• Original primitive societies
• Slavery – I owe you, so you do what I want.
• Feudalism – I owe your land, so part of what you produce is mine.
• Capitalism – I just pay you to work with my tools, so everything you produce belongs to me.
• Socialism – that “owner” guy appointed me to decide and manage, you still work with somebody else’s tools somebody else’s material and produce somebody else’s product. And I decide how the loot is distributed. Also, I know exactly what I want you to do.
• Knowledge society – I was appointed by the “owner” guy to manager, but I have no clue what to do. You are professional, it’s your job. I’ll just share the loot with you if you do a good job and I am in the mood.
• ??? What’s next???

No, really? Most of our conversations stop here, at the knowledge society. Whenever a question arises, wht’s next, I usually give the speech about “We’ll know when we’ll get there.” True enough. But you know what? I suspect some companies are already there…

There… In the…

Discovery Economy.

I’ve got to this conclusion considering management techniques for the software development industry. Being on the cutting edge, it’s no surprise that this industry produced tons of different controversial management techniques. Waterfall, rad, scrum, xp to name just a few… There are proponents of these techniques, there are opponents of them, but in the end everybody’s question is: “Do they work?” And the answer is: “It depends.”

It depends on the project you manage. It may be a project where everybody knows what to do, it’s just a matter of time and effort. That’s pretty much industrial project, where manager kknows what to do and can measure the outcome. Such project are easy to manage.

There are projects that require domain knowledge. There managers often does not know what to do, but the people do. Naturally, it’s harder to manage, but still doable. You get tasks and estimates form the people, you mange, slap then into a Gantt chart, and you are there.

Unfortunately, I see more and more projects where you have to awe your market which each release, and if you don’t… well… your loss. Do you think Palm, Blackberry, Gmail, or iPod/iPhone could have been managed in one of the ways described above? Not a chance. The problem is, to create such product you need a team where not only managers don’t have any idea of what to do, neither does the file and rank. They just have ability to produce it, but not the ability to describe it before they produced it. How do you manage such projects?

To understand the difference, let’s compare it to a fairy tale.

Once there was a prince. He dreamed of a princess locked in the highest room of the highest tower guarded by a fire-breathing dragon… Now, how would he proceed?

In the industrial society, the prince would hire a knight, who goes exactly where prince tells him to go and does exactly what the prince tells him to do. Will it result in a frred princess? Well… that does not work in the fairy tales, not to mention the real life. Neither do industrial socialistic methods in the modern society.

In the knowledge society, the prince would hire a knight, who supposedly knows where to go and what to do. Think Shrek. Yes, it work as long as you have somebody who knows where to go and what to do, details delicately omitted in the “Shrek” movie.

But what if you have no clue even where the castle is? Well, welcome to the discovery economy. Now the prince have to get in the saddle and spend days, weeks, months trying to find at least a clue, where to look for his result. He has to slay irrelevant dragons, converse with ignorant wizards, travel from town to town all over the world collecting pieces of data that will eventually lead him to the princess.

Applying older management techniques to the discovery economy

Clearly, that does not work well for the Far Away Kingdom management and accounting. So, naturally, when faced with failed deliverables, the Far Away Managers come with the management techniques.

Hey, Prince, can you, please, specify your itinerary, every day’s points of departure and arrival, all the dragons, you plan to slay, all the wizards, you plan to converse to and what exact answers do you plan to hear from them??? Yeah, right. If you’d know the answers, why would you need to talk to them in the first place?

Do you see?

More and more companies have to predictably produce outcomes that the world have never seen before. And no existing management techniques work to deliver that.

That’s Discovery Economy.

That’s the economy where every version or a release you have to produce something that will make jaws fall to the floor, and if you don’t – beware!

Granted, if you apply industrial age management techniques, some jaws will fall to the floor… because of yawning. And that’s not what you want. You want an awe…  You want inspire, shock, impress…

You want Google, Prius, iPhone… Can you do that treating your people like a canon meat on early XX century assembly line? I don’t think so.

Ok, it was too long already, so I’ll leave you thinking about what you already read about. Talk to you next time!

Another fair warning: Marxism consists of two parts: socioeconomic model, which is still good and valid, and political… stuff, which was put on top of it and, frankly, never was good or valid. I am only talking about the socioeconomic model. Also, if you look at it, you’ll find that most of it does not belong to Carl Marx at all, he actually collected a number of ideas and theories developed by other, still very respectable people, starting with Adam Smith and Charles Darwin.

Under the hood Marxism is a Darwinian theory properly applied to human societies. One paragraph essence of Marxism is quite simple:

There is food, there are those who eat it.
There is no food, there are no those who eat it.

Period.

Here is an informal one page version:

• The history of human kind can be presented as production and redistribution of food.
• Environment, resources and technological level (production forces) define who and how produces the food (the worker class and mode of production).
• Who and how produces the food (the worker class and mode of production) defines who and how takes it away from them (the exploiters class and production relations).
• These parts (production forces, class of workers and class of exploiters, mode of production and production relations) define the social system.
• Example from biology:
  • Beavers built a dam on a creek that flooded the meadow nearby.
    • Marsh plants began to grow. Mosquitoes began to multiply.
    • Mosquitoes are frogs’ food, so frogs began to multiply.
    • Herons, bitterns and other marsh birds eating frogs built nests around.
    • Otters stealing birds eggs came in.
  • Then something happened to the dam. Maybe beavers got eaten, or a bear accidentally broke it, does not matter what. The water left.
    • Marsh plants dried out and died.
    • Mosquitoes disappeared.
    • Frogs died or hopped away.
    • Marsh birds flown away and did not return next year.
  • But:
    • Meadow grasses began to grow, including those that bring grain.
    • Mice and other small rodents came in and began to multiply, eating that grasses and grains.
    • Foxes and owls from nearby forest came in hunting the mice.
  • See? There is food, there are those who eat it. There is no food, these is no those who eat it. Simple, isn’t it? Marsh-marsh plants-mosquitoes-frogs-herons-otters is one “social system”, meadow-grass-mice-foxes-owls is another. That’s it.
• Now let’s get example from the human history:
  • In 16th Century England land was the most important resource, and most efficient use of land was to grow food.
    • Owners of the land wanted others to grow food on it.
    • Hence, a lot of people could support themselves and their families by being peasants. There were “jobs” for peasants, there were peasants.
    • A few other people were able to support themselves by owning (on behave of the King) the land, where peasants worked, and hence taking away food from peasants for themselves. Again, there were “jobs” for landlords, there were landlords.
    • The system was: land to grow food – peasants – landlords. There was land to grow food, there were peasants. There were peasants, there were landlords.
    • Landlords cannot survive without peasants, peasants would be very happy to live without feudal and other gangsters. Land to grow was the reason for peasants. Peasants were the reason for landlords.
  • In 16-17th Century England, it become more profitable to keep sheep on the same land, so the land for peasants disappeared.
    • Hence, peasants were thrown from the land they used to grow food. Less “jobs” for peasants resulted in less peasants.
    • Landlords mostly stopped exploiting peasants-growers, and become wool suppliers with voluntarily employed shepherds.
    • No land to grow – no peasants. No peasants – no medieval landlords.
    • Land for sheep – sheep and shepherds. Sheep and shepherds – wool producers.
  • At the same time, England started to produce a lot of wool textile. That’s why keeping sheep become more profitable than growing food.
    • Peasants, who lost their land, become vagabonds. A lot of them (~200 thousands, with the whole British population 3-3.5 million people) were hanged on crossroads for that, the rest become workers at manufactories, producing textile, and sailors, delivering textile to overseas markets.
    • Again, jobs for workers and sailors appeared, workers and sailors multiplied. There are jobs, there are people.
    • A few people become able to support themselves as owners of manufactories. Again, there are “jobs” for capitalists, there are capitalists. When you have a lot of workers producing textile, there are those who own manufactories and can support themselves by using workers labor.
    • The social system become: steam machines to power manufactories and looms to produce textile – workers – capitalists (manufactories owners). Technology created workers. Workers created capitalists.

Some will argue that it’s capitalists who created workers. However, imagine two identical islands, both with wool supply and textile mill. One island has workers but no mill owners, another has mill owners but no workers. Which one do you think will work?

Also, imagine yourself on the second island. You have the money, would you buy a mill? A reminder, there are no workers on that island. The answer is you won’t, because you cannot use it to produce money. The workers are the resource you need as a capitalist to make money. If there is no resource, there is no income. Hence, the main Marxists point: technology creates workers, who use this technology. Technology and workers create those who benefit from it.

You may use some euphemisms like “technology makes possible to be a worker” or “availability of technology and workers make it possible to produce textile”, but in the end you will say the same thing, just in a less clear way. As I am not in the business of dimming other people minds, I don’t use those complicated vague sentences.

Here is more formal definition of it:

• The food (food and survival essentials, like shelter and fuel in cold countries) is the key to human history and social processes. Everything else matters only as something that’s convertible to food (including being part of food production or distribution).
  Example: Hollywood movies are convertible to food by selling tickets and copies on DVDs.
• Human history and social development can be described in the terms of (a) making and (b) redistributing the food (and food equivalents).
• Redistribution of food became a force in social systems at the time when productivity allowed to take part of the food from the producer, without dooming him and his family to the death by starvation. That’s the same time when humans moved from hunters and gatherers societies to more complex social systems based on domesticated crops and animals. That part of the produced food is called economic surplus.
• Every society since that was divided into two classes of people, where the word “class” is used in the original taxonomy meaning – large group with the same characteristics.
• These two classes of people are those who produce food, and those who redistribute economic surplus in their own favor.
• Everything involved with creation of food is called productive forces, including resources, technology, and food (or food equivalent) producers. Everything involved in redistribution of food is called production relations.
• Productive forces determine production relations, not the other way around.
  Simply put, you cannot use slave labor to create spaceships, they just won’t fly.
• Productive forces, especially level of technology, define how we produce food – production method. The way we produce food (production method) defines who are the food producers (the workers class).
  Example: if you top technology is hoe, your food producers are farmers or slaves, who use hoes on the land to grow food. That kind of a food producer does not need an education (hoe is a very simple tool), can produce food from a really early age and until he is alive, and only needs to maintain himself at the basic survival and procreation level (the second part is essential for the social stability, or you will run out of hoe users in one generations, and then you’ll run out of food, and that will be the end of your society)
• Who are the food producers defines how the food (economic surplus) is taken away from them. The way food taken away from food producers for redistribution defines the second class of the society.
  Example: If the product require some expensive equipment, which can be operated by relatively uneducated workforce (high school skills top), your producers are industrial workers. Owning them won’t bring any advantage, because you have surplus of available industrial workers, hence slave owner would not have any advantage in such economy. Owning large pieces of land would not result in any advantage, because factories only require a limited space, so medieval feudal won’t have any advantage in such economy. Owning the factory becomes a key for production, and hence capitalist who owns the factory has the advantage and can redistribute surplus in his own favor.
• Again, environment, resources and, most importantly, technological level define who and how produces the food (and food equivalents). Who and how produces food, defines who and how redistributes that food.
• These two classes define the social system. Slaves and slave owners in slavery societies. Peasants and feudal landlords in feudal societies. Workers and capitalists in early capitalism. Organized workers and management in socialism (or “industrial society”, if “socialism” sounds too scary for you).
• Social system is how we produce food and how we redistribute food. Another equivalent definition is who and how produces food and who and how redistributes it in their own favor. That’s it.
• Final point is that those who benefit from the system want to keep it even after production forces and technology are developed beyond the point when the old production relations work. Hence any change in social formation follows the same pattern: old relations start failing to produce the results, until finally everything blows up in some kind of unpleasant upheaval ending up with the new production relationships that fit technology level, production forces and the new production method.
• Political part of classic Marxism claims that it’s a revolution, however, we know now that it may take different forms, including some peaceful ones, albeit still quite painful like a deep economic crisis resulting in significant changes to the laws (sounds familiar?)

Frankly, that all, folks.

Oh, yeah, and of course, those who produce food don’t like most of it taken away, and those who take it away, like that a lot. As you can guess, that sort of creates a conflict, which defines a lot of social processes and what’s happening in the society. In the end, human history and social processes can be viewed as one huge fight over the food and who eats it. You see why I say that Marxism is essentially a Darwinian theory applied to human societies?

I’ve seen reviews of this book starting with “if you have no clue about statistics…” Unfortunately, that’s a lot of people, even worse, a lot of people who have no clue about statistics think otherwise. If you fall into this category, this book is a good read, which will expose for you a lot of interesting things about what you can and what you cannot do when your data are influenced by a chance. Even if you do, but you have let your knowledge get rusty, this book would be a good reminder.

Also, the actual material of this almost 500 pages book can be delivered in about 20-30 pages, which is a very good ratio for the most US published books.

