Celebrity Branding

I was recently discussing entrepreneurs' individual motivations with one of them ... a Chamath is not an Elon, etc. We got to the cadre who apparently, "need to look good" - I'm not sure if this is an autonomous confession of core-values, or just what observers notice the celebrity entreprener says when they want to back out from a bad deal, nicely.

The positive messaging crowd : apparently humanists, they may or may not actually believe it, but their positioning is to capitalise on the religion of celebration, whereby non-celebration is regarded to be a bad thing. To them, boredom is a bad thing. This is B2C astute.

But maybe no one else cares ...

The Benchmark of Talent Agencies ( or When to Hire Managers )

I find it very strange, talking to business developers who don't like to manage talent. Each individual staff is a supply-chain of time - it's just business. I guess the stakes are too small, so it is difficult to negotiate with 100 one-staff-firms. In which case one needs to hire an agency - often those are just called (talent) managers.

Furthermore it seems to follow that any internal human resources department should be at least as good as a turnkey external agency ... unless a company has external agencies to rely on. Otherwise the business function of labour inputs is underserved.

Governance Protocols : Introverts vs Extroverts

(From recent coaching work.)

Regarding the concept, that a monoculture of "introversion" or "extroversion", in the leadership of an organisation, tends to fundamentally skew how that organisation is run :

- "introverts" may be described as having a stronger sense of in-group/out-group identity - whereas, the distinction is less pronounced in "extroverts"

- so a group of introverts may depend more on protocols depending on "trusting the people we know" (high-context) - whereas, a group of extroverts may depend more on protocols where "it doesn't matter if we trust a counterparty, we can control the work anyway" (low-context)

So we may see a shift in how work gets done, if/when we start to include new leaders from different backgrounds, in the leadership of an organisation which suffers from deficiencies, attributed to an absence of diversity.

Death potato story

1. There were some potatoes.

2. The stove was cooking.

3. The pot was stewing.

4. A cook, picked up a small potato and put it into the stew.

5. Stop, said the stove, what about the mash?

6. We don't need a mash, we're making stew, said the cook.

7. Will it taste ok, asked the pot.

8. Doesn't matter, said the cook, we're serving stew.

9. Why this potato, asked the pot?

10. Because, said the cook, the customer asked for a potato, in their stew.

Ergo, death potato.

The end.

Lucid Daydreams : Structure and Function

I used to set aside hours or days for thinking. Colleagues said it was intense, and I didn't bother explaining. The reason is roughly like this : when a brain is focused on one task, or process, it is less actively thinking about other tasks. Since storage durability in brains depends on recomputation, certain memories fade as their media atrophies. Day-dreaming is pretty much this. One has to actively assign resources to the conscious reprocessing of ignored memories, in order to ensure their durability. That is why we must assign time for reflection upon the subconscious.

Personally, one thing did make daydreaming easier over the past few years ... aural noise isolation and cancelling tools. My main problem isn't aural amplitude per se, rather it is that being able to discern the semantics of others' speech distracts me.

Beware of Lags Introduced "for compliance"

A pretty good indication of the wrong way to do regulatory compliance in businesses is, that when you introduce a process which increases compliance, you then hear people complaining that there is a time trade-off. This only happens if you try to jam in more work, with insufficient resources to do the work - either insufficient labour or automation was acquired. But that is the case with all sorts of little projects isn't it? Everyone has an idea, and they just straight into execution without consideration of history, and the historical reasons for the existence of professionals.