Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

Golly. Three months without posting. But things have calmed down at work, I took a few days off for Burning Man two weekends ago, and I slept most of this past weekend, and, hey, look, I have things to say again. Well, actually, I’ve had things to say for months, but not the energy to write them up after work. And it didn’t help that I felt like I had to write something _really_ insightful or amazing to justify posting after such a long drought. But that’s silly, so this week I’m going to try to post multiple times to try to start the habit back up again.

I had a small-world moment with a friend I was meeting at Burning Man, where we discovered multiple separate paths through social space by which we could have known each other (otherwise known as small world syndrome, where it seems like new people we meet always know people that we know). I’ve talked about small world syndrome before as an example of reality coefficients, where our social worlds are so small because we only interact with people who share our view of reality.

I also had a large-world moment a few weeks ago, when I attended a housewarming party where I really only knew the host, putting me in a large room of people where I didn’t know anybody. And I chatted with several folks and realized that their social world didn’t overlap with mine at all except through this one friend we had in common. It was an interesting experience, as what little social time I have had outside of work over the past year has been spent with my close friends, so I’d been enveloped in my small world. It was good for me to step outside it and remember there are all these people I don’t know, whose worlds might be interesting and worth checking out.

I think there’s value in both experiences. Being in a small world is comforting – it provides a place where our values are reinforced and where basic worldview assumptions don’t have to be defended. But it is also limiting in preventing us from having new experiences, from challenging our beliefs – it makes it more difficult to grow. Part of the reason I moved to New York was that I felt like I was in a rut in the Bay Area, where my world had gotten too small, so it was time for me to step out into the larger world.

However, being in a large world has a separate set of issues. It does provide challenges and new experiences, but it also requires one to be always “on”, which can become exhausting. Some people thrive on the constant shiny newness, but I am not one of them. That was one of the reasons I moved back to California, with the goal of taking what I’d learned about large-world living in New York and balancing it with my small worlds in the Bay Area.

We choose the mix of small worlds and large worlds we live in. Some people choose to live within a small world their entire life (e.g. somebody living in a small town, or somebody who spends all their time on one interest like sports or video games), prioritizing comfort over growth. Others choose the large-world life of novelty, traveling the world, constantly throwing themselves into new situations for the sheer thrill of it. And every possibility in between is available, with small worlds and large worlds overlapping in interesting and unexpected ways, such as becoming the common element between multiple small worlds.

I also think it’s interesting that we call out “small world moments” when we find a surprising social connection that makes the world smaller, but don’t similarly call out “large world moments” when we step into a new and different world. I suppose that’s because “large world moments” are the default, as we don’t expect to know strangers, and our brains are wired to remember exceptions. But it might be good to observe the “large world moments” as well, to remind ourselves that the default expectation is the default for a reason.

I don’t really have a point here, but thought it was interesting to contemplate both why the world is occasionally small, and, more regularly, large, and how we can choose the mix of small and large worlds that we live in. And it is a choice – it’s up to us to change our worlds when they are not currently suiting our desired identity (if we change our environment, we change who we are). We design ourselves by choosing our context, and we must choose to be active designers.

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.

I flew up to my parents’ house yesterday, and our plane came in late due to storms. Over the intercom, the flight attendant said that there was “a newlywed couple in row 14 trying to make a tight connection to their flight to Amsterdam, so if rows 1-13 can please let them through before getting up, they’d really appreciate it.” I leaned over to my sister, and said that such an appeal would never work, as I’d seen it fail on a couple other flights. My sister said she’d seen it work several times, and, in fact, the first 13 rows did stay seated until the couple got to the front of the plane.

I was trying to figure out what was different about this time versus the other times I’d seen it fail, and realized that it was the specificity of the appeal. On the other flights I remember, the flight attendant said “We have several people trying to make close connections, please let them through”, and that appeal had no effect, as everybody considered themselves to have close connections, so everybody got up. What was effective this time was that the flight attendant had framed it as a story – the one-line story of the couple trying to get to Amsterdam reified them in our brains as “real” people. The story also invoked our social sense, and made us defer to them as we would for any member of our community.

To give more background on my thinking, my post on the ultimatum game explores how our brains react differently when we have a one-off transaction with somebody (where we try to get all that we can from that transaction) versus how we react when we are part of a community (where fairness becomes a factor as we’ll have to interact with them again in the future). I also argue in the following post that we can use stories to expand our “monkeysphere”, the number of people that we consider to be “real” people as opposed to strangers who we distrust and/or take advantage of.

