Genius? Ole!

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It’s time corporations took a coffee break.

Look at Christoph Nieman’s cover for the latest issue of The New Yorker magazine. He refers to it as a “Coffee break”. There’s a beautifully crafted commentary drawn on a maze of machines. Machines of all kinds. “The whole idea of a machine is outdated”, Nieman says.

Large corporations are often like that. A maze of a conundrum of machines… systems of all kinds. The ZX81 computer was Nieman’s first. Mid ‘80s. One that could get three lines of code written, and store nothing. That illustration of the ZX81 has memories, stories, dreams. Today, it’s just that. Memories, stories, dreams.

Corporations often forget to move their ZX81s to the memory frames where they belong. As time passes, they often lug along so many of the systems, processes, policies and rulebooks that are at best outdated. They don’t want to let go of them. Just in case.

“I have a romantic attachment to these things—I wanted to anoint them into cartoon heaven.”, says Nieman. Very well said; for that’s what they are. Each system has a time and place. Living beyond its time and place is like a romantic clinging to the past.

It’s time corporations anoint their beautiful, once-upon-a-time-functional systems to corporate heaven, and took a coffee break.

Sherry Turkle, and our misplaced obsession with tech

If you haven’t read Sherry Turkle, you need to stop everything and do that now.

As Arianna Huffington states in her recent interview with Turkle, “her new book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age cements her status as one of our pre-eminent thinkers on the ways technology impacts on our lives.”