Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

Seen on Twitter: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle

Both Drive and The Talent Code make the same point: Becoming a master isn’t about natural talent or improbable achievements – it’s about getting a little bit better every day, and practicing until what is now challenging becomes unconsciously automatic.

I like Pink’s 2 questions: “What’s your sentence?” (in other words, what do I want to be known for?) and “Am I better today than yesterday?” The first question must be answered before the second can be asked; otherwise, the definition of “better” is undefined.

Once you’ve decided on the answer to the first question, Coyle’s book provides a guide as to how to execute on the second question of getting better. It’s about having the emotional desire (what Coyle calls ignition) to spend the 10,000 hours necessary for expertise in deep practice. To put it in colloquial terms, it’s about getting the reps. We can’t improve without practicing the skills we want to acquire and building them deep into our neural system.

I should note that it’s not simply about repetitively practicing skills – it’s about continually pushing the edges of what we can do so that we can continue improving. In weight lifting, if you can slam through your reps without slowing down, you’re not getting stronger; strength is built by pushing the muscles to the point where they slightly tear, so that they get re-built stronger. Pushing oneself to that edge is difficult – I was only in that zone when I had a lifting partner (which I’ll address in a followup post about the benefits of coaching).

I don’t feel I have good answers to Pink’s questions at the moment. While the tagline of “Unrepentant Generalist” is descriptive, it doesn’t make a good answer to Pink’s first question in that it’s difficult to say what I should be practicing on a daily basis. I have a number of 2,000 hour skills, but I think it’s clear that 5 sets of 2,000 hours is not the same as 10,000 hours. So I’ve been reflecting on what the skills I need to be practicing on a daily basis are. Candidates include communication, synthesis and pattern building, which are all skills exercised by blogging, hence my attempts to get back into blogging regularly.

I leave you with these questions: what skills are you getting the reps in right now, where you’re pushing yourself to improve and get better each day? And are those skills the ones that are part of your vision of who you would like to be? And if not, what are you going to do about that? I wasn’t happy with my answers a couple weeks ago, but I think I’m starting to move in the right direction by blogging more, and spending more time reading books. Reinforcing these habits will hopefully move me in the direction of excellence, as described by the Aristotle quote above. We’ll see.

P.S. Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t reference this 2007 post on mastery, since it hits several of the same points – I discovered it while working on my next blog post but decided to add the link here, as it’s entirely relevant.

I was listening to the Fresh Air interview with Jonah Lehrer, author of
How We Decide, and he mentioned an experiment that seems relevant to me right now.

Lehrer describes the experiment in a Wall Street Journal article about New Year’s Resolutions:

In one experiment, led by Baba Shiv at Stanford University, several dozen undergraduates were divided into two groups. One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.

Here’s where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Prof. Shiv, is that those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain—they were a “cognitive load”—making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the prefrontal cortex is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before the brain starts to give in to temptation.

In other words, the brain is not capable of making good decisions when overtaxed. For instance, if one were working long hours at Google, one’s ability to come home and exert the self-discipline necessary to write a blog post instead of flipping on the TV would be impaired. Just as a theoretical example.

The unfortunate implication of this, and the basis for this post’s title, is that it is those times when one is stressed that one most needs the ability to make good decisions. When I get overloaded at work, I get tunnel vision and start focusing mechanically on the tasks assigned to me, rather than taking the time to figure out what’s actually important and working on that. I also make other bad decisions like drinking more soda, skipping the gym, eating chips and cookies at work, and watching TV instead of sleeping. And, of course, those behaviors make me even less efficient, which means work takes even longer, which means the behavior perpetuates itself.

As an aside, breaking the cycle required a full two weeks of doing nothing over the holidays plus a couple weeks of a “normal” work week for me to rebuild my reserves to where I felt capable of blogging again. Now that I’m keeping more reasonable hours at work, I go to the gym, I’m eating better, and I’m even excited about blogging in the evening.

So how do we avoid this paradox? It seems to me that the bad behaviors like TV and junk food are always lurking in temptation for me, and the good behaviors like hitting the gym and writing blog posts require self-discipline. Part of it is building desired behaviors into habits that I do without questioning: successful examples of that for me include biking to work and flossing while unsuccessful ones include daily situps and pushups, hitting the gym regularly and blogging. Others have success by using a game of sorts where badges are earned for performing the desired behaviors, but I have trouble taking such games seriously.

