Clues to the Runes

Note: This is an artilce I wrote for an IBM magazine I created and edited, Creativity!, in 1989. Creativity! was a success in that it greww to a circulation of 60,000 readers inside of and outside of IBM, Except for the reference to Fax's (how quaint that seems now), it's all still relevant. Perhaps even more relevant now if you consider that we're moving away from the literate to post literate society.

"Clues to the Runes" as a title to a column in an IBM publication may raise questions in your mind. The reference may be obscure, or even unknown to you. I briefly explained the choice in the first column written for the second edition of Creativity, 1983. But now, Creativity is seven years old, readership has expanded from 3,000 to 19,000, and the column has evolved. Especially for new readers, I thought it worthwhile to explain the reasons for the choice of the name. Then, I will close with some observations which I hope will be of interest and value to you, as I hope all the Clues columns are.

The purpose of the column is to provide some insight into the current and future business world, elucidating the forces for change, or explaining the present. The vehicle used for this purpose is personal observations and experiences, or the detection of weak signals of impending change buried in the avalanche of information that cascades on us daily.

Runes are an ancient written language. The language was discovered in the modern era, but not deciphered for some time. Since it was one of the early written languages in the West, and as I will discuss later in this column, important for other reasons, great interest existed in the interpretation of the runes. The runes have also been associated with magic and mystery, being tied to ancient religious ceremonies. This is true of most creative discontinuities. Unable to be understood by the majority of people, and demonstrating immense power, they become magic.

Consider the FAX machine in this context. The use of FAX machines has exploded just in the last year, and now they are common business tools. FAX machines can be found in the most unusual places, including many airports. A cartoon in a recent New Yorker showed two businessmen being escorted to their table in a restaurant. The maitre d' asks, "Do you want a table with or without a FAX?" We take the FAX for granted, a few may even know how it works. But consider a literate person of a few hundred years ago. Bring them to the present and show them the FAX. It would appear magical to them. Unaware of the actual physical workings, they could only assume that a letter was dematerialized and put back together before their eyes. To them there would be no difference between the Star Trek transportation system and the FAX machine.

If we now conspired to hide the secrets of FAX technology from everyone, we would be doing what the ancients did with languages such as the runes. They wanted the language to appear magical, with the power remaining in a few hands. Today, some authorities are concerned that we are creating the same two class society‑those that understand technology and those who do not. And as technology accelerates, the gap widens.

In addition, our society has honored "zero sum" activities more highly than technical activities, accentuating the problem of interesting students in technical careers. (See "Manufacturing and Product Innovation," Creativity 7:4, Dec. 1988). To a growing percentage of the population, an increasingly greater part of today's world is indistinguishable from magic.

The word "rune" itself is derived from the Norse word "runar," which meant "magic sign." It also has its roots in the German "runa," meaning either "to whisper" or " a secret." So the rune was a magical secret that was whispered only to those with a need to know.

In mythology, the origin of the runes is credited to Odin. Odin was the Norse god known in Germany as Woden or Wotan, and as Grim in Anglo‑Saxon England. He was a ferocious warrior who represented the wilder aspects of the dark forest of the northlands. He frequently was ascribed the powers of the all‑father, the creator of gods, nature, and men. Known as the one‑eyed warrior, who had given one of his eyes to Mimir, who guarded the well of wisdom and knowledge‑a caldron of inspiration, Odin had to go through a terrible ordeal to arrive at the runes. He was, in addition, as the myths say, the first to be able to communicate it to other beings. From the myths we are told,


"I know that I hung on the windy tree.
Swing there nights all nine,
gashed with a blade,
bloodied for Odin,
myself an offering to myself,
knotted to that tree,
no man knows
whither the roots of it run.

None gave me bread. None gave me drink.
Down to the depths
I peered
to snatch up the Runes,
with a roaring scream
and fell into a dizzied swoon.

Well being I won,
and wisdom too.
I grew and joyed in my growth.
From a word to a word,
I was led to a word,
from deed to another deed."


It is not clear when the runes originated, or whether they were the first phonetic alphabetic language. Unfortunately, runes first were written on wood, which often does not survive. Runic script is angular, with straight lines‑thus easy to carve on wood. Surviving records of the language exist in stone and bronze executed by Neolithic and Bronze Age artists.

Communication is the process that fuels progress. Innovations in communication have always driven major improvements in the human condition. No one knows when we first began to speak. No record has been left. The first art that we have records of is about 30,000 years old. The paintings on the walls of the caves in France are about 15,000 years old. These appear to be our first attempts to communicate ideas and feelings through media outside of our bodies, extrasomatically.

