Off Course-On Target

List with a Twist: My Best Learning Books in 2009?

I am always looking for the next great book to read and thought I’d tap into the collective intelligence, the annual end-of-the-calendar-year trend for lists, and the power of new tools such as Twitter to find the next great book to read. Below is some of the why, how, and what I have in mind.

Mashup of Old and New

I continue to be intrigued by the power that comes from creating mashups of old and new. In this case, it is about finding the next great book to read (how old can you get?) using a new means such as Twitter, blogs, etc.

In short, what I’m asking you to do is reflect upon books you’ve read this past year, choose one or more that you found to be the best learning book for you, and share this with the rest of us via a tweet.* Ideally you can also articulate with more detail on why you chose this particular book and post this to your blog, Facebook page, or otherwise share your thoughts with the rest of us.

I considered making this more wide open and going for “best learning resource” that could include books, websites, blogs, tweets, slides, presentations, etc., and perhaps we should expand this idea and format to other resources.  But for now, I have purposely limited this to that oh-so-yesterday medium—books—as I’m interested in finding more in-depth and detailed exploration of ideas, concepts, techniques, models, and the like. I not only find myself reading more than ever from a greater diversity of sources, dates of publication, and formats than ever, but as a voracious eBook reader, I find myself reading more books than I ever have (something which I already did a lot) and am finding exponentially more value in doing so. I’d like to continue that trend.

Vaguely Focused

I have also purposely focused on “learning books” and have left the definition and interpretation of what a learning book is in this context to be open-ended and up to you. You can treat learning as a verb or a noun, just make it personal and passionate. For example, you can decide to choose the book which was the best at:

• Stimulating your personal learning, was most provocative, made you think the most, perhaps one you disagreed with the most?
• Causing the most change in your thinking, your perspective, your behavior.
• Stimulating new ideas, new questions, new paths to pursue.
• Being most helpful in your personal learning and/or with learning in your organization—personal or professional.
• Affecting a change in learning as a topic/subject.
• Any other way you want to interpret what “learning book” means to you.

Like to learn by example?  Check out this list of “Books that Changed My Life” (and a very cool library pictured here as well) from Kevin Kelly.

List with a Twist

This is not an attempt to create a new top ten list, and least of all, any kind of most popular or bestseller list! There are lots of these and there are more to come I’m sure. And by all means, mention them here if you find some good lists that helped you find a great book for learning in 2009. 

While I would not want to stifle more input, rather than creating an echo chamber of agreement with someone else’s #myBLB09 tweet, I’m hoping you will either add your own book or tweet about an additional benefit you got from reading a book someone else listed. I will not be compiling a summative list, I won’t be taking votes, or in any other way trying to categorize or rate these books. The #myBLB09 will help enough with that. Rather I’m trying to stimulate more sharing of what you found to be the most valuable for you.  My assumption is that we will all benefit from our individual sharing of personal great reads.

However, I’m actually hoping to see hundreds or thousands of books listed here, which will enable each of us to add a new book to our own personal top ten list for 2009 before it ends all too soon.

Here’s how I’d suggest we can all help make this a productive and valuable resource and use of our time:

• Create a tweet with one of the best books you have read in 2009, which had a profound effect on your learning and perhaps that of others around you. 
• I’ve created a Twitter hashtag #myBLB09 and be sure to add #myBLB09 to your tweet so others can find, follow, and benefit.
• Avoid the temptation to list a book you plan to read, have skimmed, think you should read, or ones you think everyone else is reading!
• Reflect upon books you read in 2009 and do not limit this to books which were published in 2009. In fact, I’m hoping that we’ll see more old, obscure, forgotten books than those on any bestseller lists.
• Write less about why you think others should read this book and more about why it was so beneficial and influential for you. 
• Bonus points for a link in your tweet rather than text regarding the author, book, etc. so you can use more of the 140 characters to state why this is a great book for you! 

  Tip: Use the “custom naming” option in the URL shortener (bit.ly, snurl, tinyurl, etc.) that you use to make the link text more descriptive and part of your tweet text.  Search on “custom naming URL shortening” or the like for help with this such as:

  • http://www.seoconsultants.com/twitter/shorts/
  • http://www.geekpreneur.com/the-top-10-url-shortening-services

• Consider writing a more detailed account of how and why this was such a great learning book for you and posting this on your blog, Facebook page, or other ways you can share these thoughts with the rest of us. Then send a tweet with a link to your notes and include the #myBLB09 hashtag.
• If, as will often be the case, you have more than one great learning book you read in 2009, consider creating and posting your own personal list of “My Best Learning Books in 2009” and tweet a link to your list, adding #myBLB09 as well of course.

Help Me, Help You by Helping Me Help You

In the wonderful ways of the cyclical benefits of gifting, I’m hoping that by asking you to help me find my next great book to read, you will find your next great book to read. And at this time of year, if you are looking for a gift for friends and family, perhaps this will provide you with some gift ideas. However my real hope is that by doing this, I may in some small way be able to give a gift to you by asking you to consider giving yourself a gift—the gift of time for reading, thinking, and reflecting, which I find books to be great catalyst for. How’s that for circular!

While the end of year certainly brings with it lots of demands on your time, it can also provide an opportunity for the luxury of time to read. Consider it an investment in the future and an investment in yourself such that you can in turn be that much more useful and effective in helping others in the upcoming New Year and beyond. For those of you who use calendars and schedulers—electronic or paper—to help organize and manage your time, consider simply scheduling time for you to read something stimulating and provocative and the time to reflect and think about it all. It is no coincidence that in my experience with others who I regard to be extremely successful, I’ve discovered that they specifically carve out time for just this kind of activity at least annually and often more so. Why not you too?

