Month: July 2008

My father worked for IBM for a number of years.  Then he built a computer service business in Anchorage and was successful with it, using the management lessons he gained while at IBM.  To sit down and try to talk to him about decentralization, new media, and where things could be headed doesn’t get anywhere.  It’s trying to reconcile all these new theories with the old orthodox thinking of management.  People get older and they stick to their doctrines, and I think that’s fine – what they’ve seen work, worked for them.

I like reading about the new stuff, it sounds exciting and I want to understand it and keep track of the conversation.  Nassim Taleb likes to warn us, though, and tells us to keep on our toes by looking for the empirical evidence.  I don’t know if much can be produced at this point, and I realize Umair Haque just likes to think and theorize and write, but I am beginning to get tired of anecdotes and simplifications like evil and DNA.  Everytime I read DNA now my reaction is the same as if I threw my right heel down on top of my big left toe.

Things are changing, I can dig that.  But a comment on an Umair Haque post that calls him only another weatherman, or a Marc Cuban post reminding us that it’s all been said before are sobering.  The times may change, but I think the feelings stay the same.  Our fathers were just as eager and keen on the emerging trends as we are.  I think we’d do well to keep this in mind.

I get tired of the liberal college campus, often, and have this quote by Peter Blake saved:

“I don’t think the students should have any more power over the teachers than they have already.  Just at the moment I don’t really like students as a group of people.  I think they rather overrate themselves.  They seem to talk a lot and protest a lot, and have too many rights.  I think one could get overinvolved in the activity of being a student.  After all, students are not so important-they are really only there to learn how to be adults.  Students shouldn’t feel that they have to complain.”

I found it in Richard Branson’s autobiography, Losing My Virginity.  On the other side of things I have this passage, from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, on my mind:

“He stood still over me… and with a smile in which I seemed to detect suddenly somtehing insolent.  But then I am twenty years his senior.  Youth is insolent; it is its right – its necessity; it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence.”

Comes to mind when I see a kid who looks no older than 17 talking about solving the worlds problems.  Fine, fine, good luck to you dude, but you’re not saying anything new.  People will listen when things are put this way, it terms of money.