Noah Brier's Barbarian Blog

The Abstract-Expressionist Era of Management

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 04:02:27 -0500

I really liked this explanation of the changes in the role of manager over the last few decades from the NYTime’s article about brainstorming over the weekend:

Dev Patnaik of Jump has his own answer to the [innovation] why-now question. He contends that advances in technology over the past three decades have gradually forced management to reconceive its role in the corporation, shifting its focus from processing data to something more esoteric. “My dad was a midlevel manager for I.B.M.,” Patnaik explains, “and I remember him in the ‘70s, sitting there with plastic 3M transparencies, by hand, with marker, to make presentations. For years, the good manager was one who had data at their fingertips. What’s our sales in Peoria? ‘It’s actually 47 percent above last year.’ People say, ‘Oh, he’s a good manager.’ ” By the early ‘90s, though, companies like Microsoft and SAP were selling software that digitized this task. The days when a manager at, say, the Gap could earn a bow just for knowing how many sweaters to ship to Seattle were over. “When that happens, what is the role of the manager?” Patnaik asks. “Suddenly it’s about something else. Suddenly it’s about leadership, creativity, vision. Those are the differentiating things, right?” Patnaik draws an analogy to painting, which for centuries was all about rendering reality as accurately as possible, until a new technology ~~- photography -~~ showed up, throwing all those brush-wielding artists into crisis. “Then painters said: ‘Well, wait, you can tell what is but you can’t tell me my impression of what is. Here’s how it looks to me, like Seurat. Or the Cubists who said, ‘You can’t capture what is going on from multiple angles.’ ” Technology forced painters to re-evaluate, which transformed their work. Something similar has happened in corporate America. As Patnaik puts it, “We’re in the abstract-expressionist era of management.”

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Everything is Media

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 04:02:40 -0500

I was telling a few folks about a talk I gave in Singapore last year and decided to just throw the deck up. The audience was a bunch of media people and essentially I went in and told them content doesn’t matter … At some point I’ll write the thing up in essay form, but until then, here’s the deck.

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View more presentations from nbrier.

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Mechanical Turk Twitter

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 04:02:39 -0500

So it turns out Quora, the new question/answer service that keeps popping up, has set up Twitter accounts for most of its popular topics. That’s not necessarily revolutionary, except for the number of feeds they have and the way they’re setting them up. Turns out they’re using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to create new accounts, as there is no way to do it programmatically. This is interesting to me for two reasons: First, I’ve been obsessed with Mechanical Turk for a long time and second, it speaks to what I think the service has eventually become.

I first learned of the service in this 2007 Wired article about the search for Jim Gray, who was lost at sea. “Launched in 2005, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a service that enables employers to hire online workers for short-term tasks that computers don’t do well. If a city government wants to count its utility-pole inventory, for instance, it can pay netsurfers a pittance (in dollars or rupees) to click through thousands of street-level photographs, tagging the poles they see. Spotting Tenacious [Jim Gray’s boat] in a sea of gray seemed like the perfect test of MTurk’s ‘artificial artificial intelligence.’” This was forever etched in my mind as the perfect use of MTurk: Giving people a task that computers couldn’t easily handle.

However, I’ve since read (can’t seem to remember where at the moment), that many are struggling to get useful results out of the service as people come on to game the system and just rush through tasks like looking at a picture and identifying an object. If someone needs to go back and check work the service obviously loses value. Which leads us to what Quora is doing, which is essentially something that is programmatic (setting up new accounts), but isn’t available via Twitter’s API (for very obvious spam reasons). So essentially they’re hiring a bunch of people to go solve CAPTCHAs (which is the one part of the sign up process a computer can’t do). The beauty of this sort of task in the MTurk system is that it’s binary: The account is either set up or it’s not.

I’m not quite sure what my point is with all this other than to say that I think it’s fascinating that the two most interesting uses I’ve heard of for the service are art (where there is no right answer and no need to check work) and tasks like setting up accounts. Hmmm …

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Algorithm Curation

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 04:02:27 -0500

I was struck with the Hunch Gifts.com recommendation engine much better.

The real problem, it seems, is that Hunch’s algorithm is more sophisticated than Gifts.com’s stuff selection. The universe of gifts dominates the software’s ability to find good presents within it. To be a little unfair to Gifts.com, it’s like being taken shopping at Spatula City with the world’s most sophisticated personal shopper. At the end of the day, you still end up with a spatula.

As good as an algorithm is, and Hunch’s seems pretty damn good, it’s ultimately a slave to the data (or in this case gifts) it’s working with. As the author notes later, “If you go into a well-curated place like. say, Gravel and Gold in San Francisco, it would take an anti-miracle to purchase something that wasn’t better and more interesting for my girlfriend than a sake set.” I suspect the answer is somewhere in-between.

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Let's Drink in SF

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 04:02:32 -0500

Hey, I’m around SF for the week and am going to get some folks together for drinks on Thursday night. You should come. Here are the details:

Where: Rickhouse Bar, 246 Kearny St. SF, Ca 94108

When: Thursday, November 18 @ 6:30pm

Come down and have a drink. It will be fun.

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