A nice Sunday afternoon treat from Halley.
Our Job
Thanks to John Perry Barlow for ending his email with this great quotation.
Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.
— Thomas Merton
As you would expect, Lessig neatly wraps up what ought to be going on in the campaign in lieu of what has become the typical behavior we see. And we will likely get the representation we deserve rather than the representation we need.
yet more irrelevant questions.
So, shamefully, I’ve contributed to this irrelevant question blog (“Mr. President, how many times have you been arrested?”), but I can’t begin to describe fully how depressing this presidential campaign has been.
Why do we waste attention on these ridiculous questions?
I’m sure Mr. Bush’s record was nothing to be proud of — his drinking problem is well documented, and these things go together. But I’m also sure he is no longer that man — and for anyone who has seen someone overcome that demon, you know the courage this requires. So I really don’t care how many times he was arrested, I don’t care if he used power to escape his obligations in the Reserve — whether he should be our President depends only upon whether the policies he will pursue are good for this nation.
Likewise, re Mr. Kerry: I am sure he demonstrated unimaginable courage in volunteering to serve his country in an unpopular war, and then mustering the courage to articulate brilliantly the reasons why that war was wrong. But we’re not electing a captain for a military unit — if shots are fired, he will follow orders, not give them — and while it would be great if he could find a way to articulate why this war was wrong, the presidency is not a reward for great Senate testimony. Whether he should be our President depends upon whether the policies he will pursue are good for the nation.
So why can’t we actually talk about the conflict in these policies? I’m confident about that choice, but I would love my view to be challenged by real arguments, and a focus on real issues. CBS almost seems proud of their idiotic story. Shame on CBS. Shame on us. [Lessig Blog]
Don’t tell my 15-year old who’s been lobbying for HDTV, but this is the sort of thing most likely to get me to act sooner rather than later. It strikes me that the efforts of industries to preserve themselves by criminalizing behaviors are more likely to lead to widespread civil disobedience than to anything helpful to their cause.
[foo] Endangered Devices – Buy an HDTV for Freedom! (Offer not good after 7/05). Wendy Seltzer, lawyer for the EFF (join here), talks about the drive to mandate building restrictions devices into hardware that plays media content. The broadcast flag requires HDTV devices to check for a “do not redistribute” flag in the content they receive. With the flag, they can’t output high-def digital or record it. She says that this mitigates against open source software since it is modifiable; all tuners would have to be closed source. “In the post broadcast flag world, no one can bulid a TiVo without first asking permission from the FCC.” Until July 1, 2005, it’s capable to… [Joho the Blog]
McCloskey’s logic nicely summarizes my thinking on this topic.
If you’re a true Republican, you’ll vote for Kerry. I don’t know what has happened to moderate Republicans, but one of them, former Rep. Pete McCloskey, had this commentary in Friday’s San Jose Mercury News: If you’re a true Republican, you’ll vote for Kerry. Although I’m a lifelong Republican,… [New Media Musings]
I don’t care whether you print them out or not, but you will want to read them. Thank you Robin and Peter.
Best Research Articles On Information Architecture. Peter Morville, author of one of the key reference books on Information Architecture, has published a rich and well-curated list of information architecture resources online. Given his experience, know-how and vision, you can count on this being a must print-out… [Robin Good’s Latest News]
A nice workflow diagram if you are a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done(and you should be).
By way of 43 Folders, which I suspect I will also become a fan of. Some of the material there is a bit Mac centric, but the rest of it more than offsets that minor issue if you don’t happen to be a Mac user.
Getting Things Done fans, definitely don t miss this. A PDF illustrating a cool, annotated version of the basic GTD workflow. [43 Folders]
An interesting piece in Tuesday’s NY Times on a researcher who studies disasters to better understand people and organizations:
A Sociologist With an Advanced Degree in Calamity. Kathleen Tierney, a disaster researcher, says that catastrophes change the way people experience time. By By CLAUDIA DREIFUS. [The New York Times > Science]
There’s lots of good stuff here, but this quote in particular caught my eye:
one of the things you see in a crisis is devolution of authority to the lower levels of organizations, and that happens, in part, because there are so many decisions to be made. Also, effective decision making has to be responsive to what is happening at a given location. The centralized commander is too far away for that. You generally see people taking responsibility themselves.
One organizational advantage in a disaster or crisis is that centralized commanders don’t generally have the time to get annoyed when subordinates decide to take responsibility for themselves.
My own sense is that more of our organizational life is coming to resemble crises in one form or another and that we need to incorporate that reality into our ways of working. Two authors come to mind immediately. The first is Peter Vaill who introduced me to the notion of “permanent whitewater” as a metaphor for today’s organizational world. I’d recommend both Learning As a Way of Being : Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water and Managing As a Performing Art : New Ideas for a World of Chaotic Change. [Halley, this is the reference I meant today, not Peter Block, although he’s worth reading too]. The second is Gary Klein’s Sources of Power : How People Make Decisions. Klein’s work shows how much real decision making relies on “gut instinct” informed by experience with lots of similar chaotic situations.
Had a fabulous lunch with Halley today in Cambridge. Like all the lunches I’ve had with fellow bloggers, we started way past the pleasantries and our conversation ranged from ice hockey for 9-year olds to the future of the knowledge economy. Lots to think about. Looking forward to continuing the conversations here and elsewhere.
I’ve been thinking about Ted Leavitt recently.
Leavitt taught marketing at the Harvard Business School. His most famous aphorism is that “customers don’t but a quarter-inch drill bit, they buy a quarter-inch hole.” Clever, and possibly helpful, if you’re a marketer by trade. But what if you happen to be a knowledge worker? You don’t have the luxury of knowing that what you need is a quarter-inch hole.
While every technology marketer out there is trying to sell you quarter-inch holes, you actually need to be thinking in terms of what kind of general purpose knowledge work toolkit you need to assemble to address the changing and unpredictable demands you face. For knowledge work, solution selling gets in the way at best. A tool perspective will be more productive, even if it is working against the grain.
Here are some quick contrasts between a solutions perspective and a tools perspective:
| Solutions | Tools |
| Passive | Active |
| Accept/Reject | Co-create |
| Train | Learn |
| Conformance | Craft |
| Consumer | Producer |
| CEO | Hacker |
One challenge to overcome is that we’ve been conditioned to think in terms of solutions. We wait for the early adopters to figure everything out so that we can buy the answer off the shelf. We are still too soon in the world of knowledge work. If you are a knowledge worker, then circumstances have forced you back to the level of creating your own toolset. And back to the level of digging underneath the hypothetical solutions to hypothetical problems that today’s marketing conventions will layer on top of the tools themselves that ought to be your target.
Both Hugh Macleod and Evelyn Rodriguez belong in your pay attention to list if you are remotely interested in the topic of knowledge work and how it is changing the nature of the organizations we inhabit and create.
the creative age. A blogger I’m enjoying a lot these days is Evelyn Rodriguez. She’s in sync with a lot of my current thinking, namely, that we’re entering into what is known as “The Creative Age”. Good-bye white collar, hello black collar…. [gapingvoid]