How to castrate a bull (not what you think)

It's not in my nature to spend a lot of time reading management books. I do, however, have a real interest in books that deal with the decision making (or frequently decision avoidance) process in organizations. Issues in decision making are at the confluence of many disciplines, which fascinates me. Furthermore, my professional career has been devoted to software tools supporting decision management, an incredibly valuable domain that is still in its infancy.

In one of my recent Amazon shopping sprees, I ended up putting in my basket "How to Castrate a Bull: Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business", a great book written by Dave Hitz, who is one of the Silicon Valley's recent legends, one of the co-founders of NetApp.

If you are an entrepreneur, creating a venture or scaling up a company, you will find this book inspiring, and you will draw many lessons from Dave Hitz's experiences.
A few that resonated very strongly with me:
- the value of dissent in a growing organization, how it needs to be cultivated and not managed-out
- multiple takes on what how to make effective decisions in a perpetual risk-all start-up, how managing the consequences of hard and early choices is as important as making the choices
- what makes the culture of a company, the pressures that make it evolve, and how to manage its transitions without losing identity and the momentum it creates

And it is a fun read. Which for me has been a break after a few weeks reading Spartan technical books.

Recommended.

Something different - Lapointe and Perec

Not being able to sleep much has its small rewards... such as having time to spend in seemingly futile brain teasers, mind games and other "exercises" that, maybe because of the general exhaustion, I find quite amusing.

I was listening to a few old recordings by Boby Lapointe, a 50s-60s French singer, master of clever alliterations and plays on words. For some reason the lyrics of "Ta Katie t'a quitte" reminded me that I had read somewhere that he had introduced a bi-bi-binary system that would make manipulating large numbers a pleasure.
His system was basicaly an hexadecimal system (base 16 = base 2 ^ 2 ^ 2 ... no wonder Lapointe would focus on base 16 given his love for alliterations...), for which he defined a complete symbol set and corresponding pronunciation.
With this system, something like "119" + "137" = "256" would become "bibi" + "koka" = "hahoho" (thanks Google).
Much better...

Following hyperlinks reading that stuff, I stumbled upon references to other language games. In particular the famous (in the French speaking world) book written by Perec (La Disparition) that not only fully avoids using the letter "e" in a 300+ pages work, but also is largely self referential, discussing as part of its plot the disappearance of said letter [http://www.amazon.fr/Disparition-Georges-Perec/dp/207071523X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227261348&sr=8-3].
This is a brilliant technical achievement: in French, around 85% of the words that you would ever write will have the letter "e" in it (with or without accentuation).
Furthermore, the result is a book you would read: an interesting plot, constructed characters, etc. I read it many years ago, after a teacher gave me a copy of the book after challenging me to write a formal essay with the same challenge (I could not go beyond three pages in one hour, and barely articulated a very limited argumentation).
Georges Perec loved these formal challenges, very similar in nature to what Boby Lapointe did in songs.

The same teacher mentioned earlier also introduced me to the French poetry from the Baroque period - a lot of the same alliterations and plays on words. I still have in my brain somewhere the first verses of Pierre de Marbeuf's "La mer et l'amour ont l'amer pour partage".

In any case, I love this stuff.

I would love to find the equivalent kind of work in English. Recommendations?

Lem

I had never been a SciFi person in the past - but over the past two-three years a person who is very close to me have me discover it, and I have since been reading some of the best work there with my eldest son.

I just finished Solaris and Fiasco by S. Lem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Lem). These are not as much SciFi as they are philosophical essays. Impressive work, and very good reading, highly recommended.
I am not surprised at all Lem did not see eye to eye with his peers (http://www.lem.pl/cyberiadinfo/english/faq/faq.htm#sfwa)...

Of course, it is ironic that the person who initiated me to this hates Solaris... and possibly would hate Fiasco. But that goes to prove that you can embrace and extend ;)!

Context, context...

As I was writing the previous post, it struck me that I was wondering about precisely what Borges covers in "Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote".

