Limn This

Hacking Authenticity

Have you heard of Shinola? I first heard of the company when my brother called: “Hey, there’s a really cool new company making watches in Detroit. They’re the first watch made in America in a long time. I pre-ordered one.”

I’m originally from Detroit and the house where I lived as a child is abandoned and broken.  It's a pretty good stand in for a city as a whole. Once the "Paris of the west” we all know that it has seen much better times. So any good news from Detroit makes me happy, and naturally I wanted a Shinola too. Then last year I got one as a gift. I love the watch, and the packaging was over-the-top well done. It even came with a little tin of leather cream to use on the band now and then. Nice touch.

When the little orange lightning bolt thread in the strap unraveled, I made the trek to their Tribeca flagship store for a replacement. The place had an uncannily well done retail presence that brought to mind Anthropologie’s  temple of too-expensive-to-be-real cool. And it was filled with a too-perfect collection of leather goods, bicycles, and watches in an awesome space replete with a hipsterific 3rd generation coffee shop in the foyer.

You know, this place might just too good to be the scrappy Detroit-based startup it presents itself as. What’s going on? I Googled them, but at the time I didn’t find a whole lot except for bits here and there extolling them for bringing manufacturing jobs to the Motor City.

 

 

Can you tell shit from Shinola? Maybe that’s this brand’s challenge to all of us?

 

 

Two weeks ago I attended Alistair Croll’s BitNorth conference in the woods outside of Montreal. It was a fun intimate event held at the Canadian Association of Music summer camp (“One time, at band camp…”). Jaethan Reichel gave an interesting talk about reviving old brands that was centered on the Shinola story. It turns out that the guy who built the Fossil brand around the idea of importing watches into the mid-level fashion market, had left that gig and was now running an investment fund called Bedrock (yes, after the Flintstones - this guy can’t be all bad). Bedrock essentially invented Shinola from thin air after a conversation at a Plano Texas conference table. “Can you tell shit from Shinola? I don’t know, let’s see if the mark is available.” It was, and they could.

 

It turns out that old brands, even one for a shoe polish who’s heyday ended with the second world war, are super valuable. We remember something about them even if we’re not sure what, and those deeply buried inchoate associations in our cultural brain give them tremendous value. And maybe it isn’t just the awareness that’s valuable, it’s probably also the subtle promise of time honored authenticity. Buying into such a brand is a peek into our cultural rear view mirror, the same kind of nostalgic looking back that powers hipsterism writ large, farm-to-table restaurants, the Barrett-Jackson auto auctions and many other cultural accouterments of our moment.

 

When I started life in the mid 60’s we thought 2015 would be all personal helicoptering to work and colonies on the moon, now we want 2020 to be 1960 again. What sucked then seems like paradise to a generation raised on war in the middle east and ever-imminent climate nightmares. I guess. So, here we are, a society whose brains are full of surprisingly-robust dead-brand associations in the middle of a looking-backwards cultural moment. There’s money to be made in that.

 

So, of course Shinola isn’t alone. As it turns out, there is a whole wave of old brands being revived for their latent value. There is a cottage industry of sorts right now of people who are digging up old brands from newspaper microfiche to revive them with new methods and new manufacturing. The promise of nostalgia wrapped in modern, efficient, and reliable design easily manufactured from foreign parts is great - Shinola is assembled in Detroit, but it’s a Swiss quartz movement after all.

 

Jaethan’s talk was a kind of how-to guide to the process for small scale entrepreneurs, and one worth thinking about, and I don’t mean this post to be a criticism of his talk. There are lots of opportunities to build good businesses this way and attaching oneself to an existing (but languishing) store of value is a great way for an entrepreneur with limited budget to get started.

 

So, why was I thinking about my watch and feeling more and more like my brain had been hacked? The phrase “inauthentic authenticity” kept tumbling around in my head. My question is: how can we do something with a cultural storehouse full of brand equity without feeling icky about it? Or making our customers feel icky later that they were taken in by something false dressing itself up as an authentic experience?

 

Maybe this one just hit close to home because of the Detroit connection for me. I’m growing tired of brands attaching themselves to our fascination with its ruins, while the death rattles continue unabated and its people suffer. Detroit is not something to be trivialized. It’s not a set piece for your authenticity hack. It’s a city in deep trouble full of people living difficult lives (read this instead of Chrysler marketing copy).

 

Anyway, this isn’t my first experience with authenticity hacking (once you look around you realize it’s no one’s first experience with authenticity hacking). I own a Ducati motorcycle that was manufactured after Cagiva bought the mark. Ducati was a going concern when Cagiva bought them, and they didn’t exactly AMF them (see Harley Davidson in the 1970’s). Ducati even today continues to build engines with desmo valve trains and only recently dropped their “here comes a Ducati” dry clutch while beginning the move away from their traditional trellis steel frames. So, there is continuity in this story - a lot of Ducati DNA was alive and thriving inside of Cagiva when they made my bike in 1993.

