Tag Archives: Open Access

Wikileaks and Apple – why does Apple not leak anymore?

steve jobs by Collin Allen

Wikileaks: traditional liberalism with balls?
[Via Boing Boing]

The mainstream media likes to suggest, with a nudge and a wink and abuse of the word “cyber,” that Wikileaks represents a radical ideological position. But if there’s a moral crusade to be found, maybe it’s rooted in a tradition closer to home: classical Western liberal-democratic principles.

In The New Republic, Noam Scheiber takes for granted that Wikileaks is here to stay, with relentless pressure on big business and big government that permanently hampers their ability to prevent leaks. This will result in smaller, more humane organizations.

I have no idea what size organization is optimal for preventing leaks, but, presumably, it should be small enough to avoid wide-scale alienation, which clearly excludes big bureaucracies. Ideally, you’d want to stay small enough to preserve a sense of community, so that people’s ties to one another and the leadership act as a powerful check against leaking.

To make this point, Scheiber reminds us that Wikileaks’ stated aim–making organizations operate more ethically–is a mainstream one: “It’s easier for honest CEOs to run an honest business, if the dishonest businesses are more affected negatively by leaks than honest businesses,” he quotes Julian Assange.

Scheiber’s argument seems to be that Wikileaks’ disclosures could have more subtle and far-reaching effects on organizations than it expects.

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Apple demonstrates today the sort of company Scheiber discusses. Maybe it is because Jobs hates leaks.

Scheiber’s article is one that should be read by everyone. It is a very important one in its implications. Wikileaks, and the ideas behind it, may alter how businesses work and adapt. It touches on some of the ideas of David Brin in The Transparent Society – the same technologies that permit the powerful to spy on us can, and should, be used to spy on the powerful.

Scheiber postulates, and I agree, that the inability of large companies to stem leaks may result in the greater proliferation of corporate ‘cells – it is easier to control the flow in smaller groups without stemming the tide totally. Inefficiencies in small groups can be overcome when needed. In larger groups, it can be deadly.

Luckily, we also have the ability today for smaller organizations to leverage the abilities of others to succeed. The small biotech company I was VP, Research at had perhaps 3 of us who were working in the lab. But we did not need more because we could have other companies do the sequencing for us – no need for a core facility with tens of people. We could have other companies synthesize DNA for us – no need for a core facility with tens of people. We were able to accomplish great work with a company with 10-20 fold fewer people than it would have taken just 10 years earlier.

So, there will be business pressures to become smaller and more adaptive as well as information pressures.

That is why I think Apple is the first of its kind – a truly large company that has somehow maintained the abilty for small company adaptability. It acts small, has research abilities that are far beyond the modest number of people it has doing R&D. It is able to run rings consistently around other companies. It is one of the largest companies by capital value on the planet yet it acts like a startup.

I don’t know all the details of why but we all know that Jobs is the reason. But I think part of the way this new sort of company came about was because of Jobs’ reaction to leaks.

Apple used to leak like a sieve with whole websites devoted to writing about them. Jobs pretty much stopped that, so much so that a lost iPhone became a cause celebré.

One would have expected this sort of iron control on information leaks would have harmed Apple. Most organizations respond to by clamping down on information flow but, and this is especially true of large ones, this is like giving themselves a lobotomy. Information flow slows, making it very hard to make good decisions and adapt properly to changing conditions.

That is what Assange claims he wants to do with Wikileaks – cause the old dinosaurs to react in ways that result in their own downfall.

Well, Apple shut down leaks and actually became a better and stronger company. I’d love to know the details but I expect that Jobs actually implemented some of what Scheiber discusses. Break the groups down into more manageable units and use pressures to make leaking a violation of social mores.

Of course, this is a two way street and these same social mores can push back on the company to be more ethical, etc. Even the smallest group is open to leaks when some feel the company is acting unethically. It all becomes a system of controls and feedbacks that does not harm the information flow needed to adapt.

I believe that when it is all said and done, we will discover that the same things that ended most of Apple’s leaks also led to a large amount of their success. That somehow Jobs’ response actually did not stifle creativity but enhanced it.

If we can replicate this elsewhere, then things like Wikileaks would not need to be feared by most organizations. In fact, Wikileaks would become irrelevant for the vast majority of us.

The conversation I moderated

On September 14, I moderated a discussion between Ash Awad, Vice President of Energy & Facility Services at McKinstry; and Daniel Friedman, Dean of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington.

The topic was A Conversation About Sustainable Design and the Seattle Channel videotaped it. It was a fantastic evening and I had a wonderful time sitting between two great speakers.

