Expert Generalists and Innovative Organizations

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What do the great innovators have in common? Looking at examples from Picasso to Kepler, Art Markman calls these men expert generalists. They seem to know a lot about a wide variety of topics, and their wide knowledge base supports their creativity.

Markman identifies two personality traits that are key for expert generalists: Openness to Experience and Need for Cognition. Can we also expect to find these traits in innovative organizations?

Openness to Experience entails a willingness to explore new ideas and opportunities. Obviously many organizations prefer to stick with familiar ideas and activities, and have built-in ways of maintaining the status quo.

Need for Cognition entails a joy of learning, and a willingness to devote the time and effort necessary to master new things. 

In his post on the origins of modern science, Tim Johnson compares the rival claims of magic and commerce. He points out that good science is open whereas magic is hidden and secretive; he traces the foundations of modern science to European financial practice, on the grounds that markets are social, collaborative, open, forums. But perhaps it makes more sense to see modern science as having two parents: from magic it inherits its Need for Cognition, a deep and passionate interest in explaining how things work; while from commerce it inherits its Openness to Experience, a broad fascination with the unknown. Obviously there have been individual scientists who have had more of one than the other, and some outstanding individual scientists who have excelled at both, but the collective project of science has relied on an effective combination of these two qualities.

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Leveraging Social Media at The Open Group Newport Beach Conference (#ogNB)

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One way to maximize the benefits is to make technology work for you. If you are attending The Open Group Conference in Newport Beach next week, we’ve put together a few tips on how to leverage social media to make networking at the conference easier, quicker and more effective. Continue reading →

How To Understand The Difference Between Value-Proposition and a Product or Service

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One of my startup heroes Steve Blank wrote in a blog post that “value proposition is the fancy name for your product or service” It is with some trepidation that […]

Information and Affirmation

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@timrayner01 points out that so-called information-sharing is never neutral, disengaged – it is a positive act of communication.

“Don’t think of what you share as information. Even if what you share is information, by sharing it, you are telling the world that it is information that you affirm in some way. It is the affirmation that counts. We share what we love. Even when we share details about things we despise, they are things we love to hate. Love is the key to understanding how we contribute to social media commons. We populate the commons with expressions of love.”

So even scorn is a form of affirmation. The comedian who devotes his spleen to the latest reality show is thereby contributing (in a complex post-modern fashion) to the show’s success. Daniel Smith describes this as alternative consumption, and sees Charlie Brooker as a modern version of Baudelaire.

The Royal Television Society may pretend that Charlie Brooker represents the high-brow alternative to Simon Cowell.  But Brooker’s material is basically the same as Cowell’s, it just has a different sentiment. They obviously need each other.

Jonathan Harwood, Cowell and Morgan beaten by Brooker and Theroux (The Week March 2010)

Information and Affirmation

by

@timrayner01 points out that so-called information-sharing is never neutral, disengaged – it is a positive act of communication.

“Don’t think of what you share as information. Even if what you share is information, by sharing it, you are telling the world that it is information that you affirm in some way. It is the affirmation that counts. We share what we love. Even when we share details about things we despise, they are things we love to hate. Love is the key to understanding how we contribute to social media commons. We populate the commons with expressions of love.”

So even scorn is a form of affirmation. The comedian who devotes his spleen to the latest reality show is thereby contributing (in a complex post-modern fashion) to the show’s success. Daniel Smith describes this as alternative consumption, and sees Charlie Brooker as a modern version of Baudelaire.

The Royal Television Society may pretend that Charlie Brooker represents the high-brow alternative to Simon Cowell.  But Brooker’s material is basically the same as Cowell’s, it just has a different sentiment. They obviously need each other.

Jonathan Harwood, Cowell and Morgan beaten by Brooker and Theroux (The Week March 2010)

The Calculus of Cost 2

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@remembermytweet and @tetradian explore the Types of Cost (Jan 2013).

Alex identifies a number of different types of cost, which as Tom points out are largely monetary costs. But what is a cost anyway?

An enterprise incurs a great deal of cost. and these can be broken down and classified in various ways. Accountants like to express all costs in monetary terms – so for example,  human effort is translated into labour cost.

But that only works if the enterprise is directly paying for the labour, in the form of wages or contractor bills. Wasting the customers’ time doesn’t count as a direct cost to the enterprise, although it may well have an indirect cost in terms of customer complaints and lost revenue.

We might also think of anxiety as a cost. As Seth Godin comments in relation to the airline industry, “By assuming that their customer base prefers to save money, not anxiety, they create an anxiety-filled system.” Eleven things organizations can learn from airports (Jan 2013). See also my post on Anxiety as a Cost (Jan 2013).

Even for direct labour, the human cost may not be fully reflected by the wages and monetary overheads associated with employment. Many employees do unpaid overtime and incur other personal costs, and this is only visible to the enterprise accountants when it results in high levels of sickness and staff turnover.

So we need to remember the difference between a real cost and its monetary measure.

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Improving Signal-to-Noise in Risk Management

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One of the most important responsibilities of the information security professional (or any IT professional, for that matter) is to help management make well-informed decisions. Unfortunately, this has been an illusive objective when it comes to risk. Continue reading →

The Antifragile Enterprise: Complexity Exists, but Let’s Not Overcomplicate it or IT.

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The Enterprise is a complex system.  I have accepted that fact.   I think many of us in the enterprise architecture profession have also accepted this fact as well, or at least I hope we have.   But then again there is natural response to things in which we do in order to address “complexity.”  There is a tendancy to…