Large Organizations and the Boss Problem

Large Organizations and the Boss Problem is an interesting analysis of why hierarchies don't work so well. The blog itself looks like it is struggling with many of the same ideas that I am, here.

Walmart's $1.85 billon dollar mistake

Walmart's $1.85 billon dollar mistake -- the goal of this article is to point out the difference between polling customers and testing customers. If you just poll them, they'll say a lot of things, but if you actually see what they do, it will often be different than what they say they want.

But look at the deeper context here.

First, the executives who did this were looking at customer experience, which did improve. People liked it more. But customer experience turned out not to be the measure of success (although I suspect those executives were told that it was at the outset). The only measure was the profit curve. That went down in the short and medium term (which happened to also coincide with the 2008 recession) and so the experiment was considered a failure.

Second, the executives who tried the experiment were fired. This sends a very clear message: "Don't try anything new. Risk-taking behavior is punished in the most extreme fashion." Those executives who might have learned something from the experiment have only learned that it's a bad idea to experiment, and anything they might have learned is now lost to the company. More importantly, the rest of the company has learned to keep their heads down and never try anything new. Can you imagine the response when, sometime in the future, the CEO declares that Walmart needs to become more innovative? Everyone will remember what happened the last time someone took a risk and failed. It's not worth it, so no one will do it.

This will ultimately put Walmart in a downward spiral over the long term, and senior management won't be able to figure out why. "We say we want to be innovative, why isn't it happening? And why can't we hire innovators?" You can talk all you want, but if experimentation is expensive and failure is punished, no one will do it.

Startup Balance

You need to come up with a vision, but at the same time you must be able to see when your initial vision doesn't work. And when that happens, change. However, if you change on every whim that comes your way, then you won't be able to stick to anything long enough to do an actual experiment, and you'll never be able to get far enough to create something.

It requires a fine balance -- enough enthusiasm for new ideas, along with the ability to move beyond endless brainstorming. Enough stick-to-it-iveness to create something (at least, to create something that will give you feedback from potential customers), but not so much that you can't let go when it becomes clear that this isn't a useful path.

On top of all that, dedication to good design. At least, good enough that it doesn't get in the way of customer experience, and ideally, something that creates a good customer experience. If you want to really stand out, and be another Apple, dedication to exceptional customer experience.

The Education Bubble

This article is spot on. Education is the next thing on our list of "let's take something ridiculous and make it super-ridiculous by turning it into a bubble."

“A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed.” Peter Thiel points out that the value of an education is one of the last unquestioned foundational beliefs that we have in this country. Think about a college education and see if you can question its value. If you're like me you'll find it's very hard to think that not going to college is a good life choice. (I myself had such an excellent time in college that I overstayed. But it was a lot cheaper then; if you had some luck -- fellowships and teaching assistantships -- and made careful choices, living cheaply, you could actually save some money. Hard to believe these days).

Everybody just "knows" that the investment in college will always pay off, one way or another. Everyone, that is, except the parents whose kids are moving back in after graduating, struggling to pay off immense college loans which -- conveniently for the colleges and loan institutions -- are somehow (thanks to George W.) immune from things like bankruptcy. A college degree has never guaranteed a job, but it always seemed to at least tip the scales in your favor. Sometimes, if you chose a particularly desirable major, you could be snatched right out of school, or even start with summer internships during school (computer science and some branches of engineering still seem to have this kind of magnetism, but those fields are more of a calling than something you can just decide to do).

Does this mean education is worthless? Not at all. Most of what passes for education in our system, however, is worthless. Listening to uninspired lectures and regurgitating "facts" during tests is a monstrous waste of time, but that's mostly where your debt goes. You emerge, blinking in the sunlight and clutching your diploma, looking for someone to tell you what to do, give you a test and a grade -- after all, that's how you've been trained. What a shock to discover that your training is based on what is convenient for the schools and not what produces a useful member of today's society. You have been trained into the mentality of a factory worker in a world that no longer wants meat robots. Today's developed world wants creatives that can get things done -- the two things that traditional schooling teaches you not to be.

When I decided that it was time to reinvent myself, more education was one of the things that came up. For about a microsecond. I couldn't take it seriously because I've had the experience of mastering something, and most professors haven't. Even if they have, endless streams of "will this be on the test?" students have sucked the life out of them. In the end, you go to school and read books, go through some artificial "project" motions and take tests to ensure that you are more or less the same as your classmates.

I don't need to pay someone a ton of money to be told to read a book. I suspect the books they want me to read aren't going to be the ones I need. The networking aspect of school sounds good in theory, except that I'm going to be networking with people who are satisfied to go through the motions of school. This isn't interesting enough for me anymore.

