Posted 06:42 by Mark Federman permanent link
Network Effects of a Non-Electric Technology

Yesterday, my class used politics as the noticeable example, or figure, to examine the ground effects of advertising and marketing. In particular, we looked at the famous Kennedy-Nixon "Great Debate" in 1960 as the retrieval, relative to our society discovering some of the ground effects of television. Naturally, I also pointed the class - half German students and half "auslanders" - to the Howard Dean campaign and the article on The Marketing of a President. What we got around to, of course, was that some of the ground effects of the Internet have to do with forming multiple, simultaneous, interlinked relationships based on trust and reputation. But something else, somewhat surprising in fact, occurred to us during the discussion.

We observed that one of the big initiatives among Dean supporters is to organize letter-writing meetings via Meetup.com. People come together to hand-write, address, stamp and mail letters to undecided voters in states in which presidential primary elections are held. (For non-political types, these are individual state elections that are used to ultimately determine the party's nominee for the presidential election.) These letters, sent to people who are essentially strangers, explain why the letter-writer personally supports Howard Dean, in an attempt to influence the recipient's vote. Makes perfect sense, right?

The dynamics of this are as powerful as they are interesting. People who have never met - complete strangers - are connecting one-to-one via a communications medium, seeking to establish some level of trust and relationship so as to influence behaviour almost instantly upon receipt of the transmission. This is a complete reversal of the effects of television-mode campaigning, which then-Senator John F. Kennedy identified in 1959 as being "able to reach several million in one 15-minute period." In other words, the changes in our mentality and the way we interact with one another has changed dramatically because of the ground effects of the Internet, even when using a non-electric technology like so-called snail mail - traditional post. In fact, because personal, hand-written correspondence has been largely replaced by email for everything from invitations to thank-you notes in all but the most formal occasions, receiving such a hand-written epistle - clearly not bulk junk mail - is attention-getting. As I say in many of my talks, "We cannot shut out acoustic space, or the space of relationships and connections that are all around us. This suggests that we cannot shut out the effects of the Internet on our enterprises, on our institutions and on society, even if we choose not to use the Internet directly. In other words, we, in our physical reality, are affected by the changes that have their impetus in cyberspace."
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Posted 04:20 by Mark Federman permanent link
The War On Copying

An intelligent and largely non-technical article from EDN Magazine discusses The war on copying, and the ramifications of Digital Rights Management implementations. Some choice and clueful comments: "Most companies mistakenly believe that content protection is about protecting content. Consider that renting a new video release for a single night costs $4 to $5, but renting an old video for five days costs $5. Most content makes the majority of its revenue in the first few weeks of release. Thus, content protection is really about protecting the release window. ... The killer app for digital content is the connected home, yet most DRM schemes undermine consumers' ability to easily move content between devices. Protection isn't just about security; you need to consider convenience, as well. It is in these real-world individual issues that DRM will meet the most resistance. Content owners want strict definitions of stealing and honesty. However, schemes that are too difficult to work with or appear insensitive to individual circumstances may drive "honest" people to reconsider what honesty really means."

The article is worth a read, as it discusses issues, strategies and approaches that avoid the typical bombast that has surrounded DRM and piracy discussions over recent months. The article's closing thoughts are most telling: "It's easy to lose sight of the true goal of copy protection. It is not about preventing copying. In most cases, a perfect digital copy is unnecessary; many DVD-copying applications make good-enough copies—copies that users can't tell from the originals—from analog outputs. Effective copy protection, rather, is about making distribution of pirated material difficult enough that you can turn most nonpaying pirates into paying users. Of course, you can always try charging a reasonable price and trusting people to be honest. Just think of all the money you'll save not having to implement DRM."
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Posted 03:48 by Mark Federman permanent link
Not So Free Speech

"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." But apparently, in the United States, Congress passes laws that allow the tapping of funds aimed to combat international terrorism to violently suppress an otherwise peaceful assembly "to petition the government for a redress of grievances." This according to Naomi Klein's report regarding last week's anti-FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) demonstration in Miami, Florida. Klein describes the confrontations this way: "Small, peaceful demonstrations were attacked with extreme force; organizations were infiltrated by undercover officers who then used stun guns on activists; busses filled with union members were prevented from joining permitted marches; dozens of young faces were smashed into concrete and beaten bloody with batons; human rights activists had guns pointed at their heads at military-style checkpoints. Police violence outside of trade summits is not new, but what was striking about Miami was how divorced the security response was from anything resembling an actual threat. From an activist perspective, the protests were disappointingly small and almost embarrassingly obedient, an understandable response to weeks of police intimidation."

