World of Tanks

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. It's unpolite."

in World of Tanks

Makers: The New Industrial Revolution

“As Marx observed, power belongs to those who control the means of production”

(pg. 15)


“couldn’t help but observe that of his many ideas, only the sprinklers actually made it to market at all.
Why? Because he was an inventor, not an entrepreneur. And in that distinction lies the core of this book.”

(pg. 20)


“They didn’t need to compromise their music to get published, and they didn’t need to sell in big numbers or get radio play. They could find their own fans; indeed, the fans found them via word of mouth, and postcards poured into such micro-labels to order music that couldn’t be found in most stores”

(pg. 32)


“It is simply what ideas do: spread when shared.”

(pg. 37)


“Rather than inventing everything from scratch, he would have built on the work of others, compressing decades of work into months. Rather than patenting, he might have published his designs online, like other members of his community.”

(pg. 40)


“The great opportunity in the new Maker Movement is the ability to be both small and global. Both artisanal and innovative. Both high-tech and low-cost. Starting small but getting big. And, most of all, creating the sort of products that the world wants but doesn’t know it yet, because those products don’t fit neatly into the mass economics of the old model.”

(pg. 44)


“Because of the expertise, equipment, and costs of producing things on a large scale, manufacturing has been mostly the provenance of big companies and trained professionals.”

(pg. 48)


“What the Web taught us was the power of “network effects”: when you connect people and ideas, they grow. It’s a virtual circle—more people combined create more value, which in turn attracts even more people, and so on”

(pg. 57)


“But manufacturing was always seen as something else entirely. Making stuff is expensive; it needs equipment and skills in everything from machining to supply-chain management. It usually requires huge up-front investments, and mistakes lead to warehouses of unsellable inventory. Failure may be celebrated online, where the cost of entry is relatively low, but in the world of making stuff, failing means ruination”

(pg. 65)


“If I were to become a sprinkler inventor and entrepreneur, what problems would I be solving?
My assumption was that the best way to reinvent a mature industry would be to open it up to the ideas of others. So I asked a few basic questions, which you could call a toolkit for transformation (it can apply to practically any product):
1. How would these products be improved if they were connected to the Internet?
2. How would they be improved if the designs were open, so anyone could modify or improve them?
3. How much cheaper would they be if their manufacturers didn’t charge for their intellectual property?”

(pg. 72)


“My electronics company, 3D Robotics, is based on an open-source computing platform called Arduino, which is a cheap and easy-to-use processor and free programming environment”

(pg. 75)


“As we’ll see later, companies such as General Electric are using Maker-like community innovation methods among their own employees to develop proprietary products—open innovation doesn’t have to be wide open”

(pg. 83)


“Rather than top-down innovation by some of the biggest companies in the world, we’re seeing bottom-up innovation by countless individuals, including amateurs, entrepreneurs, and professionals”

(pg. 84)


“they offered it to the regional manufacturing association as the site of a laboratory in the future of making stuff. Today it is the Manchester Fab Lab, the first Fab Lab in the United Kingdom.”

(pg. 119)


“Projects made on free days are supposed to be documented online so others can share them. On other days, members pay to use the facility, and those projects can be proprietary and closed.”

(pg. 121)


“Today’s cottage industry is more typically an Etsy marketplace seller with a computer-controlled vinyl cutter making cool stickers for Mac-books or making and selling perfect replacement parts for vintage cars”

(pg. 131)


“And rather than competing on price in a commodity market that favors cheap labor, they compete on innovation. They invent their own designs and can charge a premium to their discriminating consumers who are intentionally avoiding mass-produced goods.
So, back to the future. Today we are seeing a return to a new sort of cottage industry. Once again, new technology is giving individuals the power over the means of production, allowing for bottom-up entrepreneurship and distributed innovation”

(pg. 133)


“you could only buy things that passed all of the three tests:
1. The products were popular enough for manufacturers to make.
2. The products were popular enough for retailers to carry.
3. The products were popular enough for you to find (via advertising or prominent placement in stores near you).”

(pg. 162)


“In the Web case, the “stuff” was and is mostly creativity and expression in digital form: words, pictures, videos, and the like. It doesn’t compete with commercial goods for money, but does compete for time”

(pg. 165)


“what if they could be produced using digital manufacturing where there is no cost to complexity and no penalty for short production runs?”

