Lean from the Trenches

I have been on Lean/Agile project teams off and on for the last seven years. During that time I have met an assortment of Agile Gurus peddling their mantra, silver bullets, charlatanism garbed as expertise and other travesties to gullible clients desperate to go Agile. Very few had real experience taking projects to successful completion in the client's specific domain and to that extent a very limited appreciation for the challenges involved in doing so. Often the prescription provided to the project team required us all to struggle with force-fitting our problems into a solution that just did not mesh. We were warned of the dire consequences of not following due process- the Guru had coached hundreds of teams and knew what they were talking about.

The Scrum Master was left with the unpalatable job of evangelizing the mantra he or she did not find particularly credible or useful. The unenthusiastic team went through the motions of being Agile - shuffling their task cards around the board, reporting terse (and incoherent) status in daily stand-ups and playing Planning Poker on sprint planning day whose main draw was of course the free lunch. We were pseudo-Agile at best and completely divorced from process at worst. 

The metrics suggested we were getting a half-baked product without significant cost savings and the team was incredibly burned out from the high frequency of releases. We wondered about the great success stories that the Gurus talked about - why we were not able to replicate their recipe. When we re-grouped at project close to retrospect and self-flagellate, we did not come way with an epiphany that would serve us well on our next projects.

Coming from that background, I tend to be fairly skeptical about books that claim to teach how you can do Agile. I was ready to change my mind reading these lines in the foreword to Henrik Kniberg's Lean from the Trenches : "One beauty of this book's story is its complete lack of dogma. It is a story. A story of a project that had real troubles and addressed them with a small set of easily understood practices. Applying those practices required wisdom, patience, and persistence, which is why you can't just copy the story to fix your project". What a refreshing approach to writing about Lean !

As promised, the rest of the book takes you through the project life-cycle of a single project (as opposed to compiling a bunch of disjointed lessons learned/ experiences from projects completely unlike each other) and talks about what was tried and worked and what did not. Kniberg's tone is absolutely authentic - he has the conviction of someone who has lived in the trenches for a long a time and  truly knows the score. 

He addresses every single pain point that I have run into in the last seven years. Involving the customer and keeping them engaged, keeping different project teams in synch, handling bugs, not losing focus on the high level goal while delivering small chunks of the product, testing, WIP limits and backlog grooming among other things. Developers and testers will find their challenges addressed in significant detail.

While the practices  Kniberg and his team followed, come from a place of commonsense, there is a lot creativity and ingenuity involved in every one of them. You learn how to use a principle and adapt it effectively to your own situation. Readers like myself often know what does not work but we are not quite so sure about what does - Kniberg shows you how he and his team resolved challenges very similar to your own and that I found invaluable.

If you were to have only one book on Lean/Agile in your bookshelf, I would recommend this one. A dozen tomes on theory and best practices will do less for you than reading this amazingly well-written story about a real Agile project. I truly look forward to applying some of the lessons I learned from reading this book to the next Lean/Agile project I am on.

The Information Diet

I am so convinced the way we consume information is terrible for us that Clay Johnson had me on his side just by choosing to write a book on this subject - The Information Diet. Given my bias, I don't know that I can be the most dispassionate and objective reviewer. Ironically, I might be going exactly what Johnson cautions the reader against when it comes to consuming information - taking affirmation over information. That said, I highly recommend this book to believer and non-believer alike. If you consider that the filter bubble Google, Facebook et al are creating for us is in our best interest, this book is for you. If you want to break free, assert your autonomy and consume information in the raw sans spin, filter, churn or bias, this book is for you.

