Abstraction

Interesting article in Scientific American about a study that shows the brain is hardwired such that people fit into two behavioral categories. (More likely a continuum, but for purposes of illustration I’ll keep it straightforward).

In one category, people are predisposed to alter their behavior based on new information. In the other category, people are less responsive to new information, and tend to maintain the same behavior. Although the context of the study was political (this isn’t a political blog), I think that the study is equally interesting from a business perspective as well. A quote:

Amodio says that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a forebrain region, “serves almost as a barometer for this degree of conflict.”"People who have more sensitive activity in that area,” he notes, “are more responsive to these cues that say they need to adapt their behavior,” reacting more quickly and accurately to the unexpected stimulus. On average, people who described themselves as politically liberal had about 2.5 times the activity in their ACCs and were more sensitive to the “No-Go cue” than their conservative friends.

“They are more sensitive to the need for change and more sensitive to the need to change their behavior,” Amodio says about the politically left-leaning subjects.

At an overall statistical level, I suspect that having a disposition one way or the other is not a good predictor of business success. All other things being equal, two entrepreneurs of opposite dispositions have an equal chance to succeed at the beginning of a new venture. Where it does matter is how a person copes with the unique challenges the new business will face.

For example, a person that tends to maintain the same behavior despite conflicting information may have the tenacity and drive to stick with a business plan no matter what until it succeeds. She will have the steadfastness necessary to keep the business moving forward even when everyone is a naysayer. In some business contexts, this is exactly the right person needed at the helm; the business would fail if the leader was endlessly second guessing and altering course.

On the other hand, a business plan into which people have poured blood, sweat, and tears, may be fatally flawed. In this case, the leader must be flexible enough to honestly appraise new information that conflicts with the existing business plan, and alter the course of the business based on this new information. Here, the leader that stubbornly maintained the status quo would fail.

How do you know which leader is right for which challenge? You don’t, except in retrospect. As Nassim Taleb points out, most of what happens in life is random; all you can do is put in your best effort. A person plays much less a role in their own success (or failure) than they give themselves credit for.

Concern over the stupidity of the average American has been a theme of intellectual pundits throughout my life, finding an initial voice in the early 60s with Richard Hofstadter’s “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” Since then media attention to the subject has ebbed and flowed over the years. During the early 80’s, when I was in high school, I heard constantly about the fantastic levels of moronism achieved by my peers, many of whom, it was said, struggled to find the United States on an unmarked map. Japan was opening mocking our engineering ability, and America’s competitive position seemed to sink along with our math and science scores.

For my part, I had never (to my knowledge) met someone that couldn’t identify major countries on a map; I thought it would be interesting, in a slowing-down-to-look-at-a-car-wreck kind of way, to speak with someone so fantastically stupid. In some way, I expected such a person to consider their ignorance an aspect of their personality: “I’m Sam, and I play the guitar, and I can’t find the United Kingdom on a map or describe the importance of the first amendment.”

Sadly, stupid people don’t often self-identify with their stupidity, and I never got the chance to meet my representative moron. Turns out I didn’t need to, as the election of George W. Bush and the political rise of evangelical Christianity has put a good number of them on the world stage, free to be gawked at. The election also ushered in a new cycle of intellectual hand-wringing, which has risen in pitch as the gang of Idiots seek to ensure the country is well and truly ruined before they leave office and go back to their homes and their churches.

The latest furlow: last week Susan Jacoby’s “Age of American Unreason” was released. If the review at Salon is any indication (I’ve yet to read it myself), I will probably think it’s a great book, because I’ll strongly agree with it:

The chief manifestations of this newly virulent irrationality are the rise of fundamentalist religion and the flourishing of junk science and other forms of what Jacoby calls “junk thought.” The mentally enfeebled American public can now be easily manipulated by flimsy symbolism, whether it’s George W. Bush’s bumbling, accented speaking style (labeling him as a “regular guy” despite his highly privileged background) or the successful campaign by right-wing ideologues to smear liberals as snooty “elites.”

