Links today

Posted on by David Wright

A Barker tour-de-force on negotiating. Here’s a summary list:

  1. Be warm
  2. Be optimisitc
  3. Be polite
  4. Offer them something to eat or drink
  5. Be funny
  6. Don’t assume the other guy is out to get you

The whole thing is pretty short and highly recommended. Think of a negotiation as two parties figuring out what the best course of action is. It’s an immensely gratifying experience when done properly.

Now two posts on startups.

First Steve Blank puts together a fantastic summary of what, exactly a startup is. He asks this question:

When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models? And when do business planning and execution come into play?

Then does this:

One of the things startups have lacked is a definition of who they were. For years we’ve treated startups like they are just smaller versions of a large company. However, we now know that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.  Within this definition, a startup can be a new venture or it can be a new division or business unit in an existing company.

I just think that’s brilliant. Lots more at the link.

And here’s Jason Cohen drilling home one of those lessons that needs to be drilled constantly (I reproduce a hacked summary below with apologies to Jason):

Almost all founders I encounter are leery about discussing their product plans. Now with the Social Network movie promulgating this fear, I expect it will worsen.

It’s silly, for two reasons.

1. Either you have a defensible competitive advantage, or you don’t.
2. The roadmap is not as useful as you think.

Whew

Posted on by David Wright

I ruminated on that Steve Jobs review for far longer than most blog posts. I desperately wanted to avoid contravening my New Years resolution to not be negative, but I honestly felt like I had to do it.

Anyway, Joel Spolsky (who is one of my online heroes and literally works in the building next to mine), makes me feel better today:

It is not, as it turns out, necessary to be a micromanaging psychopath with narcissistic personality disorder (or even to pretend to be one) if you just hire smart people and give them real authority. The saddest thing about the Steve Jobs hagiography is all the young “incubator twerps” strutting around Mountain View deliberately cultivating their worst personality traits because they imagine that’s what made Steve Jobs a design genius. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, young twerp. Maybe try wearing a black turtleneck too.

For every Steve Jobs, there are a thousand leaders who learned to hire smart people and let them build great things in a nurturing environment of empowerment and it was AWESOME. That doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It doesn’t mean letting people do bad work. It means hiring smart people who get things done—and then getting the hell out of the way.

Joel is much more in the *Clever* school of talent management and so am I.

And yet:

You’re A Cultist, Too. Review of *Steve Jobs* [and *Clever*]

Posted on by David Wright

Boxing fans, like everyone else on earth, consume drama. ‘Action Fighters‘ draw the crowds with danger while skilled fighters, ironically enough, weave reality TV plot lines and talk trash to stay relevant. Drama outside the ring is still drama.

Steve Jobs was a drama magnet. Not all of it was his fault, to be sure, be he was an unabashed, deliberate showman. There was always going to be a biography about Steve Jobs, he was a narcissistic egomaniac after all, and he would probably have written the thing himself if he had to. We care because he was a driven businessman, but cringe over his dark personality. BOTH qualities were necessary to his success.

Consider the best part of this book:

Jobs’ biological father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, was a restauranteur and once owned an Italian joint in San Jose:

“That was a wonderful place”, he (Abdulfattah) said. “All of the successful technology people used to come there. Even Steve Jobs.” [Mona, Steve’s biological ister] Simpson was stunned. “Oh, yeah, he used to come in, and he was a sweet guy, and a big tipper,” her father added. Mona was able to refrain from blurting out, STEVE JOBS IS YOUR SON!

Jobs was understandably astonished when she mentioned the restaurant near San Jose. He could recall being there and even meeting the man who was his biological father. “I remember meeting the owner. He was Syrian. Balding. We shook hands.”

I call BS. There’s no way Jobs remembers this more than a decade later, but even without a drop of desire to meet Jandali, he still found a way to stir the pot.

Steve Jobs was a difficult dude. I heard this before reading the book and was a bit skeptical. Can’t be that bad, right?

Well it was:

  • He continuously decomposed things into black and white. Something was either “insanely great” or “shit”.
  • When things were shit he personally insulted whomever presented him with the shit.
  • When things were “insanely great” he had a habit of convincing himself that it was his idea all along, robbing true creators of the credit.
  • He lied. A lot. He lied to himself, he lied to others. He lied about facts of history. He lied about facts of his life and others’. He cheated and he stole and he lied.
  • He was supremely self-centered as well as self-delusional. He almost certainly, as was suggested in the book, suffered from a mild case of narcissistic personality disorder.

