About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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2.9.1
Dan Pink’s book Drive was good, so I also picked up this book from the library, subtitled “The last career guide you’ll ever need”. It’s written in the style of manga (Japanese comics), and can be read in half an hour, but offers solid advice on career management.
Here are the bullet points it hits:
I thought it was a cute idea that took some standard career advice mantras and made them seem fresh by presenting them in the new form of a graphic novel. Not a ton of depth, but I enjoyed the quick read.
I’ve liked Po Bronson’s other books, like What should I do with my life?. I also really liked his New York magazine article called The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids, which described Carol Dweck’s research into the fixed vs. growth mindset of children, and what a tremendous difference it made to praise effort rather than innate ability. So I’ve been meaning to read this book, which summarizes several similar topics (the praise article is the first chapter), and finally got it from the library a couple weeks ago.
The book covers several topics where common parenting assumptions do not match what science has learned over the past couple decades. The praise chapter describes how self-esteem is actually undermined by trying to build it up. There is a chapter on how squeezing in more activities and studying harder is causing kids to lose sleep, which has startling impacts on health and even intelligence (an hour of sleep a night separated A students from D students). Other chapters cover questions about race, honesty, the pace of cognitive development in children, self-control, and socialization.
One particularly non-intuitive point for me was that “to an adolescent, arguing is the opposite of lying”. Parents hate arguments, finding them stressful, disrespectful and destructive, and don’t appreciate their kids questioning their judgment. The interesting result was that kids that respect their parents are the ones most likely to argue with them – the rest “just pretended to go along with their parents’ wishes, but then they did what they wanted to do anyway”. In other words, parents that shut down conflict and argument ended up promoting lying because the kids didn’t feel bound by arbitrary rules that made no sense to them. But when the kids were allowed to have their say, and where parents could explain why the rules made sense, then the kids could be honest and ask for what they wanted, rather than feeling they had to lie and work around the rules. As an aside, substituting manager and employee for parent and kid in this paragraph illustrates the connection between management and parenting (in case you were wondering why I’d be reading a parenting book).
I think NurtureShock is a nice summary of interesting results from the new “science of kids”. I don’t know if there are any mind-blowing revelations, but I’m definitely questioning my instincts about praise and other topics as a result. I recommend going and checking out the list of all posts and articles the authors have published on the subject, including links to the articles listed above and many others, to see if you’d be interested in the book.
In my last post, I talked about getting the reps to improve oneself on desired skills. But it’s difficult to make the time for practice, especially for deliberate practice where we are always dancing on the edge of failure. And I think that’s where I think Coyle’s observation that coaching is an integral part of talent development comes in.
One of the keys to being able to stay in the productive zone of deliberate practice is to create a tight feedback loop. Deliberate practice is about pushing oneself beyond one’s capability, failing and then figuring out how to do it right. However, a key aspect of this is getting immediate feedback on both failure and on getting it right. My theory is that part of mastery is repeating techniques until they are built into the unconscious part of the brain, and getting to that point requires consistent and useful feedback.
Fast feedback is also essential. Imagine a thought experiment where you had to wait a minute to find out if your previous action had worked or failed – you would never be able to stay in a zone of productivity because in that minute, you’d get distracted, and maybe even start on a different task (this is the experience of software engineers in languages without a REPL). To keep yourself driving forward, and experimenting with new techniques that may or may not work, instant feedback is a necessity. And that’s what a good coach can provide.
Coaches provide the immediate feedback necessary to stay in the mode of deliberate practice. This is especially necessary at the beginning of the path towards mastery, before the student has developed their own self-awareness so they can detect their own errors. Coyle described two researches watching John Wooden coach the UCLA basketball team; they were surprised to find that so little of his communication was in the form of praise or disapproval, but instead 75% was in the form of information transfer. He was watching his players and offering them instant feedback on what they were doing right and wrong. That accelerated their path to mastery, as they did not have to do trial-and-error experimentation to learn what worked and what didn’t.
