A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis

From mint.com comes one picture worth a thousand powerpoints explaining millions of greedy choices needing trillions of dollars to fix. (See below for a zoomed segment.)

And, from the Guardian comes a list of 25 deserving of tar and feathers or just a smack in the mouth as just payment for that expensive fix. Maybe about 5 have actually stepped forward to say "Flounder, you f*cked up. You trusted us." The majority amazingly still retain their credibility and welcome in many media and business circles, not to mention large sums of cash as a cushion despite their utter failure.

mind-blown, mindful, or just thinkin' bout stuff. Some links

As I troll through some stuff for that Black Triangles follow-up post on managing innovators, the saved links are like a tsunami. Let us unspool some and maybe a pony or moonshot might pop out.

[Update: down-post, we reference the multi-tasking hydra in 2 links from the NYT and The Atlantic. Slackermanager.com has posted something cool on taming the beast: Multi-tasking Must Die: 5 Ways to Single Task

Here's something on how emotion and its cascade of neuro-chemicals is like a nail-gun for those post-it notes we call memories--Via mnemosyne:

Describing the brain as a big circuit board in which each new experience creates a new circuit, Hopkins neuroscience professor Richard Huganir, Ph.D. says that he and his team found that during emotional peaks, the hormone norepinephrine dramatically sensitizes synapses – the site where nerve cells make an electro-chemical connection – to enhance the sculpting of a memory into the big board.

Norepinephrine, more widely known as a "fight or flight" hormone, energizes the process by adding phosphate molecules to a nerve cell receptor called GluR1. The phosphates help guide the receptors to insert themselves adjacent to a synapse. "Now when the brain needs to form a memory, the nerves have plenty of available receptors to quickly adjust the strength of the connection and lock that memory into place," Huganir says.

Via Seed Magazine, about how we arrange what we know and perceive (what we've noted, experienced, and remember) affects what we can imagine: The Future of Science is... Art?

...[Niels] Bohr had spent time analyzing the radiation emitted by electrons, and he realized that science needed a new metaphor. The behavior of electrons seemed to defy every conventional explanation. As Bohr said, "When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry." Ordinary words couldn't capture the data.

Bohr had long been fascinated by cubist paintings. As the intellectual historian Arthur Miller notes, he later filled his study with abstract still lifes and enjoyed explaining his interpretation of the art to visitors. For Bohr, the allure of cubism was that it shattered the certainty of the object. The art revealed the fissures in everything, turning the solidity of matter into a surreal blur.

Bohr's discerning conviction was that the invisible world of the electron was essentially a cubist world. By 1923, de Broglie had already determined that electrons could exist as either particles or waves. What Bohr maintained was that the form they took depended on how you looked at them. Their very nature was a consequence of our observation. This meant that electrons weren't like little planets at all. Instead, they were like one of Picasso's deconstructed guitars, a blur of brushstrokes that only made sense once you stared at it. The art that looked so strange was actually telling the truth.

That's from Jonah Lehrer of Frontal Cortex blog. Leonard Shlain's book, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light predates it and covers lots more. Basically, how art, artists and imagery makers work in precognitive realms, paving the way for scientists to cognitively grasp, accept and explain previously abstract concepts like black holes or even fluid dynamics. In a way, it's the Overton Window at work -- an idea is "foolish" and "impossible" until someone finds a way to make it graspable and therefore viable. Applies to 30-minute pizza delivery guarantees or to Quantum Mechanics.

For more fearless scouts, IBM has a long but intriguing Dave Snowden/Cynthia Kurtz paper on The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world. A snip...

The Cynefin framework

The name Cynefin is a Welsh word whose literal translation into English as habitat or place fails to do it justice. It is more properly understood as the place of our multiple affiliations, the sense that we all, individually and collectively, have many roots, cultural, religious, geographic, tribal, and so forth. We can never be fully aware of the nature of those affiliations, but they profoundly influence what we are. The name seeks to remind us that all human interactions are strongly influenced and frequently determined by the patterns of our multiple experiences, both through the direct influence of personal experience and through collective experience expressed as stories...

We consider Cynefin a sense-making framework, which means that its value is not so much in logical arguments or empirical verifications as in its effect on the sense-making and decision-making capabilities of those who use it. We have found that it gives decision makers powerful new constructs that they can use to make sense of a wide range of unspecified problems. It also helps people to break out of old ways of thinking and to consider intractable problems in new ways. The framework is particularly useful in collective sense-making, in that it is designed to allow shared understandings to emerge through the multiple discourses of the decision-making group.

Economic Stimulus idea: Brake the constant chase to multi-channel stimulation when possible. Memo to me: Stop pretending you can track, kill, skin and cook the bear. And the rabbit. And the deer. All at once. And well. First, The New York Times:

But the paper also found that “beyond an optimum, more multitasking is associated with declining project completion rates and revenue generation.”

For the executive recruiters, the optimum workload was four to six projects, taking two to five months each.

The productivity lost by overtaxed multitaskers cannot be measured precisely, but it is probably a lot. Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst at Basex, a business-research firm, estimates the cost of interruptions to the American economy at nearly $650 billion a year.

That's a short sober piece on the modern illusion of busy-ness as good for business. Next, The Atlantic has a longer, more entertaining and personal view: Walter Kirn's odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity begins when his girlfriend sends him a nude cellphone pic and he send his car through a fence while enjoying the, uh, stimulating composition.

...Much of the problem is the metaphor. Or perhaps it’s our need for metaphors in general, particularly when the subject is our minds and the comparison seems based on science. In the days of rudimentary chemistry, the mind was thought to be a beaker of swirling volatile essences. Then came classical physical mechanics, and the mind was regarded as a clocklike thing, with springs and wheels. Then it was steam-driven, maybe. A combustion chamber. Then came electricity and Freud, and it was a dynamo of polarized energies—the id charged one way, the superego the other.

Now, in the heyday of the microchip, the brain is a computer. A CPU.

Except that it’s not a CPU. It’s whatever that thing is that’s driven to misconstrue itself—over and over, century after century—as a prototype, rendered in all-too- vulnerable tissue, of our latest marvel of technology. And before the age of modern technology, theology. Further back than that, it’s hard to voyage, since there was a period, common sense suggests, when we didn’t even know we had brains. Or minds. Or spirits. Humans just sort of did stuff. And what they did was not influenced by metaphors about what they ought to be capable of doing but very well might not be equipped for (assuming you wanted to do it in the first place), like editing a playlist to e-mail to the lover whose husband you’re interviewing on the phone about the movie he made that you’re discussing in the blog entry you’re posting tomorrow morning and are one-quarter watching certain parts of as you eat salad and carry on the call.

Geez. After all that, the band's gonna take a break. Listen to Tom Chapin sing "Not on the test" to mellow us down a bit

This will take more than 60 seconds: rescuing Polaroid Film format

The Impossible Project, in Netherlands, aims to

re-start production of analog INTEGRAL FILM for vintage Polaroid cameras in 2010. We have acquired Polaroid's old equipment, factory and seek your support.