What's the alternative? I don't know yet, but I do know that the traditional schools aren't going to figure it out. If they're lucky, they might be able to make enough changes to hang on for awhile when the educational revolution does come, but most will probably go the way of the newspaper ("unable," as Seth Godin says, "to separate the news from the paper").

What about this, though: instead of top-down (the colleges decide what and how you'll learn), how about bottom-up? Suppose the people who want to learn something form a group? The group might collectively hunt for resources, take notes, do online group studies, and with collected resources even hire experts to help train them in specific advanced topics. The group could periodically schedule retreats to do intensive studies and projects. In a system like this, all your money goes towards your goal of learning. Just like an open spaces conference, you don't really need all the administrative overhead if you're doing something you want to do; people in the group can do whatever's necessary.

Yes, there wouldn't be grades and tests because that's not the point -- you aren't trying to get everyone to be the same and put them on some kind of curve in order to make it easy for a factory to evaluate them. Everyone would learn what they are individually able to learn. The "test" would be in whatever you produced -- the project or paper or even research breakthrough. The financial barrier to entry is much lower because the vast bulk of your money is not going into an ancient hulking infrastructure.

We need to invent some kind of different, much cheaper, much better way for people to learn. The current system is a huge waste of time and resources, producing human robots who must be told what to do after having the creativity and self-motivation crushed out of them. That's not what the world needs anymore.

Feed Your Brain

This Scientific American article: You can increase your intelligence: 5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential is a fascinating -- and science-based -- look at what really stimulates your brain. It also seems like a path to being a happy, creative person, but that's just my own guess.

One observation on her assertion that a GPS reduces your abilities by making you lazy about paying attention to where you are. I have experienced this myself; if you know the GPS is always backing you up then you don't have to make sure this is the turn, so you don't always pay attention to what's going on, noticing details that you do if you're trying to navigate from a map.

I am hesitant to come to the same conclusion she has about GPS (which is an anecdotal part of the article, not backed with research). I suspect that I am noticing different things when I'm being aided by a GPS; also I've found myself being bolder and more exploratory when I know I "can't get lost." So it's possible I'm getting more and/or different stimulation, but we just don't know for sure.

And more importantly, I recall when spelling checkers started to appear on computers. The common folklore that everyone seemed to agree on at the time was that the spelling checkers would make you a worse speller, because they're a crutch. But I had at least one experience where a friend -- an adamant lifelong misspeller -- became a much, much better speller. I think it's because the computer was gently correcting him, without judgment. Without the negative emotional baggage, he easily incorporated the corrections and began to spell better, contrary to popular belief as to what would "naturally" happen. By making the change easy, the computer made it easier for him to improve himself. This seems to be a common mistake when it comes to technological improvements -- we are often 180 degrees wrong, but when the next change comes along we haven't learned from the previous mistake. I wonder if this is due to some basic belief that, if we could discover it, we could change and start producing better appraisals. Or perhaps it comes from some evolutionarily-developed biological reflex, in which case, if we can become aware of it, we can compensate for it in our thought processes.

Point number 5 in the article indicates how important human networking is. One of the prime values of any kind of conference seems to be networking, which we are unable to control. You can't make people network, but you can create situations where networking is more likely to happen, and make it easier. This is probably THE selling point for the expenses of traveling to and participating in a conference, versus learning things (much more cheaply) via the Internet. Thus, anything we can do at a conference to help increase networking makes that conference more desirable.

Linchpin

The world has changed. The age of the factory has already passed. Unfortunately, schools haven't figured this out yet and are still churning out compliant factory workers who show up on time and go through their obedient motions, whether they are in a physical factory or, more commonly, in a cubicle.

The factory has always been the domain of the robot. Factories were invented before we had robots, so humans were turned into robots in the meantime. I'm not making this up. "They" designed it this way. Woodrow Wilson said, "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks" (Page 46).

The news media loves to say that manufacturing is going overseas. This isn't true; US manufacturing has always been on the increase and the US remains one of the top (probably THE top) manufacturing country in the world. What has moved overseas is menial manufacturing jobs. More importantly, every time we have a recession, people are laid off from manufacturing jobs and eventually replaced by robots (what factories wanted in the first place). This disrupts those who have been trained to be factory workers, but eventually everyone benefits from cheaper, better, machine-created goods.

Godin's point in Linchpin is that if you've been trained into the factory mentality, even if you've got a seemingly-creative office job, you're kind of screwed unless you can claw your way out of that box. Otherwise you're a replaceable commodity, and as soon as the company needs to tweak its numbers or screws up, you're pitched overboard because why not? You're a cog, and when they need to they can get another cog.

