Stuff I've Been Reading - July/Aug 2014

The Roxbury Russet, the oldest apple cultivar in the US

This blog is now seven years and more than 400 articles old.  I suspect I've written about 550 posts in all and removed 150 of them over time, with another 150 silly or otherwise embarrassing posts still to be pruned.  My pace has slowed to about one article a week in the last few years as I've been writing more intensively for other venues, including research and drafts for My Alleged Book (MAB).  With those trends, a back-of-the-envelope says at this time next year I'll have written 50 more articles and have a hundred less posted.  I'm proud to say that kind of trajectory puts me in league with government spending and technology start-ups.

In the course of my reading for fun and profit this last month I've stumbled upon more than a few articles and books of interest.  For instance, I've been hot on the trail of John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) for MAB and stumbled upon Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of World (2001).  I used to feel badly when I discovered a great, topical book a decade or more after its publication, but I understand better now the impossibility of just trying to keep up.  Botany is divided into four chapters--apples, tulips, pot and potatoes--and my particular interest was in the first, where Pollan traces the path of Chapman through the Midwest.  I grew up with two apple trees in our backyard and probably have had apples in our home refrigerator every day of my life, but this I did not know: apple seeds have an extreme case of botanical variability, or heterozygosity.  That means you can be virtually certain that if you plant the seed of, say, a Gala apple, you will get almost any variety of apple except a Gala.  Each seed has the genetic material of all the apple varieties ever grown, and then some.  If you want a Gala apple you have to graft.  The other thing I learned from Pollan is that the Roxbury Russet is the oldest apple cultivar grown in the United States.  So, liking all things historical and many things apple--and to my knowledge never having eaten one--that goes on my fall bucket list.  


I have watched with interest the academic flare-up between Jill Lepore and Clayton Christensen over the last couple of months around Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation and Lepore's crushing article in The New Yorker.  Steven Syre at the Boston Globe did a thoughtful recap, coming out about where I think I was headed: Christensen's theory is long and involved and had never really been challenged in its parts, so some of Jill's criticisms seemed valid.  Having said that, the simple, underlying message of the disruption theory remains intact: if a company focuses exclusively on its most advanced customers it leaves itself open to competitive attack from companies offering inferior technology and lower prices.  Seventeen years and a bunch of books, conferences, articles and an entire think-tank institute later, that's all you really have to remember.  Syre believes that's one of the two great pieces of intellectual capital that's come out of HBS (along with Michael Porter's competitive analysis, of course), but when you boil it down--don't get blindsided on the low end--one would hope HBS has been up to more than that in the last century.

I learned a long time ago that if I put "Entrepreneur" or "Innovation" in the title of a blog post, its readership would soar.  So it's no surprise to me that we get a steady diet of Web articles designed to feed America's favorite technology cult.  One recent offering comes from Gallup, which happens to be pushing a book and its own scoring system in the process.  Unfortunately, Gallup doesn't define what it means by "entrepreneur," but it does offer ten qualities--from "delegator" to "promoter" to "knowledge-seeker"--that will make for a good one.  Gallup also cites research that says entrepreneurship is "between 37% and 48% genetic."  I kid you not.  There's no link to that factoid so you'll have to purchase the book next month to learn more.  In a related article, you'll want to know that Entrepreneurs are Dreamers Who Become Doers.  This article will make your teeth hurt, I promise.

Libby Nelson at Vox reminds us how truly hard it is to forecast, especially when it involves how we expect people to behave in the future.  In this case, the team of William Strauss and Neil Howe (of Generations fame which, right or wrong, is a blast to read) published Millennials Rising in 2000.  Nelson starts off with a zinger from the book: "For Millennials, the Dow Jones only goes up, people only get wealthier, and America only fights effortless wars."  It's all downhill from there.

Sam Biddle at Valleywag makes me laugh out loud sometimes, though I would hate to be on his bad side.  Anyway, he wrote a post--There Are Officially Too Many Apps, And Nobody Is Making Any Money--that fledgling entrepreneurs really should read: 2% of all app developers will pull in 50% of all app revenue.  That's the garage band model that the old record companies used to push on unsuspecting kid musicians, signing up any and all, knowing that only one in a million would have a hit record.  Of course, if you are 48% genetically entrepreneurial, you might stand a better chance.  Sam concludes (as only Sam can):

The fewer people who chase dreams of becoming the next Yo (a sentence that makes me want to sever my fingers, one by one), the more young talent can dedicate itself to building the next Washboard.

Away from the Web, my iPad/Kindle is freighted right now with one of my favorite reads so far this year--all 688 digitized pages of The American Idea: The Best of the Atlantic Monthly.  The essays and articles in this collection are mesmerizing, but two in particular stand out in the first quarter of the book.  The great Vannevar Bush's 1945 "As We Think" posits an electronic desk stuffed with microfilm containing all the world's knowledge.  It is then taught to perform like the human mind in a series of associated links:

Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.

Remember, this was 1945.  Bush could not make the leap past analog, but he got everything else just about right.  Wow.

The other essay that will send chills up and down your spine is Robert Kaplan's 1994 The Coming Anarchy.  "It is time to understand the environment for what it is," Kaplan wrote 20 years ago, "the national security issue of the early 21st century."

You undoubtedly saw Bill Gates' favorite business book, John Brooks' 1969 Business Adventures.  It surged on Amazon (Brooks died in 1993) and is, I admit, somewhere in line behind The American Idea in my own collection.  I'll only say that it gives MAB hope.

Finally, I'll leave you with two very different but thoughtful pieces.  Maria Popova's The Science of Mental Time Travel is from her excellent "Brain Pickings," and Nick Carr is working a Theses in Tweet Form which, I admit, I don't entirely understand.  But what I do understand seems wise and makes me laugh.  Enjoy.

P.S.--For you King Philip's War aficionados, and I know you're out there, good news from Turner's Falls.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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