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.
email me if you have any questions or comments.
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I’ve heard great things about Ideo, often called the leading product design firm in the world. Last year, in my “Managing Innovation” class, we watched a Nightline special called the Deep Dive, where Nightline gave Ideo one week to re-design the shopping cart. It was a great look inside the company’s innovation process, and it left me wanting to learn more. So I bought The Art of Innovation, a book describing that process by one of their general managers, and finally got a chance to read it last week once classes were done.
The book starts their redesign of the shopping cart for the Nightline special as an illustration of their innovation process:
I’m a big fan of this process, as might be expected since I advocate rapid prototyping whenever possible. The knowledge gained by letting users interact with prototypes lets you hone in on what’s important and what’s not.
The rest of the book is a collection of a whole variety of techniques that Ideo uses to spur innovative thinking, and how it has created a culture conducive to such thinking. So there are chapters on each of the steps above (observation, brainstorming, prototyping, etc.), but there are other chapters on culture concepts like “Expect the Unexpected”, “Barrier Jumping”, and “Coloring Outside the Lines”.
One of my favorite ideas of the book was to create the advertisement before you create the product. Take the time to make a print ad or a 30-second video that extols the benefits of the product you are creating. This focuses the team on what they are trying to accomplish with the design. I can think of a few projects I’ve been on where asking these sorts of questions at the beginning would have saved us lots of time and effort later.
I think the book may actually work better as a reference than as a narrative. While it was well-written and easy to read, the density of ideas was overwhelming - there were too many good ideas to keep track of, so I only remember a few. I’ll definitely keep this book on my bookshelf at work and flip through it whenever I’m feeling stuck and need some inspiration. I highly recommend it.
I knew the biologists better, though, and said “Here’s a tool to dump the data to Excel, where you can graph it yourself and play with the data directly”. They started playing around, figured out the two or three critical pieces of data for what they were observing, and then I built them an analysis tool that graphed only those pieces of data. We had a working solution before the “real” software team had even completed their design of the singing, dancing, do-everything software that had been requested in their naive requirements gathering process.
Seth Godin is one of my favorite writers, but I have to take exception to his latest post called We specialize in everything:
When choice is limited, I want a generalist. When selection is difficult, a jack of all trades is just fine.
But whenever possible, please bring me a brilliant specialist.
If you’re shaking your head in agreement with this obvious point, then the question is: tell me again why you’re a generalist?
He later added a coda suggesting the idea of specializing in being a generalist, but sticks to his guns that “My point is that you never call on these people [generalists] when there’s a better specialist available.”
As somebody who has branded himself as an unrepentant generalist, I have to respond from my admittedly biased viewpoint.
I actually agree to some extent with Godin’s point. As The Only Sustainable Edge points out, specialization drives greater achievement in a given field, as monomaniacs achieve a level of focus that dabblers can not. Specialization also implies that only those who are truly passionate about a field will commit to the field and become the best in the world at what they do.
I think the flaw in Godin’s argument is revealed in his second paragraph: “If I need an animator, I can find the world’s best animator.” Here’s the subtle point: how do you know that you need an animator? That seems like a trivial question, but it gets to the heart of why generalists matter. Once you have defined the problem, and scoped it, and figured out exactly what skill set you need to solve your problem, then of course you’d hire the best person you can find with that skill set.
Specialists only know how to attack problems in one way - that’s part of specializing. To be the best at what they do, they have to ignore other ways of approaching the world and shut out other perspectives. A specialist is the proverbial hammer treating every problem as a nail.
So when you have a problem, how do you determine which specialist to use? Each specialist will tell you their skill set is the right one to solve the problem, because if they didn’t believe in the power of their specialization, they wouldn’t be a specialist. You need a generalist, somebody who can evaluate the problem from multiple perspectives. and who can ensure that the specialists picked will fix the real problem rather than a symptom.
