Letting Serendipity Seek You

DAMON DARLIN wrote in the New York Times section Ping: Serendipity, Lost in the Digital Deluge. After reading the piece, I can only conclude that serendipity is within the traveler and not the pathway. There has been a great deal of serendipity during this endeavor and it has changed my own paradigms.

I also don't believe that Darlin has a firm grasp on what serendipity is in truth. Truth seems a better word than fact. Serendipity is magic without the magician, the third wish without the genie or even the wish. It is more than randomness and blind luck and in its best sense can not be calculated or anticipated.

Darlin gives UrbanSpoon, as one example which depends upon randomness to find a restaurant.

But a funny thing happens with frequent users of the app. They start relying on its search engine or the “Talk of the Town” feature, an algorithm that generates suggestions that uncannily echo local sentiment.

So most of us don't stick to the path less traveled most of the time. Here he is right, the algorithm becomes a high-tech crowdsourcing, substituting for the serendipity that customers are seeking. Trouble is that you cannot seek serendipity. You have to seek, not even necessarily seek, but be open to the unknown and let serendipity find you.

But this does bring up the question of individuals finding new pathways and larger groups finding new pathways. As the TED Talk below shows - The group-think of social networks isn't good at delivering those magical moments of discovery.

James Surowiecki: The moment when social media became the news
James Surowiecki pinpoints the moment when social media became an equal player in the world of news-gathering: the 2005 tsunami, when YouTube video, blogs, IMs and txts carried the news -- and preserved moving personal stories from the tragedy. Watch this talk >>

James Surowiecki, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, argues that people acting en masse, are smarter than we think with one important caveat.

But there's also a downside to this -- a kind of dark side, in fact --and that is that the more tightly linked we come to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent.

One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that once you are linked in the network, the network starts to shape your views and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else. That's one of the things that defines what a network is. A network is not just the product of its component parts.It is something more than that. It is, as Steven Johnson has talked about, an emergent phenomenon.

Related Posts:

• Collaboration Moving Masses Through Compassion
• Social Networking, Social Fragmenting, Or Social Hand-wringing
• Taking a Step Beyond - Personal efforts in meeting the Millennium Development Goals

Ten Reasons John Mariotti Won't Use Social Media Sites

Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, who was featured in the last post, lead me to this article by John L. Mariotti.

John’s viewpoint represents the view of the vast majority of businesspeople today — they aren’t ready to drink the Kool-aid on social media sites just yet (maybe never). — Anita Campbell, Editor

I find it difficult to summarize Mr. Mariotti's ideas in any effective manner, so I am merely listing the categories. My personal perspective is that his points are either overblown or if valid there is no argument that traditional and web 2.0 marketing approaches are mutually exclusive. The chance that the majority of businesspeople may agree with him does not dissuade me.

10 Reasons I Won't Use Social Media Sites by John L. Mariotti

Plus, if you act now you will also get:

4 Better, Safer and More Personal Alternatives to Social Media

• Contacts made through professional societies and their meetings.
• Networking through current and former colleagues, friends and neighbors.
• Join and participate in clubs.
• Conferences and round-tables that deal directly and indirectly with related topics to your work.

And for a limited time with this special offer:

Other, More Profitable Mainstream Marketing Options

• Creative 3-dimensional direct mail.
• Create Selling Kits and tools that make it easier for sales people to communicate the benefits you offer.
• Pre-Trade Show Program.
• Re-evaluate and optimize your Web site.
• Include an appropriate blog that builds manageable relationships

As Mr. Mariotti tells us, I recognize that the marketing landscape is changing. I love and embrace new technology — but for the sake of profitable business and not because it's a shiny new toy. It's easy to get caught up in complexity and we know that complexity increases costs and cuts profits.

I also agree with him that, Nothing good comes easy. If this were all it took, everyone in the world would be connected to everyone else in the world and it would all be such a wonderful place. What I disagree with is that it is not worth making the effort.

A Groundswell Either Your Marketing Is Riding The Wave or Its Under Water

This weblog allows me to take an armchair quarterback approach to a number of issues. This has both good and bad aspects. As has been said before, I don't own a business, so no risk, but I still find pragmatic truth in business methodology that should be applied in change agent organizations. I am also not working with any of the change agent organizations though I do contribute to such organizations as do many others. Yet, I am still thinking and writing about issues that I see of being important to such efforts. Truth is that I am taking advantage of not being involved with day to day organizational issues to study these issues from a detached perspective allowing me to think about them more broadly and find expanding interrelationships. Hopefully, by the time I am about to retire and try something new I will have learnt and even created something useful.