Another weapon I have is simply self-awareness. If I consciously remind myself that I’m making bad decisions when I’m overloaded, it will hopefully make me question those decisions as I’m making them e.g. putting back the Oreos from the snack area at work and grabbing an apple instead. It’s helpful for me to treat my mind and body as systems that I can learn to optimize and compensate for, like having a tool that one has learned to use despite its quirky tendencies.

An extension of that last tactic is the one the WSJ article suggests, which is building up the muscles of self-discipline. Rather than doing lots of things at once, it would be better to focus my energy on building one habit, and only start on a new behavior when the first has become automatic. Right now, I’m splitting that self-discipline energy between work, going to the gym a few times a week, and blogging more regularly, so if I find myself slipping, I’ll have to prioritize more effectively. I need to recognize that my self-discipline is limited and deploy it in the most effective way until it gets stronger, rather than exhausting it to the point where I don’t do anything.

Anyway, given my struggles with work-life balance, I wanted to mention this experiment and how I perceive it as being relevant to my life. What tactics do you use to develop new habits?

P.S. I’ll be in Boston from Feb. 6-10 and New York from Feb. 11-14, with the timing chosen so that I could attend Grant McCracken’s Chief Culture Officer Boot Camp, but that’s just the cover reason for me to catch up with friends on the East Coast. Let me know if you want to meet up.

Book website, with excerpts
Amazon link

A coworker recommended this to me, and was even kind enough to lend it to me for the weekend.

Coyle asks the question: where does talent come from? Is it nature (genetics) or nurture (environment/opportunity)? He started by visiting several talent hotbeds – the Russian tennis academy that spawned Marat Safin and Elena Dementieva, the Curacao Little League baseball team that has been consistently reaching the world semifinals, the soccer fields where Brazilians train – and constructs a thesis around what common factors he sees among those hotbeds.

Here’s what he came up with. Talent is a mix of three factors:

• Deep practice – I’ve also heard it called deliberate practice. This is the kind of practice that is referred to in the “10,000 hour rule” popularized by Malcolm Gladwell – that it takes 10,000 hours of devoted effort to become a world-class expert at something – that’s 3 hours a day for ten years. Note this doesn’t mean just doing an activity – it means continuously pushing the limits of your ability, always operating just out of your comfort zone, making mistakes and learning to fix them, getting comfortable with that dynamic of improving by failing. And it’s making sure that time is spent doing the activities that you need to improve, whether it’s ball handling in soccer, technique in tennis, or expressivity in music.

  He has three rules for deep practice:

  • Chunk it up – he breaks this into three parts as well – absorb the whole thing, break it into chunks, and then slow down each chunk until you can get it exactly right. I described something similar in my cognitive subroutines post.
  • Repeat it – This doesn’t mean repeating it mindlessly – it’s more about practicing each day and trying to push the limits just a bit more. He cites research saying that we can only live in that edge zone for three to five hours each day, so any more than that is just mindless repetition and doesn’t actually help.
  • Learn to feel it – In other words, internalize it to the point where it’s unconscious and emotions guide your reactions rather than depending on conscious rational thought. Our conscious mind is slow, so to be effective, we have to get everything into the unconscious.
• Ignition – This is the will necessary to sustain oneself through those interminable hours of deep practice. Coyle suggests that one powerful factor is seeing others do it – if they can do it, why can’t I? He gives the example of Roger Bannister and the four minute mile – it was considered humanly impossible until Bannister did it, and within a year many others had. Or the explosion of baseball talent in Curacao after watching Andruw Jones, from Curacao, hit two home runs in his World Series debut as a 19-year-old rookie. Or the rise in South Korean professional women golfers after Se Ri Pak won an LPGA event in 1998. Ignition can also occur because of a desire to belong – Coyle cites several examples of clubs or teams providing the spark for kids to invest the necessary practice time.

  My favorite point in this section was a study by Gary McPherson which tracked students who were taking up musical instruments in middle school, and discovered that the single best indicator of how successful they would be with the instrument was a question that was asked of them before they started: how long do you plan to continue playing this instrument? Those that said they were planning to play the instrument for the long term got more out of 20 minutes of practice than the short-termers got out of 90 minutes. The instrument was part of the long-termers’ identity, and so they wanted to continue pushing themselves and get into that zone of deep practice.

