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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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Over the weekend, I attended the Convergence08 unconference, which focused on future technologies like biotech, nanotech, artificial intelligence, etc. I had to miss the Saturday morning sessions, as I had a chorus rehearsal for this week’s Mahler concerts, but I was there on Saturday afternoon and most of the day Sunday.
The first session I attended was on “Building a better search engine”, which I chose because I work at Google (although on nothing related to search). The attendees speculated about the next big jump in information finding technology, including:
As an aside, it was interesting to me that I’ve gone from being a technological positivist where technology will solve our problems, to being skeptical of most technical solutions, partially because I now think the hardest and most interesting problems are not solvable by technology per se, but instead require the design of new social technologies to coordinate people in new ways.
The next panel I attended was called something like AI and Sense making. I’m fascinated by the question of how we make sense of the world as my continuing obsession with stories makes clear. This was a session where people discussed the idea of sense making (Gary Klein’s work with firefighters was a big influence), how it could be embedded into technology and possible business ideas built on such technology. The discussion was interesting but because sense making is a fuzzy cognitive concept, one attendee afterwards commented that it was difficult to separate sense making from general AI. Two recommendations for further reading I want to record for myself: Perspectives on Sensemaking, an article by Gary Klein, and Sensemaking in Organizations, a book by Karl Weick.
One useful construct from the session was the idea that we create a frame, view everything coming in through that frame, but keep track of whether things are corroborating with reality. Once the discrepancy with reality grows too large, we have to consider junking the existing frame and finding a new one that fits the data better, which I see as yet another form of Bruno Latour’s process.
Then it was time for the keynote speech by Paul Saffo, which I had been eagerly anticipating after having seen him speak several years ago. I was not disappointed – even though it covered many of the same topics as that previous talk, it was entertaining and informative. Tidbits that I wrote down:
Sunday morning started with a panel on synthetic biology. There were a variety of panelists, with backgrounds in physics, software, and biology, but my favorite was Denise Caruso of the Hybrid Vigor institute, as she questioned the assumptions that the optimistic scientists were making. Her focus area has been on risk analysis, especially in new fields where the risks are difficult to quantify, but her point is that the benefits are equally difficult to quantify, so we shouldn’t be going in with the assumption that innovation is automatically good. Her belief is that we need to come up with better processes and methods for assessing risk with interdisciplinary input. You can see why a generalist like me would be a fan (I actually asked a question during Q&A supporting her viewpoint). I chatted with her a bit afterwards, and also attended the breakout session after lunch with her on innovation and risk, which brought together interesting conversations and different perspectives (the work that Etan Ayalon is doing at GlobalTech Research looks particularly interesting to me). I also liked Caruso’s concept of Bayesian regulation, where it’s not black and white, but involves conditional probabilities.
I missed the next session as I ended up chatting with folks from that first after lunch session for about half the next session, and then had to prepare for my session, “How do organizations think?” I threw it open as a discussion forum expanding on the ideas in my post on organizational cognition, and had a good discussion with the eight people who attended. We talked about different people’s experiences with different organizational structures and what might work to improve those. One key concept that was identified was that designing an organizational culture and structure has to first start with the purpose for which the organization is built. Different structures will serve different purposes, and incongruities between the structure and purpose will cause friction. People expressed interest in possibly having a follow up session after the conference was over, but I didn’t get everybody’s contact information, so I hope they get in contact with me.
I ended up bailing out on the end of the conference during the longevity panel, as I had other plans for the evening, but all in all, it was a good experience – I met a couple new interesting people, had some good discussions, and found new food for thought, which were pretty much my goals for the weekend. But now it’s time to get back to my normal life.
Technorati tag: Convergence08
I’ve been meaning to put together a list of my favorite New York things to do for a while, and it seems like this, my last day as a resident of New York, seems like a good occasion for doing so. I’m mostly recording them for my own interest, and so if anybody ever asks me what they should do in New York, I can just point them here.
This assumes that all the normal tourist things have been done, like going to Broadway shows, visiting the standard museums (the Met, MOMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, not to mention the Museum of Natural History), visiting Central Park, walking around different New York neighborhoods, etc.
s’Mac – A restaurant which serves only variations on the theme of macaroni and cheese. I read that the owners were at Peanut Butter and Co and trying to determine what other types of food could support a single-food restaurant and came up with mac’n'cheese. It’s a pure burst of joy for me: every variation is yummy (I once had Thanksgiving mac’n'cheese with turkey and cranberry sauce), the decor is bright orange and yellow, and the location is a great place to start any East Village adventure.
