Shift left only matters if the system on the right is doing a bad job
Also, Vermeer, Bruce Sterling's talking style, silencing the inner monolog.
Just some catch-up on links and wastebook’ing since the speedy episode last time.
Wastebook
Seeing a Vermeer in person is much different than printed in a book, or even a poster. It has that luster to it. Not all of the pictures, some are fuzzy more like a Rembrandt. But others, like The Wine Glass, practically glow.
“When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, things change in ways that are unimaginable.” Bruce Sterling.
“I’m from a tech-obsessed subculture, so it’s my habit to look for scientific and industrial innovations and assume they’re gonna alter the world’s situation.” Ibid.
“He hasn’t lost the media war, he’s just sort of lost the thread of what he wants to do.” Bruce Sterling on Jeff Bezos.
As you can tell, I’ve consumed some Bruce Sterling of late. His style still intrigues me. For presentations, he sort of just gives little lectures, putting a relevant visual up sometimes. He’s always offering some quirky, often cynical/unmasking analysis of a situation - it’s usually the “idk, this seems like overhyped junk” perspective. The biggest put down he can give (I think) is that something is just boring. It can seem like he’s flippant about everything, but he actually seems to care deeply and morally about important things, like climate change. And then, here, you can see that he’s just impossible to interview. You need a lot of editing if you want the interview to seem conventional, maybe even polite. He’s asking himself his own questions, and then commenting on his own answers. It’s like a fun uncle, really. I fondly remember one of his talks from SXSW - I didn’t take enough time to find the recording - where he walks up to the podium, puts down a six pack of Shiner bottles and is all like, “hey, welcome to Austin. I bought some local beer here” pops one open, takes a sip, and is like, “yeah, it’s kind of a big party conference, so here’s some Shiner. I used to have an after party, but the place got too big…” and so forth. I mean, you know, he’s the kind of person that you can’t figure out, try to say “this is what Sterling is doing,” instead you have to just talk about your reaction to him, how he acts as a catalyst for whatever you’re up to.
I’m trying to think of a time when my inner voices were helpful. “Inner voices” being a less poetic, but less insane sound version of “voice in my head”; or you can call it the inner monolog, or whatever. So far, the only time has been when one of them tells me to stop talking and listening to the those voices. Maybe I could train myself to have no voices in my head.
“A moment that changed me: I began wearing skirts with pockets big enough to hold a wine bottle” Here.
“I’ve had it with knowing about people and their awfulness… What do you want me to do, you know?” Here. And: The meatspace API is throwing an error.
Meanwhile, in the world of ArtAF
Writing this passage must have been so much fun! It’s just like Nova Express eye-noise, except relatively coherent.
Dali reminisced in The Secret Life: “Contrary to my hopes we spoke little, but devoured each other with out eyes. Freud knew nothing about me except my painting. which he admired, but suddenly I had the whim of trying to appear in his eyes as a kind of dandy of ‘universal intellectualism.’ I learned later that the effect I produced was exactly the opposite.” There is, to be sure, something deeply unsettling about Dali’s description of this scopic exchange, and here the metaphor of edibility, transmitted through the anecdote about the eating of snails in Sens - in other words, the catalytic moment leading up to Dalis fourth, successful attempt to meet Freud- assumes special relevance. Upon entering Freud’s yard, Dali notices a bicycle with a red rubber hot-water bottle hanging from the saddle on the back of which a snail is attached. The anecdote connects the two moments in the narrative framing the meeting with Freud, but it also serves a symbolic function. Aside from its folkloric, gastronomic, and cultural associations for Dali, the snail is a bisexual animal whose somewhat amorphous form is protected by an exoskeleton. a kind of armor of sorts, that can only be pierced by a needle. The snail, in this sense, might be thought of as an apt metaphor for the ego, its defensive shield protecting a self that is constantly embattled. But the bisexual status of the animal lends itself to another interpretation, inasmuch as Dali’s reference to the red water bottle elicits a moment prior to both the formation of self and the constitution of sexual identity, when the child suckles at its mother’s breast in a state of jubilant unity with the primordial object of desire.
I found a picture of this page in some photos I took in Vienna last fall. I can only assume the book was about Freud and Dali? Or just Dali?
Shared resources need to be easier and faster to use than doing it on your own
…otherwise, people will seek to “shift left.”
From Expertise And The Shared Services Problem: A Conversation With Don Reinertsen:
people keep coming to me saying that in order to get the desired outcome for their program, they need direct control over everybody who affects this outcome. They say, “I need to have purchasing on my team; I need to have manufacturing engineering on my team; I need to have quality assurance on my team.”
So, I ask them, “Well, why do you need them?” They say, “Because their work is important, and it affects my ability to get a good outcome.” Then I say, “Do you need to have a payroll function on your team?” They would say “No, why would I need that?” I say, “Well, isn’t payroll important? Don’t people like to receive their checks on time?” And they say, “Yeah, it’s important, but payroll does their job — they do what they’re supposed to do.”
So I say, “At the end of the day, you do not need a dozen extra skill sets for you to manage on your team. You need to make those shared resources responsive to what you really need. When you work with shared resources that are responsive and meeting your expectations, and your real measure of service is being satisfied, then you have no desire for the extra headache of managing another group of specialists. You need to focus on how you measure the performance of your shared resources and how to enable people to achieve this performance. Fix that problem, and you’re not going to be interested in putting them on your team.”
Relative to your interests
The future, soon: what I learned from Bing’s AI - Using Bing AI Chat for some consulting basics: “The SWOT Align with many conversations in the field…there are some gaps but is great start.”
The Art of Diving - Amazing stuff, especially for someone my age who spent a lot of time in 1980s used book stores. Also, more good selections from the same person here.
CFO-think on all the tech lay-offs. I think the theory is, this “rule of 40” thing is the asshole. Is it a good rule?
Logoff
See y’all next time!