Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

I bought a bed last weekend, and it was delivered two days ago. Yes, I finally decided that I should stop sleeping on the futon that I had bought used in grad school nine years ago. And two nights of sleeping on the nice new bed has made me go “Wow! Why did it take me so long to decide to do this?” A good question. One I actually thought about for a bit, and here’s my answer.

It’s a matter of energy and attention. We all have certain things that we don’t question in our lives, whether it’s our religion, our devotion to a given sports team (Go Cubs!), our affiliation with certain groups, etc. We can’t question everything. While I love the idea of always being able to pry open the black box to see why something is the way it is, I can’t always do that because it takes time and energy. Most of the time, I have to just accept the black box as is, and use it.

So I make a decision, and I move on, and I don’t question the decision any more. Whether it’s buying a car or a new laptop or what software to run my blog on, I find something that works well enough for the moment and forget about it, leaving more of my time and attention for things I find interesting, like reading or thinking about what I’m going to write on here. It’s a matter of conserving cognitive effort for things I care about.

To give credit where it’s due, this idea is mostly stolen from Paul Graham’s essay on nerds, where he points out that most nerds are unpopular in school because being popular is a full time job (between choosing clothes, going to the right parties, etc.), and nerds don’t care enough to bother.

So, in this specific case, every year or so I’d think about getting a new bed, and decide against it because I was sleeping fine on the futon, and a new bed is expensive. Each year the futon was getting worse and worse and my disposable income was rising, and this year the lines finally crossed, I got the new bed, and it was so easy that it prompted this post of wondering why it took so long. And that’s often the way it is. My post about productivity laments this aspect of myself, but I think it’s understandable in light of a theory of cognitive effort. Or maybe I’m just making elaborate justifications.

Oh well. Given that this is the fourth post of the evening, I think I’m going to shut up now, turn off my brain, and watch my tape of the O.C. recorded earlier.

I’ve been using del.icio.us more, so you can always go there to check out what I’ve been finding interesting in my trawls through the web, but I wanted to call out a couple specifically.

• I thought Paul Graham’s latest essay was really interesting and either inspiring or depressing depending on my mood. Inspiring because he is reminding me that I can and should be chasing after my dreams, no matter what my day job is. Depressing because his essay was aimed at high school students; shouldn’t I have a better handle on what I’m doing with my life by now? If nothing else, it points out that I should be trying to find a way to get more writing into my life; I have continued to regularly update this blog over the past year, which is astonishing given my lack of self-discipline. I need to sit down and start putting together some of these essays together into a submittable form and see if that goes anywhere.
• A conversation on Slate between Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, and James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds. It’s interesting to read their takes on each other’s books, but I’m mostly including a link to it because Gladwell mentions Gary Klein’s work. That Gladwell would have read Klein’s work before writing Blink should have been totally obvious to me, but for some reason it wasn’t.
• Interesting New Yorker article about how our armed forces are adapting to life in Iraq. I really liked the description of how the soldiers have found their own decentralized ways of sharing information, particularly through stories. I think it’s also a good description of the power of breaking the hierarchy wide open and letting everybody use their initiative. I think it’s the way of the future, and given how the army has led many management trends, it shouldn’t surprise me to see them in the forefront yet again.

A thought struck me this morning on my BART ride into work, in response to Carse’s talk. He describes infinite games as where the point of playing is to continue to play. Doesn’t this describe childhood? Over Christmas break, I was visiting some friends with kids, and I was playing Uno with their four year old. And he was just so happy to be playing that he didn’t care who won or lost, or how he was doing; he was just excited about playing. Us adults get so worked up about winning and losing that we define ourselves by our results, but a bunch of kids playing baseball will often play for hours without keeping score because the point of the game is the game itself, not the result.

In fact, it’s the adults that ruin kids by injecting finite games into their play. We all knew a Little League dad who was just miserable to be around because he’d be screaming at everybody because he wanted his kid’s team to win. But, as Carse put it, “Evil is where an infinite game is absorbed completely into a finite game.” To destroy that sense of play, that sense of joy, for the sake of something as prosaic as winning and losing is wrong.

It’s interesting to think what a society based on a childlike state of mind would be like. I think I’d quite like it. Then again, it would essentially be the state of anarchy, which is a concept that appeals to me in theory. But in the “real” (aka adult) world, rules are necessary. People won’t play nice with each other, alas.

