Last time, I did a quick comparative scan of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0 and David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5000 years, and covered Fukuyama’s book in more detail.

Let’s tackle World 3.0 next.

Ghemawat’s book is a tour de force of quantitative synthesis. Let’s start with an annotated version of the 2×2 that anchors World 3.0 (cleverly rotated by 45 degrees; I don’t know why other 2×2 inventors don’t do this). 

This 2×2 is almost the only major piece of conceptual scaffolding in a book that is otherwise an empiricist’s delight. Everything is argued with numbers, and what cannot be argued with numbers is mostly not argued at all. It makes for a book with a lot of narrative potholes wherever the data gods to not smile, but where there is data, the book is extremely solid. It’s a refreshing change for me to read something that stays away from data-free speculation.

For conceptual/narrative types like me, this relentless assault with numbers can be hard to process, but it is worth the effort. I found myself taking notes of key interesting statistics. I compiled some highlights, if you want a data cheat-sheet.

The book is devoted to unpacking this 2×2 in gory, quantitative detail. The main point of the diagram is to separate the global economic integration conversation from the global regulation conversation.

1. Low economic integration and low regulation gives you traditional, pre-nation-state societies, which some atavists believe they can and should return to. Ghemawat calls this World 0.0. It accounted for most of the world until about 1650.
2. Low economic integration and high regulation gives you a world economic order where nation-states are the dominant unit. This is the world as it was between about 1650 and 1910, and the world people like Lou Dobbs want to return to.
3. High economic integration and low regulation gives you the world Thomas Friedman thinks exists, but does not (as Ghemawat shows). It is something of a Darwinian state of nature, red in tooth-and-claw, where regulation, tied to strong nations and weak international bodies, cannot do much.
4. Finally, high integration and high regulation gives you World 3.0, the one Ghemawat believes we should work towards. In fact, he believes we have no choice but to work towards it.

The Historical Framework

There is a Z-shaped historical Z-shaped trajectory here, (0.0 to 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0) which bears a curious resemblance to an oscillation proposed by Graeber, though there are enough differences that you can only claim that they are talking about correlated, but different cyclic phenomena.

In terms of progress along the Z, we are somewhere halfway between 1.0 and 2.0 according to Ghemawat. At 1.5 say. His broad argument is that 0.0 is a hopelessly deluded and unrealistic state to attempt to get back to. 1.0 is achievable, but at enormous economic cost and reversal of global standard of living gains. Friedman’s “flat world” 2.0 is far too dangerously chaotic, but if international institutions of the right kind (i.e., not the World Bank/IMF type mechanisms) aren’t created or strengthened appropriately, we may well end up in a disaster-prone 2.0 regime, or fall back to a primitive 1.0 state.

Worlds 2.0 and 3.0 are possible futures. The level-elevating agenda is an explicit one: for Ghemawat, it is the only way to get beyond the Davos vs. anti-Davos framing of globalization.  As he notes rather late in the book, on page 259:

“World 3.0 is an essential construct because focusing on just World 1.0 and World 2.0 conflates questions of integration and regulation into a tug-0-war along a single dimension.”

It’s an agenda I am entirely sympathetic to.  So let’s see where he takes it. But a little sidebar first.

A Quick Sidebar on Free Agency

Ghemawat’s scenarios map in interesting ways to the scenarios in another 2×2: in Listening to the Future by Don Tapscott and Rob Salkowitz.  Proving Ghemawat’s point that people tend to conflate economic integration and regulation into one “globalization” axis, with dangerous consequences, that’s the x-axis here. The y-axis is degree of free-agency in the workforce.

Since increasing free agency in the workforce is related to declining power for corporate forms of economic organization, and since (as Ghemawat shows) corporations are responsible for most ongoing integration, there are some interesting questions about coupling among the variables here.

But glossing over those difficulties (making good 2×2 diagrams is an art form), at a very rough level, you could say that Continental Drift maps to 1.0, Proud Tower to World 2.0 and Frontier Friction to World 0.0. Freelance Planet doesn’t really map to Ghemawat’s model, and his World 3.0 does not really map to this 2×2.

Though the global labor markets are a major theme in Ghemawat’s model, he doesn’t call out the free agency phenomenon per se. Instead, he argues for greater international labor mobility, and presents the quantitative case for the anti Lou-Dobbs argument: that it actually costs far more taxpayer money to “save” a job domestically than to allow freer migration and pursue comparative advantage models.

His slogan, which the free agency camp will like, is protect work, not jobs. 

But on to the main part of the book.

The 3.0 Challenge

Both Ghemawat and Fukuyama belong to a breed of thinkers about world affairs whom you could characterize as being neither pro or anti-globalization. You could call them, instead, irreversabilists. They are historicists who believe that the process of globalization — gradual global political and economic integration — is irreversible. In the sense that reversal would be very painful, not conceptually impossible. A tiger-by-the-tail effect. Letting go could turn you into lunch.

For Ghemawat, the irreversibility is simply a matter of the sheer scale and momentum of the processes underway. As he notes, by 2050 the world will have doubled in population, and will be attempting (based on the rise of the middle class in the developing world) to create a five-fold increase in average per-capita income.

I hadn’t really thought of the effects of simultaneous population increase (from 6 to 9 billion) and attempts to raise the standard of living (moving a large segment of the global population to the middle class).

To avoid structural collapse along the way, Ghemawat argues, we have no choice but to try and make globalization work. Reversal of globalization processes would be extraordinarily painful for large portions of the world’s population.

I agree with Ghemawat’s point that we don’t have much choice. I am much less optimistic that it is actually possible. A five-fold increase in global output means something like a steady 4.2% global growth rate for the next 38 years (and that’s without adjusting for inflation).

What’s more, much of the population increase will actually happen in the next 15-20 years (i.e., population growth will be front-loaded). If economic growth is not front-loaded as well, we will be left with several decades where growth fails to match the demand.

This means that hundreds of millions of people who appear poised to enter the middle class around the world will either fail, or endure a couple of decades of  pretty terrible times. It would be a modified global version of what happened in parts of Africa following the AIDS epidemic: a phenomenon called demographic fatigue, where growth cannot be sustained and ends up being reversed. In the African case, the death of many working-age males caused economies to collapse, which in turn destroyed standards of living and triggered population declines.

We just crossed 7 billion this year. We’ll hit 8 billion by 2025, and 8.5 billion by 2035. The last half billion on the way to 9 billion will take 15 years (at which point the world population is expected to stabilize and start decreasing). We happen to be in the midst of a global downturn now, with no real recovery on the horizon until at least 2015 0r 2016. All in all, the next 20 years or so look extremely gloomy to me.

Broadly speaking, the book is about whether we can meet this challenge. It starts with a round of debunking of dangerous globalization myths.

Globaloney Slaying

The book starts of with an unsparing take-down of what Ghemawat calls “globaloney” — data-free posturing and rhetoric that he sees as characterizing both the pro- and anti-globalization political camps. The early part of the book is devoted to such debunking.

While he spends a fair amount of time debunking claims from the far left, he reserves his most strident criticism for Thomas Friedman. You may want to read (or re-read) Friedman’s The World is Flat just to get reoriented around globalization as the dangerously uninformed understand and frame it.

For the left, he takes a quick look at their pet ideas: highly local, self-sufficient economies built around organic farming, green practices and so forth, and quickly demonstrates that when you attempt to translate those ideas to a 9-billion-person planet, you basically fail. Those models are at best survivalist models for an elite.

The anti-Friedman narrative in the book is the most entertaining part. Ghemawat recounts several anecdotes where his own dry and pragmatic data-driven advocacy of globalization ran into Friedmanology. As part of his work, he encountered several business and political leaders (Colin Powell among them) who were operating with The World is Flat as their guide, and leaning towards dangerously flawed decision-making as a result. I can imagine his frustration at being told to “go read Friedman” to educate himself about globalization.

Rather cleverly, he turns the sales figures for The World is Flat as yet another piece of data to shed light on globalization itself.

The heart of the criticism of Friedman-style thinking lies in two points. First, globalization has simply not progressed as far as Friedman and his fans think it has. Second, if it were to progress in the manner Friedman hopes it will, we’ll get to a very dangerous sort of world.

The first claim is based on an interesting model of actual and potential levels of globalization in the world.

Distance Sensitivity, Economic Integration and ADDING Value

The framework for analysis of globalization data that Ghemawat presents is based on a notion of distance sensitivity of international relationships of all sorts (ranging from email communication patters to trade). The distance measure he uses combines geographic, cultural, administrative (similar governance forms) and linguistic ideas of distance. Using these, he shows that all economic interaction is strongly sensitive to distance.

