About the Time Molecules Book Cover

I just received the launch date for my new book, Time Molecules: Wednesday, June 4, 2025. I also received the polished book cover!

This little post is a rare “fluff piece” for this blog site, but I earlier wrote a more technical sneak peek of Time Molecules. For this blog, I’ll mostly discuss the fun symbolism within the cover.

The book cover shown above is a polished version of my original design. The items in the book cover version are sleek and aesthetically pleasing. However, like an aesthetically pleasing tumbler-polished agate losing the charm of a rough agate picked up from the beaches of Lake Superior, my rougher original design lost its rough charm.

Everything in this book—and on its cover—is about process. The large white brushstroke is an ensō, the ancient Zen symbol of a journey in progress. Its single, clockwise stroke begins at the lower left but leaves the circle open, reminding us that the work and the journey continues.

The ensō in the book cover is sleeker as it should be since the book is mostly about business processes. But the ensō in my original drawing is more organic since it’s a recording of the calligrapher’s state of mind during the process of drawing—the journey through the drawing cycle. It’s very much like how a Markov Model captures the essence of a process.

The “molecules” inside the ensō represents milestones along the journey. In this case, I’ve taken inspiration from the belt ranks of the judo dojo that I attended as a youth. Each molecule, beginning with the white molecule towards the bottom-left represents the belt colors of this particular dojo. However, for brevity, I left out of couple of ranks—blue and purple between yellow and green. It doesn’t matter because I can’t seem to find this progression anywhere today.

Admittedly, I hated the judo sessions. But I’m thankful that I was “required” (putting it mildly) to attend all those years. I didn’t realize until decades later how much it is the foundation of how I think.

The blue background (RGB 0,133,198) evokes traditional Japanese indigo dye after depleting (a process) in a vat over many months. Raw indigo progresses over time from something more like dark phthalo blue into that vivid blue. It’s kind of like tequila’s maturing process (but in reverse in terms of darkness of color): blanco, reposado, and añejo.

Toward the top of each molecule, there is a triplet of nodes. It symbolizes the three stages of a judo throw, each throw a process in itself: off-balancing your opponent (kuzushi), fitting in (tsukuri), and execution (kake). As you move through the belts, those same node triplets shift from scattered to alignment. It’s the path from a simple idea to a fully formed process.

The progression of the molecules from the scattered and loose white at “6:30” progressing to the tight and coherent white at “5:30” signifies the journey of a maturing process. The cover artist removed this feature of my original. I feel it stripped out much meaning.

These are the distinct milestones:

• White – Dashed lines show a beginner’s first steps, when every movement feels fragile and new; the nodes are scattered and tentative. Notice that the molecule ends don’t meet up—that signifies that once we leave the dojo, there is no thought of judo at all in our normal life.
• Yellow – Solid but thin lines mark your ability to follow instructions and join the practice; the nodes begin to coalesce.
• Green – Thicker lines reflect growing confidence; the gap between start and finish reminds you that off-the-mat discipline is still a work in progress, even as the nodes draw closer. This is about where the green of Six Sigma is at—very much proficient for 80% of the work, the last 20% for the Six Sigma black belts (at least as I think of it). I think in our IT world, we hardly ever reach or get beyond this level, as the tech keeps getting pulled out from under our feet with every next big thing.
• Brown – This is where an art moves into a more serious mode. The new dashed return stroke shows that you’re beginning to live the judoka’s code beyond the dojo walls. And the nodes continue to form more cohesive groupings.
• Black – This begins the expert level—there are 10 levels (dan). Solid, substantial lines and a mostly closed circle signal that the judoka’s way has become your way of life; the nodes have nearly merged into a unified shape.
• Red – The senior black-belt ranks, kind of like the “elder statesmen”. Red marks those who not only live the art but refine and share it, shaping the next generation; the nodes are now in tight harmony.
• White (Mastery) – Firstly, this 2nd appearance of white isn’t a thing—it’s just a metaphorical/hypothetical thing I’ve read about on the Internet (so it must be real … hahaha). But it conveys the phenomenon of a business process progressing from raw to its ideal form. Now the lines are thick, purposeful, the nodes fully coalesced into perfect alignment. You’ve transcended technique—becoming the art itself.

Until AI hit the “hockey stick curve” a couple of years ago, the heavy intellectual lifting and robust workload of analytics was left almost exclusively to our brains. So it was good enough for our BI systems to supply us with nuggets of information—values from slice and dice queries to BI databases and statistics-based predictions from machine learning models. Knowledge, understanding and wisdom drawn from assembling all those nuggets was our domain. But now that machine intelligence is beginning to infringe on our turf, we could fuel it with BI data in a richer process-based, not merely tuple-based form.

Lastly—and this is the most important part—my two books are meant to provide a path and intuition for every enterprise (from mom and pop businesses to Fortune 100) to compete, especially those 2nd and 3rd tier companies that have the scale to truly challenge the giants. It’s not that I begrudge the top tier. It’s that healthy innovation depends on a steady churn of disruption—just big enough to keep the ecosystem thriving. I’d hate to see this AI revolution end up as the facilitator of a corporate monoculture (see trophic cascades in my blog, Beyond Ontologies) instead of becoming a full-blown Cambrian explosion of creativity across all sectors.

Time Molecules (and my previous book, Enterprise Intelligence) will be available at Technics Publications and Amazon. If you purchase the book from the Technics Publications site, use the coupon code TP25 for a 25% discount off most items.