Imagine working for a guy like that? Yet he inspired thousands of workaholic overachievers to give him (and so us) their most precious gift: their greatest work.

Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, the co-authors of *Clever*, are no doubt baffled. Theirs is a book about managing business superstars and its model leader doesn’t look much like Steve Jobs.

It’s actually closer to Will Wright, video game “auteur”, manager of teams and an employee of Electronic Arts. They describe him as indispensable, semi-autonomous, extremely productive and inspiring. Managing Clevers is meant to be a deferential process: they just need some infrastructure, a few other Clevers around and the peace to get on with it.

Being a rather typical business book, *Clever* is padded out with enough fluff to make a struggling high school student blush. But let’s see how Steve Jobs does against a list of the qualities that maximize the effectiveness of leading ‘Clevers’:

  • Explain and persuade (vs use authority)
  • Influence with expertise (vs hierarchy)
  • Amplify their achievements and don’t take any credit
  • Protect them from politics

Not doing so well. Steve was an autocrat who mistreated his people, except those who flattered his artistic conceit. ‘Artists’ were given special treatment.

  • Talk straight
  • Encourage failure
  • Give them time and don’t interfere
  • Don’t create bureaucracy
  • Tell them what (vs how)
  • Give people space and resources

Steve does better on this second list, though reading the tone of *Clever* I might have changed the the title to *Mothering*. And there was nothing motherly about Steve.

But Clevers are, above all, performance junkies and Steve inelegantly dismissed people’s perceived performance barriers. He did it by declaring their work crap when deep down they agreed. He didn’t need to belittle them, but those that stand in awe of the resulting outperformance forgive that.

*Clever* discusses this rush of achievement but then misses the most important leadership quality of all and THE one Steve was known for.

The ability to inspire.

But let’s step back first for some necessary biographical detail.

The world is flush with narcissistics with delusions of grandeur. This one was a man gifted with extraordinary circumstance. He was raised in Silicon Valley. He and Woz (a legitimate, world-class genius) were given the gift of each other’s friendship. He was catapulted into fame and fortune while witnessing what awesome ability and hard work can achieve. His very first work experiences were with A+ players. Who can say that? If you had that and lost it, wouldn’t you want to recreate it?

But he was a willful, obstinate and shockingly difficult human being. So he took that amazing training and screwed it all up; unfortunately, that’s the only way to learn.

And learn he did. He learned by emptying his bank account, pawing at success with NeXT and Pixar. But we don’t see the stumbles and heartache so we don’t learn with him.

Instead we focus on the design of the Pixar office and other vacuous minutiae like his personal life. He didn’t care about anyone then, so why should we care now? You can feel Steve’s guiding hand pausing on the Pixar supernova then pushing us to the third act and his spectacular successes (“Talk about the iPhone! Talk about the iPad!”). Well-trodden ground with lots of puff. But where are the disgruntled insiders with new scoops?

So I didn’t even finish the thing.

I came away from this book with an appreciation for the staggering power of inspirational charisma. A charitable comparison would be to a preacher that can heal with his words. A less charitable one would be to a cult leader or con man. They all share the gift of enthusiasm without affectation, which apparently very few people can resist. We’re all cultists at heart.

And there are all kinds of interesting facets to this gift that the book implicitly explores.

One comment that kept coming up was his ability to “figure out whether you know what you’re talking about”. Time for a little (more) Robin Hanson, who taught me that leadership makes you both better at lying and better at detecting lies.

Perhaps… the implicit elites in a band [are] better able to read such clues [signaling lying], either via better raw abilities or because power frees one to use such abilities (perhaps by reducing fear of retribution).

Leaders lie a lot because they can get away with it and call people out on lies because it isn’t socially costly for them to do so.

Another example: take Steve’s desire to ‘control all aspects of the user experience’. He indulged the most extreme form of this inclination at NeXT: they built operating systems, software, hardware, factories to build the hardware and programming languages to write the software. All the while we read of Steve’s compulsive need for everything to benefit from the touch of design. Much is made of his obsession over painting the assembly machines in factories in spite of the operating complications that result.

And we see yet another side to Steve when he forced into negotiations as a partner (or, gasp, supplicant) in a deal. He’s terrible at it: all hardball and temper tantrums. As we learned in the 2008 financial crisis, assholes can’t negotiate, even to save their own bacon. Was the purity of his ‘complete experience’ vision rooted in his inability to play with others?