Johnson starts by describing his background and credentials for writing this book. He goes on to draw parallels between an unhealthy diet and its effects to the human body to lack of deliberation and consciousness in consuming information and its effects on our minds. Simply stated, Johnson wants us to evaluate our relationship with information consumption and get on a fitness regimen so we can work ourselves out of our mental obesity. He paraphrases Micheal Pollan's exhortation on diet "Eat. Not too much.Mostly plants" as "Consume Deliberately. Take information over affirmation"

Johnson recommends an Infovegan lifestyle to combat Information Obesity. It involves " mastering data literacy - knowing where to get appropriate data, and knowing what to do with it, using the right kinds of tools. It means making sure you're not put into situations where you situations where you're forced to consume overly processed information"

I could not completely agree with the Information Diet that Johnson recommends for a few reasons. Cancelling cable or satellite TV is great but to I am not sure that the best replacement is a combination of Youtube, Hulu and Netflix. Navigating them is an art and science that most of us are not well-versed in. While we may be in the driver's seat in consuming information, we may not be able to direct ourselves optimally. As such, we may become malnourished through our information diet. There is value is listening to talking heads on television. If they are in the business of churnalism and agnotology (I learned both words from this book), there is value in subjecting ourselves to both in low doses so we remain inoculated. 

I do agree with the idea of incorporating diversity into the information sources you consume from. I read Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble recently and have become even more deliberate than I was before about avoiding personalization. I love Johnson's examples of websites that do a terrific job of being information synthesizers. He names Khan Academy, TED and Kickstarter ( I was not aware of this one)

Even if you do not agree with the prescription, this book will make you think about information consumption, educate you on the research in this field and prompt you to take control of that diet.

Connecting to Desiness

During J's winter break, we were visiting with a friend of DB's whose wife recently had a baby. It is not often that we get five days of the immersive desi experience so it was almost like a trip to India minus the cost and the hassle. We had freshly cooked meals four times a day - both DB and I love to cook so we gladly pitched in. The mom-in-law caught her desi soaps on the living room TV and after the kids and grandma went to bed, we watched a Bollywood flick. This family is all set to return to India in the next couple of years - it has been their plan from the start. The amped up desi ambiance around the house is supposedly for the benefit of the kids who will find the transition easier. They socialize only with their kind to minimize the impacts of a culture that will soon become foreign to the children.

As we watched some of the ridiculous shows grandma is hooked on to, we could not help comparing them to some of  the entertainment Doordarshan provided in 80s and early 90s when there were no other options. They were infinitely more sensible and represented the India that we lived in. These folks go back every year and spend a few months in their home town - unlike DB and I, they have never grown strangers to India. It was interesting to see that they agreed with us. We would all love to see Indian television do something that spoke to us and our desi-ness. It certainly does not to me and many of my desi friends - maybe desi-ness as an idea and identity is in a state of flux right now. Until we are able to find our true voice, the popular media will sound cacophonous.

In the middle of all this, I decided to check out Aravind Adiga's Last Man in Tower and retired hurt. Past page thirty or so, I could no longer keep up with the burgeoning cast of characters. Adiga had pulled off an afternoon desi soap on the reader. The plot does not flow or expand on it's own merits but is padded and propped by characters and stories that contribute nothing to the denouement.

Our hosts recommended that we watch the movie Kaminey since neither DB or I had watched it before. We were advised to follow the plot closely because it was a complicated one. I am guessing the idea was to go for edgy, ironic and different - take done to death the twins separated at birth story and turn it on its head. Every few minutes there would be a part that was really nicely done -with that came an expectation of more and better to follow, but that did not seem to happen. The whole experience was like a roller coaster ride with frequent ups and downs. May have been fun for thirty minutes and under but intolerable for a full length movie.

Reading this story out censoring the sense out of American TV shows made me think about how our friends are preparing for their family's return to India. Maybe all of this is symptomatic of the state of confusion we are in as a people.

Short and Sweet

When J is in trouble, she launches into a defense that is as improbable as it is convoluted. She is deliberately slow and aims to exhaust. By the time she is done, I might have even forgotten what I was mad at her for and snap at her for rambling endlessly. But there are times when she can be succinct. 

When she reads a new book, I encourage her to talk about it, better still write up a short review. Needless to say, she views these things as  chores she'd rather not do. It is so much easier to get away with "It was really cool !" - a phrase that I hate with passion. This morning, I asked her about The Man Who Counted (a book she has just read) and she had this to say "It is  Birbal meets The Number Devil "

Maybe I can challenge her to summarize books in six non-adjective words. Knowing J, I would be shocked if she does not find a way to wriggle out of that assignment as well.

