Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

Picking up on yesterday’s post and Seppo’s comment, another topic that has been coming up in my conversations is the idea of “social technology”. This doesn’t mean social software, where technology is applied for social purposes like Facebook or LinkedIn, but instead the idea of creating better social patterns that we can use. In this sense, democracy and monarchy would be two different social technologies, as would consensus-driven and hierarchical decision making. Social technology is the counterpart to physical technology, like telecommunications advances or increased computing power, a distinction observed in Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth.

In particular, I’m interested in the question posed by Clay Shirky in his book Here Comes Everybody: with the new physical technologies that have emerged over the past decade (e.g. always-on access, mobile access, zero cost to publish media worldwide), how will our social technologies evolve? What new social patterns will emerge and prove useful in this world? Or to ask a more focused question, what social technologies will let us manage ourselves more effectively? Before we can get to that, we need to take a step back and look at existing social technologies.

I’m going to start by talking about a social meta-technology, which is the idea of learn and latch: “For continued successful adaptation of an entity, whether it’s a person, a genome, a corporation or a society, you need elements that are going and trying new things all the time, but you also need elements that are preserving the successful changes so that they don’t need to re-tried by the next generation.” I see this as the larger pattern that many social (and physical) technologies are designed to implement (although I may be suffering from Architecture Astronaut syndrome).

One effective social technology is stories. I love talking about stories as I think they are the key to many aspects of human behavior, from community to identity. In this case, I think that stories serve the function of “latching” in the “learn and latch” pattern. Stories preserve what has been learned by previous generations in a form that is compelling and easy to remember.

Another latching social technology is process. I tend to be dubious about process, but process is essentially a more restrictive form of stories. Instead of telling the general lesson learned, process maps out a specific set of steps that lead to the desired result. Note that process is a more effective latching mechanism in an unchanging world, as the steps will often change when the world changes. But in such a world, it is very effective at creating a standard level of competence (what Neal Stephenson refers to as the “three-ring binder” used to operate a franchise like McDonald’s). Bureaucracy is another form of process that has the same advantages and disadvantages.

The learning side of the “learn and latch” pattern is harder to characterize. A couple ways in which a person or organization learns are copying from others (but who comes up with the idea first?) and trying new things (which is often a waste of time since most new things will be worse than the status quo). One broken social technology for learning is status meetings – with the advent of new communication technologies, a meeting is possibly the least efficient way to transfer information among people (then again, I hate meetings). Note that doesn’t mean that meetings in general are useless – meetings which are used for discussion and brainstorming are using the interaction power of meetings and are thus a good social technology in that context.

I’ve written several posts about the importance of feedback, but I hadn’t thought about how feedback as a social technology embodies the “learn and latch” pattern. The general process of feedback is to let somebody do something, and then offer them feedback on how they did and what they could do better. They learn from the feedback, try again, and latch the new behavior. Without feedback, the person may be learning bad habits and fall prey to the aphorism, “Practice doesn’t make perfect – practice makes permanent”. This is also why I believe rapid prototyping is a useful social meta-technology, as it embeds constant feedback into a development process.

Having reviewed a few existing social technologies, it’s time to think about which social technologies are appropriate in today’s world. This is a question of both capabilities (what social technologies are available given new physical technologies?) and appropriateness (what social technologies apply in a rapidly changing innovative world?). To put it another way that addresses Seppo’s comment, how does one make a team most effective?

I think the fundamental problem facing the deployment of existing social technologies is that the pace of change has increased. This is not a new observation by any means, but the implications are still being worked out. Many of today’s management techniques were developed in the 1950s at enduring industry titans like IBM, and it’s easy to see why such techniques may no longer be appropriate. In a rapidly changing world, the overhead of maintaining one’s social infrastructure is a drain on productivity as new situations have to not only be handled, but then the process must be updated with the new response (the “latching” part of the system takes too much effort). Organizations that can respond to situations more fluidly will be more productive. At the same time, an organization that treats every situation as new will never learn from its history (it never “latches” anything). So there must be a balance there.

