Thank you internet.

I’ve written about this before, but two great articles recently said it even better:

Don’t try to control or make safe the fumbling, panicky, glorious adventure of discovery. Occasionally, one sees articles that describe how to rationalize this process, how to take the fuzzy front end and give it a nice haircut. This is self-defeating. We should allow the fuzzy front end to be as unkempt and as fuzzy as we can. Long– term growth depends on innovation, and innovation isn’t neat. – Bill Coyne of 3M, via Bob Sutton

If the process of bringing new things to life were a living, breathing organism, it would be a nasty beast! It would be unpredictable. It would consume as much as you dared to feed it. Some days, it would really stink. Yucko! And it would have a tendency to chew up people and spit them out. Most of all, though, it would hairy. Really hairy — think dense forests of tangly, greasy, matted, hair, the likes of which make people run for shampoo, scissors, clippers, straight razors, and a blow dryer…

But in that fuzziness is an unpredictable wellspring of creativity, which — if left to do what it will in in its own nonlinear way — is the source of the new and the wonderful. Consequently, one must never give in to the temptation to shave the fuzzy hairball that is innovation…

Understanding how to deal with ambiguity at a personal level is the key to unlocking one’s creative confidence. An organization which understands how to resist shaving the hairball, populated by people who know how to orbit the hairball, will be capable of bringing amazing things to life. – Diego Rodriguez

“Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn’t be about the money.” – Tim OReilly: The Oracle of Silicon Valley, Page 4.

Take an abundant, desirable, free resource and dangle it in front of them for hours without sharing, while hiding your reasons behind a mountain of illogical babble.

I’m sitting in the back of a United Airlines plane right now with a couple dozen other passengers. We’re crammed like sardines in a few Economy rows, while in front of us are 10 rows of empty “Economy Plus” seats. Either United drastically overestimated the demand for seat upgrades on this flight or they are deliberately trying to shift their seating toward premium spots.

Either way, it seem like a fantastic opportunity to make your customers happy, with a free upgrade to a nicer seat. Simply let people move around before the gate closes, and the plane would be balanced and happy. Better yet, surprise people at check-in with automatic upgrades. People would certainly appreciate and remember such nice treatment and be more likely to choose your airline in the future. They’d also have had a taste of Economy Plus benefits and know what they’re worth the next time.

Unfortunately, the policies in place prohibit that. I’ve heard reasons from the flight attendant ranging from “it would imbalance the plane” (what kind of bizarre balance do we have now?) to “it wouldn’t be fair to the people who paid for these seats” (would they fail to have them?) and “only gate agents can change seats” (Southwest passengers choose their own seats on every flight), but in the end the the result is that no one on board is authorized to change anyone’s seat, and we took off with an embarrassment of open seats in front of an angry crowd. There’s even only one person in the entire exit row (which the gate attendant denied existing when I tried to check for available seats), and I’m not really sure who would be in charge of opening the other door in case of emergency.

In the meantime, since they boarded the flight early and we sat for a while (including a delay while one man tried to pay for an upgrade, requiring assistance from both flight attendants), the entire back of the plane has been buzzing about the ridiculous situation and pestering the flight attendant, who clearly has no power to do anything but is scrambling to placate the mob by reciting all the reasons she can’t. Everyone is participating in a shared cathartic conversation about the ineptitudes of United Airlines. Except for me, as I’m busy writing this screed to post online (I may not be as persuasive as the United breaks guitars guy, but I do what I can). I wouldn’t be surprised if United loses dozens of customers over this single mismanaged flight.

My last United trip (note: my spell correction software just suggested “untenable” instead of “United” when I mistyped; I was tempted to keep it that way) was similarly outrageous. When checking in for the flight we were told for the first time that our seats were not guaranteed and we’d have to stand by the desk, watching a screen to see if we got on. That time I gave in to the extortion and upgraded to Economy Plus (which guaranteed seats), while watching dozens of people get bumped from the flight and delay their vacations, and I vowed to never fly the airline again as long as that behavior continued. United seems to have abandoned that policy, only to replace it with one just as ridiculous when I gave them a second chance.

I don’t mind if an airline–or any company–charges higher prices if that’s backed up by consistent, humane behavior. And I recognize that airlines are feeling pressure on their bottom lines and operate in an extremely regulated, bureaucratic industry. But this pattern of bait-and-switch penny pinching has spoiled United for me, and in the future I’ll pay premiums and inconvenience myself to fly other airlines, avoiding United whenever I can.