Data Analytics with Open Source Tools

A long time data wrangler serving many masters as one must in this role, I have been looking for a book that talked about the real life challenges of the job. I would love some practical advice on how to do my job better without driving myself completely crazy.

I found at least some of that in Philipp K. Janert’s book Data Analytics with Open Source Tools. I am not the right audience for the math in the book and based on my experience translating something that technical to executive management would be extremely challenging if not impossible. Often there are no serious math nerds on the team that understand the concerns of the business well enough to bring their numerical and computations skills to bear on them effectively (i.e. three action items to improve customer engagement by 15% in the next 90 days).

More often than not, it is falls on the rest of us who straddle the technical and business worlds, to divine (or help divine) something of value from the many cesspools of enterprise data. To be successful, we to know how to make the most of what little we have in terms of clean data, repeatable processes, inertia to improving them and a common understanding of data across the enterprise.

In the preface and introduction of his book, Janert advocates using as little statistics as possible, going with the most commonsense way to analyze the data set and get a feel for it just by looking at it. Slice and dice it many ways, run some charts and numbers to see if there is an interesting story buried there somewhere. This is been my approach almost 90% of the time and I was excited to see it endorsed by the author. I have used what the math yielded as a way to prove or disprove my story. While far from perfect, the method has helped point clients in the right direction, remedy issues that would have otherwise gone undiscovered.

Later in the book, the author brings up a very important point. Getting data to be good enough is often feasible but to get it to be truly high quality maybe an impossible task. If the success of a project hinges completely on the data being better than good enough, it may be wiser not to take on the project at all. This is excellent advice that I will remember to pass on to clients who are bent on cleaning the Augean stables in their quest for business intelligence nirvana.

I would definitely refer this book again if my job ever required me to do the math on data instead of analyzing it using the far less rigorous techniques that most shops are content to use. However, I will continue to look for a cookbook for the analyst who has to work within constraints of time, poor data quality and lack of cohesive processes that are the sources of data. Ideally, this book will have case studies, problem scenarios and real-life solutions that folks like myself can relate to and apply on our own jobs.

Myths Of Innovation

Innovation has to be one of the most overused words in the modern cultural lexicon. It is sought ardently where it cannot be found,ascribed where not apropos and most definitely widely misunderstood. The free and loose way we have with this word and all that it stands for piqued my curiosity about Scott Berkun's book The Myths of Innovation.

Berkun does his readers a big favor early in the book, by disabusing them of the idea of the moment of epiphany which causes innovation to supposedly happen.There is no Eureka or falling apple instant that turns someone into an Archimedes or a Newton. Instead, Berkun argues there is a method and discipline to the business of innovation. It is not happenstance, but the result of many years of hard work and persistence with ideas that very few believe in, coming to fruition in unexpected ways.

One of the magic recipes for innovation, Berkun says :

Hard work in a specific direction - The majority of innovations come from dedicated people in a field working hard to solve a well-defined problem. It’s not sexy, and it won’t be in any major motion pictures anytime soon, but  it’s the truth. 

On the kind of mental discipline it takes to to innovate, he says :

The secret to balancing work and play is thinking of the mind as a filter. Instead of binary switches—open vs. closed, creative vs. routine—we need a sliding scale of openness we can control. If you want new ideas, you have to slide toward openness, turning some filters off, exploring thoughts you’d ordinarily reject offhand.

My favorite part of the book is where Berkun outlines a simple plan to turn the promise of innovation to reality. I would recommend The Myths of Innovation to anyone who is curious about the the history and current state of innovation. The many practical ideas on how to innovate in the real world, are a bonus.

Cooking For Geeks

If you are the kind of cook that thrives on improvisation and experimentation in the kitchen and cannot be bothered to follow recipes then Cooking For Geeks is be the kind of "cookbook" you will enjoy. On the other hand if you are the uber-geek who wants to get everything exactly right - this is a great book for you too.

