Books – Page 3 – Harold Jarche

nine shifts — one is critical

2022-03-252018-12-31 by Harold Jarche

Nine Hours

In 2004 Bill Draves and Julie Coates wrote Nineshift: Work, life and education in the 21st Century. That was the same year I started blogging here. Nineshift is based on the premise that there will be a major shift in how we spend 9 hours of each day.

“There are 24 hours in a day. We have no real discretion with roughly 12 of those hours. We need to eat, sleep, and do a few other necessary chores in order to maintain our existence. That hasn’t changed much through the centuries, so far.

That leaves approximately 12 hours a day where we, as individuals, do have some discretion. That includes work time, play time, and family time.

Of those 12 hours, about 75%, or 9 hours, will be spent totally differently a few years from now than they were spent just a few years ago. Not everything will change, but 75% of life is in the process of changing right now.”

The authors put forth that society will significantly shift what we do with those nine hours and this will be complete by 2020 — one year from now.

People Work at Home — “Work is an activity, not a place.”
Intranets Replace Offices
Networks Replace the Pyramid
Trains Replace Cars
Communities Become More Dense
New Societal Infrastructures Evolve
Cheating Becomes Collaboration
Half of all Learning will be Online
Education becomes Web-based

the origins of creativity

2020-10-052018-11-21 by Harold Jarche

It is possible that early humans diverged from other primates when they began eating meat. This meat was likely burnt from frequent lightning strikes on the African savanna. They did not even have to know how start a fire, only how to keep one going. Eating cooked meat gave a much higher caloric intake and human brains grew significantly larger than their primate cousins. As humans developed a taste for meat and a source of constant fire at their campsites, they had to work together socially. Hunting or gathering during the day was very task-focused but in the evening groups of our ancestors sat around the fire for protection. This is where storytelling began. Modern day Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari Desert reflect this in their daily routine — ‘daytime talk’ and ‘fireside talk’ are quite different. The vocabulary of the latter is much larger and evenings are much more engaged in storytelling.

This is one of the initial premises of Edward O. Wilson’s book, The Origins of Creativity. We all belong to, and still carry some of the attributes, of this early tribe. The creative arts, enabled by our ability to share language, are what makes us human. But the study of the humanities has lost its way, says Wilson.

21 lessons

2020-10-052018-11-08 by Harold Jarche

“Without realizing the value of solitude, we are overlooking the fact that, once the fear of boredom is faced, it can actually provide its own stimulation. And the only way to face it is to make time, whether every day or every week, to just sit — with our thoughts, our feelings, with a moment of stillness.

The oldest philosophical wisdom in the world has one piece of advice for us: know yourself. And there is a good reason why that is.

Without knowing ourselves, it’s almost impossible to find a healthy way to interact with the world around us. Without taking time to figure it out, we don’t have a foundation to built the rest of our lives on.

Being alone and connecting inwardly is a skill nobody ever teaches us. That’s ironic because it’s more important than most of the ones they do.” —Zat Rana 2018-06-15

In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari concludes:

“Self-observation has never been easy, but it might get harder with time. As history unfolded, humans created more and more complex stories about themselves, which made it increasingly difficult to know who we really are. These stories were intended to unite large numbers of people, accumulate power, and preserve social harmony …

… In the near future, algorithms might bring this process to completion, making it well-nigh impossible for people to observe the reality about themselves. It will be the algorithms that will decide for us who we are and what we should know about ourselves.

For a few more years or decades, we still have a choice.”

creative economy entrepreneurs

2020-10-052018-10-18 by Harold Jarche

The co-founders of Creative Startups have published a book that is a guide for anyone interested in the creative economy at any level — Creative Economy Entrepreneurs. This book is a good read but it is more of text book, sprinkled with anecdotes and data, than a single narrative. I would recommend it for anyone working in economic development today. The authors share their 25 years of experience and compile a lot of information in an accessible form.

The premise of this book is that the fourth industrial revolution is changing the nature of work and the economy.

“Now, in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, economies are evolving to handle and process our enormous mass of accessible information. With so much information available and so many methods of analysis, access to knowledge is no longer the challenge. Everything is connected, and these connections happen instantly. The challenge for the Fourth Industrial Revolution becomes interpretation, reflection, and innovation. How do we create new value out of our hyperconnected knowledge?”

summer sci-fi

2020-10-052018-07-26 by Harold Jarche

“Science fiction isn’t useful because it’s predictive. It’s useful because it reframes our perspective on the world. Like international travel or meditation, it creates space for us to question our assumptions.” —Eliot Peper

“I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible. Science fiction, again, is the history of ideas, and they’re always ideas that work themselves out and become real and happen in the world.” —Ray Bradbury

3 Reasons Why You Should Read Science Fiction:
1. SF Extrapolates Current Technology
2. SF Highlights Societal and Cultural Changes
3. (The Best) SF Helps Solve Big Problems
—Richard MacManus

I read a lot of non-fiction and post book reviews here. When I get a chance, I read fiction, mostly science fiction. Here are some recommended reads from the last year.

Nordic leadership in times of extreme change

2020-10-052018-06-18 by Harold Jarche

Return of the Vikings

I have had the privilege of working with several Nordic organizations over the past few years — Carlsberg, HR Norge, Implement Consulting, Snow Software, Prime Minister’s Office of Finland. Over the past 14 years of writing on this blog I have advocated for more transparent work, temporary & negotiated hierarchies, and willing cooperation between interdependent workers.