What lessons can be found here? First, be real with your policies. Give them wiggle room and empower your people to modify them on the fly. The saddest part of the whole situation to me was watching the poor flight attendant harrangued by the passengers when she had no authority to help. I love a tip from Tim Ferris, who authorizes his assistants to solve any customer’s problem, without consulting him, if it costs less than $100 to fix. Over time, he’s repeatedly raised that limit rather than lowering it.

Second, be transparent in your customer interactions. Don’t mix prices around hoping to squeeze a bit more money out of people. Just state clearly what you offer for what price.

Finally, when you have the chance to do something nice for people, especially when it doesn’t cost you anything, do it! Actively look for ways to be generous to your customers. They’ll remember it and be loyal to you for a long time.

UPDATE: The next flight was “oversold by 40″, which resulted in lots of frayed nerves and strict enforcement of carry-on restrictions, which slowed boarding to a crawl and irritated nearly everyone.

So rule 4 from this trip: Don’t promise what you can’t deliver.

Was it the Wendell Berry quote?

Image by Matt Davies

These lessons from Colin Powell are much more interesting than the usual CEO tripe…

• Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.
• The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.
• Don’t be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world.
• Don’t be afraid to challenge the pros, even in their own backyard.
• Never neglect details. When everyone’s mind is dulled or distracted the leader must be doubly vigilant.
• You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.
• Keep looking below surface appearances. Don’t shrink from doing so (just) because you might not like what you find.
• Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved. Only by attracting the best people will you accomplish great deeds.
• Organization charts and fancy titles count for next to nothing.
• Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.
• Fit no stereotypes. Don’t chase the latest management fads. The situation dictates which approach best accomplishes the team’s mission.
• Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.
• Powell’s Rules for Picking People: Look for intelligence and judgment and, most critically, a capacity to anticipate, to see around corners. Also look for loyalty, integrity, a high energy drive, a balanced ego and the drive to get things done.
• (Borrowed by Powell from Michael Korda): Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.
• Use the formula P=40 to 70, in which P stands for the probability of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired. Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range, go with your gut.
• The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise.
• Have fun in your command.
• Command is lonely.

“I should charge 600 euros [for a meal at elBulli],” Adrià has said, “but I do not cook for millionaires. I cook for sensitive people.” – HBS Cases: Customer Feedback Not on elBullis Menu.

“Many VCs tell entrepreneurs to ‘come back when you have a demo.’  They aren’t wondering whether your product can be built – they are wondering whether you can build it.” – Chris Dixon.

There are 1200 taxi cabs in San Francisco, and 6000 drivers (according to my driver today). You have to wait on a waiting list to get your “medallion”, which allows you to own your own cab. If you choose, you can sell that medallion to a cab company, who will give you a car plus cash. My driver had been waiting 6 years for a medallion; he expects to wait another 4 to get it. On New Year’s Eve in San Francisco, a cab driver can expect to make $600-700. All the cab owners are driving that night because it’s a big one; regular drivers need probably 20 years driving experience to have seniority enough to get a spot that night (due to scarcity–the 1200 cabs for 6000 drivers thing). Outside a 15-mile radius from San Francisco International Airport, drivers are required to charge 150% of the metered rate. My driver once had a fare of $299 to go to Stockton’s University of the Pacific because of this.

• Founder of Acumen was in marketing at Cisco
• Malaria nets imperilled by sole buyer’s (UN) discrestion
• So they are building new business models, with local salesmen
• Water in India was always free and always dirty. Monetizing clean water was accepted and in fact changed the economy–men went to get the water instead of women, and then they created a delivery service so no one carries it on their heads anymore!

From my 2002 notes of the Becoming Human conference at Stanford:

In the Soviet Union, everyone believed in an unjust society, so you’d better take advantage of that or you’ll be left behind. In the U.S., society is based on trust, so you can’t have cheating because it breaks down the trust. Reminds me of different ways to run companies today: trust the employees or not? If you don’t, they’ll know it and try to pillage the company quickly before everyone else does. Treat them well and they’ll self-police (like Ricardo Semler in Brazil)

Tom Peters may write in an unconventional manner, but it allows him to get ideas across in a remarkably concise fashion, as he does in his This I Believe! manifesto at ChangeThis. He reads a huge amount, and I found some valuable tidbits within for design inspiration:

Quoted in This I Believe

• “The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.” — Dee Hock, Visa founder
• “Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.” — Phil Daniels
• “You can’t be a serious innovator unless you are willing and able to play. ‘Serious play’ is not an oxymoron; it’s the essence of innovation.” — Michael Schrage
• “Leaders achieve their effectiveness largely through the stories they relate” — Howard Gardner
• “We shape our buildings. Thereafter they shape us.” — Churchill
• “I never, ever thought of myself as a businessman. I was interested in creating things I would be proud of.” — Richard Branson
• “There’s no use trying,’ said Alice. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’” — Lewis Carroll
• The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. — Michelangelo
• “Nobody gives you power. You just take it.” — Roseanne
• “You can pretend to care. You cannot pretend to be there.” — Texas Bix Bender
• “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” — Gandhi
• “The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.” — William James, psychologist
• “The two most powerful things in existence–a kind word and a thoughtful gesture.” — Ken Langone, co-founder of Home Depot
• “You must care.” — Melvin Zais, General, U.S. Army
• “A leader is a dealer in hope” — Napoleon

And a few words of his own:

• Question authority! (And hire disrespectful people!)
• It is the foremost task–and responsibility–of this generation to re-imagine all of our institutions, private and public.
• Action…ALWAYS…takes precedence.
• Do…NOW. Think…later. At the very least, you’ll have something to think about since you’ve just done…something.
• He who makes the quickest, coolest prototypes reigns!
• Two Trends Worth Trillions, as in Trillion$$$. Namely: (1) Women buy All the Stuff (2) We’re getting older!
• Powerlessness is an advantage, not a disadvantage. Why? Because “powerless” people work in nooks and crannies, and are invisible enough to be able to surreptitiously pursue contrarian strategies.
• I once watched a highly energetic chief ripped asunder by a senior member of his board. “Richard,” the determined board member almost shouted, “you are smart, energetic, creative to a fault, perhaps even a genius. But much of your ‘genius’ is dissipated because you apply it to ten different things at a time, albeit with great skill.” “Let me tell you what you need,” he concluded. “A ‘to don’t’ list.”
• Major change takes…30 days…or 3 Years. Your choice!
• Fun is not a Four-Letter Word

Notes from The Corporation, part of my movie binge week a while back:

• Corporate charters were originally a “gift from the people” to serve the people, for instances like building a bridge for a city, which could not be done by a smaller company
• The 14th Amendment (which gave all men equal rights) was also invoked in the name of corporations, who argued that they too were “individuals” under the law, and thus had the same rights and protections afforded to them.
• Noam Chomsky: Corporations are a special type of person, designed by law to be concerned only with their shareholders
• Externalities: the “can’t somebody else do it?” philosophy
• Intergenerational Tyranny: “Taxation without representation” of future people

• Every one of us, depending on circumstances, could be a gas chamber operator or a saint.Noam Chomsky

• Protesters at WTO, etc., tend to be frustrated because they feel they have no effect on the corporations through normal methods (no democratic voting, only through buying shares).
• Disney’s Celebration town, mentioned as an example of corporations extending their grasp into everyday life, reminds me of the Walmart’s All-You-Can-Live township spoof
• States still have the right to revoke corporate charters; this was done often in the 19th century (at the beginning of the corporate era), but today it is rarely invoked and even more rarely successful, due to corporate lawyers fighting hard.
• Corporations’ goal of optimizing profit demands that they also “optimize” consumers’ buying practices; marketing tactics manipulate buyers to act they way corporations want them to.
• Alternatives? The public could control corporations more, though state-enforced democratic methods–this seems to be the argument of the filmmakers, especially with the “Commie Red” backgrounds to all the titles…Kurt K. mentioned that no top-down policy will ever make up for bad people filling the ranks; the only way to ensure quality is with quality people.
• Other metaphors we could use for corporations that don’t have to do with success (“a few bad apples” mentioned; means they reduce success of the crop)? Family Unit; sports team; phone system; eagle all mentioned. Reminds me of linguist George Lakoff and his book Metaphors We Live By
• 1712 began the Industrial Age, with the steam engine providing increased “productivity”, which was to become the mantra for all of life today. How did people before 1700 view “productivity”?
• Chomsky: Originally there were limits on the length and money allowed for a corporate charter.

Economist and Nobel Laureate Robert E. Lucas Jr. makes some interesting observations about economic growth in the Industrial Revolution and the inequality it has wrought in his essay The Industrial Revolution: Past and Future. Much of it reminded me of Robert Wright’s optimistic arguments in Nonzero, trying to prove that the arrow of history is pointing toward a more prosperous and enjoyable future for all. I hope so, but I’m still not convinced it will happen “automatically” as a result of everyone pursuing self-interest, as these two seem to be. Still, Lucas’ arguments are interesting coming from an economic perspective. First he explains economic growth prior to the industrial revolution:

Between year 0 and year 1750, world population grew from around 160 million to perhaps 700 million…But in contrast to a modern society, a traditional agricultural society responds to technological change by increasing population, not living standards. Population dynamics in such a society obey a Malthusian law that maintains product per capita at $600 per year, independent of changes in productivity. …As we know from many historical examples, traditional agricultural society can support an impressive civilization. What it cannot do is generate improvement in the living standards of masses of people.

