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Archive for February, 2018

Entrepreneurs: Convenience is Killing Creativity

Wednesday, February 28th, 2018

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I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry when I see ads for stuff that responds to voice command, especially when it is for stuff like changing the TV channel. I guess that using the remote takes either too much energy or too much intelligence to work it.

Everything today is about convenience, a trend I’ve been suspicious, although I wasn’t sure why.

However, after reading an op-ed piece by Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia and the author of “The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads,” called The Tyranny of Convenience I’m starting to understand what about it makes me itch.

In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies.

Granted I’m known as a digital dinosaur, but there are some conveniences — washing machines, telephones, cars, email, and Skype chat, among them — I’m all for.

However, I have no cell phone, avoid any app, service, etc., provided by Google, clean my own house, wash my own clothes, shop for my own food, and do my own cooking just as I’ve done since I was 18.

I search using ixquick.com, no ads, no tracking and my life functions just fine without always being connected. I’m not on social media and don’t suffer from FOMA; I meet friends for meals and fun and we talk on the phone in-between.

I suppose that all sounds very inconvenient these days, but I’m never bored and enjoy the feelings of accomplishment that come with doing stuff yourself, as well as figuring out better ways to do it — it’s called ingenuity.

I’ve seen many “convenient” items come to market years after I came up with a similar approach to use for myself.

Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows (emphasis mine).

Professor WU (or someone) needs to do a follow-up article entitled, “How Convenience Killed Creativity and Strangled Entrepreneurship.

Image credit: jim212jim

Ducks in a Row: Slow Makes You Smarter

Tuesday, February 27th, 2018

https://www.flickr.com/photos/sundazed/2791013250/

I doubt I’ll ever understand why, but being busy supposedly makes a person more valuable.

I find this amusing, since it is slow time that makes you smarter and, perhaps, even wiser; both extremely valuable traits.

The pressure of social media to react impedes your ability/willingness to stop and think.

In Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Plato writes that Socrates left the encounter thinking of the politician, “Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.“ Ever since, Socratic ignorance has been the hallmark of wisdom in Western thinking. (…)

That’s why slow thinking is not just wise—it’s also a revolutionary act right now. In reactionary times, slowness, responsiveness rather than reactiveness, is a radical rejection of the internet’s perpetual call to action: Always be choosing sides. Deliberate undecidedness, refusing to choose and know it all, is a kind of intellectual rebellion against the relentless pressure to get with the socially appropriate program—whatever it happens to be within your ideological and informational bubbles.

A post at Farnam Street introduces the idea of first-order positive, second-order negative (shoutout to Wally Bock for this article). It parallels the  exponentially increasing need for instant gratification.

We have trouble delaying gratification, so we do a lot of things that are first-order positive, second-order negative. We buy bigger houses than we need, only to find that rising interest rates make the mortgage payment untenable. We buy the sexy car only to discover later that it depreciates faster than the commuter car. (…)

Making time to think is a great example of something that’s first-order negative with some future payoff that’s not easily visible. However, when you think through problems, you’ll not only come to better decisions on the whole but you’ll also avoid a lot of problems.

Of course, those who are too busy to think will definitely be too busy to read.

Which means they are busier than

  • Warren Buffett (80% of his time was/is spent reading and thinking)
  • Charlie Munger (Buffet’s partner who said, “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none. Zero.” )
  • Bill Gates (reads a book a week and has taken a yearly two-week reading vacation throughout his career)

And then there is Barak Obama. I seriously doubt there is anyone in the business world who is busier, or under more stress, than Obama was during his eight years in office, yet he read for an hour every day (the 5-hour rule).

Ben Franklin said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

Paul Tudor Jones, the self-made billionaire entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, who should know says, “Intellectual capital will always trump financial capital.” 

Futurist Alvin Toffler says, in no uncertain terms, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” 

And did you ever notice that learn is earn with an ‘l’?

Image credit: Katy Warner

Golden Oldies: Hate The Plan, Love The Planning

Monday, February 26th, 2018

 

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

KG Charles-Harris sent me an article about goals, neuroscience, and “Temporal Myopia”— the inability in the decision-making process to consider the long-term consequences of an action. Good information that scientifically confirms the idea that the best way to accomplish a long-term goal is to break it down into short-term pieces that provide daily gratification.