The network era is obsolescing many artifacts of the industrial market era — rigid hierarchies, master/servant work relationships — and retrieving aspects of previous eras — tribal affiliations, oral communication. We can learn from the past and the authors of Return of the Vikings: Nordic Leadership in Times of Extreme Change, provide us with a compass to see our way into an unknown future. It is the same compass that guided the Vikings across the North Sea, to Iceland, and then to North America.

Nordic leadership is based on the Nine Noble Virtues — Courage, Truth, Honour, Fidelity, Discipline, Hospitality, Self-reliance, Industriousness, and Perseverance. There is a chapter dedicated to each virtue including interviews with people who have exhibited or witnessed these in modern times. While the compass remains steady, each person finds their own path, and in so doing contributes to the collective. Nordic leadership is servant leadership. It can be summed up as — inclusive, trusting, and collaborative.

making your education

2020-10-052018-05-21 by Harold Jarche

When I first encountered the web I was certain it would change the world. Today there is little doubt that networked society is developing into a very different world than the pre-internet days. My personal knowledge mastery (PKM) framework developed out of a need to master the exponentially growing information flows and personal connections enabled by digital networks. I developed my own ways to Seek > Sense > Share information, knowledge, and experiences. This framework is now used by many other people around the globe. I created my PKM methods out of necessity 14 years ago. Today, sensemaking frameworks are needed by everyone. As Steven B. Johnson says, “Chance favours the connected mind”. This has never been more true in our connected world.

The writers of Age of Discovery say that we are living in a period similar to the Renaissance of the early 1500’s. “I am still learning,” Michelangelo said in his eighties. He and Leonardo da Vinci epitomized the Renaissance, pushing against traditional boundaries and expanding knowledge and understanding. The Renaissance brought wonderful new discoveries (universities, astronomy, print) as well as new challenges (the pox, war, mass slavery). Our age is bringing similar discoveries (nano materials, gene therapy, artificial intelligence) and new threats (Ebola, extremism, climate change).

chaos: a user’s guide

2020-10-052018-03-27 by Harold Jarche

“Humanity is at a turning point. We are at a period when we must totally redefine the norms and values in fields not only related to work, to the economy, but also to social life and relations between countries.

It is perhaps time to put on the right lenses to understand this. It is perhaps time to get the right tools so as to construct a world ever turbulent and chaotic no doubt, but also more sustainable and harmonious.” p. 29

So ends the first part of Bruno Marion’s book Chaos: A User’s Guide (2014) . Marion uses fractals as a way to describe the underlying nature of chaos, or the world we are living in. Fractals, shapes that maintain their shape at any scale and never get simpler, were brought into mainstream mathematics by Benoit Mandelbrot.

“The world is no longer linear, it is no longer relative, it is no longer quantum — it is chaotic! Or more precisely, it is linear and relativistic and quantic and chaotic.

Now we will be able to recognize fractal images around us. We will be able to see ships, and see factories that run without stocks. We will be able to follow the example given to us by nature and be ready to understand that order can emerge from disorder and we can learn to manage our lives, or organizations in a more fractal way.” p. 65

life in perpetual beta 2.0

2018-03-052018-02-06 by Harold Jarche

The perpetual beta series synthesizes about 12 years of writing on this site. The four volumes examine learning, technology, democracy, personal knowledge mastery, leadership, and new working models. But life is in perpetual beta. Therefore the second version that builds on the series is now available. If you want the beta (latest) version, then this is it. At about 70 pages, this PDF, like the others, is DRM-free and you may print and share as you like, though my preference is that you don’t get into the publishing business with it ;)

Here is the table of contents:

the square and the tower

2018-11-222018-01-22 by Harold Jarche

In The Square and The Tower, Niall Ferguson presents us a detailed series of examinations of the struggle between networks and hierarchies in managing society since the advent of writing. A central theme of the book is “that the tension between distributed networks and hierarchical orders is as old as humanity itself.” For example, he looks at how the wave of Chinese immigration to the USA was blocked in the late 1800’s by local racism, “Just as global networks of communication and transportation [telegraph & steamship] had made the mass migration of the late nineteenth century possible, so political networks of populism and nativism sprang into life to resist them”. Networks give and take away, as do hierarchies. Historically they appear to be in constant flux.

Another theme in the book is how the advent of the internet and the printing press have certain similarities.

“There are three major differences between our networked age and the era that followed the advent of European printing. First, and most obviously, our networking revolution is much faster and more geographically extensive than the wave of revolutions unleashed by the German printing press … Secondly, the distributional consequences of our revolution are quite different from those of the early-modern revolution … The printing press created no billionaires … Nevertheless, few people foresaw that the giant networks made possible by the Internet, despite their propaganda about the democratization of knowledge, would be so profoundly inegalitarian. A generation removed from the conflict — the baby boomers — had failed to learn the lesson that it is not unregulated networks that reduce inequality but wars, revolutions, hyperinflation and other forms of expropriation … Third, and finally, the printing press had the effect of disrupting religious life in Western Christendom before it disrupted anything else. By contrast, the Internet began by disrupting commerce; only very recently did it begin to disrupt politics and it has really only disrupted one religion, namely Islam.”