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Watching time, the only true currency // A journal from John B. Roberts

Month: March 2007

  • Monday grabbag

    After fighting allergies during the last two beautiful days in San Francisco, it’s time to clean out the inbox from the last few weeks.

  • Movie: Zodiac

    We went to see Zodiac earlier in the week, and I’m mildly glad we did. Though the saga went on for years, all the killing and concern was before our time here in San Francisco. So, if nothing else, we got to see a digitally-re-created Embarcadero Freeway, the time-lapse construction of the Transamerica Building, and what hasn’t changed (on the outside): the Chronicle Building on 5th and Mission.

    Reminded that this was a David Fincher film, I’m actually less excited now. I thought Fight Club was one of the most impressive (and disturbing) films ever… and a forum for Edward Norton’s best work outside of American History X. Seven, another Fincher film, was simply disturbing, but also a story which made you look, even as you cringed. Zodiac never engaged me, though I never minded watching it.

    Metacritic score of 77 seems a touch high.

  • Book: Market Forces

    Richard K. Morgan‘s third book, Market Forces, steps away from the world of Takeshi Kovacs (Altered Carbon and Broken Angels). Like much notable fiction, Morgan spun a good story here out of a single exploratory thread: what happens to corporate politics in a world which is a state of managed disintegration?

    Morgan’s answer? Sanctioned violence, with defined rules, is the new corporate ladder. You can’t be an unthinking thug, but you need the morals of a crocodile (i.e., none). This story of corporate aggression gone very, very wrong takes place in and around London, which now controls the poor in the “Zones.” This sharpening of the existing divide between rich and poor divides London as if by apartheid, though more directly economic in nature. That’s where the epithet whispered or graffitied in the Zones comes from: Zek-tiv. It took me a while, but that’s short for “executive.”

    The corporates duel each other, with and without authorization, in their cars. Instead of competing bids being fought out over price ranges and other factors, the duelling firms literally duel, in their automobiles. To the death, if/as necessary — and leaving the opponent beaten yet alive is seen as weakness. Delivering the coup de grace often means shooting someone at close range, so the protective cocoon of the car doesn’t remove these individuals from the messy business of “getting ahead.”

    While the author acknowledges a debt to the movie Mad Max, and lists a few anti-globalization volumes in a single page at the end of the book, my immediate comparison was to Car Wars.

    Car Wars was Dungeons & Dragons, with a critical difference. Instead of rolling dice to match wizards and orcs, you found out whether your pickup truck’s armor could keep you from being scorched by a flamethrower in the neighboring Lincoln Town Car. I played this game for couple of years in middle school, before I could drive (fortunately!?). I sold all my remaining material on eBay back in 2000. The only drastic difference between Car Wars and Market Forces? One of the rules in Market Forces is no projectiles fired from a moving car.

    Anyway… the novel ranges far beyond the battles on the highways, but those duels do center the story, viscerally. It’s not a happy tale. I found it more compelling (if disturbing) than Morgan’s first two books. I will proceed on to Woken Furies, another Kovacs novel, and it appears a title Black Man is coming out this year. I’ll be reading.

  • Book: Artful Making

    I forget where I came across Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work, by Rob Austin and Lee Devin. But something about the description led me to put it on my wish list, which led to getting the book for Christmas. (Thanks, Alexis.)

    The book uses analogies to how theater companies create a dynamic performance under set time pressures to describe how managers can lead without defining each step along the way towards the goal. In many ways — as the authors recognize — artful making complements the idea of agile development.

    Agile, as I’ve learned it, has been more about development than full organizational process and thinking. But certainly some of the same lessons apply in a world where work can be (and often is) about delivering an experience, defined by code and language, through nothing but the product of several individual brains.

    The authors emphasize their theater model, even in their language. In a quote that struck me, I’ve changed “director/manager” to director for simplicity:

    A manager cannot necessarily know what workers are doing, cannot tell them what to do, but can often influence their focus. Focus is hard for individuals, as we have seen. It’s even harder for organizations. But through influence on focus, good directors can lead the group to release in productive directions, into territory rich with potential. [p. 93]

    Since my work is a rich combination of my own individual contributions and coordinating the contributions of individuals, Artful Making helped describe the practices in a meaningful way. It doesn’t hurt that the language is not dense with business jargon, and the total volume is relatively light. The authors stay away from repeating themselves too much, which seems to be a standard practice in business books. While it’s a poor website, navigationally, you can read the introduction online for free to get a sense of the ideas.