sift everything

Today in Thoreau’s Journal:

“I doubt if Emerson could trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets, because it would be out of character. One needs to have a comprehensive character.”

Is this part of the never answered tension between generalist and specialist? Is there only a philosophical recognition of holistic people?

I spent the last two days on my knees, pulling staples from our floor, and getting ready for hardwood. Quite a few times I thought that I might make a grand renovator. The simplicity appeals.

I could spend my days on my knees and my evenings in my mind and never fumble again with the ideas of a passionate career. Why?

Because I yearn to be comprehensive and only see opportunity for specialists. And I find the long tunnel to expertise in economics (or anything else) as tiresome as a life spent on my knees pulling staples.

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jubilant — ju·bi·lant (jū’bə-lənt) — an adjective meaning exultingly joyful; full of high-spirited delight; bursting with happiness. Derived from mid-17th century latin it’s the present participle of jubilare which means to call out and shout for joy.

Peekaboo Paradox by Gene Weingarten:

“On the floor in front of us, the kids — 2, 3 and 4 year-olds — were convulsed in laughter. Literally. They were rolling on the carpeted floor, holding their tummies, mouths agape, little teeth jubilantly bared, squealing with abandon. In the vernacular of stand-up, the Great Zucchini was killing.”

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Every new seat at the power table must weather the intense scrutiny of all ordained power holders.

Perched precariously between a growing power holder and the ensconced, legacy power holders – every neophyte endures just one important question: Are you valuable to me? While attempting to answer that question, never underestimate the usefulness of the word “yes”.

“Yes” is unique. It is one of the few remaining plastic but still potent words we’ve got. “Yes” assuages bloated egos like no other word in the English language and can mean anything from unconditional consent to not opposed.

Fortunately not opposed is still understood to mean unanimous support and it will be your conveyor belt, transporting formidable foes into the lukewarm waters of indifference. If everyone at the table believes you are useful to them personally, or at least not opposed to their opinions, they will languish in apathy until disturbed.

While this initial power dynamic is easily recognized; regularly overlooked is the need to choose enemies from among the hot-tubbers.

Too few of us are ready to admit that, right down to the smallest working unit, there is competition at work. You have allies and enemies. Being one who intends to climb into power, you must know that power is a finite good. To get some, you take some. And everyone you take it from will be angry.

The trick is that while everyone is focused on the winning and everyone fears the losing, almost everybody forgets about not winning. You should care about this. These are power holders who are hungry for more that won’t win. They’ll make a play and it’ll fall flat. You want to be there when that happens. You want this to happen to your banker.

Why? Because every power holder, including your banker, is in the category of enemy. You are in the business of taking. No one likes that. But being in this category is independent of anyone realizing this is true and if you’re good, no one will.

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To some, my thoughts on beauty and on power are contradictory. While juxtaposed, they aren’t opposite.

Most see Sun Tzu’s advice as the “Art of War” but a few see it as the “Art of Peace“. And many read Machiavelli for his insights on struggle and neglect his advice on grace.

In every moment of contention we can choose brutality or grace. But choosing grace does not mean deference.

If I aim to change your direction we can wrestle or dance. Either way, you’ll be turned around.

specious — spe·cious (spē’shəs) — an adjective meaning having the ring of truth or plausibility but actually fallacious; deceptively attractive or superficially correct but actually worthless

“The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.”
Niccolo Machiavelli

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It is too easy to grow desperate.

As though life were a hill. The greasy floor of the slaughter house. At the bottom lies the gaping maw of desperate living, foul choices, and black thoughts.

It seems so but isn’t that a deception? Isn’t that a consequence of laziness rather than a consequence of life?

Aren’t we surrounded by beauty, by great thoughts, by brilliance?

What is so hard then … so impossible … to be intentional and strong in our response to the desperation that threatens us daily? Why is it so taxing to stand and face that dark wave which rolls in with the dawn?

I would look for the song today, the art, the purity … this darkness is not for me … it is not for us.

To get inside with a power holder: see where they are vulnerable.

To see where they are vulnerable: stop watching them.

Just as you stopped watching the speaker, now stop watching the obvious power holder. Hiding behind a quiet façade is the remaining ocean of power. The ensconced legacy power holder.

