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I got engaged! So, here's a gif.

Crazy, right?

Purpose

Me, brainstorming, last week:

I want to create new value by applying my own critical thinking and creativity to compelling and challenging problems, especially in cases that allow me to collaborate with excited, intelligent people.

Alexis Madrigal

I really enjoy Alexis Madrigal's writing, and 5 Intriguing Things is the *best.* He just left the Atlantic for Fusion (joining another of my favorites, Felix Salmon), and his note in today's newsletter struck a chord with me. Emphasis mine:

My animating belief is that politicians and bullshitters and ideologues have taken the idea of societal change and replaced it with a particular notion of technology as the only or main causal mechanism in history. Somehow, we’ve been convinced that only machines and corporations make the future, not people and ideas. And that's not true. Just take a look back in history at the mid-century “futurists” projecting they’d be living on Mars with their stay-at-home wives, playing pinochle in all-white communities.

This is not to denigrate the importance of technology out there in the world or call for a return to pre-industrial or pre-Internet society. Because all the other types of change are being mediated by our phones and networks, artificial intelligences and robots. And those dynamics are really important.

But if you really want to know what the future is going to be like, you can't just talk about the billions of phones in China or paste some logarithmic growth charts into your Powerpoint. You have to go to the places where people are experiencing bits of the future—living the changes—and use that reporting to weave together a multivalent portrait of our possible futures. You have to get the many ways of thinking about the future into the same space, so you can see how they fit together.  

I like this.

What I do, at work

What I say when someone asks what I do:

I work for a company called Undercurrent; we do strategy consulting for really big corporations. Our work generally falls into three big categories.

The first is product strategy; we help companies figure out what to build. Typically we're talking about digital products here, so it's along the lines of "we know we need a new website, but we don't really know what our website should *do.*"

The second is organizational design. Here our clients usually have a product that  customers really want, but they're kinda bad at doing the work, so we help them figure out how to organize their team to be better.

The third is broader think-tank type stuff. There, we're brought in basically to be smart people who can provide an outside perspective on an industry or competitive landscape.

Even though he had gotten himself a seat

From last week's Freakonomics podcast, a conversation with Ed Glaeser about Gary Becker, an economist whose career was punctuated with unpopular - and brilliant - stances. Note, the references to wilderness are referring to periods where Becker studied subjects that were at the time considered taboo.

Dubner: I’m curious whether you think that there are any lessons to be learned from Gary Becker’s experience generally, and maybe how anybody who’s listening to this, whatever occupation or vocation they might be thinking about, could perhaps apply some of that determination of Gary Becker’s to their own lives?

Glaeser: I think Becker is different from many of the wilderness-years-type scientists that we think of in the sense that he was not somebody who came out of nowhere who had a brilliant idea and was mocked for it initially. He was someone who was part of a very well-established economics department, who had, early respect, early rewards in lots of different ways. But what’s different from many of us is that he didn’t in any sense rest on those, and he didn’t rest them not just in the sense that he kept working, although he worked like heck. He didn’t rest on them in the sense in which he decided to risk everything on every throw of the dice, right? He wanted to always be out there. He wanted to push as far as he could. He wanted be as risky; he wanted to risk going back into the wilderness even though he had, you know, gotten himself a seat in the throne room, right? And that’s what’s really special about him, it’s being in the wilderness by design, by choice. Here’s a guy who over and over again decided to take those risks, to court disaster, to be on the very edge, to go into rooms, to enter fields in which he knew that people were going to think that he was outrageous. He knew that people were going to denigrate his work. And yet he still did it. And that’s what made him so productive. And I think the challenge for all of us, particularly all of us who are in the idea business is it’s a reminder to try to push ourselves as much as possible to try to be different, to be unpopular often, to do things that are troubling to the status quo, that risk us being thought of as being, you know, less than we are. 

Sean Maroni

This resonates with me:

I don’t tolerate slack in an organization. When someone is underperforming I’ll point it out. While interning at a large electronics manufacturer I used my final presentation to highlight multiple issues in the company that I had observed. My manager squirmed wearily in his seat. The CTO called me to his office for more details. He thanked me for my candor.

That manager never did offer me a job. In fact, most of the department was laid off a month later. That department was broken. The fact that an intern broke the ice was case and point. I’m glad that my words made a difference for the employees who remained.

A thousand times happier

In a good article questioning the human drive for more power, emphasis mine:

Even if you don't buy into this picture of Pleistocene richness replaced by modern poverty, it is clear that the immense rise in human power has not been matched by an equal rise in human happiness. We are a thousand times more powerful than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but not even the most optimistic Whig can believe that we are a thousand times happier. If we told our great-great-grandmother how we live, with vaccinations and painkillers and running water and stuffed refrigerators, she would likely have clasped her hands in astonishment and said: "You are living in paradise! You probably wake up every morning with a song in your heart, and pass your days walking on sunshine, full of gratitude and loving-kindness for all." Well, we don't. Compared to what most people in history dreamed about, we may be living in paradise. But for some reason, we don't feel that we are.

One explanation has been provided by social scientists, who have recently rediscovered an ancient wisdom: our happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions. When things improve, expectations rise, and consequently even dramatic improvements in conditions might leave us as dissatisfied as before. In their pursuit of happiness, people are stuck on the proverbial "hedonic treadmill", running faster and faster but getting nowhere.

Pasadena, TX

A few weeks ago, right near here..

