Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

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I have been a fan of Grant McCracken’s for several years now, so I was eagerly awaiting his new book, Chief Culture Officer. Note that I may be slightly biased in this review, as Grant mentions me in the book as a potential CCO candidate.

Chief Culture Officer is McCracken’s manifesto of how and why culture matters to the corporation. He starts the book with stories like Levi’s missing a billion dollar opportunity in the mid-90s because they didn’t see the hip-hop trend and therefore didn’t understand why anybody would want baggy jeans. Another example is Steve Jobs revolutionizing industry after industry by leading a new wave of culture e.g. using iTunes and the iPod to create an individual song a la carte option in the music industry so people could create their own mixes. Or Geoffrey Frost at Motorola creating an enormous amount of value with the Razr.

McCracken then dives into several of the trends that have been taking place over the last few decades:

• Culture fast and slow – fast culture is the bleeding edge, particularly notable in the fashion and design industries where “that’s so five minutes ago” is a meaningful insult. Slow culture is represented by less flashy, more subtle trends, like how we think about our food, or how homes are changing to reflect updated needs.
• Status and cool – status is Victorian and high culture – it’s about aspiring to the One True set of status indicators like the luxury car, an appreciation of art and opera, etc. Cool is represented by outsiders such as the beats – it’s doing what the hip kids are doing rather than conforming to society’s expectations. I liked McCracken’s observation that the two trends, at odds throughout the twentieth century, have now fused into an interesting hybrid where “cool” avant-garde liberties in personal expression are eventually co-opted into the social order of “status” (shades of learn and latch).
• Producers and consumers – the age of mass media was about few producers and millions of consumers. We have moved towards a many-to-many fragmented culture, as everybody now has the tools of production. That changes our entire relationship to media, both as producers and consumers.

One insight I particularly liked was that “Convergence culture is fleeting. But it supplies order, and for the CCO this order is a gift”. Seeing the right cultural trend splits the world in a useful way and illuminates events by giving a framework through which to view them. It gives us a meaningful story by which we can interpret what’s happening, and testable hypotheses as to what will happen next. McCracken suggests we should be tracking the trends that we think are happening and revisit those predictions, so that we can learn from our mistakes (I would note that blogs are a particularly good way to track such thoughts).

How does the CCO figure out which are the next meaningful trends, and which are fads that will fade away? They need to monitor magazines, TV shows, internet forums – one person can’t do it all, so how do we collaborate? McCracken suggests having a group of advisors/editors who can collectively share tidbits (I would suggest that Twitter can be useful for this purpose if following the right set of people). And once potential trends of interest are identified, how do we convert those into actionable insights? McCracken suggests that the CCO needs to champion efforts in the corporation that catch the rising wave, and fight back against the ones on the subsiding ones.

Another insight I liked was the corporations breathe culture in and out – “the corporation is not just an economic actor, it is also a social and a cultural one.” Brands are not imposed on people; instead, brands only derive meaning from how people incorporate brands into their self-story. Brands must spark a recognition within the consumer that the brand is a meaningful expression of identity. For instance, cars are a quintessential expression of identity, ranging from muscle cars, hybrids, or minivans. In this vision, brands that aren’t co-opted and multiplied by their users wither away and die.

McCracken finishes up with a chapter on the nitty-gritty of how to observe and monitor culture, including an appendix with “A Tool Kit for the Rising CCO”, which includes recommendations for magazines, TV, events, people, books, etc. His ethnographic perspective emphasizes the act of noticing, both observing a behavior and then explaining it with a story. Part of the challenge of noticing is keeping an open mind. If you go in with an opinion, you’ll fit your observations into that opinion – you have to pay attention what is actually happening and willing to follow up on surprising inconsistencies. The ethnographer is actively engaged, “capturing how and why the assumptions in this life go together, or feel they do”.

I like McCracken’s premise that understanding cultural trends is vital to corporations that want to act effectively in this world. And as usual, I love his insights into our culture – he provides useful stories for understanding what is going on around us. This is the kind of book that is easy to read, but has meaning that is only slowly percolating into how I think. Good stuff.

P.S. As mentioned previously, McCracken is holding a Chief Culture Officer Boot Camp this Saturday in New York. I’m excited to attend, and will report back with my notes and observations afterwards.