The other absolutely vital role for generalists is in communication. Specialists see the world from their perspective, so for them to communicate with other specialists requires a generalist who knows enough of each specialization and its jargon to be able to translate between the worlds. This is a role that I have been very successful in filling at all of my different companies, especially on the interdisciplinary team of CellKey, where we had physicists, biologists, engineers and software developers all working together on the same product. Without a generalist, you have specialists talking past each other, and their effort is wasted because you can’t get them all working together and speaking the same language.
Maybe this is what Godin meant when he suggested one could specialize as a generalist, but I think that his post overestimates the value of skill alone, and underestimates the social difficulties of selecting and aligning specialists. The problems of language alignment and of picking the right team of specialists are where generalists provide value in a way that specialists can’t, precisely because they’re specialists.
A few months ago, I read a post calling for authors for a book called The Age of Conversation. It sounded interesting, so I put in my name and will be one of 275 people (listed below) contributing a single page 400-word essay on the theme of “Why Don’t People Get It?”
Here’s where I need your help. When I signed up several months ago, May 15th, the deadline for contributions, seemed eons away. But May 15th is suddenly next week, and because I’ve been distracted by finishing up my degree, I haven’t started on my essay yet. I signed up to write on the topic of Business Model Evolution, and could use some help in brainstorming. I have the noodlings of some ideas, but I’m sure I can do better with the help of another few people.
Also, if anybody is willing to be an editor, that’d be great as well. I would just post drafts here on the blog, but the organizers have requested that essays not be posted before the book is released.
Thanks!
P.S. Following the lead of other authors, here’s the list of all 275 contributors with links to their online presences: Adam Crowe, Adrian Ho, Aki Spicer, Alex Henault, Amy Jussel, Andrew Odom, Andy Nulman, Andy Sernovitz, Andy Whitlock, Angela Maiers, Ann Handley, Anna Farmery, Armando Alves, Arun Rajagopal, Asi Sharabi, Becky Carroll, Becky McCray, Bernie Scheffler, Bill Gammell, Bob Carlton, Bob LeDrew, Brad Shorr, Bradley Spitzer, Brandon Murphy, Branislav Peric, Brent Dixon, Brett Macfarlane, Brian Reich, C.C. Chapman, Cam Beck, Casper Willer, Cathleen Rittereiser, Cathryn Hrudicka, Cedric Giorgi, Charles Sipe, Chris Kieff, Chris Cree, Chris Wilson, Christina Kerley (CK), C.B. Whittemore, Clay Parker Jones, Chris Brown, Colin McKay, Connie Bensen, Connie Reece, Cord Silverstein, Corentin Monot, Craig Wilson, Daniel Honigman, Dan Goldstein, Dan Schawbel, Dana VanDen Heuvel, Dan Sitter, Daria Radota Rasmussen, Darren Herman, Darryl Patterson, Dave Davison, Dave Origano, David Armano, David Bausola, David Berkowitz, David Brazeal, David Koopmans, David Meerman Scott, David Petherick, David Reich, David Weinfeld, David Zinger, Deanna Gernert, Deborah Brown, Dennis Price, Derrick Kwa, Dino Demopoulos, Doug Haslam, Doug Meacham, Doug