Category: Innovation (technologicallly driven)

Stumbling over yourself, in the retreat

DSCN5600
[Utreg]

Remember the good ol’ Boston Consulting matrix ..?

Among the puerilely [that is a word] shallow startup business, apparently not many do. They’re only chasing the next, even more questionable question marks, ‘knowing for sure’ (not) to turn those into stars without fail. Current stars exist only to set the example and to be beaten.
Dogs, of course, are what they are. And cash cows are also dogs. As they aren’t fast enough. Sure. But where startup managers believe to have found the ultimate question mark will turn into star certainty, and VCs just spending off their (or Other Peoples’ Money ..!) lifetime earnings as lottery tickets, the cash cows prod along quite happily, getting only half of the world’s attention for delivering … 95% of the world’s goods and services (mostly, from the bottom up Maslow’s pyramid).

Thus, two economies result; the one being much more dependent on the other than usually considered, with the other not being old and decrepid, to be done away with, but a core, a solid basis for long-term alignment or else one keeps on floating in the sky until one evaporates. The other way around is not quite as necessary as believed..!
Which also leads to those of the stable kind, trying to get into the action of the fluid kind, to stumble while they try to retreat into some fluid future. They lose the stability, and cannot catch up with the road runner(s) for sheer secondness and ballast of the old. Cash cows are big, required and necessary, and should be left alone to innovate not to disrupt. Disruptors, may be loosely tied to cash cows, but certainly not with the intention to later integrate the latter back into the former. That will lead to failure throughout; the horse already left the barn and you wouldn’t have wanted to close the gate but now have had a kick in the teeth; i.e., the slow just missing the grasp and ending up on the rails, grappling their teeth together, while the train ever speeding up will have left the station. This form of retreat (that’s what it is, retreat as leader, T Rex trying to regain initiative by outpacing and outsmarting the Velociraptors in their teamwork) will lead to pathetic stumbling.

Conclusion: Don’t do it. Not in the me-too way. Dare to decide what you are, be proud of that ..! Just innovate, not disrupt yourself internally only, and be strong … survival of the fattest and fittest. Don’t be a lightweight, you’ll fall like Icarus – after you have learned not to fly too low …!

InNOvate

DSCN4825
[Again, curvy]

Gijs van Wulfen (profile here) posted something elsewhere, which I bluntly copy:

Innovation is difficult. You are not the only one who thinks it’s a challenge. It has been a struggle for me the last 25 years as manager, consultant, facilitator and as founder of the FORTH innovation method. That’s why I love it actually. I love to do difficult things. My personal goal is to make innovation less complex so others will be able to innovate their product – and service portfolios and organizations – themselves.

As one of the first Linkedin Influencers I have written more than 80 posts about innovation the last sixteen months. Last week I reread them all to identify my most essential insights. Some are provoking. Others are simplifying. Here’s a list of quotes from my LinkedIn innovation articles. Please use them to lead your organizations in innovation:

  1. In the long run a company cannot survive on doing the same things better and cheaper.
  2. Most managers are like dogs. They bark at what they don’t know.
  3. Managers say yes to innovation only if doing nothing is a bigger risk.
  4. Continuous innovation is bullshit. You only innovate when you have to.
  5. Organizations frustrate innovative employees.
  6. Starting innovation is like a child starting to walk. Learn to love the struggle!
  7. If there’s no urgency innovation is considered as playtime.
  8. Most people only innovate when they have to. Pick the right moment.
  9. Innovators need the patience of a hunter to wait for a shot that you’re sure you can make.
  10. Never start innovation with an idea. You will fall in love with it. But love is blind.
  11. A big idea is a new simple solution for a relevant problem or dream.
  12. The best innovators are need seekers.
  13. The problem of brainstorms is the inability of people to let go of the old ideas.
  14. If you don’t get new insights you won’t get new ideas.
  15. For most companies evolutionary ideas are quite revolutionary.
  16. You can invent on your own, but in an organization you can never innovate alone!
  17. Think outside the box and present your idea inside the box otherwise nothing will happen.
  18. Innovators should bring back new business not new ideas.
  19. Nobody buys innovation from a clown so bring back a new business case.
  20. The voice of the customer is your best support for a new concept.
  21. Innovators should stop writing plans. Innovation is learning by doing.
  22. Innovation does not stop at the first “No”. That’s the moment it really starts.
  23. Less creative ideas are better because they have a higher chance of becoming reality.
  24. An organization is just like a herd. Focus on the slowest animals. When they start running too your organization really gets innovative.