His most compelling piece of evidence is probably his analysis of US-Canada trade, the closest bilateral relationship in the world. He shows that even in this best-case scenario, compared to an ideal situation where distance and borders (in his abstract sense) didn’t matter, the US-Canada bilateral trade, the biggest in the world, is missing several trillion dollars.

From there, he broadens the scope of his argument and shows how most kinds of interaction are nowhere near their actual potential if distance and borders really didn’t matter. He goes into measure after measure and demonstrates the distance effects that exist. A table he compiles at the end of this exhaustive survey provides a great freeze-frame picture of globalization. These numbers represent how far globalization has progressed, with respect to a “full economic integration” end state represented by 100%. The details of the analytical model are more than I can get into, but they are worth making an effort to understand. Here’s a summary of internationalization measures, approximately captured by a chart on page 30:

1. Mail: 1%
2. Telephone calls: 2%
3. University students: 2.5% (?)
4. Immigrants:  3%
5. Charity: 5-10%
6. Direct investment: 10%
7. Patents: 15%
8. Venture capital: 17%
9. Internet traffic: 17%
10. Exports: 20%
11. Equity investment: 20%
12. News media: 21%
13. Bank deposits: 25%
14. Government debt: 35%

A general pattern here is that money is far more mobile than labor or human communication. The Internet traffic measure at 17% is probably an optimistic over-estimate, since the location of servers doesn’t really correlate very well with the content and traffic that flows through it.

This dataset is presented alongside some rather subtle arguments. For example, the different kinds of global interaction have very different kinds of leverage. Technology transfer (via IP) is very high-leverage indeed. Most countries rely on technology transfer for 90% of productivity increases. The US is the only country where the pattern is reversed: it is a net exporter of productivity-increasing technologies.

There are revealing glimpses at how hard it is to produce sensible numbers. Take the rhetoric around China taking away US manufacturing for instance.  This is actually really hard to measure. Foreign content accounts for 50% of China’s exports, and 25% – 30% of global exports. This means circulation in intermediate goods is poorly modeled by commonly cited statistics, which indicate a need for value-added accounting to correct for inflated trade deficits. Often the oveerstatement is about 3x due to such “roundtripping.”

If you want more data highlights, look at my cheat sheet.

This first part of the book ends with a scorecard model for measuring progress along 6 major vectors towards World 3.0, represented by the acronym ADDING:

1. Adding volume, (raw growth)
2. Decreasing costs (through best-sourcing)
3. Differentiating (adapting to distance sensitivity effects via localization)
4. Improving industry attractiveness or bargaining power
5. Normalizing (or optimizing) risk
6. Generating and deploying knowledge (and other resources and capabilities).

I won’t attempt to summarize what the dimensions entail.

The Road to 3.0

Having debunked data-free globalization myths, and established something of a quantitative foundation on which to build in Part I, the book then turns to a series of common globalization themes, and attempts to look for the truth behind the rhetoric in each theme with numbers.

This is necessarily a dicey exercise, and given the hugely acrimonious debates around every single one of the themes, Ghemawat understandably adopts a conservative (in the academic sense), defensive approach. The themes he addresses, over several chapters, include: concentration, global externalities, global risks, global imbalances, global exploitation, oppression and homogenization. 

While he suggests mechanisms to address concerns around each theme, Ghemawat’s primary objective is to attach numbers to each theme. For example, he counters the “global homogenization” criticism with the reframing that more diverse choices for everybody isn’t really homogenization.  If people in all countries have access to each other’s cuisines in local restaurants, that is hardly homogenization. He manages to argue that such global diversification is ultimately going to be more important than McDonaldization.

After the tour of major themes, the book winds down with a rather weak prescriptive section in Part III. While some of the prescriptions are believable, (his proposals for mechanisms to contain global financial contagion events for instance), the rest amounts to somewhat wishful thinking, given the magnitude of the challenge posed in the beginning of the book (achieving a five-fold increase in world output by 2050, to support 9 billion people at a higher average standard of living than most of them enjoy today).

But he does manage to convince that increasing global integration and regulation is the only real path forward. Those who hope for innovation-driven growth to deliver all the increase in output necessary vastly overestimate the growth potential of innovation by itself. For Ghemawat’s prescription to work, we need both Schumpeterian and Smithian models of growth to continue. And this is assuming that the increased global regulation will happen. In an era when individual nations are struggling to resist regulatory capture by the business world and regulate even their domestic economies meaningfully, hoping for sufficient international regulation to enable safe global growth seems rather optimistic.

For my part, I don’t think the challenge can be met at all. Instead, we will find growth lagging population growth, a period of demographic fatigue and middle class collapse in many parts of the world (a decline where it already exists, and a stillborn failure to launch in other parts of the world), followed by a very slow recovery through a Dark Age that will probably last at least a half-century beyond 2050. Since I’ll be dead well before then, I can safely make this prediction.

One possible pattern that may emerge by 2050 is a division of the world into two zones. One where the world continues gingerly along its current World 1.5 path, swinging dangerously between 1.0 and 2.0, and another zone where we see a collapse back to somewhere between 0.0 and 1.0: failed states, and a forced return to local economics.

Thomas Barnett’s interesting map of the world postulates one such boundary between the zones. The “Core” might be Zone 1 and the “Non Integrating Gap” might be Zone 2 (image from New World Notes).

A Brief Note on Graeber’s Debt

Thanks to a skirmish in the comments of Part I, that I’d rather not continue, with a commenter who appears to be Graeber himself, I’ve decided not to review Debt after all. It’s a good book, but not worth that much trouble for me.

While I do have opinions on many of the questions raised in the book, a review is not the place to present them. I’ll save them for exploration within my own preferred frames of reference. I still think it is well-worth a read. There’s plenty of value there, and I’ll be citing some of the book’s ideas selectively in future posts.

I recommend you read Julio Rodriguez’ review and Daniel Lemire’s shorter review.  There are also plenty of other good reviews around.

If you want to seriously level-up your thinking about how the world works, you might want to try reading 3 very ambitious books together: Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0 and David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5000 years. All three are from the reading list that I posted in August, so I am hoping at least some of you have been attacking them.

It’s worth reading them together because they attempt to tell the same story, towards the same purpose — explaining how the world works in some sense — drawing on roughly the same body of raw material. It is illuminating to see the surprising ways in which the stories agree and disagree. All three books are also particularly valuable for me personally, since I hope to take a stab at telling the same story some day.

My version will of course be the definitive one when I write it, but let’s take a look at the versions of the story on the market today.

An Academic Celebrity Death-Match

After finally finishing all three books last week, it struck me that you’d get very entertaining Jerry Springerish outcomes if you put the authors together on a conference panel. Going by their books, I’d say that Fukuyama and Ghemawat would mostly agree but eye each other very warily, given their drastically different methodologies. Fukuyama is the ultimate metaphysical conceptualizer and Grand Narrative weaver, while Ghemawat is a data-driven empiricist and narrative debunker par excellence.

Graeber is a sort of micro-narrative ethnographer-storyteller with a visceral suspicion of both numbers and abstractions. In a way the title of Graeber’s book is misleading. Debt is not one big story spanning 5000 years, but more like a collection of 5000 little stories and arguments thrown together, with a bigger narrative almost slapped on as an afterthought. And for a book about debt, money and finance, it manages the astounding feat of filling up several hundred pages with almost no numbers, equations, graphs or mathematical arguments.

On our hypothetical conference panel, Graeber would probably start out politely but end up trying to bludgeon the other two to death within a few minutes. Ghemawat would probably fight back impatiently, with barely-concealed annoyance, held back only by a sense of scholarly dignity. Fukuyama would probably walk off the stage with the tired, resigned and martyred look of a misunderstood senior academic statesman.

Moving on from these idle fantasies of academic-celebrity death-matches, let’s talk about the books.

Where they are Coming From

Jerry Springer jokes aside, the books are interesting to read together because of the sharp differences in politics, maturity of thought and individual personalities that inform the book.

It’s interesting to note that Fukuyama was born in 1952, Ghemawat in 1959 and Graeber in 1961. Personality-wise — and perhaps this is a function of age — they come across as gentle, impatient and angry, respectively.

Along another dimension, Fukuyama is mostly descriptive (though his politician-fans often mangle his ideas into prescriptions), Ghemawat is weakly prescriptive in a tentative and technocratish way, and Graeber is strongly normative.

And along a third dimension, Fukuyama is mildly reactionary (taking on classical man-in-the-state-of-nature models, but reconstructing rather than destroying them), Ghemawat is moderately reactionary (simultaneously taking aim at what he labels “globaloney” arguments on the anti-globalization side and Thomas Friedman on the pro-globalization side) and Graeber is almost entirely reactionary (devoting the entire book to attacking the foundations of mainstream economics rather than constructing an alternative framework).

