Endless Knots

Call for examples: Is flatter always better?

Jeff Stamps and I are writing a piece about organization design. In that pursuit, we're looking for what the editor calls "vivid illustration" of situations in which flattening organizations - haphazard removal of layers - has led to problems. Have you been in an enterprise that has done wholesale removal of management levels? Have you had a conversation with someone who has? Are you the exec who's made the decision to delayer an organization? We'd love to hear your story and, as always, will credit respondents or preserve anonymity as desired. Please comment here (or email me if you're not the commenting type: jessica[dot]lipnack[at]netage.com).

Every blogger's dream

Let me speculate that Holly Becker's blog, decor8, is swamped with hits this morning. Today's Boston Globe section cover story,  "A few thousand of her favorite things," by Meaghan Agnew, explains how one blogger parlayed her passion for design into 15,000 daily readers:

Bloggers can toil months or even years before securing a readership beyond family and friends; most never do. It took Becker a tidy two weeks. After beginning her new venture, Becker e-mailed the Los Angeles editor at Apartment Therapy ("they pioneered design blogs") to ask for feedback on her new venture. Becker was bummed when she didn't get a response - until she checked her stats one morning and saw that 1,500 new readers had clicked over from an Apartment Therapy entry singing decor8's praises.

Two years ago, Becker took the leap from the corporate life at local/global financial giant Fidelity Investments to pursue her love of design. And she launched her blog. She sums up one reason many of us blog: "I have this all in my head, I find all these great things - let me put it somewhere and share it."

Now to put 15,000 daily blog readers in context: It's in the top 1000 blogs, with 1741 other sites linking to it (as of my checking two seconds ago), has had 5791 (make that 5792 with this one) "blog reactions," meaning that it's mentioned in that many other blog posts, and ranks #926 in readership overall. How do I know all this? Technorati keeps track of all this. Click here for the stats on decor8.

It's still a world of boutique readers, this blogging, if a blog with 15,000 readers is in the top 1000, but it's an emotional, compelling fulfilling, and, did anyone mention this, rather habit-forming one.

This will make you hungry

Sorry about that. A good piece in The New York Times Dining In/Dining Out section today.

Like cheese fondue? As per the pseudo-recipe I posted right before Christmas, there are some good pointers and recipes in today's Times, "A Little Nostalgia, a Long Fork, and Lots of Cheese." I wouldn't want to eat fondue on a regular basis but it is oh-so-delicious on a cold night. The recipes in today's paper include the use of veggies and on for Queso Fundido with chorizo, jalapeno, and cilantro, the concoction to be scooped up with tortillas (corn or flour, depending on your gluten tolerance).

Happy Birthday, Daddy

The newspapers are full of pictures and tributes and quotes celebrating Martin Luther King Day. When I think of Dr. King, I see my father, Marvin Lipnack (no middle name), standing at the TV on that famous day, August 28, 1963, when millions turned out for the March on Washington. We had stopped at the country house of my mother's best friend on our way back from our last vacation with my father. All three adults were kicking themselves for not being in Washington for the march, all three active in civil rights from the time they were young adults, all three early members of NAACP. We didn't know that my father would die suddenly six months later on Lincoln's Birthday.

On this day in 1907 my father was born in his parents' tiny apartment on what was then called East 8th Street (now St. Mark's Place) in New York City, just below Avenue A. The oldest of four children and the only son, he was funny, tall, handsome, and incredibly smart. He was my encyclopedia. When I needed to do a sixth-grade school report on "an African country," as the assignment went, he filled me in on the Angolan Revolution. Remember, blog fans: there was barely television in those days, never mind the Internet (but we did have the Britannica, of course). It was the only time in my school career that I got an A+++.

My father had virtually no education, dropped out of high school (he said he actually ran out of the building) at 15 when a teacher made fun of him for his stutter (which he eventually overcame), got his GED at 29, and was studying at Ursinus College, in hopes of becoming an attorney, at the time he died of a massive heart attack just a few weeks after his 57th birthday.

When my brother, Eric, three years older than I, and my hubby, who is one day younger than my brother, turned 57, I held my breath for nearly the whole year. The same is true when my friends turn 57. I just can't wait until they're 58.

