simiantransmission - Tumblr blog

[simiantransmission]

Most of the frameworks for happiness conclude that there are four things required: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (meaning the depths of relationships) and being part of something bigger than yourself.

Tony Hsieh, Zappos founder

[simiantransmission]

We should distinguish technology in three forms: tools, direct instructions (like blueprints and IP), and process knowledge. The third is most important: Process knowledge is hard to write down as an instruction: you can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but absent cooking experience, it’s hard to make a great dish.

Dan Wang, 2019 Letter

[simiantransmission]

A lot of people think smart cities have technology at their core, but they really don't. It's kind of a mix between arts and culture. Technology is a component of it, but it's design, it's communication, collaboration, it's social programs. It's everything we think of as an intelligent city.

Karl Allen-Muncey, Director, Halifax Civic Innovation Outpost

[simiantransmission]

My goal is to build a company that is not dependent upon me and outlives me. The situation between the two companies and how my time is spent forces me immediately to create frameworks that are scalable, that are decentralised, that don’t require me being in every single detail … That is true of any organisation that scales beyond the original founding moment.

Jack Dorsey, Co-founder & CEO of Twitter and Square

[simiantransmission]

Because rideshare grew city by city at Uber, it led to an entrepreneurial team structure where each city had a General Manager (GM) who served as the de facto CEO of the city, acting like a mini-startup in the context of the larger organization. Surge pricing and driver incentives were first manually implemented by local teams with SQL queries and spreadsheets, and only later widely implemented in code by the software teams at headquarters. When I first joined Uber, each product team was also set up to be full stack, without dependencies into other teams, allowing them to build fast and iterate quickly to solve challenges. This kind of mindset — everyone’s the CEO of their own mini-startup unit — is key to fast cycles of innovation.

Andrew Chen, Andreessen Horowitz

[simiantransmission]

Everything everywhere wants you to think it’s 'building community'... But community isn’t always good. Sometimes, community is excellent and you make friends and memories and learn things about the world. Other times, community is a toxic clique whose members don’t do much except jealously police who’s in and who’s out, because they’re broken people with nothing to offer besides judgment or their own emptiness.

Fyre In the Hole, SF Weekly

[simiantransmission]

Building Cultures of Innovation

I went along to the Project Connect event at GridAKL on Monday night, with Aithan Shapira, founder of Making To Think, who works with organisations to help them create cultures of innovation for a rapidly changing future.

As always, it was an excellent event with plenty of stimulating takeaways. Nice work to the team behind it — AUT’s Martin Bell, Hal Josephson, and the US Embassy’s Mike Cousins. MC duties for the evening went to Anthem’s Vincent Heeringa who ably corralled a healthy Monday night crowd.

Content-wise, Aithan hit home on a tonne of points.

First off, uncertainty, unpredictability, and vulnerability are the new literacy. And even if you’re doing all the right things, but not looking around you with a culture of curiosity, you can still get it wrong.

Aithan spoke also to the fact that ‘soft skills’, not coding skills, are now the biggest skill gap that employers are grappling with (supported just this month by new survey data announced by LinkedIn).

These soft skills include:

Cultural intelligence

Curiosity

Customer Focus

Willingness to Learn

Emotional Intelligence

What really resonated for me though was Aithan’s approach using artist-centric frameworks to evaluate the process, structure and human potential of organisations.

First off, Aithan referenced a number of studies that linked improved performance in a number of different fields to incorporating some form of arts practice into your life, eg the more accomplished a scientist or engineer is (such as Nobel Prize winner), the more likely they are to have an artistic hobby.

The research argues that science as it is typically studied, practiced and taught focuses more on linear and logical thinking. Art, on the other hand, thrives on other systems — kinetic and associative thinking.

The data here suggests that artistic engagement develops talents necessary to being a more creative scientist, and Aithan extends that argument further to business and innovation more broadly, again in my mind right on the money.

Next, Aithan then looked at how businesses can apply culture learnings from the way artist communities approach creativity, collaboration, and innovation.

The example used here was the community of artists surrounding Jackson Pollack in the late 1940s with his transition during 1948–49 from his earlier style of painting to his now iconic abstract works.

Aithan looked at examples of works not just from Pollock himself, but also the artists in the collective around him, and examined common elements and themes as the artists made a step change in their styles and approaches.

The key insight here was that Pollock’s art community gave its members permission to have their style, but also to evolve and change freely.

The lesson for organisations looking to create cultures of innovation is that you have to give your people permission to be who they are AND the permission to change.

Not only that, be willing to throw it all away in order to create something new, as Jackson Pollock did.

