More time reading

I heard this quote on yesterday's Marketplace (which - let's be honest - is totally underrated). The topic of conversation was (unsurprisingly) the debate surrounding the government shutdown, and Kai noted a conversation that he had with Lisa Goldenberg, COO of Delaware Steel, who was quoted:

I was on the phone with several presidents [of other steel companies] just this morning and everyone is saying they're spending more time reading and trying to figure out what's going on than actually transacting [business].

And I'm thinking: If you're lucky enough to run a company and *not* spend most of your time figuring out what's going on, kudos to you. But what portion of midsize manufacturers are really doing that? And as ideas and business models continue to turn over at an increasingly rapid pace (citation needed), how long will the companies whose C-Suites *don't* spend most of their time paying attention to trends be able to stay around?

My feeling: If you're on your game, you're constantly struggling to stay ahead. It's okay if that's not you - but it's important to be honest with yourself about the consequences.  

Name Three

From Less Wrong, emphasis mine. 

Even with people who've had moderate amounts of exposure to Less Wrong, a fair amount of my helping them think effectively often consists of my saying, "Can you give me a specific example of that?" or "Can you be more concrete?"

A couple of formative childhood readings that taught me to be specific:

"What is meant by the word red?"

"It's a color."

"What's a color?"

"Why, it's a quality things have."

"What's a quality?"

"Say, what are you trying to do, anyway?"

You have pushed him into the clouds.  If, on the other hand, we habitually go down the abstraction ladder to lower levels of abstraction when we are asked the meaning of a word, we are less likely to get lost in verbal mazes; we will tend to "have our feet on the ground" and know what we are talking about.  This habit displays itself in an answer such as this:

"What is meant by the word red?"

"Well, the next time you see some cars stopped at an intersection, look at the traffic light facing them.  Also, you might go to the fire department and see how their trucks are painted."

-- S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action

and:

"Beware, demon!" he intoned hollowly.  "I am not without defenses."

"Oh yeah?  Name three."

-- Robert Asprin, Another Fine Myth

And now, no sooner does someone tell me that they want to "facilitate communications between managers and employees" than I say, "Can you give me a concrete example of how you would do that?"  Hayakawa taught me to distinguish the concrete and the abstract; and from that small passage in Asprin, I picked up the dreadful personal habit of calling people's bluffs, often using the specific phrase, "Name three."

Connections

From "The Happiness Advantage," quoted (in a great post) by Eric Barker, via Michael Galpert.  

...when MIT researchers spent an entire year following 2,600 employees, observing their social ties, even using mathematical formulas to analyze the size and scope of their address books and buddy lists, they found that the more socially connected the IBM employees were, the better they performed. They could even quantify the difference: On average, every e-mail contact was worth an added $948 in revenue.

Ryan Tomayko: Your team should work like an open source project

Last week I linked to a quote by Zach Holman on getting people interested in your projects. His original text included a link to an excellent post by Ryan Tomayko , which argues for structuring your team in an opt-in format, much like open source projects. I've been reading more and more to this effect recently, but Tomayko makes a really great case. A few excerpts (n.b., I've reformatted a few of these due to weirdness while composing this post {grr...}. The spirit should be unchanged. Also, emphasis is mine.):

What we're learning at GitHub is that opting in to open source project constraints often results in better natural survivability characteristics for many types of business, product development, and operations activities. That is to say, processes designed to conform to open source constraints results in a project that runs well, attracts attention, and seems to be self perpetuating where the same project structured more traditionally requires much more manual coordination and authoritative prodding. 

Tomayko excerpts the GitHub product development documentation at length:

The processes and basic rules for communication on github.com projects are roughly the same as those of an open source project. Mainly, that development and operations follows these constraints where sensible: Discussion, planning, and operations process should use a high fidelity form of electronic communication like email, github.com, or chat with transcripts wherever possible. Avoid meatspace discussion and meetings...Work should be visible and expose process. Work should have a URL. It should be possible to move backward from a piece of product or a system failure and understand how it came to be that way. Prefer git, issues, pull requests, mailing lists, and chat with transcripts over URL-less mediums...Almost no part of the product development process requires that one person interrupt another's immediate attention or that people be in the same place at the same time, or even that people be in different places at the same time. Even small meetings or short phone calls can wreck flow so consider laying it out in (a thought out) email or sending a pull request instead.

