Nico Luchsinger

trying to make sense out of stuff

Maker's schedule vs. manager's schedule

I have recently re-read Paul Graham's essay on maker's vs. manager's schedule - still very good stuff:

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster.

The Art of Negative Advertising

On the internet, it's all about creating a positive image, a good reputation. It's about caring for your customers, providing them with great service, making them care about your company and your product.

Yeah, right:

It’s all part of a sales strategy, he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: “I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.”
[...]
Which means the owner of DecorMyEyes might be more than just a combustible bully with a mean streak and a potty mouth. He might also be a pioneer of a new brand of anti-salesmanship — utterly noxious retail — that is facilitated by the quirks and shortcomings of Internet commerce and that tramples long-cherished traditions of customer service, like deference and charm.

Wonderful article from the New York Times about the guy who makes a living by being rude to his customers.

Tweets from the past, or: Filters and serendipity

Funnel

In his new book «Where Good Ideas Come From», Steven B. Johnson at one point tries to defend the Web against its critics by asserting: «Filters reduce serendipity. [...] But beyond bookmarking, filters are a second-generation addition to the architecture of the web.» The critics he is referring to usually argue that the filters we employ to identify relevant information on the web make it more unlikely that we stumble upon something we didn't actively seek - serendipitous discovery.

It's true that most filters we currently have reduce serendipity. However, they don't necessarily need to. In fact, I believe that really good filters should actively introduce serendipity.

How would a serendipitous information filter look like? Just adding an element of randomness is not enough - there is simply too much information for this on the web.

A simple way to have a little serendipity (or at least what I understand as it) in your «information diet» is to revisit information - something the filters and systems we currently have are not designed for. I have written 177 posts on this Posterous; I have saved 1778 bookmarks on Delicious and posted well over 3000 tweets. There was a reason I posted all these information bits, but I have forgotten about most of them shortly after they were online. They were replaced by new information that came my way.

I have started to "revisit" at least part of that information. I know, the idea of reading through your blog post or even tweets from a year ago sounds somehow stupid. But I keep stumbling upon interesting stuff I have long forgotten; and some of it even has a relevance for what I'm doing or thinking about right now. Especially valuable is leafing through old notebooks. (Of course, this is also partly a vanity and reconstruction exercise: remembering the many things that one has done and seen).

New ideas usually emerge when we start making connections between existing pieces of information. But the current systems - or, most of them - make it difficult to add "historical depth" to this networking exercise. 

I'd like to have information filters that actively help me with this kind of revisiting. I don't know how they could look like. But I'm sure someone will figure it out. Or, more likely, someone already has, and I just don't know about it.

The origin of good ideas

I finished reading Steven B. Johnson's "Where Good Ideas Come From" recently. It's a good book, definitively recommended for everyone thinking about concepts and origins of innovations, although there are probably more scientific studies of the subjects. My favorite quotes:

«The question is how to push your brain toward those more creative networks. The answer, as it happens, is delightfully fractal: to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible.»

«In thinking about networked innovation this way, I am specifically not talking about a "global brain", or a "hive mind". [...] Large collectives are rarely capable of true creativity or innovation. [...] When the first market towns emerged in Italy, they didn't magically create some higher-level group consciousness. They simply widened the pool of minds that could come up with and share good ideas. This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they're conneted to the network.»

«The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine. Instead of cloistering your hunches in brainstorm sessions or R&D labs, create an environment where brainstorming is something that is constantly running in the background, throughout the organization, a collective version of the 20-percent-time concept that proved so successful for Google and 3M.»

«[Martin] Ruef interviewed 766 graduates of the [Stanford Business] School who had gone on to have entrepreneurial careers. He created an elaborate system for scoring innovation based on a combination of factors: the introduction of new products, say, or the filing of trademarks and patents. And then he tracked each graduate's social network - not just the number of acquaintances but the kind of acquaintances they had. [...] What Ruef discovered was a ringing endorsement of the coffeehouse model of social networking: the most creative individuals in Ruef's survey consistently had broad social networks that extended outside their organization and involved peole from diverse fields of expertise. Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef's analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks.»

«There are good ideas, and then there are good ideas that make it easier to have other good ideas.» 

Eternal debates

Someone (I don't remember who) recommended me this WSJ article, a debate between Andrew Keen and David Weinberger on the usefulness (or lack thereof) of Web 2.0. I saved the article, as I often do, on Instapaper and read it on my iPhone while in the subway yesterday.

Only after reading it for a while I got the feeling that something was wrong. Keen referenced Second Life (that is, forgive the pun, virtually dead), and none of the two mentioned Facebook. Plus, who would start an article with "What exactly is Web 2.0?" in 2010? After checking online, I found out that the article was published on July 18, 2007.

What struck me, though, is how little the debate has changed over these years. People are still debating the fundamentals of the social web. Shouldn't we be past that? Or am I just too impatient? Is the fact that we're still having these discussions even a good sign?

Samson's autism, and other biblical illnesses

File:SamsonDestroyTemple.jpg

In a new paper, two Indian neurologists have diagnosed various biblical characters with illnesses. Samson, it turns out, was autistic.

Throughout Samson's life, it is seen that he performed extraordinary physical feats... It is possible that Samson was able to perform these feats as he may have been insensitive to pain, which is occasionally seen among autistics [ref]. A study of hospitalized individuals carried out in Sweden had reached the conclusion that individuals with autism or autism spectrum disorders are prone to acts of violence.

Westalgie statt Stolz

Hervorragender Artikel von Eric Gujer über Deutschlands momentane Befindlichkeit in der NZZ:

Stolz wird man nicht finden. Viele Wähler reagieren gereizt auf die neue Unübersichtlichkeit des vereinigten Deutschland. In der Westalgie manifestiert sich der Wunsch, zu den geordneteren Verhältnissen der Bundesrepublik vor 1989 und zum gezähmten rheinischen Kapitalismus zurückzukehren. Die Ostdeutschen müssen konstatieren, dass sich ihre Erwartungen in die völlige Angleichung der Lebensverhältnisse nicht erfüllen. Die Parteien kämpfen mit einem Vertrauensschwund, in dem sich eine Abwehrreaktion gegen diese zunehmende Heterogenität manifestiert. Die deutsche Politik ist nach wie vor stabil, aber die gesellschaftliche Grundlage dieser Stabilität wird fragiler.