Being forced to deal with change

ethernet cable by doortoriver

Feature: There is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly
[Via Ars Technica]

Twenty years ago, the fastest Internet backbone links were 1.5Mbps. Today we argue whether that’s a fast enough minimum to connect home users. In 1993, 1.3 million machines were connected to the Internet. By this past summer, that number had risen to 769 million— and this only counts systems that have DNS names. The notion of a computer that is not connected to the Internet is patently absurd these days.

But all of this rapid progress is going to slow in the next few years. The Internet will soon be sailing in very rough seas, as it’s about to run out of addresses, needing to be gutted and reconfigured for continued growth in the second half of the 2010s and beyond. Originally, the idea was that this upgrade would happen quietly in the background, but over the past few years, it has become clear that the change from the current Internet Protocol version 4, which is quickly running out of addresses, to the new version 6 will be quite a messy affair.

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While somewhat technological babble, the problems seen with running out of Internet addresses are very similar to ones we will continue to face over the coming years – having to make massive changes at the last moment because we did not do a good job thinking about the transition.

Like climate change, redoing the Internet’s addressing protocol will happen whether we want it or are prepared for it. And like climate change, we have wasted 20 years dithering.

And the transition may end up costing money, as older devices have to be replaced because they no longer work properly.

So, the next few years might be a nice demonstration of just how adaptive and resilient many organizations are. And not isolated organizations but almost all of them. One failure along the route can remove access for many.

We will be forced into a new regime where we have no experience and no real way to test possible solutions. Instead of one organization dropped in the deep end to sink or swim, imagine 50 all tied together, so if one goes down, the others may be dragged down also.

I figure we will muddle through like we have but a lot of productivity may be lost for some time as we make the transition that everyone knew we were going to have to make 20 years ago.

It does not give much hope that we will be any different with other complex problems facing us unless we change the way we do things.

Dealing with failure successfully

failure by jurvetson

What Google Could Learn From Pixar
[Via Daring Fireball]

Peter Sims:

Despite an unbroken string of 11 blockbuster films, Catmull regularly says, “Success hides problems.” It’s an insight Google should acknowledge and act on.

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One thing the article mentions is that Pixar is always working to find solutions to problems. I wrote about this before, where I sketched out some of the technical problems each Pixar movie was designed to solve.

As Pixar says, “Success hides problems.” The complementary idea, that “Failure reveals problems”, is one very few organizations want to examine. At many companies, failure leads to loss of employment. The organizations seem to believe that as long as someone never fails, then they must be better than others. Fear of failure prevents innovation. This leads to a maladaptive company, one that is not resilient enough to deal with failure when it inevitably happens, because the hidden problems do eventually pierce the bubble of complacency.

In a complex world, failure often tell you more than success. I use the game I learned in Junior High School called Bulls and Creots as an example. Here, outright failure to get anything right actually gives you more knowledge than any other single guess.

Similarly, with some very complex systems, the only way to get to clarity is to make something fail, to make it work wrong. In biological systems, some of the most insightful work has come from disabling a part of the system and seeing what happens. So, for example, in a metabolic pathway with a large number of enzymes, looking at a single enzyme tells us little about the process, since in many cases we do not know what the enzyme really does.

But disable the enzyme and what will happen? If it is a critical part of the pathway, then none of the final product will be produced. Instead, a large amount of an intermediary product will build up – the intermediary product that the disabled enzyme was supposed to work with but can’t. So, like throwing a wrench in an assembly line backs up everything behind the wrench, a disabled enzyme results in a backup of intermediary product. Study that product and you will know what the enzyme does. Do this for each enzyme in the pathway and you can then delineated what happens at each step as you add material at the beginning of the pathway.

This and other approaches yielded understanding like this, which shows the complex intermediary metabolic pathways in cells. Pretty complicated but it was only revealed through things like designed failure.

intermediary metabolism

Failure and the continuing drive to solve problems is how you keep innovation fresh and creative. Pixar gets that. Companies that do not will discover that Failure does eventually reveal problems in even successful companies and if they do not deal with that failure in a productive way, the organization could go down in flames.

And this is quite likely simply because the company has no experience with failure and will lack the resilience to deal with that Failure in a successful fashion.

All part of the great cycle of knowledge

mandala by Peter Kaminski

Open access saves $1B
[Via Naturally Selected]

A new analysis suggests that making papers open access would pump $1 billion into the U.S. economy over the next few decades.

That’s about five times the amount it costs to archive the papers, according to ScienceInsider.

