Evolving Web

How to Birth a Culture - An Obituary for E. Gary Gygax

Gary Gygax has passed away.

It must be a good 23 years since I played Dungeons and Dragons last, in John's gameroom in Grand Island, Nebraska.

Regardless of what one might wish to say about D&D geeks, they are a culture - and a very long standing one by modern measure.  Practitioners of social media and social networking who aim to create on-line cultures and communities need look no further than Dungeons and Dragons to find all the elements necessary for strong community.

It is brilliant work.  Complex, subtle, and utterly open ended.

We used to play D&D not only for hours, but for days.  It was an incredible focal point for bored teens eager for both competition and intellectual challenge.

I can firmly see a huge table with the map and game objects, the players (Chad, Kurt, John, Chris, myself, and the cycling guests), the piles of food, the bean bag to let people crash when they couldn't go on.  Marathon sessions that didn't cause carpel tunnel.  That required face to face interaction.

All because E. Gary Gygax sat down and created some books.

It was the vital ingredients in D&D that allows it to be a sustainable community, not the game itself.  The game is merely a game.  It's construction and Gygax's forethought is what makes it sustainable. 

Why is D&D so special in particular?  What do we have to learn from it?  Well, it has all the key ingredients to culture, here's just five of them:

1. Cooperation is Vital to Survival

In a D&D world, you can be a super powerful character that can run around kicking butt and taking names - for a while.  But, unless you have a dungeon master that's scared of you, something more powerful will come and get you.

In a well balanced culture, people rely on each other for success.  Every so often we may need a character like Willem Dafoe's Elias Grodin in Platoon, but they don't make a healthy culture overall.  In fact, their uniqueness is what makes them valuable to the group.

Usually, you need to build a team of varying skill sets in order to succeed.  You need visionaries, detail people, and workers.  You need producers and consumers (see my previous post about LiveJournal).   You need balance.  You need cooperation.

When you need cooperation, you build virtuous cycles to success.  Each person not only adding their strengths, but also relying on others to do the same.  Surprisingly, people actually like to be relied upon.  They don't like being forced to do things, but they love the freedom to do good.

Cooperation is a key ingredient of culture.

2. Positive Feedback and Reinforcement

Do good, get experience points.  Get experience points, become more skilled.  Become more skilled, do even more good!

Seem simple?  Well, it is. 

Surprising, there are so many VCs out there giving money to Social Networking sites that simply don't get it.  They don't see why it's important.

And why should they?  Only recently has business begun to even accept that basing performance on strengths and not weaknesses is a good idea.  As a society, we're just beginning to grasp that positive reinforcement might be beneficial.

Gygax figured that out decades ago.

He made a game out of not getting your pudding before you eat your meat.  He figured out that we want to do the work if the reward is right and that the reward not only makes us feel good, but it makes us appreciate the reward giver even more.  In short, it earns loyalty.

Reinforcement is a key ingredient of culture.

Loyalty is a key ingredient of culture. (Bonus ingredient!)

3. Freedom of Choice

And Devo sang:

We're victims of sedition on an open sea
No one ever said that life was free
Sink, swim, go down with the ship
Just use your freedom of choice

In life we have a lot of choices and some of them are a real pain in the ass. No choices, however, is the very definition of tedium.

Creating an open ended environment where players were limited only by their imaginations - but still bound to a set of conventions - is truly masterful work.  The conventions need to be firm enough to create a coherent environment, but open enough to allow the users to build whatever environment they choose.

This freedom isn't just important because people's minds like to wander, it's important because culture is not a fixed concept.  Culture meanders through time.  It morphs, reinvents itself, but still maintains an identity - if it is allowed to.  If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.

Let's copy and paste that sentence a few times. If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.

Stupid VCs who want to fund something quick take note, the world of culture building is not quick and building on-line communities to flip will fail in the long run.  Certainly you can build a bubble and steal make some money, but the tools will fail.

Gygax created a very detailed environment that let people go where they wanted and do what they wanted - within a given boundary.  A good dungeon master, in the end, was someone who knew exactly when and how to apply rules.  To keep the game interesting and fun, while being neither ungoverned nor oppressive.

Freedom is a key ingredient of culture.

4. Role Definition

We all wear many hats.  But, damn, we love hats.  When we don't have a hat, we're confused about what our roles are.

This is closely coupled with two other things: Fit and Style.

Don't give me a Cowboy hat.

The roles we choose need to fit our personality and our aesthetic.  In business, people often wear all sorts of ill-fitting hats.  Excellent producers who get promoted to managers, but hate managing people.  Team members who get a role because it's needed, but doesn't fit their strengths.  People fighting for a position for which they are ill-suited because society doesn't value what they do well.

Fit requires matching with your skill set, which requires definition. Your role must come with an explanation of what society thinks that role does.  You will augment that within bounds based on your style, but the role itself needs some boundaries in order to recognizable as a role.

