{"id":59,"date":"2006-02-15T00:06:41","date_gmt":"2006-02-14T18:36:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/2006\/02\/15\/pull-my-finger\/"},"modified":"2021-06-12T03:40:57","modified_gmt":"2021-06-12T03:40:57","slug":"pull-my-finger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/2006\/02\/15\/pull-my-finger\/","title":{"rendered":"Pull My Finger"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/mshades\/87832785\/\" target=\"other\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/wp-images\/inline\/finger.jpg\" class=\"inline_image\" border=\"0\"\/><\/a>In thier paper on pull as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cph127.com\/cph127\/2006\/02\/push_versus_pul.html\">a new model for mobilzing resources<\/a> &#8220;<a href=\"\"http:\/\/www.johnhagel.com\/paper_pushpull.pdf>From Push to Pull \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources<\/a>&#8221; John Brown and John Hagel quote William Gibson saying \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d  Quite true.  In terms of pull models the movie business has done it for decades since the old studio system fell apart.  Professional sports teams (at least in North America) also loosely follow a pull model for assembling winning teams.<\/p>\n<p>For decades now most movies have been produced as individual projects centered on a script that temporarily pulls various independent talents together for a time and then releases them back into the pool.  In terms of product development this is a highly efficient and successful model.  But please don&#8217;t forget that the old studio system did give us films like Metropolis, Double Indeminity and Casablanca.<\/p>\n<p>While I have always agreed that a pull approach can harness creativity and sheer brain power in ways that more command-and-control push approaches cannot, I simply couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get passed page 14 of Brown and Hagel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s paper.  They exhibit exactly the kind of vague, intellectually vacuous, pompom-waving fluffiness that just plain makes me angry.  Perhaps you can see what I mean in some of the examples they offer to help readers understand the power of pull.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Li &#038; Fung:<\/strong>  This is a Chinese textile manufacturer and distributor.  They demonstrate the power of pull by having 7500 business partners that help them satisfy their customers.   Okay\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 they have lots of partners\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/li>\n<li>Then there is <strong>ODM<\/strong>, a Taiwanese\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 uh\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 manufacture? (I think) of\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 uh\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 well I really don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know.  Clarity is irrelevant\u00e2\u20ac\u201dall you need to know is that Brown and Hagel say they are another \u00e2\u20ac\u0153compelling example of the application of pull models in distributed product innovation and commercialization processes.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d  Be sure to put that in your PowerPoints. Apparently ODM \u00e2\u20ac\u0153creatively pull[s] together highly specialized component and sub-system suppliers to generate ideas for delivering higher performance at lower costs\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Whatever that means.  I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll bet they help leverage synergies across the enterprise to reveal win-win scenarios for all stakeholders too. <\/li>\n<li><strong>Cisco <\/strong>offers yet another compelling story of pull\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s power.  They \u00e2\u20ac\u0153[pull] together appropriate capabilities from thousands of specialized channel partners to address individual customer needs.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d  You know, like pretty much every other business in existence.  Perhaps Manhattan Pizza down the road is another example of the power of pull.  Doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Manhattan pull together the appropriate capabilities of its pepperoni partners to address my Tuesday night meat lover\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pizza needs?<\/li>\n<li><strong>Cisco <\/strong>also uses e-training.  They force their employees \u00e2\u20ac\u0153pull\u00e2\u20ac\u009d mass-produced yet \u00e2\u20ac\u0153personalized\u00e2\u20ac\u009d training presentations and watching them at their desks.  Now that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s power!  That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pull!<\/li>\n<li><strong>University of Phoenix <\/strong>is another pull success story, because they standardize their e-training material for a really really big number of students who have to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153pull\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the stuff across the internet with their browsers.  This apparently serves students more effectively.  Pull rulez!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>To be a bit more serious, let me pick apart the U of Phoenix example to demonstrate just how fluffy this waste of 49 pages, toner and the power to run the printer, really is.<\/p>\n<p>Hagel and Brown say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153To serve its students more effectively, [The University of Phoenix] became one of the pioneers in using the Internet to help students pull educational resources to them when and where they wanted to participate in the learning process.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p>\n<p>To begin with what do they mean by \u00e2\u20ac\u0153effective?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d  And effective for whom?  The situation they describe (hyper-efficient delivery of hyper-standardized curriculum) strikes me as effective tool for accumulating content, but what does this have to do with the educational quality (presumably what the studen&#8217;t are interested in pulling, and how they would measure &#8220;effective&#8221;).  So, is education about growth or content accumulation?<\/p>\n<p>According to Brown\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own theories such a method of necessarily sequestered learning is striped of all potential social, environmental and serendipitous learning\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhich together provide dramatically more  educational value and growth potential than plain old curricular training.  Indeed Brown has already made a convincing case for <a href=\u00e2\u20ac\u009d http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/1578517087\/sr=8-1\/qid=1139875488\/ref=pd_bbs_1\/103-4142975-5096660?%5Fencoding=UTF8\u00e2\u20ac\u009d>the social life of information<\/a>.  Surely he is not now taking that back?  <\/p>\n<p>If we then to assume he is in fact not taking it back, then \u00e2\u20ac\u0153effectiveness\u00e2\u20ac\u009d cannot refer to the quality of the educational experience, nor can it be from the student\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s perspective.  \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Effectiveness\u00e2\u20ac\u009d must then be from the producer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s perspective, and refer to the economies of scale they can realize through hyper-efficiency of their distribution mechanisms and production standardizations.  <\/p>\n<p>But this is the language of push.  This is the language of 19th industrial mass production.  This isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the language of pull.  This isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the language of an innovative new approach.  Do Hagel and Brown even know what they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re saying?  Or is this perhaps a computer generated paper that takes a theme as input and then scours blogs for related fashionable info-biscuits to assemble?  Is this perhaps the result of a <a href=\u00e2\u20ac\u009d http:\/\/www.iep.utm.edu\/c\/chineser.htm\u00e2\u20ac\u009d>Chinese box<\/a>, indifferent to the ultimate sematics and coherence of its output?<\/p>\n<p>Hagel and Brown then go on to say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153[w]hile the timing and delivery of these educational materials is customized, the materials themselves are still highly standardized.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d  Notice how it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the timing and delivery that are standardized&#8211;how on earth can you standardize timing and delivery in a pull environment, since by definition you as the producer of content have absolutely no control over how and when your content is being pulled?!?!<\/p>\n<p>I could go on and on, but I think I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve made my point here: intellectually, this paper is gibberish.  Perhaps it really improves in later chapters.  I wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know because I reached my tolerance for nonsense by page 14.  I just couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t persevere though the ambiguity, muddled thinking, intellectual curly-queues, contradictions, lazy rhetoric, etc.   How can two people so highly regarded publish this kind of work?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In thier paper on pull as a new model for mobilzing resources &#8220;From Push to Pull \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources&#8221; John Brown and John Hagel quote William Gibson saying \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Quite true. In terms of pull models the movie business has done it for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-old"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/parCYG-X","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":440,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions\/440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}