Roundand

This is a great article on improvisation and business, and Tom Graves comment When you get lost return to the vision got me thinking.

Life is full of surprises. You need to make plans to get anything done, you need to have a vision - a clearly visualised and valuable strategic goal - to return to when the plans break down, you need a purpose to direct your vision, and you need values to select and fuel your vision.

In parenting, for example, you can have plans for education and entertainment, supporting your vision of an interested and interesting child, but when you suddenly get asked “Dad, you’re old - when are you going to die?” you need something more fundamental to fall back on, which I think could be described as your values.

And that’s the interesting thing about improv, either as an activity or as an approach to other activities - the recognition that plans, like all our other little models of reality, are tools to be used, not walls to be sheltered behind.

Why yes, we *were* at a street party - how did you guess?

You know you’re back in Kingston when you’re crossing the bridge one way and this guy is crossing the other

I’ve been thinking about the current dominance of Apple in the tablet market with the iPad 1 and 2, and the failure of Android (or other) tablets to make a significant dent in Apple’s share by now (March 2011).

What Apple have is not just superb design (and desirability), a well-oiled supply chain and a premium brand with loyal followers, but an innovative business model which involves locking down the platform to make significant revenue on content, from the App store, from their slice of any subscription revenue from licensed apps, and of course from their own publishing service, iTunes.

In effect they are treating the iPad more like a games console than a PC. And if they haven’t reached the position of games console manufacturers, who sell high-spec hardware below cost in order to make revenue from the games (a strategy to make King Camp Gillette smile), this is certainly a possible outcome, and one which would reinforce Apple’s current market dominance - it would be near impossible to compete with such a market leader by using a traditional PC business model depending on hardware profit margins.

In the last few days, however, we have seen some interesting announcements from Amazon.

• The Amazon AppStore
• The Amazon Cloud Drive and Player

Each of these builds on existing Amazon strengths - the appstore on their highly polished and ever-evolving online retailing; the cloud drive in effect a retail version of their S3 storage services combined with their MP3 presence. 

But that’s not all. Amazon are already leaders in the related field of e-readers. Although not as sexy as iPads, Kindle users (in my experience) love their Kindles, so Amazon already has a successful product design process and supply chain to work with.

Add in their impressive set of additional monetisation channels selling Apps, ebooks, MP3s and of course the cloud storage to hold your content, and I am now convinced that Amazon are going to introduce an Android tablet. It may or may not use the Kindle brand, but it will be cheap, it will be loved by its users, and it will make Amazon pots of money. And from a consumer point of view, I hope it will support an open eco-system, leaving room for Android hardware and software products to fit in.

(What I don’t know, being stronger on ideas and trends than I am on numbers, is how that will affect share prices. I see that Amazon already has a much higher price-to-earnings ratio than Apple, so it may be that these developments are already reflected in their share prices. Please don’t take anything I say as investment advice!)

A memory of this verse has been stuck in my head for so long, and I finally unearthed the book where I read it - Iris Murdoch’s Acastos (1986, p.64 in my Penguin copy):

Callistos, who has been putting his mask on again, sees his chance and leaps up onto a table and begins to recite.
CALLISTOS
Zeus whoever he may be
If he cares to bear this name
By it I will clamour to
Zeus - no other can I see
To lift from soul the sullen weight,
But only he, who writes in thought
His fierce decree
That wisdom must be bought by pain.
As the slow ache comes again
Dripping grief on sleeping men,
So will wisdom come unsought
To those who never wanted to be taught.

feeling the fairness in every bubble: Waitrose now selling ubuntu cola!

I’m just back from an exhilarating week skiing, where I became more and more convinced that most of my skiing limitations were due to my fear of the fall-line. The more I played whack-a-mole with that fear, challenging it when I sensed it, or was simply forced by unexpected hazards to take a tighter line, the more I balanced correctly, turned smoothly, moved myself instead of being locked into traverse positions, and generally came down faster, with greater control and less stress.

I was thinking about this as I read a couple of great Quora discussions on What do people usually do after they run a failed startup? and How do you rebuild confidence after failing at a startup? - both seem to make the point that in so many ways it is better to fail, even publicly, than to quit.

I don’t know where this line of thought is going to take me, but it just won’t let go of me.

Great evening courtesy of LBi for hosting and @Leisa for organising.

Dave Gray told an interesting story over Skype of a meeting at the World Bank where all the participants were basically far too high status to get excited, so even getting them to draw along was a success, especially when someone reported getting an insight from an exercise.

Walking back with @JeffVanCampen and @JaremFan I remembered the scary moment when I’d had an opposite problem. I’d flown over to the USA to do a prototyping workshop (we didn’t talk about co-design back then) with a client just outside Chicago. I was using a client server programming tool called Applications Manager, and the participants in the workshop were basically the users of the existing 3270 terminal based system, and while they were good at their jobs, these women were not exactly forthcoming when I started asking questions about how they worked - in fact, I was getting an echoing silence.

We took a break and their line manager, who seemed just as decent, ordinary and un-showy as the rest of his team, ordered coffee and sent out for doughnuts. At the end of the break he told his “girls” to sit together down the front of the room and - to my astonishment - switched down the lights. When we resumed, huddled round the projector screen like a tribe round its camp-fire, I started asking questions again and suddenly voices started coming out of the dark.

Not a technique I’ve every had occasion to use since, but a team and a moment I’ve always remembered with a sense of awe and gratitude. 

Deep Blue at the Science Museum - beer being the only thing at the table to benefit from uplighting.

Great article on how Chinese mothers in the USA raise their children, to the horror of western-style parents. As the English dad of a five-year old boy, I find it totally terrifying.

But it makes me think of something George W. Bush said (the only thing he said that I agreed with) when he referred to “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. He, of course, was referring to others. But could this hidden prejudice be something that nice, educated westerners are inflicting on themselves?

[Edit] The article I’ve linked to is the most commented on in the (online) history of the Wall Street Journal - 8600 comments right now. As Amy Chau clarifies in some replies to queries the headline was not hers, and

It doesn’t come through in the excerpt, but my actual book is not a how-to guide; it’s a memoir, the story of our family’s journey in two cultures, and my own eventual transformation as a mother. Much of the book is about my decision to retreat from the strict “Chinese” approach, after my younger daughter rebelled at 13.