About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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I started this blog to review books that I had read, but have been woefully delinquent in writing book reviews since August of 2008. But I have kept a draft post with the books I’ve read, so in the spirit of starting the blog back up (again), here’s the roundup. This post will be of fiction books, and I’ll post a roundup of the non-fiction books that didn’t deserve their own post at some point.
Of note is that almost all of these books are from the library. The Mountain View Public Library is a wonderful library, and the convenience of their bookmobile visiting Google once a week has changed my book habits. Instead of ordering things through Amazon, I send an email to Cody to put a desired book on the truck for me, and it shows up on Wednesday. Magic! It also means I read a lot more genre fiction, as I wouldn’t pay to buy these books, but if they’re free from the library, I’ll indulge myself and read whole series.
Normally, I’d link each title to Amazon, but there’s way too many to deal with that, so if you choose to buy one of these, please click on the Amazon link in the left sidebar, or just click here, to give me the referral fee.
Not much to comment on the last few and I’m running out of gas here, so I’m just going to list them for my own reference.
Good grief, that’s nearly 50 books read in the last year and a half. Not counting the non-fiction books, which is another couple dozen or so. Or the TV shows I follow. Or the DVDs I watched from the library or Netflix. I guess I know what I was doing with my free time now 
Trade-Off is a book which explores a simple, but useful, way to frame the world. Kevin Maney plots products along two dimensions, fidelity and convenience, and then spends the rest of the book discussing how products end up in different places on that graph, from the “fidelity belly” to the “fidelity mirage”
Fidelity is essentially quality – what makes a product unique or an experience. Examples include luxury goods that identify the owner as a person of taste, or live rock concerts where the sheer sensory overload is unmatchable by one’s stereo.
Convenience is, well, convenience – how easy it is to get the product. This includes both physical convenience as well as cost – places like Wal-Mart aim to maximize convenience by being a one-stop shop with the lowest prices.
Maney makes a few key points:
That’s basically the whole book right there. He tells a bunch of stories about how companies succeed or fail framed with this viewpoint, but you get the idea.
The book was a good reminder about the importance of focus and positioning; understand where you can get a step on your competition, and then find ways to maintain or extend that lead. The same applies to personal positioning, as Maney mentions in an epilogue. All in all, it was a quick read from the library, but I can’t particularly recommend it.
P.S. Jim Collins, the Good to Great author, wrote the introduction, and had a nice paragraph explaining the value of finding new mental models as tools:
A strategic lens … does not in itself give an answer about what you should do, and not do. Rather, and much better, it forces you to engage in a powerful question, from which you derive your own insight and make your own decisions. If you engage your team in a vigorous debate stimulated by the questions that naturally arise from the ideas in these pages, you will gain deeper understanding not just of what you should be doing (or not) but, even more important, why. The power of a strategic concept lies first and foremost in giving us a lens and a stimulus for hard thinking and hard choices. The critical question is not its universal truth, but its usefulness.
I picked this up from the library, as yet another in the recent series of books I’ve been reading that reinforce my own biases. Overall, I liked it – I knew most of the patterns in cognition that the book describes, but it summarized them nicely with good anecdotes.
One standard model of decision-making is that we are rational beings. We examine all of our options, we think through the consequences of making a decision, we weigh the costs and benefits, and then we decide. Philosophers like Descartes think that this rational mind is what separates us from other species (“I think, therefore I am”).
Another model is that of the unconscious mind, as popularized in recent books like Sources of Power and Blink. The theory here is that our brains have evolved over millenia to have an enormous amount of processing power that is not consciously accessible, and sometimes we have to trust the “intuition” that the unconscious mind is giving us.
Lehrer’s book reviews the strengths and weaknesses of each of these cognition models to help people understand when it’s appropriate to use each model.
The rational conscious mind is limited in power – we’ve all heard the idea that we can only keep 7 information nuggets in our brain at a time. It’s a bandwidth-limited single processor (one estimate is that it processes at 20 bits/second). Its strengths are that it can logically process new situations, override our kneejerk impulses that may not be appropriate to the situation, and come up with responses that have not been tried before. Also, decisions made using the rational path are easy to explain, as they are based in logic. Its weaknesses are that it is slow and has limited capacity (check out his anecdote on self-control when trying to remember too many things), and therefore works best on well-defined problems with only a few dimensions to consider.