Mitchell, Douglas Hanna, Douglas Karr, Drew McLellan, Duane Brown, Dustin Jacobsen, Dylan Viner, Ed Brenegar, Ed Cotton, Efrain Mendicuti, Ellen Weber, Emily Reed, Eric Peterson, Eric Nehrlich, Ernie Mosteller, Faris Yakob, Fernanda Romano, Francis Anderson, G. Kofi Annan, Gareth Kay, Gary Cohen, Gaurav Mishra, Gavin Heaton, Geert Desager, George Jenkins, G.L. Hoffman, Gianandrea Facchini, Gordon Whitehead, Graham Hill, Greg Verdino, Gretel Going & Kathryn Fleming, Hillel Cooperman, Hugh Weber, J. Erik Potter, J.C. Hutchins, James Gordon-Macintosh, Jamey Shiels, Jasmin Tragas, Jason Oke, Jay Ehret, Jeanne Dininni, Jeff De Cagna, Jeff Gwynne, Jeff Noble, Jeff Wallace, Jennifer Warwick, Jenny Meade, Jeremy Fuksa, Jeremy Heilpern, Jeremy Middleton, Jeroen Verkroost, Jessica Hagy, Joanna Young, Joe Pulizzi, Joe Talbott, John Herrington, John Jantsch, John Moore, John Rosen, John Todor, Jon Burg, Jon Swanson, Jonathan Trenn, Jordan Behan, Julie Fleischer, Justin Flowers, Justin Foster, Karl Turley, Kate Trgovac, Katie Chatfield, Katie Konrath, Kenny Lauer, Keri Willenborg, Kevin Jessop, Kris Hoet, Krishna De, Kristin Gorski, Laura Fitton, Laurence Helene Borei, Lewis Green, Lois Kelly, Lori Magno, Louise Barnes-Johnston, Louise Mangan, Louise Manning, Luc Debaisieux, Marcus Brown, Mario Vellandi, Mark Blair, Mark Earls, Mark Goren, Mark Hancock, Mark Lewis, Mark McGuinness, Mark McSpadden, Matt Dickman, Matt J. McDonald, Matt Moore, Michael Hawkins, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Michelle Lamar, Mike Arauz, Mike McAllen, Mike Sansone, Mitch Joel, Monica Wright, Nathan Gilliatt, Nathan Snell, Neil Perkin, Nettie Hartsock, Nick Rice, Oleksandr Skorokhod, Ozgur Alaz, Paul Chaney, Paul Hebert, Paul Isakson, Paul Marobella, Paul McEnany, Paul Tedesco, Paul Williams, Pet Campbell, Pete Deutschman, Peter Corbett, Phil Gerbyshak, Phil Lewis, Phil Soden, Piet Wulleman, Rachel Steiner, Sreeraj Menon, Reginald Adkins, Richard Huntington, Rishi Desai, Beeker Northam, Rob Mortimer, Robert Hruzek, Roberta Rosenberg, Robyn McMaster, Roger von Oech, Rohit Bhargava, Ron Shevlin, Ryan Barrett, Ryan Karpeles, Ryan Rasmussen, Sam Huleatt, Sandy Renshaw, Scott Goodson, Scott Monty, Scott Townsend, Scott White, Sean Howard, Sean Scott, Seni Thomas, Seth Gaffney, Shama Hyder, Sheila Scarborough, Sheryl Steadman, Simon Payn, Sonia Simone, Spike Jones, Stanley Johnson, Stephen Collins, Stephen Cribbett, Stephen Landau, Stephen Smith, Steve Bannister, Steve Hardy, Steve Portigal, Steve Roesler, Steven Verbruggen, Steve Woodruff, Sue Edworthy, Susan Bird, Susan Gunelius, Susan Heywood, Tammy Lenski, Terrell Meek, Thomas Clifford, Thomas Knoll, Tiffany Kenyon, Tim Brunelle, Tim Buesing, Tim Connor, Tim Jackson, Tim Longhurst, Tim Mannveille, Tim Tyler, Timothy Johnson, Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Toby Bloomberg, Todd Andrlik, Troy Rutter, Troy Worman, Uwe Hook, Valeria Maltoni, Vandana Ahuja, Vanessa DiMauro, Veronique Rabuteau, Wayne Buckhanan, William Azaroff, Yves Van Landeghem
As I’m finishing up my master’s program at Columbia, it’s time to reflect back on my experiences of the past two years. I wrote up an email to Frank Giardini from the comments on yesterday’s post, who asked about comparing the program to getting an MBA, and realized I might as well post my thoughts in public.
