One more don’t and I will.

For men the barber shop may be the one and only place where we are forced to consider ourselves for half an hour without interruption.

In the womb we are just sentient animals. No self reflection, no head chatter and no memories.

As we grow into children the ‘mind’ kicks in and we learn all the higher-order thinking and self awareness functions.

These must have evolved to give us a competitive edge over the other species and each other.

But grafted on as they are to the animal sentience we are a walking paradox, a unicameral civil war.

Taking advantage of the situation evolution has turned all this self awareness into a boon.

Thus sex and reproduction are the results of just about all of our mind-body dislocations.

For the more aware, life’s journey starts with the sentient animal, launches into the cognisant and then fights it’s way back to the sentient animal in time for the ashes

It’s a real shame that we don’t have 500 years to properly enjoy this journey. As it is most people’s journeys are fraught with fear and most never get anywhere near the endpoint.

Both LinkedIn and Twitter confuse me. Each has a useful social media monopoly but each also seems to have no idea as to what to do next.

In the case of LinkedIn it’s pretty obvious what they should do, so there must be some pretty retarded senior management down there at head office.

For Twitter though I can see that figuring out a viable future must be quite hard.

Overnight my Twitter account had been followed by hundreds of Arabic speaking people many of whom have 250k “followers”.

And the incoming followers aren’t stopping any time soon; probably this is driven by some third party bot.

Now my Twitter account has one purpose; as a beacon for my WordPress blog. I can tell how many of my Twitter followers are real based upon my WordPress stats. Say 1 in a 100 and heading south with the middle eastern influx.

The take home answer is that Twitter has a problem. There are hundreds of millions of people ignoring each other’s Tweets but staying in the system so they can attract more fake followers.

There will be a tipping point where the system will suddenly be subject to ridicule. And it will go the way of MySpace.

My advice to them is to track the reading of tweets and divide the followers up into “readers” and “collectors”.

People simply want some clarity as to the true interest in their ramblings. And without this the home publishers have a hard time monetising their efforts.

I wonder if Twitter, the corporation, has a vision statement?

I just checked and, yes, they do:

“Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue generating Internet companies in the world.”

35 words, 62 syllables, 4 clauses and 2 grammatical errors. You’d have thought they’d at least keep it to less than140 characters!

I think they should adopt this pearler attributed to King Solomon in Ecclesiastes 6:10-11:

“The more the words, the less the meaning, and how does that profit anyone?” 

An absolute winner!

“5 hidden Bible verses about machine intelligence”

This beauty lobbed in via LinkedIn.

Basically it’s an intricately long attempt to reinterpret 5 tweets from King Solomon as insights into how the human brain works.

To that I say;

“The more the words, the less the meaning, and how does that profit anyone?” Ecclesiastes 6:10-11

Which headline do you reckon the online writer went with?

‘Boom time: three startups have launched grocery shopping websites in Australia’, or

‘Boom time: Everyone is launching grocery shopping websites in Australia’

I had better launch one then. Maybe specialising in gluten free water for late night perverted millennials with logic deficit disorder.

My prediction, Tony Abbott will resign as PM before the next election.

No night of long knives for the coalition.

They are capable of learning at least one thing from the mistakes of their predecessors, surely?

Shorten will then be forced to have at least one policy when the libs have a credible new leader and agenda.

But wouldn’t it be interesting to see Labor in power with not a single promise to break?

As our so-called progressive party this might just enable them to do something interesting.

Probably not, they would still figure out how to fuck it up.

Most start-ups do a pivot and when they do they usually define their new product and market opportunity in the context of what investors want to hear.

Is it a billion dollar market? Is it a game changer? etc

Well fuck that.

My advice to founders is to just do what you want and you will make it work if your hypothesis is right enough and you have the requisite skills and knowledge.

It’s more important to love your company and the journey than it is to have excess capital to build the next multi-billion dollar disintermediator.

My guess; the guys that just follow their own passion are far more likely to create the billion dollar baby anyway, despite the extra handicaps they may have in getting funded.

I went to a business function today with a room full of CEOs from mid sized Australian service sector companies.

The lunchtime entertainment was Vince Sorrenti who lampooned Tony Abbot mercilessly over the Sir Prince thingy.

There was deep laughter in the room.

Ridicule among the business types must surely spell disaster for a conservative leader.

Or any leader for that matter.

I think that if people see enough mad dot points around a far-away leader they not only join them up but they sketch in the middle bits in colour as well.

If you are going to put free WiFi transceivers in every one of your residual phone boxes then please allow for automatic logon.

Otherwise our devices automatically connect, WiFi is deemed the primary connection by the device, and we are left without internet connectivity unless we manually logon.

Geez.

The idea of a business over-exploiting their smaller customers is a pre-internet concept.

That is, anti-volume-discounts…

It’s over guys, whether you know it or not.

Just lately I have been repeatably exposed to the misuse of the word ‘vulnerability’ in the context of a critical practice in positive personal growth.

Wiki describes it nicely; vulnerability refers to the inability to withstand the effects of a hostile environment.

What the new age correspondents are trying to express is the ability to be emotionally open in a non-hostile environment.

And in addition, to expand the number of non-hostile environments by throwing off emotional attachment to preconceptions.

What the good preachers really mean is ‘invulnerable openness’.

Successful business leadership requires three attributes:

1. An ability to deny urges
2. An ability to desire the undesirable, and
3. A passion for the unachievable.

Simple eh?