And…that’s a wrap for my New York experience. To my New York friends, it’s been a pleasure, and I hope to see you on future visits. To my California friends, see you soon.
The tennis US Open is held each year at this time in Flushing Meadows, in Queens. Each of the past two years I thought about going, but couldn’t quite convince myself to take a day off work to really enjoy it, plus I always figured I could do it next year. Alas, with the movers showing up on Wednesday, I was really running out of time. Fortunately, this gave me the incentive to get most of my packing done over the weekend so I could go today.
Once I made it through the hour-long line to buy tickets (I didn’t order ahead because I didn’t decide to come until this morning), I had a great time. The early days of the US Open are fun in that matches are taking place on all of the outer courts, where you can crowd right up to the fence around the court. It reminds me of going to watch AVP beach volleyball in that way. In the picture to the right, you can see how close I was to Stanislas Wawrinka, the 10 seed, in one of his matches.
Being that close to the matches let me appreciate how unbelievably hard these guys were hitting in a visceral way that is not apparent on television. The eye-in-the-sky viewpoint of the television camera lets you see the entire court at once, which isn’t possible when you’re standing up against the court. I started off watching Korolev vs. Soderling, and I actually couldn’t turn my head fast enough to see the serve land in the service box if I watched the service motion. These guys were amping it up to well over 100 mph on the serve, so I had to focus on the service box, and catch the service motion in my peripheral vision to have any hope of seeing the serve’s position and the return.
As an aside, I was a competitive tennis player in my middle and high school days, playing on my high school’s varsity team my junior and senior year. I played against state-ranked players, and watched my share of competitive matches between such players. So watching these guys from the pro tour from that same vantage point off to the side of the court made it clear what a quantum leap difference there was between what I’d seen and what these guys were doing. I’d always clung to the fantasy that if I’d stuck with tennis (instead of changing sports to volleyball in college and ultimate frisbee after grad school) I could have been decent, but a fantasy is all that is. Even the sound of them hitting the ball with the racket is audibly different in a way that can’t be heard on TV. Man, they’re good.
One of the other fun bits is that there’s a big board listing the current scores of all the matches happening, so I could cherry pick the close matches. I ended up seeing five different tiebreakers, as I would find the matches where the opponents were evenly matched, and watch them slug it out to 6-6. Korolev/Soderling went to a tiebreaker in the set that I watched – tiebreakers are to 7, win by 2, and their tiebreaker went to 11-9 as they battled for each point. This was the third set, and Korolev had won the first two, so he managed to finish Soderling off in the tiebreaker, but for a straight-set victory, it was incredibly competitive.
I then went to go see Wawrinka, since he was ranked 10. I had to use my height to see the court, but his first set extended into a tiebreaker as well, as his opponent, Simone Bolelli, was playing extremely well. Wawrinka pulled out the tiebreaker, Bolelli lost his composure (partially because he kept hitting to Wawrinka’s fantastic backhand and getting beat with ridiculous down-the-line passing shots rather than hitting to Wawrinka’s weaker forehand), and once Wawrinka was up a break in the second set, it was clear he had the match in hand (and I found out later he went on to win in straight sets).
So it was on to the treat of the day – Rafael Nadal, the number one player in the world, winner of the French Open, Wimbledon, and the Olympic gold medal, was playing in Arthur Ashe stadium this afternoon against Bjorn Phau, some German qualifier dude. Since this was in the stadium, I was up in the nosebleed seats, literally on the top row, but the view was still okay from up there. I got there just as it was starting, and it turned out to be one heckuva match. I’ve never heard of Phau before (he’s apparently ranked 136 in the world), but he played the match of his life today. The first set there were no breaks, although Phau was pushed harder on his serve than Nadal was, including a couple deuces. That turned out to be the difference in the tiebreaker, as Phau went down by a couple mini-breaks and lost 7-4. The second set followed form except that Nadal broke Phau once to win the set 6-3.
More importantly than the score, though, was that Phau was playing out of his mind. I saw much better quality tennis in this match than I did on the outer courts, and not just from Nadal. Phau was hitting lines, moving Nadal back and forth, and up and back pulling off some ridiculous drop shots. He was playing aggressively – he attacked the net a bunch of times in the first couple sets and won all but a couple of those points. And the crowd got behind him for playing so hard and so well – we started cheering every time he won a big point, and I think that crowd momentum helped him raise his game. Nadal was also playing a bit passively (he later admitted he was tired from the travel to and from Beijing), so he was letting Phau dictate the game, and that made things much harder. And yet, every time Phau needed a point to put Nadal in trouble, Nadal would make an unbelievable shot to put himself ahead again. There were a couple passing shots that Nadal did on the dead run that were breathtaking.
I wandered off after the second set since it seemed like Phau had gotten Nadal mad and woken him up, and I figured the third set was a foregone conclusion. I wandered around the outer courts stopping in on other matches (including another tiebreaker between Llodra and Gabashvili), but then noticed that Phau was still in the Nadal match at 4-4 in the third. I rushed back, and arrived as Nadal was serving for the match, up a break at 5-4. Phau hadn’t broken Nadal’s serve all day, but with the crowd behind him, he managed to pull it off when he needed it most, including one ridiculous point where he had gotten to the net, Nadal squeaked a lob over him, he ran back to the baseline and spun around to return it, and then managed to get back in control of the point to win it. He held his serve just barely to take the lead at 6-5, and needed one more break to take the set, even going up love-15. But it was not to be, as Nadal came back to win his serve and force another tiebreaker. Phau came out strong in the tiebreaker, but then blew two consecutive volleys on points where he was in control, and went down 5-2 and couldn’t recover. Tremendous match, especially for the first round, and especially involving a top seed – most of the other top seeds rolled through their first round matches, so it was a treat to see this one. Walking out of the stadium, everybody was buzzing more about seeing Phau than about Nadal, as his play today was a revelation.
Part of the fun of spending the day watching tennis was thinking again about different aspects of tennis strategy. I’m no David Foster Wallace (who writes extensively about the mental game of tennis in Infinite Jest and in his essays), but it was fun to see so many different styles throughout the day. I watched Kei Nishikori beat a higher-ranked Juan Monaco by essentially moonballing him, keeping the ball in play while taking pace off the ball and letting Monaco hit himself into unforced errors. I saw other players try to slug it out by hitting harder than each other. Bolelli was extremely effective at wrong-footing Wawrinka, getting him going into a rhythm side-to-side, and then hitting it twice to the same side of the court as Wawrinka was running to the other side. Phau decided to go for it on his first serves – even from the nosebleed seats, I could hear the difference when he cannoned a flat serve at 130+ mph, instead of the softer sound from his 100mph spinning second serve. It ended up costing him as I think his first serve percentage was under 50% for the match, but when he got it in, he really put Nadal on the defensive. It’s all playing the angles and trying to force the opponent into a position where they have to make a spectacular shot to avoid hitting it right back to you. Fun stuff.
I’d been watching tennis for six hours at this point, and decided I was done for the day, but as long as I was out in Flushing, I figured I should walk by the Expo site with the towers made famous (to me, at least) by Men in Black. I then hopped the subway one more stop to the Flushing-Main St. stop to walk around the Flushing Chinatown. 
While walking around, I saw Flushing Noodle Shop which attracted my attention for two reasons: (a) I love noodle shops, and (b) it had dead ducks hanging in the window (Batman’s heuristic for determining authentic Chinese restaurants). Yummy stuff. Then back on the 7 to home, and now I should really get back to packing.
P.S. I’ve been enjoying my last week in New York. Friday night, I went out with friends to get drinks at Pegu Club, and then dinner at John’s Pizzeria. On Saturday, I took a trip to the Upper East Side to visit the Whitney Museum, and its Buckminster Fuller exhibit – man, he was a nutcase, but an inspired one. I loved his description of himself as a “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist”, his idea of putting a two-mile-tall tetrahedron city to host a million people in San Francisco Bay (according to his calculations, it should float), and even better, his idea of constructing half-mile sphere cities that would float because the sphere itself would only weigh three tons, while it enclosed air of approximately fifty tons, and using the greenhouse effect, could heat the air by as little as one degree to create buoyancy (hot air rises).
I ate a yummy pulled-duck sandwich at Starwich, and went on to do a quick run-through of the Met, mostly to see the JMW Turner exhibition, since I adore his work. It turned out I’d seen most of the pieces already, as they were primarily from the Turner Bequest and on display at the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London, but still great stuff. Also, I visited the Koons exhibition in the Roof Garden – I’d never been to the Roof Garden before but it’s lovely, as they have a martini bar overlooking the park. I also took a turn through Musical Instruments, and Arms and Armor – the latter is guaranteed to turn me into a teenage boy again every time I visit. Afterwards, I wandered back across Central Park and caught the tail end of a nice sunset, as pictured.
I’m going to try to make it to the Frick Collection tomorrow and maybe MOMA after the movers come, and that should just about wrap up my New York experience. It’s been fun.
I’ve been a fan of Jane McGonigal for a few years now, and enjoyed playing her Cruel 2 B Kind game in the Come Out and Play festival two years ago. So when she said she was running another game in this year’s festival, I signed up.
The game ties into the Olympics in that it’s a “Lost Sport” that was allegedly banned in Ancient Greece. In cooperation with the Olympic Committee, Jane is running an entire alternative reality game around the sport. The linked wiki includes rules for the Lost Sport itself, aka “The Labyrinth”.
The idea is that a labyrinth is laid out (Jane used chalk yesterday, but string can also be used). A set of people stand on the lines of the labyrinth to form the walls. A blindfolded runner is placed in the center of the labyrinth, and has to make their way out as fast as possible. The wall can guide the runner by humming; in particular, the people ahead of the runner hum, and stop humming as the runner passes them, so the runner just runs in the direction of the hum.
While being in the wall might seem boring, it turned out there were several subtleties. For instance, realizing that the runner runs in the direction of the hum means that you need to stop humming before the runner gets to you, or they’ll run into you. Also, only hum when you have direct line-of-sight to the runner or they’ll run into the wall – the labyrinth has 180-degree corners which are very confusing if the wall doesn’t coordinate the humming. It helps to stick your head out into the middle of the walkway when humming so that the runner can run directly toward the hum.
The really fun bit is that there aren’t enough people to form the walls of the full labyrinth. So after the runner passes you, you have to get ahead of the runner to form the walls that don’t exist yet. Since the labyrinth is approximately circular, the best strategy we came up with was to have both sides of the labyrinth take a step outward, rather than trying to have the inner wall people squeeze through to form the outer wall. Towards the end, as the numbers dwindled, we didn’t even have enough people to do that, so things got pretty silly as the wall raced to try to stay ahead of the runner. We had one runner actually outrun the wall which left him very confused.
I like that the game is cooperative and competitive at the same time – each labyrinth is working with the runner to get faster times, but you can have multiple labyrinths competing against each other (we had four labyrinths side-by-side in Central Park yesterday, and Jane was in contact with other labyrinths in Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo, each competing for the best times). As an example of how the teamwork of the labyrinth really matters, one runner yesterday set a world record of under 14 seconds, and wanted to take another crack at beating that record at the end. We formed a labyrinth out of the remaining people, and it just didn’t work. Each of the four labyrinths had devised their own strategies, and we were bumping into each other and not being coordinated. Apparently, it had taken several runs for him to get that world record time as everybody learned where and when to hum and move.
I haven’t looked into the larger alternative reality game yet, but I really enjoyed the “Lost Sport”. I’ll keep an eye out for future labyrinth runs in New York.
On Monday night, I went to a talk by William Duggan, a Columbia business school professor who studies strategy, on a concept that he calls strategic intuition. Duggan has written a book on the subject, and has set up a blog to discuss the concept.
Duggan started by discussing the differences between expert intuition and strategic intuition. Expert intuition is built up by practice and familiarity with situations, of the sort described by Gary Klein in Sources of Power or Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. Expert intuition is using one’s built-up experience to instantly and unconsciously recognize the right thing to do in a familiar situation or its variants.
Duggan then differentiated strategic intuition by explaining that strategic intuition is the ability to recombine previous ideas into a wholly new pattern to address new situations. He uses von Clausewitz’s strategic primer, On War, to describe the process:
Clausewitz gives us four steps. First, you take in “examples from history†throughout your life and put them on the shelves of your brain. Study can help, by putting more there. Second comes “presence of mind,†where you free your brain of all preconceptions about what problem you’re solving and what solution might work. Third comes the flash of insight itself. Clausewitz called it coup d’oeil, which is French for “glance.†In a flash, a new combination of examples from history fly off the shelves of your brain and connect. Fourth comes “resolution,†or determination, where you not only say to yourself, “I see!â€, but also, “I’ll do it!â€
The rest of Duggan’s talk was describing different examples of strategic intuition, such as Napoleon’s strategy in a critical battle. He pointed out that none of these people invented something new – they just recombined previous elements in new ways. For instance, he described the Google guys as combining data mining techniques from their academic research, AltaVista’s search crawling, the idea of academic citations used as a ranking method, and Overture’s ad placement. Duggan gleefully used T.S. Eliot’s quote “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal” to illustrate the value of looking out into the world to find the missing piece that might make all the difference.
I like the strategic intuition concept in general. I’ve experienced that flash of insight a few times; as I describe in my cognitive subroutines post, “I had one of those moments where I connected a bunch of ideas, and synapses lit up”. Strategic intuition also appeals to me in that it provides a useful role for a generalist; specialists excel at expert intuition, but only generalists can bring the wide-ranging set of ideas and freedom from preconceptions that are necessary for strategic intuition in Duggan’s model.
I am a bit skeptical of how well supported this model is. He claims it’s based off the intelligent memory hypothesis of how the brain works, which I assume is what is described by Hawkins in On Intelligence. I see how that would apply to expert intuition, which builds in common responses at lower layers of the neocortex, but it would seem to fall short in strategic intuition. This may be answered in his book, so I may have to pick that up at some point (after I’ve finished the ten books lying on my floor in various stages of completion).
I’m also skeptical of Duggan’s contention that this primarily happens in the mind of one person. He started the talk by asking people where they got their good ideas, and got answers like “in the shower”, “while running”, and “late at night” and used those answers to scoff at the value of typical group brainstorming sessions. I find this interesting, because I think by talking, and often get great ideas in conversation with others. If gathering a bunch of ideas into one’s brain is advantageous for strategic intuition, it would seem to be even better to combine the ideas across two or more brains. Thinking by myself often gets me stuck in ruts that I can’t escape (which makes me unable to achieve the “presence of mind” Duggan cites as being key), and talking to somebody else breaks me out of those ruts. It seemed like Duggan undervalues the role that conversation with others can play in strategic intuition (again, perhaps something he covers more in the book). I think this is one of the roles that a generalist plays – being able to combine ideas from multiple people to create flashes of insight that could not be conceived from within any one person.
Duggan’s concept of strategic intuition does help to answer a question I’ve been struggling with since watching a Malcolm Gladwell talk about what constitutes genius. In that talk, Gladwell differentiates between genius and expertise. Genius is just being flat-out smarter and seeing things others can’t. Gladwell uses the example of Michael Ventris, the man who was able to decipher the Linear B language in a couple years in his spare time, after others had spent decades trying to figure it out. Other examples would be people like Einstein or Tesla.
Gladwell contrasts genius with expertise by citing the “10,000 hour rule”, where he claims that it takes 10,000 hours (approximately 3 hours a day for 10 years) of deliberate practice to become a world-class expert at something. Gladwell finds it interesting that talent or genius has almost nothing to do with it – if you have the persistence to put in that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, you will be an expert. He uses the interesting example of Roger Wiles proving Fermat’s Last Theorem – Wiles wasn’t a genius, and was not particularly gifted among mathematicians, but Gladwell observes that he was probably the first mathematician to just work at Fermat’s Last Theorem for 10,000 hours and he eventually cracked it. Another example would be somebody like Edison with his 99% perspiration quote.
The 10,000 hour rule really dismayed me when I first heard Gladwell speak about it partially because it makes so much sense. It takes that sort of dedicated repetition and practice to build up the unconscious machinery and cognitive subroutines to see beyond the basics. This applies in games like chess and tennis, where dedicated prodigies can become world-class competitors as teenagers (ten years after they start), as well as most careers. And the question that faced me was where I was spending my 10,000 hours.
Duggan’s talk gives me some hope in providing a new framework for the value a generalist might have. Strategic intuition is the ability to bring disparate elements together by seeing the world with a fresh perspective (what von Clausewitz called “presence of mind”), which is precisely the value I hope to achieve as a generalist. Rather than extend the limits of an existing field as an expert might do, it’s the ability to remix fields and combine them in new ways. I wonder if it’s possible to spend my 10,000 hours as a generalist, and, as Seth Godin put it, specialize in being a generalist. I guess we’ll find out.
I’ve been out of touch for a bit (I officially graduated from Columbia as evidenced by the happy cap’n'gown icon to the left, then ran off to California to marry my sister off and see some friends afterwards, and then was struck down by a bug from all the excitement), but it’s time to get back into the blogging habit. But we’ll ease back into it with a less serious post.
I’ve been thinking about the difference between New York and the Bay Area, partially because I just visited California and everybody asked me what I thought of New York, and partially because I’m starting to try to figure out where I want to end up long-term. It’s also a relevant topic on teh Intarweb, as Paul Graham wrote an essay comparing various cities, with a focus on New York vs. San Francisco vs. Boston. So I’m going to over-generalize wildly with my takes on the various cities, since those are the three cities I have experience with as an adult.
My typical response when asked what New York is like is to comment that everybody who comes to New York does so to rule the world. They may be in finance or art or fashion or media or theater, but they come to New York to be the best in the world at what they do. There is a palpable energy and ambition about New Yorkers and everything moves faster here as a result. It’s an exhausting environment of people who work hard and then play hard by staying out all night enjoying the nightlife available only in New York.
