advocacy

Doing bold things, part deux.

More from Gonzales: Heraclitus said that every time you step into a river, it’s a different river. Every time you walk a [mountain] it’s a different mountain. It’s a boundary condition, a phase transition zone. Because of that it can make a mockery of the most thoughtful plan. Experience is nothing more than an engine that drives adaptation, so it’s always important to ask: Adaptation to what? When the environment changes (a given) you have to be aware that your experience might be inappropriate.

People are always part of the system. And people love forward motion. It’s very hard to get them to disengage once a course has been set. Add to this that people “normalize” risk. If something feels less risky they’ll take more chances; more risky and they’ll take less. “We’ve been through a similar situation and emerged just fine.” It’s easiest to assume it was your skill and savvy, your adaptations that saw you through. That’s why accident preventative engineering always fails. Add anti-lock brakes to a car and people push the limits of their driving skills. They feel safer, so they increase the risk until it matches their risk comfort zone. And of course, they get into more accidents since they no longer understand the level of energy in the system, and worse, feel protected from it.

Apply this to business. A project owner will increase risk until the level matches their risk comfort zone. If they fail to understand the amount of energy in the system, if this project represents a “different project” than the one they managed the last time, their adaptations (business experiences) no longer match… and the project is at risk from the outset. One disturbance will eventually lead to a failure cascade. As they say in mountaineering “A rope without fixed protection is a suicide pact.” A project that is not self-aware, that does not introspect, that does not provide a voice to all the participants is a suicide pact.

Doing bold things

Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival writes about “Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why”. There are some clear lessons in the study of physical survival in the wilderness.

We all operate in failure mode… all the time. All. The. Time. Most failures are small ones, a dropped bit of food, a spilled drink, extra traffic, a burned-out light, the glitches we dismiss as normal.

These system failures are the outgrowth of the tightly coupled complex nature of our lives — self-organizing complexity of astonishing proportion.

These small failures are normal, and unfortunately, so are large failures. The small things are like the temblors in an earthquake zone, the quiet harbingers of the larger collapses that must eventually happen. Large accidents or failures, while rare, are normal too. Efforts to prevent them always fail.

Failure processes happen very fast and can’t be turned off. Recovery from the initial disturbance is not possible; it will spread quickly and irretrievably for at least some time. These interactions were not designed into the system by anybody.

Doing bold things is not about engineering risk to zero. Failures happen, and if we restrict ourselves to where they can’t… we’re not going to do anything very interesting.

We’ll all have good idea of how our system behaves with it’s more frequent smaller failures. But we rarely understand how much energy is in the system… and how quickly things will go critical.

If we can’t “engineer” it out, and we can’t predict anything beyond that a failure will happen, what do we do? We trust, we risk, we embrace failure when it occurs and try to understand how it fits into the system, and like the walkers on the wire, we accept that at some point, everything may suddenly and irrevocably change. We also join and build teams of people, which are far more resilient than an individual. And from a business sense, can produce far more consistent results, with higher quality, and greater speed. And do bold things.

How much for digital?

How much for digital?: It’s important to charge something, because the act of paying fundamentally changes the dynamics of the relationship. The question is this: at the start, is your goal to maximize profit or to build a platform that scales? The fact is that the market is too small right now for the price to matter. What matters is whether you can build an audience that is in the habit of paying you, an audience that wants to hear from you, an audience that you can build a business on.

At fifty cents a rental, all desire for piracy goes out the window, replaced by convenience, ease of use and a clear conscience. More important, entire new services show up, habits are built and the studios end up with a direct relationship with consumers who want to hear from them. If they don’t get greedy at the start. [I think Seth nailed this one.]
Source: Seth’s Blog

People to People

The annual Bikes for Kids program that the Rockland Bike Club runs every year got some kudos in the local paper.

It’s January and another Santa Project has come and gone here at People to People and we would like to thank those responsible for making it a great success.

At present, we’ve estimated approximately 3,000 children received gifts through Santa Project 2007. That represents about 1,100 families, all of them your neighbors right here in Rockland. There were 750 “Dear Santa” letters adopted and enough toys, checks, clothing and food came rolling in to help approximately 350 more families. I wish I could share all the hugs and blessings I received on your behalf. You lit up the faces of children young and old and gave hope to families who have, in one way or another, felt the tides of hopelessness in 2007.

[Nice. A touch more ecumenicism on the part of People to People would be nice… but helping people is helping people. Bring on the Solstice Project! Heh.]

Watchdogging Blogging

Watchdogging Blogging: I think the best way to bring change about, is not by any cyclists’ rights movement, but by individual riders, clubs and small groups of friends who ride together setting their own rules and codes of behavior.