However, I still did not like this book, specifically, for two reasons.

First of all, the author (according to his own testament) is not a professional mathematician, but software developer. That’s ok by itself, but as a result, while he has a good idea what he is talking about, he occasionally makes mistakes or uses completely wrong approaches. For example, in one of chapters he introduces a device to get a random number between 0 and 11 (kind of roulette) and then instead of giving the distribution this device provides, he expects the reader to assume that (which is one of huge flaws when working with data samples) and even worse, to “prove” it without actual data — a certain “F” in any “Statistics 101″ class, and for a good reason.

Second, his style is not that conductive to learning, even if you can recognize when he misses the target. For example, to explain “black swans”, he gives an example with the same device, when “the arrow does not stop but breaks off and hit you in the eye”. The “eye” part is certainly over the board and an amateur educator may think it helps to remember, while it actually hurts digesting the material.

COMMUNISM! That is probably the thought of those who remember the Cold War. And they are right. Such a system is popularly called “communism.” Let’s clarify one minor detail first. There has really been no such thing as communism throughout history. The countries of the communistic block practiced a social order known as “socialism.” OK, maybe a communistic flavor of socialism.

Socialism is characterized by an administrative hierarchical power structure to control the economy. This sector is comprised of people who don’t own anything, yet control everything. Whole countries and significant parts of the world were deep red merely twenty years ago. You may wonder, why am I talking about something that’s gone in history?

The answer is that I was not talking about communistic countries in the first place. Look at the description again … does it remind you of something else? Something you see every day here and now? It sure does.

I am talking about large American corporations.

If you have any doubts, read the first passage again and see for yourself.

Shocking, isn’t it? Russia was red, but it seems that America today is covered with red pockmarks everywhere you look. But maybe it’s not so bad, is it? Let us recall why it is that we did not like communism. Of course, there was that plainly evident fact that the Communists were strong, and we wanted the whole world, not merely half of it. They wanted peace, and in their language peace and world are the same word … but that’s not what our mass media said we were worried about. We were concerned with the system, right? So, what’s in the system that we did not like? Of course, there is an issue of human rights … although Pinochet in Chile, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and a few other dictators that we brought to power are not exactly champions of human rights (not to mention former CIA operatives Manuel Noriega from Panama and Osama bin Laden.) So, there should be something else that was the principal problem of communistic states. And actually, there was.

According to our beliefs, a socialistic/communistic economy is simply not efficient. Without free internal competition progress stagnates, productivity falls, and the whole thing heads straight for a disaster. People are simply not interested in performing in such a system. Hierarchical management systems bring biases into the goals and execution that are incompatible with the survival of the system and the prosperity of the people. With the complexity of the system up, control drops, and being a pet of your boss becomes more rewarding than really doing your job. More to that, soon the pets rather than the workers are getting promoted. In no time the guy on top is only good at being somebody’s pet and fighting off the competition, no longer good as a worker. Once it happens, the system is doomed. Which, as many Americans believe today, was confirmed about twenty years ago.

What is really puzzling for me is this: How is it that we think that communism is inefficient, yet still practice it every day inside our own businesses? How is it that we practice communism in large corporations – sometimes corporations the size of small countries – and still be surprised that they turn out inefficient, moronic, and don’t care about their employees or shareholders?

Granted, sometimes non-mercantile relationships work. An average atomic family with a mom, a dad and two kids lives in a perfect communism where common resources are shared by the members of the family. This is without counting who brought them in and without granting monetary rewards for helping each other … and it works great. As another example, if you own a small company with 10-20 employees, you control the system directly and everything is fine as well.

However, somewhere between 400 and 600 employees is where things start to get sour. It may also be said that somewhere around the fourth level of management, businesses go through a significant change and arrive at the worst. It is almost like at a certain number of employees, the negative effects of communism in the corporate structure grows out of control, and then we get irresponsible managers, favoritism, and a system that goes astray.

Does this magic number of 600 people, or four levels of management, remind you of something? Yes, the level of the organizational complexity that we talked about in previous chapters. In fact, the systematic negative effects of communism are exactly the way in which the drop in control due to complexity shows up in organizations. That is what’s happening in large American corporations all over the country.