One of the challenges change-agent organizations involved in social-entrepreneurship and philanthropy face is getting their message out in an effective manner to everyone involved in the mission, financial supporters, volunteers, employees, partners, or clientèle. There are obviously numerous organizations that do an excellent job, but there is still a need to consider how this will evolve in the future. The tools of Web 2.0 offer both news means of leveraging marketing and conversely new forms of complexity. As has happened in the past, this weblog has looked to the world of business for some helpful insights.

This weblog has touched upon the concepts in Groundswell before with Withstanding A Groundswell Of Complexity. This is the book that is being cited numerous times throughout the blogosphere and seems to be the focal of a debate.

"Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They're defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you in social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon — the groundswell — that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works."

Further insight comes via Brand Autopsy by johnmoore back in April of this year The Internet is your Marketing Department.

GROUNDSWELL (Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff)

If you are reading this blog then you have a clue about the Groundswell that Charlene & Josh detail in GROUNDSWELL. Others you know in the office are probably clueless about this Groundswell. They have no clue about the power to be unleashed from embracing the Groundswell. They do not realize the Internet is your marketing department.

Another perspective comes from the Financial Times of London. Dangerous e-liaisons Review by Jonathan Birchall Published: June 4 2008 Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

The book, which naturally has its own online community, is built on the argument that not everyone uses the internet in the same way. There are

1. “creators”, who blog on their own web pages,
2. “critics” who post comments,
3. “joiners” who sign up for online communities,
4. “spectators” who read and watch, and finally
5. the unengaged “inactives”

Intentions Words Actions Of the Brain By The Brain For The Brain

This weblog started with a bias towards behavioral economics when it began its philosophical inquiry into the dismal science because of my undergraduate degree in Research Psychology and well established inclinations. Psychology has a tendency though to focus on the individual as in the question asked by Gary Marcus.

Does your brain have a mind of its own? by Gary Marcus on May 4, 2008 at latimes.com

Why can't we stick to our goals? Blame the sloppy engineering of evolution.

How many times has this happened to you? You leave work, decide that you need to get groceries on the way home, take a cellphone call and forget all about your plan. Next thing you know, you've driven home and forgotten all about the groceries.

This obviously takes a evolutionary/biological approach, but using the prevalent analogy of brain as computer there is also the programing needed to make it interact with other brains. That programing would seem to be language, though to what degree it is hardwired/genetic or software/environmental learning is still something to be far better understood.

Study finds some thoughts really do require language Posted on: February 14, 2008 3:17 PM, by Dave Munger Category: Language • Reasoning • Research

I don't need words to think about the shape of a car, or how to throw a football, or the taste of a chocolate chip cookie. In fact, things like that are probably easier to think about without using language. That's why the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- that language is necessary for conscious thought -- doesn't hold up. But even if language isn't required for some domains, it's still possible that it is required for certain types of mental processes. It may even be required for some thoughts that aren't obviously related to language.Some research suggests that understanding the thoughts of others -- having a theory of mind -- is one such process. Many children who are late in learning language are also late in developing a theory of mind. This story illustrates the classic theory of mind test:

• Mouse nibbles cheese.
• Mouse puts cheese under box A
• Mouse leaves room
• Cat enters room, moves cheese from box A to box B, and leaves.
• Mouse returns.
  

• Where does Mouse think the cheese is?

Raising the question, does understanding false beliefs of others require language? The "answer" is at the original post

David Munger goes on to write about Ashley Newton and Jill de Villiers who developed a very clever experiment to test this question.

Newton and de Villiers say there are a number of aspects of language processing that could be responsible for interfering with the false-belief test, but it's quite clear that some sort of language processing is necessary in order to reason about false beliefs. So while language isn't a requirement for all thought, it most definitely appears to be a requirement for some thought.

So how does this apply when we move outside the psychological laboratories and experiments? This weblog has been contemplating the many-to-many interactions of sociology and social-grouping that the web helps to make more apparent. With Web 2.0, it is possible to draw the lines. With economics, the lines would seem to be harder to specifically determine until after the fact, though models can be created for useful and often practical approximations.

Andreessen on The Psychology of Human Misjudgment via Marginal Revolution by Alex Tabarrok on 3/28/08

Professor Tabarrok provides access to the, "Great insights from two legendary entrepreneurs" - Marc Andreessen and Charlie Munger author of The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.