Those not building power are defending it. The legacy power holder is the quiet, mirthless, furrowed brow at the table. These people are always invited to every important meeting, they rarely carry the floor, and they rarely agree. But are never negative.

The openly negative opponent is not a power holder. This is a derisive distraction. A wanna-be. Ignore them.

Look for people with enough independence that they can oppose without open warfare. They’ve got something to defend. Watch what they do. When they get their way, you’ve found your banker’s vulnerability.

Knowing your banker’s intentions and their vulnerabilities; you now know their needs.

Needs can include knowledge gaps (technical issues, positions of legacy power holders, etc.), intelligence gaps (misses non-verbal cues, misses underlying assumptions, generates logistical mine-fields), or just plain horse-power. Whatever the need, figure out how you can satisfy a few.

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The fledgling power holder is continually distracted by the need to build more.

That’s why they’re so negligent. They are looking way up above them and don’t see what’s happening where they are. This leaves them vulnerable, though they usually don’t see it, and this is why you go after them first.

These are the keys of your initial success: intentions, vulnerabilities, and needs.

To begin the borrowing process, figure out what they’re looking at. Understand their need. Know what they’re trying to build and decide how you complement that quest. Know what they intend to do and know how you can help make that happen.

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Copyright Jeremy Heigh

Debt is easier to generate than equity. This is as true for corporate-types as it is for entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs always max out their lines of credit. Max out yours.

In this case your credit is bandwidth. The time and resources you’re given to do your job. You have a maximum capacity. A portion of it is used to get your job done … to satisfy your job description. The rest can be used to grow.

Most corporate types use this bandwidth for surfing, complaining, or lunching. Use your bandwidth to find and borrow power.

Finding starts by observing.

Every conversation, whether you’re in it or not, is a chance to learn about power. The trick is to never watch the person that’s talking.

To know who to borrow from you’ve got to know who has some. A good indicator of rich and readily accessible power is the person who’s late, who isn’t listening, or who is interrupting.

Readily accessible is key. There will be power, lots of it, held by people that don’t meet these characteristics, but you won’t be able to get it when you need it – which is now. Once you’ve mustered some of your own, you can begin to tap some of these other sources.

The always late, never listening, constantly interrupting power holder is your first connection because of one, single defining characteristic: that person is still building.

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Copyright Jeremy Heigh

Unlike Hugh, I still check my stats fairly regularly. I enjoy it. It’s marvelous that we can own words or ideas, even if it’s just for a flicker of time. Imagine owning the two-word phrase “sift experiment“. Remarkable.

So, I’ve been watching this month to see if the site traffic would pass the highmark set in August when Kottke blinked my way.

Today we rolled past. This is quite a milestone. Mostly because I didn’t have a “Kottke blink” this time. It’s just … growth. But also because I’ve tried to stop trending. I chose to start writing about things that are real to me … instead of real to someone else I admire. And finally, because I haven’t posted regularly until quite recently.

So … no conclusions or anything. Just a note of interest.

The first job of every entrepreneur or corporate dilettante is to know your banker.

The mistake made by entrepreneurs is assuming their key resource is ideas. And corporate-types always mistakenly assume it’s knowledge.

For entrepreneurs the key resource is cash. How to get it, how to keep it, and what to do with it are the primary questions.

For corporates it’s power.

Having power, as a young or new employee isn’t a possibility. So, much like an entrepreneur that’s always trying to borrow more money, you’ve got to begin by borrowing power.

How to find it and how to get it? Come back tomorrow.

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Copyright Jeremy Heigh

I’d like to start working through some parallels between entrepreneurs and corporate/bureaucratic types.

Before extending the role of any aspiring corporate player, there’s something to be said about the foundation that it’s built on — a common paradigm needs to be constructed.

In the series of posts that follow I’ll try to explain how I see the root of a corporate workers job and they tools they get to play with.

Areas to cover include:

- Dollars and scents: Where power smells like cash,
- The answer is yes (and other lies), and
- Watercolor for corporate artists: Landscape painting and simiar pastimes.

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Copyright Jeremy Heigh

Are you allowed to want to be a CEO?

I’m not sure if I do. And no one has ever asked me — except one lunatic headhunter. But isn’t CEOing something that requires an invitation?

