Overview: Digital Transformation

"At the moment, it seems to be fashionable for venture capitalists and tech journalists to say “I love the blockchain, just not bitcoin.” There are a few things that people that make this claim completely ignore: The blockchain does not work without bitcoin" - The Blockchain is Important and so is Bitcoin — Medium

"the majority of participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in a room with their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes.... in one experiment, 64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began self-administering electric shocks..." How our mobile-phone-driven flight away from idletime and interiority damages our psychology, physical…

"ADEPT ... Autonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry ... taps blockchains to provide the backbone of the system... IBM and Samsung chose three protocols – BitTorrent (file sharing), Ethereum (smart contracts) and TeleHash (peer-to-peer messaging) – to underpin ADEPT... blockchains deployed within the ADEPT system would serve as a ledger of…

How industrial-era management structures hinder work today: "The industrial era approach to getting something done is to first create an organization ... metaphorically still a picture of walls defining who is inside and who is outside a particular box.... This way of thinking was acceptable in repetitive work ... As a result, organizational des…

Interesting ruminations on the limits of traditional knowledge mgt techniques. "the everyday experiences we have do not exist in a meaningful way in any documents. What has happened can seldom be understood from the Excel sheets explaining the results of our actions or the Word-documents explaining what we did or what we should have done." - Wh…

" “[Currency] is not the killer app, it’s just the first app.”... “The potential to greatly reduce or even eliminate the need for litigation and courts ... smart contracts ... in principle removes the potential for parties to have a dispute..."

"My hunch is that The Blockchain will be to banking, law and accountancy as The Internet was to media, commerce and advertising. It will lower costs, disintermediate many layers of business and reduce friction. As we know, one person’s friction is another person’s revenue." Good tour of similarities and differences between today's early-Bitcoun a…

"the blockchain is all about replacing the servers that power today’s online world with computing power and storage that we all share.... Every network requires ... a “single source of truth” — the authority that says, “this is real,”... we have depended on servers run by corporations and governments... The blockchain turns the entire network in…

"In a previous post, I outlined the benefits of Five Whys... Today, I want to talk about the mechanics of Five Whys in greater detail." - Lessons Learned: How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis

"I have come to believe that this technique should be used for all kinds of defects ... we use the defect as an opportunity to find out what's wrong with our process, and make a small adjustment. By continuously adjusting, we eventually build up a robust series of defenses that prevent problems from happening.... breaking down the "time/quality/c…

"The Five Whys technique was developed and fine-tuned within the Toyota Motor Corporation as a critical component of its problem-solving training... "by repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear." ... dig into each problem that arose until they found the root cause. "Observe the production floor w…

"Making sure everyone know's what's going on isn't just courteous—it's essential to a smoothly functioning business." To be frank this is really Project Management 101, but it's worth repeating as the number of EU comms projects managed without any of these tools never ceases to amaze. - 7 Ways To Finally Get Your Team On The Same Page | Fast Co…

A timely and interesting article... "Gossip is an effective way of achieving these goals in an unhealthy social system. People engage in gossip when they lack trust or efficacy. We become consumers of gossip when we don’t trust formal channels... We become purveyors of it when we feel we can’t raise sensitive issues more directly... The problem w…

Begins with a beautiful rant on technology's tyranny in individual and collective life: "Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability... Digital expectations of alacrity and ters…

"If you're interested in learning more about the technical operation of bitcoin, or if you're building the next great bitcoin killer­app or business, you will find this book essential reading." Based on the ToC, covers blockchains and the rest. Readable online for free.

"So for the uninitiated who have not yet grasped what Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are, you ought to catch up. This is not something that should be ignored and there is a vast array of resources that explain the concept. In this post I’ll try to make sense of the Block Chain Protocol and the emerging ecosystem that is growing on it." - Bloc…

"The most striking research results in AI came from the field of deep learning, which involves using crude simulated neurons to process data... often focuses on images... our instincts about privacy must change now that machines can decipher images." - Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence from 2014 | MIT Technology Review

"Machine learning can help by finding those hidden patterns you probably didn’t even know existed, so you can tune your marketing campaigns accordingly.... DataPop relies on semantic search and natural-language processing to infer connections between what consumers enter into the search window and what they really want, and then on machine learn…

"Kimono Labs is a data-scraping tool that offers a simple way to create an API for any website in just minutes." - 9 Startups That Made Life Better In 2014 - ReadWrite

Excellent intro to "Contextual intelligence: the ability to understand the limits of our knowledge and to adapt that knowledge to an environment different from the one in which it was developed. ... The most difficult work is often the “soft” work of adjusting mental models, learning to differentiate between universal principles and their specifi…

"Blockstream is working on technology ... to secure other kinds of assets, such as contracts or ownership of stock.... building on top of it using what are known as “sidechains.”... Blockstream has developed a way to safely move bitcoins back and forth between the blockchain and sidechains in order to add new functionality to Bitcoin transactions…

"research into network science has begun to shed light on how synchronization happens and how we can make our enterprises function more effectively.... Great overview. Of particular interest to I-Labs: - "research helps explain why it is so hard for enterprises to adapt to new challenges... leaders need to treat new initiatives not as mere organi…

"With 95% confidence we conclude that an increase in ranking “the intranet search helps me find the information I need” results in a higher valuation of the respondents intranet as a whole. The impact for the same question related to menus was statistically insignificant." Not quite the deathknell for information architects and resellers of stic…

GE's FastWorks is "a framework for entrepreneurs, building on “The Lean Startup” ... an approach to developing new products that came out of “Agile” software development... It’s now being tried in manufacturing since GE and others believe that rapid learning cycles with customers will reduce the risk that you build something you can’t sell." Star…

"Frugal innovation is more than a strategy. It denotes a new frame of mind: one that sees resource constraints not as a liability but as an opportunity — and one that favors agility over efficiency. Frugal organizations ... create good-quality solutions that deliver the greatest value to customers at the lowest cost... we have gleaned five valuab…

"a smart contract is a contract that enforces itself. ... a computer program that can be run on hardware which automatically executes those conditions." Good intro to what can - and can't - happen once you have bitcoins. - DAOs Are Not Scary, Part 1: Self-Enforcing Contracts And Factum Law – Bitcoin Magazine

An interview with Jim Bankoff, who just raised another raised $46.5 million in funding for Vox Media ("the fastest growing Web brand of 2014"), caught my eye.

Does what it says on the box.

"The core innovation of Bitcoin is not going away, and it is deeper than currency. What has been introduced to the world is a method to create decentralised peer-validated time-stamped ledgers. That is a fancy way of saying it is a method for bypassing the use of centralised officials in recording stuff. Such officials are pervasive in society..…

"even if we still need human beings to perform certain specialized tasks, can we remove the management from the equation instead?... ... encode the mission statement into code... an inviolable contract that generates revenue, pays people to perform some function, and finds hardware for itself to run on, all without any need for top-down human di…