So here were 24 of my essential insights about innovation. I hope some of them are helpful to you. As I promised 25 insights please do me a favor and share with us, as a comment, your own essential insight about innovation as number 25……..

And yes indeed, I’d like to hear your number 25, too.

Two shorties

Just to drop ’em.

First; the hypes come and disappear again quicker than you get to notice them as such. As in some Bird thing. Is this the new way trends will go ..? If so, we’ll all have trouble keeping up, and will see disparate clusters of innovation, some re-inventions without linkage, some unique evolutionary directions taken. Long live diversity! Until the Other comes to bite you. Yes, I did aim to frame this as a remark on, e.g., economic development (followed by military power to secure the elsewhere cheaper resources), new-business models, and products and services. Now that we come to realise the balance between exposure for scrutiny and secrecy for deep development. À la Eppel.

Next: Not even pop-art is sacred. What’s next; a 3D (sic) printer for Jackson Pollocks ..? The horror. But, this may lead to creativity being defined better. Since the Act of pop-art, at its inception, was the great Move. The copy, even IF it were an improvement or only equally valuable (in cultural terms), still needs the reference to the greatness of pop-art, throughout, and doesn’t add a critique or anything, no ump to new insights. Nice mee-too art, but not Great Art, for my part. Now where is that chasm; what criteria to establish..?
(And, some pics in the link are quite good, in particular when seen as a series. Some form of art there. Should not have referenced older art too much, would have been better.)

As expected, a picture again for your viewing pleasure:
DSCN3987
[Trier but you spotted that]

InfoSe€€€

DSCN5667
[Infra to use, to protect]

On then, with the dream of rational (i.e., ‘cost-effective’) information security control selection. Apart from the definitions, distinctions and boundaries between operations management, information management, data management, information security, IT security, business continuity management, etc. – I don’t really care, they all end up with the same sort of ‘risk analysis’ quod non (see earlier posts, the most prominent being this one) and a sort of afterburner about weighing costs versus benefits of controls to be put in place. Nothing on all the stuff I discussed in that prominent post; the time-sensitive chances, impacts and effectivenesses of threats, vulnerabilities, controls individually and in interactions, feedforward and feedback loops, the enormity of lack of reliable data and the overwhelming noise and error this introduces into any calculation.
And nothing on how one should go about estimating the costs of controls vis-à-vis their effectiveness. Because that’s even harder to do, when one has continuous but very often hardly-quantifiable costs of controls individually let alone in conjunction with others (all with costs varying in time, again, too ..!).

Continue reading “InfoSe€€€”

Hardcore, (Information) Security pieces

DSCN1599
[Meant as gateway, not closure]

Earlier, as in here, here and here, and other places apart from these, I floated the idea of redesigning the way we tackle the core of Information security. Unfortunately, I don’t have sufficient time (yet!) in lunch breaks to get it all together in one big white paper hence I’ll drop some elements here, again.

I’ll keep working on collecting loose ends, so when I find time, I can integrate it all, including your comments, of which I have received so much. Not so much. As one. Single. Comment.

Herewith, then, to start off, a picture I took from … somewhere, probably the ISACA site somewhere. I’ll work from this, structuring the story line from top to bottom, first how we do it now (kindergarten level, with the pretense, pomp and circumstance of high priests doing high art), next, how it should be done ndash; qualitatively, vaguely, massaging off the rough edges and not being able to do much more except for the hardest cores of security (Remember the pyramid I presented? Read up via the above links).
COSO_2013_ISO_31000-english

Also, I’ll drill down a bit on the design of controls, according the lines sketched earlier (yup, see links again) and using an augmented [By me; disclaimer [Huh? When it’s by me: Why …!?]: *value may not be included] anti-fraud matrix à la:
Anti-F 1
Which will have an advice that visually is something like this, of course:
Anti-F 2
which is very different from the usual “Uhhhh, dunno, do we have a Motivation or Rationalisation here, dude..? Can’t progress until we figure out.” i.e. is design and action oriented.
But then, this matrix will be overlaid (third dimension) on the SABSA matrix I guess. Though I’ll make it very clear that SABSA is all very well, but very much focused on the bottom layers of itself only, the bottom layers of the InfoSec pyramid I sketched. And, upwards, there’s much methodological confusion. In particular re its Information and Conceptual / Context / Wisdom definitions and placements.

