Tag Archives: IBM

Computer Mediated to Computer Meditated: Innovation Interview with Ajit Jaokar, author of ‘Meditation in the Age of Facebook and Twitter – From Shamanism to Transhumanism’

Posted on May 18, 2012 | 2 comments

World renowned as a thought leader in the area of Mobile Applications, Ajit Jaokar has long been recognised as a thought leader in the Mobile Data Industry. Among other things, he has chaired Oxford University’s Next Generation Mobile Applications Panel, acts as an advisor to mobile startups, governments and trade missions around the world. In 2009, he was invited to be a part of the World Economic Forum’s Future of the Internet Council.

Ajit Jaokar: Capital I Interview Series – Number 18

Ajit is a man on a mission, and that mission is as multifaceted as it is fascinating. At the heart of all of his projects and practices is a deep felt belief in the need to make a positive difference. This is resoundingly reflected in futuretext, the publishing and consulting firm, which he co founded in 1999. Most recently, Ajit has authored, ‘Meditation in the Age of Facebook and Twitter – From Shamanism to Transhumanism,’ which explores the efforts and effects of attempting to manage life in the digital age through meditation.

His sixth book, it looks at the potential of Innovating meditation, through neural techniques, so as to assist society as a whole, and individuals in particular, in making the most out of our technologically expanding – and for many, overwhelming – world. It is no mean feat to bind together meditation and technology, and yet that is what Ajit has managed to do; if his mission is not yet complete, it is certainly ‘game on.’

Ajit, welcome to the Capital I Innovation Series!

Firstly, many thanks Kim for the insightful questions you sent me about the ideas covered in my book. I shall cover many of these ideas, but since they and the book are evolving, I will try to extend my thinking beyond the book in this interview.

In the book you posit that meditation cannot be separated from society. Why?

Meditation, as I describe it in this book, is a technique for personal development and reflective of a wider social change that we see today. In that sense, the idea of meditation i.e. introspection – is based on the cultural context.

The traditional view of meditation is that of a monk who renounces the world and maintains a state of calm, peaceful demeanour. But, here is another viewpoint: In January 2009, due to a bird strike, US Airways Flight 1549 was forced to land in the Hudson River in New York City; it did so successfully, with no loss of life. When I first heard of this incident, I was fascinated by it. The actual technique of landing the plane is complex enough, but even more interesting for me is the mind-set of the pilot and the pilot’s perspective.

The metaphor of an airline pilot (Captain Chesley Sullenberger) is an excellent example of a meditative mind. While most of us will never have to deal with a situation remotely as complex as landing a plane on a river, the incident points to how the meditative state of mind is absolutely relevant today.

Captain Chesley Sullenberger (Image courtesy of Time.com)

In a curious sense, the situation is like our work today: we have many distractions, the stakes are high and we have to focus on the relevant instead of trying to shut down the distractions. Thus, there is a need to bring the mind-set of meditation to the (more complex) age of today

Do you think meditation has to evolve to be compatible with today’s social networks, or should social networks be made to evolve to be compatible with meditative/calm states?

We have always had ‘social networks’. Even the smallest village has a social network – we call it gossip. The issue is more that of a ‘rate of change’.

However, if you phrase the question as an ‘either – or’ i.e. should meditation evolve or should social networks evolve – the answer is the former. The rate of change of society will accelerate. This is independent of ‘social networks’ but is rather a function of technology in general.

In his book Future Shock (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), Alvin Toffler argued back in 1970 that society was undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a ‘super-industrial society.’ He predicted this change would overwhelm people, with the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving them disconnected and suffering from ‘shattering stress and disorientation.’ Toffler called this the ‘future shock.’ and stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of this future shock. He also popularised the term ‘information overload.’

Alvin Toffler

Toffler’s shortest definition of future shock is a personal perception of “too much change in too short a period of time.” For many, that sounds familiar – they are indeed living in a Toffleresque world. Living in such a world is very relevant to meditation because meditation involves detachment, the ability to ‘unplug.’ So, meditation will evolve to meet these new challenges.

Will true mastery of our digital presence require an Innovation of our neural networks, be it within the context of dreams, meditation, and/or awareness?

There are two aspects to my response here. I view a common theme in all networks, a leitmotif if you will. In that sense, if we see that we are living in a world of networks with a breakdown of hierarchies – we are becoming aware of the significance of neural networks.

Another way to look at this idea is to think of the unified theory of science. In simplistic terms, the unified theory (or a theory of everything) is a superset of existing theories in physics. The term was coined by Einstein, who attempted to unify the general theory of relativity with electromagnetism, hoping to recover an approximation for quantum theory. So too, I see ‘networks’ unifying many aspects of our world – both neural and social.

Secondly, many authors such as Nicholas Carr worry about what the Internet is doing to our brains [as he posited] in his book The Shallows. Others, like the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield [Baroness Greenfield, CBE] claim that social sites such as Facebook are causing alarming changes in the brains of little children. It appears that many of us are now left with a longing to disconnect, to unplug, and academics and gurus are tapping into that trend.

Nicholas Carr

Thus, if you take the view of the ‘scaremongering’ experts like Carr and Greenfield – then there is a negative relationship between social networks and the brain. I do not agree to this view.

I take a more optimistic view that the brain is evolving to higher domains because social networks facilitate more connections – and these connections will cause a positive innovation in our neural networks because as we have more elements to connect – we create innovations from new combinations of existing ideas.

For many, mediation and networking are mutually exclusive as mediation is individual and internal and networking is collective and external? What are your views on this perspective?

Here is a question: Were monks ever meant to be on Facebook and Twitter? Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, the Japanese author and teacher of Buddhism, describes the traditional lifestyle of a monk eloquently in his book ‘The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk’, when he emphasises the importance of begging.

Traditionally, a monk needs very few possessions. These include a bamboo hat, straw sandals, and cotton leggings. He dresses in traveling attire, and even when modern transportation is available, he walks. These and other meagre possessions are designed to be carried in a bundle on the monk’s back. The monk limits his possessions to a minimum and thereby also limits his desire to possess. He (and yes, monks were always male) leads a life of humility and also often makes his income through begging.

The point is: The monks’ original lifestyle (a frugal existence based on begging) is not compatible with our current lifestyle. By that I mean, we want to meditate but not beg! Thus, while all meditation involves looking inwards, I believe that the act of looking inwards will strengthen our outward interactions and we have to accept that these outward interactions have changed and will continue to evolve – and hence so will our inward introspection.

As individuals are attempting to retain and/or regain power over their own data and online privacy, is there a correlation between this and using mediation to regain control over our own attention economy?

The attention economy, as defined by marketers, is a more serious threat to our online attention rather than merely social media. There is a common factor between media/marketing and social networks (I define ‘social networks’ here loosely as a collection of your friends).

The common factor is: both play on ‘emotion’ i.e. you like your friends’ posts because you have some emotional connection with your friend. Media does the same – but for commercial reasons. It is increasingly difficult for media to get attention with so much choice – so media has to make content more outrageous, violent etc etc. Thus, while both appeal to emotion – and both lead to ‘distraction of attention’ – with social media you can choose – with traditional media – the choice is made for you.

Thus, I see meditation as an attempt to gain more power over our own attention – but not necessarily our data. Having said that, there are already advertising companies trying to gain understanding of their customers through ‘neural’ data. However, I think the power of meditation and brain wave meditation is better used for us to manage our attention

How do you see meditation enhancing our powers of intuition and thus our power to ‘thin slice’ all the information we are receiving, to determine what does and does not need our attention?

Intuition is an important goal in today’s world. In general, Intuition is seen to be ‘positive’ i.e. you benefit from hidden insights or insights ‘under the radar’. Intuition will also be an important part of my thinking in subsequent versions of this book.

The question I want to address is: How can intuition be improved in a world of social media? I believe that more connections equal more intelligence as long as you can process the inputs from the connections. Here is where meditation is extremely valuable in today’s context.

There is an excellent book I read with great interest recently, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow‘ by [Nobel Laureate] Daniel Kahneman. In this book, Daniel talks of two modes of thought – “System 1” and “System 2“. System 1 is fast; it’s intuitive, associative, metaphorical, automatic, impressionistic, and it can’t be switched off. Its operations involve no sense of intentional control, but it’s the “secret author of many of the choices and judgments you make“. System 2 is slow, deliberate, effortful. Its operations require attention.

One of the key points of the book is: We identify with System 2 but we are really profoundly System 1. So, System 2 is seen to be a supporting character, it needs a lot of effort to activate and gets tired easily. System 1 is active most of the time and it is right – most of the time. But it is also error prone because it has to work fast and loves to simplify.

At the conclusion of the book, Kahneman links ‘watercooler conversations’ to ‘better decisions’ – which depend on intuition – when he refers to the idea of creating valuable insights/decisions based on water cooler conversations.

Now, let’s consider this: today we have many, many such ‘water cooler’ conversations on social media. How can they be used to create better intuitive judgements? Furthermore, is it possible that we could integrate both these systems in meditation and thereby gain new intuition?

What do you believe is the impact of social technologies on meditation and how does that reflect on what you term emergence and synchronisation?

I have always been interested in the wider implications of the mind/evolution. Especially on the theories of emergence – which are network based and are at the edges of current scientific thinking.

Arthur Winfree, a scientist who studies biological rhythms, studied the problem of coupled oscillators across many different domains. Specifically, he studied the problem of biological oscillators, i.e. the ability of neurons and fireflies and other organisms to synchronise with each other on a massive scale.

Prior to Winfree’s work, scientists had restricted their investigations to two oscillators or a small number of oscillators. Winfree conducted his experiments with a system comprising a very large number of oscillators with a range of frequencies. His objective was to see under what conditions these oscillators synchronised. He discovered that such oscillators display a cooperative behaviour and that at a certain threshold the oscillators begin to synchronise spontaneously.

This is one of the first examples of a self-organising system observed under experimental conditions. The phenomenon applies to many domains like the circadian rhythm (body clock) and in general to all fields where natural oscillators are seen. Winfree’s work is significant because he was the first scientist to explore the phenomenon mathematically, and by increasing coupling, all oscillators in his experiment became locked.

If we view the brain as an oscillator, I speculate we may see the same effect with the brain at some point, especially if the brain capacity is enhanced by BCI [Brain Computer Interface] – probably as implants. This may sound far-fetched, but many of the elements exist – and I have faith in the limitless possibility of the human mind!

You discuss mediation being enhanced by BCI technology, which you say is the ‘next generation of neuro-social networks.’ How do you see this giving us an advantage, as individuals, and as a society?

I am a big believer of using BCI technology in understanding and improving meditation. It is the next natural evolution in mediation. But I also believe in understanding the past and the future together. In that sense, my thinking differs from current thinking (which focusses on either the past or the future).

It also makes the book very comprehensive i.e. it needs a lot of research to look at BOTH the past and the future (from Shamanism to Transhumanism). I already describe in the book a lot of work I am exploring with [biosensor manufacturer] NeuroSky. Today, an individual is the most granular unit of a social network. But, in future, what if you could extend this to a neural level? To take social networking to the neural level (Facebook of the connected mind), we need the ability to do the following:

record brainwaves and see them
create a visual representation of the mind at a point in time (a thought form)
share that thought form with others
do so cheaply and globally
possibly, do so using a neural implant, i.e. without a headset (using implants)

This image would look like a ‘shared hologram,’ i.e. your state of mind projected as a three-dimensional object which can be viewed by others with whom you share it. This means you will get biofeedback at two levels: 1) the individual level and 2) the social level. The very act of sharing your ‘neural profile’ with others will create the opportunity to build a shared/social/collective profile. Here, meditation using the brain as an object of meditation has two roles: at an individual level, with the ability to develop the mind; but likewise it also has a role at the social level where meditation becomes a shared/collective experience.

You might want to check the work by Brainbot, originating out of Stanford University, who also use BCI technology with monks.

You suggest that meditation, networks and technology could be used together to increase our intelligence. What makes you believe that this greater intelligence would be used in a positive way for the greater good?

Actually, the goal of my thinking is to adapt existing knowledge to the world of today – and ultimately to extend it to the future. In that sense it is agnostic of good or bad. However, networks lead to connectivity and connectivity leads to empathy – hence an overall tendency towards good.

What is your vision of the future for mankind, if, as you posit, the evolution of our neural networks through meditation and social/digital technology brings about a liberalised, borderless global society with more independent thought and fewer hierarchies?

Yes, we see the rise of the liberal mind-set as seen in many areas: the rise of women, green issues, the “springs”(Arab springs) etc. I am optimistic about the future of mankind because this is not the first time that we, as a species, have been united. The last time that happened 70,000 years ago, when we undertook a quantum leap in our evolution.

Around 70,000 to 80,000 years ago, the Toba super volcano erupted in what is now Lake Toba, Indonesia, causing a six- to ten-year-long global winter that led to a near extinction of the human population. The survivors, probably numbering as low as 1,000 individuals, were most likely forced to live and work together to overcome the dire climatic conditions. In doing so, they evolved language and social skills that we, their descendants, inherited.

So, crisis brought all humanity together and when we did connect together as a species there was a quantum leap in human evolution via networking. This evolution also impacted our brains because, in general, the more complex the society and its communication patterns, the more evolved the brain. It led to development of culture. Around 70,000 years ago, human beings deviated from other primates by evolving a culture such as is evident in the rock paintings in the Blombos Caves of South Africa.

Blombos Cave Rock Painting

After 70,000 years, humanity is being connected together again, but not by a crisis – by technology. Once again, like we did so many years ago, we can expect a quantum uptake in intelligence, adoption of new identities, and a new culture.

It has been posited that social networks may, in the future, lessen the onset of wars as it is thought that it will be more difficult to invade and kill someone you’ve ‘friended’ on Facebook. Is this what you meant when you wrote, “Once we are able to see conflicting points of view through networks, our sense of local identity is complemented by a sense of global identity”?

Ok. I love a song by Sting called the ‘Russians’ especially the section:

How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy

There is no monopoly in common sense

On either side of the political fence

We share the same biology

Regardless of ideology

Believe me when I say to you

I hope the Russians love their children too

I think the song encapsulates the sentiment i.e. once we see conflicting points of view – we have hope for humanity. People who meditate are more likely to look for weapons of mass distraction – rather than weapons of mass destruction – and find them too.

You cite Howard Rheingold in your book, noting that he helped you understand “communities from first principals.” You also mention that, prior to his 1993 book, researchers focussed on ‘computer mediated communication.’ Are you envisaging a future where the focus changes to ‘computed meditative’ communication?

In a nutshell – yes. Howard is a great visionary and a mentor. He knows networks from first principles – long before the ‘Internet’ was created, and he understands the ethos of the Internet more than most.

Deep Blue vs Kasparov

We are seeing a continuum in the evolution of the Internet. However, there is one interesting fork on the road. Currently we have a dichotomy of ‘man vs. machine’ – such as in a chess game of human (Kasparov) vs machine (the IBM Deep Blue computer). When it comes to man vs. machine, we want the human to win! But we could soon have machines complementing human ability.

This is already happening with the Cochlear Implant – the bionic ear – and could happen with future neural implants. In that sense, I agree with the question that we could see increased computer mediated communication.

To come back to the origins of the Internet, the visions of the original founders of the Internet were based on socially utopian ideas (the ‘Hippie’ counterculture). Those ideas have survived and thrived through technology – Steve Jobs is an example of this – and they will continue to evolve.

If we take it as a given that positive thoughts have a positive effect on neural networks, do you think positive thoughts may come to have an effect on digital/social networks?

The short answer is – I don’t know. There is a co-relation between positive thinking and the brain – so I would presume that there is a relationship between thoughts and social networks – but I do not know.

How are your suggestions being received by the general public and the ‘establishment’? They could be seen as somewhat frightening to the former and dangerous by the latter.

Interesting you should ask this .. I think people relate to different aspects of the book. Some, who practised mediation in the seventies, see it as an evolution of meditation. Younger people see it in a totally new context (i.e. with no previous reference to compare with). Professionals see it for pragmatic reasons (being able to focus better in a world of distractions). I think the real impact on the ‘establishment’ is yet to be felt.