They've acquired the factory and capital equipment pretty much as it was when shut-down in June 2008, in good shape and production-ready. The task is to replicate some bits of the old Pola cartridges' workings, and reinvent other old aspects that stayed constant for 40 years, despite manufacturing and materials advances. 40 years and no core R&D retooling by Polaroid? Damn, that's riding a mature horse till it's a pile of bones. Despite the limitations of the format, it's nice to see. Check out the site for details.

Oh, yeah, almost forgot: On December 23, 2008, the last major supplier of VHS tapes, Distribution Video Audio Inc. of Palm Harbor, Florida, shipped its final truckload.

Black Triangles

[updated x 2] Between the occasional inaguration and not a few meetings, it was a crazy week and so much to blog about. But it's Friday, I'm tired, so all I gots right now is Black Triangles.

All the dev team had after month of effort was a black triangle on a screen...but it was more than that.

Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as "black triangles." These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don't have much to show for it -- only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really knows the guts of what you are doing to appreciate a black triangle.

When working on complex projects, the black triangle moment is always the high point for me; it's when success occurs. Before you've got a framework built, there's significant doubt about how the project will turn out, if can even be done. After you get that first little result through the whole maze and it's clear how the whole thing will work, the rest becomes almost inevitable. (via migurski)

Truth spoken well, stolen verbatim, from Jason Kottke.

[update]Okay, I'm feeling guilty about the lifted post so let's at least add something to the mix: a mash-up from work in progress. Jason and others might identify with this, especially the hi-lited bit, and I suspect Johnnie Moore will not. Doesn't matter. It's not for them. It's to explain the difference between tigers and horses and dogs to those who have difficulty making the distinction.



[update some more 01-25-09] Got a facebook msg/question on this. The 4 cycles idea is from experience, and from conversations with people around the question of what makes people naturally comfy with change and others not. Handy stuff to be aware of if you're in the change/challenge status quo business. Maybe I should be less flip and explain better in a post. I'll link to it when it's done.

The Gig Economy - The New American Hustler

Tina Brown of The Daily Beast wakes up

Now that everyone has a project-to-project freelance career, everyone is a hustler.

No one I know has a job anymore. They've got Gigs.

Gigs: a bunch of free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time bits and pieces they try and stitch together to make what they refer to wryly as “the Nut”—the sum that allows them to hang on to the apartment, the health-care policy, the baby sitter, and the school fees.

....

A full one-third of our respondents are now working either freelance or in two jobs. And nearly one in two of them report taking on additional positions during the last six months.

Just as startling, these new alternative workers are not overwhelmingly low-income. They’re college-educated Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year.

Welcome to the age of Gigonomics...

There is a real poll: PDF

And a synopsis:

There are two kinds of new American hustlers:

• At the lower end of the salary spectrum, lower- and middle-class Americans are being stretched in ways they didn’t seek. Americans with incomes below $40,000 per year are more likely to hold multiple part-time positions, and the reason why they hold second jobs tends to be a critical financial situation: They’re behind on bills and need extra income (43%).

• At the top end, those with higher incomes and a college education are more likely to work freelance or multiple jobs as a way of expanding their scope. This upper-class population often has both a full-time job in addition to one or more part-time jobs, often freelancing. The top motivation for taking on additional work? A second job was actually a hobby that turned into a money-making operation (48%). Not surprisingly, this group is also more likely to feel stretched by their responsibilities.

Yup. Long after Unicornomics* has been settled on as a huge distraction and waste of talent and resources, there's still gonna be rasslin' over what to call the last 3 decades starting with Reaganomics and ending in Gig-o-nomics. Somehow, despite the indelible imprint of B. Boomer on the registration and paperwork, calling them the The Wonder Years 2.0 seems a longshot.

And, maybe, just maybe, there's an explanation within, and tying together, both sets of years.

----

* Q: How do you buy a unicorn? A: With imaginary money. Q: How do you buy 2 unicorns? A: Declare the first unicorn and the rides you give as an asset and revenue stream for your CapitalOne card application.

daily beast link via fimoculous

Why Murden quit: Cartoon Boat Veterans for Truth.

Naval veteran's "stays crunchy in milk" claims called into question.

BATTLE CREEK, MI: In the seemingly never ending tit-for-tat struggle for 2-dimensional leadership, new battle lines have been drawn. Yesterday, credible new sources stepped forward calling into question one leading candidate's resume and qualifications.

Independent sources suggest that Cap'n Crunch, decorated veteran and skipper of storied vessel, "The Guppy," may actually be lactose intolerant and never saw any "real milk action." This stepped-up campaign mudslinging follows on last month's still-unanswered Crunch demands to know "How'd you get that pot of gold, Lucky? Does the IRS know?"

Amid claims and counter-claims of "rotting the teeth of America's Future[sic]," no campaign charge is left behind: "Our candidate's been in the bowl--Vitamin D, 2%, Skim and soy. We know the horrors of Dairy and non-dairy substitutes," said Lt. Rocket J. Squirrel, (Ret.), Communications Director for Crunch.

Hearing the charges, incumbent Lucky the Leprechaun, on a campaign swing through Indiana told voters at a Waffle House in Bloomington, "I knew General Mills. I served with General Mills; General Mills was a friend of mine. You, Cap'n, are no General Mills."

General Mills was on maneuvers and unavailable for comment at the time of this report, but American Flagg, patriot, past Cartoon Commander-in-Chief and unofficial advisor to the Crunch campaign noted: "If I was Mr. Lucky, I'd pipe down.... 'Magically Delicious? Pink moons? Purple horseshoes? Sounds pretty 'girly' to me. Not that there's anything wrong with that."

====

Okay, John Murden has his own reasons, most likely unrelated to dairy products. Still, too bad he didn't stay with it. But it's understandable.

I don't know John. But, it's a fair bet that the 2-dimensional, cramped nature of Richmond's self-regard is a powerful reason why plenty of talented people--civic, business, cultural--keep their heads down, or just keep moving on.

That's not news. But Valerie did ask the question: If you could see any local blogger take office (locally or nationally), who would you want it to be and why?

I don't know if I can come up with a name, but I'm gonna spend the next day or few coming up with a why. Who knows, maybe some folks might recognize a little of themselves in the Why. I have a feeling that no "Why" is a pretty big part of our blockage and siloage.

That, and not enough cartoons.

(PS: I cannot tell a lie. I cheated and reprised the Cap'n from here)

Zoinks! Boingboinged for Richmond Public Schools' Mind Games and Thomas Edison

Wa-hey. What a way to start the first proper week of practice. Cory Doctorow has the blurb here. Thanks boingers!

EULA - End User License Agreement. Edison invented that, too

Edison_Eula_closeup
Originally uploaded by fouro

Read the EULA. (flickr) Tom didn't just want to protect his IP, he wanted to set market price-floors, too. The rascal.

