From Alliance to Dalliance

One to explore later: during the 90s, there was much excitement and hype about the idea of keeping a business to its core competencies — small and lean — and developing strong alliances with other businesses to flesh out the offering. In the post-stratified, networked world of today, surely businesses should be thinking past such rigidity! From our learnings with social network structures, there is much strength in weak ties — relationships which aren’t constantly reinforced, or core to our activities, but which can be called on dynamically as and when required to achieve some specific goal. Out with Alliance! …

(Not Necessarily) Talking ’Bout a Revolution

[adapted from an email exchange with Axel at SMLXL] It’s funny how bottom-up, transformative organisational change is usually portrayed as a gung-ho, networked culture youth thing… When I worked for (as it then was) Yamatake-Honeywell in Tokyo, we used to go out to places like the Nissan car factories, where the kaizen quality control systems were entirely bottom up — individual guys on the line had almost complete freedom to find ways of improving process, and the organisation had very well organised systems and communities in the corporate hierarchy to make sure that those tweaks and improvements got picked up, …

Degraded Audio and Its Promotion

Compressed digital formats (mp3 and its ilk) are expedient: they save storage space and download time. But there’s something rather disingenuous about MusicMatch — the software accompanying iPod on the Windows platform — misrepresenting 128kbps mp3 as ‘cd quality’! There is a certain aesthetic to degraded digital audio — classic 12-bit samplers sell at inflated prices on eBay for their ‘authentic hip hop sound’ — but the post-Napster generation is being sold a lie by the music industry about the quality of the music they’re being offered by the ‘legal online music revolution’. It’s certainly quicker to download a compressed …