Ahh, to some people the dropping knowledge project sounds like a great idea, right? Get 112 smart people around a table to answer the world’s deepest questions. Some good will come out of this, you might be thinking. Sorry, this will bring about some lunacy, but I doubt anything deep will come out of it. Why?
Because it’s the world’s ultimate committee! Now you can watch — in real time — why great companies slow down their innovation rate when joined in with a larger company.
Committees suck the soul out of all great ideas. This one included.
Thanks Hugh Macleod for your ascerbic commentary on this and for linking me to the world’s ultimate committee. Sigh. We should hand every participant here a copy of the Mythical Man Month. Adding more smart people to the committee doesn’t make it smarter.
Oh, and happy labor day to those of you inside the United States. Maryam is celebrating by making me labor for her. Translation: no more blogging today. 🙂
Update: you can make your own talking Web page over at SitePal. Long Zheng tried it out on his “I’m Windows Vista page.” Fun, but not something I think I’d use.
Finally, Rocketboom has a tugboat challenge from New York City.
Have a good day, even if your wife is asking you to do a bunch of chores.
Scobleizer 
Dropping Knowledge? I remember dropping courses. But WTF is “dropping knowledge”?
In how many contexts is ‘dropping’ a good thing? Bird-dropping? (not if you’re a statue or own a car, maybe if you’re an ecosystem).
Dropping Trou? (possibly, depending on the dropper and the context).
Dropping the ball? (not so much)
Name Dropping? (many do it. more cringe at it)
Dropping share price? (for bears, maybe; for option holders, ouch)
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Dropping Knowledge? I remember dropping courses. But WTF is “dropping knowledge”?
In how many contexts is ‘dropping’ a good thing? Bird-dropping? (not if you’re a statue or own a car, maybe if you’re an ecosystem).
Dropping Trou? (possibly, depending on the dropper and the context).
Dropping the ball? (not so much)
Name Dropping? (many do it. more cringe at it)
Dropping share price? (for bears, maybe; for option holders, ouch)
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Yeah, you’re totally right. Committee thinking and “consensus building” are what are killing great places like Microsoft these days. Plus, look at the participants of their event…Cindy Sheehan? You’re kidding me. A political activist who only knows how to shout slogans. Puts the whole event in a sour political light…certainly not intellectual, oh and especially when you see the UN is involved. Ugh all around.
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Yeah, you’re totally right. Committee thinking and “consensus building” are what are killing great places like Microsoft these days. Plus, look at the participants of their event…Cindy Sheehan? You’re kidding me. A political activist who only knows how to shout slogans. Puts the whole event in a sour political light…certainly not intellectual, oh and especially when you see the UN is involved. Ugh all around.
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Have a good day, even if your wife is asking you to do a bunch of chores.
Yours too? I’m looking forward to going back to work tomorrow so I can rest. 🙂
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Have a good day, even if your wife is asking you to do a bunch of chores.
Yours too? I’m looking forward to going back to work tomorrow so I can rest. 🙂
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Let’s see,
You write about all the conferences that you go to and enjoy (that’s great and you should), but somehow this one deserves your derision?
Geek conferences good, world affairs type conferences bad.
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Let’s see,
You write about all the conferences that you go to and enjoy (that’s great and you should), but somehow this one deserves your derision?
Geek conferences good, world affairs type conferences bad.
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Also Labour day in Canada today
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Also Labour day in Canada today
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How dare you… stole the snake oil from the sleazy MBA blowhards who I somehow ended up working with at my last web 2.0 company.
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How dare you… stole the snake oil from the sleazy MBA blowhards who I somehow ended up working with at my last web 2.0 company.
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If one good question/answer pair comes out of this then it will probably be worth it. But they are off to a bad start from the early questions I saw, which fell into a couple of patterns:
(1) Why is everyones life so miserable these days (have to work so hard, etc)?
(2) How do we avoid screwing up the environment?
What a poor start. The submitors of these heavyweight questions were either in their late teens or early twenties. Let us hope that the experts are at least old enough to remember a past when people worked much harder than they do today (on average) and when factories belching black smoke were the norm.
We’ve all (well, some of us) seen much smaller groups of experts spin their wheels for hours over just one such question without any of them suggesting that the questions themselves are flawed. I have a feeling this one will be no different.
But there is always hope.
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If one good question/answer pair comes out of this then it will probably be worth it. But they are off to a bad start from the early questions I saw, which fell into a couple of patterns:
(1) Why is everyones life so miserable these days (have to work so hard, etc)?
(2) How do we avoid screwing up the environment?
What a poor start. The submitors of these heavyweight questions were either in their late teens or early twenties. Let us hope that the experts are at least old enough to remember a past when people worked much harder than they do today (on average) and when factories belching black smoke were the norm.
We’ve all (well, some of us) seen much smaller groups of experts spin their wheels for hours over just one such question without any of them suggesting that the questions themselves are flawed. I have a feeling this one will be no different.
But there is always hope.
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Elitist to the core, isn’t it? Even the name, which implies we should all be grateful for whatever morsels of knowledge they bestow upon us. Yuck.