I think the Built to Last authors got it right: “Preserve the core, but stimulate progress”. Or to put it another way, understand the big picture and figure out how to apply the big picture to the individual situation. Or to put it yet another way, play the infinite game such that the rules of the finite game (processes and canned responses) get updated continuously, but the greater goal of the infinite game continues. Or if you’re a geek like me, run things like Ender did, managing the big picture so that your people are always in situations which play to their strengths and they can just react and do what comes naturally.

In the strategies I listed above, a key component is making sure that everybody on the team is aligned with the larger goal, and understand how their specific roles are contributing to that larger goal. Unfortunately, despite the proliferation of communication technologies, effective communication (getting such an idea from person A to person B) has become more difficult, as we are all suffering from information overload. Having an intranet with all the relevant information or cc’ing everybody with status update emails may seem like communication, but that communication has failed if the right person doesn’t see the right information at the right time. I’m not sure that doing that part can be automated away through technology, which is why I think that good managers will continue to have a place even if they are just talking.

Another challenge is that even if the communication is in place, the team can fall apart without trust. In a high-functioning team, the team members trust each other to give a heads up about relevant new information, so they spend their time working on their piece of the project otherwise. Without that trust, each team member spends time double checking information, gossiping at the water cooler to make sure they know what’s going on, concocting theories about ulterior motives in the information being transferred (e.g. is the due date artificially early to induce us to work longer hours?), etc. All that time is wasted productivity that could be gained back if a bond of trust is established within the team.

I’ve gotten a bit distracted here from my original question of what new social technologies will look like, partially because I’m not sure what the answer is. I do see new social technologies as having to be much more fluid in response to a changing environment, but there needs to be an easy way to “latch” the knowledge gained. Using a wiki may be part of the solution, as Wikipedia has demonstrated, but that still requires people knowing to check the wiki for that knowledge. We need better technology like the Remembrance Agent to let us know that we don’t know something. For now, we are still dependent on people like me who can map new situations onto previously encountered situations and know who to ask or where to look to find the previous best response.

I also think that new social technologies will need to free the individual to use all of their capabilities. Right now, our organizations and hierarchies hire people for specific roles, and don’t know how to handle it when people expand outside of those roles. I suspect that future organizations will consist of consensus-driven vision creation, and then each person determining how they can contribute to that vision. Formal organization creates an unsustainable overhead in updating process and charts and following the three-ring binder. To take a specific example from this past weekend, there was no time wasted creating a formal plan to set up or take down chairs and tables for the reception; instead, the bride and groom just said “Hey, make it happen”, and everybody figured out how they could help. I see that sort of self-organization being the way of the future, perhaps drawing on studies of self-organizing systems or existing leaderless organizations.

I haven’t answered the question I set out to when I started this post, but I think social technologies are a fertile topic for further thought. Like Seppo, I never would have imagined myself caring about these sorts of issues ten years ago, when I was a techno-determinist. But time and experience has taught me that fixing these social issues is more difficult but also more rewarding than the technology problems I once thought were the hardest problems to solve. I look forward to when we get social tech to match our physical tech, as I think that will enable the sheer potential of human creativity to be unleashed in all directions with spectacular results. We get hints of it from DIY sites like Instructables today, but we’re at the start of this period, and I think it will be exciting to see how things evolve.

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”?

• Reliable – one has to be trustworthy and always deliver on promises, and preferably go above and beyond.
• Selfless – one has to be genuinely interested in helping others. Quid pro quo may work in a cut-throat capitalist world, but in a social capitalist world, trust can’t be earned if one is keeping score.
• Understanding – one can’t be helpful unless one understands the problems of others. Building social capital requires empathy and an ability to see things from the other’s perspective.
• Likable – we tend to trust likable people. If I’m a negative cynic, I’m not much fun to be around, and that reduces the time I have to build trust with others. If I’m a happy optimist, people want to spend time with me, and that increases the chances I have to build trust.
• Ability to prioritize – we have limited time and social energy, so we need to invest that time wisely. So we need to recognize people that have the most potential (you’ll note that agents are rarely doing favors for families of 5’5″ basketball players). This may seem Machiavellian and at odds with previous traits, but it generally works out naturally. As one of my friends noted recently, if I’m meeting a new person, the new person has to be more interesting and fun than my existing friends who I already don’t have time to see for he or she to make it into my “regular rotation”. Or as another friend noted when I lamented that an ex-coworker wasn’t that interesting, “Remember that your standard of “interesting” is very high.”