One key aspect of coaching is that it’s not just objective feedback, but also why things happened. I could learn how to shoot a basketball better by just shooting a lot of baskets, where my objective feedback would be whether I made the basket or not. But when I missed a basket, I wouldn’t know why. And when I made a basket, I wouldn’t know how so I couldn’t repeat it. I would try a number of different things, and only a few of them would work, so I’d be wasting a lot of time in experimentation. However, if I had a coach, they could watch me, tell me what I was doing right, and more importantly, why it worked, so I could start to internalize the correct techniques. My improvement would happen much faster, because I would be able to integrate the “story” of the right way to do things into my self story.
As an aside, I was thinking about this last week during a discussion on a random Google mailing list discussing an ethnographer’s observations about Google in China. A couple engineers were dismissive, saying that objective data was better than these subjective stories. My point was that these stories help us interpret the data – data can tell us that market share is changing or that Chinese users are using instant messenger over Gmail, but social scientists can help tell the story of _why_ these trends are happening.
I think the other aspect of deliberate practice that a coach can help with is in helping with the motivation necessary to stay on the edge of failure. It’s so much easier to keep on doing what we are already good at than it is to consciously decide to do something that we know we’ll fail at. So having somebody there to encourage us to keep going past our existing competencies is helpful. Even in something as prosaic as weightlifting, I will never be as strong as I was in grad school, when I had a lifting partner who would push me to lift more than I thought I could – and it turned out I could do it. Now when I go to the gym, I don’t push myself anywhere near that hard, and therefore am not getting anywhere near the benefits.
Note that both feedback and motivation will eventually be internalized, and have to be internalized if one is to achieve mastery. Once I reach a certain point in skill development, I know what I’m doing right and wrong, and what I have to do to correct my mistakes. I also can get to the point where I don’t need external motivation because I am doing the skill for myself and can see how my practice and mistakes lead to improvement. But, boy, it’s difficult to get there, and having a coach to help with those aspects make it easier, especially at the start.
I realized as I was writing this that one of the challenges for me in my quest to become a generalist is the lack of coaching. There is nobody that can offer me instant feedback on what I’m doing, so I am in the inefficient mode of trial-and-error experimentation. And while I have been fairly committed to this path for several years now, it’s still difficult for me as I have few role models (Jerry Weinberg notwithstanding), and little in the way of formal encouragement. I don’t have a career path that I’m following, and while my position at work is enhanced by my generalist skills, they are not formally recognized, which is frustrating. I’m not sure what to do about this, but perhaps being aware of the difficulty will let me at least address the problems more directly.
Sorry for the long post – I originally had planned to split this post into one on tightening the feedback loop and another on coaching, but I feel like they work better together. Coyle’s framework is a useful way for me to think about these questions of mastery, and it integrates well with my previous thoughts on the subject. It also helps me to recognize that lessons might be the way to get me started on a new skill, rather than beating myself up for not having the discipline to start something on my own. Food for thought.
Seen on Twitter: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle
Both Drive and The Talent Code make the same point: Becoming a master isn’t about natural talent or improbable achievements – it’s about getting a little bit better every day, and practicing until what is now challenging becomes unconsciously automatic.
I like Pink’s 2 questions: “What’s your sentence?” (in other words, what do I want to be known for?) and “Am I better today than yesterday?” The first question must be answered before the second can be asked; otherwise, the definition of “better” is undefined.
Once you’ve decided on the answer to the first question, Coyle’s book provides a guide as to how to execute on the second question of getting better. It’s about having the emotional desire (what Coyle calls ignition) to spend the 10,000 hours necessary for expertise in deep practice. To put it in colloquial terms, it’s about getting the reps. We can’t improve without practicing the skills we want to acquire and building them deep into our neural system.
I should note that it’s not simply about repetitively practicing skills – it’s about continually pushing the edges of what we can do so that we can continue improving. In weight lifting, if you can slam through your reps without slowing down, you’re not getting stronger; strength is built by pushing the muscles to the point where they slightly tear, so that they get re-built stronger. Pushing oneself to that edge is difficult – I was only in that zone when I had a lifting partner (which I’ll address in a followup post about the benefits of coaching).
