Innovation is overhyped

Among the many words that are overwrought in business and shoved into public discourse far too often, innovation is an egregious example. If you look closely at your business, there are three things that you will observe:

1) You're not as innovative as you think you are.

2) Your company is not as innovative as you think it is.

3) You are producing a commodity. You should stop trying to convince yourself otherwise, and embrace whatever it is that you do better than your competitors. And then prune away all the nonsense that prevents you from improving it daily.

Yes, in the meanest sense of the definition, innovation may be part of your processes because you can claim a newness to what you're doing. Yet that is likely a dubious claim. Whatever is new in your business, is only a factor of difference from what your competitors are doing. Such a factor is likely to be a few percentage points on a scale, and certainly not a significant one.

It's not significant because you've studied your competitors, benchmarked against the leader in your category, carefully considered the industry best practices, and convinced yourself that you're creating processes for successful innovation. When you do all of these things, you assure yourself of creating a commodity. Just as you do when you spend precious resources on studying your clients/customers/buyers via focus groups.

If you are truly innovative, however, congratulations on creating something truly unique. Now, prepare yourself for your competitors to catch you.

Gardening Is More Than Gardening

It's been a while since I've posted here, and it's mostly because I've been chasing a train of thought in my free time. It's a runaway train that hasn't wanted to be caught and may take a long time to board and explore.
In a nutshell, however, the idea is simple:
Our lives, our families and our work are a garden. We must tend them all with care.

Though simple, this idea is also huge. It spins on it's head a lot of the vocabulary, processes and structures that have been put in place to define and capture our lives. In many ways we live in a proto-industrial age. We've not split from the 19th Century sweatshops and assembly lines. We've simply sped it all up.

Look at public schools. Students are shuttled from one class to the next, one subject to the next, down the assembly line of educational stimuli. And they're tested at thousands of stops. Yet, everyone seems to agree that they're not being taught well (especially in Texas from what I see and read). 

Yet no one questions the process as a whole. They merely question the output.

We must rethink it all.

We must realize that gardening is more than gardening.

Fall Feast

Today is a good day for braised brisket with cranberries, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, and salad from the garden.

The Holidays Are Here

Tonight we're walking to Main Street Gardens for the beginning of the Christmas festivities. There will be lots of activities, including a visit from Santa.
Not having to worry about parking is a definite perk of living nearby.
For a complete schedule, check the Downtown Dallas website.
http://downtowndallas.org/dallas_city_lights_2012/

The Zingers Are Dead. Long Live The Zingers.

I grew up on Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Donettes, Wonder bread, and a host of other bits of baked goodness. Sadly, today it all may be coming to an end with the news that Hostess is seeking to liquidate the company.
We never gave TheKiddo™ many of these treats (and certainly no where near the number I was consuming at her age). So she won't miss them if they're gone forever. I will.
Honestly, it's the Zingers I'll miss most. From the days of the Peanuts characters on the Dolly Madison boxes until the chocolatey goodness I had just today, they always made me smile.

Review: Aladin "Cool Kid. Hot Lunch."

TheKiddo™ likes to pack warm food for her lunches some days. Lately, we've been using a new bowl and she loves it. It's keeping her food nice and warm until it's time for lunch. Plus, we haven't had any spills.
If you pack food you want to keep warm, get some of these.

Plenty vs. Poverty

Random thoughts keep running through my mind. They cross and part and intersect again. And at each intersection there is one overriding question, "What will the world be like when TheKiddo™ becomes an adult"?

I worry that it will continue to be a world under the sway of those who measure success by dollar signs. A world that measures success by how much one person can own.

And that is the fundamental problem, at least in the U.S. Yet it is a problem we refuse to face seriously. Because to face it, is to shake the foundations of power and success (at least as such things are currently defined).

Success is ownership. It has been that way since the founding of the nation when only free, male, landowners had a say in the way government was run, or could even be members of the government. What made it success was that you could be free, vote, and determine your own destiny.

Over the course of time, some of those barriers have come down. And others, such as slavery, have been nearly eradicated. Yet the basis of success and power has remained—ownership.

Ownership as success inserts an Oligarchy over any other form of government. Because the government becomes corrupted by those who have the ownership that those within the government crave for themselves—so they too can become obviously successful.

Sometimes the corruption is overt. Sometimes the corruption is subtle. Always the corruption remains. As long as there is ownership—and therefore power—to be earned and used.

Make no mistake, those who have the most ownership don't want to give it up. They hide trillions of dollars from their governments in order to keep them. They aren't interested in using their wealth to keep war, famine, pestilence and death at bay—except perhaps for themselves. Their interest is in retaining their wealth, expanding their ownership, and having more control. And with that control, they amass more wealth to continue the cycle.

The nations of this world could benefit from those trillions that are hidden. In fact, the dollars that are hidden are more than most nations ever produce.

Sadly, taking the money from them and redistributing it solves nothing. It would merely change the players but not the game.

So if these gluttons of wealth are determined to keep their monies, and if shuffling it to someone else would merely change the names/faces of the gluttons, there isn't a solution that is readily apparent. Until you look at the entire problem from a different point of view.

Stripping ownership of its power is the key to changing the rules.

