27 de noviembre de 2010
25 de noviembre de 2010
Talvi - medidas que impulsa el Gobierno implican una “grosera violación al estado de derecho”.
El Gobierno cuestionado 25.11.2010 | 13.59El Dr. Ernesto Talvi, director académico de Ceres, considera que varias medidas que impulsa el Gobierno implican una “grosera violación al estado de derecho”. Vea la entrevista realizada por En Perspectiva. Este video consta de 5 partes.
24 de noviembre de 2010
Fool vs. Jerk: Whom Would You Hire?
Executive Summary:
You are the hiring manager with a nasty decision to make. Would you hire the lovable fool or the competent jerk? ThisHarvard Business Reviewexcerpt suggests that the decision is complicated. By HBS professor Tiziana Casciaro and Duke University’s Miguel Sousa Lobo.Seven Strategy Questions: A Simple Approach for Better Execution
Executive Summary:
Successful business strategy lies not in having all the right answers, but rather in asking the right questions, says Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons. In an excerpt from his new book,Seven Strategy Questions, Simons explains how posing these questions can help managers make smart choices. Key concepts include:- Asking simple questions enables business teams to focus on key issues instead of on the distracting information that can obfuscate clear thinking.
- A successful business strategy requires an ongoing, face-to-face debate, which a manager can facilitate by posing the right questions to the team.
- Each of the book's seven questions is the root of an "information imperative"—a particular topic or process that a manager must master in order to implement a strategy successfully.
About Faculty in this Article:
23 de noviembre de 2010
17 de noviembre de 2010
Ron Paul - Libertarian The creativity of free individuals
http://www.ronpaul.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Paul
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=AtGoogleTalks#p/u/58/yCM_wQy4YVg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Party_(United_States)
Why President Obama is right about India - Charles Krauthammer
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, November 12, 2010
Much grousing about the expense of President Obama's India trip. This is silly and vindictive. The one thing this country owes its leader is to spare no expense in protecting him. Especially when his first stop is Mumbai, scene of one of the most savage and sustained terror attacks in modern times.
It is protested that Britain's prime minister took a British Air flight when he traveled here in July. So what? To be blunt about it: A once-imperial middle power flies commercial; America flies colossal. Why do you think we built that 747 flying palace emblazoned with the presidential insignia - if not to land to awestruck crowds wherever it goes?
There was grumbling about the White House taking over every room at Mumbai's five-star Taj Mahal Palace hotel. What is the Secret Service to do? Allow suites to be let to, say, groups of Pakistani madrassa instructors?
I will admit that Indian authorities went somewhat overboard when they cut down the coconuts surrounding the Gandhi museum in Mumbai. I am no expert on this, having never been subject to a coconut attack, but it seems to me that a freefalling coconut is no match for an armored car built to withstand anything short of a small nuclear device. Now perhaps the enemy, always racing one step ahead of us, is working on the dreaded RPC - the rocket-propelled coconut. I'm not privy to all the intelligence here, and, try as I may, I could get nothing out of the Coconut Desk at CIA. Nonetheless, to this outsider, the anti-coconut measures seemed a bit excessive.
But I digress. The only alternative to drawing down the Treasury to move the president around safely is for him not to go at all. And that's not an alternative. Presidential visits are the highest form of diplomacy, and the symbolism alone carries enormous weight. No one remembers what Nixon did in China; what changed the world is that Nixon went to China.
The India visit was particularly necessary in light of Obama's bumbling overenthusiasm in his 2009 trip to China in which he lavished much time, energy and praise upon his hosts and then oddly tried to elevate Beijing to a G-2 partnership, a kind of two-nation world condominium. Worse, however, was Obama suggesting a Chinese role in South Asia - an affront to India's autonomy and regional dominance, and a signal of U.S. acquiescence to Chinese hegemony.
This hegemony is the growing source of tension in Asia today. Modern China is the Germany of a century ago - a rising, expanding, have-not power seeking its place in the sun. The story of the first half of the 20th century was Europe's attempt to manage Germany's rise. We know how that turned out. The story of the next half-century will be how Asia accommodates and/or contains China's expansion.
Nor is this some far-off concern. China's aggressive territorial claims on resource-rich waters claimed by Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Japan are already roiling the neighborhood. Traditionally, Japan has been the major regional counterbalance. But an aging, shrinking Japan can no longer sustain that role. Symbolic of the dramatic shift in power balance between once-poor China and once-dominant Japan was the resolution of their recent maritime crisis. Japan had detained a Chinese captain in a territorial-waters dispute. China imposed a rare-earth mineral embargo. Japan capitulated.
