Would you rather hire someone with an MBA or someone with passion and commitment?

“The committed person brings an energy, passion, an excitement that cannot be generated if you are only compliant, even genuinely compliant. The committed person doesn’t play by the “rules of the game.” He is responsible for the game. If the rules of the game stand in the way of achieving the vision, he will find ways to change the rules. A group of people truly committed to a common vision is an awesome force. They can accomplish the seemingly impossible.” - Peter M. Senge, via the Jeff Pulver Blog.

Would you rather commit and be wrong, or not try and never know if you would have been right?

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Would you rather leave a way out or leave no option but to succeed?

I can count on one hand the number of episodes of Cold Case that I’ve watched, but I happened to catch it the other night and it set me thinking.

The episode was about a girl who dressed and acted like a boy in the Sixties. She was killed, but not before being institutionalized and given electric shock therapy to ‘cure’ her.

Fast forward to the present day. A woman who had been in our hero’s class, who had been at that time as feminine as Tinkerbell and as mean as Lord Sauron, is now an enlightened university professor. Cue montage scene in which one of her students is a girl with a boyish haircut, covered in tats and wearing a t-shirt that says, “Queer Nation.”

I know, I know. It’s just a silly TV show. But I will take lessons wherever I find them, thankyouverymuch. And this particular silly TV show got me thinking about the relationship between how transparent something is and how much public antagonism is acceptable.

It’s a similar concept to the one in the movie Amazing Grace, about abolition in the UK, and I think it speaks to the nature of societal sea change.

Phase I: Opposition to slavery is considered to be deviant, and so it remains deeply hidden. Because it is not a subject for polite conversation, any antagonism towards the behavior was also driven underground:
Total secrecy of behavior = Minimal public antagonism

Phase II: The first few begin to go public with their beliefs, giving people in opposition equal freedom to make their opinions more public:
Partially transparent behavior = Partial public antagonism

Phase III: A critical mass of people join to make the issue totally public, arguing their cases with lifestyle and voices and votes and pocketbooks. Those who are opposed join together in outright war, fighting desperately to retain the status quo:
Totally transparent behavior = Total public antagonism

Phase IV: The argument has long since been resolved, and people can’t believe this used to be an issue:
Totally transparent behavior = Non-issue

I don’t think this is any sort of universal truth, but those fighting for a cause—whether it’s slavery or gay marriage or the environment or DRM-free music—may be comforted by the hope that Phase IV is possible.

Thoughts?

From the consumer perspective: They need to become functional at a faster rate than people get bored with them.

From the business perspective: They need to become boring at a faster rate than they become functional.

(The above is reprinted from a comment I left on Read/Write Web.)

I know, Facebook hasn’t become boring yet: average time spent on the site is up, although it’s flattening, at least in the UK.

Nonetheless, Web offerings follow a predictable pattern. At first, they are fun and cool and new and interesting, but nothing can be new forever. Ipso facto, for a site to have longevity, the attraction must morph to something other than pure novelty.

Take email. Remember when getting an email was cause for boasting? It was a while ago, to be sure. The reason we’re all still using email is that its utility increased at least as quickly as our fascination with it waned. Same with Google.

Neat for neat’s sake doesn’t last—but that doesn’t mean it can’t be supplanted by useful.

When I first signed up to Facebook, it was interesting just to find old friends and watch the connections grow. Now I use it mostly to play Scrabulous. What about you? How has your Facebook usage evolved?

One of my favorite quotes is from one of my least favorite people: Mike Tyson. “Everybody has a plan,” he said, “until they get hit.”

His words—and Google’s motto—sprang to mind as I read the news in TechCrunch that Google recommended a ‘No’ vote on two proposals, one on human rights and one on censorship.

The censorship bit calls for minimum standards:

1) Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.

2) The company will not engage in pro-active censorship.

3) The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.

4) Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access.

5) Users should be informed about the company’s data retention practices, and the ways in which their data is shared with third parties.

6) The company will document all cases where legally-binding censorship requests have been complied with, and that information will be publicly available.

The proposed Human Rights Committee would review and make non-binding policy recommendations regarding human rights issues.

Most of the commenters on TechCrunch slammed Google for encouraging people to vote against these proposals. Fabian Schonholz, however, felt otherwise:

This is a little ridiculous.

If you want to operate in any country, any company, american or otherwise, should respect the laws, customs, traditions and ways to operate that the country dictate. The only thing a shareholder can do is force the company not to operate on the countries that insult their sensitivities. It is presumptuous of any of us to think that we have the RIGHT to change how countries operate and behave.

I agree with Fabian; at the same time, I don’t think the proposals suggested anything in contrary to what he says. The censorship proposal, for example, explicitly states that the company will conform to legally binding requests. So it seems more like a case of not wanting to rock the boat than anything else.

