Jorge Luis Borges once wrote, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” Blissfully devoid of management fads, new age theories and other guru talk, 2012 was that kind of year: Great books and powerful ideas.
When Daniel Kahneman, Ray Kurzweil and Benoit Mandelbrot (from the grave no less!), plus others too numerous to note here, all publish in the same year, we have a lot be thankful for.
As in past years, I am providing a reading list of books I enjoyed and used in posts, so If you saw an idea you found interesting in Digital Tonto over the past year, chances are you can learn a whole lot more about it in the books below. Links are provided that will allow you to purchase them from Amazon. Enjoy! read more…
I find writing difficult. Words don’t always come easy, I’m an absolutely horrendous typist and I often don’t have the first clue what I should be writing about.
Nevertheless, many seem to think that I write well, in spite of my deficiencies. I publish a successful blog and have managed to consistently push out two posts per week for over three years (which is much harder than you’d think). So I guess, in the final analysis, I’m not completely bereft of talent.
The more salient point, however, is that most people write extremely poorly. For all the talk I hear about the power of social media and the rise of amateurs, most of the writing I see on the Web is completely incoherent. It doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve found that through following a few simple rules and some practice, your writing can vastly improve.
Albert Camus once said that “true art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.” Henry Ward Beecher similarly wrote that “Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”
You don’t have to look far to find quotes like these, because art is something we consider intensely human. Art and the artist are so thoroughly intertwined that we can’t bear to think of one without the other.
For better or worse, we’re going to have to rethink this comfortable little notion. Machine intelligence is advancing to the point where algorithms have begun to invade the world of culture and the aesthetic. From recommendations to evaluation to the production of art itself, computers are becoming a force to be reckoned with in the creative realm. read more…
When we look back, 2012 will be seen as a pivotal year for Microsoft. They have launched Windows 8, possibly their most ambitious product ever, as well as the Surface tablet, their biggest ever foray into hardware.
So how’s it all going? Reviews have been lukewarm, sales for Windows 8 are lagging compared to the Windows 7 launch and even Steve Ballmer has described Surface tablet sales as modest. Over the past year, I’ve been sanguine about Microsoft’s future. How do I feel now? Well, I’m doubling down.
Henry Blodget at Business Insider calls people like me delusional, but I don’t think so. What I think is really going on is that while the pundits are chiding Microsoft missing out on the last trend toward social, local and mobile computing (SoLoMo), they are probably the company best position to take the lead in the next phase of technology. read more…
If you had to put a date on it, the digital age began in 1948, when two discoveries came out of Bell Labs: the transistor and information theory. The world would be forever changed, but at the time, few noticed.
Having just come out of the most devastating war in history, the planet was a very uncertain place. The Iron Curtain was descending upon Europe, war would come to Asia in just a few short years and few cared what the eggheads were doing.
It took decades for the impact to become clear, but eventually people noticed that something important was going on. Computers were not only getting better, they were getting cheaper and in the ’90’s, the term “new economy” entered the lexicon. Now, that similar trends are taking hold in energy and medicine the impact will be even greater.
Are you data driven? Do you live by the numbers? If you are, then you’re probably wasting an enormous amount of time and energy. Even worse, you’re probably getting a lot wrong.
In the neverending quest for substantiation and certainty in corporate life, we have used numbers as a panacea. All too often, more numbers are considered better and fewer are considered worse. This is, for lack of a better term, really stupid.
In truth, what we really need is fewer numbers and a whole lot more math. Math is what the ancients invented when they ran out of fingers and toes, because they realized that they needed to start thinking about abstract relationships in order to advance. The good news is that math is much simpler than numbers, more elegant and more likely to be right.
Abraham Lincoln. Winston Churchill. Nelson Mandela. We honor our leaders and always have. In both public and business life they are treated with almost godlike reverence.
I guess that’s why we compensate our corporate chiefs hundreds of times more than we do the average worker and then give them tens of millions more in bonuses, even when they are fired for cause. Mediocrity in leadership seems to pay as well as excellence.
All of this begs the question: Do we really need leaders? Is the small chance of getting an excellent one worth the high cost of the mediocre breed? Top management thinkers have begun to ask that question and, surprisingly, there are some prime examples of high performing organizations who are able to succeed without any leaders at all.
A lot can happen in a century. In 1900 Argentina was an economic powerhouse and New Zealand had the world’s highest GDP per capita at $4300. Most people didn’t have indoor plumbing or electric lighting, much less an automobile or a radio.
Perhaps not surprisingly, people didn’t live very long, life expectancy was in the mid-forties. Penicillin wouldn’t be discovered until 1928. The concept of the atom still wasn’t widely accepted and a “computer” was a person who did arithmetic.
It’s tough to imagine what someone in 1900 would think of us, chatting on mobile phones, zipping around and tweeting away, but clearly they would have a hard time believing it all. Yet today, technology advances exponentially faster, so the change during the next century will be infinitely greater. Here are the industries that will dominate.
Senator Marco Rubio, a man who is reportedly a top contender for the Republican nomination for President in 2016, caused quite a stir last week when he expressed confusion about the age of the earth in an interview.
Liberals like Paul Krugman pounced. Conservatives like Erick Erickson defended Rubio and heaped scorn on the “atheists and secularists.” The blogosphere erupted and the pundits licked their chops at the elevated ratings during a normally quiet holiday week.
Why should we care? After all, as Rubio quite rightly pointed out that “the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow.” So why all the hubbub? Why waste time and energy over something that happened long ago and none of us were around to see? The answer, of course, is that there’s a lot more at stake than cosmology.
Revolutions are funny things. They succeed in large part because nobody is paying attention. The world appears stable, even comfortable and then out of nowhere someone sees a need, attracts a following and change comes, seemingly out of nowhere.
The seeds of major events are usually sown in small places. From the American Revolution to World War I, personal computers to the Web, the spark tends to come from the edge, rather than from the center.
There’s something like that brewing now. Over 2 billion people are connected to the Web and there are nearly 6 billion mobile subscriptions. As information technology reaches increasingly remote areas of the world, new markets are being created and multinational companies are finding that the lessons learned far away can lead to profits at home.
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