EclecticLip

Late last year, one of the executives asked me to help write a paper on the future of energy.

McKinsey & Company have now published it. 

Other authors in the series include:

• Nobel Laureate and US Energy Secretary Steven Chu (“Time to fix the wiring”)
• Intel co-founder Andy Grove (“An electric plan for energy resilience”)
• peak oil titan Colin Campbell (“The end of the oil age”)

Cooler still, as this unPhotoshopped screengrab shows, we’ve got the top spot in the Energy section!!  (For now.)

Even cooler still, McKinsey had originally intended to circulate the essay collection at the World Economic Forum at Davos.  (Ultimately they published a subset, and ours didn’t make the cut.)  So I came within an editor’s whim of being able to put “…his work has been circulated at the World Economic Forum at Davos…” on my resume!

A long-form version of the essay will be made publicly available soon; I’ll link to that in due course.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll take a few more days off blogging to bask in the quietly ecstatic glow. 

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(click to enlarge)

Yes, that’s an attempt at a pun.

In the past twenty-odd years, Microsoft has proven exceedingly good at dispatching business rivals.  They’ve been unstoppable spider-killers.

Even Google’s search dominance is a limited direct threat — Google has captured a new market, they aren’t “eating Microsoft’s lunch”. And open-source alternatives (Linux, OpenOffice) have been the business equivalent of blackflies, as opposed to, say, Viking raiders.
Until now.

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In the past few decades, GM has sunk while Toyota has soared.  I suspect a big part of this is that GM extended division of labour too far.  The principle of division of labour went from being a strength, to a crippling strength.
Specifically, by dividing “manufacturing” from “improving manufacturing” and assigning specialists to each (line workers and engineers, respectively) GM dammed up the supply of cost-cutting solutions.  The people with the most expertise couldn’t contribute.
In contrast, Toyota kept “manufacturing” and “improving manufacturing” together — and so benefited (and continues to benefit) from a torrent of ideas for improvement.

Pericles made an analogous point in his Funeral Oration during the Peloponnesian War, describing why Athens would beat Sparta: words to the effect that “Sparta has one leader but we have thousands”, in reference to Athens’ democracy.

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Apparently, the images-with-distorted-text used to prevent automated e-mail signup, are being used to manually digitise sections of text archives which OCR (optical character recognition) technology can’t use.
That’s the premise behind reCaptcha, the follow-on to Captcha (which — being “Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computer and Humans Apart” — initials out to Capttttcha).

This is very, very cool — it makes the anti-spam login step bifunctional: in addition to fulfilling the intended purpose, a valuable side benefit is also provided.
Like Skype or file-sharing, it leverages an existing infrastructure.  But instead of data transmission infrastructure or computer memory, reCaptcha capitalizes on the “gatekeeping service” crucial to innumerable websites.

Very cool, and worthy of being my first polyfunctionality tag!