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The art and science of the possible

~ A celebration of non-zero sum thinking

The art and science of the possible

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Plenty of Room at the Top: the case for a viable man-machine economic future

01 Monday Jun 2015

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Feynman1

This post originally appeared as part of the series leading up to the 7th Global Peter Drucker Forum – “Claiming our humanity – managing in the digital age”.

In his famous “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” lecture, the physicist Richard Feynman arguably seeded the concept of nanotechnology.  While there is technical debate on Feynman’s actual role in catalyzing specific nanotechnology research, his more general point as implied in the title of the lecture is clear: there is no reason we should overcrowd in selective pursuits, intellectual or otherwise.

Almost six decades later, we appear to be doing just what Feynman implicitly cautioned against. We are cornering ourselves in the narrow view that crowds man and machine onto the same tasks. The latest witch hunt is underway and gaining momentum. The witches are the rapid innovation in robotics and computing, slated to replace humans in performing increasingly sophisticated – i.e. “white collar” – tasks and so displace jobs across the employment spectrum.

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Get (some) business thinkers off the pedestals they self-climb

27 Friday Mar 2015

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If you read business literature you would have come across the quintessential business thinker: charismatic, articulate, and endowed with a keen sense of positioning for ever greater fame and reach. But, as is the case with many other industries, the ones who make it to global fame status are often not the most inspired. Politics permeates even the highest of intellectual echelons. I for one have always pursued substance at the expense of politics and fame. And so, it is natural that I get frustrated when I see initiatives of substance corrupted by mediocrities with titles.
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Prosperity by Design

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

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Design Thinking – background

Design Thinking is all the rage nowadays. It is by far the most commercially viable embodiment of the argument for augmenting creativity in the workplace. According to the DT school of thought, creativity has something to do with open-ended thinking. That is because design, as practiced in both the arts and sciences, is an open-ended endeavor. One could tell Picasso to paint a “good” painting, but adding more specific requirements would likely only reduce the genius of the ensuing work. Similarly, one could not tell Einstein “concentrate on improving Maxwell’s equations” and expect him to come up with the Theory of Relativity.

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Corporate taxation without representation

16 Tuesday Dec 2014

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corphierarchy

Let’s take a simplified scenario of the mechanics underlying the remuneration relationship between a corporation and an employee in the knowledge economy.

The corporation pays a white collar employee a certain salary and benefits. The corporation in turn charges its clients for the work performed by said employee a much higher rate, double or more (!) what the equivalent cost of the employee’s salary and benefits. This difference pools into a so-called “overhead” budget. The overhead budget covers things such as facilities’ rent, but by far, the largest chunk goes to indirect labor, i.e. executives. They in turn are supposed to make life better for everyone: customers – innovative products and services -, employees – job security -, shareholders – profit.

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Emotions

13 Thursday Nov 2014

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Emotions

Emotions – sometimes they save the day, and at other times are the source of embarrassment or outright disaster. Whether regarded as an initiator of success or source of failure, emotions are necessary. That is because emotions provide the illogical response necessary to address that portion of reality that is non-deterministic. When reality exceeds our ability to make sense, in lieu of emotions, we would behave like computer algorithms, stuck in infinite compute loops. For humans, emotions represent an effective mechanism for dealing with high uncertainty and complexity circumstances that would otherwise constitute veritable traps of logic. Quite simply, we have been able to get where we are today more based on our ability to ignore logic than follow it. Every leap of faith that preceded a ground breaking innovation had an emotional impulse behind it. Progress is in effect humanity’s recurring impulse to cut the Gordian Knot.

Back to square one

03 Monday Nov 2014

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Picture1

Since the dawn of human civilization, every time a new technology gets invented, enthusiasts claim that the world will never be the same. And yet, from a societal and human experience point, it always is.

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Universal Growth Principle for Knowledge Firms

18 Saturday Oct 2014

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Steve Jobs Mac

Many knowledge firms sell skills, embodied by the omniscient subject matter expert. While this may seem like a robust business model, it in fact scales quite poorly. Revenue being directly coupled to the number of “heads” or the firm being held hostage by star “primadonnas” are just two such examples.

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Organizational Transformation and Development

24 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by lnedelescu in human capital, Organizational Development, Uncategorized

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Tags

Change, Charles Handy, Development, human capital, Organization, Transformation

Image

One of the lasting memories I have from the Peter Drucker Global Forum event held in Vienna, Austria in November 2013 is of the great Charles Handy. His speech was great. But what amused me more was his playfulness. His willingness to still take chances. I caught him staring intently for what must have been a minute at an 100 year old “hop-on-hop-off” wooden elevator with no doors that still functions in the building of the Federation of Austrian Industries building in Vienna (see picture below). Eventually he hopped onto the moving elevator and everything turned out fine to my relief.

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Algoristics – the mindset of the possible

22 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in design thinking, problem solving, society, Uncategorized

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Tags

Algoristics, Algorithms, Breaking Through, bureaucracy, Entrepreneurship, Heuristics, Mindset, Possibility, Validity

Image

“Everything you’ve learned in school as “obvious” becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.” – R. Buckminster Fuller

We live in a world where rules and regulations are multiplying every day. It’s as if the more complex the world becomes, the more rules we throw at it hoping that we’ll be able to make it function like a neat clockwork algorithm. And so it’s tempting when looking to start a new venture (personal, professional, or otherwise) to see the world, and particularly the developed world, as a rigid mesh of algorithms that cannot be bent. It is in part because of this belief for example that I quit my corporate job in the U.S. to start a business in an emerging economy seven years ago.

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Liviu – the essential professional auto-biography

23 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by lnedelescu in human capital, Uncategorized

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Tags

autobiography, essence, evolution, Liviu, make-up, Nedelescu, professional

Image

Below is the equivalent of Sinatra’s “My Way” for my professional odyssey to date.

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