I am deeply tempted to read the three as a sort of Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva trinity. Fukuyama’s project is ultimately a creationist account of the world in a sort of “more perfect union” sense. Ghemawat’s is a preservationist account, deeply absorbed in the actual complexity and constraints of the world as it exists, and the problem of defending against threats and preventing things from unraveling. Graeber’s is destructive-nihilist, focused on fundamental inequities, social justice and a revolutionary agenda. You get the sense that he wouldn’t be too upset if everything unraveled.

Taken together, the three accounts constitute a fascinating creative-destructive reading of contemporary world affairs situated within a broader historical context.

But I won’t belabor this rather overwrought trinity metaphor, just leave it as a framing suggestion for you.

For Fukuyama, this book represents a sort of swan song in a long career in the public eye that began with The End of History and the Last Man (1993). He gained notoriety via an association with the neocon coterie around George W. Bush (a movement he later disavowed) and with this book, he is clearly wrapping up a lifetime of scholarship devoted to a single question. There is a certain sadness and poignancy in his approach to the subject matter as a result.

Ghemawat is best understood as an anti-Thomas-Friedman and anti-anti-globalists. In fact, World 3.0 is best viewed as a systematic attempt to tear down the anti-intellectual Friedman-Globalization-complex, which he clearly views as having done immense damage to the pro-globalization movement through its sloppy “flat” metaphors, shoddy arguments, and wild and ungrounded swings between alarmist and exuberant rhetoric. The most entertaining (though not most useful) parts of his book are the stories of his encounters with Friedman-influenced types. The project of countering anti-globalization types does not get as much attention, mainly because Ghemawat clearly does not take them very seriously.

As an ex-McKinsey consultant, ex-HBS professor (where he worked for 25 years), and current professor at IESE, Barcelona in the heart of the Eurozone and its present crisis, he is everything Friedman is not: an extremely careful, data-driven advocate of globalization: relentlessly pragmatic, skeptical of just-so stories, and studiously averse to grand-standing. Where Friedman is the ultimate uncomprehending journalist-outsider, going “Oh Wow!” at everything, Ghemawat is the ultimate insider-technocrat of globalization, the sort of immensely influential person who normally stays out of public conversations and sticks to persuasion in backrooms, cabinets and boardrooms.

And finally, Graeber is the (relatively) young hothead demagogue of the bunch. He appears to have been blooded in political combat during the anti-globalization movement of the eighties and nineties (he seems to have been involved in the resistance to the IMF/World Bank  approach to managing the world economy in particular). Of the three, he is clearly the Man of the Hour, given his association with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

As scholars, all three are complex people with careful and nuanced views on their subject matter. These are not the sorts of people you could reduce to simplistic political stances.

To the extent that they have actually been involved in world affairs, however, they cannot really avoid being politically pigeonholed: Fukuyama is a social and political conservative, Ghemawat is a classic business conservative/social liberal and Graeber is a cross between an anarchist and a neo-socialist.

With Fukuyama, you get a separation of scholarship and personal political history that is almost surreal. There is absolutely no acknowledgment that his involvement in Bush-era world affairs might be a relevant backstory (I was hoping to find some personal commentary in the preface, but was disappointed). The professor and the political influencer might as well be different people.

With Ghemawat, the separation is maintained, but there is open acknowledgment of how his involvements in world affairs have shaped his scholarly views (there are plenty of ideas substantiated by references to his role as a consultant to various world bodies and national governments for example).

With Graeber, there is a weak attempt to maintain some sort of scholar-activist separation early in the book, but by the end, the effort is completely abandoned and the scholarly endeavor is openly and clearly subordinated to the activist agenda. Debt starts out as a disinterested scholarly book, but ends as an openly political polemic.

The Raw Material

Each book tackles the question of how the world works, and each takes a historical approach to the question.  The time-span under consideration ranges, for all three, from roughly 5000 BC to modern times.

Ghemawat, after a quick tour of the first few thousand years, settles on the last century and the modern era of globalization (Zakaria’s Post-American World is a good companion read, since it fill in more detail around the parts that Ghemawat skips over a little too quickly, with the same data-driven approach).

Fukuyama ranges over the first few thousand years at a leisurely pace and stops just sort of the industrial revolution. His account of modernity is to be published in a second volume in 2012, which I am now impatient to read.

Graeber ranges all over the entire time-span, mainly to the detriment of his treatment of post-1800 modernity, since the 300-odd years between 1800 AD-2011 AD probably contain about the same quantity of relevant raw material as the 6800 years between 5000 BC and 1800 AD (that’s exponential trajectories for you). Where Fukuyama and Ghemawat modestly limit themselves, Graeber ambitiously tries to do it all in one book. In some ways he succeeds, and in other ways, he over-reaches.

(An unrelated reason for the weakness of the post-1800 parts of Graeber’s book is probably the difficulty of providing a purely qualitative-ethnographic account of the modern era. I cannot see any way to truly understand things like the subprime crisis without mathematics for instance).

The result is that Fukuyama and Ghemawat end up telling their stories in steady and measured ways, taking care to substantiate their arguments. Both are also somewhat predictable: the surprises they have to offer are relatively minor, but rigorously argued.

Graeber is more original than either Fukuyama or Ghemawat; there are startling insights, ideas and examples at practically every turn. But every argument seems suspect due to the hurried nature of the development.

It doesn’t help that the overarching narrative is shaky to the point of being incoherent, and unravels completely towards the end. At various points, I found myself reflecting that Debt would have worked better as a compendium of ethnographic anecdotes and short essays debunking of economic myths.

I’ve been discussing Debt with a few people over the last week and Daniel Lemire observed that the whole thing reads like somebody’s research notebook hastily published, without much editing. Justin Pickard (an alum of Goldsmith’s University, where Graeber teaches) rather evocatively called it “a mountain of intellectual rubble and tiny anecdotes that I can start playing with.” It’s an apt description: the book provides a lot of astounding value, but you definitely have to excavate the book rather than read it, and work hard to separate the politics from the scholarship.

Let’s take a brief look at each of the books in turn, in descending order of author age.

The Origins of Political Order

You cannot really understand Fukuyama’s book without reading it in the context of The End of History and the Last Man, the book that made him famous almost 20 years ago. If you just read The Origins of Political Order (which you can do, since it is written in a stand-alone way), you are likely to find the arguments less substantial than they actually are.

That’s because he dealt with the harder foundational questions to his own satisfaction (and to the satisfaction of about half the people who think about this sort of stuff) back in 1993. This book can be understood as a reading of history, assuming the conceptual framework of The End of History as a starting point, where he drew upon Hegelian philosophy to argue in favor of a strongly historicist understanding of political evolution, and came to the conclusion that the natural and necessary end point of political evolution is liberal democracy. It was an abstract and metaphysical argument rather than a historical one.

At the time, the problem of conceptually explaining the so-called “democratic peace” (the observation that liberal democracy has been spreading rapidly, and that liberal democracies normally don’t go to war with each other) was a much-debated question in political science, and Fukuyama provided one compelling answer. His former mentor, Samuel Huntington, and later Huntington’s student, Fareed Zakaria, fought back with counterarguments in books like The Clash of Civilizations and Illiberal Democracy. These reactions (in my opinion) conspired to miss the point: attempting to counter a purely conceptual argument intended to illuminate philosophical questions, sort of like the idea of general equilibrium in economics, with  empirical and historical counter-arguments. To be fair to Fukuyama’s critics, they were responding more to the co-option of his ideas by politicians seeking a post-Cold-War moral justification for “spreading democracy” than to Fukuyama himself. But in the process, they ended up resorting to thinly-disguised cultural essentialism (later, Huntington attracted a lot of criticism for his stridently cultural-essentialist treatment of the question of the rise of Latino culture in the US).

I read these books in the late 90s, during a period when I was myself rather enamored of complexity theory (I worked briefly with Robert Axelrod who was also working on computational models of the “democratic peace” at the time), so my own history of thinking about such questions has mostly been in computational-modeling terms. I fell in love with Fukuyama’s ideas mainly because they lend themselves very well to computational modeling perspectives.

In fact, The End of History served as my introduction to advanced political science debates.

I didn’t quite buy his liberal-democracy-is-natural-and-necessary conclusion, but I convinced myself that in a weaker form (contingent upon the specific conditions prevailing on planet earth, and given the peculiar psychology of homo sapiens, but not contingent upon cultural differences within humanity, which is what his critics argue), his idea of liberal democracy as the evolutionary end-state made complete sense to me.