The unconscious brain is in many ways the opposite of the rational brain. It is a parallel processor with enormous capacity that can optimize decisions among many conflicting dimensions. It is also extremely fast – it works by training neural circuits to recognize previously seen situations and respond quickly without involving the conscious mind. When we are developing our 10,000 hours of expertise, we are building the necessary neural pathways in the unconscious brain (what Daniel Coyle says are myelin sheaths).
However, the unconscious brain does not deal well with novel situations, as it may seize on an already-trained, but inappropriate, response. It is also unreliable in situations where previously seen inputs have different outcomes because the training doesn’t work – Lehrer cites slot machines as an example of the unconscious brain desperately trying to find patterns when none exist. One final weakness is that the decisions made by the unconscious brain are difficult to explain, as they are expressed through emotions we feel and so we can’t analyze the decisions rationally.
Lehrer describes many situations when the two minds are used inappropriately. For instance, complex multivariable problems can not be answered by pure reason (Lehrer cites the example of a man who lost his emotional capacity after a brain tumor was cut out, and was completely unable to make normal life decisions). In fact, if we try to attack such problems with the rational brain, we make poorer choices because we seize on variables that are easy to explain rationally rather than considering all of the possible benefits (Lehrer cites an amusing study where undergrads had to choose a poster to take home; those that had to give a reason for choosing a poster ended up choosing posters they were less happy with compared to the ones that just chose a poster). Lehrer suggests that the best strategy when confronting a complex decision with many variables is to study it carefully to load all of the information into our unconscious brain, and then go do something else (take a walk, go for a driver) while the unconscious brain processes that information. This idea is reflected in the standard trope that the best ideas come in the shower.
However, the unconscious brain only works well in repeatable situations where it can try out different responses to the same set of inputs and encode what works into the neural pathways. In novel situations, we can’t trust our instincts and have to slow down and engage the conscious brain. Lehrer tells the story of a team fighting a forest fire when the wind shifted unexpectedly and came towards them. The leader realized the fire was going to overtake him before he could get to safety, stopped running, thought for a second, and then set his own fire to create an already burned spot, which he then stepped into so that the forest fire would go around him. Most of his team was lost because they were only listening to their emotional brains telling them to run from the fire.
I liked the book’s balance between the “Blink” theory of trust your instincts and the “Descartes” theory of following reason. Both methods of cognition have advantages and disadvantages, and the best decisions will be made by taking those strengths and weaknesses into account. In some sense, the two brains are mental tools, and it’s up to us to understand when it’s appropriate to use each tool.
I have been a fan of Grant McCracken’s for several years now, so I was eagerly awaiting his new book, Chief Culture Officer. Note that I may be slightly biased in this review, as Grant mentions me in the book as a potential CCO candidate.
Chief Culture Officer is McCracken’s manifesto of how and why culture matters to the corporation. He starts the book with stories like Levi’s missing a billion dollar opportunity in the mid-90s because they didn’t see the hip-hop trend and therefore didn’t understand why anybody would want baggy jeans. Another example is Steve Jobs revolutionizing industry after industry by leading a new wave of culture e.g. using iTunes and the iPod to create an individual song a la carte option in the music industry so people could create their own mixes. Or Geoffrey Frost at Motorola creating an enormous amount of value with the Razr.
McCracken then dives into several of the trends that have been taking place over the last few decades:
One insight I particularly liked was that “Convergence culture is fleeting. But it supplies order, and for the CCO this order is a gift”. Seeing the right cultural trend splits the world in a useful way and illuminates events by giving a framework through which to view them. It gives us a meaningful story by which we can interpret what’s happening, and testable hypotheses as to what will happen next. McCracken suggests we should be tracking the trends that we think are happening and revisit those predictions, so that we can learn from our mistakes (I would note that blogs are a particularly good way to track such thoughts).
How does the CCO figure out which are the next meaningful trends, and which are fads that will fade away? They need to monitor magazines, TV shows, internet forums – one person can’t do it all, so how do we collaborate? McCracken suggests having a group of advisors/editors who can collectively share tidbits (I would suggest that Twitter can be useful for this purpose if following the right set of people). And once potential trends of interest are identified, how do we convert those into actionable insights? McCracken suggests that the CCO needs to champion efforts in the corporation that catch the rising wave, and fight back against the ones on the subsiding ones.