His charts are especially convincing: Production accelerates past population in about 1900 GDP per capita for five different world regions since the Industrial Revolution; as expected, the English-speaking First World leads the pack, with Japan, France, Germany and Scandanavia close behind. The rest barely improve, especially Africa. Population growth now slows instead of increasing when GDP rises A reason for the decline in population growth is that instead of simply having MORE children with the newfound wealth, technology enables parents to have BETTER children with more time and money invested in them:

As family income rises, spending on children increases, as assumed in Malthusian theory, but these increases can take the form of a greater number of children or of a larger allocation of parental time and other resources to each child. Parents are assumed to value increases both in the quantity of children and in the quality of each child’s life.

Interesting ruminations on the nature of innovation and the work produced by “knowledge workers”:

It is a unique feature of human capital that it yields returns that cannot be captured entirely by its “owner” Bach and Mozart were well paid (though neither as well as he thought he deserved), but both of them provided enormous stimulation and inspiration to others for which they were paid nothing, just as both of them also gained from others. Such external effects, as economists call them, are the subject matter of intellectual and artistic history and should be the main subject of industrial and commercial history as well. These pervasive external effects introduce a kind of feedback into human capital theory: Something that increases the return on human capital will stimulate greater accumulation, in turn stimulating higher returns, stimulating still greater accumulation and so on.

A summary of the process:

On this general view of economic growth, then, what began in England in the 18th century and continues to diffuse throughout the world today is something like the following. Technological advances occurred that increased the wages of those with the skills needed to make economic use of these advances. These wage effects stimulated others to accumulate skills and stimulated many families to decide against having a large number of unskilled children and in favor of having fewer children, with more time and resources invested in each. The presence of a higher-skilled workforce increased still further the return to acquiring skills, keeping the process going.

He argues that all economies will eventually make the leap up the curve, no matter how downtrodden they are now:

The rapid growth of non-European nations (and some of the poorer European ones) is mainly responsible for the extraordinarily rapid growth of world production in the postwar era. But enough other societies have been largely left out of this process of diffusion that the degree of inequality among nations remained about the same in 1990 as it was in 1960. As those economies that have joined the modern world catch up to the income levels of the wealthiest countries, their growth rates of both population and income will slow down to rates that are close to those that now prevail in Europe. We have seen these events occur in Japan; they will follow in country after country. At the same time, countries that have been kept out of this process of diffusion by socialist planning or simply by corruption and lawlessness will, one after another, join the industrial revolution and become the miracle economies of the future.

And he concludes with trickle-down economics of the highest moral caliber:

Nothing remotely like the income differences of our current world, differences on the order of a factor of 25, existed in 1800 or at any earlier time. Such inequality is a product of the industrial revolution… But of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production.

Fascinating, an economist tackling the problem of companies doing good things only when it makes economic sense to do so; now it’s on a global scale.

The Peter Principle says that workers are promoted through the ranks until they reach a position they are incompetent in. Essentially, this is because promotions are based on meeting a standard, something that is often suddenly recognized by a manager. In all probability, performance will decline slightly after this deservedly-noticed peak, making it look like the promotion was to a level of incompetence. Marginal Revolution says that this is because recent activities are overrated when making promotion decisions, though usually not undeservedly so.

In other words, firms know that you sometimes get lucky, and they set the promotion bar high on purpose. After your promotion you experience a “regression toward the mean”, and your observed performance declines in quality, relative to your promotion-winning triumphs. But on average the promotions are still deserved.

A series of speeches by Dodgers GM Paul DePodesta (1, 2) recently brought to my attention also explore a similar topic. His major point is that many baseball decisions are made subjectively on bad data. The recency effect plays a role here too…

There was one pitcher that we particularly liked, but everybody said he was going to be a top ten pick. So we weren’t expecting to get him, and the Saturday before the draft in the regionals of the College World Series, he had a terrible outing…even our scouts began to panic a little bit, and said, “Maybe there’s something wrong with this guy and maybe we don’t like him.”…I was sitting there thinking, “Excellent, I hope he gets crushed every time he goes out there!” Because I know scouts from all the other teams were there watching.

Let’s assign a value to this recency effect. Certainly it should be considered in a stronger light because it may be indicative of a trend…but a study found that the recency effect results in doubling the expected value of a decision.