(pg. )


“Goods made by passionate consumers-turned-entrepreneurs tend to radiate a quality that displays craftsmanship rather than mass-manufactured efficiency.”

(pg. )


“Today, in experiments with IKEA furniture, when the paper’s study participants were given the opportunity to buy IKEA furniture they built themselves versus identical units built by others, they bid 67 percent more for their own creations. They did the same with Lego kits and paper origami. In all cases, people would pay more for things where their own sweat was one of the ingredients.”

(pg. )


“They offer no economies of scale. It is no cheaper on a per-unit basis to make a thousand than it is to make one. Instead, they offer exactly the opposite advantage: there is no penalty for changing each individual unit or making just a few of a kind.”

(pg. )


“What entrepreneurs quickly learn is that they need to price their product at least 2.3 times its cost to allow for at least one 50 percent margin for them and another 50 percent margin for their retailers (1.5 × 1.5 = 2.25)”

(pg. )


“We release our electronics PCB designs in their native form (Cadsofts’ Eagle format), under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license (“by-sa”), which allows commercial reuse. Our software and firmware, meanwhile, are all released under a GPL license, which also allows for commercial reuse as long as attribution is maintained and the code stays open”

(pg. )


“Amateurs have as much influence as professionals. The same is true in almost any open-innovation community: when you let anyone contribute and ideas are judged on their merits rather than on the résumé of the contributor, you invariably find that some of the best contributors are those who don’t actually do it in their day job.
Rogers describes the participants as falling into two classes: “solution seekers” and “solvers.” The first want something in particular done, and the second like to solve problems of any sort.”

(pg. )



“What makes the community work is homophily (“love of the same”), the tendency for people to associate and bond with others like themselves in a network.
What this taps is the Long Tail of talent; in many fields there are a lot more people with skills, ideas, and time to help than there are people who have professional degrees and are otherwise credentialed. Exposing this latent potential, both of professionals looking to follow their passions rather than their bosses’ priorities and of amateurs with something to offer, is the real power of open innovation.”

(pg. )


“As a buyer, you spend two long weekends (six days in total) assembling the car”

(pg. )


“And so on for all the other fasteners and assembly techniques, for a foreshortened mechanic boot camp”

(pg. )


“When something goes wrong with your Rally Fighter, you don’t take it back to the “dealer” or wait for a recall. You built it, so you can fix it”

(pg. )


“But it’s also the future: the open-source community approach means that designs are not just faster, cheaper, and better, but also come already market-researched”

(pg. )


“the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in eighteen months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim.
Local Motors proved this in early 2011, when the Pentagon’s DARPA research agency ran a competition for an “Experimental”

(pg. )


“Crowd-derived Combat Support Vehicle” (XC2V). Local Motors’ community snapped into action and came up with a design within weeks, which was refined by the company’s engineers. Three and a half months later the design had won, and a month after that Rogers presented it to President Obama. Of course, the competition was designed to favor Local Motors–style communities, but it’s hard to believe that a traditional defense contractor could have even got the paperwork done in three and a half months, much less designed and built a new high-performance armored car from scratch.”

(pg. )


“Ford employees are free to use the space day or night for projects related to their work or personal projects”

(pg. )


“Rather than just driving the modern factory, the computer is becoming the model for it. Infinitely flexible and adaptable, general-purpose industrial robots can be combined to create the universal Making Machine. And like computers, they work at any scale, from the mile-long NUMMI plant to your desktop. That—not just the rise of advanced technology, but also its democratization—is the real revolution.”

(pg. )


“Kickstarter, like many of the sites like it (IndeGoGo, RocketHub, and Funded By Me, to name just a few”

(pg. )


“One of the triumphs of the twentieth-century manufacturing model was that it was optimized for scale”

(pg. )


“any color you want as long as it’s black”

(pg. )


“He discovered that what they needed more than anything else, even more than a new CNC machine, was the ability to talk to one another”

(pg. )


“MFG.com, the low-cost factories of Alibaba, or the one-off digital fabrication of Ponoko and Shapeways”

(pg. )


“Once factories only worked for the biggest companies with the biggest orders. Now many of them will work at any volume. Smaller batches mean higher prices, of course, but if you’re just making a few of something the cost difference may matter little compared to the ability to do it all. The world’s supply chains have finally become “impedance matched” to the individual. Anyone can now make anything.”

(pg. )


“Today we can amplify and identify DNA at the kitchen table. Tomorrow we will be able to sequence it, too. But after that comes synthesizing it, modifying it, and the rest of genetic engineering”

(pg. )


“At that point, people will start hacking life.”

(pg. )

In "Makers: The New Industrial Revolution" by Chris Anderson

Jackdaws

“Sir Stewart Menzies, the foxhunting head of MI6, hated intellectuals, communists, and homosexuals, but Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who led the code breakers, was all three.”

(pg. 178)


“War enables people to be what they really are: the sadists become torturers, the psychopaths make brave front-line troops, the bullies and the victims alike have scope to play their roles to the hilt, and the whores are always busy”

(pg. 196)


In "Jackdaws" by Ken Follet

O segundo mundo

"Os norte-americanos tendem a acreditar que presidem ao primeiro império global do mundo, mas a Grã-Bretanha foi de facto o último império global no qual o Sol nunca se punha. Grande parte do mundo pertencia ao seu domínio e a ele prestava contas."

(pg. 16)

"O EUA, a UE e a China representam três diferentes estilos diplomáticos que competem para liderar o século XXI: a coligação ao estilo norte-americano, o consenso ao estilo europeu e a consulta ao estilo chinês."

(pg. 18)

"Se a relações humanas têm a ver com <>, então a geopolítica tem a ver com conquistar aliados e influenciar países."

(pg. 25)

"A UE é de longe o império mais popular e mais bem-sucedido da História, pois nãpo domina, mas disciplina."

..."a Europa precisa de se expandir, senão morre. <..."

(pg. 34)

"Todos os <> são governados por sistemas supra-presidenciais que mantêm deliberadamente Parlamentos enfraquecidos, enquanto as oligarquias controlam a economia através de clientelismos baseados nos clãs. Os poderes político e económico não se limitam a sobrepor-se, são sinónimos um do outro."

(pg. 97)

"Gwadar era uma minúscula aldeia de extrema pobreza há dez anos... Os Chineses estão a transformar essa área num centro energético de primeira classe: até o Titanic conseguiria atracar lá."

(pg. 129)

"Enquanto a maioria dos países tem exércitos, aqui é o exército do Paquistão que tem um país, é um conhecida piada que circula no Paquistão."

(pg. 130)

in "O segundo mundo" by Parag Khanna

7 maus hábitos dos fracos líderes

Não são os 7 pecados mortais, mas são os 7 maus hábitos presentes nos líderes fracos, identificados por Eric Jackson na Forbes. Mesmo em Portugal temos bons líderes em todas as áreas (na política, nas empresas, no desporto, etc.) mas a verdade é que a corrupção, o nepotismo e a mediocridade tem-nos trazido cada vez mais fracos líderes.

O 1º mau hábito é verem-se a si próprios como dominadores. Este é talvez o hábito mais insidioso porque é altamente desejável. Quem não gosta de dominar, de decidir, de mandar? O problema é que esta forma sobranceira e prepotente de estar, leva os fracos líderes a nunca questionam o seu domínio e deixarem de conseguir discernir que estão à mercê das circunstâncias. Amiúde tendem a subestimar o alcance do seu domínio e a desprezar o papel da conjuntura e das circunstâncias no seu sucesso. Os líderes que caem nesta armadilha sofrem com a ilusão da preeminência pessoal, vendo-se como donos das suas organizações. Para eles, todas as outras pessoas que fazem parte da organização, apenas existem para executar as suas ordens. O sintoma é a falta de respeito pelo próximo.

O 2º mau hábito é identificarem-se demasiado com a organização. Este hábito pode por vezes parecer benéfico, porque queremos líderes empenhados e totalmente alinhados com a organização, mas a verdade é que a realidade confirma o ditado: “o que é demais é erro”. Frequentemente acabam por perder a noção da fronteira entre o interesse pessoal e o colectivo. E ao invés de tratarem as organizações para ter sucesso, os fracos líderes tratam-nas como sendo extensões de si próprios. Líderes com esta visão, usam frequentemente as organizações para atingir ambições pessoais e desviam recursos financeiros da organização, para uso pessoal. Alguns, com percursos longos e notáveis, tendem a pensar que deram tanto à organização, que qualquer despesa em proveito próprio é trivial. O sintoma é a falta de carácter.