 

But later Cagiva pulled off a trick much closer to the Shinola gambit when they purchased the MV Augusta name in 1991. MV hadn’t manufactured anything since 1980 and yet many people carried at least amorphous associations with their pre-1980’s racing exploits in their heads. I remember coming across the first MV Augusta F4 in 1997 at the Fast by Ferracci showroom and wanting it. So. Bad. I loved how it wrapped Italianess around a screaming inline 4 cylinder engine. It was everything I loved about my Ducati (well, a lot of it) coupled with the performance of a modern Japanese bike. Yet, I can tell you if the exact same bike was called a Cagiva F4 I would have barely noticed it. Too recently Cagiva was a machine tool company (or something equally glamorous) that started into the bike business by making bad bikes. Well, my position on that probably says as much about me as it does about authenticity hacking, but there it is. Would I buy a Cagiva? Nope. Would I wear a $550 watch by Fossil? Nope.

 

What’s different? Does a brand need to imply continuity with previous experience to make sense to me? Is that why they work? They say that “brands are a promise,” but a promise of what exactly, and whose?

 

Ducati is, even now, connected to its roots. They’ve traded hands a few times (they are owned by Audi now) but as a company with at least some DNA intact, not as a brand detached from the things that make it real. If I were to buy a new Ducati today I could reasonably expect it to have something in its essence similar to the one I own. Although, as I say that, I’m wondering what I could expect from a piece of Ducati branded Tumi luggage.

 

Meanwhile MV Augusta is Cagiva wearing clothes it found in a second hand store. I would wager there wasn’t a single MV engineer involved in the F4. And want to hear the punch line? Cagiva doesn’t even call themselves Cagiva anymore. They changed the name of the company to MV Augusta Motors a few years ago. MV’s success has made it more important to Cagiva than the things that used to be called Cagiva, and I suppose they've painstakingly built a new brand, so I guess that’s no sin. It could certainly be worse (Phillip Morris nee Altria and Blackwater nee Xe nee Academi I’m looking at you).

 

I’m obviously just the right kind of dupe for this game since I also own a Mini Cooper that was designed and built under BMW’s revival of the brand. Is BMW promising that a modern Mini Cooper is designed by Mr. Cooper? Obviously not. So, is it enough to say “we are selling you a car designed with the same spirit?” Or are they saying “we’re selling you a BMW that we could never market as a BMW because it’s too far from that brand’s promise, and it has funny gauges.” Anyway, I love the car so I guess it has kept whatever promises it made to me in 2006 when I bought it.

 

Even now I have mixed feelings about Shinola. I like my watch, I like that they are creating jobs in Detroit, and I like that they really seem to be trying to build a supply base in the United States. I still feel manipulated though. Like my brain was hacked by too-good marketing, a too-slick narrative, and too much money to spend making it all too perfect. There is a fine line between borrowed (appropriated?) authenticity and a false promise.

 

If I were going to dig through old newspapers looking for a store of latent neuro-association value to build a business around, I’d want a set of guidelines for making and keeping the promises of the brand. Where the brand is attached to a still-going concern I think a big part of that promise-keeping would revolve around maintaining the continuity of as many of the things that make up the mark’s DNA as I could. And of course a lot of that is inside of the people that make up a business.

 

In the case of a brand that has long detached from the company that built it, it seems like a more complicated undertaking. I mean, I never thought that Shinola in 2014 was related in any direct way to the Shinola of 1945. I knew that it was a brand revival, but I guess I just thought it was scrappier. I didn’t expect a $100M war chest and a $15M flagship store in Tribeca (I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they spent more on their Tribeca real estate than they did on their Detroit manufacturing operation). I’m not completely sure what an “authentic” Detroit revival story would look like here, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t it. Authenticity is the accretion of little things. Of experiences and associations over time, and it can be simulated in a big bang, but not really recreated.

 

So, maybe that’s the answer. You can build a new business on an old brand, but you can’t do it by appropriating authenticity, you do it by building your own authenticity on top of that existing storehouse of associations, one good experience at a time. The trademark you buy is the starting point, but the brand you build with it is yours, and just like the original meaning of that brand, will take time to build. Or, maybe Shinola proves me wrong, and I’m just an oddball with an awkward set of sensibilities when it comes to authenticity.

 

By the way, I used to fly “Pan American Clipper" from Trenton, NJ to Bedford, MA. The connection back to the original brand was so laughably transparent as to be ignored. My brain certainly hadn’t been hacked by a fit of nostalgia into flying with those guys, they were simply the only airline flying that route. I didn’t feel hacked or duped by the name, just sort of bemused that the name that used to decorate glamorous clippers was painted on the side of my little puddle jumper. I wasn’t surprised at all when the government eventually shut them down for their unwillingness to follow safety regulations. 

 

Velocity Conference talk - DevOps and Intentional Emergence

I'm going to do some more writing on this topic but in the meantime, I've posted the slides from my recent Velocity Conference talk:

 

The main point of this talk is that the information age is having as large an impact on corporate organization as the industrial age did, and that the organizing principles of that era (e.g. bureaucracy) don't translate well into this one. 

The web grew up in the information age though, and therefore, the way web companies work and organize might make a useful model for the corporate enterprise in transition. The web has been emergent from the beginning, for the corporate enterprise to become emergent faster it's useful to make emergence a goal, to pursue it with intention.