Often the simplest things like a perfectly soft-boiled egg are hard to pull off with consistently high quality time after time. Traditional recipes simply don't get into the science of egg yolk and egg white phase transitions as a function of temperature. Jeff Potter takes the mystery out of this any a lot else by taking a scientific approach to cooking. Geek or not, you would likely find that more helpful than the inexactitude of conventional recipes that leave something to the cook's imagination and capabilities.

The ground this book covers is impressive - from your basic scrambled eggs and pancakes to making your own Earl Grey infused whipped cream, Mozzarella Cheese and Beurre Noisette Ice Cream. Along the way you find nuggets such as the "Optimal Cake-Cutting Algorithm for N People" and electrocuting a hot-dog.

Early in the book, Potter emphasizes the importance of knowing what type of cook you are to help simplify the learning process. His main division are the "cook" and the "baker". The cook being the kind of person who prefers the "intuitive toss it into the pot approach" and "course correct along the way". The bakers are much for methodical and organized. To the "cooks" among us, Potter says "A recipe isn't a strict protocol, but do understand the suggested protocol before deviating".

Cooking For Geeks is a lot more than a cookbook. Along with the recipes and how-to, it is also cultural commentary on modern American society obsessed with perfection. Being a "good enough" cook is not enough any more in a time where Martha Stewart-esque perfection is the gold standard to aspire for. The author encourages the reader to fail because "Failure in the kitchen is a better instructor than success".

The book defies a conventional genre definition and is a very refreshing detour from the over-crowded cook-book space.

About Girls

In his book Girls On The Edge, the author Leonard Sax talks about who a nascent spiritual awakening in teenage girls if not given a chance to grow could result in them seeking the ultimate happiness and satisfaction through sex or romantic relationships. This is only one of the many valuable insights in this book which is a must read for anyone who has a daughter. 

Sax comes across as having a genuine empathy for girls - and concern for their overall well-being. After a long time, this is a book that kept me hooked all the way and I came away feeling like I learned things I did not know - things that may help me raise J better.

On empowerment and expression of sexuality he writes "As parents, we must reject the notion that girls have to take off their clothes to empower themselves. Boys don't have to take off their clothes to empower themselves. Girls shouldn't either." I wish Sax would write a book targeted at tweens and teens that conveyed the same message in a way that makes sense to them.

The book makes for scary reading - it would likely shake the most laid back parent out of their complacence.
There is a lot to learn and take away from this book for a parent of a young girl. For me the key learnings were :

1. The difference between the authoritative and authoritarian parent and the impacts on the child based on these parenting styles along with the risk of being a liberal parent.

2. The importance of initiating a young person into the world of adult-hood as opposed to leaving them to their own devices to find their way.

3. The threat of living in a "cyberbubble" where a girl is "hyper-connected with her peers" and "disconnected from herself".

4. Minimizing the intake and exposure to environmental toxins that cause girls to reach puberty ahead of time and bring a whole host of physical and emotional problems in the process.

Gamestorming

I have grown into my current role of business architect following a path that has taken me to almost every role in an IT shop at least a couple of times. The perspectives I have gathered along the way have proved invaluable in doing my current job but every so often, the process of getting a team's to articulate in clear, actionable terms how they would get from their current state to the desired future state can prove to be very challenging. Every traditional method of eliciting requirements and mapping as-is or to-be process in my experience has it limitations and does not readily fit the needs of the team or project at hand.

Gamestorming- A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers and Changemakers introduces the reader to some off the beaten path ideas for brainstorming, process mapping, prioritization, customer persona definition, problem scenario identification, requirement elicitation and much more. The games are uniformly interesting, well defined and easy to play. More importantly it is a large and diverse tool-set that one can pick and choose from. In acknowledging that business processes don't always follow a linear path from current to future state and may indeed have a largely fluidly defined end-game, the authors make a very compelling case for practitioners in the field to try their idea of using games to accomplish where traditional methods often fall short.