And let’s face, the ‘go it alone’/walled garden strategy was a failure for personal computers. Bill Gates (who, by the way, is easily the most interesting and funny character in the book) was right: you win by getting everyone into your sandbox.

Luckily for Steve, he got over this with the Pixar/Disney deal and only selectively lengthened his supply chain in the the smartphone/tablet era, where integrated software and hardware is essential. Indeed, the Microsoft PC strategy is as big a failure for smartphones as the Apple strategy was for the personal computer.

I don’t think that anyone who reads this book would want to retroactively make themselves Steve Jobs’ friend. Such a relationship would be unpleasant. You’d alternately bask in the attention of his charismania and wither under his belittling rage. Mostly, however, you’d live out your life without a hint that he knew who you were. Indifference is painful. He wasn’t ‘friendly’.

But he brings new life to the common lessons of startup success: work hard, be relentlessly resourceful, be enthusiastic.

Sure there is a correlation between success and some unpleasant qualities, but I still hold the faith that good guys can win, too.

Great Leaders Subordinate

Posted on by David Wright

Irony:

However, Farkas and Wetlaufer (1996) found when studying 160 chief executives that the explicit leadership styles of management were not a reflection of personal style. In effective companies the CEOs did not simply adopt the leadership approach that suited their personalities, but instead adopted the approach that would best meet the needs of the organization and the business situation at hand (Farkas and Wetlaufer, 1996, p. 111). Farkas and Wetlaufer (1996) emphasize that they do not see leadership as a generic trait or that a person’s approach to leadership is solely a function of personality. Their research suggests that somevery good leaders repress certain personality traits, or develop ones they were not born with, in order to run their organization effectively(Farkas and Wetlaufer, 1996, p. 114). Farkas and Wetlaufer (1996) hold that until scientists discover a gene for leadership the debate about personality will persist. This is unlikely to occur. Their research indicates that leaders are not driven by what they are like inside but by what the outside demands (Farkas and Wetlaufer, 1996, p. 114). Hartman (1999, p. 31) also found that personality factors could not predict and did not correlate with leadership practices. In fact, studies of leadership behavior show profound differences between leaders in areas like leadership style, decision-making style, conflict behavior, motivation and creativity to mention a few areas. Vinkenburg et al. (2001) focused on decision-making processes behind overt managerial behavior trying to find out why managers do things the way they do. Most academics agree that behavior is a function of both individual and situational factors. However, which of the two factors explains the most variance in behavior is still a topic of heated polemics (Vinkenburg et al., 2001, p. 218). Vinkenburg et al. (2001, p. 234) found that, in general, situational factors have a larger impact on the behavior choices of managers than personal factors.

Big Man Theory of History ^n

Posted on by David Wright

I’m a big fan of this blog on genetics. And I admire Razib’s ambition with this post:

one has to observe that the vast majority of modern humans are not Michelangelo or a Bachs… Men such as Alexander, Napoleon, and Hitler, were possessed of peculiar charisma… As charismatic leaders they took collections of human beings, and turned them to there purpose. Individual humans became more than the sum of their parts, and for moments exhibited almost organismic levels of cohesion.

The model I have in mind then is one where the African humans faced up against their near relations, but not as one against one. Rather, under the guidance of charismatic leaders, Paleolithic megalomaniacs driven by fervid nightmares and irrational dreams, they ground through the many enemies who fought as sums of singulars as a cohesive social machine.

Interesting, I suppose. Don’t know much about this stuff, but I can’t really see why there shouldn’t be outstanding leaders among various animals.

Anyway, Razib’s real objective is to come up with some alternative to the idea that there is a clear genetic difference between Neanderthals and H. Sapiens. This was an interesting bit:

Backing up for a moment, why do we think there might be fixed differences between Neanderthals and modern humans? The argument, as outlined in books like The Dawn of Human Culture, is that H. sapiens sapiens is a very special lineage, whose protean cultural flexibility allowed it to sweep of the field of all other hominin sister lineages. The likelihood of some admixture from these “dead end” lineages aside, this rough model seems to stand the test of time. Consider that the Mousterian technology persisted for nearly 300,000 years, while the Oldowan persisted for 1 million! In contrast, our own species seems to switch and improve cultural styles much, much, faster. Behavioral modernity does point to a real phenomenon. The hypothesis of many scholars was that there was a genetic difference which allowed for modern humans to manifest language as we understand it in all its diversity and flexibility. The likelihood of this seems lower now that modern humans and Neanderthals have the same variants of FOXP2, the locus which seems to be correlated to elevated vocal and auditory capabilities across many vertebrate lineages. And, if it is correct that ~2.5% or so of modern human ancestry in Eurasia, and nearly ~10% in Papua, comes from “archaic” lineages, then I think that should reduce our estimates of how different these humans were from the Africans.

