Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

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Subtitled “Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics”, this book is a weird mishmash of several subjects. It starts with a critique of neoclassical economics, moves on to a review of complexity theory and evolution, reframes economics as an evolutionary competition among business models, and then finishes by applying some of these ideas to business strategy, economics and politics. I applaud Beinhocker’s ambition, but the result is a disappointingly shallow book with only a tenuous thread connecting its different parts.

The strongest part of the book was the criticism of neoclassical economics. Beinhocker goes into the history of how economics developed over the course of the twentieth century, and how its practitioners yearned to turn economics into a real science. By co-opting the forms and equations of equilibrium physics, they were able to create mathematical models that bore some resemblance to the economies they were studying.

However, some of the assumptions that are necessary for neoclassical economics are patently unrealistic. For instance, the model of consumers as rational economic maximizing agents doesn’t make any sense when we consider our own purchasing decisions. Economists also assume that economic systems are in a state of constant equilibrium, and that all disruptions to that equilibrium settle immediately, hence the joke about the economist who didn’t pick up the $100 bill because if it was a real $100 bill, somebody else would have picked it up already.

Beinhocker explains how the equilbrium model that the economists were using slowly came to imprison them. Because they had some success with the equilibrium model, they trapped themselves because changing the equilibrium assumptions would mean giving up the advances they had made. Beinhocker uses the analogy of map-making - good maps “are approximate pictures of an underlying reality”. But economists were using a map not based in underlying reality, and it trapped them on a local maximum where any incremental step from where they stood was a step back. This book is Beinhocker’s attempt at a giant leap to a new model that can fit reality better.

Beinhocker stops there and takes a detour into complexity theory, starting with a Social Atom-esque description of a simple economy simulation using software agents. He has chapters about dynamics, agents, networks, emergence and evolution. Most of this section was a review for me as I’ve read books like Gleick’s Chaos, Waldrop’s Complexity, Ian Stewart’s Does God Play Dice?, Kelly’s Out of Control, Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe, Duncan’s Six Degrees, Johnson’s Emergence, Dawkins’s Selfish Gene, etc.

The next section is “How Evolution Creates Wealth”, where he posits that the economy is an evolutionary battleground between competing business models using unique combinations of “Physical Technology” and “Social Technology”. Biological evolution depends on initial differentiation (genetic drift), selection of positive traits, and replication (reproduction), to find good fits with the existing and ever-changing environment. Beinhocker’s theory is that the same factors are at work in the economy, as businesses try to adapt to a changing economic world, with the ones that adapt most successfully and achieve the best fit being copied. It’s a cute theory, but I felt that he was really stretching to try to make it work.

The last section had some interesting ideas as he used his model to suggest new business strategies, better ways of organizing businesses to achieve results, and some implications for finance and politics. I particularly liked the section where he says “Executing and adapting are the ultimate imperatives for any design in an evolutionary system”, as it echos the learn and latch theory that I posited last year. Some of his critiques of finance are pointed as well, in particular how the simplistic assumptions necessary to make current economic models work have deleterious effects on actual behavior.

I thought the book was a decent review of several different subjects, but it didn’t really give me new ideas to play with. Beinhocker’s “evolutionary economics” model is not sufficiently developed for me to be able to use it to think about the world yet, and it’s unclear whether it’s any more based in reality than neoclassical economics was. There are good bits of criticism throughout, but I wouldn’t recommend this book - The Social Atom is a much more compact and thought-provoking book tackling a similar topic.

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Do you recognize any of these book covers? Then you know of Chip Kidd’s work.

I first became aware of Chip Kidd when I picked up a book with a striking cover at the library a few years ago. The book was The Cheese Monkeys, and I enjoyed the hilarious over-the-top antics of two art students and a wacky graphic design prof. The jacket copy informed me that Kidd was a leading book cover designer, and so I started keeping an eye out for his work.

Earlier this summer, I visited the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, where they were having a “Design Triennial” to celebrate great design from the past three years. One of the displays was Chip Kidd’s book covers - he had published a retrospective of his work over the past twenty years. I flipped through the book and really liked it. I finally bought it last month when I had an Amazon gift certificate to use.