One game I found particularly thought provoking is The Anti-Problem game. It proposes a way for teams to "get unstuck when they are at their wit's end. It is most useful when a team is already working on a problem, but they are running out of solutions". The objective is to find a problem that is the exact opposite to the problem that needs solving. The more extreme the opposite the more likely the team is to solve their actual problem.

I would highly recommend the book to anyone whose role involves understanding complex processes and systems, building consensus among team members, generating creative ideas to solve an existing problem, designing a new product or concept and root cause analysis.

The Immortals

I tried to read Amit Chaudhuri's The Immortals and my head hurt from the sheer volume of confusion in the story. Maybe I don't know to read fiction anymore or maybe this is Chaudhuri trying to pull off a Rushdie on his readers. At any rate, the harder I tried to keep up with the ballooning cast of characters and the incoherent storyline the more resoundingly I failed. The last book I read by Chaudhuri was The Strange and Sublime Address. I don't recall being wowed but it was certainly not a difficult book to read. I was able to stay with the plot and the story flowed smoothly.

Whatever it is that the author has attempted to do with The Immortals, it makes for impossible reading. Yet, the central theme of the story is a one that would draw a reader in - who wins the war between materialism and art. The characters are sketched deftly - it is easy to visualize Apurba Sengupta as the successful executive, Mallika, his wife as the woman who chooses to give up her art in order to be a the kind of wife someone like Apurba needs. Shyamji the guru who straddles the worlds of Shastriya Sangeet (classical music) and the lighter Bollywood fare is a character the reader can understand. Then there is the character of Nirmalya the son of Apurba and Mallika who is a drifter is far as his choice to opt-out of the privileged lifestyle that is his lot. It seems like there are way too many peripheral characters - it is challenging for the reader to keep up with them or understand how they contribute to the story. Sometimes, the din they create is enough to drown the key players in the story.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

I chose Diary of a Wimpy Kid for J to read a couple of years ago, just after reading a few random pages from it. We both loved it - I got to read it only after J was done reading it about five times over. So when the book was made into a movie, J and I had to watch it. I liked the opening credits - it brought the book to life. The key characters were cast well enough.

And that's about all that was to like about the movie for anyone who has read the book and came in with expectations. The film adaptation takes out the best parts of the story and replaces it with random stuff that is an unnecessary and it is unappealing. There was enough and excellent material in the book to make a movie so this slicing, dicing and splicing did not make a whole lot of sense. 

What was appealing about this book to an adult reader was that the characters were entirely believable.Geoff Heffley is possessed of more pizazz, wit and intelligence than the average fifth grader, it makes sense when you consider he does not quite fit in and that his sense of humor is too mature for his peers.The movie has entirely Hollywoodized all that. Kids are dripping precocity to the point, the hero is no longer quite as special as he comes across in the book. In fact, the movie takes away from his character and leaves him being just another kid who is struggling to fit. Anyone whose read the book knows for a fact that is not what his character is about.

Imagining India

Reading Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India is like have dinner at a lavish Indian wedding. Each course is tempting, rich and flavorful but with so much to choose from, even a diner with keenest appetite is unable to justice to the complete repast. Such was my experience with Nilekani's book. He covers an unbelievable amount of ground in a three hundred something page book and attempts to tackle the hydra headed monster that the task of understanding India is. There is historical perspective, the concerns of the present and the ideas that will shape the future.

Nilekani's tone is pragmatic, empathetic and even keeled. He does not subscribe either to the India Shining rhetoric or any of the doomsday prophesying. In Nilekani's view, the truth lies somewhere in between those extreme world views and the purpose of Imagining India is to get the reader to think about the many variables and forces at play that will determine where that truth might end up being. Whether you are from India or spent most of your life there or are an outsider who is curious about that country, you would find a lot to learn and ponder over reading this book.

