Monthly Archive for October, 2008

Time with the Chief Scientist

Published on 31 October, 2008 in Science and Technology. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Professor Peter Andrews is Queensland’s Chief Scientist. In late September of 2006, he reminded a few of us that biotechnology will be the key enabling technology for the coming generation… it will impact our food, our health and our energy supply. It was great to see John Kapaleris, Damian Hines and Ross Barnard there too – people that have had a big impact on my thinking in technology and innovation management. For example, check out the subject that I did with Damian (that John is now running), Biotech Venture Management…

Prof Andrews pointed out that we’re likely to run into a severe skills shortage for scientists in the years ahead. Even now we’re trying to import talent from China and India, but as those economies develop there will be ever fewer of their best and brightest wanting to leave home. And to cultivate more scientists, we need not only to have more primary school teachers actually feel confident teaching maths and science, more students taking maths and science to senior, and more science graduates, we need more people feeling passionate about the scientific mindset. A brief profile appears on the Brisbane Institute page and in State Development.

Interestingly enough (at least for me), being a scientist has far more in common with being an artist than being in business. It is largely a mindset with enabling mental operations… here are a few differences that a study of Polymathy and Creativity found.

  • Artists and Scientists have diverse intellectual interests, while Business-types are intellectually narrow
  • Artists and Scientists have elaborate fantasies, while Business-types are more grounded and reality focused
  • Artists and Scientists are sensorily responsive and motivated to express their experiences, while Business-types tend to be disinterested in sensuality

Compared with Artists, Scientists were more willing to work in structured environments and less introspective about sex (why the ‘artist’ persona can be so seductive?). However, when compared across 50 personality dimensions, it was found that there were only two where Artists and Scientists differed, and 15 where Artists and Scientists differed (statistically significantly) from Business-types.

Another interesting implication from the study was that arts education is necessary for scientific innovation…

(It is ironic that soon after Prof. Andrews’ presentation, Queensland Schools’ Scientific Assistants were on strike because the Education Department regards them as interchangable with administration officers. These are the very people who setup the experiments to teach our young people the value and excitement of science! Additionally, there is no role for Technology assistants within these schools – at my old high school, the guys in charge of the computers are paid for by the P&C rather than by the Department. I would have thought that being serious about having a ‘Smart State’ would demand that serious attention be given to the lead indicators and contributing factors, rather than just lamenting that things aren’t better. But maybe it’s just me…)

Finally, I was able to watch a debate at Customs House (hosted by The Brisbane Institute), regarding the privatisation of public education.  I greatly enjoyed this, although I thought that the arguments against could have offered something more than laughing at the suggestion and saying “we just couldn’t”. Perhaps the more advanced arguments raised in other parts of the world could be instructive, such as those presented at FastCompany here. To me, the challenge lies in defining the educational outcomes that would be the key performance indicators used for assessing performance of the providers – though this is a problem today as much as it would be then…

Daniel Smith

Also: Thanks to West for finding a few photos of me… almost the same shots here and here with John Kapeleris at the presentation from the Chief Scientist, Peter Andrews, a few weeks ago, here barely visible during Adrian di Marco’s presentation last May, and here over drinks with that same West afterwards. It’s great to have seen YNOT continue to kick goals – great work, guys!

Just the little things

Published on 30 October, 2008 in High Performance and Innovation. Closed Tags: , , .

Sometimes you realise that it is the little things that can make a huge difference.

The photo that I uploaded here wasn’t terribly different from any photo that I’ve uploaded previously. Yet this time it has sparked a bunch of comments – whereas my ‘average’ photo on Facebook struggles to even get a caption or tagged correctly. And it wasn’t the first comment that ‘did’ it either, but rather it was the stream of comments that compounded together to create momentum.

Momentum like that is difficult to predict, a combination, I think, of there being so much random variation (aka “chance”) involved and there being so many semi-opaque variables that even if you did know all the things that you would need to know to figure out the answer, it would be too much of a pain for you to figure it out anyway.

It is like a trend – there are just so many things that contribute to a trend’s success that it is immensely difficult to predict. Why did JR Rawlings become a billion-dollar miracle while David Eddings’ or Robert Jordan’s endless volumes of high-quality fantasy remain merely popular?

