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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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I’ve been playing with this idea for a few weeks, and it’s not quite coming together, so I’m going to ramble for a bit and see whether it starts to solidify as I go.
It started with a quip I made to a friend last month where I claimed that the winners of the last ten years were defined by technology (e.g. Google), but that the next ten years would be defined by social connections (e.g. BJ Fogg on why Facebook is bigger than you think). This is partially an extension of Nicholas Carr’s book Does IT Matter?, where he argues that IT will be commoditized (something that is starting to happen with services like Amazon’s Web Services). In a world where technology can be outsourced (heck, where even intelligence is outsourced), the only remaining differentiator will be the strong social connections necessary to more effectively and efficiently outsource tasks and thinking.
I was having coffee with a friend today, talking about the importance of trust. As a manager or coworker, I can’t outsource work to another coworker unless I trust that they will deliver what is needed. Otherwise, I have to micromanage the coworker to make sure the task gets done, and the delegation takes more total time (mine and the coworker’s) than it would have to do it myself. Outsourcing is ineffective without developing trust and a social bond.
Okay, so now let’s imagine a completely free agent world, where all services are available from a consultant. What differentiates a successful company from an unsuccessful one? It’s not the technology or the talent, as those are available to everybody. It’s the companies that are most successful at building strong social trust with others, so that effort does not have to be duplicated, and management on both sides can be kept to a minimum. Admittedly, we’re not in that world yet, but that seems to be where things are headed. People that learn to build those social bonds will have an advantage as that world takes shape.
In such a world, investing in social relationships is as valuable as investing in financial relationships, hence the quippy title of “Social Capitalist” (as opposed to venture capitalist) for this post. Social capital will be a valuable commodity, and one that can’t necessarily be bought with money (although Jofish and I once had an interesting conversation about the conversion of social capital to financial capital and vice versa). It takes the investment of time and trust, and that is a commodity where we all start equally - nobody has more than 24 hours in a day. We may take different approaches to building those relationships, but in the end, it comes down to whether one can rely on others to help advance one’s agenda.
What does it mean to invest in social relationships? To take one model, let’s look at the world of professional sports, which is truly a free agent world. Professional agents often start following potential stars as early as middle school. They cultivate relationships with these kids, talk to their parents, work for free on their behalf, all to lay the groundwork that the family might choose them as an agent when the kid goes pro. They have to invest in the relationship before the athlete is already successful in the hopes of having a stronger bond of trust when that success happens.
I wonder if a similar model would work in the coming world - investing in bonds of trust and friendship for the sake of helping the other person in the hopes of later being able to build on those bonds in a professional relationship. This is one of the reasons to go to an elite university - the bonds created there can benefit one throughout life, as they are built on social capital that was generated long before there was a financial incentive.
What traits make for good “social capitalists”?
Huh. Looks a lot like the list of traits for being a good friend (except for the last one). Funny that.
As I noted at the top of this post, I’m still noodling around with this idea of what it means to invest as a social capitalist, so I’d be curious to hear what other people think.
P.S. I keep on meaning to post more, but I keep on getting interrupted, this time due to attending the wedding of AWESOME last weekend, and then trying to see lots of people while I’m here in the Bay Area.
In a comment on my strategic intuition post, Seppo asked the interesting question, “How will Google change the way we *think*?” In particular, he notes that sheer accumulation of facts once was a metric of intelligence, but in a world where Google is accessible from our pocket phones, mere facts don’t have the value they once had. So Seppo asks what it means to be intelligent in the always-on Google world where we are practically omniscient? And how will our intelligence evolve to include Google?
One question is what is the value of facts? If I can look anything up in Google, then why bother remembering it myself? I think this one is pretty easy to address, as it’s essentially the question of why anybody should bother learning arithmetic when calculators are available. The reason to learn basic facts or techniques is that those basics need to be embedded into our subconscious as cognitive subroutines before we can build more advanced ideas upon those foundations. We can’t learn algebra unless we know arithmetic cold, and we can’t learn calculus until algebra is unconscious. I think the same holds true for networks of facts - if I just have a set of facts that I have looked up, I can’t see the interconnections between the facts and see the big picture patterns that relate those facts (this is my impression of what historians do). The only way to start seeing larger patterns is to have spent the time memorizing the basics until they are unconscious.
Seppo notes that critical thinking is another critical component of intelligence in a “sea of facts” world: “you need to be able to know where to get information, how valid that information is, the reliability of the source… and that comes from having a certain amount of that experience stored in your head where it can immediately be synthesized.” If you don’t have a core set of facts stored in your brain, you have no basis on which to evaluate new facts coming in. One of the consequences of the “sea of facts” is that people can pick and choose which facts they want to believe, and the facts that we place in our brain will be the filter by which we accept or reject new facts (Farhad Manjoo’s book True Enough points out that since we no longer share a common set of basic facts, reality itself is fracturing). A basic curriculum of facts is necessary to make sure we are all evaluating new facts with the same set of criteria.
