A fine mess you've gotten us into

Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman. A Perfect Mess.

The subtitle pretty much summarizes the book (and me): "The hidden benefits of disorder--how crammed closets, cluttered offices, and on-the-fly planning make the world a better place."

In one sense I didn't learn a lot from this book since I've always been an advocate of constant short term planning, intuitive filing systems, and lateral thinking. The more you control, the less you have control. In another sense, I got what I needed: intellectual validation for something I've always felt to be true: that systems work best when they have some wobble in them.

Section headings in this book read like zen koans:

• Completeness: Awash in Useful Mess



• Invention: Creative Disorder



• The order pervert: Derives pleasure from order for its own sake

Citing such diverse examples as the discovery of penicillin (Alexander Fleming left a dirty petri dish near a window and went off on vacation. When he came back he found a fuzzy green substance growing in it. Antibiotics were discovered!) and jazz improvisation, the authors argue that messiness fosters creative connections that would not have otherwise happened, and that it is the ability to appreciate the potential of such connections that characterizes successful people.

The myth of leaderless organizations

Jeffrey S. Nielsen, The Myth of Leadership.

Every age has its leadership myths--stories that are said to illustrate the true nature of the leader. My favourite is the line attributed to the Duke of Wellington that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. The assumption is that true leadership, the kind that saved a country, was learned while playing games at an exclusive boy's school. Teamwork, a rigid class system, and the marginal presence of booklearning give you a leader. The child is father of the man, to quote Wordsworth.

Nielsen attacks the concept of the hierarchy-based organization with the charismatic CEO at the top. This myth of the charismatic CEO is rampant in our society. Jack Welch saved GE by laying off huge numbers of workers and was rewarded with a salary that rivaled the sum total of those he cut. He later made a bundle by writing a book about his leadership experiences.

Steve Jobs is probably the most famous contemporary business leader. Infamous for his bad temper and micromanaging style, he is viewed by the general public as a hero of commerce who once a year gifts us with some consumer toy--an ipod or an iphone.

According to "The Myth of Leadership," the charismatic CEO is, well, a myth--a fiction, an illusion, a product of superstition. Nielsen argues that successful organizations in the future must be peer-driven and leaderless. His message is utopian and more often formed by the negative image of the traditional leader than by the positive features of a peer-driven organization. The bad boss--manipulating, egotistical, greedy--becomes the norm in Nielsen's account.

The peer-driven organization will work when human nature achieves perfection. When people can exist without egos, greed, and fear, they will be ready to work in harmonious cooperation without the need for someone to chair the meetings.

Just put it over there

David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous

I have to confess a personal bias up front. I like ad lib planning, messiness, and intuitive thinking. Systematic, orderly processes frustrate the hell out of me, so as soon as I saw the reference to "disorder' in the subtitle I knew I would like this book.

David Weinberger is the coauthor of the geek cult book The Cluetrain Manifesto and an eternal optimist. The Manifesto predicted "the end of business as usual" and it was right. The internet has changed the face of business permanently.

In this latest book, Weinberger espouses the theory that "the new digital disorder" will cause an intellectual upheaval as we develop increasingly powerful ways of accessing and altering data.

Since Aristotle, the Western mind has been taught to think that everything has its place, that the macrostructure of the universe is orderly, and that by analogy human social structures should also be orderly. Simply put, a thing can exist in only one category and systems of categorization should somehow be parallel. A book has only one Dewey decimal number in the library and it would be crazy to classify things by incompatible criteria (ie to classify foods as high fibre, high fat, and never cooked by my Aunt Irene).

Weinberger argues that the digitizing of data has made such categorizing systems obsolete. We put physical letters into pigeonholes in a mailroom, but we forward, copy, edit, and reply to email in a far less restrictive way. The physical letter can be in only one place at one time. The email can be in many places, in many forms. It can even be recovered after deletion.

The backwash implications of digitization are philosophically enormous. If there is no single way to categorize or position an email, maybe all methods of categorization, all hierarchies, all "orders" are arbitrary.

Another aspect of the phenomenon Weinberger is describing is that, increasingly, machines are creating new data for us, dynamically, on demand. When the web began much of it was just books typed into a computer--word processing with a long reach. Today, every Google search creates, via machine, a web page or pages that never existed before, containing concepts that might not have been brought together before. There is even a web search engine called bananaslug that inserts a randomly generated word into any search the user initiates. Through randomness, get results you would never find on Google.

Bottom line: I think Weinberger is applying to the digital world something we've known all along--that despite all our system building, our rational categories, and our little plans we are to a large extent subject to kizmet and serendipity, and that we should get over ourselves.

A testament to fear

Andrew Keen, The cult of the amateur.

This is a book grounded in fear and reaction. Keen does not like the online world of wikinomics, citizen journalism, blog-based commentary, and open source software.

What he seems to fear is loss, by elites, of control over product and loss, by corporations, of money. His first fear is based on the concept of authority, as in "Joe is an authority on baseball." Keen believes that bona fide experts will lose their place in society and that their expertise will be buried under a sludge pile of drivel from bloggers and wikipedia contributors. He even cites as statement by Jurgen Habermas to that effect.

I disagree. Expertise is valuable because it is useful. The experts, as long as they continue to provide value, have nothing to fear. They might have to shape up, stop resting on their laurels, and get online, but once they adapt they will do fine.

Keen's second fear, when examined closely, is almost comical. There is little chance that kids who upload videos to youtube.com will bankrupt Fox or that an amateur programmer who creates, and gives away, his own spreadsheet will bring Microsoft to its knees. For every local company that loses money to an internet competitor there is an internet company building a global market. Amazon, Google, and Facebook are massive generators of wealth. The wealth is being repositioned and Keen seems intent on speaking for folks who want it to stay where it is (with them).

For me, Andrew Keen comes across as a voice of reaction, a fearmonger desperately clinging to the status quo.