The point of going into this extensive backstory is that without it, there is a good chance you might miss the point of Origins.

Origins is an analysis of history. Avoid the temptation to think of it as some sort of empirical “proof” of End of History. In a sense the End of History arguments are metaphysical and unfalsifiable. It is best to read Origins as a reading of history through the lens of End of History.

So what is the book about?

It is about the evolution of the institutional structure of modern liberal democracies. Given liberal democracy as the assumed end point of convergence for all political forms (think water drops flowing down from different points on the edge of a bowl to the bottom) Fukuyama wants to know where the institutions of liberal democracy come from. He identifies three core institutions in particular: the state, the rule of law and accountable government.

The book starts with classic Man in the State of Nature theories from Hobbes and Rousseau, reconstructs them in light of evolutionary biology. He argues that both Hobbes and Rousseau were wrong to posit states of war and peace amongst primitive individuals as starting points. Instead, he offers the idea that individualism itself is a relatively late (13th century) political development, and that State-of-Nature models must begin not with individuals but groups. You could say he arrives at a Hobbesian starting point, adapted for warring groups rather than warring individuals.

With traditional political science thought experiments thus reconstructed, he begins his story with kinship groups and tribes, and moves on to the formation of the earliest states (pristine state formation as opposed to competitive state formation).

Here he again breaks with traditional Western scholarship that usually begins with Greece (really, for no good reason), and chooses to start with China instead (which turns out to yield a much more coherent story).

He argues — very successfully — that the first modern state was the one based on the bureaucracy that emerged in China during the Warring States era and successfully endured, providing the first historical break from politics governed by kinship and tribal dynamics.

After noting that China did not develop the other two institutions (rule of law and accountable government) until modern times, he moves on to India where, he argues, a modern state in the Chinese sense never developed, but rule of law and a form of accountable government did, but without being embodied in stable institutional forms within which power and inertia could accrue.

Next, he moves westward and carefully examines the case of the Islamic state, which possessed a strong state capable of resisting kinship and tribal power (by developing the unique institution of slave armies and state institutions that finessed the problem of dealing with tribal loyalties — the famous devshirme and Mamluk models), and a strong rule of law, but no accountable government.

Finally, he picks up the European story with the growth of Christianity, the tussle between the church and the state, the weakening of family and kinship structures due to the impact of the church, the emergence of the modern idea of the socially mobile “individual” and ultimately, the modern liberal democracy, with functioning state, rule-of-law and accountable-government institutions.

The story is without a doubt a work of extraordinary synthesis. Having read more than a few world histories (both straight-up narratives and analytical accounts), I can safely say that Origins is in something of a class by itself. Like it or dislike it, it will definitely allow you to appreciate world history in ways that you probably have not occured to you.

Ignoring the foundational assumptions inherited from The End of History, which you pretty much have to either accept or reject based on your ideological leanings, the one weakness of the book is its uncritical assumption that the institutional structure of the world is in some sense central to the story of political evolution.  We do not really get a more fundamental account of organizations and institutional forms, and how they emerge from more basic forces. We also do not get an adequate account of the birth-death lifecycle dynamics of institutions. So you could call this position “institutional essentialism,” which makes the account something of a curve-fit of ideal and timeless notions of institutions onto the actual institutional history of the world.

I’ll stop here, since I can’t do justice to all three books in one post. Next time, I’ll cover the other two, and try to weave all three stories together into some sort of harmonious synthesis. Should be an interesting challenge.

Sometimes the difference between a good book and an Aaargh! book is a single unexamined value. Fixing the Game by Roger L. Martin is an Aargh! book. The phrase that kept running through my head as I read was so close… so close.

The book is two things: an exceptionally clear and original analysis of the question of what ails modern capitalism, and an exceptionally woolly headed prescription for how to fix it. Unlike many books that are strong on analysis, the prescription isn’t bad because it is an anemic afterthought shoved into a last chapter (here, the prescription runs through the entire book, with a goodly fraction of the word count devoted to it). It is weak because its foundational assumptions about the psychology of capitalism are hopelessly idealistic.

That’s what makes the book so frustrating. It could have been so much more. Still the book retains a lot of its value because it is relatively easy to tease apart the parts colored by idealism from the parts that are not.

Fixing the Game is among an early offering in what will undoubtedly turn into a whole what-ails-capitalism cottage industry.

Unlike the first wave of books that appeared shortly after the subprime meltdown, this book does not concern itself with investigative journalism or with blow-by-blow narration of the events that led up to the crisis. Instead, the book focuses on presenting an alternative theory of capitalism based on different assumptions.

The current theory, Martin argues (based on maximizing shareholder returns), has basically been proved false beyond all reasonable doubt. Fixes based on the current theory are doomed to fail in predictable ways.

The alternative theory is based on the idea of significantly decoupling the real market of business functioning from the expectations market (the stock market).

The narrative as a whole is based on a telling of the story of capitalism on two time scales: the decade of the 00′s (which spanned three significant financial scandals: the 2000 bubble collapse, the 2005 options backdating scandal and the subprime crisis) and  the post World War II half-century, which spanned a watershed shift in 1976 towards shareholder returns becoming the dominant performance metric for businesses.

The analysis is compelling, but the prescription, unfortunately, is both conceptually flawed and ideologically compromised.

Still, for a first book in what I hope will be a genre that spawns many more, it gets the conversation off to an excellent start.

Business as a Professionalized Sport

This is one book that can be forgiven its sports metaphor because it is so precise and so apt. If you are unfamiliar with the basics of the main American sports, you will unfortunately miss a lot of the nuanced arguments. This is not a generic metaphor where you can easily replace football with soccer and baseball with cricket.

Others have made the point Martin makes: that the main problem with capitalism is the manic focus on shareholder returns. Where the analysis breaks new ground is in explaining clearly how and why shareholder-returns is the problem, using an extended metaphor of business as a professionalized sport. Using this metaphor, and by holding up the NFL as an organization that manages its sport (American football) well,  the book illuminates an inherently murky subject bedeviled by far too much esoteric jargon.

The metaphor frames both professionalized sports and business as the interplay of two markets: the real market (games on the field or actual company performance) and the expectations market (the sports betting market and the stock market respectively).

The rest of the mapping falls out naturally. Executives become star players. The SEC and company boards become the governing forces. Customers become sports fans. Stock market speculators become gamblers. Boards become coaches. Owners become major shareholders.

The highlight of the analysis is the contrast between governance of football as practiced by the NFL and governance of business as practiced by the regulatory forces. Martin’s main claim is that much of the sustained performance of the NFL in governing American football well (as evidenced by its increasing popularity compared to basketball and baseball) can be attributed to just a handful of practices:

1. Strict separation of the real market and the expectations market via prohibition of gambling on the part of players and coaches, and effective policing of the prohibition, to ensure that players pursue returns in the real market rather than the expectations market
2. Continuous, deliberate evolution of the game rules on and off the field to keep game outcomes as unpredictable as possible. I’ll get to why this is a good thing later (Martin’s analysis is incomplete).
3. An effective model of player free agency that maintains a healthy balance of power among players, owners and game administrators and salaries on earth (in contrast to the MLB).

By contrast, Martin argues, the game of capitalism (and sports other than football) violates all these three sound design principles for a sound regulatory environment.

1. The real and expectations market are strongly and deliberately coupled via stock-based compensation for executives (and employees), whose performance is judged based on their ability to set and meet (i.e. “manage” under conditions of moral hazard) expectations in the expectations market. This would be like team captains offering spread estimates before games and apologizing for not meeting them, or trying to win by a certain margin.
2. Knee-jerk upgrades to regulatory regimes via band-aid fixes, based on a false theory of capitalism and economic disease, implemented in the wake of crises, rather than proactive prevention based on a better theory of economic health.
3. A very poor balance of power that favors executives over all other stakeholders (employees, stockholders, board members, customers), rather like star players in baseball, who earn outrageous salaries in relation to the value they add, compared to star NFL players.

If these seem like rather broad and tautological philosophical points, you’re going to be surprised by the elegance of some of the pieces of evidence marshaled in support of this analysis. For example, in the period 1983 – 1993, CEOs met stated earnings expectations 50% of the time. Between 94-97, a turbulent period widely regarded as less predictable, they hit expectations 70% of the time. Either leadership quality increased miraculously, or the CEOs had simply learned to manage expectations rather than realities (a tougher challenge).

Martin presents a wealth of both quantitative and anecdotal evidence showing in detail how expectations are actually managed. CEOs may be the conductors of these orchestras, but weak boards, craven analysts and greedy shareholders are equally complicit in this theater of absurdity. What makes the analysis particularly compelling is the detailed comparison to behaviors that are actually outlawed in the NFL (all varieties of throwing games to win in the gambling markets). As the saying goes, knowing how not to fail is not the same as knowing how to succeed. The NFL offers a compelling model of how to succeed.

