Chewing on these:
- Performing the world is a conference in New York this fall.
- Teaching social media to environmental activists.
- Lianne Raymond gives the gift of words for International Women’s Day.
- Rob Paterson on new careers in sustainability.
- Andre Hardin posts an outstanding video of a Rube Goldberg machine from the band OK Go.
- Jordon Cooper with a nice find: a video about the photographer BlueJake of New York City.
Jack Ricchiuto on simplifying strategy:
Every organization, and community, I work with on strategy is very relieved when I liberate them from the inane practice of traditional academic language in the process. I refuse to allow them to waste valuable time debating over the distinctions of: goal, objective, strategy, tactic, and night maneuvers. (I throw in the military reference to “night maneuvers” to inject humor into what is usually a very humorless and uninspired process – and it works.)
What do we do instead? We replace these never-agreed-upon jargon with complex words like: where, why, how, and what.
To be strategic, which is to in plain English is to say, proactive, is to talk about 4 things:
- Where do we want to be in 20 years?
- Why does that matter to us?
- How do we want to get there in the next 2 years? and
- What would be wise for us to do in the next 2 quarters (and weeks) to get there?
These simple and powerful questions give people a remarkable kind of alignment, velocity, and traction they are not used to in the process. What can I say? It works.
via jack/zen ” zenext » Blog Archive » Strategy, simplified.
A nice indictment – chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov on the submission of creativity to the dull incrementalisim of logic models:
With the supremacy of the chess machines now apparent and the contest of “Man vs. Machine” a thing of the past, perhaps it is time to return to the goals that made computer chess so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. Playing better chess was a problem they wanted to solve, yes, and it has been solved. But there were other goals as well: to develop a program that played chess by thinking like a human, perhaps even by learning the game as a human does. Surely this would be a far more fruitful avenue of investigation than creating, as we are doing, ever-faster algorithms to run on ever-faster hardware.
This is our last chess metaphor, then–a metaphor for how we have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s.
Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.
via The Chess Master and the Computer – The New York Review of Books.
Back to the weekly collection of interesting finds:
- Rob Paterson fins cool stuff on the new shape of non profit boards.
- Viv McWaters on how she decides to say yes to a job.
- Rolling Stone on Wall Street’s trickery.
- Harper’s on the junior hockey life in Flin Flon, late 1990s. No gold medal glamour there.
- New York Times on the sound of a close finish at the Olympics
- You Tube: a stunning clip of a high tension power line worker. Stunning