I have not pursued an MBA myself, so my perspective is admittedly biased. I’m also biased by the book Managers not MBAs, which points out how artificial the skills learned in an MBA program are when compared to the skills needed to be a manager. That being said, let me extol the benefits of the Technology Management program.
The Technology Management program has a very specific goal - it is designed to give experienced technologists the business tools they need in order to take their technology domain expertise and become successful technology executives. So we took classes in corporate finance, innovation, technology and the law, operations, knowledge management, marketing, etc. These are all standard classes that might be taken in an MBA program, but each class is taught with a technology focus so the examples and the assignments involve challenges relating the subject to a technology organization.
It’s designed for experienced professionals - most students in the program have 8-15 years experience, so the class discussions are grounded in that experience. Instead of theoretical musings, most discussions come back to “When I was in that situation, this is what I did”, which is far more useful in my opinion. For instance, in the innovation class, when we were discussing the phase-gate method of
managing innovation, I was able to offer my perceptions from having gone through a project run with that method.
The other students are definitely a highlight of the program. I have really enjoyed working with and learning from my classmates over the past two years. I also look forward to continuing to benefit from their knowledge and expertise in the future, as we plan to stay in contact via our Google Group and other social networking tools like LinkedIn.
The centerpiece class of the program, in my opinion, is Alan Morley’s class, “Behavioral Challenges in Technology Management”, or Becoming a CIO, as I like to call it. The class covers the financial and strategic tools necessary to become an effective executive and teaches how to synthesize those tools into a coherent plan. See my linked post for more details.
The master’s project itself is developing a business plan and pitch for a technology venture. Some people do an internal project at their company, while others pursue an idea for a startup. At the end of each term, each student has to present their master’s project to a panel of three mentors. They have ten minutes to give their project pitch with another ten minutes to take questions, and they are graded on whether the panel would fund the project based on that presentation. It’s a terrifying but educational experience, as these presentations (whether to boards of directors or venture/angel boards) are what executives face when getting projects funded.
The program also finds each student an industry mentor as a guide, somebody who offers feedback on the project from the perspective of somebody who is already a successful executive. My mentor was Jon Williams, who was CTO of Kaplan Test, and is now the CTO of iVillage. Other mentors are similarly distinguished, generally CIOs and CTOs from different industries in New York. I am extremely fortunate to have worked with Jon over the past two years, as he has been unstinting in sharing his advice and knowledge with me.
I highly recommend the Technology Management program, and think I learned more from it than I would have from an equivalent MBA program. It’s not right for everybody as it definitely has a technology focus, and may be a little light on general management techniques. But it succeeded in giving me new perspectives and new ways of looking at the world, which can only help me as I continue to move up in the management hierarchy.
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.
Over the weekend, I went for a walk and listened to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s talk at the Long Now (viewable at the Whole Earth site, and summarized here). I’ve been doing this for a few weekends now - I can never pay enough attention to listen to a talk like that if I’m at home because I get distracted, but going for a nice long hour-and-a-half walk is a good way to burn off some energy and get educated at the same time. I recommend the Long Now podcast if you’re looking for good talks from interesting intellectuals.
Taleb recently published The Black Swan, a follow-up to his original book, Fooled by Randomness, and uses the talk to discuss some of the ideas from that book. I won’t try to summarize the whole talk but he made two key points that I want to record for future reference. Both points derive from how our intuitions and our mental tools are not equipped to handle nonlinear models. This may seem like an abstruse topic but had very real consequences in the subprime meltdown, when investors theories’ did not take into account non-linear exponential failures of their models.
Taleb posits two worlds: Mediocrestan and Extremistan. He describes Mediocrestan by having the audience imagine a group of 100 people and their distribution of weights. Then he says to determine how the average weight of the group would change if we added the heaviest person in the world to that group. It turns out to not affect the average that much - even if we add a 1,000 pound person, it shifts the average by only 0.5% or so. This is the world of the normal Gaussian distribution that we understand very well with standard deviations and the like.
