sift everything

 
These may grease success but they can’t ensure it.  Crappy looking, high quality still succeeds when high finish, low quality falls flat.  Even Seth’s site isn’t super sharp.

So, how does this reconcile with all the hubub around design?  I guess it’s via order of priorities:

1. Something good to say …
2. … something good to look at.

Web designers, if you aren’t teamed up with a content guru, better watch your back.  That traffic you guaranteed isn’t going to stick around.

In the heart of every entrepreneur is an island.

The saddest things I’ve done, as an investor, is convice an entrepreneur the island isn’t there.

Men’s Journal is no steadfast literary friend but I am fascinated by napping, so here’s their article.

It’s almost worth a wheelbarrow, no?  Heck yeah, toss’er in.

A good nap is:

- Had in the morning or just after lunch
- Taken sans caffee/sugar and avec calcium/protein
- Enjoyed in quiet dark places (just like mushrooms)
- And less than 20 minutes long.

Categories of Naps:

THE NANO-NAP: 20 seconds - may be beneficial but certainly looks silly if taken at inopportune moments.
THE MICRO-NAP: two to five minutes - good for batting off drowsiness
THE MINI-NAP: five to 20 minutes - increases alertness, stamina, motor learning, and motor performance.
THE ORIGINAL POWER NAP: 20 minutes - includes the above and, in addition, improves muscle memory and clears the brain of useless built-up information, and improves long-term memory
THE LAZY MAN’S NAP: 50 to 90 minutes - good for improving perceptual processing and great for repairing bones and muscles (sheesh! what’s going on at work?)

Don’t know how I found it, but I’m using Performancing for Firefox to post.

Brilliant.

In case I forget, in all the hubub of tomorrow: Merry Christmas.

Hope you have a rich time with people you love.

[All technical words italicized for easy skimming]

I’m no plumber but I like to pretend sometimes. In our new house the tub’s hot water tap leaks (leaked, past tense began 3 minutes ago). And feigning competency I decided to solve that problem (hey, entrepreneur, sound familiar)?

So, lugging out the wrenches and screwdrivers, I pulled that puppy apart. Knobs, screw, rubber washers, o-rings, and copper tubing were scattered liberally about. Muttered swearing was soon heard. And vast amounts of very clean, very hot water were wasted.

The saga began three weeks ago. Brute force was the first method employed. General swearing failed to produce any positive results. Frequent trips to Canadian Tire only served to burden the Visa but didn’t nothing about the leak. Finally, today, I decided to actually look at the problem.

Pulling the entire apparatus apart for the eleventh time, I looked intently at each piece as it issued from the mysterious plumber’s (real plumber) hole in the wall. The last detachable piece, a tiny copper tube attaching the whatsit to the thing had a tiny fissure rendering the edge uneven and jagged. I immediately surmised that not only was a good seal impossible but this was the culprit shredder, destroyer of three previous jobbies.

A-ha! Off to the batcave and two minutes later, five minutes ago, the problem was solved.

Lessons: resist the urge to push harder, look intently, and swear as necessary.

One late, introspective night in early 2003, I closed my eyes and typed till done. Dave Pollard’s recent post reminded me of this note to self:

If I dream about what would make me happy or content. Satisfied. Stopped and geared up all at once. It would look like this:

My house would be on the water. It should be the ocean. But a nice lake would be fine. The house is all one level, or at least we walk into the upstairs part and the basement walks out onto the beach. The beach is sandy, I own it, no one else walks there.

There are hills around. Green. Lush. Loads of birds. The air is clean clean. Not just ‘better’ then other options. The weather is never super hot. I can’t stand hot. And never super cold. Lori can’t stand cold.

We can reach a city in 30 minutes. An airport in 20.

I get to swim lots. I run. We eat loads of fruit, drink water. I read. Lori plays piano. We have horses that I watch and she rides. Our car is black. Air conditioned. Leather seats. CD player. Sleek and professional.

I give advice. Listen, read, go to meetings, then give advice. I sort through good ideas, pick out what will work and how to get it done. Sometimes I have ideas of my own. More often I am excited by someone else’s idea. I work with a group of smarties. Some are doctors. A few worked lots and long. We have an artist, musician, and a talker. The talker sells. The artists are creative. The workers sort through the ‘realism’. The intellectuals anticipate the trends. Give advice on ethics, marketing. Information management. I am vice president. I work for an energetic visionary who can’t get a single thing done without my help. We go halfsies on the left over cash. Holiday lots. Drink something insanely expensive after every big deal. He likes cigars and I like art.

My greatest strengths are envisioning visions. Tying threads. Coupling innovations with people that need them. Thinking big. Getting the broad sense. Getting goose bumps and tingling back-of-the-neck hair at possibilities. Putting things together that ‘go’. Sensing matches. Tossing out clashes. Unless clashes are better than matches – I am the guy that knows if they are.

