04/08/2008
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I finished reading the book, A perfect mess, today. Honestly, I was closing on it about 4 days ago, when there were only about 10 pages to go. But, I kind of put the book off in an effort to, you know, organize some thoughts and ideas and facts in order, which turned out to be doing absolutely nothing! So, in an effort to try it for some more, I have extended the borrowing period today, giving me yet another one week to do absolutely nothing at all about the book. Remember, I already finished reading the book?
Here comes one of the tidiest version of the history of Western fine arts. It’s somewhat lengthy, but it’s not like we’re reading 100 pages-long theses on the Western art tradition. So, try it, and you will be surprised to figure out how one can succinctly put the entire history within a couple of paragraphs, around such irrelevant theme as the mess. So, here it goes:
The West was a bit slower to catch on. When the visual arts blossomed in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a widely embraced guiding principle was to hold up order, in its various forms, as an ideal. In balanced, standardized, uncluttered composition, in the heroic stances or graceful curves of subjects, and in virtuous and biblical themes, artists often strived to reveal order as a form of beauty and vice versa. There were certainly exceptions, especially among Dutch painters such as Vermeer and Rembrandt, who by the mid-seventeenth century were already experimenting with crowded, random-looking placements of figures and objects. But it was during the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century that artists began to pick in earnest at the ordered conventions of painting, by literally blurring images, employing thicker and even lurid brushstrokes, and dropping the Sunday-schoolish lessons in codes of behavior. There is little of the neat and orderly in Delacroix’s dreamlike depictions of lions tearing into horses.
Impressionism widened art’s rift from the orderly, often taking the stuff of everyday peasant life and visually refracting it into bursts of color. Van Gogh took this messy process so far that even today many experts tend to regard his genius as the flip side of his mental disintegration. But madness wasn’t a prerequisite for pushing art into the realm of the disordered. While romanticism and impressionism were assaults on the orderly, expressionism and cubism, which followed in the beginning of the twentieth century, demolished it. After centuries of trying to nudge reality in the direction of perfection, the task of the artist had become in part to mess reality up.
Indeed, one of the greatest challenges to contemporary artists has been to come up with novel, provocative ways of being messy. Dadaism got this endeavor off to a rollicking start around 1915 by self-consciously breaking away from the established order of art in all ways — even by pointedly refusing to be a clearly definable movement of art. That is, to the extent that it was about anything, Dadaism was a disorganized embracing of disorder. That’s not easy to top, mess-wise. But many have tried. The formless blotches of abstract expressionism, the bizarre pairing of images employed by surrealists like Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali, the riotous dribblings of Jasper Johns, the scrap collages of Robert Rauschenberg — all are at least in part attempts to employ some form of disorder, be it clutter, mixture, blur, noise, or convolution, among others. Today there are hundreds of established painters and sculptors who prominently incorporate elements of mess and disorder into their works. Among the messaphilic artists who have been the subject of major shows in recent years: Richard Tuttle, who wrangles bits of wire, plywood, rope, and other round objects into small, abstract works; Jon Kessler, who assembles video monitors, moving contraptions, and blotchy paintings into sprawling kinetic sculptures; Chris Jordan, who photographs industrial refuse such as sawdust piles, bales of recycled metal, and discarded cell phones; and Elizabeth Murray, who paints on a jumble of screwed-together minicanvases. (A perfect mess, pp. 294 — 296)
04/02/2008
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A perfect mess (remember? I am not done with this book — yet) is not a quick guide to business etiquettes or, for that matter, mess or anything else. But, it certainly contains a couple of tips just in case you have to deal with — say — the corporate structure of a Japanese company. Like, in Japan,
1. Employees are seated in a room just like the organization chart shows. That is, the organization chart is not only a tool to show you the power, delegation, authority and final sayers, but it’s essentially a map (for navigating around the company physically) in Japan.
2. During a conference, it is quite common that the senior-most person naps, often snorting and snoozing aloud. If you’re in the situation, don’t get alarmed if you’ve been boring him out or what. According to Abrahamson, “In a society that insists on both group consensus and deep respect for the opinions of superiors, how can group decisions be reached at meetings without either excluding the boss or failing to defer to his opinion? Easy: the boss kicks off the meeting, falls asleep, and wakes up when consensus has been reached.” (p. 217)
Excellent observation, and nice explanation, isn’t it?