The extensive glossary is invaluable for readers who want to revisit topics they found particularly interesting. It can also serve as a jumping off point for additional reading. I read about this book a couple of years ago and it has been on my to-read list ever since. Two years is usually enough time for a book about anything to become irrelevant and obsolete these days. It is one of the reasons, I wait a while before I read anything that is hyped a great deal. It is to Nilekani's credit that his ideas are completely apropos even now. I would highly recommend Imagining India to anyone who wants to read an exceptionally well researched, articulate and thought-provoking book about India.

Selfishness And Courtship

I was reading The Selfish Gene - 30th Anniversary Edition recently and went over the battle of sexes chapter a little more closely than I had in my initial reading. I wondered what Dawkins would say of courtship rituals in the world where connections are mostly made online and there is room for both males and females to court any number of prospects at the same time. The theoretical maximum only subject to how many suitors a man or a woman can juggle simultaneously without losing their sanity.

According to Dawkins of an extended courtship period benefits both the man and the woman for different reasons - specially where the woman was more coy than fast and the man more faithful than philanderer. Such a pair in today's world could be checking out a number of other suitable matches within a long courtship window and still not become fast or philandering - they would merely be doing due diligence by checking out the offerings in the market. There seems to be no great benefit accruing to either party in the process except feeling confused by the choices available and the feeling frustrated by the lack of progress towards intermediate goals in the larger domestic-bliss strategy.

Assuming the fundamental premise of the selfish gene, how would humans adapt to the forces of cyberculture and social media that are getting more and more twined with their relationships. Do they not need to update their battle strategies or are we as a race going through a period of evolution where our genes have not quite figured out the best way forward. Would love to see more detailed analysis and discussion on this theme.

Publish And Perish

A married couple, an incontinent cat and a mistress don't normally make for a riveting story but in Publish and Perish by James Hynes, they most certainly do. This is the cast of characters in the first story - Queen of the Jungle. It involves marital power struggle, tenure track politics in academia, infidelity and the supernatural. Yes, and there is the cat with a bladder problem that holds the plot elements in balance. Hynes is able to take this somewhat improbable mix of ingredients and whip up something that reads really fast and well. I had to finish reading the story before I could do anything else and it's been a while since that has happened to me. The two other novellas are based on the theme of "tenure and terror" as well.

I found it interesting that Haynes was able to take a cast of characters who are not immediately recognizable to readers such as myself who are not in academia, throw some witchcraft into their already unaccessible lives and still be able to get the reader's attention. Oddly, Publish and Perish reminded me of Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn - a book that I count among my all time favorites. While there are no obvious similiarties between the two, I might have sensed a connection because both authors (in very different ways) take the ordinary and turn into something strangely unique.

Open Government

Having spent the majority of my life in India, I am no stranger to the slow, lumbering and mostly ineffective machinery of government bureaucracy. With computers making their way into the system, there was some improvement but not nearly enough to make the experience of interacting with a government agency less painful than having root canal work done.

When I came to America, one of the first things I had to do was to get a SSN card followed shortly by a visit to the DMV for a drivers license. My experience as a customer, at both these agencies was not unlike what I might have expected in India. I realized that the challenges faced by the largest democracy in the world and those faced by the most evolved one were not so different after all - at least from the vantage point of a customer.

In his book Imagining India, Nandan Nilekani devotes a couple of chapters to changes electronification has brought to the hulking government machinery in urban and rural India. He sees the future of the country in large part, determined by the success of these efforts. In India, projects like the eChoupal and Question Box are impressive not only because of their simplicity and effectiveness but in their ability to pave the way for the future. They set a high bar for innovation and entrepreneurship - and the people completely deserve it.

Being a big fan of open source technology and empowering end users to create their own applications within the constraints of well articulated enterprise architecture, I was curious to see how that might translate for government agencies. Open Government Edited by Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma tries to answer how technology can be used by the American government so it works better for its citizens and increase their participation. A lot of the ideas in the book translate very easily to any democracy in the world.

In chapter one, Mathew Burton proposes starting a Peace Corps for programmers. A key factor in Burton's mind, for such an initiative to attract the best development talent would be to set a time limit after which they could return to their lives and careers outside the government. That and the freedom to fail and innovate while on the job would make a huge difference in the customer experience with government systems and contain cost.