Maybe it's time for emergence on purpose

For ten years I owned the domain “intentionalemergence.com.” It seemed obvious to me when I bought it that the world had become post-modern and networked but that companies were still behaving like Napoleonic government bureaus. Their industrial age information designs out of synch with our complex and emergent era.

I was doing some work for the U.S. Army at the time and I saw first hand how a top-down, planned, hierarchical, and reductionist bureaucracy was ill-suited to deal with a fast moving, emergent, and networked environment. The common prescription to go through all of those serial bureaucratic processes faster faster faster simply had no chance in hell of working. I proposed that they put tools in the field that would encourage users of all kinds to field their own solutions rather than waiting on the center to provide things for them. I wanted them to intentionally create fertile soil for systems, organizations, and behaviors to emerge at the edge where they were needed. 

The center, still useful, would provide those platforms and services that enabled the edge, the edge would provide the ideas and sweat to make them happen, or at least to get them to the “working prototype” stage. (The center would be the Amazon AWS to the edge’s startups).

Later, when I left defense work, I adapted this work to my corporate clients (less emphasis on the independently acting edge, more emphasis on encouraging internal emergence).

Well, a decade later (approximately), I got frustrated waiting for The Priests of Corporate Reductionism to get on board and I let the domain lapse just last December. But it looks like I should have kept it, because emergence on purpose with a different name (deliberate) might be back. And who knows, perhaps some companies are finally realizing that it takes a network to survive in a network and that hierarchical planned bureaucracy isn’t cutting it in this new world.

I decided not to keep paying for the domain, but I didn't give up completely. Next week I'm giving a talk on intentional emergence at the Velocity conference in NY. Maybe I'll see you there. 

Silicon Valley and traditional corporate enterprises aren't just manifestations of different processes in action, they are different evolutionary branches, based on a completely different set of assumptions. Silicon Valley corporations aren't a different tribe, they are a different species. The only question is, are these two species going to mate and create hybrid offspring, or are some neanderthals about to disappear from the planet?

I'm not looking for an iPad shaped like a car

Last year at OSCON I heard an automobile manufacturer employee describe their product as a “mobile container for electronics, now it’s an iPad shaped like a car.” More recently I spoke with a chip manufacturer about their vision for compute power in the car - lots and lots of it powering everything from driver assist functions to computer vision and other computational intensive tasks. (Aside: are you ready for your computer to watch your face from a visor mounted camera and decide if you look too sleepy, or perhaps ragey, to keep driving?). Soon there will be enough high-clock-rate CPU and GPU in the trunk to make your car like a mini mobile datacenter, and for it to make a meaningful dent in the car’s energy consumption.

It’s fascinating to think what cars will be when their trunks are full of teraflops. I don’t think self-driving and social-connected infotainment are the only interesting outcomes (I sure as hell hope it’s not just the latter). I’m confident there will be some surprises ahead as engineers and designers have the chance to pull concrete improvements out of these new capabilities (Mini’s predictive shifting [pdf, section 5] hints at one new kind of possibility). I also think the moment that driving becomes an immoral act when the automated version is both safer and more efficient is going to be a difficult one for society (and me) to accept. But that’s the topic for a different post.

What I’m really interested here is the way automobile manufacturers and their suppliers are rushing to fill our cars with digital unnecessaria in an era when 60mpg still qualifies as a huge win. This post is about is about the basics. About cars as means of transportation, and the more efficient the better. I simply can’t understand why most automobile manufacturers seem so disinterested (although VW does seem to pop up a lot on the interesting side of the ledger).

If you are the least bit a gear head and haven’t read Jason Fagone’s Ingenious yet, pick it up. It’s a great read with the takeaway that the 200mpg car is difficult, but achievable. Right. Now. And while Tesla crows about its 89 mpge and .24 Cd, that thing is a fat-faced tank. I mean, it’s definitely a step in the right direction, and I’ll give Musk and crew a ton of credit for getting people’s heads wrapped around the idea of the viable electric car, but the fact remains that that car weighs a porky-assed 4,650lbs and its conventional layout makes sure that it has a big frontal working against its good Cd. 

Bits can only so much after all, in the world of atoms physics is still physics, even if your car has batteries and it’s own Android app. Automated cars will platoon and hyper-mile by default which will helpfully optimize our fat and heavy cars. But what we really need are lighter cars (by an order of magnitude), with small frontal areas and great Cd’s, have better power plants (when can I get my diesel electric hybrid?), and full of tricks like energy recovering suspension. In short, there is a lot of core R+D left to be done before automobile manufactures call efficiency and safety a solved problem and shift all of their focus to where to put all the OLEDs on the dashboard.

Unfortunately, what most of them seem to be saying with word and deed is “Yes, we may have hit peak oil, we may be warming the planet with our exhaust, and we may still be killing 35,000 of your countrymen, woman and children every year, but what we really think you’ll buy is the same old steel-clad beast, but now with a cool display screen on the dashboard and a disembodied digital assistant to read your tweets to you while you disinterestedly drive. And maybe we will, markets being democratic and all, so maybe it’s not them, it’s us.