I cover this in the last segment of the book ‘Living in a Post Tipping Point World’. I think in many cases, people are beginning to see the impact of grassroots change (and not just from meditation). However, most people steeped in traditional structures will never see the impact until it is upon them. This is because network led changes are based on science – but do not follow the scientific principle of ‘cause and effect’.

Global warming is a good example of a change at the network level: events leading to global warming are interconnected, but their impact is felt only over a long period of time. When we do see the impact, it is often felt separately from the changes that trigger it. For instance you cannot know exactly how the ozone layer will change due to every plastic bag that you fail to recycle, but most people would agree that the environment is impacted by every plastic bag that ends up on the ocean floor.

I believe that these changes will be ‘under the radar’ until they reach a tipping point – at which time the establishment notices! Having said that, the effects of meditation can only be beneficial – so it is a good thing.

And finally Ajit, do you believe that mastery of meditation can have an effect on our digital presence, thus enabling and empowering Innovation in Collaboration and Cooperation?

Yes, as I alluded to earlier. If we consider that networks are holistic and that neural and social networks have common properties – and furthermore, networks lead to more connections, which in turn leads to more innovation; then we are empowered by meditation and social networks.

And may I add finally, many thanks for your insightful questions! You made me think even beyond my current book!

You can learn more about Ajit via his blog and Tweets. You can purchase a copy of ‘Meditation in the Age of Facebook and Twitter – From Shamanism to Transhumanism’ on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

2 Comments

Posted in 'Capital I' Innovation, Creativity, Innovation, Technology

Tagged Ajit Jaokar, Alvin Toffler, Arab spring, Arthur Winfree, attention economy, awareness, ‘The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk, BCI, biofeedback, biosensor, Blombos Caves, Brain Computer Interface technology, Brainbot, brainwaves, Captain Chesley Sullenberger, circadian rhythm, cochlear implant, cognitive capability, collaboration, computing, cooperation, counterculture, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Daniel Kahneman, data, Deep Blue, digital presence, digital technology, dreams, emergence, Future of the Internet Council, Future Shock, futuretext, global warming, global winter, Hippies, Howard Rheingold, IBM, innovation, introspection, intuition, Kasparov, Lake Toba, liberal, meditation, Meditation in the Age of Facebook and Twitter - From Shamanism to Transhumanism, Mobile Applications, monk, neural implant, neural networks, neural-social network, NeuroSky, Next Generation Mobile Applications Panel, Nicholas Carr, online privacy, oscillators, Oxford University, personal development, Russians, Shamanism, social media, social networks, society, Sting, Susan Greenfield, synchronisation, Technology, The Shallows, thin slice, Thinking Fast and Slow, Toba super volcano, Transhumanism, unified theory, US Airways Flight 1549, World Economic Forum

Zen and the Art of Software: The Innovation Interview with Grady Booch (Part 3)

Posted on March 9, 2012 | 9 comments

In parts one and two of our chat with software star Grady Booch, we discussed his magnum opus project COMPUTING: The Human Experience, Innovation, the Computer History Museum and the possible changing brain structure of Millennials, among many other things.

In this, the final segment of our discussion with him, we look at software – and software architecture – in general, Grady’s relationship with it in particular, the troubles facing Google and Facebook, the web, and his views on the SOPA, PIPA and ACTA bills.

To view the full introduction to this multi-part interview with Grady: Click here:

Grady Booch: Capital I Interview Series – Number 14

[This was a joint conversation between Grady, Michael and myself. I’ve italicised Michael’s questions to Ora so you are able to differentiate between us – though, I think it will become obvious as you read – lol!]

Grady, You are credited with the building, writing and architecting of so much technology; of all of those things, what is it that you are most proud of?

There are three things. The first one is very personal. My godson – he would have been eight or nine at the time – was given a task at his school to write about a hero, and he wrote about me. That was pretty cool! Everything else is details, but I’m really proud of that one.

On a technical basis, I’m pleased with the creation of the UML, not just because of the thing we created, but the whole idea and industry around it that being able to visualise and reason about software-intensive systems in this way is a good thing. So, I think we lifted the tide for a lot of folks.

UML Diagrams

I contributed to the notion of architecture and looking at it from multiple views, and how to represent it. I feel good about the whole thing around modelling and architecture and abstraction. I think I helped people and I feel good about that.

UML was certainly a game changer. I remember when it came in, before you got bought up by IBM. It was like a wave going across the globe. It made a profound difference.

And it’s different now because it’s part of the oxygen. Not everybody is using it, that’s okay – not everybody is using C++ or Java and that’s fine – but I think we changed the way people think.

Our estimates are that UML has a penetration of somewhere around 15 to 20 percent of the marketplace. That’s a nice number. We’ve changed the way people build things.

Absolutely, especially at the big end of the market.

Yeah. I wrote an article in my architecture column, that tells the story of when I was dealing with my aneurysm. I was laying in a CT scan machine in the Mayo Clinic, looking up and saying: “My gosh, I know the people who wrote the software for this, and they’ve used my methods.” That’s a very humbling concept.

It’s a pretty much a pretty good Acid test, isn’t it.

Yes, it is.

And your work is continuing in architecture…

Correct. I continue on with the handbook of software architecture, and a lot of what I do, in both the research side and with customers, is to help them in the transformation of their architectures.

For IBM the last nine months or so I’ve been working with the Watson team – the Jeopardy playing game – and helping the teams that are commercialising their technology.

How do you take this two-million line code base, built by 25 men and women, drop it in another domain and give it to a set of people who know nothing about that system. This is exactly the kind of stuff that I do for customers, and I’ve been helping IBM in that regard.

That would be very challenging. You’d need somebody with your brain power to actually manage that, I imagine.

Well, it’s not an issue of brain power, it’s an issue of: how does one look at systems like this and reason about them in a meaningful way. And after the UML comes in – because it allows us to visualise it and the whole notion of architecture as used from multiple dimensions – all these things come together. That make a two million line code base understandable to the point where I can know where the load-bearing walls are and I can manipulate them.

That is pretty impressive! You’ve found a way of managing the slicing and dicing of the codebase.

That’s a problem that every organisation faces. I have an article that talks about the challenges Facebook is going to have. Because they…. every software-intensive system is a legacy system. The moment I write a line of code, it becomes part of my legacy…

Especially if you’re successful upfront and gets massive growth, like they did.

Yes, and having large piles of money in your revenue stream often masks the ills of your development process.

Absolutely.

Google’s faced that, Facebook is facing that. They have about a million lines of [the programming language] PHP that drives the core Facebook.com system – which is really not a lot of code – still built on top of MySQL, and it’s grown and grown over time.

I think, as they split to develop across the coast – because they’re opening up a big office in New York City – that very activity changes the game. No longer will all of the developers fit within one building, so the social dynamics change.

Inside Facebook's Madison Avenue Offices

Ultimately, what fascinates me about the whole architecture side of it is that it is a problem that lies on the cusp of technology and society. It’s a technical problem on the one hand – so there are days I’ll show up as an uber geek – and on the other hand, it’s a problem that’s intensely social in nature, so I’ll show up as a ‘Doctor Phil’.

To follow-up on one of Kim’s questions: if you look at the backlog of IT, I think every company of moderate size is still struggling to deliver on business demands. Do you think that architecture helps or, does it actually contributes to the problem?

Architecture can help in two ways.

I’ll give you one good example. There is a company called OOCL (Orient Overseas Container Line) that I worked with some years ago to help them devise an architecture for their system that tracks containers and all these kind of things. Their CEO had this brilliant notion: what would happen if we were to take this system and extract all of the domain-specific bits of it and then sell that platform?

By having a focused-upon architecture, they were able to devise a platform – this is a decade before Salesforce.com and these kind of things – and they could then go into a completely new business and dominate that side of the marketplace. Here is an example where a focused-upon architecture has a real, material, strategic business implication.

The other thing focused-upon architecture offers is, it is allows you to capture the institutional memory of a piece of software. The code is the truth, but the code is not the whole truth. So, in so far as we can retain the tribal memory of why things are the way they are, it helps you preserve the investment you made in building that software in the first place.

What sort of size company are you talking about? It sounds like the telco space… large Tier 1 and Tier 2 companies.

It could be anybody that wants to dominate a particular business. Salesforce.com built a platform in that space. Look at Autostar as another example. Autostar was an attempt by BMW, and others, to define a common architectural platform, hardware and software, for in-car electronics. By virtue of having that focused-upon architecture, all of a sudden you have unified the marketplace and made the marketplace bigger, because now it’s a platform against which others can plug and play.

There is a similar effort with MARSSA, which is an attempt to develop a common architectural platform for electronics for boats and yachts. Again, it eliminates the competition of the marketplace by having a set of standards against which, people can play well together. In the end, you’ve made the marketplace bigger because it’s now more stable.

I agree. Also, an architectural approach separates the data from an application specific way of looking at things.

It used to be the case that we’d have fierce discussions about operating systems. Operating systems are part of the plumbing; I don’t care about them that much anymore. But, what I do care about is the level of plumbing above that.

My observations of what’s happening is that you see domain-specific architectures popping up that provide islands against which people can build things. Amazon is a good example of such a platform. Facebook could become that, if they figure out how to do it right – but they haven’t gotten there yet. I think that’s one of the weaknesses and blind spots Facebook has.

I also think that they are, to a certain extent, a first generation. I think the web, in terms of connectivity, is not being utilised to its fullest potential. I don’t see any reason why, for example, any form of smart device shouldn’t be viewed as being a data source that should be able to plug in to these architectures.

Exactly!

Would that be an example of a collaborative development environment?

Well, that’s a different beast altogether.

With regards to collaborative development environments, what led me to interest in that space is emphasising the social side of architecture. Alan Brown [IBM engineer and rational expert] and I wrote a paper on collaborative environments almost ten years ago, so it was kind of ahead of its time.

Alan Brown

The reason my thinking was in that space was extrapolating the problem of large-scale software development, as we’re becoming more and more distributed, to just how does one attend to the social problems therein. If I can’t fit everybody in the same room, which is ideal, then what are the kinds of things that I do that can help me build systems.

I’ve observed two things that are fundamental to crack to make this successful. The first is the notion of trust: in so far as I can work well with someone, it’s because I trust them. You, Kim, trust your husband Michael, and therefore there is this unspoken language between the two of you that allows you to do things that no other two people can do together.

Now, move that up to a development team, where you work and labour together in a room, where you understand one another well. The problem comes – like with Facebook, and what we’ve done in outsourcing – when you break apart your teams (for financial reasons) across the country or across the world. Then, all of a sudden, you’ve changed the normal mechanisms we have for building trust. Then the question on the table is: what can one do to provide mechanisms to provide building of trust? That’s what drives a lot of ideas in collaborative development environments.

The other thing is the importance of serendipity – the opportunity to connect with people in ways that are unanticipated, this option of ‘just trying things out’. You need to have that ability too. The way we split teams across the world doesn’t encourage either trust or serendipity. So, a lot of ideas regarding collaborative environments were simply: “What can we do to inject those two very human elements into this scheme?”

As we have been talking about trust, I’m curious as to your opinion on the SOPA, PIPA and ACTA bills.

I’ve Tweeted about it, and I’m pretty clear that I think those bills are so ill-structured as to be dangerous.

I get the concept, I understand the issues of privacy and the like, and I think something needs to be done here. But I’m disturbed by both the process that got us there and the results. Disturbed by the process in the sense that the people who created the bills seemed to actively ignore advice from the technical community, and were more interested in hearing the voices of those whose financial interest would be protected by such a bill.

The analogy I make would be as if all of a sudden you make roads illegal because people do illegal things in their cars. It’s stupid the way the process that led up to this bill was set, I think, because it was very, very political. From a technical perspective, while I respect what needs to be done here, the actual details of it are so wrong – they lead you to do things to the web that are very, very destructive indeed. That’s why I’m strongly, strongly opposed to it. And I have to say that this is my personal opinion, not that of IBM, etc.

This is the final segment of our multi-part interview with Grady Booch. Part One can be read here, and Part Two can be read here.

You can learn more about Grady via the COMPUTING: The Human Experience website, Grady’s blog and his Twitter feed. Be sure to keep your eye on the COMPUTING: The Human Experience YouTube channel where Grady’s lecture series will be posted.

[Kim, Michael and Grady Skyped from their homes in Sydney and Hawaii.]

9 Comments

Posted in 'Capital I' Innovation, Creativity, Innovation, Technology, Vint Cerf

Tagged ACTA, alan Brown, Autostar, Booch Method, C++, collaborative development environment, Computer HIstory Museum, computing, COMPUTING: The Human Experience, CT Scan, digital generation, Facebook, Google, Grady Booch, handbook of software architecture, IASA, IBM, IEEE, Jan Booch, Java, Jeopardy, John Hollar, John Toole, Jolt Award, Kickstarter, KimmiC, legacy system, Lt. Gen. William Lord, MARSSA, Mayo Clinic, Millenials, MySQL, OOCL, OOD, OOP, operating systems, outsourcing, PHP, PIPA, Seth Friedman, smart device, software, Software architecture, SOPA, Tim O'Reilly, trust, UML, Watson, Watson Research Center, Woven on the Loom of Sorrow: The Co-Evolution of Computing and Conflict, YouTube, Zen

Zen and the Art of Software: The Innovation Interview with Grady Booch (Part 2)

Posted on March 2, 2012 | 3 comments

In the pantheon of world-famous computer scientist’s, Grady Booch is the star who co-authored the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and co-developed object-oriented programming (OOP). He is a Fellow of IBM, ACM, the IEEE, the author of six books, hundreds of articles and papers and the Booch Method of Software engineering. Grady serves on several boards, including that of the Computer History Museum and is the author, narrator and co-creator of what could be seen as a historical magnum opus of the technological world, COMPUTING: The Human Experience.

To view the full introduction to this multi-part interview with Grady, and Part 1 of the series: Click here:

Grady Booch: Capital I Interview Series – Number 14

Grady, lets begin with the very basics. As this is the Innovation Interview Series, let’s start with: how do you define innovation?

Ecclesiastes 1:9 has this great phrase:

“What has been will be again. What has been done before will be done again. There is nothing new under the Sun“.

The way I take it is that innovation – really deep innovation – is about warming the Earth with the Sun of your own making. And to that end, that’s how I distinguish the ‘small i’ from the ‘Big I’.

The ‘small i’ therefore means: I may have a brilliant idea and it warms me, but the ‘Big I’ Innovation is where I can start warming others. There are new suns possible; there are new ways of warming the Earth… And I think innovation is about doing so.

One of my heroes is the physicist Richard Feynman. If you read any of his stuff or watch his physics lectures – which are just absolutely incredible [Ed. Note: As is his series: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out] – there are some conclusions you can draw (and there is a delightful article someone wrote about the nine things they learned from Feynman. The way I frame it is to say that I admire him and his innovation because he was intensely curious but at the same time he was bold, he was not fearful of going down a path that interested him. At the same time (too) he was also very child-like and very, very playful. In the end what really inspires me from Feynman’s work is he was never afraid to fail, but much like Joseph Campbell observes, he followed his bliss.

Richard Feynman

I think that many innovators are often isolated because we’re the ones who are following our bliss; we really don’t care if others have that same bliss. We are so consumed by that, that we follow it where it leads us, and we do so in a very innocent, playful way… We are not afraid to fail.

I’ve noticed that there is often a level of audacity and a lack of fear within innovators, but sometimes I wonder if that audacity and lack of fear could frighten general society.

Well, I think there’s a fine line between audacity and madness.

And that depends on what side of the fence you’re on.

Exactly. It also depends upon the cultural times. Because, what Galileo said in his time [that the earth and planets revolve around the sun] was not just audacious, it was threatening.

To the church, absolutely.

In a different time and place [the response to] Galileo would have been: “Well, yeah, that’s right. Let’s move on now”. [Instead of being tried by the Inquisition, found suspect of heresy, forced to recant and spend the rest of his life under house arrest.] The sad thing is you may have the most brilliant idea in the world, but you will never go anywhere.

Take a look historically at Charles Babbage. I think he was a brilliant man who had some wonderful ideas; he was very audacious, and yet he’s a tragic figure because he never really understood how to turn his ideas into reality. [A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and engineer; Babbage originated the idea of a programmable computer.] That’s what ‘Capital I’ mean to me. I think that’s why Steve Jobs was so brilliant; it’s not just that he had cool ideas, but he knew how to turn that into an industry.