Just as in the “hot hands” belief in basketball, we find that even when subjects are explicitly told that the rates of return are drawn randomly and independently over time from a given distribution, they still assign a relatively large decision weight to the most recent observations – approximately double the weight of the other observations.

The Innovator’s Dilemma is a book by Clayton Christenson about how once-successful companies fail to adapt to changing markets. It usually happens because they latch on too hard to their successful innovation. Christenson’s first example is from the early hard drive industry:

Their failure resulted from delay in making the strategic commitment to enter the emerging market in which the 8-inch drives initially could be sold. Interviews with marketing and engineering executives close to these companies suggest that the established 14-inch drive manufacturers were held captive by customers. Mainframe computer manufacturers did not need an 8-inch drive. In fact, they explicitly did not want it: they wanted drives with increased capacity at a lower cost per megabyte. The 14-inch drive manufacturers were listening and responding to their established customers.

The Onion had a humorous take on the innovator’s dilemma, in their faux editorial, “F%&# Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades” (temporarily available here). It imagines the Gillette CEO’s response to Schick upping their razors to 4 blades from Gillette’s 3, a move they combined with perhaps the most inane television commercial script I’ve seen…here’s an excerpt from the Onion editorial:

Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the…vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That’s three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next…[the competition] went to four blades. Now we’re standing around…selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we’re the chumps. Well, f*** it. We’re going to five blades.

What’s the common thread? In each of these situations, decisionmakers let their emotions overrule their objectivity. They fell in love with their past success and refused to admit that what they had was simply a temporary lead on the competition, or worse, dumb luck:

What accounts for success and failure? More often than you might think, it’s just luck. But like most things, luck can be managed…Every time you launch a product or service, every time you apply for a job or start a nonprofit, you’re either going to hit or not. If you get lucky, you’re entitled to deny that luck had anything to do with it. But if you fail–and you probably will–understanding the role of the L factor will keep you sane.

Another example of emotional decision-making is pointed out with people who buy SUVs by Malcolm Gladwell. He points out that many of the “safety features” that SUV makers tout are just designed to appeal to what French cultural anthropologist G. Clotaire Rapaille calls people’s deeper, “reptilian” responses.

“The No. 1 feeling is that everything surrounding you should be round and soft, and should give,” Rapaille told me. “There should be air bags everywhere. Then there’s this notion that you need to be up high. That’s a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I’m safer.

A similar decision was made by the makers of the Chrysler PT Cruiser, who decided to reduce the size of the rear window because drivers were afraid of people being able to see in–not caring that it made it much more difficult to see out as well…Gladwell concludes:

But that’s the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe.

Similar to DePodesta, Gladwell goes looking for the statistics that really mean something–the ones that translate into lives saved, not better numbers in a crash test. He finds that building a fortress around yourself is only half the problem–the other half is avoiding things on the road in the first place. And many of the fortesses’ reinforcements are making that part harder:

Bringing five thousand pounds of rubber and steel to a sudden stop involves lots of lurching, screeching, and protesting. The first time, the TrailBlazer took 146.2 feet to come to a halt, the second time 151.6 feet, and the third time 153.4 feet. The Boxster can come to a complete stop from sixty m.p.h. in about 124 feet. That’s a difference of about two car lengths, and it isn’t hard to imagine any number of scenarios where two car lengths could mean the difference between life and death.

Barry Glassner reached similar conclusions in The Culture of Fear. He argues that the torrent of fearful images from far away, displayed on television and in the media, often serve only to distract us from dangers that are closer to home but that we have done nothing about. For instance, paranoia about crack cocaine helps us forget that alcohol abuse has caused more pain and suffering than any other drug. But looking at the numbers is appealing to the cortex, and most of us make decisions in a more “reptilian” manner… I’ve often felt that one of my most valuable gifts was knowing exactly the limits of my own intelligence. When I am absolutely sure of something to the point of becoming emotional about it, that tells me I’m probably wrong. Emotions are wonderful–just keep them out of my business decisions.

This month’s WIRED has an article that reminded me of a core argument in Clayton Christenson’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma–that successful businesses are vulnerable to toppling by smaller competitors when their prior success blinds them to a changing market. Philip Bobbit of UT Austin argues in Technology is Killing Democracy that the very technological innovations that have pushed America to the forefront are now used by its smaller, nimbler competitors (read: terrorists) to bring it down. In a way reminiscent of the Revolutionary War innovations that helped an upstart band of colonists defeat the established British army, America is now too big and influential to make the instantaneous moves demanded by its opponents–and enabled by its technology.

The US intelligence community is not well adapted to fight global terrorism because it was extremely well adapted to fight the Cold War. That was a triumph, and we were able to preserve our civil liberties. And now our success is killing us.