When I’m out riding, I expect sloppy and poor driving from some people. I see it all the time when I drive my car, so it is not going to change just because I am on a bike. I stay alert; I ride defensively, and try not to let it spoil my ride. [First, I’d like to thank Dave for being thoughtful and writing about these issues.

Cyclists, when driving, often act/drive very similarly to car only folks with the common exception of usually treating other cyclists with courtesy (although amazingly, not always!). Same high speed, low courtesy, me first, doing too much at once behind the wheel, stuff (to generalize) that I find so obviously dangerous when on my bike. If everyone who rides a bike would drive as if they were on their bike it would be a great start, and would “put money where their mouth is”.]
Source: Dave Moulton’s Bike Blog

Matthew Parris Apologizes

Matthew Parris Apologizes: Matthew Parris in his Times column today posted a brief apology for his Christmas attack on cyclists. (See my post yesterday.)

Today Parris wrote:

“I offended many with my Christmas attack on cyclists. It was meant humorously but so many cyclists have taken it seriously that I plainly misjudged. I am sorry.”

Not much, but he did admit to a misjudgment, I’ll take it. Thank you Mr. Parris.

It just goes to show cyclists as a world wide group, do have a voice. When we all come together as in this case, it is a loud voice indeed and people can’t help but hear it.

Let’s hope lessons have been learned and some good will come out of this. Maybe Matthew Parris and some of his fellow journalists will at least tone it down in the future.


[Here’s the problem, none of these cyclists who are forever watchdogging all the comments of others (and granted beheading is a bit strong) ever wonder or decry the fact that cyclists the world over are perceived the same way. What can we, as a community, do about the issues the press and individuals raise? No small impact the clothing, packaging, manufacturing, etc have on the environment, or the lawlessness and discourtesy that are often foisted on an unsuspecting public that has no framework to understand our point of view, and worse, we do it with a righteous attitude rife with implication that we are saving the world! How about we work on *that* some more?]
Source: Dave Moulton’s Bike Blog

Music business models based on free downloads

They often start with “Get some gigs, start building a following, do some recording (because it’s super cheap now that digital is everywhere) give all that away, rinse, repeat, and sell merchandise.

That is not a business plan folks, and it simply solves the audience desire for free recordings.

First of all, getting gigs is not that simple, and are plenty expensive to a band (or band leader). There are many fewer places supporting live (especially original) music, and plenty of reasons why you need to be either willing to work for free or a loss or established. And trying to make a living selling merchandise for a band without a following is also not a winning solution.

So while a recording can be considered a promotional device the question is how to you support the cost of creating it? True the incremental cost is small, but how much does the first copy cost?

Also spoken about as if it were magic is the sell the rare, give away the ubiquitous. This is the start of the subscription model where the artist figures out ways of getting folks inside. Pre-release tracks, backstage passes, etc. It doesn’t solve the promotional problem of finding places to play.

Here’s something that a lot of folks don’t think about. Not everyone is good enough to make there living as a musician. It’s not a right that you can invoke because you desire it, and the greatest work ethic will not guarantee anything either. To be good enough as a song writer, player, etc. to support yourself in this scenario of playing your own music for adoring fans is in and of itself rare. Desire doesn’t change that. Promotion doesn’t change that.

Maybe that’s all there is to it?

My Year of Living Dangerously

My Year of Living Dangerously: Being consistently broke this year has given me a great perspective though. I’m fascinated and disgusted at the same time by the people who use sites like Wesabe or Mint to tally, organize, count and recount their money over and over again. I mean, do you realize that more than half of the U.S. doesn’t have any savings beyond a 401k, and the bottom third has no savings at all and heaps of debt? From reading the echo-chamber on the blogs you’d think everyone would find these sites useful. They’re not, especially to the 100MM people in the U.S. that aren’t in the middle or upper class. Seriously, where are the online financial services that will let me schedule out a bunch of bills, and pick and choose among those I can afford to pay this month based on an income that’s less than the total debt payments? That’s what I – and the other 1/3rd in the U.S. – would like to see, believe me. [I had serious conversation about a product like this, although the focus was savings not bill schedule displacement. However, the important difference I see is that it is hard for that bottom third to gain enough access to computers to make the service worthwhile, and of course, they can’t pay for it directly, it would have to be ad based or collect bounties for steering people to other useful credit tools/services/etc. Not simple. I should add that I spent quite a few years being poor when I worked as a musician, and can feel his pain quiet acutely to this day.]

Only two years left

Only two years left: Here’s a question that you should clip out and tape to your bathroom mirror. It might save you some angst 15 years from now. The question is, What did you do back when interest rates were at their lowest in 50 years, crime was close to zero, great employees were looking for good jobs, computers made product development and marketing easier than ever, and there was almost no competition for good news about great ideas? [Working on it… (Bought a house, and started a family for starters… still working on many other things.]
Source: Seth’s Blog