• Master Coaching – Coyle suggests that both deep practice and ignition can be catalyzed by a great coach. The coaches that he interviews are masters at observing each student and pushing the right buttons for each of them to get to the next level. Praise and criticism and information transfer are simply tools to push students to stay in that zone of deep practice at the edge of their abilities. For example, Coyle cites a study of John Wooden’s coaching style, which said that 7% of his communication was praise, 7% was criticism and 75% was information transfer – much of it in the form of “Here’s the right way, here’s what you’re doing (incorrectly), and now here’s the right way again” to reinforce the subtle improvements he desired. Another good quote from the coaching section was that “small successes were not stopping points, but stepping stones … Good. Okay, now do ____”.

One major theme of the book is the process by which expertise gets embedded in our brains. Coyle cites neuroscience research showing that brain circuits that get used extensively are reinforced by growing a myelin sheath around them – the myelin provides insulation for those neural pathways and improves the speed at which those neural pathways fire. In other words, as we repeat and get better at an activity, there is a physiological change that speeds up the signals in our brain so that we can do it faster. I love how this ties into my idea of cognitive subroutines and why I think that repetition and memorization is critical for expertise. I also learned that the myelin sheath breaks down so it has to be continually rebuilt, which is why we have to keep practicing every day if we want to maintain our expertise. Also, it responds to neural activity, and the activity is strongest when we are in deep practice mode, trying new things and seeing what works and what doesn’t.

All in all, a good book covering an important topic in a well-written breezy way. Admittedly, I like it partially because it reinforces my existing biases, so I liked the anecdotes and the neuroscience that supports those biases.

P.S. Another John Wooden quote: “Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens – and when it happens, it lasts… Repetition is the key to learning.” This reinforces Drive‘s point that we need to pick our overall goal and get a little better each day.

Drive book website
Amazon link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazon link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As usual, it’s been a couple months since I posted, so I’m lowering the standards again, and posting a ramble through some topics that are on my mind this morning. I want to get back into the habit of posting, although that will depend on me actually taking a stand on work-life balance, which I have woefully failed to do for a year and a half, so no promises.

It’s interesting reading Clay Shirky’s rant about how women should “behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks” when I identify more with the women in his rant than the men.

My 2004 rant about self promotion describes that jerk behavior and how I don’t want to be a jerk like that, but in the several years since then, I continue to struggle with under-selling myself and the impact that has on my career.

It’s particularly funny at the moment since a couple people in my group at work have started a self-deprecation watch on me and call me out when I dismiss my work as I habitually do. I need to learn to value myself more, or at least correctly, rather than under-valuing what I do because it seems easy to me.

I think there’s another element in play that Shirky alludes to, which is the willingness to make mistakes. Carol Dweck’s research, as described by Po Bronson, describes two different viewpoints towards approaching the world: one is that our skills are innate, genetic gifts (the “fixed” view), and the other is that we can improve anything we do with focused effort (the “growth” view). The two viewpoints have very different reactions to failure; in the first, failure is a sign that our innate talents are insufficient so we should give up, whereas in the second, failure is a sign that we need to try harder or try a new approach. Dweck’s research indicates that children with the first viewpoint tend to take fewer risks, as each risk has the potential to be a failure, exposing their limits.

More broadly, I think there’s a spectrum of comfort with failure, and how willing I am to take on tasks based on what I know before I start:

1. Tasks where I know I can deliver the desired results
2. Tasks where I should be able to deliver the results, but there is some amount of uncertainty in the outcome
3. Tasks where I don’t think I’ll be able to deliver the results, but hope that I can learn enough on the way to make it work – this is like Shirky’s brazen claim that he could do drafting well when he had no experience
4. Tasks where I won’t be able to deliver (aka outright lying)

My tendency has been to focus only on category 1 – being unwilling to commit to doing anything where I wasn’t sure of the results so that I would be seen as absolutely reliable.

However, reliable isn’t good enough. People who are willing to aim high, even at the risk of failing, attain more than the people like me who only attempt what is already in their grasp. My Columbia mentor, Jon Williams, once told me that if I weren’t failing spectacularly at work at least once or twice a year, I was not pushing myself enough. That means taking on more of those tasks in category 3 where it’s a big risk, but it will push me to achieve more than I would have otherwise.