You fight this by becoming special, by becoming something that your company can't easily replace. One way to do this is by taking a job designed to employ replaceable humans and add something to it, usually by investing emotional effort. A barrista is designed to be a replaceable job in a coffee shop but the one who makes the emotional connection with customers becomes far less disposable. The problem with this approach is that the boss might not see this, and cling to the (perceived) power of that replaceability. If any part of your job fits the replaceability model, those in power can focus on that part and convince themselves you are a fungible resource.

The stronger alternative is to make yourself a linchpin, someone obviously irreplaceable. Godin often refers to people like this as artists, those who create uniqueness because they have discovered their own voice. This also faces a challenge from above: those in control must go through the (usually painful) learning process to discover that management can no longer be based on the factory model: manufacturing is now the realm of robots, and creativity is the realm of humans. Alas, the bulk of companies still labor under the humans-as-cogs view of the world, and are thus unable to appreciate the value of human-as-artist. Companies that have made the shift -- or more likely, been created with the new view, as the shift is probably too fundamental for existing companies to achieve -- are rare gems in a world of mediocrity.

This book is a call to action, to discover and foster your own unique talents. I think it's probably Godin's best to date. However, there are two glaring issues that have me confused -- confused because I can't figure out whether Godin simply hasn't thought about them (hard to imagine, because he seems to think about and question everything) or if he has decided to choose his battles and simply not bring up these issues for consideration.

The first and biggest issue is that he describes everything about the working world as having changed, from the standpoint of the worker. But as far as the organizational structure goes, it's as if Godin has a complete blind spot. He never even mentions the possibility of change, as if the power hierarchy is cast in stone and could never consider changing. Again, I have a hard time believing that Godin hasn't considered this, which suggests that he thinks his audience -- mostly middle managers, I suspect -- isn't ready to hear such disturbing possibilities. It's fine for the workers to have to adapt themselves by becoming linchpins, but the management structure is sacrosanct.

This puzzles me because, without support, it's very hard for people trained to be cogs to break out and become artists and linchpins. The current organizational structure is hostile to anyone who tries to be different (despite claims to the contrary). Plus I've found a consistent pattern that people who start their own businesses have it in their family background. People from "traditional" families where the father works for BigCorp have a hard time thinking about starting their own business; it's very scary for them. The power hierarchy rewards submissiveness and stifles innovation. Does Godin assume that all these newly-minted linchpins will somehow overwhelm all that entrenched thinking and the reward system that accompanies it? I'm baffled.

The second thing I find curious is his take on "The Resistance," for which he has a whole chapter. A rather long chapter which starts to ramble, something Godin does not typically indulge. The chapter is all about our primitive lizard brains which react to anything they see as frightening, in particular big changes. Godin's only solution to this is to fight it.

I took a workshop about this once, called "Kaizen." One example was chimpanzees and a researcher with a fake leopard on a stick, at first popping the leopard out at normal speed. Predictably, the chimps panicked and fled into a tree. However, if the fake leopard were slowly, incrementally introduced, the chimps didn't care or respond. The change alone wasn't the threat; the speed of change was a huge factor. It depends on what our brains consider fearful. Going from an occasional flosser to a daily flosser is a frightening change for many people. The Kaizen approach to countering this reaction is to start with a change that is below the disturbance threshold of the lizard brain. Commit to flossing once a month, or meditating one minute a day. The lizard cannot be bothered with such trivial events.

So you can fight the lizard, as Godin asserts, or you can put it to sleep. I don't really blame him for missing the second approach because we are indoctrinated from birth to fight, to the point where it becomes reflexive. For the last year or more I have been attempting to do something I call "slow practice," which means backing way off from our usual aggressive posture about everything. This is surprisingly hard; there's a voice that constantly whispers "you're not pushing hard enough" and "other people will think you're slacking." And, when exercising, "if it doesn't hurt, you're not doing enough." It's quite a struggle to ignore or quell these voices, and it doesn't happen quickly -- the lizard brain fights this change, too. But the world that is beginning to open up is fascinating; I don't yet know how to describe it. I don't think I'm alone in this direction; I recently encountered a couple of people in town studying Yin Yoga, which emphasizes backing off of the stretch to the point where you can sit in it without any kind of discomfort (the little voice in the head is whispering "you're not really stretching"). Another physical activity that I've become fond of in recent years is slow weight training, where you drop way back on the weight and do very slow reps to exhaustion -- it seems a superior way to work your muscles without damaging tendons and joints; it also emphasizes recovery.