Patented in Great Britain, Germany, France and other Countries. This record is sold upon the condition that it shall not be re-sold to or by any unauthorized dealer or used for duplication, and that it shall not be sold, or offered for sale, by the original, or any subsequent purchaser (except by authorized jobber or factor to an authorized retail dealer) for less than 35 cents in the United States, nor in other countries for less than the price given in the current Edison catalogues of the country in which it is sold. Upon any breach of this condition, the license to use and vend this record, implied from such sale, immediately terminates.

You can handle the truth. Uncle Sam's social media Flowchart

(Hunter S. Thompson Motivational Posters - via buildings and food)

Globalnerdy has the USAF Rules of Engagement for Blogging. Yeah, I know it's odd to look at; like seeing Jack Welch at a Phish concert. But you have to give credit to the flyboys taking the web seriously, even if it's mostly from a top-down concern for Operational Security (translation: blabbermouths and leakers) and Image Management (translation: PR as organizational botox). Let's wait till the Joint Chiefs are screaming "sockpuppet!" and "astroturf!" as they argue budget appropriations. Then we'll know the world has turned.

Hey, maybe they're today's Lieutenants and Captains, modeled after my favorite Cartesian dualist grunt.

Colonel: Marine, what is that button on your body armour?
Joker: A peace symbol, sir.
Colonel: Where'd you get it?
Joker: I don't remember, sir.
Colonel: What is that you've got written on your helmet?
Joker: "Born to Kill," sir.
Colonel: You write "Born to Kill" on you helmet, and you wear a peace button. What's that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?
Joker: No, sir.
Colonel: Well what is it supposed to mean?
Joker: I don't know, sir.
Colonel: You don't know very much do you?
Joker: No sir.
Colonel: You better get your head and your ass wired together or I will take a giant shit on you.
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Now answer my question, or you'll be standing tall before The Man.
Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man sir.
Colonel: The what?
Joker: The duality of man, the Jungian thing, sir.
Colonel: Who's side are you on, son?
Joker: Our side, sir.
Colonel: Don't you love your country?
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Well how about getting with the program? Why don't you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Son, all I've ever asked of my Marines is for them to obey my orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help the Viet-namese because inside every gook, there is an American trying to get out. It's a hardball world, son. We've got to try to keep our heads until this peace craze blows over.
Joker: Aye aye, sir.
[link]

Blogging was born in a recession. Good ideas always are.

ButtonALLBlog brings good stuff from their visit to the Consumer Electronics Show, but it isn't all shiny and doesn't need batteries: A brutally great Q&A between Keynoters Robert Scoble and Gary Vaynerchuck. (ButtonALL has their bios linked.) A snip on recognizing opportunity cleverly disguised as a smash in the face, and on traditional companies missing the point, yet again:

The Economy

• Blogging was born in the last recession. Unemployed software engineers built platforms for themselves and friends to rant about the state of their “f*d company” world. They started blogging just for fun, but it unwittingly started the next revolution in media and direct to consumer communications. S
• Everything is cheap right now: labor, real estate, bandwidth. ROI is easy when the expenses are nominal. “Real Money” and “Real Good Sh*t” gets made in the next 2-3 years of this downturn. While the other bears are in their caves hibernating, you should be out foraging for food (sure, less food but a lot less competition). Anyone willing to work and hustle during this period will gain marketshare. V

Corporate America

• Blogging/Twitter is changing everything. Many companies just don’t get this “real-time feedback” world and are getting their “asses kicked” because of it. Best Buy executives were following Scoble around that day and seemed awe-stricken by his constant communication with his readership and friends. S, V
• Best Buy being surprised is “f’ing awesome.” While the slow moving corporations figure it out (”it’s phenomenal they don’t understand”), the nimble little blog can jump on opportunity….However, the gap is closing. “When I see FoxNews talking about Twitter, I get sad.” V

Given the previous posts about LandAmerica and Cisco, these points really caught my eye for obvious reasons. Go read the rest of the ButtonALL synopsis on Scoble's and Vaynerchuck's advice for virgin bloggers and on focusing and making some kind of return (coin, work, reputation, friends) out of this wacky series of tubes all the groovy kids are raving about.

As for the "good things are always born in a recession" part. Scarcity and fear freak out "the satisfied." The best and boldest and coolest inventors and innovators (and the investors behind them) are never satisfied. And scarcity makes new ideas necessary and suddenly feasible. Take a look here: sort of a how the depression catalyzed 20th century ideas and prosperity.

Dude, where's my State Motto?

"Thus always to tyrants" has that cool Rebel Alliance v. The Empire feel to it, but Virginia's state motto has nothing on some others. Maine has the LA pickup line: "I direct." Oregon has a Michael Bolton lyric: "She flies with her own wings."

Emily Wick does them all in a wood-block naive style that gold-leafed letters in granite just can't match. Here's The Fifty, via neatorama.

LandAmerica. From Sea to shining C-minus

Then on to BBB-minus, ending with an "F." Come on boys and girls, Fortune 500 companies are hard to come by and nice to have around. Richmond Times-Dispatch, today:

The chairman and chief executive of the bankrupt LandAmerica Financial Group Inc. is stepping down and the Henrico County-based company will sell its remaining business units, it said today.

...

What was once a top employer in the Richmond area and won "most admired" recognition from Fortune magazine for the past two years filed for Chapter 11 protection Nov. 26.

The Dirt Lawyer (a Chicago commercial real estate attorney who's worth keeping up with) gave us the name of the poison in November.

The skinny? LandAm apparently had a toxic exchange subsidiary that invested about $290 million in auction rate securities that may take forever to get rid of. And you need to access that money to faciliate the exchanges. In short? Liquidity crisis.

Yeah, something's all wet. Or maybe too cut and dry? Saying "liquidity crisis," as so many are, is like blaming the fork for your high cholesterol level. A quick Google offers us (via a Deloitte management guy no less) something [from 2006] that might be viewed as irony, what with all this gate-keepered "sudden news":

Fortune 500 blog project: #500 LandAmerica needs blogs

Oct 23, 2006 ... I love your explanation of why LandAmerica needs a blog (or multiple blogs!). I' ve said the same thing over and over of several blogless ...
it.toolbox.com/blogs/blogpotato/fortune-500-blog-project-500-landamerica-needs-blogs-12452 - 66k - Cached - Similar pages -

Come on Genworth, we're rooting for you!

Ipanema Beer Feast: My favorite beer was made by kids

Well, Tuesday the 13th brings on the Ipanema Beer Feast. I can't decide if I'm going as Astrud Gilberto, a beatnik or an interpretive bikini-wax artist. Either way, it'll be exciting to see what's happening with local craft brews. Mmm... beer also has a round-up of other upcoming local events.

And yeah, my favorite porter and wheat really was craft-made by kids. Okay, Mom and Dad helped too.