We have a golden rule that it really doesn’t matter how cool your tech is if nobody’s using it. And it’s a shame because there are some incredible innovations out there, but so many innovators haven’t learned the Job’s magic of marketing.

KimmiC rule: It doesn’t matter how ‘bright the light’ if no one is using it to read.

I think that’s especially true of our domain of computing systems, because we are ones who are most comfortable – as a gross generalisation – with controlling our machines. Being able to connect with humans is a very different skill set. To find people who have the ability to do both is very, very challenging indeed.

Zuckerberg is a brilliant programmer, and he had the sense to surround himself with the right people so that he could make those things [Facebook] manifest. There are probably dozens upon dozens of Zuckerbergs out there, who had similar ideas at the same time, but they didn’t know how to turn them into reality.

The same thing could be said of Tim Berners-Lee: a brilliant man, a nice man… He was in the right time at the right place and he knew how to push the technology that he was doing. He was developing things that were in a vast primordial soup of ideas.

Tim Berners-Lee

HyperCard was out; and why didn’t HyperCard succeed while Tim’s work did? Part of it is technical, part of it just the will of Apple, and part was his [Tim] being in the right place at the right time.

And HyperCard influenced Tim. Even Bill Atkinson, creator of HyperCard, said: if only he had come up with the notion of being able to link across [Hyper]card decks, then he would have invented the prototypical web. But, he didn’t do it, he didn’t think about it.

Do you feel that you are ‘in the right time, at the right place’?

There are times that I think I was born in the wrong century, but I know that if I had been born in the Middle Ages, at my age, I would be long dead.

So, yes, I can say from a very philosophical basis: I am quite content with the time in which I am now living, because I cannot conceive of any other time in which I could have been successful.

I read a quote on Wikipedia… a story you apparently told:

“… I pounded the doors at the local IBM sales office until a salesman took pity on me. After we chatted for a while, he handed me a Fortran [manual]. I’m sure he gave it to me thinking, “I’ll never hear from this kid again.” I returned the following week saying, “This is really cool. I’ve read the whole thing and have written a small program. Where can I find a computer?” The fellow, to my delight, found me programming time on an IBM 1130 on weekends and late-evening hours. That was my first programming experience, and I must thank that anonymous IBM salesman for launching my career.”

It sounds like you were quite fortunate to have bumped into someone who was willing to take a chance with you very early on.

I think that’s fair to say. Though, if it hadn’t been that person, I imagine the universe would have conspired to find me another person, because I was so driven. Looking backward upon fifty-some years passed, that was the right time and place. It may have just happened to be that was the right time and guy. But there would have been others.

Grady Presenting

[But] I haven’t told you about the missteps I had and the people who rejected me; we just talk about the successes. Historians are the ones who write history. Because it’s the history of the winners, we don’t tend to write about the failures. But even Edison pointed out… I forget the exact quote, but the reason he succeeded so much is he’s done so much and he’s failed; he’s failed more than others on an absolute basis, but he tried more.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” ― Thomas A. Edison

What, in your view, gets in the way of the success of innovation?

I think the main thing is the fear of failure. I run across people like Babbage for example… or this gentleman I was mentoring earlier today, who are so fearful that they’re not doing something absolutely perfect, they are afraid to turn it into a reality. I think some innovators are so enamoured with perfection they are afraid to fail and therefore never do anything.

Within this milieu you seem to have had your fingers in many interesting pies. One that I think must be especially fascinating is your work with the Computer History Museum. How did you get involved in that?

In a way they came to me. My interest has been in software, it always has been. I forget the circumstances but, some years ago, I connected with John Toole, who was the original CEO of the Computer History Museum when it was in the Bay Area. He showed me around the warehouse that they had set aside at Moffett Airfield.

Not long before that they had shipped a lot of the materials from the old computer museum in Boston out to the Bay Area. Gordon Moore [co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel] and others had said they wanted to make a museum, and they funded that effort. So, I was around the edges of it in the early days. I thought it was fascinating.

I think the reason it attracted me in the first place, in general, is that I have an interest in the appreciation of history, not just the history of technology, but just the history of humanity.

As I went to the exhibits I remember making the observation to John that I thought their plans were great, but, projecting out to one or two generations, there wasn’t going to be too much that was interesting to display in the museum because, by then, all of the hardware would have shrunk to a tiny size and we’d need microscopes in the exhibits.

“And so, therefore, John”, I said, “what are you doing about preserving the history of software,” which is a very ephemeral thing.

Think about getting the original source code to the [IBM Operating System] 360, or the original source code to Facebook. Because these are such ephemeral things, people throw them away. In fact we, IBM, no longer have the original source code to the first version of OS/360; it’s gone. There are later versions but not the original one.

Facebook Source Code

When Microsoft decided to stop production on the Microsoft Flight Simulator, I mean, this was a ground-breaking program, I wrote off to Ray Ozzie [Microsoft CTO and CTA from 2005 – 2010] and said: “What are you guys going to do with the software? Can we have it?” He munched around for a while, but I think it’s lost for all time.

We’re in an interesting period of time and my passion, which has led me to the museum, is to say: Now is to time to preserve software! We don’t know how to present it, we don’t know what to do with it once we have it, but let’s worry about that in future generations and just capture it now.

It’s very similar to what Hollywood has found with a lot of their film stock. A lot of it was just being lost or destroyed, but there is so much cultural history in those records.

Yes, exactly. So, prior to being on the board, I set up a workshop at the museum looking at the preservation of classic software. I wrote to 500 of my ‘closest friends’… people ranging from Marvin Minsky [cognitive scientist in the field of AI] to some other developers I knew, and everybody in between, and asked: “What software would you preserve for future generations?”

We came up with a long list. I think that very idea inspired Len Shustek, who’s the president of the museum, to invite me on to be on the board of trustees.

What is your favourite exhibit in the museum?

I like the [IBM] 1401 reproduction. They have a couple of 1401 machines and they’ve gotten them running again. It’s fun to be in a place where there is something dynamic and alive and runs and you can be in the midst of it. Just walking into the room, you smell old computers; and that’s a pretty cool kind of smell. So, is the fact it’s running and clacking away.

The 1401

Fred Brooks [IBM software engineer] and I had an interesting discussion once, in which I lamented the fact that our computers make no noise, because – and I know I sound like an old guy, but – I remember you could hear some of the earlier computers I worked on. They were clattering in one way or another, be it their hard drives or their tapes, and you could get a feel for where the program was just by listening.

You can’t do that now with our machines; they are all very, very quiet. So, the 1401 exhibit has this wonderful visceral immersive display, in which you hear it and smell it as it processes.

I’ve actually seen people get a little misty-eyed just thinking about a dial-up tone, and you certainly seem to have some ‘misty memories’ too. But, let’s look forward now. What new things do you think may be exhibited in ten years time.

I think that’s the next interesting challenge. We know how to display physical things, but there aren’t that many more things like old machines, to collect because they are disappearing.

If you go to the exhibits, you’ll see things get smaller and smaller and there is more of an interest in software. I think the interesting problem for the museum to attempt is: how do we present software to the general public so that we open the curtain on it and show some of the magic and the mystery therein. I think software can be very beautiful, but how do I explain that to someone who can’t see software. That’s an interesting challenge.

You’ve got to look at it it like an art form. Source code, especially some of the well-written stuff, looks physically beautiful; forget about what it actually does. There are many different dimensions you can look at try to get people’s interest.

[Editors Challenge to artists: here is a piece of code I’ve ‘mucked about with’

– why not see what code inspires you to create and send us a picture, which we’ll share with our readers, Grady Booch and the Computer History Museum!]

I think it’s very much like modern art because you can look at a bit of an impressionistic painting and you may not get it. Often the reactions are: “My kid could do that kind of thing.”

Well, not exactly; because the more you learn about it, the more you learn how much that painting – or whatever the art form is – speaks to you and tells you stories. It requires a little bit of education.

There is a visceral reaction at first to some art but the more you know about it, the more you can appreciate its subtlety. I think the same is true of software. We (the museum) have collected the original source code to Mac Paint, which turns out to be a really beautiful piece of software.

I’m using a phrase here that has meaning to me – beautiful – but requires explanation to the general public to say: why is this a beautiful piece of code, why does it look so well-formed? I think that’s a responsibility we have as insiders to explain and teach that kind of beauty.

What are your thoughts about the emerging trends in Innovation and technology?

Well, the web has been an amazing multiplier, and yet at the same time it’s also increased the noise. Therefore, the ability to find the real gems in the midst of all this madness is increasingly challenging. For example, with the computing project [COMPUTING: The Human Experience] we’ve done, we crowdsourced some initial seed funding for our work.

We could not have done this in the past without something like the web. We put this appeal out to the world and it gave us access to people, otherwise we could not have done it. I think the web has produced an amazing primordial soup of ideas into which we can tap; and that is so game-changing in so many ways. That’s probably the biggest thing. [You can contribute to and volunteer for the project here.]

The web has changed everything; and those who don’t keep up are doomed to be buggy web producers.

Yes, exactly. Or companies like Kodak.

I had the opportunity to speak to Kodak’s developers about 15 years ago. It was a small group of people who were in the computer side of Kodak, and I remember saying to them: “Look guys, the future of Kodak is in your hands… so, what are you going to do about it?”

I Tweeted about it not too long ago with a sort of “I told you so.” And yet, I don’t know whether or not it was inevitable. It could be the case that some businesses simply die because they just don’t make sense any more.

And they should die sometimes. But I think early IBM was a good example of a company that understood what business it was in. I don’t think Kodak really understood what business it was in, towards the end, and that’s what killed it.

I agree, very much so.

Some web business models are founded on the idea that a company has a right to use and profit from an individuals data and personal information… What are your thoughts on that? Do you think that that’s a business model that’s sustainable? I believe that the general public is wising up to this very quickly and are soon going to expect some recompense from the use of their data.

I think there is a local issue and there is global issue that is even harder to tackle. In the case of the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world, the reality is when I subscribe to those services, I do have a choice – I can chose whether or not to use them. And, by the very fact that I’m using those services means I am giving up something in the process.

So, why should I be outraged if those companies are using my data, because I’m getting those services for free. It seems like a reasonable exchange here, and I, as an adult, have the responsibility of choice. Where it becomes nasty is when I no longer have choice; when that choice is taken away from me. That’s when it becomes outrageous: when my data is being used beyond my control [in a way] that I did not expect.

I think that will sort itself over time; capitalism has a wonderful way of sorting things. It’s also the case that we have a generation behind the three of us who are growing up, if not born, digital. They have a very different sense of privacy, so, I’m not so concerned about it. We have lots of ‘heat and smoke’ but it will resolve itself.

What I find curious is that the ‘heat and smoke’ and discussions are hardly any different from what was initially said about telephones or, for that matter, the printing of the book. Look at some histories of how phones were brought into the marketplace and you’ll find almost identical arguments to those that are going on today.

I trust the human spirit and the way capitalism works to find a way. What’s more challenging is the larger issue, and that is the reality that there are connections that can be made in the presence of this data that are simply beyond anybody’s control.

I may choose to share some information on a social media source, or I may use a credit card or whatever, but the very act of participating in the modern society leaves behind a trail of digital detritus. And I can’t stop that unless I choose to stop participating in the modern world.

I think this is a case where we’ll have politicians do some profoundly stupid things, and we’ll see lots of interesting cases around it. But, we’ll get used to it. I mean, people didn’t like the idea of putting their money in a bank for God’s sake, and we got used to it; I think the same thing will happen.

You brought up the Millennials – the digitised generation. What insights would you give them in being game-changers?”

Does any young adult ever want the advice of their elders?

I didn’t ask if they wanted it… 🙂

You know… I think, we laugh about it, but the reality is – and I think Jobs said it well: “Death is a wonderful invention because it allows us to get out of the way and let the next generation find their own way.” I’m comforted by that; I find great peace in that notion. They need to have the opportunity to fail and find their own way. If I were born a Millennial, I’d be growing up in an environment that’s vastly different than mine.

Though, in the end, we are all born, we all die, and we all live a human experience in various ways, there are common threads there… the stories are the same for all of us. I think those are the kinds of things that are passed on from generation to generation, but everything else is details.

I would not be surprised if the structuring of their brain is different to ours. I’ve been talking to guys that are 10 – 15 years younger than me, and the ability to hold their train of thought over weeks or months – when you’re doing some serious development or research – they seem to find that extremely difficult. So, I wonder if we’ll see any really big innovations coming through from those generations.

You could claim that it’s not just the web that’s done that, but it’s back to Sesame Street and the notion of bright, shiny objects that are in and out of our view in a very short time frame. Certainly I think a case can be made that our brains are changing; we are co-evolving with computing – we truly are.

But, at the same time, throw me in the woods and I couldn’t find my way out of it easily; I can’t track myself well, I can’t tell you what things are good to eat and what things aren’t. Those are survival skill that someone would have needed to have had a century or two ago. So, my brain has changed in that regard, just as the Millennials’ brains are changing. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? I’m not at a point to judge it, but it is a thing.

End of Part Two. Part Three will be published next week – sign up for the blog and it will be delivered directly to your inbox!

[Kim, Michael and Grady Skyped from their homes in Sydney and Hawaii.]

3 Comments

Posted in 'Capital I' Innovation, Creativity, Innovation, Technology, Vint Cerf

Tagged 1401, ACM, AI, Air Force Academy, Alan Turning, Bill Atkinson, Booch Method, Carl Sagan, CDE, Charles Babbage, Cold War, Computer HIstory Museum, computing, COMPUTING: The Human Experience, Cosmos, Darryl K. Taft, digital generation, Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming, Flat World Navigating, Fred Brooks, funding, Galileo, Gordon Moore, Grady Booch, Herbert Simon, HyperCard, IASA, IBM, IEEE, Jan Booch, John Hollar, John Toole, Jolt Award, Kickstarter, KimmiC, Kodak, Len Shustek, Lt. Gen. William Lord, Mac Paint, Marvin Minsky, Mary Shaw, Millenials, OOD, OOP, OS/360, PBS, QED, Ray Ozzie, Sesame Street, Seth Friedman, software, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, Tim O'Reilly, UML, warfare, Watson Research Center, World War II, Woven on the Loom of Sorrow: The Co-Evolution of Computing and Conflict, WTN, YouTube, Zen

Zen and the Art of Software: The Innovation Interview with Grady Booch (Part 1)

Posted on February 24, 2012 | 21 comments

One of the greatest things about ‘Flat World Navigating’ the internet, is that it enables connections with fascinating minds, even if from a distance. If you are able to then reach out to those magnificent minds and invite them to have a chat – the encounter can be transformational. Such was the case with Grady Booch, who is, I believe, a most genial genius – a man who brings Zen to Art of Software.

Grady Booch: Capital I Interview Series – Number 14

I first encountered Grady Booch via his project, COMPUTING: The Human Experience, “a transmedia project engaging audiences of all ages in the story of the technology that has changed humanity.” I was immediately hooked on the concept, and wanted to discover the mega-mind who thought to pull this off.

In the pantheon of world-famous computer scientist’s, Grady Booch is the star who co-authored the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and was one of the original developers of object-oriented programming (OOP). That alone would be immensely impressive, but it is far from the end of Grady’s long list of credits, which include being an IBM Fellow (IBM’s highest technical position) and Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

In fact, he’s quite a fella, being a fellow the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the World Technology Network (WTN) as well as being a Software Development Forum Visionary and recipient of Dr. Dobb’s Excellence in Programming Award and three – yes three! – Jolt Awards .

There is a rumour (one which he doesn’t discuss), that Grady was approached to takeover from Bill Gates as by Microsoft’s chief software architect. What is not a rumour, and what Grady does admit to, is that he taught himself to program in 1968 and had built his first computer a year earlier – at the age of 12.

He is the author of six books, hundreds of articles, and papers that originated in the term and practice of object-oriented design (OOD) and collaborative development environments (CDE), and the Booch Method of Software engineering. Grady serves on the advisory board of the International Association of Software Architects (IASA), the IEEE Software editorial boards and the board of the Computer History Museum.