Another thing I’ve noticed about New Yorkers is that they tend to play the finite game they are given. While they want to be the best, they tend to define “the best” in terms of the industry/field as it currently exists. So they work their way up through the ranks, and look for chances for their big break. This playing within the system tends to promote a competitive zero-sum attitude, as there is a limited amount of attention in any field, and if I have the attention, you don’t. New Yorkers love working out ways to game the rules and beat the system (as evidenced by lengthy discussions about apartment searches), but tend not to question the rules themselves. Some people are working on this, including Charlie with nextNY (who has his own scathing response defending New York), but it’s a lot of inertia to overcome.
In contrast, I think the Bay Area culture tends to be more laid-back. People come to California to chill out rather than to rule the world. This isn’t to say that Bay Area folks don’t work hard, but I know very few people in California who work the 14-hour days that many New Yorkers do. Bay Area’ers do their jobs and do them well, but also spend more time enjoying other pursuits, especially the great parks available in the Bay Area (psst: for those about to give me specific examples of relaxed New Yorkers or driven Bay Area’ers, remember that I’m overgeneralizing wildly).
I also think the Bay Area culture tends to be more collaborative, partially as a result of being more innovative. There are lots of ideas in the world, and lots of ways in which everybody can succeed. People in the Bay Area aren’t working within a system which can only crown a few winners – they are each working on their own thing, so there’s no direct competition (well, except for human resources). This promotes a more non-zero-sum attitude towards the world, one where people can look for ways to help everybody win. When presented with a system, people in the Bay Area look for ways to change the rules rather than beat the system. I’m not sure why that is, whether it’s the strong startup culture, or the liberal Berkeley political heritage that questioned the system, but I feel like more people there are playing the infinite game.
To take a specific example of this dichotomy, several teachers in the Columbia program said “If you don’t learn to play golf, you’re never going to move up in the world.” It’s just taken as an axiom that to move up the corporate ranks, golf courses are the place to do it because that’s where the power brokers are. In the Bay Area, my friends at Squid Labs tell me that “kite surfing is the new golf”, because all the young tech CEOs love this crazy intense sport, including the Google founders.
I also disagree with Graham that Boston is about ideas. Boston is about tradition. Boston is America’s oldest city, and families have lived there for generations. This pervasive sense of history, where you walk by Revolutionary War sites on a daily basis, creates a degree of conservatism, not in a political sense, but in the sense that people are bound by the way things are. I think that’s one of the reasons startups have not been as successful in Boston – the people who would break tradition in that way just don’t fit in, as they have to overcome more inertia both socially and resource-wise. Rather than fight that inertia, they move to California instead, where there is no history to overcome and everybody’s on equal terms as newcomers.
I agree with Graham that the culture of academia which pervades Cambridge values smart people and ideas, but it values the way things are done more. For instance, tenure seems to be a completely broken system that doesn’t reward the best ideas or the best people, instead rewarding those that don’t rock the boat. Professors don’t like new ideas that might threaten their academic turf; as several people have quipped: “Academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so low”.
I was trying to think of what the Midwest is about, as that’s where I grew up. I think the Midwest might be about community and, more specifically, family. I haven’t thought about it as much, as I’m extremely unlikely to move back there, but that feels right. Midwesterners are about having a family, creating a good life for your kids, helping out the neighbors, supporting the local teams, etc.
Now that I’ve found a way to offend people from every place I’ve lived, my over-generalized summary is that New Yorkers want to rule the world, where Bay Area’ers want to change the world. It’s not scientific at all, but it’s a topic I’ve been thinking about as I try to figure out where I fit in best, and where I want to end up in the long term. Comments definitely appreciated about both my observations and where I might fit.
As I’m finishing up my master’s program at Columbia, it’s time to reflect back on my experiences of the past two years. I wrote up an email to Frank Giardini from the comments on yesterday’s post, who asked about comparing the program to getting an MBA, and realized I might as well post my thoughts in public.
I have not pursued an MBA myself, so my perspective is admittedly biased. I’m also biased by the book Managers not MBAs, which points out how artificial the skills learned in an MBA program are when compared to the skills needed to be a manager. That being said, let me extol the benefits of the Technology Management program.
The Technology Management program has a very specific goal – it is designed to give experienced technologists the business tools they need in order to take their technology domain expertise and become successful technology executives. So we took classes in corporate finance, innovation, technology and the law, operations, knowledge management, marketing, etc. These are all standard classes that might be taken in an MBA program, but each class is taught with a technology focus so the examples and the assignments involve challenges relating the subject to a technology organization.