It reminded me of this post and the real importance of planning. Rereading it I can say without reserve that the most important point you can take away is found in the final sentence.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Plans are made and remade over and over again, so why plan at all if it’s going to keep changing? Because the most valuable part is the act of planning, not the result of it.

Planning forces you to think in depth—an often painful process that most of us would rather avoid.

For example, it is impossible to plan an upcoming product launch without considering all the things that could go wrong simultaneously with defining the steps to take and the results you seek.

The discussion (even if it’s with yourself) engendered by stating that you are going to do A forces you to consider what will happen if A doesn’t accomplish what you want or what to do if doing A becomes an impossibility for whatever reason (time, money, manpower, etc.)

It is plan-the-verb that distinguishes the winners from the also-rans and it is the verb that keeps you ahead of the competition.

Just as importantly, it is plan-the-verb that should be pushed down throughout your organization.

This is accomplished by giving the goal to the next level down and asking them to plan how they will achieve it. They, in turn, should create multiple goals from it and pass those down to their direct reports and so on down the organizational ladder all the way to the lowest level.

At each handoff the goal is divided again and again and each person has to plan how to achieve it with the help of their group.

Always plan in pencil, because plan-the-noun needs to be a living organism that grows and changes, just as a tree bends in the wind to avoid breaking—just be sure to recycle the paper on which plan-the-noun is printed.

The benefits of this process are enormous, first, because it makes plan-the-verb a part of your corporate culture, as well as a core competency, which gives your company the ability to react far more swiftly as the waves and eddies of the economy and your industry constantly change your market.

Plan-the-verb boosts initiative, encourages taking responsibility and speeds professional growth, providing you with a stronger in-house bench from which to grow.

It is always detrimental to value the noun—plan, leader, manager—more than the verb—plan, lead, manage—but in the business world it can be devastating.

Image credit: Robert Nunnally

If The Shoe Fits: Why Stars Stifle Innovation

Friday, February 23rd, 2018

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/5726760809/

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

If I have to listen/read one more time about value/importance/etc of hiring “stars” or the “best” whatever I think I may scream. Or, better yet, shove the words/premise down the appropriate throat.

While I, and a small minority, have tried to debunk this mindset we haven’t made much progress.

So here’s an article from Scott E Page, the Leonid Hurwicz collegiate professor of complex systems, political science and economics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Perhaps you’ll pay attention to him.

Why hiring the ‘best’ people produces the least creative results

While in graduate school in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I took a logic course from David Griffeath. The class was fun. Griffeath brought a playfulness and openness to problems. Much to my delight, about a decade later, I ran into him at a conference on traffic models. During a presentation on computational models of traffic jams, his hand went up. I wondered what Griffeath – a mathematical logician – would have to say about traffic jams. He did not disappoint. Without even a hint of excitement in his voice, he said: ‘If you are modelling a traffic jam, you should just keep track of the non-cars.’

The collective response followed the familiar pattern when someone drops an unexpected, but once stated, obvious idea: a puzzled silence, giving way to a roomful of nodding heads and smiles. Nothing else needed to be said.

Griffeath had made a brilliant observation. During a traffic jam, most of the spaces on the road are filled with cars. Modelling each car takes up an enormous amount of memory. Keeping track of the empty spaces instead would use less memory – in fact almost none. Furthermore, the dynamics of the non-cars might be more amenable to analysis.

Versions of this story occur routinely at academic conferences, in research laboratories or policy meetings, within design groups, and in strategic brainstorming sessions. They share three characteristics. First, the problems are complex: they concern high-dimensional contexts that are difficult to explain, engineer, evolve or predict. Second, the breakthrough ideas do not arise by magic, nor are they constructed anew from whole cloth. They take an existing idea, insight, trick or rule, and apply it in a novel way, or they combine ideas – like Apple’s breakthrough repurposing of the touchscreen technology. In Griffeath’s case, he applied a concept from information theory: minimum description length. Fewer words are required to say ‘No-L’ than to list ‘ABCDEFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ’. I should add that these new ideas typically produce modest gains. But, collectively, they can have large effects. Progress occurs as much through sequences of small steps as through giant leaps.

Third, these ideas are birthed in group settings. One person presents her perspective on a problem, describes an approach to finding a solution or identifies a sticking point, and a second person makes a suggestion or knows a workaround. The late computer scientist John Holland commonly asked: ‘Have you thought about this as a Markov process, with a set of states and transition between those states?’ That query would force the presenter to define states. That simple act would often lead to an insight.