Making people persons by associating stories with them comes up in many different situations that I can think of:

• One obvious application is that of user interface design, where I’ve been heavily influenced by Alan Cooper’s tactic of using personas to model real users. In particular, one of the reasons I was effective as a software developer is that I was always developing software for specific people with whom I interacted, rather than for a generic “user”. Because my target audience was specific and real and I knew the stories of how they worked, my software was more effective at helping those people accomplish their goals.
• Another example is in the area of management, especially in the creation of a divide between managers and workers. When the two sides don’t know each other, there is the tendency to ascribe the worst motivations to the other side, and assume that they are actively working towards one’s destruction. But both sides are just fallible humans doing the best they can. Sometimes there are no good choices as a manager, and the manager is doing the best he or she can under the circumstances. As somebody who interacted with both sides, I saw both viewpoints and therefore couldn’t demonize the managers as arrogant control freaks or the workers as entitled whiners. I couldn’t flatten them out into stereotypes, as their stories kept them real people to me.
• One last example is in the area of politics, and specifically homosexuality. I grew up in a very sheltered and religious suburb of Chicago, where the default assumption was that homosexuals were deviant and evil. When I got to MIT, and found myself living in a house with such people, I was initially wary. But of course, once I got to know them as people, I realized how stupid and broken the stereotypes in my head were. And this has been my observation of others as well – it’s difficult to treat somebody as a stereotype once you know them as a person, because their specific details supercede the stereotype in your head.

It takes practice to remember to treat others as people, and not as puppet players on whom you are projecting your own fears and hopes. I still fall into the trap of ascribing my own stories to other people and assuming the worst or best, and being surprised either way. Learning to treat others as real people in their own right remains a goal towards which I strive, and I think it’s an essential skill to learn in a massively networked world where we are always interacting with people outside of our own core community.

What do you think?

P.S. A friend’s new blog, Made of Happy, has a neat star rating WordPress plugin, and when I inquired about it, she said it was GD Star Rating, so I just installed it. Now you can provide feedback on my posts without the trouble of having to come up with a comment!

Earlier this week I switched my RSS reader from Bloglines to Google Reader.

I’d been meaning to check out Google Reader for months, if not years, but had never gotten around to it, as Bloglines was serving me well enough for what I needed, and I’d gotten used to its quirks.

But over the past couple weeks, Bloglines started failing at its primary purpose, delivering RSS feeds on demand, as it stopped properly updating feeds. It didn’t bother me too much at first as I was busy enough that reading blogs was a luxury, but it was starting to get annoying. And then somebody twittered about a TechCrunch article describing how Bloglines users were fleeing to Google Reader, which provided instructions on making the move. Ten seconds later, I was moved to Google Reader, and now I probably won’t go back.

Let’s parse out what happened here, as I think it’s instructive.

1. A few years ago, I started reading enough blogs that updated infrequently that checking them one by one was becoming ridiculous. So I started looking for an RSS reader, and chose Bloglines as it met my requirements well enough at the time (Barry Schwartz, of The Paradox of Choice, would call this “satisficing” – speaking of which, I need to review that book at some point). In particular, it was web-based so that I could read blogs from work or home without duplication, which was the key differentiator from Thunderbird, the other major contender.
2. I stuck with the choice for several years, even as bits of it started to annoy me, as the perceived switching costs were too high. Given that there are no lock-in effects in this software (no data that I couldn’t export), the switching costs were purely cognitive. In other words, the cognitive effort of switching was the major lock-in for this product. Also, the benefits of switching were minimal – Bloglines was meeting my needs, so it was unclear how other software would be better in that core functionality.
3. Once Bloglines started to fail in its primary purpose (making it easy for me to see the latest in my desired feeds), the benefit of switching became relatively greater (other RSS readers were succeeding where Bloglines was failing).
4. Once I read the TechCrunch article, I had “social proof”, the term Cialdini uses to label our tendency to want to see others doing something before doing it ourselves. Knowing that there were dozens of other people making me the same switch helped convince me to make the jump. That was the critical tipping point.
5. The actual switch took about ten seconds (export from Bloglines, import into Google Reader). To reiterate, the effort of switching had nothing to do with the actual work it would take to switch – it was the cognitive effort of having to re-open a decision that I had already made.

What’s my point here? In the Web world, switching is often fairly painless, as most vendors provide a way to easily get one’s data out of their system (and if they don’t, that’s a bad sign). Companies are generally relying on us to pick a system and get comfortable with it, so that habit and the perceived cognitive effort of making a change is a far greater impediment to switching than other possible lock-in effects. In such a situation, the company has to never make it easier to contemplate the switch; in other words, if the company continues to fulfill its value proposition to the user, users will stick around, but as soon as they lapse, users may leave in droves (as appears to be happening to Bloglines).

Another way of thinking about it is that the game between companies and users is all played in people’s minds. While economists may believe that people are rationally maximizing their potential economic gain, most of us are far less rational in our decision-making. We use brand names over equivalent generics because of advertising or because we “trust” the brand name more. We stick with products or services that are clearly inferior to newer ones because it’s too much effort to re-open the decision we originally made. Companies that understand this game will be telling stories to convince people to use their products or services, rather than trying to convince them with data. For instance, the book Positioning is all about creating new primary needs in the minds of consumers to give them the necessary impetus to switch.