Now do the same thought experiment, but use people’s wealth instead. Imagine a group of 100 typical people, and their average wealth. Now add Bill Gates to the group. At this point, 100 of the 101 people in the group are below average in wealth, and Bill Gates has approximately 100% of the wealth of the group. This is the world of Extremistan, where outliers can blow up the normal distribution. This is the world of the Black Swan.
And what’s interesting is that we are so bad at dealing with Extremistan. We just don’t intuitively get it, even though we are surrounded by examples of it. Finance and wealth. Book publishing (a significant portion of all book sales are Harry Potter books). The music industry. eBay. We live in an Extremistan world, but our intuition (evolved in a simpler time without network effects) is still stuck in Mediocrestan. So we have to beware of our instincts, because they will get the wrong answers. And we have to beware of charlatans using Mediocrestan theories because they are calculable - it’s like physicists treating everything as a simple harmonic oscillator because that’s the only equation they can solve.
Another example of Extremistan comes from a completely different source. I’m currently reading Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a book of the wisdom of Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s investment partner. Munger notes: “If you look at Berkshire Hathaway and all of its accumulated billions, the top ten insights account for most of it.” He also quotes Buffett as saying:
“I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches - representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all. Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about.”
The typical investment strategy is diversification - invest in lots of things and trust in the average, which would work in Mediocrestan. Buffett and Munger have internalized the idea of Extremistan in investing and exploited it to their advantage by realizing that there will be successes wildly out of proportion to the norm and targeting only those investments.
The other illustration of nonlinearity that Taleb used was to imagine an ice cube melting into a small puddle. Now imagine starting with the puddle and trying to reconstruct what the ice cube looked like. You can get the volume of the ice cube, but you can not derive the shape of the ice cube because there are an infinite number of shapes that could have melted and left that puddle. In other words, there is not sufficient information in the final state to determine the initial state; information is lost in this process. He uses this observation to illustrate why he doesn’t trust theories; because the observable world does not constrain theories enough, many theories can fit existing data without providing predictive power.
This multiplicity could also be illustrated by taking the sequence: 1, 2, 3. What’s the next number? Most of us would answer 4. But the answer could be anything from 0.1 to 100,000. I can construct an equation that would give any answer you chose as the fourth entry in that sequence. There are an infinite number of possibilities that fit the available data. Taleb reminds us of this multiplicity and displays extreme skepticism when decisions are made based on believing just one possible theory.
Taleb’s ice cube reminds me of a discussion from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig quotes Poincare as saying “If a phenomenon admits of a complete mechanical explanation it will admit of an infinity of others which will account equally well for all the peculiarities disclosed by experiment.” This is the dirty secret of science - theories are worth nothing, because an infinite number of theories can explain any experimental result, including such outlandish ones as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Popper’s claim that theories must be falsifiable to be scientific is a consequence of this - every theory is always one experimental observation away from being disproven. Scientists live in a world where they are sifting through an infinity of possible theories, trying to choose one that best fits their observations, but knowing that their theories can never be proven true, only proven false.
I don’t really have any deep analysis here. I liked the visual imagery Taleb used to illustrate his points, and wanted to record that in this post. After listening to his talk, I may have to get The Black Swan from the library this summer to see if the rest of the book is of similar quality.
I just realized I don’t have an “About Me” page on this blog. You can get a sense of who I am from reading the various posts and browsing the archives, but I figured it might be handy to have an introduction post. This is partially inspired by skimming through Derek Powazek’s book Design for Community, which emphasized the importance of making the people behind the site real. So…
I’m Eric Nehrlich. I call myself an unrepentant generalist.
What does that mean? It means I specialize in nothing. Or everything.