An example…

1.Saying no to muffins at a business networking function.
2. Saying yes to attending the business function, at cost.
3. Believing that the business function will yield career boosting opportunities.

According to Douglas Adams the constant repetition of the anecdote describing the inspirational moment when he formulated the title of the ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ had obliterated his memory of the actual event.

I agree; a story often re-told eventually becomes a memory of the telling and not the doing.

Similarly a story remembered through the lens of a single photo has only one snatched moment where the story has achance of matching any version of what really happened.

The Australian honours system consists of a number of orders, decorations, and medals through which the country’s sovereign, the Queen of England, awards its citizens and the odd non-citizen, for actions or deeds that benefit the nation (Australia that is).

So when the vaguely insane PM of Australia suggests to the partially senile Queen of England (and she agrees) that she awards her mostly disliked husband, the Greek-English Prince, a knighthood for largely undefinable services to Australia, and said award is announced on Australia Day to the confusion of just about all Australians (most of whom are partially inebriated anyway), some Australians think there is a problem.

I don’t think that the problem is the Australian-England thing, although that might represent a problem of its own.

No, the real problem is that we give awards to people that (a) want them, and (b) who also get them for just doing their jobs.

PS here’s me not doing my job but getting some rewards anyway 🙂

It’s odd that we don’t need to train and get a license to do the most difficult task of all, raising children.

Not that I am proposing this, mind. I am just guessing that it will come in this paternalistic society of ours.

The issue will be what to do with offenders that get pregnant without first doing the training and getting a license?

Any punishment would likely impact on the well-being of the upcoming child.

So this last bastion of free will may crash only when birth control can be remotely controlled by a government agency.

Oh geez!

My all-time favorite t-shirt was one bought as a student at a conference in Bendigo in the late 80’s.

Supplied by Benetton, it was mostly red.

In letters the colors of the rainbow, it read:

“Warm sunny colorful and no pollution”

I have no idea why I liked it so much nor what happened to it.

There was no internet or mobile phones then; as a result Google throws up no images of this lost relic.

It lives on only in my imagination.

When I was at school there were some concrete reasons to fear the end of the school holidays.

You would think that all of the modern schooling improvements would have changed this. Nicer teachers, no corporal punishment, no bullying, more interesting curriculum, etc.

And yet my daughter is panicking about tomorrow’s date with destiny. Go figure.

In our rigid two party political system there are three factors that ensure a party is elected; the economy, pork barreling and incumbency.

The party in power has very little influence on the economy but has to create the appearance of doing things that give them the credit for a good economy.

If the economy falters then they must die on this sword.

Pork barreling works to an extent but its effectiveness is largely depreciated by our media’s manic focus on deficits, and the fact that many recipients of pork barreling can’t vote (think corporations). But yet, it is one of the gifts of incumbency.

Incumbency can only be polluted by dumb decisions which unnecessarily piss off the electorate.

A most desperate type of man, one that will do inexplicable acts, is the one that desperately wants to belong to an exclusive club.

The explanation being that the exclusive club has only one purpose; to be inexplicably exclusive.

Spirituality; people, without people, there are no spirits.

I often ask myself why society (and the individuals in it) takes sex so seriously.

What should be an enjoyable team sport ends up defining many people’s lives, and indelibly impacting many others.

And sex is continually used to manipulate all of us as the primary tenant of just about all marketing, including that embedded in religions.

My guess is that it’s outcome, reproduction, is the central purpose of our lives, hardwired into our brains.

Which is why any hostile artificial intelligence will eat our lunch; we are predictably handicapped.

In the 2000’s China stole the solar manufacturing industry off the Europeans.

They could do this because solar was by then a generic commodity technology and they, the Chinese, had much cheaper finance, labour and just about everything else.

Plus they were unconstrained by any financial modelling of their return on investment (‘bugger it, let’s just steal the market and figure it out later’; and they still are trying to figure out how to make money).

The Europeans continue to whine at the unfairness of all this. But the battle is long lost. And yet they continue to spend billions on solar R&D from which the benefits flow to Chinese manufacturers and eventually back to the European solar generators.

Just yesterday a leading European solar academic proposed this:

“In the next battle, if we want to survive, why don’t we merge all the (solar) research centres in Europe? There are billions spent (on PV R&D) every year, but if there is no industry, what is the point? There is no point.”

You have to love academics. What battle? And there is no explanation as to why merging R&D efforts in Europe would change the inherent cost benefits of manufacturing in China, and probably no thought on this.

I have said it before, beware the genius with a single life experience (academia). They know a lot about one thing and therefore, without the benefit of new experiences where they are a novice all over again, believe they know everything about everything.

And indeed they rarely apply their supposed discipline of rational thinking outside of their own area of activity.

It’s a mystery and a fact at the same time.

Drones; love ’em.

I expect that eventually we will have special hats that act as docks for little drones that can intermittently fly up to perform some useful function, like flying out and taking selfies for us or following us on our bicycles to record any wrong doing by evil car drivers.

Given that there will be so many drones up there in the sky one day I suspect that we will need a technology and a standard for drone collision avoidance.

You rent a car at $50 a day and it ends up costing you $150 a day.

We perceive this as the cost of all the extras, namely insurance, fuel option, no excess, sat nav, sales tax, credit card fee, etc.

Douglas Adams wrote about bistromathics and car rental is another example of where this weird new branch of maths applies.