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.

Yesterday was the last class of my master’s program at Columbia (I have one more final next week, but no more class sessions). A bunch of us technology management students went out for drinks afterwards in celebration, and ran into another group of students from our marketing class. And it was interesting chatting with them and getting their perspective on the class, since we hadn’t mixed much during the class itself.

It was also interesting to hear what they thought of me personally. Apparently I had been dubbed “physics boy” after I let it slip in class that my background was in physics (I raised my hand in one class when the professor asked who had experience with data mining, and he asked me what my experience was).

I was also surprised at the resentment a couple of them felt towards me. I had spoken up in class pretty regularly, as I was trying to ensure my class participation grade, but I had apparently come off as a snarky know-it-all. Admittedly, that’s a reasonably accurate description, but I had thought I had learned how to keep that under control. Good to know I should still be working on that.

The reason I’m writing, though, is that one person (fuelled by alcohol) complained that I was “too smart”, and made the rest of the class look bad. I find this interesting because it ties into the research of Carol Dweck, who studies the corrosive effects of praising people for innate qualities like intelligence rather than acquired qualities like persistence and effort. If we are valued for our intelligence, then when somebody comes along with more intelligence, we are less valued. We have less worth. And that’s devastating.

I’ve experienced this effect firsthand, as going to MIT is a brutal experience. All students arrive at MIT having been the smartest person in the class for their entire lives, so it’s an incredible shock to their self-image to meet people who are not just smarter, but ridiculously smarter (like my freshman physics classmate who regularly doubled my test scores). MIT’s former policy of all freshmen being graded pass/fail was a life saver for me, as it took me an entire year to adjust to this new reality.

Another implication of Dweck’s research is that praising for innate qualities contributes to a zero-sum view of the world. If somebody else is smarter, that takes away from the specialness of my own intelligence. Their gain is my loss. So it’s in my interest to tear them down or find ways to show how they aren’t as special as me.

But that’s not how the world works. I need to finish Robert Wright’s Nonzero one of these days, as it details the ways in which progress occurs because of non-zero-sum interactions. When we “grow the pie”, everybody benefits. When we fight over our percentage of the pie, everybody misses out on those possible benefits, even if they have a larger share of the existing pie.

We go further when we work together and learn from each other. In industry, we benefit from being surrounded by talented coworkers, as our collective product is more likely to be successful. This assumes that one is in a team-oriented environment, and not one that practices destructive practices like rank-and-yank. But, in general, we try to hold on to the talented people around us, as we benefit from knowing them – talented people do wonderful things which we can participate in and learn from. They also tend to know other talented people in a meritocratic version of the old boy network, and being able to draw on those weak ties is a huge benefit.

Another interesting observation is that I’ve never gotten any vibe of resentment from my technology management classmates. In fact, they were defending me last night to this person. This provides some confirmation that real world experience leads away from the zero-sum your-success-is-my-loss view of the world, as everybody in my program has years of experience in industry. Meanwhile, the classmates who felt resentment were much younger – I think they were recently out of college. They may still be thinking they are being graded on a curve, where somebody else’s success pushes one’s own grades down.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of non-zero-sum thinking, and have been seeing it everywhere recently. I’m not sure it totally applies to this particular situation, but I think it does.

P.S. I should start posting more regularly again with classes being done. As usual, I have a ridiculous backlog of ideas that awaits only me being motivated enough to write them up.

P.P.S. I couldn’t figure out how to fit this into the post, but I wanted to comment about the weirdness of being praised for intelligence. There’s no reasonable reaction. “Thank you” is disingenuous, as intelligence is innate and I can’t really take credit for my genes. It’s also weird because intelligence really doesn’t mean that much in the big picture. Effort and persistence matter far more. Intelligence and all other innate qualities are only a starting point – what you achieve with the gifts you have been given is a far better measure of character. We should measure ourselves against our potential and what we could achieve, and starting with more luck in the gene lottery just means our potential is higher and we should be striving to achieve more.

