Robert Paterson's Weblog

Too Busy - The Death of Creativity

All around us we hear the clarion call for more Innovation. All around us, we hear the need to take more risk. All around us we hear the need to navigate through the uncertainty of our chaotic present.

But what I see in response most often is a state of "Busyness" that leads to paralysis.

I post this today because I found this excellent link from Kathy Sierra to this piece from Slow Leadership that sums up years of my frustration.

Snip - Stress, tiredness, fear of risk and constant exposure to unreasonable demands paralyze people's willingness to make decisions—especially risky ones—since anything beyond obvious routine poses a personal risk. That's why managers try to protect themselves with ever more exhaustive analyses, approval procedures, consensus-building meetings, memos, e-mails and all the other time-devouring elements of bureaucratic defensiveness. Of course, long before all that political maneuvering is over, and everyone is sufficiently certain (read armor-plated) to decide, the data is out-of-date, the customers have changed their minds…and any competitive edge is long gone. How many promising ideas are tested and analyzed to death in the name of caution and practicality?

In pressure-based cultures, old ideas are continually re-hashed, new ones tested to destruction, and any spark of innovation drowned in consensus-building. An idea that can't be grasped in under five minutes by executives so distracted they can't recall the next meeting on today's schedule—or what was agreed at the last—is dead meat. There's no time to be wrong, so there's no time to be right either. Stick to what you've done before and get a move on. With such penalties for trying anything new, is it any wonder everyone quickly gets the message that, whatever fine words executives use, innovation isn't wanted or valued?

These high-pressure, "the bottom line is all there is" organizations don't simply shoot themselves in both feet; they use machine guns. Their attitude ensures no new ideas will survive, so they get further and further behind less macho, results-driven competitors. As a result, they must run still faster to stay in business at all; and so have even less tolerance or time for risky, creative ideas. The result is self-induced obsolescence, followed by commercial suicide. Look at the "established" US airlines. When did one of these last produce a fresh idea to counter their new, risky, low-cost competitors? The best they can do is copy them—usually long after whatever they're copying is past its sell-by date.

Slowing down, making time and space for innovation and its inevitable mistakes and false starts, isn't just a better idea. It's the only idea that works if you want to be around for the long term."

Technorati Tags: Culture, Organization, Kathy Sierra

How the Real New Economy Works

Part 1 - A Clash of Civilizations


The largest of all the statues on Easter Island was the last to be cut in a desperate attempt to appease the Gods that had failed the priests and the people.  This hanging onto a world view that no longer works has been the cause of many collapses of civilizations in human history. if we are not careful, this too may be our own fate.  Are we holding on to a machine view that no longer works? Are we in effect using an approach that must destroy us?

The Easter Islanders, the Babylonians and the Mayans had no alternative. Or they had none that their conventional wisdom and their power structures would accept. So they were doomed. We however, in the nick of time, can see a new view of reality that has been proven not in an obscure lab but in the furnace of North American Business. There is hope if we give up our reliance on a machine view and if we adopt a natural view. But to adopt a new world view demands that we "see" it and that we give up hoping that if only we used the old view harder that we might finally make it work.

My hope is that in the next few posts, I can help you see a clear and comprehensive set of rules for how the natural view is working in practice

But first - please a questionnaire. When you have seen this short deck, please ask yourself - "Do I believe that any further investment in the status quo will bring me benefit or harm?"  Can you see any good reason to keep on investing in our current system?

Download brokenins2.pdf

So what then do I mean by my use of the term a Clash of Civilizations?

It's all about an irony. The irony is that two men set in motion events in 1905 that have finally met in opposition in 2006 and represent possibly the most violent clash of culture confronting humans since the advent of writing set in motion the end of hunter gatherer life and the beginning of a hierarchical system based on property and agriculture.

The two men are of course Henry Ford who founded the Ford Motor Company in 1905 and Albert Einstein who had his Annus Mirabilis also in 1905.  Ford's ideas of a deterministic and machine approach to complexity have swept through every aspect of organized life. His view of how the world should work completely dominates how we see ourselves and the world about us.

Einstein's views were also equally persuasive but were confined to the world of physics. They were seen to operate only on the vast scale of the universe and were never considered as being applicable to the mundane world of man and our own planet.