And then goes on to "predict the decline of the office as the center of planning, coordination, and communication for software development organizations," while acknowledging their utility in developing strategy and celebrating milestones & victories: 

Lastly, working face-to-face in meatspace has proven extremely valuable in matters of strategic thinking and, obviously, for developing personal relationships, two things which are vital to a company's success.

I suspect that more and more product development cycles will move this way in the future, and think that the results will be overwhelmingly positive.

Intentions

Last week, director James Toback appeared on Alec Baldwin's excellent podcast, Here's the Thing. They talked a lot about the benefits of having full creative control over projects, but the big takeaway for me was on being forthright about your intentions. Toback paraphrases Karel Reisz's way of working:

Decide what you want, and then make your wishes clear to everybody you're working with. 

I think this is fantastic advice. 

Zach Klein on companies that allow us to play

via Nick Crocker. 

At the age of 23, Zach sold his company Vimeo. But as soon as he sold his company, he wanted nothing more than to have those wings again. He missed it. He realised he wanted to keep flying. Zach humbly offers advise on what he's doing now (DIY.org) and the lessons he's learned that have informed his own company.

Water will find its level.

This week's 99% Invisible  includes a short piece on the Strowger Switch, the 1878 invention that allowed telephone calls to be connected without a manual operator. Poignantly, Roman includes a bit about the inventor's reaction to the plight of those operators whose jobs would be eliminated due to his invention. His response, I think, is perfectly appropriate, and reminds me of this chart from McKinsey's report on disruptive technologies. From Roman's piece:

La Porte Indiana became the first place to have automatic operator-free telephone dialing. In a speech at the unveiling of the La Porte telephone exchange, the cantankerous Strowger addressed the issue of the 'hello girls' - the operators who would lose their jobs because of his automated switch. "I am often told that the the telephone girls would be angry with me for robbing them of their occupation. In reply, I would say that all things will adjust themselves to the new order. Water will find its level. The telephone replaced the messenger boy, as this machine now displaces the telephone girl. Improvements will continue to the end of time. Strike where they may."

Chuck Klosterman on agreeing with the Future

 Chuck Klosterman from his 2013 book "I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)." The key (to me) is the second paragraph; emphasis mine. (n.b., the text below is transcribed (carefully) from the audiobook. Punctuation may vary.)

And the worst part is that there is no other option. If a father stops his son from embracing the online universe, he is stopping him from becoming a competitive adult. It's like refusing to teach him how to drive a car, or boil water. You may worry about al the ancillary consequences, but you can't take away the experience. Avoiding the internet is akin to avoiding everything that matters. This is even true for adults. An author I know once explained why writing became so much more difficult in the 21st century: "The biggest problem in my life," he said, "is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine." The future makes the rules.

The future makes the rules, so there's no point in being mad when the future wins. In fact, the easiest way for any cutthroat person to succeed is to instinctively and relentlessly side with the technology of tomorrow - even if that technology is distasteful. Time will eventually validate that position. The only downside is that until that validation occurs, less competitive people will find you annoying and unlikeable. The future will retire undefeated, but it always makes a terrible argument for its own success.

The argument is inevitably some version of this: You might not like where we're going, and tomorrow may be worse than yesterday, but it's still going to happen whether you like it or not. It's inevitable. And this is what people hate. They hate being dragged into the future. And they hate that technocrats remind them that this is always, always, always happening. We tend to dislike cultural architects who seem excited that the world is changing, particularly when those architects don't seem particularly concerned whether those changes make things worse. They know they will end up on the right side of history, because the future always wins. These are people who have the clearest understanding of what technology can do, but no emotional stake in how its application will change the lives of people who aren't exactly like them. They know the most, and they care the least, and they kinda think that's funny. Certainly, this brand of technophobia has always existed. As early as 1899, people like H.G. Wells were expressing apprehension about a future "ruled by an aristocracy of organizers, men who manage railroads and similar vast enterprises." But this is different. This is about the kind of person who will decide what the future is.

