It’s Only Love – Olivia Mancini

via beatlescompleteonukulele.com

Think I heard so much Fab Four when I was in the womb that before age 10, I knew most of their songs by heart listening to the radio every morning just before the school bus arrives.

Haven't tired of listening since...

It's only love? Yeah, right ...

Failure in Innovation is a Price Worth Paying

In 2007, Mario Capecchi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for this work on mouse genes.  But as Tim Hartford narrates, it required stubbornness to beat a system designed to minimizing losses and maximizing gains.

The US National Institutes of Health is responsible for disbursing grants using government money to fund potentially life-saving research.  It involves huge sums, thankfully and with this comes the NIH's expert-led, results-based, rational evaluation of projects which is a sensible way to produce a steady stream of high-quality, can't-go-wrong scientific research. 

On the other hand, this is a system that was designed to stop Mario Capecchi on his ground-breaking research on mouse genes way back in 1980 that involved applying targeted change to DNA.  Quite simply, at that time, this was a ridiculous idea.

You would have to read the whole article to find out how he beat the system and got it funded resulting in him getting the Nobel prize.  What is interesting though is figuring out how to make it easier for many of the other geniuses who do not have the same defiant character to be stubborn like Mr Capecchi so as not to lose precious scientific or technological advances.

What the NIH system does is sound and speaks of responsibility of using taxpayer's money.  We can all agree to that.  In fact, in these time, it is quite laudible.

Tim writes, "But it is exactly the wrong way to fund lottery-ticket projects that offer a small probability of a revolutionary breakthrough. It is a funding system designed to avoid risks—one that puts more emphasis on forestalling failure than achieving success. Such an attitude to funding is understandable in any organization, especially one funded by taxpayers. But it takes too few risks. It isn't right to expect a Mario Capecchi to risk his career on a life-saving idea because the rest of us don't want to take a chance. "

Comparing the NIH way to a different HMMI program that pushes through with uncertainty and higher probability of failures, researchers found evidence that qualifications being almost similar to between the 2 systems, HMMI researchers were more likely to produce highly cited research articles and win awards.

More from Tim:

"The HHMI researchers also produced more failures; a higher proportion of their research papers were cited by nobody at all. No wonder: The NIH program was designed to avoid failure, while the HHMI program embraced it. And in the quest for truly original research, some failure is inevitable.

Here's the thing about failure in innovation: It's a price worth paying. We don't expect every lottery ticket to pay a prize, but if we want any chance of winning that prize, then we buy a ticket. In the statistical jargon, the pattern of innovative returns is heavily skewed to the upside; that means a lot of small failures and a few gigantic successes. The NIH's more risk-averse approach misses out on many ideas that matter."

So how does this idea sound to you?  

Innovation requires a great amount of courage.  Hopefully, it is something we can supply from our side so that the genius would not have to wrestle much with continuing or not.  Thus, he rewards us with a gift that we can only comprehend once he fails multiple times then succeeds even if just once.

Read complete Slate article here.

Malcolm Gladwell to Steve Job-Wannabes: "Forget Being First"

Steve Jobs sees a mouse at Xerox and begins climb to being top cat.

It has been awhile since we've read something new from Malcolm Gladwell.  Fortunately for us, all it takes is a paid subscription of the May 16 issue of the The New Yorker to read The Creation Myth.   Yes, it begins with story of the mouse, of how a 24 year old Steve Jobs struck lightning after given a product tour of Xerox-Parc, then the top dog in Silicon Valley.  But again, in true Gladwell-ian fashion, he leads us to deconstruct the creative myth and asks us to re-examine not just innovation, but the more importantly, process that goes with it.

We didn't start the fire!

You don't want to be first.  Innovation process requires refinements

Gladwell argues that there is misplaced devotion to being first as if one invention is enough to cascade and create a powerful revolution.  He argues that essentially it takes a bunch of inventions, not just one, to create massive movement and see it come to fruition.  We think of creative innovators as people with original ideas. But Malcolm makes a distinction.  A true innovator may not be the one with a new idea but one that has a new take on an old idea.

Add constraints.  

Xerox had a $300 mouse.  Jobs wanted it sturdier, without clickable buttons and one that would retail for $15.  Now, how hard was that?

Think of constraints not as roadblocks.  What more constraints actually does is force you to be creative and come up with more practical (and more commercial) ideas.  

Invention is great  but innovation makes it work.  Don't be disheartened if somebody beat you to an invention, because to innovate is to persevere and to find angles which may or may not be different to what was the prevailing thought.  This would probably entail a lot of disappointments and even ridicule which you should leave by the wayside for every quality idea that emerges is a product of the volume of the failed ones. 