(You will see many posts by me for management theory, discussing why process changes at some companies fail because people are reassigned to roles that aren't adequately explained or incorporated into the culture.)

Style is how that role integrates with you.  How are you going to be a good cost accountant or an elf mage?  Do you want to be one at all?  Does your style lead to success or failure?  You can mold the position to fit your style, but you can't completely obliterate the rules for that role.  You can't be a cost accountant that only bakes cookies, for example.

Gygax's D&D universe has a set of classes and subclasses of roles that are compelling enough to attract a wide variety of personality types and skill sets.

Roles are a key ingredient of culture.

5. Maturation Process

Can your community mature?  In D&D you mature by the leveling up of your character, but after time this becomes the mechanical part of the game.  Predictable, almost.

What starts as your primary motivation for playing the game, becomes merely a byproduct of it.  After a while, maturation takes on some familiar roles.

Mentoring, specialization, and governance are primary indicators of a mature community.  As characters and players mature, they lead other players forward and teach them the ropes (mentoring).  They become more and more skilled and subtle in their areas of knowledge (specialization).  And they tend to watch for malfeasance and, from their position of authority which comes from being a long-time member of the culture, deal with it (governance).

Again, we can see this in yesterday's LiveJournal article.  Players of World of Warcraft will recognize these elements immediately.  This process is a major factor in the success of Wikipedia.

This type of maturation reinforces culture by providing a healthy continuum of member growth and internal policing.

Cultural maturation is a key ingredient of culture.

Emotional Goodbye to Gary

You know, at the time of an experience you never know what lessons you will take away.  It's certain that at 13 years of age I wasn't really all that concerned with the cultural maturation processes of D&D.  I don't even know that Gygax was too concerned.

I do know that more than few funds were pooled to go to the Conestoga Mall in Grand Island and pick up yet another D&D book.

What I see now, as I work with clients to help build communities and collaborative management processes, is that Gygax understood tactics on a deeper level than any of us ever gave him credit for.

His company TSR (Tactical Studies Rules), which produced D&D, is keyed on tactics. We always thought it was battle tactics. It's pretty clear now that he understood social tactics as well.

Consider this: D&D was sold primarily from word of mouth in a pre-Internet era.  (The lack of advertising scared parents who felt it was a pawn of the devil.)  In other words, it was a highly successful viral marketing campaign in an era where there was tremendous friction for word of mouth.

Gygax, in the end, was a person who seemed ultimately interested in the game and the community around the game.  He said in 2004:

Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game.

In this one, compact sentence, is about half the essay above.  Every person interested in creating community, whether a social media creator, an urban planner or whatever, should have this quote on their wall.

Gygax's game did more than keep me off the streets, it reinforced deep community values and contributed to many of my current management and social theories.

So, thank you for that Gary.  I genuinely appreciate your thoughtful creations.

I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else. - Gary Gygax

Technorati Tags: Gary Gygax, E. Gary Gygax, Dungeons and Dragons, D&D, obituary, obituaries, community indicators, community, online communities, sociology, grand island, TSR, devil worship

Act Your Age - A Review of Rejuvenile by Christopher Noxon

Age is an issue of mind over matter.  If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.  ~Mark Twain

Have you met a person recently that was 40something or 50something and you can totally picture what they were like as 8?  And have you met people that you feel have been OLD forever - like straight-from-the-womb old?  Well, Christopher Noxon has done a bit of theorizing, interviewing and research on this and has rolled it into a wonderful book called Rejuvenile. 

Christopher believes that we are regaining our ability to play, to experience and to not be boxed in by life.  I say regaining because Christopher also posits, that it's only been the last 100 years that people have increasingly allowed themselves to be pushed into an "adult" form at the expense of all else.

Rejuvenile is a book that explains why we all might want to play kickball at 40 more than we want to sit inside and wax nostalgic about lost youth.  Youth, it turns out, is not so much lost as given away.  Increasingly, we are becoming more and more unwilling to give that away.

(See entire mind map in its natural environment)

(If you can't see the mind map in your feed, please go to the actual blog post)

As you can see in the concepts, Play is a major portion of Rejuvenile.  The roles of play are varied and rather exciting.  So let's discuss that first:

PLAY

Play is what keeps us young.  Why?  Because play, by its very nature is free of guilt, free of morose obligation, life-affirming, and ... pleasurable.  For me, play helps me recharge and, therefore, I try to set up even my professional relationships in a playful manner.

One of my business partners, who is a very large multinational firm, insist on the personal relationship first, the professional relationship second.  I was talking to one of them and they essentially said, "I understand you are great at what you do, now ... why should we be friends?"

In business they call this "building relationships", which is stodgy business talk for "are you fun to play with?"  The questions are less focused on "How efficient is your organization" and more "how much will you make me laugh?"