While I'm not particularly surprised at the police response - over-reaction seems to be the order of the day lately in the land of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" - what has become an increasingly "terror-ifying" pattern manifests in this revelation:

"The FTAA Summit in Miami represents the official homecoming of the "war on terror." The latest tactical and propaganda techniques honed in Iraq -- from a Hollywoodized military to a militarized media -- have now been used on a grand scale in a major U.S. city. "This should be a model for homeland defence," Miami Mayor Manny Diaz proudly said of the security operation. ... But in order for the Miami Model to work, the police first had to establish a connection between legitimate activists and dangerous terrorists. Enter Miami Police Chief John Timoney, an avowed enemy of activist "punks" who repeatedly classified FTAA opponents as "outsiders coming in to terrorize and vandalize our city." With the activists recast as dangerous aliens, Miami became eligible for the open tap of public money irrigating the "war on terror." In fact, $8.5-million spent on security during the FTAA meeting came directly out of the $87-billion President Bush extracted from Congress for Iraq last month -- a fact barely reported outside of the Miami press. But more was borrowed from the Iraq invasion than just money. Miami police also invited reporters to "embed" with them in armoured vehicles and helicopters. As in Iraq, most reporters embraced their role as pseudo-soldiers with unsettling zeal, suiting up in ridiculous combat helmets and brand-new camouflage flak jackets. The resulting media coverage was the familiar wartime combination of dramatic images and non-information."

Using the enemy-at-large of the day to justify what is truly and fundamentally an affront to American ideals has chilling precedents whose retrieval effects must give us pause. The infamous McCarthy hearings targetted innocent citizens accused of being Communists (remember the boogy-man of yesteryear?). Now, those who would assemble to demonstrate their disapproval of their government's international trade intentions - and perhaps some of the heavy-handed techniques being used to bring poorer countries to heel to American policies - are often rounded up and removed from sight, or brutely "put down" as reported by Klein. As columnist John Leo, writing for the conservative TownHall.com puts it, "Protecting the right to protest doesn't have to be one of those dread right vs. left "Crossfire" issues. If we want to improve the level of political debate, each side has to guard the other's right to speak."

Update: If you're the "seeing is believing" type, here's a news photo from the "front lines":

Update 2 (27-Nov-03): IP Justice has this report on the meeting, with particular emphasis on the "excessive force" being employed not only on demonstrators, but on poorer countries to essentially give the United States control of their intellectual property, that, according to the IP Justice report, endangers civil liberties, competition, public health, food and agriculture, not to mention important ethical considerations such as the ability of private companies to patent higher forms of life (which, incidently, Canada's courts have ruled against.) It's worth a read.
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Posted 07:18 by Mark Federman permanent link
Why We Should Fear The Matrix

You just can't keep a good inquisitor down. Most regular readers of this blog - and those who have been paying attention to the world at large - will recall how the U.S.'s Total Information Awareness initiative was shut down by Congress shortly after it was made public. TIA was the program whereby both government and commercial databases would be merged and mined to infer patterns of behaviour that might indicate terrorist proclivities. The uproar was deafening: It was obvious to everyone that the fundamental philosophy behind TIA stood in stark opposition to the basic tenets of the United States' founding principles enshrined in its Bill of Rights. Now, The Matrix rears its head as the reincarnation of TIA.

As Anita Ramasastry of FindLaw reports, the "Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange" Program will "tie together government and commercial databases in order to allow federal and state law enforcement entities to conduct detailed searches on particular individuals' dossiers. The Matrix web site states that the data compiled will include criminal histories, driver's license data, vehicle registration records, and significant amounts of public data record entries. Company officials have refused to disclose more specific details about the nature and sources of the data. According to news reports, the data may also include credit histories, driver's license photographs, marriage and divorce records, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and the names and addresses of family members, neighbors and business associates. Moreover, there is no guarantee that the type of data that the Matrix compiles will not be further expanded. And information in today's commercial databases encompasses purchasing habits, magazine subscriptions, income and job histories, and much more. Soon, we may be profiled based on what we read and buy, and how we live."