Mr. Anderson: Mr. Munger's magnum opus speech, included in the book, is The Psychology of Human Misjudgment -- an exposition of 25 key forms of human behavior that lead to misjudgment and error, derived from Mr. Munger's 60 years of business experience. Think of it as a practitioner's summary of human psychology and behavioral economics as observed in the real world.

Mr. Munger: ...almost everyone thinks he fully recognizes how important incentives and disincentives are in changing cognition and behavior. But this is not often so. For instance, I think I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I've always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower.

What the Marginal Revolution post does, to my mind, is put the individual question raised by Gary Marcus to a human species level of inquiry, not as individuals within the species but as a biological organism whose survival depends not only upon its interaction with the environment but its interaction with itself.

Our Understanding Of Ourselves Advancing Or Retreating

Two adherents of the dismal science took a look at the other social sciences and their progress in recent times.

Tyler Cowen on 4/1/08 discussed Gordon Tullock's The Organization of Inquiry and provided the full Tullock symposium here), in a Marginal Revolution Why are the social sciences backward?

This post is a summation of the original Marginal Revolution post which was itself an entry point to further reading or study. The topic is far too complex to fit into a few computer screen's worth of text . Unfortunately, the source materials are not available without cost. What this post can provide is some additional links and consider how this fits with what has been learned before.

Tullock next turns to what he considers to be the real reasons behind the backwardness of the social sciences:

• Differences in the social organization of natural versus social science.
• The relative absence of applied research:
• One example given is that there is no way to patent new sales technique?
• Many fewer checks from the applied side on pure social science research unlike the natural sciences
• The second motive for research, curiosity, is in the social sciences "likely to get distracted to essentially non-scientific ends."

According to Tullock, this is because in the social sciences: there is a strong possibility of artistic distraction. Literature of all kinds is quite frequently based on careful observation of human beings. A large number of brilliant men led by their curiosity to study their fellow men have produced great literature instead of science (p. 151).

Professor Cowen also brings into the discussion Mises and Hayek, to whom in Tullock is responding , who thought that the social sciences were different because matters of human affairs are more complex and because of the subjective dimension of human choice and expectation.

More can be found at the original post with an interesting link at complexity by Bruce Edmonds of the Centre for Policy Modelling, Manchester Metropolitan University Business School,

Professor Cowen goes on to argue that "that while economics lags behind physics, we understand the economy better than we understand the human brain or for that matter the deep ocean. "

I see complexity of the topic and accessibility to information as determining the progress of a science; I am not so far from Hayek's view, although he underestimated how much progress quantitative and experimental economics could make.

It seems there were even ancient computers, not to mention advanced philosophy. So the point remains: the absence of a developed economics until the mid-18th century remains a startling anomaly in the history of ideas. Why was that?

An Addendum to the original Marginal Revolution post provides EconLog's Arnold Kling's perspective.

Stephen J. Dubner via Freakonomics back on 4/8/08 questioned, "How Much Progress Have Psychology and Psychiatry Really Made?" in a Freakonomics Quorum

The debate about the effectiveness and safety of psychiatric drugs rambles on while new (if not conclusive) psychological studies come out with the frequency of fad diets. We invited some people who think a lot about such issues -- David B. Baker, John Medina, Dan Ariely, Satoshi Kanazawa, Peter D. Kramer, and Laurie Schwartz

Again, as with the Tyler Cowen post above, this is far too complicated a topic to do the original post justice without simply repeating the entire article, so this is not a substitute. It does bring up though the same argument emphasizing the differences between social and natural sciences, but this time within the same arena. There isn't a lack of progress but an ever increasing complexity within the fields as different disciplines cross over one and other.

for John Medina:

My personal hero in the exodus away from mental superstition is a large bolus of ego named Emil Kraepelin (1856 to 1926). He had the audacity to assume everything that was psychological was simultaneously biological.

Dan Ariely, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, principal investigator of the MIT Media Lab’s eRationality group, and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions takes the view"

“This, in my mind, is another important lesson that psychologists have learned — that our intuitions about what drives our behavior are not always correct.”

It seems to me that Professor Cowen's claim that our knowledge of economics is less than that of physics but far greater than the human brain pays too little attention to point that economics is able to smooth out the variables it studies to arrive at general principals, while modern neurosciences such as neurochemistry cannot. Economics is also arguably the consequence of the decision process by biological creatures. While we can make generalized predictions with economics, do we really understand the process if we don't understand the organisms that make those decisions?