The burgeoning of teams – most academic research is now done in teams, as is most investing and even most songwriting (at least for the good songs) – tracks the growing complexity of our world. We used to build roads from A to B. Now we construct transportation infrastructure with environmental, social, economic and political impacts.

The complexity of modern problems often precludes any one person from fully understanding them. Factors contributing to rising obesity levels, for example, include transportation systems and infrastructure, media, convenience foods, changing social norms, human biology and psychological factors. Designing an aircraft carrier, to take another example, requires knowledge of nuclear engineering, naval architecture, metallurgy, hydrodynamics, information systems, military protocols, the exercise of modern warfare and, given the long building time, the ability to predict trends in weapon systems.

The multidimensional or layered character of complex problems also undermines the principle of meritocracy: the idea that the ‘best person’ should be hired. There is no best person. When putting together an oncological research team, a biotech company such as Gilead or Genentech would not construct a multiple-choice test and hire the top scorers, or hire people whose resumes score highest according to some performance criteria. Instead, they would seek diversity. They would build a team of people who bring diverse knowledge bases, tools and analytic skills. That team would more likely than not include mathematicians (though not logicians such as Griffeath). And the mathematicians would likely study dynamical systems and differential equations.

Believers in a meritocracy might grant that teams ought to be diverse but then argue that meritocratic principles should apply within each category. Thus the team should consist of the ‘best’ mathematicians, the ‘best’ oncologists, and the ‘best’ biostatisticians from within the pool.

That position suffers from a similar flaw. Even with a knowledge domain, no test or criteria applied to individuals will produce the best team. Each of these domains possesses such depth and breadth, that no test can exist. Consider the field of neuroscience. Upwards of 50,000 papers were published last year covering various techniques, domains of enquiry and levels of analysis, ranging from molecules and synapses up through networks of neurons. Given that complexity, any attempt to rank a collection of neuroscientists from best to worst, as if they were competitors in the 50-metre butterfly, must fail. What could be true is that given a specific task and the composition of a particular team, one scientist would be more likely to contribute than another. Optimal hiring depends on context. Optimal teams will be diverse.

Evidence for this claim can be seen in the way that papers and patents that combine diverse ideas tend to rank as high-impact. It can also be found in the structure of the so-called random decision forest, a state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithm. Random forests consist of ensembles of decision trees. If classifying pictures, each tree makes a vote: is that a picture of a fox or a dog? A weighted majority rules. Random forests can serve many ends. They can identify bank fraud and diseases, recommend ceiling fans and predict online dating behaviour.

When building a forest, you do not select the best trees as they tend to make similar classifications. You want diversity. Programmers achieve that diversity by training each tree on different data, a technique known as bagging. They also boost the forest ‘cognitively’ by training trees on the hardest cases – those that the current forest gets wrong. This ensures even more diversity and accurate forests.

Yet the fallacy of meritocracy persists. Corporations, non-profits, governments, universities and even preschools test, score and hire the ‘best’. This all but guarantees not creating the best team. Ranking people by common criteria produces homogeneity. And when biases creep in, it results in people who look like those making the decisions. That’s not likely to lead to breakthroughs. As Astro Teller, CEO of X, the ‘moonshoot factory’ at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has said: ‘Having people who have different mental perspectives is what’s important. If you want to explore things you haven’t explored, having people who look just like you and think just like you is not the best way.’ We must see the forest.Aeon counter – do not remove

Scott E Page

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Ryan’s Journal: Just a Bit More

Thursday, February 22nd, 2018

https://www.flickr.com/photos/kimmanleyort/15380487938

 

Lately I have become very involved with the look of my pool. I live in Florida and we are almost to swim time, my apologies to my northern friends. I’m not obsessed in a vain way, more in that the activity of scooping out leaves calms me in some way.

I find that the gentle swirl of the water and satisfying thunk of leaves pulled from the pool can relax me immensely.

During the activity there are always one or two leaves that have escaped my net and I think, just a bit more and I will have them all.

While this may be a simple analogy I have found it can be applied throughout my daily activities.

I’m in sales and the results of my actions are very apparent on the big sales board. I manage a practice within my company that is unique and still being nurtured.

One aspect of that is I receive very little feedback on how I am doing on a given day. It can take months or years before I truly see the impact. That can be a bit debilitating if you need a constant ego stroke. My solution for this is to look at short term successes and activities. I try to do a bit more each day.

