Posts Tagged Observations

Getting people to work for you

Posted by Utkarsh in Weblog on June 9, 2010

Like I mentioned in the previous post, The Creative Economy, creativity is priceless! At least in terms of money. You can’t pay a person a billion dollars and force him to come up with an alternative to fossil fuel in just one day. It just won’t happen.

Economists and managers worldwide have started tinkering around with ideas. They’re looking for a way to promote creativity in jobs and motivate employees to work better. Motivation theories of the past don’t work for the kind of work needed today. They worked best when people were employed only to do mechanical tasks.

So new theories are being formed. Here are two videos that go into the topic of motivating employees to do their jobs better. Both videos are by Dan Pink. The first one is a TED. The second one goes into more details and the studies being done around the world.

The TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

The illustrated speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

creative, economy, Observations, video

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The creative economy

Posted by Utkarsh in Weblog on June 6, 2010

The Creative Economy

Computers have not been able to generate “creativity”. At least till now. Neither do humans know for sure what “causes” creativity. So you can expect computers to stay that way. So you have an opportunity right there! Something that just cannot be outsourced or delegated to computers.

There’s just a LOT of people getting degrees every year. Some institutes have even been labeled as engineer churning factories. Having knowledge simply doesn’t have the same value it used to have a few decades back. You’ll have to have the knowledge, and actually do something that makes an impact on the lives of others.

Here are a few examples: Facebook has had a pretty BIG impact on the way we use the internet. So has Google’s android phone.

With today’s technology, you have enough resources to create whatever you’d like. You can do things on computers: create movies, design graphics, simulate the human race, whatever you want. And the internet lets you connect with thousands of like minded people almost instantly.

So we have something that is rare, and everyone wants it. Creative output. That’s the currency of the Creative Economy. Oh, by creative I don’t mean just design oriented, or movie making related stuff. Here’s the idea – create something no one has imagined or done yet. We have enough steel plants, clothing companies, and sweetened coloured soda water sellers.

What are your views about this? Was this a pointless argument and knowledge is power supreme? Or is this a part of a paradigm shift?

computer, creative, future, Observations, predict

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Infinite Outliers

Posted by Utkarsh in Weblog on May 23, 2010

You’ve probably heard the tale of success several times. He was determined. His will to keep moving never wavered. He kept doing the smart thing over and over until someone recognized it. The extreme poverty taught him lessons necessary for the cut throat business world (eh?)

In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues how a person’s success isn’t because he’s talented, hardworking, etc. There are other factors as well, like opportunities, your surroundings, and even your ancestors.

Sure, you need to be hardworking and all that good stuff. But there are other critical factors that determine whether you’ll be successful or not. Things that are beyond your control. The book is full of examples. One of them being Bill Gates.

Obviously, he was talented, hardworking, sincere, etc. But the one critical factor that determined his success? He got a “time-shared” computer in 1968, when he was 13 years old. In 1968, the top colleges didn’t have even a punch-card based computer, let alone time-shared. Thus his interest in software took off.

And why did this happen? Because his parents were super rich. They could afford a computer when colleges and universities couldn’t.

So, the author raises a question. Why didn’t the scientists provide computers to all 13 year olds in the world in 1968. We’d have millions of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs today (a meagre 0.1% of the population of a billion). And that would be great. Just imagine products like iPods and Windows 7 coming out every day from each of these companies. Why not start doing this now?

Well, here’s a possible answer.

The Earth can’t support so much. It doesn’t have enough resources (oil, electricity, minerals, et al). Imagine a million Googles running around the world. Would we have enough electricity to power their complexes? Or rather, would these million Googles have enough cement, steel, silicon, etc to construct their complexes?

The society has “caused” such systems to be formed. A system in which people are deliberately discriminated. The lucky ones reach the very top of the pyramid. The others reach varying distances from the apex.

Observations, outliers

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The Raven

Posted by Utkarsh in Weblog on May 4, 2010

Someday I’ll be making films/videos like this one. It was made with a budget under $5,000… which is cheap for all the video capturing, the droids, and special effects done by these people.