 O 3º mau hábito é julgarem que têm todas as respostas. Esta é uma imagem que durante anos fomos habituados a cultivar nos nossos líderes. Que seriam homens fora de série, quase omniscientes, capazes de decidir e responder rapidamente a qualquer desafio. Mas diz a sabedoria popular que “depressa e bem, não há quem”. Os líderes que decidem sozinhos e depressa (a quem normalmente chamamos determinados) deixam escapar os pormenores e não compreendem bem a situação. Pior ainda é, pelo facto de acharem que têm as respostas todas, nem sequer se dão ao trabalho de consultar alguém. Na verdade os líderes que querem ter todas as respostas tendem a calar outros pontos de vista. O sintoma é a falta de seguidores.

O 4º mau hábito é cruelmente eliminarem todos aqueles que não estão cegamente de acordo consigo. Os fracos líderes querem incutir a sua visão e forçar todos a acreditarem nela. Para eles, “quem não está comigo, está contra mim”, e assim sendo só existem 2 opções para quem trabalha com estes líderes: junta-se a eles ou sai. O problema deste mau hábito é que é desnecessário e ao mesmo tempo destrutivo. Não é condição essencial, para um líder ter sucesso, ter unanimidade à sua volta. Aliás, é até benéfico ter gente com opiniões e visões diferentes, pois essa é a única possibilidade de encontrar (e consequentemente corrigir) problemas e erros. E acreditem que eles acontecem porque ninguém é perfeito. Na maioria das vezes, os líderes que tendem a sufocar quem deles discorda, acabam por cair sozinhos, levando a organização consigo. O sintoma é o mau estar e o abandono dos mais directos colaboradores.

O 5º mau hábito é serem demasiado bons oradores e obcecados com a sua imagem. Isto é mais natural nos líderes de organizações mediáticas. O problema é que, no meio de tanto “espectáculo”, de tanta dedicação às “relações públicas”, o foco na organização e nos seus objectivos começa a tornar-se menor, desleixando a gestão e falhando metas. A consequência disso é novo erro: ao invés de procurarem grandes realizações, começam apenas a preocupar-se com a aparência do pouco que vão conseguindo. Além do mais, os líderes que são obcecados pela sua imagem, cedem à tentação de gastar demasiados recursos financeiros para a promoverem, ao invés de investirem ou pouparem. O sintoma é a constante procura de atenção.

O 6º mau hábito é subestimarem os obstáculos que podem surgir. Parte do fascínio de ser um líder é a oportunidade de poder assumir e perseguir uma visão. No entanto, quando os líderes ficam demasiado encantados com a sua própria visão, começam a ignorar ou subestimar as reais dificuldades que se podem colocar no seu caminho. E quando estas se colocam, e se mostram mais difíceis de ultrapassar do que o previsto, os fracos líderes mergulham invariavelmente num abismo. Em vez de reanalisarem e reavaliarem a situação, caem em desgraça. São incapazes de reconhecer o erro e alterar o rumo, porque acham que isso os enfraquece como líderes. O sintoma é ser-se megalómano, exagerado e demasiado determinado.

O 7º mau hábito é apoiarem-se constantemente no sucesso do passado. Muitos líderes acabam por baquear pelo facto de se quererem aproveitar demasiados do que acham ser os seus pontos fortes, e por evitarem sair da sua zona de conforto. Acabam portanto por se agarrar a um modelo estático e estagnam. Insistem em receitas ultrapassadas e ideias antigas, usadas em tempos passados. Além disso não consideram os cenários presentes e futuros, as inovações, as evoluções. Ao invés de se adaptarem às novas circunstâncias, usam a sua carreira como único ponto de referência, e repetem o que no passado lhes trouxe êxito. O sintoma é constantemente referirem o que fizeram de bom no passado. Conclusão, se o leitor é um líder e comete estes erros, é melhor começar a pensar em mudar a sua maneira de ser, de estar e de agir. Se por outro lado o leitor não é, mas tem um líder assim, mais vale começar a pensar em abandonar a organização e procurar novos desafios, novas paragens.