sift everything

From Zack Lynch at Brain Waves:

“Neuroesthetics uses brain imaging and genetic analysis to understand the neural basis of artistic creativity and achievement … and has broad implications for all parts of society, including: our legal systems, business productivity and entertainment.”

I’ve always loved the hope that our brains are the key to unlocking everything mysterious about life. Deep down I doubt that’s going to happen but I like to cheer on people that think the things described below:

“Art is a human activity and, like all human activities, including morality, law and religion, depends upon, and obeys, the laws of the brain. We are still far from knowing the neural basis of these laws, but spectacular advances in our knowledge of the visual brain allows us to make a beginning in studying the neural basis of visual art.”

- the institute of neuroesthetics

More on viral marketing:

The rules: Create a new site and launch it on May 19, and build the most traffic or get the most Technorati links by June 9 — with no paid advertising.

The lessons:

- the idea must be instantly accessible — got to get it immediately
- it should provoke you to think
- mix humour and gut-wrenching reflex reaction
- the domain name doesn’t really matter much
- meta-sites such as Slashdot, MetaFilter, CollegeHumor and Fark wield more traffic power than blogs
- newspaper and radio reports from the UK, Eastern Europe and Japan bring the biggest influx of traffic

Starting to see lots of open-source apps for business:

Open-source — Information Week
The Business Experiment
Blowfly

What would open-source mean for your business? How many decisions could you give to a crowd?

Good list of things to do this summer for your company — like a pre-winter check-up for your car.

Gambling. It’s on my TV, in my online ads, fills my email, and spams my blog. So popular, so suddenly — why?

Back in 3,500 B.C. young Egyptions were already gambling. Now, 6,000 years later, you’d think the hubbub would have died down. But it’s like we just discovered it … like it was Steve Jobs’ idea.

—

I’m reading Peter L. Bernstein’s book, Against the Gods: The remarkable story of risk. In it he plays out the history of our understanding of probability and its application to games of chance — good, ol’ Texas Hold’em.

Bernstein points out how incredible it is that probability was not discovered until 1654 (by Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat). Thousands of years before, we had already filled the great library of Alexandria, charted the stars, and discovered the rules of Euclid’s geometry — but missed risk. The Greeks — rabid gamblers, snap logicians, gifted mathematicians, masters of logic, and obsessive seekers of proof — despite the nearly perfect fit, didn’t understand probability.

Before we got around to probability we had to fight the Crusades (and learn numbers from Arabs), endure the Reformation (and learn we make our own choices), and discover capitalism (you don’t get rich without making a gamble).

—

This morning I’m wondering what else we’re missing. What looks us right in the eye, everyday, that we fail to see? What perspectives, world views, and religious beliefs keep us from an even clearer understanding?

An Arab taught a Crusader to count. A Reformer taught a Catholic to consider his own future. A gambler taught a prince to be a businessman.

What’s next?

Science has posted 125 big questions that remain to be answered. 25 of them are described in some detail.

“It is not a survey of the big societal challenges that science can help solve, nor is it a forecast of what science might achieve. Think of it instead as a survey of our scientific ignorance, a broad swath of questions that scientists themselves are asking. As Tom Siegfried puts it in his introductory essay, they are ‘opportunities to be exploited.’”

Opportunities to be exploited … if you’re an entrepreneur, click the link.

I could talk about “perfection” versus “getting it done”. Or I could show you.

Nosepilot versus LEVEL 10 DESIGN.

Who you going to hire?

John Moore got me reading the Business Week blurb on creativity.

In particular I like Jeneanne Rae’s business model for Peer Insight … might have to pirate that.

I was a bit surprised to read IDEO’s David Kelley saying his new design school mixes sustainability, superlow cost for the developing world, K-12 education, health and wellness, and medical stuff with industrial Corporate America. Didn’t know you could do that all through design.

I love used bookstores; the messier the better. The owner can’t possibly know the value of all the books when they’re piled willy-nilly around the joint. I feel like a thief, pawing through the dark corners, earnestly listening for the footsteps of the owner, seeking that tattered treasure trove of lost knowledge.

PBS has a series on the Medici family that includes a scene of Giovanni as a young man, gingerly picking his way through a moratorium strewn with diseased bodies. He’s on a quest for some long forgotten scrolls hidden in a back room. And watching that I thought … that would be the coolest moment … ever.

Something about forgotten knowledge gets me going. I’d love to be some sort of geek knowledge pirate — pillaging buried libraries, discovering lost manuscripts on the back of some painting. So, when this story (via kottke) came out, I jumped right on it.

The story of the tapestries has several layers. First, there’s the tapestries themselves: the mystery, the art, the creation. Then, the riddle of how to piece together the digital photographs the MET used to catalogue the tapestries: living, water-like tapestries, billions of variables and calculations, the multitude of relationships and dynamics. Finally the story of ancient history and hyper-modern mathematics dancing together — the seemingly simple becoming the unfathomably complex.

—

When I was reading Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, I saw an opportunity to leverage the learning of others.

Diamond explains how innovation hot spots are scattered and constantly moving around the globe. While one economy is a wasteland of creativity another just a few hundred miles away can be white hot with new ideas.

He also briefly discusses how knowledge can be lost. Some ideas don’t make it through the peak and trough cycles of cultural innovation. As a result many of the problems we face have already been solved once or many times — we just don’t remember. We have forgotten more than we know.

- We do not know what we have forgotten.
- We have known things in our past that we no longer know.
- The sum of our historical knowledge is greater than our current knowledge.