In another example of the Internet providing fodder appropriate to my blog posts, the Atlantic just published an article by Nick Carr called “Is Google making us Stupid?”. Carr’s concern is that the river of information presented by Google and blogs and always-on connectivity has created such an overload that our minds are adapting by becoming browsers, grazing at the edge of the river. He worries that we are losing the ability to concentrate deeply, to read books, to handle anything that requires more than the typical 1.5 minutes necessary to read a web page. I’m less concerned than Carr because I think we will continue to adapt and evolve. One might argue that the same shortening of attention span happened with television (Clay Shirky makes a powerful argument that we took all the extra time and cognitive surplus created by productivity gains in the twentieth century and wasted them on television because we didn’t know what else to do) and we’re learning to adapt to that with longer form television like The Wire.
I think that our initial reaction to any new technology is to over-use it in the default mode presented by the technology. But over time, instead of adapting ourselves to the technology, we learn how to adapt the technology to suit us. Part of that is sheer familiarity - kids that grow up in Google world will adapt to it in ways that we can not even foresee yet. We who are coming to it as adults are always going to be non-natives that don’t speak the language. It’s not surprising that it feels clunky and awkward and threatening to us, as our brains were formed in a different time and in a different environment.
My personal take is that the way intelligence will evolve is by outsourcing. In a globalized world, companies succeed by focusing on using their limited resources to do what they do better than anybody else in the world and outsourcing anything not directly connected with that focus. Similarly, in Google world, an intelligent individual will load their brain and memory with the foundational facts and skills necessary for them to build the advanced skills they want, and outsource the rest either to the Internet or to other people (I’ve played around with these ideas before, in posts on how we extend our cognitive subroutines to use external objects or even other people). Adding in the recognition that we have a limited capacity in our consciousness and in our memory means that we need to outsource wisely and carefully; we need to recognize which concepts are non-core and can be looked up when necessary, and embed the remaining foundational concepts and skills into our subconscious.
Another interesting concept to me is how meta-information, the information about the information, will increase in value. What’s valuable about Google isn’t the information that it links to directly - it’s the sorting of that information by PageRank. That meta-information is what has driven Google to dominance. This interests me because I’m moving in that direction myself. I had a conversation with a coworker last week where I knew the answer to exactly zero of the questions that he asked me. But I knew precisely who did know the answer to each question, and was able to explain the relevant work each person was doing to the question. One of my roles at each of the companies where I have worked is to be a mini-Google, the place to start when you don’t know where to start, as I understood enough of each person’s work at the company to place it into the broader context. Like Google, I cache just enough information about a resource (information or person) to determine the utility, and link people to the actual resource if appropriate. Huh. Never put it in quite that way before, but that might be a good way to pitch my generalist skills.
This point is a bit more disjointed than I’d like, but I’m going to put it up anyway. I think there’s a lot of interesting thought to be done in this area, especially in developing tactics for maximizing brainpower in an always-on Google world. How do you use Google to augment your intelligence?
I’ve been a fan of Jane McGonigal for a few years now, and enjoyed playing her Cruel 2 B Kind game in the Come Out and Play festival two years ago. So when she said she was running another game in this year’s festival, I signed up.
The game ties into the Olympics in that it’s a “Lost Sport” that was allegedly banned in Ancient Greece. In cooperation with the Olympic Committee, Jane is running an entire alternative reality game around the sport. The linked wiki includes rules for the Lost Sport itself, aka “The Labyrinth”.
The idea is that a labyrinth is laid out (Jane used chalk yesterday, but string can also be used). A set of people stand on the lines of the labyrinth to form the walls. A blindfolded runner is placed in the center of the labyrinth, and has to make their way out as fast as possible. The wall can guide the runner by humming; in particular, the people ahead of the runner hum, and stop humming as the runner passes them, so the runner just runs in the direction of the hum.
While being in the wall might seem boring, it turned out there were several subtleties. For instance, realizing that the runner runs in the direction of the hum means that you need to stop humming before the runner gets to you, or they’ll run into you. Also, only hum when you have direct line-of-sight to the runner or they’ll run into the wall - the labyrinth has 180-degree corners which are very confusing if the wall doesn’t coordinate the humming. It helps to stick your head out into the middle of the walkway when humming so that the runner can run directly toward the hum.
The really fun bit is that there aren’t enough people to form the walls of the full labyrinth. So after the runner passes you, you have to get ahead of the runner to form the walls that don’t exist yet. Since the labyrinth is approximately circular, the best strategy we came up with was to have both sides of the labyrinth take a step outward, rather than trying to have the inner wall people squeeze through to form the outer wall. Towards the end, as the numbers dwindled, we didn’t even have enough people to do that, so things got pretty silly as the wall raced to try to stay ahead of the runner. We had one runner actually outrun the wall which left him very confused.
I like that the game is cooperative and competitive at the same time - each labyrinth is working with the runner to get faster times, but you can have multiple labyrinths competing against each other (we had four labyrinths side-by-side in Central Park yesterday, and Jane was in contact with other labyrinths in Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo, each competing for the best times). As an example of how the teamwork of the labyrinth really matters, one runner yesterday set a world record of under 14 seconds, and wanted to take another crack at beating that record at the end. We formed a labyrinth out of the remaining people, and it just didn’t work. Each of the four labyrinths had devised their own strategies, and we were bumping into each other and not being coordinated. Apparently, it had taken several runs for him to get that world record time as everybody learned where and when to hum and move.