It took another 12,000 years before writing began in Sumeria and the hieroglyph was invented in Egypt. The pictograph‑based hieroglyph was a great step forward, a shorthand notation that facilitated communication greatly. But written and spoken languages remained separate. A student of the language had to memorize many symbols to represent important concepts. In addition, he or she had to memorize the sounds that went along with the symbol. The phonetic‑alphabetic language was a way to merge the two. The symbol set was based on pictographs or ideographs, but with sounds associated with them. This was a giant step. Now the student of the language could learn some rules, string the symbols together to represent the concept, and be able to pronounce the word. It also limited the number of symbols that had to be learned. Instead of thousands of characters, only 24 in the Runic alphabet, or the 26 in our modem English alphabet, need be memorized.

The first alphabetic writing has been attributed to Syria in about 1500 BC, and the runes may have derived from that invention. Many argue that the runes were independently created, and if transfer occurred, it was the other way around. The cultures of Babylon and Egypt left a history, a record of what they did. The early northern Europeans did not. The continuous and persisting society of the Near East thus became the basis for our historical perspective on our development, the fountainhead of our historical memory. No living memory links us with the inventors of fire, the cave painters 15,000 years ago in France, or the builders 4,000 years ago of Stonehenge. They left us signs of their intent. They left messages, but we do not clearly understand their meaning.

Runes then, in the context of this column, are secrets that are only vaguely understood, messages that must be interpreted. But the messages do not come only from the past. They come from the future, or our already complex present.

Runes are also symbolic of innovation and creativity arrived at through a process of hard work and struggle. According to legend, Odin struggled, gave up some of his life blood, and sacrificed an eye to achieve. Then, going deep within himself, from where all creativity must originate, he brought forth with a cry, symbolic of the birth cry of a mother, the runes. After the struggle, he felt joy as we all still do after having a creative idea. Then, he reaped the benefits as he applied his creation to one use after another.

We now know that the two hemispheres of our cerebreum are specialized. The right hemisphere is intuitive, holistic, spatial. The left is rational, linear, temporal. Our right and left fields of vision are also segmented and reversed. The right field of vision is interpreted first by the left hemisphere, and vice versa. Intuitive wisdom of the ancients is represented here also as Odin had to give up one of his eyes, symbolic of having to give up one of the ways of perceiving in order to develop the symbol oriented alphabetic language. Before the development of the alphabetic language, man was a dominate r‑mode perceiver and thinker. The alphabetic Language required the development of l‑mode, and western society has steadily progressed toward l‑mode dominance.

Since most of us live in a society that uses an alphabetic language system, it is hard to imagine what a great creative leap it must have been to originate the first alphabetic phonetic language. History does not tell us how the idea originated. But if the development was like others of major significance in recent times that have been documented, it probably was thought about by many people, and even tried out haltingly by some. After many tentative and abortive attempts, some individual put it all together, and the new language was born. It probably evolved then, making it better, more efficient. The improvement likely was a group process, with many people suggesting improvements.

Imagine the struggle of the lone individual groping with concepts only vaguely comprehended. The process of stretching the mind to new concepts is difficult, even painful. New neuronal connections must be made. A totally different way of thinking about language had to be forged; while interaction may have taken place with others, it was probably, as it is still today, a lonely individual process.

The epic poem that describes the myth tells us that Odin sacrificed himself for himself, symbolic of our nature. Creativity must arise from within us. We are creative because we have a need to be creative. We are creative for ourselves, not for anyone or anything else. Yet, Odin was tied to a tree and slashed with a knife, his life blood flowing out to nurture the tree. Trees are the oldest living thing on earth. To ancient man, the tree was symbolic of growth, and eternity, for the tree outlived several generations of mankind. So while creativity is driven from within, its purpose is outside the individual. In our highly structured society, the tree is symbolic of our institutions, made up of many individuals joined together for a common purpose that the individuals hope will outlive them individually.

In the mythical stories of Odin we are told that he was the first one to understand the power of the runes and be able to explain them to others. Creativity has no social purpose unless its results can be taught to others. This then is the essence of professionalism, driven from within to exercise innate creative powers, tied to a social or institutional purpose, capable of teaching what has been created to others and compelled to do so.

Creativity!, March 1989

Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm

"For decades our understanding of economic production has been that individuals order their productive activities in one of two ways: either as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following price signals. This dichotomy was first identified in the early work of Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, and was developed most explicitly in the work of neo-institutional economist Oliver Williamson. In the past three or four years, public attention has focused on a fifteen-year-old social-economic phenomenon in the software development world. This phenomenon, called free software or open source software, involves thousands or even tens of thousands of programmers contributing to large and small scale project, where the central organizing principle is that the software remains free of most constraints on copying and use common to proprietary materials. No one "owns" the software in the traditional sense of being able to command how it is used or developed, or to control its disposition. The result is the emergence of a vibrant, innovative and productive collaboration, whose participants are not organized in firms and do not choose their projects in response to price signals.