Here is the irony. In physics, Einstein' ideas were quickly proved to provide a much more accurate picture of how everything worked than the Newtonian machine view of the universe.  Yet in our day to day lives we made the Newtonian system utterly triumphant. For many years, the Ford model was a genuinely useful proxy and raised living standards all over the world. Now it has become I fear, the source a series of problems that if unchecked will destroy us.

So where's the Clash? Surely the relative universe only operates on a universe scale? Not any more.

What the Internet has done has been to collapse the time space continuum in our daily lives. Let me repeat that. The Internet has collapsed time and space in our daily lives. The conditions to sweep away a deterministic view of reality have arrived.

In physics there could be no compromise. The better idea prevailed. So today the institutions of our time brace themselves for a fight to the death. We see evidence of the battles to come in the fight over net neutrality. We see the fear of blogging in the media and in organizations. The stakes are the very future of our planet.

Wright (2004) in his Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 2004 Massey Lecture presents a clear outline of the scale of the challenge we face: 

“Yet despite the wreckage of past civilizations littering the earth, the overall experiment of civilization has continued to spread and grow.  The numbers (insofar as they can be estimated) break down as follows: a world population of about 200 million at Rome’s height, in the second century A.D.; about 400 million by 1500, when Europe reached the Americas; one billion people by 1825, at the start of the Coal Age; 2 billion by 1925, when the Oil Age gets under way; and 6 billion by the year 2000.  Even more startling than the growth is the acceleration.  Adding 200 million after Rome took thirteen centuries; adding the last 200 million took only three years”

“We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. 

If we don’t do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard.  Our fate will twist out of our hands.  And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past” 

In this short series I will do what scientists who followed Einstein in physics did. I will use my observation to observe the new element of the relative institutional universe, such as Wikipedia. eBay, Google, Starbucks and Southwest and extract by observation the new rules as they have emerged in human society.

In part 2 - The Myth of Resources - I will begin by observing Wikipedia and eBay

Technorati Tags: Culture, Organization, Relationships

My Father on Father's day - Do we ever know our fathers?

With each passing father's day, I think more about who really was Jim, my father.  I have had some success in learning more about him when he was my age.  Here is a wonderfully true and funny recollection by one of his best friend's.  I hope that you see some of me there too.

To fit Wally's piece on him, here he is as Jim the "Chairman"  - this was taken a year from his death aged 55. He is a year younger than me now. He looks very corporate but if you care to read the link above you will find that this facade was just a front for a totally wild man.

I think that I am getting the hang of this Jim. But what of the younger man?
For instance, who was this man? How did this young man become the man above?

Here he is in 1953. He is 27 and the pivotal years of his business and personal life are just ahead of him.

He was on his way. He had been the "perfect son". He had been the top cadet in his class at Royal Roads. He had been a Rhodes Scholar and he had just been chosen to be the ADC of the head of Alcan's European operations. He had married arguably the most beautiful woman in Montreal at the time who was also a member of that tight little Scots world that still dominated the business life of Canada at the time. He had set up his life to go far and to go fast.

I say the "perfect son" because I sense that he was driven to show everyone that he had the stuff. He had a meteoric energy and a fire that burnt like a furnace. What had driven this energy? What was the story behind him?

He was going to prove something. His was a story of redemption. He was going to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of his family's shame.

His parents had been financially ruined in the crash. Since 1933, they had lost everything but their names. They lived like poverty stricken Russian nobility after the revolution in their country house outside of Montreal.

His mother, who had been the wealthiest woman in Canada could never cope with the humiliation. Anna, once the life and soul of Montreal who had had 1,000 people come to her coming out party, who had sent her laundry to Paris and who used to use her father's private train for shopping sprees to new York was penniless. She could not cope with this change and had been in a downhill slide of depression, drugs and alcohol.

Dad's father, "Pat" was the perfect gentleman. He had only ever wanted to be a soldier. But out of duty had taken over his father's firm with his brother just in time for the crash. Incapable of showing emotion after 4 years in the front line in the first war, he had no answers for his now mentally ill and even violent wife. Not could he do any more but hold on in a business he did not really understand or enjoy. When war came again, he escaped his work and his family and wangled his way back to the army and then to England not to return until 1945.

