Category: Uncategorized

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.”

—H.L. Mencken: attacker of ignorance, intolerance, frauds, fundamentalist Christianity, osteopathy, myths and writers that mocked him for sport…

Just sayin’…

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May 26
To start, the goal is not to be an ‘elite’ athlete…

Fourth in a 5-Part Series for http://www.SocialMode.com

(1)   Sports, like businesses or social movements have goals and costs.

(2)   The best way to advance is through the “Do”.

(3)    Focus on long-term benefits as well as short-term gains

(4)   It is not ‘automaticity’ per se that leads to high proficiency.

“Automaticity” is the perception that someone is in the ‘flow”; they make what they are involved in look automatic.

Competitors train to do stuff right; winners train so they can’t do it wrong.

In business and in sport the level of skill at which automaticity is attained is constantly changing. When the rate of that change slows too much, in sport and in business, things start to get dicey.

Most people never develop beyond their hobby levels of expertise because that is the level at which they are able to do things ‘automatically’. We’ve all seen those people in business. We’ve also seen them in different sports. Their comfort level is large and ever present.

For club golfers, swimmers or competitive tennis players, their levels of expertise for ‘doing stuff right’ in their sport are sub-par, as it were. To truly excel, there is always some part [life, sport, relationships] that is not automatic yet that needs attention.

When you raise the bar in each component area, you’ll move from an automatic state (large comfort zone) to a non-automatic state (‘zero’ comfort zone). Some can’t hack the loss of comfort. Others find it’s OK to have small comfort zones because you are betting they are only temporary.

It becomes a balancing act between that automaticity important in the “now” is the elite level to be reached you were working toward. One elite athlete I know said to me,

“The day I take the elevator rather than walk up ten floors is the day I’ll have decided to give up being World Champion.”

So most of us settle short of an elite status (business /sport); for club performance, for less, for sub-par.   Thus, we rationalize not reaching our highest potentials in one area when we come to value our current level, or “other” events or circumstances. That too is OK because you know what you are doing. That is life.

When we settle in business, others may identify it as ‘lost opportunity costs” and that may not be OK. But know that the number of mountains to climb – literally and figuratively – are enormous and, clearly, some are more fun to climb than others.

You get to decide.

Business People Learning From Elite Athletes: One Approach

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May 26
Historically, the search for a way to describe the mechanics of what is going on out there in the world and how it impacts what is going on with organisms [sometimes referenced as “the mind”, personality, cognition, consciousness, intuition, etc.] is that the fields of psychology have always used metaphors, similes, and analogies, in part, because most of the areas morphed out of philosophy, religion and literature.

Clearly for Descartes, mechanisms [particularly clocks and hydraulics] were big at the time and from there it wasn’t a stretch to embrace the naturalistic model, then the disease model, then the computer analogies, all the while not letting go of the metaphors, analogies, and similes that preceded it.

Yes, don’t forget the impact of the 70’s drug culture on 40+ years of speculation on consciousness, the inner self, higher self, etc.

The outcome of much of the theory and speculation was increased awareness at the cost of precision. All three influences are with us today as embedded vernacular, imagery, and rationales’ applied to the understanding of organisms. We still embrace the vernacular and the idioms of Freud as if they were true, valid or valuable. At another level, these approaches are embraced and morph as needed because there is little to replace them that the populace could cling to considering Western Judo-Christian history, laws, and sometimes even a bully Western philosophical interpretation of all matters. The terms, concepts, etc., work because they explain behavior to many that are clueless and communication-less without such pop-snarkness, having otherwise to depend on greater superstition, folklore and ‘commonsense’ explanations than they currently do. Said more succinctly, while the theory of mind may keep us from looking at the causes of behavior, it has some value, more than other Freudian alternatives or those endless literature dumps proposed by philosophy, theology and sociology.