This post has dealt with complexity, irrationality and mentioned the concept of artistic distraction, all in the course of studying economics, definitely food for further thought.

Still Thinking About Marketing And Web Complexity

I am still thinking about Anita Campbell's article When Did Online Marketing Become So Complex? OPEN Forum Blog from American Express OPEN. This post will address the questions she raised more directly. It has been revised since the weekend.

Below is her chart on how she organizes web 2.0 programs as business tools in terms of their return on investment.

The chart uses concentric circles to outline an online marketing strategy. Here is the chart I've come up with (click image for larger version):
The most important elements of an online marketing strategy appear in the center two circles. Those are the activities you will get the greatest return from, for the time and money you spend on them.

The main objective is to sell some service or product, but to my mind the web doesn't sell anything, it makes connections. People then sell to themselves. The primary focal point of connection is the website (or whatever one uses as their primary platform) and each concentric circle should connect to it in some way to it.

The difference between the inner circle of blogs, e-mail marketing, SEO, Pay-Per-Click and Online Press Releases is that they are more direct and focused than the outer circle of tags, and social-networking. The outer circle is less direct but it is the arena where viral marketing can arise. One could make a MySpace site dedicated especially to a particular business or service. That though should put it into the inner circle. The same could be true of listing like the yellow pages, though that does seem more passive than other components in the inner circle. Overall, it seems to be a matter of achieving authenticity.

Ms Campbell has a number of different web 2.0 programs on the outer circle, but I believe that they could be grouped into broader categories. They could also be divided by demographics, Linked-in for professionals, MySpace for younger kids. Delicious appeals to a different group then does Digg.

Ms Campbell argues against spending too much time on the outer circle which makes sense to me. Having an established and dependable foundation at your center and inner circle allows customers to respond on their own to what you have to offer. This is an essential point in my view. Your customers have to have the option to respond on their own. Your job is to figure out who your customers are.

This weblog is on the other end of the exchange. It is one of the potential consumers. It is more likely to be a secondary marketing platform. According to FeedBurner, Ms Campbell's article has been clicked on 42 times in the last month through my Delicious account, most before I got around to posting about it. How people got to it, I don't know. It is the fifth most popular item clicked on in the last 30 days. Yesterday, it got three clicks. My post from yesterday in which it was featured got one click.

Yet, according to Delicious, her article has only been bookmarked by one other person. I "discovered" it on StumbleUpon. There is also the question of how my connections with others effect this weblog. Over the last week the number of clicks to posts or sites featured on this weblog per day was around 20. Yesterday, it was 60. It is no longer a one-way discourse, even if we are not in direct conversation. It is a cascading flow of information that needs to be studied more.

Why Is The Web Complex - Because We Are

Last night I did what I often do, took a couple of articles from the web that were of interest and put them together in the same post just before going to bed. I also did what Seth Godin says that we do, I scanned, then wrote down some off the top of the head ideas.

This morning I took a second look at the American Express Open Forum post. First off, I should have recognized and acknowledged that the article was by Anita Campbell. Her Small Business Trends blog is one of the main blogs featured by this weblog and has provided a good deal of food for thought. I also did not explore the links she provided. I was able though to independently come up with the same data on there being over 100 million websites through CNN News that that she found with her Metric 2.0 link. The point is not that I am a great researcher but that everybody has quick access to data. She also discusses Affiliate Marketing.

I am interested in how it all links together even if it is not monetized. The web seems to me to have a natural tendency to create links without much effort. This weblog uses web 2.0 tools to track itself, but it has taken minimal effort to expand its reach beyond the avenues of connection that have been discussed in previous posts.

Ms. Campbell was herself part of one of these connections. One of my early posts You Can't Talk Your Way Through A Paradigm Shift dealt with "anti-social responsibility campaigns" which criticized the idea behind one of her posts. This is a minor blog in the blogosphere. I get 17 subscribers Ms. Campbell has over 86,000. Despite that she was able to find my post and write me explaining her position. This means that first the system she used was complex enough to recognize my post, second she was kind enough to take the time to respond, a computerized algorithmic approach and a human response working together.

My review not only lacked depth (which most web-writing does), it does not actually have the same focus. Her focus was on a business enterprises and how to make them better within the web 2.0 environment. This is social commentary from the peanut gallery, but there are a lot of peanuts out there. The web is complex because we are complex. We are more complex together; with the web the crowd can source the crowd. That has be be ultimate complexity. The problem is then with us, too many e-mails, some times too shallow reads and reviews, too much altogether and we get overwhelmed. It is possible though to get through all the noise, to get your message across and find connections.

