Le Petit Genius in France

I had a few more hits than usual from France today, which I find comes from a comment made on Le techno-blogue à Steph! - it's a whole new niche, because there's no Geek like a Gaul Geek.

I enjoyed the comic on the blog, which deals with the topic of Creation vs. Exploitation, and the role of the Artist and the Craftsman.


Today I feel like I'm Jerry Lewis in a small way, which is to say I am a Petit Genius in France.

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According to Google Chrome, the blog post reads like this:

It's classic. A computer scientist, a cook, a tailor, a carpenter or any talented person wants to put his talent to good use. He wants to profit more than just a pay check in exchange for his time. So he goes into business!

Suddenly, all of the creativity that made this person an artist is now going into operations details: staff management, cash flow management, growth management, sales development, advertising and marketing, etc.

The creator becomes an exploiter. Or operator. Whatever. The important thing is that his work will be less and less creative.

Mechanics and The Garage
One of my former bosses once told me "If you love to work as a mechanic and want to continue to love it, do not run a garage". It applies to all professions and to all people who earn their living with their talent.

The only exception are the real people-skills businessmen. They can sell jet-skis or mattresses, it's still sales and business development. These people, their talent is to get talented people together, to "place the pieces" as they say!

Creativity and exploitation as the devil and holy water
The creation process is chaotic, it is anything but organized and structured. We do not force creativity, it must be cultivated. It is often more creative to be on vacation than in the office. I often joke that I'm going to brainstorm during a bike ride. It is during these moments that I'm most creative, not sitting at the desk between two phones. The exploitation process is linear, organized, structured, right, square. You're unable to exploit while mountain biking. Exploitation is the opposite of creativity.

Creativity is my capacity and my fault. My talent is applied science, not the basic sciences or administration. What I do best is to find solutions to real problems, to sell practical solutions. I do not revolutionize the theory of relativity or become the CEO of Google. Instead, I will take a fax and radio and make a radiofax simply because someone has expressed a need.

Creativity is an essential qualification for starting a business from scratch, but it becomes a handicap when the business becomes operational. One, that's not what makes us tick as an individual and two, we tend to improvise. The focus is no longer on the talent in which one excels; it is now in all the distractions around you. In the long term, it is ideal for disaster. An artist who wants to play the manager is going to eat Kraft Dinner for a very long time.

So what? The designer is left with two choices. First, remove the emotional creative people as soon as it becomes exploitation. Second, surround himself with managers who will operate and leave him free in creation.

In short, this aspect of entrepreneurship is misjudged, probably due to an excess of idealism. What designer does not want to change the world? In reality, it's more complicated! We should let another control the production. Fortunately, solutions exist, and the designer-entrepreneur will find it. If it were easy, what would be the fun of going into business?

This is what the web was made for. Five geeks in France, referring to an American blog in their conversation. Tres Magnifique !

Finished, Shop Class as Soulcraft

Finished reading Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford. Crawford is a Ph.D. (political philosophy) who left academia to make his living as a motorcycle mechanic. This book is an expansion of an essay originally published in the journal The New Atlantis, and the essay is a fine introduction to Crawford's thoughts.


Crawford talks about the psychic appeal of manual labor, and points out that it is in dealing with the physical world that we interact with reality, and that those who do manual labor usually have to improvise based on the situation at hand - a decision-making process that improves with experience, requires thoughtfulness, and presents an objective measure of success - things often lacking in contemporary work.


He talks about the crafts and the teaching of a craft to young people, providing an arena for failure, learning, and the development of pragmatism. He talks about the degradation of blue-collar work, then of the degradation of white-collar work, and explains that by removing judgement and discretion from the worker (wearing any color collar), Corporations are moving the thinking part of the job into the corporate process, and dumbing down, demeaning, and removing opportunities for excellence and mastery from the employee's realm. The book is a cultural rebuke to the field of knowledge management. Crawford suggests that the blue-collar, hands-on jobs considered "low" by today's culture may actually provide for more intellectual work that office jobs do.

Crawford encourages young people to go to college for an education, and to learn a craft for a livelihood. He points out that plumbers, electricians, and mechanics haven't faced outsourcing and overseas competition because the physical nature of their work and the fact that the worker must adapt to the specific situation at hand makes these fields incompatible with "knowledge management" and "process improvement" - he makes the point that when you want a deck on your house, you hire a local, not somebody in China.

He recognizes the complexity of modern life and sets a simple virtuous standard for interacting with the modern world - he calls for achieving "a mastery over your own stuff", being able to fix and maintain your own property and devices.


In my own experience, I take a small pleasure in repairing flat tires on my bicycle and then patching and re-using the tubes, not because it saves a bit of money and reduces waste, but because it permits me to interact with the thing-in-itself, it lets me work on my own "stuff", and it is clearly done either well or poorly.

I really enjoyed the way Crawford describes the increasingly lost concept of the journeyman, and teases out the tension between judgment and decision making on one hand and on slavish attention to rules and procedures on the other hand. He points out that although Rules may permit untrained inexperienced people to handle basic-to-normal situations, Judgment will develop journeymen who can adapt and resolve difficult-to-complex situations. This was a particularly pleasing part of the book, because the spectrum between judgment and rules is of great interest to me (I fall with Crawford in favor of Judgement).

Philosophically, he suggests a chosen life focused on the physical rather than the virtual or administrative, a work focused on livelihood rather than self-esteem, the development of judgement rather than rule-following, and a participation in the local rather than the global economy.

I found the book very similar to Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, but curiously the somewhat negative NYTimes book review specifically says that this is not Pirsig Part Two. Having read the book, I disagree with the NYTimes reviewer; I did not find that the book has "a chip on its shoulder", but rather found that it suggested an alternative approach to the admin 2.0 workplace, in a manner that continued Pirsig's line of thought.

This was an excellent book and I recommend it.

Finished: Artists, Craftsmen, and Technocrats

Finished reading Artists, Craftsmen, And Technocrats, by Patricia Pitcher. (Link leads to PDF).

This is an excellent book about the role of artists, craftsmen, and technocrats. I've been increasingly interested in the role of apprenticeship in the the historic European journeyman system, and the guild structure. This book applies the artist-craftsman-technocrat scheme to modern life (in work, organizations, and societies). I really enjoyed reading it, which is unusual in a book translated from the French into English; the author is a PhD at a bilingual Toronto university.

She describes all three as honest, hardworking, and ethical. She positions the Artist as that 1% of the population that is the creator, the dreamer, the filler of vacuums, the synthesizer who can take the (work, industry, society) to a new level. The Artist is people-oriented, open-minded, intuitive, and visionary.

She paints the Craftsman as the majority of the population, the people who've learned through experience, the day-in-day-out people who actually do things, the patient, tolerant people who know what works and what won't. The Craftsman is humane, dedicated, knowledgeable, and wise.

The Artist and Craftsman are "fellow-travelers"; they get along and respect each other.

But the Technocrat is another story. Detail-oriented, rigid, methodical, and hardheaded, the Technocrat is the enemy of both the Artist and the Craftsman. His/her analytical thinking leaves no room for fresh ideas and new pathways; he/she follows an uncompromising set of rules he/she believes are right.

The Technocrats are the buzzworders, acceptors of current wisdom, the micro-focused, the planners and charters, the people who want it now, and in essence the people that embrace the administration of things rather than the human and social consequences involved.

Of course, she says it much better than that. She develops interesting flows of how each group sees the other, and suggests that the Technocrats have risen beyond their place in (business, society) to the detriment of us all.

Her dynamic suggests that the Technocrats have thrived because the Artists respect their skills, and the Craftsmen tolerate or ignore them, while the Technocrats will actively plan against the other two groups, viewing the Artist as out of control and lazy, and the Craftsman as old-fashioned and incompetent.

She closes with a call to embrace the Craftsmen and to tolerate the Artists, who are hated beyond reason by the Technocrats.

The test of any good theory is: does it explain what you've experienced? Does it predict where things might go? On both counts, this book is informative and successful.

Pitcher describes the behavior, thought processes, temperment, and inner life of each group. She backs it up with a 15-year ethnographic examination of a financial corporation, and I find it hard to disagree with her descriptions.

She does not offer bromides or checklists for the care and feeding of each type, but rather focuses on a call for Character, a return to Philosophy, a re-cognition of the Classics, and a call for restoring the place of the Craftsman, who has been too easily displaced by the Technocrat.

I enjoyed the translation, and found her discussion contrasting the French system of compagnonnage and it's social attributes with the more German system of apprenticeship to be a fascinating examination.

I highly recommend this book. Although I purchased the hard-cover from an hard-to-find book vendor, this link sells the PDF for $4. It's a good read from a multi-disciplinary perspective.