Sociate

All the communication technologies we use -- telephones, newspapers, radio, IM, e-mail, mailing lists, TV, books -- are mired in historical cruft that keeps us from seeing clearly what to build next. It is useful to go to first principles, then reexamine whatever communication task you have at hand. So let me suggest the following basic dimensions of communication: timing, audience, mode, length, persistence, production level, identity and permission.

The list with explanations and more on my wiki here.

posted by Jerry Michalski at 12:45 PM

Heretics are sometimes right.*

Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman was just awarded the Nobel prize for economics (NY Times story). Among other things, his (and others') work in what is now called behavioral economics punches holes in one of the main tenets of classical economics, Rational Expectations Theory. It turns out that people don't always make rational, self-interested decisions. We behave "irrationally" all the time.

In the same vein, 29-year-old associate professor of econ at MIT Sendhil Mullainathan just won a MacArthur Fellowship. Much of the coverage of his prize mentioned his research in executive compensation, a hot issue these days (another NY Times story). Not much mentioned that he is a rising star in behavioral economics.

Behavioral economics isn't the only discipline with insights into our seemingly irrational behaviors. I've put some broader ideas on my wiki, here.

* Well, not all Nobel laureates are right. In fact, Kahneman's work disproves the work of Harry Markowitz (also a Nobel laureate) and other economists. It's amazing how much sway the Nobel awards committees have on business and public perceptions of what's right.

posted by Jerry Michalski at 12:13 PM

There is considerable debate on whether music file sharing is harming or helping CD sales. I haven't seen evidence to convince me either way (especially removing other effects, like crappy music releases), although I tend to lean toward the effects being neutral to positive so far. But I don't think that matters, because CDs are a dead idea (and online services that are more constrained than CDs are deader ideas).

Physical music distribution is comically inferior to the all-electronic alternatives. In Being Digital, MIT Media Lab founder and director Nicholas Negroponte briefly explains the difference between atoms and bits (physical goods versus electronic goods) by contrasting the current music business with its electronic alternative. Negroponte’s example is just a phrase, so I have made the steps involved in physical production and distribution of music more explicit in the following list.

To get recorded music from a band in a studio to a listener in today’s most popular format, the audio CD, someone has to:
Record a tune, burn a master version
Copy it onto CD audio discs
Put each disc in a plastic “jewel box”
Add security measures to the jewel boxes (holographic “dogbones,” magnetic alarm tags, etc.)
Wrap the jewel boxes in plastic
Put them in boxes, put the boxes on pallets, label them
Wrap the pallets in plastic, put them on trucks
Send them around the world through transit terminals, warehouses, etc., to local stores
Protect them in transit
At each store, unwrap the pallets, open the boxes
Put each CD into a plastic security sleeve to prevent shoplifting
Label them, record them in inventory and put them into displays, from which
Customers select them, usually without hearing them, and
Go to cashiers, who remove the security sleeves or disarm the magnetic alarm tags and
Put the CDs into plastic bags
So customers can take them home and
Throw away the bag
Unwrap the plastic wrap
Remove the security devices
Open the jewel case
Put the disc into a player
And play the tunes
Whew! An ecologist’s worst nightmare, screening hourly at a store near you.

There are also a few other inconveniences. When a new technology replaces an old one (vinyl to 8-track, 8-track to cassettes, cassettes to CDs, CDs to DVD Audio or online subscription services -- the celestial jukeboxes), you get to buy the same tunes all over again. There’s no upgrade policy. Scratch or lose the CD and you get to buy a new one. And all the tunes, trapped on CDs, aren’t connected to anything in the rest of the online world. They are inert and unchangeable.

MP3 music files look pretty appealing, don’t they?

posted by Jerry Michalski at 2:55 PM

David Kirkpatrick mentioned me in a Fortune.com piece on how the music industry is alienating its customer base in order to protect the only asset it thinks it has: the music.

I have a collection of good music-industry readings here.

posted by Jerry Michalski at 1:11 PM

The saying "Good fences make good neighbors" means that fences improve relationships between neighbors, right? Not really.

Being an "Indian giver" (if you'll pardon the non-PC term) is generally considered a pejorative. Should it be?