Zach Holman

via Timoni. Original text on GitHub.

I’ve had a few really great ideas over the years of really awesome things I’ve wanted to work on, and sure, you get people saying “yeah that’d be awesome to have!” But then I couldn’t find anyone to work on it with me. That’s a huge indicator. It’s easy to get people to agree with you, but if you can’t convince them to donate their time to make the vision a reality, it’s a massive signal that what you’re doing isn’t great.

-Zach Holman

Hamish McKenzie on content providers

Hamish McKenzie, writing on Pandodaily about Spotify and the future of content providers.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it until the publishing world has fully adapted to this ongoing tectonic shift in media: In a world in which digital content is increasingly being distributed via all-you-can-eat platforms like Spotify, Netflix, and Oyster at the same time as social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, and email are pushing content to people rather than the other way around, and as we increasingly consume media on one-thing-at-a-time mobile devices, the “bundle” doesn’t matter nearly as much as it did in the print or Web 2.0 eras.

Homepages are becoming less relevant.

Stories have to stand on their own.

Content owners have to get used to the idea that their carefully curated packages are being blown to bits. 

Jeff Bezos on being misunderstood

Amazon's Jeff Bezos at the Aspen Institute in 2009. Via The Motley Fool (emphasis mine).

If you look at where we are today, it's half luck, half good timing, and the rest has been brains. So in some ways, I think we have not been tested. You know, we were unprofitable for so long, and people predicted our demise for so long, that we did develop thick skins - which I think is very valuable for invention, because often times invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort. When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, 'Are they right?' And if they are, you need to adapt what they're doing. If they're not right, if you really have conviction that they're not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It's a key part of invention.

Jeff Bezos on regrets

Amazon's Jeff Bezos, quoted by The Academy of Achievement in 2008. via The Motley Fool (emphasis mine).

So, it really was a decision that I had to make for myself, and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called -- which only a nerd would call -- a "regret minimization framework." So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, "Okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have." I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that's very good. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, "What will I think at that time?" it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That's the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won't regret later.

Valve on Management (or lack thereof)

While people occasionally choose to push themselves to work some extra hours at times when something big is going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication.

From the Valve employee handbook. Lots of good stuff there, this is just an excerpt. 

Chris Anderson on Digital Manufacturing

So, the "Seminars on Long-Term Thinking" podcast is awesome.  

Today I became engaged in a conversation about the future of manufacturing. It was in the context of my parts organizer spiel, which I tend to think (self importantly) is the basis of one aspect of a revolution of how we manage data on physical objects. My interlocutor - with a totally healthy degree of skepticism - questioned the breadth of what I was suggesting (which, dear reader, you're just going to have to imagine for now - I don't have the energy to describe it in full here). He pointed to the required complexity of a unifying theory for parts management, and asked to the basic premise that a single standard for parts data was necessary or useful. It was a totally fair line of reasoning, and one which I defended myself against in a marginal way at best.

It was a pure coincidence, then, that I returned home and listened to an excellent talk given by Chris Anderson about digital manufacturing. I'll skip right to the chase here: Anderson begins by describing the NUMMI factory, which was jointly run by GM and Toyota from 1984-2010, when it closed due to market pressure and disputes between its owners. What follows below are Anderson's words (emphasis is mine; photos are from google images):

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That was ten, twelve years ago. And then Tesla bought that factory...for a song, and put in place another factory. This is what the Tesla factory looks like:

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What you're seeing there looks superficially the same. You're once again seeing machines making cars. But the difference is that the NUMMI machines were custom - each machine did one job. And they were extremely hard to program, and very inflexible, and once you got the whole factory up and running, you didn't want to change it - you just churned it out, one after another. And every machine was different. The welding machines were different from the painting machines which were different from the stamping machines which were different from the sewing machines and the testing machines and the wheel-applying machines, etc.