A friend recently sent me an update email with the line:

She is my “it’s complicated” on Facebook.

[updated to add: the friend in question cites xkcd as his inspiration]

I think this quote is wonderfully transcendent in capturing the zeitgeist, so much so that I’m going to spend a blog post unpacking it. Grant McCracken introduced me to the anthropological concept of unpacking in this essay contest from last year (the winners are here), where he asks his readers to supply the “underlying cultural notions” that help to explain what has been observed. So let’s take a look at what’s going on in this quote.

Let’s start with the mention of Facebook. Most people are at least aware of Facebook at this point – it’s a social networking site where one can share one’s life with one’s friends and acquaintances. In particular, one can describe one’s status in a variety of ways, write notes about one’s life, put up pictures from one’s life, etc.

One way in which Facebook is changing the culture is that there is an increased awareness of the public performance aspect of our actions. The Facebook generation is aware that they are always on stage and are comfortable with it in a way that writers like Daniel Solove certainly wouldn’t be. In fact, they use Facebook as a platform to communicate with their friends and update them more efficiently than could be done by communicating with them individually using SMS or phone calls. So it becomes a big deal when they change their relationship status on Facebook or when somebody edits their Top 8 friends on MySpace. Using such platforms to manage one’s social life becomes a reflexive performance with an explicit awareness of one’s audience; the platform is used to deliver public messages to one’s community about shifting social relationships.

The next concept I want to unpack is “it’s complicated”. In Facebook, you can describe your relationship status as one of: single, in a relationship, engaged, married, in an open relationship, or it’s complicated. The first four are the straightforward ones that everybody expects, but the last two are decidedly non-traditional. “It’s complicated” is a nice catch-all term for relationships that don’t fit into the normative bounds of society, where it takes time (and possibly a whiteboard) to explain what’s going on.

It seems like such relationships are becoming more common, and possibly even more accepted. My friend who lives with his two boyfriends is often disappointed when he gleefully explains his living situation and people say “Oh, that’s cool” rather than being shocked or dismayed. Conservatives might rail against such non-traditional relationships, but American society is slowly moving in the direction of “if it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad” (to quote Sheryl Crow).

I also wonder if Facebook including “it’s complicated” as a first-order option for relationship status will hasten the acceptance of such non-traditional relationships. Can the widespread use of Facebook redefine social norms? On Facebook there is no stigma associated with such relationships, as they are just another option in the dropdown box for relationship status (unlike other forms where one has to choose the dreaded “Other”). As people use Facebook to represent themselves, will the implicit acceptance of such relationships by the software influence how people think of those relationships?

I love how this one sentence indicates the direction our society is taking as we explore relationships that do not fit into the traditional nuclear family and how it affects us when our previously private social lives are a matter of public discourse. I don’t know if I have done justice to either the statement or the idea of unpacking, but hopefully this exercise gets you thinking about how even simple statements can tell us much about the state of our culture.

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possibly a whiteboard: My friend Brad had a special category at his Love Sux dinner for Valentine’s Day, where he said that even though the event was for single people, “if you’re in a complex kind of relationship where you really can’t tell if you’re single or not, you qualify. Just come by and complain to us how he’s really sweet but he’s with his wife and her girlfriend the circus-trainer for Valentine’s Day… White-boards not provided, you’ll have to draw on the placemats.”

I’ve been mentioning several theories to several different people recently and decided it’s time to put them all on my blog so they are easy to reference. Some are prescriptive, some are descriptive, but I find all of them useful in certain situations.

The Crusher Theory

Michael “Crusher” Ernst once explained this theory to me and Chuck, and I think it explains a lot about social interactions. The theory is that everybody is always the same age in your head as they were the day you met them. In particular, when Chuck said she was younger than I was, Crusher said that was impossible because I was 16 (he met me as a freshman) and Chuck was 20-something (the age she was when he met her).