I haven’t looked into the larger alternative reality game yet, but I really enjoyed the “Lost Sport”. I’ll keep an eye out for future labyrinth runs in New York.
On Monday night, I went to a talk by William Duggan, a Columbia business school professor who studies strategy, on a concept that he calls strategic intuition. Duggan has written a book on the subject, and has set up a blog to discuss the concept.
Duggan started by discussing the differences between expert intuition and strategic intuition. Expert intuition is built up by practice and familiarity with situations, of the sort described by Gary Klein in Sources of Power or Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. Expert intuition is using one’s built-up experience to instantly and unconsciously recognize the right thing to do in a familiar situation or its variants.
Duggan then differentiated strategic intuition by explaining that strategic intuition is the ability to recombine previous ideas into a wholly new pattern to address new situations. He uses von Clausewitz’s strategic primer, On War, to describe the process:
Clausewitz gives us four steps. First, you take in “examples from history” throughout your life and put them on the shelves of your brain. Study can help, by putting more there. Second comes “presence of mind,” where you free your brain of all preconceptions about what problem you’re solving and what solution might work. Third comes the flash of insight itself. Clausewitz called it coup d’oeil, which is French for “glance.” In a flash, a new combination of examples from history fly off the shelves of your brain and connect. Fourth comes “resolution,” or determination, where you not only say to yourself, “I see!”, but also, “I’ll do it!”
The rest of Duggan’s talk was describing different examples of strategic intuition, such as Napoleon’s strategy in a critical battle. He pointed out that none of these people invented something new - they just recombined previous elements in new ways. For instance, he described the Google guys as combining data mining techniques from their academic research, AltaVista’s search crawling, the idea of academic citations used as a ranking method, and Overture’s ad placement. Duggan gleefully used T.S. Eliot’s quote “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal” to illustrate the value of looking out into the world to find the missing piece that might make all the difference.
I like the strategic intuition concept in general. I’ve experienced that flash of insight a few times; as I describe in my cognitive subroutines post, “I had one of those moments where I connected a bunch of ideas, and synapses lit up”. Strategic intuition also appeals to me in that it provides a useful role for a generalist; specialists excel at expert intuition, but only generalists can bring the wide-ranging set of ideas and freedom from preconceptions that are necessary for strategic intuition in Duggan’s model.
I am a bit skeptical of how well supported this model is. He claims it’s based off the intelligent memory hypothesis of how the brain works, which I assume is what is described by Hawkins in On Intelligence. I see how that would apply to expert intuition, which builds in common responses at lower layers of the neocortex, but it would seem to fall short in strategic intuition. This may be answered in his book, so I may have to pick that up at some point (after I’ve finished the ten books lying on my floor in various stages of completion).
I’m also skeptical of Duggan’s contention that this primarily happens in the mind of one person. He started the talk by asking people where they got their good ideas, and got answers like “in the shower”, “while running”, and “late at night” and used those answers to scoff at the value of typical group brainstorming sessions. I find this interesting, because I think by talking, and often get great ideas in conversation with others. If gathering a bunch of ideas into one’s brain is advantageous for strategic intuition, it would seem to be even better to combine the ideas across two or more brains. Thinking by myself often gets me stuck in ruts that I can’t escape (which makes me unable to achieve the “presence of mind” Duggan cites as being key), and talking to somebody else breaks me out of those ruts. It seemed like Duggan undervalues the role that conversation with others can play in strategic intuition (again, perhaps something he covers more in the book). I think this is one of the roles that a generalist plays - being able to combine ideas from multiple people to create flashes of insight that could not be conceived from within any one person.
Duggan’s concept of strategic intuition does help to answer a question I’ve been struggling with since watching a Malcolm Gladwell talk about what constitutes genius. In that talk, Gladwell differentiates between genius and expertise. Genius is just being flat-out smarter and seeing things others can’t. Gladwell uses the example of Michael Ventris, the man who was able to decipher the Linear B language in a couple years in his spare time, after others had spent decades trying to figure it out. Other examples would be people like Einstein or Tesla.
Gladwell contrasts genius with expertise by citing the “10,000 hour rule”, where he claims that it takes 10,000 hours (approximately 3 hours a day for 10 years) of deliberate practice to become a world-class expert at something. Gladwell finds it interesting that talent or genius has almost nothing to do with it - if you have the persistence to put in that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, you will be an expert. He uses the interesting example of Roger Wiles proving Fermat’s Last Theorem - Wiles wasn’t a genius, and was not particularly gifted among mathematicians, but Gladwell observes that he was probably the first mathematician to just work at Fermat’s Last Theorem for 10,000 hours and he eventually cracked it. Another example would be somebody like Edison with his 99% perspiration quote.
The 10,000 hour rule really dismayed me when I first heard Gladwell speak about it partially because it makes so much sense. It takes that sort of dedicated repetition and practice to build up the unconscious machinery and cognitive subroutines to see beyond the basics. This applies in games like chess and tennis, where dedicated prodigies can become world-class competitors as teenagers (ten years after they start), as well as most careers. And the question that faced me was where I was spending my 10,000 hours.