Yes, with all that (and more) to his credit, Grady could quite comfortably sit on his laurels, and yet, instead he is the author, narrator and co-creator of what could be seen as a historical magnum opus of the technological world, COMPUTING: The Human Experience.

“At the intersection of humanity and technology is COMPUTING. From the abacus to the iPad, from Gutenberg to Google, from the Enigma machine designed to crack the codes of the Nazi SS to the Large Hadron Collider designed to crack the code of the universe, from Pong to Halo, we have created computing to count the uncountable, remember beyond our own experience, touch the invisible and see the unforeseeable. COMPUTING: The Human Experience is a brilliant and surprising insider view of the hidden stories of passion, greed, rebellion, rage and creation that created the technologies that are everywhere, transforming our world, our lives, and who we are as a species.”

Grady is not alone in this endeavour, working as he does with a tremendous creative team which includes, among others: Grammy Award winner, Seth Friedman; President of the Computer History Museum, John Hollar; and psychotherapist/theologian/social worker Jan Booch, Grady’s wife, co-writer and co-creator of this obvious labour of love. The series will include lectures, books, videos, an interactive website, and much more.

February 24, 2012 sees Grady launch the first in a series of lecture series at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California. For those readers who are not lucky enough to be in the vicinity to attend ‘Woven on the Loom of Sorrow: The Co-Evolution of Computing and Conflict’, I hope you will enjoy reading this multi-part Innovation Interview with Grady as much as Michael and I enjoyed talking to him!

Grady Booch: Capital I Interview Series – Number 14

Grady, when I clicked on the link from your LinkedIn profile, I was extremely excited by the idea of the COMPUTING: The Human Experience and found it to be immensely interesting! What made you feel that it was important to compute the human experience?

I think it has to do a lot of where I am in my life. In the sense that I have nothing left to prove, if you will, and I could do what I want to do. I could just happily fade away into an existence here. But, I think part of it is wanting to give back to the community that has given so much to me; and being able to express to the general public my child-like joy and delight at what I do. That’s why I think I chose to go down this path of telling the story.

In the end, I’m a story teller, and I think there is a story to be told here. There’s probably some other factors that happened that led me in this direction. Just random stories… A side conversation with one of our goddaughters…

We were talking to her about computing stuff, and she said:

“Oh, I know everything there is to know about computing. Because I’ve taken a class.”
“Oh, what did you learn?”
“Well, in my class we learned how to write a Word document and how to surf the web.”
I was like: “Oh, my gosh; there is so much more!”

It’s things like that that have led me to say… We’ve created this technology, and I’m responsible for helping create that technology, and we as a civilisation have chosen to step inside and live inside it. We’ve created a world and yet most of people in the world don’t understand it and can’t understand how to use it to their advantage.

I think my goal is: let’s open the curtain and explain some of that matter, and the mystery, beauty, excitement, and human stories that lead to it.

I think there is a lot of latent interest there, that is untapped at the moment.

I think so; I hope so. Well, there is a lot of interest in anything. Why do you think we still watch celebrities like Paris Hilton? It’s amazing what people get interested in.

But I think here is a topic that has profoundly changed humanity, and we are at the time and place where we can talk about it. And the people who made these changes… many of them are still alive, so let’s get their stories and tell that to the world!

The phrase I often use is: “An educated populous is far better able to reconcile its past, reason about its present and shape its future.” And I want to help contribute to educating that populous.

You don’t shy away from contentious topics, either. Such as: computing and war, computing and faith, and computing and politics. What are your thoughts on these subjects?

It’s interesting you called them controversial, because I see them as simply part of human experience. The reality is that there are billions of people, a billion Muslims, a billion Christians, and lots of others who profess a faith of some sort. So, to not talk about faith denies an element of the human experience; to not talk about war denies the existence of warfare. It’s not intentionally controversial, it’s a recognition that this is part of the human experience, and that it’s reasonable for us to consider what role computing has played in it.

So, let’s take computing and war for example. This is the one that I’ll be giving my first lecture [Woven on the Loom of Sorrow: The Co-Evolution of Computing and Conflict] on at the Computer History Museum on February 24. My premise is that war is part of the human experience, for better or worse.

By the way, a background you must recognise was that I trained to be a warrior. I went to the Air Force Academy and I learned about war, and many of my classmates have killed people in anger in warfare. It’s part of the life in which I have lived.

And yet, if you look at the parallel story of computing and warfare, the conclusion I draw is that computing was, at one time, a companion to warfare; it now is a means of warfare, and it’s quickly becoming a place of warfare. I’d like to tell that story: an observation, from an insider, of how computing has both enabled and been shaped by warfare.

I think the average person would be surprised to know that your average smart phone, and a considerable amount of technology, exists simply because of what happened during the Cold War and World War II.

2012 is the centenary of Alan Turning's birth

There are surprises in those regards. There are also some incredible personal stories. The tragic story of Alan Turing... [considered to be the father of computer science and AI]

Absolutely!

Who changed the course of World War II. He saved a nation, and yet that very nation eventually condemned him because he was homosexual. Go figure!

Will the lecture be something that people around the world will be able to access?

Our intent is to make it available on our YouTube channel and the museum’s channel. And I believe the local PBS station, QED, has an interest in making it available on their channels as well.

Wonderful!

So, yeah, we’re going to see a wide distribution of this. Ultimately, you can view this as the alpha (or beta) of what we’re trying to do with the series. One of the main things we’d like to get out to the world is an eleven-part series for broadcast. This [lecture] is not the broadcast, but we’re talking about it and this is one of the lectures about it.

What is the end product, or goal, of the COMPUTING: The Human Experience project? Would you say that the series is the end product, or is it something that doesn’t necessarily have to have an end?

It won’t ever have an end because I hope we will develop a dialogue with the public that goes on far beyond this.

Look at Sagan’s Cosmos; it’s still being seen to this day. I hope, and I certainly strive, to produce something as interesting and as timeless that. So, I’ll put it in the terms of [political scientist] Herbert Simon: ‘What our intermediate stable forms are‘… We want to produce eleven one-hour episodes (that’s a big thing), have a book, an e-book, curriculum materials, some Aaps. Those are the physical things we’ll actually be delivering.

To that end, you’ve already gone through one very successful Kickstarter funding round. I’m sure there will be others, but, other than helping to fund the project, what can readers of the Innovation interviews do to help you, and the project, reach some of those goals?

I think there are two things: My wife Jan and I have self-funded this for the last four years, but we’ve now gone to funding, like with Kickstarter – the very process of doing a Kickstarter has brought a number of volunteers to us. In the next few years, we need to raise about eleven-million dollars to pull this off. We’re going to foundations, we’re talking to individuals, and we’ll continue on that path.

Grady and Jan Booch

In a recent interview with Grady, Darryl K. Taft noted, “Meanwhile, Jan’s role on the project is multi-faceted. As a social worker, she attends to issues of multiculturalism, inclusivism and the impact computing has had on society. As a psychotherapist, her focus is on how human desires and needs have shaped and continue to shape the development of computing technology. As a theologian, her focus is on the moral and ethical issues found in the story of computing. Finally, as a non-technical person, she assures that the stories will be approachable, understandable and interesting to the general public.”

Working on the book and lecture series allows us to continue story development in a very, very low-cost kind of way. So, one of the things that I hope people can do is to say: “Hey! I know a guy who knows a guy, who works for this person, and they may be interested.” I hope we can find some serendipitous connections to people with whom we can find some funding.

I know foundations within the US, but I don’t know what opportunities there are in other parts of the world; we’re telling a global story so I hope we can get some connections that way.

The second is: I hope that people will look at this and say: “This is interesting. I think you should tell this story or that story.” And so I hope from this people will come to us and help inform us as to what they thing the world should know about.

[They hope to collect more than 2,000 human experience videos for their YouTube channel, so don’t be shy, make a video!]

Along with a magnificent creative team, you have an extremely eminent board for the COMPUTING: The Human Experience project. In particular, I must note Vint Cerf, who helped me kick off the Innovation interview series and really was integral in its initial success. How did you gather those people around you?

My philosophy is to surround myself with people far smarter than I am, because they know things that I will never know. I want to be able to go to them for two reasons: one is as a source of information, and the second is as a source of contacts.

Tim O'Reilly

I reached out to this set of people and I’m going to be growing the board to around 20 or 30 total for people who have specific expertise and who have been game changers in certain domains.

I’ll give you a great example of how this has worked well: Vint, Tim O’Reilly and Mary Shaw have been particularly useful for me thus far, but for developing the lecture on computing and warfare, one of the people on my board is Lt. Gen. William Lord, who happens to be the Chief Information Officer and Chief War Fighting Officer of the Air Force.

Mary Shaw

He has helped me out because I wanted to get some information that simply doesn’t exist in ‘the literature’: what’s the current doctrine at the war colleges about the use of Predators… what are people thinking? He put me in touch with people who have that source of information.

Lt. Gen. William Lord

Tim has been able to do similar kinds of things. The computing community, at one level, is a relatively small community; we all kind of know all the movers and shakers. Well, let’s get them to be a part of this, because I’m also celebrating their story!

You can learn more about Grady via the COMPUTING: The Human Experience website, Grady’s blog and his Twitter feed.

This is part one of a multi-part interview with Grady, be sure to look out for the next instalment – Part Two can be viewed here and part three here.

If you’re in the San Francisco area on the 24th of February, I heartily suggest you try and attend Grady’s lecture. If you, like me, are unable to attend, be sure to keep your eye on the COMPUTING: The Human Experience YouTube channel where the lectures will be posted.

[Note: the lecture has now been posted on the Computer History Museum YouTube channel. Thanks to John Hollar for letting us know!]

[Kim, Michael and Grady Skyped from their homes in Sydney and Hawaii.]

21 Comments

Posted in 'Capital I' Innovation, Creativity, Innovation, Technology, Vint Cerf

Tagged ACM, AI, Air Force Academy, Alan Turning, Booch Method, Carl Sagan, CDE, Cold War, Computer HIstory Museum, computing, COMPUTING: The Human Experience, Cosmos, Darryl K. Taft, Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming, Flat World Navigating, funding, Grady Booch, Herbert Simon, IASA, IBM, IEEE, Jan Booch, John Hollar, Jolt Award, Kickstarter, Lt. Gen. William Lord, Mary Shaw, OOD, OOP, PBS, QED, Seth Friedman, software, Tim O'Reilly, UML, warfare, Watson Research Center, World War II, Woven on the Loom of Sorrow: The Co-Evolution of Computing and Conflict, WTN, YouTube, Zen

Growing the Culture of Disruption: A chat with Linda Bernardi, a Most Personable Provocateur

Posted on January 6, 2012 | 12 comments

Linda Bernardi, author of ‘Provoke: Why the Global Culture of Disruption is the Only Hope for Innovation’, is undoubtably one the most personable provocateurs I’ve ever had the pleasure of speaking with. The fact that she is as inspiring as she is interesting is a bonus. Once I read her insightful and thought provoking book, published in November of 2011, I knew I wanted her to launch the 2012 Season of the Innovation Interview Series.

Linda wears an wide variety of hats, she is: CEO of StraTerra Partners, a technology strategy consulting company focussed on new tech adoption; an an early-stage technology Angel Investor in the US, Europe and India; and a board member for several commercial and not-for-profit organizations. Her work with the Bernardi Leadership Institute sees her training in large enterprises and academia as well as engaging entrepreneurs internationally in Innovation Based Leadership™. If that weren’t enough, ConnecTerra, the company she founded in 2001, provides RFID tech to large enterprise IT. All of this underlines that Linda knows what she’s talking about when it comes to ‘Capital I’ Innovation – and yet, as engaging as all of that is, none of it is why I was so determined to interview her for this series.

The fact is, with all those feathers in her cap, Linda now also wears the hat of an author, and it is for that reason – once I had read Provoke – that I sought her out.

Linda Bernardi: Capital I Interview Series – Number 10

Throughout my reading of ‘Provoke‘, I found myself talking out loud and having a dialogue with the book, “Yeah, that’s right!”… “I know!” … “I’ve thought that for years!” But, to Linda’s credit, I also learned a great deal, and found myself rethinking certain ‘givens’, which perhaps aren’t given any longer. Credit where credit is due – I recommend Provoke to anyone interested in moving the economy, especially the economy of Innovation, forward.

Throughout this interview you will find ‘snippets’ from the book. I hope they inspire you to purchase a copy and dive into your place in the ‘Culture of Disruption’ [CofD] that Linda opens to her readers.

“You are already part of the Culture of Disruption. Just by reading this book, you’ve become a disruptive force.”

Congratulations on writing such an engaging and insightful book Linda. Provoke prompts readers to ask themselves, “What can I do to become part of, enhance, enrich and ensure a successful Culture of Disruption,” be that in their school or business, and regardless of whether that business is a startup or an entrenched, global corporation. You’ve defined the Culture of Disruption as:

“…the culture that invites and nurtures ideas and ways of thinking that continually disrupt convention wisdom and legacy models. A CofD needs to be part of any organization looking to innovate.”

Added to that, you have made clear that change is inevitably uncomfortable, at least initially, but Innovation is the responsibility of everyone involved in the ecosystem. This ecosystem encompasses entrepreneurs and employees, investors and Board of Directors, even academia and the media and, perhaps most importantly, Consumers – who are the market. As you see it, working together – collaborating – they can create an unstoppable Culture of Disruption.

You refer to Collaboration a great deal in Provoke. Why is collaboration so important in the Culture of Disruption?

Collaboration has very broad ramifications. Part of what I hope to do with Provoke is explain the different constituents in the ecosystem… and illustrate how things are changing. As things get more democratised and open, by nature they become more collaborative, and this includes decision making… even very fundamental decisions such as strategic acquisitions, product directions and market plans.

The process of making these decisions will become much more collaborative within companies. It will also become more collaborative with the consumer – the market component, because the market now has an immediate voice regarding anything that company does. Decisions that used to be non-collaborative, where a company produced something for the market and the market had to take it or leave it, are now commented upon and can be broken, or not, based on the input of the market. Social media enables bi-directional communication.

These forces, that we never had in the past, allow uni-directional decision making, development, and communication; it’s becoming very bi-directional and collaborative. For the first time we’re embracing intellectual development on all levels and planning strategic development at a collaborative, global level. We’re respecting, or learning to respect, the power within individuals – whether they’re within a company or collaborating with the company – and the market.

In opening up to collaboration in such a social way, things are moving very quickly. Do you see the CofD as evolutionary or revolutionary?

Parts of it are evolutionary, because it would be impossible to say that everybody has to stop what they’re doing and completely change tracks. If it’s a big company serving tens of millions of consumers, it’s inconceivable that they’d immediately stop what they’re doing, abandon the past, and develop anew. On the other hand, certain Cultures of Disruption can be revolutionary, because they don’t have a legacy burden or have to service a huge market.

“The 3 Is–Inspiration, Impact and Innovation in the CofD.”

To that extent, you see companies like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, new generation companies that can evolve their business model immediately. Because everything is very dynamic, smaller companies have the ability to be much more agile and evolve very rapidly. Added to that, the bigger the company becomes, the less likely they are to reward risk and innovation.

Do you think that innovation is always risky?

Actually, I don’t think it is at all. Innovation, fundamentally, is looking at something that doesn’t exist, or a new way of doing something… creating some new possibilities. Innovation should be inherent in anything we’re doing. [Unfortunately] bigger companies tend to think they’re not entrepreneurs.

When I give a lecture to a company where there may be a 100,000 employees, a common [theme] that comes up is, “I’m just an employee; I’m not an entrepreneur. This stuff does not apply to me. I can’t bring about change.”

“… a formula for figuring out the odds that a given acquisition will succeed, based on five conditions that exist when the ball gets rolling: 1. Purpose; 2. Plan; 3. Personality; 4. Players; and 5. Panic.”

Well, anyone and anything they do can be innovative. That is why companies hire them; why companies go to the best universities and hire the best people. They bring them in because they want their talent. Their talent means they have brilliant ways of solving problems. That is innovation!

But something happens in their journey, and within a year or two, these same individuals get frustrated and leave. It’s ironic because they go off and doing the most fantastic things, and when you ask them, “Why didn’t you do it while you were at work?” They come back to their line of thinking: “I’m not supposed to innovate. I’m not entrepreneurial. I’m an employee.”

