A Networked World

Management is for compliance, not innovation of creativity

HT to Johnnie for this. The problem with incentives

Dan Pink gives a punchy TED talk about the adverse impact of incentives. He reports studies that show that offering incentives will increase performance for routine tasks. But for activities that require creativity or problem solving, the bigger the reward, the worse the performance.

Here's the TED Talk from Dan

The biggest problem with business these days, especially big business, and with Government, is that it has been captured by the managerial class and they KNOW this stuff already. But like every ruling class in history, they cannot afford to admit the problem because that involves their own career and livelihood being cancelled.

The only process by which management is finally unseated is the failure of the company.

BTW, Dan talks about the candle problem but he hints at something even more difficult; the problems that we face now are so complex that we cannot even define them properly. Even the big, apparently simple ones like peak oil can't adequately be described at any scale in which most people can take action.

You can tell that because, for most people, especially decision-makers, the problem itself is invisible, it is outside the scale of their competence and all their training comes down to, "if it can't be measured, it can't be managed" because management can do only those things that are susceptible of management. Because they have captured the organisation, only management can occur.

And around we go in the drain.

Innovation, is it worth it?

For the last few years we've been treated to endless praise of "innovation", whatever that may mean to the speaker, we have "innovation management" (oxymoron) and the Russians even have an "innovation strategy" run by some Government department (dead serious, I sat through one of their presentations at a UNESCO conference once, they even had thoughts on how you force companies to innovate).

At a dinner at the Auckland Uni buisness school on Tuesday night there was a lot of use of the word innovation and how you teach it and so on it goes all the way from "first mover advantage". Well that worked well for Apple, IBM, eXcite and any number of other 'innovators" who don't appear to own the world. Marco Rinesi argues:

"But for all of its undeniable power, the printing press wasn’t the source of large fortunes for the engineers, investors, and businessmen involved in this industry. Profits were made, yes, sometimes significant ones, but nothing quite proportional to the influence of the technology. The bulk of the benefits came to the organizations that leveraged this technology for their own ends like modern states, which would have been logistically impossible without the printing press, or the myriad business that cannot be conceived without a superbly well-educated (for pre-modern standards) source of workers and consumers.

The same pattern can be seen in many other technical advances, specially those that impacted society the most. Contraceptives, telecommunications, refrigeration: they are often overlooked foundations of the contemporary world, each of them enormously disruptive, yet none of them, over the long term, a gold mine of extraordinary returns."

There’s nothing guaranteeing that today and tomorrow’s disruptive technologies like the Internet, genetic engineering, or nanotechnology, won’t follow the same pattern, utterly changing the world but without profits at the same scale. We do not argue against investing in disruptive technologies, though. After all, they still offer a better chance of extraordinary results that non-disruptive technologies. And even if in the long term something like genetic medicine becomes as mundane as TV sets, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t very large sums of money to be made in that industry, specially in its early stages.

But always keep in mind that in most industries, no matter how advanced, you are selling tools to other people. They are the ones that will use the tools, and they are the ones most likely to reap the bulk of the benefits of them. And they should: they are the ones changing the world.

Adam Elkus adds some notes to that.

When reading of this, I think mostly of Mikhail Kalashnikov, whose humble assault rifle was widely pirated and copied. Despite the production of 100 million AKs, Kalashnikov lives on a meager state pension and is buying shares in umbrella companies. This is a reason to look askance at claims of disruptive innovation making instant billionaires. Rather, it's worth reflecting on how niche inventions and tools developed out of existing platforms have been the most successful. Kalashnikov did not invent the first assault rifle--rather he invented the most cheap, reliable, and user-friendly variant. Similarly, the team behind Facebook didn't invent social network sites but created a juggernaut through innovative redesign of an existing template and platform.

The other facet to keep in mind is that innovation and disruption, of themselves are nothing, you still need to pop them up in the right place at the right time, luck matters. Otherwise you are just another target in the game of cosmic Whack-a-Mole

Wasting their time

The thing I like about the net is that everyone gets to have a say, even pontificating jerks like me, Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. Given the underlying mischievousness of so many net based stuff, I'm betting this is a have. But if it isn't, the StupidFilter is a cool way to waste their time.

The concept behind the StupidFilter Project originated during a conversation between Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. StupidFilter was conceived out of necessity. Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise.

HAH! The net has ALWAYS been littered with drivel, egos, flame wars, cods, gags and stupidity. Get over it guys.

The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point.

Diddums. What we USED to have was a filter called the media but it too has largely joined the baying, as distinct from Bayesian, pack of  pavlovian droolers

It's time to fight back.

The solution we're creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we're collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.

Yep, this is a send up.

Eventually, once the research is completed, we plan to release core engine source code for incorporation into content management systems, blogs, wikis and the like. Additionally, we plan to develop a fully implemented Firefox plugin and a Wordpress plugin.

Wot? No Twitter filter?

Seriously, they should read Shirky, the net IS the filter.

In other news, Michael Jackson, having been dead for a number of years, has finally decided to lie down. The media is full of, even more than usual.

Back to the garden.

Update: I fed this page into the filter and it picked not one as stupid.

Fail.