"My country, right or wrong" was not intended as a blind patriotic statement. The full quote is "My country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right. When wrong, to be put right."

I've begun to debunk a few misquoted and misunderstood memes on my wiki, right here.

posted by Jerry Michalski at 9:06 AM

Andrius has just written a wonderful message about dealing with violence. It is inspiring, challenging and full of love.

David Weinberger has posted it here, on JOHO.

Andrius started and runs the Minciu Sodas Lab in Lithuania, where he and others try to engage people who care about thinking (minciu sodas means "orchard of thoughts").

posted by Jerry Michalski at 10:12 AM

The Web is a superb place to collect and share insights, so let's put it to work. Need to learn quickly about an industry? You can run a quick search on Fortune or BusinessWeek, but what other resources are there?

Let's borrow a page from the Wikipedia and other grassroots resources and build some industry briefing books. If you know of some already finished on the Web, please let me know. Otherwise, I've taken a small step here, using a wiki.

posted by Jerry Michalski at 7:07 PM

Friction keeps us from doing things we might otherwise really want to do, such as writing a handwritten note to a friend or donating money to people whose work we admire. The causes can be quite complex, such as the bookkeeping, auditing and disclosure that assures us that donated funds really get to their intended recipients, but it's the other extreme that is remarkable: Even simple impediments can become insurmountable obstacles.

If it's hard to park at a downtown store, you might go to a shopping center a little farther away, or be interested in home-delivered groceries. If an online service won't store your ID and password, even for valid security reasons, and requires you to type in twenty characters, you won't be eager to use it. It doesn't take that much friction to cause a problem. Even one extra step can have as significant an effect as twenty.

Businesses constantly test this Law, and our patience, to make money. Ticketmaster hates deep linking because it wants to be sure its visitors go through several pages of ads before they get to the information they want. That's why so many sites have those pesky pop-up ads on every page. That's why TV networks feared TV remote controls early on. The work of getting up to change channels was turned into a flick of the thumb, and suddenly viewers were far more likely to switch programs or skip around during ad breaks.

The Law of Convenience is simple.

Every additional step that stands between people's desires and the fulfillment of those desires greatly decreases the likelihood that they will undertake the activity.

The Law has wide applicability. It's not just about product or service design, its obvious applications, but also about business models and sales strategies.

It's also less about laziness than about habits and memory. Reducing the number of steps it takes to do something makes the entire activity more efficient and more likely to become a habit. But first you have to know that it exists at all, which can be a huge barrier.

Not many people know that you can change the default home page on your browser (call it the Law of Defaults, a corollary of the Law of Convenience). Fewer still know how to, even though it is easy. It can also be done by a computer program, so some Websites ask whether you want to make them your home page, knowing that people who say yes by mistake may not know how to reverse their decision later.

http://www.sociate.com/Topics/Convenience/convenience.shtml

posted by Jerry Michalski at 4:36 PM

Bruce's many years of research and activism have found their resonant hour.

posted by Jerry Michalski at 3:05 PM

I'm expressing a point of view. I'd like it to be explicit, accessible and useful. I'd like its constituent parts -- the ideas, commentaries, citations and such -- to be available as building blocks for other people, just as I am going to build on others' work.

I love Weblogs and am starting one here, but they have two weaknesses that I would like to overcome.

First, Weblogs offer only one distribution model: People have to come read your blog at its Web address. Why can't people read each entry as it is posted, if they would like to, as they can with e-mailed newsletters? It is somehow strange that Dave Winer's Radio Userland Weblogging software doesn't allow its users to do what Dave does every day with Scripting News, which is post to his broadcast list and his Weblog. (You can syndicate Weblogs with Radio and use XML for other nifty features, but it's not a mailing list.)

This weakness isn't that hard to fix. I've been an advisor to Pyra (the company behind Blogger) for some time, and Ev -- surviving considerable nagging from me -- has added a post-to-e-mail feature in Blogger Pro. Excellent.

In fact, I'm creating two lists for this one Weblog. The first list, Sociate, is a broadcast list for people who want to see new items quickly, but don't want the e-mail traffic of a discussion list; the second, Sociate-Talk, includes all the outbound posts of the first list, but is meant for people interested in the discussion.