Provoke is trying to break that mould… to say that innovation CAN emanate from within. One of the reasons that I wrote Provoke is to change the lethargic behaviour that we see in big corporations and conglomerates. Most of my clients have one-hundred-and-fifty to two-hundred thousand employees.

The Bernardi Leadership Institute

It is frightening when I enter these companies and see an attitude, which is much more about: “I’m here to do a job and collect a pay check,” versus: “I’m here because I’m super-bright. I’m here because I have enormous talent and enormous capacity.” I think they’re only operating at anywhere between 10 to 15 percent of their intellectual capacity in these types of companies.

There are reasons for this. Often there are a lot of barriers – which I talk about in Provoke – that prohibit people from being innovative. After I give a lecture people will approach me and start sharing their stories. They inevitably revolve around not having a supportive manager, having a leadership that’s disconnected, a system that does not reward risk taking or innovative thinking, and failed systems of capturing innovation from within.

“Smart leaders should be looking at a managing method I call “the baton”: orchestrating diverse groups, allowing expression within the boundaries of an overall plan, and making work emotionally appealing and creative…”

Think about it; if you have one-hundred thousand employees… if one percent of those people – just one thousand people – were to have one idea a year… that’s one thousand ideas per year! Yet if you look at the amount of innovation that’s actually captured within companies, it’s maybe three to four ideas per year.

To me, as an ex-CEO, it’s as if these company leaders are willing to bypass their most incredible source of innovation. Often they think, “Maybe I need to make an acquisition to do an innovation.” A lot of times the Innovation acquisitions that are made could have been accomplished within companies, but employees within the company were never consulted. Imagine their motivation level. The level of inspiration drops proportionally the less people are involved in innovation.

We have to disrupt this model, cultivate and inspire talent, and bring creative thinking out. Currently I believe this is incredibly dormant, both within the US as well as globally. Instead, it’s the big company model that prevails, on in which, for some reason, expressiveness and innovation go unrewarded and are even discouraged.

You must meet, at least initially, a great deal of scepticism in these larger corporations.

Well, scepticism is a lot easier than innovation, isn’t it? In fact, in the five stages of dealing with disruption, scepticism is one of the first stages. When cloud computing came out, it was very easy for people to be sceptical: “It’s not going to work. I’m not going to use it as my corporate enterprise system. It’s going to fail. Nobody is going to want it. There are security issues.” The list went on and on.

When Apple disrupted the music industry and brought out the iPod, it was an incredible revolution, it redefined the entire possibility landscape, it redefined distribution of music. And then it came up with the iPhone and redefined telcos.

My big clients in Europe all said: “Well, a computer company that’s a music company… they are never going to make it as a phone company. It’s not possible! We’re a phone company!”

And when Apple redefined the iPad the sceptics said: “No one is going to walk around with an iPad, and an iPhone, and a MacBook.” And what do you think are the most three prevalent devices at any meeting I go to? Those exact three devices! Then the sceptics said: “Nobody is going to abandon their iPhone just to get a new iPhone,” yet everybody does.

I’m so glad you brought up this question because there is so much scepticism and misunderstanding around innovation. Innovation – or disruption – doesn’t mean just coming up with a flaky idea, going off and doing something new without considering what the ramifications are.

Innovation (whether it’s by a small, medium or large company or an individual) looks at the possibility of developing something that doesn’t exist, or expanding on something that exists, and disrupting the model.

“Here are a few tips:

Try something that seems crazy.

Solve a problem.

Observe everything.

Ignore the naysayers.

Have a strategic plan and execute it

Expect more of yourself”

Look at companies like Kodak, which I talk about in Provoke, who owned the entire photography space, and I think about the myriad number of ways that Kodak could have taken digital photography and owned that space… It could have been the hub, the platform for all digital photos. Or, look at Blackberry, that owned the business of communication smart devices…

I think there are very few companies that are willing to take the broad risk of blatantly innovating in the face of scepticism, while understanding the heightened level of gratification they have to give to the consumer.

Speaking of the consumer, do you see a widening or lessening of the generation gap – between those of a ‘certain’ generation and those part of what you deem Generation I (the Generation of Innovation)?

I’m delighted by how intelligent the consumer is. Something magnificent is happening today, the like of which we’ve never seen before. When the first personal computers came out people that were over a certain age, who had never dealt with a computer, never learned. There was a very distinct gap.

Somehow, in the last five to ten years, with the help of social media, that gap is being bridged to the point where grandparents are revelling in the use of Skype… they know how to use their iPhones. They feel a part of it. And that’s fantastic! A nine-month-old can take an iPad and play a game. Of course there is a broad range of technical capabilities, but the generational gap is becoming less and less relevant. In my view, it’s because innovation is becoming more practical and end-user-oriented.

We’re developing things with the idea that the mass of people should be able to use them; things are becoming simpler to consume. With computers in the past, the art lay in buying the computer, loading the operating system, figuring out what program to buy, going through the heroic task of installing it and figuring out how to use it. Only a very small percentage of the population could actually do that.

It’s very different today with the ‘www.anything/anytime’ model, which allows anyone access to anything. The art is the use rather than the technical prowess to be ‘able’ to use; and that has really diminished the generational gap.

Unfortunately I think a great many technologists miss the fact that, regardless of how ‘smart’ their technology is, if people aren’t using it, it just won’t matter.

Exactly. If we ask the question, “what makes certain innovation distinct?” it is when you develop something that people use. In Provoke I discuss each of the constituents within the ecosystem of disruption, which is the enabling body of the Culture of Disruption. These include the leadership, the board, the investor and the employee.

I then talk about the market and its power, because it’s the market that is totally redefining advertising and marketing. The market has a tremendous impact. Look at what happened at Netflix within span of few days. The company came up with a new business plan, people revolted and called it back. Imagine if we could have done that ten years ago with hybrid cars.

“DISRUPTION = INNOVATION = EXCELLENCE”

When Innovation becomes practical and usable, it redefines everything. And the beauty of it is that, sooner or later, change is inevitable. The sooner you embrace the disruption the better. If you don’t believe in disruption, you’re fundamentally saying that you believe in nothing changing… companies that think like that are the companies that become extinct.

The business equivalent of the dodo bird.

Exactly.

That leads into my next question: is ego bad for innovation? As a consumer I have a great amount of ego because I feel, more and more, that I can have an effect – especially if I group together with other consumers. From my perspective as an innovator, I realise that if we (KimmiC) didn’t have ego, perhaps we wouldn’t be as audacious as we are in deciding that we can change the world.

On the other hand, perhaps part of the reason that people and companies feel they don’t need to change is the ego they have invested in their current offerings.

What are your thoughts?

It’s a very important question. If we were to define ego, I think competence, belief, passion and drive are necessary attributes… they’re critical for any of us to do anything significant. If you didn’t have those you wouldn’t be able to do what you believe you can do. You wouldn’t have the passion or the drive to do it; or the fundamental belief, as an entrepreneur, that: “I know this is risky but I really believe in the fundamental outcome. I’m going to do it and very little is going to stop me if anything”.

On the other hand there is the misplaced ego, which is ego by virtue of what you’ve been in the past, or what you think you are, or what you think you have to be. That’s wrong because that completely stifles growth. Those are the companies (or individuals) that are not innovating, because they believe that if they shatter that ego, everything will fall apart.

It’s necessary to know what you don’t know, to know that you have to learn, and to be eager to learn. Unfortunately, in the latter group of people (or companies), there’s very little learning or change going on because of their belief: “I’m company X. I’ve dominated this field. I own it. No one can be as good as me.”

At the same time there are some entrepreneurs that can be unfoundedly egotistical. They believe they know all the answers just because they’ve been successful in the past. These are the entrepreneurs that believe they’re going to take their social media company public and, suddenly, it’s going to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Those that wear their Google Goggles proudly!

Yeah. Or because they’re 20 years old, they got their Ph.D. at MIT and somebody told them they’re super-bright. They have expectations, at the age of 23, that they are going to be multi-millionaires on their yacht.

“The comfort and the recklessness born of wildly available capital are actually corrupting innovation. Obstacles and scarcity force us to be better, think creatively, and work harder.”

Silicon Valley, while it’s been enormous in bringing us tremendous innovation, is also the breeding ground for unfounded ego, both in entrepreneurs, corporations and investors. There are venture capitalists there that believe that, in some sense, they’re God! One of the things that inspires me about Asia (and some of the other continents) is that they are where Silicon Valley was about 20 years ago. There’s passion and hunger, but there’s also an incessant energy and drive. It’s extremely difficult to balance that with unfounded ego.

Talking about Asia brings me back to thinking about scepticism. I believe, and I think from reading Provoke and speaking to you that you probably have a similar view, that woe betide those who are sceptical of what is going on in Asia.

Right. One things that got me really worried and started me thinking about writing Provoke was a December 2010, CNN round table of six CEO’s from major companies in Silicon Valley – we’ll leave them unnamed. For an hour they were being spoke about the prowess of the U.S. versus the global market, and how the U.S. would never lose in the innovation game.

Clearly, they all have operations in various countries outside the U.S. and they definitely, as executives travel there, but the answers they rendered really left me baffled.

“Among giant companies, only Apple and Google seem to have mastered the deliberate act of balancing a youthful, wildly innovative, disruptive organizational ethos with the iron discipline and market focus that produces win after win… What my students and clients want to know is how to capture that same spirit.”

In my role as an investor in companies across the globe, I get a unique opportunity to look at entrepreneurism in various countries at a fundamental level. For instance, in India there were about 5,100 business plans submitted [to us] last year. We’re expecting this year to top 7,000. China, South America, Europe… Talent is everywhere. Genius is everywhere. So to think that it’s going to be in one place is a very dangerous game.

StraTerra Partners

Everything is available everywhere. So, for companies and the leadership of those companies to sit there and say things like: “We are going to be the leader. Nobody can catch up with us,” really showed enormous blindness.

It could be posited that the current state of the U.S. economy is, at least partially, reflective of that blindness.

Absolutely. Innovation is collaborative. Right now, just within my client list, there are three to four million employees. That’s a lot of people.

Just within that group of people, if I can start the process of active thinking and processing, just awakening people to the power that they have, and get them to believe in it… To believe that an entrepreneur is just somebody that thinks creatively; that they can be, and are, an entrepreneur in what they do. If the system around them is not designed to listen to them, they should create a system that is.

If enough people think like that… well, how could the leadership of a company resist 50,000 people wanting to express themselves. What are they going to do? Lay them all off… because they’re thinking creatively?

“People need to feel valuable, creative, inspired.”

Disruption is simply another way to look at something. Imagine if we’d never experimented… because that by default means disruption. We would have never had any discovery. That’s the power of the ‘what if’ culture. That’s what engineering and science is, it’s about experimentation. Disruption doesn’t mean disrupting the business, it just means opening up the business to new opportunities.

You mention in Provoke that you’d like an opportunity to rebuild the entire business school paradigm. How would you change it?

I can actually answer that question with a very concrete answer. I taught a number of classes last year at the University of Washington, in their MBA program. It went so well that they’ve now offered me a lecturer position and, starting at end of January, Provoke will be used as a textbook.

It was very interesting to go into a program that’s well-established. It’s very methodical, like every other MBA program, and I taught it completely differently. I wanted my audience to participate with me, I wanted the students to think.

I made them very uncomfortable because I told them I didn’t think they were thinking enough. At one point I turned around and said I found it completely boring being with them.

I know they’re bright but they were just sitting there waiting for me to teach them things. I said, “But you know everything! Let’s talk about how you can change things!” What ensued were incredible business plans; and I thought: “Oh my God! They’ve woken up. Look at what they can do!”

“Professors should pursue corporate relationships, explore creative funding options and worry more about impact and less about tenure.”

This is the first step. We’re going to incorporate it with formal teaching and, over the course of the year, I hope to expand it to other universities and other business programs. I really think that business programs have to be completely disrupted and revamped for the new world that we’re entering.

In Provoke you mention your respect for (The Daily Show’s) Jon Stewart. What is it about Jon that moved you to mention him in particular?

In addition to being a comedian, Jon played a very important role during a very difficult previous [Bush, Cheney] administration. His was probably the most unbiased and candid voice talking about what was going on in the administration, in congress, in politics in general.

Jon Stewart

Part of the comedy passport that he has allows him to bring things to the foreground and talk about them both in a way that audience connect with. He is able to make light of very complex things which, frankly, need to be made light of.

It’s ironic, but though he’s a comedian, he’s one of the cleanest source of political news. That frankness is also needed in discussions about business, Innovation and the Culture of Disruption.

He’s very much a provocateur, as are you. Like Jon, you don’t seem to have any reticence in voicing your opinion, nor qualms about how you may be perceived in doing this. That is not necessarily a position that a lot of women are comfortable taking.

I would say that, as we enter 2012, it’s really disturbing to me how few women do what I do.

When I look at technical conferences, and go through the list of keynote speakers, there are no women. We’re 50% of the workforce, yet we’re not there. When I sit around an investment table, I don’t have women investors with me. When I’m on a board of directors, I don’t have women with me. It’s disturbing to me that in a course of decades, instead of this becoming a non-issue, in fact it’s a real issue in that, women are still uncomfortable taking centre stage.

I’d like to have a lot more women doing what you’re doing – asking tough questions, putting themselves on the map. But generally women lack a desire for risk. Women dislike failure and want to play it safe – for a lot of historical reasons – yet women have enormous power. I’m hoping that, as the world becomes more and more collaborative, more and more women will come to centre stage.

How will you measure the success of Provoke in the Culture of Disruption?

I really believe in the power of the people and I want Provoke to have a role in it. So, if you ask me: “What would be a measure of success for me in a year?” it is how many people I might have touched with Provoke. How might I have helped them change their thinking around the inevitability of disruption and their positive role in the Culture of Disruption. To me, those would be incredible success factors.

“I’m a free thinker, not a Kool-Aid drinker”

If I can just provoke people to think differently, the mathematical combination of possibilities grows infinitely. I’m very pleased to see companies – some as large as federal agencies – saying: “You know what? We need to bring in innovative thinking.” In fact, they’re replacing my “Culture of Disruption” with “Culture of Innovation.” They’re saying: “You need to help us create our Culture of Innovation.” Right there, suddenly there’s a positive translation of my dream. The “Culture of Disruption” has now been translated into the “Culture of Innovation,” or, as you call it, the “Capital I”… which is huge!

Linda is giving a free gift of the first chapter of the Provoke eBook, along with a Culture of Disruption membership card, to any readers of this Innovation Interview who sign up for her monthly ‘Innovation Excellence’ newsletter by clicking this link!!

You can find out more about Linda, Provoke and the Culture of Disruption on her website and blog. You can also connect with Linda on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

(Kim and Linda Skype’d from their homes in Sydney and Seattle.)

12 Comments

Posted in 'Capital I' Innovation, Creativity, Innovation, Technology

Tagged academia, Apple, Asia, Bernardi Leadership Institute, Board of Directors, Broadband, business school, Capital I innovation, cell phones, CEO, Cisco Systems, CNN, CofD, collaboration, communication, ConnecTerra, consumers, Culture of Disruption, Culture of Innovation, economy, ego, employees, Enterprise IT, entrepreneur, entrepreneurs, Facebook, futurist, generation gap, Generation I, Google Goggles, IBM, Innovation Based Leadership, Innovation Generation, investors, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Jon Stewart, KimmiC, Kodak, Linda Bernardi, LinkedIn, MacBook, market, MBA, media, mobile devices, Netflix, occupy-wall-streeinnovation-interview, Oracle, provocateur, Provoke, Provoke: Why the Global Culture of Disruption is the Only Hope for Innovation, RFID, scepticism, Silicon Valley, smart phones, Sony, start-ups, Steve Jobs, StraTerra Partners, tablets, tenure, The Daily Show, Twitter, University of Washington

Chewing on Black Swan for Christmas

Posted on December 19, 2011 | 4 comments

Rather than looking back at 2011, we chose to talk to Doug Vining – chief technology adviser to the FutureWorld Global Think Tank and Editor of MindBullets: News from the Future – about the future, and his hopes for it, in this, the last Innovation Interview of 2011.

