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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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This is a study of what makes ideas stick. They start it off by relating the kidney heist urban legend, a story that all of us have heard and can probably recount. Why has this story stuck in our memories so successfully? It has no advertising budget, nobody pushing it - it is a completely self-propagating meme. Companies would love to have an advertising scheme as successful as this urban legend. And Chip and Dan Heath set out to analyze how companies could do so.
They looked at different advertising campaigns, from the Jared diet at Subway to “Don’t Mess with Texas”, and tried to extract the common themes and elements that they saw. Their acronym for what makes an idea sticky is SUCCESs: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Story. You have to have a core idea that can be expressed in a single sentence or phrase. If you can’t boil it down to something that simple, it will never stick. It has to be unexpected and surprising - our brains are “wired to remember the abnormal and outlandish because they break the routine patterns that we have learned”. It must be concrete, because humans each interpret abstractions differently - only by making an idea specific and concrete can you assure that it will be remembered and passed on unchanged. It must be credible - if it is not easily verifiable, it will be dismissed as outlandish. Emotions play a strong role in memory, so it’s not surprising that ideas that evoke emotions are more sticky. And my favorite topic, stories, make ideas sticky because we remember stories as exemplars of patterns that matter to us.
As an aside, my last post about stories and patterns captures many of these same ideas, as I tried to evaluate how to make a story stick with people. Dang! I really need to get organized about writing! Or at least come up with cute acronyms.
One of the thought-provoking things about this book was that it is possible to get people to pay attention to your idea even when they aren’t actively interested by using these principles. I often struggle with getting other people to change their behavior. Sometimes I give up and say “You can’t change somebody who doesn’t want to change”. But reading these stories inspired me to realize that if you frame your ideas correctly, sometimes you can change their minds even if they’re not looking to change.
For instance, one health organization was trying to convey how unhealthy movie popcorn popped in coconut oil was. It contained 37g of saturated fat, nearly double the recommended daily allowance. But movie-goers weren’t interested in statistics. So they did an ad where they said that the saturated fat content of the bag of popcorn “contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings - combined!” Illustrated with a picture of all of those meals together, the advertising campaign had a definitive impact.
Another idea that I really liked was the Curse of Knowledge:
Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.
This is something that I struggle with - I often assume other people can see the same connections that I do, so I don’t draw them out explicitly. At the same time, because I’m not an expert in most fields, I have a better chance of communicating to non-experts than do the true experts. Just being aware of the “Curse of Knowledge” gives me a chance to communicate better.
I liked this book a lot. It’s a quick read of a few hours, but there’s some good stuff in there, and lots of fun stories. Thumbs up.
On the plane ride to my parent’s place, I read the book Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace, by Grant McCracken. I’ve been reading McCracken’s blog, titled This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics for a while and really enjoy his commentary on the process of ethnology and on the different layers present in the media around us. Sadly, the book itself wasn’t that great - the flows are basically the flows of ideas around us, and his flocks are basically the same idea as Geoffrey Moore’s adoption curve, where the enthusiasts and the early adopters try new technologies, creating a comfort level that paves the way for the majority of customers.
What’s interesting to me is that this same adoption mechanism has cropped up in a variety of different settings and used for different purposes. Here are a few from my own reading:
I’ve been futzing around with this idea for a couple days now and I can’t quite get the unified theory here, but you can see the general idea. For continued successful adaptation of an entity, whether it’s a person, a genome, a corporation or a society, you need elements that are going and trying new things all the time, but you also need elements that are preserving the successful changes so that they don’t need to re-tried by the next generation. Learn and latch.
What’s apparent from my own experience is that you need a balance between the two phases for things to work. A person that never tries anything new, that follows the same routine every day, is probably very comfortable, because they have found a routine that works for them and they have latched it so that nothing else can interfere with that routine. But they may also be trapped on a local maximum, and not even realize that their life could be much better if they made a few changes. And they are susceptible to disaster if their environment changes unexpectedly. On the other hand, a person that is always trying new things, and is never satisfied with what they have, is probably going to live an exhausting life as they keep on getting into the same scrapes over and over again in different forms.