Scary stuff. What is even more scary is the determination of certain elements of the government to push forward with initiatives that clearly contravene the express direction of Congress, never mind the Constitution itself. The rule of law was never in greater danger in America.
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Posted 06:38 by Mark Federman permanent link
The Marketing of a President

A great article that gets to the heart of the issue which the Dean presidential campaign manifests: There is no distinct line that divides cyberspace and realSpace, or perhaps more accurately, physical space. What is particularly interesting to me is that the message of the Internet, in its ability to create relationships and network links among people, is emergence, unfortunately contrary to Steve Johnson's emphatic assertion in his otherwise worthwhile book, Emergence. The Internet receding into ground effects provides the potent mechanisms of proximity and feedback, necessary conditions for emergent properties to manifest. With the Dean campaign that effectively demonstrates - and deftly uses - the lack of a distinct demarcation between digi- and physical spaces, the fundamental change in politics that we wrote about some months ago is certainly upon us.
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Posted 15:19 by Mark Federman permanent link
usiShaya - Pictures and Interviews About South Africa's AIDS Orphans

This evening, I attended the launch of a new and important book that has just been published simultaneously in Germany and South Africa. From the University of Pretoria announcement:

"In this book, relatives and caregivers are given a platform to share their experiences, as are scientists and others who have been working on the sociological, political and economic effects of the AIDS pandemic. usiShaya shows something of the reality experienced by children who have become orphans as a result of AIDS, and it seeks to draw attention to the situation of these children and their caregivers. However, it also wants to state the reasons behind all this, in the face of which AIDS is spreading in such a devastating manner in South Africa. The word "usiShaya" is described as follows: "AIDS changes your whole life. People say it’s like an earthquake. AIDS just shatters your life. It strikes you with blows - usiShaya. You are never going to be the same again." The editors of the book are Prof Ingelore Welpe and Ms Britta Thege of the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Kiel, Germany. The photos were taken by a German photographer, Juliane Zitzlsperger. During this event Prof B Makinwa from UNAIDS will deliver a paper about HIV/AIDS and the effect it has in the countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). "

Of all countries, AIDS has devastated South Africa, with over four million people already HIV-positive, and 1,500 new cases of HIV infection occurring each day. An entire generation of adults has been wiped out for all intents and purposes, leaving millions of orphans to be raised by aging grandparents, or charities and aid agencies in thousands of orphanages around the country. According to this report by the BBC, the African National Congress, the ruling party in South Africa, continues to block international efforts to provide affordable anti-AIDS medications. According to some of the people here at FH Kiel with whom I spoke at this evening's launch, even offers to send the medications from German companies for free have been turned down. It is both a tragedy and a travesty that transcends national borders.
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Posted 14:59 by Mark Federman permanent link
Brainstorming McLuhan-style

An interesting practical exercise in applying McLuhan's Laws of Media tetrad structure in today's class. This is one we touch on only briefly in McLuhan for Managers, but is perhaps the most immediately useful application of the tetrads. McLuhan's Laws of Media ask four questions about anything we can conceive or create:

• What does it extend, enhance, amplify, intensify or enable?


• When extended beyond the limit of its potential, into what does it reverse?


• What does it obsolesce?


• What does it retrieve from the past that had been formerly obsolesced?

We know that these four aspects apply to all things we can dream up, and a complete set of these four apply relative to any applicable ground. Using this knowledge, we can address an issue that occurs all too often in the business world - the fallacy of brainstorming.

Why fallacy? Simply put, we use brainstorming when we want to come up with new ideas. However, by putting a group of people in a room, and recording all the ideas they have on a particular topic or issue, we are merely discovering all the ideas that have already occurred to each of the participants. Once they are all out and recorded on the flipchart, there is no mechanism to discover the questions that have yet to be asked after we've asked everything we can think of. Enter the Laws of Media.

For each item brainstormed, the group decides whether it represents an enhancement/extension/amplification, a reversal, an obsolescence or a retrieval. The items are then each categorized (best done with the assistance of a facilitator who is well-experienced in using the tetrads) into one of the four aspects. As well, for each item, the group should decide what is the ground or context. Once all of the formerly brainstormed items have been sorted and tagged with their applicable ground, look for what is missing.