I paint. Sort of real, mostly edges. Blurry edges. Like visions. I read. Books about the future, science, unanswered questions. Remarkable people. People that tried. I listen to music that is floating. The music must make my heart ache or sing. Reaches in, grabs my throat just above the heart and plugs it with a lump. My neck tingles here like it tingles at work.

I have trimmed nails. Both toes and hands. My hair is grey. I wish it was black and grey. It isn’t. I have strong legs. I have a strong stomach and you can see the muscles if I cough. My pecks twitter in the morning when I yawn. I have nice white teeth. I had laser eye surgery. I see well. But I still wear fake glasses sometimes - I like thinking I look sophisticated.

I drink wine and know why it’s good. When Lori is out I sip scotch or something else that is smart. I like feeling expansive. So I do that when she can’t make fun of me. I buy art and only get what feels right. I use technology but it never uses me.

I have a soul that is at peace. I don’t worry about being good enough, right enough, or acceptable. I have enough self-discipline to not fight something I really love. I never cut corners on being true. I use my mind – all of it. I am not silly about being vain. I just love what I got going on. I really really love it.

I smile and people get warmed up. I laugh liquid. Not starchy like now. I sit like a heavy bag of sand left for a week. Rooted and still.

I breath long deep breaths. I play the piano late at night.

It’s two year’s old, vain as hell, and still gets me juiced.

Whilst lolling despondently on the sofa: “When will I start doing the things I am great at? I keep doing things that help me be greater.”

Good friend in from old places: “Maybe guys like you just keep growing and never ‘get there.’”
___

Thinking about the deluge of newness that is my life these days; an idea popped into mind on the way to coffee at 5:50 this morning: Focus on todo.

GTD, 43folders, etc do a great job on the basic tasks or todo’s of the day, but I don’t mean these. I mean the big ones that are less than purposes and more than checklistable activities. These are the functional todo’s rather than the tactical.

I am a new father; what are my big todo’s? I am a husband, what todo? I am a new investment manager — todo? I am grandson, son, brother, friend, co-worker, threat, foe, arch-enemy: todo?
___

I’m too visionary and too strategic to settle for a daily list of stuff. Too far reaching to nail down a strategy for “this stuff” (in the narrow sense of today’s functions). And too interested in “that stuff” (meaning everything but this stuff).

So I’ll try functonal todo’s …

… hey, what’s that?

Seth Godin on idea viruses:

“Delighting them, enraging them, hospitalizing them or surprising them–that’s how sneezers [or spreaders of viruses] are born.”

Part of the viral framework?

This map of the web was rendered in 1998 by Bill Cheswick and Hal Burch of Lumeta Corp. It was generated from data collected in mid-September and the color scheme is based on the IP address of the nodes. To see it in big, go here.

Of course 1998 was a long time ago, but I couldn’t find a more recent graphic. Anyway, the potential of a people-centric technological movement is … apparent.

Web 2.0 … first time I’ve typed out those words.

Dion Hinchcliffe finally clarifies, succinctly, why it matters:

“Web 2.0 ideas [are] successful because they effectively put people back into the technological equation … [it] fundamentally revolves around us and seeks to ensure that we engage ourselves, participate and collaborate together, and mutually trust and enrich each other …”

It’s all over the web. I’m wondering when it’s going to hit corporate management? What about education?

via Darren Barefoot

In a Google-world, owning anything text based is a stretch. But somehow, Warren Buffet (renown investor, maker/breaker of fortunes, and deity of the stock exchange) has cornered the market on the phrase “circle of competence”.

“The most important thing in terms of your circle of competence is not how large the area of it is, but how well you’ve defined the perimeter.”

It’s easy for me to admit I don’t know something. The line between utter ignorance and sufficient understanding is pretty clear. I just struggle to stay inside the curve. If I don’t know it, I want to.

While there are lots of arguments for following Buffet’s advice (and the most compelling is the great big stack of cash that cat sits on), I wonder who’s going to tell the bigger story if we all stick close to home?

If I buy this story and my product/service needs to be clearly defined — do I?

I’m still in student mode: packing myself plump with new knowledge and spasmodically seeking places to stick it … maybe my circle of competence is learning and sticking.

Anyway, tight little phrase.

A few months ago I was talking to a guy I grew up with. We were chatting about work. Me flashing over to Paris for international meetings and him driving truck. We had started out in the same place but now there is, literally, a world between us.
___

My friend’s dad used to have this tiny tank filled with oil and multi-colored sand of different grits. You’d shake it all around to mix up the sand and then put it back on its stand. The stand had this little motor that rocked the tank back and forth to get a wave going. Eventually, with the motion of the oil, the sand would sort itself out into individual layers - black, pink, brown, white.
___

We can all nobly chastise ourselves into thinking we’re all the same — but we’re not. There’s layers between us. We see the world differently and to see it my way you have to do as I do. Be as I am. Go where I’ve gone. Until then, we’re different.
___

The waves came. We settled out.

there are things
down
there
still
coming ashore

Loren Eiseley, translated by Dave Pollard

every time we walk along a beach
some ancient urge disturbs us
so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments
or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers
like the homesick refugees of a long war.

