What’s The Point of a Designation? (With a Venn Diagram!)

Posted on by David Wright

This is a fairly weak challenge to the pursuit of technical certification, but let’s start with it anyway:

I have come across a lot of my friends who aquired very nice percentage and received certificates though they have very minimal knowledge, or they have never worked on that particular technology. How crap is that, and now they are the proud owner of certificate, showcasing it proudly over their work desk. Ask them a very simple question on the technology that they have got certification, they would be for sure struggling to give answer to it. This is quite common, Certifications are being done only to get an extra point during their salary appraisals or job interviews. And I pity these corporate giants who would consider certification to be something remarkable.

How many out there would say, Yes certification is worth doing and it must be done to prove that you are good in a particular technology?

First point: if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, stop right here. Stop reading, stop everything and go start building stuff. The longer you wait the harder it will be.

Second point: certifications are often required to work in a chosen field. That’s called occupational licensing and it’s often ridiculous. I’m going to concentrate on what real benefits certifications offer (in my experience) to the risk averse, hard working and ambitious. Doctors and lawyers need not read further.

I mentioned at the top the argument above is pretty easy to dismiss. Knocking something you haven’t actually tried? Striking down the straw man of heavily credentialed morons? Here’s a Venn diagram:

I did a fairly terrible job of scaling the image. The Red-only zone should be pretty tiny, the smallest of them all, really. Most people who spend the time and energy studying a topic do come away with some competence.

The deeper question is something anyone who spends a lot of time studying for tests should struggle with: is it worth your time? What does it get you?

Once upon a time I was at a dinner with a client who gave me some offhand advice: take some courses, they’ll teach you something, you’ll get an initialism for your business card and you’ll advance your career.

What terrible advice. I followed it, which I’ll get to later, but here’s what he should have said:

  1. Education is good, but remember its two functions: to teach you practical skills and signal your intelligence.
  2. Many certifications, unfortunately, are completely useless. By that I mean they teach you nothing useful and don’t signal a damn thing of any use to strangers.
  3. Most skills that will actually improve your job performance are best learned on the job. There is usually no good substitute for experience. Go help domain experts solve problems and effing pay attention. Study them.
  4. The most important skill of all? Check out this paper, which I’m actually reviewing for another blog post:

    In this study, measures of interpersonal and task-related skills were obtained from two groups of engineers: those nominated as “stars” by their managers and those nominated as “average”. Interestingly, the researchers found that the only distinguishing difference between the two was the stars’ interpersonal and affective skills. Specifically, the stars were better at developing rapport with coworkers and building extensive, loose networks of reliable problem solvers.

    Interpersonal skills. No certifications for that.

  5. Depressed yet? Well you should be. There is no reliable way to accelerate your career except to experience more. The only other possibility is to perhaps the change the trajectory of your career by changing the what kind of experience you get and how you respond to it.

NOW let’s talk about certifications.

Certifications work best as an introduction to a body of knowledge. Your goal should be enough understanding to follow a conversation between experts. Doesn’t sound like much, but this is incredibly important.

Imagine your mind dragging a net along behind it everywhere you go in life. You actually don’t have enough knowledge to properly interpret a lot of the experiences that pass through the net. Think of a certification as a way of shrinking the mesh of your net.

The second thing certifications can offer is the opportunity to work your ass off. Some certifications are really challenging to complete. Following my client’s advice I took a softball course, which has proven useless. The last module in it, however, was an introduction to finance which I really enjoyed (I was shocked – I HATED finance in undergrad and nearly failed it).

So next I tackled the CFA exams, then moved onto the CAS exams. Some would look at the amount of time I spent on these (over years and years) and shudder. Good. This makes them a fantastic signal of all kinds of qualities employers love.

But even the most grueling course yields nothing in isolation. What you want is the holy grail: high-value experience. By that I mean working with and learning from the best.

You see, the skills of the most incredibly skilled have afforded them prestige (always), wealth (often) and an extraordinary demand for their skills (always). They need help. And who are they going to pick? Putting nepotism to one side, they’re probably going to pick the highest status recruits, which means those with the strongest signals of quality.

I’m pretty fortunate to have a challenging certification available I can sink my teeth into. But programmers have an enormous expanse of open source projects they can attach their names to. And writers can always write, artists can, um, create, etc.

Certifications are ideal in mature industries where innovation is slow and the canon of skills relatively stable. In others, go online, the Internet has enabled quality signaling in just about any worthwhile pursuit.

But remember the iron law of education: if you don’t have to work hard for it then it probably isn’t worth your time.

The Staggering Genius of Taco Bell

Posted on by David Wright

Warning: I’m being pretty generous with over-the-top superlatives today.

I think Taco Bell is the most innovative company on earth. Honestly.