Duggan’s talk gives me some hope in providing a new framework for the value a generalist might have. Strategic intuition is the ability to bring disparate elements together by seeing the world with a fresh perspective (what von Clausewitz called “presence of mind”), which is precisely the value I hope to achieve as a generalist. Rather than extend the limits of an existing field as an expert might do, it’s the ability to remix fields and combine them in new ways. I wonder if it’s possible to spend my 10,000 hours as a generalist, and, as Seth Godin put it, specialize in being a generalist. I guess we’ll find out.
I’ve been out of touch for a bit (I officially graduated from Columbia as evidenced by the happy cap’n'gown icon to the left, then ran off to California to marry my sister off and see some friends afterwards, and then was struck down by a bug from all the excitement), but it’s time to get back into the blogging habit. But we’ll ease back into it with a less serious post.
I’ve been thinking about the difference between New York and the Bay Area, partially because I just visited California and everybody asked me what I thought of New York, and partially because I’m starting to try to figure out where I want to end up long-term. It’s also a relevant topic on teh Intarweb, as Paul Graham wrote an essay comparing various cities, with a focus on New York vs. San Francisco vs. Boston. So I’m going to over-generalize wildly with my takes on the various cities, since those are the three cities I have experience with as an adult.
My typical response when asked what New York is like is to comment that everybody who comes to New York does so to rule the world. They may be in finance or art or fashion or media or theater, but they come to New York to be the best in the world at what they do. There is a palpable energy and ambition about New Yorkers and everything moves faster here as a result. It’s an exhausting environment of people who work hard and then play hard by staying out all night enjoying the nightlife available only in New York.
Another thing I’ve noticed about New Yorkers is that they tend to play the finite game they are given. While they want to be the best, they tend to define “the best” in terms of the industry/field as it currently exists. So they work their way up through the ranks, and look for chances for their big break. This playing within the system tends to promote a competitive zero-sum attitude, as there is a limited amount of attention in any field, and if I have the attention, you don’t. New Yorkers love working out ways to game the rules and beat the system (as evidenced by lengthy discussions about apartment searches), but tend not to question the rules themselves. Some people are working on this, including Charlie with nextNY (who has his own scathing response defending New York), but it’s a lot of inertia to overcome.
In contrast, I think the Bay Area culture tends to be more laid-back. People come to California to chill out rather than to rule the world. This isn’t to say that Bay Area folks don’t work hard, but I know very few people in California who work the 14-hour days that many New Yorkers do. Bay Area’ers do their jobs and do them well, but also spend more time enjoying other pursuits, especially the great parks available in the Bay Area (psst: for those about to give me specific examples of relaxed New Yorkers or driven Bay Area’ers, remember that I’m overgeneralizing wildly).
I also think the Bay Area culture tends to be more collaborative, partially as a result of being more innovative. There are lots of ideas in the world, and lots of ways in which everybody can succeed. People in the Bay Area aren’t working within a system which can only crown a few winners - they are each working on their own thing, so there’s no direct competition (well, except for human resources). This promotes a more non-zero-sum attitude towards the world, one where people can look for ways to help everybody win. When presented with a system, people in the Bay Area look for ways to change the rules rather than beat the system. I’m not sure why that is, whether it’s the strong startup culture, or the liberal Berkeley political heritage that questioned the system, but I feel like more people there are playing the infinite game.
To take a specific example of this dichotomy, several teachers in the Columbia program said “If you don’t learn to play golf, you’re never going to move up in the world.” It’s just taken as an axiom that to move up the corporate ranks, golf courses are the place to do it because that’s where the power brokers are. In the Bay Area, my friends at Squid Labs tell me that “kite surfing is the new golf”, because all the young tech CEOs love this crazy intense sport, including the Google founders.
I also disagree with Graham that Boston is about ideas. Boston is about tradition. Boston is America’s oldest city, and families have lived there for generations. This pervasive sense of history, where you walk by Revolutionary War sites on a daily basis, creates a degree of conservatism, not in a political sense, but in the sense that people are bound by the way things are. I think that’s one of the reasons startups have not been as successful in Boston - the people who would break tradition in that way just don’t fit in, as they have to overcome more inertia both socially and resource-wise. Rather than fight that inertia, they move to California instead, where there is no history to overcome and everybody’s on equal terms as newcomers.
I agree with Graham that the culture of academia which pervades Cambridge values smart people and ideas, but it values the way things are done more. For instance, tenure seems to be a completely broken system that doesn’t reward the best ideas or the best people, instead rewarding those that don’t rock the boat. Professors don’t like new ideas that might threaten their academic turf; as several people have quipped: “Academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so low”.
I was trying to think of what the Midwest is about, as that’s where I grew up. I think the Midwest might be about community and, more specifically, family. I haven’t thought about it as much, as I’m extremely unlikely to move back there, but that feels right. Midwesterners are about having a family, creating a good life for your kids, helping out the neighbors, supporting the local teams, etc.
Now that I’ve found a way to offend people from every place I’ve lived, my over-generalized summary is that New Yorkers want to rule the world, where Bay Area’ers want to change the world. It’s not scientific at all, but it’s a topic I’ve been thinking about as I try to figure out where I fit in best, and where I want to end up in the long term. Comments definitely appreciated about both my observations and where I might fit.