You’ve done your best to be good all year right?  You not only deserve this gift, but in the end it will enable you to better gift the rest of us with an even more powerful and passionate you in 2010.

Looking forward to your help in finding the next great book to read.  Thanks!

Wayne

_____________________

* If Twitter and tweeting is new to you or you have been trying to figure it out, my experience is that this is one of those things that you can only learn experientially. Use it for a month and you’ll know if it is valuable for you. See my previous post “Twitterpated” for more details. Why not use this opportunity to start your experiential learning of Twitter now?

Write You Are!

For many years now, I’ve more often than not taken great exception to those traits and characteristics which  the “experts” and pundits say are the norm or the coming trends of our societies. They just don’t seem to match up with the reality I see all around me and what my sense of these trends are.

For example, I still keep reading about these grave concerns that we (especially the younger generations) are becoming isolated individuals who:

• Live in dark rooms lit only by the glow of our computer screens
• Have no social life and only limited “real” human contact
• Read less and write less
• Passively sit there all day clicking our mouse and watching endless video

I don’t know where all these masses of people are who the experts say are out there and are becoming the norm. I see mostly the opposite among all of the many groups, ages, nations, and cultures that I’m privileged to spend time with around the world. I see people of all ages, classes, and cultures who are more social than ever—communicating, sharing, reflecting, observing, analyzing, and otherwise engaging more than I think we may have ever done.

I think the reason for this vast difference in observations is mostly because these interactions don’t look and feel like they used to. Behaviors have changed and they don’t fit the norms and definitions of the past. But make no mistake—from all indications and observations I can make, the fundamentals of socializing, interacting, communicating, writing, probing, being curious, and other such fundamental traits are not only alive and well, but they are at an all time high and are increasing exponentially.

You can therefore imagine my delight in finding more and more examples in the past few months of others who have been noticing this same counter-trend. Even better, some of this has now been formally studied and evaluated, so it is no longer just a matter of opinion and a collection of anecdotal observations.

The “Stanford Study of Writing”

One of the more recent examples is the massive study called “Stanford Study of Writing” that was recently completed by Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. Clive Thompson did a good synopsis of this study in a the Sept. 2009 edition of Wired magazine called “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy”. Lunsford studied college students from 2001 to 2006 and used over 14,000 samples of their diverse writings including formal assignments, emails, blogs, and chat sessions. Tellingly, 83% of their writing took place outside of their academic assignments. One of her conclusions particularly rang true to me when she remarked, “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.”

Perhaps most importantly, this study showed that it is not just volume but effectiveness of writing that has increased so dramatically. I picked up a new word (always a great find for me) in Clive’s article that Lunsford uses to quantify a critical competency that her study showed had dramatically increased. Kairos is the ability of a writer to “assess their audience and adapt their tone and technique to best get their point across.”

New World Encyclopedia notes that in Panathenaicus, Isocrates wrote “educated people are those who manage well the circumstances which they encounter day by day, and who possess a judgment which is accurate in meeting occasions as they arise and rarely misses the expedient course of action.” Sounds like a pretty important skill to me!

According to Clive (something of particular note to those in education), Lunsford observed in her study that “students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.”

My Lessons Learned

Here is a short spur-of-the-moment list of some of my recent observations and learning regarding writing— both my own and that of those around me. I would be most interested to hear from you about how well these match or conflict with what you are seeing when it comes to writing and communication skills now and what you think will happen to them in the future.

• The diversity and quantity of outlets and motivation for writing and sharing is increasing at an exponential rate. It is easy to forget how much the pace of new forms of writing and distribution is accelerating. Not that many years have passed since many of us switched from paper-based writing of letters, books, and articles to the much more prolific digital forms of word processors. In the last few years, we saw the exponential growth of connectivity via the Internet and saw the rise of email and online forums. Laptops and mobile phones became mainstream and provided some of the catalyst for more outlets, such as instant messaging and SMS text messages. And in the past few months, we’ve seen even faster growth of phenomena such as Facebook and Twitter (to name but a few). Each of these provides yet another outlet and demand for writing, and we seem to be answering the call in droves.
• There is an equally rapid growth in the diversity of types and styles of writing. If you have been reading much of my writing, or worse had to listen to me, you know I graduated with honors from the University of Never-a-Sentence-When-a-Paragraph-Will-Do. For me, the brevity which outlets such as “tweets” and SMS texting ruthlessly enforce has been helped me to write (sometimes) with greater clarity and conciseness. As my dear friend Marcia Connor recently put it in an article she wrote about social media,  “If my friend Wayne can tweet, anyone can!”
• The motivation factors for writing are also increasing at similar rates and for more and more people. When I talk with others who maintain blogs, journals, websites, and email lists, and have a presence on Twitter and Facebook, most of them mention that knowing people are reading what they write, often commenting on it, adding additional points of view, etc., significantly motivates them to develop the habit of writing more often and sharing more of their experiences.
• Writing is becoming more immediate and more authentic. It resembles a conversation in terms of its characteristics—it is more spontaneous, more serendipitous, and more personal. And as with a great conversation, these tend to be much richer in their content and context.
• Writing is becoming more and more personalized, another example of “The Snowflake Effect”. This writing trend reflects firsthand experiences—writing about what you know, reflective writing, and writing that is much richer in value.
• Skills in analysis are becoming less important since this is increasingly automated and done for us with a mouse click. But  having skills for synthesizing is growing in value as we consume ever larger quantities of disparate information sources and types, reflect upon them, and put together our thoughts and ideas on what they mean and what trends and patterns we see.
• These changes in our writing provide more examples of how we are increasingly becoming societies of prosumers. For example, I don’t regard myself as a writer or a reporter, but when I recently found myself in the midst of the tsunami in Pago Pago American Samoa a few weeks ago, thanks to the wonder of modern communications technology, suddenly I was just that: an on-the-scene reporter, able to provide firsthand, immediate and very personalized reports via my tweets, emails and my blog.  You can read my accounts of this experience by following these links:
  • Doing the Tsunami Tango in American Samoa: Part I
  • Doing the Tsunami Tango in American Samoa: Part II
  • Doing the Tsunami Tango in American Samoa: Part III

