In order to find plot

George Packer, writing in the New Yorker: 

Journalists and historians have to distort war: in order to find the plot—causation, sequence, meaning—they make war more intelligible than it really is. 

There's a nontrivial value to this kind of deception, but it's a tricky balance to strike. One presumes that there are lessons to learn from war, and it follows that someone should be empowered to tease those meanings from the (literal and figurative) rubble. At the same time, I have a strong aversion to making even subtle modifications to underlying truths, and it worries me to consider that what I read is distinctly different from facts.

This same dilemma extends to other realms, including my own (as it were). Business analysis (even that which I find most insightful) and the opinions of experts are subject to all manner of distortions, and I struggle to keep those out of my own work.

Undercurrent

I became aware of Undercurrent a little over a year ago. I found them via Radiolab, where they were an underwriter; their ad caught me off-guard (in particular because it mentioned both additive manufacturing and human-refrigerator interaction), and I've spent a lot of time since then tracking the organization. Undercurrent's philosophy, talent, and focus were highly attractive to me, and I enjoyed reading about their work.

And so it's with great pleasure that I can announce that I'm joining Undercurrent in a full-time strategy role.

Mike Arauz describes Undercurrent's philosophy well here:

This is why we’ve built a team that doesn’t look like traditional consulting firms. We value someone’s ability to see how organizations need to be in the future more than someone’s knowledge of how organizations operated in the past. Our core competency is not our ability to apply rigor and proven methodologies to make safer bets and mitigate risk, it’s our insight about how the future is going to be different than the present, gained through intuition, intelligence, and creativity.

I will be continuing my work on the variety of other projects I've got going - with increased vigor, in some cases. Undercurrent has the highest density of curiosity, creativity, and excitement that I've ever seen in a workplace. I'm looking forward to being a part of it.

What is possible in the future

Ben Bajarin, on twitter yesterday:

Understanding where semiconductors are going informs a great deal of what is possible in the future. That is why I study them so much.

— Ben Bajarin (@BenBajarin) March 26, 2014

I always, *always* want to be looking down the road in fields upstream of mine. If you want to be ahead of the curve, it's critical to be tracking the curves of all the fields that inform yours.

Enough Authority/Enough Responsibility

David Cole, writing about the role of designers in a very good presentation from last year. 

If the project you were working on failed — it hit the market and nobody wanted it, nobody used it — would you blame yourself? If the answer is no, then I think you don't have enough authority. If you're blaming others for the outcomes in your work, it's time to demand more.

I would generalize this statement to all professions, all roles. I would also add that responsibility is key to this equation as well, and that responsibility isn't given - it's taken.

Equity

Marc Andreessen, writing about the future of the news business. Emphasis is mine.

The best approach is to think like a 100% owner of your company with long-term time horizon. Then you work backward to the present and see what makes sense and what remains. Versus, here is what we have now, how do we carry it forward?...

There are some artifacts and ideas in the journalism business that arguably are counterproductive to the growth of both quality journalism and quality businesses. It’s why some organizations are finding it so hard to move forward.

An obvious one is the bloated cost structure left over from the news industry’s monopoly/oligopoly days. Nobody promised every news outfit a shiny headquarters tower, big expense accounts, and lots of secretaries!

Unions and pensions are another holdover. Both were useful once, but now impose a structural rigidity in a rapidly changing environment. They make it hard to respond to a changing financial environment and to nimbler competition. The better model for incentivizing employees is sharing equity in the company.

I tend to agree that unions and pensions are outdated, but it's often difficult to relay the complexity of the situation without sounding overwhelmingly conservative. Andreessen's suggestion is more interesting: replace unions and pensions with equity. I find this quite agreeable.

Nothing to add

Gabe Newell, in the second part of his interview with WaPo, on how he approached his entry into the gaming industry.

It seemed like the big mistake would be to get into a business where you couldn't tell if you were any good at it because you could throw a lot of money away and find out that you really had nothing to add.

This sounds so simple, but I find it totally profound.

Feltron

Nick Felton, in an interview with The Great Discontent: 

Certainly, the Annual Report personal project has elevated my career enormously, but it was only one of many personal projects that I tried along the way—no one gave a hoot about most of them. Not letting that discourage me, I kept trying other things. It wasn’t about finding “the idea,” but putting things out that I thought were worth doing and seeing if anyone cared. If not, I moved along.

Equity

From Yiren Lu's very good opinion piece in this week's NYTimes Magazine, "Silicon Valley's Youth Problem." Emphasis mine.

These are places where the C.E.O. often sits alongside the engineers, where recruiters talk about a “flat” hierarchy as a perk on par with paternity leave, where regular engineers get equity. Some of these changes have occurred out of necessity. “In the ‘80s, it was not uncommon to pay people salaries and give them few if any stock options,” Biswas said. “Now, you can’t have a company like Facebook and attract that kind of talent without offering equity.” 

Ownership is *really* powerful.

Not engineering exercises

From a post on Medium by the very smart team at Bolt.io:

Conduct prototype builds as science experiments not engineering exercises. Have a hypothesis about one specific thing, build something to test that hypothesis, test it, and then analyze your results. Too often startups build a full functional prototype before testing basic assumptions they’re making about their users. Reduce your prototype iteration time as much as possible, and then a bit more.

Unsolved problems

Kegan Schouwenburg's advice to entrepreneurs working in 3D printing, from an interview with Ideas Lab:

Do something that isn’t being done currently. There are so many unsolved problems in 3D printing, and it seems like everybody is focusing on the same one right now, which is basically: Let’s make a cheaper 3D printer. But that problem has been solved. We have that. I think the question now becomes, How do we create products that people want? How do we develop the infrastructure to support that?

