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CB called and mentioned an idea that sounded a lot like the creative collective I had previously bandied about for a novel idea. You'll like it, Yule. Makes it seem like it is a good idea. Lots of questions still remain:
And a host of others.
The real issue is that the goal can only be to introduce novelty through human freedom. You can't predict where things will go. You can only disrupt the current stability.
Generally, the collective is a group of high-mode individuals who band together as a company to accomplish individual goals. This mirrors in many ways the formation of companies in the Renaissance. People of a variety of abilities would join together because:
Encyclopædia Britannica reports that today is the birthday of Ṣaddām Ḥussein, executed deposed-President of Iraq, and the anniversary of the execution of Benito Mussolini, dictator and self-styled "Il Duce" of fascist Italy.
Nice juxtaposition, there.
There is still time to pick up the excellent MacUpdate Promo's Parallels Bundle for Mac OS X for only US$64.99 (less than 42 EUR, thanks to the dollar's wretched state), complete with the MSRP $79 Parallels virtual machine for when you need to kick open Windows XP. Although I'd rather just boot up and enjoy the full RAM for playing a game now and then, Parallels offers decent performance for those times when I'd rather run Visio in the native OS rather than through Codeweavers Crossover Office.
Nice grab for Mac users.
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Have you figured it out yet? There are things that I haven't said, of course. Your job is bad for you not just because it's not at the right level. It's also not using the right language of achievement. You haven't heard this yet, because we have needed to spend some time thinking about work levels.
And Flow. Do you remember when you last had that thrilling experience, to lose yourself in the work, to be beyond mastery, to feel the walls of your perception fall away? Somewhat akin to the alpha states achieved by some in Pentecostal worship services and raves.
When's the last time your work energized you rather than chewed you up?
But not all of us have options about work. But here's some secrets for you that others won't tell you.
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[ Continue reading "New MacUpdate Promo Bundle" ]I was cleaning out my file cabinet and came across this jewel of a photo from the mid-1980s, probably from Time magazine. I need to hit a library with a Readers' Guide set from back then, since none of my online resources can go back that far. The article title was retained, thankfully: "Taking the Test for Teachers".
Yes, we all need more intruction. I was just saying to the missus that I need to start intructing.
The funny thing was that nowhere in the article was this sign mentioned. I can't imagine that the photo editor didn't do it on purpose, and certainly Chow Wong, the Houston Chronicle photographer who took this gem, knew what he was doing.
Sorry about the quality. It was at one time pasted to something and the adhesive bled through.
Sure, Yule, April showers bring May flowers, but we've had so much precipitation this last winter that the ground is still soaked. Or as the National Weather Service says, "hydrological conditions are favorable for flooding". 1-5 inches (2.5-12 cm) is a lot of rain in 24 hours. It's not San Antonio's 35 inches (89 cm) in a week but it's still a lot of rain, considering that this was one of the North End's wettest winters on record (in total precip).
And then we're to get sleet and snow on Saturday.
To make up for all this wonderful water, we'll probably have a drought all summer, of course. Lots of rain to make it impossible to plant, and then no rain when we need to water the crops. Right when it's a great time to be a farmer, what with food prices doubling.
I'm sure that you're enjoying your weather.
Some random thoughts I've had over the past couple of years, collected. Randomly. About what I call underemployed or underutilized high-mode individuals. Others call them "ex- gifted child" or "adult underachiever" or "irritating screw ups". If you don't know what "mode" means, here's a quick explanation.
Elliott Jaques and Wilfred Brown discovered that people's ability to handle complexity was tied to their mind's time horizon, and that different people grew at different rates. Not only that, but they tended to follow set paths from the time they were in the early twenties: people were on different development arcs.
Think of a chart with your time horizon on the X-axis and your age on the Y-axis. People are on different trajectories on this chart: the growth of their mental time-horizons is different. These trajectory arcs tended towards bands, with people staying in one band as they aged. Maybe with a lot of effort you can change your arc: Jaques and Brown didn't think so, and most of the research indicates that it is at least not what most of us do.
none of these are me
Here's a chart showing different bands. The vertical rectangles are where certain individuals were when they were evaluated. Let's take the yellow rectangle at the bottom left. This guy was 25 when I interviewed him. I believed that the evidence supported him currently having a time horizon of more than 1 year (which is represented by his position on the X-axis). My evaluation says that he is likely in the bottom of that range (the stronger yellow), and that he will continue growing in this band all his life.
Why is any of this important? What could it mean for your life?
People are closer in time-horizons when they are younger. (The time on the X-axis is logarithmic: that is, it increases exponentially as we go up it.) So if you are a "high-moder", in one of the steeper trajectory arcs, you actually grow farther away from people as you age. You become increasingly irritating to the people around you because you keep on trying to talk at your time-horizon.
Look at the red rectangle at age 40. He's in the 8th mode, according to this evaluation. His time horizon when I interviewed him was around 10 years. He works with people who are three to four trajectories down from him, but his age, with a time-horizon of 1-3 years. Every time he starts talking, he has to be very careful lest he overpower the conversations with time-horizons that are 3x+ longer than his coworkers.
When they were in college, at 21, he had a time-horizon of about 2 years, compared to their 3 months to 1 year. A big difference, and one that was noticed, but not too bad. Now he's just a freak.