  These accounts were subsequently picked up by news services around the world, many of which were able to call me on my sailboat via my satellite phone and do a live interview as I was literally in the mist of the tumultuous effects of the tsunami in real time. This is not only something that was technically impossible a few years ago, but serves as a dramatic example of just how much we are becoming the “prosumer” society which Alvin and Heidi Toffler so presciently described in their book “The Third Wave” wherein we are no longer either a producer or a consumer, but are both at the same time.

• These changes in our writing skills and habits are not at all limited to the younger generation. This is a phenomenon affecting all of us who are living and writing at this time and in these environments.

Your Turn to Write!

I’m sure you can come up with many more examples of other trends and directions, skills, and consequences of the changes happening with our writing and communications. I therefore hope and encourage you to add yet another example of this trend by either posting some of your observations on your own blogs, tweets or Facebook pages, or directly here. I hope that my  own writing here is reflecting the positive traits of this exponentially accelerating trend.

Referring back to the Wired article I mention at the start of this posting, I thought Clive made a great point in closing when he noted: “knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.” Write on Clive!

Wayne

VMG

As most of you know, for the past two years I’ve been out conducting a grand experiment of learning, living, and working from my sailboat most of the time, as I explore and experience this phenomenal planet of ours from the vantage point of the sea. I am currently anchored at the small village of Rikitea on the Island of Mangareva, which is in the Iles Gambiers (cut and paste the lat/long pair 23 06.939S 134 58.098W into Google Earth if you’d like to see where this is).

One of my primary drivers for heading off on this new direction in life, was to turn myself into a truly fulltime learner and dive into the deep end of the ignorance pool.  I wanted to see if I could figure out how to swim and have fun doing it. It has been working extremely well too. Every single day is almost a nonstop set of learning experiences on just about every level you can imagine: personally, professionally, of other people and cultures, of geography, geology and archaeology, of all things mechanical, of the stars and solar system, of maps, of me and of the worlds above, below, and on top of the water.

I’m finding that there is an incredible amount of very deep lessons to be learned, as well as some extraordinarily helpful concepts and models that apply themselves to so much more than “just” sailing and a life aquatic.  One of these in particular, is a term unique to sailing called VMG which is the acronym for “velocity made good”.  This one has really struck me as an enormously helpful conceptual model and it has stayed with me throughout my adventure. Now I’d like to share it with you here, get your comments on it and offer it as a model that I believe you too would find very valuable, both professionally and personally.  Bear with me for just a bit while I quickly walk you through what VMG is all about in the context of sailing, and then I think you’ll quickly see how well this can be applied to most other things in life.

VMG or “velocity made good” is the measurement of the speed at which you are progressing toward your intended destination. VMG is vector-based in that it requires TWO values—speed and direction—in order to determine what the VMG value is.

Now, to get from point A to point B in a power boat, you’d simply follow the common principal that a straight line is the shortest distance between any two points, and you’d steer the motorboat directly towards point B.  There would be no need for this special term of VMG because you’d simply measure your speed over the ground or through the water and that would be how quickly you were progressing toward your destination.

In a sailboat, however, you are dependent upon the wind for your motive power, and it is not always possible to follow the straight line to your destination. For example, if the wind is coming FROM the point B you are trying to get to, then you have a problem.  In fact, until relatively recently in the history of sailing, it was only possible to sail in about whatever direction the wind was blowing; that is, downwind. This is why, for example, all the historical sailing routes of the world went in similar directions and to similar destinations. You were essentially at the mercy of Mother Nature and you literally went whichever way the wind was blowing.

To this day, many people assume that a sailboat is “pushed” by the wind and therefore, can only go downwind.  But in fact, modern sailboats are not dependent upon being pushed, they can also and most often, be “pulled” by the same principle that enables airplanes to fly—lift. The sails are carefully shaped and angled such that they act as a wing and create lift, which combined with the similar lift being generated by the keel under the water, enables the sailboat to move forward. While it is not possible to sail directly into the wind, it is possible to sail within as little as 30 degrees off the wind, and therefore you can now move towards, although not directly at, your destination, even if the wind is coming straight from this point. The technique is known as “tacking” and if you were to observe it from above, the path of the boat would be a zigzag pattern, since the boat is steered first to one angle (say, off to the starboard or right side) and then back to the other angle (to the port or left side).  By maintaining this angle to the wind, the sails and keel generate lift and move the boat forward, and you are able to tack or zigzag your way to point B.