Obviously, those are extreme cases for the sake of example, but the organizational equivalents are evident, and I’ve seen both. I’ve worked at a company which had a process and procedure for everything, where you always had to fill out forms to do anything, and where it was more important to follow the process than it was to be successful. In a world of continuing innovation, that company is struggling. I’ve also worked at startups where we made the same mistakes over and over again, where we refused to learn from the experience of others, and that was just as frustrating.
The ideal organization (or person or entity of any sort) has parts of their existence which are devoted to trying new experiences and new ways of doing things without worrying about how those new experiences will integrate with what they have. Then if some of the new experiences seem useful, they adopt those experiences and build them into their processes. Now that I think about it, this describes Bruno Latour’s idea of the Collective, where new elements ask for admittance to the Collective via spokespersons, and then the Collective has to decide whether to accept the new elements and reconfigure itself so as to integrate those new elements. Man, it really is all the same idea.
As I illustrated above, this adoption mechanism is everywhere once I started thinking about it (my professor, Art Langer, calls the same concept Responsive Organizational Dynamism) (if you want to go old school philosophy, what little I know of Hegel suggests that Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis covers the same ground too). And by applying the ideas from one manifestation to others, there are some general principles that we can extract. One is that the situation is always changing, so you can’t stay static - an unchanging process, no matter how great it is, can not continue to remain successful in a dynamic world. Another is that there must be a way for you to adopt new things; for instance, McCracken discusses the various ways that the fashion, movie, music and restaurant industries handle adopting new ideas. And the last is that there must be a way to know what has been tried before and whether it worked or not; encoding or latching previous experiments keeps us from having to repeat them.
It makes me wonder if humans grew to dominate the planet because our communication skills allowed us to reduce the learn and latch cycle time from generations down to days (I think I read that idea someplace, but I can’t remember where now). I also think learn-and-latch provides a good general pattern to start working from. In my personal life, I need to think about how I try new opportunities and whether I can figure out how to integrate what I learn into my ongoing habits. In a company, it may be useful to review how the company incorporates new ideas into its culture, and what mechanisms it has in place to reinforce that process. Obviously, the details have to be tailored to each individual situation, but the general pattern is a strong one.
P.S. That last bit gets me thinking about the process of identifying general patterns and learning how to tailor them to one’s individual situation. Way too many people seem to follow specifics without understanding the gestalt that lies behind them. I tend to spend way too much time thinking about the underlying gestalt and not enough time figuring out how to extract practical applications. Hrm. Maybe this could be the project I suggested I needed in my last post.
A couple weeks ago I broke down and actually did some non-class, non-Economist reading. Crazy, eh? It was a weekend where I didn’t feel up to socializing, but didn’t feel up to homework either. So I looked for something light in my book pile, and this is what I read.
Bobos in Paradise, by David Brooks
I’d meant to read this book for a while, but never got around to it. I saw it in the Strand for $5, so I picked it up. It’s the “comic sociology” of the rise of bourgeois bohemians. For decades, the two cultural forces of bourgeois and bohemians had been battling, culminating in the culture wars of the sixties. But as we entered the nineties, the two cultural forces had merged. “WASPy upscale suburbs were suddenly dotted with arty coffeehouses where people drank little European coffees and listened to alternative music. Meanwhile, the bohemian downtown neighborhoods were packed with multimillion-dollar lofts and those upscale gardening stores where you can buy a faux-authentic trowel for $35.99.”
Brooks takes a look at the two cultures throughout history (or at least since the Industrial Revolution, which really defined them) and how we’ve gotten to this point, with chapters discussing the ways in which the mix of cultures has permeated all aspects of society, including:
I don’t feel like the book had much in the way of deep insight, but it was a pleasant quick tour of a culture of which I’m probably a member.
Sperm Are from Men, Eggs Are from Women: The Real Reason Men And Women Are Different, by Joe Quirk
Joe Quirk wrote a novel called The Ultimate Rush a few years ago. I’m not sure how I found it, but I really enjoyed it. It’s basically Snow Crash set in modern-day San Francisco, but it’s loads of fun. I actually ran into him at a Future Salon at one point, and asked him what his next book was going to be. And he said it was going to be a non-fiction book on evolutionary biology. And I was like, um?
But here it is. I’ve had my eye out for it for a while, but picked it up in the half-off section at The Strand. Another quick, fun read. Quirk is not a scientist, just an interested amateur, but he takes the ideas of evolutionary biology and relates them back to common questions of sexuality in chapters such as “Female Promiscuity Controls the Size of Your Testicles”, “Male Promiscuity Decides Your Height”, “Why Women Are Coy, Men Clueless”, “Why Your Clitoris Is Hard To Find”, etc. It’s pretty entertaining for him to relate the penis to a peacock tail. I’d heard many of these ideas in bits and pieces, but Quirk’s a good writer, and it’s fun to have them all in one place. It does make for a depressing read in places, as he draws (sometimes tenuous) connections between a lot of really stupid sexual behaviors and evolutionary biology. I’d recommend it as a quick read from the library if you want to become even more cynical about dating.
I first heard of Chuck Klosterman when the ESPN Sports Guy did an interview with him (here’s part 2). Described as a pop culture guru, the interview made it clear that he spent way way too much time thinking about inconsequential things. And I mean that in a good way. So he was on my mental list of authors to check out when I got a chance.
I happened to be wandering through a bookstore one day, and saw Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, noticed it was by Klosterman, and picked it up. It’s a book of essays on a variety of topics, including Saved by the Bell, porn, Tom Cruise, the Real World TV show and a Guns’n'Roses cover band. Oh, and a meditation on Star Wars, that I flipped to in the bookstore. I read the following paragraph:
…it’s clear that Luke Skywalker was the original Gen Xer. For one thing, he was incessantly whiny. For another, he was exhaustively educated - via Yoda - about things that had little practical value (i.e. how to stand on one’s head while lifting a rock telekinetically). Essentially, Luke went to the University of Dagobah with a major in Buddhist philosophy and a minor in physical education. There’s not a lot of career opportunities for that kind of schooling; that’s probably why he dropped out in the middle of the semester. Meanwhile, Luke’s only romantic aspirations are directed toward a woman who (literally) looks at him like a brother. His dad is on his case to join the family business. Most significantly, all the problems in his life can be directly blamed on the generation that came before him, and specifically on his father’s views about what to believe (i.e. respect authority, dress conservatively, annihilate innocent planets, etc.)
I read that, and bought the book. Anybody that could extract that amount of analysis out of Star Wars and phrase it so hilariously was somebody I wanted to read more of. The rest of the essays are of similar excellent quality. Highly recommended. It’s great bedside reading.
I later picked up Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, his next book. This was a travelogue, as he took a cross-country road trip to visit the places where rock stars have died. It sounds morbid, but it’s mostly an excuse for him to talk about music. He cares about music a lot. No, really. A _lot_. He also mixes in personal stories about women he’s loved and lost. It sounds more self-involved than it is. Well, actually, okay it is that self-involved, but it’s funny along the way. Less laugh out loud than Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, though.
I should grab his new book at some point. And Fargo Rock City, his first book.
P.S. To try to keep up with the daily posting schedule, I’ll probably be doing backlogged book reviews on nights when I’m feeling uninspired, as with tonight after my Corporate Finance class.