Doug Vining: Capital I Interview Series – Number 9

Futurist, entrepreneur, guru, writer and editor – these are only some of the words used to describe Doug Vining. With an eclectic career which has encompassed advertising, corporate consulting, and working for tech titans such as IBM, Doug has had his finger on the pulse of Innovation and its commercial applications – along with its potential for solving real world problems – for many years. With 30 years in ‘the game’ and three business degrees, Doug is a tech and strategy consultant, with a particular fascination for emerging technology .

You define yourself as a futurist… what does that term mean to you?

Well, I’m part of a group called ‘FutureWorld‘. What we do is teach companies and organisations how to learn from the future. They call us ‘futurists’, but we don’t predict the future, the future is impossible to predict.

Life is not perfect, reality is messy, that is what you should expect. Anything is possible in the future. What is needed is an attitude of durability and adaptability… expect the unexpected and learn from what could happen.

We look at scenarios. We don’t say, “This is what will happen.” We say, “This is the kind of thing that could happen.” Even if some of it would seem to be improbable.

Very often it’s the least likely scenarios that occur. Looking at the opportunities in those scenarios and planning a strategy today, that will help you in the future, that’s what we mean by ‘learning from the future’.

Your fellow FutureWorld gurus are very impressive.

Yes. For over twenty years “Future World” has been in operation, so we have quite an impressive group of gurus. There are four core members (I’m including myself) who have been involved with the business for about twenty years, and then there are others who come and go, or get involved in one stage or another.

Your fellow core members are Wolfgang Grulke, Anton Musgrave, and Neil Jacobsohn.

That’s exactly right. Wolfgang started this whole thing when he was still with IBM. Many years ago he said, you can’t look to the past for strategy. Strategy has got to be about the future; strategy and innovation are tied together in that future perspective.

“In this warp-speed world it is no longer enough to learn from experience, we must learn from the future.” Wolfgang Grulke

Anton Musgrave

It’s about agility, adaptability and flexibility. If you expect everything to be ordered and measured, then unfortunately, you’re going to be wrong.

That sounds like one of your MindBullets.

‘MindBullets: News from the Future‘ was one of several that Wolfgang came up with. The idea was to present a scenario in the form of a short, sharp news story that would make business executives sit up and think. Executives are often far too focussed on operational issues, and need a jolt to get them to think strategically and consider the future.

The mind bullets are little news stories from the future. We produce one every week, we’ve been doing it for years. Because we have been doing it for so long, some of those ‘futures’ have become the present, or the past. It’s quite interesting to see how many of those MindBullets, which we thought were crazy ideas at the time, actually look pretty normal in today’s world.

Such as?

A big one must be world-wide communication and the adoption of cell phones, and smart mobile devices; it’s completely changed the modern world. We said that these sort of things would become commonplace.

Another example is an article we wrote four or five years about communication becoming a basic human right. Just last year the United Nations said that internet access should be considered a human right, and countries are starting to put in broadband for their citizens. Those are the kind of trends that we considered futuristic at the time, and now they’re commonplace.

Would you say that is something like the smart/mobile phone, which enables easy communication, is the most important piece of innovation in your lifetime?

Absolutely. In my life time I think the most profound piece of innovation has been the internet and the convergence of the internet, cellphones, and smart mobile devices.

The mobile phone on its own has completely changed the way the world works, especially in places like Africa and Asia. In the past, for example, a manager, or someone with some product, would have to travel to another town to find out if there was a market for their goods, or their labour. Often that trip would be a fruitless waste of energy and they would miss other opportunities by making it. Now, with cell phones, they can find out where there is a demand for their services or products. That completely changes economic opportunities.

And, of course it’s become more pervasive, more into the realm of social communication. We’ve seen what’s happened in Egypt, and Libya and Tunisia. The catalyst has been the ability to communicate and organise socially, and to be heard. People who were powerless have been given power.

Speaking of power, FutureWorld has a very impressive list of clients: huge companies and multinationals such as British Airways, Cisco Systems, The Financial Times, Gartner, IBM, Kraft, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle.

There’s a number of reasons for that. When we engage with clients on a formal basis we are quite expensive, so start-ups can’t afford us. And, start-ups normally already have that innovation… that future-looking, crazy-idea mentality.

Therefore, yes, most of our clients are big corporates who are kind of set in their ways and very static. They need the intervention from FutureWorld to get them to consider programs of innovation such as setting up a separate a business unit to take new ideas into the future. Start-ups don’t need us and can’t afford us; big companies who can afford us definitely need us.

I suppose one of the ways that a start-up, or an individual, could gain access to you and the rest of the gurus would be to sign up to MindBullets.

Absolutely. There are a number of entrepreneurs who’ve been subscribing to MindBullets for years. There’s a lot of intellectual property, a lot of our thinking, available for free on our website. We also started a discussion forum; everyone that subscribes is free to comment and enjoy the conversation.

And the controversy?

That’s the point. The future actually awards people who stand out. I mean, look at Steve Jobs. He was the obvious example of the unreasonable man. He wasn’t part of the crowd; he was a maverick. He expected the impossible and he often got it. There’s an old saying: “To change the world all you need is an unreasonable man”.

There’s a book called “The Black Swan“, written by the international speaker Nassim Taleb. Now, a black swan is an inventor or invention that is unreal, unusual, and appears to be random. But, it – the black swan – completely changes the landscape and the status quo; so much so that things are never the same again.

The origin of the black swan was from the time in history when all swans were thought to be white (because all swans in Europe were white). This thought prevailed until someone from Europe went to Australia and ‘discovered’ the black swans there. Of course the discovery completely changed the previous volume of knowledge… the certainty that all swans were white.

There are so many obvious examples of black-swan events, like the 9/11 attacks, the Fukushima tsunami, and earthquake. Even the global adoption of mobile phones is a kind of black swan thing. People didn’t predict it, they didn’t expect to be quite so dramatic, and so profound in its impact. The key thing about the black swan is the world will never be the same again; we can never go back to the way it used to be.

With that in mind, do you think that movements such as OWS (Occupy Wall Street) are Black Swan events?

I do. I think that they are important events. I think they’re also a symptom of a shift in mind-set.

There are a number of themes around this kind of thinking. The first one is the rise of the individual. One of the lessons from the future is that the individual becomes much more powerful than institutions, and corporations. The individual has the power to connect, to communicate, to organise and to make big changes in society, and economies.

A more recent theme, which Niel (Jacobson) and I put together over the last year or so is called “Naked Leadership“.

Neil Jacobsohn

This theme has proved to be very popular with our clients in the last few months. It looks at social media bringing about things like the Occupy movements, and the uprisings in Egypt, and Tunisia. There are number of factors playing there: communication, the power of individuals, the transparency that people demand, and the fact that institutions, countries, governments, big businesses, and big brands, are no longer in control.

I wouldn’t like to predict where it’s going to, as it does change from day to day, but there is the argument that Occupy Wall Street is the manifestation of individuals demanding their rights, and their freedom. On the other hand, there’s a feeling that this could be a kind of socialism which could subjugate individual desires of to those of ‘the group’. Once the 99% are in power, where does the individual stand?

How very Ayn Rand-ian.

Exactly. It’s about individual rights being under threat.

Speaking of individuals, who inspires you as an Innovator?

One of the innovators who I truly, truly admire is a young chap called Elon Musk. Elon is a multi-millionaire entrepreneurs living in California, but he is originally from South Africa. He helped found PayPal, which he sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. He’s currently involved in three things: Tesla Motors (electric cars); SpaceX, his private company, which is the first private commercial company to launch a space craft into the atmosphere and orbit Earth; and, he’s also very interested in the concept of green energy.

Elon Musk

This year [2011] he was awarded half a million dollars for the Heinlein Prize, for ‘accomplishments in commercial space activities’ – which is no mean feat; and apparently (according to Wikipedia and Jon Favreau) he was the inspiration for Tony Stark, of the ‘Iron Man’ movies.

He’s an amazing guy. And, it just shows you that innovation can come from strange places. I think Elon epitomises what I consider to be a ‘Capital I’ Innovator. At FutureWorld we talk about Radical Innovation, which think that ties into your view on “Capital I” innovation.

Absolutely.

Radical Innovation creates new products, new businesses, new business units, and creates a steep difference in the performance of a company. That’s one of the truths you learn from the future… to create radical innovation in your businesses and in your life.

Radical Innovation is about expecting and getting ready for what’s next… the next big, radical, exponential increase. Sometimes that means you have to kill off your old business to make room for your new one.

An example of that, of course, is the iPod. Sony could have had the iPod years before Apple did, but they said: “No! It’s going to cannibalise our Walkman business”. Of course it did; except Apple did it for them!

That’s just a typical example. That’s one of the lessons from the future: eat yourself before someone else does.

Its about consistently, and continuously are editing yourself. Very Darwinian.

Certainly radical innovation is all about taking risks and finding those opportunities that are going to be the next big thing, even if it does mean killing off existing things.

When we go to companies, we try and help them to engage in programs of radical innovation. We say that they should look at using their existing businesses, which hopefully include some cash cows, to produce the revenue necessary to invest in risky ventures for the future. It’s like taking some of your mature business lines and nurturing them, while at the same time pouring money into more risky things that may be the next radical businesses of the future.

As a futurist, do you have any thoughts or lessons to share for 2012; what do you think we should be looking out for?

Well the problem is that, for me, 2012 is almost yesterday. We’re looking beyond 2020, because what’s going to happen next year is already old hat… it’s kind of discarded and even obvious. The longer view is much more important and much more interesting. Having said that, there are lots of thing that I expect, maybe not to happen, but to start becoming much more mainstream.

One of the things that I’ve been talking about for years is solar energy becoming cheaper and more efficient. To the extent that, ultimately, it will probably dominate as a primal form of energy world-wide. Now, there are many reasons why you might want to debate that, but it certainly seems to be emerging as highly probable.

I’ve got a blog where I talk about ‘The New Energy’. Whether it’s solar, biofuel, bacteria [microbial fuel cell], genetically-modified organisms or organic waste [pyrolysis], I think it’s definitely in the future. When? I don’t know. But the sooner the better as far as I’m concerned, because it will offer so many opportunities and solutions to problems that everyone assumes can only get worse.

This is the big thing about the future: futurists are very optimistic. You have to be!

Image: Peter Griffin

I think we will see black swans in climate change, in energy, in communication, and all sorts of things. I believe that the future beyond 2020 will be a bright future.

(Kim and Doug Skype’d from their homes in Sydney and Johannesburg.)

—

This is the last Innovation Interview of 2011. I’d like to take this opportunity, on behalf of Michael and myself, to thank all the Interesting, Insightful, and Inspiring ‘Capital I’ Innovators who have given their time so graciously and who’ve been so enthusiastic in becoming involved in the Innovation Interview Series this year.

We’d also like to send our thanks to the thousands of people who have joined us on this journey, as readers, supporters, commentors and influencers.

To all of you we wish a very happy holiday season and an Innovative 2012!

Cheers!

4 Comments

Posted in 'Capital I' Innovation, Innovation, Technology, Uncategorized

Tagged Anton Musgrave, Apple, Ayn Rand, bacteria, biofuel, British Airways, Broadband, Capital I innovation, cell phones, Cisco Systems, commercial space activities, communication, controversy, Darwinian, Doug Vining, Elon Musk, entrepreneur, future, FutureWorld, futurist, Gartner, genetically-modified organisms, Heinlein Prize, human right, IBM, Innovation Interview, internet access, iPod, Iron Man, Jon Favreau, Kraft, microbial fuel cell, Microsoft, MindBullets, mobile devices, Naked Leadership, Nassim Taleb, Neil Jacobsohn, Occupy Wall Street, optimistic, Oracle, organic waste, OWS, PayPal, pyrolysis, Radical Innovation, SAP, smart phones, solar energy, Sony, SpaceX, start-ups, Steve Jobs, strategist, strategy, tablets, Tesla, The Black Swan, The Financial Times, The New Energy, think tank, Tony Stark, UN, United Nations, Wolfgang Grulke

Do Fries Go With That Business Shake(up)?

Posted on September 1, 2011 | 1 comment

Capital I Innovation Interview Series – Number 5

Vincent Hunt is a man on a mission. And what is that mission? To make change. With his tool box including the skill sets of lateral and creative thinking along with design, he is an enthusiastic, some might say evangelistic, proponent of the newly emerging role of CIO – Chief INNOVATION Officer.

Now I must be honest and say that, first off, that after ten years in the Netherlands, and two years in Sydney, sometimes the only change – let alone innovation – I’m looking for in the hospitality industry is, well, some hospitality. That said, there is definitely a a scent of change in the air, and there are those that are leading the way. One such leader is Vincent Hunt.

Vincent is Co-founder, Chairman & Chief Innovation Officer at Kind Intelligence, which leverages cloud, mobile and social technology to bring Innovation to the hospitality industry through Hospitality Intelligence.

Vincent, how essential has innovation been in your career to date; and how important do you envisage it being going forward?

Innovation has been, in essence, the foundation of my career for quite some time, I can not remember a time where innovation has not been a factor in my professional development. As individuals, I believe that we each have a responsibility to ourselves to continually challenge ourselves through rethinking, redefining and re-inventing who we are. EVEN as it pertains to our career, in-fact, I believe that this is one of the areas of our lives, more now than ever, that we should be exposing ourselves to “internal innovation” – evolving, and growing in a time where our historical perceptions of work are being challenged . So not only has innovation been important in MY career, innovation has quintessentially shaped my career.

What do you think is imperative to allow ‘Capital I’ Innovation to occur? reform

I’m totally anti-politics, so I am going to steer away from that end of the question, BUT what I am going to do is dig in where my heart resides. Education.

I believe that if we are to see and benefit from one of the greatest paradigm shifts in innovation we will ever see in OUR lifetime, and if not this lifetime, one shortly after… We MUST authorize, and unleash one of the greatest and most powerful innovative forces the world has ever seen… Generation Y, the Echo Boomers and post Echo Boomers, and I think it starts with the education system.

This generation is growing up in a post-industrial world, and experiencing an industrial education system. While there is little emphasis on the arts, creativity in equal parts, and we are seeing children as young as 7 or 8 years old being diagnosed ADHD and sedated out of their creative potential, simply for the sake of conforming to a system that was pretty much designed to produce industrial minded contributors, citizens… We have to not only evolve the education system, we have to turn it on it’s head and start exploring the creative capacity of our children.

What do you think are the main barriers to the success of innovation?

Some of the main barriers to the success of innovation, in my humble opinion are, and some of these may overlay one another…

1. Resistance to change

2. Rigorous conditioning by the collective mind

3. Fear

4. The protest of “play” within the workplace

5. Habit/Routine

8. If you could give a ‘Capital I’ Innovation Award to anyone, who would you nominate?

This one is tough because I believe in so many of the Capital I Innovators… So can I give two? Please??!!

1. Tom Peters and

2. Apple …

Tom Peters, has, in my opinion, single handedly turned the business world upside down for the better. In his provocative book Re-Imagine (2006), Tom Peters gave us a Manifesto for the way we should view work where, not only was he Visionary and concise, BUT he ushered in a whole new way to think about business. Tom Peters talked about Social Media well before the phrase “Social Media” existed. And TO THIS DAY, Tom Peters continues to define the foundation of business from a radical new paradigm, that gives Innovators a roadmap to navigate by…. Revolutionary.

Apple… Not only does Apple have the “chops” to create incredible products, the iPhone (game changer), the iMac (simply beautiful, and oh yeah… powerful), the iOs (revolutionary)… BUT they also believe in Design Thinking like no other company that I can put my finger on today (besides the champions of the thinking, Ideo, Frog, to name a couple), and it’s this “difference” that leads them to design and innovation excellence.

As it pertains to their “Capital I” contribution… one product that really rings true to me is the iPhone, and later the iPad. I can remember when the iPhone first came into the marketplace, and I clearly remember the competition saying things like “It’s just another cell phone, with an oversized screen and touchpad… Big deal…” AND big deal it was… Because it was not only the beautiful aesthetics that made the iPhone amazing, it was the thinking behind the iPhone that was the “Innovation”.

The iPhone was the first hand-held device that gave the users the power to create the experience THEY wanted, and that was, and is, magical. Apple totally rethought the cell phone, and what it meant to us as a people, and the “mobile device” (surely we can’t keep calling them cell phones now… right) will never be the same.