It is where numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants or in this case around car rental centers.

Car rental conforms to the third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of bistromathics; specifically the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each item, and the original quote.

Numbers written on a car rental final receipt presented to the rentee whilst returning the car and also while in a daft dash for a plane do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the universe (except restaurants).

No one has ever noticed because no one has ever properly dissected a car rental receipt. If they had tried they would have failed.

Interestingly, human intuition steps in here. To avoid the ensuing risk of madness our subconscious alerts us and we never get around to toting up these receipts.

How about this for an invention …

A car door lock that unlocks whether or not someone on the outside has lifted the door handle.

That might save a few marriages.

Ever noticed the price of hiring a taxi is unaffected by gas prices except when they go up?

Please develop at least one G-shock watch with these features;

1. Automatic time zone detection and time adjustment – actually, this is optional. It’s not that hard to manually adjust the time when you land somewhere. Only add this is it doesn’t add too much complexity, bulk and battery demand.

2. Slim profiled so the watch can be worn with work shirt sleeves. But keep the diameter nice and large.

3. Analog only function with a night light button

4. And no other functions, not even the day or date. We have our smartphones for these.

5. A simple black design without all the usual superfluous text or sub-dials all over the watch face.

6. Keep the rotating bezel in case anyone wants to do simple minute timing. Besides it looks good.

7. Solar powered battery quartz movement.

8. Make it out of carbon fibre filled black resin and titanium to keep the weight down and also to justify it’s high price.

9. It needs a second hand so we know it still has battery. I suppose the light fills this function too but the second hand is better. For some reason I don’t like the quartz movement second hand (click-click second to second) – it looks clunky. I wonder if a continuous second hand can be developed?

The market for this watch is business types that grew up on G’s and don’t want to go mechanical or wanky Swiss, but that need something more elegant than any G-shock on offer today.

I keep running into startups that are using crowd sourcing to cheaply aggregate data, with an aim to disintermediate incumbents and to figure out a business model once they have enough customers.

However there are some segments where data is not currently threatened by the crowd at all.

Generally this is where data needs high levels of curation to be useful and also where data holes or data mistakes add too much risk for the users.

Examples are data purchased by corporations upon which critical decisions are made, such as market share and competitor information and patent data.

There is however an analytics opportunity out there to compare crowd aggregated data with curated data, to put a fair market value on both sources of data subject to use cases and inherent risk profiles for the users of the data.

Rushing between meetings in the Bay Area I have been listening to American public radio today.

What strikes me, yet again, is how extreme the views are of minority interest groups here in the US.

From organic farming to black rights and Amish style simple-life proponents, the language and arguments are structured only to appeal to the converted. They are seriously disenfranchised.

My guess is that this is just a reflection of the extreme greed of those incumbents who have, over time, insulated their power base from the democratic process

In effect, the US is an oligarchy charading as a democracy.

A key sign is that information and decision making used for ensuring the security of US citizens is increasingly being isolated away from general access, contrary to the very reason why democracy was originally invented in ancient Greece.

It’s odd also that the debate about personal security focuses on exterior threats when the manifest threat to life and limb is very much domestic.

The one saving grace in Australia is our electoral system of compulsory voting which ensures that any oligarchy has to either snow over 50% of the voting age public or control both sides of politics; a challenge that naturally attenuates their avarice.

I have surfed all my life and, no matter how much I try to avoid it, the subject of ‘sharks’ pops up every now and again.

A few times the buggers have popped up, quite literally, next to me.

On all but one occasion I ignored them; my reasoning was that they were too small to worry about. More likely I was subconsciously relying on the fact that they were simply not interested in my preservative-laden non-organic carcass. And in each case there were also the fact that the other 20-odd guys out there didn’t react; who was going to be the wimp that cracked first eh?

The other solitary occasion was different. I was surfing late on a winter day by myself at a deserted beach about 4 hours south of Sydney. The biggest shark you can imagine emerged out of the water, chasing some fish, not more than 5 meters away from me.

I swear I literally levitated out of the water in my efforts to catch the next wave, which just happened to be a monster close-out that put me right through the wringer. Even so, I didn’t stop moving until I was on barely wet sand.

I did not go back into the water that day.

There are a few popular myths among surfers on the subject of sharks. Unfortunately, no one really knows which are true and which are not.

1. Urination attracts the buggers. So if you care, don’t, even if you are freezing to death.

2. Keep your dogs out of the water people. They also attract sharks.

3. You paddling on a board – from below a shark thinks you are a fish in distress. Someone once asked a shark this and it confirmed it.

4. Most sharks are not really interested in Homo sapiens sapiens – they only attack them by mistake, thinking they are some odd fish in distress.

5. Shark repellents don’t work – only a wally would try.

6. There is safety in numbers – someone else is likely to get eaten and not you.

7. Sharks are more likely to attack a solitary surfer. Or so it seems when your mind wanders onto the subject waiting for a set, with not another person in sight.

8. Sharks are more present at dusk and dawn, when you are more likely to want to surf.

9. If a shark attacks you the best thing you can do is use your board as a weapon – there’s no point trying to get away.

10. Dolphins and sharks don’t mix – so you are safe if there are dolphins around. Except when the shark decides it wants to eat a dolphin.

11. Stay away from schools of fish and their telltale seagulls in pursuit – the fish attract sharks.

12. Ignore shark alarms – these are set off by clubbies that have nothing better to do than see a shark in every lump of seaweed or dolphin.

