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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 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.
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.”
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.
I stopped by the library on Monday evening since I happened to be walking by, and walked out with four books. One of the books I picked up solely because of its title: The Futurist, by James P. Othmer. It’s smart and sassy with trenchant commentary on the modern world. Here’s the protagonist’s description of himself:
He sits alone in back seats and attempts candid conversations with drivers paid to accommodate. He gleans local lore from chatty bellhops, from Conde Nast Traveler. From the top steps of grand hotels he elicits profound sociological insights. From a part in the curtains of eighteenth-floor executive suites he absorbs geopolitical experience. He gets it with his healthy start breakfast from English-speaking room service waiters. From free newspapers dropped outside his door. From SpectraVision. Then he chronicles it, rolls it around in his head, and distills it down to anecdote, to conversation starter, to pithy one-liner, and finally he turns it into a highly proprietary, singularly respected worldly expertise that is utter and complete bullshit.
I really enjoyed the book, having finished it in a couple days. Othmer is apparently a former ad executive and you can tell he’s enjoying dishing out all the cynicism that he had to keep bottled up in front of his clients for years. Each chapter has a paragraph summary of former achievements of the protagonist, e.g. “He once spoke before the graduates of a Bible college in Virginia about the future of God and one week later delivered the keynote address to the Adult Video Distributors Conference in Vegas about the future of porn, and received standing ovations at both.”
The plot is a bit weak, but the ride was enjoyable, and I’d recommend it. I may even pick up a copy for myself if I ever see it at a used book store. Maybe I can use it as a guide in my on-and-off quest for pundithood.
P.S. I’ve been really enjoying this reading for fun concept. I recently read Twelve Sharp, by Janet Evanovich, the latest Stephanie Plum mystery which I borrowed from the library at 7pm on Monday and had finished reading by 10pm. Fun and frothy just like always.
I also got a couple paperbacks from the $1 rack at a used bookstore a couple weeks ago, which I then read in a few days. One was The First Immortal, by James Halperin, which I picked up because I liked The Truth Machine. This one details a near future projection of how somebody in the next few generations achieves immortality - the protagonist of the book takes advantage of cryonics to freeze himself and is resurrected with nanotech biotech genetic engineering gobbledybook. The other was Knight Moves, by Walter Jon Williams. I know of Williams through the Wild Cards series, but his solo work has been pretty nondescript. Still, it’s hard to go wrong for a dollar.
I should really think about finishing books for a while. I think I’ve got something like eight books which I have started in the past few months but haven’t finished.
P.P.S. My computer’s back up. I think I even recovered most of the files from my old hard drive that I wanted. I may be missing a few, but I probably won’t notice for a year or two.
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.
Lots of book reviews to catch up on, so I’m going to do capsule reviews until I’m caught up.
Balance of Trade, by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
I really like the Liaden universe books, but hadn’t gotten around to reading the new books in the universe. When I saw this one in the library, I picked it up and read it last weekend. It was decent. I didn’t think the characters sparkled as much as in the other Liaden books, and some of the plot twists were far-fetched. But it was solidly entertaining, which is about all I can ask from a library book.
A Dirty Job, by Christopher Moore
Christopher Moore is an author that I’d like to read more of. I read his book Coyote Blue, and was tolerably amused by it, and would like to read Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal just for the sheer blasphemy. This one describes what happens when a normal schmo (described as a Beta Male, the subservient to the prototypical Alpha Male) gets imbued with the powers of Death. It’s a little bit odd. But quite funny.
The Jazz, by Melissa Scott
Melissa Scott is another author whose work I like, even though it’s not part of my regular rotation of comfort reading. I’ve read a lot of her stuff, and particularly like Burning Bright for its projection of gaming in the future, and Trouble and her Friends which is cyperpunk-y with a dash of women’s studies. So when I saw a Scott book at the library, I picked it up. This one is a near future projection where “the jazz” is a major component of the net. “The jazz” is basically a combination of gossip-mongering, tabloid journalism, and rumors with just enough truth to make people believe it. It’s another book describing a future where image is more important than reality. Anyway, a teenage kid puts out a new piece of jazz, but is discovered to have stolen a program to help him make it. Pursuit ensues. The kid picks up unlikely allies along the way, while the record studio chases them with a ruthlessness that reminds one of the RIAA. The book itself is kind of by the numbers, but I liked the idea of the jazz; it reminds me of Bug Jack Barron in a way.
