TDI Web Log

I get a lot of people asking what Tempus Dictum does.  What’s the company about?  What do y’all do?  Etc.  And from my friends in Silicon Valley, I often get the question:  Why Portland?

Well, there are many answers to these questions, some of which I’ve covered (albeit in an apparently infuriatingly vague way, according to some) in previous log entries.  I admit this is a problem and we really should work on our … [cough] … messaging.

But, regarding the question of why we’re located in Portland, I can cite at least two things right off the bat:

1. a do-it-yourself culture, and
2. beer.

I won’t say anything about the DIY culture this post.  And Portland’s reputation for beer is global.  Now before you jump to the conclusion that we merely have a prurient interest in beer, I’d like to point to this article, which makes an interesting point that speaks directly to everything Tempus Dictum is about, including the English translation of its name “Statement of the Time”.  Civilization is based not on high-falutin’ past times like science, economics, or politics.  Civilization is based on banal things like water, shelter, food, and neighborhoods.  Portland excels at the banal while maintaining a satisficing tendency toward intellectual foresight.  And if Mr. Will is right and beer is positively correlated with civilization, then Portland is one of the most civilized cities on the planet.  Shouldn’t that be enough of a reason?

This story in Information Week helps provide the justification by which the Tempus Dictum hypothesis (TDH) will graduate to a full thesis:

Solo Entrepreneurs: Big Bucks From Tiny Computing Startups

The TDH states that, if the information explosion continues its general trend, human organizations will tend toward smaller and smaller clusters.

The TDH is an informal combination of the concepts of scale-free networks, libertarianism, and distributed problem solving. As I explained in The Motivation behind Tempus Dictum, we are, banally and somewhat facetiously, just a collection of misfits who find greater efficacy when operating “in the wild”, as it were. But the deeper message is that TDI presages an emerging trend in the way humans apportion their attention and efforts. Large bureaucracies are efficient and effective at exploiting coherent circumstances. Small organizations are more agile and much more effective (if not efficient) at discovering potentially coherent circumstances. In a relatively stable system, small organizations form in co-evolution with emergent coherence in circumstances. The small organizations reinforce the coherence and “blaze” the trail for the large organizations that follow.

However, as the world becomes more connected (via the internet but also other more robust factors like the homogenization of cultures through air travel), the potential coherency of any set of circumstances decreases. I.e. the phenomena and patterns that emerge are much more fragile when there are more paths to the same objective. And as humans become more connected, there are more feasible paths to the same objective.

This means that we need fewer large organizations to achieve our objectives because, if one particular path is capital or infrastructure intensive, it’s likely there is another path that is less so, making it achievable with a smaller organization.

Granted, we will still need some large organizations to achieve the objectives to which we can’t find easier paths. For example, space exploration and colonization is still capital and infrastructure intensive. Another example is the burgeoning epidemiological problems brought on by increased connectivity. Higher connectivity means higher homogeneity means more susceptibility to epidemic. Finding solutions for problems like the loss of honey bees, influenza, and Kraken will also be capital and infrastructure intensive.

However, if we mis-read this trend, we may be inclined to coerce ourselves into big money, big infrastructure solutions where such are unnecessary and, worse, wasteful and obstructionist. Big organizations form naturally when the discovery mode (many small organizations trying to achieve some objective by different means) wanes. Prematurely establishing artificially large organizations to solve improperly explored solutions is the primary risk during our evolution from a mostly heterogeneous, cliquish population into a mostly homogenous, connected population.

The techdirt entry:  Noncompete Agreements Are The DRM Of Human Capital gave me a great opportunity for an appropriate first post to the Tempus Dictum (TDI) web log. The entry talks about how non-compete agreements, limiting the extent to which employees can work for their employers’ competitors, dampen the collective innovation of a geographical region or legal jurisdiction. This seems rather obvious; but the nonintuitive conclusion is that non-compete agreements hurt each employer in the long-run because it means each employer, like all the others in the jurisdiction, cannot exploit the unused resources of its competitors.

In other words, every organization is, by definition and good reason, a bureaucracy. And in every bureaucracy, there are some individuals who cannot realize their full potential because their methods or ideas are incommensurate with the infrastructure (a.k.a. mis-fits). In those cases, the bureaucracy is not only dampening the individual, it is the source of inertia to the evolution of the organization.  It’s often best to set the individual free so that they might develop their ideas into a usable invention that more readily will fit into the bureaucracy.  I.e. set the misfit free and be ready to use their  invention to good effect.

Typically, setting the individual free means they quit and either go to work for another organization, usually in the same domain, or they start their own venture. [1] And this is where non-compete agreements come in.

With this background, it is easier to understand the foundations of TDI. Ostensibly, TDI is a custom software contracting firm. We take clients’ needs and codify solutions into software. But, this is just the banal projection of what TDI really is. What we really are is a collection of (habitual) misfits who love to work on interesting and difficult problems, regardless of where those problems arise. When one or more solutions to a problem percolates up and shows itself to be worthy of a new bureaucracy, one of us will “jump ship” and help start a new venture around that solution. Then, because we’re focussed on interesting and difficult problems, when that new venture stabilizes (or … [ahem] … dies), we hop back aboard TDI to continue the hunt.

At least that’s the vision, anyway. Ideally, by articulating such a structure and providing a supportive infrastructure for misfits, we not only facilitate our own development as the collective TDI and the individuals within, but we facilitate the creativity and progression of the groups [2] with which we engage.

[1] Intelligent organizations are finding many ways to patronize such misfits without cutting the ties entirely. I don’t really give career advice; but were I to give such advice, it would consist solely of “Don’t work for an organization that’s obviously dumber than you are.”

[2] Although the techdirt article talks specifically about the legal and regional application of non-competes, it seems clear to me that the conclusions would extrapolate to any group or domain wherein a standard set of [im|ex]plicit rules obtain, regardless of geographical proximity or legal jurisdiction. Groups that enforce within-group non-compete rules will be less innovative than groups that do not enforce such rules.