It seems like a silly theory, except that it explains so much. Our parents always think of us as the little kids we once were. Our friends tie us to specific periods of our lives, and we behave differently with our high school friends, our college friends, our work friends, etc. And when they meet us in a different context, they don’t know what to make of us not being the person they expect, which is also why we feel such tension in situations where worlds collide, such as when parents attend a gathering with friends.

The Wes “Two Things” Theory

Wes explained this to me at Burning Man in 2000. His claim was that we only have time and energy in life to do two big things at a time so we have to select our big things carefully. For most people, the two things are work/career and a relationship/family. For me at the time, it was work and the chorus, and right now, it’s work and school.

I keep on trying to rebel against this theory, under the pretense that I can do more, but I never seem to manage it, and always end up wearing myself out. One of the results of that initial conversation was that I found a new job a month later as I realized I didn’t want to be spending one of my two “big things” doing what I was doing. Fortunately, in May I’ll be done with classes and able to select a new “big thing” at that point – now I just have to decide what that will be.

The ‘Bug “Fear” Theory

My friend, DocBug, has the theory that when given an option among different things to do in life, one should always choose the one that scares you the most. I like it because it forces us to confront our fears and discover they are not as overwhelming as they initially seem. I’m not very good at following it, though. I guess I have gotten over some of my social fear over the past few years. Now I just need to get over my fears of conflict and rejection in both work and social settings.

The Raj “Just Do It” Theory

Many years ago, I was talking to my friend Raj and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life (funny how I still haven’t figured that out after all these years). I was debating whether I should take some time off and think about what I wanted to do. Raj said that thinking would never enlighten me as to whether I wanted to do something; the only way to know if I liked doing something was to do it. So he said I should just pick a likely candidate and try it out and see what I thought.

I’ve been following that advice ever since, and it’s led me through a couple different career paths and a number of different industries. I think it makes a lot of sense – I can come up with all sorts of reasons in my head for why something would or would not be a good fit, but none of my thinking can help me understand the day-to-day decisions and challenges of a job or activity.

There are probably others, but these were the ones that have come up in recent conversations. What theories do you use? Any you’d like to share?

Rock Band is a video game phenomenon. One enthusiast I know calls it the greatest in-person multiplayer game ever. Over the holidays, I played it three times in a week at three different apartments, and played it some more at our company retreat last month. So what makes Rock Band a great game?

First of all, it’s just fun. Almost everybody wants to pretend they’re a rock star, so being able to rock out with friends is a great experience. Everybody gets a prop (guitar, bass, drum set or microphone for vocals) and if you play the game on a big screen and hooked up to a stereo, it’s like starring in your own rock concert. They’ve done a good job of selecting songs with catchy tunes that most people know (who of my generation doesn’t enjoy rocking out to Bon Jovi?). But I think the design of the game is exemplary in other ways.

Rock Band enables people of different skill levels to enjoy playing with each other. This sounds minor, but imagine the experience of a novice playing a first-person shooter game such as Quake 3 with somebody that’s an expert. The expert kills the novice repeatedly, and it’s not fun for either player as the expert is bored and the novice gets no chance to improve. Compare that to Rock Band, where one player can select Easy and the other Expert, and both will be presented with game material challenging for their skill level. Everybody has fun, and when they make it through a song, they can celebrate together.

Rock Band also does a great job of continually challenging players. When playing Rock Band for the first time, you choose the Easy skill level of an easy song. As you get more comfortable, you can try harder songs at the Easy level. Once you can master the hardest songs on Easy, you realize that you can handle the easier songs at the Medium level, and start working your way through the songs at that skill level. The game offers a well-designed continuum of challenges so that there is always a next step just out of reach, so that if you try that song one more time, you might get through it. This continuous incremental achievement is gratifying and I think it is why many of my friends are so addicted to the game.

The game keeps players working towards improvement by offering excellent feedback. At the end of each song, each player is given a percentage grade showing how well they did at matching the patterns given to them. The grading is dependent on the skill level; the game is much more forgiving of being a split second off (or of being out of tune when singing) at the Easy level than at the Expert level. With the numerical grade, one can chart one’s improvement even when playing the same song repeatedly, and when combined with the range of game material discussed in the last paragraph, that offers players the challenge of always improving themselves.