As metaphors are wont to do, they work to make intangibly complex relationships more tangible, understandable, usable and communicable. Science has not had a history of doing that well either so the result is there is little pragmatic value change in understanding what the heck is going on out there and ‘in’ there if science doesn’t make cases well enough.

The lay vocabulary we end up using is residue that provides consistent, sometimes vivid equivalents for concepts until the understanding of relationships and patterns can get sorted out. A MAJOR problem comes from the reification of those terms like mind, need, motivation, personality, evil, addiction, intuition, etc., such that they are never scientifically challenged or shown to be what they are; a trail of metaphysical left-overs from philosophy, theoretical speculations and dependence on analogies, similes, and metaphors.

Unfortunately, the metaphor has become reified to the extreme by the world’s citizens and, through the conditioning we all used to get an education, became the reality of what it was a ‘place holder’ for. We’ve all seen it over and over: what had been an incomplete story-like example became the “thing” studied, described, interacted with before suddenly becoming raison d’être.

There is no bridge between pragmatism and articulated science. If one can’t use what science provides people – even academia – will embellish what they have and use it it as they have for centuries. Traditions allow us to avoid the constant assessment tasks that are needed.You know the old saw,

“insanity is doing the same things over and over and expected the results to be different’ (-Einstein or W. Deming; take your pick)

By embracing those states that come to keep us comfortable and un-questioning, only those events we subjectively or theatrically sense as catastrophic will generate uncomfortable questions that when answered will make a difference.

Thus, for you to entertain changing your sense of how anything works, business, families, social networks, corporations, football teams, etc. (you get the idea) you’ll need to get fired, get shunned, get de-friended, get passed over, lose the Super Bowl, and many other things equivalent to a kick in the ass. When that happens, most of us change our perspective a wee bit after we get up… others just continue to blame or claim the world is evil, unkind, gone mad, filled with greed before setting out to get restitution, get even or get a lawyer.

How’s that last option working?

Are traditions roadblocks or safety nets?

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May 25
Pressler in his NYT article of May 18^th 2010, takes a stab at explaining why Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal and other unnamed people in the lime-light say and perform in corrupt or dishonest ways to get ahead can be accounted for as “rooted in the dishonesty that surrounded the Vietnam-era draft.”

If only life was so simple and had a list of absolute causes and values as he posits. His argument is flawed; No, not in the straw-man ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ sense.

Just because he lived in the midst of the Vietnam War changes doesn’t give him or his generation any special knowledge [as implied] of that period he calls the “The Technicality Generation”.

“… many in my generation knew they were using a broken (but legal) system to shirk their duty. They cloaked themselves in idealism but deep down had to know they were engaging in a charade. (I, too, was against the Vietnam war and felt that people should protest, but not dodge their draft responsibility.)

The above quote shows that what Pressler valued, others didn’t, be it the system, the War, the ‘duty’ to serve, and so on. It also points out a more insidious case that (1) fear of consequences is a pervasive driver of behavior and (2) we [Homo sapiens] don’t have the slightest understanding of why we do what we do and don’t do what we don’t do.

The latter point (2) is the point of this response to his article.

Pressler has confused the causes with some effects — in his castigation of others in his article. It is not BECAUSE of the Vietnam War, but having an understanding of what you value was up for assessment in the 60’s. Rules of life were changing. More and more people were seeing patterns that didn’t make sense. More and more people were questioning the basis of past rules in the context of their 28,500 days on earth. They were questioning the basis of past antecedents linked to how they were supposed to behave as well as the expected consequences for that behavior.

The fact that “someone poorer or less educated, and usually African-American, had to serve” when others didn’t, is one of those consequences in life, not just for Vietnam, but for life in general. As a Rhodes Scholar Pressler might want to review history, contingencies management, and factors modulating individual behavior.

Besides finances and education, many of those who served were also culturally separate, had different histories, had different contexts and had different prospects for the immediate futures than those who didn’t. Yes, there were a large number of African-Americans. There was also an abundance of other minorities as well, just as it is today in a volunteer armed services world. This ‘abundance’ has an abundance of causes. None of those minorities had exactly the same set of values [learned rules in cultural – community] for enlisting, serving or NOT serving and avoiding Vietnam.

