What do you mean that camera doesn't automatically add your location?

The W Mexico City (An Instagram photo)

While I'm in a change-is-happening-faster-and-faster way of thinking after my chat with Daniel Burrus earlier this week, here's a quick example.

I've been enjoying using Instagram. It's a photo sharing iPhone app that includes some filters for you to jazz up your crap photos and make them look artsy. It also allows you to share your location by picking from a list of nearby places. When I was in Mexico City recently, I started to use this feature just to add a location to my photograph so I had a record of where I was for each photo. Surely it's only a matter of time before all smart phone cameras will include this functionality? Another example of something you didn't know you wanted becoming a necessity that you can't live without.

So, not only does my poor old digital camera have to justify the extra space it takes up in my bag vs. my iPhone camera (which it might do on the basis of slightly better quality pictures), it now has to overcome the fact that it's not wifi connected and won't ever be able to tell me where I am and what places are nearby.

If I was a manufacturer of lower-end digital cameras I'd be worried. The end for that end of the market may be very near.

What's the best way to stop a penalty kick?

Photo: ratterrell (Flickr)

According to a team of Israeli scientists, the answer is "Do nothing: Just stand in the center of the goal and don't move." The chances of stopping the ball are highest if the goal keeper stays in the center.

As reported in the New York Times Magazine, these scientists found that goal keepers, in fact, dived to the left or right 94% of the time. Why? They theorize that the goalies are afraid of looking indecisive. "They want to show that they are doing something," says Michael Bar-Eli, one of the authors. "Otherwise they look helpless, like they don't know what to do."

Which is interesting because typically, when faced with a tough problem, people tend to prefer to do nothing. Better to do nothing and hope the problem goes away.

Bar Eli suspects that leaders trying to solve the financial crisis are like goal keepers. The spotlight is on them so they have to do something even if staying the course might be the right answer. As an example Bar Eli says: "I know an investment manager whose clients will be calling him on the phone saying: 'Do anything! Just do something! I cannot sit and look at how my shares decline!'"

Hopefully they're going to guess the right way.

How do you get to your Carnegie Hall?

Photo: NYCArthur (Flickr)

The story goes that a New Yorker (Arthur Rubinstein, in some versions) is approached in the street near Carnegie Hall, and asked, "Excuse me sir, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?" He replies, "Practice, practice, practice."

There's another version of that story that I once saw in an ad (I can't remember for what). The question was the same but the answer was: "Well, I wouldn't start from here."

As I read Anu Gawande's article in The New Yorker about health care reform, titled Getting There From Here, it was this second version of the Carnegie Hall story that I remembered. Gawande's argues that pragmatic reform of the health care system built around the mess we have is preferable to any of the start-from-scratch proposals on the table (single payer or free market).

No-one can accuse him of having a rose-tinted perspective as he summarizes: "Yes, American health care is an appallingly patched-together ship, with rotting timbers, water leaking in, mercenaries on board, and fifteen per cent of the passengers thrown over the rails just to keep it afloat. But hundreds of millions of people depend on it...There is no dry-docking health care for a few months, or even for an afternoon, while we rebuild it. Grand plans admit no possibility of mistakes or failures, or the chance to learn from them. If we get things wrong, people will die. This doesn’t mean that ambitious reform is beyond us. But we have to start with what we have."

Gawande bases his argument on the idea of path dependence. Shouldn't I already know about path dependence? I don't know. Anyway, it describes how decisions today are influenced and limited by decisions made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant or optimum. Witness the QWERTY keyboard still going strong today even though it was designed originally to slow people down so they wouldn't jam the typebars on their typewriters.

In path-dependent processes, early events play a critical role in the market outcome. Take America's transportation system. Early decisions to base it on gasoline-powered automobiles (as well as a few well-timed interventions by the auto makers) have created an entire infrastructure that make it very difficult to do things differently.

What path dependence tells us it that, when people have devoted a lot of time and resources into a particular way of doing things and they have become efficient organizing themselves around a system, it can be really difficult and counterproductive to try and start from scratch. Applied to health care that means building on our flawed current system. Applied to business that means choosing business model evolution over reinvention (except when your industry is hit by a massive asteroid).

Such thinking doesn't need to lesson our ambition. We all can strive to get to our own Carnegie Hall. But we need to get try and get there from where we are now instead of where we might wish we were.