A few years back, one of my then-agency partners, Scott Sparks, came across a Virginia Business article on a shoestring nano-micro-brew operation in Williamsburg. Since Jamestown/APVA was a paying client we were helping, we had a perfect excuse to drop by. The brewmaster, Hugh Burns, was an ex-Stealth Fighter pilot who'd left flying and reengaged his biology degree to promote the metabolic and autolytic wonders of yeast. Hugh learned us about filtering or not filtering (much better) and bottle conditioning and other neat stuff that I forget. What I remember clearly was his answer to Who's your help? "My wife Nadia runs the business side and the kids help out with labeling and all kinds of stuff." Like I said, nano-micro-brew. And it was really good (the only "review" I could find online).

After talking about how he could better master his local market of retail and restaurants, they made Nadia his media buyer and Kinko's their production department for ads, table tents and tap-head promos. And we made his kids the marketing directors:





It's been ages since I've seen the Burns, but Google tells us that Willamsburg AleWerks bought their gear in 2006. The Barleyblog gives their range a taste. Here's hoping that Sean and Emily Burns have found something they enjoy as much as they did working with Mom & Dad.

Does Twitter have a really low Dunbar Number?

Is Twitter really a 21st Century hive-mind network, or just the same old daisy chain? Via firstmonday, some Hewlett Packard researchers find that tweeters may be densely packed, but they ain't no flock.



[Bolding is mine]

Figures 4 and 5 show that even though the number of friends initially increases as the number of followees increases, after a while the number of friends saturates. This trend can be explained by the fact that the cost of declaring a new followee is very low compared to the cost of maintaining friends (i.e., exchanging directed messages with other users). Hence, the number of people a user actually communicates with eventually stops increasing while the number of followees can continue to grow indefinitely.

[snipped some good detail]

Many people, including scholars, advertisers and political activists, see online social networks as an opportunity to study the propagation of ideas, the formation of social bonds and viral marketing, among others. This view should be tempered by our findings that a link between any two people does not necessarily imply an interaction between them. As we showed in the case of Twitter, most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view. Thus the need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend.

Well, that potentially knocks the wheels from under certain Web 2.0 assumptions, doesn't it? But is it surprising, really? "Maintaining" friendships is high cost, always has been once we blew past the boundaries of village and clan. In those times, maintenance opportunities were likely achieved for us as the automatic by-product of constant proximity. (James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed: "Before 1450, life was intensely local. Most people lived and died in the same cottage, and never went further afield than 7 miles.")

Of course, that same syndrome, everyone knowing your every move and action, is one of the reasons the town of my wife's grandparents, Gettysburg SD, has no young people anymore.

I'd be interested in seeing how this plays out with professional (intra-)nets, like those in the previous post that Cisco is trying to plus and push. Somehow, I'd bet the binder of a paycheck and actual peers depending on you, not to mention promotion requirements, would encourage more committed flocking. Let's hope so.

Speaking of claustrophobic village-life, I wondered what wiki said about Dunbar and his number. It's funny to think of the Chamber of Commerce or First Fridays as "social grooming"...

Dunbar's surveys of village and tribe sizes also appeared to approximate this predicted value, including 150 as the estimated size of a neolithic farming village; 150 as the splitting point of Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound on the number of academics in a discipline's sub-specialization; 150 as the basic unit size of professional armies in Roman antiquity and in modern times since the 16th century; and notions of appropriate company size.

Dunbar has argued that 150 would be the mean group size only for communities with a very high incentive to remain together. For a group of this size to remain cohesive, Dunbar speculated that as much as 42% of the group's time would have to be devoted to social grooming.

Turning Japanese. Instant Asian-chic for boring English names

Found: "Mark"

This is what the name "Mark" looks like in Japanese:

It is pronounced "MAAKU". (Consonants are pronounced more or less the same way as in English. "A" sounds like a in father, but shorter. "U" sounds like oo in hook, but with less rounding of the lips. Double vowels like "AA" are held for twice the duration of single vowels.)

You can search for another name if you like: [linky]

"it is unacceptable not to share what you know"

Karl Fisch, Colorado educator (and creator of 2006's way-gone-viral Did you know? education-shift presentation) has a look at the surprising goings-on on at Cisco. He directs his editorial comments/questions to fellow teachers and administrators, but they're relevant to anyone lost in the tactical weeds of their particular profession and, perhaps burdened by the "Walk before we can run" managerial mindset. From the TheFischbowl:

The December/January issue of Fast Company has an interesting article on Cisco and its CEO John Chambers. Here are some lengthy excerpts (emphasis added by me).

He has been taking Cisco through a massive, radical, often bumpy reorganization. The goal is to spread the company’s leadership and decision making far wider than any big company has attempted before, to working groups that currently involve 500 executives. This move, Chambers says, reflects a new philosophy about how business can best work in a networked world. “In 2001, we were like most high-tech companies, with one or two primary products that were really important to us,” he explains. “All decisions came to the top 10 people in the company, and we drove things back down from there.” Today, a network of councils and boards empowered to launch new businesses, plus an evolving set of Web 2.0 gizmos – not to mention a new financial incentive system – encourage executives to work together like never before. Pull back the tent flaps and Cisco citizens are blogging, vlogging, and virtualizing, using social-networking tools that they’ve made themselves and that, in many cases, far exceed the capabilities of the commercially available wikis, YouTubes, and Facebooks created by the kids up the road in Palo Alto.

Cisco is moving from “me” to “we.” What about your district? Your school? Your classroom?

An avowed Republican (and a cochair of John McCain’s presidential campaign), Chambers politely ignored my observation that Cisco’s new regimen feels a bit like a socialist revolution. But Chambers did kick off the analyst conference with a slide that read, COLLABORATION: “CO-LABOR”; WORKING TOWARD A COMMON GOAL. In language and spirit, Chamber’s transformation is a mashup of radical isms and collectivist catchphrases. Of course, with analysts suggesting that the “collaboration marketplace” could be a $34 billion opportunity, it’s radicalism of a reassuringly capitalist bent.

Cisco is emphasizing working toward a common goal and developing the collaboration marketplace. In your last staff meeting did you discuss a collaboration learning-place, or did you discuss moving borderline students up to the next cut score?

Trust and openness are words you hear a lot in the endlessly optimistic world of Web 2.0, but at Cisco, it seems to be more than a PowerPoint mantra, even to my jaundiced eye. As Mitchell and I settle down to our conversation in an open space not 25 feet from Chamber’s office, I can hear the CEO chatting on the phone with customers. Mitchell, who is charged with encouraging the company’s rank and file to adopt new technology, is undistracted. “We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you know,” he says.

"Unacceptable not to share what you know." Yeah. But what if you've spent 20 years--or 300 of them--building a reputation? What if you inherently know that the fetish for sorting is counter-productive or wasteful, but creating, then checking off, boxes is how you are evaluated? What if what you know--or who--is your only concrete symbol of worth? You've worked hard to adapt, to get along, to suck it up, dammit.

