Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

In September, I was walking through Greenwich Village with a friend. We were chatting away as we passed by the IFC movie theater. Suddenly he noticed that I was no longer talking, and that, in fact, I had stopped several paces behind him. I had been dumbstruck by the theater marquee which said “Buffy singalong”.

Those of you that know me are probably aware of my once-overwhelming obsession with Buffy. So the idea that a theater was doing a singalong to the musical episode of Buffy was really just too awesome for words. I went over and asked about it, and they were doing a midnight showing. I called a few friends, and managed to convince a couple people to come with me to it. We got there at 11:45. There was a line of a couple hundred people on the sidewalk. We went to get tickets. It was sold out. I was denied!

However, they said they would be doing it again in November and that tickets would go on sale the following week. I stopped by the following week and bought six tickets, and then even managed to scare up five people to go with me.

Last night was the long-awaited (by me, at least) second Buffy singalong in New York. We already had tickets (fortunately, as it had sold out earlier in the week), but showed up at 11:20 or so to get in line for seats; there were about sixty people already there by that point. I was not even close to being the biggest Buffy geek in line. I don’t own the musical episode DVD (I recorded it off the air) or the soundtrack CD. I’d probably watched it fewer than ten times (although I did watch it on Friday night to remind myself, and then printed out the lyrics). After hanging out in line, we finally got to go in at midnight.

The show itself was a blast. In light of it being November, they showed Pangs, the Thanksgiving episode from season 4, as the warmup act. Much funnier than I remember it being, or maybe that was an effect of watching it with a crowd of other psyched people. They also had a Spike trivia quiz, which I did embarrassingly poorly on - I only got something like 4 out of 10 right. I’ll have to study up if I go again.

As far as the musical episode itself, they’re trying to jump-start a Rocky Horror-like cult movement, so they had people acting out the various parts on stage, and passed out goodie bags to use as props. They prompted people to yell things at the screen (”Shut up, Dawn!”), throw things at appropriate times, use their cellphones as lighters during Giles’s power ballad, etc. I had been worried that people wouldn’t actually sing along but they did, so I got to sing out and enjoy myself.

Fun stuff. I might go again in December - they’re planning to do it monthly now. Check it out at Buffy Sings.

P.S. Probably more fluffy posts for the next few days as I catch up on homework. As usual, read the comments on my last post for some well-thought-out alternative viewpoints.

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 saw the movie Sweet Home Alabama yesterday. It was decently entertaining, but later in the evening, I started thinking about the cultural memes that it is propagating, possibly because I have been reading too many of Jessie’s posts. The rest of this post will involve spoilers so if you have not seen the movie and plan to, you have been warned.

Quick plot summary: We first meet Reese Witherspoon as a successful fashion designer in New York City, getting engaged to the New York City Secretary of Housing, who is also the mayor’s son. She tells him she wants to tell her estranged parents about the engagement personally, so she flies back to rural Alabama. There we meet her childhood friends, including her high school sweetheart and husband, from whom she was never officially divorced. Wackiness ensues. By the end of the movie, she chooses her high school sweetheart over the overly coiffed New York paramour.

It’s a bit preposterous on my part to think of such an inconsequential movie as having an agenda, but I thought it was interesting that the film centers on the rejection of New York culture in favor of a simpler, more friendly, family-oriented Southern culture. The New York mayor is portrayed as manipulative and cold, always calculating the political consequences of an action. The Alabama friends are portrayed as living in the moment, having a good time down at the bar each evening. At the climax of the film, where Reese breaks off the engagement at the wedding, the mayor tries to stop her, saying that no poor white trash can do that to her son’s political ambitions, and starts excoriating Reese’s mother. Reese punches the mayor, saying “Nobody talks to my mama like that!” as the crowd cheers this victory over the Yankees.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a snooty New Yorker now, but this portrayal really bothers me. New York seems to represent a lot of what is great about this country. It is a true melting pot, with people of all nationalities mixing together; it’s almost more common than not to hear languages other than English being spoken. It is a land of opportunity, where people move every year in search of their chance to make the big time, whether in finance or media or theater or whatever. Everybody here is ambitious, aspiring to something great. Yes, New York can be harsh, but as the lyrics state, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere”.

Meanwhile, the stereotypical Southern culture as portrayed in the movie is far more static. Her childhood friends are all still mostly the same, living in the same town, doing similar things. Reese’s father is a Civil War re-enactor, still fighting for the Confederacy. Nothing had changed in the seven years since she had been home. At one level, it’s very comforting; “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in”. However, I could also call it stagnant. It promotes a conservative worldview where we can aspire to nothing more than what we already have. In fact, anybody that does aspire to anything more should be thought of as crazy because such ambition implies that the status quo is not the best of all possible worlds. Such ambition disrupts the comfortable community, and thus the agent of change must be treated as an outcast.

At the end, the film tries to have it both ways, by having the high school sweetheart create a business that he can then move to New York and join Reese, holding true to their past but moving forward together into the future. But I find it interesting that they were unable to carry out their dreams in their hometown. They had to move someplace new, using a new context to create a new identity, as Reese did in her initial move to New York, and as she got her husband to do later in the movie. Even in a movie where New York is portrayed as a shallow glitzy sort of place, it is still an environment of change.

And change is good. Change allows for the possibility of improvements. It can mean progress. Change is also scary and terrifying because it brings the unknown, but that can be good as well. I think we should celebrate agents of change like New York; if it weren’t for people like ambitious New Yorkers striving to make their mark on the world, we would not have made nearly the amount of progress that we have.

I find it interesting that the rest of the country despises liberal bastions like San Francisco and New York, and yet celebrates American ideals like innovation and competition, which are best exemplified by those bastions. Conservatives tend to despise the Old World of Europe for holding on to the past, and yet idealize small-town culture (or the stereotypical Southern culture portrayed in Sweet Home Alabama) which is stagnant and unchanging.

It’s interesting how I ended up with a political rant from an attempted movie deconstruction. Cultural memes are transmitted through movies, which influence people’s worldviews by reinforcing certain attitudes and deprecating others, and those worldviews influence how people end up voting. Frames trump facts. It’s also interesting how I’ve become such an intellectual leftist relativist postmodern freak, for having once had such an objective hard-science viewpoint. But that’s another story and another post.

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.

Amazon link

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.

Book website

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.

Amazon link

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.

Amazon link

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.

Book site

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.