And Noxon catches your next obvious question... "You mean that being competent no longer matters?"  No, it does.  We are still adults and part of being adults is understanding the nature of responsibility. 

But being a good Rejuvenile Adult is learning that responsibility neither buries nor jails you.

Play is central to this.  When you are in jail (when I was a kid it was called "being grounded") you cannot play.  Post-industrial age adults were self-jailed in Victorian values that rewarded stoic demeanor and pooh-poohed expressiveness.

Noxon contends, this created a false distance between adults and children which may well have led to the issues we've seen in the last 30 years with the dissolution of the family.  Children of stodgy households never knew what growing up with a cohesive family was like.  In the service of order, the Victorian era effectively dismantled itself.

Play is central to most of the parents I know.  They often play with their kids, share directly in their imaginings and role playings, and get a lot from it personally.  Rather than their kids aging them, they are actually sustaining them.  How exciting!

Redefinition

More than a handful of redefinition comes from Rejuvenile.  We see alterations of the concepts of Maturity, Adulthood, Parenthood, Hierarchy, and Discipline.

What I see in Noxon's writing is the softening of the need for authoritarian rule (which requires distance, alienation and fear as central elements of power) and a rise of social discipline (which requires respect, accountability, and problem solving).  Kids still understand the natural authority of the parent, but the parent need not rule in an authoritarian way.

Inspirations

I have more than a few inspirations from this book.  I've already discussed the energy one in the post linked to above.  But there are a few others in the mind map that I'll try to roll into one or two paragraphs.

Kids naturally seem to want to help and have a willingness to fail (no this isn't universal, nothing is).  As we get older, our desire to help is often tempered by our load of responsibility and our willingness to fail is diminished by our growing awareness of our mortality.  We look at our parents invariably see the realization of some fear of adulthood we don't want to repeat.

But, it seems to me, our parents were always older than us.  So we always looked at them as "old".  We don't give them credit for their level of play or for the hard decisions they had to make.  So we are often reacting to stereotypes we have subjected our parents to, rather than the human beings that are actually our parents.

What's funny is that since their inception Cartoons have seemed to bridge this gap.  Until his death, my Grandfather was crazy for Loony Toons.  Now, when you turn on Cartoon Network, you see age straddling cartoons like Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends. In one episode, Bloo is kidnapped and forced to be a spokes-imaginary-friend for a deodorant stick company.  During that episode, there are two TV announcers that look like Mary Tyler Moore and Ted Knight.  The character that looks like Ted named "Todd" and is constantly being called "Ted", to which he replied "It's Todd!" - A mirroring of Ted Knight's Ted Baxter character's recurring line on the Mary Tyler Moore show 30 years ago.

Closing

So, I'm very thankful for Amazon's little recommendation algorithm for recommending Rejuvenile to me.  I tried to set up a coffee with Christopher when I was in Los Angeles last weekend and he graciously accepted, but with the caveat that we'd need to hook up on the fly because he was going to birthday parties and other events with the kids.  So, alas, we didn't get together on that trip.

But I'm certain we'll find a time to play together later.

Rejuvenile gets a "Highly Recommended" from me.  I'm certain it will join the ranks of the often-referenced in the Evolving Web blog.

Incidentals

Read: 27 May to 5 June 2007

Where: San Jose, Seattle, San Marcos, and Palm Springs

Between: The Penultimate Truth and The Starfish and The Spider

Buy Rejuvenile here

Read Christopher Noxon's Blog here

Technorati tags: Christopher noxon, rejuvenile, childhood, adulthood, maturity, communcation, creativity, play, cartoon network

Blogged at Caffe Keffa in Seattle, Washington using Windows Live Writer.

Towards a Philosophy of Oblivion, Detroit, Ubik, Power and Couches

A while ago Ed Vielmetti, yeah- the walking guy, grabbed a bunch of questions from 103 Bees and answered them in his blog.  See, 103 Bees mines your blog's search-hit history and analyzes it in various ways. One of those ways is to give you a list of direct questions people have asked and, for whatever reason, Google (usually) has directed them to you.  Also, usually these questions are no where and in no way answered in your blog. 

Many times these questions are outright insanity and you stare at the results trying to figure out how they made it to your blog in the first place.  But, nonetheless, through the great mystery that is "relevance" there they are.  Unrelated questions driving traffic to your site.  

I thought Ed's use of the questions would be a great way to get rid of writer's block.  Well, today I'm working from home.  My back patio is lined with spring plants waiting to make it to the ground or into containers and I have writer's block.

So I'm going to take a few questions from my list from 103 Bees and answer them for real.  Yes, these are real questions real people asked a search engine and somehow found their way to Jim Benson's blog.

Question 1: How do I get oblivion without using a torrent?

I am assuming anyone who would ask this question does not actually want to buy the game Oblivion at full retail, and is not asking how to obtain actual oblivion.  Lucky for you, the Internet includes eBay, a quick search gives you Oblivion on three platforms (XBox 360, PS3 and PC).   The lowest price here is a penny.  I think you can suck it up and pay a penny for something you really want.