What you're seeing [at the Tesla factory] is that all of the machines are the same. These are Kuka robotic arms, from Germany...but the point is that they are general purpose robots. Every car can be different. And today, the American car [factories], they could be making washing machines on the same line. These robot arms have these racks of different tool heads, and they can change their functions simply by going and grabbing a different tool, so they can be a welding robot or a bolting robot or a door-closing robot or a wheel-applying robot. And there is hardly a person to be seen on the floor.

What looks like a subtle difference - single purpose, specialized robots vs. general purpose robots - is actually transformative, because fundamentally what this allows is flexibility. And flexibility, I'm going to argue, is the key winning factor of the 21st century. Because flexibility allows you to move faster, it allows you to operate in smaller batches, and it allows you to personalize. Every Tesla can be different...So this is what digital manufacturing looks like on the industrial scale, and that's why this era of automation is different from the other ones.

Anderson goes on to discuss - with infectious enthusiasm - the Maker Movement, distributed fabrication, and his expectations for how manufacturing, creativity, and product development will change in the 21st century. I highly recommend his full talk. 

The net effect, though, is this: We need - and I plan on spending as much of my career as possible addressing - more general purpose solutions to the problems associated with hardware development and manufacturing.  

My focus on general purpose technologies is a large contributing factor to my wariness about the hype surrounding 3D printing. 3D printing is not a general purpose technology. And every bit of energy spent working on producing a better 3D printer just distracts from the tools that I believe will truly revolutionize hardware development and distribution. We need broader, more powerful tools - tools which interface with all manner of manufacturing processes, and which designers and consumers alike can plug directly into. 

The pieces are all here. 3D CAD has trickled down to all manner of consumers. Prototyping tools abound as well - and here I mean not some crappy FDM machine, but services like Rapid Machining and Shapeways. Distribution platforms are there as well, from Shapeways to Kickstarter to Etsy. 

What's needed now is to unite these all with a single layer. When all of these platforms speak the same language - and when Makers, designers, and consumers learn to do the same - then the third industrial revolution will begin to take shape.

Patents are insane pt. 2

All I'm gonna say is that the image below is one of three that support patent  EP1140526 B1.

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Patents are insane.

I got sucked in a little today looking at Google Patents. It's really cool to find a design and then look at all the patents filed by the designer. Weirder still if the company is one that makes a product you hold in high regard, viz. LH Thomson, the contract machine shop and venerable manufacturer of bicycle hardware. 

On the one hand, Thomson owns an incredibly broad patent for "Object clamp, such as for bicycle component, having at least one relief area and related methods." This would appear to cover not only any split tube clamp, including those on bicycle stems & seatpost clamps (as the patent describes), but also almost any accessory that attaches to a tube, anywhere (disclaimer: I am not an expert in patent law). See fig. 33, below:

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If I'm reading this correctly, it's saying that if your split tube clamp has one bore which is of a slightly larger diameter than the diameter of the part you're clamping to, your part is covered by Thomson's patent - at least until 2021, which (I believe) is when it runs out. 

On the other, Thomson owns a patent for "Bicycle rider hand attachment and cooperating gear shift actuator and associated methods" that is batshit crazy. The basic idea is that of a gripshifter, but Thomson's version requires the user to wear one of many medieval glove-like contraptions, which interface with the shifter itself. See fig. 15, below:
 

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It should be noted that this is exactly as crazy as it looks - disjointed thumb and all. Or see fig. 6, which installs a shaft onto the rider's hand, to interface with some handlebar-mounted shifting device:

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So yeah, anyway: Patents are insane. Are these inventions useful? Are they worth protecting? Is the value of their protection greater - to either LH Thomson or the greater society at large - than the value of open sourcing them? I don't claim to have an answer, but I would be interested to hear arguments for the pro side - it seems a bit specious. 