I don’t feel I have good answers to Pink’s questions at the moment. While the tagline of “Unrepentant Generalist” is descriptive, it doesn’t make a good answer to Pink’s first question in that it’s difficult to say what I should be practicing on a daily basis. I have a number of 2,000 hour skills, but I think it’s clear that 5 sets of 2,000 hours is not the same as 10,000 hours. So I’ve been reflecting on what the skills I need to be practicing on a daily basis are. Candidates include communication, synthesis and pattern building, which are all skills exercised by blogging, hence my attempts to get back into blogging regularly.
I leave you with these questions: what skills are you getting the reps in right now, where you’re pushing yourself to improve and get better each day? And are those skills the ones that are part of your vision of who you would like to be? And if not, what are you going to do about that? I wasn’t happy with my answers a couple weeks ago, but I think I’m starting to move in the right direction by blogging more, and spending more time reading books. Reinforcing these habits will hopefully move me in the direction of excellence, as described by the Aristotle quote above. We’ll see.
P.S. Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t reference this 2007 post on mastery, since it hits several of the same points – I discovered it while working on my next blog post but decided to add the link here, as it’s entirely relevant.
I was listening to the Fresh Air interview with Jonah Lehrer, author of
How We Decide, and he mentioned an experiment that seems relevant to me right now.
Lehrer describes the experiment in a Wall Street Journal article about New Year’s Resolutions:
In one experiment, led by Baba Shiv at Stanford University, several dozen undergraduates were divided into two groups. One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.
Here’s where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Prof. Shiv, is that those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain—they were a “cognitive load”—making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the prefrontal cortex is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before the brain starts to give in to temptation.
In other words, the brain is not capable of making good decisions when overtaxed. For instance, if one were working long hours at Google, one’s ability to come home and exert the self-discipline necessary to write a blog post instead of flipping on the TV would be impaired. Just as a theoretical example.
The unfortunate implication of this, and the basis for this post’s title, is that it is those times when one is stressed that one most needs the ability to make good decisions. When I get overloaded at work, I get tunnel vision and start focusing mechanically on the tasks assigned to me, rather than taking the time to figure out what’s actually important and working on that. I also make other bad decisions like drinking more soda, skipping the gym, eating chips and cookies at work, and watching TV instead of sleeping. And, of course, those behaviors make me even less efficient, which means work takes even longer, which means the behavior perpetuates itself.
As an aside, breaking the cycle required a full two weeks of doing nothing over the holidays plus a couple weeks of a “normal” work week for me to rebuild my reserves to where I felt capable of blogging again. Now that I’m keeping more reasonable hours at work, I go to the gym, I’m eating better, and I’m even excited about blogging in the evening.
So how do we avoid this paradox? It seems to me that the bad behaviors like TV and junk food are always lurking in temptation for me, and the good behaviors like hitting the gym and writing blog posts require self-discipline. Part of it is building desired behaviors into habits that I do without questioning: successful examples of that for me include biking to work and flossing while unsuccessful ones include daily situps and pushups, hitting the gym regularly and blogging. Others have success by using a game of sorts where badges are earned for performing the desired behaviors, but I have trouble taking such games seriously.
Another weapon I have is simply self-awareness. If I consciously remind myself that I’m making bad decisions when I’m overloaded, it will hopefully make me question those decisions as I’m making them e.g. putting back the Oreos from the snack area at work and grabbing an apple instead. It’s helpful for me to treat my mind and body as systems that I can learn to optimize and compensate for, like having a tool that one has learned to use despite its quirky tendencies.
An extension of that last tactic is the one the WSJ article suggests, which is building up the muscles of self-discipline. Rather than doing lots of things at once, it would be better to focus my energy on building one habit, and only start on a new behavior when the first has become automatic. Right now, I’m splitting that self-discipline energy between work, going to the gym a few times a week, and blogging more regularly, so if I find myself slipping, I’ll have to prioritize more effectively. I need to recognize that my self-discipline is limited and deploy it in the most effective way until it gets stronger, rather than exhausting it to the point where I don’t do anything.
Anyway, given my struggles with work-life balance, I wanted to mention this experiment and how I perceive it as being relevant to my life. What tactics do you use to develop new habits?
P.S. I’ll be in Boston from Feb. 6-10 and New York from Feb. 11-14, with the timing chosen so that I could attend Grant McCracken’s Chief Culture Officer Boot Camp, but that’s just the cover reason for me to catch up with friends on the East Coast. Let me know if you want to meet up.