Because you are never advancing directly towards your destination, you’re always moving away from it to some extent; your actual speed on the water is of little importance. What you want to know is how much progress you are making towards point B and THAT is what VMG tells you. Unless you are moving in a straight line directly towards your destination, your VMG is always going to be less than your actual speed over the ground. But how much less?  In approximate terms, if you are traveling at an angle of 90 degrees to your destination, then your VMG would be zero; that is, you’d never get there. Greater than 90 degrees and your VMG would be negative. So angles less than 90 degrees have some amount of positive VMG; therefore, you’d be making positive or forward progress towards your destination.  How much would be a vector or combination of your actual speed and the angle. This is how VMG is calculated. 

Fortunately, on modern sailboats such as mine, there is a digital readout that tells me exactly what my VMG is at any moment and this reading is what you learn to pay the most attention to because it is the “bottom line” of how well you are sailing towards your next waypoint or destination.  Figuring out when I’m going to arrive at this next point then is not based on how fast the boat is moving through the water, but what the VMG speed is.  You therefore adjust your sails and angle of your heading not to get the maximum speed but to get the maximum VMG.

What I’ve been finding even more fascinating though, is that if you remove the context of sailing and treat VMG as a general conceptual model, it becomes extremely useful in many other situations. Destination can now be any form we like, such as a personal goal or an organizational objective. As in the case of  sailing, you are often faced with opposing forces that work against you and keep you from being able to move directly towards your point B. Some would simply “go with the flow” and let themselves be controlled and pushed by these forces, and therefore go in similar directions and to similar destinations that were all “downwind”.  But if you really want to get to the point B that you have set your sites on, then it is possible to develop strategies that allow you to head “upwind”, without taking the opposing forces on directly, but very cleverly using those same forces to provide the metaphorical equivalent of “lift” to you and your team, thus enabling you to make forward progress, and ultimately arrive at your destination. 

Does this sound familiar?  Do you recall times when you have purposefully decided to take an indirect path, meandering in different directions that move you closer but not directly towards your goal?  If done with purpose,  it can be extremely smart and enable you to go against the flow, to succeed in spite of opposing forces, and to get where YOU want to go. 

You can see how well this all fits into my long time focus and the namesake of this site—the strategy of being “off course” and yet very much “on target”.  Yet for me the real lesson of VMG is in the value of having an accurate measurement of what my VMG is.  This is where I think we can also gain the most advantage in using the concept of VMG in other applications. What we need is a VMG meter for all of our other pursuits in life!

In many ways, I think it can be relatively straight forward to create a VMG meter for any application. First, of course, we need to have a clear and accurate sense of where point B is. What is the end state we are trying to achieve?  What are the coordinates of point B?  Then we need to know our current location, where we are now.  And finally, we need to know what is our actual speed AND at what angle away from our determined destination are we moving?  Put all these together and you get a very simple, but profound, guiding metric of your true progress. 

Think how well this would let you make adjustments to your strategies and implementations, and how quickly you could find out what effect this has on your VMG. For example, moving faster often seems to be a good thing: “We must be doing well, look how fast we are going!”  But how often has it turned out that you were making LESS progress towards your goal, even though you were “going faster”?  When would it be smart to choose to go slower at a different angle to reach maximum VMG? 

As with many of my “off course, on target” stories, including the original Apollo mission example that got me started with this whole line of thinking, it is all about getting good at constant course correction, which requires that you know where you are headed and how far off course you are at any given point in time.

So give this VMG idea a try in YOUR context. How well have you quantified the specifics of your “point B” destination?  How would you measure the “angle” away from the direct line towards your point B? How do you measure the speed that you or your project are moving at? If you can measure these, then you can put them together and create your very own VMG gauge, which will let you make constant course corrections and successfully reach that elusive point B destination before everyone else.

Would you rather join the rest of the crowd, go wherever the prevailing winds blow you, and let the external forces determine your future?  Or would you like to chart your own course?  Do the impossible and sail upwind. Fashion your own version of a VMG gauge, and you can purposefully put yourself very much off course, but equally much on target!

Happy sailing!

w
a
yne
=====

Great Thoughts

Here's another posting derived from my ever growing list of items to blog about.  This one springs from an article I read in the IEEE Spectrum back in Jan 2007.   

Did I mention I’m behind in my postings and the list is growing? However on the plus side I like this delay because it acts as a check on just how relevant and useful things are.  If it stands the test of time, it gets posted, and this one passed the test with flying colors.

The title of this posting “Great Thoughts” is the same as the article by Robert W. Lucky (IEEE Fellow), now retired. In it, he wrote: 

“There is a theory of creativity that holds that creativity is most often the product of the unexpected intersection of two previously unconnected thoughts. If you are thinking very hard about one such thought, perhaps you are suppressing the other thoughts that could connect with it. On the other hand, if your mind is a perfect blank…”

This is an interesting conundrum: not focusing too much on one thing yet not shutting out all thought, something that my ADD riddled brain can't even comprehend!

But for me, the takeaway here has more to do with the question of what constitutes “new” these days?  What makes something original?  What constitutes plagiarism or copying?  What is at the heart of innovation and creativity in the world today?

In this era where more and more things are mashups, a new assembly of previously existing things, is there any such thing as an original idea, song, drawing, text, etc.?  The answer is more "yes" than "no", I think, but it is worth noting that most of the time what is new and what makes something unique is not the bits and pieces that it is made from, but the selection of certain items and the way they are assembled into a new whole. And most often, the value of this new assembly is much greater than the sum of the parts.

This concept is nothing new really. Think of some fundamental examples such as text, where we have almost all existing words available in the dictionary (although the list is growing and evolving all the time), yet from this finite set of letters and words we can create an infinite number of written documents (e.g. articles, books, poems, and scripts). Or music where we have another finite set of notes and chords that enable us to create an infinite number of new songs, melodies, and even ring tones!

