An experiment in light expression

The Economist has an interested piece on Mao and management. In the same spirit as Machiavelli, Chanakya and others, this article describes Mao as a management role model of sorts. It outlines four strategies from Mao’s turbulent political lifetime for executives who are finding it difficult to get their message across and be considered ’successful’ managers.

1. Have a powerful, mendacious slogan (”Serve the people”) - how many modern corporations can claim to have a 3 word slogan?

2. Do ruthless media manipulation - A clear message, hammered relentlessly often overrides inconvenient truths
3. Sacrifice your friends and colleagues - the objective evaluation of performance

4. Substitute activity for achievement - Do more things (more emails, project plans, visions, groups and committees….) and bail out before the results of these random activities start manifesting

After months of seeing it on my bookshelf, I finally finished reading Steve Denning’s compelling book Squirrels Inc. tonight on the use of stories to transform organizations and communicate, share and put into action core values for the future. If you have two hours to spare, I would recommend reading this book especially if you are in the business of leading people in any capacity.

Unlike other rather simplistic (even if effective) books like “Who moved my &@#$&* cheese”, Squirrels Inc. uses the story of an imaginary company (Squirrels Inc. which is in the business of storing nuts for squirrels) and its motley group of executives (Diana, the up and coming exec who has a new future business model to sell, Mocha the expert in diffusing rumors, the bartender in the neighboring bar who is sort of an anchor pointing the story…) to illustrate the different kinds of stories that you could use in different contexts (the springboard story, the story to quell rumors, the story for getting people to work together, stories for values, actions, visions of the future…) while telling the rather interesting and often tumultuous story (at one point the central protagonist gets chucked out of Squirrels Inc) of the squirrels themselves.

My major takeaway from this book: Stories are a very powerful medium of expressing, sharing, and getting resonance on concepts and ways of being and ways of doing things. I should seed my office and team space with interesting story books and of course more comic book art!

I recently caught an iTunes video of Jonathan Harris’s work including the fascinating ‘We Feel Fine‘, ‘Yahoo Time Capsule‘ and ‘Universe’ projects.

Harris’s work reminded me of an old (paraphrased here) Terence Mckenna quote “If aliens were to look down upon Earth from their ships, they would not see biology the way we see it - they would see the evolution of a gene swarm of concepts and ideas and language using human biology as the reduction valve”.
Harris’s work describes a new mythology - the mythology of the post modern relativistic age of the 21st century. For every kingdom, merchant mafias, gate keeper and courtesan of the ancient age, there is a corporate monopoly, Private Equity cult, legal counsel, and minor celebrity surviving through their 15 minutes of infamy. Harris’s Universe is not made of hydrogen and carbon, but of the bubbling cauldron of thoughts, events, concepts, and meta-verses.

I am getting to be a big fan of Slideshare - the online service which allows you to upload, share, tag, and download Powerpoint presentations using a very fast, engaging and usable interface.

What particularly excites me about the Slideshare interface is that it allows me to do very rapid, hyperlinked, keyword based trend analysis and learning - concepts and patterns and connections and trends form rapidly in my head.

In the desktop Powerpoint experience, I find my attention wandering because the plain Powerpoint UI backdrop doesn’t quite engage me - and the full screen Powerpoint is too attention demanding - you can only focus on it and nothing else on the desktop.
On the contrary, with Slideshare, I find my attention to be comfortably divided between the presentation at hand and the surrounding UI. I think the presentation mode is very compelling and fast, and it also seems to bring out the best in the authors of these presentations.

Perhaps, after years of seeing drab, soulless, templatized, over-worded corporate Powerpoints, most of the authors of good presentations on Slideshare have used this new medium to express their creativity. Also the community does a good job of generating interesting tags for the Powerpoint, which means that while viewing a certain presentation, you always have a nice ambient view of related presentations — always a boon for a hyperlinked-learning junkie like me.
Kudos to Rashmi Sinha and Jon Boutelle and their team on their continue brilliance and design touches within Slideshare.