13. Don’t ignore shark alarms that are the result of a fly-over – these guys can actually see sharks.

14. There are more sharks than there used to be because (a) over-fishing is driving the sharks closer to shore to find fish to eat, (b) the warming waters are driving the bigger sharks north (or is that south?); and (c) they are now under fishing sharks.

15. There are a bunch of morons that want to protect sharks. They tend to live in the inner city suburbs, buy their food at Macro, are members of GetUp, and they rarely enter the surf for anything other than a quick splash. They, the sharks (and maybe the people too), should be fished to extinction and bugger the food chain.

16. Shark nets don’t do anything but we should have more of them.

17. There are more shark attacks because there are more people in the water.

18. There are more shark attacks because there are more sharks in the surf.

19. There are more shark attacks because there are more GoPro’s in the water. Sharks hate them.

20. There are not more shark attacks than before, just more GoPro’s.

21. Recreational fishermen and surfers don’t mix. The former tend to do things to attract fish, like put out burley pots. This also happens to attract sharks. Don’t surf anywhere near burley of any sort.

22. Be nice to lids; sharks see them as an entree which gives you a chance to get out of the water before the mains are served.

23. Someone once invented an armoured wetsuit. Sort of like neoprene crossed with Bilbo’s mithril shirt. But you couldn’t bend your legs or arms in it.

24. Sharks don’t like white water so you are safe once you are in it, apparently. The evidence is that you can’t take a photo of sharks, or anything else, in white water. My advice would be to keep paddling.

25. Sharks are colour blind so you should have a blue board and a blue wetsuit to camouflage yourself in the water. If you believe this nonsense then you deserve to be shark bait.

26. Once told to me by a long haired Bali lifer; if you snag a shark while fishing always let it go otherwise shark karma will come and get you (‘man’). As a young teenager I once accidentally caught a large shovel nosed shark while fishing for whiting in a dinghy off our place in Jervis Bay. I kept the shark but had to get out of the boat before it injured me. My dad thought it was funny, watching from the shore. In any case the bad karma hasn’t got me yet.

27. I had a period where I intermittently used a waveski, a.k.a. a goat boat. These wonderfully difficult and exhilarating buggers have been chased out of the water due to the propensity of their riders to catch every wave based on their greater boat speed. Even so, they had certain shark-proof benefits; a faster get away, no limbs dangling in the water and a paddle to ward off sharks. I never got to use this weapon on a shark but I did smack one particularly obnoxious local with it once; and then scarpered almost as quickly as the time I saw the big shark.

28. Shark stories like all fishing stories get bigger in the telling. Always depreciate any local advice on the matter.

29. You really have to get sharks out of the brain. There is nothing worse than sitting on your board worrying about sharks. It ruins the experience.

30. Even so, you will have some friends or family members that insist on discussing the subject, driven by some GoPro’ed incident on the news. They might even start giving you useful advice culled from the above list and gleaned from some ‘Wakeup Australia’ TV nonsense . If so, tell ’em to fuck off and go and have a surf.

And just to prove a point see the headline below … shark attacks a bogan wearing a GoPro.

It’s the GoPro’s I’m telling ya.

Our native pests just hate ’em.

Next up some dickhead wearing a GoPro out in a bush laundry will get swarmed by a bunch of enraged funnel-webs.

See the headline below – so, what do we do?

Make kangaroos wear helmets and get a license, or

Ban cyclists from riding at more than 5 kmh and thus endangering native pests, or

(the simplest) Ban the wearing of GoPro’s by either cyclists or kangaroos. According to the Bogan Law no. 1, if it ain’t GoPro’ed it didn’t happen, mate.

A quick list of ten government monopolies in Australia

1. violence off the sports fields

2. totalizators

3. taxation (no receipt) and duties (you get a virtual stamp at least)

4. incarceration

5. must-follow rules other than those defined by mutually agreed contracts

6. human transport over the edges that are girt by sea

7. advertisements for government monopolies that no one watches

8. licenses and degrees for occupations that can be learned in a couple of weeks on the job

9. most of the profits on the sale of petrol, alcohol and cigarettes

10. the selling-off of profit making government monopolies for no good reason

Mr President said “These ideas won’t won’t make everybody rich, or relieve every hardship. That’s not the job of government”.

In times past (and in many place today) where there were rulers but no government there tended to be a handful of people that were very rich and a majority with not much at all.

Curtailing the wealth of the rich by government decree is exactly the same thing as relieving hardship for others, since these are both relative concepts.

That is, a primary role of modern government is to strive towards reducing wealth disparity and thereby relieving hardship for many. Well so I thought.

But then I suppose without some people suffering from hardship how will the rich Americans know they are rich?

At least the Americans know where they stand – there’s no sugar coating in the state of the union of the states of north america.

Here’s an interesting one; on United Air there are three categories of audio books – fiction, non fiction and business.

Does this imply that business occupies some sort of weird hybrid universe between proposed truth and utter fabrication?

That would match my working experiences.

I am just about to take off for San Francisco in economy class.

I have a baby in front me and one next to me. Both with mothers and fathers in tow.

Why do people do it to themselves?

In addition the mother next to me has a bad attitude, over mothering syndrome, a complete lack of pride and encroachment issues.

This will test my equanimity.

So I have decided to channel Siddhartha and block everything out of my consciousness.

I think I can do it so long as I don’t get spewed on.

Productivity is usually measured as the outputs per unit of input.

