Friday’s Finds

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The car gave to the democratic cavalier his horse & armor and haughty insolence in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided missile … it has become the carapace, the protective & aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.” —Marshall McLuhan, via @grescoe

“Computers are rubbish. They only give answers” —Picasso, via @alansmlxl

@mmay3r: “The internet doesn’t fracture truth, it reveals the many competing truths that always existed but were flattened by centralized broadcast technology.”

@cennydd: “I’m trying to avoid the term ‘AI’. It mythologises tech as a new species, a self-directed moral agent outside our control. But, of course, these technologies are absolutely within our control. They’re products of our code, decisions, and policies. Their ethics are our ethics.”

@SimonDeDeo: “Machine learning is an amazing accomplishment of engineering. But it’s not science. Not even close. It’s just 1990, scaled up. It has given us *literally* no more insight than we had twenty years ago.”

@LuxAlptraum: “Plastic Strawgate became a thing for the same reason we endlessly argue over recycling: it’s easier to fixate on small, personal choices that feel under our control than it is to restructure our society at the systemic level we’d need to truly help the environment.”

@HughCards: “You can have a fantastic product, work your ass off, be loved by the media, and still be poor. Just ask any restauranteur.

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” —George Orwell

“As the preliterate confronts the literate in the postliterate arena, as new information patterns inundate and uproot the old, mental breakdowns of varying degrees–including the collective nervous breakdowns of whole societies unable to resolve their crises of identity–will become very common.” —Marshall McLuhan (1969)

The Illuminations of Hannah Arendt: NYT via @leadershipabc

In her 1951 work, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt wrote of refugees: “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion, but that they no longer belonged to any community whatsoever.” The loss of community has the consequence of expelling a people from humanity itself. Appeals to abstract human rights are meaningless unless there are effective institutions to guarantee these rights. The most fundamental right is the “right to have rights.”

Why Trump’s Baby Jails Strategy Backfired, Unleashing Waves of Empathy by @GeorgeLakoff

“As I’ve written before, the conservative moral system is based on the metaphorical idea of a Strict Father Family. In this metaphor, the strict father figure makes the rules and enforces them. It’s the job of everyone else to do as he says. If they don’t, it’s his job to punish them painfully enough so that they will do as he says in the future. Zero tolerance! Authority is justified. Winners deserve to win; losers deserve to lose. Winners are better than losers.”

Kleptocracy and kakistocracy

“It is also a mistake to think that it is only in countries with weak institutions and immature political systems that thieves and goons can reach the most important positions. What we are seeing today in the United States and in many European countries that have long democratic traditions simply shows that no nation is immune to the rise of a kakistocracy. Internet searches for this word, derived from ancient Greek, have seen a huge boom since Donald Trump got to the White House.

Like all good illusionists, the kleptocrats know how to distract us from looking at their misdeeds and the kakistocrats know how to distract us from their ineptitude. They do it by talking to us about ideology and attacking those of their rivals. While we watch and play our part in these ideological circuses, they steal. Or tinker with government policies they don’t really understand.”

Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy by Siva Vaidhyanathan – review

“Although Facebook has become a leviathan, that simply means that it can only be tamed by another leviathan, in this case, the state. Vaidhyanathan argues that the key places to start are privacy, data protection, antitrust and competition law. Facebook is now too big and should be broken up: there’s no reason why it should be allowed to own Instagram and WhatsApp, for example. Regulators should be crawling over the hidden auctions it runs for advertisers. All uses of its services for political campaigns should be inspected by regulators and it should be held editorially responsible for all the content published on its site.”

Reclaiming RSS by @aral

“Before Twitter, before algorithmic timelines filtered our reality for us, before surveillance capitalism, there was RSS: Really Simple Syndication … RSS was an essential part of Web 1.0 before surveillance capitalism (Web 2.0) took over.”

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” —Father John Culkin (1967) A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan, Image by @BryanMMathers

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity.” —Nietzsche, Notes, 1874, via @surreallyno

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” —W.B. Yeats, via @FishinWaterProd

“When he laughed, respected senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.” —W.H. Auden, Epitaph on a Tyrant

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@Tom_Peters: “Networks increase your ability to get things, especially complex things, done. Period. And if well developed, they do make you more powerful. Period. Like anything else on earth, they can be used for good or for ill.”

Enabling adaptive space, by @sonjabl

“Pressure and crisis tend to open up adaptive space naturally – I often hear stories of how cross-silo collaboration happens spontaneously when a crisis occurs. The problem is our natural tendency to impose order when under pressure. Organisations that have healthy adaptive processes respond from a complex paradigm and enable adaptive space where the tension between exploration and exploitation is productive even in the midst of external and internal pressures.”

Will AI replace KM?