My being a generalist is partially aptitude (I learn fast so I can pick up new ideas quickly, and I have enough mental models that adding more is easy), partially limitations (I don’t have the focus necessary to dive deep into a subject for five years, as I found when I tried to be a grad student), and partially interest (I like talking about everything). The phrase “Unrepentant Generalist” is a reminder to myself to glory in rejecting specialization, and to explore where this generalist path leads. I use this blog to help trace that path, recording my thoughts on everything from cognition to community to conversation to design to management to media to philosophy to politics to stories.
I didn’t mean to be a generalist; in fact, I had planned to be a specialist. When I was a kid, I decided I was going to be a particle physicist because I was a big nerd and wanted to be Richard Feynman when I grew up. I did a high school science fair project at Fermilab, went to MIT where I worked on the Superconducting Super Collider over the summers, did an internship at CERN, and went to grad school at Stanford to work on the Stanford Linear Accelerator. But instead of studying physics all the time like my compatriots, I was singing in the chorus, playing volleyball, going to various talks, running the alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer FAQ, etc.
So I left Stanford to try a different specialization. I had always liked computers even after taking several CS courses at MIT, and friends and advisors often wondered why I chose physics over computers when I had a knack for getting computers to do what I wanted. Since physics hadn’t worked out, I went to work for a friend as a software consultant. Working with a variety of companies taught me about software, but taught me even more about people. I learned that the best technical solution was not always chosen, and that clients rarely asked for what they wanted, so I started to see the limits of being a specialist.
I then joined Signature BioScience, a highly interdisciplinary startup developing new instrumentation for drug discovery. Working there gave me a unique insight into the dynamics of an organization, as the software I developed had to reflect the interests of everybody from engineers to testers to biologists to physicists to managers. I eventually grew into a “union foreman” role, representing the interests of employees to the management team, as I had worked with all factions of the company and understood their issues. And I began to see my value to Signature was not my specialized software expertise - it was my ability as a generalist to meld different viewpoints into a coherent synthesis that happened to be expressed in software.
Signature BioScience unfortunately went bankrupt due to some poor decisions by the management team. The failure of Signature as a company showed me how even a great technical team’s efforts could be wasted by key management decisions. I realized that the value I could bring to an organization by improving its management would easily dwarf any technological contributions I could make, given the multiplier effect of management decisions on the rest of the organization. And my skills as a generalist were well-suited to management, as managers have to balance the interests of their group with those of the larger business, so it requires the ability to see from multiple perspectives.
With this in mind, I moved to New York two years ago to join a Software Management Training Program at Fog Creek Software, and I have recently completed my M.S. in Technology Management at Columbia University, a degree that is similar to an MBA but with a focus on using technology strategically to serve the business.
If that didn’t satisfy your curiosity, here are some links to other versions of me:
Invitation
Now it’s your turn. I’d love to be introduced to any or all of my readers. Feel free to do so in the comments, or send me an email if you’re too shy. Say who you are, why you read this blog, and anything else you want to share.
I watched the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica this morning. This wouldn’t be surprising except that I don’t get the Sci-Fi channel, which broadcasts that show on Friday evenings. I watched it over at hulu.com, the video site started by NBC (which owns the Sci-Fi channel) after they pulled their content from iTunes last summer.
What’s interesting is that NBC lost money from me in this process. I had been paying $2 an episode to watch Battlestar Galactica last year on iTunes. On hulu.com, I watched it for free, except for a total of two minutes of advertisements, clumsily sprinkled throughout the episode. I can’t imagine that the advertising revenue they are getting is worth more than the cut of the $2 they got from iTunes. So how does this make sense? It doesn’t to me. And there are a few other questions about television that don’t make sense to me either.
Why doesn’t HBO have an online portal where I can see their shows? I want to see the final season of The Wire. I don’t even get basic cable, so it would cost me $40/month to get the “standard cable” package, and then another $15/month to get HBO on top of that. It doesn’t make sense for me when I just want to watch one show. I went to iTunes but The Wire was not available there, even though I would have gladly paid $2 an episode. Heck, I would have paid $5 an episode which is comparable to their DVD pricing of $50 for a season); after all, I pay $10 for a two hour movie, and an episode of The Wire is much better than most movies. But HBO had no way for me to give them money in exchange for watching a specific show as it is released (I have to wait for the DVD).