Of course, creating a work environment where people can make mistakes and learn from them is still not the norm, as Scott Berkun described in a recent blog post. It’s a challenge to design a flexible culture where taking risks is encouraged so long as learning is taking place, a challenge which is often ignored if not completely unacknowledged. But there are people out there thinking about this – I’m reading a book by Roger Martin called The Design of Business which describes companies like RIM, P&G, and Herman Miller to see how they have infused an iterative design approach into their cultures.

So it’s a two part problem to encourage more of this sort of risk-taking ambitious behavior.

• Changing the people to be more like “jerks” in pushing them towards those category 3 tasks, as Shirky is hoping to encourage, and I’m starting to work towards in myself.
• Changing the environment – creating companies and support structures where failure is seen as a badge of honor rather than, well, a failure. It means moving more towards a world based on Carol Dweck’s “growth” theory, where failure is seen as the path to improvement, rather than the “fixed” theory which says that we succeed or fail based on our innate abilities.

Figuring out concrete steps towards that second world is something I’d love to work on, if I could only figure out where to begin.

P.S. I’m amused to realize that the books I currently have out from the library are all in this theme of management and motivation: Daniel Pink’s Drive and Johnny Bunko Career Guide, Po Bronson’s NurtureShock, Mintzberg’s Managing, and the aforementioned Roger Martin’s The Design of Business. Now I just need to make the time to read them all.

While it’s still fresh in my mind, I wanted to jot down some passing observations about my experience at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference.

• From the warm-up tutorial, it was interesting seeing how some of the personality preferences were demonstrated by Don Gray and Steve Smith.
  • I particularly liked the I vs. E demonstration – they asked the I’s and E’s to meet up and decide how many people constituted a “large” group. The consensus of the I’s was 8-10 people, the consensus of the E’s was 50. Although I tend to be an I, I had a slightly different take – the group feels large to me if there are more people I don’t know than people I know – so if I’m in a group with 5 strangers, it feels large, but a group of 40 people where I know 30 is fine. And one of the nice things is that as the conference has continued, I have grown more comfortable with the folks here so the groups feel smaller.
  • Another nice demonstration was asking people to situate themselves on a continuum between “Work before Play” and “Always Play Time”. The J’s tended towards the “Work Before Play” end and P’s on the other side. Sadly, despite identifying as a P, I had to place myself more towards “Work Before Play” given my total lack of work-life balance at the moment.
  • One interesting thing for me was that when I took the quick preference test, I identified as an INFP, instead of the INTP I used to. But when they described the F’s as making value-based judgments and thinking about people consequences, and the T’s making “objective” judgments, I had to admit that I’m leaning more towards the F side these days (as evidenced by the air quotes I put around “objective”).
  • The demonstration clinched it for me: they had T’s and F’s decide on how they would execute a layoff of 12% of a company’s workforce. The T’s said use a rating system, cut the bottom 12%, and done. The F’s talked about a number of different factors (key skill sets to keep, personal circumstances), and gave consideration to how to keep the remaining 88% of the company motivated in the face of this distressing news. Admittedly, the F’s had the advantage that several of us had been involved in layoffs either from the employee side like me, or the manager side.
  • The N vs. S demo was entertaining also, as Don separated us into groups and said “Write down uses for this object” while holding up a pair of scissors. The N’s started brainstorming and had an “anything goes” attitude, so ideas like “Rock paper scissors” and “Pacman” (think of opening and closing the scissors as it moves forward) were included. The F’s ended up with fewer and more quotidian uses on their list.
• Both of Jerry Weinberg‘s sessions that I attended were outstanding.
  • One was on being able to say no when needed – lots of interesting fodder for me to consider, including the idea that one can avoid the yes/no question entirely by providing other alternatives (shades of avoiding positional negotiations as described in Getting to Yes).