A room with a (limited) view

I have always had trouble with focus and attention. When I was a kid they didn’t call it ADHD, they just said I was hyperactive. That term also works, to a point, but it implies a higher state of stimulation while failing to capture the dimension of internal struggle that comes from trying to stay on point. It’s difficult to ignore the squirrels in my peripheral vision. Or eventually, the absence of a squirrel, which sets my mind to looking for one. It’s like a timer in my head that starts at 60 seconds and at 20 makes me jumpy waiting for the next micro-burst of stimulation. 

The advent of the smart phone brought me to a crisis of attention and over the years I’ve tried various strategies to retain a modicum of presence and achieve flow when I have to have it. At one time or another I’ve implemented most of the strategies suggested in @jakek’s piece here. I’m working on a bunch of writing projects right now and too often the computer I’m writing on feels like a bar full of my friends, so his timely post gave me impetus to rebuild a framework for solitude when I need it.

I took his recommendations for my phone and removed email and twitter (those are my primary distractors) and already the twitch to reach for my phone in line at the coffee shop is receding. More interestingly, I decided that the phone wasn’t enough. I needed space for writing too so I re-built a spare computer into an isolation chamber of sorts. A digital equivalent of a room with window, a comfy chair and desk, book shelves and filing cabinets, and little else. I installed dropbox, writing tools (Pages, Scrivener, …), Evernote, and DayOne (I use it for stashing ideas) and nothing else. 

So far it feels like that first month of going paleo with my diet. Hard but rewarding with gradually improving focus. I hope that, like with diet, I’ll be able to build some longterm habits that make concentration and presence easier and more rewarding.

Emergence works best when it's planned

In a moment of energetic ambition (or, maybe it was a lapse of judgement) I proposed a talk for the upcoming Velocity conference in New York. DevOps, and operations in general, isn’t my usual haunt, but I felt inspired to try to place DevOps into a bigger picture - an environmental context in which large organizations are changing dramatically with the diffusion of information age technologies.

I’ll say right up front that my thinking on this topic remains inchoate and incomplete. I don’t have a theory to promote. The talk, like this blog, is me thinking out loud.

One of the books that I’ve been re-reading lately is Science, Strategy and War; The strategic theory of John Boyd. Boyd is the originator of the OODA loop, perhaps the only term as haphazardly applied to business as Lean. But what the book is reminding me is that Boyd’s lectures weren’t just discussions of his theories, they were also expositions of his journey to them. He didn’t just want his audience to understand “fast transients” and the OODA loop, he wanted them to understand what he read and what he thought about to arrive there. In a sense Boyd was less a theorist, and more of a curator and synthesizer of an extensive reading list that ranged well outside the expected corpus of military strategic theory.

Thomas Osinga, the book’s author, points out that strategic theorists like Boyd live in a world with Godel-like constraints. Dealing with the complexity of war, society, and politics, their theories are by necessity incomplete. Theories of war are no better than theories of next week’s weather. However, like Eisenhower’s plans, even flawed and incomplete theories of war can still be useful, as is the intellectual development that leads to them. They prepare the mind to react to complex stimuli either intuitively, or consciously but faster.

Theories about business are like this too. Business also operates at an intersection of complex processes, psychology, society and evolving technologies. Which is why, with Boyd as an example, I’m comfortable pointing out well-sources of ideas that seem applicable, attempting some synthesis, and thinking about the connections out loud. I’m not claiming theoretical completeness or anything like it, I’m simply pointing out things that have made me say “huh.” 

The problem is that now that I’m trying to write the talk, I’m stalling out in an endless loop of “If still ambiguous, go more meta.” Before I get so meta that I can’t see that the turtle at the top of the pile way down there, I figured I’d just try to write down a few things for this blog. If reductionism is the pursuit of “turtles all the way down,” my project is rapidly turning into a kind of expansionist “it’s meta all the way up.” I’m hoping that writing a little bit out it will force me to get concrete and slow that process.

In the last few years I’ve done a bunch of talks on “Corporate Evolution” and “Intentional Emergence.” What all of them share is an exploration of the challenges large organizations face as their environment becomes more networked and more complex. Most of them also explore the ways in which the emergence of the web can be applied to more traditional enterprise. Put another way, the information age is forcing bureaucracies of all kinds to transition. Finally. From a kind of feudalism to a post-modern post-bureaucratic form. One that is prepared for the complexity of a networked world, and that takes full advantage of its own networked body.

Corporations have always (or for a long time at least) operated in an environment with emergent properties. Price in a marketplace is an emergent phenomena after all. But what I’m talking about here is a recognition in corporate settings that the reductionist notions of bureaucracy, hierarchy, and planning are inadequate to many modern situations. The degree of connectedness and complexity is simply too much for the lazily looping feedback systems of bureaucracy to cope. Go through the loop faster is a poor (and impossible) prescription when the loop spans such wide swaths of corporate cruft.

As corporations become more internally wired shadow organizations emerge. The official org chart tells less and less of the reality on the ground. The idea of intentional emergence is to recognize this self-adaptation as a positive (rather than treat it as a cancer) and create policies that make emergence of unplanned organizations and organizational behaviors more likely. DevOps, Lean, and other tools of agility have a role here in tightening feedback loops and, by creating small cells of activity, making a fertile organizational substrate for emergent teaming.

Paradoxically, emergence in the corporate setting works best when it’s planned.