Is there a context that does not have items in one or more of the aspects, or an aspect that is significantly imbalanced? This should prompt the group to use that ground as the new medium for consideration, asking the "missing quadrant(s)" question. The answers will undoubtedly lead to a new discovery or insight that might provide new and alternative approaches to the problem.

In class, the issue had to do with the Media Dome project of which I wrote a few days ago, that is about to be launched to the public. The project has a firm deadline and very limited budget. Using this McLuhan-thinking-enhanced brainstorming technique, the leaders of the project and I were able to quickly identify two new possible approaches to problems that have been hampering them for some time - and there were still several tetrad aspects left to explore!

We are available to help teach and facilitate this enhanced brainstorming technique as part of our McLuhan Management Studies "anti-consultancy." Contact us for more information.

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Posted 14:26 by Mark Federman permanent link
Voices Without Votes - Can You Influence the U.S. Election in 2004?

One of our McLuhan Fellows, Peter Deitz, has echoed my not-so-rhetorical question of whether the Internet - or more precisely, the nature of the connectivity effects of the Internet - will have a significant influence on the outcome of the upcoming presidential election in the United States. I suppose that it is now a matter of "how much," as opposed to "whether," given the story of the Howard Dean campaign for the Democratic nomination. The Internet is being used for more than an electonic campaign brochure, with tremendous success, and the nature of partisan politics and campaigns are changed forever. But Peter is investigating what is perhaps a more interesting question: How much influence might the rest of the world have on the outcome under our global village conditions? Today's discussion in Joi Ito's blog provided the perfect launching pad to announce Peter's project, Voices Without Votes 2004, albeit a little earlier than he had intended. I'll let Peter carry on from here:

"The conceptual basis for this project reflects my interest in the effects of new forms of electronic communication on the relations between political communities. An open space in which non-U.S. citizens can voice their concerns, and U.S. voters can access and respond to those concerns, has the potential to begin altering the way the United States relates to its neighbours and to the rest of the world. In an attempt to critique institutionalized American insularity—particularly with regard to the electoral process—I intend to utilize the Internet so as to permit Canadians and others to indirectly take part in the 2004 election. Few people are advocating for, or even expecting, the advent of legal changes that would permit direct foreign involvement in the U.S. electoral process. Yet, the Internet makes possible surrogate participation, and therefore changes of consciousness. The long-term effects of greater international involvement in this touchstone of American domestic politics will not be slight. Canada-U.S. relations could be fundamentally transformed in the process."

"One objective of the Voices Without Votes web site is to give non-U.S. citizens an opportunity to participate in the debates leading up to the next presidential election. Another goal is to offer U.S. voters an opportunity to assess the blind spots in their nation’s public and private institutions, specifically, with regard to how Canada and the rest of the world are portrayed. In other words, this online project is intended to persuade by example. The United States’ public and private institutions will most likely, and for sometime into the future, continue to encourage unawareness of Canada and the rest of the world. During the next fourteen months, Voices Without Votes will be active in amplifying Canadian voices, and those of the rest of humanity, in an effort to reach out to individual U.S. citizens."

The full functionality of the site is still under development, although the Voices '04 Blog is up now.
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Posted 09:42 by Mark Federman permanent link
Cliché Probes and Insightful Thinking

In today's class, we covered the cliché probe McLuhan thinking tool. You take a cliché, one of those tired, "trite-and-true" expressions or standard responses, and twist the words into an often humorous probe. The probe then allows you to achieve a new insight. In McLuhan for Managers, for instance, we probed the cliché of "customer focused." One of our international students came up with what appeared at first to be a nonsense saying, but turned out to be an interesting insight.

In Israel, there is apparently an expression used to placate those who hold low-paying, low-status "mcjobs," that goes something like this: "There is no job that doesn't respect its owner." In other words, if you have a job so menial that no one will respect you, at least the job itself will respect you. In Hebrew, it's roughly pronounced, "ayn avodah shelo marbedet et b'aliyah." Probing the cliché by twisting a few of the words gives, "ayn kavodah shelo avodat al b'aliyah," which means "there is no capacity (void) that doesn't work on its owner."