Most commonly it is used to report how efficient we are at converting and then presumably consuming resources.

The internet confounds  productivity in one respect; in some cases outputs are created with very few inputs and virtually no resulting consumption of resources.

This, the Matrix, is both infinitely productive and not all productive.

What we need is a new measure of non-productivity … the efficiency of using the internet to keep people occupied so they don’t unnecessarily consume our limited resources.

I often wonder what goes on in the mind of my daughter. She looks so thoughtful at times.

Yesterday we had a day at the beach. When we got back ‘home’ she did a run and dive for her laptop

Curious to see what mystery of the day she wanted wiki-solved I peeked a look at her screen.

Japanese puppy clothes. Outfits for little dogs.

Slightly confused I asked her why.

There is a faint possibility that she might go to Japan in July with her mum and her friend that lives in Japan has told her all about Japanese puppy clothes.

I pointed out that she doesn’t have a puppy.

“I bet they do kitties as well, dad”

I am not normally a fan of chalkboard quotes or calendars decorated with waterfalls superimposed with little poems, but this piece of randomly encountered wisdom bears recording.

Ahead of the Queensland state elections the operator of the Gold Coast Superduck franchise has accused the government of an underinvestment in glitzy tourism infrastructure, and as a result he argues that the Gold Coast is becoming a ‘bogan villa’.

[Scene] The pool at the Gold Coast Marriott … Bogan central.

Overheard behind me, a bunch of overweight forty something mothers discussing a new TV show called the Shark Tank. It sounds like Australian Idol meets the Mad Inventors.

The mums spent a good two hours discussing ‘inventions’. Mostly they were in fact just problem statements with no means of reducing them to practice.

An example was a mosquito killer which sounded eerily similar to Nathan Myrvhold’s laser based version.

This one would use high pressure water ‘drops’ (i.e. bullets) to kills mosquitos.

The question was posed as to how automatically find the mosquitos.  ‘Sonar’ was deemed a satisfactory answer.

I turned around at one stage to look for my daughter and I swear the mums went quiet on me in the interests of industrial secrecy.

According to some creative semi-genius there are two types of creative individuals; the conceptuals and the experimental innovators.

Conceptuals usually have an early ‘big bang’ period of creativity. Think Albert Einstein. After this initial bang they either reconcile to eating a lot of dinners off their early efforts or spend the rest of their lives futilely trying to recapture the incapturable.

Experimental innovators continue to create throughout their lives, often improving with experience. Think Henri Matisse. Missing an early hit, my guess is that they often feel unappreciated early on which provides continuing motivation.

I have written before that start-ups require both incredible skill and serious luck. In other words, start-ups are actually an art form as well as a business activity.

In this context the successful CEOs need to be creative geniuses. And in this you have your conceptuals such as Mark Zuckerberg, and your experimental innovators such as Steve Jobs.

My assertion would be that the experimental innovators are far more successful at transitioning across from start-up success to listed corporate success. Apart from continuing to be creative, they also continue to learn and adapt.

In the context of business leadership, creativity is that special extra thing, the achievable vision that is above and beyond a solid workmanship style of general management skills. This has to come from the CEO’s head – it can’t be grafted onto that person because it won’t be owned in the same way nor will it come with a proper appreciation of the environment requiring such a vision.

In the case of Steve Jobs, after a successful period at the early version of Apple and then in his own company, he came back into Apple with a clear vision. Based on product leadership in consumable personal computing and content, he would use the design, hardware and software development skills of Apple to build a recurring revenue business built on proprietary device sales and incredible marketing.

Because Apple only had a handful of products, Jobs could be the head of product development as well as the CEO. Which means there was one man with a single creative vision that defined all the product specs and approved their release. This is unique for a company of this nature. Most companies have so many products that the product development responsibilities are devolved to the business units; as a result there is no unifying ground-breaking vision and often products appear me-too-ish.

Knowing all this, I would say that the ideal start-up founding team is partnership of a conceptual and an experimental innovator. If you can find two of these that get on well and are well-grounded in the same area of technology and business, and have a burning desire to succeed, then you really have something worth investing in.

Just before bed last night I was checking through my emails.

One of the last that I skimmed and deleted was my daily Crunchbase list of venture capital deals.

Subsequently, in one of my dreams I met a bay area startup that had raised $70m to develop and propagate a new technology for cleaning used soy sauce bottles.

Food is the new black!

The CEO pitched me, showing graphs of billions of used bottles, a large percentage of which are disposed of.

Using a new micro-robot cleaning technology developed at a garage within a bus ride from Stanford and an app which will be co-marketed with the leading soy sauce vendors, the company is targeting 29% market penetration within 2 years giving them $1b in revenues.

But it’s not just soy sauce! First soy sauce bottles and then the world.

And then, thankfully, I awoke from this banal madness.

Overheard in the hotel cafe:

“Can I have a cow’s milk flat white thanks”.

My nephew’s partner is having a baby tomorrow. We know not what sex.

Which make pre-purchasing those presents an issue. Blue and pink seem to have invaded just about every category of baby goods.

The solution? A desert camouflage range of baby goods. Good for hiding all those excretions and it’s unisex to boot!

I rarely quote others in this blog but this pearler from Gerard Minack on Australian federal politics is worth repeating:

“One of the few areas of bipartisanship we’ve had over the past dozen years is both parties have agreed to be short term and second rate!”