That makes the traditional U.S. role as offshore balancer all the more important. China's neighbors from South Korea all the way around to India are in need of U.S. support of their own efforts at resisting Chinese dominion.
And of all these countries, India, which has fought a border war with China, is the most natural anchor for such a U.S. partnership. It's not just our inherent affinities - being democratic, English-speaking, free-market and dedicated to the rule of law. It is also the coincidence of our strategic imperatives: We both face the common threat of radical Islam and the more long-term challenge of a rising China.
Which is why Obama's dramatic call for India to be elevated to permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council was so important. However useless and obsolete the United Nations, a Security Council seat carries totemic significance. It elevates India, while helping bind it to us as our most strategic and organic Third World ally.
China is no enemy, but it remains troublingly adversarial. Which is why India must be the center of our Asian diplomacy. And why Obama's trip - coconuts and all - was worth every penny.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
16 de noviembre de 2010
Who is your city - Richard Florida
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khQ9BaXZAjM&feature=player_embedded
the creative sector is the growth engine for Western economies as menial work migrates to developing countries.
quality of place -personality open to experience- people that have ideas- cognitive diversity- innovation- growth
the world is not flat its spiky
in the US 40 cities- 20% of population-66% of GNP- 85% of innovation
the mobile- the rooted- the stuck
http://www.creativeclass.com/
http://www.economist.com/node/17468554?story_id=17468554
TPP - Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership
The objective of the original agreement was to eliminate 90 percent of all tariffs between member countries by January 1, 2006, and reduce all trade tariffs to zero by the year 2015. It is a comprehensive agreement covering all the main pillars of a free trade agreement, including trade in goods, rules of origin, trade remedies, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, technical barriers to trade, trade in services, intellectual property, government procurement and competition policy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Strategic_Economic_Partnership
15 de noviembre de 2010
The Two Cultures By DAVID BROOKS
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/opinion/16brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
Yet that is what has happened. The economic approach embraced by the most prominent liberals over the past few years is mostly mechanical. The economy is treated like a big machine; the people in it like rational, utility maximizing cogs. The performance of the economic machine can be predicted with quantitative macroeconomic models.
These models can be used to make highly specific projections. If the government borrows $1 and then spends it, it will produce $1.50 worth of economic activity. If the government spends $800 billion on a stimulus package, that will produce 3.5 million in new jobs.
Everything is rigorous. Everything is science.
Conservatives, who are usually stereotyped as narrow-eyed business-school types, have gone all Oprah-esque in trying to argue against these liberals. If the government borrows trillions of dollars, this will increase public anxiety and uncertainty, the conservatives worry. The liberal technicians brush aside this soft-headed mush. These psychological concerns are mythological, they say. That’s gaseous blathering from those who lack quantitative rigor.
Other people get moralistic. This country is already too profligate, they cry. It already shops too much and borrows too much. How can we solve our problems by borrowing and spending more? The liberal technicians brush this away, too. Economics is a rational activity detached from morality. Hardheaded policy makers have to have the courage to flout conventional morality — to borrow even when the country is sick of borrowing.
The liberal technicians have an impressive certainty about them. They have amputated those things that can’t be contained in models, like emotional contagions, cultural particularities and webs of relationships. As a result, everything is explainable and predictable. They can stand on the platform of science and dismiss the poor souls down below.
Yet over the past 21 months, it has been harder to groove to their certainty. To start with, the economy has not responded as the modelers projected, either in the months after the stimulus was passed or this summer, when it was supposed to be producing hundreds of thousands of jobs. It has become harder to define how much good the stimulus package is doing. An $800 billion measure must leave a large footprint, but it is hard to find in a $70 trillion global economy.
Moreover, it has been harder to accept that psychological factors like uncertainty and anxiety really are a mirage. The first time a business leader tells you she is holding off on investing because she is scared about the future, you dismiss it as anecdote. But over the past few years, I’ve had hundreds of such conversations.
It’s been harder to dismiss morality as a phantom concern, too. Maybe in a nation of robots the government can run a policy that offends the morality of the citizenry, but not in a nation of human beings, as the recent elections showed.
Nor has the world come to look simpler and easier to manipulate since the stimulus passed. It now looks more complicated. It’s one thing to hatch an ideal policy in an academic lab, but in the real world, context is everything.