The economic analysis, about the effects of a pending National Institutes of Health policy that would make all papers from federally funded research free after a delay, comes from John Houghton at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues. He has also suggested open access could save nearly half a billion euros per year in the UK, as well. You can read more about the newest model here.

Publishers, of course, have decried the proposal. Do you think such a potentially dramatic cost savings is enough to convince skeptics?

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I’m sure that the analysis will meet with some scrutiny but that is how we usually get closer to the truth. Someone takes some data to create information and produces some knowledge. Someone else takes that, adds some more data and, hopefully, creates more knowledge and a better understanding.

Cranking the cycle several times is how wisdom is achieved. So, perhaps soon we can find out if Open Access is actually a wise approach for many situations.

Lower barriers to entry applies almost everywhere

barrierby Donald Macleod

iPhone economics and lower barriers to entry
[Via O’Reilly Radar]

Tomi Ahonen at Communities Dominate Brands has an interesting analysis on iPhone economics. It’s a substantial piece with a lot of good stats, and his key conclusion is:

… don’t invest in [app development] today … Put your creativity and investment into the real money opportunities, remember Pop Idol simple SMS votes earning half a billion dollars in USA this year alone …

He comes to this conclusion after observing that the vast majority of apps will lose money, while only a tiny handful generate significant revenue. Consequently, the logical response is for developers (and businesses) to instead focus their attentions on more lucrative opportunities. In other words, the only way to win is not to play the game.

While his numbers are sobering, they’re not all that surprising. Consider publishing — people have long known that the vast majority of authors slave away on projects that will never make any money, while a very few stars (think J.K. Rowling) make a killing. Whatever you call it — the long tail, the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule — this simply appears to be the brutal truth of most media industries, from publishing to movies to music.

What I think he overlooks — or is bemoaning — is the important role the App store is playing in lowering the barriers to market entry for developers. He cites the big money opportunities as “SMS, MMS, and WAP” (seriously, WAP?). But, good luck trying to get a biz dev deal there. Only a few, really well-connected organizations are going to get those. When you compare the costs of hiring some kid out of college who can’t believe he’s actually getting paid to write apps to the cost of building the kind of highly skilled (and highly compensated!) sales force required to put these deals together, an app investment suddenly doesn’t look so bad.

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Why industries are being overturned comes down to one simple fact – work that used to require years of training and a tremendous expense to accomplish can be done by someone in their basement. It is true in software development, in music, in books, etc.

While it may be difficult to be a superstar here, it does make it easier for creative people to actually make more money, since they can reproduce their work so easily.

I first heard about this new economy two years ago at an O’Reilly meeting. A class at Stanford was devoted to understanding how people choose apps. Breaking into small teams, they worked on developing apps that people would use. They discovered that you can learn what makes a winning app.

In 10 weeks, they had created apps with a possible yearly revenue of $10 million dollars. Some students left school to run the companies that created the best apps, which were bringing in close to $1 million.

The faster they could run their test cycle, the faster they could create a winning app.

The key is low barriers. This allows people to rapidly produce a variety of apps, with the focus then going to those with the best results. This way, instead of having to hit some grand slams in order to pay for overhead, a bunch of singles can give one a comfortable amount of money.

New Seminar – You’re not crazy. You are innovative.


201006021448.jpg  

I’ve been working on a series of seminars. I hope to announce more of them soon but I have the first one ready.

You’re not crazy. You are innovative. will examine the disruptive innovators in a community. These people are absolutely critical for the introduction of new ideas into an organizations – ideas that could make or break the success of the company.

Yet often these people are seen more for their disruptive activities rather than their innovation. The majority of the community – the people who simply get things done – views disruption negatively because it changes their workflow, making it hard to simply get things done. Doers distrust disruptors.

This seminar will explore how human social networks adapt to change and why the disruptors are so often not listened to. It will demonstrate that the social networks of disruptors and doers look very different and how Web 2.0 tools can be used to identify members in each group.

It will also provide insights into human social networks that can empower disruptors, making it easier for their innovative ideas to traverse a community and have the major impacts that they should.

The next class in Seattle will start soon. I can also provide seminars for groups. If you would like to attend, send us an email.

‘Twitter’ for business

conversation by cliff1066™

Use Microblogging to Increase Productivity
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

Are you using Twitter to reach your customers and followers? Do you update your status on Facebook several times a day? Maybe you daily ask questions of one of your specialized LinkedIn groups?

You can replicate this experience inside your organization. There are a number of internal solutions that allow employees to share messages and information with each other, including Yammer and Socialtext. Laurence Smith, Vice President of Global Learning & Development at LG Electronics in Seoul, Korea has become an advocate of Yammer as a way to drive greater innovation in the design of the company’s training programs.