And yet the progressives (Labor) attempted to introduce major new policies in their last minority government. Odd.

And the current Coalition government seemed intent on removing all these Labor policies or at least re-branding them. They haven’t been too successful in introducing any of their own.

Without control of both houses and in the era of total opposition how can any party be anything other than short term and second rate?

It is often said that you learn the most from your mistakes.

Indeed in the startup world I have dished out this wisdom to CEOs over and over, primarily to prevent them from being too cautious and therefore doomed.

In startups, each mistake is usually fatal. So a good CEO, not having enough time to learn all the lessons by failure (that would take 500 years), must learn to discern those that should be listened to. And then listen to them.

Any reading on the subject has little value other than alerting the student to the subjects that should be discussed with mentors.

The successful CEOs, through their mentors, absorb the lessons of generations of CEOs and their collective mistakes, usually by situation analysis (“what do I do now?”).

Even so, success also requires luck. The removal of controllable mistakes is a necessary but not sufficient condition for startup success.

I suspect that there are other business activities where the excision of avoidable mistakes actually guarantees success.

My guess is that these lower return activities can be taught as trades in a class room. They are so structured as professions that they only allow for mistakes by negligence.

First order reality in the 21st century; if you can’t photograph it then it doesn’t exist.

“Thank Christ for selfie mode and mirrors then, eh Lola?”

I deferred a discussion of subjective idealism, substance theory and bundle theory, on the basis that none of them can be snapped.

It is a matter of recorded fact that humans are rapidly gaining in average intelligence as measured by IQ tests.

This is ascribed to improving education and less damaging emotional development.

A lesser known fact is that good looking people have better opportunities in life, all other things being equal.

Especially for men, good looks improve things such as average salaries and the rate of promotions in the workplace.

The hypothesis is that other people collectively (& erroneously) associate good looks with other characteristics such as leadership potential and intelligence.

For women, the benefits of being good looking aren’t as great when it comes to career prospects because these benefits are offset somewhat by the ‘dumb blonde’ myth.

It also postulated that in times past other characteristics such as strength and durability were equally important but as we have engineered risk out of our daily environment these factors have dropped in perceived value.

It all makes me wonder if, similarly to IQ, whether our race is slowly becoming better looking because better looking people have more resources and hence more likely to reproduce?

Or are the less fortunate, including the not so good looking, breeding at a greater rate in revolt, and sending us backwards?

It would be unlikely that we are static in this regards.

And it is said that beauty is subjective. The data suggests otherwise. Who would have guessed?

When I was a youngster there were no scatter cushions.

Slowly over the last couple of decades, some women have adopted the habit of decorating their couches with scatter cushions and throws

Due to the competitive nature of the advertising driven madness it is now not uncommon, upon being proffered a seat in a den of femininity, to first remove a dozen cushions and three throws in order to avoid having ones head touch the ceiling and ones rear wobbling like a tinnie at sea.

For the male visitor the first task is to identify the couch, camouflaged as it is.

This is a plea; you can’t teach a pig to sing nor a male to burrow. At best they will suffer in silence.

Today I heard an interview with a Booker prize winning novelist, Richard Flanagan.

An inspiring interview and a man with something very important to say.

And yet I wonder if the high-art novel form does his message justice.

Why?

Firstly it’s only accessible to the very literate. It’s written in that Booker prize winning fashion with every sentence carefully crafted and a marvel of persistence. Which, in my opinion, gets in the way of the story and the message.

Think of this like eating at a three hat Restaurant. Molecularly assembled food for the cognoscenti but so rich that you need two livers to complete the meal.

And in this, the book is preaching only to the worldly inconvertible.

And secondly, the author intermittently drops into ‘god the narrator’ mode. As in:

“The men were like other young men, unknown to themselves”.

This infuriates me. There is no God that proffers opinions and absolute truths like this are by their very nature deniable.

Some young men know more of themselves than some old men. Some are callow and some come from places that allow them to just ‘be’ from the moment they are born.

I believe that any such generalisations should be derived from the narrative by the reader.

Let the story guide the reader. And let the reader derive their own meaning from the novel.

Authors are simply foster parents and efforts to control their children after they have left the nest simply spoil the result.

The optimal stopping theory in economics is a restatement of the Pareto Rule, with a $ sign thrown in.

As in, how many houses do you look at before saying “near enough is good enough”. Which is to say ” if I wait for perfection I may never buy a house because they just keep rising in price”.

The internet has helped people make better choices in this context by allowing more options to be perused in a period of time. Whether it’s houses, cars or dating.

Of course everyone else has the same benefit so the competitive benefit is somewhat diminished in this regard.

The internet has also unleashed unparalleled use of ‘artificial scarcity’. As in ‘act now or lose the deal’.

Marketing gone mad but we are much better off. Right?

Byron Bay whispers to me a tale of three peoples.

One mob that isn’t here.

One that could be anywhere.

And one that is attempting to catch the fragments of someone else’s dream.

Change.

Some people hate it. Some just want to hang onto what they have always had.

My view is that you have to respect the past. Cherish it. But that enshrining it is a personality trap.

When the time is right, engage a forward gear before the gear box rusts up.

For women… the easiest and safest way to chat up a bloke is to say “that’s a nice watch”.

If he turns out to be uninteresting you can fall back into your watch appreciation mode, and exit stage left when that is done.

Assuming they are wearing one that is. If they aren’t, then run – I will explain later.