Ethan Ilzetzki of the London School of Economics and Enrique G. Mendoza and Carlos A. Vegh of the University of Maryland examined stimulus efforts in 44 countries. In a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper, they argued that fiscal stimulus can be quite effective in low-debt countries with fixed exchange rates and closed economies.
Stimulus measures are generally not as effective, on the other hand, in countries like the U.S. with high debt and floating exchange rates. The authors of the paper pointed to a series of specific circumstances that complicate, to say the least, the effectiveness of increasing public spending: How much stimulus money ends up flowing abroad? What is the relationship between fiscal policy and monetary policy? How do investors respond to fear of future interest rate increases?
One could go on. It’s become harder to have confidence that legislators can successfully enact the brilliant policies that liberal technicians come up with. Far from entering the age of macroeconomic mastery and social science triumph, we seem to be entering an age in which statecraft is, once again, an art, not a science. When you look around the world at the countries that have come through the recession best, it’s not the countries with the brilliant and aggressive stimulus models. It’s the ones like Germany that had the best economic fundamentals beforehand.
It all makes one doubt the wizardry of the economic surgeons and appreciate the old wisdom of common sense: simple regulations, low debt, high savings, hard work, few distortions. You don’t have to be a genius to come up with an economic policy like that.
Carlos A. Vegh
Carlos A. Végh
Birth August 1, 1958 (age 52) Montevideo, Uruguay
Nationality Uruguayan American
Institution University of Maryland
Field International economics
Alma mater University of Chicago
American University
Influences
Guillermo Calvo · Robert E. Lucas · Jacob Frenkel · Robert Mundell
Information at IDEAS/RePEc
Carlos Végh was born in Montevideo, Uruguay on August 1st, 1958, the son of a prominent Uruguayan business leader Alejandro Végh Villegas who served as Economy Minister of Uruguay from 1974 to 1976 and again from 1982 to 1985[4]. He is also the grandson of Carlos Végh Garzón, who was Economy Minister in 1967.[5]
Between 1979 and 1982, Végh attended college at Universidad de la Republica (Uruguay), before transferring to American University, where he received a B.A. in Economics in 1983. That same year Végh went on to attend graduate school at the University of Chicago where he obtained his Ph.D. in economics under the supervision of Joshua Aizenman, Jacob Frenkel, and John Huizinga. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he held several positions in the International Monetary Fund.
He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of International Economics, International Tax and Public Finance, among others.
[edit]Research and publication
He has written and is considered a top international scholar on a variety of topics in macroeconomics, monetary economics and international finance including: optimal monetary and fiscal policy, cyclical behavior of fiscal policy, international capital flows, inflation, banking and sovereign debt crises, currency crashes, and contagion. His work has been published in scholarly journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, the Journal of International Economics and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. His work has been featured in the international press, including The Economist[6], La Nacion (Argentina),[7]The National Review[8] and El Colombiano (Colombia)[9].
http://econweb.umd.edu/~vegh/
Piñera quiere revivir "el milagro chileno"
http://www.observa.com.uy/internacionales/nota.aspx?id=104752&ex=25&ar=2&fi=1&sec=10
"YOU MIGHT BE A MUSLIM IF...
Jeff Foxworthy on Muslims
1. You refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to liquor.
2. You own a $3,000 machine gun and $5,000 rocket launcher, but you can't afford shoes.
3. You have more wives than teeth.
4. You wipe your butt with your bare hand, but consider bacon unclean."
5. You think vests come in two styles: bullet-proof and suicide.
6. You can't think of anyone you haven't declared Jihad against.
7. You consider television dangerous, but routinely carry explosives in your clothing.
8. You were amazed to discover that cell phones have uses other than setting off roadside bombs.
9. You have nothing against women and think every man should own at least four.
10. Your cousin is president of the United States
How to avoid Japan's economic mistakes
Monday, November 15, 2010
It's hard to remember now that in the 1980s Japan had the world's most-admired economy. It would, people widely believed, achieve the highest living standards and pioneer the niftiest technologies. Nowadays, all we hear are warnings not to repeat Japan's mistakes that resulted in a "lost decade" of economic growth. Japan's cardinal sins, we're told, were skimping on economic "stimulus" and permitting paralyzing "deflation" (falling prices). People postponed buying because they expected prices to go lower. That's the conventional wisdom - and it's wrong.