Unable to grasp even the basic principles of statistics or the scientific method, Americans gullibly buy into a cornucopia of bogus notions, from recovered memory syndrome to intelligent design to the anti-vaccination movement.

Ms. Jacoby also has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post:

It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an “elitist,” one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just “folks,” a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980.

Truth be told, I’ve myself accepted “elitist” as a pejorative, one that I use almost unconsciously in a self-deprecating way. The main culprit, according to Jacoby, is the rise of video culture and correlated decline of reading

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Not that Jacoby’s effort matters. As Laura Miller describes in her Salon review, she is only preaching to the choir. I’ll buy her book (I’ll even read it), but it’s really an exercise in narcissism in the sense that I know the book will just reinforce my own opionions. Just think: I’ll be even more elitist.

This quarter’s topic at the Silicon Valley Junto is “This I believe,” a theme borrowed from the recently-reinstated NPR program. “This I Believe” was originally produced in the 50s by Edward R. Murrow, and was wildly popular in its day. A book of transcripts of essays from the program was a huge best seller. Because Murrow refused to support the show with commercials, he was able to include many scandalous essays on the program that would otherwise never air because frightened sponsors would kill it. One of these was an Eleanor Roosevelt essay in which she admitted to doubts regarding the existence of God (if I remember correctly, her gist was that it’s more appropriate to focus on solving worldly problems rather than perservating on post-death access to a gated community with lots of gilding and de rigeur facial hair). But I digress.

Anyway, I’m out of town and won’t be able to participate in the Junto, but it made me think. What would I write? What, exactly, do I “believe?” It’s a deceptively difficult question, at least for me. Certainly there are things that I think are true, but I find it difficult to boil these ideas down into one that captures me. Something that I can point to and say, “this is what I’m about.”

The trouble is that the things I believe are either trite (I believe my employer should provide me with all the free Diet Coke I can drink) or are pretentious (who the hell cares what I believe politically or religiously or whatever). Then there’s the temptation to write about things I “believe” that are really about trying to establish myself as a good person.  “I believe in treating people equally and with kindness” is abstractly true, but the true-truth is I’m often a grumpy asshole for no good reason. And don’t get judgmental about that, mother fucker, because you can be an asshole sometimes too.

I imagine this all has to do with the depth of thought one puts into things. That is, the depth of one’s thinking about an issue is proportional to the importance one places on the issue. It’s disconcerting to be faced with one’s shallowness.

I work for a company based in Ireland, and I travel to Dublin a lot. It’s a global lifestyle filled with parties and laughter, a jet-setting wonderland that only a very few get to enjoy. I know you’re jealous! And well you should be.

Take comfort. There’s always pictures through which you can live vicariously. Like this one, taken from my hotel window this morning. Ah, Ireland in January!

I was talking with a friend the other day in a local Blockbuster. He commented that 7-11 stores used to rent movies, and that he missed having that option. “With 7-11, there were, like, five movies to choose from. It was really easy to decide which of the five I wanted to rent — I always made a choice. At Blockbuster, there are a million movies. I walk in here, and I can’t decide.”

This reminded me of one of my favorites concepts; the notion of the tyranny of choice. For some people, living as a privileged person in a place with plenty of everything is psychologically damaging. Having options can make you unhappy.

At the core of this is the observation that people can be measured by the extent to which they are “maximizers;” that is, to the extent to which they carefully analyze their decisions in an effort to find the very best option. When making a decision, maximizers weigh every option carefully, taking time to consider the very best possible choice.

The trouble with being a maximizer, it turns out, is that the “best possible choice” does not exist independent of a person’s mind. There is no car that is innately “best,” just as there is no “best” entree, shoes, vacation spot, or anything else. In the end, the best choice is the one that makes you feel the best having chosen it. And there’s the rub.

