"Invention is always born of dissension" - Jean-François Lyotard.
Innovation and creativity are everything to Dietrological. You might expect us to live in lateral-thinking-territory with respect to our analyses of the financial markets but our experimentation also leads us to develop unusual business structures and enhanced business models. Our lifestyles are a bit of a grin too.
We reckon that 50% of our level of performance is dependent on these fuzzier inputs. Listen up.
The Dietrological team were doing tri-centre existence when others were outsourcing. Our Edge.
We progressed onto bi-centrality with a virtual and nomadic tertiary office allowing us to trade from the Carpathian mountains in Romania via a mobile and a laptop, for example, when others were going mental about Blackberry's. Our Edge.
Dietrological now link both to one another and to our colleagues globally via an intricate Cell And Web infrastructure which enhances all of our operations while others are selecting an intranet as their informational security barrier of choice. Our Edge.
Continuous Experimentation and Life Hacking are core competencies within Dietrological as innovation and efficiencies are highly prized while the competition prefer continuity - more of the same please, no new challenges. Our Edge.
We are proactive and embrace change. Others react and plagiarise. Our Edge.
We are Open Source within the limits imposed by our Isolationism whereas our competitors are fearful and paranoid in their jealous control of their patch of corruption. Our Edge.
We are Holistic. Our competitors are not focused on the Reality. Our Edge.
Most Management Theory is bobbins. And then there is Peter Drucker. Forget the rest, just read a bit of Drucker, plug in your common sense, chill and create for yourself and/or your company a more rational, efficient, optimised and innovative work/life balance.
All such real time infrastructural enhancements to one's realities are, of course, dependent on the state of technological advancement and such atmospheric analysis ensures that all scenarios are projected realistically when consideration is being given to the Management of New Change.
There are Good Things and there are Bad Things, and some of the Bad Things can be made into Good Things. I'm far too busy to think of an entertaining angle on this so here's a list of how we choose to surround ourselves with some Good Things while having a Good Time.
* Living and working in, at least, two different locations with vastly different cultures. Continually readdress geographical preferences and proactively move. Preferably, independent travel arrangements should exist between the centres.
* Take all aspects of isolationism and selected invisibility seriously. For example, always rent property (in somebody else's name) or purchase outright for cash. Leave as few traces as possible.
* Await technological "advancements". For instance, mobiles are currently virtually useless - give us a mobile that provides broadband internet access at the peak of Helvellyn and we might be interested.
* Micromanagement of daily, weekly and monthly work structures enables innovative and creative juxtapositions and coincidences between various different aspects of the work/life balance.
* Dovetailing of activities to produce exotic dishes - imaginative brain cooking.
* Experimentation on both the foundations of the business project and on oneself. Two examples: We constantly reengineer processes and adjust strategies to maintain our competitive advantage both generally and specifically. We are currently working with some Neurologists at MIT to utilise fMRI to monitor neural activity during different aspects of the trading process.
* Face-to-face meetings are totally inefficient and should form the exception rather than the rule. We use pagers primarily, email secondarily and phone as rarely as possible. Effective liaison across territories and time zones is paramount.
* Avoid consumerist trends and hysterias - hysterical behaviour being only rarely acceptable - the mad stampede towards the Virtual Office being just one such example which we will look at further below when we attempt to address the societal impacts of the New Slavery.
* Approach all potential external contracts on a 50/50 basis prior to any tilting relevant to input. No hierarchy internally - everybody earns equally with respect to input. All input is valuable. All decisions to be unanimous otherwise individual members of our team may take on proprietary projects themselves away from the Dietrological entity. We never aim to gain an edge on the financial aspects of a negotiation but we never accept less than our fair share.
* We are very, very, very fussy who we choose to work alongside. Grow imaginatively and organically. You do not need anybody else's cash - never relinquish your shared internal control. Short-term fast growth isn't sustainable and most certainly isn't strategic.
* Meditation/Retreats. Most of our Traders use Qi Gong or Tai Chi for, at least, a part of the trading window. We all also utilise self-imposed periods of retreat where we locate in the middle of the outbacks of Kerkyra or elsewhere, individually or collectively, to undertake 24/7 brainstorming on major infrastructural issues. The culture and the environment are catalysts for enhanced visualisation, lateral thinking and the targeting of just reward without deferred gratification.
* Trust is everything. I implicitly trust the three other people in my Team. It is critical to develop cooperative rules of engagement prior to the project beginning and the business structure produces a major dynamic towards each of us possessing a self-motivated and conscientious approach.
* Have an end goal. Have an exit route from individual sub-projects. Have a life plan.