Continuing on my recent theme of zero-sum vs. non-zero-sum thinking in management, today I want to discuss two different communication styles, which I am calling adversarial and collaborative.
The adversarial style is essentially the Thunderdome approach to communication: “Two ideas enter, one idea leaves.” The default assumption of the adversarialist is that the other person’s ideas are wrong. The other person must prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their ideas are right. The adversarialist believes that good ideas are forged through the crucible of conflict, and that weaknesses in an idea must be attacked in order to make the idea stronger. Adversarialists like arguments and battles; in a zero-sum adversarial discussion, if one person wins, the other person loses, so every point of discussion is a skirmish in the larger battle and it is easy to keep track of the results.
The advantage of this style is that it forces every idea to be examined. An adversarial debate sparks research, as one must buttress every point in one’s argument with solid evidence to ensure that there are no weak points that can be attacked by one’s opponent. Courtrooms use the adversarial style (prosecutor vs. defendant) to ensure that every piece of evidence is considered when determining the path of justice. The adversarial style also taps into the motivating power of competition; people want to win, and being in a battle gives them incentive to do whatever it takes to do so.
The adversarial style has many disadvantages, though. For one thing, if a discussion is framed as a battle, it creates opponents of people who perhaps should be on the same side (e.g. departments within a company), making it hard for them to collaborate towards their common goals after the “battle”. The psychological principles of commitment and consistency described by Cialdini play a role here; because we want to remain consistent with what we have said previously, once we start arguing for a side, we believe in it more and become unable to see the value of the other side. This can be destructive if the sides need to work together after the decision has been made, as they will no longer perceive themselves as sharing common ground.
The adversarial style is also destructive for morale; just as it is thrilling to win, it is demoralizing to lose. People go into withdrawal after losing, and will not be as productive. A company that has to rely on the losers of the discussion to implement the decision will probably fail, as those people will not believe in the solution and not be motivated to implement it.
One last issue with the adversarial style that specifically affects managers is that it is difficult to have a true discussion if there is a power differential between the participants. The adversarial style only works if both sides are doing everything they can to win the discussion, but most employees will not dare to contradict their bosses too often. In such discussions, the boss will consistently win, believing that their idea has won on its merits, but the idea will not really be tested until it is exposed to true competition, such as when the product idea goes to the marketplace. Reading Chip Kidd’s book The Learners reminded me of Stanley Milgram’s experiment, a disquieting example of how the presence of authority can alter people’s normal reactions beyond all recognition.
Another style of discussion is the collaborative style. Participants in a collaborative style make the default assumption that the other person’s idea is right, and they just aren’t understanding the idea correctly. When there is confusion, they ask the other person to please explain the idea again, and then restate the idea in their own words to confirm that they are “getting” it. People in a collaborative discussion build off of each others’ good ideas, working together to create something new (shades of Hegel here, where the adversarial style is thesis and antithesis, and the collaborative style is synthesis). The collaborative style assumes that all participants are working towards the same goal, and they are helping each other towards achieving that goal. It’s a non-zero-sum game - everybody can win, as the final idea might include contributions from every participant.
The advantage of the collaborative style is in what happens after the discussion. Because everybody was involved in making the final decision, they feel more invested in the result and are more motivated to implement that result. There are no losers who hang their heads afterwards; even the people whose ideas weren’t used will feel that their ideas were considered fairly as everybody took the time to understand their point. By working together, people create better ideas than when they feel obliged to stick to a side.
The disadvantage of the collaborative style is that it isn’t competitive. Because people’s egos are not on the line, ideas may not get criticized as strongly as they would in the adversarial style. Issues that would have been addressed in a gladiatorial style argument may not be seen in an environment where people are trying to build on each other’s ideas rather than destroy them. While the urge to compete and win is primal, collaboration is slightly less natural to us, so developing the habits to collaborate effectively may take some practice. There is no easy way to keep score in a collaborative discussion, so it is less appealing to those who want a quantitative way to track their status.
I have an obvious bias here. I believe strongly in the collaborative communication style. I think there may be areas where the adversarial style is more appropriate, such as between organizations or in the courtrooms as I mentioned, but within a single company, the collaborative style makes much more sense to me. When everybody is nominally on the same side, and the people involved in the discussion will have to implement the decision, having a collaborative discussion seems like it will be far more effective in the long run than an adversarial discussion where half the people feel like losers afterwards.
I also think the collaborative style is far more human - we should give our fellow employees the benefit of the doubt, to believe that they are trying to contribute something of value to the discussion. We should try to understand their point and extract the value of their experience even if we don’t initially understand. This creates a more generous and motivated environment, where everybody will feel more involved in decisions being made, and the company as a whole can only benefit.
As those of you who follow my other feeds know, I’ve taken up playing ultimate frisbee again with the Manhattan Ultimate league. While the main benefit is getting back into shape after two years of class-induced neglect, I also really enjoy playing ultimate because of the philosophy baked into the rules of the game.