Does anybody like it when someone flutters in and says "Time's up, move along"?

From media and their "anonymous sources" to Professionals and the knowledge of their arcana, the hoarding and obfuscation of information or influence from the top down is being rendered a low-efficiency model by technology and it's levelling influence. (Setting aside the too-clever-by-half and now-dead Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, just ask all the accountants replaced by Quickbooks.) Heck, even iTunes is abandoning DRM--the media industry's 21st Century version of hoarding--after only a few years of valiant effort.

That's the trend, but the on-ground resistance is still problematic, eh?

For people, organizations and communities, the one thing that remains an obstacle to accepting this implacable truth of rolling change is the explicit assault it makes on our accrued self image--the difficulty letting go of it, of letting it become something more. Because, "something more" likely means a new, different thing that was decided without you, by market forces or generational and technological change. Maybe, it's the result of your own success--your ideas have run their course and you've neglected your upkeep and, therefore, obsoleted yourself. Just like Corporations do all the time but resist admitting with ferocious vigor.

This would likely explain why there's no Union Pacific Airlines. Or no Ford Prius. And no Greater Richmond MetroRail Company.

The Hindu(?) proverb goes "The true nobility is in being superior to your precious self." I think maybe that's fancy talk for get out of your own way. For this reason alone, Cisco deserves an A for effort, and Chambers, a Gold Star for humility.

The question for me, after years of head/wall/banging experience in similar organaizational brand initiatives is, simply, how is Cisco creating a culture where it's unacceptable not to share your care? I ask this more and more often in business situations, because shared care--converging agreement on what matters, what moves us--the actual affinity between people, is the roadblock. And I'm certainly not claiming any wisdom in that statement...

"I don't care what you know until I know that you care."

Some sayAristotle wrote that, others think John C. Maxwell. Doesn't matter though, since it holds so very true. And universal. And, sadly, in so many "professional" environments, "care" seems to be just too, well, irelevant or squishy. The best way I've found to eliminate this remove is to talk about it, early and with those who hold the checkbook. The conversation is often begun with a skeezy aphorism I can claim.

Nobody ever threw themselves on a hand-grenade for a spreadsheet.

You know what? I really hope Cisco and Chambers have done their homework AND their heartwork. I hope their lexicon is not limited to TCO and ROI and ROE. I hope it includes a real awareness of ROEI, Return on Emotional Investment. Because that's what they're asking many to abandon. But let's be optimistic. In Cisco's case, the future Chambers talks about is not alien, it's not like a whole body blood transfusion. Their entire reason for being relies on awe and respect for the networked existence, the understanding of individual, unique nodes MAKING the value of the network. In fact, faith in 1s and 0s, in their power is not a problem at all at Cisco: Digits are predictable and manageable. They do what you tell them. They respond to reason.

So, it's an older form of the analog hole they are tackling, isn't it? As the article suggests, the revolutionary aspect of their change is getting turf-conscious executives and professionals--lots of emotional equity and habits of expertise there--to lay down their weapons and play nice together. That's the ultimate and age-old low-tech problem.

Yeah. Whether we're talking about Cisco's efforts at renewal and change, or those of my little town of Richmond, all the panels and consultants and formulas and grand initiatives in the world can't overcome something I heard at a seminar once:

The Heart has reasons that reason cannot know.

Believe it or not, that is from a hard-core mathematician and scientist, Blaise Pascal. He wasn't saying you couldn't know or understand, just that using the wrong tools, asking the wrong questions, and in your favored vocabulary, will doom your efforts no matter how good intended or deep your pockets. He saw the difference between analog and digital, and respected both.

Somehow, if that guy could grasp the gist of motivation's seeming mystery, I'm guessing plenty of other number crunchers, have a chance too.

===

Something extra for the process-minded after all that "touchy-feely": The transition cycle - a template for human responses to change. Awareness that more 'change agents" could benefit from if they don't already.



Graphic on Human Response to Change via EOS LifeWork. Try their guidelines for organizations anticipating change from a very useful broader article.

Tis the season to think, design, test, make and break things

Gary Hustwit's Objectified has a trailer. Should be good. (Via fimoculous)

Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.

We Think - a video of the concepts in Charlie Leadbetter's book of the same name (Chapters here.) (link via Karl Fisch, I think)

mass innovation, not mass production

We Think explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.

Ideas take life when they are shared. That is why the web is such a potent platform for creativity and innovation.

It's also at the heart of why the web should be good for : democracy, by giving more people a voice and the ability to organise themselves; freedom, by giving more people the opportunity to be creative and equality, by allowing knowledge to be set free.

But sharing also brings with it dilemmas.

It leaves us more open to abuse and invasions of privacy.

Participation is not always a good thing: it can just create a cacophony.

Collaboration is sustained and reliable only under conditions which allow for self organisation.

Makers - the Do-It-Yourself Counterculture. (We're gonna ask the question later this week: Why do San Mateo and Austin have Maker Faires but the birthplace of Temple's Toggle, home of Frank Sprague and Giles Jackson, Tredegar and the Manchester Old and Historic District does not?)



Manifesto: If you can't open it, you don't own it. Makers have a tv channel too

Speaking of teevee, the Godfather...



And a less oldie from Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users: T-shirt-first development

Guy Kawasaki (the original Mac evangelist for Apple) said it in his 1992 book Selling the Dream: make the t-shirt before you make the product.

If you're a team lead, project manager, open source evangelist... make the t-shirt. If you're promoting a business, service, supporting a cause... make the t-shirt. And the more subversive, the better. If the t-shirt is for internal use only, see how far you can push before marketing or legal steps in. The more maverick the shirt, the more valued it becomes. At Sun, for example, there was always somebody trying to make an underground, unapproved shirt featuring the Java mascot Duke. If you were lucky enough to get one, that meant something.

I know...it's just a frickin' shirt. How can a t-shirt mean something? Think about it. Go look in your closet. Go look in your garage. How many special t-shirts are you holding onto for sentimental reasons? Be honest. How often have you lusted after someone else's limited edition shirt? If you're really honest, you'll remember the time you "borrowed" someone else's special t-shirt and "forgot" to give it back.

What's with all the design links? Just getting in the mood. Thursday begins coaching the 2009 Richmond Public Schools Mind Games season. Umm, We are Fisher!


Photo/slideshow: Mark Gormus/Richmond Times-Dispatch

And yes, we make the t-shirts first.

Malcolm Gladwell addresses Richmond. No, really.

The video is Malcolm Gladwell speaking for an hour to the movers and shakers of Calgary, Canada back in March of 2008. He was invited to a thing called ACAD SmartNight, hosted by Alberta College of Art + Design. Why'd they invite him? To talk, in general terms, about "revitalizing their community."

If you're from Richmond, his words and terms will resonate. If not, they'll likely resonate anyway. His hour begins at the 31:00 mark of the video.