If the capitalism game rewards executive behaviors that are somewhere between neutral and harmful, it also penalizes good behavior: companies that pay attention to customers and building up the value of actual assets see stagnant performance on the stock market (Apple is a recent  exception that is insufficiently analyzed in the book).

If you’re like me and don’t  have a detailed technical understanding of how stock markets work, the book is also invaluable for its exposition of a few key academic ideas that are central to the design of the modern game of capitalism (in particular the 1976 paper by Jensen and Meckling, The Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure, which led to the elevation of stock performance above all other metrics, and the 2005 paper by Erik Lie, On the timing of CEO stock option awards which precipitated the options back-dating scandal).

Overall the analysis is very persuasive and most importantly clear, thanks to the NFL analogy. Without the striking contrast of an existence proof for a system that actually works, the analysis might have been no more than a just-so story, easily countered by an alternative just-so story.

Problems with the Analysis

That said, given the ambition of the change agenda being proposed (nothing less than the re-invention of capitalism), the analysis is not nearly strong enough. In particular, the heavy dependence of the argument on the before/after comparison around the 1976 watershed year unnecessarily weakens the overall argument.

For example, one piece of evidence offered is that real average returns dropped from 7.5% for 1933-1976 to 6.5% for 1977-2010, with significantly increased volatility (both in everyday terms and in terms of the frequency of big bubble-bust cycles).

Even accepting these not-too-solid numbers as roughly right, causality is harder to determine than Martin admits. It is not clear that the rise of shareholder returns is entirely to blame. 1976 is also a very good watershed year for a lot of other things that changed.

• American businesses suddenly encountered real competition for the first time since World War II for example, with many technology markets based on WWII innovations (automobiles, aircraft, radio, computing) maturing and turning into zero-sum mature market games.
• The OPEC crisis in 1979 is another major factor that confounds the historical analysis. Oil is so fundamental to the industrial economy that significant events in the story of oil must be incorporated into any larger story.
• The late 70s also marked a powerful transition from sloppy and inefficient operational cultures that had reigned for several decades, to lean and quality-focused cultures that have reigned (with their own problems) between 1980 and today.
• This operational shift was accompanied by the birth of the modern strategy industry, also around 1979 (as Walter Kiechel documents in Lords of Strategy). While one subplot of the strategy story was devoted to managing share prices, there was a larger shift in management models as well. CEOs started actually “doing” strategy.
• A few decades of middle-management Organization Men ruling the roost ended, and sociopath senior management types regained control, a transition that, for all its problems, was a positive one.
• The era of lifetime employment began to crumble, with both employee and employer loyalty crumbing with it.

With so many things changing at once, a story that blames one factor for much of the malaise is suspiciously convenient. I do think the focus on shareholder returns was a major cause, but it is unlikely to have been  the only cause or even a primary cause. I suspect Jensen and Meckling merely codified operating principles that had already emerged in response to environmental shifts. The shareholder-value rulebook likely came after the actual subterranean shifts were already underway.

The restriction to two time scales (2000-2010 and 1933-2010 with a 1976 watershed) is also a source of weakness. The excesses of poorly regulated capitalism during the Gilded Age (which I am reading about right now) and the longer history of bubble phenomena, dating back to the South Sea Bubble of 1622, need to be comprehended in a truly credible version of the argument. Shareholder-returns-focus  seem like it might be the latest manifestation of a more fundamental force. A longer natural history of corporate performance metrics seems called for.

That said, most of these problems can be fixed with more words and research. The fundamental argument, appropriately qualified, is believable.

The deeper problem is with the proposed theoretical framework itself. In particular, some of the weaknesses arise from the simplistic characterization of the market as non-zero-sum and value producing (fan enjoyment and customer value respectively) and the expectations market as zero-sum and non-value-creating.

This isn’t really true or completely fair.

The so-called “real” market is non-zero-sum only during  expansion phases while a generation of new technologies (often birthed by war) matures. Innovation unfortunately is a punctuated equilibrium process rather than one that adds value steadily.

In mature markets, leading up to the next technological paradigm shift, the market behaves more like a zero-sum game where market share is won or lost driven by fluctuations in the distribution of natural resources, random fashion trends and advertising rather than fundamental increases in value.

It is  also unclear to me that a real-market entity is a good thing simply because it produces “real” things. Many sincere people work hard solving real problems and creating real products and services that customers use. Unfortunately, many of those products and services are arguably, bad for the world. From cigarettes to addictive junk food to television programming that panders and enslaves, the real market is hardly a cornucopia of humanity-elevating production. Indeed, some of these things are worse than hedge funds, which is saying a lot.

Equally, the zero-sum and negative-sum dynamics of the expectations market does play a legitimate role in driving the diffusion of certain kinds of information and creating an environment of Darwinian weeding out of weaknesses (or what we like to call creative destruction).

While that legitimate role does not excuse the existence of perverse incentive structures that lead to outsize, under-taxed profits (especially in pure expectations market games like hedge funds), the strong suggestion in the book that the real market is “good” and the expectation market “bad” is simply misguided.

Unlike sports betting, the stock market plays an actual information-theoretic governance role in the functioning of capitalism. Even hedge funds (for which Martin reserves his worst criticism), with a few rule changes can probably do some good through their apparently perverse amplification of market volatility.

The Prescription

Martin’s prescriptions are a curious mix of subconscious cynicism and conscious idealism.

On the one hand, we get careful and detailed accounts of exactly how the 2-20 model of hedge funds leads to cancerous dynamics, and how simple changes to those rules can make the game vastly healthier. Some of the ideas are quite radical (like banning normal options-based compensation packages) but supported by very cogent arguments.

But on the other hand we get the vacuous suggestions that company board members should view their work as public service and that the rules should be written to enable CEOs to lead “authentic” lives (apparently, while enjoying their fabulous wealth, they are secretly pining for “authenticity” and bemoaning their empty lives, beholden to investor meetings, and are to be pitied).

While many of the individual tactics are based on realistic psychology and ideas about checks and balances, removal of moral hazards and conflicts of interests, and strengthening of weak parties in a currently unequal balance of power, the big picture suggestions essentially amount to a forlorn appeal to higher motives and positive psychology principles.

The whole prescription rolls up into a surprisingly weak grand goal: to displace the formula “maximize shareholder value” with the equally problematic “maximize customer delight.”  Martin’s argument in favor of customer delight is based on one good reason and one bad one.

The good reason is his rather clever argument (which he explains at length) that customer delight is a “powerful” objective in that it subsumes other, weaker objectives.  If you pursue customer delight, he argues, you will automatically also grow shareholder value at a “reasonable” rate (“reasonable” is one of many weasel words in the prescription). Since optimizing a robust function of many variables tends to be difficult in complex systems, maximizing the most powerful single objective is the next best thing.

The problem with this argument of course is the one I have already mentioned: “customer delight” reveals nothing about social value. You could be a drug pusher delighting cocaine addicts.

I don’t have an alternative proposal. No single formulaic and static objective is going to work. What you need is a more powerful dialectic that keeps the the meaning and pursuit of economic value in a state of fluid contention among contending voices.

Much of the woolly headedness starts with a fundamental value-based assumption on page 94 and then runs through the book like a gigantic fault line:

The illegal and unethical behavior of business executives over the past few decades suggests that something is seriously out of whack in the corporate world. Assuming people would rather be ethical than unethical, how did we wind up with such pervasive unethical and illegal behavior?

Far from being a throwaway line, the entire prescription rests on this one assumption. In effect, Martin’s is a theory of executive behavior based on Douglas McGregor’s Theory Y: that left to themselves people will naturally behave well (as opposed to Theory X, that given a chance, people will lie, cheat and look for any old way to get ahead). You just have to remove the perverse conditions that make them behave badly, and perhaps offer them an uplifting sermon to get them started in a new direction.

This assumption, quite simply is not true, but that’s a longer story, going back to theories about “man in the state of nature” due to Rousseau and Hobbes, and involving more recent work in evolutionary psychology. I’ll talk about that story another day, when I review Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, but for now, let me just offer without proof, the assertion that humans are a mix of X and Y tendencies. Some have more of one tendency and some have more of the opposed tendency. Different environments confer advantages on people with different tendencies. Good governance systems are designed around the full range of likely human behaviors.

When you base an ambitious prescription on a Theory Y model of executive motivation, you necessarily end up with such non-solutions as promoting “authenticity,” shaky conflations of “real” with “non-zero sum” and an uncritical idolization of an idealized “real” market where real things are produced and executives nobly strive to delight customers and life improves for all.