Question 2: How do I draw a couch {facing forward}?

A lot easier than you would facing backward.  But if you were looking for a how-to... First, draw a rectangle that is about 4 times as long as it is high.  Now on either end at the bottom draw a little square (make sure they are both the same size).  Now on top of that box on either side draw an upright rectangle that's about twice as high as it is wide and is about the same height at the original rectangle.  Now, at the top rectangle to the left draw a line going up a little bit, now make another line going up that same amount from the far side of the of the right rectangle.  Now join those two rectangles.  If you did that right it looks like a couch.  If you did that wrong, I suggest you look directly at the front of a couch.

 Question 3: 48 laws of power how to read?

I'm including this question because I actually see it fairly often.  I wrote a pretty crummy review of the book and left it at that, but many people have come to the site with searches like this.  How do I read the book?  I'm scared of the book?  Does the book corrupt people?  Is the book accurate?

The 48 Laws of Power is an historical look back on how people of immense power obtained and lost that power.  The overarching principles of how to influence, manipulate, and hoard in the quest of power.  I've had people tell me that they would not read the book, lest some of those lessons actually rub off on them and they would become bad people.

In my opinion, it's a great book and I've used lessons in it to actually avoid falling into the same traps as those who have allowed others to be manipulated.  Ultimately, though, understanding "bad" is a primary key of becoming "good".

We can see many people in the world of "good", from Jerry Falwell to Bill Clinton, who have pontificated "good" and did "bad" and were honestly surprised by it. 

The 48 Laws of Power aren't all "bad", however, many can be mustered in the true service of "good".  Much like drinking, many of the 48 laws are helpful in moderation, harmful in over-indulgence.

As for "How to read?" I would say that the 48 Laws of Power is not a how-to manual, but a book of lessons.  The are delivered in as amoral a manner as possible and it is up to you to fill in the moral lessons.

Be your own Gandhi.

Question 4:  What should be the conclusion of Ubik?  

Philip K. Dick's Ubik is also a major search engine hit for me.  Ubik is a story of pattern matching and the bewildering nature of misinterpretation.  Some of the characters in the book are dead.  We're not sure which ones or how dead they actually are.  A mysterious substance called Ubik may provide relief from this state.  But what is Ubik?

PKD uses all sorts of vehicles to foist Ubik upon the characters and the reader.  Some people know about it, sometimes it's a snack, sometimes it's a cleaning solution.

Written in 1969, Ubik also is fully aware of Marshall McLuhan and the saturation of push-advertising.  Each chapter starts with a gratuitous advertisement for Ubik - each time Ubik is performing an entirely different miracle solution to common problems.

Ubik, in the end, is about corporate control.  Over our choices, over our flows of information, and ultimately over how dead we can actually get.

Or at least that's my conclusion, anyway.

Question 5: How many people have read being and nothingness?

Millions of people have read Being and Nothingness of their own free will.

But I suggest you read No Exit.

Question 6: What happen when city planning goes wrong?

Hmm.

For redlining see Detroit.

For all else see every suburb in North America.

CLOSING

Okay, so there we have it.  I skipped these questions:

how do rabbits brains work - (three brain lobes, hopping, carrots, bunnies)

how do street dealers work - (cell phones, guns and bling = profit)

and my favorite

how do I know that my wife likes women? - (as opposed to hating them?)

I skipped those among others.  I have about 40 of them I think. 

 

Technorati tags: 103bees, ed Vielmetti, blogging, urban planning, philip k dick, ubik, sartre, no exit, being and nothingness, existentialism, detroit, suburbs

Blogged at my house in Seattle with Live Writer

Tribes, Mechanics and Pains in the Ass - Contrasting Three Management Books

I've had the pleasure recently to read three management books that some may find contradictory, but I've found value in all three.  Respectively, they take a sociological, mechanical and social psychological look at business leadership.

Ray Immelman - The Sociological View

Book:  Great Boss - Dead Boss (my review)

Dominant Paradigm:

People naturally self-organize into naturally developing insular groups or "tribes".  People quickly identify with their smaller groups first and then larger groups second.  While they may identify with your company, their first allegiance to to the group within your company.  If your organizational structure is in conflict with the natural formation of these tribes, work teams will probably be dysfunctional.  If your organizational structure stops people from naturally working in tribes, they will rebel. 

What is Good Business

Good business understands people's need to gather and be social.  Good business provides a structure that allows groups to form naturally and non-destructively.  A good business rewards the creation of the business-wide supertribe over the sub-tribes.  A good business balances individual rewards and tribal rewards.  A good business has a strong sense of identity and understands its competition.

How to Lead

Good leaders can spot the formation of counter productive insular tribes and diffuse that energy into the overall tribe.  Good leaders game the tribal system through various rewards and punishments (though preferably rewards) to keep energy and enthusiasm focused on the company's mission.  Good leaders foster constant communication between people throughout the organization to show that everyone is working together.  Good leaders understand how to make individual strengths into group strengths and not into positions of hoarded power.

How People React To Bad Leadership

Bad leadership results in uncertainty in the workplace.  When this happens, the worker's security of the super-tribe is threatened.  One of the first things they will do is shore up a power base.  This usually comes from a smaller group of like-minded people.  Say, the marketing team (tribe).  This results in the creation of factions throughout the company who are more interested in the security of the faction than the overall company.  Bad leadership can include, dictatorial decision making, poor communication, or uncertain business goals - to name but a few.

Role of Quality

Quality in Immelman's world is an outgrowth of a healthy culture.  People naturally want to do well and when they identify with the company first and their group second, they are predisposed to provide quality work because they want the company to succeed. 

 

Greg Kaplan - The Mechanical View

Book:  Be The Elephant (my review)

Dominant Paradigm:

Business success is contingent first and foremost on a firm business plan.   

What is Good Business

A good business is one that will not close in three months.  In order to assure this, it is incumbent upon the entrepreneur to answer several basic questions.   Can this make money?  Can this have good cash flow?   What is the marketing model for the company?  When is it alright to launch new business lines?

How to Lead

The healthy company is led by someone who has a firm grasp of the economic health of the business.  Is there enough cash flow? 

This leader also is responsible for growing the business.  When should you add a new product line?   When should you add a new service? 

How People React to Bad Leadership

People don't have much time to react to bad leadership because the company collapses under the weight of its own bad planning.

Role of Quality

Quality is embodied in and an outgrowth of the sound business plan and strategy.  Quality is beyond a merely a good product, it is the full understanding of the environment in which the product will be manufactured, sold and supported.

 

Marshall Goldsmith - The Behavioral Psychological View

Book:  What Got You Here Won't Get You There

Dominant Paradigm:

Successful leaders watch trends.  They get into positions of power usually because they can spot, follow and respond to trends to the benefit of their organizations.  Leaders also find themselves seduced by apparent trends involving themselves.  In short, their own success can make them arrogant.  This arrogance has 21 (or so) bad behaviors to watch out for.  Understanding our own submission to these behaviors can allow us to correct them.  If the leader can correct them, that leader can become even better.

What is Good Business

Good business is a managerial style that is non-combative and supportive.  Good business does not allow management to run roughshod over staff.  Good business has feedback mechanisms in place to ensure that even upper management are constantly improving.  Good business understands that civility is a major asset.

How to Lead

Leaders understand how to empower, how to acknowledge effort and how to see the boundaries of their own input.  Leaders rally staff to action and are not the source of all action. 

How People React to Bad Leadership

Bad leadership is divisive.  People don't perform, resent the chain of command, and will look elsewhere for work.  They figure, Life is Too Short for Bad Management.  People also generally don't tell their managers that they are bad until on the way out and by that there has usually been enough politics that the manager doesn't value their opinion.

Role of Quality

Quality here is in the role of personal introspection.  Does the leader care enough about the organization to question the leaders own actions and style?  Can the leader be hurting the organization while being successful in it?  If the leader is providing quality leadership, then the leader can face any personal failings and work to improve upon them.

 

Technorati tags: Marshall Goldsmith, Steve Kaplan, Be the elephant, Ray Immelman, Great Boss Dead Boss, Books, Book reviews, management

Blogged at Mark Spencer Hotel, Portland Oregon Using Windows Live Writer

Reviewing Be The Elephant by Steve Kaplan

 

Book: Be The Elephant (2006, Workman Press)

Author: Steve Kaplan

Read in:  Seattle, Vancouver BC  

Rating: ****

 

Review: 

If I were in a bookstore, I never would have bought this book.  It's coated thick with superlatives and overpromises of success like:

A foolproof road map to success.  Don't grow your business without it.

Nothing is a foolproof road map to success.  That statement would have made me distrust the book from the outset.

As it was, I ordered the book from Amazon which meant I read the Amazon recommendations before the cover of the book.  As you can see, I gave this a 4 star rating - so I obviously enjoyed it.

My 4 stars came from three qualities of this book.

1. It's concise - business books love to over-explain or try to micromanage their readers.  Be the Elephant is less than 220 pages. 

2. It provides tools - There are more than a few very helpful, simple tools for business analysis that I began using before finishing the book.

3. Website - the book is backed up by a website that has templates for the tools.

All in all, the book is built to quickly give people necessary tools to avoid failure. The tools don't guarantee success, but they go a long way to helping you avoid failure while also avoiding analysis paralysis.

So, even though I apparently don't recommend the cover quotes, the book is an excellent toolkit for small business owners.  