This combining of existing things to create new things, the heart of the Snowflake Effect is what makes it a scalable model. Not that we won’t also be creating new bits and pieces along the way, such as the new words which are added to dictionaries every year, but for the most part I think most of what is new and valuable, most of the innovation and creativity we are and will be seeing, comes from the serendipitous intersection of two or more previously existing things, be they thoughts, ideas, notes of music, letters and words, lines, arcs or circles.

So here’s to celebrating and fostering the creativity in all of us by focusing on being the unique snowflakes we all are and designing more and more new original ideas and “stuff” from what we already have around us.

Where Is Value in the Economy of “Free”

Seems like one of my recent postings “Good Luck Trying to Copy a Snowflake”  on the Long Slow Chat, resonated with many of you. The Long Slow Chat is a blog that Erik Duval and I are using to focus more on the Snowflake Effect. I got a lot of comments in particular about my note that:

“I think we are now in an era where there is an inverse correlation of ease of copying with value.“

I remember being struck by this idea when Kevin Kelly first published his article “New Rules for the New Economy” in Wired magazine back in September 1997.  He talked about the “The Law of Plentitude: More gives More".  When you couple this with the fact that value is directly related to scarcity, the uniqueness generated by the Snowflake Effect takes on a a very large and new value. 

For example, I have often observed that content has little-to-no value in and of itself. In large part, this is because content has become so plentiful and abundant. In this context, I’m using the term content to describe anything recorded or captured, such as illustrations, drawings, text, video, audio, and music. Largely due to the Internet, content has become increasingly easy to copy and distribute, and therefore its value, based on scarcity, has been on the asymptote towards zero and getting closer by the minute. 

But if there is an inverse relationship between value and the ease of copying, such that most content has no value, then where do we find value and in what?  Well, I believe there is still a direct correlation between value and scarcity. So in the case of content, the value comes from the mantra of the Snowflake Effect; that is, getting it “just right”—just the right content to the right person at the right time and in the right way.  Reflect upon this a moment and see what you think. Would you not find that your valuation of any piece of content is directly related to how useful it is to you at a specific time and in a specific context? 

To my way of thinking then, the value proposition for content is transforming it from a “product” to a “service”, since the value comes not from the content itself but from when it is the right content for the right person at the right time. All this is very much in keeping with my noun/verb perspectives but I’ll leave that for a future posting.

I was therefore delighted to find that Kevin too has also been working more on this theme of copying and value, and he has recently published his thoughts in an intriguing article called “Better Than Free” on his blog The Technium, which is also the new book he is working on. But this same article has also just been published on the Change This site in PDF format.

I highly recommend that you check out this article from either source to get some new perspectives on where value comes from in this economy where “free” is increasingly predominant. Kevin addresses the challenge that most others seem to ignore or deny, which is "where will value come from and how will there be a fully functioning 'free economy'?"  As Kevin succinctly said:

“How do you make money with the free?”

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

As you will read in his article, Kevin goes on to describe eight things which are “better than free” and are values that can't be copied, which he calls “generatives”:

“A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing cannot be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time.”

The eight generatives are:

1. Immediacy
2. Personalization
3. Interpretation
4. Authenticity
5. Embodiment
6. Patronage
7. Findability

As you can imagine, I was particularly interested to see "personalization" on this list. From my (no doubt biased) perspective, the whole list is part of the Snowflake Effect, where getting to a state of “just right” is key. And more so than characteristics, this list of generatives creates a list of qualities and competencies that will be increasingly important and valuable for all of us. More on that in some future postings.

I particularly liked a note Kevin makes at the end of the article:

“In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.”

Attention is about as personal a quality as I can imagine, and is one which I value especially since I suffer so acutely from a deficit of it.

I’ll have more on this whole theme of copying, originality, sources of value, new competencies, and attention in future postings. For now, I’d recommend that you give some of your very valuable attention to this topic and this article, and I look forward to hearing more about what you think about the sources of value in an economy of "free."

Babelfish Requires Babbling Too

For those of you who were around then, remember the arguments for Esperanto back in the 1970's?  According to Wikipedia, "Esperanto is by far the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language in the world. "

Developed in 1887 by Polish physician Ludovic Zamenhof, Esperanto as stated in "The Decline and Fall of Esperanto: Lessons for Standards Committees"  was supposed to be  "a simple, easy-to-learn language. His goal was to erase communication barriers between ethnic groups by providing them with a politically neutral, culturally free standard language." The authors go on to say:

"... by the 1970s, Esperanto was receiving serious attention from linguistic scholars, with numerous publications appearing in academic journals.

[But] "Despite the logical concept and intellectual appeal of a standard language, Esperanto has not evolved into a dominant worldwide language."

While I agree that anything we can do to increase communication is a plus, this notion of inventing an artificial language, and then all of us acquiring a new one that we would have in common, makes no sense at all.  It has no history, no future, and no culture and these aspects of language are not only important for communication, but I believe for acquiring a language.

For many years I've proposed that technology would play a major role in our ability to communicate with one another.  And in fact, language translation capabilities are growing and getting better.  But while I would have formerly thought that we won’t need to know more than one language since given enough time, we'll have the Babelfish, an idea put forth by Douglas Adams in his book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, my recent experience with learning a new language, specifically Spanish, has changed how I view this.