Okay. At about 50 minutes, Gladwell's talk is worth the time and it'll give you a taste of his current book, Outliers: The Story of Success. For background, the book (and part of the video) explores the idea that success is the result of a few things (the bolded terms below, except for concerted cultivation and meaningful work, are my clunky headlines):

• Head Starts - or first mover's advantage; birth day and administrative age-sorting rules favor kids in sport, academics, etc in terms of maturity advantage, with domino effects as we age: good for those at the front of the line, nost so for those further back.
• The Lucky Sperm Club - middle class and higher kids get antsy, helicopter parents as adjunct tutors/facilitators with a checkbook.
• Concerted Cultivation - those same middle class and higher kids are exposed to a certain "entitlement mentality" via their parents - if you have a question, ask it; if you want something, expect that it is is possible if you expend effort.
  
• Cultural Sensibility - if your familial/social/ethnic group decides to be "about" something: hard work, craft-skill, the value of an education, collaboration or any other collection of admirable values, you will imprint to that mosaic. And this basket of ideals will be a firm launch pad for whatever talent you may have while others with comparable talent but lacking those mosaic values will face tougher odds. This happy accident of almost subconcious self-determination is one positive aspect of what he calls community.
  
• Meaningful Work - we create structures and social orders that benefit and perpetuate these ordering (adminsitrative and counting) frames more than they aid the greater number people working within them. The frames are usually culturally inflexible since those who designed them had first say and therefore designed to what they knew and wanted - to what advantaged them. First say often becomes final say. These barriers/structures outlast their makers and live on, imposing a false standard or claiming false utility. Meaningful work, the stuff that engages our talents and assets, regardless of our background, faces these arbitrary barriers. For no good or practical reason, talent is lost and new Bill Gateses--the unlucky or poorly positioned ones--don't happen.

History and geneology and timing mate with talent to make success is mostly it. Gladwell leads off the book (and the talk) by telling a marvelous story about an "anachronistic" small Pennsylvania town called Roseto, settled by new emigrant Italians in the late 1800s. I won't spoil the surprise, but suffice to say there's a certain bondedness and shared cosmology--a particular flavor of community--in the small town that accrues some interesting benefits. Watch, or buy the book to get the story.

All in all, the book is an anecdotal argument--chock full of them, ranging from Gates' unique formative experiences as a kid born in 1955 with then-unprecedented adolescent access to early computer terminals, to the dynamics of Chinese rice farming and its unique conceptual advantages and lessons. I might quibble with some of his correlation-is-causality assertions, but I buy his overall drift. In the end, success is the sum of parts, many of which we don't recognize because of their background and cultural/historic nature. Yes, some are "born on third base and think they hit a triple." And, yes, too many of these latter types comprise a narrow archaic definition of American "success" that needs a recalibration to match and catch up to our social and economic changes of the last 50 to 100 years.

That's my simplistic overview. For a decent discussion of Gladwell and whether he has a tipping point, try Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.

===

Now, for Richmond and what Gladwell's story of success points toward. In the video, he flatters the folks from Calgary at the 41:00 mark

You're all here today because you want to start a conversation about Calgary's future. and because Calgary has been presented with an extraordinary, once in a century opporttunity. You're a medium size city that's about to become a big city, a regional city that's about to become an international city. You're a prosperous city that's about to be come a really, really wealthy city. You have an opportunity to build something, a cultural and creative community of a truly world class level. But the question you want to ask yourselves is what kind of community you want to build. [Emphasis mine- fouro]

That will sound very familiar to Richmonders because you can't swing a cat around here without hitting some group or collection of groups parleying endlessly about "who we are." In their own way, in their own narrow subsets, they are casting about and asking questions about "community."

And that's not a bad thing. But, much as we heard at a certain political party's convention last year, "Community" and the "organizing" of it draws suspicion--or sneers and hoots--from many, even in Richmond's army of talkers. They get, derisively so, but misguidedly so, that community is a "soft" thing. And their definition of community, their love of and interest in the thing, ends at their nose or at the front door of their organization or interest. Included in this mix are many who will loudly proclaim they are "about results" and are "anxious to get on with it." They are about "hard" things: For a thing to be real to them, they must be able to touch it, measure it, and claim it. They want shovels in the ground, ribbon cuttings, and a guaranteed path to Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortization.

Soft versus Hard.

Do you see the paradox? Community is a complex system. We all know that. But, what community comprises primarily is an idea binding a collection of affinities in motion: A shared notion of what matters. Gladwell doesn't say as much, but that's what he's getting at. Community is an intrinsic good, not an instrumental one. (We'll get more into this melding of soft into hard, and into realizing it, in an upcoming post.)

The things that impelled narrow "success" in Gladwell's examples in Outliers were structural: Junior hockey players born early, fell into the league's age sweet spot. A calendar drawn up, ostensibly to organize things, unintentionally set up a structural advantage toward kids born in Jan, Feb, March. Because of this, those kids, with their bodies slightly more mature than other seemingly "identically-able" 10 year-olds born later in the year, went on to dominate and were positioned to be identified and culled as potential talents by coaches. (I have a 10 year-old, and 10 and 1 month is far different, mentally and physically, to his now 10 and 9 months.)

This simple "born lucky" aspect is perpetuated each year because the math didn't change--the more advanced 10 year-old becomes the more advanced 13, 14, and 17 year-old. The reason? His Outlier advantage was derived from an accident of birth that positioned him for extra notice and attention. It really is as simple as the old adage: The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Now, extrapolate that to a city. Who gets heard? Who got heard in 1955 when an interstate was being planned? Who gets heard or noticed when someone says: Downtown Richmond needs Economic Development and incentives? Who gets heard when someone says SOLs will have a downside for employers looking for versatile problem solvers? Who gets heard when somone asks: What does a "City of the Future" walk and talk like--what does it care about, Mayor Wilder?

Since this is a blog post, I'm already way over my word limit so I'll wrap it up for now.

I intend this to be the first of many posts using Gladwell and guys like Richard Florida and even Jim Crupi as examples of trees obscuring our little central Virginia forest. Their concepts and recommendations are real and often useful, but they presume some ability and awareness--some readiness--in Richmond that's just not there. Buying a Hawai'ian shirt doesn't make you Magnum P.I., and inviting trendy authors or consultants to a town unreconciled with its identity and heritage is no formula for success. And, when I say, there's no readiness, I'm generally not talking about the multitudes. I speak specifically of leaders and influencers. They're a well-meaning group for the most part, but they're also stuck in a deeply cynical loop of frustration and over-complication due, in most part, to a mistaken application of history and it's lessons and value, things unique to Richmond. And, if there's one thing Richmond deeply, desperately wants, it is to Be Unique.

