idea - Jimmy Breeze on Diigo

01 Dec 09

07 Nov 09

Michel de Montaigne - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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people idea

In his own time, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation
Montaigne would be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, 'Que sais-je?' ('What do I know?')
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- Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
- Montaigne's stated goal is to describe man, and especially himself, with utter frankness.
- Inspired by his consideration of the lives and ideals of the leading figures of his age, he finds the great variety and volatility of human nature to be its most basic features. He describes his own poor memory, his ability to solve problems and mediate conflicts without truly getting emotionally involved, his disdain for man's pursuit of lasting fame, and his attempts to detach himself from worldly things to prepare for his timely death. He writes about his disgust with the religious conflicts of his time, reflecting a spirit of scepticism (believing that humans are not able to attain true certainty). The longest of his essays, Apology for Raymond Sebond, contains his famous motto, "What do I know?"
- Much of Blaise Pascal's skepticism in his Pensées was a result of reading Montaigne, whose influence is also seen in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson.^{[citation needed]} Friedrich Nietzsche was moved to judge of Montaigne: "That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this Earth" from "Schopenhauer as Educator".
- Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.
- Kings and philosophers defecate, and so do ladies.
- Our religion is made to eradicate vices, instead it encourages them, covers them, and nurtures them
- Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.
- Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known."
- No man is a hero to his own valet.

03 Nov 09

Business.view: How to change the system | The Economist

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people idea complexity

31 Oct 09

Fifth Estate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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idea society

28 Oct 09

Novelist Douglas Coupland: the man who sees into the future | Books | The Guardian

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idea interesting books

"Now that optical recognition technology has come in, Google could take a book, put it on a scanner, and the computer turns it into a digital file that you can search. There's a frightening amount of information suddenly; in a year, kids will be scanning all my books, the menu of what they ate for lunch – all they'll have to do is point and click and it turns everything into a file, so the entire planet becomes searchable. I do think that is very spooky, and I don't like it at all." You see, I pounce again – the future is a terrible place!

20 Oct 09

Logic+Emotion: The Value of Visual Thinking

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visualization complexity communication idea

Being able to think visually, break down complex ideas and synthesize them into something meaningful is my forte
So what's the value of visual thinking for business? For starters it can help educate, especially if you are launching a new product, initiative or idea.
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- Communicating
  It doesn't matter if we're talking about consumers or employees — attention is becoming scarce. If you want to communicate something, you need to capture attention and communicate your point quickly.
- The value of effective visuals is to stop someone in their tracks, engage them, draw them in and inform them as they absorb what it is you are trying to communicate.
- Training
  In the design of business, visual thinking will be key in the design of new processes, systems, and structures. Expect to see the mapping of ecosystems, flows, org charts, social systems and data visualization. All of which can help people understand and get behind change.
- Visual language can also be an effective training tool as businesses retool and re-equip their employees to compete in blisteringly fast paced environments.
- “Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.”
  
  Visual thinking equates to "show me", and that's the bridge between telling and understanding — that's the value it brings to any context.

05 Oct 09

Antonio Gramsci - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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people idea

Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the 'common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.
For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on coercion, and in a "crisis of authority" the "masks of consent" slip away, revealing the fist of force.
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- Gramsci gave much thought to the question of the role of intellectuals in society. Famously, he stated that all men are intellectuals, in that all have intellectual and rational faculties, but not all men have the social function of intellectuals. He claimed that modern intellectuals were not simply talkers, but directors and organisers who helped build society and produce hegemony by means of ideological apparatuses such as education and the media.
- Furthermore, he distinguished between a 'traditional' intelligentsia which sees itself (wrongly) as a class apart from society, and the thinking groups which every class produces from its own ranks 'organically'. Such 'organic' intellectuals do not simply describe social life in accordance with scientific rules, but rather articulate, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could not express for themselves. The need to create a working-class culture relates to Gramsci's call for a kind of education that could develop working-class intellectuals, who would not simply introduce Marxist ideology from without the proletariat, but rather renovate and make critical of the status quo the already existing intellectual activity of the masses.

