sift everything

Am leaving today for a mini-sabbatical - a canoe trip deep in the sticks of British Columbia.

No net. No phones. No batteries. Posting will be even lighter this week than it has been the last few.

As investors we ask a lot of questions. It’s the part of the job I enjoy the most.

I’ve always been attracted to important questions … this work has cemented that interest.

Here’s a question I found a while ago. Still think it’s great:

“Why are you choosing this?”

It’s complete answer either reveals:

- all the information included in decision making,
- the criteria by which choices are being made,
- the rank of alternative paths to action,
- the final goal in mind,
- the strategy for achieving that goal or …

… it provides a simple indicator of the gaps.

Anyone got a better one?

From sites around the net: “brilliant”, “genius”, “inspiring”.

The world is begging for wonderful.

P.S.: If reading this via RSS - Go here.

While doing my MSc, I explored the economic costs of a massive ice storm in Eastern Ontario. One of the women on the project focused on the costs specific to maple syrup producers.

Maple syrup production is lovely - tucked deep into old stands of trees, far from the ebb and flow of cities. It’s a quiet and wholesome work.

It feels so mysterious; it is ancient. Little beads of sap forming in the taps, dripping silently into the tubing, joining the million other drops slowly flowing to the tanks.

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What do you think of this? Is it a power worth using on trifling things like brow-beating gas boys or getting a window seat? It feels a bit more special than that.

A friend and I used to talk about the power of rhetoric. The art of argument … or, even more accurately, the art of presenting argument. A master of rhetoric is a force of nature. And such power demands responsibility.

On the heels of those discussions, the same friend told me the story of meekness.

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Retro post #143

I love design (even if my vanilla background and black text don’t prove it). In grade five I discovered that Ms. Faulkner gave A’s for illustrated stories and B’s for the plain text version. By 13 I knew that ladies preferred a poem to shouted declarations of undying ardour. My early conviction that design was distinctive kept me following design even when I wandered off into the “real” things of life (like regression equations, Brownian motion, and sodding elasticities of substitution).

This month’s issue of Fast Company does a great job laying out the intersection of design and business. Continue Reading »

So, I’ve been fiddling lately. Toying really. Poking and prodding. Dilly-dallying. A bit itchy actually. I’d like to play a little. Something related to biomimicry I think.

Biomimicry or biomimetics is the study and imitation of nature. Taking inspiration for natural design and processes. Extracting learning from nature (rather than just resources).

I’d like to play with any of these issues: waste management (preferably municipal), water treatment, or energy efficiency.

But it’s important to me that, when describing the play, one must say “like a ____” where the blank is filled with some natural phenomenon or mechanism that is both a metaphor and a real-life example of what is being done. For example: “Cleans water like … the Florida Everglades” or “Creates and secretes specific enzymes like … a fungus” or “Maintains temperature like … a termite nest” etc. Because the story is as important as the mechanism … this is business after all.

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A good friend and I were chatting about personal branding, it started with the regular hoopla: posture, piercings, language, work ethic, body odour, etc. Gradually we got to talking about how we perceive ourselves and how we each perceive the other. That got interesting. It’s surprisingly difficult to make explicit and vocal how I want to be seen and how I am seen.

If much of our reality is a consequence of our own mental images, it strikes me that tuning up our own personal brands on a regular basis is important. To get an intentional read on how I see myself and, from those I trust, a sense of what I’m communicating to others.

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Retro post: No. 99

Philip Pullman in the Guardian:

“It’s when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we won’t make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. It’s when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time. Everything else is proofreading.”

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