Just a few years ago, Smith says, “when we wanted to revise a classroom training program, we would write a survey, send this to all business unit HR leaders around the world, analyze the results and then use this input to design a new pilot.” The total time elapsed was several weeks to several months and often yielded limited feedback.

But today, Smith and his team start a conversation on Yammer and use tags to create a dialogue with employees. One program in the development stage is FSE (Foreign Service Executive) Soft Landing. It’s targeted to managers assigned to a new country who need to understand the local culture and norms.

[More]

Companies are beginning to see that microblogging approaches can have real value behind the firewall. They are useful fro rapid information dispersion across a variety of devices as well as providing simple ways for people to carry on ad-hoc discussions.

Socialtext continues to have the greatest number of useful social media tools for corporations. and at a very reasonable price also. By making these conversations explicit, not only can the company leverage the information it can also harness the knowledge of all its employees.

And by having everything time stamped, everyone knows who should get the credit for great new ideas or helpful information.

Who am I?

I figure that I may be getting some traffic from the Huffington Post article so an introduction.

I’ve been working in the field of biotechnology since the early 80s, spending 16 years as a researcher at Immunex, the premier biotech in the Seattle area until it was bought by Amgen. It was an incredible crucible of top-notch researchers working with little money to find cures for important diseases. There were, I believe, less than 50 employees when I started and several thousand when I left. So I had first hand knowledge of many of the needs of a small biotech as it grew. I was a small part in the development of a biologic that changed people’s lives – ENBREL.

I left Immunex when Amgen finalized the merger and spent some time thinking about what to do next. Luckily Immunex stock options, which were given to all Immunex employees when I started, provided some economic buffer. I worked with the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association on several projects and helped form a philanthropic organization called the Sustainable Path Foundation, where I am still a Board member.

I started a blog called A Man With a PhD, something I continue to this day, as well as a science-based blog called Living Code for Corante, that Forbes picked as the 3rd best Medical blog in 2003.

In 2004, I became the third employee of a startup biotechnology company called Etubics. As VP in charge of Research, I did everything from ordering lab equipment, growing cells, negotiating contracts and having to fly cross country to talk with suppliers. All while trying to raise money so we could have a hope of producing the vaccines that I believe can change the world.

So I got to see firsthand and at the highest levels, what it takes to start and run a company. I left last year as the company was entering a new phase, where clinical development and manufacturing were at the forefront and research was on the back burner. Not only were these areas I did not have a lot of expertise or interest, but I also was pretty well burned out. The stress of a small company is enormous, particularly in an industry where it takes over 15 years for a therapeutic to get from the research lab to the patient.

I left to pursue one of my real passions – how to understand why Immunex was such a powerhouse of research, why it is was one of the few biotech companies started in the 80s to produce a blockbuster drugs, along with several other good drugs, and whether this could be replicated.

That is what SpreadingScience is about – how to create organizations that are resilient to change, that can adapt in ways that increase the successful outcomes need. You can read some of the material or follow my blog to get an idea of how I am accomplishing this.


Fixing problems

I expect some traffic from people following the Huffington Post article about Peter Rubin.

I always get a few butterflies in my stomach when I talk with a reporter who contacts me out of the blue. As with most things, trust is important. Also, I have a tendency to babble a lot on the phone, especially when talking extemporaneously, so I always worry if I will say something that does not exactly fit what I really mean. I hope I did not sound like too much of a Pollyanna.

I think Arthur did a reasonable job, particularly since he was talking with me for the first time and having to deal with my speech patterns.

The point I had is that I’m torn because there are vitally important reasons for some companies to need the expertise of some people so I do not want to prevent access to their expertise. But I also do not ant to see people using their position, particularly if it is a tax=payer supported one, to simply enrich themselves.

How to remove the latter without harming the former?

One big point I made to Arthur Delaney, who was the reporter that called, was that openness and transparency are a huge part of solving what is a difficult problem. Shining a light into this process makes it much less likely that people will game the system. Not impossible but less likely.

It seems to me that much of the misbehavior that many people partake in comes from the fact that they can carry out this bad behavior, and escape its consequences, because is happens in the dark, behind the scenes.

Most people – not all, I’m not that much of an idealist – may modify their misbehavior if they know that others can see it. And if they know that there will be consequences if they do misbehave.

There are lots of important, legitimate reasons for organizations to need the expertise of a range of people who have worked in government or for a company or for an NGO. To be successful, specialized expertise is sometimes needed. This expertise can be critical, particularly for small companies.

We need to make sure that those types of interactions are not harmed.

Real openness should not harm them. At least I hope not.