It’s great. 400 pages of beautiful images of book covers, with a paragraph of commentary from Kidd on each page explaining what he was trying to do. You can see the care and detail which Kidd puts into each and every one of the covers that he designs. I really liked that he includes preliminary sketches, first drafts, and failed attempts of certain covers. By seeing what didn’t work, the reader gets a much better sense of why the final cover does work. It was also great to see his designs for a collection of an author’s work in one place, so that the common design elements popped out.

He also includes great quotes from the authors that he has worked with expressing awe and admiration that Kidd can capture the souls of their books in a few well-designed graphic elements. One memorable account is from a first-time novelist who hated the cover designs that her publisher sent her. Her publisher said “Go to the book store, find a few covers that you like, get the designers’ names, and we’ll go hire one of them to design your cover.” She went to the store, picked four completely different covers so she could get a range of designers, and then found out that all four were designed by Kidd.

While I don’t have an instinct for graphic design myself, I really enjoyed reading about the process that Kidd uses to get his ideas. Sometimes it’s serendipity - while reading the book, he’ll come across an object at a rummage sale that suits the book’s content perfectly. Sometimes it’s hard work - several attempts before converging on one that everybody likes. He will do whatever suits the book’s content best - look at some of the different approaches he uses:

As my experience of finding The Cheese Monkeys demonstrated, a book often is judged by its cover, and can influence somebody to pick up a book they might not otherwise have. If you love books and are interested in graphic design, I’d recommend this book. Come flip through my copy if you’re curious.

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This book is recommended by Joel (mentioned in his post on “Econ 101 Management”) so we read it recently in our book club at work.

The premise is that measuring employee performance is guaranteed to distort an organization’s desired results. This assertion contradicts management mantras everywhere, such as “You can’t improve what you can’t measure”. How can a manager know her employees are doing the right thing for the company unless she measures their performance?

Austin attacks this conventional wisdom by creating an economic model of how managers and employees will interact, and then exploring the consequences of that model. The model assumes a certain amount of intrinsic motivation - that the employee wants to do the right thing, but is only motivated to work so hard on their own. So the manager has to offer incentives to get the employee to work harder.

In the model, the employee has two dimensions along which their performance could be measured. If the manager offers incentives based on only one of the dimensions, that will distort the employee’s efforts. Austin uses the example of a job placement service which offered incentives based on the number of job applicants each employee interviewed. The inevitable result was that the employees spent all of their time interviewing applicants and none of their time calling companies to find jobs for those applicants. The goal of the organization was to connect applicants with jobs, but because of the distorted incentive system, it failed completely. Another example is from 21 Dog Years, where customer service representatives at Amazon were measured by how many phone calls they answered per hour. Mike Daisey hung up on every third caller and won a customer service award because he answered so many calls.

At this point, many managers are saying “That’s because the measurements were stupid - if I measure enough aspects of performance, then I can construct an appropriate incentive system.” The problem is that not only do managers have to measure all aspects of performance that contribute to company goals, they have to measure them all equally well. Otherwise, Austin’s model shows that the poorly measured aspects will get ignored in favor of the well measured aspects, and the same sorts of performance distortion occur.

Furthermore, measurement has a cost. An organization has to spend time and resources constructing measurement systems and reviewing the results. If an organization has to measure many aspects of performance to monitor employee performance, the cost of such measurement may outweigh the short-term benefit in increased employee performance.

Austin acknowledges the possibility that in a system with perfect knowledge of what an employee should be doing, such as an assembly line, it might be possible to perfectly measure performance along all relevant axes. But in a knowledge and service based economy, the measurement of performance is always going to be inexact. Because measuring performance directly is impossible, organizations use easier-to-measure proxies for performance. And because there is not a direct correlation between measurement and performance, distortions are introduced into the system.

Austin recommends managing by increasing the intrinsic motivation of the employee to do a good job. He makes the assumption that employees know the most about how to do their own job, so they are the only ones who can optimize their effort among the different aspects of their job. So a non-measuring manager needs to convince the employees to do their best “by example and through persuasion, and in clearly communicating direction to employees”.

The weakest part of the book is that Austin’s thesis rests on the model he constructed for how employees might behave in a measured environment. While the model is appealing, he provides very little data justifying the assumptions he builds into the model. For instance, he assumes that the employee knows better than the manager on how to optimize effort, but that assumption would not hold in a situation where a recent college graduate is being managed by a twenty year veteran. He also assumes employees want to do the right thing for the company/customer, which is not universally true in my experience. Austin is playing the same game as the managers he criticizes - he makes convenient assumptions and constructs a system that will work for those assumptions.

Despite having issues with his methodology, I agree with Austin’s recommendations for management. I hate being measured, as my rant about timesheets illustrated. Don’t revert to Taylorist management methods that treat the employee as an automaton that has to be bribed into doing the right thing. Hire skilled people who want to do a good job, point them in the right direction, and then clear obstacles from their path so they can get there.

I recommend the book as a thought-provoking read despite its weaknesses. Austin’s model is a good counterweight to the pithy aphorisms spouted by management consultants. His thought experiment provides ammunition for a more human-oriented style of management, where employees are treated as more than numbers in a spreadsheet.

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This book is based on the idea that complex organized behavior can emerge out of simple atomic behavior. In physics, simple atoms interact with each other and generate complex behavior like temperature. Such models were never thought to be applicable to humans because people are too complicated and have free will. Buchanan collects work being done by “social physicists” to show that macroscopic human behavior, with hundreds of people interacting, can be modeled by “social atoms” following simple behaviors.

One aspect which made it difficult to construct such models of human behavior is that people learn. Atoms may blindly have the same response every time when presented with a certain situation, but if a response doesn’t work, people will try a different one. We can now use computers to model people’s learning behavior, and see the dynamic equilibrium that results.

For instance, he cites a paper by Brian Arthur discussing the “bar problem”. Arthur liked to go to the El Farol bar near the Santa Fe Institute on Thursday evenings when the Irish musician Gerry Carty played there. But about half the time that he went, the bar was too crowded for him to enjoy the music. So he started guessing when other people wouldn’t be going to try to plan his visits. He realized that others must be doing the same thing.

Being an economist, he decided to model the behavior of attendees. Some attendees would guess that if it were crowded the week before, it wouldn’t be crowded the next week. Others would feel that it would stay crowded. In either case, though, if a strategy weren’t working, people would abandon it and try a different strategy. And when he plotted the results of what bar attendance would look like, it fluctuated wildly around the maximum bar capacity. Why? If somebody hit on a strategy that works for letting them attend when the bar was uncrowded, other people would eventually try that strategy, which would make the bar crowded on those nights, making that winning strategy now a poor strategy. There is no stable equilibrium with “atoms” that learn. Unsurprisingly, the same model approximates the behavior of the stock market, another domain where any successful strategy is immediately copied to the point of no longer being useful.

Another “social atom” model that I really liked was one of a world where there are atoms of four colors: red, blue, green and yellow. When those atoms interact, they can adopt one of four strategies: cooperate with everybody, cooperate with nobody, cooperate with atoms of the same color, cooperate with atoms of different colors. The colors provide no evolutionary advantage whatsoever - they are just an easily identifiable way to tell atoms apart. What happens in a population of randomly colored atoms each starting with a randomly chosen strategy?

Surprisingly, atoms that only cooperate with their own color soon grow to dominate the population. The atoms self-segregate into neighborhoods of like color, and atoms that cooperate with all colors are taken advantage of by all sides before being squeezed out. Axelrod and Hammond call it The Evolution of Ethnocentric Behavior. The atoms in the model have very simple behaviors, and yet generate a result that looks suspiciously like racism. Coincidence?

One last model that I liked took a look at wealth distribution. It started with a population of atoms that each had the same amount of money. The atoms had to preserve a certain amount of money (equivalent to rent and food), and were allowed to invest the rest. Like all investments, the investment was risky, with a chance of losing the money invested, but provided significant returns if successful.

The population ended up with the distribution of wealth we see in the world where a small minority controlled the vast majority of the wealth. The model did not include skill in picking investments or any sort of ability by the wealthy to protect their investments by lobbying, so those weren’t factors. Buchanan explains it as being a result of the power of compound interest, or as the paper authors Bouchaud and Mezard called it, wealth condensation. An atom gets lucky and is successful in their first few investments. Now they can risk a much greater proportion of their wealth in investment because their basic needs are satisfied. Because they risk more money, they gain even more when they are successful, and in a large enough population, somebody gets lucky enough times to end up with all the wealth.

I highly recommend this book. It’s a quick read, but it’s thought provoking. These simple models fascinate me with their ability to generate results that look like people in the aggregate. The models don’t “prove” anything, but it’s instructive to realize that such results as racism or wealth inequality may have nothing to do with people being “evil” or “greedy” - they may simply be a byproduct of people learning successful adaptations within the system. And if such models can be used to predict the behavior of people in the aggregate, is social physics the beginning of Asimov’s psychohistory?

As usual, I’ve been reading lots of books, and haven’t been writing them up, so it’s time for another round of short reviews.

The Creative Habit, by Twyla Tharp

I’ve already mentioned Tharp’s ideas in my posts on discipline and laying the foundation, but this is a record that I did eventually finish the book. Tharp is the well-known choreographer, and this is her book on sharing where ideas come from and what it takes to be creative. Her main thesis is that creativity is not a bolt from the blue - it requires disciplined routine and the courage to face the blank page again and again. It requires ruthless self-editing, and an unwillingness to accept anything less than your best. She includes several useful exercises to shake up one’s thinking and get one thinking in fresh patterns of thought as a start to creativity.

The Brazen Careerist, by Penelope Trunk

I came across the Brazen Careerist blog a few months ago. I liked it because it advocated attitudes that are antithetical to my parents’ generation but make sense in today’s world (e.g. that it’s okay that “the average 30-year-old has had 8 jobs since college”). She’s got some interesting points, but I think following all of her advice would require being relentlessly ambitious and self-involved. I wouldn’t recommend the book - it’s mostly republishing of posts from her blog, so just read those instead.

The Dip, by Seth Godin

I like Seth Godin’s work, so I was excited to get his latest book The Dip. Unfortunately, there’s not much there. It’s a two sentence idea expanded out to a 80-page mini-book. Here’s the idea - when trying a new venture, you’re going to run into hard times aka The Dip. You need to either have the discipline to push through The Dip because the rewards on the other side are worth it, or to quit because they won’t be, and the key to success is quitting early in The Dip rather than wasting your time if it’s the latter. Because each case is so different, he can’t give general advice on how to make the determination of whether sticking is worth it, so he cites a couple of cute stories and calls it a day. Don’t bother buying this book.

Bit Literacy, by Mark Hurst

I’ve been reading Mark Hurst’s Good Experience newsletter for years now, as he’s an articulate advocate for the centrality of customer experience as an evaluation metric. He’s been pitching bit literacy for a few years now, with the idea being that we need to learn habits of success in a fast-changing all-digital world. Bit Literacy is a book summarizing what he recommends.

The main thing I took away from this book was his contention that bits are no longer valuable - they are a torrent that we should let pass us by rather than trying to capture. To make a strained analogy, his perspective is we should stop trying to control this torrent with the equivalent of a dam and instead use a net to fish out the useful bits. In a specific example, he recommends against being a packrat with email - either deal with it immediately, or delete it. You won’t get to it later, because there’s always more email arriving. He recommends getting the inbox down to 0 messages at least once a day. He makes similar recommendations for all aspects of your digital life.

Decent read, some good ideas, but I’d recommend it only if you’re feeling overwhelmed by digital inputs and are ready to make a change (my inbox still has 1370 messages in it, so I’m not quite there yet).

Maverick, by Ricardo Semler

I’ve been seeing references to Semco for a while now. It’s a Brazilian manufacturing company that is run in an almost anarchistic way. Employees set their own hours, dress however they want, interview their own managers, set their own salaries, etc. The financial books are completely transparent - everybody knows what everybody else is making. And yet despite this seeming chaos, they’ve been successful at weathering the dips of the Brazilian economy over the past twenty years.

This is the book by the leader of Semco, and how they got to this point. He didn’t start out intending to be a radical. He was just trying to get through one crisis at a time. Each time he gave more autonomy to his employees good things happened so he kept on doing it. It’s a pretty inspiring tale if you’re a closet anarchist like myself. Very quick read - I’d pick it up from the library if you’re interested.

Coffee at Luke’s, ed. by Jennifer Crusie

Subtitled “An Unauthorized Gilmore Girls Gabfest”, this is a collection of essays devoted to the world of the TV show Gilmore Girls. I’ve got three such books for Buffy, plus the one for Serenity, so I thought I’d try this one as well. A pleasant distraction, nothing too deep, but mostly it made me want to go back and rewatch my DVDs to revel in the referenced dialogue again.

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This wasn’t at all the book I was expecting when I ordered it, but ended up being much more satisfying. I thought it was going to be some tract on how and why the brain feels happiness, and what we can do to make ourselves happier. Instead Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, explains how the brain functions, and then shows why we consistently make the same types of mistakes in trying to find happiness.

Gilbert’s main thesis is that the reason we have so much trouble making ourselves happy is that we are taking action on behalf of a future version of ourselves. It turns out we are _terrible_ at predicting what that future self is going to want. Our brain has evolved with blind spots and shortcuts that make it impossible for us to predict the future, even our own future. Yet it leaves us believing in our predictions, unable to recognize those limitations.

One thing that made me happy was a chapter on “the Blind Spot of the Mind’s Eye”. Gilbert shows that our brains do not store all the raw details of our experience in memory - it stores a small set of key features. When recalling the experience, “our brains quickly reweave the tapestry by fabricating - not by actually retrieving - the bulk of the information that we experience as a memory” (he cites Daniel Schacter’s book Searching for Memory). This reweaving is very sensitive to the conditions of recall - it’s easy to influence how the reweaving takes place. Gilbert cites one study where subjects were shown a set of slides depicting a car accident where the car failed to yield at a yield sign. Half of the subjects were asked “Did another car pass the red car while it was stopped at the stop sign?”, and then were asked to select the slide they’d seen between one with the car at a yield sign and one at a stop sign. 80% of the subjects that had been asked the question pointed at the slide with the stop sign (90% of the control group answered correctly). It makes you wonder about eyewitness testimony, doesn’t it?

Another thing our brain is poor at is projecting into the future. Gilbert uses the analogy of looking at things that are far away - they are small, smooth, and lacking in detail. When we project more than a few days into the future, our brains see events with the same lack of details, but without the developed filters to remind us that the details are missing. So we imagine only fuzzy good things for the future event, and then when the day arrives, we are confronted with messy reality.

Our brain also does some sneaky stuff when we project how we will feel in the future. The analogy Gilbert uses is that when we imagine something (say, a penguin), we don’t get confused and actually start thinking there’s a penguin in the room with us. Our brains are well-trained to override our imagination with reality, and we know which is which. But when we project how we will feel in response to an imagined event, our present feelings will override our projected feelings without any such awareness of the override mechanism. The brain’s “Reality First” policy “that makes it difficult to imagine penguins when we are looking at ostriches also makes it difficult to imagine lust when we are feeling disgust, affection when we are feeling anger, or hunger when we are feeling full.” We project that we will feel in the future the same way we are feeling now.

I’ve definitely confronted this one in my personal experience. After a long day at work, I might get home and not want to do anything. If I haven’t made plans, I’ll sit at home and mope because I can’t think of anything I want to do. If I’ve made plans, though, I’ll go out and have fun - my brain was tricking me into thinking that nothing would make me feel good because I wasn’t feeling good at the time. So I particularly liked this insight because it gives me more ammunition to get myself moving when I’m feeling mopey in the future.

One last section that I really liked in the book was discussing how the brain exploits ambiguity to get the best possible result. “We ask whether facts allow us to believe our favored conclusions and whether they compel us to believe our disfavored conclusions. Not surprisingly, disfavored conclusions have a much tougher time meeting this more rigorous standard of proof.” Our brains focus on the aspects of our experience that make us happy. For instance, he cites one study where he asked a group of people to define what “talented” means. “Talented” is a fuzzy word, so it’s not surprising that there were a variety of definitions offered. Also not surprising is that each person defined “talented” in a way that included them as somebody that was “talented”. Exploit that ambiguity!

Gilbert says we can think of this as a

“psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in much the same way that the physical immune system defends the body against illness… A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it… We need to be defended - not defenseless or defensive - and thus our minds naturally look for the best view of things while simultaneously insisting that those views stick reasonably closely to the facts.

This immune system kicks into gear when we have intensely unhappy feelings. We find ways to believe that we’re better off now that we’ve been dumped or lost our jobs, but not when we stub our toes or get in the wrong line at the grocery store. “The paradoxical consequence of this fact is that it is sometimes more difficult to achieve a positive view of a bad experience than of a very bad experience.”

It’s also triggered when the suffering is inescapable. For instance, we will accept far worse behavior in our families than we would with our friends, because we can’t choose our family. The immune system kicks in because “it is only when we cannot change the experience that we look for ways to change our view of the experience“.

I’ve now covered a total of about 10 pages out of this 260 page book. There’s lots of great stuff in here. I’m fascinated by the brain (I even split off and populated a new cognition category recently), and I’ve speculated before on some of the ways in which our brains fill in the blanks so these sorts of findings fascinate me. The brain is a complex thing, and reading a book like this which provides scientific backing to several of my wacky theories is gratifying.

However, it’s not a self-help book. It’s not going to teach you how to be happy. But it does provide an understanding of how the brain works and the things it’s doing beneath the surface. Knowing those tendencies can help one consciously compensate for them, like realizing that nothing will sound like fun when I’m feeling depressed so I have to just make myself go out. Because one of the things that makes us happy according to the book is feeling a sense of control, this book will make you happier by understanding your brain better and thus giving you more control over how it feels.

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Subtitled “What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work”, this book addresses the question of managing knowledge workers who are more independent than ever before. The authors study how a dramatic troupe puts together a performance for ideas on how to assemble talented and creative free agents into a coherent effort.

In the industrial age, people were given assigned roles and were told to behave like automatons, repeatedly reproducing the same movements, which led to the rise of Taylorism. But in the world of the Creative Class, such notions are no longer applicable. If a worker is a free agent that can choose where to be employed, treating them like a robot is sure to drive them away. Also, in a world where the pace of change is increasing, doing the same thing repeatedly is a recipe for failure.

To find a suitable analog for a free agent world, Austin and Devin turned to the world of the theater, where the entire team is thrown together on a per-production basis. Each team member has their special talents that they bring to the production. And no production is the same. Even when the same production with the same cast and crew is repeated on consecutive nights, the performances vary - the crowd is different, one actor may be in a different mood, the understudy may be needed, etc. Theater has had to incorporate change.

Austin and Devin see the process of art as being one of iterations, of trying different things to find out what works. Rather than try to replicate exactly what happened last time, artful making seeks to reconceive during each iteration, incorporating what was learned in previous iterations but trying something new each time. Whether it’s the weeks of rehearsal time needed for a play, or the dozens of sketches an artist does before the painting, or the different drafts a writer throws away before the final novel, iterations are key to finding the artful way through. To achieve “Artful Making” therefore requires reducing the cost of iterations in business, a point also made in the book Experimentation Matters.

Another key component of “Artful Making” is taking advantage of the specific resources available. As the authors point out, the goal of putting on a play is not to follow the script exactly because “the script is a wholly inadequate specification, lacking sufficient detail to control the rehearsal process the way plans and specifications control industrial processes.” The script is just a starting point, and it’s up to the company to adapt it to the actors, to the theater space, to the lighting and sound available, etc. This requires iterations and experimentation, trying to find out what works and what doesn’t. A scene may have been played one way in previous productions, but it doesn’t work with the actors in this production, so a new way of conceiving the scene must be found.

Directing a production is different than managing an industrial-era process, according to the authors. In Frederick Taylor’s world, the authors describe management as “Tell them what to do; fire them if they don’t do it.” But in a rapidly changing world, the workers may know more than the managers about what they should be doing - “Forcing workers to comply with preconceptions often hinders the overall making process.” So the manager/director needs to find a way to focus and harness the talents of their crew without restricting them from discovering innovative solutions.

One analogy I particularly liked illustrated different conceptions of control.

Lee borrowed a pen from a student, gripped it tightly in his hand, and waved that hand in the air. “See this pen?” he said. “I’m controlling it.” He swooped it around like a fighter plane. “It’s doing exactly what I want it to do.” Then he held the pen out in front of him. “Now look; I’m going to control it some more.” And he dropped the pen. It fell to the floor and bounced. He picked it up and repeated the gesture. The pen bounced again, quite differently. “See that? It did what I wanted it to, each time.” (attributed to acting teacher Milton Katselas)

I love this because I think it strikes to the essence of how to manage a diverse group of talents. Micro-managing somebody who’s an expert in their field is stupid because then you’ll only get out what you put in, so you might as well not even have the expert. But if you give them an environment that drives their actions, you can benefit from their expertise while still moving towards your goals.

To get that benefit requires creating a secure environment for experimentation. This means reducing the cost of iterations so that your team can try different things without fear of failure. Failure’s a misnomer in this case, because iterations that don’t work inform the reconception of the next iteration. The only failure is when an iteration doesn’t teach the team anything new.

Furthermore, the team needs to know that they can push the edge and not get punished. True innovation requires trying new ideas, stretching oneself past the point of comfortable ruts, and that requires management that supports such experimentation.

One last benefit of iterations is that it prepares the team for unexpected changes. Industrial replication processes are brittle because if anything changes from the expected inputs, then the worker doesn’t know how to react - they have not been prepared. In “artful making”, the team has been experimenting continuously through different iterations. They may already have tried something that will work in the new changed environment, and even if they haven’t, they can adapt and improvise because change has been part of their process. The iterations have laid the foundation for them to react at a higher level, where they aren’t thinking about how to just do the task, but how to achieve the greater goal of the ensemble.

Iterate more. Create the environment and the focus, but give up control to your team. It seems like it would mean chaos and no hope of making deadlines, but theater companies regularly get their productions on stage on time with a success rate far higher than most technology teams. Ideo’s process has similar elements, and they’re regularly recognized as one of the most innovative companies. I think it’s only a matter of time before such management techniques become ubiquitous. We’ll have to see.

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This was recommended to me by a friend as a great book on becoming a leader and manager.

The book reminds me of How to Win Friends and Influence People in that the advice is deceptively simple. If I had read this book even five years ago, I think I would have dismissed it as being simplistic and obvious. For instance, Weinberg describes problem-solving leadership as consisting of “understanding the problem”, “managing the flow of ideas”, and “maintaining quality”, which seem like completely generic management strategies. But with experience at several companies and with the examples that Weinberg uses, I can see how breakdowns in these areas will hamstring any project before it even starts. This is an example of how my greater experience lets me find the value in different perspectives.

He also emphasizes the difficulty of achieving a leadership orientation. My post about the attitude of management was inspired in large part by reading this book and the ideas that it evoked in me. He points out that to take a big step up in competence often involves taking a step backwards first, and if we’re too afraid of that step down, we can never advance.

I think I’ll be re-reading this book for many months. I haven’t done many of the self-assessment exercises as I was on an airplane while reading it, although I have started doing the 5-minute daily journal that he recommends. I may end up doing what a friend of a friend did with Dale Carnegie and re-read a chapter each day or week and try to apply those ideas to my life.

Even though I found this book valuable, I found it difficult going in spots because it made me question a lot of what I thought I knew. It certainly got me thinking about the larger issues associated with leadership. This is not a book for the arrogant (as my younger self was), as they will not be willing to do the critical self-assessment necessary to benefit from the lessons here. Heck, I’m still not sure I’m ready to benefit from this book. We’ll see how the next little bit plays out.

