..the evolution of a concept (Did Steve Jobs steal the idea of the personal computer from Xerox, or did he just revolutionize the idea?)
The difference between direct and indirect manipulation is not trivial. It is the difference between something intended for experts, which is what Xerox PARC had in mind, and something that is appropriate for a mass audience, which is what Apple had in mind. PARC was building a personal computer. Apple wanted to build a popular computer.
The ways armies have transformed themselves with the tools of the digital age— the Soviet Union, the United States, and Israel:
— The Soviets had a strong, centralized military bureaucracy, with a long tradition of theoretical analysis. It made sense that they were the first to understand the military implications of new information systems. But they didn't do anything with it. they didn't connect word with deed.
— The United States, by contrast, has a decentralized, bottom-up entrepreneurial culture, which has historically had a strong orientation toward technological solutions.
— As for the Israelis, their military culture grew out of a background of resource constraint and constant threat.
No one stole the revolution. Each party viewed the problem from a different perspective, and carved off a different piece of the puzzle.
...visionaries can be limited by their visions.
...heaven is not a good place to commercialize a product.
For an actual product, you need threat and constraint— and the improvisation and creativity necessary to turn a gold-plated three-hundred dollar mouse into something that works on Formica and costs fifteen dollars. Apple was Israel.
"You can be one of the most successful makers of enterprise technology products the world has ever known, but that doesn't mean your instincts will carry over to the consumer market...They're really different and few companies have ever been successful in both."
Gary Starkweather:
...the imaginative poverty of Xerox management.
...creativity wasn't on a metric.
...Often difficulties are just opportunities in disguise.
The truth is that Starkweather was a difficult employee. It went hand in hand with what made him such an extraordinary innovator.
He was disruptive and stubborn and independent-minded— and he had a thousand ideas, and sorting out the good ideas from the bad wasn't always easy.
Starkweather and his compatriots at Xerox PARC weren't the source of disciplined startegic insights. They were wild geysers of creative energy.
...this fecundity is often at the heart of what distinguishes the truly gifted.
A genius is a genius because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great. Quality is a probabilistic function of quantity.
...there is nothing neat and efficient about creativity. The more successes there are, the more failures there are as well— meaning that the person who has far more ideas than the rest of us will have far more bad ideas than the rest of us, too. This is why managing the creative process is so difficult.
Somone was always trying to turn off Starkweather's tap off. But someone had to turn the tap off: the interests of the innovator aren't perfectly aligned with the interests of the corporation. Starkweather saw ideas on their merits. Xerox was a multi-national corporation and it needed to consider every new idea within the context of what it already had.
Without the big idea, Xerox would never have seen the value of the small idea. If you consider innovation to be efficient and ideas precious, that is a tragedy: in the real messy world of creativity, giving away the thing you don't really understand for the thing that you do is an inevitable tradeoff.
Innovation is an unruly thing. There will be some ideas that don't get caught in your cup. But that's not what the game is about. The game is what you catch, not what you spill.
It was ever thus. The innovator says go. The company says stop— and maybe the only lesson of the legend of Xerox PARC is that what happened there happens, in one way or another, everywhere.
Showing posts with label Malcolm Gladwell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Malcolm Gladwell. Show all posts
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Malcolm Gladwell— What the Dog Saw
Why Problems Like Homelessness May Be Easier to Solve That to Manage
Power Law Distribution— where all the activity in a distribution graph is not in the middle (like a normal distribution) but at one extreme
In the 1980s, when homelessness first surfaced as a national issue, the assumption was that the problem fit a normal distribution: that the vast majority of the homeless were in the same state of semipermanent distress.
Homelessness doesn't have a normal distribution, it has a power-law distribution— 80% of the homeless (in a Philadelphia study) were in and out really quickly (i.e. 1-2 days) and they never came back.
The chronically homeless cost health care and social services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated...In Boston, 119 chronically homeless, over the course of five years, accounted for 18,834 emergency-room visits, accumulating costs of roughly $18 million.