Where else … name any other situation where you show up and ask to the leader. Aren’t the best leaders invited to be leaders?

Listening to the 800-CEO-READ podcast of an interview with Justin Menkes, author of Executive Intelligence, I kept quietly hoping I was bright enough … intelligent enough to rank. Again, I’m not convinced the CEO spot’s for me. But I sorta, kinda want to find out if I could do it.

It’s a bit like the server job I tried to get while in university. The restaurant was trendy and exclusive. Once I found out I got the job, I didn’t want it anymore. It might be the same here.

But casting out a screen on the things I am … I don’t really know a lot. I can’t tell if I’d need to. What really gets used … what’s the gap a CEO fills? Knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom … in what ratio?

If knowledge is like construction materials — you either got them or you don’t, then intelligence is like knowing where to put all the pieces in a house that hasn’t got a blueprint, and wisdom is understanding if the house should be built and where to put it.

In order of rarity it’d go wisdom, intelligence, then knowledge. But, according to Menkes, the ranking for CEO goodness is intelligence and knowledge. Wisdom isn’t discussed.

And if I could pick one I’d take wisdom.

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Copyright Jeremy Heigh

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

More here.

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.”

incredulity — in·cre·du·li·ty (ĭn’krĭ-dū’lĭ-tē) — a noun meaning the state or quality of being incredulous; disbelief, dubiety, dubiousness, incertitude, uncertainty

“There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all who would profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit … the lukewarmness arises from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.”

- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513

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I’ve been thinking about the things corporate salary-type folks could learn from entrepreneurs. It’s actually an old idea of mine … not really an idea I guess … more of a recognition — entrepreneurs have lots to teach innovators within large organizations.

I even bought a domain: you & company.

It seems to me that I’ve got a unique chance to share something on this topic. I just left a fairly successful stint in the federal government: 2.5 years, four levels of promotion, and lots of opportunities to go back … not bad. I worked happily (at least from my side) with several entrepreneurs throughout that time through sift. And now I chug away with myriad entrepreneurs as an investor.

I’ve got an unusual perspective too. I’ve come from a position in international discussions to an unmarked office in the industrial sector. From a need to be very visionary to a need to be very tactical. From an organisation of thousands to an organisation of seven. From the nation’s capital to a tiny, rural Alberta town. These are big changes. Polar changes. And if nothing else, offer mildly interesting observations.

Perhaps one of the most best things I can share is my take, and changing understanding, of what it took to be successful in an organisation like the one I left. And the things I’m learning now that would have changed the way I did things then.

This is a big group of people. A quick scan for stats gave me an Inc. article that suggests there were more than 6,000 companies with more than 1,000 employees in 1998. Not sure what the number is now, eight years later, but that’s quite a niche.

So, here it comes: You & Company — council for corporate entrepreneurs.

(For now I’ll post it here … to busy to make a whole other site.)

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Copyright Jeremy Heigh

brouhaha — brou·ha·ha (brū’hä-hä’) — a noun meaning an uproar; a hubbub; a confused disturbance far greater than its cause merits.

Spotted at Bloglines Highlights: “Crashes in Japan, Chocolate Cities and Body Armor Brouhaha”

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From Paul Graham on How to Do What You Love:

“It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.

Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what’s admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.”

randy — ran·dy (răn’dē) — an adjective meaning lascivious, lecherous, or if you’re a Scot, ill-mannered. Likewise, it has meant obstreperous, unruly, rampant (The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose).

Spotted at 43Folders, by Merlin Mann:

The randy clusters of zeroes and ones which power the index cards which run the servers which make the 43 Folders blog come to your home computer set have apparently decided to unionize without telling anyone. Consequently, I suspect a wildcat strike may be behind a lot of the unreliable site behavior in the last day or so. So it goes.

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the sift everything experiment
sift. everything. experiment.
sift/experiment …

sift everything; experiment

s*e

I’m a fan of words. It’s the biggest reason I love T.H. White, Billy Collins, and E.B. White — their delightful choice of words.

So, for kicks, here’s philologr: A pop of perfectly placed words in a world of abused terms.