Happy Birthday, Daddy. I was still so young when he died that I called him that. Happy Birthday, Daddy.

"Heisenberg and social networks"

Patti Anklam went to see Copenhagen at Boston's American Repertory Theatre (technically, it's in Cambridge, Mass.) the other night and, as a result, extends the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to the social domain. In her post, "Heisenberg and Social Networks," she wonders whether the very observance of a social interaction, what she calls its "visibility," influences the interaction itself.

Given last night's immersion in thinking about what we can see and not see and the impact of observation on interactions, it was impossible to not beg the question of uncertainty. Certainly, people expect to meet and connect with others when they go to conferences or symposia, but to what extent and in what ways does the visibility of the connecting process impact the experience? Are ties made during the excitement of the moment any less or more durable than the ties that are not observed?

It's making me think about writing. If I send you an email, I say one kind of thing. If I send it to you and copy a bunch of other people, I say something different. Others are watching. Not certain that this is precisely what Patti is talking about...but what do you think about what she's saying?

Text me your novel

I suppose it was inevitable but frankly it's never crossed my mind: writing a novel on my phone. Today's NY Times gives  front page space to Norimitsu Onishi's very good reporting, "Thumbs Race as Japan's Best Sellers Go Cellular."

That's right. Of the top ten best selling novels in Japan in 2007, five were written on cell phones.

Writers, get thee-selves to the thumb exercise gym. Writing your brilliant prose on your phone is the NBT, and if you don't know what that is, click here (oh, no, it's not there: Next Big Thing):

Whatever their literary talents, cellphone novelists are racking up the kind of sales that most more experienced, traditional novelists can only dream of.

One such star, a 21-year-old woman named Rin, wrote “If You” over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors.

Turns out that writing via this method owes its success in part to "packet death." Huh? This special form of electronic extinction was befalling Japanese cellphone users when their text messaging bills were in the $1000 range. When providers changed their billing methods from charging by the message, the prevailing model here in the US, to charging flat fees for unlimited data transmission, they made it economical for people to post via their phones. Young writers, who got their start posting novels to their blogs, quickly made the transition to writing on their phones.

Thus, a new genre was born. Only the publishing establishment is not so sure it is a genre, which is where the literary tension comes in. Or not. The books tend not to have any, according to the article. Simple love stories, written with a lot of text abbreviations, little character development, and very short sentences seem to be the style.

I better brush up my texting skills. Or i btr brsh up my txtg skls.

Very interesting article. Worth reading.

Why Twitter may lead to world peace

Some years ago, Jeff Stamps and I were invited to keynote the US Intelligence Community's Fourth Annual Conference on Collaboration. Honestly, at the time we were invited, I didn't even know there was such a thing as the "intelligence community" (Jeff probably did). And so when we were invited to dinner with the CIO of the CIA the night prior to the speech, I was hungry with questions.

As the conversation unfolded, it turned out that the CIO's young son, around nine years old, as I recall, was on AOL, the Facebook of its time, and participated in chat rooms with kids all around the world, including in Pakistan and the UAE (I think I've got this right - might have been Bahrain). I asked the father what he thought the implications were for future diplomacy. He hadn't thought about it yet, he said, but allowed as these early encounters might have an effect on his son's approach to the global problematique.

I just came across "Trust and cooperation cannot be surged," an excellent post by technology visionary Dan Bricklin that deeply connects the current social networking craze with solving our terrible dilemma. If you've been hanging around the tech world, particularly here in Boston, you know who Dan is. Even if you haven't, he's had an effect on your life - or that of your accountant or your kids or anyone who's ever opened a spreadsheet. Nearly 20 years ago, Dan invented the spreadsheet so next time you open one, take a little bow in his direction (and mine as he's a neighbor here in Newton, Mass).