Just the opposite is true: Japan's economic eclipse shows the limited power of economic stimulus and the exaggerated threat of modest deflation. There is no substitute for vigorous private-sector job creation and investment, and that's been missing in Japan. This is a lesson we should heed.
Japan's economic problems, like ours, originated in huge asset "bubbles." From 1985 to 1989, Japan's stock market tripled. Land prices in major cities tripled by 1991. The crash was brutal. By year-end 1992, stocks had dropped 57 percent from 1989. Land prices fell in 1992 and proceeded steadily downward; they are now at early 1980s' levels. Wealth shrank. Banks - having lent on the collateral of inflated land values - weakened. Some became insolvent. The economy sputtered. It grew about 1.5 percent annually in the 1990s, down from 4.4 percent in the 1980s.
Despite massive stimulus, rapid growth hasn't resumed two decades later. Although the Japanese reacted slowly, they adopted the advice of economics textbooks. They raised spending, cut taxes and let budget deficits balloon. Gross government debt soared from 63 percent of the economy (gross domestic product) in 1991 to 101 percent of GDP by 1997. It's now around 200 percent. The Bank of Japan (their Federal Reserve) cut interest rates, going to zero in 1999 - a policy that, with some slight interruptions, endures.
Deflation doesn't explain persisting economic stagnation. Japan's consumer prices have declined in nine out of the past 20 years; the average annual decline was six-tenths of 1 percent. "People aren't going to say, 'I'll wait until next year to buy a car, when the price will be a half a percent cheaper,'" says New York Univeristy economist Edward J. Lincoln, a Japan specialist. If the Japanese were delaying spending, the household saving rate would have risen; instead, it fell from 15.1 percent of disposable income in 1991 to 2.3 percent in 2008.
Japan's lackluster performance has two main causes. One is the "dual economy": a highly efficient export sector (the Toyotas and Toshibas) offset by a less dynamic domestic sector. Until the 1980s, Japan depended on export-led growth that created jobs and investment. An undervalued yen helped. "You had 20 percent of the economy carrying the other 80 percent," says Richard Katz, editor of the Oriental Economist newsletter and the author of several books on the dual economy.
But the yen's appreciation in the mid-1980s - making Japan's exports more expensive - doomed this economic strategy. Ever since, Japan has searched in vain for a substitute. Cheap credit (which fueled the original "bubbles") and many "reforms" haven't sufficed. Japan's domestic sector remains arthritic, often protected by cartels or government regulations. Japan has one of the lowest rates of business creation among major industrial countries. One survey ranked Japan 44th in the world in the ease of starting a new firm, reports economist Randall Jones of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (The United States was fourth.) Indeed, Japan's best recent years of economic growth (2003-07) occurred when a weaker yen revived exports.
The second cause is an aging, declining population, which dampens domestic spending. For decades, Japan's traditional family - a workaholic husband, a stay-at-home wife and two children - has been besieged, as anthropologist Merry White of Boston University shows in her book "Perfectly Japanese." Even in 1989, the fertility rate (children per adult woman) of 1.57 was below the replacement rate of about 2. The poor economy further discouraged family formation. Low wages and insecure jobs make children seem too costly. For men, the age of first marriage is 35, up from 27 in 1990, says White. The fertility rate is about 1.3.
So Japan's economy is trapped: A high yen penalizes exports; low births and sclerotic firms hurt domestic growth. The lesson for us is that massive budget deficits and cheap credit are at best necessary stopgaps. They're narcotics whose effects soon fade. They can't correct underlying economic deficiencies. It's time to move on from the debate over "stimulus."
Economic success ultimately depends on private firms. The American economy is more resilient and flexible than Japan's. But that's a low standard. Neither the White House nor Congress seems to understand that growing regulatory burdens and policy uncertainties undermine business confidence and the willingness to expand. Unless that changes, our mediocre recovery may mimic Japan's.
12 de noviembre de 2010
Chinese workers build 15-story hotel in just six days
As the United States and China battle over the finer points of currency manipulation at the G-20 summit, American negotiators may want to take note of this startling testimonial to the productivity of Chinese workers: A construction crew in the south-central Chinese city of Changsha has completed a 15-story hotel in just six days. If nothing else, this remarkable achievement will stoke further complaints from American economic pundits that China's economy is far more accomplished than ours in tending to such basics as construction.
