Category: Innovation (technologicallly driven)

In that Case, No.

Is your organization still replying on ‘business’ ‘cases’ to fund projects? Then there’s a special place for you in Dorchester.
When building such business cases – apologies for not mocking that newspeak already –, have you ever come up with one that did not pass the hurdle rate ..? Or come across a case where no business case was needed because the case for investing was so obvious or it wasn’t most clearly but someone of the Board wanted it so whatever dreadful return was expected all still had to be done?

Which made business cases the spider web that catches the little flies when the big ones simply smash on through.

And the insects that game-change and disrupt your feeding/business model and/or market share, don’t even fly near your web or turned inedible.

How many start-ups go through formal business cases for every investment or pivot ..? And only just making the 10% rate ..? With all costs so exactly calculable as you present those (the 100%+ error rates you leave out ’cause band widths are too difficult to understand by the ones with the money bags. You presume that, they deny that vehemently because it would show them to be the emperors in their newest clothes (but with piggy-fat pay checks), but you are certain of not being able to mark the averages for the cost items so you take lowest estimates), and the benefits monetized [my italics, auth.] to fabulously inflated figures. With oh so many unethical rounds of ‘adjustments’. Newspeak for: cooking the books of your business case. By lack of the hardest of scientifically concrete counterevidence you maintain your weakest of kindergarten estimates still hold.
Again, not very much like the start-ups you envy. You envy for their success rate. Ah, you now say the failure rate of start-ups is dismal. How about the failure rate of your projects; if they had been single initiatives, wouldn’t they have gone bankrupt at an even higher rate? Aren’t your successes the panting hanging-in-by-the-thread shrill-shouts of objectives achievement? Where the start-ups are considered successful only after passing the … maybe 500% return rate; reflective of … business value through non-monetary returns you could only dream of.

Don’t feel like I’m just bullying you like all the rest, with the weapon of slight. I’m trying to provide ammo so you can be allowed to move away from the bleak common business case of ‘decks’ full of PPTs where the content would be much, much better presented in Word and the 6 words shoud be per sheet not per half inch; unreadable, not made to understand. [Why!?!? Why use PPT; why are you using a truck to get a dozen of eggs from the Walmart ..!?]

So, what pointer can you provide to beat the business case system; not to game it but to replace it with another that might actually be useful, functional, in (larger) organisations …?

There’s hope

Though hope has never been solid business planning, as it is what’s left after all rational expectations and handles have vanished and only leaving it to fate remains, this move may, may have some impact in one way or another: Ello mutating into a PBC.

And, for the weekend:
DSCN6157[We have a beautiful prize available for the first to locate this!]

Unfreeze, the quest for ~ in business

How do Those In Business that deal with the all-sorts of überbureaucratisation, think the Second Law, of thermodynamics of course, wouldn’t apply to their work as well?
Let’s kick off with:
DSCN8580
[Appropriately named the Airplane building. Zuid-As]

Happened to attend a conference last week. And was able to read back a great many days of twitter feed. Due to the utter boredom. Because the presentations were all about … introducing control frameworks, under the guise of governance frameworks, that aren’t (fact).