Loren Eiseley, translated by Dave Pollard

for just a moment
I held the universe at bay

by the simple expedient
of sitting on my haunches before a fox den
and tumbling about with a chicken bone.

it is the gravest, most meaningful act I shall ever accomplish,
but,
as Thoreau once remarked
of some peculiar errand of his own,

there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society

Loren Eiseley, translated by Dave Pollard

Beyond bellowing bunters and mussed hair, what makes a good leader? Who draws in the cash when everyone else is furiously writing proposals?

Three must-haves: trustworthy, deeply knowledgeable, and all-in.

1. Being trustworthy covers a multitude of sins. A mistake made with the best of intentions is always more palatable than one made out of apathy. And an omission based on integrity is instantly forgiven where one made out of suspicion is never forgotten.

2. Deeply knowledgeable entrepreneurs are reassuring to investors. It’s difficult to be a leader and lots more easy to be a guide. From the back row we can holler out instructions without doing much else but the leader must make sense of all the ruckus because, ultimately, that’s where the buck stops.

3. Finally: “all-in”, “hooked”, and “lots of skin in the game” are metaphors for unquestionable commitment and need. The entrepreneur has to need to win. Win or die. Without that it’s just someone else’s money on the table and when push comes to shove, the investor’s money won’t count for much.

On the weekend we rolled past seven young boys playing a motley game of baseball outside the Swiss Chalet. Despite cigarettes lolling from their mouths and the weather being a balmy -20 degrees Celsius, they had a good thing going out there on the brown lawn.

Ever interested in the forces that move dullards to productivity, I stopped to watch the players: One charismatic leader, his hat perilously pitched on the back section of an unruly head of hair, bounded around the front of the group hauling in new pieces for the game. One stolid and infallible partner stood bellowing out rules created in real-time from home plate. And the usual cadre of undeciders were milling around and pushing each other while they waited for things to be sorted out.

Adding to the amusement was the Shelley-esque combination of ingredients they’d been able to muster. These include and were limited to the following: a bat (landline marker), a ball (someone’s lost gas cap), a home plate (for sale sign), and somewhere to run (ditch along the highway).

Driving home I concluded: as in baseball, so in business.

For business one needs a bunch of cash, a product/service, a place to make it, and somewhere to stick it.

Those are the ingredients but you can’t get any unless you have the leader, supporter, and others. Which is obvious to everybody. But somehow what’s remained less than obvious is the role of the leader in creating the ingredients for the game. And this includes cash which then includes me in my new role as an investor.

For that spontaneous baseball game, the leader created everything including the bat (which, remember, represents cash). But the general complaint in business is that sufficient cash does not exist. And I contend that it just needs to be created.

And that my role is not dolling out cash at all but simply watching for leaders that are ready to create the game.

The company I work with invests in three areas: financial capital (of course), intellectual capital, and managerial capital.

Financial capital is really the grease that gets everything else moving. Without it there’s mostly friction, lots of heat, but little else. Almost everything needs money to get rolling.

Intellectual capital is anything you can own that isn’t stuff. Patents, trademarks, brandnames, recipes, etc. These are cerebral property and provide a competitive edge.

Finally, managerial capital is the know-how, experience, and potential to deliver the end product. The executors.

Of the three, financial and intellectual capital are the most well understood. Finance is highly sophisticated and evolved. Intellectual capital is growing, has lots of attention, and was the promise land when I was sliding out of school several years ago.

But managerial capital lacks the depth that the other two enjoy. For either financial or intellectual capital we have a fairly tight checklist and filter that assures us the needs in these areas are met. For managerial capital, it remains a function of instinct and experience.

Now we’re each hard-wired to assess other people. Within just few seconds we can accurately nail a wide range of characteristics on people we’ve just met. But as Malcolm Gladwell explained in Blink we can also get this stuff wrong.

I might be missing something obvious, but isn’t there a huge opportunity for rigor in the “people” business? Isn’t there a host of assessment tools lying around, unattached, that could be fit together to make a sophisticated checklist in this area?

What’s with the wheelbarrow? This is a placeholder where I want to begin to use and understand the humanity of tags.

Metatags: first derivative of thought.

Metatags are key to meta-knowledge

Clay Shirky: “Taggers are good at characterizing material in ways that search engines are incapable of, and tags are thus good for letting you find material whose characterization does not appear in the text itself.”