So Dad became the de facto head of the family.   His and his brother's childhood was over. The only person that they could rely on at home was their Nanny - Old Nan.

Nan had joined the family in 1928, two years after Dads' birth and stayed with us in one way or another, until she died in the arms of my Aunt Ann. After the crash she did not take a salary for 8 years. She not only raised my father and my uncle but also helped in the early years with raising me and my uncle's four children. Here she is with me aged 1. When she died, she willed every penny that she had ever earned back to her two dear boys.  She is buried next to my grandfather and my father and keeps watch on them even now.

Nan's father has been the chief petty officer of the Royal Navy and had come to Canada in retirement to run the Mint. He returned to Portsmouth after his second retirement. The only foreign trip Dad and Robert ever had was to visit him in the 1930's with Nan of course. Being the ex chief petty officer of the RN meant that Chief Mullins had access to the entire Fleet and the boys were treated like royalty. I suspect that this experience was a reason why when war came, Dad chose the Navy rather than the army where his own father was a legend with 2 DSO's.

Here is dad in 1944, aged 18 just graduated from Royal Roads. He is with his brother, my namesake, Robert who is 16. The woman in the picture is not his mother of course but his aunt Elspeth.  She and Nan were the only two women that Dad would ever obey.  Nan and Aunt Elspeth were truly formidable. After my grandfather Pat, lost all his money, his two sisters demanded that their husbands, who were extremely successful contractors, lend Pat and his brother Hartland enough money to keep the wolf from the door. The brothers finally paid their brothers in law off in 1954 and then closed the family business advising their sons never to work for themselves. It's ironic that after that generation nearly all the descendants are back being self employed! But my father always had deep inside him a fear that if he went it alone, he could lose it all. In the end this was his downfall. How we take our family stories to heart!

So Dad's world began to collapse in 1933 when we was 7. I don't think that children of that age think much about money and prestige but the financial collapse put a terrible strain on his parents that must have been felt by the boys.

For many years neither would speak directly to the other and would speak only via Nan. This meant that at the dinner table, Anna would say "Nan inform Col Paterson that I will be out for lunch tomorrow." Pat would be feet away from Anna at the head of the table. Nan would say "Col Paterson, Mrs Paterson will be out for lunch tomorrow" He would reply "Tell Mrs Paterson that I thank her for the courtesy of keeping me informed. I will go to the club then" Nan would then repeat this verbatim. The boys would site mute or fool around with jill, the killer Alsatian. (My madness for dogs is in the genes)

Boarding for the boys, as later for me, was not a penance but was a refuge. As Anna became more outrageous, Pat withdrew. When Pat used his tight connections with his old gunner friend, Andy MacNaugton, to get a job in England, my father was on his own. The house was closed. They were homeless. The boys relied on their aunts to house them in the holidays. Their mother descended ever lower into her own hell from which she would never recover.

So what does a 14 year old boy do under these circumstances? What would you do?

Dad's response was to show them. Not only "them" as his parents but also the rest of "them" in Montreal. The Scots ruling class in Montreal were much like PEI today. Not only did "everyone" knew each other but most were related. When you are shamed in such a small society, you really feel it. He was going to show them that his family were not finished. These were the ashes that would feed his phoenix flight through his short life.

So what did I learn today, this father's day,  as I wrote this?

I wish I had been more compassionate as a young man to a father whose own teen years had been so hard. My own sadness is deepened by the fact that my own son and daughter are such a compassionate friends to me. What a gift that would have been for him if I had had the heart that my own children have and had given it to him then.

What I cant do then in life, I do now. It is never too late for love. So dearest Dad on this, your day, I would like to offer up Stephen Spender's great poem for all those who burn too bright.

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

Maybe next year, I will explore more. With luck, before I die, I may know him as I know myself. After all, what are we but stories?

Technorati Tags: Family, Jim Paterson, Fathers

I'm Better - some lessons I learned

Lazarus is raised!

Phew! I weigh 5 pounds less than last week (was 206 pounds in Feb and I am now 185) and I am finally all but well now.

Here are a few tips. Day 3 I went to the pharmacy to ask her advice about Imodium. (By the way in Canada it is easier to get advice on common ailments from a pharmacist than to see a doctor), Imodium works well but her advice was let the bacteria take its course - don't block them still in there.