When you choose to go in a particular direction, you are simultaneously choosing against going in another direction. More to the point, you are choosing against many different directions. Having carefully studied those options, the maximizer is intimately familiar with all of the wonderful qualities he just rejected. This creates a two-fold burden for the poor maximizer: the pain of losing all the options now rejected, and the quickly diminishing joy found in the choice actually made.

Consider the person obsessed with buying a new car. Once chosen and bought, the new car quickly loses its patina. It become mundane and hum-drum with familiarity. In the meantime, all the various lost features offered by the dozen cars rejected float in the (now depressed) maximizer’s mind. Compounding this pain is the amount of energy put into the choosing process; after pouring energy into finding just the right option, it doesn’t feel very good.

The situation isn’t just anecdotal or an interesting thought experiment, there’s lots of evidence that too many options cause real suffering. From the sciam article linked to above:

Assessments of well-being by various social scientists–among them, David G. Myers of Hope College and Robert E. Lane of Yale University–reveal that increased choice and increased affluence have, in fact, been accompanied by decreased well-being in the U.S. and most other affluent societies.

Opposite the maximizer is the satisficer (a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice), someone that chooses the option offered that’s good enough, without obsessing about whether the choice is the best possible. This doesn’t mean that satisficers settle for low quality, nor does it mean that they don’t care. It means they don’t obsess — and often, when considering the cost of an obsessive decision-making process, a satisficing choice is near-best anyway in terms of overall cost.

The moral? Pay attention to your decision making process and notice if you tend to struggle or obsess. If you do, force yourself to say “Screw it, I’ll take the middle one” (or whatever other method that quickly identifies the good-enough option). You’ll be happy that you did. And never spend more than five minutes searching for a movie in a blockbuster.

Every so often I learn something that challenges something I’ve (almost always unconsciously) held as a fundamental truth.  For me, it was a fundamental truth that group activities such as brainstorming are more effective than individual efforts in creative exploration of an issue.

I’m sure the “fundamentalness” of this truth is largely due to the ubiquity of group think in business.  People constantly have meetings, and brainstorm, and attempt to arrive at consensus.   But it turns out that brainstorming is not only unproductive, it’s very unproductive:

I am endlessly frustrated by navigating through automated customer service messages. The absolute worst are the voice interaction messages, to which you are supposed to speak your request (instead of pressing “1” or whatever).

The problem is, I’m usually in a car, or at the airport, or in some other similarly noisy place. the stupid machine can’t understand me above the ambient noise. I’m amazed at how irritating this is. It’d be less irritating to just whack me in the head with the phone.

Phone: Welcome to AlwaysLate Airlines. Just speak your request, or say “Help” for a list of available options.

Me: Flight status

Phone: I’m sorry? I didn’t get that.

Me: Flight status

Phone: I’m sorry? I didn’t get that.

Me: FLIGHT STATUS

Phone: I’m sorry? I didn’t get that.

Me: FFFFFFLLLLLLIIIIGGGGGHHHHHTTTTTTTT SSSSTTTTTAAAATTTTUUUSSSS

Phone: I’m sorry? I didn’t get that.

Me: Help.

Phone: I’m sorry? I didn’t get that.

Anyway, check out www.gethuman.com. It’s a great site, with numbers and instructions for getting right to a real human being.

I’m a procrastinator. I’m a little embarrassed to say this, though I don’t consider it a personal shortcoming (I mean, I don’t think procrastinating per se makes someone an asshole). Procrastination smacks of immaturity, of unprofessional slacking. And god knows, “unprofessional” and “immature” are the absolute last things anyone would think about me .

Here’s the thing: procrastination works for me. Always has. When a deadline is close enough to begin to cause a little anxiety, I can tackle a project with a focus and flow that is harder to find when there’s no time pressure.

Imagine my surprise (and a little relief) to discover that I’ve stumbled upon a pretty effective — and clinically proven — strategy. Stress, it turns out, causes blood levels of cortisol to increase. Too much cortisol is a bad thing, but just the right amount boosts interest, attention, and motivation, producing maximum cognitive efficiency and achievement. By procrastinating until a deadline began to loom, I am creating a “sweet spot” of stress during which my performance is better than it would be had I not procrastinated.