Lipstick on a Pig, by Torie Clarke
Subtitled “Winning in the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game”, this book is one woman’s perspective on playing the PR and communications game in the panopticon era. I thought it was pretty decent for providing some good overall principles for a communications strategy, with advice like “Deliver the bad news yourself, and when you screw up, say so - fast!” and “Flood the Zone - Transparency makes good things shine and bad ones go away.” She points out the importance of having a message - “Generating positive media coverage is not an objective” and “Getting a positive article in the New York Times is not a strategy”. Figure out what your message or objective is first, and then develop a strategy that will achieve that objective. For instance, she told a record company executive that he probably wasn’t going to reach the teen audience with a message against music piracy by writing an op-ed in the newspaper. I like her perspective on communications and can therefore overlook the fact that she worked for Rumsfeld and her tendency to over-use cute anecdotes. Well worth the library read, but I probably won’t get a copy for myself.
My Life as a Quant, by Emanuel Derman
I happened to see this in the library, and was intrigued after reading the back cover, as Derman was a former theoretical particle physicist who made the jump to Wall Street, working at Goldman Sachs. Emanuel Derman is now a professor in financial engineering at Columbia University, and wrote this book describing his experiences throughout his life, from physics to Bell Labs to Wall Street. He also takes the time to explain at a layman’s level how the black box of options pricing works, from the Black-Scholes model to the Black-Derman-Toy model that he helped to develop. I thought it was interesting how he managed to draw on his background in particle physics, possibly the most idealistic and esoteric branch of science, in a career on Wall Street, which is about as practical as it gets. It’s a well-written fast read - I read it on the plane out to San Francisco a few weeks ago. I’d recommend it if you’re interested in moving to Wall Street, or in how to apply a physics degree.
P.S. Blogging is going to take a hit probably. Classes started in my program this week, so that’s three-hour classes two nights a week plus a ton of homework (approximately 6-8 hours per class per week). Plus working full-time. So I basically have no free time or brain power for the next two years. I’m sure I will have thoughts I want to share, but it’s going to be hard to find time to write them up.
I finally finished the Latour, about a month after starting it, which is about how long it took me to read his previous book, The Politics of Nature. It’s a hard book to review; the goal of the book is to explain actor-network theory, which Latour co-created based on the social studies of science, but is sufficiently obscure that even after twenty years of refinement, there is still great confusion about what it actually means. So Latour wrote this book to be the definitive explanation of actor-network theory. And 260 pages later, I’m still not sure I can sum it up.
The book is an attack on traditional sociology; on the second page, he starts things off with “’socio-logy’ means the ’science of the social’. The expression would be excellent except for two drawbacks, namely the word ’social’ and the word ’science’.” (p. 2) The main issue he has with traditional sociology is that it assumes that its purpose is to study society and social forces. What’s the issue? It assumes that such a thing as ’society’ exists to be studied. Latour makes the claim that it does not. He compares it to classical physics, where it was assumed that there must be an “ether” for waves to propagate in; Einstein developed the theory of relativity which showed that no such absolute frame of reference existed.
He believes that ’society’, as a concept, is a premature assemblage of entities. It has not been collected together with due process, as described in the process of creating a collective. Because it is assembled too quickly, it smooths over the bumps and ignores the things sticking out when it tries to jam everything together. These inconsistencies are what first gave Latour in his study of science the hints of the path forward.
Latour follows the same path he has always followed, as he described it in Science in Action; he follows the actors. He listens to what people say and the reasons they give for doing it. And then he traces those reasons back to other reasons, and figures out what forces are acting on the people. And it turns out it’s never “society” at the end of the various chains. It’s other people, other actors.
So here’s the basic idea of actor-network theory, as far as I can tell. Social forces and society don’t exist, per se, or at least not in any sort of abstract global sense (I covered a bit of this in a previous post). Social forces are the result of other entities influencing us in a variety of ways. Latour makes the claim that traditional sociology (which he calls the “sociology of the social”) removes initiative from its agents; in other words, people are treated as mere intermediaries of social forces, unable to overcome their social programming. My analogy would be the juvenile delinquent, who is treated as if he had no other choice than to become a criminal because of his social situation.
Instead, Latour proposes the actor-network as a central concept. The actor is acted upon by a variety of mediators, each of which is pushing him in a direction. The actor, instead of being a singular point which can be knocked around like a billiard ball by social forces, is instead a star-shaped network, deeply entwined with other actor-networks, such that it is difficult to trace back any sort of singular reason why the actor does anything. The actor-network has enough different influences that it comes down to choice, influenced by other factors certainly, but not compelled by them.
So how does one do an actor-network analysis? Latour includes an excellent 15-page interlude, where he writes an imaginary dialogue between a business student who wants to analyze the networks within a corporation and an actor-network theory professor. The student keeps on looking for reasons behind people’s actions, a unifying theme that he can write a thesis on. The professor points out that the idea that an academic can drop in on a corporation and discern an underlying force that the employees themselves were unaware of is hubristic, at the least. The professor recommends instead following the employees around, listening to what they have to say, and constructing an understanding of what is going on from their words and actions. There are no hidden forces, just people and other actors (bureaucracy, laws, architectural patterns) interacting with each other.
Latour uses this dialogue to poke fun at his caricature of the traditional sociologist, who parachutes into an organization, comes up with an overarching theory, imparts it to the participants to edify and enlighten them, and leaves. These overarching theories always start to fall apart when you try to apply them to something, much like the classification systems in Sorting Things Out. Latour calls such theories panoramas, in that they provide the illusion of displaying the whole landscape, but are merely shadows on a wall; “They design a picture which has no gap in it, giving the spectator the powerful impression of being fully immersed in the real world… it’s this excess of coherence that gives the illusion away.” (p. 188)
The real world is messy. There are always conflicting priorities and influences that must be resolved in any local situation. I started reading the Amartya Sen book on identity, and he makes the same point - that we have a multitude of identities we can choose from; Sen says “The difficulty with the thesis of the clash of civilizations begins well before we come to the issue of an inevitable clash; it beings with the presumption of the unique relevance of a singular classification.” A worldview of Western civilization versus Muslim civilization is a Latour-ian panorama, which ignores a wealth of other possible classifications (as people, as workers, as husbands and wives and parents and children, etc.).
One of the common criticisms of actor-network theory is that because it is always so relentlessly focused on the local situation and local causes, no general principles can be derived from it. How can Latour claim to be scientific if there are no general principles? In a nice bit of table turning, Latour uses the example of science to illustrate his viewpoint. There is a platinum kilogram kept in France that is the definitive kilogram. Yet we don’t have to go to France every time we want to weigh something in kilograms. We use instruments which have been calibrated against other weights, which have been calibrated against other weights, until somewhere back in the chain, something was compared to that definitive kilogram. We can trace the chain of evidence back through each of those measurings. So there is no such thing as a universal kilogram, abstract and ethereal; the “kilogram” is constructed through well-understood chains of mediation radiating out from the definitive kilogram.
Latour makes the same claim as to how universal social concepts can be created through his methods.
“Can we obtain some sort of universal agreement? Of course we can! Provided you find a way to hook up your local instrument to one of the many metrological chains whose material network can be fully described… No discontinuity allowed, which is just what ANT [actor-network theory] needs for tracing social topography. Ours is the social theory that has taken metrology as the paramount example of what it is to expand locally everywhere.” (p. 228)
So what’s the point of the book? I think the main thing I take away from it is this viewpoint that things need to be continually reinvented and retraced. America is not an abstract concept, hovering in some sort of Platonic ideal space waiting to be discovered. It is an idea being constructed by the manifold ways in which people interact; in the terms of the Politics of Nature, it is a collective always being reconstructed. The same holds true for any sort of social concept that you can think of, from family to a company to friends; they don’t exist unless they are continually retraced and recreated by participants.
I also like his contention that things are complicated, that there are a multitude of influences at every step. We are not mere puppets being yanked about by social forces. Although we are being buffeted about by influencers, we are true actors who can create our own path incorporating those influences. One last quote:
Sociologists are often accused of treating actors like so many puppets manipulated by social forces. But it appears that puppeteers … possess pretty different ideas about what it is that makes their puppets do things. Although marionettes offer, it seems, the most extreme case of direct causality - just follow the strings - puppeteers will rarely behave as having total control over their puppets. They will say queer things like ‘their marionettes suggest them to do things they will have never thought possible by themselves.’ When a force manipulates another, it does not mean that it is a cause generating effects; it can also be an occasion for other things to start acting. … So who is pulling the strings? Well, the puppets do in addition to their puppeteers. It does not mean that puppets are controlling their handlers - this would be simply reversing the order of causality - and of course no dialectic will do the trick either. It simply means that the interesting question at this point is not to decide who is acting and how but to shift from a certainty about action to an uncertainty about action - but to decide what is acting and how. (p. 60)
I’m still not sure I have a firm grasp on Latour’s ideas here. I’ve got an inkling, though, and I’ve got some ideas as to how to apply them in a less theoretical domain that I’ll try to get to later this week. There’s also loads of other interesting ideas that he brought up that I didn’t get to. But I’ve undoubtedly lost all of my readers by now, so I’ll stop here.
After reading Survival Is Not Enough, I figured I would go ahead and pick up another of his books since it was in the office library. This was another very quick read, with one good idea. To wit, Godin suggests that it is no longer good enough to have an outstanding message or advertising campaign; your company has to have a product that stands out from the rest of the marketplace, something that is really different and attracts attention - for instance, a “Purple Cow”. The downside to creating something really different is that it won’t appeal to everybody. Some people will hate it, some will love it, and that’s okay; that means it is not in what Kathy Sierra calls the Zone of Mediocrity.
The rest of Godin’s book is filled with inspiring stories of companies that took chances, catered to the extremists rather than the mass market, leveraged the gossip power of early adopters (he calls them “sneezers”), etc.
I liked the book, but there’s not a lot there. Borrow it if you can.
Another book from the Joel reading list. Subtitled Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World, this is a book by a career programmer on how to survive in the corporate world. Having spent eight years as a software developer in a variety of corporate environments, I was curious to see how much these tactics would have helped me in past skirmishes I had participated in. The answer? Not much at all.
Even though it purports to give you tactics for surviving in the real world, I found very little that would have helped me in the various real world conflicts that I’ve been part of. For instance, he assumed that every programming house uses the waterfall development model (specify, design, implement, test), and pitches a lot of his advice on how to cut corners within that model to make deadlines. Since I’ve never worked at a place that used that philosophy, I found that to be a big weakness of the book.
I also found some of his advice to be laughably optimistic. He suggests telling the boss that you need a few days to come up with a good estimate of how long the project will actually take, or that there will need to be as much time on the schedule for testing as there is for implementation. Having tried both of these requests in the past and having zero success with either, I kind of wonder what companies he worked at that made him think a programmer would have the leverage to receive positive results for such requests.
If he had been writing a book on what the ideal software development world, I might have forgiven such lapses. But I found it far too idealistic for a book that claims to be about the real world. Big thumbs down.
I first learned of Scott Berkun last year, when I followed a link to one of his essays and found it thoughtful and well-written. I started reading his blog, joined his mailing list. and kept my eyes out for new content from him. So when I saw his book, The Art of Project Management, in the Fog Creek library, I grabbed it and read it over the past couple weeks.
It’s really good. It’s a well-written book condensing his years of project management experience into chapters with good questions to ask and lists of tactics to try. Lots of sensible, down-to-earth advice about what it takes to manage a project from start to finish, including how to get started, how to define the project, how to relate to your team, and how to drive through to the finish. Check out the sample chapters from the book website
One of the things I really liked about the book is that he starts from the problem that needs to be solved (e.g. coordinating people on a project) and works outward from there, suggesting several possible solutions. Rather than presenting a big-M Methodology, he presents a variety of tactics the prospective manager can use; in the case of coordination, he suggests everything from a whiteboard outside the office listings the current to-do list, to Excel spreadsheets, to Gantt charts, to heavy-artillery project management software. They’re all just different tools that can be deployed to solve the problem. By keeping the focus on the problem, rather than on specfic solutions, he provides a much more useful perspective than other business books that try to espouse the One True Way of management.