So, depending on your level of interest, you can

Visit the Sociate Weblog,
Subscribe to the Sociate List
(the Weblog info as an e-mail newsletter) or
Participate in the Sociate Discussion
(all of the above, as a two-way mailing list)

Again, if you join the discussion list, no need to join the newsletter also. It's included.

Here's the second weakness: Weblogs offer little context. Like articles and stories in more official news sources such as newspapers, radio and TV, blog entries flow past, one after the other, slipping off into archives. Good entries are cross-posted by other bloggers, but eventually they all slip into archives. If you know what you're looking for, you can probably find an old entry, but most are just gone. Blog posts live in evanescent streams of consciousness, rescued from total extinction only by Google, ever the watchful servant. In this sense, blogs are too much like the traditional media with which commentators often contrast them.

So I will harvest the best items and set them into a more permanent context, using several tools. The obvious method is to collect similar items into various categories and post them on this Website, which I will do. But Web pages aren't that expressive, so I will also use two more interesting tools: a wiki and my Brain.

By combining Weblogs, mailing lists, Web pages, wikis, TheBrain and other tools and services in interesting ways, I hope to turn the daily flow of news, recommendations and ideas into useful stocks of information, all within a broader context.

I won't be doing any of this alone. Many others are at work across the world, and I'll be weaving some of those pieces together from my perspective here.

posted by Jerry Michalski at 4:24 PM

Ackoff, Russell
Redesigning the Future and Ackoff’s Fables

I studied under Ackoff while I was at Wharton, where he was a bit of a black sheep. His ideas, well outside the mainstream Wharton establishment, affected me more than any others I was exposed to during the MBA program. I also did a bit of consulting for him in Buenos Aires after graduation. Ackoff may best be known for the Idealized Redesign process he uses to help companies rethink what they do (sometimess referred to as planning backwards). Surprisingly, I’ve found no resources online describing Idealized Redesign.

In the 1930s, Ackoff was a student of West Churchman’s. Alongside a few others, they helped start the field of Operations Research during World War II by figuring out how often ship convoys should zig to avoid enemy submarines and how many shells to test in each box of ammo to be sure most of them would work properly. (OR is a branch of applied statistics that includes techniques such as queueing theory, linear programming, Monte Carlo simulations and multiple regression.)

Later, disillusioned with OR’s direction and approach, Ackoff and Churchman founded the field of systems theory. For years, Ackoff ran the Social Systems Science department at Wharton, also known as S-Cubed, and consulted to the likes of Annheuser Busch, Mexico, Iran, Clark Equipment, Volvo, Alcoa and Martin Marietta. In the early 90s, Ackoff left Wharton and founded Interact Design with his longtime colleague, Jamshid Gharajedaghi.

Infamous for not getting along with his peers, Ackoff is becoming increasingly famous for the clarity with which he has long explained the complex ideas of how systems work (and therefore how companies, industries and economies work). If “systems theory” sounds muddy to you, Ackoff’s your man. His Fables are accessible anecdotes that he has used for years to illustrate systems solutions. Redesigning contains the bulk of his thinking, presented with his trademark simplicity.

Many of Ackoff’s peers have done fascinating work, including Eric Trist, Fred Emery, Stafford Beer (who tried to help Salvador Allende build a cybernetic control panel for Chile), Chris Argyris and Donald Schon (Argyris and Schon brought us double-loop learning). [Bo McFarland steered me toward Geoffrey Vickers.] Management guru Peter Drucker has long been a fan of Ackoff’s; systems thinking is Peter Senge’s famed Fifth Discipline.

Churchman, C. West
The Systems Approach and Its Enemies
Churchman, a gentle soul, didn’t originally have “and Its Enemies” in the title of this book. He added it in the second edition, having seen the reactions to the first edition. Systems thinking is challenging, but making systems change is really difficult. Hierarchies and mechanisms don’t morph easily.

posted by Jerry Michalski at 4:09 PM

Amitai Etzioni's criticism of MBA ethics courses matches my experience. Can't we offer better training?

posted by Jerry Michalski at 9:15 PM

Boy, it took long enough. Despite iVillages action, the Washington Post seems to have implemented pop-ups with a vengeance all of a sudden.

posted by Jerry Michalski at 2:39 AM