Yes. There was a time when men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

Is there a way to assemble the ideas in the book into a different prescription? One that is not based on notions of human perfectibility and shaky appeals to the nobler motives of executives who are doubtfully cast as “would rather be ethical” characters? I am not suggesting we should be developing systems based on assumptions of inherent corruptibility. Such systems tend to be too cautious, paranoid and costly.

I am suggesting that we think about systems based on realism rather than either idealism or cynicism.

A Different Dialectic for Capitalism

If an unreconstructed notion of “delighting customers” cannot fuel a richer dialectic for capitalism, where might we find a richer dialectic? To create a powerful dialectic, you need a collision of well-matched forces.

There are two strong clues in the analysis and NFL analogy.

The first is the idea that keeping the game unpredictable is central to good governance. This means making more games real contests. Organized sports become boring when one force consistently beats another (example, offenses consistently beating defenses or vice-versa) or when one player is allowed to accumulate too large an advantage. At a deeper level, when every game is a challenge, innovation rates increase.

The second is the idea that empowering of players via free-agency was central to creating this unpredictability in the NFL. You cannot create a system of rules that leads to mostly even and unpredictable contests if one side is able to accumulate significantly more resources than the other. A rule change can neutralize a specific idea like the West Coast Offense, but it cannot restrain a team stacked with more stars, and fueled by more money than the competition. Innovation stagnates because some teams lose hope and others win without trying.

Unpredictability is a time-honored goal in the design of sports. Thorstein Veblen noted, in The Theory of the Leisure Class, that the games of the leisure class evolve their rules to reduce outcomes to pure chance. Mechanisms like handicaps carry this logic to an extreme.

The purpose is not to create a contest where the best team or athlete wins, but one where the definition of “best” is kept fluid so that the audience has the most fun, due to the unpredictability. As a side-effect, the gambling markets remain inherently simple because there isn’t as much information for them to process: at most you have simple betting or spread betting. The gambling markets merely process superstitions, tacit outsider information, and other forms of information that are not of immediate value to players in the real market. Usable information is kept out of the expectations market to the extent possible, and people in possession of usable information are prevented from participating in the expectations market and encouraged to actually use it to improve performance.

This is a fundamentally sensible strategy. The best use of real information is improving the real game; feeding it back and improving real performance via innovation. Using real information to manipulate expectations is a tragic waste.

Chasing Unpredictability, Arming Free Agents

In the NFL, the game is changed when a tactical innovation provides makes a previously unpredictable element of the game predictable. Such an advantage is mostly used to win games, not to manipulate the gambling market. Rules are eventually changed to even the odds when such innovations occur. The spurs innovation and the game evolves faster than the gambling.

The fact that the stock market is a maze of incomprehensible regulation that changes with every new crisis, while the copyright and patent regimes have been evolving at a glacial pace, suggests that we are driving innovation in the wrong game.

To move the rapid innovation to the real market, and to keep the stock market game comprehensible and slowly evolving, you need a contest in the real market between forces that have fundamentally opposed objectives.

Martin’s prescription (and his proposed new model of capitalism) perpetuates a fundamental mistake: treating capitalism as a game between regulators (both central and board-level) and players — people with information and levers that allows them to manipulate both expectations markets and real markets.  To use the NFL analogy, this amounts to having the players and coaches fight the NFL governing body and team owners.

This isn’t a contest. The people with privileged information will always win. It cannot be made an unpredictable and even contest: those with privileged information will use that information to get ahead whatever the incentive structure.

You cannot neutralize an arms race with rules. You can only displace it with a different arms race.

So what you need instead is to displace the contest: make it a game between two parties with equal access to privileged information and fundamentally different motivations, who are forced to fight in the real market rather than the expectations market.

In the sports examples that Martin cites, this other party comprises individual players. Thoughtfully enabled free agency was a big part of what made the NFL formula work. Pitting individual players against teams creates a contest between equally powerful forces.

The natural conclusion is that you need to enable serious free agency in the working population with respect to their “teams” (corporations). From portable health insurance and IP regimes that favor individuals to protection for whistle-blowers and venture capital markets that are stacked in favor of entrepreneurs rather than VCs, plenty can be done to create a very interesting new dialectic for capitalism.

When individuals, ranging from good to slightly evil to totally evil, find that they can do more with their skills and information in the real market than in the expectations market, innovation will shift to the real game instead of being focused on the design of ever more incomprehensible derivative instruments and frenzied loophole-chasing.

Why does Martin miss this obvious argument and insistently return to authentic executives and delighted customers? How does he manage to miss the biggest source of real information in the business world, the large mass of employees?

I am not sure.  Possibly it is due to past failures to mobilize this class via a challenge to capitalism itself (i.e., socialism). Or perhaps it is something else.

August is always a bitch of a month for me, to the point that I agree with David Plotz of Slate that we should get rid of it entirely. It seems to be my de facto annual planning month, though I have no reason anymore to be on an annual planning cycle. In August, I always seem to have far too many things in early stages of development, and too few leaving at the other end. I am currently in the early stages of several rather ambitious blog posts, a couple of new consulting projects and a couple of new personal projects. This year, thanks to my summer travels (I am back in Las Vegas now), I also have piles of unprocessed raw material from stuff I researched on the road, to write about.

So that’s a long, whiny excuse for rather sparse output over the last several weeks. I think I’ve hit my August trough though, so I can only build up momentum from here. But in the meantime, I assume many of you are on vacation, or planning to go on vacation, so I thought I’d share my current reading list, if any of you want to read along. Some of this will show up on the blog, some will not. My reading list piles up so fast that I’ve decided to be brutal. This list is it for the rest of the year. I will not be adding more books to the queue until I am done with these.

1. Titan by Ron Chernow: Multiple people have recommended this Rockefeller biography to me.
2. Tycoons by Charles Morris: Seems like a good overview of the Robber Barons
3. The First Tycoon by T. J. Stiles: A biography of Vanderbilt, probably the founding father of the Robber Baron era.
4. The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama: Don’t let the vague neocon associations dissuade you. There’s a reason this guy is so famous. If he writes a history of political order, you need to read it.
5. World 3.0 by Pankaj Ghemawat: As meaty as Friedman’s The World is Flat is not. I suspect it’s going to become the definitive textbook introduction to globalization for those who actually care about getting the details and numbers right. The title is unfortunately rather uninspired, but the contents are solid gold.
6. Fixing the Game by Roger L. Martin: Haven’t yet started it, but seems like a really intriguing premise: applying the lessons of the NFL to figuring out how capitalism should be fixed to avoid the kinds of messes we seem to keep getting into.
7. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson: I rarely read fiction these days, but everybody keeps telling me to read Stephenson, so I finally caved, especially since it seemed to go well with the rest of this list.  This is the first volume of the Baroque Cycle. If I have time, I may attempt to finish all three volumes this year.
8. Debt: the first 5000 Years by David Graeber: I like ambitious reframings of everything from a new perspective, and this certainly qualifies. An attempt to rethink all of civilization and society as a manifestation of debt. If you want to sample before you decide, Julio Rodriguez at Wild Intent has attempted a valiant assault on this Mt. Everest scale book (ambition, not raw size).

Yes. There’s a definite theme here. No, the theme won’t take over the blog. I may even decide not to pursue it at all.

Mostly I am trying to flesh out the thinking around this year’s summer blockbuster hit, A Brief History of the Corporation to figure out just how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Though I hate to admit it, that piece did share some rather unpleasant characteristics with Michael Bay’s movies, so I am trying to think through some Oscar-season type follow ups.

Here’s to all of us seeing this beast of a month through. I’ll be in Hawaii over Labor Day weekend, so there is that to look forward to.

This is a guest post by Stefan King, who has been bootstrapping his intriguing new blog, RecordedViews. I happened to mention in an offline discussion that I’d had Paglia’s classic, Sexual Personae, on my reading list for a while. Stefan offered to write a review/summary/introduction. To my surprise, he found some ideas from Tempo to be a useful framework for analysis. I totally did not bribe him to come to that conclusion. This post should make stand-alone sense even if you haven’t read Tempo. He also has another post up on his blog right now that should interest ribbonfarm readers.

In 1990, the art historian Camille Paglia provoked feminists and post-modernists with her controversial book Sexual Personae.  Paglia’s goal was to show the pagan patterns of continuity in western culture, and to expose feminist ideals as misguided wishful thinking. Now, two decades later, it is time to dig Sexual Personae out of the cultural compost heap and see if something interesting has grown there. Paglia has a highly sensitive intuition about great works of art, and she is a talented psychoanalyst of artists. The value of the book lies in those intuitions, which we can now study with the benefit of hindsight.