An illustration: A coworker of mine, 42, had a time-horizon of about 3 years. He was consulting to a massive insurance company. His client contact was 27 and had a time horizon of less than one year. They were called into a meeting with a vice-president, who probably had a time-horizon of 6 years. She was considering whether she should pull the project that they were working on. Which would mean both would get fired.
She kept asking for something from the young kid. He kept thinking he was agreeing with her, when in actuality he was shrinking what she wanted to something he could handle, which is not his fault and something we all do. It was as if the conversation was like this:
"I want you to do this 5 METERS of work."
"I hear you and agree: this 1.5 METERS of work."
"No, I want 5 METERS of work."
"Yes, I hear you. You want 1.5 METERS of work. We're in total agreement."
"Listen, you obstinate little twerp: I want 5 METERS of work."
"I hear you, and I'm agreeing with you: 1.5 METERS of work. What's your problem?"
At this point my coworker steps in and translates between the two. This placated the vice-president who didn't pull the project.
But it totally pissed off the client contact, who walked out saying that if my coworker ever embarrassed him like that again in front of a VP, he would fire him and get rid of the entire consulting firm. The kid had no idea how badly things were going.
It wasn't his fault, of course. He should never have been in that position. He didn't have the ability to handle the mental complexity that comes with these longer time horizons.
The red rectangle guy has this problem with everyone. As a result, he has adopted several coping mechanisms that obscure his true mental size, which make him come off as a weirdo to many. But I've seen him go full bore. It scared me white. All those weird adaptations (which he needs to survive) fell away and I got the full force of his intellect. It was stunning.
But if he had tried to give that to most of the people he works with, they would have reacted with mental violence of some sort against him. It would have been threatening and hurting them. He would be trying to shove a 10 year time horizon argument into a 3 year time horizon mind. It won't fit.
Since that has made no sense to anyone yet (I'll clean this up for my business blog later), here's some random notes:
Baghdad fell to US-led forces on this date in 2003. For a war where we supposedly won five years ago, this sure has taken a long time. This is like saying that because we still have troops in Europe that the war has never ended. Didn't the Iraqi government get conquered?
We actually need to send more troops to Iraq, not pull out the ones we have. Institute a draft, spend the next five years with 250,000 or more American troops (not contractors) destroying all resistance and ensuring stability, and then get out.
Not that we can afford that, of course. Ron Paul was right in 2003: invading another nation is stupid because no people wants to be invaded. Liberated, maybe, but occupied, no. Maybe McCain will solve these problems when he gets elected — oh wait: he won't win because Americans haven't elected a combat veteran since 1988.
Ah, well. At least sixteen years of draft-dodging moral bankruptcy will be over, even Clinton wins. I mean, she didn't avoid the draft by leaving the country or "serving honorably" in the National Guard for children of the wealthy. Then we can settle back into just moral bankruptcy.
At least McCain understands that we will be in Iraq for as long as we had to stay in Europe and Japan after WWII. Too bad he won't win just because he has combat experience.
Ralph D. Stacey, Douglas Griffin & Patricia Shaw. 2000. Complexity Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking?. Routledge: New York, NY. (Part of the Complexity and Emergence in Organization Series.)
I've had this book for a long time (~2003), having scored it from Powell's near the U of Chicago and I've yet to be able to plow through it. But I spent four months working intensively with Warren Kinston, a highly accomplished Systems thinker. Maybe I just needed more exposure to systems theory in order to understand the argument.
Not that the writing has helped. It's a thick book, written in dense text. But the topic itself is dense. I missed out on Philosophy 301 at Trinity of Texas (maybe because I slept through my classes for a semester) but I really didn't have the background to get the teleological arguments. After getting through Kinston's Working With Values I'm more prepared for these types of density and philosophical arguments.
Philosophy matters, of course, especially in management theory since so many managers are Pragmatists in their decision-making approach.
A sample of the discussion:
This deals with sexuality and may not be suitable for younger readers.
It's amazing how hard this number was to find.
From "Behavioral, Biological and Structural Components of MSM STI Morbidity" by Steven Goodreau and Matthew Golden, University of Washington CFAR. Presented at the 2004 National (USA) STD Prevention Conference, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). [PPT]
In this slide from their talk (and probably a summary of their findings reported later in Sexually Transmitted Infections (2007;83:458-462).
So around 25% of all males have had more than two partners in the past twelve months, while among just MSM it runs around 65%.
The problem is that NHSLS is representative of the nation as a whole. UMHS only surveyed urban men, and the methodology seems flawed to me, skewing towards MSM who would be heavily sexually active.
This still doesn't say what the median or modes are.
The new church had a meeting to move forward in our start-up. There are a lot of issues that need more frank airing and dealing with (mostly it has to do with money and what having a functioning church would probably require, realistically). It seems obvious to me that we are not going to be an "outreach" church or "seeker sensitive". We're moving towards "teaching church". If you are going to be a teaching church, you will not be focusing on evangelism.
And that statement needs some unpacking.
You see, there are some things that any small religious organization that needs to add to its numbers must do. Spiritual training, developing its people, choosing certain values against other ones, specifying group boundaries, evangelizing, marketing the ideas, keeping the members focused, etc.