Cheers.
___

flummox — a verb meaning perplex, vex, stick, get, puzzle, mystify, baffle, beat, pose, bewilder, flummox, stupefy, nonplus, gravel, amaze, dumbfound

Spotted in Made for CES by David Hoffer:

The ubiquity of the iPod was the most notable thing this year at CES. Standing in the Microsoft booth at the Playsforsure kiosk, an attendee looking at the 40+ MP3 players before him said, “Where’s the iPod?” “Apple doesn’t come to CES,” the flummoxed Microsoft responded. “They have their own show.”

___

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Copyright Jeremy Heigh

My days are a blur of chaos.  Too many new things. 

New son.  New house.  New city.  New job.  New friends.

I don’t mind the pace … usually.  But just the idea of slow makes me realize how fast I’m going. 

Before leaving Ottawa I read the book, In Praise of Slowness.  Actually, I sped read it.  But as attractive as the idea is … I didn’t like the book.  From my perspective, the malady of chaos isn’t addressed by reducing speed.  Slower isn’t the point; it’s really about intentional change.

Two days ago Michael Bierut posted an article in the Design Observer.  In it he reviews the intentional changes made in The New Yorker magazine.  Building forward from the first issue on February 21, 1925 he illustrates how little this “standard for sophisticated urbanity” has changed.

Michael argues that there’s a case to be made for slow design.  That in a time when “designers are used to lecturing timid clients that change requires bravery … after 80 years — not changing begins to seem like the bravest thing of all.”  Quoting slowLab he writes:

“‘Daily life has become a cacophony of experiences that disable our senses, disconnect us from one another and damage the environment, say the designers of the not-for-profit . But deep experience of the world — meaningful and revealing relationships with the people, places and things we interact with — requires many speeds of engagement, and especially the slower ones.’  

… slow design is not just about duration or speed, but about thoughtfulness, deliberation, and — how else to put it? — tender loving care.”

When panic threatens to overwhelm me … when my knees are bouncing a jittery staccato rythum … when my bandwidth spikes repeatedly before 10:00 a.m. — I don’t ache for slowness.  I’m after loving care.

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Copyright Jeremy Heigh

Web 1.0 … 2.0 … 3.0 … is well ahead of me. I still muck around with tables, html, and color schemes. And my friends think that’s impressive — both of them.

But I could understand Jeffrey Zeldman and that’s a big deal. Go here.

For me isn’t the technology or even the new toys. It’s small teams, plugging into unbridled human passions, and leveraging the oceans of data swishing around us all. Bracket it with whatever numbers you like, but that’s the point.

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Copyright Jeremy Heigh

[posted January 16, 2006]

Below is the purpose I had for sift when I started this experiment.

I’m still all in on those ideas but I think the purpose is quickly evolving away from purely entrepreneurs and purely business. Just as I am evolving past these things.

While in my government job … while living on two great incomes without kids … while living in the nation’s capital … while representing Canada internationally … life had a different flavour. I saw a different set of rich things. I enjoyed different colours.

Now I am an almost VC … a father (and not so wealthy one) … I live in a tiny Alberta town … and represent a very small company … the old richness has faded and a new set of colours has emerged.

While I learn to paint with these new colours I don’t have the heart for those old things. At least not in those old ways.

I’m changing. I am picking up different parts of myself. I am rebecoming.

Instead of tactics, I choose strategy. Instead of bestsellers, I choose classics. Instead of buzzwords, I choose parables. Instead of knowledge, I choose wisdom.

This is my experiment.

[posted September 24, 2004]

“A gracefully executed work has no peer.” Si-Ma (1019-1086)

Peerless. Imagine that. A place where your greatest competition is … you. This is the niche, the blue ocean strategy, the true art of war.

Where is peerless found? In the essence of business … the art of graceful execution. Perfect expression of purpose. Flawless code. Brilliant design. Simple strategy.

Perfect, flawless, brilliant, and simple only come from complete knowing; graceful execution is a consequence of absolute understanding. To fully know, you have to have looked, studied, analyzed and described the depth and edge of your art.

Only after knowing can you express the essence of purpose — to fully know you must give up narrow, focused, and singular thinking. You must go deeper and wider. But to be a great entrepreneur — to beat the terrific odds against your success — you must focus narrowly on a single opportunity. A paradox.