The Venus of Willendorf

The grand narrative of western archetypes, or “sexual personae” as Paglia calls them, starts with the Venus of Willendorf, a small statuette from the Stone Age. It is a faceless lump of feminine flesh, possibly a fertility talisman. It contrasts perfectly with anything civilized: there is no line, no shape, no stillness, and no Apollonian light. In those times, nature’s domination of humanity was total.

The Bust of Nefertiti

The next phase comes as the Egyptians develop their imagination in myth, and worshiped the gods of the sky and the earth alike. The human image becomes more conceptualized. To run an empire and canalize the flood of the Nile, they needed abstract thought and symbols. The balance between a cult of the demonic earth and sunlit clarity reaches the first height of archetypal beauty: the bust of Nefertiti. It is a created ideal of shape and form, still, with a sphinx-like androgynous face. It reveals an artistic strategy of denying chaos. Art is an attack on nature, that tries to push its random cruelty away. It is a frozen beauty, rendered legible to the intellect. In contrast to Dionysian identifications such as drinking and dancing, Apollonian beauty appears when aggressive eyes dominate nature. “Paganism is pictorialism plus the will-to-power. It is ritualism, grandiosity, colossalism, sensationalism.” That last sentence is an example of a dubious type of claim Paglia likes to make: “X is Y”-propositions. More on that later.

The techniques of form and shape are refined by the ancient Greeks, who made sense of the artistic possibilities. The god Apollo, originally depicted as a virile wolf-man, became an immature, beautiful and narcissistic boy who stares in the distance with dreamy eyes. That epoch ends with the spectacles of the ancient Romans. Art is an escape route from ethics.

The Mona Lisa

Then the arts reach a phase of stability in centuries of latent homoerotic religious icons, until Renaissance gives enough artistic momentum to a Florentine crucible of gay geniuses, who use pagan images to create an explosion of sexual personae. Examples are the Femme Fatale, Greek heroes, and angels such as the cherubs and seraphs. These creations culminate into a second artistic height: the Mona Lisa. “Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is the premiere sexual persona of western art. She is the Renaissance Nefertiti, eternally watching.”

The richness of sexual personae left behind by the Renaissance is then ritualised and refined by the romantic poets and painters. Paglia notes that every work of art implies a vision of human nature, and of nature itself. The duality is between the visions of Rousseau and de Sade. Rousseau believed that man is naturally good but corrupted by society, while de Sade sees humans as naturally cruel, driven by inner demonic forces. Romanticism is the struggle between these visions.

The early romantic poets approach natural beauty carefully, as they become aware of the closeness of nature to sex and cruelty. Just like their predecessors, they embrace androgyny as the only solution. Sexual chaos is excised or repressed, Apollonian beauty is taken as far as possible, to the point where a sexual personae is fully objectified for ritual worship by the artist. An example of the grotesque end state is The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, another gay genius. Paglia even counts Edvard Munch’s The Scream as a decadent work, where a fetus is cast as a sexless sexual persona.

Narrative Structure and Sexual Personae

Disclaimer: I’m not burdening myself with a discussion of her views on post-modernism and feminism. Instead, I am trying to reconstruct Paglia’s perspective into something that is legible to those with a more scientific perspective. I’m not dealing with the book as a whole.

Paglia’s view on western culture seems correct to me, but she doesn’t express it very well. She fills page after page with “X is Y” statements that define a unfalsifiable Freudian space where anything goes. Like Nietzsche, Freud and Jung, she sees much, although you shouldn’t call it science.

We can interpret the art discussed in Sexual Personae as a single narrative with a double Freytag Triangle, and you can see the subconscious ‘grand strategy’ within the Western artistic tradition, and understand better what makes certain archetypes beautiful (click for larger image; the two peaks are the Bust of Nefertiti and the Mona Lisa respectively, while the beginning and end are the Venus of Willendorf and Modernism respectively).

(Note from Venkat: the double Freytag triangle is a model of narrative structure I made up in Tempo to represent the rise and fall of dramatic tension/narrative entropy in individual “decision stories” based on the classical Freytag triangle, and incorporating elements of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth model. Stefan has used it in this post to represent the structure of a grand narrative rather than an individual narrative).

If it is true that the history of western archetypes is a unified whole, then the narrative will have the emotional tones of a story. Every line in the double Freytag Triangle is an epoch with a characteristic tempo. In the summary I hinted at the emotional tones of the phases, but now we can explore them more directly and see what we find.

The left side of the first triangle is the exploration phase with a volatile, dissipative tempo. Recall that the Egyptians worshiped both the earth and the sky. The Egyptian gods are obviously energetic, with their animal heads. The mythology is rough and violent.

The top of the first triangle is the point where the exploration leads up to the recognition of an exploitable pattern: in this case, the bust of Nefertiti. The artist discovers that he can use his eyes to fixate nature into a light, conceptual stillness. He can locally repress the demonic powers of nature. Apollonian beauty is found.

The right side of the first triangle is always a decrescendo with emotional relief. The pattern fits: the sexual persona of Apollo becomes the archetypal beautiful boy, who is calm and dreamy. Unlike an Egyptian god, he is too weak to get things done, and he doesn’t have to.

When the treadmill of the religious icons is broken, culture enters the second crescendo which, according to Tempo, is characterized by a “high effort, low-coherence increase in momentum.” The works of the renaissance are energetic, interesting and diverse. I’ve never been bored in museums that have paintings from that age.

After the Mona Lisa – Leonardo’s externalisation of his theory of nature – art enters a retrospective phase with a “mix of joy and sorrow.” After the romantic poets figured out the rules, decadent painters ritualise the array of archetypes of the Renaissance into calm dreams, languid poses, androgynous and useless gentlemen, and dead bodies lying in the brambles. The decadent poets invent the genre of the gothic novel, with a sombre rhythm and impotent ghosts.

Art and Instinct

Paglia shows in Sexual Personae that art is never innocent; that there is no such thing as frivolous beauty. Archetypes are serious business, apparently, because of how human instinct responds to nature. Not ‘nature’ as in trees and flowers and lions, but ‘nature’ as in biology: the natural world is simultaneously our nurturing mother and our destroyer. The fear of death and the desire for sex are the primal motivational currents, that drag thoughts, eyes, and actions along with them.

This is a given for evolutionary psychologists and biologists, but not so long ago there was not much proof. Then, it took the intuitions of Nietzsche and Freud to figure it out. Camille Paglia channels the same spirit: she sees how the instinct of sex, and the fear of death, inevitably take shape in the archetypes that populate great art.

For the last two years, I’ve had three books on garbage near the top of my reading pile, and I’ve gradually worked my way through two of them and am nearly done with the third. The books are Rubbish: The Archeology of Garbage by William Rathje and Cullen Murphy (1992), Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte (2005), and Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage by Heather Rogers (2005).  Last week, I also watched the CNBC documentary, Trash Inc.: The Secret Life of Garbage. Notice something about the four subtitles? Each hints at the hidden nature of the subject. It is a buried, hidden secret physically and philosophically. And there are many reasons why uncovering the secret is an interesting and valuable activity. The three books are motivated by three largely separate reasons: Rathje and Cullen bring an academic, anthropological eye to the subject. Royte’s book is a mix of amateur curiosity and concerned citizenship, while Rogers’ is straight-up environmental activism. But reading the 3 books, I realized that none of those reasons interested me particularly. I was fascinated by a fourth reason: garbage (along with sewage, which I won’t cover here) is possibly the only complete, empirical big-picture view of humanity you can find.

The Boundary Conditions of Civilization

Sometimes an engineering education can lead to very curious ideas about what is important. Garbage is important and interesting in an engineering sense because it illuminates one of the boundary conditions of any systemic view of the world. If you cut through the crap (no pun intended) of all our lofty views of ourselves, humanity is essentially a giant system that feeds on low-entropy resources on one end (mines, forests, oilfields) and defecates high-entropy waste at the other. Among other things, this transformation allows us to create low-entropy islands of order around ourselves (cities, buildings and everything else physical that we build). If this flow from resources to garbage were to shut down, nature would rapidly reclaim every inch of civilization, and you can read about this fascinating thought experiment in The World Without Us by Alan Weisman which I’ve mentioned before.

Here’s the thing about this view: the input end is simply too complex to comprehend in any summary sense. We suck resources out of the planet in extremely complicated and diversified ways. The processing part is also far too complex to understand (it is basically “civilization”), but thought experiments like Weisman’s at least help us get a non-empirical sense of the scale and complexity of our presence on this planet.

