May 2011

About once a month, the partners at High Lantern Group gather a small list of interesting, provocative, and contrarian items that shed light on what makes great strategic positioning and thought leadership. We are happy to share them with you – and hear from you about ideas worth sharing.

Six Ideas That Made Us Think

Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1.  It Is Rocket Science

Jeff Greason is a mild-mannered, uncharismatic, low-key rocket scientist.  But in a talk at TED-San Jose, he delivers an utterly compelling presentation. He offers clear, insightful thinking about the relationship between space exploration and free markets.  Memorable moment:

The space age has not yet opened. We are at the very beginnings of it. That’s why I came into the rocket business. Because what we need is not magic. We just need for rockets to go through the same kind of competitive improvement process that aircraft have gone through. And the technology that we’re missing is capitalism.

2.  How Apple Does “Crisis Management”

Astute observation from Daring Fireball on how Apple treats most crises–whether the poorly functioning antenna on the iPhone or the more recent fury over “tracking” iPhone users:

1. An Apple-related crisis or problem occurs. 
2. There’s an immediate flurry of news coverage and speculation.
3. A week or more passes before Apple responds, but when they do, they do so decisively.

The author notes the absence of the “drip, drip, drip of vapid PR statements. Just silence, then an answer.”  

3.  Edward Tufte: The Most Influential Sage of Data and Ideas

Superb and overdue profile of Edward Tufte, “a kind of oracle” for visualizing statistics. Hired frequently in Washington, Tufte is a “philosopher king” in “the growing field of data visualization—the practice of taking the sprawling, messy universe of information that makes up the quantitative backbone of everyday life and turning it into an understandable story.”

The underlying philosophy behind all of Tufte’s work is that data, when presented elegantly and with respect, is not confounding but clarifying. (Click here to see an example)…He casts a shadow over the world of graphs and charts similar to the specter of George Orwell over essay and argument.

If you haven’t read Tufte’s books, you’ll want to order them after reading this article.

4.  Privacy, Data, and the Public Good

Here’s a rarely discussed conundrum: in our reluctance to share personal data, we prevent better public policy results, especially in health care. Good summary here about a new way to shape the debate about “data commons,” the Cloud, and private information:

Instead of arguing about ownership and the right to privacy we should be imagining data as a public resource: a bountiful trove of information about our society which, if properly managed and cared for, can help us set better policy, more effectively run our institutions, promote public health, and generally give us a more accurate understanding of who we are.

For those interested a very lively debate about privacy and the Internet, see this panel discussion at last month’s Milken Global Conference, moderated by High Lantern Group’s Daniel Casse.

5.  Failure as the Precursor of Success

Review of and excerpt from economist Tim Harford’s new book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. Choice quote from the book:

Individual failures need not be a problem for the economy as a whole. Far from it. There are good reasons to believe that more successful economies play host to more failures. To get an instinctive grasp of this, just compare the astonishing failure rate of Silicon Valley firms with the situation of the Big 3 in Detroit, who seem to be in a perpetual state of slow-motion failure without ever quite leaving the economic stage.

Harford raises a stimulating public policy question: why don’t we see more experiments – and welcome more failures – in education, health care, or policing?

6.  Will Twitter Replace Journalism?

No.  Mathew Ingram critiques bloggers who believe that Twitter-reporting is the-nail-in-the-coffin of traditional reporting. Ingram argues that someone needs to make sense of all of the tweets that are sent out during a significant event – a role that the mainstream media hasn’t yet taken up:

If anything, in fact, the kind of live reporting that [others] do with Twitter…  increases the need for curation and context and background and reporting. Watching the stream of thousands of tweets…produced during the uprising in Egypt was fascinating and compelling, but it was also overwhelming in terms of the sheer magnitude of data.

For more information about High Lantern Group, please visit our website at www.highlanterngroup.com

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