Getting ready for TED 2010 ...

As we are getting ready to watch TED 2010 via live webcast, I came across this related post on the Social Media Workshop ...

TEDActive 2010: Desert Diaries - The Social Media Workshop

(TEDActive 2010. February 9-13, 2010, Palm Springs, CA. Credit: TED / Michael Brands)

Maybe it was news of the blizzard onslaught back on the East Coast that made our 20 Social Media Workshop attendees so nonchalant about the chilly air in the high desert this morning. But the weather today was nothing to shrug off, and it was admirable that it was faced with such pluck ... and then just awesome that everyone brought such interesting stories to share!

We brought a bushel of our own leads ...

• What's "raising awareness" really worth?
• Social media and the Super Bowl
• Can real viruses teach us how to make content "go viral"?
• The rise of social media is a return to the natural order
• What's the real effect of the Facebook "Cause"?
• Black holes don't "lurk"
• How to be a lady online

... and our friends brought even more of their own:

We learned how being a social media rock star has its ups and downs. We learned how Twitter can help you stay one step ahead of your political opponents. We learned about "whuffie." We learned about the difference between The Beatles' success after Ed Sullivan and Susan Boyle's success after Britain's Got Talent. (We learned a lot about Susan Boyle: she's authentic; she's archetypal; she was edited well.) A 10-second, one-act, one-man play taught us about the future of face-to-face conversation. We learned about the 7-38-55 ratio and heard a lesson that drilled home the importance of good writing. And we learned that "anything can happen at launch, including porn."

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Jaron Lanier at the RSA - "You Are Not A Gadget"

One of the things I really enjoy as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (the RSA) is attending their thought-provoking talks and conversations. Last night Jaron Lanier was talking about his new book, "You Are Not A Gadget". He is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.

As the talk synopsis said, Jaron is worried that " Individual creativity has begun to go out of fashion. Machines, specifically computers, are no longer just tools to be used by the human mind - these days, we treat them as if they are altogether better than humans."

In essence he is saying that we should all be pro-internet, pro-technology - but there are certain myths (e.g. "everything that's best is free", "social networking is always a good thing") and certain problems (e.g. "our gadgets/technology drive us not the other way round") that we should fight against. Only by challenging these can we nurture individual creativity (and thus further develop our own humanity).

Jaron wrote an article for the WSJ earlier this month - and rather than try to further explain his proposition, let me extract a couple of paragraphs from that article ...

"Most people know me as the "father of Virtual Reality technology." In the 1980s and 1990s, I was a young computer scientist and entrepreneur working on how to apply virtual reality to things like surgical simulation. But I was also part of a circle of friends who tried to imagine how computers would fit into the peoples' lives, including how people might make a living in the future. Our dream came true, in part. It turns out that millions of people are ready to contribute instead of sitting passively on the couch watching television. On the other hand, we made a huge mistake in making those contributions unpaid, and often anonymous, because those bad decisions robbed people of dignity. I am appalled that our old fantasies have become so entrenched that it's hard to get anyone to remember that there are alternatives to a framework that isn't working.

Here's one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn't want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don't get innovation.

If you want to foster creativity and excellence, you have to introduce some boundaries. Teams need some privacy from one another to develop unique approaches to any kind of competition. Scientists need some time in private before publication to get their results in order. Making everything open all the time creates what I call a global mush.

There's a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn't proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe's Flash— always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth."

You can read in full Jaron's article here.

What was also interesting was that Nico Macdonald, the RSA's event moderator, encouraged the audience to comment and ask questions in real time via twitter, complete with its own hashtag. Here's a sample of the stream ....

@ThinkAboutArt Thanks to Jaron Lanier for stating that artists deserve the dignity of their own creative work!! http://bit.ly/8Q4CpP #rsalanier

@mahemoff "The Machine Stops" is one of the most prescient things ever written acc to Lanier #rsalanier

@milwardoliver Interesting thought out of #rsalanier that children on facebook have their growing up recorded in digital form without the ability to forget.

@mickyates "The geeks have created a world that benefits geeks - so others are denied chance for own personality formation" Jaron #rsalanier

@tomux @melex #rsalanier. It's like a health-food movement for the internet generation. We should eat more broccoli.

@petemarcus Economic model of 'free' doesn't work. Web does not provide bounty if you give your stuff away for free. #rsalanier

@petemarcus Originally PCs allowed consumers to also be creators. New devices like Kindles only make us consumers now. #rsalanier

@melex #rsalanier Lanier concludes that he's not anti-tech per se, but is against 'ritualistic, anti-human design'. Hear hear, sense at last.