Remeaning the world: the fundamental drive of modern humanity.

Are metatags culture?

Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn: “Culture is a product; is historical; includes ideas, patterns and values; is selective; is learned; is based upon symbols; and is an abstraction from behavior and the products of behavior.”

Are metatags a world view?

Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A world view is a theory (interpretation of all things) and a technology (precept for action). This includes metaphysics, religion and philosophy.

“Human thoughts and ideas are not the achievement of isolated individuals. Thinking succeeds only through the cooperation of thinkers. No individual could make headway if he must start from the beginning. Older generations have formed the tools, concepts and terms, and have raised the problems.”

“Action is always directed by ideas; it realizes what previous thinking has designed.”

Promise of metatags

Liz Lawley on Many-to-Many writes:

“I understand completely the value of controlled vocabularies and taxonomies. I don’t want to have to look in six different places for information on a given topic—I want some level of confidence that the things I want are grouped together. On the other hand, I don’t share the optimism that so many of my colleagues in this field seem to have that the collective “wisdom of crowds” will always yield accurate and useful descriptors. Describing things well is hard, and often context-specific.”

There’s a nearly universal hope that someday, somehow we will discover some fall-over, easy way to do difficult things. Fortunately for those practioners of perfection - beautiful, brilliance, and clarity remain hard work.

Metatags tell you who you are

Jeremy Wagstaff has a summary on folksonomies.

Citing Wired’s Folksonomies Tap People Power:

“The job of tags isn’t to organize all the world’s information into tidy categories,” said Stewart Butterfield, one of Flickr’s co-founders. “It’s to add value to the giant piles of data that are already out there.”

The article describes the website of contemporary design magazine Moco Loco, to which 166 Delicious users had applied the tag “design.”

“But 44 users had also assigned the URL the tag “architecture,” 28 “art,” 15 “furniture” and so on. That means that because so many people applied so many different tags to Moco Loco’s site, it could be located in a number of different ways.”

One of the great values of getting your company into the community of taggers is the wealth of information the tags provide about your company.

Rules for priceless metatags

From Clay on Many-to-many:

“I think cheap metadata has (at least) these characteristics:

1. It’s made by someone else
2. Its creation requires very few learned rules
3. It’s produced out of self-interest (Corrolary: it is guilt-free)
4. Its value grows with aggregation
5. It does not break when there is incomplete or degenerate data

“And this is what’s special about tagging. Lots of people tag links on del.icio.us, so I gets lots of other people’s metadata for free. There is no long list of rules for tagging things ‘well,’ so there are few deflecting effects from transaction cost. People tag things for themselves, so there are no motivation issues. The more tags the better, because with more tags, I can better see both communal judgement and the full range of opinion. And no one cares, for example, that when I tag things ‘loc’ I mean the Library of Congress — the system doesn’t break with tags that are opaque to other users.”

beneath every no
lays a passion for yes that had never been broken

- Wallace Stevens, Esthétique du Mal

pandora

What I’ve been missing since the old Napster went away.

While I haven’t been posting at all, I have kept up on my reading. This post by Dave Pollard is worth noting.

Dave has an incredible capacity for synthesis and generating copious insights across a wide range of areas. The end result is either succinct distillations of current understanding or a hugely encompassing grab at new learning. Either way: almost always valuable.

Dave’s asked for a response and I’ll start at a higher level and beyond the scope of Dave’s post: Knowing where innovation comes from is only as valuable as your ability and intention to execute on it. In all the hubbub around creativity and innovation I have yet to find the requisite commitment to execution. We’re mad for new and stagnant on the response.

That said, those interested in harvesting innovation and related insights need something like Dave’s matrix of inputs. Dave’s done something very helpful when he splits strategic and tactical sources. Too often organizations confuse the two and it’s great that the clarity is deliberately laid out first thing.

Perhaps missing from the matrix are three important sources: internal crazies, internal hackers, and external hackers. Of course these terms don’t fit with Dave’s sober classifications but they’re key inputs to innovation. And I recognize that Dave may have looked at these sources and caught them inside of other categories but in an effort to be succinct didn’t acknowledge them explicitly.

Internal crazies are those folks that well understand the interests of their organizations and are cerebrally free enough to experiment with those purposes. These people are generally useless in a room full of decision makers but someone savvy enough to translate their ethereal jaunts into new products is usually very thankful for their rants.

Internal hackers are those that deliver a high quality company product despite the encumberances of the company’s process. Inside their personal process are hacks, work-arounds, and plug-ins that can be a valuable source of innovation. This might be caught up in Dave’s category of “Product Innovations” but I’ll leave it to him to flesh out.

Similarly, hackers that use the company’s products in alternate ways are a pool of insights. These people either make up for deficiencies in the products with band-aid solutions or use the product in ways it was never intended to be employed. Some of the most important innovations have come via this source.