How do you see Capital I Innovation changing the hospitality industry?

The Hospitality Industry is going through a major shift right now, greatly in-part to the emergence of what I like to call the “Connected Consumer”. Consumers have more opportunity than they have ever had, to shape, and re-shape, their experiences.

For the first time, the voice of the consumer is richly audible and influential, and brands are starting to understand that their brand experience is in large part, at the mercy of the consumer voice [via] Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Urban Spoon, Foodspotting… enabling technologies that are a direct line of influence on the hospitality industry. If one person has a bad experience at a hotel, that one bad experience can instantly change the perception of thousands upon thousands of people that MAY be thinking about visiting that hotel, and one tweet, retweeted can make that happen.

At Kind Intelligence, we conceptualize and develop breakthrough ideas that 1. help hospitality industry professionals streamline operational efficiencies, but more importantly, 2. we are feverishly thinking about ways that we can turn the hospitality industry on it’s head to deliver rich, and meaningful customer experiences. Our innovations rest in “delivering better ways of doing things based on new sets of data”… new, deeper, demographic information (Hospitality Intelligence 2.0).

We think about empathetic intelligence. I can learn more about you. I can learn your mood at any given point of the day, and for the first time, I can market to moods. The Connected Consumer is giving us more data than every before, the question is how do we leverage that data and how do we make solutions that improve the customers experience. Does this means that one day you’ll be able to walk into a restaurant and be offered a completely unique experience, could that be possible? Absolutely.

I can see Capital I Innovation shifting how consumers connect with hospitality brands, but more importantly, how hospitality brands connect with the consumers.

Do you think the ‘Groupon Effect’ emboldening innovation in the industry?

I think that Groupon is a great idea, from the consumer side of the house, as they’re are able to get deals and save a lot of great money. But I think it hinders the growth and potential of some restauranteurs and other companies because they discount their products and services and reduce the value of their offerings.

What is the difference between ‘Possibility Thinking vs Competition Thinking’?

This is something that I am fanatical about, and it’s become the foundational thinking that we embrace at Kind. We don’t think in terms of ‘competition’ because we feel that that only leads to incremental (at best) change. We lean towards focusing on what is ‘possible’, which often leads to a more disruptive form of innovation.

Right now we are working on a massive project with Mutual Mobile out of Austin Texas called Menulus, that we feel will totally reinvent the dining experience. Menulus, [which we’re launching in the first Quarter of 2012] was designed based on possibility thinking, and some of it’s abilities are going to “shake up” the mobile space in a very profound way.

‘Possibility Thinking’ is innovating based on what is possible in todays marketplace vs ‘Competition Thinking’, which suggest that we simply innovate, a little, to beat the competition. It’s the difference between taking an ‘innovation’ stance vs a ‘disruptive innovation’ stance.

It sounds like Menulus is going to enable Micro-pitches to the consumer.

Through micro-pitches we have ways of extending Kindness, and that’s where the name of our company comes from. Kindness is a choice, but I need tools to help me make better choices and that’s where the semantic web and Web 3.0 really empowers what Menulus is all about.

Could we potentially have a POS (Point of Sale) System that’s integrated into the menu in real time? Could we have consumer facing tools that allowed us to discover food and restaurants in completely new ways that are more catered to our preferences – all the way down to our calorie counts? Can we do that? Absolutely. And we did it.

Tell me about The Hospitality Intelligence Company.

Kind, The Hospitality Intelligence Company focuses on conceptualizing and developing breakthrough ideas that streamline operational efficiencies and improve customer experiences within the hospitality industry. Our value proposition rest in our “thinking” vs our “doing”. We work with really creative people to develop new products, services and brands that can fulfill our companies objectives and ethos… The pursuit of design and innovation excellence.

When we formed Kind Intelligence I knew I had to take the position of CIO, Chief INNOVATION Officer, as I wanted the ethos of the company to reside there, in design and innovation excellence. I oversee the Innovation Initiatives of this company, I drive that. Its interesting to be in this role at such a critical time in our economic transition, going from the Industrial Age into the Creative Age.

Here in the US the role of Chief Innovation Officer is fairly new. You have them, but you don’t have that many of them. The other component to that is that I am African American. I think I am one of only a few African American Chief Innovation Officers in the country.

Why do you think that is?

If I talk to 10 colleagues and ask them what a CIO is, they’ll all say ‘Chief Information Officer’. They just don’t know that this position exists, so they don’t know to pursue it.

That’s one of the reasons I’m excited to be in this role, because I plan on championing it and bringing it to the forefront. Saying, “This is what a Chief Innovation Officer does; and yes, you can be one!”

Its seems that in his role as Chief INNOVATION Officer, Vincent Hunt is shaking up more than the hospitality Industry. I know I’m not alone in seeing where his enthusiasm and expertise lead.

[More information on the Semantic Web and business here.]

1 Comment

Posted in 'Capital I' Innovation, Innovation, Technology, Uncategorized, Vint Cerf

Tagged ARPANET, AT&T, Australia, Bell Labs, Bob Kahn, Broadband, Capital I innovation, Cloud, cochlear implant, computing, Da Vinci robotic surgery, DARPA, eHealth, Ehternet, entrepreneurship, father of the internet, Googe, Google, government, Graeme Clark, IBM, internet economy, Internet Evangelist, Interplanetary Internet, Intuitive Surgical, invention, J.C.R. Licklider, MCI, National Science Foundation Network, NBN, NSFNET, OECD, persoal helicopter, petabit, protocols, Roger Kermode, Silicon Valley, Stephen Conroy, Technology, terabit, Unix, vBNS, Vint Cerf, Why the West Rules - For Now, world wide web

Vint Cerf: Father Knows Best! (Part 2)

Posted on July 8, 2011 | 19 comments

Capital I Interview Series – Number 2 (Part 2)

KimmiC chats with ‘Father of the Internet’, Vinton ‘Vint’ Cerf

(Along with our particular questions, we invited some of our readers to submit their own queries to Vint, which he was happy to answer. Thanks go out to to ‘ePatient Dave’ Dave deBronkart, Brent Hall, and Roger Kermode for taking part!)

This is the final segment of the KimmiC chat with Google VP and Chief Internet Evangelist, Vinton ‘Vint’ Cerf, known around the world as one of ‘fathers of the internet’. [Part 1 available here.]

There has been a great amount of debate about Net Neutrality Vint. Do you think it is important to ongoing Innovation? 

Yes, in the sense that it is intended to assure that the limited number of providers of broadband access to the Internet, do not use their control of this pipe to interfere with competing applications that rely on this transport. It is the anti-competitive aspect that is the most critical problem. A lot of smoke and misleading argument has obscured this basic fact.

The issue here is a business issue more than anything else. It is distorted and twisted around and treated as if its a technical problem or ‘just a bunch of geeks who don’t know what they’re doing’, but this is a real, honest business problem; especially in places where there is not much competition to provide broadband service.

When you don’t have a market that’s disciplined by competition, you have the potential for real monopoly or market power abuse. If you’re the only party supplying broadband access to the internet, and if you supply vertical services like video, then you may be persuaded to interfere with someone else’s service in order to take advantage of your control over the underlying pipe.

The situation in Australia largely eliminates that problem because of the way in which you’re investing in the NBN. Here in the United States we have a serious problem because Broadband is not very competitive. We have Telcos, CableCos and maybe you could consider satellite services to be a third possible competitor, but the synchronous satellite delay makes it a lot less attractive.

Last week a popular Ted Talk by ‘ePatient Dave‘ Dave deBronkart was launched. An eHealth advocate, Dave was pleased to have the opportunity to ask you:  Increasingly, “e-patients” are using the internet to supplement the care they receive from professionals by connecting with information, and with each other, in ways that were never possible before.

: ePatient Dave

Some have found life-saving information online, but others warn that there’s garbage amid the gold. And some doctors don’t like it when patients present information they haven’t seen.

Are there lessons from other fields that have similarly faced the democratization of information?  

There are several facets to this question. First of all, there’s a lot of misinformation on the internet about healthcare. There are a lot of quacks and people who tried things and think there are correlations. Things like, “I jumped around on my left foot and sacrificed a chicken over my computer, and I got better.” So they conclude that you have to jump around on your left foot and sacrifice a chicken over your computer to get better.

Of course that’s all nonsense. Anyone who goes out on the net looking for healthcare information should be very careful to look for bona-fides and some evidence that the information is valid.

On the other hand doctors are saying that they have more informed patients than they have ever had before because information is more readily available. I sense that people are paying more attention to their health conditions and they’ve learned a lot.

Doctors don’t have a great deal of time to tutor their patients about their problems. So one thing the healthcare system would benefit from is a deliberate provision of good quality information about either a condition, or its treatment, its potential outcomes and possible side effects. Then the population can learn more without chewing up a lot of the doctor’s time.

As far as making a comparison with other vertical segments, none immediately come to mind, except perhaps Climate Change, which as you know is a hugely controversial thing. Perhaps one other would be in the financial services area where people go out on the net looking for advice about investments, specific stocks, or choices about home mortgages and things of that sort. All of that is subject to misinformation and deliberate fraud.

I think the honest answer is, people do get defrauded on the net. People do get involved in things that turn out to be unrealistic – ponzi schemes and whatnot. The only thing I can say is, if you don’t teach people, or at least encourage them to ask questions, or at least do some validation… if they don’t spend some time evaluating the information they’re getting, then they are going to be at risk.

The one thing that I would want to teach kids today about the net is: think critically about what you’re seeing and hearing – don’t accept everything that you see without doing some more homework.

As I’m sure you know, July 1 marked the 45th anniversary of the implementation of Medicare following President Lyndon Johnson signing the healthcare program on July 30, 1965.

How do you envisage eHealth developing with the advancement of the internet and broadband capabilities? 

I have to confess that I had not been driven specifically by the eHealth vector in my work on the internet. But as it became increasingly apparent that the healthcare problem was going to get worse and worse here in the US, in terms of dollars spent per patient/capita I got more and more interested – for the same reasons that you mentioned.

As you probably know, Google has announced that its going to terminate its current efforts in the electronic health record effort. I’m disappointed at that. I think that we had hoped that it would have more traction that it did. Part of the problem is getting people to adopt and use those records – and interoperability and so on.

There is however, a small piece of light. The US CTO, Aneesh Chopra, at least succeeded in getting some agreements on a format for data that could be exchanged by email. As you know the concerns about privacy and health information have been quite intense here in the US. There’s a big, complex system here called HIPAA, (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), apparently he was able to cope with that and still get an interoperable agreement done.

: US CTO Aneesh Chopra

From my point of view, there is no doubt that having records which are sharable, at least among physicians, would be a huge help. When people go in to be examined, they often have to repeat their medical histories. They don’t get it right every time, they forget stuff. Yet the doctors are not in a great position to service a patient without having good background information. I am very much in favour of getting those kinds of records online.

The second thing I would say is that for chronic conditions, which are generally the worst problems we have in healthcare – whether its heart disease, diabetes, cancer, [obesity] – those chronic conditions cost us more per capita than anything else in the healthcare system. If we were able to harness the electronic healthcare system to provide incentives for people to respond to those problems, to take better care of themselves, then we would reduce a lot of the system costs, simply because we had a more healthy population.

On this point about a healthy population, if you are not collecting data, you can’t know what the state of health of your population is. We have to get better data.

There is a concern about Telcos on the whole, and in the US in particular, having asked for and received huge subsidies along with the removal of regulations and obligations for common carriage. In return, they have promised to provide improved services for everyone, and yet they have consistently failed to do so. 

With that in mind, could you comment on Brent Hall’s question: What is the greatest threat to the future of a free and open internet? 

I worry about the: “Our business models don’t work anymore. We can’t expect the general public to pay for access to this expensive resource, so we have to find other sources of revenue to pay for the build out, which might mean government handouts,” argument. Or the, “Hey, look at those guys over there at Google and Facebook and Amazon. They’re sending streaming video over our pipes, and they’re not paying for it!”

Of course we are paying for it! We pay commercial services a lot of money to put our servers up on the net. Now they’re saying, “Customers can’t pay!”
My reaction to that is: technology should be cheap enough that you can make this available to customers at a reasonable price.

Now, what are we going to do about it? Well, Google is doing something about it. We’re going to fibreize Kansas City. It’s not as big as Australia but it’s our attempt to do the work. We will expose what the problems were, what was easy, what was technically hard and what was fiscally expensive.

And by the way, I haven’t said this to [Senator] Stephen Conroy, but I would find it extraordinary if the Australian Government would be willing to share what the costs turned out to be. The reason for that is, it might encourage others, or at least give us a real datapoint so that if we want to do what you’re doing, we will all – the US and elsewhere – know what we’re getting into.

: Australian Senator, and Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy

This could be a dangerous thing. If it turns out that its all a cock-up of some sort, if it costs more than was expected and it doesn’t get done, then nobody is going to want to talk about it. I understand that. But I am increasingly confident that you’re going to pull this off successfully. I sincerely hope you do.

The world over, citizens in their millions are calling for more openness from their respective governments. As part of the Board of advisors of Scientists and Engineers for America, what is your view of the effectiveness and potential of President Obama’s Open Government Initiative and its mandate to create an unprecedented level of openness in Government?

As you probably know, Vivek Kundra who is the CIO at OMB (the Office of Management and Budget) was vigorous in his pursuit of that objective. He got an enormous collection of government databases up and running and made them easily accessible – including budgetary information – which of course is what the OMB is all about.

US CIO Vivek Kundra

What he did was to create a tool online, which enabled you to drill-down into the budget. It allowed you to find the actual person who was responsible for spending that ‘piece’ of money in the US budget, which is unprecedented. Nobody had ever done that before.

Coupling that with tools to visualize some of this ‘dry as dust’ information was really eye opening. You began to see historical trends and things you would never see by just leafing through pages and pages of table and figures.
I’m sorry to say that in the crunch of the national debt limits and concerns over entitlements such as healthcare, social security and so on – non-discretionary expenses… in the course of trying to negotiate reductions in spending, they reduced the budget Vivek had for some of his projects.

Whether it was causative or not, I don’t know, but recently Vivek announced that he is going to Harvard to the Berkman Centre. I don’t know who his replacement will be, but whoever it is will have less budget than Vivek originally had for the pursuit of this stuff.

President Barack Obama

I don’t think the President or any of his senior people are any less enthusiastic about openness and making information transparently available. I think they’re facing a reality of a budget problem that’s going to be hard to fix.

Looking to your past, who most influenced you in high school? I ask this, as I find it amazing that you, Jon Postel (editor of the RFC document series) and Steve Crocker (co-creator of the ARPANET) all went to the same school – was there a particular teacher, or club who inspired you there?

I actually did not meet Jon until we met at UCLA as graduate students.

Jon Postel

Steve and I were, and are, best friends -we were best men at each other’s weddings and have collaborated in many ways over the course of 5 decades.

Steve Crocker

I think the biggest influence for me in high school was the enrichment program sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation in the wake of Sputnik.
I was a direct beneficiary of the emphasis placed on science, mathematics and technology in American high schools in the 1960s. I had teachers who encouraged me in all academic subjects including history, creative writing and literature, not only math, science, physics, chemistry, etc. Steve and I were members of the math club and he was president. The club won city-wide awards in contests and that was very satisfying.

And today, why is Google a good place for an Internet Evangelist and Futurist? 

Google is vibrant and alive with ideas, energy and a youthfulness that leads to innovation and Innovation. The leadership is willing to aim at big targets and is willing to allow for failure as long as the targets are ambitious enough. The company has a highly successful business model and a culture of invention and collaboration.

Vint, thank you so much for your time, which I know you extended for me. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, don’t hesitate to let me know! 

If you could figure out how to fix the exchange rate between the US dollar and the Australian dollar so I can could buy more Australian wine, I’d really appreciate that!

(Kim and Vint Skype’d between from their homes in Sydney and Washington D.C. Part One of their conversation was published on July 1, 2011)

[This interview has been translated into the Serbo-Croatian language by Jovana Milutinovich of Webhostinggeeks.com]

Capital I Innovation Series Introduction

19 Comments

Posted in 'Capital I' Innovation, Innovation, Technology, Vint Cerf

Vint Cerf: Father Knows Best!