It’s designed for experienced professionals – most students in the program have 8-15 years experience, so the class discussions are grounded in that experience. Instead of theoretical musings, most discussions come back to “When I was in that situation, this is what I did”, which is far more useful in my opinion. For instance, in the innovation class, when we were discussing the phase-gate method of
managing innovation, I was able to offer my perceptions from having gone through a project run with that method.
The other students are definitely a highlight of the program. I have really enjoyed working with and learning from my classmates over the past two years. I also look forward to continuing to benefit from their knowledge and expertise in the future, as we plan to stay in contact via our Google Group and other social networking tools like LinkedIn.
The centerpiece class of the program, in my opinion, is Alan Morley’s class, “Behavioral Challenges in Technology Management”, or Becoming a CIO, as I like to call it. The class covers the financial and strategic tools necessary to become an effective executive and teaches how to synthesize those tools into a coherent plan. See my linked post for more details.
The master’s project itself is developing a business plan and pitch for a technology venture. Some people do an internal project at their company, while others pursue an idea for a startup. At the end of each term, each student has to present their master’s project to a panel of three mentors. They have ten minutes to give their project pitch with another ten minutes to take questions, and they are graded on whether the panel would fund the project based on that presentation. It’s a terrifying but educational experience, as these presentations (whether to boards of directors or venture/angel boards) are what executives face when getting projects funded.
The program also finds each student an industry mentor as a guide, somebody who offers feedback on the project from the perspective of somebody who is already a successful executive. My mentor was Jon Williams, who was CTO of Kaplan Test, and is now the CTO of iVillage. Other mentors are similarly distinguished, generally CIOs and CTOs from different industries in New York. I am extremely fortunate to have worked with Jon over the past two years, as he has been unstinting in sharing his advice and knowledge with me.
I highly recommend the Technology Management program, and think I learned more from it than I would have from an equivalent MBA program. It’s not right for everybody as it definitely has a technology focus, and may be a little light on general management techniques. But it succeeded in giving me new perspectives and new ways of looking at the world, which can only help me as I continue to move up in the management hierarchy.
Over the weekend, I went for a walk and listened to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s talk at the Long Now (viewable at the Whole Earth site, and summarized here). I’ve been doing this for a few weekends now – I can never pay enough attention to listen to a talk like that if I’m at home because I get distracted, but going for a nice long hour-and-a-half walk is a good way to burn off some energy and get educated at the same time. I recommend the Long Now podcast if you’re looking for good talks from interesting intellectuals.
Taleb recently published The Black Swan, a follow-up to his original book, Fooled by Randomness, and uses the talk to discuss some of the ideas from that book. I won’t try to summarize the whole talk but he made two key points that I want to record for future reference. Both points derive from how our intuitions and our mental tools are not equipped to handle nonlinear models. This may seem like an abstruse topic but had very real consequences in the subprime meltdown, when investors theories’ did not take into account non-linear exponential failures of their models.
Taleb posits two worlds: Mediocrestan and Extremistan. He describes Mediocrestan by having the audience imagine a group of 100 people and their distribution of weights. Then he says to determine how the average weight of the group would change if we added the heaviest person in the world to that group. It turns out to not affect the average that much – even if we add a 1,000 pound person, it shifts the average by only 0.5% or so. This is the world of the normal Gaussian distribution that we understand very well with standard deviations and the like.
Now do the same thought experiment, but use people’s wealth instead. Imagine a group of 100 typical people, and their average wealth. Now add Bill Gates to the group. At this point, 100 of the 101 people in the group are below average in wealth, and Bill Gates has approximately 100% of the wealth of the group. This is the world of Extremistan, where outliers can blow up the normal distribution. This is the world of the Black Swan.
And what’s interesting is that we are so bad at dealing with Extremistan. We just don’t intuitively get it, even though we are surrounded by examples of it. Finance and wealth. Book publishing (a significant portion of all book sales are Harry Potter books). The music industry. eBay. We live in an Extremistan world, but our intuition (evolved in a simpler time without network effects) is still stuck in Mediocrestan. So we have to beware of our instincts, because they will get the wrong answers. And we have to beware of charlatans using Mediocrestan theories because they are calculable – it’s like physicists treating everything as a simple harmonic oscillator because that’s the only equation they can solve.
Another example of Extremistan comes from a completely different source. I’m currently reading Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a book of the wisdom of Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s investment partner. Munger notes: “If you look at Berkshire Hathaway and all of its accumulated billions, the top ten insights account for most of it.” He also quotes Buffett as saying:
“I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches – representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all. Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about.”