Rather like intimate relationships at times…

Of course, there are externalities involved at times and conspiracy theorists have been making other books out of this for years (a la The Da Vinci Code), yet the gap between the .00001% that makes a fortune and significantly impacts the lives of millions of people, and being “just another” seems so grotesquely small.

It doesn’t seem to be “skill” (eg Ayn Rand).

It doesn’t seem to be “originality” (eg The Secret).

However, it is a form of genius. Perhaps the most important lesson that I can take from this is to pursue what you personally feel passionate about… firstly because that is what is most likely to yield an outcome that is sufficiently unique and able to adequately connect to the hearts of those that you strive to impact that it gives you a chance of “winning”, but more importantly still, because even if you don’t “win”, you will still be doing what you love.

Daniel Smith

Eagles and Chickens

Published on 29 October, 2008 in Personal Growth. Closed Tags: , , , .

I was always afraid of abseiling. When I was in school, many of my friends would do hard-core climbing and canyoning etc, but I was so terrified that I’d freeze up as I went over the edge.

A few years ago I was indoor rockclimbing. It was awesome fun! But on the last climb of the day I was just out of reach of the top. It didn’t matter how I stretched, I was still about six inches from the ‘top.

So I jumped.
And I touched the bar.
And then I enjoyed the bouncing on the dynamic safety rope.
In that moment, I knew that the safety eqipment ‘worked’, and I was never afraid again.

If you never let go of the need for approval, suspend your fear of disapproval and live your own life rather than the life that others want you to live, you’ll always be trapped. And if that’s your path, that’s fine… But you can do anything.

Sometimes it seems like you’re like an eagle who has grown up surrounded by chickens… And when you’ve looked up and seen the eagles flying overhead, you’ve sensed that you could be like them, until you’ve listened to the chickens around you telling you that you can’t so much that you almost believe them. You may not yet know to where you are flying or how high you can fly, but you are an eagle.

You always were an eagle, and you always will be.
Of course, maybe we’re all eagles and just acting like chickens… forgetting our true nature.

I was recently given the metaphor of the carrot, the egg and the coffee bean. They’re all very common foods that start out hard. When put in hot water, look at the difference. The carrot becomes soft. The egg becomes hard. And the coffee bean releases itself and changes the environment in which it is placed. When faced with adversity, do I go soft, do I grow hardened, or do I release my true essence and in doing so change the world… transform the challenge into purpose?

Daniel Smith

Powerful concepts

Published on 28 October, 2008 in High Performance. Closed Tags: , , .

Sometimes we come across ideas that change the way we see the world. Reading The Fountainhead as a barely-teenager shifted my model of the world radically by presenting values and attitudes that I didn’t again question for many years.

There were a few key books while I was in business school that had a similar impact – like Strategy Maps and Foundations of Corporate Success. One paradigm that hasn’t made it to much of a book format but that did leave a big impact was the work of Jason Potts and his work in Micro-Meso-Macro economics… so here is a link to the article that he used as a working paper for the subject that I did with him. It is pretty academic in expression, but I really liked the concept.

To me, this structure applies very neatly to business development, personal development and even social development… I would have loved to have used the framework when writing my paper on Objectivism while studying Political Economy.

It also helps make sense of how the rate of technology diffusion has such a seemingly disproportionate impact on development – it is still amazing to me that it takes about 47 years for world-changing inventions to diffuse .

Daniel Smith

Making it Matter

Published on 27 October, 2008 in High Performance. Closed Tags: , , , .

I’m fascinated by high performance. I have been ever since high school. It’s what led me into psychology, and then catapulted me into business (with Effective Learning Solutions), it’s what sent me back to uni to do an MBA… and a chain of adventures with The Honour Society , ShirtsandSuits.com , Free Real Estate … and is the foundation for my pursuit of The Genius Project, which focuses upon the nature of high performance.

But the funny thing that I’m finding as I study more and more extreme achievers is that they’re not ‘in the game’ for the usual reasons. If you look at creative genius, you’ll find that they’re far more likely to be motivated by mastery over the domain than wealth, recognition or any other extrinsic reward. It’s not that they set out to achieve the honour and the acclaim and the wealth; those are just the things that follow when you go about your task with commitment, discipline and tenacity.

It was great to find Seth making the same observation about business people… how the greatest businesses often spring from some revolutionary freak who thinks that his or her idea is cool enough… not that it will make them a millionare, but that it is just a really cool idea!

I wonder… what if you had something that was really cool?

Daniel Smith

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