Book website, with excerpts
Amazon link
A coworker recommended this to me, and was even kind enough to lend it to me for the weekend.
Coyle asks the question: where does talent come from? Is it nature (genetics) or nurture (environment/opportunity)? He started by visiting several talent hotbeds – the Russian tennis academy that spawned Marat Safin and Elena Dementieva, the Curacao Little League baseball team that has been consistently reaching the world semifinals, the soccer fields where Brazilians train – and constructs a thesis around what common factors he sees among those hotbeds.
Here’s what he came up with. Talent is a mix of three factors:
He has three rules for deep practice:
My favorite point in this section was a study by Gary McPherson which tracked students who were taking up musical instruments in middle school, and discovered that the single best indicator of how successful they would be with the instrument was a question that was asked of them before they started: how long do you plan to continue playing this instrument? Those that said they were planning to play the instrument for the long term got more out of 20 minutes of practice than the short-termers got out of 90 minutes. The instrument was part of the long-termers’ identity, and so they wanted to continue pushing themselves and get into that zone of deep practice.
One major theme of the book is the process by which expertise gets embedded in our brains. Coyle cites neuroscience research showing that brain circuits that get used extensively are reinforced by growing a myelin sheath around them – the myelin provides insulation for those neural pathways and improves the speed at which those neural pathways fire. In other words, as we repeat and get better at an activity, there is a physiological change that speeds up the signals in our brain so that we can do it faster. I love how this ties into my idea of cognitive subroutines and why I think that repetition and memorization is critical for expertise. I also learned that the myelin sheath breaks down so it has to be continually rebuilt, which is why we have to keep practicing every day if we want to maintain our expertise. Also, it responds to neural activity, and the activity is strongest when we are in deep practice mode, trying new things and seeing what works and what doesn’t.
All in all, a good book covering an important topic in a well-written breezy way. Admittedly, I like it partially because it reinforces my existing biases, so I liked the anecdotes and the neuroscience that supports those biases.
P.S. Another John Wooden quote: “Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens – and when it happens, it lasts… Repetition is the key to learning.” This reinforces Drive’s point that we need to pick our overall goal and get a little better each day.
Drive book website
Amazon link
I really liked Pink’s TED talk on the “surprising science of motivation” where he says “There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does”. In particular, the compensation and motivation strategies currently used by businesses have been shown to undermine motivation rather than enhance it. So I’ve been interested in reading the book-length version of his argument, and managed to snag it from the library soon after release.
Alas, there’s not much more in the book than what’s in the TED video. So go watch that. Or read his “cocktail party summary”:
When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does. Our current business operating system–which is built around external, carrot-and-stick motivators–doesn’t work and often does harm. We need an upgrade. And the science shows the way. This new approach has three essential elements: 1. Autonomy – the desire to direct our own lives. 2. Mastery — the urge to get better and better at something that matters. 3. Purpose — the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
I don’t have much to add beyond that, except to cheer him on. I think that creating new organizational cultures that trust people rather than processes is a goal towards which we should all be aspiring, even if I have no idea how to make that happen.
I also really liked his 2 questions video. The 2 questions:
The weekday posts are going to be less thoughtful, but, hey, I’ve got a year’s backlog of books to review, so I can crank those out during the week, and hopefully I can continue digging into more meaty topics on the weekend.
I’m not sure where I heard about this book, but the subtitle, “Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage”, pretty much sold me on at least checking it out, since I’m interested in both design and management. So I got it from the library and read it.
Martin frames business as operating in a “knowledge funnel”, which starts with a mystery, gets refined to a heuristic, and is instituted into an algorithm. He uses McDonald’s as an example of the knowledge funnel.
The knowledge funnel is a nice little metaphor, but it is not a particularly new way of looking at things. Or maybe that’s just my overactive relational mind making connections everywhere, as I think that the knowledge funnel could be seen as another form of Latour’s Collective process or Moore’s Chasm.
