Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs tapped out, or 2.5 percent.
The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how could the listeners not “hear” it in their taps?"
Today's New York Time presents a remarkable piece which, as many
remarkable pieces seem to do, states the obvious. Innovative minds
don't think alike.
This brings into question the many, exhausting, expensive
efforts to conform knowledge-worker knowledge to a certain defined
standard. As I've commented before, most of the work we do these
days relies upon tacit knowledge, that kind of knowledge we might
not even be aware we have. It's different for you and for me and
for that other guy over there. When we manage to get to thinking on
the same page, we're stuck on that page. This, I claim, is one
reason we see every bank stumbling on the same sub-prime mortgage
crisis (every one had a model that told them exactly when to sell,
but, interestingly, not whom to sell to), and why every company
that hires only PMPed project managers find their projects
compromised in exactly the same old way. (Yawn.)
Here's the link to the article.
“I haven’t a chance to make a difference, unless it’s falling slow.”
“Just keep trying!” I hear d a voice encouraging her on,
“One never knows until it snows, ‘though your chances DO seem long
That anyone as small as you could ever slow the storm.
But unless you try, I can’t say why, you know you’ll never know.”
“But it just seems so hopeless!!” the child’s small voice replied.
“They’re stinging my nose and biting my toes,” that young one almost cried.
And I felt her frustration and thought I’d intervene,
“Who is this toad who likes to goad an innocent, unseen?”
Then in a spark of wisdom, I glimpsed the human fate
To stand against impossible odds, convinced it’s not too late
to catch enough from far too much and find a foothold there.
Even there! Even thin air could prove essential stuff.
So I held my tongue and stood my ground and furtively glanced around
Wondering if she would catch the drift of the wonder I had found.
Her chore was surely hopeless, like everyone’s it seems,
And yet under just such impossible odds, wonder’s usually seen .
12/25/07
Tracing Business Acumen to Dyslexia
By BRENT BOWERS
Published: December 6, 2007 New York Times
It has long been known that dyslexics are drawn to running their own businesses, where they can get around their weaknesses in reading and writing and play on their strengths. But a new study of entrepreneurs in the United States suggests that dyslexia is much more common among small-business owners than even the experts had thought.
The report, compiled by Julie Logan, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Cass Business School in London, found that more than a third of the entrepreneurs she had surveyed — 35 percent — identified themselves as dyslexic. The study also concluded that dyslexics were more likely than nondyslexics to delegate authority, to excel in oral communication and problem solving and were twice as likely to own two or more businesses.
“We found that dyslexics who succeed had overcome an awful lot in their lives by developing compensatory skills,” Professor Logan said in an interview. “If you tell your friends and acquaintances that you plan to start a business, you’ll hear over and over, ‘It won’t work. It can’t be done.’ But dyslexics are extraordinarily creative about maneuvering their way around problems.”
Read the rest of the story here: http://tinyurl.com/yps3tv
I have written here and elsewhere about entrepreneurial energy, about how investigators have tried to identify those skills and teach them to others. What if these skills aren't really skills at all, but rather automatic responses to certain innate disabilities. The logic of collaboration might well get lost in the hustle IF the would-be collaborator really could take care of everything alone. But these dyslexic entrepreneurs have learned, as the founder of Kinkos learned, that anyone can do it better than they can, so sharing the reins becomes more likely under stress.
Can these different abilities be taught? This survey found that a paltry 1% of corporate managers are blessed with the gift of dyslexia, and recruiting strategies seem pretty effective at preventing these special people from ever entering the ranks of corporate management. They do show up in the ranks of those unlikely managers, those who find themselves managing projects, the most entrepreneurial activities in the enterprise.
The current certification craze has further limited entry for those apparently most likely to succeed in these entrepreneurial activities. This might explain why large companies continue to operationalize project work, as if it were just another manufacturing process improved by routinization. It also might explain why large corporations live for, on average, no longer than thirty years. A decade in entrepreneurial engagement, a decade cruising on the start-up's momentum, and a decade extinguishing the initiating spark through selective recruitment and process enforcement.
This is a powerful example of how all those so-called disabilities are situational strengths. If only we could learn to appreciate differences rather than exclude or try to reform them.
I’ve spent most of my current visit in Vienna, where my wife and I were invited to speak at a conference. We spent the first Sunday morning of our visit strolling through the Augarten, a park sited on the grounds of a former palace. (Vienna is lousy with former palaces.) This one, though, is different, because in it stands two flakturms,
There’s little left of the war years’ deprivation. Vienna today is a modern city populating a rebuilt, ancient infrastructure. Our conference was held in another old palace, dating from the fifteenth century, but remodeled into as modern a conference facility as any in the world. Not remodeled cheaply, but re-gilded, with fresh frescoes on the ceilings and finely-carved paneling on the walls. One friend there, who has been expanding his home, showed us his work. He said he built every addition expecting it to last at least two hundred years. Yes, he admitted, it’s expensive, but he feels an obligation to future generations to continue this tradition of building to last. If anything typifies this new Europe, it is this dedication to the long view.