It also makes me wonder when we lose that sense of childlike joy. Not everybody does, obviously, and the ones that don’t are often among our most innovative thinkers (e.g. Feynman and Einstein). But most of us do. I certainly have. I never get that zap of “Wow, this is really cool!” any more, where I’m doing something for the sheer pleasure of doing it. I need to learn to be more immature again

Anyway, I thought that the observation that only adults play finite games was interesting. Thought I’d share.

Amazon link

I read about this book in the Economist, and the concept intrigued me. I’ve been in the business world long enough to develop the typical technologists’ disdain for MBAs and their lack of domain knowledge and emphasis on numbers that are probably meaningless. I was looking forward to reading this book to gain more armament in my arguments against such a restrictive view of management. Alas, it did not deliver in that promise.

The problem is that Mintzberg takes it for granted that MBAs and their analysis-centric view of the world are wrong, and that the more touchy-feely know-your-business synthesist view of management is right. He spends the first several chapters of the book ranting about the evils of the MBA, and how it is damaging not only companies, but the MBAs themselves, as well as society as a whole. That part of the book uses a lot of “Clearly”s and “Obviously”s, which up the emotional quotient, but aren’t actually an argument. I think I agree with his viewpoint for the most part, but he makes a very poor case for it.

The second half of the book is his recommendation as to what management education should look like. Naturally, it is a description of the program that he helped to design, the International Masters in Practicing Management. I didn’t find this part very interesting, and had to slog through it.

So, short answer, don’t bother reading this. I’ll tell you everything of interest in the book in the following list of bullet points.

• Good managers need to know their business. There are some business functions that can be abstracted out (such as finance, marketing and accounting - he claims that the MBA should be more accurately titled the Masters in Business Analysis), but management is a synthesis of these functions and of the specific business and of the specific company and of people skills.
• To benefit from management education, you need to have been a manager. His chapter “Wrong People” claims that taking kids who have only a couple years of business experience and expecting them to learn how to manage in an MBA program is ludicrous. Only with some experience as a manager will students appreciate the classes and be able to integrate them with their own experience to learn. Hence, the IMPM program only takes experienced managers.
• Business schools that teach by cases, led by Harvard, present an artificially simplified world. As Klein’s book suggests, real experts have an enormous wealth of context-specific knowledge that they draw upon to make good decisions. A business school student designing a response to a case in a field where they know nothing will, by necessity, design an incomplete solution. Business school may give them the confidence to jump in without knowing anything after graduating, but it doesn’t ameliorate the fact that they don’t know anything.
• The emphasis on numbers in MBA programs provides a false sense of objectivity. Without understanding the numbers and where they come from, “such data tends to be categorical more than nuanced, often reducing complex realities to simple measures, mostly recent.” (p. 101) While “soft” numbers may be unreliable, they can provide a better view of the big picture. I obviously agree.
• The IMPM program is interesting not only because it takes only experienced managers, but also because of its structure. It is set up as a set of five two-week modules, each focusing on a different aspect of management (Reflection, Analysis, Context, Collaboration and Action), with each module being taught at a different university around the world. For instance, the Context module is taught in India, so the setting reinforces the importance of learning the local context when managing. The modules are spread at approximately three month intervals, so that the manager has a chance to go back to his company and begin to integrate the new ideas he’s learned of and thought of into his daily work before getting a new set of concepts. It’s all about taking general theories and figuring out how to apply them in your specific context. Given my recent context kick, I really like that part of the program.
• I like his discussion of theory.
  

  “It would be nice if we could carry reality around in our heads and use it to make our decisions. Unfortunately, no head is that big. So we carry around theories, or models, instead: conceptual frameworks that simplify the reality to help us understand it. Hence, these theories better be good! The university is society’s instrument for developing and disseminating good theories.” (p.249)

  Understanding the difference between the map and the territory is huge, and something that I wish we could teach better. Good maps (aka theories) are enormously helpful, and worthy of sharing. But at some point, you have to connect the theories with your particular situation, your territory. And the IMPM program sounds like it gives its students a chance to do that.

• The other interesting thing about the IMPM program is that it tries to give almost 50% of classroom time over to discussion among the students. Since the students are experienced managers themselves, they often have valuable insight into how a certain idea has worked (or not) in their own experience. Mintzberg says that the teachers often learned a lot during such discussions and were able to use it to help focus their presentations the next time.

So that’s it. Pretty much everything interesting in a 400 page book distilled down to a few bullet points. It’s a pity. I was really looking forward to this book, but I can’t recommend it at all.