Some might look at what this company offers and think them a bit pedestrian, but remember, this may be the most mature industry conceivable. Innovation is NOT supposed to happen in mature industries.

First is a unique offering which exploits the only true competitive advantage Taco Bell has, the ability to offer texture in its food. To the uninspired, it’s the usual hamburger formula: carb, veg, cheese, beef carb. But, come on, crunch in your burger? Nobody makes it like this!

And the grand triumph is a co-branding strategy that I think is possibly the most extraordinary work of marketing genius ever committed on earth.

These are its best selling products of all time and no surprise.

Now consider this: anyone with half a brain figured out smartphones were coming, tablet computers were coming and… wedge laptops? Puh-leeze. Easy.

Taco Bell has come up with two complete breakthroughs which I’m convinced would otherwise never exist. And in commodity fast food! I’m so impressed.

Entreprenempathy

Posted on by David Wright

Let’s start with this assumption: entrepreneurs are the best leaders/managers a company can have. Most importantly, the entrepreneur that founded a company is the best leader that company will ever have, probably. Why is that?

Entrepreneurs come up with things that sell, they’re product people. For some reason, large companies can often come to be run by people who are good at many of the other things large companies do other than sell products: raise money, deal with regulation, institute internal processes, fire people, hire people, etc. Sometimes these skills need to be the focus over some time horizon. But be not fooled: these are secondary functions.

At best, an entrepreneur is a product person that views the company as an extension of his/her personal self. It’s not just the financial alignment that investors spend all their time worrying about, but an alignment of identity. Because of that, many of the secondary functions simply fall into place: you run the company’s finances like you’d run your own, which makes you (more) risk averse, which is basically good. You run the brand like you run your personal relationships, which, assuming you’re mostly normal with your own quirks (which everyone is) makes the brand accessible yet interesting. Et cetera.

Seeing a company as an extension of your self seems to me to be a kind of empathy. You feel pain when the company is hurt, you feel joy when the company grows. The pressure of having to care for this thing you created, which includes its people (think about the word company), provides a motivating force unlike anything else in our society.

So that’s what an entrepreneur is to me: a person with deep empathy for his/her firm and relentless focus on the #1 priority of any business organization: customers’ needs. Which, of course, is another form of empathy.

Now THAT’s Genius

Posted on by David Wright

In the five years since the iPhone launched, Apple created a total of 35,852 retail jobs.

Some of those jobs came from new store openings. The total store count went from 172 to 361, more than doubling. But the growth in employment was faster: from about 6400 to 42,200, more than quintupling. This is reflected in the total number of employees per store which increased from 37 in Q1 2007 to 117 in Q1 2012.

Apple has removed shelving, registers and almost all non-Apple merchandise. It has replaced the visible stock with tables on which rest products that can be used. If there weren’t any people in the store, the store would look almost completely empty, just an open space.

But that’s the whole point. The stores are designed to be filled with people. The stores have an open layout because it allows more people to be inside the store at the same time. And the more people the more employees.

Lots of good graphs at the link. The ability to drive foot traffic in Apple’s stores is no doubt related to their enormously popular products, but it is true that their stores always LOOK packed. Because they are. With customers and employees. Who are not on commission, by the way.

Indeed, the sheer number of employees in a store of modest size (117 employees on an average of about 8k sq. ft.) implies a brazen disregard for the economic orthodoxy of retail efficiency and incentives to sell.

Hype and branding. It’s a marvellously integrated offering, the Apple brand. THAT is evidence of the Steve Jobs genius.

Covered In Glory

Posted on by David Wright

About 45 minutes into the discussion, he shared something with me:

“This is my 5th start-up. I hope it works but…. My wife says, “this is it.” We’re done after this one. I’ll have to go work for some big tech company if this doesn’t work out. We’ve chased this dream for a long time. It’s been real tough to be so close.”

They didn’t make it. The company’s gone. I haven’t kept up with him but I assume his wife ensured he followed her advice.

More here with a bit of a ‘the best are mostly lucky and the smart ones know it’ slant.

Haters Will Hate. Good.

Posted on by David Wright

You care deeply about your work. And adversity strikes hard. Imagine the emotions: shame, embarrassment, loneliness.

What do you do?

Remember the most important motivational trick of professional athletes:

1. Everyone thinks you don’t have a chance.
2. Yet you are capable of beating the best.

To overcome insurmountable paper disadvantages requires psychological rocket fuel.

Remember the space race? The Soviets were smarter, better organized; they racked up all of the previous ‘firsts’ in spaceflight. Yet only one flag stands on the moon.

And take the fact that visits have stopped not as a lesson in the silliness of the pursuit. Take it instead as an homage to the essential characteristic of human progress: the everlasting desire to (figuratively, these days) annihilate the opposition.