—

Look up the Pyramids, the Notre Dame Rose Window, or Brunelleschi’s Dome. We don’t know how we did that.

What have we forgotten and how could we use that knowledge now?

—

Boil it down. What, if anything, is new to humanity? We’ve faced these same problems before … they were just in different combinations.

The same is true of opportunities. Our wants and needs vary less than the problems we face.

—

This all matters to an entrepreneur for several reasons. First, you are forgetting lessons you already learned. Second, you have knowledge that is useful in more ways than you realise. Finally, in your struggle to be new, you may forget that all these problems are very old.

cartoon by Hugh MacLeod

I got one clients who’s going to hate this (if he follows this link, he’ll blow his cerebellum). But he’s well ahead of the pack now … he knows he’s doing it. But for the rest of you, if you aren’t patting your pockets, furtively scanning your website, and glancing at your business card — you should be.

And while you’re at it: hit this link.

Too trendy and webby for you? Listen to George Orwell (1946) on clear communication:

- Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

This is fun. Yeah, yeah, I know my profiles stinks. But look at my neighborhood — I really like most of those blogs.

Rob’s asking some good questions about perfect. A few things to note:

- He’s talking about a small company.
- The pie shop is in a local, niche market.
- This story is about you.

It’s funny, improv is teaching us to be ourselves. I think, at its core, it’s a method for freeing ourselves from the straight jackets we’ve been taught to wear in various social settings. It frees us up to collaborate, persuade, and lead naturally.

I’ve seen Johnnie Moore’s ideas on improv before, but here are a few more links with book lists to boot:

800-CEO-READ
Brand Autopsy
Business Blogcasting

Tom Peters on how to eat WalMart’s lunch:

- Be niche-aimed (Never, ever be “all things for all people”).

- Never attack the monsters head on! Steal niche business and lukewarm customers.

- Compete on value/experience/intimacy, not price.

- DESIGN! (”Design” is a premier weapon-in-pursuit-of-the sublime for small-ish enterprises, including the professional services.)

- Employer of choice. (A very cool, well-paid place to work/learning and growth experience in at least the short term … marked by notably progressive policies.)

- Innovative! (Must keep renewing and expanding and revising and re-imagining “the promise” to employees, the customer, the community.)

- Excellence! (A small player … per me … has no right or reason to exist unless they are in Relentless Pursuit of Excellence. One earns the right— one damn day and client experience at a time!— to beat the Big Guys in your chosen niche!)

Summarised, I think it boils down to three things:

1. Be huge in a small place

2. Be excellent in a big way

3. Look outside for innovation and inside for delivery

Sufficiently simple to be ignored.

I just spent three weeks in Alberta with my wife’s family. While we were there her grandmother passed away. At and after the funeral we spent a lot of time marveling at the impact of that little lady’s life.

Invariably, one of the awful things following the passing of someone we love is figuring out what to do with all their stuff. Since I was a bit more distant from the emotional impact of it all, I found the process mildly intriguing.

Wandering around that 100 year-old school-house I watched a quiet feud focus on the most unlikely of objects — a doorknob. The one pictured here threatened the nearly unshakable fortitude of my wife’s family. Of course a great deal of sentimental value is associated with anything in the place but I got to wondering about this doorknob in particular — why does everyone care?

One of the reasons is that it’s beautiful. It was carefully designed and has withstood a 100 years of constant abuse by rowdy children and frustrated, door-slamming parents. That glass knob is nearly perfect in its purpose.

“Perfect in its purpose” has been on my mind since then. Is there money in perfect? Look at bespoke tailoring, haute couture (requires reg), and high-end architecture. Ponder the success of IKEA, Apple, and Herman Miller. So, where is perfect among the doorknobs, toilet seats, and running shoes we consume today? Why aren’t web pages brilliantly designed? Where’s the mastery in the songs we sing in church? Where’s the art in broader consumerism?

—

I’m finally reading Leading the Revolution by Gary Hamel and he describes the overwhelming inertia of industries toward convergence. Convergence, he says, naturally moves companies to look and act like everyone else in their industry. In the end we get, in economic terms, perfect competition and everyone makes the same minimal level of profit.

When he wrote the book the economy was chin-deep in high-tech euphoria and (beneath the surface) rampant commoditization. In the five years since then we’ve seen the free-fall of dot coms, the crumbling of the twin towers, and the unnerving emergence of potentially pandemic, food-borne diseases — in the wake of these changes people are seeking things more tangible, unique, and intrinsically valuable.

There is now a toe-hold for perfect. The new niche is the art of everyday things. Just take a gander at the zen section, design section, and culture section of your local bookstore — people are looking for quintessential not just essential.

—

When I finished my master’s thesis the cycle of rewrites, endless scrutiny, pawing supervisors, and stringent reviews drove me to swear off anything that required 99% quality. Among entrepreneurs I thought I’d found the players in the economy that work for 80% quality and then race to market. And, maybe, among the few in new markets, this is the case. But I’ve discovered, to my deep consternation, that the overwhelming majority of those in maturing markets really have just two choices: convergence or perfect.

Another discussion here of the rapid emergence of small, tribal companies. Look here for a deeper discussion of the same theme.

Brand Autopsy describes an imaginary board of directors (from ThinkerToys).

If nothing else, it’s a brain jogging way to think through where you most need advice. Defining a dream team board of directors can help you see where you have gaps that need to be addressed.

First, among the latest slew of spam were interspersed some valid comments. Unfortunately, I deleted them (inadvertantly, of course).

And I’m on holidays, so the posts are coming slow too.