This Pressler logic implies that everyone who used the law, their circumstances, etc., and didn’t go to Vietnam had similar values and everyone that did go to Vietnam had a different set of values – like those aligned with Pressler himself which he contends were the correct values. As if Pressler himself or his generation invented functional dualism, Pressler then castigates others for not doing what he did concerning his definition of “basic responsibilities.”

“Once my generation got in the habit of saying one thing and believing another, it couldn’t stop.”

Please!

If all that happened in the 60’s hadn’t happened as it did, things would be different today than they are.

His contention is that things would be better. I maintain that he has a long way to go to show any such reason for that conclusion. If anything he has shown that ‘the system’ that he and others fought for, works… including catching up to Mr. Blumenthal’s and having the consequences of his betrayal of constituents, state, friends and family come into play. Maybe due to the thorough level of vetting of individuals Pressler’s article should more poignantly have been titled: “FROM THE VETTING GENERATION: WELCOME!”

Richard Blumenthal and “The Technicality Generation”

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May 20
The case for behavioral strategy

Left unchecked, subconscious biases will undermine strategic decision making. Here’s how to counter them and improve corporate performance.

MARCH 2010 • Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony

Once heretical, behavioral economics is now mainstream. Money managers employ its insights about the limits of rationality in understanding investor behavior and exploiting stock-pricing anomalies. Policy makers use behavioral principles to boost participation in retirement-savings plans. Marketers now understand why some promotions entice consumers and others don’t.

