Lone Gunman

After a long time of suc­cess­fully man­ag­ing to avoid the blog, I even­tu­ally clicked this past week when I was sent Fake Steve Jobs’ reac­tion to the news that an employee of Fox­conn, one of Apple’s Chi­nese ‘man­u­fac­tur­ing part­ners’, com­mit­ted sui­cide shortly after report­ing a miss­ing iPhone v4 prototype.

We can’t make these prod­ucts in the United States. Nobody could afford to buy them if we did. And, frankly, the qual­ity would be about half what we get out of China. […]

We all know that there’s no fuck­ing way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrig­er­a­tors and TV sets and every­thing else at the prices we’re pay­ing for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and every­thing is done fair and square and every­one gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused—what we’re talk­ing about here is our way of life. Our stan­dard of liv­ing. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because every­thing you own, it’s all done on the backs of mil­lions of poor peo­ple whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imag­ine them, peo­ple who will do any­thing to get a life that is a tiny bit bet­ter than the shitty one they were born into, peo­ple who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives.

You know that, and I know that. Okay? Let’s just be hon­est here.

It reminds me some­what of Jared Diamond’s Col­lapse, specif­i­cally where he dis­cusses how “[China and Japan con­serve their] own forests by export­ing defor­esta­tion to other coun­tries, sev­eral of which (includ­ing Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and Aus­tralia) have already reached or are on the road to cat­a­strophic defor­esta­tion” (empha­sis mine).

Now, are first world coun­tries like the U.S. and those of West­ern Europe not just export­ing poor work envi­ron­ment stan­dards to the sec­ond world coun­tries of Indone­sia, Malaysia and China (as a con­se­quence of large-scale, inex­pen­sive man­u­fac­tur­ing that we no longer can/want to undertake)?

Jonah Lehrer sug­gests that the ideal cre­ative work­place is “a room with blue walls that feels very far away and is filled with ref­er­ences to for­eign coun­tries”. Why would these three con­di­tions be con­ducive to creativity?

Colours can influ­ence how we think (in one exper­i­ment, red back­grounds were found to make par­tic­i­pants more accu­rate, while blue back­grounds drew out creativity).

The link­age of red and accu­racy makes some intu­itive sense, since peo­ple tend to asso­ciate red (stop signs, the color of blood, etc.) with dan­ger and cau­tion. But why would blue make us more cre­ative? […] It turns out moments of cre­ative insight are best achieved when peo­ple are in a relaxed, peace­ful state of mind.

Psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tance (think­ing some­thing is fur­ther away) makes us more likely to solve dif­fi­cult prob­lems cre­atively.

Accord­ing to [con­strual level the­ory (CLT)], psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tance affects the way we men­tally rep­re­sent things, so that dis­tant things are rep­re­sented in a rel­a­tively abstract way while psy­cho­log­i­cally near things seem more con­crete. […] Abstract think­ing makes it eas­ier for peo­ple to form sur­pris­ing con­nec­tions between seem­ingly unre­lated concepts.

Liv­ing abroad increases cre­ativ­ity (pre­vi­ously).

First, liv­ing abroad can allow indi­vid­u­als access to a greater num­ber of novel ideas and con­cepts, which can then act as inputs for the cre­ative process. Sec­ond, liv­ing abroad may allow peo­ple to approach prob­lems from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives. […] Third, expe­ri­ences in for­eign cul­tures can increase the psy­cho­log­i­cal readi­ness to accept and recruit ideas from unfa­mil­iar sources, thus facil­i­tat­ing the processes of uncon­scious idea recombination.

Elab­o­rat­ing on a con­cept from one of my favourite posts writ­ten by Dil­bert cre­ator Scott Adams (career advice: either “become the best at one spe­cific thing” or “become very good (top 25%) at two or more things”), Josh Kauf­man of Per­sonal MBA sug­gests the 12 core human skills that we should strive to become very good at (top 25%) if we wish to suc­ceed.

• Information-Assimilation
• Writ­ing
• Speak­ing
• Math­e­mat­ics
• Decision-Making
• Rap­port
• Conflict-Resolution
• Scenario-Generation
• Plan­ning
• Self-Awareness
• Inter­re­la­tion
• Skill Acqui­si­tion

As Josh says, “take a moment to imag­ine all of the things you’d be able to accom­plish if you improved your skills to the point where you ranked in the top 25% of the human pop­u­la­tion in each of these areas”.

The prob­lem: “pre­sent­ing large amounts of infor­ma­tion in a way that is com­pact, accu­rate, ade­quate for the pur­pose, and easy to understand”.

The solu­tion: Edward Tufte (actu­ally, the solu­tion is “to develop a con­sis­tent approach to the dis­play of graph­ics which enhances its dis­sem­i­na­tion, accu­racy, and ease of com­pre­hen­sion”… but that’s not as catchy).

Yes, it’s an arti­cle out­lin­ing Edward Tufte’s “work on the  use of graph­ics to dis­play quan­ti­ta­tive infor­ma­tion”, as gleaned from his three books: The Visual Dis­play of Quan­ti­ta­tive Infor­ma­tion, Visual Expla­na­tions, and Envi­sion­ing Infor­ma­tion.

Seth Godin offers some advice on cre­at­ing qual­ity, leg­i­ble, graphs.  Short and sweet.

• Don’t let pop­u­lar spread­sheets be in charge of the way you look.
• Tell a story. The only 4 sto­ries permissible:
  • Things are going great, look!
  • Things are a dis­as­ter, help!
  • Noth­ing much is happening.
  • We need to work together to fig­ure out what the data means.
• Fol­low some sim­ple rules:
  • Time on the bot­tom, from left to right
  • Good results go up on the Y axis.
  • Don’t con­nect unre­lated events.
  • Pie charts are spec­tac­u­larly overrated.
• Break some other rules (but not too many)

Seth’s writ­ten pre­vi­ously on this topic, specif­i­cally to pro­claim the three laws of great graphs (one story, no bar charts, move­ment) and then later to defend his posi­tion on bar graphs and pie charts.

As Dan says, “It’s not exactly Tufte, but it cov­ers the basics”.