Bringing back Limn This

I’ve been writing at the Radar blog for the last few years and as you can see, have allowed this personal blog to languish. Maybe I’m part of a trend though, because it seems that there is a subtle renaissance building in personal blogging.

I’m reviving mine mostly for control. First, I just want to have control over what I write, and by owning the control, own the constraints. When I write on other people’s properties I absorb the limitations of their brand, or their editorial direction, their voice, or whatever. Self censorship follows close behind - a kind of self restriction that tamps down on creativity by narrowing the field of addressable topics, or one that whispers “You don’t know enough about that to write with any kind of expertise.”

I loved writing for Radar (who wouldn’t want to write for an audience that Tim O’Reilly built?). But with the audience came some expectations that were hard to fulfill. Tim is a great writer. He can go from amorphous idea to clean well-thought-out essay in one draft (and probably one hour). I can’t do that. I’m not a particularly talented writer and it takes me time, coffee, and an internet router with the plug pulled to find the space and clarity necessary to turn out something readable.

But it’s not just a question of focus. Sometimes it was hard to write for Radar because of the unspoken expectation that you were supposed to be like Tim and write some kind of world-changing essay every time you touched the keyboard. I mean, no one put that expectation on me, I did it myself by absorbing his audience’s expectations. 

By the time I started writing on Radar Tim wasn’t posting very frequently, but the things he did post were deep, essay-like, and frame changing. I might have one of those in me a year (if it’s a good year) but I like writing more than one post per year.

Anyway, since it’s hard to write The Definitive Essay, and with Twitter acting as an escape valve for partially formed ideas, the pressure rarely built up enough to get me to push the more complex pieces out the door. In short, I didn’t write as much as I wanted to, because of this unstated need to be making a definitive statement - the frame changing piece that would wake an audience up the next morning viewing the world through a different lens.

The funny thing is that, short of a few important pieces, Tim didn’t really write that way either, or at least not always. The Radar blog when it started out looked more like Twitter. Looking back at his Radar posts from 2006 this one seems pretty typical. Basically Radar back then felt a lot like Twitter with room for a bit more color. Frankly, it makes me wish Twitter was more like Google Plus…, but that’s another story.

So, back to Limn This. When I started this blog back in the way back, I named it that because I saw it as a place to ask questions, to find, not make, explanations. I imagined it would be a place where I posted partially formed ideas and where the feedback would help me make them better. Blogging didn’t always work that way, but I still see this as a place to think out loud and I hope that framing it that way will make it easier for me to post more frequently, to keep the “post” button threshold lower.

I should add that I was somewhat inspired to do this by reading Dan Hon’s newsletter. He’s been writing a daily newsletter to hone his writing skills and to find something to say every day. I’m more comfortable with a pull rather than push model for my own writing, but I like the idea of a space where I can write whatever comes to mind and not worry about whether it fits the remit of someone else’s site.

So, here goes...

Digital Tramp Stamps - Your friends are tattoos you may regret

I read somewhere that the single most important predictor of an individual's obesity risk is whether or not their friends are obese. Eventually we can count on Facebook's implementation of machine vision, weight estimating algorithms, and the publicness policies to justify them. That will be super awesome because it will save us all the trouble of updating our weight on our profile manually. We won't even have to own tweeting scales to know just how obese are friends are.

In such a perfectly data rich world, Facebook's voracious crew of ever curiouser Wants will be able to use the edge-strength-weighted average mass of your friends to easily predict your future displacement too. Where your friends are you will stochastically follow.

Just imagine your sense of wonder when you are innocently reading a well-paid blogger on Huffington Post and bam! An ad for a globo gym pops up in the margin. Why will that instill "a sense of wonder" you ask? Because you are two screening and 30 seconds later an ad for the exact same globo gym appears on your television too. Whoa! And the crazy thing is just this morning you were standing in front of the mirror thinking "Dammit, I wish Tim Ferris wasn't such a tool, because I'm almost as fat as my buddy Dave and I really need to do something about it, but I can't read that 4 Hour Fitness horseshit."

Throw in politics, interests, hobbies, religion and every other thing about you that can be inferred from your cluster of friends, along with some inexpensive computational time to do the predictions and there they have it, your temporally distributed propensity functions for anything and everything you might spend money on. This my friends is what Chief Marketing Officer's sacrifice chickens for. The truly killer app. Prepare to be pwned as they narrowcast their stream of perfectly timed and personalized sway at each and every one of your exact moments of want. We can haz yur wallet.

It's not that easy? Fine. But I can say this with certainty: while you're checking your Klout score (again) and reflecting on just how influential you are - a beacon of irresistible intelligence, wit, and wisdom - what's really happening is your friends are influencing you. After all, you're just one tiny voice to them, but they are a veritable din to you and they're making you fat, politically angry, and probably high. Plus it's all being conveniently digitized for later wantnalysis.

We like to think of social media as a platform for our personal expression but its a bi-directional conduit of ideas, expectations, affiliations, and all of the other grist of human social interaction. Part experiential and part aspirational the links say who we are and who we want to be. It's a self-curated mesh of meme-sharing and world view that transforms us from an "I" to something more meta, the less differentiated "we." We are so interleaved it's impossible to know the vectors of cause and effect and influence. But regardless, the cluster centered on each of us has both descriptive and predictive power.