This was a key take-away from Aithan when discussing how we can tackle the culture prevalent in many organisations today, where often we are afraid to make mistakes when trying to innovate.

The question of how to deal with backlash or resistance to innovation, or worse to failure when attempting to innovate, was something that came up both during the session Q&A, and in social media comments afterwards.

Here, Aithan’s advice was again solid, suggesting that in the long term, the best approach to changing the culture is to start with changing our own practices and attitudes first.

Innovation is not about changing what others see. It’s about changing how you see — not how you see the world, but how you see yourself.

Excellent evening all round with Aithan, and it reaffirmed my view that the success principles around innovation cultures are the same regardless of scale.

These principles — a healthy diversity of thinking and perspectives, the intersection of arts and tech/science as a key enabler to drive creativity, the need for an insatiable curiosity, and the requirement to have freedom to safely experiment and tinker — are essential whether you are trying to drive change as an individual, or as a large corporate. And equally as important whether you’re looking to create a vibrant coworking community, or a larger scale innovation ecosystem.

It’s all the same principles, the only change is the scale at which you apply it.

[simiantransmission]

We plant the seeds of resilience in the ways we process negative events.  After spending decades studying how people deal with setbacks, psychologist Martin Seligman found that three P’s can stunt recovery; Personalisation - the belief that we are at fault; Pervasiveness - the belief that an event will affect all areas of our life; and Permanence - the belief that the aftershocks of the event will last forever. Recognising that negative events aren’t personal, pervasive, or permanent makes people less likely to get depressed and better able to cope.

Sheryl Sandberg, from  Option B

[simiantransmission]

In a way, happiness is other people. It’s the connections we build and the relationships we foster. They create us, and they continue to shape us.

Zat Rana, on The Subtle Art of Connecting With Anyone

[simiantransmission]

“Authoritarian leaders definitely helped Taiwan, South Korea, and many Southeast Asian and Latin American countries to facilitate their economic take-offs. But China is now long past the take-off point,” he said. China was facing the “middle income trap” stage of newly industrialised economies, and to escape it meant remaining open to democracy, he said. “The correlation [so far] is 100 per cent: democratise to some extent or you don’t become a developed economy. China, under Xi Jinping, is the ultimate test case challenging this empirical historical record.”

David Shambaugh, China expert at George Washington University

[simiantransmission]

Many debaters argue that reducing income inequality is a good idea not merely in an AI-dominated future, but also today.  Although the main argument tends to be a moral one, there's also evidence that greater equality makes democracy work better: when there's a large, well-educated middle class, the electorate is harder to manipulate, and it's tougher for small numbers of people or companies to but undue influence over the government. A better democracy can in turn enable a better-managed economy that's less corrupt, more efficient and faster growing, ultimately benefiting essentially everyone.

Max Tegmark, from Life 3.0, Being Human In the Age of Artificial Intelligence

[simiantransmission]

We all collectively see cities as about friction: good friction and bad friction... Good friction is serendipity, it’s opportunity, it’s diversity, it’s seeing 40 different nationalities on the subway as you commute in the morning. Bad friction is congestion, it’s pollution.

Dan Doctoroff, Sidewalk Labs

[simiantransmission]

“Breakthrough technology results from two distinct activities that generally require different environments—invention and innovation. Invention is typically the work of scientists and researchers in laboratories, like the transistor, developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1940s. Innovation is an invention put to commercial use, like the transistor radio, sold by Texas Instruments in the 1950s. Seldom do the two activities occur successfully under the same roof. They tend to thrive in opposite conditions; while competition and consumer choice encourage innovation, invention has historically prospered in labs that are insulated from the pressure to generate profit.”

Google X and the Science of Radical Creativity

[simiantransmission]

Life sucks and it’s okay. Life is great, and it’s okay. Life goes up and it’s okay; life goes down and it’s okay... If we can instill a sense of resilience in people, we mitigate suffering.”

Jerry Colonna, from This Man Makes Founders Cry

[simiantransmission]

The people we surround ourselves with either raise or lower our standards. They either help us to become the best version of ourselves or encourage us to become lesser versions of ourselves. We become like our friends. No man becomes great on his own. No woman becomes great on her own. The people around them help to make them great. We all need people in our lives who raise our standards, remind us of our essential purpose, and challenge us to become the best version of ourselves.

Matthew Kelly, The Rhythm of Life

[simiantransmission]

Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, the great urbanist Jane Jacobs was among the first to identify cities' diverse economic and social structures as the true engine of growth.

Richard Florida, The Great Reset

[simiantransmission]

New York's continued success - its uncanny knack for renewing itself again and again - is based on the diversity of its industries and its ability to attract the best and brightest across a wide range of fields.

Richard Florida, The Great Reset