Russians were red. They’ve changed their minds. Our economy is covered now with the red pockmarks of large corporations. We need to do something about it. We need to change the way large corporations are governed and managed. We need a cure for this mini-communism. Fortunately, we do not have to demolish our whole political system to achieve that in the manner that Russians had to do. We can do that one company at a time. We can heal and turn around one company at a time. But we need to do that soon … because our shirts are at stake.

You see, his book is more than 500 pages long. I just made an experiment, and one page requires almost exactly 3 minutes of my time to read it attentively, in fact, even a bit more. Yes, sure, speed reading would help, but that’s not what you want reading a really good book. 500 pages to 3 minutes make 1500 minutes to read it just once cover to cover. If you floundered arithmetic classes in your elementary school, let me tell you, that’s 25 hours of your time. Or, more than 3 work days of intensive work without interruptions, not even bathroom breaks! In reality, that’s more like a week of work.

It’s really odd, but somehow the American public treats buying books the same way as buying beef, pork or potatoes – by the pound. Somehow, the thicker the book is, the better it sells and the higher price you can demand. Isn’t it odd?

Think about it. A 500 pages book requires a work week of my time. I don’t know about your income, so lets assume something average. According to the U.S. Census Bureau average (mean) personal income for both sexes age 25-64 is about $44K, or about $844/week. Tony Robbins’ book I mentioned above has a very moderate price of $16, but once you factor in the time you have to spend readings it, the cost of ownership goes up to $860. Really. $16 for the book and $844 for the time you spend reading it. That’s what an average employer pays to an average employee for a week of work. And you spend a week of work to read that book. That defines the real cost of the book.

Imagine that you can buy a book and magically instantly know everything that was in the book. Would it be worth $860? Still, when you buy a $16 book with 500 pages, that’s what your expectations are. Weird, isn’t it?

It’s odd, but when the public buys books by the pound, the publishers have no other way to go, but to comply and produce large books. The result? The market dominated by the “books by the pound”. The result? ROI (Return-On-Investment) for book readers falling down. The next result? Book reading is not treated socially as an attractive career proposition or real self-improvement.

If this trend will continue, the American public will become the least literate in the world (if it’s not already), and for good reason! It will be deprived of high quality literature by the invisible force of the market, so reading won’t bring the benefits anymore, it once did. Can something be done about it? I don’t know… When I write my books, I am conscious of readers’ time, and my books are on average 200 pages only. However, I can tell you first hand, if I’d want them to be successful, I’d have to beef them up at least twice or more before any established publisher will even consider it.

Geeze, Serge, as somebody who has two great colleges under the belt you sure should know better than mixing up privilege and right, legally, two quite different concepts.

I just disagree on focusing it on firearms theme. I don’t think that in “moron+gun” the problem is the gun. Just like in “moron+voting”, “moron+car”, “moron+alcohol” or even “moron+ability to procreate”.

“To the best of my knowledge
US is the only country in the world
where vacations are measured by hours.”

As usual I went to a Native Americans reservation La Push to the west of Seattle on Olympic Peninsula.

So, what about werewolves? Simple. There was a movie “Twilight” about a year ago. How I found later, based on a popular book series with the first one under the same title. Frankly, I did not read the book and I did not watch the movie either. AFAIK, some regular Hollywood vampire stuff. Although, I have to admit, there is enough twilight and mists in the area. Like this:

Or, this:

Of course, there was enough sun too:

And under the sun there are many more beautiful things to see, especially during the low tide:

Back to werewolves. In both the movie and the book, a small town Forks is the places where vampires live. Actually, that’s the closest place with a supermarket, so I was dropping by to shop and get the right kind of gas for the car. One hotel even has an ad: “Edward Cullen did not sleep here!”

Also, according to the book, nearby tribe of Native American were werewolves and enemies of vampires. For anybody local or visiting the place as often as I do, that’s a very clear hint: Quileute tribe believes it originated from wolves and La Push is their home.

The area heavily commercialize the movie popularity and on the way from Forks (and highway 101) to La Push, about 7 miles to each, near a small restaurant, store and gas station there is a road sign: “Treaty Line: No Vampires Beyond This Point!”

So, such a romantic place, and no vampires even in a New Moon:

In the Year 2000 the Matrix Has You!

While there is a much deeper truth in it, which I will talk about later, consider this circumstantial evidence for now: how often do you see pictures like that:

Or, like that:

And how often instead you see the pictures like that:

Really?