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:

• Personalized agents that know you and just find the right information - I brought up privacy, and the general response was that privacy was overrated and should be ignored for the sake of this discussion as better results would trump privacy.
• Semantic technologies with natural language understanding - somebody from Powerset was there pushing this idea, and somebody else recommended Semantifind. I’m extremely skeptical of such technologies, as I’ve spent most of the past ten years figuring out how to translate between different disciplines as a generalist, and I already understand language. I think it’s going to be a long time before computers can figure out the implicit frames that influence comprehension.
• Social search - leverage our social networks to find more relevant results. If a trusted associate noted something, it’s probably more relevant than a random stranger noting the same thing. The issues I raised is the modelling of the social network - I would trust certain friends to make recommendations about stereo equipment but definitely not about clothes and vice versa. And unless the software can gather enough data to model those subject- and pairwise-specific interactions, it’s not going to get the desired results.

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:

• “If you don’t change direction, you’ll end up where you are heading.” (in other words, inaction is a choice with consequences)
• The future will still have a lot of dull parts (riffing on Hitchcock’s claim that “Drama is life with the dull parts cut out of it”). We look forward to all the excitement of the future but forget that amid all that excitement will stlil be dull parts.
• “Change is never linear” (s-curve, s-curve)
• “Cherish failure, especially someone else’s” - this was a theme from the other talk I attended, where he pointed out that the consequences of the s-curve is that the time when everybody decides that a technology is a failure and that it will never work is the time when it might be just about to take off. Which actually made me wonder about my dismissal of semantic technologies in the session earlier, as part of the reason I dismissed it is that it’s been “just around the corner” for 20 years now, which, in Saffo’s world, means it may be just about to finally succeed.
• “Look for indicators” - form a quick opinion, but then look for proof that you’re wrong, which he elaborates in his strong opinions, weakly held blog post.
• “Use forecast techniques until reality gets too complex” - this was an interesting riff where he said that even our forecasting techniques continually get outmoded and need to be updated. He believes that we’re in such a phase transition now, where the old qualitative models are breaking down, but new quantitative models haven’t arrived yet. The four factors that he thinks will drive the next generation of forecasting models are Moore’s law, better forecasting algorithms, more and better data, and more of our lives being stored in digital form thanks to Facebook. My eyes lit up, as that’s a perfect explanation of why I joined a forecasting group at Google.
• Three book recommendations: the novel Daemon, by Daniel Suarez, “A general theory of bureaucracy” by Elliot Jaques, and the “creative destruction” work of Joseph Schumpeter.

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

Despite the help of my readership in brainstorming ideas for the essay, one of the requirements for publication was that I refrain from posting my essay here for six months. So if you just want to see my essay, ping me then.

This led to an interesting situation, where my brain started feeling very odd with a sort of buzzing sensation, and I started having trouble thinking clearly. I eventually figured out where I’d felt that way before - it had been during Mike Murray’s Hacking the Mind talk, when he had pulled a buffer overflow attack on the audience by opening loops (by starting stories) and never closing them (by finishing the stories). What had happened is that I had started exploring one topic, seen a link to another topic, opened a new tab to look into that topic, seen a link to a third topic, opened a tab for that, etc. By the time I noticed my brain feeling odd, I was up to ten open tabs on various topics. Yup, I had committed a buffer overflow attack on my own mind to the point where I’d impaired my own functioning.

Once I figured that out, though, it was easy to figure out what to do - I had to close the loops in my mind and offload the storage from my brain. So I started a to-do list with the different topics of interest to be explored later, and the links that I had open in each tab for that topic. I also started a list with links to the tabs that had particularly useful information for future reference. Once I created those lists, I started closing the tabs and thus convinced my brain that it could free up those memory pointers. With the swap space that had been devoted to those open loops, I then had the brainpower to actually think again.

It was an interesting process to watch, but it also highlights a danger of my typical way of learning. I like learning in a top-down fashion, where I learn the big picture of a system first, which gives me a framework on which to attach my understanding of pieces of the system. At the previous startups I had worked at, I could read all of the documentation written by the startup in less than a day, and get a big-picture understanding of how everything fit together pretty quickly. Trying to do that at Google was like trying to drink from the firehose and demonstrated that there are some systems that are just too big for me to hold completely in my brain at once.

So I’ll have to be more disciplined about organizing how I’m learning things this week. As noted, I’ve opened up a couple files to help me organize what I’ve learned so far and what I still need to learn. I’ll also need a few more files to offload information once I’ve learned it, at least until I see it enough times that it can be transferred to long-term embedded storage, which has more capacity.

Anyway, I was entertained by this incident of accidentally malicious self-hacking, so I figured I would share.

My friend suggested that my faking was a hubris-laden attempt at being a know-it-all. And I think that’s part of it. Through high school, I could know it all, mastering all subject areas to which I was exposed. I was a champion “Scholastic Bowl” (aka Quiz Bowl) player, answering questions from math to literature to history to biology to physics. Even though it’s patently ridiculous for me to now pretend I can be an expert in all of those disciplines, a bit of me still clings to that youthful self-identity, and keeps on trying anyway.

And yet I’m perfectly happy to concede my own ignorance when confronted with somebody that clearly knows more than I do, so it’s not purely an ego thing where I’m trying to assert dominance. There’s something else going on here. After thinking about it some more, I think it’s actually tied into my identity as a generalist.

Part of being a generalist is understanding different subject areas well enough to effectively communicate with practitioners of that subject. That means not only speaking the right jargon, but understanding the structure of thought associated with that subject, and the mental connections that practitioners make. Without this framework understanding, the generalist will not be able to effectively translate into and out of the subject. For instance, physicists are grounded in a quantitative view of the world, so trying to communicate with them in terms of verbal abstractions will be ineffective; mathematical approaches will work better. On the flip side, biologists are more open to fuzziness, as biological systems are much less predictable and temperamental experimental subjects, so qualitative observations are acceptable.

So when I’m faking knowledge on a topic, I’m practicing my skills as a generalist. Do I understand the structure of the subject well enough to keep up my end of the conversation? It’s a test of my mastery of the jargon, of the basic concepts of the field, of the way in which practitioners communicate. If I am not called out as a fake, I pass the unspoken test, and am accepted as one of the community. If I am called out (as my friend once memorably did in a conversation about art history when she said after five minutes “Wow, you know way less about this than I thought you did!”), I can review what I did wrong which helps me improve my understanding of the communication within that subject.

Understanding the language is also an essential element of being accepted within a community. I’ve written about this before with respect to ultimate frisbee culture, but it’s true of any community. Each community has its own jargon and cultural touchpoints, and knowing what those are is part of what it means to be a community member: Chicago Cubs fans are scarred by references to Bartman, classical music buffs have opinions about Mahler and Mozart, certain nerds talk in Star Wars quotes. My ability to learn the basics of the jargon and the culture of many different communities gives me the freedom to travel between those communities as a social butterfly, cross-pollinating between them.

Faking it is also a good way to find out if I’m talking to somebody who actually knows a subject. They’ll be able to catch me out on a topic, which becomes an opportunity for me to learn from them about that topic. This may not work, as many people are too polite to tell other people they’re wrong or full of crap. MIT tends to foster an adversarial conversation style, where mistakes are leaped upon, but more genteel members of society just nod politely and change the subject. So that’s a potential problem with faking it as a means for discovering expertise.

So does faking knowledge on a subject make me a charlatan know-it-all, unfit for society? Or does it make me a generalist, developing my ability to communicate between communities? What do you think?

“Anthropologists are good at recognizing patterns in social and cultural data. My clients get this about me. They used to ask me to find the solution. More and more, they ask me to find the problem. How, they ask, should we be thinking about this? Anthropologists are good pattern seekers, good assumption hunters.”

Along similar lines, I’ve often said that one of my skills is asking the right questions. When confronted with an unfamiliar situation, I can draw analogies to other situations that I have previously dealt with, and ask a series of questions to narrow the cone of uncertainty. Once the situation is framed appropriately, that elicits a series of appropriate questions. I may not know the answers to those questions, but once the right questions are being asked, I can call on the appropriate specialists to answer those questions, as I described in a previous post defending generalists.