As we go through the week, I would imagine you’re facing challenges that may require a bit more. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed with the big stuff, so I break it down. Build upon and expand. How do you approach those activities?

Perhaps it’s a single minded focus, micro doses of acid, or just the elephant approach of taking one bite at a time.

This week make it a point to do just a bit more.

I can assure you that you’ll be happy with the results.

Image credit: KimManleyOrt

Why Diversity Training Doesn’t Work

Wednesday, February 21st, 2018

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Yesterday we looked at the new methodology being used to determine Fortune’s 100 Best Places to Work, which has been tweaked to emphasize feedback from those who self-identified as women, minorities, or LGBTQ.

Hard data has proven over and over that a diverse leadership and workforce increases revenues, adding substantially to company revenues and success.

Companies have spent millions on diversity training, so why hasn’t it worked?

It shouldn’t be surprising that most diversity programs aren’t increasing diversity. Despite a few new bells and whistles, courtesy of big data, companies are basically doubling down on the same approaches they’ve used since the 1960s—which often make things worse, not better. Firms have long relied on diversity training to reduce bias on the job, hiring tests and performance ratings to limit it in recruitment and promotions, and grievance systems to give employees a way to challenge managers.

The answer is fairly obvious to anyone who considers people, instead of datasets, etc.

In short, people don’t like being told what to think/do.

As social scientists have found, people often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy. Try to coerce me to do X, Y, or Z, and I’ll do the opposite just to prove that I’m my own person.

Not exactly rocket science.

So what’s a successful approach?

It’s more effective to engage managers in solving the problem, increase their on-the-job contact with female and minority workers, and promote social accountability—the desire to look fair-minded.

Or in today’s terms, DIY

Maybe it is rocket science.

More proof that diversity is (finally) being taken seriously is found in a lawsuit recently filed by IBM.

Diversity hiring, once a niche pursuit of human resources, has become a major recruiting priority at many US companies. As evidence, IBM is suing its former chief diversity officer for bolting to Microsoft.

Diversity hiring as a trade secret.

I love it.

Image credit: US Forest Service – Southern Region

Ducks in a Row: Best Places to Work Sans Google

Tuesday, February 20th, 2018

Fortunes 2018 list of 100 Best Places to Work is out and guess who isn’t on it anywhere?

Google.

Why?

Because the criteria was tweaked this year.

But there’s something different about this year’s list, which was based on responses from more than 300,000 employees at large companies that opted into the survey. A change in methodology this year put greater emphasis on feedback from survey respondents who self-identified as women, minorities, or LGBTQ. It is the first time, says Michael Bush, the CEO of Great Place to Work, that the list reflects what he has dubbed a “Great Places to Work For All” mindset.

At first, adding “all” to the pot scared the heck out of many CEOs, but after explaining, most came back.

His clients could see that a “for all” commitment would mean the firm was “maximizing the potential of all employees.” (…) Bush reports that organizations scoring highest under the new “For All” methodology “grew their revenue about 10 percent faster over the same period than the companies that scored best according to [Great Place to Work’s] old methodology.”

Some of the Top 10 may surprise you, but Salesforce in the top slot shouldn’t.

One reason Google didn’t participate in the survey may be found in job site Hired’s 2018 State of Salaries report.

The average worldwide salary for a tech worker in 2017 was $135,000, says Hired, up 5% from the 2016 survey. (…) But the data also showed that a person’s race has what Hired called “a significant impact” on salary in the tech industry. And black tech workers are the ones getting the most shortchanged — Hired found that black tech workers are making $6,000 a year less than their white peers, on average.

Interestingly, the data suggests both a cause and a solution. Black candidates and Hispanic candidates tend to begin their salary negotiations at a lower point than their white counterparts, according to this data.

White candidates tend to ask for the highest salary, $130,000, and get offered $136,000 (+4.6% on their request).

Meanwhile, black and Hispanic candidates using Hired’s platform say their preferred salary is $124,000, on average. But even when an offer beats their initial request, it’s still relative to the lower number. Black workers are being offered $130,000 (+4.8%) on average and Hispanic candidates are offered $131,000 (+5.7%). Asian candidates ask for $127,000 on average and are offered $133,000 (+4.7%).

I guess it’s just simpler to ignore this and similar surveys and ignore the media questions about why you didn’t participate, than it is to fix the problem — and this one is definitely fixable.

No one ever said solving fundamental problems like diversity was easy, especially when it takes more than data and algorithms.