If you’re not familiar with ultimate, the rules are pretty simple. On a field with two end zones, two teams of seven line up, one on each end line. One team starts the point by throwing the disc to the other. The disc can only be advanced by throwing to a teammate - once you catch the disc, you can’t continue running, and must hold a pivot foot stationary. If a pass is not completed, the other team takes over going the other way. Score by catching a pass in the end zone.
These rules make ultimate a truly team-oriented sport. An individual player can’t take over the game single-handedly, the way they do in basketball or football or baseball, because every pass involves two players. The way for an individual player to excel is to make their teammates better. When they don’t have the disc, they can help their teammates by getting wide open, or by rescuing poorly thrown passes with great catches. Once they catch the disc, their teammates don’t have to get as open because a good thrower will put it right into their hands away from the defender.
The best teams use everybody on the field, creating spacing with different people going in different directions. For instance, because I’m tall and relatively fast, I often run downfield routes, where my teammates can just put the disc up high and expect me to either out-run or out-jump my defender. Other teammates who have more agility dart in and out with underneath routes. Players who have good throwing skills hang back to give their teammates an easy throw when they get in trouble. You need a good mix of skills on the field working together to achieve success.
What’s interesting to me is the management lessons that can be learned from ultimate frisbee. Different sports lend themselves to different management practices. Football is a typical hierarchy, with a coach and a quarterback leading the troops in precision maneuvers. Basketball is like a design firm, with individual superstars able to freelance their way to excellence. I think ultimate frisbee is a great model for understanding the distributed management style necessary for knowledge workers, where everybody has their own expertise to contribute.
Like the good ultimate player, good managers of knowledge workers make their employees and coworkers look good by setting things up to be easy for them. They know their coworkers’ strengths and weaknesses and find ways to accentuate the strengths and minimize the weaknesses (like me running deep in ultimate where I can use my height and speed, without worrying as much about my weaker throwing skills). They don’t need to take credit for themselves, because they know that the team being more successful is credit enough. Returning to my current non-zero-sum theme, they realize that “growing the pie” of success will reward them far more than trying to grab a bigger share of credit for the existing “pie”.
Bad managers, on the other hand, are playing the zero-sum game, trying to make themselves look good at the expense of their employees. They are the ones who take personal credit for anything their group does, but makes sure to blame mistakes on their employees. The ultimate frisbee equivalent would be prima donnas who, while having superior skills, yell at their teammates about making mistakes, and making them miserable. Soon enough, their teammates stop caring and stop running as hard, and the prima donna has created a self-fulfilling prophecy of bad teammates.
Another interesting parallel between ultimate and management is that it takes time for teams to jell. While it’s fun to play pickup games in ultimate where you choose sides and go, teams improve immeasurably by playing together and learning each other’s tendencies. You learn which routes people like to run, which throws your teammates have (which influences which routes you run when they have the disc), how to cover for each other on defense, etc. And each team and each combination of players is different - in this league, our team has actually been suffering from having too many subs for each game, as the team can’t quite settle into a rhythm because each point has a different combination of players.
A good manager needs the same sort of time to make their team most efficient. It takes time to learn how different team members think, how best to work with them and persuade them. Building a team is a long process, as each person needs to develop trust and respect for their teammates, and find a role for themselves within the team, a place where they can specialize in a way that plays to their strengths. Following Katzenbach’s formula, they must also develop a common group purpose and accountability, such that they believe in the team and will do what is necessary to make the team successful, rather than looking out for themselves in a zero-sum way.
As an aside, I just re-read the Katzenbach post and realized that good ultimate frisbee teams match up perfectly with his criteria for teams: small number (7 on the field), complementary skills (handlers, mids, and deeps), common purpose and performance goals (scoring and winning), common approach (teams that are successful work together in a coherent fashion), and mutual accountability (it’s almost funny how many people on an ultimate team try to take the blame after a close loss - everybody focuses on the mistakes they made that cost the team a couple points).
I’m not saying all managers should go out and take up ultimate frisbee (okay, that’d actually be kind of cool), but I did find it interesting that this mindset of non-zero-sum thinking about management had me seeing the same lessons so clearly on the ultimate frisbee field. This may just be another example of me taking a single perspective and seeing it everywhere, but I think that ultimate frisbee may be a good exemplar for truly distributed management techniques, the sort that would be appropriate in a knowledge worker economy.
I’ve heard great things about Ideo, often called the leading product design firm in the world. Last year, in my “Managing Innovation” class, we watched a Nightline special called the Deep Dive, where Nightline gave Ideo one week to re-design the shopping cart. It was a great look inside the company’s innovation process, and it left me wanting to learn more. So I bought The Art of Innovation, a book describing that process by one of their general managers, and finally got a chance to read it last week once classes were done.
The book starts their redesign of the shopping cart for the Nightline special as an illustration of their innovation process:
I’m a big fan of this process, as might be expected since I advocate rapid prototyping whenever possible. The knowledge gained by letting users interact with prototypes lets you hone in on what’s important and what’s not.
The rest of the book is a collection of a whole variety of techniques that Ideo uses to spur innovative thinking, and how it has created a culture conducive to such thinking. So there are chapters on each of the steps above (observation, brainstorming, prototyping, etc.), but there are other chapters on culture concepts like “Expect the Unexpected”, “Barrier Jumping”, and “Coloring Outside the Lines”.
