Entrepreneurship, Workhacking

Why Entrepreneurs Should Study Poetry

 

A very short argument (so a very short blog post):

  1. Entrepreneurs need to size up novel situations quickly
  2. Our most potent human tool for sizing up a new situation is an analogy (“Oh, this new thing is kind of like when that saber-tooth tiger ate Og”)
  3. We can train our ability to do analogies by studying potent compact analogies
  4. Potent compact analogies occur at a greater density in poetry (and, btw, in songs) than almost anywhere else
  5. Therefore: entrepreneurs should study poetry to sharpen their abilities to generate and evaluate analogies
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AOL’s problem was not that it was a walled garden

As I think about my last post on walled gardens and dumb pipes, a simple thought occurs to me: AOL didn’t fail because it was walled garden.  AOL failed because it was a dumb pipe.

The value proposition of AOL back in the day was, “We’ll pre-digest the Internet for you, and put it in a safe, packaged form that’s good for beginners, children, and digital immigrants”.

Actually, the value proposition back when I signed up in the early ’90’s was, “We’ll give you an Internet ID that’s a name, not a number”.  Recall that their big competitor walled garden at the time, Compuserve, had User IDs that were a pair of numbers.  <300129, 1235> or the like.

But by the time we got to the beginning of the end for AOL, they had a walled garden: they figured that their inmates would be too terrified to leave.

I suspect what happened, however, was that the “inmates” began to receive offers from other service providers that were 1) competitive in price and 2) better in terms of bandwidth and latency.  So it’s not that people became tired of the walled garden, it’s that another service provider — in what became essentially a commodity market — had better service for a lower price.

Classic Dumb Pipe stuff.

Now, to be fair to the argument, the “features” of AOL — especially AOL IM, which was hegemonic for a while — should have kept AOL as a “smart pipe” and didn’t.  But it’s amazing how quickly people found those features irrelevant when the price was right.

advertising, digital media

Dumb Pipes and Walled Gardens

If the online world has one potent effect, it’s turning proprietary value chains into dumb pipes

Over just a decade-and-a-half we’ve watched this happen to:

  • Software sales.  Who now goes to an Egghead software store to interact with a salesperson with expert advice about what software to buy?  Software is downloaded directly from vendor websites if it’s downloaded at all.  Most of the time you give in your credit card and start subscribing.
  • Music.  Who today goes to a CD store (or indeed even to an iTunes Store) to buy music.  Music is purchased in bulk on streaming services.
  • Phone companies.  Who now buys a land line from a phone company?  Voice is one service among many over the Internet.  (We will speak about wireless service in a bit).
  • Newspapers.  Who now consumes news, local events, and classified ads in a printed package?  Not so many.

Pay TV is tipping as we speak.  Why pay for someone’s packaging of programs (whether as a “channel” or as a bundle of channels) when you can fetch high-quality video content directly over the Internet, “over the top” as it is called?

Although those-who-are-about-to-die can see their doom coming, they can’t necessarily evade it.  Pay TV is a great example.  The MSOs have gone from bravado (“premium content will always be worth paying for”) to playing catch-up.  No one wants to become a dumb pipe.

What’s the opposite of a dumb pipe?  In some ways, a walled garden.

A “walled garden” is an online venue who keeps a captive audience and gets value out of them, either by subscription, or by advertising to them, or both.  As long as the audience is truly captive, it’s an annuity.

I saw a clip when I was a boy about a scientist drawing a chalk line on the ground and putting a chicken’s head down on it.  The chicken, the voice-over said, believed the chalk line was a rope and stayed put.

Audiences aren’t like that.  They won’t stay put forever, as AOL, MySpace, SMS text messaging services, and others have found out.  Walled Gardens have a way of turning into Dumb Pipes.

 

 

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How Do We Stop a Bad AI from Hurting Us?

I just published a review of Nick Bostrom’s book “Superintelligence: Paths, Danger, Strategies”.

Pdf of the review: Gordon – Superintelligence Book Review (Spring 2015 IST)

My basic thesis?  AIs need a Freudian superego to keep them from getting uppity.

The review appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Issues, the thought magazine of the National Academies of Science

Let me know what you think.

Workhacking

Two Philosophies About “The Room”

For whatever reason, our metaphor for interaction in business life is “The Room.”

“Working the room.”  “Every eye in the room was on him.”  “She had the room eating out of her hand.”

I just finished teaching a group of business-school students, and a good chunk of their grade was their participation in class and on their teams.

I found myself distinguishing two philosophies about participation, about “the room”, and I found myself appreciating one philosophy much more than the other.

Philosophy #1: “Be the smartest person in the room.”  Very understandable that kids would learn this in school, their first “room”.  In the schoolroom, the smartest kid gets the strokes.

But I got introduced to Philosophy #2 some years ago, and it makes more sense for most situations, for most grown-ups, for most rooms that are not set pieces like classrooms: “Be the one who helps the room move forward.”