Why do all broadcast networks have an online video on demand service now? I love it as a consumer. If I forget to tape a show, or if two shows I want to watch are on simultaneously, I can just go to the network’s site a day later and watch the show I missed. Most sites even store four episodes so that I can catch up on a series if I lost track for a few weeks. NBC has the entire run of Friday Night Lights online to try to build viewership. While it’s tremendously convenient, I don’t know how it makes sense economically (NBC doesn’t even put advertising in their online episodes).
I suppose one possibility is that the networks are using online rebroadcast of their content as a way of gaining access to a highly profitable market segment, which would be people like me that have broadband video connections and the tech savvy to even want to watch a TV show online. The problem I see with this explanation is that they don’t have any way of targeting me currently. I don’t login to hulu.com or to the network sites. So unless they start delivering advertising interspersed with the show, they’re not making money, and given typical online advertising rates, I don’t know if they’d be profitable even then.
I have been waiting for years for the “a la carte” option of television to become a possibility, where I can pay for just the content that I want to see and nothing else. I wanted this as a cable subscriber - I hated paying for the entire cable package when I really wanted just four channels. I want this as somebody who follows specific shows - I got into television as a result of becoming a Buffy fanboy, and still have an instinctive revulsion for the idea of flopping on the couch and “seeing what’s on”. The funny thing is that I would be willing to pay more to get what I specifically wanted - while the cable company charges $40/month for 40 or 50 channels, I would pay $10/month happily for the 4 channels I actually wanted. I know the economics don’t work that way (the channels I want cost more because they are higher profile) but I hate the idea of paying for something I’m not using.
I was excited by the advent of iTunes video, as it seemed like I could finally pay for only what I wanted. I’ve been following The Shield and Battlestar Galactica on iTunes because those are shows on cable channels I don’t get. I would have happily paid for The Wire if given the option. But with various content producers like NBC pulling their content from iTunes so that they can go their own way, it does not appear as if iTunes will be the “a la carte” solution I had hoped.
I wonder how much of my disappointment is because I’m decidedly atypical in my television consumption. I used to use a VCR and now use a DVR to ensure that I only watch shows that I want to watch. So I record shows, and play them back at times convenient to me, generally skipping the commercials. I’m a nightmare for the traditional television advertising model in the sense that I both time-shift and skip commercials. My viewing habits ensure that I am an advertising money-loser, so the “a la carte” solution would seem to be the only way to make money from me.
But I’m guessing most people aren’t like me when it comes to television (the Nielsen ratings back up that assertion). Most people come home from work, flip on the TV and watch whatever’s on. They surf through the channels available to them, rather than focus on specific shows. And when they do focus on specific shows, they don’t set their Tivo - they make sure they’re home to watch it. A digital analogy would be that I’m one of the minority that uses an RSS reader to follow blogs, where most people just go to a site when surfing to see if there’s new content.
Beyond the “a la carte” subscription model, there are a few other possibilities for how television gets made in the future. One possibility is a donation culture, where customers donate money to get the next book or record produced. I’m not sure that scales to the amount of money necessary to get a television episode produced, though.
Another intriguing possibility that may be what the networks are thinking is using content as a loss leader. ValleyWag had a recent article suggesting that “Recorded music is no longer a product, but advertising”, where artists should give their music away as advertising for things they can actually sell, like t-shirts and concert tickets. Perhaps television episodes could now be used to increase the power of the brand, with the actual money being made from DVD sales and other merchandising. Again, this seems unlikely with the much greater money necessary to make television than music.