Her other advice was to drink lots of Gatorade. replaces not just the fluids but the salts etc. In spite of the ersatz taste and colour, the Gatorade was very soothing.

I wrote to the hotel who replied that they had checked their systems and that all seemed OK from their point of view. But as the only thing I ate was their sandwich something slipped through. Another lesson - don't buy sandwiches at 6.30 am - they had to have been made at least the night before.

Thank you to the many who have written to me wishing me well - I have had a my father's day fried breakfast and I am off to have my first bike ride in ages

Technorati Tags: Health

I'm Sick

I had a great trip to San Francisco this weekend where I met my old friends at Values Technology and had a talk with the folks at Omidyar.Net.

But I had a sandwich for lunch that I bought at the Hotel. Proscuitto, Bonconcini and Mayo. Looked like a good idea as they do not serve a real meal on the flight anymore.

As the day went on I started to feel nauseated. Fortunately my body did not erupt until I got home. I post no details, just say I have lost even more weight.

I have just got up after 20 hours in bed and feel so weak I can hardly do anything. The storm seems to have passed.

Lesson - don't buy sandwiches made the day before

Technorati Tags: Health

Rare Breeds of Dogs - The Island Raindog

This a very rare sighting of the almost extinct, Island Rain Dog. Once common among the Mikmaq people in Atlantic Canada, the Island Rain Dog helped hunt salmon. The Rain Dog would swim in the rivers - herding the fish into the nets. All that is really left of this trait is a great love for getting wet.

Technorati Tags: Dogs, Island rain Dog, Mikmaq, Rare Breeds of Dog

Recalled to Life Part 2 - English Food - Setting My Taste Buds for Life

Some ignorant people think that English food has no class. But the great inside secret is that for many of us our fondest memories are of food in the nursery and English sweets (Candy to you).

I hope today to give you a glimpse of some of the highlights of this great cuisine and the best Sweets in the world.

Here I am in Cornwall in 1956 looking into a pub window at my parents. They are tucking into something nice like Steak and Kidney pudding and washing it down with a real local beer - I can hardly think of a better meal.

So let's start with Sweets. In 1954, rationing had just ended. Sugar had been hard to find since the early 1940's. Many kids had never seen an orange. "Yes we have no bananas" was a song written in 1923 but was very relevant to kids after the war. No wonder I am indifferent to fruit. I never saw any until I was almost a teen.

All kids love sweets - we lived for them as a crack cocaine addict lives for crack. Here is a wonderful link to many of our favorites. Murray Mints, Black Jacks, Sherbert Fountains etc. We also liked Gobstoppers. For those who have never heard of a Gobstopper - this is what they look like.

Here is a pack of Murray Mints - we loved them as well. These were the kind of sweet that you could make last.

Diana and I got a shilling a week pocket money. This was a fortune at the time. Remember this was the pre-decimal age and there were 12 pence in a shilling. Black jacks were 4 for a penny. A Cadbury's chocolate bar was 2 pence! So with 12 pence, we could get enough sweets to make us ill.

We would walk down to Kensington Church Street to a little corner shop every Saturday to get our fix. What a wonder the shop was! Tiny full of papers and comics and rows and rows of sweets in the front and jars that seemed almost as big as us at the back packed with delights like Lemon Sherberts.

Crisps were just coming in. They were made by Smiths. No flavours just plain. The salt came separately in a little blue bag. You had to be careful not to eat too fast. Many a time I bit into the bag and got a mouthful of salt. It was the later advent of Wonder crisps and Flavors that really expanded the crisp business.

In about 1956, Iced Lollies arrived. Popsicles to you. We were so mean to little Fiona, who was the little girl being comforted by Mrs Cushing in the previous episode. We tied her to the railing and danced around her eating our chocolate Iced Lollies - taunting her with how delicious they were. This caused yet another visit to our mother by her angry parents.

Mars Bars were however the Holy Grail. If I needed a favour from Diana, I would buy her a Mars bar.

In the 1950's there were no frozen foods in England. We ate what was in season or from a tin. There were no supermarkets. On every high street there were small stores that would deliver food by boy and by bike. Fishmongers with slabs of ice covered in fish and crabs. Butchers with rabbits and game hanging in the window. In the war much of the rabbit was really cat. Green grocers with bins of potatoes, greens and cabbages - no Kiwi fruit in those days.