Meanwhile, it's easy to imagine the disorientation of Changsha residents who'd gone away, or who just hadn't recently ventured into the downtown neighborhood of the new Ark Hotel: "Honey, I don't remember a hotel there, do you?"
The work crew erected the hotel -- a soundproofed, thermal-insulated structure reportedly built to withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake -- with all prefabricated materials. In other words, a crew of off-site factory workers built the sections, and their on-site counterparts arranged them on the foundation for the Ark project.
Despite the frenetic pace of construction, no workers were injured -- and thanks to the prefab nature of the process, the builders wasted very few construction materials. Below is a time-lapse video that shows the hotel being built from the ground up in less than a week:
10 de noviembre de 2010
9 de noviembre de 2010
Fidel Castro y Manuel Fraga Iribarne juegan domino en Galicia
ÁGATHA DE SANTOS - VIGO Dieciocho años después de la visita que Fidel Castro realizó a Galicia, tierra natal del padre del que fuera presidente de Cuba, el director gallego Manuel Fernández Valdés (Pontevedra, 1979) recrea sus pasos a golpe de hemeroteca y de bota en el documental "Fraga y Fidel, sin embargo", cuyo estreno está previsto para finales de este año. El entonces presidente de la Xunta y ex ministro de Francisco Franco , Manuel Fraga Iribarne, fue su anfitrión durante las dos intensas jornadas (27 y 28 de julio de 1992) que el líder cubano vivió en la comunidad y que Fernández califica como un "encuentro sentimental de dos mitos contrapuestos".
El equipo de "Fraga y Fidel, sin embargo", que produce la gallega Bambú Producciones, se encuentra en estos momentos rodando en Láncara (Lugo), donde nació el padre de Castro, reconstruyendo su periplo por tierras gallegas a partir de los testimonios de las personas que tuvieron alguna relación con esa visita.
"Nos interesa plasmar la impresión de las personas con quienes se cruzaron, el recuerdo que tienen de ella, qué opinan tanto de Fraga como de Castro y cómo entienden que dos personas políticamente contrarias estuvieran tan próximas", explica Manuel Fernández, que narra este viaje a modo de diario, en primera persona. "Me gustaba que mi voz estuviese presente, que no fuese una voz aséptica, y que todo lo que nos hemos encontrado esté presente, desde la gente a la taza donde Castro bebió vino", explica.
Cerca de medio centenar de personas cuentan la visita de Castro, desde el entorno más cercano a Fraga hasta los empleados de los establecimientos hosteleros donde se hospedó el líder cubano, quienes les sirvieron la comida, los vecinos de Láncara y los grupos que gritaban a su paso "Fidel, Galicia está contigo".
Un artículo en un periódico, que planteaba la contradicción de este "encuentro sentimental" con las políticas contrarias de ambos mandatarios fue el punto de partida del proyecto. "El tema del documental es la relación que tenemos con el poder y cuánto de verdad hay en el mito", argumenta el realizador.
Según Fernández, los colaboradores por aquel entonces de Manuel Fraga sostienen que se trató de una visita meramente personal. "Una parte del entorno más cercano a Fraga intenta quitar el matiz político a esta visita y asegura que fue estrictamente personal, ya que los dos líderes tienen en común el fenómeno de la emigración", asegura el realizador. Este documental, sin embargo, intenta encontrar, las otras razones que impulsaron tan peculiar encuentro.
"Los padres de ambos emigraron a Cuba, La única diferencia es que el de Fraga regresó y el de Fidel se quedó. Sin embargo, a mí me cuesta creer que ésta sea la única razón de un encuentro entre un presidente de Gobierno y un presidente de una autonomía, que fue diplomático y jefe de la oposición", asegura el realizador, que recuerda que en 1992, tras la caída del muro de Berlín y el final de la URSS, la Cuba de Castro vivía su peor momento histórico.
"Castro, que había llegado a España para participar en la Cumbre Iberoamericana que se celebraba en Madrid, tenía mucho que ganar paseándose por el país. Más extraño es que Fraga fuera su anfitrión en Galicia porque todas las personas cercanas a él nos han hablado de su gran sentido de Estado, y de hecho fue a él a quien más problemas ocasionó esta visita, que después justificó con la liberación de varios presos políticos en Cuba", recuerda.
¿Y qué poso dejaron ambos mandatarios entre quienes compartieron con ellos algún momento de aquella visita fugaz? Según el realizador, los entrevistados califican a Fraga como una persona sentimental y que valora la emigración a Cuba de su familia, mientras que del ex presidente recuerdan que era "muy alto y muy simpático". Y quienes en su día fueron partidarios de la revolución cubana, reafirman su posición, a pesar de que la figura de Castro como político se ha desgastado desde que abandonó la presidencia.
El documental se detiene también en los tópicos que rodearon aquel encuentro. "Hubo gaitas y salsa, empanada y queimada, algo muy clásico en la época de Fraga", recuerda el realizador, para quien esta visita tuvo muchos elementos cómicos, que también se destacan en este trabajo.
.
Texas Governor Perry Kills Coyote Menacing His Dog
Perry told The Associated Press on Tuesday he needed just one shot from the laser-sighted pistol he sometimes carries while jogging to take down a coyote that menaced his puppy during a February run near Austin.
Perry said he will carry his .380 Ruger – loaded with hollow-point bullets – when jogging on trails because he is afraid of snakes. He'd also seen coyotes in the undeveloped area.
When one came out of the brush toward his daughter's Labrador retriever, Perry charged.
"Don't attack my dog or you might get shot ... if you're a coyote," he said Tuesday.
Perry, a Republican running for a third full term against Democrat Bill White, is living in a private house in a hilly area southwest of downtown Austin while the Governor's Mansion is being repaired after a 2008 fire. A concealed handgun permit holder, Perry carries the pistol in a belt.
"I knew there were a lot of predators out there. You'll hear a pack of coyotes. People are losing small cats and dogs all the time out there in that community," Perry said.
"They're very wily creatures."
On this particular morning, Perry said, he was jogging without his security detail shortly after sunrise.
"I'm enjoying the run when something catches my eye and it's this coyote. I know he knows I'm there. He never looks at me, he is laser-locked on that dog," Perry said.
"I holler and the coyote stopped. I holler again. By this time I had taken my weapon out and charged it. It is now staring dead at me. Either me or the dog are in imminent danger. I did the appropriate thing and sent it to where coyotes go," he said.
Perry said the laser-pointer helped make a quick, clean kill.
"It was not in a lot of pain," he said. "It pretty much went down at that particular juncture."
Texas state law allows people to shoot coyotes that are threatening livestock or domestic animals. The dog was unharmed, Perry said.
Perry's security detail was not required to file a report about the governor discharging a weapon, said Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Tela Mange.
"People shoot coyotes all the time, snakes all the time," Mange said. "We don't write reports."
The governor left the coyote where it fell.
"He became mulch," Perry said.
The business of innovation: Steven Johnson
"The lone genius is the exception rather than the rule."
Standing on the station platform, waiting for the Philadelphia train one night in the summer of 1902, Willis Carrier was about to have his 'eureka moment'.
As the fog rolled in across the track, he suddenly realised how he could fix the nascent air-cooling system he'd been working on, using water as a condensing surface.
This sudden moment of inspiration led to the invention of modern air-conditioning, a fortune for its inventor, and the foundation of a multi-billion dollar company.
The lone genius, beavering away in the seclusion of his lab is how most of us imagine the great moments of innovation have come into being. But is this really the whole story?
Not entirely, according to author Steven Johnson. He believes Willis Carrier is very much the exception rather than the rule.
"It's not that the individuals disappear in this, it's just that they need to be part of something larger than themselves to be able to do the work that they do."
This is not completely new ground for Mr Johnson. He has written seven books on how science, technology and human experience interact, including the best-selling Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
This is not completely new ground for Mr Johnson. He has written seven books on how science, technology and human experience interact, including the best-selling Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
He is the co-founder of three websites - the now defunct Feed magazine, Plastic.com and his current project: hyperlocal aggregator outside.in. He also has nearly 1.5m followers on social media site Twitter.
Isolation v collaborationHis latest book, Where good ideas come from: The natural history of innovation, is his attempt to explain the phenomenon of inspiration.
"[Good ideas] come from crowds, they come from networks. You know we have this clichéd idea of the lone genius having the eureka moment.
"The ultimate idea comes from this remixing of various different components. There still are smart people and there still are people that have moments where they see the world differently in a flash."But in fact when you go back and you look at the history of innovation it turns out that so often there is this quiet collaborative process that goes on, either in people building on other peoples' ideas, but also in borrowing ideas, or tools or approaches to problems.
"But for the most part it's a slower and more networked process than we give them credit for."
The book spans a huge period in history, ranging from the invention of double entry accounting, and Gutenberg's printing press in the 15th century, through to Tim Berners Lee and the world wide web, and ultimately YouTube.com.
He had the idea for the book while writing The Ghost Map, about the cholera epidemic of 1854 in London, and the subsequent discovery of the origins of the disease. The story goes that a man named John Snow had had the idea to map cases of the disease, and using that map pinpointed the source of the outbreak - a water pump.
As he researched the story he realised that it simply wasn't true - that Snow had had the idea for some time before this and that he also had had a collaborator, a vicar named Henry Whitehead who was central to the investigation. This is what Mr Johnson calls the 'slow hunch'.
"I realised there was this theory about innovation, and the spaces that made innovation possible, that was lurking in the background of that story"
Innovation spaceThe book starts with a young Charles Darwin on a sun-drenched tropical beach in the Keeling Islands, as he formulates his theory on the creation of these coral islands - not simply pushed up by volcanic forces, but the result of the work of millions and millions of tiny organisms - the coral itself.
He is at the beginning of the 'slow hunch' that would result decades later in his theory of evolution. The coral reef also provides Mr Johnson with his analogy for the perfect innovation environment - a hugely diverse eco-system where despite the constant competition for resources, existence is dependent on collaboration.
This could be a city, a coffeehouse, an environment where ideas come into contact with each other - as Mr Johnson puts it, a liquid network.
"You know I think that there are two [perfect reefs] that really stand out. Clearly the web itself has been an amazing reef. Just the speed with which it's transformed itself over the last 15 years is just amazing.
"And so much of that is because it's wonderfully set up for other people to build on top of other people's ideas. In many cases without asking for permission.
"But I think that the other thing I want the book to be a reminder of is how much important innovation both in the commercial space and the private space comes out of the university system.
Charles Darwin, like most great thinkers, had a lot of hobbies
Universities, Mr Johnson argues, have in many ways exceeded the market in terms of the pace with which they generate ideas - despite the lack of the 'direct reward' found in the commercial arena.
"I think there's this abiding belief that markets drive innovation, corporations drive innovation, entrepreneurs driven by financial reward drive innovation, and while that's certainly true in many cases there's also this very rich long history of important world-changing ideas coming out of the more or less intellectual commons of the universities.
"The internet was not commercially useful to most ordinary consumers for 30 years really. It was in a sense a 30-year-hunch. It was providing other services in that time but in terms of the ordinary consumer and the payoff for investment it took a long time.
One of the other great preoccupations of the book is the concept of the 'adjacent possible', a phrase coined by the scientist Stuart Kaufman. In essence it means that invention is dependent on the right circumstances - as in a chess game, where there are a finite set of moves available at any given time.
"You can't invent a microwave oven in 1650, it's just beyond the bounds of possibility. There are too many intermediate steps on the way to something that complex.
"So the trick is to find the points of possibility in your own particular place and own particular space. And not jump too far ahead. It's kind of an argument for small modular steps using the ingredients available to you and not trying to reinvent everything.
Building your reef"Part of the problem is that one day a year they have a corporate retreat and they all go into the country, and they do brainstorming sessions and trustfalls and then they go back to work.So what should companies be doing to foster innovation in their workforces? Mr Johnson argues that creativity is a continuous process.
"But equally you don't want to have a non-stop creative process where nothing gets done.
"Corporations have an opportunity to cultivate hunches and hobbies and the sideprojects of their employees because those are such great generators of ideas."
Google is one company that has famously capitalised on giving space for workers to innovate, with its 20% time system. Employees are required to spend 20% of their time working on their own pet projects.
According to the company, about 50% of new features and products have resulted from it, including Adsense, Google suggest and social network Orkut.
"One of the lessons I've learned is that so many of these great innovators, Darwin is a great example of this, one shared characteristic they all seem to have is a lot of hobbies."
"I mean the web was a hobby for Tim Berners Lee, that's one of the wonderful things about it, it was a side project at his job at Cern."
But for those who yearn to find the spark within ourselves, Mr Johnson rounds off the book with this advice:Mr Johnson's open, collaborative environment is the antithesis of the closed rooms of corporate Research & Development and the increasingly litigious world of the intellectual property lawyer. For some companies betting on the slow hunch that may pay off in 30 years may seem a risk too far.
"Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down; but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies, frequent coffee houses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent."
Suscribirse a:
Entradas (Atom)