One of my favorite ideas of the book was to create the advertisement before you create the product. Take the time to make a print ad or a 30-second video that extols the benefits of the product you are creating. This focuses the team on what they are trying to accomplish with the design. I can think of a few projects I’ve been on where asking these sorts of questions at the beginning would have saved us lots of time and effort later.
I think the book may actually work better as a reference than as a narrative. While it was well-written and easy to read, the density of ideas was overwhelming - there were too many good ideas to keep track of, so I only remember a few. I’ll definitely keep this book on my bookshelf at work and flip through it whenever I’m feeling stuck and need some inspiration. I highly recommend it.
I knew the biologists better, though, and said “Here’s a tool to dump the data to Excel, where you can graph it yourself and play with the data directly”. They started playing around, figured out the two or three critical pieces of data for what they were observing, and then I built them an analysis tool that graphed only those pieces of data. We had a working solution before the “real” software team had even completed their design of the singing, dancing, do-everything software that had been requested in their naive requirements gathering process.
Seth Godin is one of my favorite writers, but I have to take exception to his latest post called We specialize in everything:
When choice is limited, I want a generalist. When selection is difficult, a jack of all trades is just fine.
But whenever possible, please bring me a brilliant specialist.
If you’re shaking your head in agreement with this obvious point, then the question is: tell me again why you’re a generalist?
He later added a coda suggesting the idea of specializing in being a generalist, but sticks to his guns that “My point is that you never call on these people [generalists] when there’s a better specialist available.”
As somebody who has branded himself as an unrepentant generalist, I have to respond from my admittedly biased viewpoint.
I actually agree to some extent with Godin’s point. As The Only Sustainable Edge points out, specialization drives greater achievement in a given field, as monomaniacs achieve a level of focus that dabblers can not. Specialization also implies that only those who are truly passionate about a field will commit to the field and become the best in the world at what they do.
I think the flaw in Godin’s argument is revealed in his second paragraph: “If I need an animator, I can find the world’s best animator.” Here’s the subtle point: how do you know that you need an animator? That seems like a trivial question, but it gets to the heart of why generalists matter. Once you have defined the problem, and scoped it, and figured out exactly what skill set you need to solve your problem, then of course you’d hire the best person you can find with that skill set.
Specialists only know how to attack problems in one way - that’s part of specializing. To be the best at what they do, they have to ignore other ways of approaching the world and shut out other perspectives. A specialist is the proverbial hammer treating every problem as a nail.
So when you have a problem, how do you determine which specialist to use? Each specialist will tell you their skill set is the right one to solve the problem, because if they didn’t believe in the power of their specialization, they wouldn’t be a specialist. You need a generalist, somebody who can evaluate the problem from multiple perspectives. and who can ensure that the specialists picked will fix the real problem rather than a symptom.
The other absolutely vital role for generalists is in communication. Specialists see the world from their perspective, so for them to communicate with other specialists requires a generalist who knows enough of each specialization and its jargon to be able to translate between the worlds. This is a role that I have been very successful in filling at all of my different companies, especially on the interdisciplinary team of CellKey, where we had physicists, biologists, engineers and software developers all working together on the same product. Without a generalist, you have specialists talking past each other, and their effort is wasted because you can’t get them all working together and speaking the same language.
Maybe this is what Godin meant when he suggested one could specialize as a generalist, but I think that his post overestimates the value of skill alone, and underestimates the social difficulties of selecting and aligning specialists. The problems of language alignment and of picking the right team of specialists are where generalists provide value in a way that specialists can’t, precisely because they’re specialists.
A few months ago, I read a post calling for authors for a book called The Age of Conversation. It sounded interesting, so I put in my name and will be one of 275 people (listed below) contributing a single page 400-word essay on the theme of “Why Don’t People Get It?”
Here’s where I need your help. When I signed up several months ago, May 15th, the deadline for contributions, seemed eons away. But May 15th is suddenly next week, and because I’ve been distracted by finishing up my degree, I haven’t started on my essay yet. I signed up to write on the topic of Business Model Evolution, and could use some help in brainstorming. I have the noodlings of some ideas, but I’m sure I can do better with the help of another few people.
Also, if anybody is willing to be an editor, that’d be great as well. I would just post drafts here on the blog, but the organizers have requested that essays not be posted before the book is released.
Thanks!