04/01/2008
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Chapter 5, mess and organization, of A perfect mess may be one of the most interesting part, if you’re interested in the management or stuff. Take the example of the explanation on modular companies (it’s somewhat long, but it’s certainly worth it):
The basic thinking behind this more freewheeling sort of structure is to focus on new, “spin-up” business units that quickly pop into existence when an opportunity present itself and then compete for resources within the company. If the spin-up thrives, it’s allowed to quickly expand without limit, pulling whatever it needs from other parts of the company, even if doing so hurts the rest of the company. If it doesn’t thrive, it’s quickly put out of its misery. It’s a different way of thinking about a company — not as a seamless whole, but as a fractured conglomeration of transitory, semi-independent units, some leaping into being and growing quickly, others withering away, with employees and funding flowing freely and fast between them. University of Milan researcher Mario Benassi refers to spin-up-friendly companies as “modular” companies, and espouses three basic principles for them: growing in pieces instead of holistically; being as quick to shrink or get rid of logy pieces of the company as to invest in the promising ones; and being prepared to reorient its efforts around any of the pieces. “Modular companies are more focused, and faster,” he says. “They can quickly get rid of activities they’re not interested in anymore.” Traditional companies, by contrast, tend to be so fixated on preserving the same core business that potentially hot new markets are poorly served — if they are served at all. As challenging as coming up with promising new spin-up ideas may be, the hardest part of the process may be to quickly close down those ideas that don’t show signs of panning out. Nijkamp says a company with a spin-up failure rate of 60 percent would be doing quite well, suggesting that the key is to keep a high churn rate. In that light, the spin-up concept starts to look a little less like brillian business planning and a little more like trial and error. (pp. 167 — 8)
Inertia is a terrible force. You would envy if you happen to find a person or company that defies the force over and over again. But, that doesn’t mean mimicking whatever it’s doing, you can defy the force, too. Thinking like this, however, undermines the basic assumption of the science of management: There is a certain way to make money. If somebody succeeds, by all means copy them and emulate their success. The science of management will be happy to help you out.
Very well… Try copying those successful modular companies, like Scientific Generics, “located in Waltham, Massachusetts, and Cambridge, England” (p. 167). And, good luck.
03/29/2008
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Get-organized propaganda is a big business, accounting for multibillion dollars solely in the US. To grasp the size of the business, see chapter 1, the cost of neatness, of A perfect mess. Efficiency zealots might have failed to make the world a better place, or a more efficient one. But, at least they have succeeded in turning it into a big moneymaker.
At the center of the turmoil stand two efficiency gurus: Stephen Covey and David Allen.
Allen wants you to arrange items on the list according to convenience — that is, tasks that you can accomplish together should be listed together. Stephen “Highly Effective Habits” Covey, on the other hand, emphacizes placing the items that are most important to your goals at the top of the list. (A perfect mess, p. 119)
I certainly agree with Eric Abrahamson that there are times when it’s kind of nice being messy: “The truth is, we are all at least a bit of a mess — and all the more interesting for it.” (p. 145)
I wonder, however, if the comparison may be a little bit of oversimplification. Did you notice that Stephen Covey is highly effective toward the corporate market, whereas the GTD thing is extremely popular among programmers. If in doubt, just look around familiar blogs and websites, like lifehacker, 43 Folders and lifehack.
Why? I vaguely infer that the relationship is similar to, to oversimplify the matter, the approaches adopted by Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds respectively. Something like the relationship between top-down and bottom-up thing:
bottom-up implementation /n./
Hackish opposite of the techspeak term `top-down design’. It is now received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying sequences of action in increasing detail until you get to actual code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to build things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of primitive operations and then knitting them together. (from The New Hacker’s Dictionary)
And, the most interesting question of all: Why are we so obsessed with the effeciency/productivity/organization stuff? Maybe it’s because we see flaws all around us, but if you accept the method, then those flaws magically turn into a trivial, technical digression rather than the character flaw, wrong training and education, stuipd choice or even evolutionarily failed experiment… In other words, we can assure ourselves that there’s nothing we can’t do anything about. Not a big deal. And, probably we’re paying huge amount of money for the condolence we get from the advices.
03/27/2008
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If you saw the movie, Beowulf, you probably would remember one or two passing comments on Jesus expelling dragons and all other monsters from the earth — literally or rhetorically, from storylines. It is a small surprise to know that regarding the poem, Beowulf, scholars discuss on its similarity with the Bible and the character with Jesus.
Probably it was true, that Christianity had destroyed all myths and dirty tricks of rulers. Probably that’s what religion is all about. Or, even that’s what civilization is all about. In the novel, Snowcrash, all hackers’ must-read novel, Neal Stephenson identifies software with religious rules, like Sumerian me and rules in Deuteronomy.
In the Snow Crash interpretation of Sumerian mythology, the masses were controlled by means of verbal rules called me. The characters of Hiro and Lagos compare me to small pieces of software that could be interpreted by humans. The me contained information for specific tasks such as baking bread; they were stored in a temple and their distribution was handled by a high priest, referred to as the en. Within this context, Enki was an en who had the ability to write new me, and is described as the primordial hacker. Also, the deuteronomists are supposed to have had an en of their own, and that kabbalistic sorcerers known as the Baalei Shem (masters of the name) could control the primordial tongue. (Wikipedia on Snow Crash)
For your information, I think that even Christian zealots hate reading Deuteronomy. And, Numbers. Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, authors of A perfect mess, say that Leviticus and Numbers and much of the Old Testament are, “in fact, taken up with the sort of listy, prescriptive and proscriptive material that might have found its way into an ancient version of Organization for Dummies.“ (p. 58)
Chapter 3 of the book, The history of mess, is probably the most interesting part of the book. It details how various human efforts — including religion, science and management to name but a few — can be viewed as an incarnation of tireless efforts of humanity for neat, organized state.
The book says earlier that if we do the cost-benefit analysis carefully, the cost of maintainig order probably exceeds its benefit. That should be true, in a world governed by the rule of entropy. And, they stop short of saying that human brain is wired to prefer tidiness, that it is biased toward organization, probably for biological and evolutionary reasons. Is it another version of the lizard brain that some of our habits persist despite that they ceased to be effective anymore?
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