I realize now that my ability to communicate effectively is not limited to just saying the right words, it’s about semantics; communicating meaning.  A Babelfish would not address the cultural contexts that are so important to communication. Acquisition as humans of multiple language capabilities involves more than technology. Technology will indeed play a role, but it will not be sufficient in and of itself.

Given that a Babelfish won't solve all of our communication problems, what can we do to make it easier and more efficient and effective for all of us to acquire more languages? My most recent experience of one-to-one instruction in Spanish is a model we all should be looking at because my sense is that it is quite scalable, effective and has many indirect benefits.

The Power of Conversation

For one thing, this method of learning a language was quite effective and amazing. Three times I started with a new instructor in three different locations.  Not once was there any discussion over the methodology or how we were going to teach me Spanish. Most striking was my experience with the first instructor Axel, because I had no Spanish capability whatsoever (not counting commonly known phrases, such as gracias or buenos días).

From the beginning, Axel and I started talking in Spanish and never stopped during our five hour daily sessions together for two weeks.  We didn't have a conversation about this, but the unwritten rule was that we were not going to use any English beyond that which was absolutely necessary. I'm not quite sure how we managed to do this, but I know we used a lot of Pictionary and Charades techniques.  Our interaction worked really well when the other person understood it was a game of "guess what I'm drawing/acting out"

Early on, one of the most important phrases I learned was "como se dice" (How do you say), but what really made it effective was how I used it as a signal for starting the guessing game. Instead of tacking on the English word at the end, such as "como se dice binoculars", what worked well was for me to have to describe binoculars in whatever limited Spanish I had supplemented with drawings and diagrams.  There's something about having to work at it more and taking the time and effort to acquire the words. Plus I had to use what little vocabulary I already had to acquire more vocabulary. That's a really effective model.  More importantly and as things advanced,what I was asking for was not a word but a phrase, a saying or a sentence that would convey my meaning rather than a translation of my words.

One reason why I think this model can scale so well is that the only real requirement of the instructors is that they are fluent in the language being learned, Spanish in this case. I don’t think instructors need to know much of the other language...in this case, English.  Nor did I find any need for the instructor to have any significant instructional skills beyond patience because for our sessions, my instructors and I were literally “just” having a conversation. Since the whole model is immersion-based, we're not going to use English, then knowledge of my language was not required.  So I've concluded that any two people can use these techniques for language acquisition.

There are some limitations or concerns within this model. For example, what if the conversation occurs between two people who do not speak "proper" English or Spanish?  To share well, all of us will need to have more consistency in the way we speak a language. Jargon and slang are always a problem in an isolated group.  But the solution is simple.  You need to get out more.  The more you expand your circle of people, the better chance you have of learning a form of the language that is understandable by many.  This is not a new phenomena: as the audience grows, so too does the need for a common way to speak a language. Take broadcasting or something like national news for example. In Canada, national radio and TV broadcasters speak “proper English” or as my mother would say "the Queen's English" that is devoid of the local color, accents, and jargon of what you would hear on the streets of any one province or geographical region.

The Topic Doesn’t Matter at All; It is All that Matters!

For this model of language learning to be really effective though, I think the two people need to feel that there is a value in both of them doing so. In the case of the instructor, it's about getting paid.  But also, having something in common other than the language is a huge factor in effective language learning. All of my tutors said how much they were enjoying the teaching because the conversation itself was interesting.  I think it's because we had a real conversation...they were interested in WHAT we were talking about.  What might have made it more valuable too was that I took the lead.  While I was interested in learning Spanish, I also had an ulterior motive. I had a zillion things that I wanted to talk about because I was interested in learning more about them, their culture, their city and region such as "What's family life like?" "Do you have a computer at home?" "What kind of music do you listen to?"  So it took some of the pressure off of the instructor to provide topics of conversation and also engaged the instructor in some authentic conversation that was interesting, relevant, and engaging to them irrespective of the language.

Following along with the theme of Off Course - On Target: how effective is it to get to a goal indirectly? Obviously I wanted to learn Spanish.  But by just having a real conversation, we approached this goal in an indirect sense.  A conversation about the importance of authenticity in musical performances for example, in one sense, has nothing to do with Spanish.  It just happens to be that we agree that the only way we're going to talk about music is in Spanish.  No stilted arbitrary "Look, look! See Spot run" or "today we're going to turn to Chapter 3 and talk about what clothes to wear in the morning."  In fact, during our informal sessions, we used no books other than a dictionary, and we talked very little about grammar. Instead we were both actively engaged in a conversation of mutual interest.

One-to-One is a Scalable Model

So, if two people were to share a common interest in a work project, they would already have the context and content of the conversation. Now, can we add language to it?  Can we say, "I need you two to solve this work-related problem, and oh by the way, one of you only speaks French so you’ll have to do all your communicating in French?"

So how is this method of language learning scalable?

1) It isn't limited to people with instructional capabilities. If everyone of us can be a teacher as well as a learner, here's a wonderful example of it happening.

2) It can be applied to any situation so long as both individuals see a shared value in having the conversation.

3)  It leads to higher performance as the choice of people increases dramatically and we are able to get just the right people matched up with just the right jobs, roles and teams.

IF we really are living in a global economy or a global existence where our location doesn't matter so much anymore and our work is more conversationally related, more idea related, then here is an opportunity, if not a need, to be able to communicate more effectively.  Think of the richness of our experiences and our ability to communicate if we were all acquiring the ideas and concepts that come with using words or phrases that do not have equivalents in other languages...words like gestalt, zeitgeist, schadenfreude, or phrases like joie de vivre, crème de la crème, or c'est la vie which English speakers have adopted to convey ideas that were not originally part of the language.