Related:

PARC responds and adds to the enlightenment.

With Amazon's Public Cloud Reign Intact, Private Cloud Innovators Prepare For War

Private cloud market proves more appealing than playing public cloud runner-up.

HP, Cisco and Brocade all came up with product offerings aimed at carving out a private cloud market niche of their own in the last 7 days. To make things more appealing, all three are throwing networking architecture caveats that will allow enterprises to leverage virtualization, mobility and cloud computing much more flexibly.

Game of (Cloud) Thrones

This doesn't mean that cloud computing on it's own lacks pizzazz. This just confirms the fact that besides the numbers, Amazon rules public cloud and there's not a lot of thing companies can do to surpass it. Maybe a couple more outages, perhaps.

Still, the private cloud market is no small fry as reported recently by Forrester. In fact, it should prove profitable -- yet also not cheap. Companies looking to salvage as much existing infrastructure like data centers would do well to capitalize on these private cloud offers to continue to gain a measure of profitability against the cloud onslaught.

Perhaps, shopping around, they need not lose hope of finding affordable cloud solutions to help transition into a cloud business.

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Cloud computing: More Than Another Amazon Cloud Outage, Fear Complacency

Success hides problems and truth is, Amazon didn't know what hit 'em. Sure there was a man-made error to start with but who would've thought that a self-healing feature actually made things worse. Right out of a movie script if you ask me.

Plan for failure is good reasonable advice but certainly doesn't cover everything and vague for most to truly appreciate and apply. Important to remember that at this stage, there will be trickles about specifics before the fact. But then, this shouldn't stop you with cloud plans.

Be vigilant instead and continue working to get small wins. Much as we know a lot about the cloud, the things we're unaware of - problems that remain out of sight, actually hold the more valuable answers.

To freeze and stop with cloud computing now is the real disaster.

Here are excellent blog posts covering the outage to get you moving in the right cloud direction from hereon:

The Big List of Articles on the Amazon Outage

Learning the right lessons from the Amazon cloud outage

Final Thoughts on the Five-Day AWS Outage | eWeek
Amazon EC2 Outage Explained and Lessons Learned | InfoQ

“Two things companies need to focus on to get a better understanding of their cloud solutions: diversity & control”

Cloud computing around the web : April 25- May 1

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The Good Cloud (And Why It Matters More Than What You Think It Is)

If people were primed to think about height, researchers wondered, might people be more virtuous? Recent study shows it does and might also explain why the cloud in cloud computing would be a perfect metaphor as vehicle for social change.

There's quite a lot of talk nowadays of bunking and debunking the role of IT as change catalyst. On one side, we've got plenty who argue about the power new tech tools particularly social media has afforded us. One can look at how it has affected the concepts of power and authority, from the workplace to the fate of countries in light of what is happening in the Middle East. Then there are those who argue that IT tools are over-hyped, that social revolutions will happen with or without these tools.

And what about the cloud? For those in IT, it has moved past from just a meteorological term to what is undoubtedly, a meme for a sweeping technological phenomenon tied up with things that are "web service delivery-enabled" and even social media. Would any term, other than cloud capture this wave of disruption?

Interesting how a recent research again shows the power of metaphors to shape our thinking particularly the effect of 'heights'. In a series of studies - involving escalators, auditorium stage and film clips of scenes taken from an airplane above the clouds, or through the window of a passenger car, it is quite surprising to note that participants exhibited:

"remarkable consistency, linking height and different prosocial behaviors -- i.e., donations, volunteering, compassion, and cooperation. While we may be inclined to think that our behaviors are the product of comprehensive thought processes, carefully weighing the pros and cons of alternatives, these results clearly show that this is not always the case."

Again we ask, would any other term beside cloud be as highly adopted to describe this form of computing? Common sense says this might be irrelevant - miniscule compared to the importance of understanding how it works and the resulting value.

Yet, it does seem that not only does the cloud represent innovation and disruption but many other good things that has meanings that are more personal - small aspects of our psyche we often take for granted but collectively can be such a force for good.

As this study shows, little things matter and in this case, as in most of life, the effect of metaphors often loom large.

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The Page View

Who doesn't love books?  Who hasn't been touched by an author's remarkable insight, storytelling skills and carefully chosen words to form strings of thought?  And yet, starving artists most of them remain.

And they will remain as such.  No thanks to widespread piracy.

Irony is when 'don't be evil'  seems cut from the same page out of the commercial tactics books.

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