Tim O'Reilly explains what Government 2.0 can be and the benefits of "implicit participation". He cites, the rise of Google Maps as the predomination application in that space due to Google's decision to make their API public which resulted in a wide variety of mash-ups. A very similar idea is the "holy cow machine" envisioned by Health and Human Services CTO Todd Park. This idea was prompted by an Atul Gawande article in  the New Yorker that showed how the highest cost of health-care in McAllen, Texas also had the worst outcomes. Todd wants to build a service that would allow every city to see the correlations between cost and outcomes in health-care.

Beth Simone Noveck makes a case for open and collaborative democracy. She advocates dividing a large policy problem into smaller parts and distributing it to be worked on by a community of volunteers. She cites as an example, the workforce that made Mozilla Firefox possible and continues to make it one of the most popular browsers. Taking the same approach to solve for policy issues would result in faster, better outcomes with the additional benefit of increased legitimacy than what the government enjoys.

Carlo Daffara and Jesus M.Gonzalez-Barhona explain the many benefits of using FLOSS (free/libre/open source software) in government but also discuss the pitfalls to be aware of. While it may provide independence form suppliers, ability to customize and make the internals of any application available for public scrutiny, there are many things that could go wrong as well. One important caveat they point out is the lack of previous cases to learn from or an established set of best practices for government applications.

And that is a very small sampling of the wonderfully thought provoking ideas and the wide range of perspectives in Open Government. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is curious about how democracy and technology confluence today and where things are headed in the future.

Micromanufacturing

Got caught up with Clive Thompson's blog recently and particularly enjoyed reading his thoughts on what he calls the Micromanufacturing Revolution. I have been reading Ellen Ruppel Shell's book Cheap The High Cost of Discount Culture where the author makes an impassioned case against the death spiral created when retailers out-discount each other to everyone's detriment - including that of the penny-pinching consumers'. 

Along with everything else that is nice about the burgeoning micromanfacturing trend, it is also relatively immune to the forces of discounting undress duress. If everything a seller makes is bespoke and the buyer has the both the discernment and the budget to chose it over the deeply discounted, mass-produced offerings of big box stores, chances are that the seller can ask and get what they believe their creation is worth. 

If more and more people become sellers, it might even be possible to trade using a barter system.Micro-financiers could step in to help those who have everything else it takes to get a micro manufacturing business going except for the seed money to begin their venture.

Book Nirvana

B is in the digital printing business and when we met recently, he was talking about how marketing budgets for print ads have shrunk with the bulk of the action moving to social media outlets these days. I asked him about the the idea of printing books on demand that gets tossed around - if he thought there was a future for print shops like his in that line of work. He was not sure how popular that model of book buying would get and how soon.

With conversation turning to books and the many ways to read them today, I wondered if it were possible in a print on demand scenario to excerpt out portions of several books and make it the book the buyer would actually read in its entirety - an idea not unlike buying one song at a time from the iTunes store rather than a full album. This is specially relevant for non-fiction books.

More often than not, I find myself skimming through many chapters that are of little interest to me, until I find one that I like enough to read in full. In a 300 plus page book, I may be interested in only 50. If I could have a book that excerpted these 50 pages for me, allowed me to add material from ten other books on the same subject so I ended up with a book that exactly met my needs and interests, that would be ever so perfect.

It seems like the model would help less established authors if a book seller offers suggestions on other books that may be of interest based on what I choose to excerpt from my each of selected books. A second order benefit may be for one such as myself - which could be just about any book buyer, to go ahead and plow back into the system their custom books for other readers to buy or browse through.

B agreed that it was a neat idea but probably hard to implement because of the financial implications to the author, publisher and even the buyer of the book. He did not even want to hazard any guesses on what it meant for intellectual property, copyright and such. I guess it won't be any time soon that I can mash up ten books of my choice to print out a volume that I will enjoy reading from page one to page three hundred.