Transmedia storytelling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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media newmedia qualitative idea

02 Oct 09

Six Sigma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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management organization idea leadership

25 Sep 09

Reciprocity (social psychology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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idea evolution

Cybernetics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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science research idea

24 Sep 09

After capitalism « Prospect Magazine

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future capitalism trends idea interesting

16 Sep 09

James Scott and Friedrich Hayek

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idea people economics planning politics society cities books

Heaven knows that I am no Austrian--I am a liberal Keynesian and a social democrat--but within economics even liberal Keynesian social democrats acknowledge that the Austrians won victory in their intellectual debate with the central planners long ago.
But on a second level, it is an act of displacement. Friedrich Hayek, after all, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for making many of Scott's key arguments: that the bureaucratic planner with a map does not know best, and can not move humans and their lives around the territory as if on a chessboard to create utopia; that the local, practical knowledge possessed by the person-on-the-spot is important; that the locus of decision-making must remain with those who have the craft to understand the situation; that any system that functions at all must create and maintain a space for those on the spot to use their local, practical knowledge (even if the hierarchs of the system pretend not to notice this flexibility). These key arguments are well known: they are the core of the Austrian economists' critique of central planning.
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- Scott draws heavily on the excellent work of Jane Jacobs to criticize this planned, surprise-free, every-apartment-building-looks-the-same high-modernist order of pre-planned Brasilia.
- Jacobs argued that rigid spatial segregation of functions made for visual regularity from the bird's-eye view of the architect but made the city damn hard to live in. By contrast, it is the mingling of residences with shopping areas and workplaces that makes an urban neighborhood interesting--and livable. And this urban diversity of uses cannot be planned by the high-modernist architect. At best it can be planned for--by the government providing a framework and infrastructure for urban development instead of specifying land use down to the last square centimeter.
- I should note that today almost every single economist--even those who (like me) are profoundly hostile to many of Hayek's arguments (that government regulation of the money supply lies at the root of the business cycle, that political attempts to reduce inequalities in the distribution of income are likely to lead to totalitarianism, that the Federal Reserve should be abolished, that the competitive market is the "natural spontaneous order" of human society)--agrees that Hayek and his company (including Scott) hit the particular nail that is Scott's central theme, the critique of high-modernist centrally-planned social-engineering, squarely on the head.
  
  Scott's Seeing Like a State's index contains no references to Ludwig von Mises. It does contain six references to Friedrich Hayek:
- The first two references I agree with. Hayek is right in criticizing the inflexibility of the command economy, and Scott is right in arguing that the market economy is not the "natural" form of human social order.
  
  The third, fourth, and fifth references seem to me to miss the point: no one reading Hayek should be surprised that he is skeptical about claims to useful theoretical knowledge, the unanimity between the left and right branches growing out of the anarchist tradition is not "curious" but a result of these two branches' common roots, and the late Foucault (even though correct, and at the time of his death a serious student of liberal political economy) is not the expert of choice on liberal political economy.
- The sixth reference may be the key. Scott cannot cite Edmund Burke in Seeing Like a State--and much of Scott's book consists of praise for the wisdom embodied in community practices in a Burkean vein--except as an "apologist... for... power, privilege, and property." And Scott cannot embrace Friedrich Hayek out of the fear that it will turn his book into a "case for politically-unfettered market coordination." Instead, he believes that his argument is as much a critique of "market-driven standardization" as of "bureaucratic homogeneity."

