Thoughts on a (rhetorical?) question in Peter Morville’s “Search Patterns”: “What, if anything, will never be subject to search?”

My first thought was that we’re not currently able to search by feeling or emotion, and that that might not ever be possible.  And to be clear, when I say search “by feeling or emotion,” I don’t mean searching using a feeling word, like googling “sad” or “depressed” or “happy.”  That, obviously, is eminently possible now.  

What we aren’t doing yet, is to literally search (and tag) by the feeling or emotion experienced.  Certainly, you can already tag, for example, a TED Talk, with a feeling or emotion word, such as “inspiring,” or “fascinating,” or “funny.”  But you can’t communicate the actual physical, emotional experience that a video, blog, website or other content provides.  At least, not yet.  What if you could tag a YouTube video with the physical sensation of the uproarious laughter you experienced when you watched it?  Or if you could actually share the feeling of delighted terror you experienced at that new horror movie?   

Or perhaps you could search by physical touch sensation.  If you could imagine the feel of silk, and the online store would filter clothing results by those with that “feel.”  Or someone might sensation-tag a wool sweater as “very itchy,” and when you clicked on that item, you could choose to “feel” the sensation-tags that other users had applied.  (I would hope the default would be that you would have to request or allow that tag first - nobody likes auto-launching music on sites, I can’t imagine they’d appreciate auto-launching sensory overload.)

Or what if you could research vacation destinations by searching for the sensation of warm sand between your toes and the sun on your face?  Or picturing the type of wilderness trails you'd like to hike and letting the search engine find close matches to that visual image, and rank them by, say, how close they are to you?

The more I thought these ideas, though, the more I realized it might not be so impossible, after all.

Consider how advanced things like fMRI are now.  Scientists know where in the brain certain emotions are seated, and can visualize, in real-time, the blood flow to those regions, indicating whether or not you are using that part of your brain, and experiencing that emotion.  And advanced prosthetics are able to use electrical signals from the brain to control movement of those artificial limbs, and the science behind those is continuing to advance.  One has even been demonstrated on the Colbert Report.  We already have fairly accurate speech recognition capabilities which allow people to control their computers hands-free.  

And the technological development (that I know of) that is closest to something which could evolve into the mechanism for such a type of search, is the brain-computer interfaces which are already capable of helping locked-in syndrome victims communicate by focusing their thoughts to move a cursor on a computer screen to communicate, surf the internet and more.  One great example is this video of the NeuroSwitch:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWe5YVV9dWs  And that’s not the only such brain-computer interface out there.  

It’s not a far cry from that to “mind reading,” of a sort.  In fact, when I googled the phrase “computers reading minds,” it returned over 28,000,000 results.  Perhaps a little frightening, in the time elapsed from this afternoon to this evening, the same search yielded 100,000 additional results the second time.  

Right now, the focus seems to be on more obvious practical benefits, such as helping the locked-in communicate, rather than a superfluous-seeming search-by-emotion capability.  But if you consider how quickly computers evolved from giant mainframes that cost millions of dollars, to something you could carry in one hand and use to read books, watch tv, play games, shop, make phone calls, video conference, and more, given the technology that already exists for computers to interpret human brain patterns, what as-yet un-thought-of applications might that develop into in the next 25 years?  It would be frivolous now to use the technology for “mere” online search purposes, but there may come a time when that’s the least of what brain-computer interfaces can achieve.   

Twitter - I'm behind the curve :\

Sometimes I think I'm so smart, but so far, it's always been the case that somebody else already had the idea before me... Wall Street Journal article about Researchers utilizing Twitter data

Knowing the right compromise requires knowing your purpose

[slightly modified from a discussion board post I made for a class assignment]

Management thinking great Peter Drucker states that you have to start out with “what is right rather than what is acceptable” before you compromise, so that you don’t make the wrong compromise (from The Daily Drucker, p. 304).  

As an aside, I would argue that part of the reason is that the compromise itself is what is “acceptable” - it’s what you settle for when you can’t get what’s ideal.  If you’ve compromised the ideal before you even reach the point where you have to compromise, you haven’t left yourself many good options.

But I digress.  I think in corporations, compromises are most often made over money - how much to budget, and for what.  Where to strike the balance between profitability and the sustainability of the organization.

And this is where successful companies have realized that having a purpose can help guide those determinations and compromises.  Some part of any corporation’s purpose is, of course, to make money, to be profitable.  But that can’t be the sole driving force in a company.  It doesn’t motivate workers, or create or increase morale, and it often doesn’t even drive profitable behaviors, because the decision-makers ignore sustainability and future success in favor of profits now, and by failing to invest and plan ahead, can (eventually) completely eliminate the business’s ability to be profitable.

So, “what is right” is what aligns with the company’s purpose.  To use our first class presentation subject, Procter & Gamble, as an example, the company’s purpose is “touching and improving more consumers’ lives in more parts of the world more completely.”  And this sense of purpose is infused throughout the company.   We had the good fortune to interview a P&G employee who said that he is guided only a daily basis in his work by the company’s purpose.  With that sense of “what is right,” people at any level of the company can make the right decisions, the right compromises, and still achieve the company's goal without "cutting the baby in half."  The company can decide to invest in an audacious goal like digitizing the entire company, because they see that doing so, and using technology to be as efficient and informed as they can possibly be, will help enable them to touch and improve consumers' lives all over the world, including growing markets like China and India, where they can’t necessarily just sell to a few giant Wal-marts, but need to reach many smaller stores in order to deliver their products to their consumers.

A blind pursuit of nothing but profit can lead organizations to make bad compromises and bad decisions.  “Undisciplined pursuit of more” is what Jim Collins, in “How the Mighty Fall,” labels as the second of five stages of corporate decline.  If you cut costs and expand markets or grow company size without investing in technology, training, and process improvement, you can end up with a company that is analogous to a tree that has rotted on the inside, where it may still look fine on the outside, but it’s only a matter of time before a storm comes that tears the whole thing down.

And the expert interview [part of our class materials] with Jim Igel touched on this, as well, when he and Guy St. Clair addressed the importance of corporate social responsibility.  The interesting fact is that social responsibility and even altruism in corporations is not only *not* anathema to profitability, but there’s also a substantial body of research demonstrating that the two things actually go hand in hand - a company that benefits society ultimately improves its own bottom line (cf. “Built To Last” by Jim Collins).  

Coincidentally, I posted this homework assignment on Friday, October 7, and the very next day, October 8, @TEDNews tweeted this TED Talk by Simon Sinek, discussing how inspired and inspirational leaders and organizations "Start With Why" - "people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it."