At first, the sentence appears to make no sense. But with a little thought, we can interpret the probe to provide an insight into greed and desire. If one is greedy - has an unfilled capacity - that greed will continue to "work on its owner," eventually corrupting the owner to fill it, one way or another. In a way, it is a reversal of the "money burning a hole in one's pocket" cliché. An interesting probe, to say the least, and one that works in the best way - taking a trite idea that applies to one class of people, and sharpening it to probe those at the opposite end of the economic spectrum.
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Posted 07:09 by Mark Federman permanent link
Media Dome

There was a time when visiting a planetarium meant being treated to a star show displayed by the famous Zeiss Star Projector. But these intricate instruments are enormously expensive and require ongoing maintenance for them to maintain their accuracy and precision. Today, planetariums are often opting for other, more flexible, approaches to taking their audiences on voyages through the universe. One of these is a digital dome theatre projection system created by Evans and Sutherland. It is just such a system that has been installed in the new Media Dome here at Fachhochschule Kiel. A series of six synchronized digital projectors, connected to a cluster of computers, projects the expected star field on the ceiling of a domed theatre, while the audience sits below on reclining chairs in a circular theatre. But in addition to star fields, the digital images can show any content, from a trip through the solar system and beyond, to visits on neighbouring planets. But in addition to traditional planetarium fare, the dome rendering software system can project any digital content, making the theatre far more versatile.

The plan is to create new forms of multimedia productions - some of which may include the incorporation of live production and interactive engagement with the audience. Think about a 360 degree view of a ballet, seen from the visual perspective of the dancer. Think about the multimedia launch of an album by a rock group with a name like "Fury in the Slaughterhouse." The Media Dome is part entertainment venue, open to the public, part exhibition venue for productions created by students of the Master's Program in Multimedia Production, and part development laboratory for these students to experiment with new modes of presentation using the dome rendering image systems.
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Posted 06:39 by Mark Federman permanent link
Applied McLuhanistics auf Deutschland

The McLuhan blog is coming to you from Kiel Germany where I am teaching (a slightly expanded version of) my "Applied McLuhanistics" course as part of Fachhochschule Kiel’s Master of Multimedia Production program. This is an international graduate level program that brings both students and professors from around the world. In my class of 14 students, 6 are from Germany, 2 are from Brazil, and the rest come from Thailand, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Indonesia, Israel and Pakistan. Because this course deals with creating a cognitive antienvironment from which we can learn to notice and observe the hidden ground our customary environment, I particularly enjoy teaching it in a foreign country to an international group. It offers me the opportunity to do a "ground check" on myself and my course material, testing my cultural references and base assumptions. They seem like a bright group - they even answered my "name the three most significant technological innovations in recorded human history" question correctly! Can you?
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Posted 14:03 by Mark Federman permanent link
Can Democracy Survive Television?

The short answer is that democracy is very resilient - every time we try to kill it with a medium that is growing old, it comes roaring back to life thanks to a newer medium. Here are some thoughts that were inspired by the discussion on The People's Agenda.

Marla Crockett began the conversation by quoting from an essay she recently read. The essay made the observation that Television news treats a story as hype that dulls our ability to tell what really matters. Of course the essayist is describing the hot effects of television that creates a mental condition similar to hypnosis - a trance-like state that makes us highly suggestible to whatever the television programmer is sending our way. Despite occasional outbreaks of excellent and insightful reportage, our search for Truth-with-a-capital-T (that stands for TV) is as futile as Diogenes's search with his lamp.

Television must create a story. By definition, what comes across is a fiction - something that may be close to what actually happened, but created and recited by the storyteller. It is the storyteller that sets the context - the ground for our understanding. In the case of television, it is the television producers, and ultimately the networks, that set the context for each story. When the story is politics, setting the context means setting the political agenda. This is why, for instance, concentration of media ownership is the significant issue that it is.

An equally important issue is the conditioning to which we are subject by television as a medium. There is an expected story "arc" for drama, and increasingly, news and political stories are following that dramatic arc. The recent gubernatorial race in California, for instance, is a perfect example of a classic story: A "bad" ruler ultimately overthrown by the people led by a charismatic, handsome action hero, who is married to the princess, a daughter of America's "royal family." Television creates and celebrates celebrity, and cannot help but create the politics of celebrity.