 

Blogged at Monique's Yaletown Flat in Vancouver, BC Using Windows Live Writer

Reviewing The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid

Book: The Social Life of Information (2000, Harvard Business School Press)

Authors: John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid

Read in:  Richmond BC, Ocean Shores, San Jose, Seattle  (Lots of travel again....)

Rating: ****

Review: 

In the world of technology books, the Social Life of Information is "old". Written a staggering 7 years ago, this book was the face that launched a thousand excited and often misguided ships. Like most books that present a new, unusual and promising way to look at human interaction, many took the most simplistic implications of the book and called it the core - then went crazy trying to implement them.

Oddly, this is exactly what the book is warning against.

In this case, it would be warning against the application of technology or information without giving careful consideration to how the information is used socially. There are countless posts in this blog now about providing adequate context to information and tools. People need reasons to use tools and for the tools to provide them with both information and an indication of appreciation for using the tool.

JSB & PD are essentially arguing in the book that a focus on information alone does not provide value. Written in 2000 and now reviewed by me in 2007, it is apparent that this book struck a chord. Pre-Dot-Com-crash, there was much emphasis on the information infrastructure. Then this book arrived.

The Social Life of Information seemed to fit well into networking theory, a'la Duncan Watts. With these, and other works, the social networking boom was on.

I think personally, for me, I realized this was a pretty important book when I became rather bored with it in the middle. "I know all this," I was thinking to myself. While reading it, my mind kept wandering to the social media book I'm trying to write. I kept coming up with new thing to write in the book.

Soon, The Social Life of Information, was coated with scribbles related to my book.

And then I had to laugh at myself when I realized this was a large part of JSB's & PD's point. I had all the information to come to these little epiphanies, but it was only through the social interaction of reading their book did many of these concepts gel.

These thoughts gelled not because these guys were specifically telling me them, but because reading their book was part of a pattern of practice of my own in social media. Their ideas, my ideas, their experiences, my experiences and information combined to create context. Our social interaction created context.

--

The book was the impetus for several posts in this blog. Some of which I'm about to write and some I wrote while reading the book. These include:

• To Be Acquired in the World
• Context Goes Way Beyond Function or Why Social Media is not Mother Theresa
• The Sound of a Train in the Distance
• Communication in the Quest for Information
  • The Funny Form
  • Importing A Wife

 

Technorati tags: The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid, social media, social software, book reviews, books

Blogged from the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington

Reviewing Great Boss Dead Boss by Ray Immelman

Book: Great Boss Dead Boss (Buy It)

Author:  Ray Immelman

Read in:  Los Angeles, Ocean Shores, Half Moon Bay, San Jose, Seattle  (Lots of travel this time....)

Rating: ****

Quick Review: 

Over drinks one night David Anderson recommended that I read Great Boss Dead Boss.  I think he recommended it about a dozen times before I actually bought it.  Somehow David and Ray are kindred spirits, as Amazon shows me this:

Okay, you're going to have to click to enlarge the image, David's book title is just too damn long.  Anyway, readers of Ray appear to be readers of David.

For the last few years I've been building my company to have a specific type of self-reinforcing corporate culture.  There is still authority, there is still people with assigned roles, but I wanted my group to feel truly energized about working on our products and projects.

I have noticed over the years that management books recommend a lot of activities but the subtext was always this:  communication is the heart of a good environment.

My psychological training (sorry tom cruise) has also given me great insights into what motivates and what demotivates people.  But those mechanistic models of action and reaction were always searching for a unifying construct.

Ray's construct is tribal behavior and balancing our need to feel good about ourselves and the groups to which we belong.

In essence, people tend to gravitate toward groups that reinforce their self-worth.  Traditional business structures tend to rigidly group people and, by doing so, people identify with smaller groups of their own design rather than their larger corporate or office group.  The results are seldom good. 

When I was working for a large consulting company, I was initially part of and later the lead of their Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Group.  We had millions of dollars in contracts every year and, despite the work we put into educating the planners and engineers of what we did - they would routinely sub out ITS work. 

At first we thought they were not getting what it was we were doing.  But in reality what was happening was that they got much more value from subbing out our work.  This value came from raising their stature in planning / engineering by being the "Prime" and maintaining their relationships with other companies thereby ensuring future work for their group.

Their tribal needs (engineering or planning tribes) were better served outsourcing the work, when our tribal needs (ITS tribe) would have been better served by keeping the work in house?

Who was right?  Well, we both were.  But in the end, the lack of communication between our groups created an adversarial atmosphere which impacted relationships and quality of work throughout the firm. 

I find some holes in Ray's model - for example I find it a bit weak on the outside issue front.  There are people out there who have issues outside the office that directly impact their response to things inside the office.  Ray does cover this, but compared to his attention to detail on the rest of his model - this part seems a little weak.

