Kerabu

Finally, an organizer I can use

Maybe if I had one (or several) of these things, I'd be better organized about posting here?  I don't have a calendar app., and I resist any kind of heirarchical organization so much that my desktop looks like a Microsoft pinata  exploded over it.  And I willfully refuse to change, until someone comes up with an organization system that mimics nature--where objects can be embedded in a three-dimensional, reticular system searchable by sight, sound, memory, sentiment, taste smell... ah, life.  But seriously, doesn't this organizer look like the very definition of the perfect relationship?  A messy, yielding entanglement of flexible support capable of absorbing, holding--and releasing--anything. 

Heck, I don't want to buy this, I want to be this.  Even if it's name is Harry. 

All the World's a Game (or at least it should be)

From Ross Mayfield:

An interesting article in Wired by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas Page explores the role of online gaming as job training and a recruiting qualifier:

...Unlike education acquired through textbooks, lectures, and classroom instruction, what takes place in massively multiplayer online games is what we call accidental learning. It's learning to be - a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture - as opposed to learning about. Where traditional learning is based on the execution of carefully graded challenges, accidental learning relies on failure. Virtual environments are safe platforms for trial and error. The chance of failure is high, but the cost is low and the lessons learned are immediate...

...In this way, the process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a total-immersion course in leadership. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. Guilds routinely splinter over petty squabbles and other basic failures of management; the master must resolve them without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Never mind the virtual surroundings; these conditions provide real-world training a manager can apply directly in the workplace...

Mayfield suggests he'll be looking at prospective hires' "extracurricular" activities, like World of Warcraft play, as well as their work achievements from now on.

I say, if we can learn to do business better by playing games, couldn't we also improve business itself by making business itself more like a game? As a manager, I'd love to have lots of Avatars. I'd also like to see Avatars in a company perform specific jobs, especially those jobs no "real" person likes to feel stuck--anyone in the company could become Vlad the Collector for the length of a phone call, or spend an hour playing Katrina the Customer Service Fairy with far less ego-involvement than they feel being dispatched to do these things now. Role-playing could make the "dirty jobs" of business more palatable (and keep egos in check for the big jobs, too).

I also like the way games quantify abstract acheivements and encourage non-monetary forms of exchange between players. Getting people within a company to collaborate has always been an issue. What if they had karma, health or power points in a game, some juju to trade?  You could look at this as encouraging "office politics," but if you've worked in an office, you know the vast amounts of energy that go into office politics no matter what you do. Why not harness and store that energy and put it to use?

Could we make work as engaging and dynamic and fun as a game? Of course we could. I'd like to someday build an entire company with a virtual office on a gaming platform, and hire from the ranks of online players. Kind of like Ender's Game, but with profits instead of destruction.

A priest, a rabbi and a software engineer walked into a bar and...

Jeff Trexler calls isolatr "Web 3.0." I just call it funny:

BMW Audio Books: Beyond Product Placement

I like to listen to moody, noirish mysery novels while driving around in the Southern California sunshine. It's a sweet-and-sour thing. Never gets stale for me.

Which is why I was intrigued recently when I stumbled upon BMW Audio Books. The company has commissioned original fiction by some unexpected authors, and to judge by a first listen, they've done it right.

This weekend I downloaded and listened to James Flint's Outer Limits-ish Master of the Storm this weekend while winding up the Pacific Coast Highway. The production was impeccable, far better quality than most of the books I've purchased on Audible.com, the story performed (rather than merely read) by Forbes Masson, a Shakespeare-trained Scotsman with an intoxicating, single-malt voice. Flint's work has a distinctive style, and like the other authors BMW has engaged, he has enough edge-dwelling credibility that there's precious little chance anyone will mistake him for a shill... even though the story does take place in a car--a BMW.

The presence of the car in the Storm has a nudge-nudge, wink-wink quality to it, and little to do with the story itself. But any expectation that the story would be advertorial in nature is quickly dispelled  as the protagonist gets behind the wheel after one champagne too many and plows into an innocent bystander. Not a particularly safe plot point for a car company, but a turn that had the effect of instantly earning my trust and attention.

When you're a successful luxury brand, your job is to keep your profile up and not lose your cool--all the while acting like you have nothing to prove to anyone.

That's not an easy prescription to follow. Just ask Jaguar, which, under Ford, ran a series of banal suburbanite ads that left one wondering whether the product were a car or a washer-dryer set. Sales of the Tauruses--er, Jags--predictably suck.

Publishing slightly off-color, risk-taking fiction is a brilliantly safe way of owning the edge, I think. Unless you start slandering mullahs, literary fiction isn't likely to upset anyone, even pretty out-there fiction. And it's an art form in serious need of patronage. 

I think one of the ways in which the arts have helped to marginalize themselves is by subscribing to a basically socialized view of artistic production as lying properly outside of the commercial arena (sure there is money in the arts, but only speculative money; I'd argue that there's no robust arts economy as such). Corporate-sponsored literature is something that could give serious literary fiction a real boost, and actually improve the quality and range of what's available, as a paying commission frees the artist to work, whereas speculative work is always done behind a door with a wolf on the other side of it.

Tags: BMW, BMW Audio, fiction, literature

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Finishing the Internet

Heh:

After wasting a whole hour online that would have been better spent studying or relaxing, I reach the end of the internet. It is a simple popup describing how I had just clicked on the final link on the final page and it recommended that I step away from the computer.

From a 17 year-old college freshman in Buffalo.

Tags: Internet

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As Vince Lombardi might say, what we need is a new play book

I'm going to assume that you, dear reader, don't subscribe to "Organisations and People, the journal of the Association for Management Education & Development" any more than I do. So I'm going to quote a fair bit of their review of Pat Kane's book The Play Ethic: A Manifesto For a Different Way of Thinking, as posted on Kane's blog, Play Journal:

Pat Kane’s book is every bit a manifesto, railing against the Protestant work ethic and New Labour’s ‘getting people back to work’ thinking, and suggesting a new ethic to cope with an unpredictable world. It is an eclectic collection of ideas and discussion, drawing from ancient and modern philosophy, art, music, education and probably every possible discipline you can think of. (The endnotes and references run to some 79 pages – this is a seriously researched text). But far from being a deep academic treatise, it is highly readable; a book that you can skim for ideas, read in depth or skip to the topic that interests.

This is not an anti-work book as some commentators have suggested, linking it to Tom Hodgkinson's How to Be Idle or Carl Honore's In Praise of Slow; it is not about promoting laziness or slothfulness, it is about challenging some the values and assumptions that exist in our education, politics and society.

As Kane explains in an early chapter: “The core statement of the play ethic now becomes clear. We need to be energetic, imaginative and confident in the face of an unpredictable, contestive, emergent world. We need to accept the complex relationship between all forms of play, whether ancient or modern. Play’s ultimate function for humankind is to maintain our adaptability, vigour and optimism in the face of an uncertain, risky and demanding world. However, we endure a political tendency in the developed countries that believes, by and large, that work is the most functional and useful mode of human existence.”

If that doesn't make you want to read the book, then you have the soul of a sea cucumber.  You can order the British paperback at Powell's (still the best bookstore in the world, despite my recent scolding), or cue up for the forthcoming US edition on Amazon.