Serial to Parallel

In my business life, I often wonder about motivations that drive organizations. I’m talking beyond the make money / become more efficient macro motivations.  Why do we elect to do A over B, in that order, to accomplish our goals ? Is this the only idea we have ?  Or perhaps is this the only way we’ve ever done it before..

How we make decisions on future potential paths would seem to be tremendously insight-full, (as in full of insights) if we can get our heads around it.  One of the trends I see over and over though its rarely acknowledged as such, is the movement from serial work to parallel work.  We know we need to do more with less.  In this case, less refers to resources, time, money, capabilities and so on.  In an effort to do that, the historic model of one foot in front of the other to proceed down our path is being usurped by many feet in front of many other feet to reach the same point 2x, 5x, 1000x faster.  Which is all good on paper, but the devil is in the details.  Time isn’t cheated easily.

Think about a real life situation where we see this.  I'll select Apple as they are well known, and as I write this, recently they had another big launch event.  In some of what they did, they seemed to work well in parallel, while in another, they didn’t do as well.  With the new phone launches, they held an event on Sept.9^th and had the new product in stores and delivered by Sept 19.  Impressive.  They’d developed, tested, refined and put production and delivery mechanisms into place in relative secrecy to move vast quantities of these products almost as soon as they let the cat out of the bag.  Very parallel.  In contrast, they also announced a watch on the same day. It’s not available yet, won’t be for months in fact.  They are still refining, testing and finalizing and no doubt working out production logistics.  Quite serial.  Now they had an advantage as they already made phones, so could tap into that expertise, while they haven’t sold watches before..but still.

Working in parallel requires more than experience.  It needs systems, skills, forward thinking and safeguards.  And let’s not ‘mistake’ the late cycle product announcement for parallel work – it usually just means serially they saved the announcement for the end of the cycle. (Apple does this a little admittedly too but the parallel work started months ago, not just in September).

Beyond products though, we seek to multi-task (parallel work) in our daily lives, we try to achieve life-work balance personally, and we try to refine this skill understanding that the world is throwing more at us every minute, then historically was done in any given days.

So, my prediction for the future is that parallel work will continue to be the aim in it’s many forms for the foreseeable future.  Companies will sell ideas, systems and approaches to enable this. Scale (a code-word for parallel work) and accessibility (cloud anyone?) are needed to allow parallel to be achieved.  Until that is, that the fundamental concept of parallel is itself usurped by another way to achieve the desired end-state.  After all, developing new ways to cheat time is always interesting.

What Happens When We Die

It was a time-waster, a conversation filler, or at least a way to keep the discussion going I'm certain.  I was asked this yesterday, and answered in a perhaps too sincere manner, such that I lost the audience of one.  That bodes well for what you're about to read.

The reason to re-hash the answer I offered isn't to make it clearer, or even perhaps different.  The reason is that I think the answer matters. I'm not pushing religious dogma here btw, though I do think there is some elegant metaphysics in the answer I'm about to offer.

Let me start by saying I think we as a species think ourselves too important.  We very quickly lose historical perspective and assume that the last couple centuries have been infinity, where we will rule the galaxy forever.  Poppycock. (younger generation pls use Wikipedia to get that reference). Science tells us that the planet is about 4.54 Billion years old, about one third the age of the universe.  In that time, almost 4 Billion of those years saw an earth populated by very small and/or microscopic life.  So life as we'd acknowledge it only appears in the last 550-580Million years.  The first 4B years are referred to hereafter as Heaven's soft opening.

In that last 550-580 Million years, vertebrates and other creatures evolved, and amongst them was some early ancestor or two of ours.  Dinosaurs had their day, for 160+ Million years and the first recognizable hominids - those we can look at and say, yes that looks a little like us -are really appearing only 2 Million years ago.

Evolution as they say takes time, and it wasn't until Cro Magnon man that we've unearthed the first signs of spirituality - about 32,000 years ago. Burying the dead, cave paintings and some early symbols.  So, if we grant this point in history as the evolution of a soul (A huge uncertain leap), our ancestors were soul-less for 98.4% of their evolution.  Herein lies the first issue I see - we take today's level of spiritual awareness and assume it's always been like that.  It hasn't.  In fact if we rounded these numbers just a little, we still don't have souls, statistically.

The second argument I'd make concerns the body v soul division.  We came up with that I believe as a handy way to get around the fact that once a body is dead, and placed into the ground, it begins to no longer be a body. Said nicely, it re-joins it's surrounds.  That clearly doesn't fly if I'm trying to fund a great new religious building (cathedral, synagogue, mosque, temple etc) as there needs to be something more than the physical that can't be proven or disproven.
The spirit is a beautiful answer here - the good have their spirits rewarded, and the bad are punished.  But wouldn't that be the case for animals too ?  Wouldn't your loving dog, dolphin, whale or whatever also have this spirit that could move on..?  Seems not in our humano-biased view.  Its the same issue with zombie movies, why are there no mammal zombies, just people..we know we share diseases across species, why not spirit life as well. Factor in time on top of this, and you have an empty Heaven waiting for us to become self-aware and when it finally happens they no longer admit our furry buddies. Bummer.

While it's a little too easy to poke holes in some established theories, the real trick is arriving at one's own.  I do offer this, for your scoffing and smiling pleasure. Poke away..

There are a finite number of atoms in the universe.  I'm currently 'using' some Oxygen, Carbon and Hydrogen atoms (96% of each of us) and some smaller amounts of others. On the universal scale, I'm gonna live to be 100 (as if) and so I'm really borrowing these for 0.00000769% of the time. Again...we're rounding errors.  The elegance to which I earlier referred is that "I" get to rejoin the universe in another form quite soon.  I may come back as dust, or a plant or perhaps this assembly of atoms may never assemble again, but "I" will have existed, made some kind of impact and the cycle continues.  I'm not preaching reincarnation in a traditional sense - we can't all have been King Richard or Shirley McClaine.  But we all do come back.  The trick of course is recognition, or perhaps should I say appreciation of what's around us.  Birds have wings, fish have gills and people have a sense of self-awareness.  Enjoy your time in this form.

So, it's your turn now.  Answer the question for yourself.  You don't have to tell anyone, or you can - your choice.