The Rumsfeld Behavioral Landscape

June 5, 2014 By

I made up an interesting way to visualize habits, routines and larger behavioral complexes in terms of Rumsfeld’s famous known, known-unknown and unknown-unknown typology.

rumsfeldMap

Here’s how it works. Your basic building block is a habit, and these are either built around attractors or repulsors (the green and red contour sets respectively, with the green representing valleys and the red representing hills). Your behaviors are decision patterns that may orbit one or more habits in complex ways.

Here’s how you read/use the map (you can build a real one around your own habits of course, this is just an illustration).

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Saints and Traders: The John Henry Fable Reconsidered

June 4, 2014 By

I only recently learned (from Sarah Constantin, whose new blog is worth checking out) of the American folk legend of John Henry, a steel driver who raced against a steam drill and won, only to drop dead right after. Wikipedia tells the story thusly:

He worked as a “steel-driver”—a man tasked with hammering a steel drill into rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock away. He died during the construction of a tunnel for a railroad. In the legend, John Henry’s prowess as a steel-driver was measured in a race against a steam powered hammer, which he won, only to die in victory with his hammer in his hand and heart giving out from stress. The story of John Henry has been the subject of numerous songs, stories, plays, books and novels.

The amazing thing about John Henry is not that he chose to race against a machine. The amazing thing is not even that he won a Pyrrhic victory. The truly amazing thing is that he was turned into a folk hero rather than a cautionary tale, and a symbol of human dignity when in fact his behavior was what you might call morally robotic: based on non-negotiable values that killed him.

The key word above is prowess. It’s a rather archaic word, one I’ve never heard used in conversation, but a useful one. It has connotations of both skill and valor, bundled together in a notion of dignity. On a level playing field with a closed and bounded set of fixed rules, prowess could also be considered synonymous with competitive drive. 

Unfortunately, a human racing against a steam drill is not exactly a level playing field and the economic activity of building profitable railroads is not exactly a cleanly circumscribed Olympic competitive sport. Asymmetric and open-ended conditions separate prowess from competitive ability and turn it into a liability. A large fraction of the labor force today is in a John Henry situation within protectionist sectors of the economy, so it is important to knock down this particular idol with some unsentimental revisionism.

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Artistic Forestry: 2014 Annual Letter

May 29, 2014 By

For the past three years I’ve been doing a sort of annual letter to shareholders/call for sponsorships a la Warren Buffet’s Sage of Omaha act, roughly around March-April. I am about two months late this year. I am just going to start calling this my annual letter from now on. I plan to make it approximately 5% more magisterially smarmy every year until people start calling me the Sage of Ribbonfarm (the name of a short-lived gag panel  that I experimented with in 2008. I had to give it up because Yurij, my off-oDesk Russian artist, suddenly dropped out of sight. I sincerely hope Putin didn’t do something to him).

So if you consider yourself even a minor shareholder in ribbonfarm (through comments, guest posts, sharing, recommendations, playing couchsurfing host to me on my travels, sponsorships or whatever you’ve been doing to help keep this show going), this letter is for you.

Each year, I also add one line to my evolving business philosophy. In 2011, the line was go where the wild thoughts are. In 2012, it was go deep, young man. In 2013, the line is grow branches and roots.  Continuing with the arboreal theme from previous years, this year, my line is  practice artistic forestry. That’s the first topic on the agenda. Here’s the rest of the agenda.

  1. Practicing artistic forestry
  2. The state of the forest, in numbers
  3. The Web, it is a-changing
  4. Bitcoin and online publishing
  5. The future of longform

Let’s get started.

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The Logic of Uberreaction

May 20, 2014 By

I recently made up a word: uberreact. To uberreact is to  insist that regulations which exist for the benefit of  incumbent producers in a market (and their political patrons) are there to protect the interests of consumers. The inspiration for the term, of course, is the very predictable pattern of response by taxicab companies when Uber enters a market. Here’s a particularly clear example from London, where the taxicab union is arguing that Uber drivers should be required to have licenses to act as booking centers (rather than just driver’s licenses), since they operate under minicab laws:

“It’s like when you buy a saucepan online and you use PayPal to pay for it. Your transaction is with the guy you bought the saucepan from, not with PayPal,” McNamara told Wired.co.uk. “With Uber, the guy taking the booking is the operator and so needs a license and a licensed operating center which can’t be a car…One day there’ll be a major accident in one of these cars and there will be a multimillion pound claim and an insurance company will look at it and say that the hiring didn’t take place through a licensed operating center so it won’t be insured,”…

Bertram [Uber UK GM] points out that the intention of the law is to protect passengers and that there are many public safety measures that technology like Uber’s can bring. “The point of knowing who accepts the booking is so that there’s traceability. We have the name, photo and registration of the driver, you can share a live map of the journey with family and friends and get a full copy of the details in a receipt.”

The taxicab union argument against Uber conflates the principle of protecting the consumer interest with a specific technology-dependent mechanism for doing so, and Uber representatives very reasonably offer the counter-argument that their technology actually offers many improvements towards the intent of protecting customer safety.

But what is curious here is why both the taxicab unions and Uber seem to have tacitly agreed to talk about customer safety rather than what the rest of us assume is the issue: suddenly devalued million-dollar medallions and jobs under threat.

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Frustration Effects and Curse of Optimality

May 19, 2014 By

Let’s say you have a project to staff with three available roles: a leadership role P with power, a sexy role S with opportunity for high public visibility, and a grinder role G with a lot of tedious schlepping. For logistics reasons, the partitioning of the work is not negotiable. You have three people with whom to staff the project: Alice, Bob and Charlie.

You chat with each, and it’s clear they all have the same preference order of roles: P>S>G, which means there’s no way to satisfy them all perfectly. All three believe they can do all three roles well enough. So you sit back, think through how good each is at each role, make up a little table like the one below,  crunch some numbers and assign roles: Alice gets power, Bob gets the sexy role, Charlie gets the grinder role. Your configuration has a nominal value of 5+4+2=11 points, and is the best you can do among all possible configurations.

Skill\Person Alice Bob Charlie
Power  5  4  3
Sexy  3  4  1
Grinder  3  4  2

Unfortunately, each also has an unknown motivational drop-off element to their personalities, due to which their commitment and productivity drops by at least a certain fraction for every degree removed from most-preferred role. So how does that change the actual outcome?

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Power Gradients and Spherical Cows

May 15, 2014 By

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal had a comic recently explaining the argument against evolution based on the 2nd law of thermodynamics: “Life on Earth can’t get more complex because that would require energy, and the sun doesn’t exist.” The understanding of entropy is there, but conspicuously missing is the distinction between open and closed systems and the fact that increased entropy in the system does not preclude localized negentropic environments, such as those on Earth sustaining life.

This specific failure mode for thinking I call the Spherical Cow fallacy, after the classic physics joke. [Read more…]

Two Examples of Narrative Time

May 10, 2014 By

In the last week, I came across two interesting examples of what I called narrative time (as opposed to clock time) in Tempo. The first is this interesting analysis of the creative potential of tempo in the pacing of episode-releases in television shows, now that they have been decoupled from clock time by on-demand technology (HT Kartik Agaram).

Let’s quickly survey the Cambrian explosion of season-shapes. House of Cards falls from the sky like a crate of emergency rations. Sherlock delivers a tight burst of movie-caliber episodes, then disappears for two years. True Detective and American Horror Story remake themselves every season with a new cast and story. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. braids itself into the Marvel movie machine. (As I’m writing this, the show has just pivoted in mid-season to reflect the revelations of the Captain America movie that premiered the week prior.) This year, Louie marches double-time, airing not one but two new episodes every Monday. No season of TV has yet pulled a Beyoncé and arrived entirely without warning, but surely, it’s coming.

Complete article over at Medium: The Art of Anticipation.

The business story behind the artistic evolution is also interesting: check out this Wired story on how Netflix and other companies are fighting over narrative time.

The other example is this hilarious set of clock-time estimates for the narrative time vocabulary of the modern workplace (HT Alan Martin):

“Just a sec” = 5 minutes

“Just a minute” = 10 minutes

“Pick your brain” = 17 minutes or, in rare cases, 90 seconds

“Quick chat” = 48 minutes

Complete article over at McSweeney’s: Corporate Time Equivalents

Science! and Other Off-the-Wall Études

May 8, 2014 By

Last year,  around this time, I posted a selection of attempted aphorisms from my Facebook wall (you can follow my public posts if you want the live firehose). I thought I’d do another selection, this time focusing on a new length I am practicing: sub-300-word études (inspired by the corresponding form in music) written as single dense (but not aphoristic-dense) paragraphs. If you are mainly a long-form writer, I highly recommend this composition form to improve your game, and Facebook public posts as the best medium for practicing it. If I ever put together that writing-for-thinking course as I keep meaning to, études and aphorisms will be a major part of it.

Here is a selection of what I consider my better études over the past year. Use the date hyperlinks if you want to share a specific étude with someone.

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Replaceability and the Economics of Disequilibrium

April 30, 2014 By

Sam is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog at Moore’s Hand.

One characteristic of personal meaning is irreplaceability. If you’re the only one who can do what you’re doing, your actions suddenly seem a lot more important.

We’re familiar with this principle in our personal relationships — perhaps a friend needs a piece of advice, or a child needs parenting, that only we can give.

But larger systems are designed to make most people replaceable.

If you are replaceable, the system will equilibrate without you. If you aren’t replaceable, it won’t.

This is good for you but bad for the system. So your manager’s job is to make sure that the company will survive you being hit by a bus.

Replaceability is a spur to the ambitious. Every law school grad applying for a Supreme Court clerkship; every Ivy League grad interviewing at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, knows that ten other people want the job, and can do it.

But replaceability is existentially demotivating. “Just a cog in the machine” has been an epithet for employment since Charlie Chaplin filmed Modern Times.

If a system will achieve roughly the same outcome no matter who’s inside it, these people are by definition replaceable.

And so in seeking irreplaceability, we must ask: what systems are capable of achieving genuinely different equilibrium outcomes?

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Product-Driven versus Customer-Driven

April 24, 2014 By

I have lost track of the number of times I’ve had conversations about product-driven versus customer-driven businesses in recent years. It’s a distinction that just keeps cropping up, and has featured in every consulting gig I’ve had in the last three years, but surprisingly I haven’t found any treatment of it that satisfies me. So this post is partly an attempt to save myself from future repetition.

The distinction is central to many questions people ask in business:

  1. Which kind of business should you build?
  2. Can you transform your business from one kind to the other?
  3. Is one kind provably better than the other?
  4. How can you tell which kind is which?
  5. Which kind suits your personality?
  6. Can you hybridize the two and get the best of both worlds?
  7. Should you listen to customers?

These questions have been discussed for decades, at least since Henry Ford didn’t make clever remarks about faster horses. So why are we having this conversation with increased frequency and urgency these days?  Two words. Steve Jobs. 

But it isn’t just the inspiring dent-in-the-universe life of Jobs that is forcing this conversation, or even the fact of Apple’s exceptional performance in the market during a decade when many businesses were thrashing about in search of a direction. The reason this debate is at the forefront today is that the life and work of Steve Jobs suggested a set of polarizing, absolutist answers to these questions, which have historically attracted hedged answers beginning with it depends. 

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