More Steve Jobs

Posted on by David Wright

I’ve waited to post this because frankly I was bored of the whole Steve Jobs tribute thing. I made my play for eyeballs and it worked on the day.

I read Pete Warden’s blog, which is excellent, and he contributed this bit to the Guardian following Steve’s death:

Several times he never even got as far as showing off the features we’d been slaving over because Steve would immediately focus on a bad visual element in the interface. Whether it was an ugly button, a mis-aligned font, or a control panel with too many buttons, we’d never recover. All our work under the hood meant nothing, he had seen enough and we’d failed.

Very very very very important point. The most important thing I’ve yet read about Jobs.

I have the same issue with my weekend project. I am very proud of the code I’ve learned and built, but the thing looks like a piece of garbage and so IS a piece of garbage.

Never lose sight of what matters. CEOs (bosses in general) might be frustrating creatures because they have laser-like focus on some small aspect of your work. But that’s probably the only part of your job that is at all useful.

Watch The Kids Play. Then Beat Them Up (or Eat Them).

Posted on by David Wright

Steve Hanov’s latest post discusses a recent conference he attended. He really caught my eye with his general observations of startups:

  • Disruption – Disruption is big. If you’re not disruptive, you might as well be selling mainframes and typewriters. Companies are disrupting each-other at an astounding rate. Sometimes, while one company is busy disrupting an industry, another one will sneak up behind it and try to disrupt it when it is not looking. That is why companies need to be agile and pivot frequently.
  • Metrics – The info-geeks have taken over. Founders are demanding dashboards for their business, updated in real time. But not only for themselves — every click of the web site, and every cancellation is streamed to every employee to give an accurate picture of the health of the company. A special version containing only the “Customer Happiness Index” and a huge happy face is streamed to the investors.
  • Crowd-sourced employee recognition – At least three companies are working on this. It can be hard for bosses to identify their best contributors to allocate bonuses. The idea is to crowd-source this from their workforce. “So we’ll give them a button — so whenever anybody does something nice, other people will just push it and they get a — a pony point — yeah! And then I just have to add them all up to find the best contributors!” If you’ve worked at a large company for more than a year, you already know what an awesome idea this is. Just rename “pony” to “stab”.
  • Skype – Ask anybody, in tiny or large companies. Odds are that they bypass their Enterprise Collabosoft GrouperWare system and secretly use Skype to communicate. Just a minute while I go privately Skype to people about why Microsoft should acquire my startup.

Great stuff, right? And no doubt smaller, nimbler, more tech-savvy (younger and geekier) companies are taking advantage of all these things. Do they make employees more productive? Perhaps. If they do, what’s going to stop a larger company from just doing this stuff anyway?

Nothing. Remember the tech trends. Everything else is just adoption, which isn’t really exogenous, but rather function of the rate of the other trends.

Anyway, remember Marc Andreessen’s investment strategy? Pick startups that will beat the big boys at their own game by being, well, better at computers.

Earlier I disagreed with this view. Still do.

Obviously this is true at some margin. There will be disruptive startups that take over big industries. But I think something else drives most innovation. Let’s call it the Cronus strategy.

Cronus, you see, had this problem:

Cronus learned from Gaia and Uranus that he was destined to be overcome by his own sons, just as he had overthrown his father. As a result, although he sired the gods Demeter, Hera, Hades, Hestia, and Poseidon by Rhea, he devoured them all as soon as they were born, to preempt the prophecy.

While the Greeks considered Cronus a cruel and tempestuous force of chaos and disorder, believing the Olympian gods had brought an era of peace and order by seizing power from the crude and malicious Titans, the Romans took a more positive and innocuous view of the deity, by conflating their indigenous deity Saturn with Cronus.

So call me a Roman and Marc a Greek, then.

Now I’m not saying that big companies are sitting back and chuckling to themselves at the silly little startups trying to nick their lunch. Quite the contrary. They are and should be terrified that they are missing the innovation boat and aren’t using current technology properly.

But corporates are conservative institutions: they have something to lose! And most startups fail for good reason. Their ideas are bad and Keith Richardses are hard to come by.

And most importantly…

MOST NEW THINGS ARE FADS

Oh, yeah. Just because the kids are using facebook doesn’t mean that you can use it to sell insurance or dishwashers, or make dishwashers for that matter.

My hunch is that it’s usually a cheaper strategy to let the startups sort out which technologies are disruptive to which industries and then either pull a Cronus or just steal the idea.

The question, of course, is which ideas are worthy of theft?

Study Failure, Too

Posted on by David Wright

Here’s a decent article on JaMarcus Russel. A few quick comments:

Those who excel at ANYTHING differentiate themselves at the higher levels on mental strength alone, I think. Here’s an important quote from Russell:

I take some responsibility, but I was one guy… . I may have missed a throw, but I didn’t give up 42 points, I didn’t miss a block.

Nope, not good enough. Everyone is going to be surrounded by incompetence. The great among us aren’t just people who have the highest levels of personal skill. The greatest walk around with an incompetence-minimizing force field that brings everyone’s level up.

It is precisely that JaMarcus didn’t take responsibility for his team members’ failures that makes him a poor leader. Let’s say his force field had a neutral effect on others. In that case, sure, he’ll respond to Top-1% coaches, teammates, management and trainers. But that situation rarely presents itself and, crucially, he also responds in a similar but opposite way to bottom-1% affiliations.

Don’t be Mick Jagger with all the talent. Be Keith Richards and elevate everyone else. It’s the harder job.

I’m reminded of an excellent podcast Bill Simmons did with the CEO of Ticketmaster. One fascinating observation was that we think of these gigantic sports franchises as being run like the best-performing corporations in the world. Well, they aren’t. A lot of the time it’s better to think of them like family businesses, which are often run poorly.

People will bring you down if you let them. Russell doesn’t have what it takes to excel at the highest level.

Pro Tip

Posted on by David Wright

If you’re an eater of all-natural penut butter, like I am, one of the most infuriating things in the world is having to remix the oil and solid paste that gravity pulls apart after the jar’s been sitting on the shelf for a while.

When I was a kid, I used to pull out a knife or spoon or something, shove it into the jar and churn. It spills over the top, I get all greasy… What a mess.

Well, folks, I don’t do that anymore.

NOW, I take the jar and simply plop it into the cupboard upside down and wait a day or so.

What happens? Well that infuriating separation process is thrown into reverse and gravity’s my friend now. When I pull it out again a little while later, I get smooth and consistent creamy goodness.

This isn’t perfect, of course, as there might be the odd clump hidden in there somewhere, but by the time I find it, the jar is low enough that I can dispose of the offending sludge with a quick flick of my knife.

Use this knowledge wisely, readers.

People Are Terrible With Counter-Factuals

Posted on by David Wright

Here’s an interesting piece: “10 Years Into the iPod Revolution”. I tend to get really irritated with this kind of attribution. My instinct here is to say: it would have happened anyway.

They dig up an interesting review of the original iPod:

People used to argue whether the trend was toward an all-in-one gadget that does everything as opposed to a collection of specialized gadgets. If I’m right about the iPod, both sides of this argument are correct; people will use one comprehensive iPod-like storage and connectivity unit in combination with every specialized peripheral you can think of. As before, something designed for digital music will spread across other areas of technology. Descendants of the iPod MP3 player will replace the PC as the hub of your digital life.

You could look at that last sentence and say: “OMG, he gets it. Apple was destined to make the ipad”. But you’d be skipping over some pretty important information.

First, the ipod’s descendents have hardly become the hub of anything. iCloud is making a play for this, but only within the Apple walled garden. We shall see whether this works.

For another, the iPod was simply the best HIGH-END mp3 player out there. There was always going to be a high-end mp3 player and Apple just crushed that market. Without them, there would have been another and maybe we’d be talking about that one instead.

My first iPod was the shuffle, which was, as far as I can tell, the first real mainstream product Apple ever made. Then Apple found its home in the cell phone market and its exploitation of gigantic personal discount rates. Presto: expensive products seem cheap.

Convergence between mp3 players and cell phones was always inevitable. Apple was the exception, I think, in that no other mp3 player manufacturer made the leap to phones. In every other case, the leap was for phone makers to just add mp3 functionality.

I don’t want any of this to suggest that Apple’s innovation machine wasn’t (isn’t) awesome. That’d be stupid. But to say that they’re more than, say, 10% better than the next rival is overdoing it.

Today’s worst mp3 players are a thousand times better than the original ipod. Apple’s cleverness buys it a bit of time, but that’s all.