The bloggy way of doing it

Felix Salmon, writing about Newsweek's handling of the Satoshi Nakamoto case: 

The bitcoin community is just that — a community — and while there have been many theories as to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, those theories have always been tested in the first instance within the community. Bitcoin, as a population, includes a lot of highly-intelligent folks with extremely impressive resources, who can be extremely helpful in terms of testing out theories and either bolstering them or knocking them down. If Newsweek wanted the greatest chance of arriving at the truth, it would have conducted its investigation openly, with the help of many others. That would be the bloggy way of doing it, and I’m pretty sure that Goodman would have generated a lot of goodwill and credit for being transparent about her process and for being receptive to the help of others.

Premortem

More from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Emphasis mine.

Organizations may be better able to tame optimism and individuals than individuals are. The best idea for doing so was contributed by Gary Klein, my "adversarial collaborator" who generally defends intuitive decision making against claims of bias and is typically hostile to algorithms. He labels his proposal the premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: "Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster."

...The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction. 

As a team converges on a decision - and especially when the leader tips her hand - public doubts about the wisdom of the planned move are gradually suppressed and eventually come to be treated as evidence of flawed loyalty to the team and its leaders. The suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice. The main virtue of the premortem is that it legitimizes doubts. Furthermore, it encourages even supporters of the decision to search for possible threats that they had not considered earlier. 

This is a brilliant idea. 

A quick thought: Angle of Organizational Repose

Thinking about the [citation needed] trend of traditionally hierarchical organizations going flat. Remembering how much I like the term "angle of repose."

Think there's something here.

It seems likely that there is some angle of repose for hierarchy in an organization. I hesitate, though, to suggest (literally or figuratively) that highly hierarchical organizations can't support themselves/will tend to collapse under their own weight. That seems a bit too on-the-nose, and anyway the analogy gets really complicated really quickly. There are too many factors to consider in an organization's structure, and each must be considered against an arbitrarily large set of organizational purposes & principles. 

Still, it's a fun comparison to consider.

The Viral Self

Rob Horning, writing in The New Inquiry about virality. Emphasis mine:

Virality, unlike celebrity, isn’t about exclusivity or personal talent; it’s about moving information continually. Wanting to go viral is not the same as wanting to become famous. Whereas a famous person has become a someone, a viral self is always in process of becoming, always proving itself. But it needs only to be circulating; it doesn’t need to climb.

And later, on a different note:

In a consumer society, we aspire to be as popular as the products we are expected to crave.

That last part is brilliant. 

Exactly the right tool

Ian Frazier, writing about his experience developing a tool to remove plastic bags from trees: 

From that point, in a small but real way, my life changed. Having the exact right tool for a particular job is always satisfying, but when the tool (and, indeed, the job) never existed before, the satisfaction is multiplied. Plus, what we were doing, in addition to being fun, actually was benecial to society. In an over-full urban environment, we had found our niche, one we had all to ourselves. Nobody else in New York City, or in the world, was taking plastic bags out of trees. 

And later:

Now I understood, a bit, how people felt who had worked on the construction of some major public landmark like the Empire State Building.

The fun part about developing a useful tool is that it doesn't really matter what it's used for. The fact that it is used, and that it was never used before, is plenty.

Experience alone is a poor substitute for critical thinking.

-me.

Being Copied

Bunnie Huang, responding to a question about IP theft in Chinese contract manufacturing. The question is at about 22:30, here.

I'm different than a lot of people - I'm a big fan of open hardware, so before I get to that point with the factory I'll publish my schematics and everything online anyways. Feel free to copy me. Right? And the good news is that your idea was good. You were copied. None of my ideas are ever copied, so obviously they're not very good. 

Shapes

Scott DeFelice, CEO of Oxford Performance Materials, said something in conversation yesterday that I found really prescient. I'm paraphrasing this a bit from my notes, but the feeling is there:

There is a business selling shapes. It's not a new business. Shapeways and MakerBot are doing interesting things with the business model, but it's the same business. 

The business of selling *useful* shapes is totally new.

What Scott's saying here rings true to me: When designers are able to create shapes that are functional in and of themselves, the nature of the product - and its value to the end user - changes dramatically. 

If I'm selling shapes, I want to be selling useful ones.

Title/Position

Yup.

Yet more Kahneman

From "Thinking, Fast And Slow," p.124. Emphasis mine.

In an experiment conducted some years ago, real-estate agents were given an opportunity to assess the value of a house that was actually on the market. They visited the house and studied a comprehensive booklet of information that included an asking price. Half the agents saw an asking price that was substantially higher than the listed price of the house; the other half saw an asking price that was substantially lower. Each agent gave her opinion about a reasonable buying price for the house and the lowest price at which she would agree to sell the house if she owned it. The agents were then asked about the factors that had affected their judgment. Remarkably, the asking price was not one of these factors; the agents took pride in their ability to ignore it. They insisted that the listing price had no effect on their responses, but they were wrong: the anchoring effect was 41%. Indeed the professionals were almost as susceptible to anchoring effects as business school student s with no real-estate experience, whose anchoring index was 48%. The only difference between the two groups was the students conceded that they were influenced by the anchor, while the professionals denied that influence.

Given the choice between a professional who won't admit their faults and a man-on-the-street who will, I'll take the latter every time.