Martin did articulate well how a company is often started around finding a heuristic to solve a mystery, and then spends the rest of its existence refining that heuristic into ever more efficient algorithms. But if the company isn’t careful, another company will find a new mystery that disrupts the original company’s business model (aka the innovator’s dilemma).
One of the reasons that companies get trapped into refining efficiency is that tackling mysteries is scary. Once a company is into the refining heuristic stage, decisions can be made analytically. Refinements can be tested to see if they are more efficient and reliable, so that cold, hard data removes the subjectivity of the heuristic.
Tackling new mysteries requires a leap away from the safety of data and reliability. Martin suggests that “validity” is a better way to think about such problems than reliability – a valid solution that works some of the time is more valuable than a less valid solution that works every time.
The rest of the book describes several case studies of companies that have successfully made the leap to “design thinking”, where attacking the next mystery is valued as much as refining the existing solution. His examples included:
One suggestion I liked for companies to avoid ossifying around an existing algorithm was for companies to use a project oriented structure:
“In companies organized around ongoing, permanent tasks, roles are rigidly defined, with clear responsibilities and economic incentives linked tightly to those individual responsibilities. This structure discourages all but senior staff from seeing the big picture… to move along the knowledge funnel is by definition a project; it is a finite effort to move something from mystery to heuristic or from heuristic to algorithm. And such projects demand a business organized accordingly, with ad hoc teams and clearly delimited goals.
In other words, when your entire job is defined around a function, you will not welcome others who are trying to disrupt the status quo, even if that’s the right thing for the company. But if everybody works in a project-oriented mode as they do at design firms like Ideo, they will work towards finishing the current project, and moving onto the next.
Overall, this was a quick read with a few good anecdotes and a useful metaphor, but it’s not a book that I see myself buying for my permanent collection.
P.S. Using the cheat code of doing a book review for a blog post, since they don’t require as much thought. We’ll see how long I can keep this up.
Along the lines of yesterday’s post where I mashed up two different interests of mine (cognitive science and organizational theory), today’s post is about an intersection between basketball and management.
I don’t know a lot about basketball. I watch the game recreationally, but I’ve never played, and don’t have a feel for the sport. I do read a lot about it, though, in part because my favorite sports columnist, Bill Simmons, is obsessed with basketball, to the point where he recently published a 700 page tome called The Book of Basketball.
One of the more interesting debates in basketball these days is how to measure the productivity of a player. You would think it would be easy – take a player’s statistics like points, rebounds and assists, mash them together, and see who does the best. And that’s exactly what ESPN’s John Hollinger has done in his Player Efficiency Ratings to rate every NBA player with a single number.
However, basketball is a team sport. It has been shown repeatedly that five supremely skilled individual players may not mesh well as a team, so there’s a need for team players who fill in the little things that don’t get measured by the traditional stats. One such player is Shane Battier, who was described as the No-Stats All-Star by Michael Lewis in a New York Times story.
So how do you measure team contributions? Basketball geeks are now using something called “plus-minus”. In its simplest form, it’s straightforward – take the team differential in points when a player is on the court. In other words, if the team outscores its opponent by 5 points with the player on the court in a game, then the plus-minus for that player is +5. There are several refinements to adjust for teammates and strength-of-opponent and other factors, but that’s the basic idea.
The reason plus-minus is attractive is that the point of basketball is to have your team outscore the other team, and plus-minus measures the player’s impact on achieving that goal. As it turns out, Shane Battier tends to do well in plus-minus, even though his other stats are terrible (he rates as well below average in Hollinger’s Player Efficiency Ratings). Michael Lewis’s story describes some of the things that Battier does that don’t show up in the box score, particularly on defense, but it’s hard for most people to believe, since “numbers don’t lie”. The flip side to Battier is Kevin Durant, where his stats were eye-popping, but plus-minus said that he was actually hurting his team, in part because of his poor defense and inefficient shot selection.
Based on examples like these, it appears that traditional basketball statistics don’t necessarily measure a player’s contributions to whether the team wins; in other words, teams are measuring the wrong things. Well, not all teams. Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, has been affectionally dubbed Dork Elvis by Bill Simmons, because he’s figured out a Moneyball-esque approach to measure subtle ways in which players can affect games, and his team is winning with an unconventional set of players despite losing its two All-Stars to injury this season.