The one area in which Rock Band could improve is in offering direct competition with others. While we were on the company retreat, we split up into two teams of four with roughly comparable skill levels, and took turns playing the same song to compare our scores (although we spent all of dinner arguing over what the proper way to compare scores would be). This turned out to be remarkably fun and each of us probably played our best when we were doing our battle of the bands because we were so focused. I imagine something like this is possible with XBox Live, but I’ll defer to others who would know better.

The interesting thing to me is that all of the design choices that make Rock Band excellent can be applied to management.

• Having fun is important. It may be difficult to quantify, but I believe that employees that are happy at work are more productive.
• People want to feel like they’re contributing regardless of their skill level – they don’t want to be on a team where the expert does everything and everybody else watches.
• Jobs should be designed so that they are always stretching employees’ capabilities. When they master one set of skills, introduce some new element that challenges them to continue learning.
• Consistent feedback is vital to employee satisfaction and improvement. When they know how they are doing, they have a target which they can aim to exceed moving forward.
• Competition is good. It gets people to push themselves harder than they would otherwise, and achieve results they would not achieve by themselves.

P.S. I’ve been meaning to write this post for a month, but life has been crazy. This is only the second weekend I’ve spent in New York since mid-December, and the other one was when I had class from 9 to 5 on Saturday and six hours of reading to do on Sunday. I have several posts I want to write, including catching up on my backlog of book reviews, so please nudge me if I don’t start writing more often.

Earlier today, my friends were putting their house back together after the party last night, and called me up to ask me where I had put something while cleaning up yesterday afternoon. I told them, hung up, and then thought about what had just happened. It felt almost like something out of a religious myth, where people had made a plea to the heavens for information, and their request had been granted.

I’m reminded of a similar incident last summer when Jofish and I called up our friend Bats from the Home Depot aisle to get his advice on which products we should be buying for our home improvement project. Thirty years ago, we would have been reliant on the salesperson in the store; instead, we were able to consult the most knowledgeable person we know on the subject of construction. It seemed unremarkable at the time, but in retrospect, it shows how technology has made us much more powerful. Anything known by anybody we know can be shared with us at the push of a button. Our intelligence has become multiplied and distributed across dozens if not hundreds of people.

Stories like this make me feel like we are starting to achieve the aspirations espoused by the Whole Earth Catalog when they said “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it”. While none of us are omniscient, the oracles of Google and Wikipedia certainly grant us knowledge. I can pull out my cell phone and within seconds get the answer to almost any question, no matter how trivial (at the party last night, there was a dispute over who sang “Don’t you want me?”, quickly revealed by Google to be Human League). Think about how fantastic it would look to somebody even fifty years ago for me to consult a pocket-sized device and be able to read off so much information.

On a more personal level, we have more tools than ever to know what our friends are doing. I can see what my friends are thinking on blogs and LiveJournal. I can get real-time status updates from Facebook or Twitter. I can even see what they’re doing by looking at their pictures on Flickr. For instance, pictures from last night’s party are already popping up on Facebook, and they were up on Flickr this morning, so only one day later you can see images from an event at which you weren’t present. While it may not be omniscience, it can certainly feel god-like at times.

There are downsides to having this much access to information. It’s easy to become sucked into the flood of information and never do anything with the information gained. One can easily spend all day following the exploits of people around the world (I have a particular weakness for following Chicago sports). We have created this surfeit of information following the American mottos of “More is better” and “Too much is never enough”, but it’s unclear we know what to do with this information access. If we are becoming like gods, we need to learn how to become good at it, and figure out how to turn our partial omniscience (oxymoronic?) into action.

Perhaps omniscience is not a state to which we should aspire. It’s hard to resist the temptation to gather more information in the hopes that the next piece of information will determine what we should do next. Maybe the goal shouldn’t be to know everything, but instead to quickly discern the most critical piece of information and figure out how to learn that. When Jofish and I were looking for home improvement advice, we could have spent days doing research. Instead, we called Bats, and used his expertise to sort through the different possibilities quickly.