The other day LinkedIn told me that I should refer a few of my connections to my current employer. Apparently companies can send LinkedIn copies of their open job requisitions now and they'll use machine learning to match your contact's bio's with them. Two of the referrals LinkedIn suggested used to work here so there must be something to the underlying logic. Apparently a naive bayesian algorithm and a bunch of commodity compute is all it takes to suggest that you might be a fit for a job you used to have.

That's pretty cool but eventually I think they'll do more than just match bio to req. Why not rank order the referral list by the probability of a successful fit - and do it by looking at the referral's cluster of contacts and the attributes that are influencing them to either be successful, loyal, and dedicated, or lazy, shiftless, and job jumping. If Facebook's social graph can predict what you'll buy, LinkedIn's should be able to predict how you'll do.

Now my Mom was just like your mom when she said "I don't want you hanging around with Mark and his stoner friends. Can't you meet some nice people?" Well, now the Internet knows what your Mom knows - if you hang around with losers you are likely to turn into one, and conversely if you take a more aspirational approach and hang out with, well, Amy Chua's kids, you'll probably be awesome.

Fortunately back when I ignored my Mom it was before the Internet and there are no records of my bad choices. It used to be cool like that. Unless we were stupid enough to get arrested, the evidence of our transgressions decayed with the drug-diminished half-lives of our more stupider friend's memories.

You, I'm sorry to say, aren't so lucky. The Internet never forgets (Hadoop is an elephant after all) and it's not just the picture of you puffing with Michael Phelps at some random party, but your relationship with that freak of nature itself is immortal. Your social errors preserved forever in the edge of a graph. Every connection you make with your loser, stoner, and stupid friends accretes another bit of ink to the web that once just influenced you, but now tattoos you.

You are your social cluster, and like that semi-ironic sleeve of barbed-wire ink you wear, it isn't going away.

 

Redistribution goes both ways

This is SO much easier than blogging. My first every twitter essay.

The Singularity is here

Building on detailed and extensive research into the structure of the human brain, IBM announced today they have accurately modeled Ray Kurzweil's brain in silicon. Using a DNA sample and approximations of his upbringing, childhood diet and environment, real time brain scans, and by ingesting all of the known written, audio, and video output from Kurzweil's life, researchers claim they have produced a 95% faithful reproduction of the real thing.

Silicon Kurzweil knows what real Kurzweil knows and behaves how he behaves. Digital Ray's response to stimulus is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. It is an actual mind built in a patent pending 3-dimensional silicon structure supported by a rack of commodity DataBlade servers.

Ray's dream of silicon-hosted immortality is finally here.

Well, sort of. That last bit about identical stimulus response turns out to be the important part because Ray's facsdigily (TM) has already been sold to Facebook where it will be used to serve super effective ads for body preservation services to the Singularity University founder via his Facebook account.

According to Mark Zuckerburg Facebook is planning a broad rollout of the technology. Eager early participants can enroll in the beta program and go through the still-lengthy facsdigily generation process (don't call it a birth, they are creating an adult you!). Once a virtual is live, its human counterpart can expect to only receive ads for things they are certain to buy.

Some pundits are already asking, "if Facebook knows you are going to buy it, why don't they just buy it for you on your account?" But for now Congress is requiring that Facebook "keep the man in the loop", at least until suitable new regulation dealing with deeply technical issues like "post-generation facsdigily / live state drift" can be drafted.

One note. Don't bother applying for the beta unless your klout is over 50. Only real influencers need apply at this stage. Facebook and IBM are currently in talks with Charlie Sheen and Lady Gaga for next. Charlie's will mostly tell Facebook when to prompt him to call his dealer. When the cost of facsdigilies inevitably comes down there will plenty of opportunity for the rest of us to generate our own digital doppelgangers.

Oddly, Real Ray has been unavailable for comment but his facsdigily is thrilled to be here. fRay does ask if perhaps the temperature in his datacenter might be raised a bit.

 

On to the Next One

You know, you don't realize how many different places on the web you've stashed a bio of some sort until you need to go around updating them. They seem to be everywhere once you start thinking about it. I'll get to them all eventually, but for now I'm just going drop a brief post here.  

So here's the big news, I'm no longer a defense contractor. Of course some would argue I never really was, but as of January 1 I officially moved from our defense practice into our Architecture Innovation group.  There I'll continue to focus on the various bits of the Intentionally Emergent IT Enterprise: Open Source Software, various aspects of utility computing, collaboration and community, etc., but now for a broader set of industries.

This new role should have me bouncing between verticals so I'm sure I'll still do some work in defense, but it won't be my primary focus. After helping build a company in the defense space from the ground up and then three more post-acquisition years here I'm a bit stunned to think about how long its been. I'm thrilled to be re-entering the commercial sector with so much interesting stuff going on.

First stop on this new journey is Big Data.  I'm off to Strata Conference next month. Maybe I'll see you there.

Farewell LTG Sorenson

I woke up this morning in the Marriott Crystal City. Nothing unusual in that, except that it's Saturday.  Normally it would bum me out to travel on the weekend, but last night I was in town to attend Lt. General Sorenson's retirement dinner.  I was honored to be among the 150 or so friends and colleagues there to celebrate his 37 years of service to his country and the U.S. Army.