14 Sep 09

Why capitalism fails - The Boston Globe

article on minsky - v clear & easy

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capitalism idea people

But if Minsky was as right as he seems to have been, the news is not exactly encouraging. He believed in capitalism, but also believed it had almost a genetic weakness. Modern finance, he
argued, was far from the stabilizing force that mainstream economics portrayed: rather, it was a system that created the illusion of stability while simultaneously creating the conditions for an inevitable and dramatic collapse.
While most economists spent the 1950s and 1960s toiling over mathematical models, Minsky pursued research on poverty, hardly the hottest subfield of economics. With long, wild, white hair, Minsky was closer to the counterculture than to mainstream economics.
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- In his writings, Minsky looked to his intellectual hero, Keynes, arguably the greatest economist of the 20th century. But where most economists drew a single, simplistic lesson from Keynes - that government could step in and micromanage the economy, smooth out the business cycle, and keep things on an even keel - Minsky had no interest in what he and a handful of other dissident economists came to call “bastard Keynesianism.”
- Although Keynes had never stated this explicitly, Minsky argued that Keynes’s collective work amounted to a powerful argument that capitalism was by its very nature unstable and prone to collapse. Far from trending toward some magical state of equilibrium, capitalism would inevitably do the opposite. It would lurch over a cliff.
- he formulated an intriguing theory: not only was capitalism prone to collapse, he argued, it was precisely its periods of economic stability that would set the stage for monumental crises.
- Minsky called his idea the “Financial Instability Hypothesis.” In the wake of a depression, he noted, financial institutions are extraordinarily conservative, as are businesses. With the borrowers and the lenders who fuel the economy all steering clear of high-risk deals, things go smoothly: loans are almost always paid on time, businesses generally succeed, and everyone does well. That success, however, inevitably encourages borrowers and lenders to take on more risk in the reasonable hope of making more money. As Minsky observed, “Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.”
- As people forget that failure is a possibility, a “euphoric economy” eventually develops, fueled by the rise of far riskier borrowers - what he called speculative borrowers, those whose income would cover interest payments but not the principal; and those he called “Ponzi borrowers,” those whose income could cover neither, and could only pay their bills by borrowing still further. As these latter categories grew, the overall economy would shift from a conservative but profitable environment to a much more freewheeling system dominated by players whose survival depended not on sound business plans, but on borrowed money and freely available credit.
- Once that kind of economy had developed, any panic could wreck the market. The failure of a single firm, for example, or the revelation of a staggering fraud could trigger fear and a sudden, economy-wide attempt to shed debt. This watershed moment - what was later dubbed the “Minsky moment” - would create an environment deeply inhospitable to all borrowers. The speculators and Ponzi borrowers would collapse first, as they lost access to the credit they needed to survive. Even the more stable players might find themselves unable to pay their debt without selling off assets; their forced sales would send asset prices spiraling downward, and inevitably, the entire rickety financial edifice would start to collapse. Businesses would falter, and the crisis would spill over to the “real” economy that depended on the now-collapsing financial system.
- Minsky spent the last years of his life, in the early 1990s, warning of the dangers of securitization and other forms of financial innovation, but few economists listened. Nor did they pay attention to consumers’ and companies’ growing dependence on debt, and the growing use of leverage within the financial system.
- A year ago, an influential Financial Times columnist confided to readers that rereading Minsky’s 1986 “masterpiece” - “Stabilizing an Unstable Economy” - “helped clear my mind on this crisis.”
- To prevent the Minsky moment from becoming a national calamity, part of his solution (which was shared with other economists) was to have the Federal Reserve - what he liked to call the “Big Bank” - step into the breach and act as a lender of last resort to firms under siege. By throwing lines of liquidity to foundering firms, the Federal Reserve could break the cycle and stabilize the financial system. It failed to do so during the Great Depression, when it stood by and let a banking crisis spiral out of control. This time, under the leadership of Ben Bernanke - like Minsky, a scholar of the Depression - it took a very different approach, becoming a lender of last resort to everything from hedge funds to investment banks to money market funds.
- Minsky’s other solution, however, was considerably more radical and less palatable politically. The preferred mainstream tactic for pulling the economy out of a crisis was - and is - based on the Keynesian notion of “priming the pump” by sending money that will employ lots of high-skilled, unionized labor - by building a new high-speed train line, for example.
  Minsky, however, argued for a “bubble-up” approach, sending money to the poor and unskilled first. The government - or what he liked to call “Big Government” - should become the “employer of last resort,” he said, offering a job to anyone who wanted one at a set minimum wage.
- “He saw these ideas as perfectly consistent with capitalism,” says Wray. “They would make capitalism better.”

11 Sep 09

Design with Intent | The Design with Intent Toolkit v.0.9

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design behaviour research usability idea innovation

10 Sep 09

Main Page - Project VRM

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idea identity wiki privacy

19 Aug 09

Don't just howl with rage. Try an idea that does away with banks altogether | Jonathan Freedland | Comment is free | The Guardian

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finance idea

11 Aug 09

Urban Nomads - LSE Public Lectures and Events - LSE

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photography BRICs idea

Media treatment of China's migration tends to homogenize their experiences; by contrast Urban Nomads attempts to look at the issue on a micro, human scale.

Craig Calhoun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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people idea

05 Aug 09

Paul Romer's radical idea: Charter cities | Video on TED.com

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Jimmy Breeze's Library tagged idea → View Popular

IdeaPaint: Turn Your Entire Office Into a Whiteboard | Design & Innovation | Fast Company

Michel de Montaigne - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Business.view: How to change the system | The Economist

Fifth Estate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Novelist Douglas Coupland: the man who sees into the future | Books | The Guardian

Logic+Emotion: The Value of Visual Thinking

Antonio Gramsci - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Transmedia storytelling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Six Sigma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Reciprocity (social psychology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cybernetics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

After capitalism « Prospect Magazine

James Scott and Friedrich Hayek

Why capitalism fails - The Boston Globe

Design with Intent | The Design with Intent Toolkit v.0.9

Main Page - Project VRM

Don't just howl with rage. Try an idea that does away with banks altogether | Jonathan Freedland | Comment is free | The Guardian

Urban Nomads - LSE Public Lectures and Events - LSE

Craig Calhoun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Paul Romer's radical idea: Charter cities | Video on TED.com

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