So focus on the value proposition your company offers to its customers. If you can make sure that the value of your product keeps on increasing, you can benefit from the perceived effort of switching and keep customers even in situations where they might rationally choose another product or service. Ideally, of course, your product is the best in class, but every little edge counts, right?

Now I just have to get over the cognitive effort of switching from Windows to Mac…

P.S. I have been at Google for exactly one month as of today. Crazy how the time flies!

I’ve been meaning to get around to reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow for a while now, and finally got around to it recently after downloading it to my iPhone (thanks, Stanza!). The most recent trigger to read it was from Tara Hunt, who is writing a book called The Whuffie Factor using a term from Doctorow’s book.

Whuffie is an idea stemming from Doctorow’s examination of “reputation economies” and “post-scarcity social dynamics”. In the book, all physical needs are satisfied for free, health is guaranteed, etc. So how do people compare themselves to each other? What do they strive for? The answer is “Whuffie” – essentially a numeric indication of reputation. If you see somebody rudely push somebody else aside, you indicate a debit on the pusher’s Whuffie. If you see somebody do something notable or impressive or selfless, you indicate a credit. People with high Whuffie numbers are more respected and tend to be leaders as others defer to their “Whuffie”.

“Whuffie” is basically measuring social capital, but in a publicly visible easily adjustable way. You can see why this concept would interest me, given my social capitalist post from a couple months ago. In the circles of society where I typically hang out, it matters less how much you make or what you have bought – instead, people are judged by what they contribute, the fresh ideas and perspectives they bring, and what they are building in the world. In other words, social capital matters more than fiscal capital.

From a purely capitalistic perspective, this “economy” doesn’t make much sense – it violates capitalistic assumptions to do things to impress others without necessarily having a path towards extracting fiscal value. And yet, it turns out that the things done in this way sometimes create much more value than projects designed to extract ROI (return on investment). When Hugh MacLeod drew the Blue Monster cartoon for Microsoft, he did it as a one-off because he thought it expressed an interesting idea, never thinking it might turn into a consulting business as other companies try to hire him to create a similar cartoon to express their brand. Many of the “A-list” bloggers didn’t start blogging to get famous – they started because they just wanted to share their opinion with the world. It’s a peculiar paradox – doing something for intangible rewards can sometimes pay off in tangible rewards, but only if you are not doing it for the tangible rewards.

Building social capital involves approaching interactions from the perspective of what one can do to help others. It has to be done from a selfless perspective, because we humans are reasonably well-trained in detecting ulterior motives. It’s like using the techniques of Dale Carnegie – when used for good purposes, they increase the value of the interaction for everybody, but when used for selfish reasons, they are often perceived as clumsy attempts at manipulation. Trying to calculate every interaction in terms of how I can benefit is going to limit my upside, whereas trying to do good for others creates the potential for much bigger wins.

To take another perspective, this ties into my theme of non-zero-sum thinking from earlier in the summer. Trying to help others creates the possibility of “growing the pie” of finding solutions that help everybody rather than just oneself. Trying to be selfish may ensure a larger fraction of the pie, but limits the size of the pie. Building social capital is an exercise in building “non-zero-sum-ness”, to use Robert Wright’s term from his book Nonzero (which I will read one of these days, honest!).

I was going to add a disclaimer here that this idea of building social capital may only make sense in affluent developed societies, but I’m not sure I believe that (disclaimer: the following paragraph is a wild extrapolation based on nothing resembling facts or research). The cohesion of villages has a lot to do with social capital, as people know they will be judged long-term by how they behave towards others. They can’t just up and move away to escape a toxic environment they have created, so they have a better sense of the long-term. Also, without the capitalistic urge towards me-me-me, villagers are less concerned with “keeping up with the Joneses” and more about what will build their standing long-term in the community. I’m reminded of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which explores the powerful resonance of gift-giving in myths throughout many different cultures, where those who hoard are punished and those who give are rewarded.

I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this concept, but I feel like there’s an important idea hidden somewhere in here about how social capital and non-zero-sumness interact and what that implies about how I should be behaving. I guess I’m also trying to figure out a responses to Adam Smith capitalism where the “invisible hand” will make the system work if everybody diligently pursues their own self-interest. I think that we are seeing the limits of that system, and I’m trying to understand what the motivating assumptions of a new system would be. In a future post, perhaps I will figure out how one might design a company around such a “Whuffie” system to create the proper incentives for employees to think of the long-term and of others rather than hoping the “invisible hand” will take care of the company.