We still haven’t learned how to live with these increased powers granted to us by technology. Our cultural and societal values are still trying to catch up, as is demonstrated by the various debates over privacy with regard to Facebook and MySpace. Another example of our struggles to deal with the implications of technology is the debates over stem-cell research and the questions raised by genetic engineering. How would we behave if we had the powers of gods? How should gods behave? We may have to answer these questions over the next few decades, especially if those who believe in nanotech or the Singularity turn out to be prescient.

I’ve mostly been able to ignore the subprime mortgage mess. I don’t work in finance (although several of my classmates at Columbia are walking on eggshells), and my investments are mostly long term so the volatility in the markets doesn’t really concern me. But then I read the following paragraph in The Economist:

The boldest suggestion has come from Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a guarantor and supervisor. The crisis is so grave, she argues, that most borrowers who are facing resets but still paying their dues should be given the chance by servicers to switch into fixed-rate loans at the starter rate for the full 30 years.

I’ve since seen other articles indicating that the government is seriously considering plans to freeze these loans at the introductory rate for at least five years. And I’m furious.

When I bought my condo, I looked into adjustable-rate mortgages. They started off at a lower interest rate than a fixed rate, but then would be released to the market rate after the introductory period. I did my research (i.e. I asked my parents) and determined that interest rates were as low as they’d been for decades, so the market rate would almost certainly be higher after the introductory period. With that in mind, I went with the fixed-rate mortgage, despite the initially higher interest rate.

And now I’m being penalized for being fiscally prudent. If they freeze the loans at the introductory rates, then people who made bad decisions are being rewarded by getting to keep their low interest rates, while people like me who made good decisions are penalized with higher interest rates than we otherwise would have had. That doesn’t feel right.

At the same time, I understand the social issues at play here. Having to foreclose on people’s homes doesn’t help anybody – the bank is left with an asset it can’t sell to cover the loan because the housing market has been weakened, and the people lose their home. The government is intervening because the economy is being damaged by the housing market decline. I get all that. But I still can’t get over my initial angry reaction.

Where does social responsibility end and personal responsibility begin? I believe that we should have a social safety net, but I also believe there has to be consequences to actions or the same mistakes will continue to be made. I don’t understand the people who said they didn’t understand what they were getting into and they were misled by evil mean brokers who said they could afford these big loans. Regardless of what they were told, they were the ones signing a contract, and they were the ones responsible for fulfilling the terms of that contract. If they got suckered by a seller in a flea market, we would have no sympathy for them, but because it’s their house, they expect to be bailed out.

There’s been an infantilization of society where people expect that they can make stupid decisions and somebody else will have to deal with the consequences. This has been happening because it removes responsibility from people, and also because institutions benefit by exerting more control over people’s lives (the MIT Freshmen on Campus decision comes to mind). But being an adult and a citizen means taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. It means admitting mistakes and trying to fix those mistakes.

I wonder what can be done to instill that attitude in our citizens moving forward, and how to remove the temptation from institutions to increase their control. That would be the socially responsible initiative, encouraging people to learn from their mistakes rather than seeking to shield them from the consequences of those mistakes.

Amazon link

Subtitled “How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow”, this is a book applying the ideas of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to running a business. Maslow’s hierarchy states that people have different needs, but they can’t even think about certain needs until more basic ones are considered. We have to have food and shelter and safety before we ever start thinking about friends and family. We have to have friends and family before we worry about fulfillment, etc.

Conley applied these ideas in running his hotel management company, Joie de Vivre. He says that everybody involved in a business, from employees and customers to investors, have a hierarchical set of needs. For employees, the baseline need is for good benefits, a fair salary and to be treated well. But that’s not enough to get employees to be loyal participants in the business. Once those basic needs are satisfied, they have social needs – they need recognition from their peers and from their management. If all of their basic and social needs are met, then they look for meaning in their job, where it’s not just a job, but a calling, sharing the company’s mission.

He goes through similar pyramids for customers and investors, and observes that only by reaching the top levels of each pyramid do you get fanatic employees, fanatically loyal customers (Apple), and fanatically loyal investors. And getting those fanatics is a great place for a business to be.