Yet very few corporate strategists making important decisions consciously take into account the cognitive biases—systematic tendencies to deviate from rational calculations—revealed by behavioral economics. It’s easy to see why: unlike in fields such as finance and marketing, where executives can use psychology to make the most of the biases residing in others, in strategic decision making leaders need to recognize their own biases. So despite growing awareness of behavioral economics and numerous efforts by management writers, including ourselves, to make the case for its application, most executives have a justifiably difficult time knowing how to harness its power…

~~~~~~~~~~~

Here is the thing…

The subject of the article is the categorization of ‘biases’.

Like the other media forms, if you run out of new terms to use in business, your presentations die an agonizing death of disuse. This paper provides a fine example of what lack of clarity and misapplication of the vernacular does: http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Strategy/Strategic_Thinking/The_case_for_behavioral_strategy_2551?gp=1

Put ‘Behavioral’ or ‘Neuro-‘in front of almost any expression, term or concept and it would appear that it is born anew. Throw in a set of myths, superstitions or “common knowledge” as those found in the metaphysics of the ‘subconscious,’ and cognitive biases, then make up some new words, like “debias” and you have the makings of another mechanism that supports ignorance of behavior [corporate or personal] from slippery sound bites. Lovallo and Sibony have done a story for the acclaimed McKinsey Group and packed it with metaphors, similes and analogies but missed the behavioral part of their article, that is:
1. EMPIRICISM –
2. OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS –
3. SHUNNING OF MONOCAUSALITY –
4. MEASUREMENT OF BEHAVIOR OF INDIVIDUALS, COMMITTEES, OR COMPANIES SUBSEQUENT TO ANTECEDENTS OR AS CONSEQUENCES
Biases are not new, empirical, behavioral or operationally defined and therefore constitute a rehash of psycho-babble that
1. Doesn’t address how biases come to exist OR influence behavior like selection of options or decisions
2. Doesn’t address how biases are maintained OR why they are negative, irrelevant or harmful
3. Doesn’t address what to do to reduce their effects in business for some company benefit
McKinsey Group should move on and get some behavioral assessment partners to mull business approaches with these gentlemen. With stuff like this being offered to the management of companies that can afford help, is it any wonder that businesses sometimes seem to be clueless on what is going on with customers, vendors, or partners?
Making a better case for “behavioral strategy”

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May 18
It has been suggested by urban myth and scientific pundits that we do not come close to tapping the resources of —or actualizing—our potential. Dah!

What is a resource and what is actualized or not are subjective matters as is the meaning and the implications of ‘potential.’ Tiger Woods is a good example of how this can be all framed; that is, ‘resources,’ ‘actualized skills’ and the meaning of ‘potential.’ Based on the rules sets used for evaluation, he did well in the golf game part but less well on the husband, communicator, father, business analyst, family member or friend parts. However, if you are using the idea that is some throwback to an underdeveloped person with unmet interests, he did alright. It all depends on the frame of reference.

Still others would suggest that intelligence, in some operational way, is made up of the skills we develop. Tiger wasn’t very intelligent in some areas as he was in others; all relative to the rules used to assess his behavior. Clearly, to keep a stable of secrets that substantive for that long so as not to be discovered or distracted from his game was an act of deliberation and intelligence.

Superior talent then, rather than being a rare genetic mutation, is a result of highly concentrated effort. Malcolm Gladwell gave the world the relative number of hours it takes to ‘get it done’ in some area of concentration. It is the 10,000 hour rule of success in his Outliers book. While the books interpretive value escapes me, 10,000 hours is a nice number to provide where focused expertise in some small area will yield results, perhaps as it has for Mr. Gladwell in writing a tidy book on confirmation bias.

Thus, the thrust of Gladwell’s book and pointedly of this oplog, is that it is not innate genius or talent that creates great achievers, great works or great breakthroughs but seized opportunities on some aspect of life that, with an extraordinary period of time — a minimum of 10,000 hours — will deliver on the promise.

Einstein didn’t read the latest business gurus or attend the power seminars of T. Peters but he happened upon that theory before it was a theory:

“It is not that I’m so smart, but that I stick with problems longer.”

How really different is that from the modern day saw of “The more I practice, the luckier I get!”? We all have heard it but still look for the magic, the pill, the magic pill, this or some new-age short-cut. Talk about self-hypnotic entitlement…!

Randy Jackson on American Idol might attempt to grab your attention by extolling you to “Check this out dog!” In a less hip fashion I am asking you to test the following: GET SOME LEVERAGE and see how it affects your achievements!

You and your ideas aren’t going to change in any but trivial ways without getting some leverage and that means some risk of failure. If failure is important to avoid, read no further.

But if you can tolerate some course corrections, stone walls and echoes, “get some leverage” at doing something you must do because you value something, make the NOT doing something so painful and distasteful to you that you can commit to the hours, the rejection, the near misses and the real possibility of lasting failure. You’ll know you’ve got leverage when you know exactly what to do in the AM to keep you up in the PM.

The repeated attempts to reach beyond our present level will produce clearer views to your achievement. For some, that may mean graduating from high school while living in squalor. For others it may mean finding a new use for nanotube technology no one wants. It’s all subjective evaluation but you can make it real.

Is there anything in your life today you would withstand losses again and again if certainty of tomorrow’s success was in the balance?

If there is, are those really ‘failures’ or losses or just the feedback from your world?

If not, when you do find that ‘something,’ go about framing it in a way that keeps you in the game and not in the gallery.

May 14. 2010

Yes, its about the ‘do – do…’

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May 15
Tuesday, May 11, 2010

THE SEMESTER IS OVER AND NOW WHAT?

This is not a political endorsement but a process endorsement.

It starts something like this: Under pressure, few of us are as calm as President Obama appears to be.

How does he keep his cool? Someone might ask, “Does he meditate? Does he practice yoga? Has he tried any of the hip therapies that have promised everything that the media has pushed since his election? How about brain exercises? Those are ‘cool’ right now… What kind of medicinal herbs, salt-free diets or protein shakes is he provided that the rest of us need to know about?”

Along with 92,000 other people packed into the University of Michigan’s football stadium last weekend, President Obama deliver a remarkable speech very calmly to the Michigan’s graduating class of 2010.

Volcanoes are erupting, oil vomiting from the ocean, rivers flooding, car bombs smoldering in Times Square and the birthplace of all nation-states collapsing in Europe while wars of our own making are raging along with division and derision of the American people on what to do and how to do it. The whole world seems to be wrenching by the porcelain. Everyone’s ‘rules’ are being broken in so many ways. Yet, President Obama appears to be calm.

Attacks on him as a person, on the office of the President and on his policies are everywhere, any one of which could anger, embattle or create greater amenity toward those yelling, plotting or disagreeing. Just writing about it spikes my blood pressure. Yet, he’s been doing something we were taught is a good rule to have; he is listening.

While some contemplate their own navel, march to their small righteousness, stand firm in mystic convictions or ponder what therapies to experiment with next, he interacts with as many Americans as possible. As pointed out elsewhere, every night President Obama reads ten letters from American citizens. He says, “This is my modest effort to remind myself of why I ran in the first place” he admits. He also admits that about a third of the writers call him an idiot or worse, which is how he knows he’s getting “a good representative sample” he concedes with his typical delivery smile.

If you turn on the news, read the printed media or listen to the talk while getting a Starbucks, you can sense why friends, family and strangers are on edge. Serious arguments about serious issues are bound to arouse emotions during these unique but fear-filled times. Obviously, we can’t solve our problems if we can’t hear the good ideas delivered in the cacophony of that fear. Our fears challenges the possibility to disagree with people’s positions without demonizing them or questioning their motives or patriotism.

The advice he gave to the newly-minted graduates of ‘Big Blue’: “For four years you’ve been exposed to diverse thinkers and scholars,” he said. “Don’t narrow that broad intellectual exposure just because you’re leaving… Instead, seek to expand it. If you grew up in a big city, spend time with somebody who grew up in a rural town. If you find yourself hanging around with people of your own race or ethnicity or religion, include people in your circle who have different backgrounds and life experiences. You’ll learn what it’s like to walk in somebody’s shoes.”

My advice to you at the end of this class is as robust and just as meaningful contextually: Listen. Suspend disbelief that anyone could accept ideas that you don’t have. Avoid emotional fits; they’re all exhaust. Then, question what you think you know, what your teachers, authorities, gurus, priests or potentates tell you is the ‘absolute’ or the ‘new’ truth. This process has no known short-cuts, is hard & can be lonely but will keep you going when others bog down from rhetoric.

This is not a political endorsement but a process endorsement.

Contorted, twisted and purloined from a P. Warner Post in The Huffington Post : May 9, 2010

What’s next for you?

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May 12
I’ve avoided posting much about Tiger Woods. It’s just too easy. However, today ESPN had a piece from Rick Reilly that is just too crazy to not poke at a bit. The piece isn’t badly written or “wrong”… it’s crazy in its assumptions and bombastic its claims and it might just be an accurate reflection of golf’s, ESPNs, sports’, and Tiger’s audience values.

Here’s the zinger of it all:

We don’t usually build statues of nice, helpful, well-balanced men.

This sentiment seems to call out a justification of Tiger Woods’ behavior – in the pursuit of greatness you should do anything… in fact, greatness is a result of Tiger Woods’ “self-obsession, a limitless appetite for domination, me-first-ism to the extreme.”

That’s the same logic used by people to suggest that great comedy comes only from troubled souls, good writing from lonely people, successful business from obsessed workaholics, etc. etc. These are catchy statements that help people wrap up complex situations but they really aren’t justified. For one, you can’t at all determine causation from correlation in any of these examples.   It might be that great sports stars learn those behaviors while playing their sport, or they self select into the sport, etc. etc.

He vows no more “entitlement.” But Tiger Woods always played as though the trophy had his name engraved on it when he showed up Tuesday.

He vows to “tone down my negative outbursts and … my positive outbursts.” But can he win without the fist pump? Can he win without passion?

So… if Tiger Woods doesn’t win the Masters will Reilly and the audience blame rehab? Tiger’s wife? Buddha? The Weaker Fist Pump?   There’s a subtle suggestion in this article that suggests that Tiger sorting out his personal life might not be worth possibly losing some golfing success.

I suspect there’s a good chunk of the audience that share these value statements – winning golfing tournaments might be more important than the other stuff……….

If Tiger Woods wins his last 4 months of behavior will fade quickly from the public discussion.   (Remember what Kobe Bryant did a couple of years ago? No, not that winning MVP and championships….)

I’m not saying it’s good or bad values that we’re seeing on display or I share any of these.. just calling out that there are value systems at work here and they often aren’t very politically correct.

Tiger Woods Masters Experience – About to Showcase Audience Values In A Major Way

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Apr 6
Now that both the iPad and Wolfram|Alpha iPad are available it’s time to really evaluate the capabilities of these platforms.

Wolfram|Alpha iPad

[disclaimer: last year I was part of the launch team for Wolfram|Alpha – on the business/outreach end.]

Obviously I know a great deal about the Wolfram|Alpha platform… what it does today and what it could do in the near future and in the hands of great developers all over the world. I’m not shy in saying that computational knowledge available on mobile devices IS a very important development in computing. Understanding computable knowledge is the key to understanding why I believe mobile computable knowledge matters.   Unfortunately it’s not the easiest of concepts to describe.

Consider what most mobile utilities do… they retrieve information and display it. The information is mostly pre-computed (meaning it has been transformed before your request), it’s generally in a “static” form.   You cannot operate on the data in a meaningful way. You can’t query most mobile utilities with questions that have never been asked before expecting a functional response. Even the really cool augmented reality apps are basically just static data. You can’t do anything with the data being presented back to you… it’s simply an information overlay on a 3d view of the world.

The only popular applications that currently employ what I consider computable knowledge are navigation apps that very much are computing real time based on your requests (locations, directions, searches).    Before nav apps you had to learn routes by driving them, walking them, etc. and really spending time associating a map, road signs and your own sense of direction.   GPS navigation helps us all explore the world and get around much more efficiently. However, navigation is only 1 of the 1000s of tasks we perform that benefit from computable knowledge.

Wolfram|Alpha has a much larger scope!    It can compute so many things against your current real world conditions and the objects in the world that you might be interacting with.   For instance you might be a location scout for a movie and you want to not only about how far the locations are that you’re considering you want to compute ambient sunlight, typical weather patterns, wind conditions, likelihood your equipment might be in danger and so forth. You even need to consider optics for your various shots. You can get at all of that right now with Wolfram|Alpha. This is just one tiny, very specific use case. I can work through thousands of these.

The trouble with Wolfram|Alpha (its incarnations to date) people cite is that it can be tough to wrangle the right query.   The challenge is that people still think about it as a search engine.   The plain and simple fact is that it isn’t a web search engine. You should not use it as a search engine. Wolfram|Alpha is best used to get things done. It isn’t the tool you use to get an overview of what’s out there – it’s the system you use to compute, to combine, to design, to combine concepts.

The iPad is going to dramatically demonstrate the value of Wolfram|Alpha’s capabilities (and vice versa!). The form factor has enough fidelity and mobility to show why having computable knowledge literally at your fingertips is so damn useful. The iPhone is simply too small and you don’t perform enough intensive computing tasks on it to take full advantage. The other thing iPad and similar platforms will demonstrate is that retrieving information isn’t going to be enough for people. They want to operate on the world. They want to manipulate. The iPad’s major design feature is that you physically manipulate things with your hands. iPod does that, but again, it’s too small for many operations.   Touch screen PCs aren’t new, but they are usually not mobile. Thus, here we are on the cusp of direct manipulation of on screen objects. This UI will matter a great deal to the user. They won’t want to just sort, filter, search again. They will demand things respond in meaningful ways to their touches and gestures.

So how will Wolfram|Alpha take advantage of this?   It’s already VISUAL! And the visuals aren’t static images. Damn near every visualization in Wolfram|Alpha are real time computed specifically to your queries.   The visuals can respond to your manipulations. In the web version of Wolfram|Alpha this didn’t make as much sense because the keyboard and mouse aren’t at all the same as your own two hands on top of a map, graph, 3d protein, etc.

Early on there was a critical review of Wolfram|Alpha’s interface – how you actually interact with the system. It was dead on in many respects.

WA is two things: a set of specialized, hand-built databases and data visualization apps, each of which would be cool, the set of which almost deserves the hype; and an intelligent UI, which translates an unstructured natural-language query into a call to one of these tools. The apps are useful and fine and good. The natural-language UI is a monstrous encumbrance…

In an iPad world, natural language will sit back-seat to hands on manipulations. Wolfram|Alpha will really shine when people manipulate the visuals and the data display and the various short cuts. People’s interaction with browsers is almost all link or text based, so the language issues with Wolfram|Alpha and other systems are always major challenges. Now what will be interesting is how many popular browser services will be able to successfully move over to a touch interface. I don’t think that many will make it. A new type of services will have to crop up as iPad apps will not be simply add-ons to a web app, like they usually are for iPhone. These services will have to be great in handling direct manipulation, getting actual tasks accomplished and will need to be highly visual.

My iPad arrives tomorrow. Wolfram|Alpha is the first app getting loaded. and yes, I’m biased. You will be too.

iPad’s Killer App? Wolfram|Alpha iPad.

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Apr 2
Paul Carr nailed this.

Geekiness is now cool enough to invade pop culture in a non-patronizing way. It goes much deeper and further back than than Carr presents in his funny (and weird!) post this morning.

Super Cool Geek

The “geek” used to stand for values and behaviors counter to fame, fortune and romance. And, in general, geekery didn’t lead to fame, fortune and romance. There’s no real simple cause and effect chain of when geekery broke through. A combination of hi-tech business success, the gadget as status symbol, the Internet and TXT as major communication medium, and the shift from blue collar to knowledge worker jobs generated a demand for pop culture representing the world and then the success of that pop culture reinforced further geek-to-cool.

Above I have a picture of Robert Redford from Sneakers (from 1992). I think this is one of those early hi-tech geeks can be cool and sexy movies. It’s distinctly different than say War Games – where the geek is still counter-culture. I think the Matrix pushed geekery officially into cool. In some ways the Matrix gave a message of “geeks shall save us all” as well as pushed geeks to be as cool as Neo – a celebration and a challenge. The success of South Park’s creators, Simpsons’ writers, Model-turned-Punk’d-turned-TwitterLeader Ashton and countless other recent examples…. have only further cemented the reality that celebrity without geekery just isn’t possible anymore.

Now geekery is reinforced by the iPhone, distribution of viral videos, facebook, youtube. Carr thinks it’s “weird” but in reality celebrities and media folks who don’t get their geek on are flat out not making as much money and gaining fans. The geek vocabulary is now mainstream (and you might wonder if there is a deeper geekery developing that is counter culture to mainstream geekery… probably….). Geekery is a part of how regular folks will meet boyfriends/girlfriends, get their first job, notify each other of life’s happenings, make their cash and so on. The pop culture reflects this.

Geeky Celebrities and Celebrity Geeks

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Oct 4

Category: Uncategorized

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.”

To start, the goal is not to be an ‘elite’ athlete…

(4) It is not ‘automaticity’ per se that leads to high proficiency.

How’s that last option working?

Please!

The case for behavioral strategy

Here is the thing…

May 14. 2010

**To start, the goal is not to be an ‘elite’ athlete…**

(4) **It is not ‘automaticity’ per se that leads to high proficiency.**