With procrastination, though, there is a fine line separating the sweet spot from a negative downward spiral. Procrastinate too much and you risk stress levels climbing high enough to produce a feeling of outright fear. At this point, the more stress escalates, the worse mental efficiency becomes.

This cortisol “sweet spot” phenomenon has implications for leading teams. It implies that leaders must introduce gentle stress into a team to effectively motivate them, to help them reach their full potential. I say “gentle” stress to distinguish my suggestion from the stress caused by the red-faced-table-pounding behavior favored by the Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison wannabes among our corporate leaders.

“Gentle” stress means establishing specific, moderately aggressive deadlines for each project, and then frequently following up with the team member to assess how he/she is doing against the goal. Defining a deadline itself is important (work always expands to fill the amount of time available), but the (lets call it what it is) nagging creates a sense of urgency around the deadline. You are reinforcing that the deadline is meaningful, that you care about it. Creating a sense of urgency and meaning can take the team to the productivity “sweet spot.”

I think it was in Dreaming in Code that I first came across the term “Shaving the Yak.” The concept has been familiar for a long time, I just didn’t have the words to express it. “Shaving the yak” refers to an focus on tools to accomplish a task instead of actually working on the task itself (e.g. Use this db, or that one? This coding language, or that one, etc.)

Sadly, yak-shaving happens to be one of my all time favorite activities. This is most evident in my book-buying: When I’m interested in a topic, I like to browse and buy books about the topic much more than I do actually learning about the topic.

My house is stuffed to the rafters with books that can serve as a chronology of my various interests over the course of the last decade or so.  You can note the many Dr. Phil books, for example, and, based on their position relative to other books, surmise that I had a fight with my wife sometime in 2001. My penchant for this book-buying has to do with feeling like I’m tackling a subject without actually having to tackle the subject.

For a long time, among my favorite yak-shaving activities had to do with personal productivity. Turns out I’m not alone, either; shaving this yak is so popular it’s got it’s own moniker: productivity prOn. There’s lots and lots and lots of web sites devoted to it, and a book, and many, many gurus. And no geeky blog is complete without a missive devoted to it.

And…I’m over it.  Thing is, my day to day work involves many onerous tasks that I’d really rather not have to do.  I think I subconsciously felt that if I were only to become super-productive, some of these tasks would take care of themselves. It’s akin to buying Quicken to fix an overspending problem.  You install it, feel like you’re making progress, and then realize that the unpleasant not-spending part is still there. (Then, irritated, you go out and buy Microsoft Money instead).

So no more shaving the yak for me.  I’m quitting the habit.  And to prove I’m serious, I’ve found a couple good books on the subject.

High among my (many, many) pet peeves is the bathroom hand-dryer, the wall mounted device that blows a sad little bleat of warm air on your hands, forcing you to either stand around and repeatedly cycle the machine or just give up and smear your hands all over the front of your pants.

Now, reminding me that the potential for a great product is often right in front of you, comes a better hand dryer.

It dries with a slim jet of air moving at 400 miles per hour. The Airblade doesn’t heat the air, so it uses about 80% less electricity than conventional machines. The dryers, which will be launched in the U.S. on June 26, are getting rave reviews from early customers. “Everybody loves them,” says George Denise, general manager for property manager Cushman & Wakefield at Adobe Systems Inc.’s buildings in San Jose, Calif. “They’re high-tech. They’re unique. They work well. And I’d even go so far as to say they’re fun.”

That great products ideas are everywhere, if you only know where to look, reminds me of an aphorism — there is, right now, a tiny company (or just an idea for a company) destined to grow into a billion dollar monster. If you missed your chance as an early employee at Google (or wherever), don’t sweat it; the next Google (or Oracle, or YouTube, or whatever) exists today, right now, somewhere. All you have to do is find it. They’ll hire you, no problem. Also, once you find it, you have to stick with it even when everything is going to hell and you’re sure it’s going to be a miserable failure. Easy, right?

