Business Quests in the Information Age

Beautiful presentation by Lawrence Lessig at TED

With interesting examples extracted from his book "Free culture", Lessig makes a powerful case for the need to have a more flexible framework of managing intellectual property rights if we are to empower, not stiffle, creativity and innovation. His points are particularly important when one considers how scientific knowledge grew in the Ancient worlds (China, Mesopotamia, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans), in the Islamic Golden Age or after the Age of Enlightenment: innovation relied on the sharing and reuse (remixing Lessig would say) of previous advances.

Of course we must ackowledge the relevance of some form of protection of intellectual property acquired after substantial investment of time, money and energy. So it is essentially a matter of balance that I believe Lessig's beautiful creation (the Creative Commons system) provides. Quite clearly,

• the mass adoption of tools for producing, processing and distributing (sharing) digital content,
• the read / write or remix culture ,
• the empowerment of creative masses
• the challenge to established empires of content (organized as guilds whether they are called RIAA or MPAA or otherwise),

all have huge implications for the media industries and all the marketing, PR and communications models. Something that is definitely worth taking into account in businesses like Vanksen or BuzzParadise.

OECD's "Education at a Glance"

Well, it takes more than a mere glance to exploit the data in the OECD report, but if you are in the business of education or e-learning like one of my customers in Luxembourg then it's well worth poring over this document.
Download 2007_OECD_EducationAtAGlance.pdf

Something I found quite interesting is the break-down between capital expenditure and current expenditure in primary and secondary education in a bunch of countries studied by the OECD (click on chart for details). Interestingly the US, Norway, Greece, South Korea, Luxembourg and Turkey are allocating significantly over 9% (about the OECD average) of their spending in capital expenditure. I wonder whether that means that these countries are investing more seriously in computing and networking equipment for educational purposes, which I would find great. Now of course the question remains whether these countries have a strategy for national education and R&D and I think Singapore is a great role model for that. If you want to get a feel for the clarity and thrust of their plans regarding education, this page of Singapore's Ministry of Finance is quite interesting to read. Probably an example to follow for several European governments.

Quote of the day

"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you  cannot visit,
Not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you,
For life goes not backwards, nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children, like living arrows, are sent forth.

The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
And He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the Archer's hands be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable."

The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran

The Ethical Mind

There's an interesting interview of Psychologist Howard Gardner in the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, in which he gives a couple of perspectives on the ethical mind. Gardner sees the human mind as a set of cognitive capabilities that can be grouped in five classes he calls the five human minds (disciplined, synthesizing, creating, respectful and ethical). Here are a few interesting quotes from an article definitely worth reading:

"A person with an ethical mind asks herself, "What kind of a person, worker and citizen do I want to be? If all the workers in my profession adopted the mindset I have, or if everyone did what I don what would the world be like?"

"A study we published in 2004 found that although young professionals declared an understanding of an a desire to do good work, they felt that they had to succeed by whatever means; When they had made their mark, they told us, they would then become exemplary workers."

"We live in a time of intense pressure on individuals and organizations to cut corners, pursue their own interests, and forget about the effect of their behavior on others. Additionally many businesspeople have internalized Milton Friedman's belief that if we let people pursue their interests and allo the processes of the marketplace to operate freely, positive moral and ethical consequences will magically follow."

"When everything that matters can be bought and sold, when commitments can be broken because they are no longer to our advantage, when shopping becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our litany, when our worth is measured by how much we earn and spend, then the market is destroying the very virtues on which in the long run it depends." - Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks

The world is shaped in the blink of an eye

I just finished reading a fascinating book called Blink. Malcolm Gladwell, the author does a great job at showing how the human mind has an ability to sort and process very rapidly relevant information in the blink of an eye to reach conclusions, make decisions and take action. Blink is about "the power of thinking without thinking" as Gladwell says, that incredible capability in of our unconscious mind that helps us steer our course in this universe for the best and for the worse. The book contains some very interesting case studies from a variety of fields from marital counseling to marketing to military and art. I was struck by the work done by Harvard to show the unconscious biases into which our education and social contexts conditions us: try it for yourself at this site or here (if the first link does not work as was reported by a reader).

One of the most interesting case studies deals with a war game of the Pentagon which took an unexpected turn as the bad guy was able to inflict severe losses to US forces in the simulation simply by organizing his side as a loose system instead of trying to capture huge amounts of data to make decisions in the heat of the battle. In a way it reminded me of modern management where there is a drive in many companies to capture all sorts of data about a business in a futile attempt to control the future, whereas it is often far more productive to hire the right people and give them the freedom to perform.