Paradox is opportunity. An opportunity to seek another perspective, a higher perspective — sift.

Sift lets you see opportunity at its highest level, while you focus at the lowest level. Sift ignores the existing order, while you strive to impose order. Sift thinks about everything, while you think about surviving.

Sift uses observation and fluid thinking to cross all silos of learning and bring you the best knowledge from art, science, culture and business — because this is the way that peerless is found.

Perfect, flawless, brilliant and simple. Peerless. Your choice.

“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of taking walks daily … who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.” Henry David Thoreau

I am of two opposing natures.

On one side stands the enigmatic, aggressive, strategic, dominant, chaotic self. On the other: a reflective, melancholic, wise, introspective, envisioning self.

Thoreau always calls out the second. We play together for hours.

Here’s a chore: Define what you’re worth for a day.

Don’t turtle and say it’s your wage; or if you’re an entrepreneur, what you pull down — you’ll miss too much.

Include your thought time, all the stuff you decide not to do, every time you say no, relationships you build or refortify, egos you caress so they keep chugging. These and a vast pool of forgettable decisions are a part of your worth at work.

Define that number and then decide how to get paid.

Way back at the end of this podcast, Joe Liemandt (Founder and CEO, Trilogy) describes how he changed what he asks for.

Jack Welch and a few other clients were telling Joe that his software was great but they weren’t getting what it was worth. The value wasn’t apparent. So Joe took them up on their gripe and changed how he was paid.

Now he asks for a percentage of the difference he makes. Which is way bigger than the up front cost his clients were paying.

And everybody’s lots more happy.

Why? First, people want to know that the things they get are worth paying for — and are willing to pay more for the knowing. And second, people want to get paid for what they put on the table — and are willing to work harder to prove it.

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Copyright Jeremy Heigh

I love conferences.

There’s no better example of how dedicated we are to ignoring everyone else. Conferences are even better than meetings because we actually pay to be there. We pay for speakers to come just so we can ignore them. We spend a great deal of time and energy explaining why each one of them is wrong. And when we get frustrated enough, we go out into the hall to make expensive long-distance calls on our cell phones.

Yesterday I went to my first conference on bioenergy. 

So, we all piled into this tiny room in the basement of the hotel.  Around 70 of us. And for nearly eight hours we tried to get past the filters of “agriculture”, “forestry”, and “energy” paradigms to build a “use everything that grows for it’s best purpose” paradigm.  We didn’t get far.  Breaking molds is tough work. 

I left the room with three pseudo-conclusions:

1. Anyone with a sliver of expertise and a tonne of eloquence could hijack the show.
2. Five players hold fragments of the whole story and none of them work well together.
3. Only two in a room of 70 are ready to move.

It felt like a bloggers conference.  All the jazzy ideas, a few funny speakers, lots of “we” that means “me”. A bunch of earnest seekers trying to find their edge. Lots of talk about change without getting any.

We were talking about a revolution. For us it was changing how the world things about energy. For bloggers its changing how the corporate world thinks about its customers.

Hugh included the thoughts of Marketing Hub and Johnnie) in his summary of how bloggers are doing. There are three suggestions in his post that are just as useful in the bioenergy area:  Few companies are ready to move, most are waiting for their partners or clients to move instead, and the best that’s come from all the conversations to date isn’t inducing someone else’s evolution — it’s our own.

Isn’t that good enough?  Not just good enough, but actually the whole point?

Look around for the biggest players you really wish would change.  Figure out how long they’ve been around.  And make an intentional assessment of how important that company really is.  Is that thirty-five year old company, who’s already being hunted by a three-year old company, really the best target for your change?

If:

• conversations are actually changing us,
• corporate/political life cycles are relativly short, and
• tiny companies can behead juggernauts, then
• caring about giants is exactly the wrong focus.

It’s point two in the list above where change can be engineered.  Ignore the rehetoric.  Forget the other 68 wallflowers.  Just focus on the five fragment holders, grab the two that want action, and get stuff done.  Then get really good at telling the story.

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Copyright Jeremy Heigh

Strategy is a mindful, present response to hope.

The difference between hope and strategy: hope is a prerequisite to strategy but not a sufficient condition. Action is also required but also insufficient. The equation must also include understanding and for most this is, or becomes, the critical issue.