The Blue Notebook

I am not sure why I decided to read The Blue Notebook by James A. Levine given the subject matter. It is the story of a child prostitute named Batuk who escapes from the here and now of her life by writing in a blue notebook. She is a story-teller and dreamer at heart and no matter how sordid and horrifying the reality of her life, she dreams on steadfastly and is able to find oblivion at least for a while in her notebook.

That was possibly the idea that made me gravitate toward the book. Levine's graphic descriptions of the brutal sexual abuse the child is subjected to made it impossible for me to read the story. Time after time, I had to skip several pages before I was able to find something I could actually bear to read. It is a book I will not be able to forget - not because of  it had exceptional literary merit but for my visceral reaction to it.

It seemed to me that the author in the process of feeling empathy for his character, was not longer able to maintain the aesthetic distance from his story. In as such, the reader feels like they are being dragged through the cesspool and the character of Batuk turns two dimensional from that perspective. A reader may expect to feel pained for Batuk but instead find themselves like the author hurting along with her. In all, a very unsual reading experience.

Growing Too Soon

Children often grow up sooner than would want them to. As a parent the best I can do is to offer the support  J needs, instead of allowing her to stumble along with ill-formed ideas she gathers from her surrounding unprepared to accept and process them. I have written about J's fan-ship of the President from back in the pre-election days. So when a kid in her class, said that to J that President thought it was okay to kill babies - she came home sad and bewildered. She asked me anxiously "Mommy, is that really true ?"

I was not ready for this and had no idea where to begin. Talking about birds and bees is one thing but to explain the arguments for and against abortion to a young third grader is quite another. I asked J to give me some time to explain the background around what her friend had told her, so she could arrive at an independent conclusion. Help came to me in the form of a book - 33 things every girl should know about women's history. I had J read the chapter titled Body Politics by Anastasia Higginbotham from it. The author provides a succinct primer on the pro-life vs pro-choice debate along with historical context.

After J was done reading, we talked about what she had understood (or not) and it became a lot easier for me to translate what she had heard from her friend into something that was factual and coherent. But for the book, I would have been hard pressed to figure out where and how to begin talking to an eight year old about a subject I had not been planning on discussing with her in a long time. 

Real life unfortunately does not allow a parent the luxury of having a timetable and being able to follow it - disruptions are more rule than exception. This incident is a lesson for me as a parent and I would do well find the help I need (and ahead of time) to keep up with a generation that is growing up a little too soon relative to my sense of time at least.

The New How

Anyone who has seen a top down strategy implementation gone awry will know after reading the first chapter of The New How, that Nilofer Merchant gets it.Instead of the traditional approach to strategy creation and execution, she suggests a collaborative, inclusive style. She recounts with extreme candor her own missteps so the reader may learn from her mistakes instead of making their own.

Of the gap between strategy and tactic, a primary driver for failure. Merchant says : One person's strategy is another's tactics. The unnecessary and fruitless war of what is tactics or strategy or execution must end. That hits the nail on the head.She also lists the many telltale signs of trouble in teams, who don't have direction fully translated to a realizable execution plan. The bulk of the book is devoted to the alternative approach - one of being co-creators of collaborative strategy.

It is easy to agree enough to with Merchant's recommendations, but this is the kind of organizational change that cannot go from bottom up. It has to flow down and spread across - and in that may lie the biggest challenge in implementing it. Opening up the super-rarefied environs of strategizing to the hoi polloi, is not likely to make every C suite exec jump for joy. How do they then differentiate themselves from the rest and justify their power, influence or compensation even. If everyone, including folks down in the trenches were to be partners co-creating collaborative strategy, the first thing to go, would need to be the over-size corner offices so partnering could take place on equal terms and in shared space.

Merchant refers to two different kinds of elephants in the room when she discusses the nuts and bolts of collaborative strategy implementation. The first elephant is the big issue that everyone knows about but it's a somewhat taboo topic, so no one brings it up and the issue never gets addressed. The second is one that looks different from every perspective : an important but multifaceted issue that many people see, but each in a limited way. While the idea Merchant proposes in The New How is a very good one, getting it to work may involve getting the first if not both elephants out of the room.