Having said that, his model is sound and a great construct to help diffuse otherwise tense situations.  You can be told that angry people have an unfulfilled need and that the proper response is to find out what that need is and discuss it all day ... but when someone is yelling in your face that's pretty hard to zero in on.

With Ray's model, there is a short cut to analyze the type of threat (as opposed to the specific threat) the person or group feels and then deal with that.

We're in the process of creating an employee manual and it's been bothering me for quite a while.  It's rigid, dictatorial, and top-down.  Great Boss Dead Boss has given me an inkling of how I'd like to re-create the concept of an employee manual.  ... but it's just an inkling.

Lastly I'll note one other element of this model: when you think of your organization as an entity - as a tribe or whatever - it's important to give that entity substance.  Substance that comes from a strong definition (not a mission statement) and a good sense of self. 

Oddly, I had been working on that for the last few months.  Gathering up the lore of Gray Hill Solutions, identifying why our processes work, and incorporating those two things into a single narrative to better explain why we do the things we do.

Suffice it to say, I'd highly recommend you read Ray's book.

Oh, and it's a narrative.  But don't let that stop you.

Technorati tags: books, book reviews, nonfiction, management, psychology

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Reviewing Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell

Book:  Designing Interfaces (Buy It)

Author:  Jenifer Tidwell

Read in:  Seattle

Rating: ****

Quick Review: 

A fantastic how-to and reference for interface design. Well stocked with images and illustrations. The layout is beautiful and functional.  It's incredibly easy to quickly find what you need in here.

Designing Interfaces is a good primer, but it's also a great reference.  Shoot through the book for a quick understanding of how different interfaces work and what their design patterns are.  Then keep it handy when interface discussions come up. 

I've already recommended it to four people who've already purchased it and a few more are on the way.

Very highly recommended.

 

Technorati tags: Books, nonfiction, nonfiction review, book reviews, jenifer tidwell, designing interfaces

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Reviewing Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Book:  Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (Buy It)

Author:  Cory Doctorow

Read in:  Seattle, Los Angeles, Ocean Shores

Rating: ***

Quick Review:

The protagonist of this book has no idea what he is, his parents are a mountain and a washing machine, his brothers include a psychic, an undead malcontent and symbiotic stacking dolls. He keeps trying to live a normal life, but his family won't let him. Despite his bizarreness, he can at least walk down the street without too much trouble. This is different from a woman he befriends whose bizarreness is so noticeable that she needs to saw off parts of her body on a regular basis.

Ultimately this book deals with issues that any iconoclast or counter-culture denizen will recognize.  While the characters issues are weirder-than-life, they all span the gap of the social outcast - wanting to live in the mainstream world, resenting the mainstream world, observing the mainstream world ... but never quite being a part of it.

Cory is an easy read. The book flows nicely. Characters are interesting, plot twists are well executed. Even though I've only given this 3 stars, I likely be reading more Cory Doctorow in the future.

 

Technorati tags: Cory Doctorow, Someone Comes To Town Someone Leaves Town, Fiction, Fiction Review, Books, Book Reviews

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The Top Few of My 52

In 2006 I wanted to read 52 books in 52 weeks.  I did that and a little better.  So, I'm pretty happy with that.  I thought I'd run down what my favorites were and what inspiration I received from them and other books this year.

I broke them out into categories.  I'm surprised to find the list of science books beating out business and web theory books. 

Fiction

This year I started reading one book by Philip K. Dick per month, just because it seemed like a patently ridiculous thing to do.  No Philip K. Dick books are on my list.  Go figure.

1.  The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom

Mitch Albom: The Five People You Meet in Heaven

I totally loved this book, I must have read it in all of an hour.  It's a very short, very poignant book that managed to push all my sappy buttons.   I had Vivian read it immediately after I finished it.  I find it a very patient book, wry and knowing.

In the end, this book is about the value of all life, even our own.  And while we may not want to die, we have no real way of ever measuring our actual impact.  It's hard to put ourselves in perspective. 

2. Third Class Superhero - Charles Yu

Charles Yu: Third Class Superhero

This book is a major reason not to shop at Amazon a lot.  I was down at the Kinokuniya Bookstore in Seattle and this was on the new releases shelf.  I paged through it a bit, put it down, went to leave and walked back into the store to buy it.  "You forgot to buy me..."

This is a collection of short stories, and I hate short stories. It's also Yu's first book.   I was immediately struck with the tone he used with his characters - it reminded me immediately of Vonnegut.  Calm, understanding, patient.  Even though his stories are very short, the characters are well developed and conceptualized. 

Sometimes his stories are in a bizarre environment - such as one where superheros are fairly common and getting in as a superhero is a bureaucratic process.  The main character has a fairly uninspiring ability that - you can tell - could be used well, if he wasn't uninspired in general.  Others are more common settings.