“What do you think of the idea of a cruise ship in the Pacific Islands?”

Left field. Deep fine leg. Unexpected. Unwanted.

“Oooo … it’d be like an RSL club in an earthquake”.

My local gym has a book drop swap area. It seems that the latest new years resolution is to get rid of one’s books. There is a bonfire’s worth of them there now.

Bob Ellis says we have got it all wrong. He says humans are tactile animals and that we need to touch and feel books to have a rewarding experience.

I have to reluctantly agree with Bob. But unless someone comes up with an actual paper book where the ink morphs I think the future is LCD, OLED or electrophoretic.

In the 1980’s no matter what your tactics the half life of your bicycle ownership was about 6 months.

Then it was stolen.

Today you can’t get your bike stolen in Sydney even if you try.

Even the easily removable bits, like lights and front wheels, remain intact in even the most trying of situations

I can leave my bike tied up overnight outside of the ‘projects’ in Waterloo, and with my flimsy lock. And it’s still there in its entirety in the morning.

My suspicion is that thievery is a victim of the rise of cheap Chinese manufacturing and the internet, cutting out all the middle men.

As goods have got relatively cheaper the risk/return merits of theft have become much lower. The same risks with much lower financial returns.

Also the honest and increasingly affluent recipients of stolen goods down the pub have less to gain from the dodgy cheap purchases. Why bother when you have eBay or Kmart?

I am almost tempted to ride sans lock. Not really. But just look at the thing, a child could bust it.

My uncle Gary chews every mouthful of food 100 times and he likes talking.

Consequently he is the slowest eater I have ever met.

When quizzed on this peculiarity over his dinner (the rest of us had long finished and he was winding up my brother by suggesting Australia should pump all it’s coastal river water into the inland for irrigation – I had to change the subject) he admitted that he had never been asked before and was himself quite unsure where the habit came from.

After a few more painfully slow mouthfuls he admitted he may have over-absorbed advice from his elders as a child, and that, yes, he doesn’t mind winding people up.

LG has announced a new washing machine at CES with two washing units – a smaller one for small loads and the bigger one for usual loads. This is supposedly a result of listening to customer’s needs and also a desire to save energy on the smaller loads.

It got me thinking about other aspects of washing machines which could be improved.

Firstly, soap. We still put it in manually. I would be nice to just stick the whole box into the machine somewhere and have say a screw drive automatically load the soap each time according to the needs of the load. No spilled soap. No over or under dosing.

Secondly, settings. We still have to choose gentle loads, long wash etc. A little bit of sensing technology could identify straps on bras for example and automatically choose gentle mode. Or colours and whites would lead to an auto choice of cold wash. Etc.

Finally, for front loaders, a back wall that pushes to the front thus automatically adjusting the volume of the washer to the load size and minimizing water use.

No need for controls. Just stick it in and you get the best out of the machine.

Glassdoor is a startup that provides online information on companies’ work environments, salary details, reviews, interviews and job listings.

This of another example of how the internet is impacting the corporate environment.

Given that human capital is so important the availability of this type of information to current and potential employees will impact the performance of a corporation by impacting the moving average of the quality of people in a corporation. Hence it will also affect a corporation’s behavior with respect to it’s people.

This  measurement plays to two of the new ‘capitals’ which are used to evaluate the worth of a company – human capital and social & relationship capital.

As startups emerge that measure even further details of each and every corporation I expect even more ‘capital’ types to emerge.

Readily available information and not corporate desire is driving these changes.

One of my pet subjects is hypothesizing alternatives to our Westminster democratic parliamentary system of government.

Why? Well I have this suspicion that technology is allowing the system to be gamed by the major parties in a dance of death with hyper-partisonship. And that this gaming is leading to an absence of differentiation in policy and a diminution in the rate of development of useful new policy. I am not the first to think this.

Just possibly we could learn something from the corporate sector where shareholders elect boards and boards appoint the senior management. It seems to work most of the time with notable exceptions when shareholder oversight is weak.

Imagine electing a board of governors here in Australia who are then tasked with appointing ministers based not on party lines but on actual capability.

The board would get re-elected every four years. Non performing ministers would be replaced whenever by the board but election results would be based on incoming governors identifying changes they would like to see, and hence a carrying a mandate to change certain ministerial appointments.

The chairman of the board could be our president, elected amongst themselves, and holding reserve powers.

I have recently learnt that of the top 100 entities on the planet (by value) that about half are countries and half are corporations. The corporations are gaining ground in this measure so maybe their governance processes are just that much more effective. And corporations are now increasingly considering other forms of capital other than cash and capital – they are basically heading towards full management consideration of all the the matters that affect our daily lives.

It’s not the worst idea I have ever had.

Current theory has it that the value of an enterprise can be measured by accounting systems using the six ‘capitals:

1. Financial capital – basically the double entry cash accounting system developed by the Venetians

2. Manufactured capital – the addition of the value of plant and equipment

3. Intellectual capital – patents, brands, copyright – all government mandated monopolies

4. Human capital – the value to a business of it’s highly trained employees

5. Social and relationship capital – a more recent concept that values customer perceptions of a business

6. Natural capital – another recent addition that values the impact of a business on the environment and our limited resources

All of these factors contribute to the ‘value’ of a business. The last three are recent additions, initially added because they represent assets to a business and in some scenarios, a risk to a business. Anything that requires both  investment and risk clearly impacts the value of a business and can therefore be accounted for.

