What Does it Mean to Work Hard?

November 29, 2010 By

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I tried, and failed, to relax. I am sure I am not alone, and that many of you had the same experience. But I failed in a very revealing way, that led me a very interesting definition of work.

What happened was this:

I was reading a book to relax (Robert D. Kaplan’s excellent Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the future of American power). It was pure relaxation in the sense that the subject has nothing to do with either my work or subjects I normally blog about (my other “job”). But a few chapters in, something very interesting happened: I suddenly decided I might want to blog about the book. And just as suddenly, a relaxing experience turned into “work,” and within a half-hour, I felt I needed a “relaxation break.”  So what happened?

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Ribbonfarm is Now Mobile-Friendly (Sort Of)

November 19, 2010 By

After lazily sitting out the mobile revolution so far, both as a reader and writer, I am making my first grumpy concession to the tiny-fingered-squinters. I just installed the WPTouch plugin which miraculously makes WordPress sites mobile friendly with just a few clicks (where would I be without all these free plugins?). If you use, or would like to use, your iPhone, Blackberry or whatever else to read ribbonfarm, go ahead and try it right now and let me know if it works for you. I tried my ancient iPod Touch and it worked fine.

There were some annoying configuration hiccups but I think I’ve figured them out. Fingers crossed.

I’ve no idea why anyone would attempt to read my typical 1500+ word posts on a mobile device. Seems like an exercise in masochism to me. But apparently many of you already do, going by the small but significant (and growing) percentage of traffic that comes from mobile devices.  I’ll be watching the stats with interest to see if the better support increases the numbers.

I am quite the Luddite when it comes to mobile. I have to admit I hate the trend. I don’t like pecking away at tiny keyboards and squinting at tiny screens. I only have this iPod Touch because I won it in a contest.

But at some point, sitting the mobile revolution out would be like doing my writing longhand or on a mechanical typewriter. So I suppose, now that I’ve started down this slippery slope, I’ll cave at some point and buy a smartphone.  And then I’ll figure out a perspective that makes me a rabid fan, and allows me to join the digital-leash hordes.

Seriously though, for those of you who DO love this damn digital leash, what do you like about it?

What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from the Poor

November 16, 2010 By

I am going to come across as a terrible person in this post. I recently finished a fascinating book, Portfolios of the Poor, which chronicles the lives of desperately poor people around the world living on less than $2 a day. And I am going to review it from a thoroughly selfish angle: the surprising lessons for entrepreneurs from the $2/day world. In my defense, I started reading the book with nobler and more compassionate motives: I truly did want to understand the plight of the poor and learn what I could do to help. I was also just plain curious about povertynomics, if you will pardon a terrible neologism. But the content of the book was so surprising, and so obviously and intimately connected to the world of entrepreneurship, that that angle hijacked both my reading and blogging intentions.

So let’s go doing some greedy mining of wisdom-of-the-poor. If you’re not interested in entrepreneurship, this is not going to be the best review/summary/introduction for you, but should still be acceptable.

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The World of Garbage

November 6, 2010 By

For the last two years, I’ve had three books on garbage near the top of my reading pile, and I’ve gradually worked my way through two of them and am nearly done with the third. The books are Rubbish: The Archeology of Garbage by William Rathje and Cullen Murphy (1992), Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte (2005), and Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage by Heather Rogers (2005).  Last week, I also watched the CNBC documentary, Trash Inc.: The Secret Life of Garbage. Notice something about the four subtitles? Each hints at the hidden nature of the subject. It is a buried, hidden secret physically and philosophically. And there are many reasons why uncovering the secret is an interesting and valuable activity. The three books are motivated by three largely separate reasons: Rathje and Cullen bring an academic, anthropological eye to the subject. Royte’s book is a mix of amateur curiosity and concerned citizenship, while Rogers’ is straight-up environmental activism. But reading the 3 books, I realized that none of those reasons interested me particularly. I was fascinated by a fourth reason: garbage (along with sewage, which I won’t cover here) is possibly the only complete, empirical big-picture view of humanity you can find.

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Ancient Rivers of Money

November 5, 2010 By
This entry is part 1 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

Sometimes a single phrase will pop into my head and illuminate a murky idea for me. This happened a few days ago. The phrase was “ancient rivers of money” and suddenly it helped me understand the idea of inertia as it applies to business in a deeper way. Inertia in business comes from predictable cash flows. That’s not a particularly original thought, but you get to new insights once you start thinking about the age of a cash flow.

We think of cash-flow as a very present-moment kind of idea. It is money going in and out right now. But actually, major cash flow patterns are the oldest part of any business. It is the very stability of the cash flow that allows a business to form around it. In fact, most cash flows are older than the businesses that grow around them. They emerge from older cash flows.  When you buy a sandwich at Subway, the few dollars that change hands are part of a very ancient river of money indeed. Through countless small and large course changes, the same river of money that once allowed some ancient Egyptian to buy some bread from his neighbor now allows you to buy a sandwich.

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Warrens, Plazas and the Edge of Legibility

October 27, 2010 By

Long-time reader and astute commenter, Xianhang (Hang) Zhang wrote a very interesting post a couple of weeks ago on his blog: The Evaporative Cooling Effect. It is part of a fascinating series he is doing on social software. The post explores a phenomenon that is very close to the status illegibility phenomenon I explored two weeks ago, and in fact draws inspiration from the same Groucho Marx/Lake Wobegon observations that I started with.