If only our system hadn’t worked so well before; maybe then we’d be more willing to change it now, something we need desperately to do.

Few things are simultaneously more impressive and disappointing to me than the phenomenon of a “power law”. The idea is that a networked and global economy shrinks the barriers of both control and obedience to nothing, so a powerful person can influence scores of people far beyond their physical reach, and others can follow, in obedience or idolization, the actions of the powerful from afar. It impresses me with its potential; disappoints with its elusiveness. You see, once I get my act together and actually know what I’m talking about, I’d like to be the beneficiary of one of those power laws, like IDEO, Microsoft, or even Stanford. They innovated and industries formed around them, so at the beginning they were the biggest in this new field. By being biggest, they defined themselves as the leaders. As leaders, they grew even bigger. The web has its own power law beneficiaries, sometimes known as BNBs, like Kottke, Wil Wheaton, and Instapundit. By getting in early and being big in a linked economy, they just keep getting bigger. For these folks, the power law is great. It funnels traffic and business to them at an exponentially-growing rate, despite their work quality improving at a much more linear speed. No one can get ten times better at their job in a week; but with good publicity, you could book ten times the clients. So while their work is only moderately better than everyone else’s, they get the lion’s share of the reward. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? In a perfect economy, each person would get the precise amount of credit they deserved, giving young talented workers the same opportunity as the old average workers they easily match in ability. It’s not a perfect economy though, and even if it were, “intangible” qualities like personality, diversity, and friendship will always influence decisions. There is another law, similar to the power law, that has recently been unearthed and is equally impressive and disappointing. This is the idea of the “irreplaceable person”. These people are so exceptional at what they do that no number of lesser talents can equal their singular ability. One example of this is displayed in the book Moneyball, by Michael Lewis. A book superficially about the Oakland As baseball team, it chronicles their ability to field a successful team on a tiny budget. One thing essential to this was figuring out exactly what actions contributed to winning baseball games — for instance, a sacrifice fly in the right situation may be better than a triple in another, or a strikeout of Murderer’s Row could offset giving up a home run earlier. Paul DePodesta of the As makes sense of all these statistics, and his insights on the process are invaluable. DePodesta is probably himself one of those “irreplaceable people” — we’ll find out soon enough, as he has moved to the Los Angeles Dodgers to help them find diamonds in the rough. There are people like this in every profession, but sports bring out the superstar talents most often. CNN recently profiled the people who push the limits of human ability, concluding that some people defy nature:

“It’s hard to explain how they can do that because if you take the numbers that we know from medical school, it just shouldn’t happen,” said Dr. Kenneth Kamler, author of Surviving the Extremes, a chronicle of his medical adventures in treacherous locales such as the Amazon and Mount Everest. “But it does happen. It happens in every kind of human activity. People exceed what you would calculate as their limits.”

More importantly for competition, people exceed what other people’s limits are. My cycling team, Webcor, recently went from just pack filler to the leaders of the field after signing Chris Horner, America’s top domestic cyclist. It turns out that while my teammates are not capable of winning big pro races themselves, they are entirely able to support a leader’s win. Horner is incredible, and everyone else is adequate. The Moneyball of cycling… I know a number of incredible people, in all walks of life. While none of them can carry a team, they can certainly lead one and inspire others to support them. The lesson here is to spend whatever it takes, sacrifice quantity for quality, to get that one special person who brings you to the next level. Talent also acts like a power law, and if you accept that you are prepared to reap the benefits of the popularity that follows.

This is part two of a two-part series, written together. The first part explains how I chose the ultimate destination for my creations. The second part shows how I plan to create them in the first place. It is rambling, self-indulgent, and without a real conclusion. However, if by some chance a reader makes it through the entire essay, perhaps they will understand why I’m not worried about that. I wrote about XML in my last entry, and I want to start with it again. Last time I wrote about its “eXtensible” nature; now I want to concentrate on the “Markup Language” part of its name. Like HTML, XML is a system of descriptive and identifying tags that surround information. Like English, XML is a language, with rules and processes to follow. It’s a pretty good language, though, and as I explained before, it is probably the best computer language to come along yet. For me, it has promised independence from the constant changing of tags and code. When you try to support new technologies in the computer industry, you are constantly learning the slightly-different language of your new realm. In each evolution, you tweak symbols, add descriptive information, remove outdated styles and more. Creating markup is a phenomenal bore, prompting me to often think how easily my job could be replaced by a computer. Creating content, on the other hand, is quite exciting. Caught up in the passion of writing this essay, for example, notice how seldom I link to documents, underline words, or add styles. I’d much rather concentrate on the concepts than on the language of their framing document. XML promises to make it easier for me to write what I mean, rather than worry about how it will look. If I define once how a quote from someone else will look (in the code and on a computer screen), then I can simply write (quote)”The text of the quote”(/quote). Much simpler than what I wrote for the sentence below, (/p)(p class=”quote”)”The text of the quote”(/p). But really, it’s just minimizing the code and making it slightly more universal. I still have to decide what merits a “quote” designation, what the reader should focus on first, and what on the wild wild internet they should look at next. What I would really like is to simply write this essay and let the computer figure out what is a quote, what my main idea is, and what the relevant external resources are. Sergey Brin from Google has said:

Look, putting angle brackets around things is not a technology, by itself. I’d rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than by forcing humans to write in ways computers can understand.

Take a look at the bottom of this page (that is, the bottom of the January 30, 2004 A.D. internet webpage version of this essay–more on that distinction in the first part). You’ll see several sections, two of which are titled “Related Entries” and “Related Web Links”. Related Entries are chosen by the Movable Type publishing system I use, by analyzing all the words, markup, and links in the document, comparing it to the words, markup, and links in all my other essays online, and returning the three essays most similar to this one. It’s automatic, requires no work by me, and highly accurate. Related Web Links, on the other hand, requires me to type in a few “keywords” to be associated with this essay, and then searches Google with those words. This process is terribly hard to remember, causes me tremendous difficulty as I try to distill all the content of the assuredly rambling essay into two or three words, and, since I inevitably fail at that, returns links of dubious relevance. One of those processes is the computer doing the categorization; the other is me doing it. Currently the latter is merely a problem of technological scale, one that will surely be eliminated in the very near future. However, it points out the danger of forcing humans to categorize things and the benefits of making machines understand us as we are. In the past, I’ve been skeptical of technologies that try to anthropomorphize the electronic world. Everything from speech recognition, to humanoid robots, to Minority Report-style desktops seems to be forcing a square peg through a round hole. My argument has always been to use computers in a way consistent with their nature, which usually means conforming humans into the shapes machines demand. But having spent a tremendous amount of time this year using computers, I find myself no longer using them as a supplementary tool, but rather thinking like a computer in my everyday life. I search for the “undo” button when I drop a plate; I brainstorm using keywords instead of full sentences; I try to put my daily schedule into the computer and have alarms go off at each milestone. These anecdotes are always good for a laugh with friends, but every silver lining has a dark cloud. I am excellent in Photoshop but have trouble drawing with a pencil. I have refused to spend time with a friend because my electronic organizer beeped at me. I fail to see many forests because my efficient methods insist on examining every tree. Using computers the way they are used best turns out to be a dangerous philosophy. When I look at this closely, I see how it is more than just a computer problem. The problem is with how we use language to codify the world. This is something I’ve written about before, how the language we know controls how we feel about the world. For the entirely of the human race, we have been limited by our ability to communicate our feelings. Everything in our lives, of course, begins with a feeling. For a scientist, the feeling may be an inclination to experiment in a new way that results in invention. For a politician, it may be a confidence welled up by the support of followers that causes a gutteral howl. For a husband, it may be the deep attraction to his beautiful wife that inspires him to bring flowers home after work. Each of those feelings found its way out through the language and behavioral pathways that the individual person knew how to use. We are forever searching for ways to express how we feel, and those who can express their feelings the best are likely those who are happiest and most productive in this life. It is merely a thought, a momentary inspiration perhaps, but I would like to propose that in the coming technological world, we concentrate our energies on letting computers do what they do best, and letting humans do what we do best. I would argue that humans are best at creating–creating love, friendships, joy and ideas; and that computers are best at optimizing those creations–categorizing, sorting, connecting and producing. It is a daunting technological task to conceive such a machine, but if there is one thing I have learned about the technology business, it’s to bet on things getting faster and more efficient every day. If you bet on that in the stock market, you’ll be rewarded several times over, and if you bet on it in life, you won’t come up empty-handed. The fact is, throughout history that which has caused love to increase has succeeded, and that which caused it to decrease has faded away. This trend will continue because of, not in spite of, technological progress. Betting one’s career on the ability to hand off optimization (consulting work), categorization (administration work), sorting (processing work), connecting (communication work), and producing (manufacturing work) to machines is as safe a bet as you can find. And committing one’s career to the tasks of creating (inventors), loving (counselors), befriending (all of us), enjoying (whoever follows their heart), and thinking (who can resist?!) will not disappoint. My feelings? I’m tired. I’m tired of constantly explaining myself, constantly having to put labels and categories on that which I have created and conceived. Who am I to say how something I have done will be interpreted or used by others? How can I presume to declare a category for something that will live beyond me? It is a task beyond my abilities to produce an optimal product for each person of the human