* Be self-sufficient. Don't trust your financial, health or any other aspect of your future to anyone else whatsoever. No stocks, no shares, no bonds, no insurance, no pensions, no nuffin. There is no other way under the yoke of psychopathic capitalism.
* Downsize, energise, improvise. Target niche superiority.
* We do not need to expand to be successful. Growth is an option not a command. Indeed, we will be deliberately reducing growth in one of our business areas over the summer when the Dietrological Football Information Provision Service is repriced and remarketed as a Service for leisure punters rather than industry professionals. We will lose money through this process of self-induced negative growth. It is our belief, however, that this new profile will dovetail more suitably with other areas of our operation. Choose the Informal Economy and not globalisation.
* Spend as little of your life as is humanly possible in contact with the body-neurotic that is the world of venture capitalists, business angels, lawyers, accountants, consultants, bankers, government, civil servants, brokers, market makers, public relations androids and all middle people and analysts.
* All of our office space is highly functional. No meeting space - we meet imaginatively. Each space is a fully equipped trading room with spidered access to the pricing systems relevant to our businesses and access to the visual images of the corruption being perpetrated. These are our invisible CCTV systems against the Spectacular Simulacrum - a sousveillance system seeking traces of evidence of the Perfect Crime.
* Undertake external consultancies, albeit selectively. Only 7% of the negotiations commenced by members of our Trading Team result in contracted projects. We terminate over 90% of these discarded ideas ourselves. Be able to step into different worlds and coolly assess the environment. Be equally able to step out again. Psychological profiling must form a part of a watertight negotiation agenda. Play with their psychologies. What are they feeling? Do they possess the capacity to be able to feel?
* Minimise tax - as minimal taxation must surely go with minimal representation. Maximise bottom-up philanthropy and donations.
* Continual investment of time in Life Hacking agendas. Continually improve efficiency, performativity, operativity and processes to enhance the competitive advantage.
We could go on and on with our pithy and, probably, largely irrelevant homespun philosophy (we have hundreds of irritating little truisms like those outlined above) but we'll move onto two aspects of the modern work environment that are worthy of particular attention. The obsession with IT and the societal impacts of the economic system now known as the Imperial New World Order.
Sloterdijk: "Deprived of destiny, the modern individual replaces it by a fateful experimentation on himself".
In both the spheres of IT and wider society, this has become disturbingly true. Undoubtedly, IT offers some valuable tools - the internet is a major communications breakpoint, well designed databases are able to limit tedious processing work, for example - but it has reached the point, in most areas of knowledge, where these machines are being utilised as a replacement for the thinking process - "indulging more in the spectacle of thought than in thought itself" as Baudrillard opined. We have built our Unified Trading Model virtually entirely without the use of sophisticated computer software, some Neural Net stuff aside. This was a deliberate strategy when the project began in 1992 - the guesstimation was made that a more holistic big picture overview of the macro and micro worlds would be achieved with a more hands on approach. Use the pen and calculator as your prime tools just as our ancestors, and my Greek neighbours, use(d) the scythe and the seasons.
Baudrillard: "Leaving intelligence to machines is, in the end, relinquishing the responsibility of knowing, just as leaving it to politicians to govern us relieves us of the responsibility of power".
IT has two other major flaws. Firstly, the use of computers "modifies the types of phenomena susceptible to being processed" to the inevitable detriment of our species and the rest of the planet. Knowledge is "advanced" only in cul-de-sac's that fit into the IT "map of development". Evidently, this produces a vast area of knowledge that is peripheralised and unfunded as it bears no fruit for the performativity of the IT based economic system. Secondly, the computer redefines the natural, the Real, in the same manner that Illusory society eradicates the Real, while offering us the pretence that it is, in fact, that self same Real. Digitally remastered or the original analogue recording? Drum machine or a drum kit? Virtual Reality or The Reality? Holographic form or three-dimensional Reality? Additionally, pattern recognition software, used so extensively in the field of financial market analysis, fails utterly and completely in its attempt to link cause and effect - witness the ongoing subprime scandal and credit squeeze as all taxpayers shell out for the lack of regulatory oversight of the quantitative analytical ruses perpetrated by these allegedly whizz kid programmers. Neural Nets or Market Memory? Code or Intuition? Hindsight Analysis or Scenario Analyses?
Baudrillard: "The secret weapon of the human is the weapon of intuition, emotion, the strategem, playing a 'double game'".
More information does not necessarily lead to better decisions.
Something else does.
Creativity is more than mashing-up snippets.
The New Work Environment of the Imperial New World Order is not so new really. A battery farm office space under strip lights and a false ceiling is not life in the same way as most post-Industrial Revolution work realities are not life. These lives possess a frivilous and futile circularity - you are helping to build something-of-no-consequence economically while, concurrently, being rewarded by being able to purchase consumerist images of no consequence in return for your endeavours. We initially needed masters and overlords to impose discipline and "order" in this farcical and fractal system. No longer. "People feel inadequate compared with the enormous opportunities they have" according to James Katz of Rutgers University. Worse, these "opportunities" are Illusory, at least taken on a probabilistic basis. It is statistically highly unlikely that you will be the next David Beckham, for instance. The Industrial Revolution (sic) was built on enslavement and fear while modern day shareholder capitalism is based on a self-induced micro-enslavement within a societally disguised macro one. Enslavement and fear again. We fear our competitors, we fear poverty. We compete to our detriment, we burnout. Baudy says: "What becomes of a master without a slave? He ends up terrorising himself. And of a slave without a master? He ends up exploiting himself". This voluntary servitude is hidden behind an array of spectacular society masks.
Initially, the masters couldn't trust us so we were required to be tied to the land or enslaved in the workhouses of the Industrial Revolution. Fast forward to the cubicle in the call centre and monitoring is still a fact of life in a hierarchical and abusive non-unionised environment. The Virtual Office is a different entity altogether. Neoconservatives could only advance their strategy to this new level once they were convinced that the Pavlovian masses would behave accordingly when an illusory aspect of freedom was introduced to the Illusion. Having already overseen the destruction of society, as Thatcher proudly boasted (can't be that long now, surely), the neocons are now enabling the destruction of the workplace. Workers may now be trusted to self-motivate, self-manage and become self-sufficient. Workers are able to delude themselves that these "advancements" represent new freedoms when they evidently merely represent reconstructed chains. And, as we are all more than aware, you don't feel the chains until you try to move.
With the quantumisation of society into niches of ever smaller magnitude - community, single interest groups, extended family, family, partner/children, self - we are being moulded into perfectly efficient economic units, whether as "creative" producers or "programmed" consumers. Or both. James Katz bemoans the disappearance of the village blacksmith from the community - the disappearance of an informal economy serving a societal need, run from within one's own living space and within the community that one is sharing. This life still exists in Kerkyra and stands in marked contrast to the pseudoreality of the Illusion in the UKKK (a derivative joke, I know, but one that needed to be made anyway).
To counteract this atomisation of the individual - we would go further and call it the particlisation of the individual into her/his fundamental state - we are being provided with an array of Third Places. Neither home, nor office, these locations are the Illusion's answer to the disappearance of community life. You troop into Starbucks, order some liquid amphetamine, sit somewhere suitably individualised to mould into the form of your body and your life, energise the laptop or the Blackberry, pretend to be doing something of vital importance which might suggest to the other "villagers" that you are a person of some consequence. You provide some extra layers of illusion to the Illusion. This Illusion is not Virtual in its impact, however. In East Africa, nothing less than the rights to starvation are dependent, effectively, on the whims of a nonsense. This abusive structure which forces the coffee growers to accept un-premium but unitary agreements based on fear, also enables an illusory market entity to market an illusory product to an illusory grouping at the core of the Illusion. Voila!
Of course, the unwritten rule in such Third Places is that, under no circumstance, must one enter into a discussion with anybody else from outside your Ideal Clique unless it is to be served with more black amphetamine 50-percented with a milk that represents the basic food source of now-dead-calves. The new village life with just shadows of a reflection to an older Reality where the cows and calves would be in the field next to the blacksmith's workroom instead of being factory farmed out of any existence whatsoever. Sound familiar?
Talking of Third Places and the Virtual Office, Katz writes: "These places are physically inhabited but psychologically evacuated". You undertake more and more networking in parallel with a grouping of individuals remarkably similar to yourself. Such imbreeding of thought and human interactions can only produce backwards intellectual offerings and offspring.
They have destroyed community, society, the interactiviveness of our species. They have broken our links with nature and the environment - we no longer have any idea of how to remember who we really are. We live in an Illusory Simulacrum which offers no wormhole back to Reality. Having destroyed Reality, the Illusion must respond by creating a new fake pseudoreality, a new hyperreality, in an attempt to obscure the fact that a Perfect Crime has been perpetrated. Virtual World, Virtual Reality, the Virtual Firm, the Virtual Office... Why Virtual and not Real? Why Second Life when the First Life is more than adequate?
Unless, of course, First Life has been Illusioned out of Existence?
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