  • Still, all was presented as if there would be little in place already;
  • Still, it appeared none looked past ‘first-time’ implementation. Albeit that some (not all…) mentioned the repeat of the PDCA (some, as just an element of a PDCA cycle they, how Ecce Huomo, completely erroneously mixed up with the management control cycle!), none seemed to have had any experience with an actual (hence very shoddy) implementation of ‘GRC’ let alone found the root cause of its continued, law-of-nature certain decline. Law of nature, as the system of control of which we speak, having entropy-aversion as its rationale, will suffer from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The entropy of a closed system never decreases. These systems, leak all the way, and aren’t rigorously consistent and/or stable in the first place. I.e., all these systems tend towards Chaos; no Man, half-god or god(s) has ever been able to (or wanted to!) prevent this.
  • As if the concept of Life Cycle wouldn’t apply to the totalitarian system of bureaucratic control that GRC is; the Decline has been set in everywhere as it has set in throughout the Culture Of GRC.
  • As if there weren’t already serious errors in the system itself: Trying, repeat ad nauseam, in vain to control the uncontrollable, to capture the thing that is defined by its escape from control, i.e., Risk.
  • As if it were a good thing to consider GRC as necessarily (sic) one-size-fits-all within an organization; all elements should be in all corners. That is not ‘governance’ (which already is nothing in itself) but genocide-by-dehumanization-and-slavery over all involved.
  • As if GRC isn’t self-defeating or rather, self-destroying by crushing initiative (that necessarily is over the edge of Control’s allowance; the more perfect GRC the more so!) and hence straightjacketing anything and everyone into tighter and tighter harnases whilst the competition, muddy-ocean to blue ocean whatever, would not overrun and eradicate your organization. ‘The fish starts to rot at the head’, here too.
  • As if… as if the step-wise activities approach still depicted, would possibly work anywhere and not fit, as any day at the office (sic) would be swamped with all activities all the time in an insurmountable mix.
  • Where the likes of Nassim Taleb did already prove that when one thinks to control better by being displayed less variance in some results variable, that is only a sign of the powers of nature prepping up for the big Bang that kill those very results. Which is the force of nature, demonstrated since the dawn of humanity to having plagued all systems of cooperation and society: The Apollo side may think to triumph, but the Dionysos side in Man will get even no matter what. The more the latter is pushed aside, tha harder it will strike back in unforeseen directions. No doubt; fact of godly nature.

You get it. I hope. Now, go understand Road to Nowhere.

Not so self-driving

Errrm, after reading this Slate article, what is the ‘self-driving’ the car does ..? It’s just fitting into the template of the world laid out, not self-driving with ‘self’ being autonomous and aware.
Though I’m not fully in agreement on the conclusion, I do recognize the comparison in the early paragraphs: The G’s self-driving one as the Newton. But that was handsomely overtaken (intended) by the handhelds of all sizes that are ubiquitous today. As the article already hints, it’ll be a matter of AI creeping into our cars in all sorts of ways, when we suddenly realize how close we are to (or past the point of) true autonomy. But we’re not very close to that, yet; the jumps to be made may be much bigger than the Newton-to-Android-phablet one. Not being able to cope with any but the finest weather … Ugh, if one had known that, no-one would have claimed anything about self of driving, right? Where are the permits to road-legality (CA, probably already, UK 2015/2016 it was?) going to if mere sleet and fog may destroy safety?

By the way, did you notice the similarity with what happened to Glass ..? “Yes indeed, where has that gone!?” Well, it turns out it was a good try for Big G and now has vanished due to the public denouncement, through ridicule and physical backlash. So… next time, the tech will be inobtrusive, secretive, so you’ll not be able to detect or defend against it… Big win, not. So it will go with cars. Till the next round; then: Sneeking up on you, then be inevitable.

OK, I’ll leave you with yesteryears’ gloomy perimeter defences:20141019_134718[1]

The two faces of digital transformation

A plain reblog from Esko Kilpi, on the future of information flow within the organization. Very thoughtful. If only you’d be allowed to read it and not be stuck in printed documents …

IoT starts at the right end

of the products scale. As in #5 of this post.
#1 would be no surprise, by the way.

And, I’d also not be surprised when you(r company) haven’t considered similar changes. Isn’t IoT something that would not touch your business for decades to come, until you’re blown off the market in lees than five years; either by doing something stupid which you could always do, even today, or by some competitor that has dreamt up some game changer in their garage already yesterday ..? Go ahead and sleep ’till you’re no more. Change isn’t painless, sitting still is. Or isn’t it sleep, just being burnt out (as a company) (link in Dutch) ..?