Posted on July 1, 2011 | 14 comments

Capital I Interview Series – Number 2 (Part 1)

KimmiC chats with ‘Father of the Internet’, Vinton ‘Vint’ Cerf

(Along with our particular questions, we invited some of our readers to submit their own queries to Vint, which he was happy to answer. Thanks go out to to “e-Patient Dave” Dave deBronkart, Brent Hall, and Roger Kermode for taking part!)

Imagine having the opportunity to ask Johannes Gutenberg about his thoughts on how his printing press would change the industry – let alone his opinion on how his press would change the world. Well, essentially, that’s the chance that I’ve had this morning, when I was given the opportunity to speak to Google‘s VP and Chief Internet Evangelist, Vinton ‘Vint’ Cerf, known around the world as one of ‘fathers of the internet’.

When looking for a ‘poster child’ for Capital I Innovation, Vint is, to many – myself included – at the top of an impressive, international list. His list of awards and medals from around the globe is vast, as is his experience and range of interests. I do believe, in this instance, it is fair to say that when discussing Capital I Innovation – especially as it relates to the internet – ‘Father really does know best’.

As this series is based on Capital I Innovation, Lets start with how you define Innovation?
I think capital “I” innovation happens when something new is invented that has very large potential for cultural and/or economic change. However, it is important to appreciate that some innovations are stillborn if they are not, in fact, taken up widely.

In a recent book entitled Why the West Rules – For Now by Ian Morris (2010, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York), evidence is given that strongly points to the long term evolution and adoption of agriculture ultimately replacing a hunter-gatherer way of life. The process is not instantaneous but it has dramatic effects on culture and economy.

We sometimes think of Innovation as a sudden invention but often it takes decades and even centuries to have an effect. The printing press took centuries to have its primary effect. The telegraph, railroads, highways, radio, television and even the Internet took decades but those are a blink of the eye in terms of human history, which is fairly short itself (a few tens of thousands of year for prehistory, perhaps 8,000 for “history”).

Do you see a difference between ‘little i’ and ‘Capital I’ Innovation?
Yes, I think of the lower case instance as sequential refinement and adaptation while the basic Innovation might be a dramatically different way of doing something.

The Industrial Revolution is capitalized because of that – a shift from manpower or animal power to harnessing non-biological forms of mechanical energy (water power from rivers; steam from coal and wood; hydro-electric, oil, gas, wind or solar generated electricity; internal combustion engine; fractional horsepower motors).

The Transistor (and reed switches or vacuum tubes) ushered in the harnessing the power of “mechanical” thought using computers and programs. The Telegraph ushered in new forms of communication that eventually lead to the telephone, radio, television, optical fiber, coaxial cable, microwave, etc.

Printing Telegraph

The combination of computing and communication, once the economics reached a certain level, created the conditions for the invention of packet switching and, eventually, the Internet and many other kinds of computer-based networks.

With that in mind, do you think that Cloud Computing is big enough – different enough – to be capitalised?
Yes I do, for a couple of reasons. I’ve been jokingly saying that it is like time-sharing on steroids, as, like time-sharing, it does share the same resources. However, the scale of a Cloud system is so dramatically different than any time-sharing system that’s ever existed that it does deserve to be Capital I. There is a common belief that once you scale up by a three or four orders of magnitude you are in a different space than you were before.

Of course, this raises a very interesting question about the internet, because the internet is now 6 orders of magnitude bigger than it was when we first launched it in 1983. You have to ask yourself, is it still the same architecture, the same protocols? What’s different?

Of course one thing that’s different is that there are two billion users. Another thing that’s different is that the world wide web wasn’t there, and now it is – that [came] 10 years after launch. Its also available on mobiles, which didn’t exist. So, there are a whole bunch of things about that scaling up, including data and video, which could allow you to argue that this is a whole different beast now.

The meeting I just came back from in Paris suggests this. If anyone had suggested to me in 1983 that in 2011 there would be a meeting of 50 or so countries in the OECD, for two days talking about the internet economy, concerns about intellectual property, crime on the net and so on… I would have scratched my head and said, this thing is for the military, and the research community.

You’re called by many, one of the ‘fathers of the internet’. What do you think of your baby now?

Astonished at its evolution and growth,
Hopeful that it will reach well beyond the present 2 billion users,
Amazed at the response to the WWW infrastructure,
Worried about government intervention that might seriously harm the openness that has driven innovation in and around the Internet,
Excited by the possibility of extending its operation across the solar system to support manned and robotic space exploration,
Envious of kids who get to use it at age 5 when I had to wait until I was 28… and we had to invent it first!

What is the most important piece of innovation, which has launched in your lifetime?
The obvious answer for me is, of course, the Internet, but in fact it depended on the creation of conditions that allowed this idea to be explored and, ultimately, exploited.

The ARPANET, the successful invention of packet switching, the invention of the Ethernet, the invention of the Unix operating system, the invention of the mini-computer (ie. something that could afford to be replicated and used as packet switches or routers), the invention of high speed, long distance communication technology (wired, wireless, satellite, mobile…). Those, and so many more technologies, all had to be readily available for the Internet to grow.

Business models had to be invented, not only to make and sell the equipment and software needed for the Internet to operate but for the support of the enterprises that grew up around the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW itself would not likely have amounted to much had it not had an Internet on which to be supported. It was invented or at least became operational in a single node in December 1990, six years after the Internet became available to the academic and military communities and contemporary with the development of a commercial Internet service.

I was born in 1943. I grew up using a three-party, black dial up telephone with long-distance operators. There was no television to speak of. Jet planes were purely military. Early in my life, the atomic bomb was invented, tested and used. Microwave and radar were military systems. Sputnik happened when I was 15 and just entering high school.

We landed on the moon when I was 26. At 18 I worked in a small way on the F-1 booster rocket engines used in the Saturn V rocket that put the astronauts in orbit around the Earth.

The microwave oven became a commodity in my lifetime as did jet travel. The computer was very new during my early lifetime and I was introduced to the tube-based SAGE system (Semi-Automated Ground Environment) when I was 15.

Lasers were invented in my life time and have myriad uses today. Robotic surgical systems such as the Intuitive Surgical Da Vinci system were invented in my lifetime. So was the Pill (by Syntex and others, for birth control). The discovery of the structure of DNA occurs around 1953 when I am ten years old.

While relativity and quantum theory were already a few decades old when I was born, the existence of quarks wasn’t really demonstrated until 1968 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), at about the time I am working on the ARPANET at UCLA. The cochlear implant, invented by Graeme Clark beginning in 1973, was a long process, but had utterly spectacular results. My wife, who was profoundly deaf for 50 years, has two implants and is living a second life as a result!

What piece of innovation did you expect to happen/take off, that didn’t?
Two things were really disappointing. When I was working on the Saturn F-1 engines in 1962, I really did think that we would have regular, weekly space launches in 20 years, maybe out of the Antelope Valley north of Los Angeles where the famous Lockheed “Skunkworks” is located. I also thought that we would be flying personal helicopters by then, too.

I also thought 20 years was a long time (more than twice my lifetime at that point). I was wrong about all three, but I am not disappointed to have outlived thrice my lifetime at age 19!!

Where does the Interplanetary Internet project stands at the moment – and why do you think it is important?
The standards are firming up well. There are implementations of the Bundle Protocol and the Licklider Transport Protocol that realize the Interplanetary Internet architecture. Instances are on board the International Space Station and the EPOXI spacecraft. Discussions are underway in the Consultative Committee on Space Data Systems to standardize these protocols for international use.

If all space-faring nations adopt these protocols, then all espacecraft will be able to communicate with each other. Once they have completed their primary scientific missions, they can be re-purposed to become part of an interplanetary backbone network. One can imagine the aggregation of a solar internet over a period of decades, in support of both manned and robotic exploration.

Here on earth, are entrepreneurs born or made?
I think there has to be a combination of conditions to allow entrepreneurship to happen. A person has to be willing to take risks, and that often has a genetic component. But a person’s experience with risk also has to have had some positive feedback effect. If you are never successful at taking risk, you are likely to learn to be very conservative.

Conditions also have to be right to allow the risk-taking to go on long enough to produce results. This is the so called “runway” needed to go from the idea to a successful, profitable or at least self-sustaining business. It should be noted, however, that not all inventors are entrepreneurs. They may take risks in the technical sense but not necessarily in the personal (livelihood) sense.

Conditions for invention may actually require that the inventor be shielded from economic risk while exploring ideas that may have a high pay off in some sense, but such high risk that no one could afford to take the personal risk needed to explore them.

This is one reason that it is often a government that has to make the investment in research in high-risk area,s since no business or inventor would take the economic risk. It is also why inventors often die in poverty (think of Tesla) [while] others harvest wealth in addition to technical success.

What do you think are the main barriers to the success of innovation?
Sometimes they are technical (can’t process that much information in a timely way, can’t store it, can’t build a big enough data platform, uses too much power) or economic (can’t deploy the necessary infrastructure, devices out of consumer reach) or operational (too bulky, battery life too short, displays don’t work in all lighting conditions). Sometimes the major barrier is that the private sector doesn’t give innovative employees the freedom to fail.

For any particular innovation, the conditions for its sustainable growth and use may simply not yet be ready.

What do you think is imperative to allow ‘Capital I’ Innovation to occur?
Not all Innovations require government support, but often this is the only path to initial success because the risks are too high for the private sector, even venture capital or angel investors to take.

Google was essentially entirely private sector funded and that’s something of an anomaly, given its stunning success. In that case, angel investment was an important component.

Economics is another critical factor. It is possible to have a breakthrough invention that is simply too expensive for widespread adoption.

Mobiles have been stunningly successful but took many years to emerge because the costs and the physical size, battery life, and infrastructure were a long time in development. Tax breaks can be sustaining but generally don’t lead to capital I innovation, to first order.

If you could give a ‘Capital I’ Innovation Award to anyone, who would you nominate? This could be individuals, organizations and/or companies (it could also be yourself!).

Graeme Clark for the cochlear implant
DARPA for decades of innovation
Bob Kahn for initiating the Inter-netting research program at DARPA.
Larry Roberts for the ARPANET effort.
Posthumous award to J.C.R. Licklider at MIT who was the first director of DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office from which the ARPANET project began.
Steve Crocker for creating and pioneering the underpinnings of the structure of standards for making the ARPANET and Internet.
Intuitive Surgical for the Da Vinci robotic surgery system

Does Innovation have a nation?
I think there is no country that has a lock on innovation but some places, like Silicon Valley, have conditions that support it better than many other places. You have:

a continuous stream of trained, high technology graduates,
experienced business people,
venture capitalists,
a liquid stock market,
mobility from company to company, and
a community of players that know each other.

It is a potent brew. There are more smart people, in absolute numbers, outside of Silicon Valley than inside, but the conditions in SV are remarkable.

Is innovation an overused term?
Yes in some ways. It is too much the focus when one should be asking “under what conditions can innovation take hold and become a real driver of economic growth?”.

It could be said that a huge amount of the core innovations that we use seems to have come out of either government funding and/or telco’s (for instance MCI and AT&T). Do you agree with this? And if so, do you think it was past structural, political and economic situations that made these innovations possible.
I think we should be very careful to distinguish between innovation and participation within the infrastructure. MCI supplied point-to-point high speed pipes to build the NSFNET backbone, to build the vBNS network, and to ultimately build Internet MCI a publicly available internet service.

Where they DID pioneer was in the commercial use of optical fibre. You have to give them credit for that, and for participating in the National Science Foundation Network by contributing underlying transmission resources. The fact that they were willing to get into the game is different than them being the inventors of it.

The real innovators for NSFNET were Merit and IBM. Particularly IBM, which designed and built the original routers; though they didn’t really follow up on that. Ironically IBM built the routers for the NSFNET back bone but Cisco systems, Juniper and others turned out to inherit all the commercial value from it.

AT&T, as a very successful monopoly, had an enormous amount of resources, which they put into AT&T Bell labs. Bell Labs was absolutely one of the most innovative places anywhere in the world. Nobel prizes have come out of there, the transistor came out of there. There’s no doubt in my mind that something was lost when AT&T was broken up.

The one thing about MCI which was interesting was that, instead of doing research, they would dangle a $250m dollar cheque in front of company and say, “If you can do this, I will buy a quarter of a billion dollars worth…” Its amazing how much R&D you get out of people when you do that. So, rather than taking all the risks themselves MCI simply said, we’ll buy a lot of stuff if you make this happen.

And yes, there’s no question in my mind that government sponsorship for this kind of high risk research is important.

Many nations are in the midst of debates about Broadband. You were recently quoted as saying that you believe” internet bandwidth can increase exponentially,” adding that this would, among other applications, “enable greater access to high-def video.” Other than being able to get the latest blockbuster downloaded in no time, where else do you see it being of use?
The term “exponential” is not one I would use (a reporter put that word in my mouth). However, I do believe we are far from fully taking advantage of communication technology to achieve many gigabits per second, end-to-end on the Internet.

These speeds have a transformative potential because they dramatically reduce the cost of moving information in large quantities from one place to another. It allows replication for resilience and safety. Large files like MRI scans will be easily retrievable and processable with higher speed transport.

We can build much larger data processing systems when we can interlink the processors at terabit and higher speeds. In a recent technical session, serious mention was made of 1000Tbs (that’s a petabit per second). Holographic simulations will benefit from speeds of this kind.

By the way, Stephen Conroy was in Paris with me for the OECD Conference, and I have to say that I continue to stand in awe of the Australian Government decision to fund the fibre network.

Stephen Conroy launching the Digital Strategy 2020 (zdnet.com.au)

This is the kind of infrastructure investment that probably would not ever be made by the private sector. There would be parts of the community left out, there would be economic decisions that would reduce capacity….

This is a very big deal and I’m hoping that it all works out. If it does, it would be a bell weather example of why government investment in fundamental infrastructure is so important.

This leads neatly to Roger Kermode‘s question: What advice would you give Australian ISPs, governments and businesses to take best advantage of the NBN?
First of all, because its a Level 2 infrastructure, anybody who wants to is free to put up a level 3 routing system on top of it. That means they can all compete for any business or individual subscribers service. Then on top of that you have the enabling effect of the broadband capability. This means that people can put applications up there that they would never have put up without such a broadband infrastructure.

Next, with the fact that everybody is online, or very nearly everybody, you can begin to say, “We are going to do ‘X‘ for the entire population,” and have a reasonable expectation that you will, in fact, reach the entire population.

For example, when it comes to healthcare, and the possibility of remote diagnosis and things like that, you’d be in a position to actually exercise that idea. Whereas, most other places, including here in the U.S. would not.

I anticipate that if this infrastructure goes into place and it operates reliably that you will be exploring a space of ‘online-ness’ which no other country has ever experienced.

End of Part 1 – Follow our blog and Part 2 will be delivered to your in box next week!

Part 2 – Next week we talk about net neutrality, eHealth, Telcos, Google, the Open Government Initiative and more (including a message to Australian Senator Stephen Conroy)!

(Kim and Vint Skype’d between from their homes in Sydney and Washington D.C.)

[This interview has been translated into the Serbo-Croatian language by Jovana Milutinovich of Webhostinggeeks.com]

14 Comments

Posted in 'Capital I' Innovation, Innovation, Technology, Uncategorized, Vint Cerf

Tag Archives: IBM

Zen and the Art of Software: The Innovation Interview with Grady Booch (Part 3)

Zen and the Art of Software: The Innovation Interview with Grady Booch (Part 2)

Zen and the Art of Software: The Innovation Interview with Grady Booch (Part 1)

Growing the Culture of Disruption: A chat with Linda Bernardi, a Most Personable Provocateur

Chewing on Black Swan for Christmas

CAPITAL I INNOVATION – the KimmiC definition:

Subscribe

KimmiCFlatWorld

KimmiC Facebook

Follow Blog via Email

About Kim Chandler McDonald

Pinterest

Recent Posts

Blogroll

Archives

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Categories

Network Blogs

Tag Archives: IBM

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

CAPITAL I INNOVATION – the KimmiC definition:

Subscribe

Follow Blog via Email

About Kim Chandler McDonald

Pinterest

Recent Posts

Blogroll

Archives