Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

September 18, 2008 By

[This detailed, chapter-by-chapter précis of Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions is a guest post by George Gibson, a colleague of mine at Xerox. George originally posted it on our internal blogs as a series, and I found it so much fun to read, I asked if I could repost it on ribbonfarm. So here you go.]

Chapter 1: The Truth About Relativity

This was clearly the most interesting of the books from my summer reading list. Let me be clear that though I don’t buy all of the points Dan tries to make, I find them all interesting and worthy of thought. With any luck we can begin a real discussion of his ideas and observations in the commentary. That means I’ll attempt (not always successfully) to keep my opinion out of the body of this piece, and reserve that for any commentary that might develop. The real point here is to get you interested enough to read the book yourself.

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How to Measure Information Work

September 11, 2008 By

Continuing my exploration of information overload, in this piece, I’ll further develop the argument that it is not the real problem, but a mis-framing of a different problem (call it X) that has nothing to do with “overload” of any sort. Most people who start their thinking with the “information overload” frame look outward at the information coming at them. One aspect of the real problem is terrible feedback control systems for looking inward at your work. On the feedback side of things, we measure capacity for work with the wrong metric (headcount, or in shorthand managerese, “HC”). I’ll explain why HC is terrible at the end of this piece (and I’ve also written a separate article on HC).

So, can you measure information work? Yes. Here is a graph, based on real data, showing the real cumulative quantity of information work in my life during two years and some months of my life, between January 2004 and about March 2006.

Quantity of work over one year

Figure 1: Quantity of work over one year

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Organizing to Disrupt

September 6, 2008 By

Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma has helped frame an entire decade of thinking on innovation. His taxonomy of radical/incremental//sustaining/disruptive, despite being very widely misunderstood, has been the filter through which all of the popular innovation literature has been viewed in recent years. Now, more than a decade later, finally companies are figuring out how to systematically organize to disrupt. Three recent books (one blessed by Clay himself) address bits and pieces of this theme, so let’s try to synthesize an overall view of what it takes, and along the way, talk about these three new books (and a bunch of older ones that have play key roles in this story).

First, recall what disruption actually means. I made up a mnemonic graphic, based on the against-the-grain metaphor, to help me remember.

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Maslow for Market Segmentation

September 4, 2008 By

It suddenly struck me today that I’ve never seen a visualization of a very obvious way to understand markets at the broadest level: segment all products and services based on what customer need they serve on the Maslow hierarchy. Though I’ve seen Maslow discussed in the marketing/sales literature, I’ve never seen a graphic like the one below, that actually draws the famous Maslow triangle with areas sized to represent dollar value of corresponding markets. I include in my broad notion of “market” the demand for things supplied by governments and organized religions, rather than private enterprise. Here we go. Should be self-explanatory. I’ve sized the areas in this example roughly based on what I think the market sizes are in a developed economy, and included examples of businesses that deliver products and services to that level in the hierarchy. Some explanatory comments follow, for tricky bits.

Maslow-Based Segmentation for Markets

Maslow-Based Segmentation for Markets

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The Bloody-Minded Pleasures of Engineering

September 1, 2008 By

Welcome back. Labor Day tends to punctuate my year like the eye of a storm (I’ve been watching too much Hurricane-Gustav-TV). For those, like me, who do not vacation in August, it tends to be the hectic anchor month for the year’s work. On the other side of Labor Day, September brings with it the first advance charge of the year to come. The tense clarity of Labor Day is charged with the urgency of the present. There is none of the optimistic blue-sky vitality of spring-time visioning. But neither is there the wintry somnolence and ritual banality of New-Year-Resolution visioning. So I tend to pay attention to my Labor Day thoughts. This year I asked myself: why am I an engineer? The answer I came up with surprised me: out of sheer bloody-mindedness. In this year of viral widgetry, when everyone, degreed or not, became an engineer with a click on an install-this dialog on Facebook, this answer is important, because the most bloody-minded will win. Here is why.

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How We Fly: Aircraft as Career Metaphors

August 24, 2008 By

If you visualize your career (or your entire life) as the piloting of an aircraft, what sort of aircraft do you see? Modes of flight work as great metaphors for your life and career. The story of Icarus, of course, is the best known flight-as-metaphor parable. On the abstract side of the metaphor, you have Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. On the pseudo-spiritual parable side, you have Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. In this piece you have a very literal-minded aerospace-engineer take on the subject (mostly stolen from other people; back story at end). Here’s a chart of major aircraft-choice personality types for you:

Aircraft as metaphors

Aircraft as metaphors

Take a moment to classify yourself (if you know enough about aircraft, you can of course pick one not on the list, and get specific beyond generic labels like “fighter.”)