P.S. I realize I never actually mentioned the book itself. The book explores how the quest for “Whuffie” influences several characters in a future Disney World run by “adhocracies”, fluid networks of people who have chosen to help run the park (remember, nobody has to work in this future scenario). It was a quick, fun read, but the idea of “Whuffie” as a motivating factor in society was the most interesting concept to me.

Yesterday’s post on branding actually started because I have been thinking extensively about personal branding throughout my just-completed job search. Looking for a job entails trying to find a plausible intersection between one’s background and skills, one’s interests and career aspirations, and what a company needs. For a generalist like me, this gets particularly interesting as I have a broad background scattered across several industries and career paths, with a corresponding lack of specialized skills. Because most companies post specialized positions, my resume is generally not a good match, and so it is up to me to frame my background and experience in such a way as to make me attractive to the company.

This framing reflects the fact that interviewing is a sales process, convincing a company that what they need is what you offer. At one extreme, one can go about this dishonestly, puffing up one’s resume and claiming accomplishments that were driven by others. At the other extreme, one can be lucky enough to be a perfect fit for what a company needs (eight years ago, Signature BioScience’s job listing for a software engineer matched my resume perfectly, right down to the physics background). But in most cases, the situation is somewhere in between (note the similarities to yesterday’s post about the need for companies to frame their brand for potential customers).

What most job candidates don’t realize is that it’s up to the candidate to sell the company on themselves as a match. When looking at a resume or cover letter, companies are looking for a reason to say no and reduce their options, so if they have to work to figure out how and why a candidate would be a match for the position, the application gets rejected. I struggled with this in my recent job search, trying to find positions where I could plausibly match up aspects of my background with the posted requirements for a job. So I had to put together a cover letter for each potential position that drew the appropriate connections between what I’ve done and what the company needed.

Making these connections between seemingly disconnected topics turns out to be a great application of my ability to look at things from multiple perspectives. I can look at a job opening from the company’s perspective, and emphasize the relevant skills I could bring to that job. One mistake that many candidates make is thinking that it’s important for them to list off all of their positive attributes in their interview or resume, as they are looking at things from their own perspective. What’s more effective is to list only the positive attributes that are relevant to the company, and finding a way to turn what could be perceived negatives into positives. My Columbia mentor emphasized the importance of following up every negative with a positive e.g. “Well, I have not done that specifically, but I have done these other tasks that are similar in these ways.”

One other interesting development during this job search was my realization that I have become more comfortable with my personal brand as a generalist. I can admit to myself that I am better at thinking across disciplines and considering the big picture than I am at specializing and making sure all the details are right, instead of trying to be good at everything. This was a negative with many potential jobs – companies want to be able to abstract away details by hiring a specialist to handle them. So I rejected jobs in software development and project management, as those moved me further away from my strengths and interests. At one point in my life, I would have been far more concerned about trying to build on my previous background, and molding myself to fit those types of jobs. Instead, I stuck to my generalist brand, explaining to companies that I was better at figuring out how the pieces fit together into a coherent whole than I was at doing any of the individual pieces. Not everybody sees the value of that, but the ones that do are likely to be better places for me.

This gets back to the idea of embracing a specific vision for a brand rather than trying to be everything to everybody. It also has helped me start to zero in on the things I want to be doing, rather than the things I am necessarily qualified to do at this time. Part of what I want is to spend more time on the types of issues I discuss on this blog. Part of it is becoming an advisor of sorts, bringing the people around me a fresh perspective on themselves and their issues. Part of it is being a connector, figuring out which ideas go together, and which people should be talking to each other. It’s still an inchoate vision, but I think my friends are starting to see where I’m going with this and helping me to shape that vision and my future. And it’s a virtuous circle, as people’s perceptions reinforce my vision of myself which continues to shape people’s perceptions.

Part of what’s been good about this job search is realizing what I don’t want to do; as I expressed a few weeks ago, a vision is as much to determine what not to do as it is to determine what should be done. It’s been frustrating for my friends in that they wanted to help me find a job, but I kept on rejecting ideas that they had as not being quite right without being able to concisely express what why their ideas weren’t right. Being able to have a better answer for the kind of work I wanted to do is part of what I’m trying to figure out with my personal brand.

It’s also difficult because most job searches start with what one has done previously and building on that, but I was looking for something different than what I’ve done before so that I could continue to broaden my experience. I was looking for positions where my eclectic and broad background was an asset rather than a liability. One of the reasons I liked the Google position is that it draws on all aspects of my career so far – my analytical skills from my physics days, my technical understanding from my development days, and my developing business and strategy skills from the last three years – while giving me a chance to add yet more skills to my toolbox.