Slow Practice is not an easy path when you've been trained all your life to think "faster, harder, more aggressive." You can easily tell yourself that the pushers are getting ahead in life while you dawdle. But I'm beginning to wonder if there's any more effective way to produce change, especially because whenever you push something through there's always a push back. But put the lizard to sleep by moving slowly, and you may never encounter any resistance at all.

Despite these observations I really like this book. More to the point, while I've been reading it a lot of friends around me have picked it up and gotten excited about it, so I plan to buy a number of copies (the paperback is almost out) and give them away. Yes, I wish it had gone further but there's a lot of great inspiration and insight.

Highlighted passages:

• Management owns the machines, labor follows the rules. Management wins when it can get the most work for the least pay. (Page 23).
• We've been taught to be a replaceable cog in a giant machine. We've been taught to consume as a shortcut to happiness. We've been taught not to care about our job or our customers. And we've been taught to fit in. Non of these things helps you get what you deserve. (Page 39).
• Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, "Violence, sexism, and general nastiness are biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of behaviors. But peacefulness, equality and kindness are just as biological -- and we may see their influence increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish." (Page 39). [ Creating that social structure for an organization is exactly what I'm trying to do -- BE]
• What they should teach in school. Only two things. 1. Solve interesting problems. 2. Lead.
• The digitization of work (measurement, Internet connection, mechanization) makes a typical MBA very happy. This is the sort of thing you can put in a spreadsheet. The challenge is that all your competitors are using the same spreadsheet, so your opportunity for quantum growth and significant market advantage is tiny. The easier it is to quantify, the less it's worth. (Page 96).
• The reason that start-ups almost always defeat large companies in the rush to market is simple: start-ups have fewer people to coordinate, less thrashing, and more linchpins per square foot. They can't afford anything else and they have less to lose. (Page 105). [I think this is oversimplified. I think start-ups have a different organizational structure even if it isn't explicit. Also, they have everything to lose which drives them to try things that the large company won't risk -- BE].
• Over time, drip by drip, year by year, the manual was written, the procedures were set, and people were hired to follow the rules. The organization gets extremely efficient at producing a certain output a certain way ... (Page 120). [This is why startups are different! -- BE]
• Doing more of what you were doing, but more obediently, more measurably, and more averagely (is that a word?), will not solve the problem, it will make it worse. (Page 121).
• The race to make average stuff for average people in huge quantities is almost over. (Page 123).
• You call the resistance "hard-hearted capitalist common sense." Perhaps you call it "being realistic about the system we live in." Better, I think, to call it stalling, a waste, and an insidious plot to keep you from doing your real work. (Page 123).
• Fear of living without a map is the main reason people are so insistent that we tell them what to do. ... Not only does the map insulate us from responsibility, but it's also a social talisman. We can tell our friends and family that we've found a good map, a safe map, a map worth of respect. (Page 125).
• We tried to set up an economy where you could hide your big ideas, go through the motions, and get what you needed. That's not working so well now. (Page 126).
• ... art represents a chance to improve the status quo, not just make it cheaper. Art builds a community, and the community creates value for all. (Page 153).
• "Teamwork" is the word bosses and coaches and teachers use when they actually mean, "Do what I say." (Page 153).
• Transactions distance parties from each other. (Page 162).
• Organizations will always strive to replace replaceable elements with cheaper substitutes. (Page 165). [This might be the essential description of the factory age -- BE].
• Great work is not created for everyone. If it were, it would be average work. (Page 171).
• Fundamentalist zealots always manage to make the world smaller, poorer, and meaner. (Page 181).
• ... the board game Candyland and all board games like it ... is early training in agenda following. Indoctrination in obedience. We teach kids that the best way to win is to mindlessly pick cards, follow instructions, and wait for it all to turn out okay. (Page 193)
• We have everything we need, so we're not buying commodities. We're not even buying products. We're buying relationships and stories and magic. ... Corporations tried to depersonalize all of those so they could lie to us, so they could package commodities, so they could scale without involving humans. And now they're out of steam. The corporatization is not working as well. (Page 216).
• The challenge, then, is to be the generous artist, but do it knowing that it just might not work. And that's okay. (Page 224).
• The system is broken. (Page 231). [Here, at the end, Godin does acknowledge that there's something about the system itself that has failed -- a hint that we might need to change the organization. But only a hint. -- BE].
• Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity. (Page 232). [I don't think that an industrial-age company can just choose to change and start championing creativity. I think it requires a fundamental change in the organizational structure. -- BE].
• We can't profitably get more average. (Page 234).