Withstanding A Groundswell Of Complexity

OPEN Forum Blog from American Express raised the question back in March of this year, "When Did Online Marketing Become So Complex?" Annotated

The online marketing landscape has become so complex that cutting through the “noise” is now one of the biggest problems small businesses face. Sorting out WHERE and HOW to spend our limited time and resources is increasingly the challenge.

Probably when we became able to do niche targeted marketing from Bangalore, India to people in Bangor, Maine. A CNN report last November by Marsha Walton tells us that there are over 100 million websites out there. According to BBC News in December of last year, "A decade on and blog-watching firm Technorati reports it is tracking more than 70 million web logs."

More than the aggregate numbers, it is how we are all connected, one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one or many-to-many. This is one area in which my views have changed dramatically. I started off cynical, but the last six months or so have demonstrated the reach of the web. The concept of crowdsourcing is one that to my mind has little meaning outside of the web.

Now the good news is that source of complexity, the web itself, is also the source of understanding that complexity. Here is one recently discovered example. Groundswell Annotated diigo tags: psychology, marketing

Forrester's Social Technographics® classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation (see a presentation, 8 slides). Based on our survey data we can see how participation varies among different groups of consumers, globally.

I know that this is too quick and easy an answer to the question that was raised above and I will come back to it, but the tools for working the web are within the web itself.

A Complex Pathway For Our Evolution

One topic that I have had a novice interest in is complexity theory and how it integrates with other fields such as biology and evolution. Wired Science from Wired.com had on article on Complexity Theory Takes Evolution to Another Level by Brandon Keim, posted on February 12, 2008. Wired Science also provided an updated post on the subject..

One hundred and ninety-nine years after Charles Darwin was born, and 149 years after he published On the Origin of Species, some scientists say that the theory of evolution is due for a revision.

It's heady stuff, and a lot of the hard science that Woese explained didn't come out well enough in transcription to make sense here. To understand him more completely I highly recommend reading "A New Biology for a New Century," published in 2004 in Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews. It's a visionary blend of history and microbiology, and shows that Woese is that rarest of all organisms: a brilliant scientist who can really write.

Update: a follow-up post, "Evolution as Biological Thermodynamics"

Another related Wired article provides some basic background on evolution and biology, as well as additional information on Carl R. Woese, whose work has been such an important part of this field. Biologists Take Evolution Beyond Darwin -- Way Beyond Annotated diigo tags: biologists, evolution, complexity,

Darwin described how changes in an organism are passed from generation to generation, dwindling or spreading through populations depending on their contribution to survival. Biologists later combined this with genetics, which had yet to be discovered in Darwin's time. The fusion -- called the modern evolutionary synthesis, or neo-Darwinian evolution -- describes evolution as we now know it: Genetic mutations produce changes that sometimes become part of a species' heritage and, when enough changes accumulate, produce new species.

A recent international symposium at MIT looked at the second law of thermodynamics. One of the lectures also involved biology, the Second Law and Biophysics with Kenneth Dill, Professor of Biophysics; Associate Dean of Research, University of California, San Francisco.

Surviving Ideaicide And Other Perils Of The New Economy

Some of the recent posts for this weblog have been dealing with the creative-destructive aspects on the Web 2.0 business environment, Kevin Kelly's insights for the creative side and commodification for the destructive. Another post dealt with the new Artisan Economy.

What this post is taking a look at are some of the aspects of the social/business environment in which all of this is suppose to be happening. This is to serve as a reminder that having a laptop does not instill instant creativity or guarantee a smooth road to success.

As this New York Times BUSINESS article on February 3, 2008 By JANET RAE-DUPREE tells us in Unboxed: Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work

As humans, we want to believe that creativity and innovation come in flashes of pure brilliance, with great thunderclaps and echoing ahas. Balderdash.

Not only do we have to work hard on our own ideas, we have to maintain an openness to conflicting ideas, going back to what F. Scott Fitzgerald advised. This Los Angeles Times article provides a more indepth perspective.

The modern world is an ever-changing mass of contradictions. Reconciling them is fundamental to success, whether in business or in life.

The need to keeping conflicting ideas in balance is hard enough, but one also has to do so in an environment of increasing complexity. As small business expert by Ivana Taylor review of The Complexity Crisis — Why Keeping it Simple is Not Stupid at Small Business Trends' tells us.