“Also AI and Big Data still only work in the realm of documents, information and data, and in the processes of analysing and retrieving; they don’t help with the transfer and creation of knowledge through conversation, or with tacit knowledge. So AI will be a massively powerful tool in the KM toolbox, but it won’t replace the toolbox. We will need the roles and the processes and the governance to interplay with the technology. KM shifts up a gear, but still will be needed.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The Edge … There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” —Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels, 1966, via @moehlert

@deehock: “Unrecorded thoughts are fragmentary, illusive and evanescent. When recorded they take on permanency, enabling us to give them context, discover error, improve content and refine expression.”

“The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.” —Hannah Arendt, via @cyetain

@white_owly: “I once completed a psych test for a job I didn’t want (long story). So I self-sabotaged and answered ‘yes’ to ‘are you happier when people fail than when they succeed?’ and ‘no’ to ‘do you consider yourself a team player?’. I then got invited to the final interview.”

“Susan Sontag was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10% of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10% is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80% could be moved in either direction” —Kurt Vonnegut, via @holdengraber

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@Rhappe — “So much data. So little insight.”

@deewhock — “An intelligent, motivated person in a bureaucracy is like a long haired hunting dog in a patch of cockle burrs. Energy and capacity are diverted from the hunt to removal of the impediments.”

@lukewsavage — “Billionaires like Bezos and Musk are obsessed with space travel because it helps them maintain the illusion that they’re technological prometheans at the vanguard of civilizational progress, rather than greedy plutocrats who happen to own expensive bits of paper.”

@jatodaro — “So you’ve got a huge campus where employees can roam around and find a comfortable space to work. No one can locate you and everyone uses Slack to communicate, Zoom to talk, and Dropbox to share files. You’re already working remotely, you’re just driving to an office to do it.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@BenRiseman: “W.E.B. Du Bois, in his last speech in 1957 said, ‘Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.’”

@White_Owly: “The fact that many who attended elite schools include it in their profiles decades later says more about social than intellectual capital.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”  —Martin Luther King Jr.

Return of the Vikings: Nordic Leadership, by/via @indalogenesis

So, let us start with something very central to the Vikings. The Nine Noble Virtues:

Courage, Truth, Honour, Fidelity, Discipline, Hospitality, Self-reliance, Industriousness, Perseverance

The virtues are derived from ancient Nordic Mythology. It is believed that the Vikings lived their lives according to this set of values. Values of which each can be found in many religions and cultures, but somehow, when you combine them they form a unique basis for leadership – and a way of living. Chris Shern interviewed 50 very different leaders with very different perspectives on Nordic Leadership as part of his research for the book. And what he found for them to have in common were qualities similar to the Nine Noble Virtues. But we will get back to that later …

To Chris Shern the thinking was, that the Nordic approach to leadership is better equipped than others to meet the challenges of a chaotic future. Gone are the days when a boss could sit back and hold on to all the knowledge and information and you repeatedly had to go and ask him whether you can or cannot do something. What Chris Shern saw among the Nordic leaders was courage to delegate great responsibility to their employees, and for the employees to have the discipline and self-reliance that is needed to handle great tasks. This kind of corporation is depending on fidelity and for everyone to take an honour in their work. Chris Shern also found that all the people he interviewed were driven by something more than just making money. It was about having a purpose and giving back.

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

Lean interaction by @EskoKilpi

“Knowledge is the act of interacting and new knowledge is created when ways of interaction, and therefore patterns of relationships, change. The creative assets of an organization are the patterns of interaction between its members. Assets are destroyed when relationships are missing or are dysfunctional.”

Rethinking the balance between equality and hierarchy: 2) New insights into the evolution of hierarchy and inequality throughout the ages

‘Perhaps most striking, in terms of political reversals, were the seasonal practices of 19th-century tribal confederacies on the American Great Plains – sometime, or one-time farmers who had adopted a nomadic hunting life. In the late summer, small and highly mobile bands of Cheyenne and Lakota would congregate in large settlements to make logistical preparations for the buffalo hunt. At this most sensitive time of year they appointed a police force that exercised full coercive powers, including the right to imprison, whip, or fine any offender who endangered the proceedings. Yet as the anthropologist Robert Lowie observed, this ‘unequivocal authoritarianism’ operated on a strictly seasonal and temporary basis, giving way to more ‘anarchic’ forms of organisation once the hunting season – and the collective rituals that followed – were complete.”’

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@ActivateLearn: “I see the internet as one massive table with different people talking, sharing, learning, laughing, connecting, engaging. Unfortunately, my mum can’t cook for them all …”

“Experience by itself teaches nothing. Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning.” —W. Edwards Deming, via @StudioRed42

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs … This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking …” —Leo Tolstoy, via @DailyZen

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