Take adversity as an opportunity to focus your mind on a critical weakness and eliminate it. Press hard on the nerves of identity politics: it’s ‘us versus them’ and even though they all doubt us we know we’re the best.

Incompetence = Ignorance

Posted on by David Wright

poor performers grossly overestimate their performances because their incompetence deprives them of the skills needed to recognize their deficits.

That’s from this paper (via).

The great question about Steve Jobs and other accomplished leaders is what on earth they do that’s so valuable. More and more I’m thinking they are simply unsatisfied with results others find acceptable. And they have the power to demand more of people.

Society has developed ways of policing us. Gossip is such a device and people who are more sensitive to social pressure are better off.

But unlike simple morality games psychologists study, knowledge of how to make great smartphones or Initial Public Offerings or open field tackles is concentrated among very few. If your friends can’t do it, you won’t either:

The groups you associate with often determine the type of person you become. For people who want improved health, association with other healthy people is usually the strongest and most direct path of change.

Googorola

Posted on by David Wright

The story goes that Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, was trying to poach new head of Motorola, Dennis Woodside, from Google to be Head of Sales at Apple.

But then Larry Page asked Woodside to be the next Steve Jobs.

If there’s one thing I learned from reading the Jobs biography, it’s that in order to build a company that makes great products you’ve got to be a “products guy”. Jobs himself said that Cook wasn’t the type, oddly. Is Woodside? One thinks perhaps not:

Woodside, 43, is an Ironman triathlete with a law degree from Stanford but little experience building hardware or software. He admits to catching up only recently on such technologies as mobile-phone processors.

The focus on engineering credentials, Steve Jobs might say, is beside the point. Does he ‘get’ what great products are? Can he drive people to fill a pipeline with awesome products, which everyone is worried will be Tim Cook’s failure?

It’s an audacious move, but a necessary one, probably. Apple has shown that the strategy of marrying hardware and software was as big a loser for PCs as a winner for mobile.

And one couldn’t imagine Facebook making or pulling off a similar move. So the lines are drawn: Apple vs Google for global technological hegemony.

Big Fails

Posted on by David Wright

The economist has a list of ways to birth a megaflop, by which they appear to mean a strategically important investment that loses a company money, face and time. The basics:

  1. Don’t break something that works (“slaughter a sacred cow”)
  2. Don’t do something you’re not good at just because you can. (“mix oil and water”)
  3. Don’t produce a genuinely awful product.

I’m fascinated by organizational dysfunction. Not only from train wreck voyeurism, mind you, but because the only way to learn is through failure and I’d rather learn through others’ failure if I can. (btw, the only book I’ve seen in this vein, and it isn’t that great, is this one.)

Anyway, the most interesting kinds of failure happen when companies that get a lot right screw up. In that light, that list above isn’t too bad. But I’d add one:

4. Forgetting what the product is.

The Economist opens their article with a discussion about the recent film flop John Carter, which I wanted to see but skipped after checking reviews. I think Hollywood blockbusters are a better example of my point than any of theirs.

The problem is that ‘Hollywood’ is actually not in the content creation business, believe it or not. They’re in the distribution business, a business run by advertisers, marketers and salespeople. There are two really important challenges to overcome in sales driven businesses:

First, to quote Gordon Moore: “Every the salesmen thinks he’s management material”.

Second, salesfolk are quick to criticize products that they think might be a difficult sell.

Sales is tough. And when it doesn’t work it’s not always obvious where something went wrong.

Salespeople have two extremely powerful advantages that quickly turn into a disadvantage in tough times: they have outstanding communication skills (which they use to trick themselves and everyone else into thinking they know more than they do, see Gordon Moore above) and they’re the ones who are experts in sales. Shouldn’t they know what’s best?

Hollywood flops all the time. I think this happens when the sales department makes too many decisions on what they want to sell: the package becomes the product.

It’s easy to say “don’t give marketing too much control!” but remember that marketing is often a bigger part of the blockbuster budget than the film itself. They control the money!

I didn’t quite know where to link to it, but this is an awesome post on sales.

Notes from Paul Graham’s Speech at PyCon

Posted on by David Wright

Wow, great speech. Recommend you read all the notes, they’re short and packed up tight. Here’s the part that caught my eye:

instead of getting a degree from an institution, get it from a person. (sorta like phds). this is actually how universities used to work – you’d get certified by someone from the guild.

As noted, educational is going in the opposite direction and so becoming more democratic (less about who you know, etc). Standardized tests are a way of minimizing the damage from a crappy network. In my world, the CFA and CAS exams do this.

But let’s not get caught up in the romance. The best way of being extraordinary will never change: you need to learn from extraordinary people by joining a (the?!) Paul Graham Network.