Man's quests in the information age

Will machines dominate mankind? How will business quests look like in an era of artificial rationality? Yes, I think it is about rationality and not intelligence: machines don't understand nor manipulate concepts, they don't invent, they don't paint and they don't weave relationships... not yet at least. Welcome to the dawn of the information age.

As the latest edition of a man-machine chess game shows, it's increasingly difficult for man to beat machines in the field of pure rationality. Chess master Kramnik lost against Deep Fritz a mighty machine that is capable of calculating 8 to 10 million chessboard combinations per second. Artificial rationality is here to stay and will become more and more present in our lives (if we don't blow the planet before that). The rise of artificial rationality and some day of artificial intelligence, will radically transform our universe. It will either multiply our capabilities or subject us to a terrible form of totalitarianism. Assuming AI multiplies our capabilities, what are the implications in terms of business quests? Machines are already vital in many professions like for instance traders. What is the role of man is such contexts? Could we imagine a world of almost totally automated markets? Perhaps machines will take care of activities that are either repetitive or can be assessed in probabilistic terms and people will specialize in activities requiring intuition, creativity and artistic talent? What if all those activities (writer, artist, singer, painter, sculptor, dancer, actor...) often considered as decadent in conservative societies of the industrial era were to become our main focus in the coming decades? What if the current rise of the social dimension of the web and the adoption of technological enablers for human relationships were only the first steps in the direction? What if a creative class was to rise?

Many science fiction writers imagined future worlds characterized by ubiquitous computing and a permanent contest between humans and machines, sometimes leading to wars (Hyperion, Endymion, Foundation, Robots, Matrix, Legends of Dune) and the rise of post-machine worlds (Dune). Sometimes science fiction describes political systems (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), environmental degradation (The Precipice, Earth) and fictional business quests (Moonrise). I think science fiction is a good source of inspiration aside from being a great way to take some rest.

No asshole

Some business people (conservative types) tend to look at non-standard ways of doing as suspicious and sometimes well worth their disdain. My professional path being fairly non-standard, I occasionally face disdainful arrogance, which I use as means to work on my equanimity... Now I have a very official and quite academic way of characterizing this type of behaviour as being only a manifestation of what Stanford Professor Bob Sutton calls "the asshole rule".

Guy Kawasaki provides quite a few very interesting comments on the book and on the necessity to resist asshole behavior both as a victim and as a perpetrator of such behavior...

Are we all pronetarians?

I recently read a book outlining the impacts of technologies adopted in the early Information Age (now). Now, many books exist on the topic, each with an inspired vision about our future and how technologies are transforming about every area of modern life. This one is particularly powerful, both because of the combination of skills the authors brought together to make it happen and because it provides a good synthesis of phenomena often described without reference to the big picture. The book was written by renowned French scientist and humanist Joël de Rosnay with the help of an intriguing entrepreneur called Carlo Revelli.  Worth reading if you speak French. If you don't, an adapted version in the English language is in the works, which I am pleased to work on. The original authors and I expect to have it finalized around September and it will be published under a Creative Commons license.

Potential within

A little over a month ago I read the latest book written by a most interesting Belgian doctor in medicine called Thierry Janssen. The book is called "La solution interieure" and makes the case that a substantial number of factors necessary to human well-being and health are actually to be found within each one of us. I think that has enormous implications for the way we run our businesses, our societies, our planet...

While extremely committed to scientific discipline, the author gives an account of his research in and study of various forms of the art of taking care of human well-being. The book deals with a whole range of disciplines amongst which is our western medical science and convincingly makes the case that it is time to broaden the scope of our thinking when it comes to health and well-being, while it also argues in favour of preserving a scientific approach / discipline to guarantee the quality of "service" to people. Full of common sense and characterized by true scientific curiosity, this book is the kind I really enjoy because it is devoid of "certainties" and "truths", focusing rather on questions that are worth asking and aswering (an you know how much I enjoy questions). Of course, some of the questions may not be comfortable to answer for the pharmaceutical industry at least in the short run...

It is definitely worth reading and I hope translated versions become available soon.

The Little Prince: 60th anniversary of the French version

French magazine Lire has an exceptional issue dedicated to The Little Prince, a book I personally consider as a wonderful creation that is full of resources for a wide variety of contexts (education, personal development, business, politics...) and for all stages of human life. It's well worth getting it if you speak the language.
I found it interesting to learn how New York welcomed Saint-Exupéry as an acknowledged writer when the French literary circles of Paris in the thirties were quite disdainful of him because he was seen as an airpilot who would occasionally write, i.e. not a "real" writer. He was not "pure" enough in short. Perhaps a proof that the quest for "purity" was not exclusively an attribute of nazis and fascists... Also an interesting perspective on the rigidities of France which are by not means new and had already caused the country to be in deep decline right after WWII.

If only The Little Prince was to inspire the Prince in our countries and organizations...