One of the things I love most about living in Silicon Valley is how it celebrates geeks. Everything that is geeky, everything that made high school a miserable experience, is the norm here. It’s embraced. If it happens makes you very rich, it’s even sexy. People that aren’t geeky, or are at least associated with some geeky endeavor, are assumed to be cognitively impaired in some fundamental way. Not in a “you are stupid” way, but in a “you don’t really get it” kind of way.

It’s necessary at this point to admit that every non-geek I know (including my wife) would rush to emphasize that they in no way wish to “get it,” nor do they feel their life is in any way poorer for not “getting it,” and where the hell does a geek get off denigrating another person anyway, for God’s sake, not to mention the many things that geeks “don’t get,” including, all too frequently, personal hygiene and a modicum of conversational ability.

But I digress.

My point, such as it is, is that I just learned about the Tech Shop in Menlo Park. From the Tech Shop home page:

TechShop is a fully-equipped open-access workshop and creative environment that lets you drop in any time and work on your own projects at your own pace. It is like a health club with tools and equipment instead of exercise equipment…or a Kinko’s for geeks.

I think that such a great place could only exist in Silicon Valley. Anyway, kudos to Guy Kawasaki for pointing it out. Very, very cool.

One of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen is a demo of Photosynth done by Blaise Aguera y Arcas at TED 2007. Photosynth is a kind of sophisticated web robot that can find images (e.g. by scouring sites like Flickr), automatically determine which images are of the same object, and knit those related images together into an amazing mosaic through which users can navigate.

It’s impossible to really understand how incredible this technology is by reading about it. Take a look at the demo for yourself, and visit the Photosynth site.

What really caught my attention, beyond the technology itself, is the social networking implications for Photosynth. It’s enables one to look at an object (say, Notre Dame, as in the TED demo) through the eyes of thousands of people simultaneously; it potentially represents our collective view of the world. Amazing.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times in previous posts, I’ve recently joined a new company and now have a totally different work schedule. My company is based in Ireland, and I’m working primarily from my office at home in San Francisco, supplemented with monthly trips to Dublin.

It’s my first experience working from home. I entered into it with great optimism about how taking control of the lion’s share of my time would create opportunities that I otherwise would not have. I could, for example, opt to take my son to a swimming lesson on Tuesdays at 11am without disrupting my work schedule at all. As long as I got the job done, there was no one looking over my shoulder telling me that I needed to work within a specific window of time. I can move the window (or break it up) any way that I wished).

On paper it sounds great, and I’m still optimistic that it will be great. But it’s been much harder than I thought it would be. Look at this blog, for example — I provided an update near daily for months before starting the new gig, and have made perhaps three pathetic updates since.

Routine is really important for productivity. At least is is for *my* productivity. Unless I structure my day into specific blocks of time, each allocated to one specific goal or the other, I find that I get almost nothing done. I like to tell myself that this is indicative of an extremely curious mind (e.g. there’s always something interesting to think about, read, or work on). That’s mostly crap. It’s really indicative of my tendency toward disorganization and procrastination, against which I fight a constant battle.

So I’m developing a routine, and am finally getting the details of my home office worked out. The results will speak for themselves in the coming weeks. If I begin the next post with “man, it’s been awhile,” you can be assured that I was less successful that I had hoped.

Well, it’s only been a week or so since my last post, but based on the carryings on I’m getting via email, you’d think that I’ve engaged in some terrible betrayal. Sorry about that.

I do have an excuse: I’ve started a new job. It’s a good excuse, because it’s a high stress event. Here’s proof:

Divorce, death of a loved one, job loss—it’s not surprising to find life events like these on the high-stress list. But marriage? A new house? A personal achievement [such as a new job]? Sure enough, these “good” events are stressful, too.