In my last post, I talked about getting the reps to improve oneself on desired skills. But it’s difficult to make the time for practice, especially for deliberate practice where we are always dancing on the edge of failure. And I think that’s where I think Coyle’s observation that coaching is an integral part of talent development comes in.

One of the keys to being able to stay in the productive zone of deliberate practice is to create a tight feedback loop. Deliberate practice is about pushing oneself beyond one’s capability, failing and then figuring out how to do it right. However, a key aspect of this is getting immediate feedback on both failure and on getting it right. My theory is that part of mastery is repeating techniques until they are built into the unconscious part of the brain, and getting to that point requires consistent and useful feedback.

Fast feedback is also essential. Imagine a thought experiment where you had to wait a minute to find out if your previous action had worked or failed – you would never be able to stay in a zone of productivity because in that minute, you’d get distracted, and maybe even start on a different task (this is the experience of software engineers in languages without a REPL). To keep yourself driving forward, and experimenting with new techniques that may or may not work, instant feedback is a necessity. And that’s what a good coach can provide.

Coaches provide the immediate feedback necessary to stay in the mode of deliberate practice. This is especially necessary at the beginning of the path towards mastery, before the student has developed their own self-awareness so they can detect their own errors. Coyle described two researches watching John Wooden coach the UCLA basketball team; they were surprised to find that so little of his communication was in the form of praise or disapproval, but instead 75% was in the form of information transfer. He was watching his players and offering them instant feedback on what they were doing right and wrong. That accelerated their path to mastery, as they did not have to do trial-and-error experimentation to learn what worked and what didn’t.

One key aspect of coaching is that it’s not just objective feedback, but also why things happened. I could learn how to shoot a basketball better by just shooting a lot of baskets, where my objective feedback would be whether I made the basket or not. But when I missed a basket, I wouldn’t know why. And when I made a basket, I wouldn’t know how so I couldn’t repeat it. I would try a number of different things, and only a few of them would work, so I’d be wasting a lot of time in experimentation. However, if I had a coach, they could watch me, tell me what I was doing right, and more importantly, why it worked, so I could start to internalize the correct techniques. My improvement would happen much faster, because I would be able to integrate the “story” of the right way to do things into my self story.

As an aside, I was thinking about this last week during a discussion on a random Google mailing list discussing an ethnographer’s observations about Google in China. A couple engineers were dismissive, saying that objective data was better than these subjective stories. My point was that these stories help us interpret the data – data can tell us that market share is changing or that Chinese users are using instant messenger over Gmail, but social scientists can help tell the story of _why_ these trends are happening.

I think the other aspect of deliberate practice that a coach can help with is in helping with the motivation necessary to stay on the edge of failure. It’s so much easier to keep on doing what we are already good at than it is to consciously decide to do something that we know we’ll fail at. So having somebody there to encourage us to keep going past our existing competencies is helpful. Even in something as prosaic as weightlifting, I will never be as strong as I was in grad school, when I had a lifting partner who would push me to lift more than I thought I could – and it turned out I could do it. Now when I go to the gym, I don’t push myself anywhere near that hard, and therefore am not getting anywhere near the benefits.

Note that both feedback and motivation will eventually be internalized, and have to be internalized if one is to achieve mastery. Once I reach a certain point in skill development, I know what I’m doing right and wrong, and what I have to do to correct my mistakes. I also can get to the point where I don’t need external motivation because I am doing the skill for myself and can see how my practice and mistakes lead to improvement. But, boy, it’s difficult to get there, and having a coach to help with those aspects make it easier, especially at the start.

I realized as I was writing this that one of the challenges for me in my quest to become a generalist is the lack of coaching. There is nobody that can offer me instant feedback on what I’m doing, so I am in the inefficient mode of trial-and-error experimentation. And while I have been fairly committed to this path for several years now, it’s still difficult for me as I have few role models (Jerry Weinberg notwithstanding), and little in the way of formal encouragement. I don’t have a career path that I’m following, and while my position at work is enhanced by my generalist skills, they are not formally recognized, which is frustrating. I’m not sure what to do about this, but perhaps being aware of the difficulty will let me at least address the problems more directly.

Sorry for the long post – I originally had planned to split this post into one on tightening the feedback loop and another on coaching, but I feel like they work better together. Coyle’s framework is a useful way for me to think about these questions of mastery, and it integrates well with my previous thoughts on the subject. It also helps me to recognize that lessons might be the way to get me started on a new skill, rather than beating myself up for not having the discipline to start something on my own. Food for thought.

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I really liked Pink’s TED talk on the “surprising science of motivation” where he says “There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does”. In particular, the compensation and motivation strategies currently used by businesses have been shown to undermine motivation rather than enhance it. So I’ve been interested in reading the book-length version of his argument, and managed to snag it from the library soon after release.

Alas, there’s not much more in the book than what’s in the TED video. So go watch that. Or read his “cocktail party summary”:

When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does. Our current business operating system–which is built around external, carrot-and-stick motivators–doesn’t work and often does harm. We need an upgrade. And the science shows the way. This new approach has three essential elements: 1. Autonomy – the desire to direct our own lives. 2. Mastery — the urge to get better and better at something that matters. 3. Purpose — the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

I don’t have much to add beyond that, except to cheer him on. I think that creating new organizational cultures that trust people rather than processes is a goal towards which we should all be aspiring, even if I have no idea how to make that happen.

I also really liked his 2 questions video. The 2 questions:

• What is your sentence? In other words, if you were forced to summarize your life’s work and accomplishments in one sentence, what would that sentence be? Distilling it to one sentence forces you to pick what your overall purpose is, rather than trying to do lots of things at once (says the generalist).
• Was I better today than yesterday? After the sentence helps you define your purpose, each day is an opportunity to move closer to that purpose. Having a daily check-in forces us to question every day whether we’re making progress towards our goals. Or to put it another way, using a quote I found on Twitter, “If it’s important enough to you, you’ll find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.”

The weekday posts are going to be less thoughtful, but, hey, I’ve got a year’s backlog of books to review, so I can crank those out during the week, and hopefully I can continue digging into more meaty topics on the weekend.

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I’m not sure where I heard about this book, but the subtitle, “Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage”, pretty much sold me on at least checking it out, since I’m interested in both design and management. So I got it from the library and read it.

Martin frames business as operating in a “knowledge funnel”, which starts with a mystery, gets refined to a heuristic, and is instituted into an algorithm. He uses McDonald’s as an example of the knowledge funnel.

• A mystery is a new niche or new problem that is not handled by existing solutions. People wander around in the mystery trying things to see if they can figure out something that might work. In the case of McDonald’s, the McDonald brothers were trying to figure out how a restaurant should work in a mobile car culture.

• Once a partial solution has been found, it becomes a heuristic or rule-of-thumb. The heuristic is a frame that provides a useful way of thinking about the mystery that makes its solution tractable. It doesn’t guarantee results, but generates working solutions more often than not. The McDonald’s brothers created the idea of fast food as we know it, with reduced menu options, standardized cooking, and the drive-thru instead of the drive-in. But it was still dependent on the implementation at each new restaurant.
• Once a heuristic has shown the way, the drive for efficiency begins, where the uncertainties of the heuristic are mapped out such that every element can be institutionalized as an algorithm. Once an algorithm exists, it can be standardized such that anybody can run it, or even automated by a computer. Ray Kroc bought the McDonald’s chain and compiled explicit instructions for every aspect of running a franchise, from how long to cook hamburgers, how often to clean the bathrooms, and even how to choose a new location.

The knowledge funnel is a nice little metaphor, but it is not a particularly new way of looking at things. Or maybe that’s just my overactive relational mind making connections everywhere, as I think that the knowledge funnel could be seen as another form of Latour’s Collective process or Moore’s Chasm.

Martin did articulate well how a company is often started around finding a heuristic to solve a mystery, and then spends the rest of its existence refining that heuristic into ever more efficient algorithms. But if the company isn’t careful, another company will find a new mystery that disrupts the original company’s business model (aka the innovator’s dilemma).

One of the reasons that companies get trapped into refining efficiency is that tackling mysteries is scary. Once a company is into the refining heuristic stage, decisions can be made analytically. Refinements can be tested to see if they are more efficient and reliable, so that cold, hard data removes the subjectivity of the heuristic.

Tackling new mysteries requires a leap away from the safety of data and reliability. Martin suggests that “validity” is a better way to think about such problems than reliability – a valid solution that works some of the time is more valuable than a less valid solution that works every time.

The rest of the book describes several case studies of companies that have successfully made the leap to “design thinking”, where attacking the next mystery is valued as much as refining the existing solution. His examples included:

• P&G, which realized that it was better at the heuristic and algorithm phases of the knowledge funnel, so it set the goal of sourcing “half its product innovation from outside the company” to take advantage of its development engine.

• RIM, the makers of Blackberry – I liked the description that the founders “realized RIM’s strengths lay in designing, building and marketing communications devices for busy people” which is a good mission statement since it is completely technology-independent
• Herman Miller, the makers of the Aeron chair – where the CEO emphasized the independence of design to the point where he said “You never ask the sales force what they think of a design. Their job is to sell it.”

One suggestion I liked for companies to avoid ossifying around an existing algorithm was for companies to use a project oriented structure:

“In companies organized around ongoing, permanent tasks, roles are rigidly defined, with clear responsibilities and economic incentives linked tightly to those individual responsibilities. This structure discourages all but senior staff from seeing the big picture… to move along the knowledge funnel is by definition a project; it is a finite effort to move something from mystery to heuristic or from heuristic to algorithm. And such projects demand a business organized accordingly, with ad hoc teams and clearly delimited goals.

In other words, when your entire job is defined around a function, you will not welcome others who are trying to disrupt the status quo, even if that’s the right thing for the company. But if everybody works in a project-oriented mode as they do at design firms like Ideo, they will work towards finishing the current project, and moving onto the next.

Overall, this was a quick read with a few good anecdotes and a useful metaphor, but it’s not a book that I see myself buying for my permanent collection.

P.S. Using the cheat code of doing a book review for a blog post, since they don’t require as much thought. We’ll see how long I can keep this up.

Along the lines of yesterday’s post where I mashed up two different interests of mine (cognitive science and organizational theory), today’s post is about an intersection between basketball and management.

I don’t know a lot about basketball. I watch the game recreationally, but I’ve never played, and don’t have a feel for the sport. I do read a lot about it, though, in part because my favorite sports columnist, Bill Simmons, is obsessed with basketball, to the point where he recently published a 700 page tome called The Book of Basketball.

One of the more interesting debates in basketball these days is how to measure the productivity of a player. You would think it would be easy – take a player’s statistics like points, rebounds and assists, mash them together, and see who does the best. And that’s exactly what ESPN’s John Hollinger has done in his Player Efficiency Ratings to rate every NBA player with a single number.

However, basketball is a team sport. It has been shown repeatedly that five supremely skilled individual players may not mesh well as a team, so there’s a need for team players who fill in the little things that don’t get measured by the traditional stats. One such player is Shane Battier, who was described as the No-Stats All-Star by Michael Lewis in a New York Times story.

So how do you measure team contributions? Basketball geeks are now using something called “plus-minus”. In its simplest form, it’s straightforward – take the team differential in points when a player is on the court. In other words, if the team outscores its opponent by 5 points with the player on the court in a game, then the plus-minus for that player is +5. There are several refinements to adjust for teammates and strength-of-opponent and other factors, but that’s the basic idea.

The reason plus-minus is attractive is that the point of basketball is to have your team outscore the other team, and plus-minus measures the player’s impact on achieving that goal. As it turns out, Shane Battier tends to do well in plus-minus, even though his other stats are terrible (he rates as well below average in Hollinger’s Player Efficiency Ratings). Michael Lewis’s story describes some of the things that Battier does that don’t show up in the box score, particularly on defense, but it’s hard for most people to believe, since “numbers don’t lie”. The flip side to Battier is Kevin Durant, where his stats were eye-popping, but plus-minus said that he was actually hurting his team, in part because of his poor defense and inefficient shot selection.

Based on examples like these, it appears that traditional basketball statistics don’t necessarily measure a player’s contributions to whether the team wins; in other words, teams are measuring the wrong things. Well, not all teams. Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, has been affectionally dubbed Dork Elvis by Bill Simmons, because he’s figured out a Moneyball-esque approach to measure subtle ways in which players can affect games, and his team is winning with an unconventional set of players despite losing its two All-Stars to injury this season.

Now what’s amazing to me about this is that basketball is a pretty simple game. There are five players per team on the court at a time, and the goal is to score more than the other team. The professional teams spends millions of dollars to find and train the best players, and they’re only now starting to figure out how to measure the impact that a good team player can have on winning or losing.

If basketball teams haven’t figured it out, measuring the impact of a team player in the business world, where the goals are varied and conflicting, where teams are fluid and changing, and where performance evaluation is an afterthought, would seem to be impossible. And yet I’m wondering if some equivalent of plus-minus is possible, in part because I think of myself as a good team player, and would like to see those skills more widely recognized and appreciated.

It would have to start with defining the goals of a team, and having a way to measure the progress towards those goals, the way plus-minus measures team point differential as a metric for winning games. This is already complicated, as a team may have explicit goals (deliver the project successfully) that conflict with implicit goals (don’t contradict the manager). But efforts like the “results only work environment” are starting to move businesses in the direction of focusing on the end goals, rather than the process.

The other component, measuring performance, is also difficult, as any set of metrics will immediately be gamed. Perhaps a better metric of a team player’s effectiveness would be to ask each team member at the end of each project which team member they would most want on their next project. That could favor other characteristics like popularity, but if the team members were going to be judged as a team on the results of the next project, seeing who they want on their team could be a decent proxy to plus-minus.

Wrapping up, I think that plus-minus serves as a useful reminder for managers. If the best players in basketball aren’t necessarily the ones with dominant statistics, it’s possible that the best employees are not the ones with the highest performance evaluation scores. Plus-minus is a reminder to look beyond the numbers, and watch how the team actually works together, to see who is doing the little things that enable the team to function effectively, and to think of new ways of measuring productivity that might more closely map to the desired end-goals of the organization.

One of the topics I want to think more about is organizational cognition aka how organizations think, and how to design an intelligent organization. For some reason, I was thinking about this today, and made a connection to standard theories of cognition that I hadn’t made before.

Let’s start with Descartes’s view of the world: I think, therefore I am. In this view, consciousness is what fundamentally defines us as human. Our rational, conscious minds take in sensory input, make decisions and execute actions in response. Consciousness and thinking are assumed to be identical. Note: I am aware this is an oversimplification and possibly a mis-statement of Descartes, but that’s what straw men are for – see the Wikipedia entry on the Cartesian theater for a similar take.

This view of how we think has been shown to be incomplete, at best. Books like The User Illusion and On Intelligence describe an unconscious mind which is doing so much processing and filtering that it can often respond without ever involving the conscious mind. One might picture this as a bubbling brew of unconscious perceptions and responses which only rarely permeates the conscious mind.

What was new to me today is how these two views of the human mind might map to theories of corporate management.

The first view of cognition corresponds to the archetypal hierarchical command-and-control corporate structure, with the executive team corresponding to the conscious mind. All major decisions are brought to the CEO or executive team, a decision is made, and instructions are fired off to the rest of the company to execute. Once decisions have been made, processes can be put in place to ensure that such decisions are made consistently without the need to bring them to the executives again, much like McDonald’s has its three-ring binder which specifies every aspect of running a fast food franchise in a completely standardized way.

It’s less clear what would be the management equivalent of the second view of cognition. I think it’s closer to my idea of what an intelligent organization might look like, with self-organizing teams that band together to achieve a common goal. In such an organization, managers might not be hierarchical decision-makers, but instead “exception handlers” who trouble shoot problems that are not handled well by the existing teams (for some reason, I’m picturing the Wolf from Pulp Fiction here). This would be the analogue of the conscious mind only being involved in decisions where there is no established cognitive subroutine. In such an organization, most things would bubble along, being handled by the teams, and only rarely would be surfaced to the “conscious mind” of executive management.

Of course, this is an overly broad analogy, and figuring out what such an organization would look like in practice is really difficult (how do we balance between surfacing problems when needed and keeping the critical decision-makers from being overwhelmed?). But I thought it was interesting to explicitly draw the cognition analogy to organizations and see what that might imply about management. I’ll have to think about this some more. And, of course, I’d welcome any thoughts you have.

I had lunch today with the always inspirational Grant McCracken, who leaves my mind fizzing with new ideas and thoughts, so I’m riding that energy wave and updating my blog.

As an aside, Grant is in the Bay Area talking about his soon-to-be-released book, Chief Culture Officer, about how companies need to incorporate an understanding of cultural forces into their executive planning, much as they do for finance and sales expertise. Read Grant’s blog for some neat thought experiments of how the corporate world would be different if such a position existed.

One of the questions we discussed today was how to find out what’s happening in culture. It’s too big a space for any one person to wrap their mind around, and the relevant forces only become apparent in retrospect. Grant’s suggestion was that the Chief Culture Officer (CCO) must be an expert at pattern recognition to find needles of insight among the haystacks of culture. I suggested that perhaps the CCO could serve as a lens, magnifying trends and bringing them to the attention of the relevant stakeholders. Both of these are decidedly human, and depend on the noticing skills of the person in question.

One idea we talked about is whether cultural trend watching can be automated in some way. Grant has a nice post about one potential tracker of fashion culture. Google Trends is another interesting way of tracking the cultural zeitgeist, as people’s searches reveal their concerns.

The risk with any sort of automation culture tracking is the same as with people, which is that biases may be inherent. The same things we are blind to as people may get coded into the routines we write to track the culture. We may not be sufficiently leaving ourselves and our algorithms open to the surprises of serendipity, the break in the patterns that is the only hint we get of the new patterns to come. We may ignore such breaks as “outliers” or reject them as mistakes in our algorithms. Thus arises the question: how can we plan to be surprised?

Note that this is anathema to many organizations, as surprise has a negative connotation. Some managers control their organizations with process and bureaucracy, and the last thing they want is to have any unexpected surprises. However, in suppressing the risk of negative surprises, those managers also prevent themselves from the potential of positive surprises.

What’s ironic about this tendency towards process and control is that it blinds such managers to the very trends that could blind side them in the future. Once a process is in place, people assume that the process is complete in and of itself, and so they stop paying attention to things outside the process, inconsistencies in the process results, and other hints that the process may no longer be applicable. They restrict their perception to what’s relevant to the process rather than using their peripheral vision to see what’s all around them.

Can we plan to be surprised while also institutionalizing what we know? I think we’re still learning how to do that. I’ve touched upon the idea in previous posts about social technologies and the balance between learning more about the world and latching our knowledge into place.

I think it also depends on maximizing people within the organization – as Grant pointed out today, companies have a huge wealth of cultural knowledge embedded within their employees but have no way of extracting or using that knowledge. Training people to notice when things don’t fit with tools like recognition-primed decision making may be more valuable than training them in a process which may become outdated within months.

And, unsurprisingly, I think it really helps to have generalists around as they are predisposed to see and understand patterns in disparate worlds. They are more likely to notice when new trends are coming, as they have different noticing filters from their varied backgrounds that let them see beyond the filters of the single-minded expert.

Lots of scattershot ideas here, which I don’t really have the time or energy to refine into a focused post. But I wanted to record my initial reactions, and hopefully I can build on them at some point.

Why was the iPod successful?

• It didn’t have the most features – I once bought an Archos Jukebox with many options unavailable on the iPod at the time.
• It certainly wasn’t price – I bought a Dell DJ for $100 less than a comparable iPod in 2005.

The design and user experience, the sleekness and trendiness, certainly played a part.

But the most important thing, to me, is that the iPod made things easy. Here’s how to buy and listen to a new song on an iPod:

1. Look it up in the iTunes store.
2. Click to buy.
3. Sync your iPod.

Easy. No trying to remember where you downloaded a certain file, or making sure it’s in the right directory to get transferred to your MP3 player, or trying to find a legal copy to buy – Apple has taken all of the effort out of this fundamental transaction.

And I think this is something to remember – a good business plan can be built around taking the things that should be easy, and making them easy. Why is Google successful? It makes it easy for advertisers to find users who are searching for relevant information, and easy for users to find relevant advertisers to their interests. Google makes it easy for these two populations to find each other, and has made absurd amounts of money.

It reminds me of Seppo’s description of game design – find the fundamental unit action of a game, and make it fun. The equivalent for business model design is find a fundamental action of a user, and make it easy. There is value in making things easy, and users will pay for that value.

Even the rise of blogging can be seen as a testament to this idea. From the earliest days of the Web, it was possible to post updates and thoughts on a web page – it was crude by modern standards, posting individual HTML pages, but possible, as evidenced by my ramblings page which was started in 1994. But the advantage of blogging software is that it makes it much easier to post an update. And although I don’t pay for WordPress, I do pay a subscription to LiveJournal and MyBlogLog to make my blogging easier.

Twitter takes the next step to making it so easy to keep one’s friends informed that we can do it from anywhere we have cellular access. I think that Twitter may be the perfect mobile application in that it is easy to dip into the Twitter stream whenever I have a few minutes to kill, and I can do it from anywhere. I do worry that it is destroying my attention span, though.

One last example: Google has changed how I do things because it makes certain things so easy. I have now given blood twice and plan to continue doing so. It was always something I meant to do, but never got around to. But when Google brings the blood drive on campus, so all I have to do is go downstairs, it’s so easy that all of my objections go away, and I just do it. Similarly, having the Mountain View Public Library come to campus once a week, and making it possible for me to request books via email, means that the library is now more convenient than Amazon (which in itself is an example of a business model built around making a common action easy).

It makes me think that there are plenty of business opportunities left in the world. I feel like any time I encounter something that is difficult that I can imagine could be made easy, I should now react to it by thinking of it as an opportunity rather than a frustration. Admittedly, it’s only a business opportunity if it’s enough of an annoyance that a significant number of people will pay for a solution. By making it easy to do things that were difficult or impossible before (like buying music online or finding people interested in your advertising), an entrepreneur can create new value in the world. And it seems like there’s an endless supply of things in the world that should be easier.

Charlie asked the question last week: “Why aren’t you striving to be a leader in your field?” which has gotten me thinking about leadership, and what it means to be a leader. It also sparked an email exchange with a friend on the topic, which led to some interesting thoughts.

What does it mean to be a leader?

• Is it being an “active participant in professional societies, write popular blogs about your industry, get asked to write articles for magazines and regularly speak on conference panels”, as Charlie suggests?
• Is it being the person on top of the org chart giving orders?
• Is it about knowing more than others?
• Is it being the person who everybody gets along with and goes to with their questions and problems?
• Is it being the person motivating others to achieve more?
• Is it about being impressive?

We can probably think of people in all of these categories who we think of as leaders. So it’s clear that “leadership” is not an easily definable characteristic. Yet it’s like obscenity – we know it when we see it.

Perhaps leadership is about helping people achieve their goals. In other words, if I want to be a leader, I must gain followers, and therefore I must do something that would get people to follow me. I can do that in a number of different ways:

• I can be an industry spokesperson, with the potential to widely publicize followers who add value, possibly turning them into leaders themselves.
• I can be the organized one, who puts together plans, prioritizes goals, makes sure resources are available, etc. so that my followers efficiently use their time and effort.
• I can be the domain expert, with the experience to understand how to turn ideas into reality and the ability to enhance others’ capabilities by providing them with the knowledge they need to succeed.
• I can be the consensus builder, able to bridge different viewpoints and synthesize them into solutions that are better than any individual contribution.
• I can be the inspirational one, able to convince people to reach deep inside themselves to work harder towards a common goal.

One way to measure leadership might be to see who everybody in the room looks to when a decision needs to be made. Just because somebody is the manager on the org chart doesn’t necessarily make them that sort of leader (as Rands’s great story about “The Culture Chart” illustrates). One can be “The Guy” to whom others look using any of the methods described above.

So what can one do to become a leader? Part of being a leader is understanding one’s own strengths and weaknesses and choosing a leadership style that matches one’s tendencies. Gerald Weinberg’s book Becoming a Technical Leader offers advice about finding one’s own path towards leadership. And, on the flip side, it’s hard to take somebody seriously as a leader when they are acting in a way that is contrary to their nature – the engineer trying to schmooze his way to the top, or the MBA spouting half-understood technical jargon.

Mostly I’m fascinated by this idea of leadership that initially seems so prosaically obvious – we all know what leadership is – and yet so difficult to define.

What do you think defines a leader?

P.S. There were a couple crazy months there, both at work and in life. Things have calmed down a bit, and I enjoyed a slothful few weeks to recover from the craziness, but it may be time to pick up the posting habit again.

Anybody that’s been following my Twitter feed knows I’ve been working long hours recently. I’m actually working harder now than I was last year when I was working full time while finishing my master’s degree at Columbia. This would come as a surprise to, well, pretty much anybody that’s ever worked with me, given my tendency to do just enough to get by and no more. So what’s different about working at Google for me? My current answer to that question requires a detour through some other things I’ve been thinking about.

I really liked Po Bronson’s book What Should I Do With My Life? when I first read it (his original Fast Company article is a nice introduction). Trying to find a place for myself in the professional world has been an ongoing struggle, as while I have the capability to do anything, I have often found myself in situations where I was stuck doing the “wrong things”. Bronson recently published an update article with his perspective since publishing the book, and a couple quotes from that resonated with me:

“All jobs have things you hate about them. But real people feel fulfilled by the overall purpose of their organization that the shitty parts are worth putting up with. It’s not what you do, it’s what you’re working towards. …you know the feeling you desire — fulfillment, connection, responsibility, and some excitement.”

I think these last four characteristics he describes are absolutely key for me. I don’t define myself by the specific work tasks that I have to do, as I have the flexibility to do any number of tasks. I aspire to define myself with the meta-work of being a generalist. I want to feel that I am getting to use my unique potential and abilities in the course of doing my job. I need to find some sort of meaning in what I’m doing, or at least be working towards both personal and company goals.

As Bronson observes, there are annoying parts of every job – the question is whether the goal towards which one is working is worth the annoying parts. To put in a larger sense, it is important to know the answer to the question of “Why am I doing this?” In a similar vein, when I have friends considering grad school, I argue strenuously against it and try to dissuade them from going. This is not because I don’t value education – it’s because grad school is really hard, and the only way to get through it is to know exactly why you are going. My arguing against grad school is a way for me to get them to articulate their core reason for going to grad school.

To get back to my original question of what makes my job at Google different than other jobs I’ve had in the past is that I can see how I am contributing to making the company work better. I do genuinely believe that Google is making the world a better place, all things considered, as it provides us all with tools that are astonishing in their ability to put information at our fingertips. I can see a future for myself where I get to use all of my skills and talents in that goal. The only obstacle between me and that future is myself – I have the opportunity, the skills, the support to get there.

So while the long hours are irksome, they are not morale-destroying – we were joking this week about who in our group would be the first to snap, and I was surprised to realize that I wasn’t anywhere near snapping. I have hit my limits before and know what that feels like. But in this case, while I am tired and occasionally cranky, I feel like the work I am doing is recognized as meaningful, both to the company and to my future, and that’s far more sustainable for me than working even half the hours on dead-end tasks like technical support.

This has tremendous implications for managers. In a free agent world, getting the top people is no longer about paying them the most (beyond a certain point, I don’t think it makes a difference) or showering them with perks – it’s about giving them challenging, meaningful, interesting work. Managers need to find ways to engage their employees by framing the work that needs to be done in a narrative that propels the employee forward into a desired future. Getting back to Bronson, managers need to work with their employees to answer the question of “Why am I doing this?” And the answer doesn’t have to be existential – it can be as simple as earning the money to support one’s family. But there needs to be an answer, because without that answer in place, the annoying parts of the job will wear anybody down.

Anyway. We’ll see how I feel in another month if things don’t slow down, but for now, it was interesting to think about how this job has given me the belief that I can finally stretch myself in the directions I want to go with my career and life, in terms of building on my interests in interdisciplinary collaboration. It’s not a Great Cause ™, but the belief that I have found a good fit for my skills and talents is exciting enough to me to keep me going through the long hours. That being said, it sure is nice to take a weekend off and actually have time to write down some of my thoughts