Real knowledge also comes from Fred who works the assembly line in Detroit, or a Bantu hunter, or a Muslim mother with five kids making ends meet, or a 90 year old Chinese grandfather with much knowledge to impart. They know things the “elites” are clueless about.
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Elitist to the core, isn’t it? Even the name, which implies we should all be grateful for whatever morsels of knowledge they bestow upon us. Yuck.
Real knowledge also comes from Fred who works the assembly line in Detroit, or a Bantu hunter, or a Muslim mother with five kids making ends meet, or a 90 year old Chinese grandfather with much knowledge to impart. They know things the “elites” are clueless about.
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Good points. I’d suggest a far more appropriate approach was taken by the Copenhagen Consensus, which prioritized global challenges and suggested how to work toward the solution of huge and pressing problems like Malaria and AIDS.
Anybody who pays attention *already knows* what the big problems are. We can solve these for less than the cost of a year of war.
Let’s solve them first and talk about them later.
http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com
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Good points. I’d suggest a far more appropriate approach was taken by the Copenhagen Consensus, which prioritized global challenges and suggested how to work toward the solution of huge and pressing problems like Malaria and AIDS.
Anybody who pays attention *already knows* what the big problems are. We can solve these for less than the cost of a year of war.
Let’s solve them first and talk about them later.
http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com
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Death by Committee, consensus is merely everyone agreeing in totality, what no one agrees individually.
And it all gets bogged down in ‘teams’, starts out with bam and flash, but then only 20% kick-up heels, later on the 20% see the 80% getting the benefit and credits, and they quit or drag it out, and then it all cracked-oil grinds to a halt.
Committee’s are hub-based, take out the hub’s, it all hits fireball-freefall gravity. Just insert any instant-coffee socialistic system or biz fad of the moment (Process Re-Engineering, Six Sigma, TQM, LO, MBO, Peak Performance, Chaos, Excellence) here.
Gosh, Scoble thinking straight, hat trick of good posts, and his boss John, quite well-versed in Economics…
Road to Damascus indeed. 🙂 Yah, gonna hafta pick up a Cranky Badge from JCD soon enough. 😉
PS – btw, I reco this book HIGHLY. http://future-hype.com/
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Death by Committee, consensus is merely everyone agreeing in totality, what no one agrees individually.
And it all gets bogged down in ‘teams’, starts out with bam and flash, but then only 20% kick-up heels, later on the 20% see the 80% getting the benefit and credits, and they quit or drag it out, and then it all cracked-oil grinds to a halt.
Committee’s are hub-based, take out the hub’s, it all hits fireball-freefall gravity. Just insert any instant-coffee socialistic system or biz fad of the moment (Process Re-Engineering, Six Sigma, TQM, LO, MBO, Peak Performance, Chaos, Excellence) here.
Gosh, Scoble thinking straight, hat trick of good posts, and his boss John, quite well-versed in Economics…
Road to Damascus indeed. 🙂 Yah, gonna hafta pick up a Cranky Badge from JCD soon enough. 😉
PS – btw, I reco this book HIGHLY. http://future-hype.com/
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Ideas like SitePal must be the new idea. Late last week I learned about InPerson by Rovion (http://www.rovion.com/), which uses a video instead of an avatar.
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Ideas like SitePal must be the new idea. Late last week I learned about InPerson by Rovion (http://www.rovion.com/), which uses a video instead of an avatar.
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Ever hear of the “Wisdom of Crowds”? (Surowiecki) There’s a lot of truth to that thought in general. However, for this, I agree it’s kind of foolish.
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Ever hear of the “Wisdom of Crowds”? (Surowiecki) There’s a lot of truth to that thought in general. However, for this, I agree it’s kind of foolish.
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Copy editing note: “acerbic,” not “ascerbic”.
Dropping knowledge indeed. Like birds dropping knowledge on your newly washed car.
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Copy editing note: “acerbic,” not “ascerbic”.
Dropping knowledge indeed. Like birds dropping knowledge on your newly washed car.
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Damn I wish I could come up with this kind of crap. The organisers must be making a mint – they even have Merc giving them chauffeur-driven cars to “ride around Berlin in” while they pontificate on how to save the environment.
Oh, hold on…
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Damn I wish I could come up with this kind of crap. The organisers must be making a mint – they even have Merc giving them chauffeur-driven cars to “ride around Berlin in” while they pontificate on how to save the environment.
Oh, hold on…
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I don’t think dropping knowledge was that bad. I read a cool article about it on Deutsche Welle — it’s critical, but also shows that this kind of action has a potential. “If revolution is indeed “the sex of politics” — as American critic H.L. Mencken once called it — Berlin became on Saturday the capital of a new kind of revolution: glamorous, digital and corporate-funded.” 🙂
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2169613,00.html
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I don’t think dropping knowledge was that bad. I read a cool article about it on Deutsche Welle — it’s critical, but also shows that this kind of action has a potential. “If revolution is indeed “the sex of politics” — as American critic H.L. Mencken once called it — Berlin became on Saturday the capital of a new kind of revolution: glamorous, digital and corporate-funded.” 🙂
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2169613,00.html
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