  • The other session was on not letting a four-year-old run your life. The theory is that we learn certain behavior patterns as children and ingrain them so deeply in our psyches that we don’t even question them, even if they no longer make sense for us as adults. He worked with one woman in the class who had a “rule” of “I must never ask for help”. Through the session, he worked with her on transforming that into “I must always be self-sufficient” to “I can always be self-sufficient” to “I can sometimes be self-sufficient” to “I can sometimes be self-sufficient, such as when:” (listing out scenarios like “It does not cost me too much to do so” or “I have the resources available”). Really interesting for me as I have difficult asking for help as well, so I may have to do some hacking on my own ingrained rules.
• I also attended Esther Derby’s session on implementing ideas, which was interesting. We talked through different characteristics of successful and unsuccessful implementations in small groups, put together a list of successful characteristics, and one thing that stood out was organizational support. So Esther had us map out influence networks within our own companies around some idea we were trying to implement – who were the different people involved, how did they influence each other, and what was their relation to our idea. The process of drawing it out was useful to me in making it clear where I was fuzzy on influences and relationships. And then when I explainied it to another participant, he asked me questions that revealed I was making certain assumptions that may not be justified. So I’ve got some things to check on my understanding of why I’m having trouble implementing this idea.
• I did not get as much out of Johanna Rothman‘s session on project portfolios as I had hoped. I was looking for some techniques to balance conflicting priorities when they’re coming from all directions and are generally requests that appear to be small, whereas the class was more focused on larger scale project prioritization with iterations of two weeks or a month. But another attendee overheard me asking Johanna about this afterwards, and he offered me several potentially useful ideas over lunch, so it was still beneficial.
• I also managed to volunteer at one of Don Gray’s sessions on how to get unstuck when problem solving to get free consulting on a couple issues I’m facing at work. So I sat in the center of the room, and several other attendees asked questions about the situation and offered potential solutions and it was really helpful to be able to do that sort of brainstorming.
• Steve Smith’s session on selling ideas to management was also helpful – he posited that the three key elements of a pitch to management are “What does the manager need to do?”, “What are the benefits for the manager of doing that?” and “What are the costs of the manager doing nothing?”. Then we ran through some role-playing with four people trying to pitch ideas to somebody role playing their manager, which was particularly helpful because we could ask the “manager” afterwards what worked and what didn’t, a benefit we almost never get in real life.

Overall, I enjoyed the conference and learned a lot. I met several like-minded people, have some new perspectives and tools with which to approach problems at both work and in life, and am starting to remember to value myself again. Now if I can only manage to integrate these ideas into how I approach my everyday life…

As many of you know, I’m off at the AYE conference, and one of the major attractors for me personally was Jerry Weinberg. I’ve read books of his like Becoming a Technical Leader and The Secrets of Consulting, and his systems thinking approach is an inspiration to me (his second “law of consulting” is “No matter what they say, it’s always a people problem”).

I attended his first session yesterday afternoon, on being able to say “No” and mean it. It started off somewhat slowly, but things picked up when he requested a volunteer to talk about a situation where they should have said “No” but didn’t. The volunteer discussed a time when he had given an outsized raise to an employee in the early days of his company. Jerry had the conversation role played out in the middle of the room, and a few lines into it, he called freeze to discuss what he saw going on.

He’s a freaking people ninja. In this particular case, he explained how the volunteer was defending his position of not wanting to give a big raise, without ever testing how serious the raise request was. As somebody else pointed out, it’s okay for others to want whatever they want, including a big raise, but we have to recognize those wants as being requests, and treat them as such, rather than treating them as demands to be defended against, subjugating our own opinions in the process. As Jerry asked the volunteer, “Why don’t you value yourself?”

It reminded me of a passage from Speaker from the Dead, where Miro sees Ender clearly for the first time, and says something like “It was as if he knew people at such a deep level that he just brushed past the surface illusions” (the real quote is better but I don’t have it with me). That’s what it felt like watching Jerry parse these conversations. He just ignored the artifice, said what he thought was going on, and was totally present and congruent. Inspirational.

I then got the even greater bonus of going out to dinner with Jerry afterwards – in the session, he said he wanted to meet some of the new conference-goers and five of us immediately volunteered. We talked about a lot of different things, but I particularly liked it when he got into the war stories of old-time hacking. Fun fact of the day – Jerry said that six of the twelve programmers that originally wrote Fortran spent their time developing a single keyword, and he asked me what I thought that was. I took a couple guesses, and he enjoyed telling me the answer was FREQUENCY, and seeing the puzzled look on my face as I had never even heard of it (it was the first thing removed from the language after release). In some sense, he’s a generalist role model for me, as he’s done software, psychology, systems thinking, writing, etc. (he talked about his PhD in systems, where he had to satisfy professors in a number of different fields from linguistics to engineering, even though none of them could pass each others’ tests).

Unfortunately, Jerry announced via Twitter yesterday that he has been diagnosed with fatal thymic carcinoma and this will be his final public appearance for the foreseeable future.

I’m glad I decided to go this year to the conference. The rest of the conference has been good, but meeting Jerry has definitely been a highlight and I’m glad I got the opportunity.