Another insight I liked was the corporations breathe culture in and out – “the corporation is not just an economic actor, it is also a social and a cultural one.” Brands are not imposed on people; instead, brands only derive meaning from how people incorporate brands into their self-story. Brands must spark a recognition within the consumer that the brand is a meaningful expression of identity. For instance, cars are a quintessential expression of identity, ranging from muscle cars, hybrids, or minivans. In this vision, brands that aren’t co-opted and multiplied by their users wither away and die.
McCracken finishes up with a chapter on the nitty-gritty of how to observe and monitor culture, including an appendix with “A Tool Kit for the Rising CCO”, which includes recommendations for magazines, TV, events, people, books, etc. His ethnographic perspective emphasizes the act of noticing, both observing a behavior and then explaining it with a story. Part of the challenge of noticing is keeping an open mind. If you go in with an opinion, you’ll fit your observations into that opinion – you have to pay attention what is actually happening and willing to follow up on surprising inconsistencies. The ethnographer is actively engaged, “capturing how and why the assumptions in this life go together, or feel they do”.
I like McCracken’s premise that understanding cultural trends is vital to corporations that want to act effectively in this world. And as usual, I love his insights into our culture – he provides useful stories for understanding what is going on around us. This is the kind of book that is easy to read, but has meaning that is only slowly percolating into how I think. Good stuff.
P.S. As mentioned previously, McCracken is holding a Chief Culture Officer Boot Camp this Saturday in New York. I’m excited to attend, and will report back with my notes and observations afterwards.
Dan Pink’s book Drive was good, so I also picked up this book from the library, subtitled “The last career guide you’ll ever need”. It’s written in the style of manga (Japanese comics), and can be read in half an hour, but offers solid advice on career management.
Here are the bullet points it hits:
I thought it was a cute idea that took some standard career advice mantras and made them seem fresh by presenting them in the new form of a graphic novel. Not a ton of depth, but I enjoyed the quick read.
I’ve liked Po Bronson’s other books, like What should I do with my life?. I also really liked his New York magazine article called The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids, which described Carol Dweck’s research into the fixed vs. growth mindset of children, and what a tremendous difference it made to praise effort rather than innate ability. So I’ve been meaning to read this book, which summarizes several similar topics (the praise article is the first chapter), and finally got it from the library a couple weeks ago.
The book covers several topics where common parenting assumptions do not match what science has learned over the past couple decades. The praise chapter describes how self-esteem is actually undermined by trying to build it up. There is a chapter on how squeezing in more activities and studying harder is causing kids to lose sleep, which has startling impacts on health and even intelligence (an hour of sleep a night separated A students from D students). Other chapters cover questions about race, honesty, the pace of cognitive development in children, self-control, and socialization.
One particularly non-intuitive point for me was that “to an adolescent, arguing is the opposite of lying”. Parents hate arguments, finding them stressful, disrespectful and destructive, and don’t appreciate their kids questioning their judgment. The interesting result was that kids that respect their parents are the ones most likely to argue with them – the rest “just pretended to go along with their parents’ wishes, but then they did what they wanted to do anyway”. In other words, parents that shut down conflict and argument ended up promoting lying because the kids didn’t feel bound by arbitrary rules that made no sense to them. But when the kids were allowed to have their say, and where parents could explain why the rules made sense, then the kids could be honest and ask for what they wanted, rather than feeling they had to lie and work around the rules. As an aside, substituting manager and employee for parent and kid in this paragraph illustrates the connection between management and parenting (in case you were wondering why I’d be reading a parenting book).
I think NurtureShock is a nice summary of interesting results from the new “science of kids”. I don’t know if there are any mind-blowing revelations, but I’m definitely questioning my instincts about praise and other topics as a result. I recommend going and checking out the list of all posts and articles the authors have published on the subject, including links to the articles listed above and many others, to see if you’d be interested in the book.
In my last post, I talked about getting the reps to improve oneself on desired skills. But it’s difficult to make the time for practice, especially for deliberate practice where we are always dancing on the edge of failure. And I think that’s where I think Coyle’s observation that coaching is an integral part of talent development comes in.
