It is the best of times, it is the worst of times

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. It depicts the plight of the French proletariat under the brutal oppression of the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, and the corresponding savage brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution.

the book starts with the famous line “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times”

i have not written a blog entry in 3 months, 1 quarter in business life. after a semester at yale, our return here was a crash landing:

• the horrible war in Gaza,
• the disappointing elections in Israel, and
• the economic downturn affecting our lives and especially the Israeli VC scene, Gemini’s portfolio companies and my own clearly effected.

We have a new government is Israel, which is nothing to be proud of.

A new business quarter has begun.

The VC market is hurt, and civil society here is very hurt. From my trips to the Europe, UK and USA it seems that israel is highly Isolated

it seems like these is the worst of times, and it is here to last.

However, after contemplation and observation, i would like to claim this is also the best of times:

• VC: israel has a great denisty of talent, velocity of innovation, and ability to take (and manage?) risks.
• Gemini: we have money and are seeing quality deal flow
• Civil Society: many NGOs will go out of business. many will have to unite and merge. the fragmented market will consolidate. those who survive will be better
• Israel: (it is a bit harder to be optimistic here), but i have seen in the past, that when logic analysis shows that we are doomed, something unexpected happens. so we need to learn to expect the unexpected.  Discovery of natuaral gas reserves! joining OPEC?, peace with Syria?

it is the best of times

reflection has been taken away from our lives

grand strategy with

John Gaddis, He is a noted historian of the Cold War and grand strategy. He has been hailed as the ‘Dean of Cold War Historians’ by the The New York Times. He is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th century statesman George F. Kennan.

Charles Hill, a diplomat ambassador and professor. involved in the iran-contra affair in a big way. teaches oratory of statehood. A career foreign service officer, Ambassador Hill was a senior adviser to George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan, as well as Boutros Boutros-Ghali,

and

Paul Kennedy is a newcastle born historian specializing in international relations and grand strategy. He has published prominent books on the history of British foreign policy and Great Power struggles. his books have been translated to about 25 languages. the rise and fall of great powers.

some of the great minds at yale which produced much of US foreign policy since the first clinton adminstration. since 1992 presidents and secratery of state are yale graduates.

key takeaways:

• what are the feedback loops of the machine? how does it balance in thick and thin times. during war and peace, expansion and contraction?
• reflection has been taken away from our lives.
  timescale in planing a strategy. looking ahead vs the free metro newspaper that reports about you. the daily demands of ‘right now’. during office you do not acquire intellectual capital, you run on what you accumulated previously. IQ drops as you start to use powerpoint?
• negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents’ possible action. Greater “negative freedom” meant fewer restrictions on possible action. note that negative liberty is central to the claim for toleration due to incommensurability.
• westphalian state system is convenient to ‘go back to’ and since it is easy as a thought paradigm it influences institutions. are nations the imagined communities? i think not

discussion:

Gaddis:

strategy is a way of thinking about how to get from where you are to where you want to be. calculated relationship between means and ends.

von clausewitz, war is the continuation of policy by other means. diplomacy is supreme and war is a tool, not an objective in itself. means is subject to the ends. this is significant because resources are limited. so, resource constraints are an example in which means are subordinate to the ends.

this is platitude. it reminds us of the basic, common sense, but this is exactly it purpose, to remind us of common sense while we are becoming professionals.

friction

“Everything in war is very simple,” Clausewitz notes, “but the simplest thing is difficult.” (119) “In war more than anywhere else things do not turn out as we expect. Nearby they do not appear as they did from a distance.” (193) Moreover, “…every fault and exaggeration of [a] theory is instantly exposed in war.”

Clausewitz terms “friction” the “only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper.” (119) Friction is caused mainly by the danger of war, by war’s demanding physical efforts, and by the presence of unclear information or the fog of war.

First, the intrinsically dangerous nature of war means that in an atmosphere of blood, bullets,and bombs, “the light of reason is refracted in a manner quite different from that which is normal in academic speculation.” (113) Only the exceptional soldier keeps his incisive judgment intact during the heat of battle.

Second, physical effort in war also produces friction: “If no one had the right to give his views on military operations except when he is frozen, or faint from heat and thirst, or depressed from privation and fatigue, objective and accurate views would be even rarer than they are.” (115) Clausewitz hence reminds strategists not to forget the immense effect of physical effort upon the soldiers engaging in combat.

Ambiguous information in war is yet a third element which Clausewitz says distinguishes real war from war in theory. Although strategists should gauge plans by probabilities, it is sometimes impossible to do so during war, when most intelligence is indeterminate:

isaiah berlin, incommensurability. two concepts of liberty, He defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents’ possible action. Greater “negative freedom” meant fewer restrictions on possible action. Berlin associated positive liberty with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one’s destiny. While Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, as a matter of history the positive concept of liberty has proven particularly susceptible to political abuse. Berlin contended that under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel (all committed to the positive concept of liberty), European political thinkers often equated liberty with forms of political discipline or constraint. This negative liberty is central to the claim for toleration due to incommensurability. This concept is mirrored in the work of Joseph Raz.

The third and last part of Adam Curtis’s documentary series The Trap discusses Isaiah Berlin’s concepts of positive and negative liberty

you can not have it all at once, so you have to balance

power is not singular, it has multiple forums that need to be balanced. self confidence of french army occupying moscow. ‘war and peace’. taking moscow is not enough to win.

everything is related to everything else. astonishly frequently forgotten. so it is an ecological failure. any action will have (an equal) and oppsite reaction, even across spheres.

it is a practical and effecient manner of distiliing knowledge

individual players on the field will have to make their own decisions. instincts plus some training on expecting the unexpected

charlie hill

something is lost when quantitive methods and science is applied to all domains

in humanities, as opposed to sciences, you can not solve problems once in for all

no two problems are alike

democracy in america, ‘Forces’

ideas

theories                               leadership                     concepts

skilles                                  forces                           culture

mechanisms                        rhetoric                         values

institutions

Paul Kennedy

the power of rhetoric of roosevelt and kennedy

of the 7 coalition wars between the british and the france between 1689 and 1815 the french lose all with superior population and resources. why?

king, hmg, parlament, taxes: funing and loans. now you have markets. loans are never to be defaulted upon. so by middle wars, (7 years, napoleonic) swiss,dutch and french buy these loans because the british governement is the only one that has not deaulted on loans. now you get a feedback loop. large navy. destory others resources, lines,economies

you get balanced budget in piece times. there is possibilites of transferability.

Think With the Senses, Feel With the Mind

there is no such thing as a good painting without an idea, and there is no such thing as a good idea without a form.

session with robert storr, dean, yale school or art, director of the last biennale.

Robert Storr is an American curator, academic, critic, and painter. He was named Dean of the Yale School of Art for a five-year period beginning July 2006 and was the director of the Venice Biennale in 2007. He has been described as a “vital link between the museum world and academia” and “a gifted writer”.

here is an interview

wrote 2 books on richter, my favorite current artist. doubt and belief in painting is an interesting one

key takeaways:

• next biennale in june. i am going who is coming?
• volta in basel as well

above richter

• brazillian favelas as creating and designing a neighborhood

• artists that are ’successful’ are often not from the country in which they become popular. their identity and nationality is complex. if art is ahead of ‘culture’ by decades, how does that reflect on identity and globalization?
• does art have silos?
• demian hirst as ‘bad art’? important cultural figure but not good enough?
• artists who have done well in their regions, local galleries, that is where real art happens
• no real art capital where things are happening. berlin is going to be the next place.

discussion:

a god has died, a new one is born.

• l’appartment 22, morocco

• wallid raad, the atlas project
• suspicion of collective a priori requirements, though is an indispensable  phase
• respect something that is moving along in its own way

identity should be like garments of north africa. once in a while some nakedness should be visible.

• art as a form of foreign policy
• maus, a great book
• studio museum harlem
• cartoons as art. i agree that it is an under-rated medium
• art as a way to learn how to learn
• artis, promoting israeli contemporary art
• artis, art tours study abroad.
• imitating art similar to learning another language.
• breaching the barrier, like karioke for the first time

find yourself, by losing yourself, in something bigger than yourself

lecture by mark albion.

and  joy at criterion ventures an $85M social venture fund. 10 years ago she was a high school teacher in NYC.

• think about the first step. keep walking costs low
• success is personal.
• support is critical. have a tribe

what is good about being 104 years old? no peer pressure

how are you going to measure success? what does success mean to you?

do it sooner rather than later. people think they need money first. it is like waiting with sex till later in life.

we live our life as if to survive, not thrive.

it is about doing a lot of little things, not a few big things.

joy had some interesting observations:

eat what you kill

in big systems you can do what you want, nobody notices

scope of influence. how to gain power in big systems

the safest career choice is actually the riskiest

think about your job in terms of ‘bond’. every month you earn a salary and the right to earn it next month. how boring. perhpas you should try and make a product and scale.

even better, just do what you want while lowering your ‘walking cost’ (no longer running cost).

what is your ’soul price’? the cost of doing what you are doing. think of it  as opportunity cost

how close are you to the gutter? how close are you to what you want to do?

making a life vs. making a living

sunk cost is taught but not practiced.

every MBA learns it. why? not because they would avoid it. it is hard to avoid the big hug of sunk cost.

so is the parable on the fisherman know as ‘the good life‘ parable. we all heard of it but find it hard to practice.

take a look at making a life.

mark albion, an interview about ‘more than money’. reminds me of barthalome’s final session in OB in INSEAD.

he is trying to construct a framework that will help define the path you take. more on this after i read it

1,2,3 4 stages of an american city

new haven and the american city

summary

periods

1st age: geography, community, agriculture, land

2nd age: industrialism urbanization density

3rd age: service, growth, end of urbanism, sprawl, decline of city, technology overcomes time and space. ‘nuclear family’. retail from dime store, general store, to  deparatment store to mall to big box.

transportation, decay of rail in favor of trucking. port cities to river cities to resource cities

4th period,  size matters, american cities are not close to the density and scale of major cities. cities market themselves, tell stories. re-invent themselves.

take a look at global footprint network & sage UW madison data

cities – where we go to see the future

fragments of the city

below, larionov, rain

key takeaways:

• cities are thought of as places of stability, but are a place of change. values, people, lifestyle are often different than trends elsewhere in the USA
• the street as a project. the city as a memory in image and fantasy of itself. a place of choice and also a place of last resort

discussion:

cities have been forced to play politics from a weak position

neo primitivism, neo tribialism, schools of art and politics suggesting that human beings have evolved to live in a tribal, as opposed to a modern, society, and thus cannot achieve genuine happiness until some semblance of tribal lifestyles has been re-created or re-embraced.

Neotribalist ideology is rooted in the social philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Kingdon Clifford, who spoke of a “tribal self” thwarted by modern society. The Evolutionary Principle of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, which states that a species removed from the environment in which it evolved will become pathological, has been cited by Neotribalists as providing a scientific basis for their beliefs.

Certain aspects of industrial and post-industrial life, including the necessity of living in a society of strangers and interacting with organizations that have memberships far above Dunbar’s number are cited as inherently detrimental to the human mind as it has evolved. In a 1985 paper, “Psychology, Ideology, Utopia, & the Commons,” psychologist Dennis Fox proposed a number around 150 people. Recently some supporters of neo-Tribalism have put forth the argument that their ideas have been scientifically proven by the discipline of evolutionary psychology. This claim has been highly disputed, however.

a bearded guy on wall street

have you ever seen a bearded guy on wall street? Cromwell is now, but was not at the time

david cromwell ex 30 years at jpmorgan including president and CEO of jpmorgan capital. adjunct professor at yale som

32% IRR in 1990-1995.

30 years at wall street at the same place!

key takeaways:

• big business maybe riskier than small business
• type A people die. stress
• people think ideas are stolen. the value is in the ability to execute on the idea, not the idea.

discussion:

small business at 6m vs 20K large companies. 50% of economy, 75% of job places.

big companies are shriking

generalizations about entrepreneurs characteristics:

• desire for personal responsibility
• want to be in control
• desire direct feedback, quick, too
• high degree of commitment
• tolerance for ambiguity. i prefer the term ‘uncertainty’.
• persistence. not easily frustrated.
• love working long hours
• flexibility
• organizing skills
• spotting opportunities in the future
• want to do something vs want to be something
• rules are guidelines, not rules
• manipulative
• action oriented
• focused, one problem at a time
• do not earn more money, but more satisfaction

cromwell’s top 10 traps:

• hire good people. any doubts? do not hire. integrity is the number one issue
• stuck with ceo
• blind optimism. enthusiasm and persistence are good, but need flexability. leads to ineffecient capital, no backup
• lack of foucs
• no boss. pick a ceo and treat her like one
• spiraling costs
• first class vs garage
• no diversity. 3 engineers
• market segment failures. size too large, no reason for customers to change
• weak management: integrity, hire low, inflexibile. spend a lot of time worrying about the CEO

promise less and keep more

i have a tendancy to prmoise too much and then not to do it.

when i do do it, it is often not on time. we all love to procrastinate

how many of our promises do we end up keeping:

• we do it
• on time
• at desired quality