One message Borges delivers: the meaning of the literary text is more a function of the context (historical, cultural, etc) than it is of the text itself. Which means each reader creates the meaning of what he/she reads starting from what the author wrote - each one of us, in a personal way.
Another message he delivers: the meaning of the literary text is more a function of the process involved in creating it than in the result.
What I find more attractive than the messages (I do not want to want into discussions that involve the Barthes and the Baudrillards of the world... too far from what I can grasp) is the way Borges uses his immense wit to convey them in a tiny fraction of what these so-called scientists do, while provoking in the reader the pleasure that comes with stumbling on unexpected beautiful gems.

Enjoy (text in spanish):

"
Es una revelación cotejar el Don Quijote de Menard con el de Cervantes. Éste, por ejemplo, escribió (Don Quijote, primera parte, noveno capítulo):

• ... la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, émula del tiempo, depósito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir.

Redactada en el siglo diecisiete, redactada por el “ingenio lego” Cervantes, esa enumeración es un mero elogio retórico de la historia. Menard, en cambio, escribe:

• ... la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, émula del tiempo, depósito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir.

La historia, madre de la verdad; la idea es asombrosa. Menard, contemporáneo de William James, no define la historia como una indagación de la realidad sino como su origen. La verdad histórica, para él, no es lo que sucedió; es lo que juzgamos que sucedió. Las cláusulas finales —ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir— son descaradamente pragmáticas.
También es vívido el contraste de los estilos. El estilo arcaizante de Menard —extranjero al fin— adolece de alguna afectación. No así el del precursor, que maneja con desenfado el español corriente de su época.
"

A now something totally different...

I don't know what to make of this: [http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/].

I have genuine respect and admiration for Orwell. Through his life, involvement and writings, Orwell represents a amalgam of many of those people on the left of the political spectrum who are genuinely touched by injustice, unfairness, have a realistic understanding of the world and are not swayed by rhetoric, and hold their friends to the same standards as their "enemies".
I am part of a diaspora of sorts caused by political turmoil. I know how simple things are on one hand (how can you not fight against regimes that kill and torture?) and how complicated they can be on the other hand (do I have the right to bring my whole family into exile because of my ideals? Is it right for me to risk the welfare of my kids because of my belief system?). But while it's true that the real choices are significantly less obvious than idealists would like, there are some clear universal principles that are worth standing up for.
What I read from Orwell, what I read about him (read Hitchens [http://www.amazon.com/Why-Orwell-Matters-Christopher-Hitchens/dp/0465030491]and [http://www.amazon.com/Unacknowledged-Legislation-Writers-Public-Sphere/dp/1859843832/ref=sr_1_29?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218157821&sr=1-29]), increases my admiration for the writer.
His lucidity and his ability to convey reality clearly dazzles me, and I am not easily impressed. Read his essay on how the language is perverted for political purposes in everyday discourse: [http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm].

But my respect and admiration are not blind - what about Orwell's delivery of a list of crypto-communists to the Foreign Office towards the end of his life? Well, as I wrote earlier, things are never as simple as they seem. This whole story has been hotly debated, and I am in no way qualified to argue but am ready to believe he did draft such a letter. That list reflects essentially his fierce anti-communism, his realistic choice of one evil versus another (I am not necessarily agreeing, I am stating a fact), and his public statements. While the list did name names, its purposes was to identify cultural agents that could not be trusted with anti-communism propaganda. Still a vile list, and it does not make me like Orwell-the-man better. But participating to those activities is the kind of decisions many brilliant and otherwise admirable people end up taking - something that I would really like to read more about. Borges is another such case.

Back to the blog that will open. According to what I understand, it's an interesting exercise: an attempt to blog through a few years using material from Orwell's journal in chronological order, starting 8/9/1939. This means the blog will go on from now to 2012.

I am glad we will get to know more about the writings - the raw writings. I understand some of what will be published is not-yet-published material.
And I wonder whether the new format, the blog, will somehow alter the message - make it resonate more, or less. I am certain the observations Orwell makes remain relevant - but will the blog medium used to deliver them change how they are received?

In any case, a very interesting project. Check it out!