3. Ender's Shadow / Xenocide - Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card: Xenocide (Ender, Book 3)

No one can make me sit down and read 1,000 pages like Orson Scott Card.  He's utterly magic.  I read Xenocide, all 800 pages of it, in Hong Kong when I had nearly no time to read -- in four days.  The same was true for Ender's Shadow, which I read over a weekend back in Seattle. 

Card, especially in the later books, goes long for the ethical dilemmas.  He explores the boundaries of self-interest, race relations, religion, science, politics, war, and so on.  In programming, the conditions that don't quite fit the way we wanted the software to work (and therefore breaks it) are called boundary conditions.  Card seems to find all of life's boundary conditions.

Which sounds like it would be plodding and a total bore to read.  But, somehow, he makes it flow like water.  The man is a total freak of nature.

Science

1. Emergence - Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

Since writing Emergence, Steven Johnson has proven himself to be a popular blogger and an author of other wildly popular books.  As an urban planner turned software developer, Johnson's parallels between the emergent natures of cities and of software hit home for me.  He places those discussions in a context of social, biological and political emergence that also parallels well with the work I'm doing with cooperation.

The key here is that coherent patterns emerge from complex or seemingly random systems.   Those coherent patterns are what we often recognize and act on or, conversely, discount - depending entirely on point of view.

2. Decoding the Universe - Charles Seife

Charles Seife: Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes

You were upset about being reduced to a number? Well Seife is gonna reduce you to a probability! In Decoding the Universe cryptography, physics, astronomy, biology and a cat supercollide and the resulting reaction describes how the universe works, how you think, and how everything is going to implode after an inexorable march toward oblivion - which we are about half way done with.

Decoding the Universe is a phenomenal trip down reductionistic lane.  It was a wonderful companion to the Dalai Lama's Universe in a Single Atom, which I'll review under spirituality.

3. Natural Capitalism - Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken: Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution

Written before the massive surge in oil prices, Natural Capitalism discusses how prudent environmental practices are good for a capitalistic society.  Hawken provides details of the cost benefit analyses surrounding the use of green materials and practices.

Hawken received much fame from this book, propelling him to a recognized world leader in thoughtful enterprise and development.  I saw his new, yet unreleased, book the other day and was only able to get a glance of it.  I'm looking forward to getting a copy soon.

Spirituality

1. Universe in a Single Atom - Dalai Lama

Dalai Lama XIV: The Universe in a Single Atom : The Convergence of Science and Spirituality

The Dalai Lama is a wise and thoughtful man who has been blessed by the opportunity to have long discussions with both spiritual and scientific leaders.   In Universe in a Single Atom he shows movements in modern science that very closely map to historic teachings in Buddhism.  At the same time, he shows how religion can sometimes blind people of both spirituality or beneficial science.

This book is an excellent example of how to simultaneously contrast two viewpoints and show their similarities.  An utterly fascinating read.

Internet Tech

1. Ambient Findability - Peter Morville

Peter Morville: Ambient Findability

Ambient Findability is about how we, as people, make sense out of our environment.  Wayfinding and Mapping are part of my daily life.  Morville helped me extend my thinking of them even further.  My copy of this is littered with notes on nearly every page.  Whether I was arguing or agreeing with Morville, every page had something to think about.  This is a short, well written, colorful book that is a must read for every urban planner, sociologist, psychologist, software developer, geographer, librarian or (other).

Business

1. Birth of the Chaordic Age - Dee Hock

Dee W. Hock: Birth of the Chaordic Age

You'll notice a lot of these books have been out for a while, this one is no different.  But I wasn't anticipating what I found inside.  Hock's book is told in a very Persig-esque fashion with narrative interspersed with philosophy. 

The book tells the story of how Hock helped create VISA, the organization largely responsible for every monetary transaction on this planet.  VISA was built by banks who were very power hungry - so VISA had to be an organization that would never bow to anyone's direct power and yet have no actual power of its own.

Hock calls this a Chaordic organization.  Chaord is the boundary line between chaos and order.  Visa had to be ordered enough to get the job done, yet lack the power associated with traditional order.  It had to have that element of chaos that came along through mob-rule by all the individual participating banks.

This book turns management theory on its head - and gives real success story examples of the applications of its theory.

Cookbooks

1. The Barbeque Bible - Steven Raichlen

Steven Raichlen: The Barbecue! Bible

I should note that when looking for new recipe idea I, of course, turn to the net.  I have FoodNetwork in my search bar and make good use of it.

The sheer mass of recipes and cooking information on the net makes The Barbeque Bible all the more special.  I bought it at the cook shop up the street because it had this great stuffed standing roast recipe and had good tips on technique.

When I got it home and started to read it, I was floored by the depth of this book.  Usually books called The <Random Subject> Bible fall short of the mark.  This is certainly an exception.  Raichlen will tell you about all BBQ techniques, give you amazing recipes and extend your appreciation for both gas and charcoal grilling.      

Technorati tags: Books, book reviews, 2006, lots of authors

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