So to the point: about a month ago, Dan wrote an excellent post about the deeper meaning of social networking tools like Twitter. Twitter and its cousins (like Jaiku and probably 10 more I haven't heard of) are like belonging to a text messaging club. When you join (and any time going forward), you set up a list of people who receive your twitters and vice-versa (and you can easily post to your blog). The general etiquette is that you send out little updates on your current activities - mine right now would say, duh, posting to my blog when I should be making pancakes. A little news, something personal, a snippet of Life with Jessica (which as you can see is puh-retty boring).

Earlier, when I was not making (Nova Scotia) pancakes, I was tripping along a series of links from Boston Globe reporter Scott Kirsner's Innovation Economy blog and came upon this wise post from Dan where he connects the US Navy's "maritime policy" with Saint Exupery's Little Prince. The idea is that "these social systems, by allowing (and encouraging) repeated, simple, personal interactions, actually help build community and trust." He goes on to say that understanding the mechanisms by which this happens are important and here's where he gets quite creative.

First Dan pulls a great quote from a US Maritime strategy document from 2007: "Trust and cooperation cannot be surged," meaning, to my mind, that you can't just add more troops to a situation and expect they will build social capital. It builds something else (secure neighborhoods perhaps, cleaner streets) but not by itself social capital.

Then he goes on to explain how the Little Prince handles diplomacy:

The Little Prince encounters a fox and asks the fox to play with him. The fox replies that he can't play with the Little Prince because he isn't tamed. He explains that "taming" means to "establish ties". If they establish those ties, then they will need each other. They will each be unique to the other. And, this great quote: "One only understands the things that one tames." Taming takes time. It takes repeated simple encounters. It takes simple "rites" that make certain times special. The Little Prince "tames" the fox by visiting each day, first sitting at a distance, and then moving closer. The closing thought: "You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."

He wraps his post with this thought:

This idea, that repeated simple encounters (in person or today electronically) help develop trust and friendships, is an important concept to grasp. The Navy gets it (they've been building cooperating teams for hundreds of years). The CNO [Chief of Naval Operations in the US] emphasizes the importance of the growth in understanding of others that occurs. We should look to this idea, too, in our evaluation of social software. People may make fun of blog or Twitter posts about what someone had for breakfast or how they like a certain video game, but it is all part of how humans build a cooperating society that works. It can't be rushed, and it can be nurtured, even with simple text messages.

Excellent, Dan. I've added your blog to my reader...and maybe I'll start actually using my Twitter account.

By request

Ravel-detail, ink on paper, 22” x 30”,  2007 As per the request below, more work by Eliza Stamps.</p>

February '08 book club: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Next up the much talked about Cormac McCarthy book, The Road.

The way in which I'm handling the Fiction Book Club's reading here is not useful. Each month, I've been posting what we're going to read and since I'm usually screeching into our meetings while reading the last few pages, I never have anything useful to say about the next month's book. It would be better if I posted after I've read the book and could include opinion...so going forward, I'll have to change my evil ways.

Meanwhile, since I trust his judgment completely, I'm quoting Dennis Lehane here from the review that he wrote for Amazon. It's much longer than this ... and had he not mentioned the father's love for his son by the fourth sentence, I doubt that I could even open this book:

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work.

BostonNow publishes Endless Knots

A couple of days ago, I joined BostonNow,  "a free Boston daily newspaper and website that incorporates both traditional and citizen journalism. [It] is built for rich multimedia experiences and for community-created content, whether it’s blogs, slideshows, videos, music files, or comments on shared items."

How do you "join" a newspaper? You sign up, submit your blog, and once your content is validated, you're in. Thus I started posting to it and to my delight, I received this email earlier today:

Greetings Jessica!

Your blog entry titled "Endless Knots blog: Copenhagen by Michael Frayn" [first posted here] has been selected for publication in today's paper.

If you didn't have a chance to pick up the paper around Boston to see yourself in print you can also download the PDF at BostonNOW.com/print_edition.

You're also noted in the blog roundup at bostonnow.com/blogroundup.

Thank you for sharing your views with the newspaper readers and being a part of the community at BostonNOW.com!

Best regards,

BostonNOW

And my thanks to Nick Peterson, the force behind the American Repertory Theatre blog, who told me about BostonNow. I'm curious whether anyone reading here knows whether BostonNow-type sites are in other cities as well.