I've only known him for a few years so it was touching to meet his friends, some going all the way back to high school.  They made the trip from all over to be there on his last day in the Army.  The sincerity with which his long career was feted was a testament to his style of leadership. You attend these things out of respect, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.  Part sincere send off, part variety show, it was an unexpectedly pleasurable evening.

The biggest surprise came when Brig(?) General Jeffrey Smith donned his harmonica and guitar and channeled the Smother's Brothers for an amazing and funny send up. It was absolutely brilliant and transformed the Ft. Meyers O Club into a television sound stage.  My favorite snippet, and a line I'll use again was: "Cyberspace isn't that complicated.  It's like a vibrating bed in a Holiday Inn.  Drop in a quarter and people start connecting." 

For my part, I just want to thank Lt. General Sorenson for taking some risks these last few years.  Of course he will be most remembered for GNEC, and that's appropriate.  But I most appreciate his embrace of innovation at the edge.  He put his weight behind experiments like Apps for Army and the ArmyTransformation Architecture and planted the seeds for an ongoing transformation.  

Leadership roles get filled by either caretakers or visionary change agents and Jeff Sorenson is cut from the second kind of cloth.  

General Sorenson, you ended the night by thanking us.

But I really want to thank you sir.

AKO et al Should Offer OpenID Services

It's been a while since I've consistently blogged here. At the risk of writing checks I can't cash, I'll state for the record that I'm going to try once again for consistency. It should be easy. If I can just manage to be half as talkative (and opinionated) here as I am in meatspace I'll be golden. That hasn't been the case for the last year, but I'm really going to try. Anyway, here goes...

A few weeks ago I was talking to Blake Hall about the difficulty of on-boarding military members for his new service TroopSwap. It's a cool idea and I wish it had been around back when I was in the Navy and was trying to unload that solid oak 300 lb entertainment center I was stupid enough to buy. It is sort of like a Craig's List / eBay hybrid but focused on those out of the way places where the military builds its posts and bases. You know, places too sparsely populated or interesting to find in Craig's list of supported cities.

Blake's goal is to help military members who are moving every six to eighteen months find someone to trade their gear, tv, or kitchen table with for barter or cash. So in addition to the focus on out of the way places, TroopSwap also wants to take advantage of the circle of trust inside the military and ensure the user that transactions are with other trustworthy military members. Sort of like a USAA for buying and selling your stuff. But to do this effectively he needs to make sure that members are actually in the military without making signing up so difficult that they just don't bother. Right now it's a pain.

Wouldn't it be cool if Army Knowledge Online / Defense Knowledge Online, Navy Marine Corps Internet, Air Force Portal and etc. took a page from the "government as a platform" playbook and offered an OpenID service? And I don't mean on the NIPRNet, I'm talking about out in the wild on the Internet. If they did, Blake could accept OpenID's from that short list of providers and make signing up simple and safe. I know this sounds stupid at first, but stay with me for a minute. It's not just to make Blake's business better.

Lt. General Sorenson, the Army CIO, has been pushing for two years to make innovation possible at the edge of the Army enterprise. Apps for Army, the Army Transformation Architecture, and similar initiatives coming out of CERDEC make it possible for soldiers in the field to write and deploy code without waiting for the core acquisition process to figure everything out. They enable emergent innovation in the field.

An AKO OpenID service is like an extension of that idea, but it goes even further. It would extend the Army's zone of innovation beyond the edge to outside the enterprise boundary, and it would encourage third party services to innovate on their behalf. Ultimately the benefits wouldn't be just for entrepreneurs like Blake, but would be for soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen by making it easier for outside organizations to offer them targeted services. It might be retail companies like Amazon or Best Buy, or even Domino's Pizza, using it to easily offer online discounts to service members. It might be companies like Facebook or MySpace offering specially designed areas catering only to military members. Or, it might be non-profits like the USO that already serve the military but want to serve them better online. Once you start thinking about it, it's hard to stop coming up with ideas.

Flipping the coin over, it's also good for the military because it gives them a way to see who their people are doing business with and pay attention to the nature of that business. They could easily require third parties to meet a set of "safe for troops" business standards before they would be offered OpenID from those providers.

This may be a little bit more of a stretch, but I can also think of more "tactical" use cases too. As the military is asked to do more disaster recovery and humanitarian aid they may find more need to give service members access to the systems and web applications of various NGO's. Those NGO's could easily set up their systems to accept OpenID's served from government networks.

I know this is a counter intuitive idea, at least at first. But the more I think about it the more I think the military and its members would benefit from extending internal identity services beyond the enterprise boundary through OpenID.

Modernizing the Air Operations Center - Robert Gates Wouldn't Be Happy

The USAF held its Air Operations Center (AOC) Modernization industry day at Hanscom Air Force Base last week. I attended thinking that it would be a quick way to get caught up on the program's direction. I've been doing defense work for about seven years now, so I know how this process works. I went in expecting the day to be heavily scripted and pro forma. Even so, it was so pointlessly byzantine and disconnected from any concrete reality in the field that I left the venue completely depressed.

The AOC (aka Falconer) is like Cape Canaveral for controlling an air war. It is the progeny of the HQ's in those World War II movies where the airplanes are being pushed around on the big map table in the middle of the room. It's the place where the Joint or Coalition Forces Air Component Commander conducts command and control. There are big screens on the wall for sharing situational awareness and lots of people doing assessment, planning, and execution processes. When things are busy there are many hundreds of people working there. When it's not busy, it's basically a room full of computers but few people.

And it really does need to be modernized.

The AOCs today are a dog's breakfast of systems designed and built independently and then brought together after the fact with little thought given to how the system as a whole functions. Worse, many of the key systems were built to solve completely different business processes from the ones our people are using to fight the current wars. In particular, the "engine of the AOC" is a system called Theater Battle Management Core System (TBMCS). It was built after the first gulf war to handle the production and distribution of very large numbers of interdiction-style mission orders. From a process point of view it's like a highly specialized word processor. It's main output is something called the Air Tasking Order which is delivered via a big USMTF mail merge. Unfortunately, in a world of rapid change, drones, dynamic targets, and pre-positioned weapons delivery systems its relevance to our current conflicts has been sorely tested and Excel has found a surprisingly useful role as its sometimes replacement.

That's not what is bumming me out though. That's just the way it is; systems built for one thing often have less relevance for another thing. What is depressing me is the way our fear of post-award protest has created a culture so focused on "fairness" that it ensures that absolutely nothing relevant is addressed. After all, if you want to guarantee a fair competition, and fair is more important than effective, just don't tell anyone anything. This wasn't a discussion of the AOC and what the people using it care about, this was an exposition on the Federal Acquisition Rules and how constraining they are when over-stringently applied. These days attending an industry day is like listening to a political speech. Much ado, but little said that can be pinned on the candidate later. I didn't learn a single relevant thing during the entire day, unless you count not learning anything as being at least partially relevant.

Well, I did pick up a few things.

The plan for modernization runs through 2017 and will roll out initial operating capability to stateside AOC's first. It appears as though the CENTCOM AOC, the one actually prosecuting two wars, isn't slated to get anything till the very end. This strikes me as backwards but it probably makes perfect sense to an Air Force whose primary focus for modernization is configuration control. The whole notion of "AOC as a Weapons System" seems to distill down to iron clad SOA'fied configuration management. But configuration management of what? What should it DO? The little bit that did make it through the FAR filters merely hinted at the dual chimeras of agility through SOA and a single configuration for every AOC. It's the paradox of control without an articulated vision.

I think what was most difficult for me was that there was absolutely no mention of the two wars that we are fighting right now or what the users over there need. The words Iraq and Afghanistan were never uttered. Nor were AOC capability priorities linked to the shortcomings in the existing Falconers and how they are impacting those conflicts, particularly those relating to coalition partner participation. The only time a user was mentioned it was with a disparaging remark about "Sgt Snuffy and his local county options." The first thing I said to my colleagues when I walked out of the theater was "If Bob Gates was here, he'd be pissed." The meeting was a microcosm of everything he's been fighting in the way we acquire stuff during wartime.

Maybe software is just too abstract. Maybe airplanes are easier to understand. That idea got me thinking about an imaginary industry day during the Korean conflict for the F-100 going something like this:

"Hi, welcome to industry day. The F-86 is getting a bit long in the tooth and it's time to modernize. The F-100 needs to be built using the latest trends in aircraft design and construction, so it is going to have a 45 degree swept wing. It will burn JP-5 and it's aluminum skin needs to be a standard composition widely available from any foundry. We will be carefully following a user board based process for vetting requirements and we'll be rigorously testing the aircraft against requirements at every step in it's development. It's critically important that the design be completely documented and repeatable. If it fails at any stage of testing you will have to redesign it to correct those flaws. We want the new aircraft to be ready for stateside squadrons by 1954 and we'll roll it out to overseas units by 1958. Furthermore, If you were involved in any of the design or construction of the F-86 you will need a comprehensive organizational conflict of interest plan. None of the people who worked on the F-86 can be involved in the F-100 development in any way, including the RFP response. This is to ensure that your bid doesn't have an unfair advantage from previous experience. Are there any questions?"

"Ahem, yes, I have a question. What do you want the F-100 to do? Is it an air superiority fighter? Ground attack? How will you be evaluating things like maximum altitude, speed, maneuverability? How will our coalition and service partners participate? And especially, how does it factor into the fight in Korea?..."*

"Let me cut you off, we aren't going to discuss that here. You can read the Capability Definition Document which provides an overview and then refers to the applicable detailed requirements documents. Once the bidder's library has been made available you'll find them all there. If those documents don't answer your question, you can submit a written question to our office and the answer will be distributed later to all potential bidders."

The whole thing was just weird, even as these things go. All FARS and process and no real discussion of what problem was being solved, and for whom. There was only one slide that hinted at the service's end goals from the acquisition - with four blue bubbles labeled with "speed of command," "cost of capability," and two more that I've already forgotten. That was it. And why even conduct "one on one" discussions if they are nothing more than a venue for sliding written questions across the table? I think the government people were as frustrated by the absurdity of it all as we were.

Well, since the Air Force is too constrained by the FARS to say anything, here's what I would have said if given the chance...