race, and an overwhelming thought to imagine trying to connect my ideas to each person that wants to hear them. What I am good at is feeling–feeling inspiration, experiencing love, enjoying friends and experiences. I have no time, energy, or desire to plug all of that into specific ends and means. Furthermore, how can one even live with such a complicated system of goals? I’ve typed this while watching the movie Gandhi, and seen him constantly befuddle his adversaries by sticking closely to just one precept–of non-violently resisting that which is evil. This only shows evil that it is so. In contrast, denying your own weaknesses and trying to maintain the status quo leads to a set of irreconcilable contradictions in belief. Gandhi was phenomenally effective because of, not despite, his simple principle of doing what he felt compelled to do. But now, as I watch the ending of the movie, I realize that not only do we desire to avoid categorizing, we are terrible at doing it when we try. Onscreen, Muslims and Hindus fight entirely along religious lines, performing atrocities to their neighbors. It seems that once one group categorized as “enemy” (the British) is removed, people seek another category to be their “enemy”. Gandhi’s response to the clash? To fast, taking no side; and encouraging transparency of religion and the denial of one’s own categorization. So what will I do? Do I now stop creating for the web? Do I stop writing? I don’t know. If anything, this experience is teaching me that the last thing I need is to create more categories, even if they are “right” and “wrong”. There is love, and doing that which I love is what I will do now. I cannot sacrifice that which I love for that categorized as “right” by others or myself. But at times I love the beauty of computer language, am drawn inexplicably to structure and categories and the power that lies within them. It may be a reflection of my selfish desire to be heard, to be productive and to succeed, yet I love the process of it and therefore am not afraid of the symptoms of the conclusion. And even if everything in the future will find its source in the wellspring of human emotion and be then interpreted and connected by machines, we aren’t there yet. I wrote before that XML is a beautiful language for computers to speak to each other, but they can’t understand our feelings yet, and as long as I feel joy in doing so I will help build the bridge between human feelings and machines that can store, connect, optimize and produce them. By doing so, I can also help create joy and love for others, which allows allow me to share in it. That is reason enough to continue creating, whether as XML or as friendships, and to continue taking joy in it. Until computers can understand my feelings and communicate them better than my fifth-grade-level vocabulary can, I will need to use them to store my writings and the connections I make by hand. I realize this is a big contradiction; that it seems I am selling out to the very thing I want to avoid. But the beauty of the internet is that it’s much easier to contradict yourself. You can be John Doe in one page, and Jane Smith in another. You can experiment with different personalities, styles, and principles. Of course, you can do this in the physical world as well, but it’s easy to get discouraged by the looks askance you’re sure to get. This may actually be the case online as well for those whose websites are read by many people. Regardless of readership, online there is an extra layer of anonymity and for me, that’s just enough to start arguing with myself. I’m quite unbiased as to which side wins. So for a while this space may have different views of the same thing. I’m going to experiment with XML as a publishing language, forcing myself to thing like a computer wants to. But I’m also going to publish in ways that computers can’t handle yet. I’ll scan abstract drawings that come out of emotional experiences and put them online. Maybe I’ll breathe into a jar while feeling angry, take a video of it, and encode it into binary, stored in a *.zip file. I don’t know. But what I do know is that no longer will I allow categorical systems to limit the thoughts and experiences I am able to have. I believe that the primary reason outwardly successful people on this earth are unhappy is that they fail to truly embrace in life those things that God has caused them to love. Instead we choose to categorize ourselves, following a pattern instead of our hearts. The problem I have with writing or living according to categories is not that what is created is so bad. It’s that what could have been created is so good. Without being constricted by labels and categories, paths and channels, any number of new things could be created that instead will never see the light of day. Dean Kamen references this in Codename:Ginger, saying:

If I gave you objectives, you might reach them, and that would be terrible, because it might keep you from doing something really great.

Love: the ultimate futureproofing. It’s ambiguous, general, and utterly impossible to apply to real-world, categorized situations. But it’s the only way to truly succeed and be happy, and you can rest assured that if it is applied in every question and decision, it will not fail. Gandhi knew that he would not fail when he burned his Indian identification card, when he marched to the sea to make salt, when he fasted for peace. For by always acting in love and by his God-inspired mandate, even his death–considered by most the ultimate failure–would cement his victory over those who opposed him with hatred. We’re still talking about him today…