Another possibility that occurred to me after posting is that networks may still consider the TV show aired in its normal time slot as the franchise. The video on demand on their sites and sites like hulu.com are merely designed as ways to bolster the original broadcast. This way, if I miss an episode, I can catch up and not feel like I missed a key plot point. Or I can watch a few episodes online and start watching a show that I might not have otherwise (this is how I started watching Friday Night Lights). The network assumes that I will then start watching the broadcast version so they can get their advertising revenue that way. But this assumption is headed towards breakdown as people become more comfortable with technology options like DVRs and video over the internet, which is inevitable as the net generation grows older.
I don’t really have answers. I’m not sure I’m even asking the right questions. But it’s an interesting topic, and I wanted to write about it while the hulu.com/iTunes discrepancy was still fresh in my brain.
I love being part of teams. When I’m on a good team, I work harder, I get more done, and I enjoy the activity more. My biggest career achievement thus far was achieved as part of a tight interdisciplinary team. And yet I’ve often been part of teams that never jell, and are ultimately more frustrating than inspiring. What are the qualities that make a team work, and what can prevent good teams from forming? That’s what Katzenbach (whose work I previously enjoyed in Real Change Leaders) and Smith investigate in The Wisdom of Teams.
The book is filled with inspiring stories of teams that came together under dire circumstances and achieved amazing things. Katzenbach and Smith use these stories as a way of organizing their observations about how to create high-performance teams, from details of how to get people to exchange an individual focus for a team focus, to the characteristics of good team leaders, to how to get a team unstuck from obstacles. But let’s start with determining what a team is.
The authors define a team as “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” These are the key components to creating what they call a “real” team, as opposed to a group of individuals who are working together. They studied teams in dozens of organizations and determined these were the common elements among the teams that were highly successful. So let’s take a closer look at these characteristics.
The CellKey team which I enjoyed so much had all of the characteristics of a “real team”. We were 12 people, each with different skills, who were trying to build this completely new instrument. MDS Sciex gave us short-term performance goals in the form of “phase-gates” where we had to prove the viability of our research in order to continue moving forward with product development, but we held ourselves mutually accountable to a higher standard than Sciex did. And we achieved more than I would ever have thought possible when we originally started experimenting with cells in a back room at Signature.
One surprising lesson from this book is that an emphasis on teams does not create teams. No amount of team-building exercises or team initiatives will create teams… unless there is a focus on strong performance. The first “uncommonsense finding” in the prologue states that “Companies with strong performance standards seem to spawn more “real teams” than companies that promote teams per se”. When the stakes are high and things absolutely have to get done, the normal way of doing things breaks down as being too slow to change and react, so teams emerge as the method to reach those performance goals.
This observation reminds me of a paper on innovation that Scott Berkun recommended, which said that the way to spur innovation was to set a goal that was impossible to achieve by normal methods. People don’t think of new ways of doing things unless they are forced to by circumstance - why take the risk of trying something new when the old way will work? Similarly, organizations will cling to hierarchy and bureaucracy unless they absolutely have to achieve more than they have been; teams emerge to save the day.
I have to admit that I’m not entirely convinced that teams can be manufactured by applying the principles described in this book. As the Peopleware authors observe, team building is more about removing the obstacles to the team forming. I think that the observations of Katzenbach and Smith fall into a similar category - these are necessary but not sufficient conditions for a team to emerge. I suspect that you could do everything mentioned in this book and still not have a team form because of a personality conflict or some other detail.
I recommend the book as a good way to reflect on how high-performance teams can be cultivated within an organization. It’s also fun to read about teams that conquer all the obstacles before them - the epilogue tells the story of the “Killer Bees”, a basketball team in Bridgehampton that competes for the state championship every year despite a male student body of less than 20. But they work hard, they play as a team, and with an entire town rooting for them, they somehow overcome the odds to succeed. Stories like that continue to inspire long after the book is done (which isn’t surprising, since it fits all of the Made to Stick rules of being simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and in the form of a story) and only add to the enjoyment of the book. Thumbs up.