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The Impossibility Triangle in Talent Management

August 17, 2008 By

I have taken to asking an unfair question in interviews in recent months: as a manager, how can you make sure you help people play to their strengths, while making sure the organization meets its goals on time? The question is unfair because I believe the right answer is you can’t. I haven’t yet gotten that answer from anybody. Most of the time, I get carefully noncommittal answers couched in terms of “there are always trade offs” or faux-pragmatic ones of the form, “well at some point people have to get on the same page and realize that a company is in business to make money.” Both answers are misguided. By trade-off people usually mean deterministically balancing coupled motivations in the presence of some sort of scarcity; they do not usually factor in uncertainty. Talent management introduces competing uncertainties, which are more complex beasts. The second answer is faux-pragmatic because everybody already understands tautological statements about companies being in business to make money. The realization makes no difference at all in how the psychological calculus of strengths and motivations plays out. In other words, yelling business realities out from the rooftops won’t help you attract talent or prevent you from hemorrhaging it.

So let’s keep ourselves honest here, by beginning our search for a next-generation talent management theory, Theory W, by acknowledging the fundamental limits in play. I represent these in the Theory W Triangle (if you are curious, this is inspired by the well-known Pizza triangle and the less well-known Spreng triangle, which I discussed before).

The Theory W Triangle

The Theory W Triangle

Let’s dig in.

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Some Pointers to Thinking Styles

August 13, 2008 By

Okay, I couldn’t resist that bad pun in the title. I was idly wondering today, while taking my evening stroll to the coffee shop, about one of the most powerful visual icons in our world  — the arrow. It is simple, yet supremely expressive. Take a look at this quiver full of twisty arrows I made up, to represent thinking styles. I had some more, but they wouldn’t all fit in this graphic, so if I collect enough more, I’ll make up a part two. And to think we invented the physical artifact merely to kill.

Some pointers to thinking styles, feel free to use, with attribution.

Some pointers to thinking styles, feel free to use, with attribution.

The Future of the Internet according to Jonathan Zittrain

August 10, 2008 By

“Be wary of SaaS and Internet-connected appliances, and it’s a good thing if the legal innovation never catches up with technological innovation.” That would serve as a rough summary of the thesis Jonathan Zittrain, cyberlaw Professor at Oxford, seeks to defend. In The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It he develops an elaborate and densely-argued socio-legal doctrine designed to do one thing: protect the generativity of the Internet without letting it becoming prey to its own power or the anxieties of regulators. This is no quick and dirty treatment of GPL vs. Proprietary. It isn’t your grandmother’s elementary lecture on free as in speech vs. free as in beer. This is a demanding book written by a lawyer, unapologetically full of long, complex sentences that throws the full complexity of cyberlaw problems at you. I was drinking a pretty stiff vodka as I was going through the toughest part, Part III. That is not a good idea, since you need to be pretty alert when reading this part. Still, I think I was sober enough to make this a roughly accurate review/summary.

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The Next Level of the Game

August 5, 2008 By

The coach tells the high-school star athlete, you’ve got to take your game to the next level to compete in college. The executive coach tells the young hotshot, at the next level, EQ matters more than IQ. What does this mean? The metaphor of levels is pervasive but obscure. It illuminates many things — sports, education, careers, personal-life stages — but very few things illuminate the metaphor itself. In fact I can think of only one: a certain class of video/computer games. Games that are somewhere between the elemental, abstract ones like Tetris and over-engineered MMPORGs. A great example, that I’ll use, is the neoclassical vertical shooter, LaserAge (think ‘modernized Space Invaders). Here is a screen shot of Wave 1, Level 1.

Ingava LaserAge, Level 1

Ingava LaserAge, Level 1

What makes this game just right to illuminate the “levels” metaphor is that it is in a Golidlocks sweet spot. Unlike, say, Tetris, you don’t get sucked into a realm of mathematical abstraction. But neither do you get sucked into complicated mythologies and narratives that obscure the mappings to real life. Playing a lot of Tetris or World of Warcraft makes you better at Tetris or World of Warcraft. Playing LaserAge makes you better at life.

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