A critical supplier was the milkman. For some time, he arrived with a horse drawn float. For Diana and I he also had our only real luxury. The cream at the top of the milk.

This is what an English Milk bottle still looks like. In the summer birds would often make a hole in the cap. In the winter, the milk might freeze and push the cap up off the top. Diana and I took turns with the cream on our porridge. We still love cream and miss it terribly in Canada where we only get a sad chemically filled substitute. The milkman delivered eggs and butter as well. Dairy is still my favorite part of food.

So what would have been a typical food day for Diana and I in say 1956?

Breakfast would have been porridge and cream - if it was your lucky day. Followed by maybe a boiled egg and soldiers. Lunch might have a stew or Mince with potatoes and cabbage in the winter. There was no dinner. We had Tea at about 4 pm. Tea might be a mix of sandwiches, chocolate rolls. It might have biscuits. For many English children though tea was synonymous with a product that I never liked - Marmite.

I don't know why I don't like Marmite. I love all savory foods. Just could not stand Marmite. When we got a bit older, Fluffy - the greatest nanny ever - would take us out occasionally to Lyons Corner House where we would have Egg and Chips! If I was to be executed for murder, my last meal would be a toss up between a traditional English breakfast and egg and Chips. If its not fried it's not food became my motto and still is.

So tea was it. Then baths and bed by 6. Where is the TV you ask. What TV? We did not get one until 1956 - a whole chapter on TV later for all you Bill and Ben fans. We were very thin. We ran around all day and as you can see had very little to eat. I was hungry a lot. No one I knew was fat. Most of us looked like we had just been released from a concentration camp.

Later, when I get to prep school, I will talk about the real English food adventure - Toad in the Hole, Dead Man's leg, Treacle Tart and Treacle Pudding.

Next though - Life in the nursery - my relationship with Diana, nannies and Fluffy

Technorati Tags: Black Jacks, Gobstoppers, Lyons Corner House, Murray Mints, Mars Bars, Rob Paterson, Rob's Life, Smiths Crisps, Sweets

Rare Breeds of Dogs - The Diviner

The Diviner is a rare breed of dog originally from the sub sahara whose great skill was in finding water.

Today, in the domesticated version, they can often be found in your bathroom.

Technorati Tags: Dogs, The Diviner, Rare Breeds of Dog

Rare Breeds - The Sharpeicameleon

This very rare breed of dog, the Sharpeicameleon, has found an excellent evolutionary way to sleep on humans beds without their owners knowing. Being able to blend into the bedclothes and blankets has meant that they are rarely spotted by watchful humans.

Unfortunately the advent of the duvet has made it easier to see the dog and it is unlikely that they will be able to breed to fit this new environment soon enough.

Technorati Tags: Dogs, Sharpeicameleon, Rare Breeds of Dog

The Commons is Spreading

This in the Globe and mail today - The idea of a Work Place Commons is emerging spontaneously across Canada

By SHANE SCHICK

They weren't really friends, at least not at first -- they were bloggers who got to know one another electronically. Then the group in Charlottetown started to wonder: Wouldn't it be great if they all worked in the same building?

That's when an actor-comedian, the head of a software development firm called SilverOrange, and a consultant decided to create a space called Queen Street Commons. Inside, it looks like a comfortable house, the walls painted in rich shades of blue, orange and green. Its purpose, however, is not to shelter a family. It's to establish a community for entrepreneurs and small businesses that can't afford office space in a downtown high-rise, but don't want to be working in isolation at home.

"They needed a community. We knew that, because we are those people," says Cynthia Dunsford, the actor-comedian in the founding trio.

"We worked out of our homes and met clients in coffee shops, primarily because they offer wireless to lure you in. You'd be sitting at Timothy's or Starbucks and holding court all day with all your meetings. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not completely professional."

The alternative is what some are calling a "third working space," which attempts to create the atmosphere of a coffee shop along with the privacy and amenities of a regular office.

Read on to find out what is going on elsewhere

Technorati Tags: Commons, Community, Culture, Cyn Dunsford, Dan James, Queen Street Commons, Rob Paterson, Work