The White Moderate

I've been thinking a lot about what kind of effect I want to have on the world, and this passage of Letter from Birmingham Jail came to me. In case you haven't read it recently, this document is incredibly powerful; I know of no thinker more masterful in his ability to direct the listener towards a particular moral perspective.

Emphasis below is mine.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

...

I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

Locus of control

From the Wikipedia page for "Self-serving bias," emphasis mine:

Locus of control is one of the main influences of attribution style. Individuals with an internal locus of control believe that they have personal control over situations and that their actions matter. Those with an external locus of control believe that outside forces, chance, and luck determine situations and that their actions cannot change anything. Individuals with an external locus of control are more likely to exhibit a self-serving bias following failure than those with an internal locus of control. The difference in attribution style between individuals with internal and external loci of control, however, is not as marked in successful outcomes, as individuals with both types attribution style have less need to defend their self-images in success. Airplane pilots with an internal locus of control were likely to exhibit a self-serving bias in regard to their skill and levels of safety.

A few rules for communication

I've been thinking a lot (perhaps obviously) about my beef with slide decks, and came up with a list of tentative rules that I want to hold myself to. Many of these could be generalized for communication writ large, but for now they're tailored for decks.

• No stock images, anywhere.
• No transition slides.
• Charts are for displaying data.
• No slide projection of text.*
• List format & headings should be meaningful (no single bullet points, etc).

These are in service of two things:

• Signal > Noise
• Nuanced > Watered down (where applicable; nuance is in the service of other benefits - not a feature in itself)

Basically:

If my audience doesn't have the time or attention to hear an appropriately nuanced argument, they don't really want to work with me.

There's probably more work to be done on these, but they're a start - and in many circles, they're pretty radical.

---

* Translation: Don't write an essay and then chop it up into pieces to display on a page. Paginated prose is an idiosyncrasy of an outdated delivery medium (printed paper). If you're writing prose today, do like the web does, and use infinite scroll.

More Paul Graham

Both from "How to Make Wealth:"

When you're starting a business, it's easy to slide into thinking that customers want what you do. During the Internet Bubble I talked to a woman who, because she liked the outdoors, was starting an "outdoor portal." You know what kind of business you should start if you like the outdoors? One to recover data from crashed hard disks.

What's the connection? None at all. Which is precisely my point. If you want to create wealth (in the narrow technical sense of not starving) then you should be especially skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like doing. That is where your idea of what's valuable is least likely to coincide with other people's.

and:

Faced with the idea that people working for startups might be 20 or 30 times as productive as those working for large companies, executives at large companies will naturally wonder, how could I get the people working for me to do that? The answer is simple: pay them to.

Internally most companies are run like Communist states. If you believe in free markets, why not turn your company into one?

Hypothesis: A company will be maximally profitable when each employee is paid in proportion to the wealth they generate.

Paul Graham

From an excellent 2004 essay called "How to Make Wealth:"

Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don't need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It's doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.

Notifications

Hat tip to Amanda Peyton for instigating this.

A couple weeks ago I turned off basically all of the notifications on my phone. Only the most time-sensitive apps get sounds - and if it's in the lock screen/notification center, it should have a sound, and vice versa. This is all that's left:

Not having sounds & vibrate for email is the biggest change. It's really nice - it really emphasizes that email is characteristically different from SMS, and allows me to turn off much more easily.

I recommend trying this out, especially for emails. It's really nice.

The Future of Work

Last week, I spoke with Brian Barela for a Future of Work project he's working on with Bill Jensen. It's partly a recap of my career and partly my view of the challenges that legacy companies are facing today. 

There are, I'll have you know, remarkably few videos of me talking on the internet. Enjoy these while they're hot.

Being you

While out of town on work, we (in this case Vlad) ask each other questions like "what are the critical things to know about being you?"

Vlad's things to know:

• Remain calm. Nothing is ever an emergency.
• Be kind up to the point of regret.
• Strive to make a dent in the universe.

Spencer's things to know:

• Believe ruthlessly in yourself. The only thing that's for sure is that you will experience things.
• Trust people implicitly; be skeptical of ideas.
• Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

Jordan's things to know:

• Be friendly. Life is long, and you never know who you'll need.
• Be open. You never know when you're wrong.
• Be involved. Because you don't know what you're missing.

The evolutionary cables have crossed

From an opinion piece in the Times about values and subjective well being (emphasis mine):

But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”

But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.

Go out into nature

Penelope Boston, in a long interview about her time researching weird life forms (in our world and others):

It’s just amazing what one’s human experience does. This is why I think engineers should be forced to go out into nature and see if the systems they are designing can actually work. It’s one of the best ways for them to challenge their assumptions, and even to change the types of questions they might be asking in the first place.

Tim Cook

Via Horace Dediu; emphasis mine:

We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.

That last part - participating only where you can make a significant contribution - is important to me. Selling stuff that isn't somehow different, unique, or specific to my outlook and worldview is not where I want to focus my efforts.

Entrepreneurs are limited by their weakest skill

From an interesting study which links entrepreneurship with not specializing during college:

Those who work for others can specialize in one skill, but entrepreneurs are limited by their weakest skill. Let there be two skills, x1 and x2. To make this concrete, albeit extreme, let income of specialists be given by

(1) income of specialists = max[x1, x2]

and

(2) income of entrepreneurs = λ min [x1, x2] 

where λ is a market determined parameter that sets the price of entrepreneurial talent so as to equate supply and demand. This formulation captures the point that entrepreneurs must be good at a number of different skills to put a business together.