Contrary to anyone believing that investors are only interested in short-term results, business is thriving there, but it’s anticipating the pinch of our sub-prime mortgage crisis. They expect that our financial flu will migrate to infect their economy, and they are not pleased at the prospect of economic sniffles caused by our short-sightedness.
America has lost influence in Europe since 2000. On prior visits, I found our hosts and the attendees at the conferences fluent in English. This time, several commented that their English has grown rusty with disuse. I felt embarrassed that they find little reason to follow the American media or stay current with what used to be considered the trend-setter nation. More than our dollar is falling behind.
The New Europe has resolved many social issues we Americans continue to stiff-arm. High fuel taxes keep cars off the road and encourage choosing public transportation, which is convenient, plentiful, and cheap. When we discovered that a cab ride to the train station would cost us a hundred dollars, we caught a municipal bus half a block away that arrived within ten minutes and cost less than ten bucks—and got us to the train just as quickly. Walking and bicycling are common and delightful in cities purposely designed to be compact. Mornings found legions of bicyclers—many more bicycles than cars—using the bike lanes bordering every road. Sure, there are a lot of regulations limiting choices there, but the European Union has actually made good on commitments to, for instance, leave a smaller ecological footprint while our congress argues over everything but resolves little.
Likewise, universal health care is impossible to argue against. I frustrated myself failing to explain the rationality of our system. They complain about paying half their income in taxes, but are astounded to learn that we pay more than that after adding up the private costs of all our government doesn’t provide. They’ve never had to make the choice between keeping the house and having an operation, and had never heard of anyone having to pay off childbirth expenses over years, like car payments.
And our paranoia over terrorism feels pathological compared to the EU’s responses, even though they’ve been threatened from terrorism for decades. Boarding a flight into an EU country is little different than boarding a domestic flight here. Flying back to the States, I’m cautioned to arrive two and a half hours before departure time, because every passenger must be personally interviewed by airline security personnel—a process that extends a wide-body’s loading time to two hours! Arriving here, I might be asked to exit the plane with my passport held open at arm’s length through a gauntlet of Homeland Security personnel, progress up the exit ramp slowed by repeated questions about my destination and purpose for the visit. And I was born here! Friends confided that they avoid the hassle of visiting the US, even though our weak dollar would make their trip cheap.
The misconceptions between our cultures are huge and growing larger. Our friends’ kids were surprised that we weren’t chubby because they’d heard that all Americans were fat from eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. Neighbor kids stopped by to see some fabled ‘real Americans’, and left disappointed that we didn’t look much different from anyone else. Our friends served non-fat milk, and when I noted that I thought Europeans didn’t care about saturated fat, they just laughed at me.
Every conversation seems to eventually slip into mutually embarrassing questions about what we’re doing in Iraq. To anyone growing up in the shadows of flakterms, war is a futility one needn’t have personally experienced to choose to avoid. Our friends wonder how we’d ever extract ourselves from Middle Eastern quicksand, and I share their dismay.
Our distant cousins, left behind when we went to invent a new world, fear for us. They watch in dismay as we fall into the same traps our common ancestors stumbled into, and are genuinely concerned at the long shadows our modern, virtual flakterms will cast on future generations who will want nothing more than a walk in a well-tended garden on a frosty Sunday morning.
Travel, the old adage claims, broadens one. It broadens by highlighting the narrowness of parochial perspective. We still have a lot to learn from each other, if we can respect differing opinions to actually learn from each other. Our differences make us so much the same that we dare not dismiss each other now.
We are not the ugly Americans they too easily expect us to be. They are no longer the war-ravaged refugees our Marshal Plan revived. These facts become obvious over something as personal as coffee and strudel shared in a smoky Viennese coffeehouse. They’ve left the Intensive Care Unit of international relations and stand quite proudly upon what they are building with their own hands. And we are no longer the Daddy Warbucks they relied upon in the past. Neither of us seem sure who the other is now.
Any visit to Europe is a step into history and tradition so present that it colors everything. From the cobblestone streets to the ancient cathedrals, the new Europe stands on the shoulders of its past. Just like us.
I will return from this visit reminded of this simple fact. No one escapes from their past and our present is destined to be our future’s foundation. We can securely stand only upon sturdy shoulders. It’s up to each of us to deeply consider our future while we construct our present because the towers we build today will not be easily torn down then. What keeps us feeling secure today might well cast long shadows over our children and their children’s children long after whatever threatens us has gone.
from men who’s wisdom didn’t show, of whom they were afraid.
Their work was nothing special, leaning heavily upon routine.
They, too, swept the floors and kept the workshop clean.
The mindless
hours melted, layering same upon more same,
and
the point they gained their mastery came subtly, without a
name.
And
then you came apprenticed to this unlikely trade,
and
you, like them before you, strove to make the grade.
And you, like
them, were baffled to learn that what you’d
done—
which seemed no
more than trivial work—proved adequate to run.
Those who hold
the secret, dare not share it straight—
that
years of mindless innocence define the master’s
fate.
And so another
innocent arrives indentured here,
and
you, unlikely as it seems, will teach what no one
hears.
You’ll
speak in muttered orders to focus all they do,
attending to
daily details ‘till their mastery comes through.
12/02/07
Epe,
The Netherlands
