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I finally made a new computer purchase, the first time in almost seven years. Yes, even though I am a computing professional working in cutting edge grid computing, my personal boxes were from the days when Windows 2000 was new.
I work on Linux for the grid, installed Linux desktops at home – this is being written on a 800 MHz desktop with a failing graphics card, in Firefox on Mepis, an Ubuntu variant. I have administered Solaris and Windows 2000, and run Windows XP Professional on my current old HP laptop.
But after using an older Mac Powerbook G4 at the lab, I couldn't do anything but buy a Macintosh. They just work.
Kirsch, David and Goldfarb, Brent. November 17, 2006. "Small Ideas, Big Ideas, Bad Ideas, Good Ideas: 'Get Big Fast' and Dot Com Venture Creation".
Kirsch, David; Goldfarb, Brent; and Miller, David A. April 24, 2006. "Was there too little entry during the Dot Com Era?"
Laseter, Tim; Kirsch, David; and Goldfarb, Brent. 2007. "Lessons of the Last Bubble". strategy+business, 46 (Spring 2007).
Laseter, Tim; Turner, Martha; and Wilcox, Ron. 2003. "The Big, the Bad, and the Beautiful.". strategy+business, 33 (Winter 2003).
The general argument in all of these is that "Get Big Fast" works only in limited circumstances. Kirsch, Goldfarb and Miller argue that the Dot Com Era had a higher success rate in new businesses than both the national average and for new businesses in mature, known industries. Over 50% of Dot Com Era tech firms made it past the drop.
(I should admit that I was the owner of a Dot Com Era tech firm that provided consulting services to large firms, including other consulting firms. We survived but only because "we" is not a big number. I would imagine that many such companies exist. My old partner's company is still around although he'll bill about $500 this year. I closed mine after eight years and am now opening up a new one. Long and short: I'm suspicious of the numbers.)
The articles all make the point that big is not always good, that managed growth is better than explosions.
From "Lessons of the Last Bubble":
To avoid the [next] bubble, we recommend lots of little experiments that send the herd in many different directions. Avoiding the 'get big fast' strategy and the herd instinct allows for a more thorough investigation of the terrain. Many members of the herd will fall upon barren terrain and die, but in the long run, careful nurturing of the fruitful routes will produce a greater herd than overgrazing of the fertile patches discovered by the lucky few.
Or, as someone else said sometime before them:
Hearken; Behold, there went out a sower to sow: And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the way side, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up. And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth: But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away.
And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit.
And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased; and brought forth, some thirty, and some sixty, and some an hundred.
And he said unto them, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
This indiscriminate scattering of seed has bothered people for years. You should concentrate on the model that works, they say. But you can't ever be sure what that model really is, or who will receive your output today. Yesterday's customers, whether in business or for the "Kingdom of Heaven", are not the receivers tomorrow.
Models must be experiments, hundreds of them, which all have more or less equal chances of being wild failures. In fact, the failures may produce successful strategies that can be adopted by others later. But if you are going to be successful, you must not worry that things aren't always successful but concentrate on learning.
"Raiders of the Lost Arc: Is Joan of Arc the prototype for modern celebrity?",by Jessica Winter on Slate.com.
Donald Spoto's Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint is reviewed by Winter. He apparently takes a more historically appropriate look at the great saint. She's an enigmatic character to us moderns, but somehow compelling in so many ways.
Or is it just that we like celebrity?
... When fame is sought solely for itself, rather than for God or for a secular higher calling, then the anguished prelude to transfiguration can become an ugly vestige of the earlier religious incarnation of celebrity, lacking meaning except as spectacle.
... But if we look upon modern celebrity as a hollowed-out, mummified version of Christian fame, we suddenly have a context for the ghoulishness of so much contemporary stardom, the sheer number of sordid off-ramps in celebrity Babylon—especially, it seems, for young women: Their endlessly repeated passions of self-starvation, zombie debauchery, drug-scrambled neurons, kamikaze recklessness, and penitent public rituals are displayed for our delectation on countless celebrity Web sites, with relics available on eBay.
A long time ago, I read John J. Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001) and was greatly influenced by it. Strangely, I never noted it: he only appears as a note in my discussions of a book about Ulysses S. Grant.
Mearsheimer is a West Point graduate who currently teaches at the University of Chicago. He expands the realist tradition by adding a testable (read: can use history of foreign affairs to prove) element. His argument is really that states are interested in survival, you can never be sure about other states' intentions, and therefore a state must constantly be accumulating power. You can't become a non-warring state because it doesn't make sense for survival.
There are two interesting interviews with Mearsheimers I've passed through recently:
Put Mearsheimer's ideas with Julian Fairfield's ideas (in a forthcoming book) using holonic theory to explain human conflict and you have a nice reason for Balkanization and why what's-his-name said in his book on Jesus that many of the ruling Jews didn't have a problem with being ruled by Rome: in the end, the external balancer forces opposing sides to play with each other rather than go at each other's throats.
Mearsheimer's sound bite is that in international relations, if someone doesn't do what they said they would do, there isn't any one at the other end of your "911" call.
Interesting is Mearsheimer's discussion of the Realists' opinion of the invasion of Iraq.
I'm doing some ghost-rewriting of some articles for some consultants. Some of them were pretty easy. I think that those are the ones that I can easily grok. But these last two are apparently at stratum 7, and, frankly, I'm not that smart. It takes just about all I have to figure out what these two guys are trying to say. One was pretty clear but needed strong editing. I gave it a nudge and hopefully the author was happy about it. I wouldn't mind writing with him again.
Writing on the edge of your understanding is tiring. I'm pretty sure that I have done a poor job on this last one, but it was a better job than anyone else I've known could have done. I understand the theory and I understand writing. But it's like writing two master theses. Well, they are shorter, but the content is extreme. Both have sent me to the library. So to speak: I use online subscription services to access decent materials. I think I've been totally upside down because of these things.
It's exhausting to try and figure out this stuff. These guys have at least twenty years on me, and at the age that I was working at Radio Shack they were working at places like McKinsey. At least the basic ideas, those wacky Requisite Organization ideas of Elliott Jaques – aren't particularly difficult. It helps not to be a fascist or enjoy pissing matches.
I'm listening to my Pandora station, using the PandoraFM mashup. I'm one of those people who isn't disappointed by Pandora's listings. I would never have done Skeeter-Kenney or the Violet Archers without having heard them first. Right now, Bill Mallonee's "Overflow".
But I'm also one of those poor sots whose music tastes haven't really settled. Honestly, I don't want to listen to the music of my high school prom. *Bleh* When I worked at Radio Shack — this month marks my one year out of it — the guys there were younger than I was but insisted on listening to 80s rock. Whoopee. Even the musicians wanted to listen to that stuff. Been there done that: if I listened to it at the ice cream factory, I don't want to listen to it now. Inexplicably, that includes Suzanne Vega's "Luka" which they played on WIOT back when it was hot. I can't explain that either.
Anyway, Pandora: Neat! It's made my next music purchase Richard Thompson. His cover of "Oops! I did it again" is amazing. Really.
(Ooo! Ooo! He just came on! Ooooooo! Spooky! I'm really tired, I guess, because that amused me for a long time.)
I think that I've never been all that interested in helping companies become richer by applying these principles. I rather like Wilfred Brown's work, but he was pro-union, something Jaques turned his back on later. At least, Brown recognized the right of organization and created work councils at every level of the company. His company, if I recall rightly.
Frankly (my new word) I just don't give a hoot. Or a hootman, if you will. I just care about companies only so far as they help me achieve other goals that represent more difficult values: freedom, dignity, liberty. I'm not that interested in people who want to kill the union.
From David Reff, CEO & Principal Search Consultant, Reff & Co.:
The second reason companies struggle [to find good hires] also is related to leadership. Specifically, a resistance to what I think is a basic truism, which is that character is destiny.
— "How to Hire and Retain Top Talent", February 5, 2007 IBM Innovations Podcast
Reff was talking about companies and their own character, that people are attracted to companies who know their purpose, trust their people.
It's an interesting interview. Reff knows what a good company looks like, but he really doesn't know how to identify it until he's there. You can tell right when you walk in, he says. You can feel the energy, see the enthusiasm. Just as you can feel the lack of it.
"Character is destiny" would be useful to remember in your own jobhunts. I'm going to combine the four or five Big Ideas that I've been writing on (I'm cleaning up some articles for publications for a management group) and put it here. Because I'm tired of repeating myself and all.
What is your character?
If I lit your house on fire, what would you run in to get? If you had that, and had time, what else would you want to get?
I had to create a new bio to describe how I learned about Elliott Jaques stuff. What do you think, Yule?
[ Continue reading "A New Bio, etc." ]manasclerk is a professional writer who has worked in a variety of settings. He paid his way through college providing consulting services to the environmental compliance group of a coil coater and has been a consultant more or less ever since. Mostly because no one in their right mind would ever hire him as an employee, as several career coaches and mentors have pointedly pointed out.
I suppose that I should say something in response, Yule, something deep and meaningful. Especially in light of the ideas about singleness as a modern disease. Sure, there's widowhood, which was pretty prevalent. We always think about widows but childbirth was pretty risky. Losing your wife wasn't uncommon just to that. Add disease and warfare (plus all those pesky accidents in the wide world) and you have lots of death to go around.
Still, I imagine that it was different. There weren't as many people idealizing being single.
But I said I wouldn't talk about it. So let's hear about Hope.
We took the girl to visit Hope College this weekend. Got caught in whiteout conditions as the high winds blew the snow off the Michigan fields. I now know why you should never leave your car during a blizzard. I have a pretty good sense of direction but I had no idea where I was. There just weren't any landmarks.
And Holland's signage is just plain awful.
But she loved it and had a great time. That's what it was all about anyway. We just think that she'll grow so well there.
Now to get them to give her the financial aid package to match Earlham and Evansville....
Are you happy, friend?
http://gridpp-storage.blogspot.com/
Grieg Cowan's probably got the single most useful stuff out there if you're trying to put your sites terabytes onto a grid using dCache.