One of the keys to being able to stay in the productive zone of deliberate practice is to create a tight feedback loop. Deliberate practice is about pushing oneself beyond one’s capability, failing and then figuring out how to do it right. However, a key aspect of this is getting immediate feedback on both failure and on getting it right. My theory is that part of mastery is repeating techniques until they are built into the unconscious part of the brain, and getting to that point requires consistent and useful feedback.
Fast feedback is also essential. Imagine a thought experiment where you had to wait a minute to find out if your previous action had worked or failed – you would never be able to stay in a zone of productivity because in that minute, you’d get distracted, and maybe even start on a different task (this is the experience of software engineers in languages without a REPL). To keep yourself driving forward, and experimenting with new techniques that may or may not work, instant feedback is a necessity. And that’s what a good coach can provide.
Coaches provide the immediate feedback necessary to stay in the mode of deliberate practice. This is especially necessary at the beginning of the path towards mastery, before the student has developed their own self-awareness so they can detect their own errors. Coyle described two researches watching John Wooden coach the UCLA basketball team; they were surprised to find that so little of his communication was in the form of praise or disapproval, but instead 75% was in the form of information transfer. He was watching his players and offering them instant feedback on what they were doing right and wrong. That accelerated their path to mastery, as they did not have to do trial-and-error experimentation to learn what worked and what didn’t.
One key aspect of coaching is that it’s not just objective feedback, but also why things happened. I could learn how to shoot a basketball better by just shooting a lot of baskets, where my objective feedback would be whether I made the basket or not. But when I missed a basket, I wouldn’t know why. And when I made a basket, I wouldn’t know how so I couldn’t repeat it. I would try a number of different things, and only a few of them would work, so I’d be wasting a lot of time in experimentation. However, if I had a coach, they could watch me, tell me what I was doing right, and more importantly, why it worked, so I could start to internalize the correct techniques. My improvement would happen much faster, because I would be able to integrate the “story” of the right way to do things into my self story.
As an aside, I was thinking about this last week during a discussion on a random Google mailing list discussing an ethnographer’s observations about Google in China. A couple engineers were dismissive, saying that objective data was better than these subjective stories. My point was that these stories help us interpret the data – data can tell us that market share is changing or that Chinese users are using instant messenger over Gmail, but social scientists can help tell the story of _why_ these trends are happening.
I think the other aspect of deliberate practice that a coach can help with is in helping with the motivation necessary to stay on the edge of failure. It’s so much easier to keep on doing what we are already good at than it is to consciously decide to do something that we know we’ll fail at. So having somebody there to encourage us to keep going past our existing competencies is helpful. Even in something as prosaic as weightlifting, I will never be as strong as I was in grad school, when I had a lifting partner who would push me to lift more than I thought I could – and it turned out I could do it. Now when I go to the gym, I don’t push myself anywhere near that hard, and therefore am not getting anywhere near the benefits.
Note that both feedback and motivation will eventually be internalized, and have to be internalized if one is to achieve mastery. Once I reach a certain point in skill development, I know what I’m doing right and wrong, and what I have to do to correct my mistakes. I also can get to the point where I don’t need external motivation because I am doing the skill for myself and can see how my practice and mistakes lead to improvement. But, boy, it’s difficult to get there, and having a coach to help with those aspects make it easier, especially at the start.
I realized as I was writing this that one of the challenges for me in my quest to become a generalist is the lack of coaching. There is nobody that can offer me instant feedback on what I’m doing, so I am in the inefficient mode of trial-and-error experimentation. And while I have been fairly committed to this path for several years now, it’s still difficult for me as I have few role models (Jerry Weinberg notwithstanding), and little in the way of formal encouragement. I don’t have a career path that I’m following, and while my position at work is enhanced by my generalist skills, they are not formally recognized, which is frustrating. I’m not sure what to do about this, but perhaps being aware of the difficulty will let me at least address the problems more directly.
Sorry for the long post – I originally had planned to split this post into one on tightening the feedback loop and another on coaching, but I feel like they work better together. Coyle’s framework is a useful way for me to think about these questions of mastery, and it integrates well with my previous thoughts on the subject. It also helps me to recognize that lessons might be the way to get me started on a new skill, rather than beating myself up for not having the discipline to start something on my own. Food for thought.
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:
He has three rules for deep practice:
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.
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.