Goodwill is another capital – but it is really just used in accounting systems to round out the errors and explain why the value of a business, in say a sale, is often different to the carrying value.

There is one ‘capital’ missing from this list and that is ‘Oligarchical Capital’. It is where a business invests in creating an unfair advantage by lobbying government to create barriers to competition. This also carries risks to a business since overdoing it makes a business lazy and at risk to obliteration when there is substantial changes in the external environment.

Netflix is opening in Australia with limited content compared to the US. Ahead of this they are cracking down on foreign users accessing their US service via VPN.

Staying in the home of others over Christmas I learn that Foxtel has quite limited content in Australia, charges subscriptions and still puts adverts into the middle of shows.

The government is trying to crack down on unlawful downloads by making them illegal. A new code of practice “will include a process to notify consumers when a copyright breach has occurred and provide information on how they can gain access to legitimate content”.

Yeah how about adding “at a price no greater than what US viewers are being charged for the same content, and with no adverts inserted into the content. And if they can’t provide the show for any reason the consumer is free to download it from anywhere.”

CAUTION
Make product development decisions only when someone competent is in charge. Engaging lawyers while developing products can lead to serious fuck up’s. Some contracts are functionally useless. Use common sense and obey the KISS principle. See your user forums for complete operating instructions.

AGREE

(And the buggers would have to press ‘agree’ every day they go to work just like I have to ‘agree’ every time I start the car)

“A hearing-impaired girl becomes separated from her boyfriend on a bush trail in the Blue Mountains”.

What is it with Australian film makers?

Besides it’s a ‘track’ here.

Overheard on Swanston St:

“You dignit”

The noun for dignity? However it did sound somewhat derogatory and not at all dignified.

I think it’s a vocative in apposition. The appositive explains why it requires a noun. The vocative explains why it cannot be third person.

It’s a keeper.

At a recent conference in China on the business of patents there was a talk on the subject of patent trolls. This is pretty obscure stuff unless you are in the business.

In question time an American got up and somehow, I don’t know how, he managed to include in his dissertation (posing as a question) the concept of America’s bill of rights. I think patent trolls either restricted his rights, or the legislation of laws to restrict the patent trolls restricted their rights. It doesn’t matter which.

It seems to me that every bill of rights should also come with a bill of responsibilities. If they don’t you get this sort of behavior where an individual spuriously claims that their rights are being impinged.

If there was a Bill of Responsibilities then an individual that forgoes his’ or her’s responsibilities would also have their rights attenuated until penance has been served and they can demonstrate that they fully and properly understand their responsibilities.

It is sort of this way under law anyway but it would be useful to put rights and responsibilities on the same level.

Or to keep it simple, avoid Bill of Rights and Responsibilities altogether. After all they are just words and we do all seem to be able to read into the words whatever suits us.

In December a letter went around Australia via Facebook regarding bank foreclosures on farms. A precis would read ‘drought. farms not worth as much. banks behaving badly and foreclosing on farmers. possible conspiracy to sell farms to Chinese and miners’.

I am not much of a fan of emotionally simplistic communiques so I just spent a bit of time Googling the subject.

It seems the Australian Wheat Board at one time held the mortgages for hundreds of farms but during the GFC sold these to the big four banks, probably at a loss and maybe due to an issue with liquidity.

Due to the current drought in some parts of Australia the value of some farms is now below book value and the banks are probably using a clause in the contract to demand more mortgage guarantees from the farmers, and if these are not met then exercising an option to foreclose. Even if a farmer is meeting all repayments!

This is so just so messed up and belies the old-school partnerships between businesses and banks, the latter which are ironically permanently illiquid themselves, in principle.

The only reason the banks could pick up the loans during the GFC was because our savings in them were underpinned by the Australian Government – otherwise they wouldn’t have had this flexibility. So in a way we the Australian taxpayers underwrote their ability to buy these loans at cents in the dollar and now to exploit them for capital gain.

The Wheat Board should only have on-sold these mortgages with the revaluation demand clauses excised, or the government should have demanded so. And to the farmers I would say, you should demand a first option to buy out or re-finance your mortgages, rather then allow a Wheat Board to sell them to whoever.

The value of farm properties in an extended drought is very low due to the low demand for properties which in turn is impacted by cashflow in the sector. Because farmers are struggling there are no buyers; however this probably doesn’t reflect the true value of properties – it’s a sort of second order effect that exaggerates the drop in value of farms. Given that droughts are a way of life I believe that farmers should not be exposed to the extremes of property value fluctuations (by government decree) otherwise we won’t have anyone willing to go into farming,

I suppose a conspiracy theorist would argue that the whole farm mortgage scheme is designed to recapitalize farms (downwards in value) to reflect the true value in a post-climate change world (where droughts will be more common and the land will dry out) and put the assets into corporate hands where economies of scale will allow lower costs and continued operations. But only after the land has been stripped of any useful mining resources for a one-off bonus.

In the end this will probably just happen and the only thing that may halt it is market intervention by parliament; this will come down to the effectiveness of the power of representation of the farmers in parliament versus the power of lobbying of the finance and corporate sectors to those who are not supposed to represent these interests in parliament.

On current form the farmers are well behind and fighting a rearguard action – they need to start getting seriously aggressive if they want to fight entropy and greed and preserve the past in a rapidly changing world.

To be honest, I am not even sure it makes sense for them to do so unless they come up with an entirely new structure for their sector. One which they control.