This reminds me of a question a friend asked me a couple months ago: does being a generalist just mean specializing in multiple areas? My instinctive answer was no, but it took me a while to articulate why. There is a different attitude towards the world - when confronted with a problem, a specialist, even a multi-specialist, tries to figure out how to use their mastery to answer the problem as posed, whereas a generalist asks questions to understand the system, possibly revealing an underlying problem that should be handled by a different specialist. I do think that experience in multiple specializations will tend to incline one towards the generalist attitude, as the different perspectives of each specialization will make one have to think about how the system fits together; after all, that’s how I got to this point, wending my way through physics and software and biotech. But I don’t think that’s the only way to become a generalist.

This question of what it means to be a generalist has also come up recently as I try to explain my latest career move to friends; when I say “I’m going to work for Google…”, they nod and say “Yeah, makes sense”, but when I continue with “…as a financial analyst”, they look confused and don’t see how it makes sense with the rest of my career. To explain what attracts me to this position requires a digression into my generalist quest, as part of the reason for taking this job is to give me more perspectives with which to work, including a financial perspective, a quantitative modelling perspective, and the perspective of working for a large company as opposed to a startup. Understanding how companies work as a system requires understanding the financial side, as that is a driving factor in many corporate decisions.

Getting back to the original question of what it may mean to be a generalist consultant, I think it may mean analyzing companies as systems by examining how the different parts of the company are working together. By being able to talk to each area of the company in their own language, based on my own experience as a developer, scientist, manager, and now analyst, I could see how the areas are working together or against each other. The delivered analysis would include asking and answering the right questions to understand why delivered results are not consistent with stated goals, including inconsistent incentive plans, interdisciplinary communication difficulties, etc. (as an aside, I need to do some more reading in the field of organizational behavior and organizational learning, as that would seem to be a field where these sorts of questions are being asked). And the experience of building revenue models at Google will give me tools that may be useful in generating ROI spreadsheets to convince management of the value of such analyses. I don’t know - I’m still playing around with ideas here, as the branding of myself as a generalist is still a work in progress.

Tomorrow, some thoughts on how my generalist perspective sometimes mischievously reveals itself.

P.S. I’m back! Since my last post three weeks ago, I’ve road tripped across the country with a friend and a harp via Chicago, the South Dakota Badlands and Yellowstone, moved into a rented house in Mountain View, and caught up with several Bay Area friends. I start work at Google on Monday, but I’ve been enjoying the time off after a crazy summer of job hunting, packing and moving. If you’re around and want to hang out this week, let me know.

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.

New York experiences

• Brooklyn Bridge - My favorite New York experience to recommend is to take the subway downtown, and then walk across the Brooklyn Bridge - I just feel the bridge is iconic, it provides great views of New York, and it’s a nice walk to boot. Plus, you can end the walk by ducking under the bridge to have pizza at Grimaldi’s.
• Ice Skating at Central Park - I only did this a couple times, but wish I had done it more. The experience of zipping around the rink with the New York skyline rising past the surrounding trees is breathtaking. Ice skating at Rockefeller Center or Bryant Park are other possibilities but those are more crowded.
• Staten Island Ferry (or really any excuse to be in a boat in the harbor) - New York is great to see from the water. The Staten Island Ferry is free and goes right by the Statue of Liberty, so it’s the easiest option, but I’ve been sailing a couple times, and went to a party out on the Manhattan Sailing Club’s barge once, as well as my Staten Island Ferry experience.
• Riding my bike - New York is surprisingly bike-friendly (despite the stupid crackdowns on Critical Mass), with lots of bike lanes and paths. I regularly enjoyed the ride up and down the Hudson River, taking the bike path from my place all the way to the north or south tip of Manhattan.
• East Village - I just love the feel of the East Village. It’s where I stayed during my three week vacation in New York in 2005, and things are _always_ happening there at any time of day or night. If I ever need to suggest an activity for friends, wandering around the East Village is always a possibility.
• Philharmonic in the Park - a picnic in Central Park with friends, followed by a concert of audience-friendly classics performed by the New York Philharmonic, followed by fireworks. What’s not to like?
• The Frick Collection - I visited the Frick again this week, for the first time since 2001. I had wondered if I would still find it as amazing as I did then, and I did. Frick custom-built this house to display his world-class art collection, and it’s just fantastic. The house is gorgeous, I spent as much time looking at the furniture as the art, and, oh yeah, the art is great too. For instance, there are around 30 known Vermeers in the world - the Frick collection has three. The Frick is lesser known than the big museums, but I think the experience is better in many ways, as one can experience the whole museum in a couple hours and enjoy the experience rather than being overwhelmed.
• Sports events - Obviously, I enjoyed the US Open this week. I’ve also gone to a couple Yankees games and the AVP Brooklyn Open. Never took in a basketball or hockey game at Madison Square Garden, which is a shame. Or made it to a football game, or watched the New York marathon. I’ll have to do those at some point.

Eating establishments

• 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.
• Burger Joint - In addition to having one of the tastiest burgers in Manhattan, this place particularly endears itself to me for its context switch. You walk into the lobby of the luxury Park Meridien hotel with 30 foot ceilings, mirrors and chandeliers, spy a small neon representation of a hamburger down a dark corridor next to the check-in desk, duck through curtains at the end of the corridor, and walk into a different world: a fake-wood-panelled dive joint with three guys making burgers over a grill. Alas, it’s too popular now, and regularly has 20 minute waits, but I still generally go when I’m up in the area.
• Pegu Club - Amazing hand-crafted cocktails, interesting decor and ambience, comfortable seating, and quiet enough to talk easily with friends (rare in New York). It’s expensive ($12 cocktails, and small plates for a similar price), but I love going there as a special occasion to spend time drinking and talking with close friends . Admittedly, I haven’t been to the other top cocktail bars in New York, other than Little Branch, but as of now, it’s my favorite bar in New York.
• Hallo Berlin - a Hell’s Kitchen beer garden with sausages and beer. I really liked it for hosting large gatherings of people (as I was introduced to it), but I’ve had a couple reports of bad service recently from friends, so it may have gone downhill.

Shopping

• Ward-Nasse Gallery - an artist-owned collective. The exhibitions change monthly, but mostly I recommend it as a place where reasonably priced art can be found on a regular basis. Both pieces of art I own were bought here (see one here).
• HousingWorks bookstore - I just love this bookstore, both the space with its gorgeous sweeping staircases and comfortable chairs, and the general vibe, as it’s more personal than a place like the Strand. Plus I’m a sucker for the proposition of buying books for charity. I only gave away a bag’s worth of books before moving, but they went to HousingWorks. And I managed to restrain myself to only buying one book while there!

Things I wish I had done but will have to do on a future visit

• Shake Shack - Iconic burger place in Madison Square Park. The line is always ridiculous, but I wish I’d waited it out once just to see. It’s also a great place for mixing with the digerati - somebody even set up a Twitter channel to arrange meetups there.

• Dia:Beacon - an outdoor gallery an hour north of New York, which apparently has a great collection of big contemporary art pieces that can only be displayed in outdoor settings or large spaces.
• Visit Philadelphia - I’ve never visited Philadelphia as an adult. It’s only a two hour bus ride from New York, and somehow I never managed to squeeze in a day trip or weekend trip there.
• See more live music - I’m not that much of a music buff, but it does seem like a shame for me to have lived in New York and not taken more advantage of the fact that there are dozens of places to see great live music every single night.

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.

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.

This framing reflects the fact that interviewing is a sales process, convincing a company that what they need is what you offer. At one extreme, one can go about this dishonestly, puffing up one’s resume and claiming accomplishments that were driven by others. At the other extreme, one can be lucky enough to be a perfect fit for what a company needs (eight years ago, Signature BioScience’s job listing for a software engineer matched my resume perfectly, right down to the physics background). But in most cases, the situation is somewhere in between (note the similarities to yesterday’s post about the need for companies to frame their brand for potential customers).