“Your body reacts to stress in the same way regardless of the cause,” says cardiologist Gerald Pytlewski, D.O., of Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network. “The level of stress hormones goes up, and if the stress continues over time, it elevates your cholesterol, blood pressure and heart disease risk.”

See? And note that the fact that this is some random quote from the internet that happens to support my premise doesn’t for a moment dilute it’s truthfulness. I mean, it’s not divorce or death, but it’s up there.

Anyway, I’ve started a new job. It’s not my first new job, either — I’ve done this a couple times, and I’ve learned something about new jobs over the years, and since it’s on my mind I thought I’d jot them down.

Start before your first day
For much of my career, I didn’t think about my new job until the moment I found myself sitting in an unfamiliar area surrounded with unfamiliar people. It’s much easier if you prepare for the first day by talking with everyone you can. Talk with the person you are replacing. Talk with people on your team, and teams with which you are going to be working. I usually make a list of the half dozen or so people that are likely to be most important in my new role, then I write an email asking to set up a quick phone call to introduce myself and talk about the role. This doesn’t have to be a big production, and it can be kept fairly informal, but it gives you a chance to form some initial relationships and get a “feel” for the important issues facing the company in general and you in particular.

Talk with everyone
People are most productive when they have working relationships — when they are part of the corporate “family.” There’s no magic bullet toward making this happen — it takes time. You can jump start the process, however, by making it a point to introduce yourself and say hello to absolutely everyone you see. Schedule in person meetings with the half dozen people you spoke about on the phone. Don’t wait for people to come to you; make yourself easy to meet and easy to talk to. Ask about the company, the products, the customers, the competitors, anything and everything you can think of.

Be conservative
Be careful how you express yourself, however. When you’re the new guy, there is a strong temptation to prove your value (your amazing intelligence, the formidable breadth and depth of your knowledge, your heroic past deeds). Resist this temptation. Everyone you meet will assume that they are the expert because, as the new guy, you know nothing. Frankly, they are probably right. Even if they are wrong, pretend otherwise. Give them the opportunity to have a forum in which they can teach; it’ll win you friends.

Of course, it goes without saying that you should avoid potentially controversial or contentious subjects such as religion or politics. Laugh at jokes, but avoid the temptation to prove that you are funny (or cool, or worldly) as well. Avoid expressing strong opinions about work-related matters. Collect as much information as possible, ask as many questions as possible, but don’t pass judgement. Even if you are right — the website might actually be pretty awful, the collateral poorly written, the business plan short sighted, the accounting sloppy, but talking about it probably won’t win you any friends and is likely to earn you some enemies. The company got along just fine before you arrived, and it’s amazingly easy to say or do something that causes people to wonder who the hell you think you are.

Read everything
You’re pretty stupid going it, and it’s important to become less stupid as quickly as possible. Read everything you can about your company, your products, your competitors, your technology. Everything. Then read it again. The faster you become fluent in your particular “language” the easier it is going to be.

Find an easy, early win
If you’re talking with everyone, reading everything, and making friends, some opportunities to contribute should become pretty clear. Unless you’re in a position in which your boss is laying out things he/she specifically wants you to accomplish, you need to identify some accomplishments yourself. It almost doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it is possible to achieve within a couple months (at most) and is accepted as a legitimate accomplishment that moves the business forward in some small way. At all costs, avoid the situation in which someone says that you are “off to a slow start” in any context (e.g. if something says “he’s smart, engaged, wonderful, and, though he’s off to a bit of a slow start, I think he’ll really be an asset” really means “he certainly seems capable, but he hasn’t accomplished anything yet.”

Oh, yeah, and a sixth bonus tip:

Give yourself a break
Starting a new job really is a difficult, stressful thing to do. You know no one. You know nothing. Every detail, down to the nearest rest room and how to file an expense report, is new. You aren’t going to swoop in and change the world, so don’t beat yourself up as you ascend the learning curve.

Babies with baggies are particularly unwelcome.