In this paper I explain that while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode "commons-based peer-production," to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

The paper also explains why this mode has systematic advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies when the object of production is information or culture, and where the capital investment necessary for production-computers and communications capabilities-is widely distributed instead of concentrated. In particular, this mode of production is better than firms and markets for two reasons. First, it is better at identifying and assigning human capital to information and cultural production processes. In this regard, peer-production has an advantage in what I call "information opportunity cost." That is, it loses less information about who the best person for a given job might be than do either of the other two organizational modes. Second, there are substantial increasing returns to allow very larger clusters of potential contributors to interact with very large clusters of information resources in search of new projects and collaboration enterprises. Removing property and contract as the organizing principles of collaboration substantially reduces transaction costs involved in allowing these large clusters of potential contributors to review and select which resources to work on, for which projects, and with which collaborators. This results in allocation gains, that increase more than proportionately with the increase in the number of individuals and resources that are part of the system. The article concludes with an overview of how these models use a variety of technological and social strategies to overcome the collective action problems usually solved in managerial and market-based systems by property and contract. "

http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html

Natalie Shell

Ten Steps to Take Advantage of the Public's Yearning for Community

“Ten steps for political, business, and religious leaders who want to take advantage of the public’s yearning for community:

1. Clearly define your purpose. It’s what galvanizes your community.

2. Give your staff the clear sense that they’re vital to achieving a common purpose.

3. Build your organization from the bottom up, not the top down. Technology makes grassroots organizing easier than ever.

4. Give your customers/voters/worshipers a say in how the product/campaign/church is marketed. Recognize that the consumer has more control than ever.

5. Tap into existing networks when possible. Create networks where none exist.

6. Be true to your purpose. Authenticity, accountability, and trust are the keys to building a bond or a brand.

7. Join the online community of bloggers to catch the first whiff of a crisis and to make sure your message is heard in the cyberspace community.

8. Wherever possible, make your enterprise a Third Place, a community outside home and work for people in search of connection.

9. Donate time and money to community causes. Customers are inclined to support civic-minded companies such as Home Depot, according to Bridgeland, the former head of UDSA Freedom Corps.

10. Identify the community’s leaders (Navigators) and get them on your side. Better still, use the Internet and other tools to create products that draw people together in online communities.”

Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community
Douglas Sosnik, Matthew Dowd and Ron Fournier
Simon & Schuster (2006)

Applebee's America

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” Eric Hoffer

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin

This book is at the same time engaging and appalling. Either which way you might interpret it; it is a book that you have to read. It provides clues into some of what has been happening in America. By tying together the success of the Republican Party in the last several elections, companies like Starbucks and Applebee’s, and the mega churches, the authors have pulled the curtain back on the tools, principles and mechanisms of manipulating people into doing what an organization wants them to do.

Life targeting, or micro-targeting, as it has been recently tagged, is a methodology of predicting the behavior of micro segments of a society based on lifestyle and demographics. Then identifying specifically who these people are by name and contacting them with a message targeted to their micro sector. It is not necessary that the organization really hold the values held by the members of the micro segment, only that the organization can make the people believe that the organization does.

In the 1980’s I came to realize that organizational values were the key to success in the marketplace. While at IBM, I developed an organizational change methodology to determine the values of the customers, and change the values of an organization to reflect those values. This was described in a book I coauthored entitled Innovate! (McGraw Hill, 1994). We pointed out that here must be a values match between the customers and the values those customers perceived from the organization. And, that it was set of values that differentiated one organization from another. Moreover, that same set of values controlled the type of innovation most likely to be produced by the organization. Efficiency and effectiveness of the organization depends respectively on the target of the values focus and the spread of the values focus.

We, the authors of Innovate!, assumed naively that organizations were really interested in changing their values…

Do I hear protests from the readers? Some of you may be saying, “But lifestyle targeting has been used by consumer companies for a number of years.” That’s true, but not in the same way. Examples in Applebee’s America are described such as Applebee’s convincing individuals that they really cared about what happened to them. (Remember the ad showing the coach retiring?) When’s the last time you believed that a large corporation really cared about what happens to you. It is a business and until business stops being totally driven by shareholder value, concern for the individual will remain a lost value. Yet many of us need to believe that the message is true, and the corporation continues to grow.