So here's what I’ve learned from my recent language learning experiences and want to leave you with:

• Words are a means to an end, and the end goal is the ability to effectively communicate our ideas, concepts and opinions.  Therefore, it is all about semantics, meaning, and common understanding.
• Phrases, sayings, references are key to conveying meaning.
• If a common language is removed from the requirements of choosing team members, this dramatically increases the ability to find “just the right people to pair up or to have on a high performance team.
• Language helps us learn more about each other, broadens our awareness of other cultures, models, metaphors, stories, and perspectives.
• Common understanding leads to less conflict from misunderstandings.
• Almost anyone can be a language instructor in this model since there are very limited teaching or language skills needed.
• Authentic conversation, relevant to all involved, is key to language acquisition.

Unfortunately for you I’m just warming up on this overall topic of languages, learning, and living, so stay tuned for more of what you’ve come to expect from OCOT: unexpected paths that lead to great discoveries!

Happiness is the Snowflake Effect on Spaghetti Sauce

As Erik Duval, my fellow "snowflake" knows all too well from my incessant ramblings over the years, I’m of the sincere belief that the purpose of life is happiness.  By this I mean happiness or joy of the very deep, profound kind: experiencing great joy in your own life and living your life to help others to experience great joy in their's.  So while recently watching TED Talks, I was intrigued by a talk from 2004 called  “What can we learn from spaghetti sauce” by  Malcolm Gladwell on finding happiness with spaghetti sauce.  Malcolm’s talk is about his long standing fascination and respect for the work of Howard Moskowitz, a world renowned expert in “psychophysics” and author of Selling Blue Elephants. 

I found the whole thing to be a fabulous example of the Snowflake Effect.  Here's an excellent use of 17 minutes and 42 seconds of your valuable time.

In Malcolm’s description of what he gets from Howard’s work, he noted for example how Howard has been instrumental in changing people’s thinking in the food and beverage industry. Prior to Howard’s interventions and insistence with the food and beverage industry, “everyone was looking for universals”, “looking for one way to treat all of us”, “something to please all of us”, “finding the rules that govern all of us”, and being surprised or puzzled when they failed to be successful in doing so.

These are very similar to the questions Erik and I are raising in our focus on the Snowflake Effect. Why it is that we seem to live in a world designed for sameness when we live in a world inhabited by unique "snowflakes"?  In Malcolm’s estimation, the biggest change in science in recent years has been “the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability”.  Obviously you’ll need to listen to Malcolm’s TED talk to understand the context, (one of my ulterior motives here), and I ‘d also highly recommend listening to Howard himself, such as in this interview of Howard by Phil Windley on Technometria.

To me, Malcolm was articulating a great example of the Snowflake Effect on spaghetti sauce, science, and coffee.  The reason I think Malcolm is so passionate about happiness and Howard’s work (he has been writing and talking about his hero consistently for many years) is summed up in his closing line in this TED talk where he explains that he thinks the most beautiful lesson of Howard Moskowitz is “that by embracing the diversity of human beings we will find a surer way to true happiness.”  Couldn’t have said it better myself, Malcolm!  This is why Erik and I are so passionately pursuing a better understanding and awareness of the Snowflake Effect.

World Languages: Going Colorblind?

"Maps courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps used with permission"

In case you find it as interesting as I did, here is the list (according to www.geographic.org) of the top ten most popular languages in the world. See the map above and this full list of the top 50 languages.

1. Mandarin	(1120 Million)
2. English	(480M)
3. Spanish	(332M)
4. Arabic	(235M)
5. Bengali	(189M)
6. Hindi	(182M)
7. Russian	(180M)
8. Portuguese	(170M)
9. Japanese         10. German	(125M) (98M)

** note this list was updated Oct.1 to correct errors in list tabulation that omitted Spanish!  Apologies for confusion and thanks Kean for correcting!

As is often the case with these kinds of lists and large scale estimations, we need to keep in mind that there are many different ways of counting and measuring things, such as the amount of people who speak a given language. Do you only count the first or native language?  Do you group dialects together?  What constitutes fluency? To prove my point, I've picked two other equally interesting lists of language by population that you can find here and here. No doubt there are many more to be found by simply searching online.

What these lists and maps don't show us is how these languages are spreading throughout the world based on both the movement of people from their country of birth to other countries for work or through marriage for example, as well as the spread of languages via people learning new ones, organizations setting up offices, factories, and other operations around the world, etc. 

In the next 25 years or so, especially with the augmentation and acceleration of language-based technology and translation, I wonder if we are headed for a world that is "colorblind" when it comes to languages, and the need for these maps becomes somewhat obsolete?

Loving Lexicographical Learning

Related to my theme of languages, but through pure serendipitous discovery via my addiction to watching TED Talks, check out this TED talk by Erin McKean on Redefining the Dictionary.

I LOVE this lady and her TED Talk for several reasons:

• As much as anyone, she’s in charge of the English language.
• She loves words and so do I.
• She gets to call herself a lexicographer, which as she explains also lets her say things like lexicographical which is a double dactyl like higgledy piggledy.
• Her desire to be a word fisherman rather than policeman, so she “… can go throw her net out and see what she can drag up from the bottom of the sea.”
• Her great sense of humor and ebullient presentation style.
• Her wonderful irreverence towards what makes a word “official” or “proper”, good or bad. Instead she focuses on what is useful for communicating.
• Her focus on inclusion rather than exclusion.
• Her appreciation and support for neologizing, which is the invention of new words and something I’m all too fond of doing!
• An entire presentation without ONE bullet point or text slide!  I’m inspired!