Now what’s amazing to me about this is that basketball is a pretty simple game. There are five players per team on the court at a time, and the goal is to score more than the other team. The professional teams spends millions of dollars to find and train the best players, and they’re only now starting to figure out how to measure the impact that a good team player can have on winning or losing.
If basketball teams haven’t figured it out, measuring the impact of a team player in the business world, where the goals are varied and conflicting, where teams are fluid and changing, and where performance evaluation is an afterthought, would seem to be impossible. And yet I’m wondering if some equivalent of plus-minus is possible, in part because I think of myself as a good team player, and would like to see those skills more widely recognized and appreciated.
It would have to start with defining the goals of a team, and having a way to measure the progress towards those goals, the way plus-minus measures team point differential as a metric for winning games. This is already complicated, as a team may have explicit goals (deliver the project successfully) that conflict with implicit goals (don’t contradict the manager). But efforts like the “results only work environment” are starting to move businesses in the direction of focusing on the end goals, rather than the process.
The other component, measuring performance, is also difficult, as any set of metrics will immediately be gamed. Perhaps a better metric of a team player’s effectiveness would be to ask each team member at the end of each project which team member they would most want on their next project. That could favor other characteristics like popularity, but if the team members were going to be judged as a team on the results of the next project, seeing who they want on their team could be a decent proxy to plus-minus.
Wrapping up, I think that plus-minus serves as a useful reminder for managers. If the best players in basketball aren’t necessarily the ones with dominant statistics, it’s possible that the best employees are not the ones with the highest performance evaluation scores. Plus-minus is a reminder to look beyond the numbers, and watch how the team actually works together, to see who is doing the little things that enable the team to function effectively, and to think of new ways of measuring productivity that might more closely map to the desired end-goals of the organization.
One of the topics I want to think more about is organizational cognition aka how organizations think, and how to design an intelligent organization. For some reason, I was thinking about this today, and made a connection to standard theories of cognition that I hadn’t made before.
Let’s start with Descartes’s view of the world: I think, therefore I am. In this view, consciousness is what fundamentally defines us as human. Our rational, conscious minds take in sensory input, make decisions and execute actions in response. Consciousness and thinking are assumed to be identical. Note: I am aware this is an oversimplification and possibly a mis-statement of Descartes, but that’s what straw men are for – see the Wikipedia entry on the Cartesian theater for a similar take.
This view of how we think has been shown to be incomplete, at best. Books like The User Illusion and On Intelligence describe an unconscious mind which is doing so much processing and filtering that it can often respond without ever involving the conscious mind. One might picture this as a bubbling brew of unconscious perceptions and responses which only rarely permeates the conscious mind.
What was new to me today is how these two views of the human mind might map to theories of corporate management.
The first view of cognition corresponds to the archetypal hierarchical command-and-control corporate structure, with the executive team corresponding to the conscious mind. All major decisions are brought to the CEO or executive team, a decision is made, and instructions are fired off to the rest of the company to execute. Once decisions have been made, processes can be put in place to ensure that such decisions are made consistently without the need to bring them to the executives again, much like McDonald’s has its three-ring binder which specifies every aspect of running a fast food franchise in a completely standardized way.
It’s less clear what would be the management equivalent of the second view of cognition. I think it’s closer to my idea of what an intelligent organization might look like, with self-organizing teams that band together to achieve a common goal. In such an organization, managers might not be hierarchical decision-makers, but instead “exception handlers” who trouble shoot problems that are not handled well by the existing teams (for some reason, I’m picturing the Wolf from Pulp Fiction here). This would be the analogue of the conscious mind only being involved in decisions where there is no established cognitive subroutine. In such an organization, most things would bubble along, being handled by the teams, and only rarely would be surfaced to the “conscious mind” of executive management.
Of course, this is an overly broad analogy, and figuring out what such an organization would look like in practice is really difficult (how do we balance between surfacing problems when needed and keeping the critical decision-makers from being overwhelmed?). But I thought it was interesting to explicitly draw the cognition analogy to organizations and see what that might imply about management. I’ll have to think about this some more. And, of course, I’d welcome any thoughts you have.