It’s been months since I’ve done book reviews, so I’ll just wrap up a bunch of quick summaries of things I’ve finished recently. Alas, I still have many books that I am about 100 pages into that I’m not sure when I’ll finish, not because I don’t find them interesting, but just because I don’t have the brainpower to read them right now.

Naked Economics, by Charles Wheelan

Subtitled “Undressing the Dismal Science”, this is a breezy overview of economics and why it matters from a correspondent of The Economist. It covered everything from unemployment rates to why the Federal Reserve matters in an accessible, easy-to-read way. I’d recommend it to anybody looking for an overview of macroeconomics, and how the tools of economists can be applied.

Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I’d been thinking about buying this book for a while before seeing it at the library. I like the main thesis that our brains don’t handle probability very well, and seek to ascribe stories and reasons where they may be none. For instance, he points out that if you have a million stock traders flipping coins to make decisions, some of them will experience phenomenal success and some of them abject failure, despite their decisions being made completely randomly. Yet because we hear about the success stories, we try to pick out their traits so that we can emulate them when it may have been no more than luck. There are a lot of good examples along that line, but it got a bit repetitive.

However, the book was inspiring in a completely different way. Taleb is not an academic or an author by trade. He’s a stock trader who had an idea that he felt needed wider dispersal, so he wrote a book on it and got it published. Admittedly, he did a lot of research and had expertise in the field of market trading to give him credibility, but he made it happen. Now I just need to find a field where I have credibility. Hrm.

The Discomfort Zone, by Jonathan Franzen

Despite widespread popular acclaim, I was not able to get through more than the first 50 pages of The Corrections the one time I picked it up from the library. So when I saw this short book of essays from Jonathan Franzen at the library, I figured I would give it a try to see if it enticed me into trying the bigger book, much like I did by first reading David Foster Wallace’s essays before tackling Infinite Jest. Alas, I was unimpressed by the essays - they were reasonably well-written, but didn’t have any defining characteristics, such as the dazzling wordplay of Wallace or the humor of David Sedaris. So I’ll move on to other authors.

Finding Serenity, ed. Glenn Yeffeth, Jane Espenson

I’m a sucker for overly intellectual analysis of pop culture, especially TV shows I like, as evidenced by my collection of Buffy books, so I figured I should give the Serenity one a try. There were some interesting takes on the series, but nothing really stuck with me. Mild distraction, at best.

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I’ve liked Colson Whitehead’s previous work, including The Intuitionist (the title convinced me to pick up the book), and John Henry Days. His writing is just wonderfully sumptuous, so rich that I often have to re-read bits to appreciate the language.

A few years ago, he published this book, a set of essays reflecting on his home of New York City. Now that I’ve been here close to a year (!), it was interesting to read it and see how his impressions match my own experiences.

It’s great stuff. He’s got chapters on many common experiences at New York, from arriving on the bus at Port Authority, wandering down Broadway or through Central Park or Times Square, visiting Coney Island, or even the quotidian experiences of morning, rush hour, or rain.

On the very first page, he described when you are a New Yorker, and I’ve shared this observation with several people here, and they all go “Wow, that’s exactly right!” Here it is:

“No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet cafe plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.”

While I love so many of his observations throughout the book, I picked one almost at random to share as an example of what the book feels like. Check out his description of waiting for the subway:

“Look down the tunnel one more time and your behavior will describe a psychiatric disorder. It’s infectious. They take turns looking down into darkness and the platform is a clock: the more people standing dumb, the more time has passed since the last train. The people fall from above into hourglass dunes. Collect like seconds.

There’s a culture for platforms and a culture for between stations. On the platform there are strategies of where seats will appear when the doors open, of where you want to be when you get off, of how to outmaneuver these impromptu nemeses. So many variables, everyone’s a mathematician with an advanced degree. Wait. Those elephantine ears of hers. Does she know something he doesn’t, she’s moving closer to the edge, and then he hears the roar, too. The herd trembles, the lion approaches, instincts awaken. The jaws slide apart and the people step inside. Various sounds of gorging.”