Text Sushi by Alf Rehn

So, the magazine Forum made a profile on me. The story is OK, but mostly I’m happy that the cover-shot came out alright. Oh, and the fact that it refers to me as the “bad boy of business studies”… Heh.

So, I returned from China, horrendously jetlagged and in an odd state of mind. Interesting trip, involving everything from musings upon innovation in a socialist country to entrepreneurship without barriers, as well as a picnic on the Great Wall and eating oddities such as scorpion and duck’s brain. A good trip, all in all. Very good, even.

One really good thing. I finished my manuscript of Vad är företagsekonomi? (”What Is Business Studies?”), leaving me more time to focus on other writing. The only problem being that I must face the fact that I’ve probably promised more than I can deliver… Well, that’s what the theory of strategic choice is for.

So, I’m off to China for a week, to talk about Chinese innovation and finish a manuscript. I only wish I had one of these bad boys to take along.

Today, in the newspaper, I read that the Finnish forestry industry has devised an “innovation company” called Metsäklusteri Oy (the Forest Cluster Inc). This is supposed to double the value of the Finnish forestry-industry’s production and service functions by the year 2030, and make Finland’s forestry famous and productive and profitable and blah, blah, blah. Let me point out why this kind of news bugs me.

a) The bloody name to begin with. You’re starting an innovation company, and you couldn’t come up with anything more enticing than “The Forest Cluster”? Obviously, the name itself needn’t mean much (and I’m getting really annoyed at the current trend of babyfied names like Jaiku and Joomla and Gooh and so on), but a name as boring as this smacks of intense bureaucracy and decision-making by committee. Why not just call it “HeadInSand” and be frank about it?

b) Jesus Christ, they don’t even turn up on Google. They’re called Metsäklusteri, but turn up neither at www.metsaklusteri.com nor at www.metsaklusteri.fi – hooray for innovation strategy…

c) An innovation company that assumes that it’s business will be more or less the same in 25 years, am I the only one a little concerned? Obviously forestry will be important in 25 years, and I despise the snake-oil salesmen who pretend otherwise, but things can change a wee bit in 25 years. The assumption this company makes, that it can actually have a 25 year plan, is charming in a sense, but I doubt they’re thinking the way I am about this. Were this a anti-establishment move, a brave anti-position to overly cheerful innovation thinking, I’d like it. It could have a bit of punk, a bit of old-school Maoism about it, and I like that attitude. But I doubt this is how they’ve thought. This is innovation by keeping things the same, creativity by committee and tight reigns. Not good.

d) Oh, and everyone’s invites to the party. All the companies, all the government agencies, a bunch of universities – all part of the monolith. Yeah, throw in everyone’s entrenched opinions, make it a political muddle to begin with, and make sure that everything will by necessity be log-jammed by competing interests, that is just a perfect way to start up innovation in an industry.

I wonder, like Chandler from Friends, could they be any more clueless?

In our age, which is obsessed with lists and reviews, it was only a matter of time until someone figured out that there was a need for a page where entrepreneurs could rate venture capitalists. Kinda like HotOrNot, but for VCs. It makes for surprisingly intriguing reading, actually.

BoingBoing reports on Kurt Vonnegut’s death. I’ll toast a genius tonight.

Reading Michael Lynch’s old article on reflexivity I am once again moved to comment on the dreadful tendency among academics to position their methods as virtues and their epistemologies as the moral high ground. Having participated more than once (more then a hundred times) in debates where differences in methodology have been cast as a major issue of purity and righteousness in the world, one now comes to any debate on epistemology with a certain sense of dread. I may simply be due to the fact that academics see their chosen methods as necessary parts of their professional identity, and that any attack on this constitutes a questioning of their right to be seen as equals. Or it may be a question of people investing everything they believe into their techniques for legitimizing behavior, making methodology a playground for psychoanalysis. In either case, we have to stop seeing issues of epistemology, method and reflexivity as pure categories, and more as analytics of human nature.

As always, the New York Times finds the really important research, such as The Perfect Bacon Sandwich Decoded. Some might see this as flippant, or a waste of tax-payer money (why it is that it’s always research that represents this waste, I cannot say), but I do not agree. Any research that can create more happiness in the world should not only be lauded but financed, and sometimes happiness is a bacon buttie.

Ideally, Danish Bacon said, 0.4 newtons should be applied to crunch the sandwich, creating 0.5 decibels of noise. The formula uses these values: N = force in newtons; fb is the function of the bacon type; fc is the function of the condiment or filling effect; Ts is the serving temperature; tc is cooking time; ta is the time taken to insert the condiment or filling; cm is the cooking method and C represents the breaking strain in newtons of uncooked bacon.

So, I’ve started a new blog, and been less than faithful to this. The fact is, Vox is a really fun blog-platform, and I like toying around with it. Oh, and I can put up movies and photos directly from my phone, and I love that. And it enables me to put up books, wonderful books.

Check it out: Vox Sushi