What most job candidates don’t realize is that it’s up to the candidate to sell the company on themselves as a match. When looking at a resume or cover letter, companies are looking for a reason to say no and reduce their options, so if they have to work to figure out how and why a candidate would be a match for the position, the application gets rejected. I struggled with this in my recent job search, trying to find positions where I could plausibly match up aspects of my background with the posted requirements for a job. So I had to put together a cover letter for each potential position that drew the appropriate connections between what I’ve done and what the company needed.

Making these connections between seemingly disconnected topics turns out to be a great application of my ability to look at things from multiple perspectives. I can look at a job opening from the company’s perspective, and emphasize the relevant skills I could bring to that job. One mistake that many candidates make is thinking that it’s important for them to list off all of their positive attributes in their interview or resume, as they are looking at things from their own perspective. What’s more effective is to list only the positive attributes that are relevant to the company, and finding a way to turn what could be perceived negatives into positives. My Columbia mentor emphasized the importance of following up every negative with a positive e.g. “Well, I have not done that specifically, but I have done these other tasks that are similar in these ways.”

One other interesting development during this job search was my realization that I have become more comfortable with my personal brand as a generalist. I can admit to myself that I am better at thinking across disciplines and considering the big picture than I am at specializing and making sure all the details are right, instead of trying to be good at everything. This was a negative with many potential jobs - companies want to be able to abstract away details by hiring a specialist to handle them. So I rejected jobs in software development and project management, as those moved me further away from my strengths and interests. At one point in my life, I would have been far more concerned about trying to build on my previous background, and molding myself to fit those types of jobs. Instead, I stuck to my generalist brand, explaining to companies that I was better at figuring out how the pieces fit together into a coherent whole than I was at doing any of the individual pieces. Not everybody sees the value of that, but the ones that do are likely to be better places for me.

This gets back to the idea of embracing a specific vision for a brand rather than trying to be everything to everybody. It also has helped me start to zero in on the things I want to be doing, rather than the things I am necessarily qualified to do at this time. Part of what I want is to spend more time on the types of issues I discuss on this blog. Part of it is becoming an advisor of sorts, bringing the people around me a fresh perspective on themselves and their issues. Part of it is being a connector, figuring out which ideas go together, and which people should be talking to each other. It’s still an inchoate vision, but I think my friends are starting to see where I’m going with this and helping me to shape that vision and my future. And it’s a virtuous circle, as people’s perceptions reinforce my vision of myself which continues to shape people’s perceptions.

Part of what’s been good about this job search is realizing what I don’t want to do; as I expressed a few weeks ago, a vision is as much to determine what not to do as it is to determine what should be done. It’s been frustrating for my friends in that they wanted to help me find a job, but I kept on rejecting ideas that they had as not being quite right without being able to concisely express what why their ideas weren’t right. Being able to have a better answer for the kind of work I wanted to do is part of what I’m trying to figure out with my personal brand.

It’s also difficult because most job searches start with what one has done previously and building on that, but I was looking for something different than what I’ve done before so that I could continue to broaden my experience. I was looking for positions where my eclectic and broad background was an asset rather than a liability. One of the reasons I liked the Google position is that it draws on all aspects of my career so far - my analytical skills from my physics days, my technical understanding from my development days, and my developing business and strategy skills from the last three years - while giving me a chance to add yet more skills to my toolbox.

Getting back to the idea of personal branding, the difficulty of branding is not just deciding what one stands for, but ensuring that one’s brand is successfully communicated to one’s target audience. In the interview process, one must frame one’s personal career brand (project manager, software developer, or generalist) as being what the company is looking to hire. If one were looking to date, it’s projecting an appropriate image to attract the desired demographic. This is a tricky process, and gets back to the questions of morality and truth that I touched upon briefly in yesterday’s post. Who are we really? And what does that question even mean if one takes the idea of multiple social identities seriously?