Evaporative cooling is basically the effect of the highest status people in a group leaving, lowering the average status of those left behind.

What I found fascinating though, was Hang’s suggestion for how to combat the effect (and thereby stabilize groups). In my post, I proposed that status illegibility helps create the stability. Hang brings in another dimension, which is illegibility in the group’s environment/context.

In particular, in social software (or physical environments for that matter), smarter-than-average early adopters often leave when the “unwashed masses” start to jump on the bandwagon, devaluing the social cachet. Hang proposes that one of the best ways to combat this is to build (or rather catalyze the evolution of) “warren” architectures instead of “plaza” architectures. Here are the pictures that pair of evocative terms produces in my head. You might imagine something else:

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Coloring the Whole Egg: Fixing Integrated Marketing

October 20, 2010 By

Three kids are selling lemonade in their neighborhoods one hot day, to passers-by.

Kid Red yells things like “The best lemonade in town!”

Kid Green yells things like “Hey Joe, how ’bout some lemonade?”

Kid Blue yells things like “It’s hot today! Get your lemonade before you head to the beach!”

Can you identify the future marketer, salesperson and PR guy? It turns out there is a systematic way of guessing. On this important question hinge many things: business vision, market positioning and corporate culture. The answer also drives a mutually-exclusive 3-way choice that sorts companies into marketing, sales, and PR-driven kinds. And perhaps most important, the mutual exclusivity means that the most seductive idea in selling, a 1972 idea known as the “Whole Egg,” (an integrated sales+PR+marketing model) originated by Ed Nay, then president of Young & Rubicam needs an update. The Whole Egg is not a white egg. One primary color will dominate. One of the three functions will always lead. Looking for balance is a recipe for failure. To get to a whole egg, you must first pick a color to paint it.

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The Gervais Principle IV: Wonderful Human Beings

October 14, 2010 By

Each of them – and they constitute 80% of humanity – is born the most beautiful baby in the world. Each is an above-average child; in fact the entire 80% is in the top 20% of human beings (it’s crowded up there). Each grows up knowing that he or she is deeply special in some way, and destined for a unique life that he or she is “meant” to live.

Series Home | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | ebook

 

In their troubled twenties, each seeks the one true love that they know is out there, waiting for them, and their real calling in life. Each time they fail at life or love, their friends console them: “You are a smart, funny, beautiful and incredibly talented person, and the love of your life and your true calling are out there somewhere. I just know that.” The friends are right of course: each marries the most beautiful man/woman in the world, discovers his/her calling, and becomes the proud parent of the most beautiful baby in the world. Eventually, each of them retires, earns a gold watch, and somebody makes a speech declaring him or her to be a Wonderful Human Being.

You and I know them as Losers. Welcome to Part IV of the Gervais Principle series. Read Parts I, II and III first, otherwise you will misunderstand (and possibly be deeply offended by) this post.

Last time, we left one of the unfortunate Clueless, Andy Bernard, staring with deep frustration and anger at the world of the Wonderful Human Beings, pining to join, but rejected and humiliated.

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How Good Becomes the Enemy of Great

October 7, 2010 By

“Good is the enemy of great” is an insight that a lot of people have stumbled upon, though I can’t trace the origin of the phrase.  It might be Jim Collins’ Good to Great, but I am not sure. A hint about the dynamics are in that book (again, an insight I’ve heard elsewhere): good people with a bad process will always beat incompetent people working with a good process.

The clue is in the word process. Process is how good becomes the enemy of great. And I mean process in its most general form, not just the rigid bureaucratic stereotype. So a specific portfolio analysis technique for picking stocks to maximize some risk/returns function, or any sort of “methodology” is a process. A 12-step program is a process. A “Maximize Your Creativity” book that deals in colorful balls and right-brained art exercises is still a process. “Be agile and improvise” is also a process. If it can be defined and written down as a prescription, with any kind of promise attached, it is a process.

Here’s why this happens. Processes (and systems) of any sort first emerge when a spectacular and undisciplined success occurs. Like a startup — XYZ Corp. say, getting wildly successful. Or the PQR basketball team racking up a string of victories. Or an actor making it big in Hollywood. First, there’s a success that attracts imitative greed. Then something very predictable happens. A “great” story is retold in ways that only capture the “good” part.

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Learning from One Data Point

September 28, 2010 By

Sometimes I get annoyed by all the pious statistician-types I find all around me. They aren’t all statisticians, but there are a lot of people who raise analytics and “data-driven” to the level of a holy activity. It isn’t that I don’t like analytics. I use statistics whenever it is a cost of doing business. You’d be dumb to not take advantages of ideas like A/B testing for messy questions.

What bothers me is that there are a lot of people who use statistics as an excuse to avoid thinking. Why think about what ONE case means, when you can create 25 cases using brute force, and code, classify, cluster, correlate and regress your way to apparent insight?

This kind of thinking is tempting, but  is dangerous. I constantly remind myself of the value of the other approach to dealing with data: hard, break-out-in-a-sweat thinking about what ONE case means. No rules, no formulas. Just thinking. I call this “learning from one data point.” It is a crucially important skill because by the time a statistically significant amount of data is in, the relevant window of opportunity might be gone.

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