And of course I’ll throw in a bit of ABAC referring to this.

OK. Time’s up!

Which means I welcome your comments. One may dream, right …?

A few bits of hope, a lot of redundancy

DSCN1926
[Perfectly doable, for a machine/computer, very soon. Barça harbour.]

Along flew a tweet on this insightful piece.

Providing some leftover bits of hope that there will be a humanity that can sustain itself, in various marginal ways. Glad that we don’t need to be drones (and other links) ‘anymore’… As long as we can outpace AI, which we may lose control over soon.

Exit homo sapiens sapiens. Entrat Singularity, artefactum sapiens sapiens sapiens.

No coin

Bank? Nopes!
[Bank towering over daily affairs? Nopes!]

OK, a final (?) note then on Bitcoin et al.
Because we haven’t discussed the non[?]-currency equivalents yet. Austrian Freigeld, Swiss (very succesful, still very much operational) WIR and Dutch Noppes (nothingnadas), that sort of stuff. And now, there’s Qoin, working internationally. Because Noppes “… didn’t deliver the required result. By linking noppes to the guilder [now euro], there was no market efficiency. With noppes, the rich still got richer. A lawyer could hire a cleaner very cheaply, whilst people with little talent and a greater demand for care, were left out.” OK …

Why then, link up with the community currency Makkies (‘hendies’), where the unit of calculation is someone’s hour of performance regardless of any-currency going rate ..?

And why not drop all the stuff altogether, and move to the full digital currency schemes? [Suddenly realise how ominous that can read.]

But I may repeat myself from that post, and others.

Conclusion: Crisis makes creative; let so many ‘genetic’ variants spring up in ‘richer’ times (rich of need, in a surprising evolution theory plot twist), and all but a few be weeded out once the real pressure comes on. And we’ll end up in Singularity armageddon.

Contra?note ID is

This @meneer returned to an old snippet, on his blog. To which I have the following, apart from an earlier post:

  • People, if they are real people, visit your site to obtain services, indeed. But you want either moneda or some other nonpecuniary return. This may be kudos only, as in the naive sharing model, or some other form of not near- but far-money, e.g., client data for you to sell better or to sell outright. [Yeah, I know @meneer, you wouldn’t. Others have mortgages.]
    So it’s not that they don’t trust you for services, but you may need some form of trust (e.g., through pre-trust in their propensity to ‘pay’ through some reliable third party declaring their trustworthiness or allsorts of revenue from affiliation however looesy defined).

Interlude; here’s a picture for your viewing delight:
DSCN4130
[Valencia, obviously, by the master, obviously]

  • Unreal ‘people’ will just troll. Actual hooman trolls, or the AI that keeps getting better (also at guessing captcha’s). You may want to not ‘service’ them with bandwidth, and/or with room to screw up e.g., your site its stats, its quality image (re illegible or defamatory comments) or its usability for others. You do need some way to assess the trustability level in advance i.e., when the visitor comes to your site.
  • Your dislike for trust models is correct. But how did we get along on sneakernet ..? What is the closest proxy we can find, when in bits? Paying for bandwidth ..? All sorts of bonus/malus and whitelist/blacklist systems work only if not when all involved, all ‘citizens’, would fall under the same rule of unified law. I’m not negative, but don’t see a solution.

Trust is not a one-way affair (though ‘leaders’ of the real kind, trusted, may not trust all their followers individually…, etc.), but a cumbersome concept. Cumbersome implementations, will follow.
Too bad! And even if we get the basic concepts extremely simple, they may not be implementable similarly. As in e.g. quantum physics et al.: Simple basics, but not simple or useful in its implementation throughout when you’re in the mudane world out there, e.g., at a good restaurant. [Disclaimer: I’m not a fan of molecular cooking; waaay too much chasing effects at the expense of natural cooking.]

No I don’t have a definitive answer. Just wanted to add my 2c.

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord