In the last few days I was reading a book titled - ‘In Praise of Slow’. I picked up this book at the local store mainly because of the title which was rather eye catching. Eye catching because most of blurbs we see in the media, the books we read are about speed, doing things at a faster pace, eating foods hurriedly, juggling with multiple schedules all at once, reading 200 blogs daily, trying to chalk out every slot of the day etc.

Consider an hypothetical example. There is a wheel which has 2 colors painted on it , red and green on each half of the area on the wheel. When the wheel is rotated against the needle , it either stops on red area or the green area. The events that is of discussion in this example , i.e the needle being on the red area OR the green area is completely random.

The theme of the book by Paul Ormerod revolves around three aspects, they being, firstly, the pervasive nature of failure, secondly, the patterns between biological extinction of species and firm failures, and thirdly the way one can deal with this failure. Is the failure pervasive ? A look at the history of firms shows clear evidence that the life time of a company is not really long. Hannah, a noted researcher analyzed all the firms the top firms between 1912 - 1995 and observed that only 13% of the firms survived.

Via Chicago Tribune : I’m with the latter group, mostly because, whenever I think about new technology and its potential to go mainstream, I remember the Rule of the VCR. Every household had one. They were easy to set up and use, and using them fully offered people the great benefit of watching TV on their own, not the network’s, schedule. Yet in more than 9 out of 10 homes, the VCR might as well not have had a “record” button; it was put to its simplest use, playing tapes.

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