really hard to control, so how do you as a human being, or as an organization, survive in this chaotic, unpredictable system where planning is almost impossible?
Wired: Please tell me you have an answer.
Ito: There are nine or so principles to work in a world like this:
Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure.
You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.
You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety.
You want to focus on the system instead of objects.
You want to have good compasses not maps.
You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it.
It[’s] disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience.
It’s the crowd instead of experts.
It’s a focus on learning instead of education.
We’re still working on it, but that is where our thinking is headed.
A few thoughts:
The ‘risk/safety’ dichotomy is also ‘be biased toward speculative experiments that allow deeper understanding of implications, rather than optimizing around lowering disruption and short-term costs’.
One thing missing is the principle related to resilience: ‘go slow to go fast’. This means you need to step out of the flow of today’s operational frenzy to take new actions. In martial arts, this means you must relax your muscles and nerves to respond or attack quickly.
‘You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told’ is priceless.
(via brucesterling)
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Come In Strong, Or Don't Come In At All
If you’re going to strike early, you must strike hard. A strong offering is strong at any time. The same goes for a weak one. The difference is knowing what you have, and adjusting the message accordingly.
Chinese Lunar New Year travel madness
Chinese Lunar New Year travel madness
The Loop
Gadling:
Chinese New Year is the one time of year when everyone returns to their home villages to see family members and it’s been called the largest annual human migration in the world.
Some Chinese who can’t get train or plane tickets find creative ways to get home for the holiday. China Daily reports that one adventurous soul took a scenic route home, using “48 buses, a ferry, a free ride and his own feet to carry him 660km to his home town.”
You think traveling around the US is hard at Thanksgiving? It’s a cakewalk compared to the insanity in China this time of year.
∞ Read this on The Loop
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Taking care of your friends and family.
How to listen
The Loop
How to listen
Seth Godin:
The best way to honor someone who has said something smart and useful is to say something back that is smart and useful. The other way to honor them is to go do something with what you learned.
Great advice.
∞ Read this on The Loop
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The speed of the leader determines the rate of the pack.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Benedict Evans posted this link earlier about the original Apple ads. The past is dead and is nothing history but sometimes you need to pay respect to the moment, then wonder what’s the next move.