Sosnik, Dowd and Fournier repeatedly give example from politics, business and mega churches that can be interpreted as I have. Politics goes one step further however. With American divided nearly equally between the two major parties, and low voter turnout, a small group of voters actually determine who wins. Using concepts like business, politicians can calculate the cost per vote in these micro segments and allocate money accordingly. The message they delver to these micro segments, if effective, swings the election, even if the candidate holds the values projected or not. It’s not about the issues. The American public glazes over when issues are discussed. It’s about the values connection between the candidate and the voters. This technique will win elections but it will forever divide us for there is no benefit of collaboration among differences. It exploits the differences.

Hypocrisy is defined as “a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude.” This is the line we have crossed over in the current use of micro-targeting.

Eventually hypocrisy is revealed. It is just too difficult to sustain a pretense, and actions do indeed prove louder than words. But what America’s powerful have learned is that it takes a long time for people to perceive the pretense.

In First Democracy, Paul Woodruff points out that in Athens the primary role of public education was to prepare Athenians to be able to participate in their democracy. Unfortunately, we haven’t done that.

To the author’s credit, while they do not take the low view I have of micro-targeting as it is now practiced, they do point out that the values connections has to be real to be sustained:

“Navigating the Stormy Present - How to Be a Great Connector:

I. Make and Maintain a Gut Values Connection. Voters felt President Bush was a strong and decisive leader. They felt President Clinton cared about them and would work hard on their behalf. Both presidents fell out of favor when they were not true to their Gut Values, proving that authenticity matters in this era of spine, not spin.

2. Adapt. President Clinton realized he needed to change his message and methods to appeal to Swing Is and Swing IIs. Eight years later, President Bush determined that there were no longer enough swing voters to make a difference and that he had to find new Republican voters.

3. LifeTarget. President Clinton barely scratched the surface of the potential to find and motivate voters based on their lifestyles. President Bush took it to a new level in 2004.

4. Talk Smart. Both presidents broke new ground in niche and local advertising, constantly looking for ways to communicate to their voters through the channels those voters used to get information.

5. Find Navigators. President Bush's campaign identified more than 2 million people who could influence how their friends, family members, and associates make political decisions.”

In each of the three markets they analyzed, they provide the above roadmap.

Applebee’s America describes a methodology that is borrowed from Myer’s Briggs Personality Type, the concepts of lifestyle, the concepts of generations, demographics and the concepts of the tipping point. It’s pieces of these sets of concepts lashed together in a way that is incredibly effective, according the authors.

Oh, by the way, how did the Republican’s get the specific names, addresses, telephone numbers and in some cases e-mail addresses for the members of the micro-target sectors? Well, they got them the same way that business do from credit card transactions, and from the membership of some of the mega churches. Is this ethical?

So far I’ve been writing about the first part of the book – Great Connectors. I personally found the second part of the book – Great Change – much more professionally interesting. The chapters on anxious Americans, the 3 C’s (connectors, community and civic engagement), navigators and generation 9/11 give a good, insightful view of present day America with some views of the future. However, as a professional I would have preferred to get accessible references to the data they quoted to make a point (none are given). Example:

“…’protecting the family’ rose to become the No. 1 value of American’s (cited by 53 percent of respondents in a 2000 Roper analysis.”

Anyone who works with data taken from surveys knows that it is important to know the context and how the data was collected and what else the data indicates in order to interpret it.

The author’s provide:

“Ten steps for political, business, and religious leaders who want to take advantage of the public’s yearning for community:

1. Clearly define your purpose. It’s what galvanizes your community.

2. Give your staff the clear sense that they’re vital to achieving a common purpose.

3. Build your organization from the bottom up, not the top down. Technology makes grassroots organizing easier than ever.

4. Give your customers/voters/worshipers a say in how the product/campaign/church is marketed. Recognize that the consumer has more control than ever.

5. Tap into existing networks when possible. Create networks where none exist.

6. Be true to your purpose. Authenticity, accountability, and trust are the keys to building a bond or a brand.

7. Join the online community of bloggers to catch the first whiff of a crisis and to make sure your message is heard in the cyberspace community.

8. Wherever possible, make your enterprise a Third Place, a community outside home and work for people in search of connection.

9. Donate time and money to community causes. Customers are inclined to support civic-minded companies such as Home Depot, according to Bridgeland, the former head of UDSA Freedom Corps.

10. Identify the community’s leaders (Navigators) and get them on your side. Better still, use the Internet and other tools to create products that draw people together in online communities.”

In spite of my negative reaction to what they were saying in the first part of the book, I liked the book. It’s a book that should be read by many and the focus for a lot of discussion.

It was very curious to me that the book (inadvertently?) undercut the approach of the first part of the book with the second part. In politics, the battle between micro-targeting and grass roots civic engagement is being fought out in present and future elections. If I have a vote, I vote for the latter.

Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community
Douglas Sosnik, Matthew Dowd and Ron Fournier
Simon & Schuster (2006)