In addition, Google is likely to get its way; last year, shareholders rejected a different proposal to stop the search giant from self-censoring.

Nonetheless, I’d like to know the rationale for the ‘No’ recommendation on the Human Rights Commission. Google’s mum on the topic—the proxy statement offers no explanation and there’s nothing on their blog—but it just doesn’t seem consistent. How can you not be evil if you don’t even have thorough information about the human rights implications of your actions? What is the business activity that might be shut down if these two proposals go through?

If you’ve got more information about this, please let me know in the comments. If you want more information, say that too.

And so am I.

So are your colleagues, your bosses, your subordinates, and your competitors.

You think you’re smart? Me too. I can learn just about anything I set my mind to. The problem is that there are infinite things to which I could set my mind—and I don’t have infinite time.

For a while I thought that people I looked up to knew everything. I dealt with mentors who displayed such an air of confidence that I was sure there was no question they couldn’t answer.

Now I have learned something more important: wisdom doesn’t mean lack of ignorance.

Each of us, no matter how learned or how studied or how much a member in good standing of Mensa, can only know a tiny portion of an infinitesimal fraction of everything there is to know.

This is not to say that mentors shouldn’t be respected. On the contrary, we can learn from every single person we meet. No, there are two important lessons I take away from the realization of my own massive ignorance:

1. You can continue to feast on new information for the rest of your life; the supply will never wane and your insatiable curiosity can always find new objects of desire. Just the other day, for example, I learned that there is a world championships for rock, paper, scissors; our Head of Research will be competing. I am in awe.
2. If you wait for complete information before acting, you will never act.

My friend Susanne has an organic vegetable farm. She always eats her own produce when it’s available. When it’s not—when it’s out of season or she’s traveling or she just doesn’t feel like cooking—she doesn’t worry about whether the food on her plate meets the same high standards she applies at home. She just eats, and enjoys it.

She is wise.

In The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz says to always do your best, and never to worry about not having done otherwise.

He is wise.

Accepting that you can only do your best is extraordinarily freeing. You can actually be wrong—and it won’t fatally undermine your sense of self. You can take any energy you put into defending what you already know and put it to productive use exploring the vastness of the unknown.

Have you embraced your ignorance today?

I don’t normally touch politics on this blog, but this excerpt from Matt Ruff’s novel Sewer, Gas & Electric—written in 1997, set in 2023—was too good to pass up:

…Lexa asked her computer to run a program called SumpPumpGraphics. “Working,” the computer replied, and on its main monitor drew comic strip images of the seven Democratic presidential candidates, seated as if for a debate of their own. When Lexa fed copies of their stump speeches into an optical scanner, dialogue balloons appeared above the seated figures, sized in proportion to the wordiness of the speeches. The largest balloon belonged to President Hackett, a dark horse opportunist who on separate occasions had claimed to be a native of eighteen different states, including Belgium, which had apparently been admitted to the Union when no one else was looking.

“Ready cull feature,” Lexa said.

“Cull feature ready. Average speech length at start is three thousand, six hundred, and seventeen words.”

“Cull salutations, jokes, and needless historical anecdotes. Ditto quotations and statistics that don’t directly support a platform point. Cull platitudes and non-sequiturs. Cull reiterations of obvious facts. Cull redundancies. Cull misleading statements and outright lies, but flag them for later.”

“Working,” the computer said, and the dialogue balloons shrank drastically. “Culling completed. Average speech length is now two hundred and seven words.”

“Cull and flag impossible promises. Also cull promises that fail a vagueness test.”

“What is my threshold of acceptable vagueness?”

“Let’s not be too stringent. Cull anything that rates below a four on the Thatcher Hem-Haw Scale.”

“Loading THS parameters. Working.” The dialogue balloons became tiny dots. “Culling completed. Average speech length is now twenty-two words.”

Lexa took a laser pen and pointed it at the cartoon figure that represented candidate Harmon Fox. Fox recited the bare bones version of his stump speech: “If elected, I will raise taxes against the rich, cut military spending in favor of social welfare programs, and plant one million trees.”

Lexa shifted the light beam to candidate Nan Sheffield. “If elected,” Sheffield promised, “I will raise taxes against the rich, cut military spending in favor of social welfare programs, and plant two million trees.”

A bidding war. Lexa tapped Preston Hackett next and was surprised to hear the shortest speech thus far: “If elected, I will raise taxes against the rich and cut military spending in favor of social welfare programs.”

“Nothing about trees?” Lexa asked.

“Candidate Hackett’s sole reference to trees,” the computer replied, “was that he had a plan to reforest the Great Plains. That statement did not survive culling.”