These ideas make a lot of sense to me. As I mentioned at Thanksgiving, I’m fortunate that I’m in a position where I can worry about that top level of the employee pyramid, where I’m looking for meaning in my work. It also helps explain why I’ve been dissatisfied at other jobs in the past, despite getting paid well and having autonomy – I either didn’t feel I was getting the recognition I deserved within the company, or I didn’t share in the company’s mission.

While there aren’t any radically new ideas here, this book presents a good framework to think about the issues associated with running a company. It’s not the answer, but I like the viewpoint it presents, and it’s one I’ve referred to several times since I started reading this book.

When I first went to work for Applied Strategies, I didn’t really understand what they did. Applied Strategies (at that time) specialized in doing demand forecasting using decision analysis, which meant that we constructed mathematical models to estimate the size of a market for a drug or a vaccine. Our analysts used complicated decision trees, taking into account the probability of getting to clinical trials, succeeding in each phase of clinical trial, getting FDA approval, what other competitors were entering the same space, how much it would cost to build a factory and scale up production, etc.

At the end of all of these calculations, a number was delivered as to the size of the market. And I was horrified to think that this number was a deliverable. There were an absurd number of assumptions made in the calculation of that number, and changing any of those assumptions would alter the number significantly. So I couldn’t figure out what the value of that number was.

I eventually figured out (or had it explained to me) that the real deliverable wasn’t the number; it was the model. By constructing this model that had all of these assumptions and possible inputs, our customers could then see for themselves how altering certain assumptions would affect the result. The model also helped our customers do a sensitivity analysis and figure out which inputs had the greatest effect on the final result, which determined the inputs for which they needed better data. In other words, the deliverable wasn’t even the model – it was using the model to help the customer determine the relevant factors in their analysis, changing how they viewed the world.

In class this evening, we were discussing various frameworks for strategy analysis, from Michael Porter’s Five Forces Analysis, to a standard SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), to a PEST framework (Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological). One of my classmates at the break was commenting that he wasn’t sure that he saw the value in such analyses, because things change so fast these days that the result of the analysis is stale as soon as you’re done.

His comment reminded me of my Applied Strategies experience, and I observed that the point of the analysis was not in the specific results, but in the change in view that results from doing the analysis. For instance, us technologists find it very easy to get sucked into the everyday grind of specific deliverables. But if we do a five forces analysis, even if the results of that analysis are immediately obsolete, it starts to get us thinking about the big picture of the overall industry and where it’s heading. Doing such an analysis changes how we see the world, and that is the important result.

I am also reminded of scenario planning, as described by Peter Schwartz in The Art of the Long View and at a Long Now talk. The point of doing a scenario analysis isn’t to predict the future – it is to prepare oneself for the future. By examining the larger trends that can shape the future and how one’s organization would react to those trends, scenario planning allows the organization to identify key pointers that indicate which way trends are heading and therefore be able to take proactive rather than reactive action.

This idea that the results of a process are a change in view rather than a tangible result resonates with me. Many organizations claim that people are their most important asset, but few organizations follow through in realizing that changing the viewpoints of their people is among the most effective investments they can make. If everybody in the organization is thinking strategically (shades of Semler), then the organization will have achieved greater results than they ever could have by investing in technology or tangible assets.

Several people have asked me why I’m pursuing this degree in technology management, when it appears to them that I have all the skills for management already. This viewpoint change is a significant component. I know how to think like a scientist, an engineer, a technologist, and an end-user. I even have some inkling of how to think like a manager. But this program is giving me the tools to think like an executive, and to put issues into the terms they will understand.

As an aspiring generalist, I believe in the power of bringing multiple perspectives to an issue, of having many mental models in my toolkit. I want to be able to communicate effectively with every level of the organization, from the peons doing the front line work, all the way up to the executive board who are concerned with ROI and shareholder value. I want to be able to re-frame issues and ideas in such a way that they make sense to anybody I talk to (part of the point of this blog is for me to practice explaining ideas within the constraints of a few paragraphs). I’m still not quite sure what precise career path this is preparing me for, but I’m investing in the most valuable resource I have, my mind, and I look forward to the eventual returns on that investment.