I was working at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and doing my first presentations to big audiences, also my first consulting gigs.  A colleague approached me after one session we had worked on together and said, “You know, Dan, being the smartest person in the room isn’t always the right strategy.”

“Huh?  What?”

“Your strategy is to be the smartest guy in the room.  And you do it really well.  But it’s not always the right thing.”

“What’s a better strategy?”

“Everyone in that room is there trying to do something, solve some problem, move something forward, that’s why they’re in the room.  I try to help move the room forward.”

“What does that mean?”

“Find out what people are trying to do, and help them figure out how to do it.”

I kept thinking about this, and thinking about it.  My colleague was so right.

So fast-forward to these kids.  They were supposed to fill out online forms after each class discussing what they had contributed to class that evening.

And almost every one of them put in stuff where they had said something smart, where they had said something that could have made them the smartest person in the room.

A couple of students got it, though: they talked about what they had said or done that helped the class move forward, or helped their team move forward.

They were the ones who got my votes for best class participation.  Like they say here, “If you’re the smartest guy in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”

CrummyCook

Poached Eggs with Greens and Goat Cheese on Toast

I’m sure you know how it is with food: it speaks to us in a welter of voices and feelings: whispers, sighs, hot voice in the ear.

So last night, on my way back home, thinking about dinner, I got an authoritative “Poached Eggs” from my limbic system.

I like them.  I’m not very good at making them (they spread out too much or else the yolks get too hard).  Good chance to practice.

But what to make with them?  I had noshed at the last event of the day — a reception for some teams finishing up an Entrepreneurship course — and didn’t want some blowout dish like Eggs Benedict or hash and eggs.

Epicurious to the rescue.  They had a dish called “Poached Eggs with Ramps” that looked like the ticket.

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That’s theirs.

Well, needless to say, I didn’t have any ramps, but I did have some baby chard from the farmer’s market.

And I didn’t have goat cheese, but I had some La Tur, which is a blend of goat, sheep, and cow.

Safe improvisations, both.

And I had some nice gnarly-looking multigrain bread to give some bottom to the piece.

So, I sauteed the chard with olive oil and salt

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As I feared, I ran into trouble with the eggs.  First egg spread way out, even with the vinegar in the water.

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Second egg went a bit better, and I knew enough by now to get them out of the water before the yolks turned to adamantine,

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20150306_195228Here’s the final result.  Not too shabby, and very tasty.

 

A decisive answer to that limbic voice.

 

 

CrummyCook

“Delicious Broccoli-Rice bake”

So, Debbie went out of town last night for a few days.  Perversely (since the whole genesis of Crummycook was spelling her in the kitchen) her trips generally bring the Crumster out of retirement.   And so it was last night.

I looked up “brown rice” (I had a couple of cups cooked left over) and “ricotta” (because we have a pint of it and this happens all the time: we use a bit of it for one recipe and then the rest eventually goes to mold).

Guess what?  My beloved Epicurious let me down.  Nothing for these two except some recipe that didn’t look very interesting.

So I just googled the ingredients, and one that came up — from Writes4Food.com — was a casserole-type dish with brown rice and broccoli… and ricotta.

Broccoli-Rice casserole

Not the best picture, but you can see what it looks like.  Cheesy on top, with chunks of broccoli throughout a rice-and-cheese matrix.

Pretty good.  No one to do criticism and self-criticism with, so not much to say in that regard.  But I’d cook it again, although with fewer pots and pans.  I somehow filled the sink with apparatus making this, and it’s not that hard.

Maybe I should go back to past Crummycook recipes and reduce the pot-and-pan count…

CrummyCook

Crummycook rears his head: Stuffed Cabbage

I’ve been trying to find time to do CrummyCook some more, and was able to make something last night.

Stuffed cabbage, to be exact.

My mom made an unbelievable stuffed cabbage, at least in memory, so the benchmark was high.

I took a recipe from The Joy of Cooking, which also loomed large in my childhood.  My brother David and I had a scheme to cook everything in Joy and got as far as a couple of recipes.  Story for another time perhaps, especially since David died 47 years ago yesterday.

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Here’s how it looked.  The look was good, true to my memories of long ago.

Debbie liked it, or said she did.  I thought the sauce was a little bland.  To my mind, I didn’t put in enough salt and brown sugar, so the sweet and sour flavor was off a bit.  I guess the upside is it didn’t give me heartburn.

All in all, a good job on a personal classic.  And looking to do more CrummyCooking in coming months.

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Gearing up to review “Superintelligence”

I’ve been finishing up this book during the week.

The gist of it is: “What can we do now to prepare for superintelligent AI’s who may not have tender regard for us humans”?

Right off the bat, let me say that I’m glad someone is thinking about this.  For reasons that he details in the book, Nick Bostrom believes that we need to be talking this rather abstruse topic before a superintelligent AI comes on the scene, because it could happen pretty damn quickly.  It’s a worthy argument.

Benefit from my 35 years of tech industry experience