This is DEFINITELY worth 16 minutes and 02 seconds of your precious time!

Erin also maintains several blogs that are also worth checking out.  See her bio info below for links to a few of them and then go from there.

And if you liked this presentation, you probably will enjoy her great Slideshare presentation on “If Language Weren’t a Commons”.

If Language Weren't a Commons ...

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: isummit08)

From her bio on the TED site:

Why you should listen to her:

Much to Erin McKean's delight, her job as editor in chief of the Oxford American Dictionary involves living in a constant state of research. McKean searches high and low -- from books to blogs, newspapers to cocktail parties, The New Scientist to Entertainment Weekly -- for new words, new meanings for old words, or signs that once-favored terms have fallen out of use. ("Information Superhighway," anyone?) And it's clear that she relishes the hunt.

McKean is also the editor of the language quarterly Verbatim ("language and linguistics for the layperson since 1974") as well as the author of multiple books, including That's Amore and the entire Weird and Wonderful Words series. All that, and she maintains multiple blogs, too: Erin is the keen observationalist behind A Dress a Day and Dictionary Evangelist.

"Ms. McKean is part of the next wave of top lexicographers who have already or may soon take over guardianship of the nation's language, and who disprove Samuel Johnson's definition of a lexicographer as 'a harmless drudge.'"

The New York Times

View Erin McKean's Profile

Coming to our Senses

If you have been kind enough to listen to me or read some of my entries on OCOT or my other writings, you may have correctly concluded that I suffer from a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Contrary to popular opinion (and even some “experts”), ADD is not about a LACK of “attention” but rather, an excess of it! 

And Now a Word from My Symptom

Those of us with ADD are unable to pay attention to just ONE thing at a time and are instead forced to pay attention to every sensory input all of the time. We try to make sense of things when EVERY thing is demanding our focus. All of our sensory inputs are dealt with equally and simultaneously. 

What we can’t do, for example, is turn down the volume on every sound except the one we want to focus on. We can't tune out the movements we see around us or choose not feel every input through our skin. In other words, we can only pay attention to EVERYTHING, all at the same time and all at equal levels.

I’m one of the fortunate few with ADD who, long before I knew what it even was, began to develop  coping skills and techniques to survive with these traits. They didn’t seem like anything special to me.  For the longest time, I just assumed everyone else was having the same experience.  And somehow I managed to start turning these “bugs” into features that have enabled me to be as successful as I am and to do what I do. If everything demands your attention and you find everything interesting, then life is very full!

If you are interested in learning more about ADD, look at some of these  alternative descriptions.  And on the topic of attention itself, I know of no better source than that of my dear friend and fellow ADDer Marcia Conner and her Ageless Learner site’s section on Attention and on How Adults Learn.

But now, back to the topic at hand (see what I mean?!)

It All ADDs Up

So why are my ADD tendencies relevant here?  Because its a way to introduce a meta theme that I'd like to address on OCOT. Just as my own natural sensory interface presents challenges, so too are the challenges of developing human/machine sense-based interfaces. Over a series of postings, I'd like to address:

• The use of our human senses as ways through which we communicate and interact with machines, computers, and technology, and ourselves. 
• Other interrelated topics both individually and as a collective whole. 

I’ll do my best to stay "on target" as I wander around "off course" and divide my pursuit of this trend toward more natural and sense-based interfaces into several separate posts. I see it playing a critical role in the future I am both designing and imagining.  

The Missing Link?

Interestingly, this whole topic of natural or sense-based interfaces does not seem to have any common singular term or definition. Or perhaps I just have not found it and some of you can point me to it?  I’m aware of categories such as:

• HCI  Human Computer Interaction/interface
• HMI Human Machine Interface/interaction
• User Interface

But these all seem to be differentiated based on interactions with specific types of technology, computers only, or segmented into individual human senses, such as touch with the use of haptic interfaces and technology with tactile feedback . And I can find definitions of HCI, HMI such as this one from Wikipedia that describe them as:

“...the 'layer' that separates a human that is operating a machine from the machine itself.”

However, my interest is in the larger meta theme of using all human senses and eliminating the “separation layer” between machines and ourselves so that they are invisible and we can directly connect and communicate through our senses. I’m want to ensure that we are taking the more holistic and inclusive view of the use of ALL of our senses, not only because we have so many that are being underused, but also because it is often the combination of multiple senses that make up our best experiences and interactions.

Making Sense of and Better Use of Our Senses

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll address the meta theme of sense-based and more natural interfaces through a variety of posts, podcasts, and perhaps some interviews over the next few months. I’ll alternate between the big picture view of the use of senses in general and the use of them collectively, then look at the use of individual senses such as touch and feel, audio, visual, and so on. I will also cover the use of combinations of senses for better, more innovative designs and solutions for interacting with technology...and each other. Add to this the coverage of tools, technology, and examples of real world applications of sensory-based and natural interfaces and I think we’ll have a lot of fun and learn a lot in the process. These posts will be intermixed with other topics on a regular basis and spread over many months for as long as my and your interest continues to be high.

Oh!  Look at that cool blue butterfly that just flew by!  Hmm, I wonder what kind of plane that is flying overhead?  Now what was I saying?  Oh yeah, senses, interfaces, human interaction... 

Hang on, fasten your seatbelts low and tight, we’re about to take off on what should prove to be a fun and very "off course", very "on target" sensory journey!