I’ll leave you with this:
20140917_092605[1]
[At The Factory, indeed, Utrecht]

Players, sides, too many – where’s the (over)view?

Apart from the #ditchcyber aspects, in the (sometimes somewhat sportsy, even) battle about control, or is it temporary one-upmanship, over the world’s communications, so many parties play a role, in such varying sizes, and operating for so many sides, sometimes multiple sides at the same time, sometimes without even knowing that, with the interactions playing at various topics and levels of abstraction and with varying scopes, time horizons, strategies and plans (quality), I could really do with some clarity. Some mapping, interactive or not.
Which all was triggered by this post on yet another singleton developer taking on, inactively!, some well-funded TLA.

Will have to dive into the detail of it all, but know that I’ll end up losing the helicopter view. How many similar developments are out there, known or not? What stages of development, of deployment, of maturity, of starting to crack and leak are they all ..? It’s a hard life, this keeping up thing.

Hence, you deserve:
DSCN8926[As if moulded by a genetic algorithm, Porto]

Steve and Tim went up the hill…

Aren’t recent developments around, through, by the brand just an amusing (?) sign of the times – the times being the same as ever: A (single?) sinus wave (or multiple smaller ones, stacked on a larger one (bigger wavelength and amplitude); wavelets sales) –, as in this piece and this one ..?

As the latter quotes: “This is not [irrelevant reference to a musicological drama; ed.], and should instead be remembered primarily as a monumental blunder by the tech industry.”
to which:

But the details aside, why didn’t many enough see this coming? Why did anyone expect continued excellence from any company, in particular one so hyped, so turned into a dangerous cult already ..? Whereas so far, every co has demonstrated to have a serious Best Before / use By / Sell By issue. Except the rare exceptions, noted for the exceptionality.
As in:

Adn also don’t forget these twelve wineries… Yes some are so common and/or famed still that you wouldn’t think they’d be so old and still be in the same line of business… [Thanks Wine Turtle for the post]

So, the expectance that something(s; probably multiple, of varying error sizes and (distinct) impacts) might go wrong in any near future, would have had to be raised already, and rise still further. Note that through fuzzy logic, this isn’t offset I think by lowered probabilities of doing things well…! This is just how fuzzy (business) logic works, sometimes…
[Edited to add: And then we find this… Strangely not built into the corp system]

So, Steve and Tim went up the hill to have their little fun, then Tim forgot by taking the blue pill and now…

DSCN2435[What a once great name … Reims. Yeah, look it up, I’m not going to spell it out for you]

Errrm, how to brick your car/office…

Though it was inevitable, this has arrived. The FourSixteen. Details and official pics here.
Which is of course all good; especially for the trickle down from the insane yet moneyed (re: the price tag) – note that I don’t mention ‘wealthy’ as that would refer to cultural development or common ethics and decency, that anyone seriously looking into this vehicle wouldn’t have – to the shop workers and onwards.

But in these Maker times … How would one go about modding one’s Prius ..? And how would one call a less-than-successful job at that? Bricking your ride..?

Anyway, totally (un)related, I’ll leave you with your mobile office:
20140917_144502[1]
[Yes it does have an office work bench for you. And wifi, once you plug in (??) a router]

Note (bank-, bankable); ICYMI

Hmmmmm… Who would be able to mine the easy pickings already, in the Bitcoin world ..? Who has sufficient resources, old-money wise and miners wise ..?

As the firsts through the gate may gain an insurmountable head start at the game of the future. Also, re this on the as yet ill-understood, hardly visible / overseeable spin-off world. DACs are just one part. When incumbent countries’ / nations’ and supra-governments find themselves competing not only with each other but also with anon societies existing virtually (non-geographically – though in the end, physical servers will have to be somewhere), will the latter be re-invented like wheels, with or without preventing the failures of history …?

Since it will be very interesting, sociologically, but still years away (I think…), this:
??????????[Guess where. Netherlands]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord