Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Here’s another trio.

• Executive = Declarations: bring forth, generate something new, lead.
• Manager = Requests: please do x by time y with condition of satisfaction.
• Worker = Promises: deliver competent performance in a domain, over and over.

I lifted that from here, but it smells like management faddism.

Chasing links we get this little table:

Executive - Manager - Worker
Lead - Lobby - Legislate
Future - Present - Past
Declaration - Request - Promise

whatever.

New category, groups of three.

For example. Weber’s three basic legitimation’s of domination:

1. The authority of the ‘eternal yesterday’.
2. The authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace, aka charisma.
3. The domination by virtue of ‘legality,’ e.g. rule based and professionalism.

I should have started this category years ago, say when I wrote about my affection for having three models.

Every since reading Anisle’s “Breakdown of Will” I’ve be thinking and reading a lot about what might be called self management. I’m currenly reading “Ethics, Law and the Exercise of Self-Command.” There is a delightful quote in this essay:

Social controls play a role; the Times Literary Supplement for January 22, 1982, contained a splendid example, a review article by George Steiner on the life and work of the Hungarian radical Georg Lukacs. “When I first called on him, in the winter of 1957-8, in a house still pockmarked with shellbursts and grenade spliters, I stood speechless before the armada of his printed works, as it crowded the bookshelves. Lukacs seized on my puerile wonder and blazed out of his chair in a motion at once vulnerable and amused: ‘You want to know how one gets work done? It’s easy. House arrest, Steiner, house arrest!’”

That example is splendid, but exceptional and extreme. The student of this stuff should, I think, pay more attention to more pedestrian social controls; e.g. voluntary membership in groups who’s habits we admire and aspire to. The rough edges of voluntary are far more interesting than the strong arm example of house arrest.

The essay appears in “Choice and Consequence” by Schelling. The topic of this essay is the ethical puzzle of what society can and can not do to help individuals keep their promises to themselves. This is an extended discussion of the curious fact that you can’t make contracts with your self and then go to the court to have them enforced. Schelling’s other essay in this arena “The Intimate Contest for Self-Command” also appears in this book.

Schelling also reached the conclusion I got from reading Anisle; that the individual is a group of interests who’s governance has so much in common with the governance of other groups that it becomes useful to treat the individual as just like any other hard to manage group.

Meanwhile there is little concensus on what the secret of productivity is.

If you rub two surfaces against each other they tend to smooth each other out. But, if you rub them every which way for long enough they don’t get flat. To get a flat surface you need to rub three surfaces against each other in assorted combinations. You can make optically flat surfaces this way. My father was an optics guy. He taught me that, but I forgot until recently.

Since being reminded about that I’ve been thinking about how interfaces boundaries rub against each other and how they tend to smooth out over time.

In industrial standards work we spend a lot of time proactively creating specifications whose intent is to assure smooth efficient exchange on interfaces. It’s not uncommon to fly brilliant engineers and implementors to other continents so they can do interopt testing to assure that the resulting systems are conformant to the spec and work smoothly with each other. The cost of such coordinated efforts is extremely high; often fatally high.

Rubbing isn’t a very sophisticated approach to gettting a smooth surface. It is what I was taught to call a strong method, a method that works in all cases. Rubbing, in optics, is always the last method. When you make a lens you attempt to get it right; but latter you always use rubbing to get it right.

I distill two points out of all that.

Simple standards tend to win because they have fewer rough edges that need to be worn down when you get to the rubbing stage.

Rubbing to get things smooth and interoperable is always part of the story.

Standards that are many to many smooth out better. I.e. one of the challenges in B2B standards compared to other internet standards is the way that it’s less common to find a firm that is doing B2B exchange with a huge number of partners in a way that’s similar to the huge number of sites that web browser visits.

One essay in Stephen Jay Gould’s books made a deep impression on me, it was a rant about the dangers of a dialectic argument. Individuals of this species, dialectic arguments, like to join together into herds. The moment one enters the room you can expect a stampede of analogous arguments to show up soon. They also have a clear pecking order that gives lazy groups a well worn path they let the conversation take.

For example. Start to discuss the trade off of speed v.s. quality. Map speed to man, and quality to women. Map man to rude, and women to polite. Map rude to bad and polite to good. Map bad to evil, and polite to noble. If you do this really fast it’s amusing; but built up slowly it leads to nothing but trouble. The escalation is one obvious problem. Another less obvious problem is the forcing of unlikely bed fellows. For example slavery for/against used to be aligned with democrat/republican but then labor/capital is aligned democrat/republican; that wasn’t stable. Or to take another example: secular/religious doesn’t mix well with labor/capital unless you force secular/religious to align with independence/hierarchy - not a very natural mapping either. Strange bed fellows. The strangeness gets magnified as the polarization increases.

The wealth of well worn dialectics tends to make it easy to fall into these trap. To help counter that in my own thinking I’ve been seeking a a catalog to three sided things. For example geographic/political ones - New York, New Jersey, Connecticut; or England, Scotland, and Wales. Sooner or later I’ll get around to pulling together my current collection and posting it.

Moving the discussion from two to three has, of course a more general form. For example now when ever I see a list, like hardware, software, services, I ask “Can I have another?” Solutions?