Will TheKiddo™ Have Heroes?

Do you ever look at your children and wonder, "Who inspires them"?

I spend most of my time worrying about her school, her health, her day-to-day wellbeing that I don't always think about her bigger dreams. What are they? Where do they come from? How can I help her?

I caught myself wondering about her inspiration tonight as I shut off the lights and put the bedtime stories away.

Our daughter is interested in such a wide variety of things. It is hard at times to keep track. She swims. She plays drums. She dances. She plays with dolls. She loves board games. She explores with her Girl Scout friends (technically Daisies at her age).

She does all the things that are probably normal for a majority six-year olds. And yet I find myself wondering who her female heroes and role models will be.

Will it be her mami? TheBetterHalf® is an incredible woman (and I'm sure I don't tell her that enough—lo siento muñequita).

Will it be Missy Franklin? TheKiddo™ has made it clear she loves swimming, and that she wants to win gold medals in the Olympics just like Missy.

Will it be Lisa Randall? TheKiddo™ does love math and science (a love I hope to foster for as long as I live).

I have no idea from where TheKiddo™ will draw inspiration. Mine came from books, movies, and my imagination. I didn't have heroes, or anyone that I truly aspired to be. I wasn't even sure who I ought to admire.

I'll do my best to place incredible opportunities, people and role models in her path. And at the end of the day, that may be all I can do.

Urban Gardening: A Day for Planting

We had a long day at the garden, or rather gardens.

It began with a lot of work at our two plots that are part of Gardeners In Community Development. We had a little bit of harvesting to do. The bush beans are producing, and several other items are growing well. The pole beans are blooming, and the broccoli and brussels sprouts are getting rather large.

Harvesting and tending to the first plot was followed by a whole lot of planting of carrots (multiple varieties), turnips, peas, lettuce, and spinach.

After several hours (and a bit of a sunburn), we ran out of steam and headed for home. Of course that meant a stop at our small plot at the Deep Ellum Urban Garden. (DUG also has a facebook page if you prefer that sort of thing.)

We started the DUG plot to have an herb garden much closer to home. It's going to come in very handy for cooking.

Is Public Education Focused On The Wrong Product?

Public education, particularly Dallas ISD, has been a constant topic in our house since the start of the school year. This week, the conversation has been focused on "leveling."

For those who aren't going through this tedious process, I'll explain it briefly.

Leveling refers to a reduction in the number of teachers and personnel to correspond to the number of students. The process seems to be a bit more complex this year in DISD due to the consolidation of elementary schools (e.g. the closing of some campuses and the redistribution of the anticipated students to other campuses).

Where TheKiddo™ goes to school, they had anticipated 420 students, and only 360 enrolled. So for the first six weeks, we've known that some teacher would be leaving us. We just didn't know which ones, or when.

News is finally trickling out, and we should have confirmation tomorrow.

The upside of what we're hearing is that TheKiddo's teacher isn't one of the ones leaving. The downside is, we don't know if she'll be moved to another grade or not. So TheKiddo will have a bigger classroom because one of the teachers is being reassigned. We just don't yet know if she'll have a new teacher too. Regardless of the outcome, lots of students who should be well on their way to establishing routines, will have to start at the beginning.

It's terrible that we're days away from the end of the first marking period and we don't know. It proves to me that DISD isn't focused on the well being of the children. They're focused on the items that generate revenue: attendance, and test scores (particularly TAKS or STAAR, or whatever it has become).

The focus on these items is understandable. If that's where the money is, and that's what's being measured, then they're an obvious place to look. Yet it's the wrong outcome. Because these items don't necessarily have any causality for future success, preparation for college, or a students knowledge and ability to be a contributor to society.

By focusing on attendance and test scores, students are transformed from recipients into producers. They are no longer the end result, they are part of the machinery that is responsible for creating the end result: higher test scores.

If the students are constantly pushed to create better and higher test scores, they are not learning how to communicate clearly, think critically, and synthesize all the information being presented to them. They are merely focused on narrow analysis of specific pieces so that they can perform well when tested.

And if those producers don't create an end product that is of sufficient quality, they aren't fired and replaced as in a traditional workforce scenario. The result is far worse for them, for you, for us, for society as a whole. They are relegated to the dustbin of the unteachable. And that is an unconscionable outcome.  

We must move from our industrial-age, analysis-over-synthesis view of the classroom and its result.

The synthesis is crucial. It's what helps students understand that geometry is important, beyond the boundaries of geometry class, for example. We need to rethink the priority, and begin treating the teachers and students as humans rather than resources.

I don't have the solutions. I do know we need to start looking in different places for them.

Connect Four Degrees of Separation

TheKiddo™ took her Tio to school playing Connect Four. At the same time, she took my mind on a trip to the one place on the surface of the Earth that is farthest from the center of the planet.

Her facility with the game and the ease with which she won a couple of them, started some thoughts about cognitive hierarchy. The budding thoughts then led me to this PDF about economics that is copied from "The Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2004"

This (of course) led me to Poisson Distribution, and the infallible realization that I need a refresher course in mathematics. 

This reminded me of a TED speech from Rives, and now I can only think of one word:

Chimborazo!