IdeaFestival

Lead with verse: the business principles of poetry

Slated to speak at the Wharton Leadership Conference in Philadelphia on June 7, Dana Gioia (pronounced  Joy-a) talked with Knowledge@Wharton about the connection between business and poetry saying that he "came into business as a poet" rather than arriving at an appreciation of the form during his business career at General Foods.

Asked in the online interview how "business managers might benefit from poetry," Gioia doesn't hesitate:

I think that if you come into the business, with an arts background, you have a tremendously difficult time initially. This is because it's a very different world, it looks at problems differently and by and large, they don't necessarily respect your background.

For that reason, I did not let anyone I worked with know that I was a poet. This is because, let me ask you a question, if you had a poet working for you, wouldn't you check his or her addition? So privately I went through a very difficult time. That being said, as you rise in business, as you get out of the lower level staff jobs and the quantitative analysis, and you get into the higher level of problems, I felt that I had an enormous advantage over my colleagues because I had a background in the imagination, in language and in literature.

The learning process works in the other direction too. Reflecting on what business taught him now that he is the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, he says

...I think the thing that I've learned from business, which most artists never learn, is... the ability to create win/win partnerships with other agencies and with individuals - so that by doing a worthy project everybody comes out ahead.

The complete interview is also available via iTunes or straight xml. 

Wayne

Food fight

What are economics of food production? That's the central question behind New Grub Street, a Columbia Journalism Review essay from Christopher Shea that attempts to sort through the claims and counter-claims from the food (writer) wars. It begins:

Time was, a war of words between a food writer and an organic-foods retailer would have attracted the interest of maybe seven people in your local food co-op–a bit of chatter over the brown-rice bin and everyone would move on. Those of us in a Safeway with our Perdue roasters and our broccoli avec a hint of pesticide would not have known that an argument took place. But the recent exchanges between Michael Pollan, author of the 2006 bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, and John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, are, if not squarely in the mainstream, awfully close to it.

Far from another polemic (hey, I've got a stake in the game), Shea seeks a middle ground between the rhetorical extremes. I find it refreshing.

Wayne

Seeing in parallel

Asked to contribute some words to Wired on "what we need from science," author and futurist David Brin suggests that it unleash problem solving. It's a point on which he elaborates in a recent Discover interview about the future, portions of which are reproduced here.

...some trends exceeded anticipation. I did not expect the "age of amateurs" to progress so far, so fast. Fifty million hobbyists are demanding that professionals, from doctors to scientists to movie directors, accept a new world where expertise is not limited to the licensed.

And answering the question, "what's the biggest change you see coming?" Brin continues along that line:

I believe that the real breakthrough is connected to something I referred to in the Transparent Society, and that's the distribution of power. For example, low-cost screening methods will lead to personalized diagnostic therapy. People are talking about inexpensive methods to screen for millions of biomolecules. Try to imagine what it will be like when cyberneticists do to their room-sized laboratories what others did to the room-size computers of the past. And of course, it's going to pose a great many problems to us. Because when pimple-faced teenage hackers can't mess up just your Web site but they can also synthesize any known or unknown organic compound and then go to work at a fast-food joint, are you gonna eat fast food under those circumstances? The fundamental thing that's always made a difference in every revolution is the distribution of power. That's my main theme - it's not about the fast-paced changes in how small or big or penetrating we can see individually. What's very fast-paced is the spreading of seeing in parallel. It's happening in biochemistry. It's happening in astronomy. It's happening in almost every source of perception.

My emphasis. There is much, much more in the Discover interview. It and other articles on such subjects as the search for time, souls and the weighty subject of "nothing" should be online in the next two or three weeks, about the time the print version of the magazine appears.

Wayne 

IF Podcast: John Barrow, Infinity

Photo: Geoff Oliver Bugbee, www.geoffbugbee.com

The latest IF podcast has been released. See the front page of the blog for it, or just take this feed to make sure you don't miss it and future audiocasts.

Cambridge cosmologist and mathematical physicist John Barrow, who spoke at the last ideaFestival, is featured. My live take on that October session is here.

Wayne

Illustrating the future

Guest blogging at Bruno Giussani's web log, Lunch over IP, futurist Michele Bowman briefly describes the FringeHog Tags the World project, an effort to illustrate the future with your images.

Set your sights on the people, places and activities that hint at what the future might look like in 10, 20 or even 50 years -- we're looking for images of objects, activities, media, and people that give you that "aha" feeling, like the future is whispering in your ear. Than snap a photo and email it, along with a title, brief description and the location the picture was taken to [email protected]. Photos will be accepted now through June 15, 2007. Photographs will be geo-tagged, credited and displayed on the FringeHog Tags the World map; select photos and contributors will be featured in a book.

I'd be remiss if I didn't also point out that Bruno has written up a recent Zurich speech on innovation by Steve Wozniak, who will be appearing at the ideaFestival this September.

Wayne

An explanation for everything will have to wait

Cosmic Variance suggests that news articles and opinion to the contrary, the String Wars haven't ended. String theory still has something to offer, though it might take a while for all or parts of it to be vindicated.

Ultimately, of course, string theory must make contact with data in order to remain relevant and interesting. But profound ideas don’t come with expiration dates; that contact might come next year, ten years from now, or a century from now. In the meantime, the relative importance of string theory within the high-energy physics community is bound to take a hit, as results from the Large Hadron Collider promise to bring us firmly beyond the Standard Model and present theorists with new experimental puzzles to solve. A resurgent interest in more phenomenological particle physics is already easy to discern in hiring patterns and graduate-student interests.

Bonus: under "Daily Linkage" on the front page of IFblog is a link to some science philosophizing at Cosmic Variance on the subject of "what I believe but can't prove." It's pretty good take on the 2005 Annual Edge Question.

Wayne

Wikipedia: Standard Model, Large Hadron Collider, Particle Physics, Phenomenology

Parthenogenesis

By utter coincidence, I happened to be at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha early last week close to the filming of an ABC news piece about an event that had never before been documented among sharks. The zoo had just concluded an exhaustive six year study, confirming that a Hammerhead Shark, captured as an immature female and having never come into contact with males, had given birth to a pup. It was releasing the results of the study during my brief visit.

Since the pup inherited only the mother's genetic material, it doesn't augur well for the species should asexual reproduction become more common. And as it turns out, other species at the aquarium had also reproduced asexually, raising the issue of whether confinement had somehow triggered the event.

The New York Times has this story on the development.

Wayne

Wikipedia: parthenogenesis

Rocking out with the Psalms

The May 16 issue of USA Today ran an interesting piece, "Three were 'called' to reporting on religion" on three religion writers and their respective books, now out.

Though I haven't read the books, I'll probably have a look because they deal honestly with a particular question of mine.

Robert Abernethy, who hosts the PBS show Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, has published a collection of essays from the show in his new book, "The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World."

Cathleen Falsani, whose book, "The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People," came out in paperback recently, interviews public personalities such as Bono about their spiritual lives. The article describes her as discovering "her calling at age 12 when she heard U2 frontman Bono rocking out with lyrics drawn from the Psalms."

I can relate.

Krista Tippett heard a similar call, returning to belief, to faith, when she found that it "could accommodate her questions and that 'belovedness' - the quality of loving and being loved - undergirds all that matters." Her new book, "Speaking of Faith," is drawn from the radio show of the same name.

Like, Abernethy and Falsani, she's known for her thoughtful treatment of religious faith, rejecting guests who simply declaim about religion in favor of people who honestly grapple with its fantastic claims. Anglican priest and physicist Sir John Polkinghorne is said to be one of her most memorable interviews. The exchange, which I called "Polkinghorne: beauty and belief" here, is one of my favorites as well, lodged semi-permanently on the front page along with other favorite posts.

Belief lives on a continuum of rationality, informing everything from the next steps - literally and figuratively - to devotion to religious claims that cannot be proven. But I also think that belief is a major component of disciplines ranging from behavioral economics, to game theory to theoretical physics. The very idea of possibility in many disciplines emerges from those mental "what if?" scenarios, those moments when possible futures are held in front of the imagination for inspection. One cannot prove what will come, only engage it. And yes, given my personal history, belief and its crazier cousin, religious belief, forms the subtext for (the many) questions I have on this blog, and in particular this one, which the three authors above surely touch on again and again in their books:

What does it mean to know?

Wayne

Branding randomness

And I was worried that I wouldn't bring you anything original today.

If you have a need for true randomness - not the fake, mamby-pamby, computer-generated kind, why not use the natural phenomenon of space? According to Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log, the British-based company, Yuzoz, wants to do just that, using celestial data to apply the industrial cosmic-strength randomness of space to meet random needs on Earth.

Why, you ask?

[Jeff Manber, who developed the idea] envisions having Yuzoz-branded randomness incorporated into computer games (which relies quite a bit on random numbers), offered through cell phones for picking lottery numbers, plugged into computer-generated musical compositions and engineered into architectural lighting schemes.

'Yuzoz is in part an artistic project,' Manber said. 'You either get it or you don't. If you would enjoy walking into a cathedral and having the lighting patterns change based on space, you get it.'

I can see the marketing campaign now. "Is it random? Is it Yuzoz?"

If I can just harness this energy to generate IF posts, I'll never bore again.

Wayne

Thinker it through

Via John Maeda's announcement that he was blogging the Illinois Institute of Technology's Design Strategy Conference, I found "ThinkeringSpaces," which is a cool name and a better cause. The MacArthur-funded ThinkeringSpaces are

interactive environments that encourage school age children to tinker with things, both physical and virtual, reflect upon what they discover, and elaborate their ideas in ways they can share with others.

Having watched my two young sons grow up interacting with computer games, I'm an optimist about information technology and gaming. I've undoubtedly set the bar pretty low, but they'll both be a bit brighter than their dad in part because they've had access to the instant feedback from computer gaming. For heaven's sake, I surreptitiously watched my 5 year old playing CHESS on the home iMac last week. And no, I never showed him how.

Anyway, at the top of the Design Strategy conference blog right right now is a great quote from Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child initiative on design strategy.

Creativity comes from differences. The best design strategy for almost anything is to explore differences.

Hundreds of years from now, I believe historians will look back on the convergence of design and strategy in virtual environments as a monumental time in human history.

Thinker it through.

Wayne