P.S. Following the lead of other authors, here’s the list of all 275 contributors with links to their online presences: Adam Crowe, Adrian Ho, Aki Spicer, Alex Henault, Amy Jussel, Andrew Odom, Andy Nulman, Andy Sernovitz, Andy Whitlock, Angela Maiers, Ann Handley, Anna Farmery, Armando Alves, Arun Rajagopal, Asi Sharabi, Becky Carroll, Becky McCray, Bernie Scheffler, Bill Gammell, Bob Carlton, Bob LeDrew, Brad Shorr, Bradley Spitzer, Brandon Murphy, Branislav Peric, Brent Dixon, Brett Macfarlane, Brian Reich, C.C. Chapman, Cam Beck, Casper Willer, Cathleen Rittereiser, Cathryn Hrudicka, Cedric Giorgi, Charles Sipe, Chris Kieff, Chris Cree, Chris Wilson, Christina Kerley (CK), C.B. Whittemore, Clay Parker Jones, Chris Brown, Colin McKay, Connie Bensen, Connie Reece, Cord Silverstein, Corentin Monot, Craig Wilson, Daniel Honigman, Dan Goldstein, Dan Schawbel, Dana VanDen Heuvel, Dan Sitter, Daria Radota Rasmussen, Darren Herman, Darryl Patterson, Dave Davison, Dave Origano, David Armano, David Bausola, David Berkowitz, David Brazeal, David Koopmans, David Meerman Scott, David Petherick, David Reich, David Weinfeld, David Zinger, Deanna Gernert, Deborah Brown, Dennis Price, Derrick Kwa, Dino Demopoulos, Doug Haslam, Doug Meacham, Doug Mitchell, Douglas Hanna, Douglas Karr, Drew McLellan, Duane Brown, Dustin Jacobsen, Dylan Viner, Ed Brenegar, Ed Cotton, Efrain Mendicuti, Ellen Weber, Emily Reed, Eric Peterson, Eric Nehrlich, Ernie Mosteller, Faris Yakob, Fernanda Romano, Francis Anderson, G. Kofi Annan, Gareth Kay, Gary Cohen, Gaurav Mishra, Gavin Heaton, Geert Desager, George Jenkins, G.L. Hoffman, Gianandrea Facchini, Gordon Whitehead, Graham Hill, Greg Verdino, Gretel Going & Kathryn Fleming, Hillel Cooperman, Hugh Weber, J. Erik Potter, J.C. Hutchins, James Gordon-Macintosh, Jamey Shiels, Jasmin Tragas, Jason Oke, Jay Ehret, Jeanne Dininni, Jeff De Cagna, Jeff Gwynne, Jeff Noble, Jeff Wallace, Jennifer Warwick, Jenny Meade, Jeremy Fuksa, Jeremy Heilpern, Jeremy Middleton, Jeroen Verkroost, Jessica Hagy, Joanna Young, Joe Pulizzi, Joe Talbott, John Herrington, John Jantsch, John Moore, John Rosen, John Todor, Jon Burg, Jon Swanson, Jonathan Trenn, Jordan Behan, Julie Fleischer, Justin Flowers, Justin Foster, Karl Turley, Kate Trgovac, Katie Chatfield, Katie Konrath, Kenny Lauer, Keri Willenborg, Kevin Jessop, Kris Hoet, Krishna De, Kristin Gorski, Laura Fitton, Laurence Helene Borei, Lewis Green, Lois Kelly, Lori Magno, Louise Barnes-Johnston, Louise Mangan, Louise Manning, Luc Debaisieux, Marcus Brown, Mario Vellandi, Mark Blair, Mark Earls, Mark Goren, Mark Hancock, Mark Lewis, Mark McGuinness, Mark McSpadden, Matt Dickman, Matt J. McDonald, Matt Moore, Michael Hawkins, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Michelle Lamar, Mike Arauz, Mike McAllen, Mike Sansone, Mitch Joel, Monica Wright, Nathan Gilliatt, Nathan Snell, Neil Perkin, Nettie Hartsock, Nick Rice, Oleksandr Skorokhod, Ozgur Alaz, Paul Chaney, Paul Hebert, Paul Isakson, Paul Marobella, Paul McEnany, Paul Tedesco, Paul Williams, Pet Campbell, Pete Deutschman, Peter Corbett, Phil Gerbyshak, Phil Lewis, Phil Soden, Piet Wulleman, Rachel Steiner, Sreeraj Menon, Reginald Adkins, Richard Huntington, Rishi Desai, Beeker Northam, Rob Mortimer, Robert Hruzek, Roberta Rosenberg, Robyn McMaster, Roger von Oech, Rohit Bhargava, Ron Shevlin, Ryan Barrett, Ryan Karpeles, Ryan Rasmussen, Sam Huleatt, Sandy Renshaw, Scott Goodson, Scott Monty, Scott Townsend, Scott White, Sean Howard, Sean Scott, Seni Thomas, Seth Gaffney, Shama Hyder, Sheila Scarborough, Sheryl Steadman, Simon Payn, Sonia Simone, Spike Jones, Stanley Johnson, Stephen Collins, Stephen Cribbett, Stephen Landau, Stephen Smith, Steve Bannister, Steve Hardy, Steve Portigal, Steve Roesler, Steven Verbruggen, Steve Woodruff, Sue Edworthy, Susan Bird, Susan Gunelius, Susan Heywood, Tammy Lenski, Terrell Meek, Thomas Clifford, Thomas Knoll, Tiffany Kenyon, Tim Brunelle, Tim Buesing, Tim Connor, Tim Jackson, Tim Longhurst, Tim Mannveille, Tim Tyler, Timothy Johnson, Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Toby Bloomberg, Todd Andrlik, Troy Rutter, Troy Worman, Uwe Hook, Valeria Maltoni, Vandana Ahuja, Vanessa DiMauro, Veronique Rabuteau, Wayne Buckhanan, William Azaroff, Yves Van Landeghem