Another concept I mentioned in yesterday’s branding post is the idea of enlisting customers as advocates - what would this mean in personal branding? In the realm of job searching, I think this is just networking, enlisting friends and former coworkers to help one find a new job. We all have friends who are looking out for us, and looking for ways to help us move forward - these are our advocates of our personal brand, whatever it is.

I like the idea of a personal brand, mostly as a way of framing for myself the decisions I’m making about the type of career I’m currently pursuing, the kind of person I want to be, and how I convey those decisions to other people. It’s the same problem that companies face when trying to define who they are in the marketplace, so applying similar techniques to my life would probably be helpful.

So what’s your personal brand? How would you define yourself in one sentence?

Taking a step back, at the beginning of the summer, I had just graduated from Columbia and was in need of some time off after the craziness of finishing the semester. I had three weddings to attend in California in a month, so I spent two and a half weeks in the Bay Area between May and June, and used it as a chance to catch up with many of my California friends. Seeing them made me realize how much I missed them all, and made me want to see them more often than once or twice a year. At the same time, I was starting to think about the next move in my career, since the “Software Management Training Program” at Fog Creek was ending at the end of the summer.

Putting the two together, I decided to move back to the Bay Area - many of my close friends are out there, the culture fits me better out there, there are many more technology companies to choose from career-wise, the weather’s better, etc. But mostly it’s the people - people are what matter to me in the end, and many more people of my “tribe” are out there (notwithstanding the many outstanding people I’ve met here in New York like Grant, Noah, Charlie, and my fellow Columbia students).

Having decided that, it was just a matter of finding a job, and as of today, I have accepted an offer to work at Google in Mountain View. I will be an analyst on a sales finance team that develops revenue forecasting models to help Google executives make decisions. I was drawn to the position because I get to use both my quantitative skills in building the models and my generalist skills in that the models are built on understanding everything from the technical product decisions being made, to sales and marketing strategies, to what customers and competitors are doing, to the larger economic and business environment. It will also be valuable if I decide to continue with the management track at some point, because executive managers have to understand the financials to be successful, so it would behoove me to understand revenue at a micro- and macro- level. You can read about the Revenue Force team to which this team contributes in this New York Times article which explains some of the contributions of Hal Varian as Google’s Chief Economist (Varian is also one of the authors of Information Rules, which I read in preparation for my interview with him at Google).

So that’s the plan. While I’m sad to be leaving New York, I went back and re-read my moving to New York post from two and a half years ago, and I think I have gotten what I wanted to out of my New York experience:

• I was involved in all aspects of running a growing software startup. Fog Creek Software went from 9 to 23 full-time employees in my time there, and my responsibilities included technical support, sales, marketing, QA, beta and release management, project management and program management. I learned about the operational side and all the work necessary to finish a product beyond the technical work.
• I academically bolstered my shift to the management track by getting my master’s in Technology Management from Columbia.
• I really feel like I know my way around New York now. In most neighborhoods of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, I know restaurants and bars and fun things to do (alas, Queens and the Bronx are still mostly a mystery to me, although I at least made it to Arthur Ave, the Botanical Gardens and the Bronx Zoo) (and Staten Island was uninteresting). I’ve memorized the subway map, I’ve walked the Brooklyn Bridge, I’ve ridden the Staten Island Ferry, I’ve seen the Philharmonic in Central Park, etc. It’s been great getting to know the city, and while I could spend a lifetime learning more, I have reached a level of satisfactory acquaintance.
• In an added bonus, I learned who I was in a new environment, making new friends, trying new things, visiting new places. It was really great for me to leave my comfortable Bay Area routine, start over and find out that I could handle it better than I would have guessed.

I will be leaving New York at the end of August, so there’s a couple weeks left in which to say good bye. I will probably be organizing a bar night out next week some time (maybe Thursday?), so contact me by comment or email if you would like to be part of those plans.

P.S. In case you were wondering why my posts have been sparse over the past few weeks, I was concentrating on my job search in California. I’m hoping to get back into a blogging rhythm soon, but we’ll see how that fits in with packing up, figuring out logistics, seeing all of my New York friends one last time, and hopefully squeezing in some last bits of sight-seeing in New York.