...the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it...Simply running soup kitchens and shelters allows the chronically homeless to remain chronically homeless. You build a shelter and a soup kitchen if you think that homelessness is a problem with a broad and unmanageable middle. But if it's a problem at the fringe it can be solved.
...take homeless policy from the old idea of funding programs that serve homless people endlessly and invest in results that actually end homelessness.
The idea that the sickest and most troubled of the homeless can be stabilized and eventually employed is only a hope. The current philosophy of welfare that government assistance should be temporary and conditional, to avoid creating dependency. But chronically homeless do not respond to disincentives and sanctions (i.e. getting put back out on the street) in a normal way.
Power-law homeless policy has to do the opposite of normal distribution social policy. It should create dependency: you want people who have been outside the system to come inside and rebuild their lives under supervision.
That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn't seem fair. Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. (Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It's simply about efficiency.)
We also believe that the distribution of social benefits should not be arbitrary. We don't give only to some poor mothers, or to a random handful of disabled veterans. We give to everyone who meets a formal criterion, and the moral credibility of government assistance derives, in part, from this universality.
There isn't enough money to go around, and to try to help everyone a little bit— to observe the principle of universality— isn't as cost-effective as helping a few people a lot. Being fair in this case, means providing shelters and soup kitchens, and shelters and soup kitchens don't solve the problem of homelessness.
Our usual moral intuitions are of little use, then, when it comes to a few hard cases. Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.
Solving problems that have power-law distributions doesn't just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political intuitions as well. It's hard not to conclude, in the end, that the reason we treated the homeless as one hopeless undifferentiated group for so long is not simply that we didn't know better. It's that we didn't want to know better. It was easier the old way.
Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching...cost/benefit analysis.
Power Law Distribution— where all the activity in a distribution graph is not in the middle (like a normal distribution) but at one extreme
In the 1980s, when homelessness first surfaced as a national issue, the assumption was that the problem fit a normal distribution: that the vast majority of the homeless were in the same state of semipermanent distress.
Homelessness doesn't have a normal distribution, it has a power-law distribution— 80% of the homeless (in a Philadelphia study) were in and out really quickly (i.e. 1-2 days) and they never came back.
The chronically homeless cost health care and social services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated...In Boston, 119 chronically homeless, over the course of five years, accounted for 18,834 emergency-room visits, accumulating costs of roughly $18 million.
...the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it...Simply running soup kitchens and shelters allows the chronically homeless to remain chronically homeless. You build a shelter and a soup kitchen if you think that homelessness is a problem with a broad and unmanageable middle. But if it's a problem at the fringe it can be solved.
...take homeless policy from the old idea of funding programs that serve homless people endlessly and invest in results that actually end homelessness.
The idea that the sickest and most troubled of the homeless can be stabilized and eventually employed is only a hope. The current philosophy of welfare that government assistance should be temporary and conditional, to avoid creating dependency. But chronically homeless do not respond to disincentives and sanctions (i.e. getting put back out on the street) in a normal way.
Power-law homeless policy has to do the opposite of normal distribution social policy. It should create dependency: you want people who have been outside the system to come inside and rebuild their lives under supervision.
That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn't seem fair. Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. (Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It's simply about efficiency.)
We also believe that the distribution of social benefits should not be arbitrary. We don't give only to some poor mothers, or to a random handful of disabled veterans. We give to everyone who meets a formal criterion, and the moral credibility of government assistance derives, in part, from this universality.
There isn't enough money to go around, and to try to help everyone a little bit— to observe the principle of universality— isn't as cost-effective as helping a few people a lot. Being fair in this case, means providing shelters and soup kitchens, and shelters and soup kitchens don't solve the problem of homelessness.
Our usual moral intuitions are of little use, then, when it comes to a few hard cases. Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.
Solving problems that have power-law distributions doesn't just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political intuitions as well. It's hard not to conclude, in the end, that the reason we treated the homeless as one hopeless undifferentiated group for so long is not simply that we didn't know better. It's that we didn't want to know better. It was easier the old way.
Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching...cost/benefit analysis.
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