In the mid 1860s, mining engineer Fredrik Idestam established two ground wood pulp mills on the Nokianvirta River near Tampere, Finland giving rise to the name of the firm we all know today as Nokia. How that company trans- formed itself from a wood pulp company producing paper products to what was up until a few years ago the world’s largest cell phone manufacturing firm is a circuitous tale. This story is a fascinating account of how alert management can shift the focus of an entire organization in time with changes in the outside world so as to more effectively deploy available resources. At one time or another, Nokia proceeded from the production of paper to producing rubberized cables for telephone and electrical firms, as well as bicycle tires, and rubber boots. In the mid-twentieth century, Nokia expanded its repertoire to include consumer electronics by manufacturing electricity generation machinery, personal computers, and communication equipment. In 1992, the firm decided to abandon consumer electronics and focus solely on the rapidly growing telecommunication sector. This decision sowed the seeds of Nokia’s early dominance of the cell phone business when the company used its expertise to develop the GSM technology, which was later adopted as a de facto standard for mobile telephony in the 1990s. It’s estimated that by 2008 worldwide GSM connections were growing at a rate of over one million per day.
Tag: Confronting Complexity
The Strange World of Texas Politics
We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills . . . critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education . . . which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the students’ fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
2012 Platform, Republican Party of Texas
Complexity Gaps Lead to Inequality
American political scientist Francis Fukuyama announced the “end of history” in his essay of the same name published in 1989. In that article, Fukuyama argued that communistic social and economic principles collapsed along with the Soviet Union thus leading to a victory for liberal-democratic capitalism in their decades-long battle. What many people missed in Fukuyama’s essay was the part in which he wondered whether citizens in the West would proceed to lose moral and spiritual purpose now that the Cold War had ended the East- West ideological conflict.
Crisis of the Middle Class
One of the most talked-about films of 2014 was Richard Linklater’s epic Boyhood, which gives a blow-by-blow account of the maturing of a young man in twenty-first-century America. While the film covers over 4,000 days of the growing-up of the film’s star, Mason Evans, Jr., the actual filming took just 39 days of shooting. Linklater describes his film as an “epic of the intimate,” which is very descriptive as we see the hero deal with various life trials that a young man confronts in early twenty-first-century America.
Social Mood and Complexity Overload
On the night of November 12, 1993 at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, Royce Gracie was the last man standing in an eight-man martial arts tour- nament, which is now known as “The Beginning.” These fights were more like a street brawl with no rules, other than no biting and no eye-gouging. This tournament was televised on pay-TV, and served to introduce the new phenomenon of “ultimate fighting,” which turns out to have a huge world- wide following, as evidenced that by 2011 the Ultimate Fighting Cham- pionship (UFC) was estimated to be worth around $2 billion by Forbes magazine. Commentators have noted that the fascination with this form of combat dates back to ancient Greek and Roman gladiators who fought in the Roman Colosseum and elsewhere for the entertainment of spectators. It would appear that over the last several millennia people have not lost the urge to see violent combat between two humans engaged in a battle to the death. These ultimate fights serve as extreme examples of both complexity mismatches and social mood bias at the level of individual interaction. Let’s see why.
It came from outer space
TIME: 65 million years ago.
PLACE: What is now the Yucatan Peninsula in eastern Mexico.
EVENT: The crash of an asteroid 20 kilometers across.
EFFECT: The end of the dinosaurs and most other life forms on Earth at the time.
Suppose you were a lumbering triceratops. What would your walnut-sized brain have registered when this fiery crash occurred? Answer: Basically, almost nothing beyond an unbelievably intense light in the sky before you were instantaneously reduced to a heap of ashes, or even obliterated entirely if you happened to be in the impact zone. Here’s the scenario.