@mickyates It's not a problem with the internet - that's brilliant - it's the dogma of the "open/free culture" of web 2.0 that's the issue! #rsalanier

So, quite an event - and an exercise in the new (social media) and the old (the RSA - or more completely the "Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce - a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress", founded in 1754) that was fascinating in its own right.

The RSA's founder, William Shipley, would have been proud!

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Can You Learn to be Self-Disciplined? Ali Hale

From the PickTheBrain blog, by Ali Hale, on January 29th

A lot of people have quite a fatalistic attitude towards self-discipline. They see themselves as essentially undisciplined people who lack the stamina to follow through on their decisions. They might talk about a “procrastination problem” or “no will power”. They blame their lack of self-discipline for their inability to get their business off the ground, or finish college, or successfully quit smoking or diet.

I don’t believe that any of us are lost causes when it comes to self-discipline. I also don’t think that any of us are born with iron wills or great tenacity: it’s something which we learn.

Short-Time Pleasure

A lack of self-discipline is often the result of a focus on short-term pleasure over long-term rewards. You might have experienced this a lot as a teen or in college, prioritising partying or computer games over studying! And, at the time, you might have been quite annoyed by adults who tried to persuade you to knuckle down and get on with your homework. Perhaps you used to blow your allowance money on CDs, only to end up broke and unable to go out with friends. 

As we grow up, we learn (sometimes painfully) that it’s often worth enduring some short-term difficulties in order to have longer-term happiness.

How You Developed Self-Discipline

In most cases, we become more self-disciplined as we grow older. If you think back to your childhood or teens, you can probably remember times when you had almost no self-discipline. I suspect that now:

• You’re able to get up on time when you have to go to work – without dad yelling at you to get out of bed
• You make sure you have enough money to pay your bills – without mom doling it out in small installments
• You keep your home reasonably clean: not because your parents are nagging you to do your chores, but because you want to have clean dishes to eat off!

Even though you might feel that you’re not very self-disciplined, you have learnt to delay gratification and to get on with things that aren’t necessarily end-to-end fun – because you know that life’s easier that way.

Growing the Self-Discipline Muscle

In college, I used to regularly drink far too much. I stayed up late at night playing computer games, and often dashed off essays at the last minute. I expect that might sound pretty familiar! However, I now make a living freelancing – and I’ve also written around 200,000 words of fiction in the past year. I probably wouldn’t have had the self-discipline to do what I do today, six years ago.

If you’ve ever worked out in the gym, you’ll know how quickly you can build up muscles. Your self-discipline is a bit like a muscle: the more you use it, the stronger it’ll become. However, if you try to do far too much too soon, you’ll just fail and end up disappointed.

So how can you actively improve your self discipline?

• Pick three things you will definitely accomplish tomorrow. Many of us have real trouble in actually getting on with the things which we want to get done – we let interruptions and distractions take over our day.

• Take a thirty-day trial. If you’re trying to lose weight, take up exercise, etc, doing it for thirty days can give you more motivation and focus than if you simply try to do it indefinitely. You can always choose to extend the trial. (If thirty days is too long, try a week.)

• Get into the habit of fulfilling your promises – and ask those around you to keep you accountable. If both you and your partner know that when you say “I’ll cook tonight” that it’s not going to happen, then make sure that changes.

• Talk to friends or read books or blogs which encourage you – either by offering advice or by setting an example to follow. I like Dave Navarro’s no-nonsense Rock Your Day.

Above all, stop telling yourself that you “just aren’t self-disciplined”. Don’t see your levels of self-discipline as something dictated by fate – see them as something you can actively earn and improve upon.

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Firms in developing Countries are more centralized than Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian ...

From Harvard Business, Working Knowledge - "First Look" - by Martha Lagac

Do you need sign-off from headquarters when you want to make decisions? Or can you undertake capital investments, hire new employees, introduce new products, and otherwise exercise managerial independence in your daily work? In the age of globalization, the extent of firm decentralization and the reasons behind it are still something of a mystery, leading HBS professor Raffaella Sadun and colleagues to wonder whether product competition is one factor spurring the trend toward decentralization. The basic idea is this: Local managers' information might be increasingly valuable as more products crowd the marketplace.

To test this proposition Sadun, Nicholas Bloom, and John Van Reenen analyzed data on nearly 4,000 firms across 12 countries in Europe, North America, and Asia. "We find that competition does indeed seem to foster greater decentralization," they write in their working paper, "Does Product Market Competition Lead Firms to Decentralize?" [PDF]

The results by geography were also telling: "Intriguingly, we found that firms in developing countries (Brazil, China, and India), tended to be the most centralized, with almost all major decisions taken by the owners in the corporate headquarters. Japanese firms were also relatively centralized. In contrast, firms in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries (Canada, Germany, Sweden, UK, and US) were relatively decentralized. The rest of Europe (e.g. France, Italy, and Poland) tended to be in the middle of the decentralization ranking." Developing countries might experience tighter control from HQ due to less product competition, the authors suggest.

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Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

Inspired by Nigerian history and tragedies all but forgotten by recent generations of westerners, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels and stories are jewels in the crown of diasporan literature.

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Haiti - a view from Jacqueline Novogratz, of the Acumen Fund

In 1995 my family was in the middle of the Kobe quake ("The Great Hanshin Earthquake"). We were lucky. The quake killed over 6,400 people. We got off very lightly. Experiencing that event first hand was traumatic enough, but we are all now looking at terrible pictures from Port au Prince, and we hear that the Haitian earthquake may claim over 100,000 lives ...

It is a wonderful testament to humanity that people all over the world are rushing to help, just as they did with the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004, which killed almost 230,000 people.

Whilst anything we can do to help today is critically important, once Haiti is "out of the headlines" there will still be even more to do ...

Jacqueline Novogratz founded and leads the Acumen Fund, a non-profit which uses investment capital to drive social change. I've blogged about Jacqueline before, as I find the model compelling. But this e-mail received today is worthy of a re-post.

"Dear Mick,

I've heard from many of you asking for suggestions of where to give and what to do in light of the devastation taking place in Haiti. It is impossible to look at the extraordinary photographs of destruction and despair without feeling your heart twist, wondering what it will take to rebuild and how long that process will require.

Right now, of course, the world's focus must be on helping the millions of victims survive.

As soon as that situation is stabilized, however, we need as a world to help Haiti build for a better future. That will take much more than money, but a more determined insistence on establishing the right policies and infrastructure to enable markets to work, better education for all, and investments in entrepreneurs that won't stop until they have solved tough problems or created significant numbers of jobs.

There are many organizations doing good work in Haiti, and Acumen Fund recommends two. Partners In Health has been committed to helping Haitians for more than two decades; and supporting them will enable greater focus on both short-term relief as well as longer-term investment. Architecture for Humanity will focus on the longer-term by building critically needed housing and community structures. We are proud to know the entrepreneurs behind the organizations and can vouch for their quality as individuals focused on doing the right things.

I hope this helps in some small way.

We stand in solidarity with our Haitian brothers and sisters and with people all around the world who are seeing how much we need one another, how interconnected we are, and how much each of us can do.

In peace,

Jacqueline

Jacqueline Novogratz | CEO | Acumen Fund 76 Ninth Avenue, Suite 315, New York, NY 10011 www.acumenfund.org"

Over to you ....

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Respect and Dignity - from Martin Thomas

I wrote a blog post in November on "Respect and Dignity for All", following a brilliant talk by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, at the RSA. What I took as his biggest idea was that, whilst we talk about a proper distribution of wealth, as we aim to eradicate poverty, we should really aim for "a proper distribution of dignity".

Martin Thomas, a friend and colleague in the Change Leaders, turned the idea into a short poem. here it is:

A most important aspect of the human balance sheet

(that most of us acknowledge but so few of us keep)

is that we each should have the right to our own points of view,

whether they be held by most, or only me, or you.

Respecting those divergent views is harder than it seems:

we humans act as if hard-wired to protect our own group’s dreams.

Respect for others means accepting all without a fuss,

recognising (for all time) they may be more “right” than us.

Giving everyone that chance is a key to self-respect,

without which we will lead the world with egos to regret.

True respect for others is that most illusive key

to universal ethics, and collective dignity.

I’m not just arguing for politics’ democracy,

For real liberation: let everyone’s thoughts be free!

Martin went on to comment on "free thinking", and related this to apostasy (the renunciation of one's previous religious beliefs). He notes that apostasy is viewed much more respectfully in non-Abrahamic religions - historically in many "western" faiths, free-thinking (effectively apostasy) has been deeply frowned upon or even persecuted.

In effect, Martin says, the amount of respect that a movement has for individuals' freedom of thought is inversely related to the gravity it attaches to apostasy. And he goes on to suggest that the practice of real respect for others (as denoted by the acceptance of free-thinking beyond religious dogma) is low in all of the monotheistic Abrahamic faiths, despite what is professed.

Food for thought? Agreements? Disagreements? Comments ......

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