Hope is also a prerequisite to entrepreneurism. It is the belief that a possibility will become a reality. And for the entrepreneur this is where action begins. The problem begins because few understand that: action does not equal strategy and the nature of strategy is conditioned by an ability to influence the future.

Constructed deliberately, here is the equation:

Where,

- Hope (H) is a vision of the future,
- Action (a) is a response to that hope, and
- Understanding (U) is the recognition of how action impacts the future.

Then,

Strategy (S) = H(a)*U

And the first derivative of strategy is: a*U

Hence,

Understanding is integral to strategy and the impact is multiplicative.

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Copyright Jeremy Heigh

Blogs are like flashers; books are like strippers.

Blogs give only a glimpse of substance where a good book builds to full revelation. Blogs present a snapshot of an idea’s evolution; a book constructs the idea from its creation to its current state.

Bloggers are like privateers; book writers are like man-o-wars.

Bloggers are more cavalier with their reputations, more wont to be careless, and less bound to a certain cause. A book writer is tactically deliberate, confined to a topic, and has made a massive investment that had better pay-off.

Blogs are like jam; books are like bread.

A pure diet of blogs threatens to decay any capacity (and any appetite) to build and hone an argument based on facts, iteration, and rhetoric. A pure diet of books may sometimes be bland but it is sustainable.

Blogs are like gossip; books are like legends.

There are no “classics” in blogs.

Blogs are like topsoil; books are like bedrock.

There is no blog (in it’s most broad and whole sense) that has withstood the assault of time and continuous scrutiny to emerge as a foundation for the next generation of writers.

Blogs are like moths; books are like pearls.

Blogs take moments to create, the ideas percolate for mere days before publication, and exist for as long as the main page takes to cycle. Books are the product of years, are refined continuously throughout their publication, and exist almost indefinitely.

Blogs are like spruce; books are like oak.

Burn spruce and you get minimal heat, lots of noise, and mostly ash. Burn oak for lots of heat, minimal noise, and hardly any ash. It depends what you’re after: entertainment or heat.

Past, present, or future. What of strategy?

In the fog of waking up I saw what seemed a clear picture: the answer depends. Depends on an ability to influence a future position. The answer’s been clarified by my recent career swerve.

When working for the government, I was paid to understand and partially define the future. Looking forward I might see an opportunity or an issue and my job was to help design a set of programs that would answer what was coming. I made waves.

Now, as an investor, I still see the future but can only barely influence it. The only real leverage I have is a stubborn resolve to invest in companies that act on the possibilities I too see on the horizon. My only action is to narrow my interest to those investments that achieve those potential outcomes. Here I understand currents.

And as an entrepreneur, there is only one choice: ride the wave. No single entrepreneur has sufficient power to move waves nor perspective to truly understand them. The only decision is to move as the wave does and the only action is to optimize the ride.

Malcolm Gladwell tells a story about symphony auditions. Until relatively recently, auditions required the player to walk out in front of the judges, sit down and perform. And while the pool of players was racially diverse and often included women, the winners were regularly white males.

Believing that the results were a consequence of visual stereotypes rather than capacity, many symphonies now use a screen behind which the performer will play unseen by the judges. And the results are remarkably weighted toward female players.

Malcolm’s conclusion is that less information (no more visual cues) can sometimes result in better decisions.

It got me wondering about investments. Right now, when considering an investment: we meet the client, tour the facilities, ask for references, do a credit check, dissect the business plan, pursue rigorous due diligence on the proposition, invite outside opinions, approve at three levels, and disburse on milestones to mitigate risk.

Would we be better with less? I’d be interested in what Brad Feld and Fred Wilson have to say.

Past. Present. Future.  They are each chimeric and spin as ghosts. What is the future worth?  What can the past teach?  What is important about the present?

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen master, says that in every moment we can choose one of the three. 

In the past is our regret.  In the future is our hope.  And only in the present is life.

It is only now that life exists.  The only moments for color, joy, love, and grace are this moment. 

A plan to love isn’t loving.  An remembered rouge isn’t.

Getting past the love/joy bit, what is strategy or even thinking when only action creates the outcome we desire?

The Edge Annual Question — 2006

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?

“The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?”