As you read, make up your own mind. I'm gonna include examples from my prior work, or my company's, with Jamestown, Colonial Williamsburg and Virginia Tourism and others. In the spirit of open source, I'm gonna reveal some of the stuff and conversations that we've been involved in with people whose jobs it is to guide Richmond to better things. As you might guess, a lot didn't get done or acted upon. For not very good reasons born of those silos and parochialism mentioned above.

We're good at studies and working groups in Richmond. Some say "We'll get back to you" should be on our license plates. As my partner, Shelli Brady, the ex-planning commission vice-chair and early champion of Manchester says, "Meetings and formulas are usually a dodge. You can do some social engineering with spaces, but that's no substitute for leadership with courage and heart." Indeed, "heart" not love is what Gladwell speaks of with his little town of Roseto, Pennsylvania.

Richmond doesn't want to be Loved. It wants, needs, to love itself.

And it can't do that until it is comfortable with itself; until it finds context to focus all that disconnected pretext of history and anxiety, and hopefulness.

I do love my city, so I'm taking a chance here. But, as I wrote the other day, Chance favors the bold, right?

The system is broken. Admit that, and the solutions become clear.

Michael Lewis of Liars Poker fame has, with David Einhorn, written a very very worthwhile read in Sunday's NYT. A snip from The End of the Financial World as we know it:

...OUR financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense. Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that’s the problem: there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest.

The credit-rating agencies, for instance...

[snip]

And here’s the most incredible thing of all: 18 months into the most spectacular man-made financial calamity in modern experience, nothing has been done to change that, or any of the other bad incentives that led us here in the first place.

Bad incentives lead to bad experiences. Yes, those guys responsible for evaluating risk engaged in some very risky behaviours. Because "there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market."

Serious pressure. From outside. That doesn't mean outside of organizations--our organizations. Maybe yours. It means outside of the bubble of leadership, that once comfy home of Insulated Deciders.

It's probably little consolation to some at this time, but now is an important moment in crash psychology. As paradigms shift they paralyze the old guard. It is their familiar model and narrative, after all, that is crumbling before their disbelieving eyes. This is the time new leaders and new "cosmologies" (Karl Weick, Harvard Bus. Review) are either being formed, weighed, or given a podium. In other words, chance favors the bold. Are you stepping up? Do you have the balls?

If you do, form a group in your organization to talk out your ideas--off hours if necessary--because there's strength and feedback in numbers. Find people whose chief skill isn't only bitching about the company. They likely can't be trusted or relied upon, even in good times. Look for the lost idealists. They're most often the cynics with a decent track record nonetheless. Don't misperceive humility, it often masks courage. Be semi-sensible but find the real, emotional core of your company's business. The chances are 4-to-1 that leadership has lost sight of this in their efforts to appear, well, "leader"-like. Explore the idea that your product or service is the means to some other purpose--some more valued satisfaction or realization--beside its practical description. (Hint: If Starbucks sold "coffee" or Apple offered "MP3 players" or Anthropologie sold "unusual stuff" or Ukrop's sold "Groceries" or Frank Gehry "designed buildings" those companies wouldn't be the "risky-is-safe" outliers that they are.)

It's an emotional time, even with all the stiff upper lips. But you don't overpower emotion with pure logic. You find a better more useful, more compelling emotional benefit. And I don't mean fear--you're looking for antidotes to fear, enablers of optimism, energy and courage. Entertain this idea because, most likely, the practical use of your product and your means of providing it is already dangerously close to "blah", a commodity.

If so, it is at this point because somebody decided it be so; somebody preferred the safety of status quo that likely no longer offers much cover.

Lewis again, from part 2 of his NYT article, How to repair a broken financial world:

If we are going to spend trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, it makes more sense to focus less on the failed institutions at the top of the financial system and more on the individuals at the bottom. Instead of buying dodgy assets and guaranteeing deals that should never have been made in the first place, we should use our money to A) repair the social safety net, now badly rent in ways that cause perfectly rational people to be terrified; and B) transform the bailout of the banks into a rescue of homeowners.

Perfectly rational people are terrified. Let's face it, many are shell-shocked and in stand-by mode. Worry rules. The one thing they'd love is the return of certainty. Can't have it. Ain't gonna happen.

In this environment, the one thing people need is positive shock, constructive surprise, not tentative moves and soothing words. Well, this is the realm of product and system design--and what they can deliver--that gets overlooked during "fat" times. (Read Don Norman's wonderful "Being analog" for inspiration on where your opportunities can lay.) And those terms, positive shock, constructive surprise--the understanding of them--are only in the lexicon of people whose chief worry isn't what's "proper" or "seemly." As Lewis' article points out, all kinds of "polite" and "appropriate" behaviour--hedging of bets and words, abdication of conscience--is what got us here.

New ideas, latent offerings born from the resources and talents we all call our companies, are the ticket to renewal. And new ideas, never an easy executive sell in the best of times, will not come from the top floor. No money? Be brilliant in your poverty. (It's easier than you think: Necessity being the mother of invention and so forth, scarcity makes you savvier and if it doesn't you starve or freeze.) Be asymmetrical and befriend unusual allies; look for not-so-obvious common-cause relationships in your market that seemed unneccessary in times of busy and plenty. There's lots of useful surprise there, and burden-sharing opportunities, too. Recall that 30-minute pizza delivery and banks in grocery stores were once thought ridiculous or immature fantasies by responsible people "in the know." Yeah, they were. Genius is defined by rescuing the simple from the messy and convoluted, and from the "responsible." Again, remember Lewis' article: over-complication and officiousness are now impractical, even deadly.



As you can hopefully tell, we're not talking aimless anarchy or frivolity here. Nor pie in the sky. Asymmetrical or counter-intuitive thinking? You bet. The picture above is one such real-world example of constructive surprise and its power that I've mid-wifed or witnessed. But that dead desk was the just the beginning of one sustained (and successful) exploration to shake doldrums and evade a larger corporate death.

It's time to cut lots of desks in half. It's time to dust off the ambition and reacquaint with your inner MacGyver. Now. Because, believe it or not, 2009 will get worse in many sectors. Unless you make it better.

Things are bad, until we decide they are good again.

A post to start the new year on a useful note. The title stems from a conversation had in the boardroom of a client company several years back. It was the culmination of a discussion between partners facing necessary but discomforting changes--some forced on them externally, some due to managerial inattention or distraction.

The choice was simple, but like all really clear choices that involve people, it was one that had varying degrees of support. The choice was shift focus or stay pat? A) Explore new but untested (and un-procedured) lines of business. Or, B) ride their mature horse till it most likely dropped dead in the road. There were several camps. There was a palpable tension. Then, some plaintive speechifying ending with...

"If we have to shift our core everytime there's a downturn, what does that make us?" said partner #1

"Solvent," said one joker.

"This downturn is different," begged partner#2.

"How?" said partner #3.

"This one isn't responding well to good news," said partner #2.

"Or memos," said the joker.

Partner #1: "Very funny. This is a bad situation."

"Is it?" asked the joker.