The danger of the hypnotic, relatively hot effects of television - despite the fact that people watch "good," in-depth reporting in increasing numbers - is that people remain passive consumers of the programming. Democracy only works when people are engaged and actively participate in the political process. This participation begins with actually going to vote, and increases from there. Television does not move people - in fact, the nature of the beast is precisely the opposite: Television encourages us to sit on our couches and stay put (for the extreme extension of this, see the EFF article, "Bathroom Breaks are Theft.")

Can democracy survive television? It certainly can, but only if we recognize the effects of a newer medium that engages people, and draws those that have become disillusioned with the political process back to participation. A major effect of the Internet is its ability to create ties and active relationships, and to create conditions whereby people actively seek connections and engagement. The Howard Dean campaign, for one, understands this, and was created with precisely these effects in mind. Formerly disinterested people have become re-engaged and energized through the 'net's ability to enhance and extend individual voice, having it reappear out of the mouth of the candidate, as well as its ability to enable the creation of multiple, autonomous groups whose emergent characteristics allow them to all move in the same direction without central control. Such conditions return us to some semblance of government by the people.

If Dean wins the Democratic nomination, we have a wonderful case that retrieves the 1960 presidential campaign, and in particular the famous Kennedy-Nixon debate that pit television versus radio for the determinant that tipped the balance of the election. 2004: Bush vs. Dean. A television president vs. an internet candidate. Politics will never again be the same.
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Posted 17:08 by Mark Federman permanent link
Mark Federman on The People's Agenda

I will be a guest tomorrow morning on "The People's Agenda with Marla Crockett," the public affairs call-in show on NPR affiliate KERA, 90.1 FM in Dallas, Texas. "Friday, November 7th, we'll talk about the impact of television on democracy. Some believe it's seriously undermined the ability of citizens to engage with and understand complex issues. The show is part of our week-long series, "Whose Democracy Is It?" Hope you can listen, beginning at 10am Central Standard Time on 90.1." Live feeds on the web are here (RealAudio) and here (Windows Media).
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Posted 00:32 by Mark Federman permanent link
The Innovator's Solution - Still a Dilemma

Renee Hopkins over at IdeaFlow is reading Clay Cristensen's newest book, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. She is apparently quite taken with the book: "How do I love this book? Let me count the ways: the carefully rendered statement of the thesis, the placement of the starting point for the argument -- and, oh boy, the footnotes!" I haven't yet read the book, but plan to do so soon. I quite enjoyed his last book, The Innovator's Dilemma, that described how companies who do all the right things can be blindsided by disruptive technologies. What was interesting to me about his last book was that, while the argument was compelling and well-documented in a solid theoretical base, its subsequent attempted application in a deterministic fashion (by Christensen himself) was a dismal failure.

Of necessity, theory and scholarship based in the scientific method - particularly the exceptional scholarship demonstrated by Christensen - requires a ground of pre-conceptions that are often unnoticed with regard to their psychological stipulations on perception and cognition. Often the extant foundational theory itself must be questioned.

In particular, Renee Hopkins mentioned the following:
"the widely held belief that growth is so hard to achieve "repeatedly and well" because "creating new-growth businesses is simply unpredictable." The process, he says, looks unpredictable because its results are unpredictable. But "you cannot say, just by looking at the results of the process, whether the process that created those results is capable of generating predictable output. You must understand the process itself." And predictability, he explains, comes from well-researched theory."

Herein lies perhaps the basic fallacy of Christensen's argument and method. It is becoming increasingly apparent that for most processes - and particularly processes that involve human interactions and dynamics - true predictability is not possible. Predictability does not necessarily come from well-researched theory if the process itself is non-deterministic and chaotic. The outcome of a process is often an emergent property; Murphy's Law (and its many corollories) have almost become business axioms in a complex environment in which predictable determinism has been obsolesced by our increasing understanding of the nature of complexity.

Invariably, Christensen's work - now on both the bestseller list and required reading list for "frequent flyer university" - will become the basis of the next business fad. More power to him, I say, since his research is good and his logic is impeccable. However, business people who attempt to adopt his principles unthinkingly as gospel do so at their peril. It is awareness, and not theory or predictions, that are the key to business success.
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