Paul Graham on Formidibility

Anyone who's randomly reading my blog and doesn't know Paul Graham should just stop now. His subject matter is both focussed and applicable to a wide variety of situations; his ideas are poignant; and his manner of presentation is perfectly tailored.  From his "How to Convince Investors" piece, posted 2013.08 (emphasis mine):

The most important ingredient is formidable founders. Most investors decide in the first few minutes whether you seem like a winner or a loser, and once their opinion is set it's hard to change. Every startup has reasons both to invest and not to invest. If investors think you're a winner they focus on the former, and if not they focus on the latter. 

...

There is a role for ideas of course. They're fuel for the fire that starts with liking the founders. Once investors like you, you'll see them reaching for ideas: they'll be saying "yes, and you could also do x." (Whereas when they don't like you, they'll be saying "but what about x?")

But the foundation of convincing investors is to seem formidable, and since this isn't a word most people use in conversation much, I should explain what it means. A formidable person is one who seems like they'll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way. Formidable is close to confident, except that someone could be confident and mistaken. Formidable is roughly justifiably confident.

There are a handful of people who are really good at seeming formidable—some because they actually are very formidable and just let it show, and others because they are more or less con artists. But most founders, including many who will go on to start very successful companies, are not that good at seeming formidable the first time they try fundraising. What should they do?

What they should not do is try to imitate the swagger of more experienced founders. Investors are not always that good at judging technology, but they're good at judging confidence. If you try to act like something you're not, you'll just end up in an uncanny valley. You'll depart from sincere, but never arrive at convincing.

LH Thomson

Pretty cool diagram. From EP0842083 B1, filed 1996.07.30.

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Machinery's Handbook should be a Wiki.

That's it. 

I think Tinder is okay.

And how dating, like most things, is mostly about showing up and wanting to be there. 

Note: This draws from my personal experiences with a variety of romantic and dating approaches. It in no way is meant to be a comment on the dating preferences of others, or - more importantly - the qualities of the women I've seen, cared for, hurt, or been hurt by. Also: YMMV.  

Why I date.

I date because I like being romantic with women. Romanticism allows for openness that doesn't usually exist elsewhere in life. It offers different joys, and different pains, and is, has been, and will (I hope) continue to be a net positive in my life. It allows me opportunities to learn about other people's hopes, dreams, and ways of communicating. It teaches me about my own strengths, weaknesses, and inabilities.

Having an endgame is not my game. Dating is not a chore; I date because I want to date. Showing up to a date wanting anything else but to be there, with this person- I find that highly disrespectful.

There are, as far as I can tell, two factors that determine whether I enjoy being on a date:

1. Whether I want to be on the date.
2. Whether my date wants to be on the date. 

OkCupid encourages me to message, and presumably date, people who fall within the compatibility profile that I claim for myself. If I insist that I wouldn't date someone who smokes, OkCupid will lower the compatibility ranking of smokers. If I admit to owning a dog, OkCupid will match me with people who like dogs.

Sorting through matches on OkCupid is an exercise in establishing criteria for who I'm willing to see, and then exercising judgement based on that criteria.  The thing is, I find my own criteria to be largely reactionary and arbitrary; I have a great deal of mistrust for my own prejudices. Moreover, I am not at all sure that the ideal relationship that I am presumably imagining even exists - and, assuming that it does, whether it would ultimately make me happy. 

So I rank suitors on whether or not it seems that they want to go out with me, and I weight the result with the accuracy I believe they have in their assessment of my character. On OkCupid, I find a high portion of people to be deeply ambivalent about dating. I choose, insofar as I am able, not to date those people.

It's possible the same holds true for Tinder; I suspect that it likely applies across the general population.  But because Tinder selects for mutual attraction, I find that interactions there tend to be a bit more enthusiastic. In addition, Tinder pays due homage to the arbitrarity of attraction. Despite whatever I might say in my OkCupid profile, it would be dishonest of me to enumerate why I am attracted to any one person. For that matter, I can't honestly say why I've fallen in love in the past - and I suspect that the same holds true for most of us. And yet OkCupid insists that I have some insight into what type of person I'll fall in love with next... I just don't believe them.

Call it what you will: Hot-or-Not; a vanity machine; strictly for hookups. I think Tinder is arbitrary, weird, and insightful. And I see no reason why it would be any less effective than anything else out there.