Getting back to the idea of personal branding, the difficulty of branding is not just deciding what one stands for, but ensuring that one’s brand is successfully communicated to one’s target audience. In the interview process, one must frame one’s personal career brand (project manager, software developer, or generalist) as being what the company is looking to hire. If one were looking to date, it’s projecting an appropriate image to attract the desired demographic. This is a tricky process, and gets back to the questions of morality and truth that I touched upon briefly in yesterday’s post. Who are we really? And what does that question even mean if one takes the idea of multiple social identities seriously?

Another concept I mentioned in yesterday’s branding post is the idea of enlisting customers as advocates – what would this mean in personal branding? In the realm of job searching, I think this is just networking, enlisting friends and former coworkers to help one find a new job. We all have friends who are looking out for us, and looking for ways to help us move forward – these are our advocates of our personal brand, whatever it is.

I like the idea of a personal brand, mostly as a way of framing for myself the decisions I’m making about the type of career I’m currently pursuing, the kind of person I want to be, and how I convey those decisions to other people. It’s the same problem that companies face when trying to define who they are in the marketplace, so applying similar techniques to my life would probably be helpful.

So what’s your personal brand? How would you define yourself in one sentence?

I have been thinking about the importance of having a vision recently, both in the context of companies and also my own life. The lessons of Built to Last continue to resonate with me, especially the message of “Preserve the core, but stimulate progress.” The companies that had long-term success were the ones that had a vision that gave them criteria by which to make decisions beyond merely making profits. This has also been recently relevant with the retirement of Bill Gates, as several articles mention Microsoft’s initial vision of putting a computer on every desk and in every home, an initially ludicrous idea that has now been mostly achieved in the developed world. Several commentators have felt that since achieving that goal, Microsoft has drifted in its focus, and needs a new vision to move them forward.

Vision is important because it provides constraints when making decisions. In some sense, vision answers a meta-question about decisions – how do we make decisions? Every decision at a company gets made by criteria which can range from “what will be the most profitable next quarter” to “whatever the boss says” to “our customer asked for it” to “what will be the most fun to do”. Without such decision-making criteria, every decision would take forever to make, as every possibility would have to be considered. The existence of such criteria constrains the decision space down to a manageable set of possibilities to be considered.

If those meta-criteria aren’t clear, though, then decision making becomes much harder. At each decision point, the question is first “how will we make this decision?” and once that is decided, then the decision itself can be made in accordance with the criteria chosen. Given the variety of criteria listed in the last paragraph, this can lead to inconsistent decisions, which means the company is essentially doing a random walk in decision space and may make no progress towards any goals. It also leads to confusion among the employees as it’s unclear what decisions are the right ones to make, as the criteria by which those decisions will be judged keep changing.

Some companies try to address this question by putting processes in place by which to make decisions, step-by-step guides to guide employees. These processes may even use different decision criteria for different decisions. The problem with such processes is that they don’t cover new situations, so employees need to consult their bosses to ensure they make the “right” decision by company standards. This slows the company response time down, which means that it may miss the chance to exploit new opportunities (shades of The Innovator’s Dilemma).

Having a strong corporate vision in place helps with all of these issues. Employees will understand the criteria by which decisions get made. For instance, Nordstrom’s is well-known for its customer service, and at one point, their employee handbook essentially boiled down to “Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. … Rule #1: Use good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.” If a customer comes in and wants to return something bought at another store, Nordstrom’s will accept (including the legendary tale of a customer returning tires to this clothing store).

By providing constraints on the decision space, a long-term vision makes decisions easier. With limited resources, constraints allow the company to prioritize more effectively. 37 Signals is a software company that espouses the design philosophy of embracing constraints as a way of finding better and more creative solutions. Rather than try to be everything to everybody, 37signals recommends deciding what you stand for and sticking to that vision. Even Google, which has no resource constraints at the moment, is claiming to value constraints in product design, and has its own corporate philosophy with ten points to guide employees.

I’m starting to try to apply the importance of constraints and vision to my own life. Like many other non-commital Gen-X-ers, I tend to make my decisions by always choosing the option which gives me more options, and never to close the door on a possibility. At this point in my life, that method of decision making is starting to be counter productive, as trying to continue getting more options is precluding me from pursuing any of the options I actually have. I’m fortunate to be in a position where I have so many options, including where to live, where to work, etc. But I think it may be time to start narrowing options down, which brings me back to this idea of vision and constraints. I need to come up with a vision for myself to set the criteria by which I choose among the options available to me.

The terrifying thought for a Gen-X-er is the idea of locking into a path (or a vision) and then finding out a few years later that it’s the wrong one, and all that time and effort was wasted. One thing I need to remember is that doing something is better than doing nothing – a year of experience doing the “wrong” thing is still better than a year spent dithering about what to do. And I have also learned that even when I change my life’s direction, the time spent on the original vision/goal is not wasted – I can apply the previously learned lessons to my new direction. When I finally gave up my dreams of becoming a physicist, it was a really hard decision for me, as it felt like I was throwing away the ten years of my life which had been devoted to physics. However, much of what I learned as a physicist has continued to be useful throughout my career, including the approach to problem solving, the data analysis capabilities, and the instrumentation experience I used when working on CellKey. One of the ingenious parts of the human brain is that it always finds a way to retroactively harmonize one’s previous experience with one’s current direction.

To some extent, this post is an attempt to convince myself that it is more important to have a vision than what the specific vision is. If the vision is wrong, it can be changed later in accordance with what was learned while going the wrong direction. But without any direction to constrain the decision-making process, I am left with decisions that take too long to make, and that conflict with each other. Now I just have to apply this idea in picking a direction to help me move forward. We’ll see how that goes.

I live in the future.

I don’t mean that in any sort of wacky time-travelling sci-fi sense, but in the sense implied by the William Gibson quip: “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.” I live in a world that’s a few years ahead of the mainstream. My friends were the geeks with Palm Pilots and cell phones and laptops before they became ubiquitous. We were the ones downloading digital music before iPods made it easy.

Sometimes I forget that my world is not the mainstream. Here’s an example – I’ve been amazed that more websites don’t have an iPhone-specific interface. The ones that I know do are Google, Twitter and Facebook. But the rest of the sites on my typical rounds (sports sites like ESPN or community sites like LiveJournal or even Internet standards like Yahoo) don’t. And I can’t understand why these sites would be so short-sighted. After all, half the people I know have an iPhone! Why wouldn’t these sites be catering to this massive population…oh, right, my friends are not representative of the mainstream.

That last statement needs to be modified, though – my friends are not representative of the mainstream now. There’s a reason my community is consistently living in the future – it’s because we shape what the masses adopt. We are the early adopters of technology, recognized by our other friends and family as the ones that have done the research and figured out what the useful gadgets are. We make the recommendations that drive adoption and help certain technologies cross the chasm into the mainstream.

Companies that think they are making the wise financial move by not investing in “fringe” technologies because they are a small percentage of users are missing out on the chance to influence these early adopters. To take an obvious example, if you go to any conference of leading thinkers these days, the vast majority of presenters will be using a MacBook. Most of my friends are Mac users now, except for the ones that are constrained by work obligations. Any software company that wants to capture future mindshare needs to support Macs. The same holds true of Firefox support, as nobody I know uses Internet Explorer as their default browser. Even though the overall percentages are small (8% for Mac and 15% for Firefox adoption), the percentages among the technology influentials are far higher, and their impact on future adoption needs to be considered.

As an aside, this dichotomy presents an interesting question – should companies target the mass market of Microsoft and IE or the leading edge of Mac and Firefox? It’s another instance of the perennial dilemma for companies: deciding whether to allocate resources towards short-term or long-term results. Of course, whenever presented with two choices, you should ask why not both, and that’s what many companies are doing by moving to the web (although cross-browser compatibility is still an issue).

This idea of living in the future is a powerful one to me, and one that came up again this week in a conversation with Wes. If I know I’m living in the future, then I should be able to figure out a way to leverage that fact. If I can identify problems that are facing my community now, I have a few years to devise a solution before those problems will be faced by the mainstream and create the market for that solution. It’s a tricky forecasting problem, as I have to identify the problems that will cross the chasm and actually be an issue for the mainstream. For instance, information overload is an issue for me, with 130 feeds in my RSS reader and dozens of emails a day from a variety of mailing lists. But it’s unclear that most people would ever face these issues – heck, less than 10% of people today use an RSS reader.

Another example of an issue I face that may not ever cross the chasm is keeping track of a geographically distributed set of friends. It seems perfectly natural to me to still be in touch with college friends scattered across the country, but I wonder if that’s as much of an issue for others. For instance, I suspect most of my high school friends ended up in the Chicago area, so if they want to visit old friends, they can just do so. So the adaptations my community has made, taking advantage of Internet technologies, free long-distance on our cell phones, and cheap air travel, may not be necessary for most people.

One example of a problem that may be useful to the mainstream is the mobilizing of weak ties. This is a problem that LinkedIn is starting to solve for job-searching, as it lets people find out connections they have to target companies of interest. But we need tools like that for everything in our life – “Who do I know that has the answer to my question?” Even in Google world, we still need to consult expertise. Sometimes the answer is obvious (if I have a home repair question, I call my friend Batman), but other times, somebody may have expertise that you are completely unaware of. I wonder if there’s a way technology can make visible the latent knowledge in other people’s heads.

Another example is a phenomenon that BJ Fogg is calling mass interpersonal persuasion in a comment he left on my post. It’s the idea that the tools of persuasion are being democratized, that anybody can create an application that goes viral and is seen by millions of people (the students in his class created Facebook applications that were collectively getting a million views a day by the end of the term). This is a fascinating development – the next step beyond the democratization of publishing and organization that Clay Shirky describes may be the democratization of persuasion. I don’t really know how this will develop yet, but it’s interesting to me, and one of the advantages of being connected to the people who will be mapping and creating the future.

Speaking of which, another topic that came up when talking to Wes is this phenomenon of feeling like something new is important, without quite being able to describe why. Wes asked why I was so interested in Jane McGonigal’s work and I couldn’t quite articulate it. The idea of games as a medium is clearly important to me, and her work is pushing in all directions to understand what makes a game good and how the same principles can be applied to more serious purposes like Peak Oil. The same holds true of other friends like Squid Labs – people who I respect doing interesting things, even if I don’t always understand where they’re going. To some extent, I feel like I’m on a similar path – I can’t quite articulate the generalist path (even though I keep taking stabs at it in this blog) but I feel like at some point I’ll be able to look back and say “Oh, I see how it all fits together now” in a nice retcon. Again, by the time somebody can justify what they’re doing in terms of mainstream values, it’s too late – they’ve crossed over into the mainstream. So much of the interesting stuff in society is being done by people that you question “Gosh, what the heck are they doing?”

As usual, a wandering post, somewhat centered on the idea of “living in the future” and the implications. Most of this post was written on the bus up to Cornell, and then I added a few closing paragraphs this morning despite staying up too late last night. But I wanted to get it posted before the festivities begin. Happy Fourth of July to those who care!

LP’s comment on my Social Objects post made me realize that I needed to clarify what I meant by “social”. My last post drew a bunch of new readers (thanks to Hugh Macleod’s Twitter) and I could see how my position might have been misinterpreted based on that post alone.

The crux of the comment was rebutting my claim that everything important is social, citing writing, reading, studying, and exercising as solitary activities that provide meaning in an environment without distraction. I think I was unclear about what I mean by “social”. It’s a bit funny to me to be called an extrovert, as I’m a person sitting alone in my studio apartment writing to the Internet, which is pretty much as solitary and introverted as it can get. To be clear, I agree completely that solitary activities are important; I need several hours of alone time a day or I get really cranky. And, as the commenter observes, there are many things that are only possible alone – certain activities like coding or writing require no interruptions and the undisturbed time necessary to get into what Csíkszentmihályi would call Flow.

However, I still hold to my original point, which is that our communities are what create meaning for us. Even those that are not social in an extroverted sense need to have their identity validated by other people. They may participate in online games or communities. They may belong to a poetry club. An extreme example is somebody like Ramanujan, who worked alone with nobody understanding him, until he sent off his theorems to Hardy as somebody who could evaluate his work. He didn’t have any way to judge himself, to decide if he was brilliant or crazy, until he found a community that validated his results. Even mathematical proofs, a solitary activity, required social validation to imbue the work with meaning.

To take a Klosterman-like hypothetical, what if one could achieve one’s greatest goal but not be able to tell anybody about it? I would have a very hard time with it, and I don’t think I’m unique in that respect. Even if our great experiences were done alone, they achieve greater meaning when shared with the people we value. As several of my classmates said at commencement, the program didn’t feel done until we had the closure of the ceremony where they could stand up in front of their families and receive a piece of paper, even though all the work had been done a week or two before.

Another example is rites of passage. One does not go through a rite of passage in secret and not tell anybody. The rite of passage must be performed in front of the community and acknowledged by the community to have meaning. This is true of commencement as noted above, bar mitzvahs, promotions at work, or anything else I can think of. The rite of passage is not the specific actions that are performed – it is the performance of those actions in the eyes of the community and the actions do not have meaning without the community’s acknowledgment.

I may be overplaying the social community angle, but I think that communities are the building blocks of identity. When we say who we are, we express it by which communities we belong to: I’m an MIT graduate, a technologist, a geek, a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc. We may have different personas within those communities, but the intersection of all of those communities defines our identity. So I believe that we can’t construct meaning for ourselves without relying on those communities.

There are millions of events happening in the world at any point in time, and our communities filter that stream by telling us what’s important. In a broad generalization, Republicans watch Fox News, Democrats read the New York Times and listen to NPR. Their reality is defined by which events those media cover and the spin that is placed on those events. Things that may be important to one community may be meaningless to another; for instance, most of my friends don’t care at all that the Cubs are in first place, whereas that is fairly important in parts of Chicago. Information and events only have meaning as threads that bind a community together (e.g. the way a friend and I used to sprinkle our conversation with quotes from Buffy).

