A Warrior’s search for Synchronicity

I inherited an SLR minolta camera when I was 13. It should have been as old as me (1990). The photometer of the camera was not working and there was no feedback loop for the camera to tell me when to adjust the aperture or the shutter speed to get the intended result. So till I saw the developed photograph I had no way of knowing how my calculations would turn out. As a result I developed an acute awareness of what impact, factors like light, atmospheric conditions (heat or cold) would make on the photograph and how I could arrive at the desired result by adjusting aperture or shutterspeed.

With the advent of the digital cameras all these skills became worthless. You could see the final result the photograph along with the changes you made on the settings from the LCD display. This change enabled all unskilled to become as good as the skilled. What I miss is that acute awareness or oneness I uses to feel with my surroundings and the forecasts I made about the impact, the change I could influence by changing shutterspeed or aperture and the sheer triumph I felt when the forecast and the change I intend came true. The upside is all these skills became democratised and ordinary. Before the advent of excel mathematical geniuses and chart makers were highly regarded for their skills. Excel democratised mathematics and visual display of information a skill that can be acquired by all and sundry.
Personal loss and wonder of a selected group became collective gain and mundane utility of the masses.

A story of triumph, feels like a class war victory. Is it really so?

Who benefits when people use excel, who benefits when people use Canon or Nikon digital SLR camera? Who benefits when people use photosharing sites like flickr or facebook or picasa or Twitter

That question is discussed in Life – How the World became a corporation and how to take it back. What I want to discuss is the loss of depth, the sense of wonder, the sense of oneness that happened as a result of the demorcatisation of the skillset. And when generations go by you lose knowledge even the existence of such skill sets and pass on to a different mindset altogether. That is discussed in ‘Avatar’ by James Cameroon.

When I look at Florence Nightingale’s charts which was used to tell the Monarch that soldiers were dying more of unhygienic living conditions than from wounds from war, I can pitch the skill of Hans Rosling, the celebrity who statistician who does magic with charts on TED stages in the light it belongs. (Nightingale did not have any software or excel)

Similar depth can be experienced when you watch Anupam Mishra’s TED talk

Tara Hunt has done an excellent job at explaining the power of online relationships, need for building reputation online , need for helping out , need for helping people to help out, need for serving a higher purpose and how all these are transforming the world we live in. She also predicts how all this will become part of the job despcriptions of future. There are a lot of stories on Twitter, Craiglist, Flickr, Threadless – all amazing stories of extraordinary avhievemnts of ordinary people

Whuffie infact relates to having a network of people or community to whom we add value to and that value taking a natural turn inorder to serve back. It is realising that it is not about you and it is all about them. In Parallel streams I wrote about 2 streams of people, one going for the beeline and the other trying to milk the network to get things done. In Tara’s world both these merges into one and teaches me, if the beeline does not go through people’s hearts it will not go far.

The idea that stuck to my mind from “In search of excellence” was the abundance of data and intelligent use of software, where you could change few variables and get an accurate estimate, triumphed over long term business relationships to establish new standards of efficiency and decision making. Tom Peters illustrated this through the story of an electric appliances company, if I remember right. Much water has gone down the lane, the data driven decisionmaking is not new anymore and is pretty much taken for granted. Now most of the customers are looking for the human emotional connection anyone has to offer, over and above the correct solutions. Much of the decision making gets weighed towards the emotional connection rather than a rational choice. Very often the question people ask themselves is, “is this the kind of partner I want to be with when I face trouble?”

A very similar phenomenon happened in the world of marketing. When broadcast media was new, there was a strong relevance for ads and the premium you paid for eyeballs. Now the broadcast media is loathed and the Ads despised, because of the overuse of marketing messages. People respond better to genuine human voices and recommendations – this is where amazon and facebook thrives

Each idea has a life of its own. It mostly has more than one life. Each organisation or individual adopts the idea at a different time period and the life of the idea is greatly influenced by the nature of that entity. For example the idea mentioned at the beginning of this post entered my mind 4 years ago and now it has transformed into something new. The same idea may have ruled through many of the organisations for a much longer period