The typical investment strategy is diversification – invest in lots of things and trust in the average, which would work in Mediocrestan. Buffett and Munger have internalized the idea of Extremistan in investing and exploited it to their advantage by realizing that there will be successes wildly out of proportion to the norm and targeting only those investments.
The other illustration of nonlinearity that Taleb used was to imagine an ice cube melting into a small puddle. Now imagine starting with the puddle and trying to reconstruct what the ice cube looked like. You can get the volume of the ice cube, but you can not derive the shape of the ice cube because there are an infinite number of shapes that could have melted and left that puddle. In other words, there is not sufficient information in the final state to determine the initial state; information is lost in this process. He uses this observation to illustrate why he doesn’t trust theories; because the observable world does not constrain theories enough, many theories can fit existing data without providing predictive power.
This multiplicity could also be illustrated by taking the sequence: 1, 2, 3. What’s the next number? Most of us would answer 4. But the answer could be anything from 0.1 to 100,000. I can construct an equation that would give any answer you chose as the fourth entry in that sequence. There are an infinite number of possibilities that fit the available data. Taleb reminds us of this multiplicity and displays extreme skepticism when decisions are made based on believing just one possible theory.
Taleb’s ice cube reminds me of a discussion from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig quotes Poincare as saying “If a phenomenon admits of a complete mechanical explanation it will admit of an infinity of others which will account equally well for all the peculiarities disclosed by experiment.” This is the dirty secret of science – theories are worth nothing, because an infinite number of theories can explain any experimental result, including such outlandish ones as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Popper’s claim that theories must be falsifiable to be scientific is a consequence of this – every theory is always one experimental observation away from being disproven. Scientists live in a world where they are sifting through an infinity of possible theories, trying to choose one that best fits their observations, but knowing that their theories can never be proven true, only proven false.
I don’t really have any deep analysis here. I liked the visual imagery Taleb used to illustrate his points, and wanted to record that in this post. After listening to his talk, I may have to get The Black Swan from the library this summer to see if the rest of the book is of similar quality.
I went to New York Bite Club last weekend. Bite Club is an underground eating club which serves gourmet dinners in private apartments around New York. It was excellent. I highly recommend it.
It was an amusing process to get into the dinner. I had to apply online at their site, and then exchanged a few emails with the organizer. Then to ensure my seriousness in attending the selected dinner, I had to drop off a cash deposit – it was fairly odd to walk into an office building, go into a random office, and drop off an envelope full of cash to a receptionist with a knowing nod. I was then sent an email with the location, with the warning “IT IS VERY IMPORTANT that silence is maintained while walking through this hallway. All noise can be heard by neighbors and that can bring a lot of attention to our operation, which isn’t going to be acceptable.”
Saturday night finally arrived. I got into the elevator with three other people. We realized we were all going to the same floor, and grinned sheepishly at each other. We walked into a typical New York apartment with the main room filled with tables and chairs, and a couple people working feverishly in the kitchen. We were assigned seating (the organizer had tried to balance the tables with appropriate dinner partners). I was at a table with a Wall Street trader and a manufacturer’s representative. We started talking, but our thoughts were on the food to come.
The night that I went was a 7-course winter tasting menu with a wine pairing (click on any picture for the Flickr set). It was _fantastic_. Comments on most of the courses:
The thing that amazed me was that this was not a specialized kitchen – this was a regular New York kitchen. They brought in extra dishes, an extra set of shelves to hold them, and a table for prep, but other than that, there’s really no excuse for me not to be able to make such dishes myself. Well, except for lacking culinary skill.
Oh, that was the other amazing part – when we inquired as to which restaurant the chef was associated with, we found out that he just does this for fun. His day job has nothing to do with food. He just really enjoys cooking and trying new things, and started throwing bigger and bigger dinner parties until he decided to make it a regular event.
All in all, it was a lovely evening. Four and a half hours of good conversation, while being pampered with a wonderful seven course dinner, each paired with a well-chosen wine. It was pricy, but still far cheaper than a similar dinner would be at a haute cuisine restaurant. Definitely an experience I look forward to repeating as soon as I can raise the funds 
A couple of us in nextNY were discussing the need to have the chance for more in-depth conversations than can be had in the typical environment of meetups and happy hours. And since nextNY is a user-driven organization, we realized it was up to us to make it happen. So Jean Barmash and I are organizing Tech Dinner Salons, with the first one this Wednesday on the topic of blogging. If you’ve been reading my blog and looking for an excuse to come chat with me, this would be an excellent opportunity.