I hope this clarifies some of what I was talking about in the previous post. I sometimes forget how my world view is somewhat non-standard, and that I need to articulate and clarify the assumptions I am making, rather than expecting readers to pick things up from context. Being in my brain means I can drill down into greater detail on any particular point, but I tend to stay at the top level and infer the rest (see: Generalist) which can be confusing to others. If you’re curious about my thoughts about how community impacts identity and everything else, see the community tag of this blog.

P.S. One of these days I’ll get back into a blogging rhythm, but this week was a bit crazy at work and I was zonked a bit from being on West Coast time. I also need to catch up on some book reviews here. Ah well.

---

brilliant or crazy: The difference between what is brilliant and what is crazy comes down to what one’s communities accepts. What does it mean to be crazy? Most of us would point to somebody who is different than everybody else in ways that we don’t understand. For behavior to be non-crazy, the community has to find meaning in what a person is doing. This doesn’t necessarily have to be one’s immediate physical community – it could be a community on the Internet, a book club, or any other grouping of people that validates our behavior. Growing up in a Republican fundamentalist Christian town, I sometimes wondered if I was crazy because wow, I thought differently than anybody else I knew. Fortunately, I eventually got to MIT, and found my home community to provide the social validation for the person I was trying to be all along.

[author's note: I wrote most of this post nine months ago, but never got around to finishing it. It seemed an appropriate companion to my recent series of "Social [X]” posts, so I added a couple paragraphs to the end and am posting it.]

I was reading a gapingvoid post, and saw this wonderful quote (for reference, gapingvoid is the blog of Hugh MacLeod, who’s using social media to advertise for a wine company among many other things):

The main thesis is that it’s not the wine per se that is interesting, it’s the conversations that happen around the wine that is interesting. And that is true for all social objects. People matter. Objects don’t.

I love this quote because it gets at an idea that is very important to me, which is that nothing matters without people. I never got around to writing a This I Believe essay, but my premise was going to be that the most important thing in this world is the connection we make with each other. All of the objects and experiences in the world are means by which to satisfy the end of connecting to others.

Why do sports matter? Sports are just grown men playing kids’ sports, and yet we are willing to pay for the privilege to spend hours watching them. But it’s not about the sport itself, or the game. It’s about the connection with the other fans, about the instant communities that watching sports creates.

To illustrate this point, imagine somebody that cared about a sport that nobody else cared about – let’s say javelin throwing. This hypothetical person obsessively follows javelin competitions, can quote stats of the top throwers, etc. Most of us would consider this person to be a loser, and borderline insane. And yet they’re doing nothing different than fans of sports like football or baseball – they just don’t have the community in place to validate their behavior. Being a sports fan without connecting with other people is pointless.

I’m trying to think of objects or experiences that don’t qualify as “social objects”. Even though purely individual experiences like riding a motorcycle down the Pacific Coast Highway can be enjoyable, they only mean something when we share the story of the experience with somebody else. When we get a nifty new toy, we don’t keep it to ourselves – we want to show it off to our friends. When we find a new restaurant, we want to take others to it or at least tell them about it. We watch movies and read books and are disappointed when others haven’t because then we can’t talk about our experience with them.

I think that this social object concept can change the rules in a market. One of the reasons that the Nintendo Wii has been staggeringly successful is that Nintendo realized that gaming was not about the game, but about the social experience, and designed the Wii accordingly. Apple’s renaissance has a similar tone. Saturn was initially successful because they realized that a car wasn’t just a car, but an experience and a community which they bolstered by hosting homecoming events for Saturn owners to meet. Rock Band has been a recent phenomenon that illustrates that the games that people most enjoy are the ones that they can play together.

The Internet has been a boon to making these sorts of connections. No matter how obscure your passion is, there’s a community for it on the Internet. Sports of all kinds, crafts, do-it-yourself, hipster music, social software, Buffy the Vampire Slayer – okay, those aren’t particularly obscure, but they are the ones I know about.

This gets back to a point I made in my social technologies post – when social and technology mix, it’s the social that is interesting. We’ve been focused on the physical technology, but it’s the newly possible social communities engendered by such technology that change markets (and possibly the world!). Twitter/Facebook/LiveJournal are interesting because now I have an ambient awareness of my friends that enables me to maintain communities with them across physical boundaries. I know more about my friends that keep up such accounts regardless of where they are than I do about friends that live in the same city as me. These technologies are changing our communities and creating new ways for these communities to interact with themselves, and that sort of meta-interaction will accelerate the evolution of communities.

Hugh Macleod has continued to emphasize the importance of social objects – he believes that any marketer whose product isn’t a social object is in big trouble. See Social Objects for Beginners for another take. I’m more interested in the change in viewpoint when we stop focusing on the object, and focus on the connections the object creates. I could get really esoteric now and explain how this all relates to actor-network theory, but I’ll refrain. I’m also not sure how to tie this into creating new social technologies or what this has to do with social capitalism. Maybe one of you will make the connection for me.