Looking at the current business obsession regarding product proliferation, the long tail, and flat worlds complexity the argument goes has run amok among businesses, both big and small. John Mariotti, former president of Rubbermaid Office Products and Huffy Bicycles, lends perspective and clarity to complexity in his new book The Complexity Crisis. Why too many products, markets and customers are crippling your company and what to do about it.

"Businesses must compete in more complex global markets than ever before. Most companies are seeking double-digit growth in markets growing in single digit rates — or not at all. This quest for growth has led to runaway complexity caused by the proliferation of products, customers, markets, suppliers, services, locations, and more. All of these add costs, which go untracked by even the best accounting systems. Complexity also fragments management focus, wastes time and money, and ultimately reduces shareholder value. The problems grow, but they remain under the radar of management attention. Complexity is arguable, the most insidious, hidden profit drain in today's business world."

What is of greatest interest is how, even succeeding in meeting the above challenges, you keep your ideas alive. One source of inspiration has been referenced before, the Change This Manifesto. This time the pointer comes from Brand Autopsy's johnmoore on 2/1/08 Ideaicide Prevention is Everybody's Business.

"Ideas are usually rejected out of turn for being too 'something' — too fast, too unproven, too far beyond the corporate image. 'Too something' is a reactionary description used to take the edge off ideas that are strong, bold, and a little scary at first sight. Your challenge is to help people discover a means, harmonious with the culture, to accept your concept."

Alan Parr & Karen Ansbaugh Ideaicide: How To Avoid It And Get What You Want * ChangeThis Manifesto *

I am not sure that this has to happen necessarily in a corporate setting. GroupThink, which I suspect is a primary cause only needs two to be contagious. Government is also particularly susceptible to this aliment.

Finally, in this type of environment the chances of unhampered non-stop success are slim and none. As the The Entrepreneurial Mind told us back on 1/30/08 Failure Stinks!. Fortunately, Dr. Cornwall provides a pointer to Bounce.

Barry Moltz's long awaited second book, titled Bounce, has finally arrived. From his (Barry Moltz's) website:

Conventional business wisdom tells us that there is always something to learn from failure. Not true--sometimes it just stinks! Failure that offers no real learning value becomes a big jolt to the basic business belief system.

Barry's gift is that he uses humor to offer lessons that all entrepreneurs can learn from. During his last visit to Belmont, Barry offered some glimpses of what he planned to explore in his new book. Just like with his first book You Need to be a Little Crazy, this book is a must read for entrepreneurs at any stage of their development.

Barry demonstrates that developing the resiliency to 'bounce" through these cycles determines who ultimately will succeed. Using real life business examples, he shows that with true business confidence, we can face our fears, let go of shame and failures, use all our choices, be better risk-takers, and define our own brand of success.

The Universe Is Conspiring to Help Us Or At Least Kevin Kelly Is

The Universe Is Conspiring to Help Us via NPR Series: This I Believe
Whether hitchhiking to work or bicycling across the country, Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly always found strangers willing to help him. Kelly believes that to be a good giver, you must also know how to receive.

Kottke.org by jason@kottke.org had a piece on Kevin Kelly has written a thoughtful post about how to...

Kevin Kelly has written a thoughtful post about how to make money in a world where the rules are:

• When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
• When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
  

He then lists eight reasons why people pay money for things that could be free, one of which is immediacy:

Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released -- or even better, produced -- by its creators is a generative asset. Many people go to movie theaters to see films on the opening night, where they will pay a hefty price to see a film that later will be available for free, or almost free, via rental or download. Hardcover books command a premium for their immediacy, disguised as a harder cover. First in line often commands an extra price for the same good.

The Good Experience Blog also gives us Two new Kevin Kelly pointers

• The Bottom is Not Enough, on the challenges of bottom-up design

• Subterranean Tutoring, on being a geek dad trying to raise geek kids.

See also:

• Kevin Kelly's must-read article on what's "better than free"

• All mentions of Kevin Kelly recently (there have been many)

By my own standards I should be adding more to this post than just rehashing what others have already done. The truth though is despite knowing, "the bearded guy on the bike who wrote the Whole Earth Catalog", I really did not appreciate the work of Kevin Kelly. So I am letting those with far more experience in this Web 2.0 environment educated me. This post provides other avenues for studying some of the issues that this weblog has been considering.

Even researching Kevin Kelly provides some further insights into the Web 2.0 world. Searching for Kevin Kelly in del.icio.us brings up a number of hits. Interestingly though there are numerous hits for Cool Tools, each separate because they were assigned a different set of tags. Some of the tags linked to more specific selections with only 25 people sharing the tag set and other have 2,237 people sharing the tag set. Searching for Cool Tools on del.icio.us goes beyond Keven Kelly's Cool Tools.
Searching for Kevin Kelly on Stumble Upon brought up less hits than I would have guessed. It did however list Cool Tools under related sites, though again the designation goes beyond Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools.
[There use to be a paragraph here that said Jason Kottke and Mark Hurst use the target _blank code. That was wrong. It didn't have anything really to do with this post and since this weblog is designed for my web explorations I will still be using target blank because I like it, but it was still wrong.]
Below is my first direct introduction to Kevin Kelly from TED.

Collaboration Moving Masses Through Compassion

Previously, I quoted Seth Godin as saying.

One more reason not to obsess about the A list in any media category. Worry instead about people with passion and people with lots of friends. You need both for ideas to spread. That was Malcolm's point all along.

I agree, but it's actually the concept of passion and people that I agree with, not what is Malcolm's Gladwell's point. I am even more sure that it is not Duncan Watt's point. Also raised a point regarding what had been said about the quality of feedback to and from a subsystem within a larger (information) system when dealing with unintended consequences.

What was missing from these discussions was the concept of collaboration. Both the posting on Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point and the posting on Unintended Consequences raised by the Freakonomics involved basically unilateral communications or at least the appearance of it.

If there was two-way communication, it was not conscious, purposeful nor intentional. The example of inter-ethnic violence cited by the British Psychological Society Research Digest blog, featured in past posts best illustrated the disruptive capacity of this, while the most illustrative example of decentralized crowd wisdom collaboration was undoubtedly Cosmic Variance's starlings used in a previous post to discuss greed and the human condition.

I realize that statistically we can see trends moving in certain directions and ignore the actions of the individual. But I am also reminded of the words of Krishinamurti.

Challenging The "Popular" Theory Of Group and Individual Interaction

Kottke.org by jason@kottke.org puts his two cents in on the Fast Company article By: Clive Thompson regarding Duncan Watts' research.

Duncan Watts' research is challenging the theory that a small group of influential people are responsible for triggering trends as explained in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

"If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires:

"And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."

Jason has more here of what he has previously covered about the topic of the article.(link)

Seth's Blog by Seth Godin has its own perspective on Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point plus that of some other Web 2.0 elite via The Hyping Point.

As I understand it, people are influenced by the people around them. That we act, like buffalo, in a herd. The idea that a single influential individual (even a blogger like Guy or a talk show host like Oprah) can individually change the herd is crazy, and I don't think anyone has argued that.

What should be really clear, though, is that people with big audiences certainly count as one of the people around you. If the guy down the row at work buys a Mac Air, it counts. If Guy buys a Mac Air, it counts just as much (or possibly a bit more).

Since people with big audiences have more 'friends' and have more 'people down the hall', they have more influence. Not because they count for more, just because they 'know' more people.

Cory Doctorow's take on it is here. Steve Pyke provides a guest perspective at Guy Kawasaki's blog. Steve agrees with Seth that this is One more reason not to obsess about the A list in any media category. Worry instead about people with passion and people with lots of friends. You need both for ideas to spread. That was Malcolm's point all along. I can agree with that

Seth uses his own Unleashing the Ideavirus as an example which he says, didn't spread because 'important' people endorsed and promoted it. It spread because passionate people did.

I can't fully buy Seth Godin's thinking on this one. He seems to be trying too hard to keep everybody happy. One issue is that we are looking at this from a very slanted and narrow perspective - marketing. At least narrow when compared to the larger fields of human psychology and sociology. We could even go one step further and talk about organic and inorganic information systems and how they interrelate. This weblog has posted previously to the ability of birds to communicate individual data that is transformed into group decisions in flight, basically bird-brains can effectively work in unison. While humans afflicted with ancient hate have the same deterministic predictability as inorganic chemicals. Seth is right in that it is a matter of balance, but as has also been argued in a previous post Nature Is Better At Balancing Complex Systems Than We Are. The problem is that this seemingly goes against what was said about feedback to and from a subsystem within a larger (information) system when dealing with unintended consequences. This is going to take a bit more thought.

Looking For Loopholes In Law of Unintended Consequences

Stephen J. Dubner of Freakonomics wrote Toward a Better Understanding of the Law of Unintended Consequences on 1/25/08.

We recently published a column describing a few instances of the law of unintended consequences — specifically, what happens when well-meaning legislation winds up hurting the parties it is designed to help.

I thought it was a pretty good column. But I see now where it could have been better. Alex Tabarrok, writing on Marginal Revolution, , addresses the law of unintended consequences per se,

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution cites Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science which had the post on What kind of law is the Law of Unintended Consequences?

The Statistical Modeling ... blog is maintained by Andrew Gelman, Aleks Jakulin and Masanao Yajima.

This weblog linked to the original Freakonomics post back in October and has further considered the concept of unintended consequences with regards to the healthcare programs of the Gates Foundation and other related organizations.

Andrew Gelman does a u-turn on the citation back to Alex Tabarrok.

P.S. Interesting comments below. Also, Alex Tabarrok has further elaboration:

The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system. The political system is simple, it operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short time horizons, low feedback, and poor and misaligned incentives. Society in contrast is a complex, evolving, high-feedback, incentive-driven system. When a simple system tries to regulate a complex system you often get unintended consequences.

I can agree with the concept of complex and evolving but would argue that we only know in hindsight what the system is evolving into. There may be high-feedback for the system as a whole but we don't have full access to that total system information so the problem of limited information remains. The alignment of incentives is also something it seems to me that is determined only after the event and can involve complex interactions which are often not always apparent. I also have problems with the implied concept that there is some overall arching system out there which is true and correct and our little political/economic systems are poor and inadequate copies. We also need to look at the alternative options that Andrew Gillman provides, "examples of intended consequences that actually happened? Or unintended consequences which, although unfortunate, were minor compared to the intended consequences," including as well "unforeseen adaptations".

There are a number of expanding links related to this subject running through the posts and comments and it's interesting to see the difference in approach between the economist and social scientists.

Nature Is Better At Balancing Complex Systems Than We Are

"When Removing One Predator Harms the Prey" - New York Times: By HENRY FOUNTAIN Published: December 11, 2007

This article makes a good point regarding thinking about long term impact and the complexity of interrelated systems.

"The predator-prey relationship is simple, right? If a predator is around, that is bad for the prey, and if the predator is removed, that is good for the prey."

"Ecological theory, however, suggests that isn’t always the case, particularly if there is more than one predator species around and they share the same prey. In that case, elimination of the top predator may allow the midlevel predator to thrive, and a result may actually be worse for the prey."

The New England Complex Systems Institute, which is one of the web pages saved under del.icio.us and other tagging systems, has a fascinating visualization of a related system model. You will need Quicktime. Spatial Predator-Prey Models and the Evolution of Altruism. The use of such systems will, to my mind, undoubtedly increase, both as a means of understanding challenges in the future as well as overcoming those challenges and mitigating the impacts.

The New England Complex Systems Institute was featured in a previous post and placed under Paradigm Pathways Science Pathways. The researchers had created a mathematical model - based purely on the geographic distribution of ethnic groups - that provided a highly accurate prediction of where violent conflict would occur regarding Inter-ethnic violence using the same rules for prediction that govern chemicals.

Digging Your Way In and Out Of A Hole 2

Continuing with the concepts from the last post, TEDblog also had something to say about How toddlers (and monkeys) make choices. They focused though more directly on the question of human happiness citing the same study as the New York Times article in the previous post. However, they or their links to the Proper Study of the Mankind provide the actual recent study published in Psychological Science, by Louisa Egan, Laurie Santos and Paul Bloom, as well as better sources for in-depth inquiry and other voices that took part in the discussion. This includes Barry Schwartz, who spoke on the paradox of choice at TED. Other speakers on What Makes Us Happy have also spoken in the past at TED on this subject.

This led to other sources of insight. Dr Christian Jarrett, BSc MSc PhD, is according to his writeup, a writer/editor specialising in psychology and the neurosciences. He works full-time for the British Psychological Society as inaugural editor/writer of their Research Digest. His blog had two articles of interest to this line of inquiry - How ignorance can lead to the right answer and Inter-ethnic violence predicted by same rules that govern chemicals. This reminded me of a past post that linked to a Cosmic Variance article Birds of a Feather. The fascinating premise of the article is that the movement of the flock was created by the decisions of the individual birds.

So where does this leave us? We enter the world in ignorance. We become very good in justifying our selves and our ignorance. As Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson point out in their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), "we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right—a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong". I do believe though that we can make decisions that transcend cognitive dissonance, where we don't create a false belief to justify ourselves, but we must also be willing to not continue to attach to that which we chose not to pick.

"The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." F. Scott Fitzgerald