Join  my tomorrow for a look at why most diversity efforts fail, what works, and how diversity programs are being considered trade secrets.

Video credit: Fortune

Golden Oldies: Entrepreneurs: The Value Of Old People

Monday, February 19th, 2018

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

In a country still focused on youth it’s good to remember that Rob Hull was no spring chicken when he founded Adaptive Insights in 2003, was rejected 70 times by VCs and survived the 2008 recession. Adaptive is now a software unicorn that seems to have no interest in chasing spring chickens when hiring — just great talent of whatever age — and ranks 3.9 on glassdoor.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Who does a company, with explosive growth, founded and built by old folks in their forties and fifties all with extensive executive management experience, turn to when moving to the next level?

The company hasn’t disclosed exact revenue figures, but it says it grew new annual recurring revenue by more than 50% in 2014, and claims more than 2,500 companies, including Coca Cola, Toyota, and AAA use its software. It’s raised $100 million in funding from investors like Salesforce, Norwest Venture Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners.

The company is Adaptive Insights and the guy is Tom Bogan, an even older guy, with even more experience.

A guy who is (gasp) 63 years old.

Gasp, because according to a recent study, old people shouldn’t even go out in public.

When a large sample of Facebook groups created by 20- to 29-year-olds was examined by a team based at the Yale School of Public Health, three-quarters of the groups were found to denigrate old people. More than a third advocated banning old people from public activities like shopping.

Of course, one assumes that the ‘old people’ to which they refer aren’t their relatives.

(I’d like to hear them on the subject 10, 20, 30 and 40 years from now.)

There is enormous value in having ‘been there/done that’ through multiple economic cycles, cultural change, globalization and technology evolution/revolution.

But to take advantage of it you need to be comfortable enough in your own skin to admit you need to learn — like Mark Zukerberg and Larry Page.

Image credit: Adaptive Insights

If The Shoe Fits: Selective Emulation

Friday, February 16th, 2018

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/5726760809/

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

If you heard only the following comment who would you think it’s about?

He was determined to succeed by any means necessary, subordinating questions of right or wrong to the good of his career and driving himself crazy with his hunger for power and control, his hypersensitivity to perceived threats to his independence and stature, and his overarching need to measure up.

Travis Kalanick? Howie Hubler? Parker Conrad?

Nope, none of the above.

What about this quote?

“It is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standard of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege.”

Marc Benioff? Pierre Omidyar? Henry Ford?

Nope, none of the above.

Both the description and the quote are about the same man.

Someone lightly touched on at school, but not explored in any depth, as were those who held the same position at other times.

Certainly most of the information in the article KG shared was new to me and I’ll bet it would be new to most of you.

The person is Herbert Hoover, the 31st President of the United States.

The book, published last year is “Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times” by Kenneth Whyte.

Read the article (if not the book); you’ll find it very enlightening.

Then choose which parts of Hoover are worth emulating.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Ryan’s Journal: Is Discipline Better than Motivation?

Thursday, February 15th, 2018

https://www.flickr.com/photos/bullgator0892/11371081616/

I am a former Marine, I served five years and learned a lot while in. Marines tend to have some quirks and one of those quirks is the idea of motivation.

If a Marine is said to be motivated it means they are professional, diligent and an all around squared away Marine. To not be motivated basically means you are a poor performer or worse.

One takeaway from this experience was that the idea of motivation was skewed for me for a while.

In the civilian world I have never once heard one person call another motivated. However I have heard people say that someone is disciplined or that they have a strong work ethic. And maybe that’s what the Marines meant, discipline and motivation were really one and the same.

So that takes me back to my question. Is it better to be disciplined or motivated?

Getting up early for a run typically sucks; I don’t know many that want to leave the comfort of their warm bed to go for a run or to the gym. What gets them up? Rarely motivation, it’s usually discipline.

Working toward a task at work can be tedious. Discipline will get you to the finish line, while motivation can be that spark that gets an idea flowing.

Perhaps it’s motivation that tells you to get up early and discipline carries you through.

I’ll be honest. I lack discipline. It’s a constant struggle for me and something I strive to achieve. Since it’s an area of opportunity I tend to dwell on it.

It has slowly become apparent to me that motivation and discipline are not mutually exclusive. They are compatible.

So, as you go through your day tomorrow consider what is driving you?

Is it motivation or discipline or all of the above?

Image credit: Pati Morris

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