The Pursuit of Awesomeness / on tumblr

1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.

2. This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.

4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.

5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. (Rothko said “this is the essence of academicism.)

6. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.

7. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

June 13, 1943 edition of the New York Times, brief manifesto: Mark Rothko, with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman.

Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Rothko

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E Pluribus Unum: Deterritorialization, Reterritorialization, And The Box.

Out of many, one. The cornerstone of modernity is perhaps modularization[1]: of people and objects alike into cogs, fulfilling assigned roles within a machine-system. Tribal-human networks have been replaced by industrial-machine-systems – batches[2] – pivotal numbers through which systems[3] run efficiently, generating abstract wealth if not necessarily well-being.

By consolidating units into batches/containers, the Box[4] reduced costs dramatically. It also allowed for ‘bulk’ and specialized transportation, e.g. meat via refrigerated containers. This is as important as cost-reduction itself, as it changed what could be transported, generating new industries, economic centers, and consumption patterns through its existence.

So we see ‘Creative Destruction’ operating at two levels: reconfiguring the existing cargo and shipping industries through increased automation[5], and making new industries possible. As I understand it, where Schumpeter looked at creative destruction through business cycles within a given industry or firm[6]; McLean and the container disrupted the industry from the outside.

The essay itself makes the case for entrepreneurship over innovation, and I surmise that’s accurate. We see throughout the essay an emerging system that would support the modern container business: container trucks, shipping containers, trade policy, and financial instruments such as leveraged buyouts[7]. McLean’s insight, I believe, is fundamentally recombinant[8]. With any emerging industry you see many different solutions to a problem, before they’re consolidated into some most-viable solutions[9]. Without any one, it’s perhaps unlikely that the industry could have achieved scale and success.

This was also the period that words like “diversification” became commonplace[10]. You get a sense of inevitability when you realize that Theodore Levitt’s HBR essay – Marketing Myopia[11] – was published just over a decade after McLean rose to prominence, in 1960.

“No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.” Victor Hugo

[1] Modularization as deterritorialization and reterritorialization, being reconfigured to form the optimum “batch”. I borrow the concept loosely from philosophers such as Baudrillard and Deleuze and Guattari. Modularization, I suppose, could also be referred to as standardization, but I’d gravitate towards ‘modularization’ because it gives you a better fundamental sense of what’s happening.

[2] There is obviously theory/material with regards to the idea of “batches” but for the purposes of this essay the concept is developed from a discussion in an Operations Management class.

[3] Corporations or industries, for example.

[4] For the purposes of this essay, the notional Box is, of course, from the essay assigned.

[5] What MIT’s Andrew McAfee might refer to as skill-based technological obsolescence in his book ‘Race Against the Machine’, although he is looking more at the accelerated version seen with the rise of digital technology.

[6] Wikipedia note on Schumpeter’s strain of Creative Destruction

[7] One trend is certainly the two inventions of time-shifting in this case – (a) of specialized transportation that allowed goods to be transported further, thus theoretically allowing firms to move away from port cities and relocate to low-cost areas and form new value/competitive clusters; and (b) financial instruments such as leveraged buyouts, that allowed you to reach scale faster. It is only when these elements are brought together that you see adoption increase rapidly.

[8] Innovation is oftentimes recombination.

[9] This somewhat reminds me of Tim Harford’s core thesis in his book ‘Adapt’ – a sense of Darwinian variation and natural selection in ideas and firms.

[10] Google NGramViewer, Diversification

[11] Marketing Myopia, Theodore Levitt, 1960 

It’s a sultry night in July. You’ve fallen asleep in the armchair. Abruptly, you startle awake, disoriented. The television set is on, but not the sound. You strain to understand what you’re seeing. Two ghostly white figures in coveralls and helmets are softly dancing under a pitch-black sky. They make strange little skipping motions, which propel them upward amid barely perceptible clouds of dust. But something is wrong. They take too long to come down. Encumbered as they are, they seem to be flying — a little. You rub your eyes, but the dreamlike tableau persists.

Of all the events surrounding Apollo 11’s landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, my most vivid recollection is its unreal quality. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin shuffled along the gray, dusty lunar surface, the Earth looming large in their sky, while Michael Collins, now the Moon’s own moon, orbited above them in lonely vigil. Yes, it was an astonishing technical achievement and a triumph for the United States. Yes, as Armstrong said as he first alighted, this was a historic step for the human species. But if you turned off the byplay between Mission Control and the Sea of Tranquility, with its deliberately mundane and routine chatter, you could glimpse that we humans had entered the realm of myth and legend.

We knew the Moon from our earliest days. It was there when our ancestors descended from the trees into the savannahs, when we learned to walk upright, when we first devised stone tools, when we domesticated fire, when we invented agriculture and built cities and set out to subdue the Earth. Folklore and popular songs celebrate a mysterious connection between the Moon and love. The word “month” and the second day of the week are both named after the Moon. Its waxing and waning — from crescent to full to crescent to new — was widely understood as a celestial metaphor of death and rebirth. It was connected with the ovulation cycle of women, which has nearly the same period — as the word “menstruation” (Latin mensis = month, from the word “to measure”) reminds us. Those who sleep in moonlight go mad; the connection is preserved in the English word “lunatic”. In the old Persian story, a vizier renowned for his wisdom is asked which is more useful, the Sun or the Moon. “The Moon,” he answers, “because the Sun shines in daytime, when it’s light out anyway.” Especially when we lived out-of-doors, it was a major — if oddly tangible — presence in our lives.

The Moon was a metaphor for the unattainable: “You might as well ask for the Moon,” they used to say. Or “You can no more do that than fly to the Moon.” For most of our history, we had no idea what it was. A spirit? A god? A thing? It didn’t look like something big far away, but more like something small nearby — something the size of a plate, maybe, hanging in the sky a little above our heads. Ancient Greek philosophers debated the propositon “that the Moon is exactly as large as it looks” (betraying a hopeless confusion between linear and angular size). Walking on the Moon would somehow have seemed a screwball idea; it made more sense to imagine somehow climbing up into the sky on a ladder or on the back of a giant bird, grabbing the Moon, and bringing it down to Earth. Nobody ever succeeded, although there were myths aplenty about heroes who had tried.

Not until a few centuries ago did the idea of the Moon as a place, a quarter-million miles away, gain wide currency. And in that brief flicker of time, we’ve gone from the earliest steps in understanding the Moon’s nature to walking and joy-riding on its surface. We calculated how objects move in space; liquefied oxygen from the air; invented big rockets, telemetry, reliable electronics, inertial guidance, and much else. Then we sailed out into the sky.

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The Moon is no longer unattainable. A dozen humans, all Americans, have made those odd bouncing motions they called “moonwalks” on the crunchy, cratered, ancient gray lava — beginning on that July day in 1969. But since 1972, no one from any nation has ventured back. Indeed, none of us has gone anywhere since the glory days of Apollo except into low Earth orbit — like a toddler who takes a few tentative steps outward and then, breathless, retreats to the safety of his mother’s skirts.

Once upon a time, we soared into the Solar System. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was Apollo really about?

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For me, the most ironic token of that moment in history is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the Moon. It reads: “We came in peace for all mankind.” As the United States was dropping 7.5 megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity: We would harm no one on a lifeless rock. That plaque is there still, attached to the base of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, on the airless desolation of the Sea of Tranquility. If no one disturbs it, it will still be readable millions of years from now.

Six more missions followed Apollo 11, all but one of which successfully landed on the lunar surface. Apollo 17 was the first to carry a scientist. As soon as he got there, the program was canceled. The first scientist and the last human to land on the Moon were the same person. The program had already served its purpose that July night in 1969. The half-dozen subsequent missions were just momentum.

Apollo was not mainly about science. It was not even mainly about space. Apollo was about ideological confrontation and nuclear war — often described by such euphemisms as world “leadership” and national “prestige”. Nevertheless, good space science was done. We now know much more about the composition, age, and history of the Moon and the origin of the lunar landforms. We have made progress in understanding where the Moon came from. Some of us have used lunar cratering statistics to better understand the Earth at the time of the origin of life. But more important than any of this, Apollo provided an aegis, an umbrella under which brilliantly engineered robot spacecraft were dispatched throughout the Solar System, making that preliminary reconnaissance of dozens of worlds. The offspring of Apollo have now reached the planetary frontiers.

If not for Apollo — and, therefore, if not for the political purpose it served — I doubt whether the historic American expeditions of exploration and discovery throughout the Solar System would have occurred. The Mariners, Vikings, Pioneers, Voyagers, and Galileo are among the gifts of Apollo. Magellan and Cassini are more distant descendants. Something similar is true for the pioneering Soviet efforts in Solar System exploration, including the first soft landings of robot spacecraft — Luna 9, Mars 3, Venera 8 — on other worlds.

Apollo conveyed a confidence, energy, and breadth of vision that did capture the imagination of the world. That too was part of its purpose. It inspired an optimism about technology, an enthusiasm for the future. If we could fly to the Moon, as so many have asked, what else were we capable of? Even those who opposed the policies and actions of the United States — even those who thought the worst of us — acknowledged the genius and heroism of the Apollo program. With Apollo, the United States touched greatness.

When you pack your bags for a big trip, you never know what’s in store for you. The Apollo astronauts on their way to and from the Moon photographed their home planet. It was a natural thing to do, but it had consequences that few foresaw. For the first time, the inhabitants of Earth could see their world from above — the whole Earth, the Earth in color, the Earth as exquisite spinning white and blue ball set against the vast darkness of space. Those images helped awaken our slumbering planetary consciousness. They provide incontestable evidence that we all share the same vulnerable planet. They remind us of what is important and what is not. They were the harbingers of Voyager’s pale blue dot.

We may have found that perspective just in time, just as our technology threatens the habitability of our world. Whatever the reason we first mustered the Apollo program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of Apollo. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival.

Travel is broadening.

It’s time to hit the road again.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

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“Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. 

The politician will be only too happy to abdicate 

in favor of his image, because the image will 

be much more powerful than he could ever be.” 

Marshall McLuhan

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“… reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real,

preferably through another reproductive medium, such as photography.

From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death.

But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction.

It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object:

no longer the object of representation,

but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination:

the hyperreal.”

Jean Baudrillard

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You can tell I’m feeling self-indulgent today.

I finally got down to reading Umair Haque’s Betterness this weekend.

It raises important questions about economics as we know it, and about how firms are set up to create value.

Two bits I shared via Kindle I captioned as “on the trouble with the expedient” and “on the need for ‘meaning’ organizations”

Reading it raised a couple of very obvious points on how we measure value today, and what’s needed to build a better future. For Umair’s take I would suggest reading the book itself, and also dropping by his HBR blog. 

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What I want to explore here is a key point that’s troubled me for ages now. The notion of GDP, and what our metrics of “prosperity” are based on.

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Now, basically, GDP is Gross Domestic Product — i.e. the total amount of output produced by a nation. And GDP/head is a metric that I was taught to use as a kid to compare the prosperity of countries. GDP per person being the total amount of “stuff” produced per person in a country.

What troubles me about this is obvious, I suppose.

GDP per person gives me a number that every person in a country must theoretically consume in order for the economy to break even.

So if the US has a GDP/head of $50,000; it implies that every person in the country needs to be consuming $50,000 of stuff every year for the national economy to break even. 

That is, for companies to make money — and therefore to pay the bills, hire employees — every employee needs to spend $50,000, just to keep the cycle going.

Now, if you look at the bifurcation in how firms have evolved over the past 50 years, you’ll see the bifurcation into ideas and executions.

Some kinds of firms leverage innovation and ideas — basically “brands” to make money, and other kinds of firms leverage scale and low cost manufacturing / back-end services to make money. 

A similar kind of extrapolation can be made in how we structure employee remuneration within firms. 

This altogether accounts for factors like growing income inequality, and then you realize that most people likely don’t have $50,000 to spend on stuff every year.

Which is how you move from (1) industrial to (2) service economies, and then further make the transition into (3) credit economies.

Because if the majority of people can’t spend $50,000 a year, you’re going to have to extend lines of credit to get the “poorer” people within the populace so that they can consume their “required share” of GDP.

But at some point, the difference between debt and equity gets so large for people that they simply can’t be lent to under proper rules. So we move up to the next level of credit economies — welcome sub-prime lending and CDOs. 

And today we’re talking about the app-economy, micro-manufacturing, collaborative consumption, as the next stage of the economy.

We should remember that these are all still systems that require consumption. And the right balance needs to be found between profit and value, regardless of which system we choose.

Remember, economies, institutions and firms alike are not structures, they are systems. Which means they are not entities, but tendencies.

The system we have today tends towards maximizing output (corporate/institution-level sales and profits) and maximizing consumption (individual-level consumption).

In a system of limited resources, only one of those can succeed, unless we find the aforementioned balance. And all this against the backdrops of decrepit politics and the challenges of environmental sustainability to boot. I can’t say there are any easy solutions here, but evolving businesses as they exist today is probably not the right answer.

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For Umair’s suggestion on how to tackle the challenges of tomorrow, read Betterness. And then figure out how you’re going to restructure the firms you run or work for cognizant of the trap we’ve built for ourselves. I’m going to do the same.

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Two concepts that come to mind, (1) diminishing marginal utility; and (2) non-competitive game theory, which I will elaborate on at a later date.

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On the non-competitive game theory wiki, there was an interesting quote by Clinton from 2000

“The more complex societies get and the more complex the networks of interdependence within and beyond community and national borders get, the more people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win–win solutions instead of win–lose solutions…. Because we find as our interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when other people do better as well — so we have to find ways that we can all win, we have to accommodate each other….”

Nice thought, but extending credit lines seems to have been the answer to this, and that’s categorically not it.

“For the merchantilisation of knowledge is bound to affect the privilege the nation-states have enjoyed, and still enjoy, with respect to the production and distribution of learning. The notion that learning falls within the purview of the State, as the brain or mind of society, will become more and more outdated with the increasing strength of the opposing principle, according to which society exists and progresses only if the messages circulating within it are rich in information and easy to decode. The ideology of communicational “transparency,” which goes hand in hand with the commercialisation of knowledge, will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and “noise.” It is from this point of view that the problem of the relationship between economic and State powers threatens to arise with a new urgency.

Already in the last few decades, economic powers have reached the point of imperilling the stability of the state through new forms of the circulation of capital that go by the generic name of multi-national corporations. These new forms of circulation imply that investment decisions have, at least in part, passed beyond the control of the nation-states.” The question threatens to become even more thorny with the development of computer technology and telematics. Suppose, for example, that a firm such as IBM is authorised to occupy a belt in the earth’s orbital field and launch communications satellites or satellites housing data banks. Who will have access to them? Who will determine which channels or data are forbidden? The State? Or will the State simply be one user among others? New legal issues will be raised, and with them the question: “who will know?”

Transformation in the nature of knowledge, then, could well have repercussions on the existing public powers, forcing them to reconsider their relations (both de jure and de facto) with the large corporations and, more generally, with civil society. The reopening of the world market, a return to vigorous economic competition, the breakdown of the hegemony of American capitalism, the decline of the socialist alternative, a probable opening of the Chinese market these and many other factors are already, at the end of the 1970s, preparing States for a serious reappraisal of the role they have been accustomed to playing since the 1930s: that of, guiding, or even directing investments.”

AdAsia had asked me to write a note on “marketing in uncertain times”, you can find the original blogpost here.

Figured I’d post it here, too, for posterity’s sake.

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The God that failed

Uncertainty, the new certainty

 “You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.” ~ Charles Bukowski

In Leviathan, his 1651 treatise on man’s civic existence, Hobbes refers to the State as “mortal God under immortal God”, alluding to the two drivers of constancy and meaning: Religion and the State.

With the accelerated inter -connectedness of societies on the one hand, and attritional (and largely unnecessary) wars and the abdication of forward-thinking by the State on the other, a third ‘institution’ arose in the late 20^th century that could be tasked with the job of giving us a semblance of constancy and meaning – the free-market.

It’s not as outlandish as it might seem. In the developed and developing world, identity is as easily cued by what shoes you wear or what car you drive (i.e. access and taste, = choice), as much as by where you’re from or which God you worship (i.e. birth, = fate.)

The biggest ‘thing’ firms produce today, regardless of what it is they produce, is “meaning”. It goes for any major brand you could think of. Meaning is implicit in the design of a product or a service. But quite often design ends up being “clever” packaging of a feature-set, rather than its elegant core. When you think about it, this analogy explains why the iPod succeeded where better-featured mp3 players didn’t, or why Facebook and Twitter have little to fear from Google+ in its present avatar. Good design reimagines behavior; it doesn’t merely add a layer to existing behavior.

With the challenges the World faces today, we have an opportunity to take meaning-making further, and help build what Thoreau called ‘corporations of conscience’. There is a mandate to help answer the bigger questions of environmental, economic and social sustainability through meaningful design and meaningful business. To lead and build culture, not just mimic and recycle it. To make a genuine difference in the lives of people, instead of merely figuring out how to sell more to them.

We can only do this by focusing on the individual and the family, the human beings at the heart of it all, remaining cognizant of the social, political and economic braids that surround them.

The path to love is illuminated by solutions based on helpfulness, understanding and feeling, not communication based on apps, ads or activations.

In an uncertain world, that much, at least, is certain.

Aditya Anupkumar

Saatchi & Saatchi – The Lovemarks Company

I revisit Joseph Campbell’s “The Masks of God” every now and then. Always enlightening and inspirational. This is his Power of Myth series. Good to watch if you’ve got a few hours on hand, and are *really-really* fascinated by mythology and, more specifically, comparative mythology.

It’s a six-part series, I could only find part 1 on YouTube.

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The Hero’s Adventure

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“Power is the ability to produce intended effects.” Bertrand Russell

For most of human history, up until the end of the 20th Century, this has involved controlling the factors of production. Governments, Lobbies, Conglomerates.

In the 21st Century, Competitive Advantage may well continue as is, but I suspect a secondary politic and economy will emerge, with more nimble and adaptive participants. Whether these new structures will, in their own way, tend towards larger systems remains to be seen. I certainly hope not. 

Maybe the 21st Century “anchor” for leadership will be thought leadership, not resource ownership (don’t let tech cos fool you, patents are, for example, “resource ownership”.)

Some firms will, through resources / patents / cloud services become utilities companies — much like we have power or water today, Google, Microsoft or anyone else who succeeds at cloud services will join this list. Which implies that at some point, they’ll have to be regulated/restricted by governments. Will they become utilities / allow governments to regulate them?

Fascinating times of flux ahead. 

#FridayMorningMusics