![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I am enjoying the political/fandom intersection in which people debate Springsteen fandom and one’s appropriate position therein, mostly for the stupid David Brooks question parodies: when you listen to the Clash, did you know that London is not, in fact, calling you?
Dodificus recorded a podfic of my Dean/Castiel story Why we fight!
Oded Shenkar, Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge: This slight business book shares the defects of its genre—buzzwords and superficial analogies to examples from biology (mirror neurons!) more than concrete lessons. Sample takeaway: “The imitation process should be systematic and yet eclectic and creative.” I’ll get right on that. Likewise, he advocates both copying and defending against copying, with not much in the way of advice about the latter. (“Yes, this sounds like hiring a convicted hacker to handle computer security”—no, it doesn’t; it sounds like hypocrisy, but then again without any details maybe it’s not.) Still, the book has some interesting examples of successful copying. Shenkar reminds us that Apple wasn’t the first to make an mp3 player, just like VHS followed Betamax; coming later allowed it to fix what wasn’t working with the first generation. Successful copiers like Sam Walton carefully examined the competition, visiting individual stores and taking detailed notes. Imitation, Shenkar suggests, is riskiest when, along with not understanding the full complement of features that makes a success a success, you try to mix and match two successful yet incompatible models, like quick turnaround and cheap production. Slate has a good series on operations management and a recent story in the series alludes to this point, discussing Zara’s “fast fashion” approach which is limber but has higher production costs (not for nothing, because it pays higher wages) compared to Uniqlo’s, which cuts costs through advanced planning and simplicity. No one’s figured out to have both, and plenty of people have gone broke trying. Good imitation can also come from moving an idea geographically or across businesses: copying a model for selling cleaning supplies through home sales to create Tupperware parties. Also, apparently any business success these days has to come at the expense of workers: he touts Ryanair for making flight crews buy their own uniforms and office workers buy their own pens, and thinks “Wal-Mart with wings” is purely complimentary.
Stainislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention: Reading is an amazing thing: English readers’ brains can recognize an “a” in multiple fonts, upper and lower case, even though these variants often look nothing like one another; they can also easily figure out words that are scrambled except for their first and last letters, and convert identical ambiguous cursive letters into “c” or “e” depending on which makes sense of a word. (Readers in other languages can do plenty of things that seem like they should be more difficult than they are too, but English turns out to be the European-derived language with the most complex interactions between pronunciation and writing/spelling, which makes English readers take a couple extra years to become proficient compared to, for example, Italian readers.) This book has lots of detail about exactly what goes on in the brain as children learn to read, some of it pretty numbing, but I enjoyed the discussion of the complexity of reading, including what goes wrong in dyslexia and tentative approaches to making reading easier to master for people who have dyslexia.
Dodificus recorded a podfic of my Dean/Castiel story Why we fight!
Oded Shenkar, Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge: This slight business book shares the defects of its genre—buzzwords and superficial analogies to examples from biology (mirror neurons!) more than concrete lessons. Sample takeaway: “The imitation process should be systematic and yet eclectic and creative.” I’ll get right on that. Likewise, he advocates both copying and defending against copying, with not much in the way of advice about the latter. (“Yes, this sounds like hiring a convicted hacker to handle computer security”—no, it doesn’t; it sounds like hypocrisy, but then again without any details maybe it’s not.) Still, the book has some interesting examples of successful copying. Shenkar reminds us that Apple wasn’t the first to make an mp3 player, just like VHS followed Betamax; coming later allowed it to fix what wasn’t working with the first generation. Successful copiers like Sam Walton carefully examined the competition, visiting individual stores and taking detailed notes. Imitation, Shenkar suggests, is riskiest when, along with not understanding the full complement of features that makes a success a success, you try to mix and match two successful yet incompatible models, like quick turnaround and cheap production. Slate has a good series on operations management and a recent story in the series alludes to this point, discussing Zara’s “fast fashion” approach which is limber but has higher production costs (not for nothing, because it pays higher wages) compared to Uniqlo’s, which cuts costs through advanced planning and simplicity. No one’s figured out to have both, and plenty of people have gone broke trying. Good imitation can also come from moving an idea geographically or across businesses: copying a model for selling cleaning supplies through home sales to create Tupperware parties. Also, apparently any business success these days has to come at the expense of workers: he touts Ryanair for making flight crews buy their own uniforms and office workers buy their own pens, and thinks “Wal-Mart with wings” is purely complimentary.
Stainislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention: Reading is an amazing thing: English readers’ brains can recognize an “a” in multiple fonts, upper and lower case, even though these variants often look nothing like one another; they can also easily figure out words that are scrambled except for their first and last letters, and convert identical ambiguous cursive letters into “c” or “e” depending on which makes sense of a word. (Readers in other languages can do plenty of things that seem like they should be more difficult than they are too, but English turns out to be the European-derived language with the most complex interactions between pronunciation and writing/spelling, which makes English readers take a couple extra years to become proficient compared to, for example, Italian readers.) This book has lots of detail about exactly what goes on in the brain as children learn to read, some of it pretty numbing, but I enjoyed the discussion of the complexity of reading, including what goes wrong in dyslexia and tentative approaches to making reading easier to master for people who have dyslexia.
Tags: