Skill or Habit? What belongs to the first category and what belongs to the second? And how can technology better promote skill? That is the primary question of this week’s podcast and we take a long time to answer it. Our trip takes us through the writings of Adam Smith, an app that can calculate net wealth from a business card and an eight year old disruptive innovator who will never move to Brooklyn “because everyone knows that the best startups aren’t in Brooklyn.”
Cast:
Maddie Insullie – Zoe Anastassiou
Vinny LeGoff- Geoffrey Grier
Penelope Othmar – Debbon Ayer
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===== The Schumpethon is business pitch contest of the Lillian Moller Gilbreth School for Disruptive Innovation, the fictional school that is next to our fictional office in Silicon Valley. It is, of course, named for Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1960) the Austrian economist who studied business cycles and argued that recessions helped move capital from less efficient industries to more efficient industries. This episode introduces Maddie, one of the competitors in this year’s contest. This is not her first Schumpethon but as she is only eight, she will have many more opportunities to disrupt.
Every community should have tradition for the December Holidays. Our tradition comes the predecessor to this drama, the podcast “Errant Hashtag.” This is an adaptation the essay “Songs of Comfort and Joy.”
Two notes, while this is dramatic, it is not technically drama. The event actually occurred at the Computing Center of Southern Methodist University in Dallas Texas. It was documented in the Dallas newspapers. Second, the Producer’s father is in the center of the back row.
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HWMS did not long remain a conventional podcast, if it ever was conventional. In the summer of 2015, we interrupted an interview by parading a French Army band through the studio.
By the fall of 2015, we knew that we wanted to move another direction. We went looking for dramatic talent, hired actor Sarah Corbyn Woolf, and put her on stage as Anna-the-Intern.
Anna believed that technical information was transient, that it could be easily purchased on the open market and that the real guarantors of success were the ability to read a room and to express yourself with confidence.
Sadly, she is probably right on all points.
The HWMS Drama begins.
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HWMS began as conventional podcast. More or less. (Probably less but we wouldn’t admit it.) It followed in the footsteps of three successful podcasts: “Known World” (2007-2009); “Crowdpod” (2010-2012), and “Errant Hashtag” (2013-2015). All three had become books: Too Soon To Tell (Wiley 2009), Crowdsourcing for Dummies (Wiley 2012), and The Company We Keep (IEEE Computer Society 2015).
As was common to podcasts that started in the mid-teens, the founders believed that they could recreate the conversations that they had in private. They were probably right but they hadn’t been entirely honest with themselves about the nature of those conversations. They were always a little dramatic.
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