As I recall things, this is where the discussion became a bit more productive. The good news of partner#2 was mostly visible only to partner two and his CFO dashboard. Partner #1's essential "core" was really a grab bag of previous choices, much discussed, and all as yet really uncommitted to.

Some of the partners were more troubled than others. Number 1, the most senior, was pissed his chances at defining the organization, beyond his dabbling and unrefined pet visions, had now passed. His choices were being dictated by market trends, competitors' practices and the desires of a younger staff to move into fresher work and more satisfying methods of achieving that work. Partner #3, in quiet moments away from the rest, would name "boredom" as her chief emotional response to her important position within the company.

It became obvious to the assembled group that their angst over "change" had less to do with the need to change and more to do with the fact that it wasn't in "The Plan."

Their plan.

Finally, after summarizing what he viewed as their "core"--enthusiastic problem solvers--and what he believed were some viable and useful courses of action, the joker dropped his line...

Things are bad, until we decide they are good again.

And that was the point. Times were "bad" because the times weren't cooperating with SOP. "Bad" equaled involuntary and dynamic. "Bad" equaled discomfort and challenges to worldviews. The times, they were a changing--had changed already--but they didn't get a permission slip.

The ultimate irony? A prior "Bad time" had been the catalyst for these partners to jump ship from an old line firm where they were associates and junior partners facing a grey ceiling. They left to do things their way; in what they saw as a better way. And so they did.

The memories of starting their firm in those times? Unabashedly Good. The best. And, because of the dynamism and the unknowable, not despite it.

Last I spoke to her, Partner #3 was no longer bored. Somehow, together, I think they learned how to survive what "Good times" can do to you.

=====

The catalyst for this post was a piece by David Brooks in the NYT containing this highlight:

In “The Unwisdom of Crowds,” in The Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell explores the contradictions between common-sense morality and the rules of finance. In a time of economic crisis, common sense tells you to hunker down and save money. But this is the exact moment when a central bank has to lend freely and spend profligately....Fundamentally, Caldwell is asking an uncomfortable question about the morality of capitalism. The system is not just based on hard work.

“To be blunt, credit is successfully re-established when financial elites say, ‘When.’ Credit is close to a synonym for the mood of the ruling class. To say an economy is based on credit is to say it is based on animal mysteries. Glamour, prestige, élan, sprezzatura, cutting a figure ... that is what the economy is made of.”

Exactly. Credit may be "frozen." But the refrigerant is nothing other than loss of faith and trust in the system and in its coin, honestly valued collateral. Smart people have been shown as deaf and dumb, yet they still hold the keys to the bus. Outlier economists predicting this have been vindicated if not wholly made heroes, yet. (Cassandra is still a low-percentage resume builder.) And, suddenly, theoretical invisible money seems a whole lot less attractive than actual signs of work being done and things being made.

Watch this date: January 20, 2009. Days or weeks from that day, a river of taxpayer capital is going to be unleashed for various and sundry projects. No bank board in its right mind will stand arms-crossed, holding its breath on some principle, as that tsunami of wealth and opportunity flows right under its nose. They WILL dive in with gusto.

But fight the urge to tut-tut as best you can. Some of these projects will fail, just as 70% of mergers and acquisitions fail. There will be inefficiencies, just as private healthcare needs 14 cents of a premium dollar for admin costs where medicare is capped at 4 cents per dollar. There will be folly and wild bets, just as we see in the local business section and the newsletters of every Chamber of Commerce in America. In other words, some of these projects will fail; and so what?

To our eyes, the point of this new money, and its potential, is not guaranteed success or some fairy tale of skyhigh ROI that a Bernie Madoff or a John Gutfreund peddles to the smart yet apparently quite gullible. Their schemes all relied on the urge for importance, power and heroism on the cheap, and quickly. Those guys counted on us wanting the benefits of courageousness and wisdom without us having to realize--work for and engage--those two things. Yes, leverage on the cheap, the appearance of derring-do but with the firewall of plausible deniability in the moral realm, explains both Madoff and the fall of the big money houses on Wall Street. (The WSJ interestingly tackles this smart/gullible conundrum here.) And, in a way, it describes our friends, The Partners.

Back to our point. This money is a proxy for vision, energy and optimism--for courage--when we can't hormonally or mentally provide our own. Economies are mostly psychology, as are corporate cultures. And psyches--or corporate worldviews--are, in most cases, up to us to decide or surrender to. Thankfully, one joker fulfilled his archetypal duty to his partners; he was a daredevil of simple truth-telling...

Things are bad, until we decide they are good again.

Need a loan? Expect a credit check. Need a doctor? Expect a credit check.

Star Tribune

What do detectives and hospitals have in common?

Both need to find people who don't necessarily want to be found.

That's why a Maple Grove company that used to cater to private investigators and collection agencies has remade itself for the health care industry as hospitals and clinics struggle with rising bad debt.

Dan Johnson, a former telecom executive, started SearchAmerica by combining various national computer databases to help clients search for individuals. Now, hospitals use his software to verify the identity of patients, screen them for financial assistance eligibility and predict the likelihood they will pay their bills.

SearchAmerica's roster of about 1,000 clients includes California's Kaiser Permanente as well as Allina Hospitals and Clinics, Fairview Health Services and HealthEast Care System in Minnesota.

Last month, the company was sold for $90 million to Experian PLC, a Dublin, Ireland-based financial services giant.

Click the link for an interview with SearchAmerica boss Johnson. It starts very encouragingly:

Q Tell me how your business came about.

A I started the company in 1994; my background is in the telecoms industry. What I know how to do is connect databases together geographically.

No, not much about the Hippocratic Oath or medical ethics in his resume or in the interview.

This is the system we have, by disinterest and default, and"Kludge" is too kind a term for ServiceAmerica's addition to things. It is related, in sensibility and action, to the larger system we are currently watching fall down the well *it* dug for itself. I'm reminded of Michael Chrichton's pop-chaotician from Jurassic Park, Dr. Ian Malcolm:

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

As noted many times hereabouts, the next 15 years are ones of renewal and rewriting rules, and recalibrating the definition of "pain"--pain in terms of well-being, and pain in trms of balance sheet health.

UPDATE: Just ran across this on PhRMA's selfless pursuit of truth and efficacy over profit at American Prospect. More of the same, twice daily, after meals.

In 2002, four intrepid researchers filed a Freedom of Information Act. But they weren't looking for information on Guantanamo or revelations from Cheney's lair. All they wanted was the FDA's drug analysis data. Taxpayer funded research. They got it. The studies examined were conducted between 1987 and 1999 andcovered Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor. They found, on average, that placebos were 80 percent as effective as the drugs.

Put aside the surprising results: Why didn't the public know about these studies? Why wasn't the medical community informed? The answer, as Marcia Angell argues in an important New York Review of Books article, is that our system of clinical evaluation is so riddled with conflicts of interests that "it is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines."