Over on Big Think, I’ve finished my look at Gary Hamel’s “Future of Management.”
I broke it into four parts. The book evokes The Purpose-Driven Life for businesses, in part because you’ll have to believe him that the model for business management is as outdated as the early 20th century industries it was created to run.
Seeing Into Gary Hamel’s Future
He’s filling in for the striking Hollywood screenwriters with his automated “Monolog-a-tron.”
My favorite:
With imported oil nearing $100 a barrel, California Governor Schwarzenegger has suggested that the state’s residents switch to heating their homes with a resource more plentiful in California,
(for the answers, click on the link above…)
Adam Penenberg has written a lovely piece in Fast Company, All Eyes on Apple, assessing whether Apple’s growth prospects match its lofty stock price. I have a small sidebar looking at Apple’s hardware, box by box.
My latest Prototype column in the New York Times looks at the slow process of innovation towards a mobile Web. See Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far.
The Great Depression doesn’t sound like fun reading. But there are uplifting reasons to look at Amity Shlaes’ recent history of the period, The Forgotten Man.
Andrew Mellon, for one. While not entirely forgotten, few people likely remember that he was in his day probably even more important than Alan Greenspan (the line goes that three presidents served under Mellon while he was Treasury Secretary). he also was quite probably the original venture capitalist, and one today’s VCs might want to emulate a little more closely. His originality and his ability to bet long with great success at a time of huge economic and social change — electrification and the emergence of broadcast media as well as the airplane were all a frenzy – make him particularly worth remembering. In addition, Shlaes shows him as behaving magnanimously towards those who tried to crush his name towards the end of his life.
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For another, she attempts to pull discussion of the Great Depression away from just a focus on monetary policy. The standard line is that if the Federal Reserve hadn’t bungled by tightening credit, things would’ve been fine. But Shlaes argues that the Depression lasted far longer than it should have if monetary policy had been the only culprit. In fact, she starts her book with the forgotten Black Tuesday, the one in 1937, which showed that the New Deal was not succeeding. She instead makes a case that between Hoover and Roosevelt, government became so involved in trying to direct the economy that it in fact made it worse.
The forgotten man of her title is one who can do things without need for a government. Traditional federalists and modern libertarians will particularly like this book.
Of course, most people alive today have no memory of what small government is really like. It’s unlikely that we’ll be able to get back to it, either – the historian William McNeill argued in “The Rise of the West” that ‘the managerial elite’ tend to manage more and more things over time, becoming a self-perpetuating force not unlike the Borg. But Shlaes isn’t just being nostalgic – she’s trying to seed a new way of thinking.
The interview I did with her ran recently in Shukan Daiyamondo. Here’s how it looked as I submitted it.
Amity Shlaes Q&A
Some reviews of the book.
“A Raw Deal” in Foreign Affairs, September/October 2007
“Meddling Through” in Commentary, September 2007
“No Free Lunch” New York Times, August 26, 2007
Two groups of researchers have independently derived embyronic stem cells without destroying embryos. The New York Times called it New Stem Cell Method Could Ease Ethical Concerns. And as it noted, if it’s true, we can start to figure out whether stem cells really could help cure neurological disorders, without side effects like cancer.
I went to see Palm and Treo creator Jeff Hawkins speak today at RPI. Hawkins is both smart and humble and would be worth listening to just to hear him talk about starting a company. (In fact, check out this terrific 2002 entrepreneurship lecture he gave at Stanford).
Today, he talked about his idea of Hierarchical Temporal Memory, which he spelled out in the 2004 book On Intelligence. A thumbnail description of HTM is that human intelligence is built around the neocortex’s ability to recognize patterns and make predictions about them, which he argues is an algorithm that can be used to create intelligent machines. For more on what smarter machines — or computers — would mean in business, see my Big Think post Making Computers Smarter
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I condensed a series of thoughtful articles on competition in American life from the Wilson Quarterly in my latest Big Think post, looking in particular at what kind of hires companies should seek (anxiety-prone chokers like me, for one).
Here’s the full post of A New View on Competition.
I posted recently on a series of excellent profiles on young innovators, published in Smithsonian magazine. In particular I cited its brilliant brief profile of managing Ramon Gonzalez, who four years ago started the Laboratory School of Finance and Technology, a public middle school in New York’s South Bronx neighborhood. I also cited several of the unusual lessons one could learn from these innovators. See A Little Innovation Inspiration.
My second post in The Big Think looks at whether networks are more important than connections when it comes to business. It draws on the ideas of Michael Stallard and his book Fired Up or Burned Out. As I note in the blog,
Stallard’s theme is connection, and he doesn’t mean connection of the social networking kind. He thinks businesses, from the CEO on down, need to develop a culture that encourage employees – all employees – to feel like they’re valuable. He argues that it comes down to connecting with employees, and helping them connect with customers and partners. Stallard says that takes a vision, an ability to make other people feel valued, and to give employees a voice.
Here’s the full post of The Importance of Connecting with Colleagues.