Along similar lines, he tends to focus on the questions that the project manager should be asking, rather than the specific answers to those questions. For instance, he points out that the point of a vision document is to answer certain questions about the project; if it is not useful in later guiding how the requirements are developed and the work task list is created, then it has failed as a vision document. He doesn’t give a format for the vision document or meaningless stuff like that; he just explains what it will be used for, and therefore the questions it has to answer.
I was also pretty inspired by his bibliography. The books I had read I really liked (e.g. Sources of Power and Peopleware) and the ones that I hadn’t, he provided really interesting descriptions of that made me want to read them (several of them are winging their way towards me from Amazon as we speak). I often flip straight to the bibliography of books these days to judge whether they’re worth reading, so seeing that he liked several of the same books I do made a positive impression on me.
It’s a good read. I had planned to pick up a copy for my personal bookshelf, but I got a chance at receiving a free copy so we’ll see how that turns out first. But I definitely recommend it - I have a feeling I will refer to it often in upcoming years.
Technically, this isn’t on Joel’s list, but he knows Seth, and several of Godin’s other books are on the shelf in the Fog Creek Library, so I’m counting it under a technicality. I happened to pick up this particular book a year ago in San Francisco from the discount rack in a book store. Seth Godin has some interesting ideas about marketing, and this book promised to relate the ideas of memetics and evolutionary biology to the world of business. But after I bought it, I got distracted, so I put it on my shelf, and it stayed there, unloved, for a long time.
Until last weekend. I was looking for something to read, and my new Amazon order had not yet arrived, so I picked it up. It’s great. Really well-written and easy to read, and completely relevant to where I am right now in my thoughts. Another one of those right-time, right-place kind of reads.
Seth Godin’s main point of this book is that change happens. And it is happening more and more. Therefore any company or person has to learn to deal with change. You can create a viable winning strategy, but that strategy will get overtaken, much like the dinosaurs got overtaken by those pesky little mammals (my analogy, not his). He points out that nature has already come up with a mechanism for dealing with continuous change in natural selection: constant change via mutation, evaluated by sexual selection and natural selection. So he recommends learning from evolution to deal with the phenomenon of accelerating change.
It was good for me to read right now, because I’m the midst of trying to change my own outlook on a bunch of things. He basically endorses the idea of rapid prototyping in life, and encourages ever faster feedback loops. Change all the time, but evaluate all the time as well. The only quibble I have with the book is that he (deliberately?) does not discuss what a proper fitness metric should be for a company or a person in evaluating which changes to keep. I think this is because it varies so much from person to person and company to company, but it does make it harder to apply his advice - I could easily see a misguided company apply all of his advice, but use the fitness metric of “reinforcing the things we have always done”, which would subvert the whole point of his other strategies.
One other point that I liked as a generalist is that he counsels against becoming an expert, because investing the energy and resources in becoming an expert means that you (or your company) has committed itself to a specific path, and therefore will be unwilling to change later. This can work for a while, and sometimes pay off spectacularly, but since all winning strategies eventually fail, it’s a race against time. If you are changing all the time, then one can continually evolve new winning strategies, and therefore not worry about when the current one will fail. Plan for the obsolescence of your strategies. It was good for me to read this perspective after reading the opposite take last month in The Only Sustainable Edge, as mentioned in this post.
So I recommend it - it’s a quick read, with a couple good ideas. I’ll probably borrow a couple other of Godin’s books from work when I get a chance.
P.S. I know I’ve said this before, but perhaps I will endeavor this week to catch up on my backlog of book reviews. My brain has been fried from too much tech support at work (new product release a couple weeks ago), so I haven’t had much in the way of original thought, and most of my brain has been caught in a fugue-like state of trying to figure out where I want to focus my energy at work. Maybe writing about my thoughts from the books I’ve been reading will help remind me what I think is important.