But the output end? Easy. Just drill into the nearest landfill. Or follow the course of a single man-made artifact. In Trash Inc., there is a revealing  example: plastic beverage bottles.

Message in a Bottle

The story of plastic water/soda bottles from a trash perspective is simple. According to Trash Inc., in the US, about 51 billion bottles are used every year (this number seems incredible. It amounts to about 1 bottle per person every 2 days. But it seems to be correct).

Only about 22% are recycled. The recycled stuff goes to make polyester fabrics, mats and the like. Ironically, a manufacturer of such recycled plastic goods in the US profiled in the documentary noted that he was forced to import about 70% of his bottle needs from countries like Canada.

What happens to the rest?  Those that get thrown away with the regular trash make it into the regular waste stream, with companies like Waste Management working hard to figure out how to cheaply separate the bottles out (since they represent a significant revenue opportunity; a WM talking head in the documentary noted that WM could potentially increase its revenues from $13 billion to $23 billion if it could just figure out how to cheaply separate valuable recyclables from the waste stream headed to landfills).

And there is a third category: stuff that doesn’t even get to landfills, but washes down streams and rivers into the open ocean, where it drifts for hundreds of miles to form garbage islands in the middle of the ocean, such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The story of the plastic water bottle serves as a sort of radioactive tracer through the garbage industry, touching as it does every piece of the puzzle.

The three books and the documentary explore different aspects of the system, so let’s briefly review them.

Rubbish by Rathje and Cullen

Rubbish, though a little dated, is the most professional of the three books, since it is the result of a large, long-term academic study, with no particular agenda in mind, and written by the godfather of the entire field of Garbology. To the principals of the University of Arizona Garbage project, garbage is just archeological raw material. The fact that drilling into modern, active landfills tells us about modern humans, while digging into ancient mounds tells us about Sumerians, is irrelevant to them. The perspective lends an interesting kind of objectivity  to the book.

The first and most basic thing I learned from the book surprised me no end, and answered a question that I had always wondered about. Why do ancient civilizations seem to get buried under “mounds”?

Turns out that for much of history, waste simply accumulated on floors inside dwellings. Residents would simply put in new layers of fresh clay to cover up the trash. Every dwelling was a micro landfill.  When the floor rose too high, they raised the ceiling and doorways.

The result was that most ancient civilizations rose (literally) on a pile of their own trash. There is even a table of historical waste accumulation rates included. South Asia is the winner in this contest: the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilization apparently had the fastest accumulation of waste at nearly 1000 cm/century. (I can’t resist a little subcontinental humor: how about we attribute all the great cultural achievements of the Indus Valley Civilization to modern India, and the trash to modern Pakistan, where the major archeological sites are situated today?)

Ancient Troy was also quite the trash generator, at about a 140 cm/century. Since those ancient times, accumulation rates have declined dramatically (this doesn’t mean we’ve been producing less trash per capita; merely that we’ve stopped burying it under our own floors).

Historically, trash was also thrown out onto streets, and burned outside cities. The composition of trash has changed as well. If you think today’s plastic water bottles are a menace, you should read the description of the horse-manure problem that (literally) buried New York before the automobile.

Skipping ahead a few thousand years, you get the modern sanitary landfill. But the takeaway here is a sense of perspective. Historically speaking, our modern times are not the trashiest time in our history. Though the scale and chemical diversity of the trash management problem is huge in our time simply because of the size of the global population, we are relatively far ahead of older civilizations in managing our trash.

Much of the work described in the book is about the insights you can obtained by drilling into landfills,  or collecting garbage bags directly from households.   The findings provide  fascinating glimpses into the delusions of human beings. Take food habits for instance. One interesting research exercise the book describes is a study comparing self-reported food habits to the revealed food habits based on trash analysis. The authors call this the Lean Cuisine Syndrome:

People consistently underreport the amount of regular soda, pastries, chocolate, and fats that they consume; they consistently over-report the amount of fruits and diet soda.

The book notes a  related phenomenon called the Surrogate Syndrome: people are able to describe the actual habits of family members and neighbors with “chilling accuracy.”

Another fascinating analysis involves pull-tabs of beer cans. These seem to be a sort of carbon-dating tool for modern garbage.

The unique “punch-top” on Coors beer cans, for example, was used only between March of1974 and June of 1977… In landfills around the country, wherever Coors beer cans were discarded, punch-top cans not only identify strata associated with a narrow band of dates but also separate two epochs fone from another.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of the book is the demographic detective work stories. It turns out you can accurately figure out a lot of things about neighborhoods: income levels, race, number of children, consumption patterns and the like, simply by looking at and classifying the trash. Trash also appears to be a goldmine of market research (I am surprised there isn’t a market research agency out there offering segmentation reports based on personas/clusters derived from trash analysis. Or perhaps there is). Interestingly, the hardest thing to infer from trash is the proportion of men in a population.  A Census Bureau funded project failed to find any convincing models. For other variables, reliable equations are available. For example,

Infant Population = 0.01506*(Number of diapers in a 5 week collection)

There are similar correlates for women. For men though, such indicators are unreliable: “Men are not exactly invisible in garbage, but garbage is a more unreliable indicator of their live-in presence than it is for any other demographic group… ”

Overall, the book is fascinating in the sense that Levitt’s Freakonomics is fascinating. There is no overarching conceptual framework, just an entertainingly told story that weaves together a few broad themes and dozens of anecdotes chosen as much for entertainment as insight.

Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte

Royte’s book is much more of a popular science treatment. The interesting part is her “follow the trail” approach to her subject.

She starts with an account of an urban adventure: canoeing in Gowanus Canal, a highly polluted waterway in Brooklyn, in 2002, with volunteers dedicated to keeping it clean. From there she moves on to an analysis of her own life by examining her own garbage, an amateur self-study along the lines of the Rathje-Cullen study of larger communities. Among her reflections:

Picking through garbage was smelly and messy and time-consuming, but it was revelatory in a way. I hadn’t realized my diet was so boring. Anyone picking through my castoffs would presume my family survived on peanut butter, jelly, bread, orange juice, milk, and wine. And, largely, we did.

The opening chapter includes a page from her garbage diary, and it inspired me enough to stop and reflect on my own garbage and recycling that week. Suffice it to say, the lessons were not pleasant.

From her home, Royte moves on to the next logical step: the curbside. She arranges a ride-along with a garbage truck. This section is a fascinating portrait of New York’s Strongest, as the sanitation department workers call themselves (the cops are the “Finest” and the firefighters are “the bravest”). The NYC garbagemen lift about five to six tons a day, in seventy-pound bags. The view from the garbageman’s perspective is disturbing. Royte notes:

I knew, after just one day on the job, that san men constantly made judgments about individuals. They determined residents’ wealth or poverty by the artifacts they left behind. They appraised real estate by the height of a discarded Christmas tree, measured education level by the newspapers and magazines stacked on the curb. Glancing at the flotsam and jetsam as it tumbled through their hopper, they parsed health status and sexual practices.

It is not entirely a first-person narrative though. Bits of history and research are woven through the narrative. There is an interesting section on the history of New York’s sanitation history, and the horse manure problem I mentioned before. In 1880, we learn, 15,000 dead horses had to be cleared from city streets. City horses dumped 500,000 pounds of manure and 45,000 gallons of urine onto city streets daily. The situation needed a hero, and Colonel George Waring was that hero. He created the first modern civic garbage-handling infrastructure in the US.

The rest of the book continues in this vein, chronicling Royte’s explorations of landfills, incinerator plants, toilets and sewage. The story is by turns alarming, amusing, disgusting and scary. While there is no overt alarmism, the book, by virtue of being a very personal exploration, gets to you in a way that the more detached and objective Rathje-Cullen book does not.

Gone Tomorrow by Heather Rogers

For completeness, I’ll offer just a note about Gone Tomorrow, since I haven’t finished reading it. It covers much of the same ground as the first two books, but primarily from an environmentalist perspective (there is also a documentary). It lacks the open-ended curiosity and sense of discovery you get from the other two books, but you do get the right pattern of highlighting if you are interested in the environmental angle.

Trash Inc.

And let’s wrap with the CNBC documentary. While rather shallow, the documentary does have the largest scope of  all the material I went through. Of particular interest is a segment on the garbage problem in China, another on the MIT Trash Track project, and the plastic water bottle story I told in the beginning. Catch a rerun if you can.

Landfills

Through the three books and the documentary, the star of the show is definitely the landfill. One particular landfill, the Fresh Kills landfill in New York (closed about a decade ago) plays a role in all the stories (the largest landfill in the US today is the Apex landfill in Nevada).

The closing of Fresh Kills turned out to be a big event in garbage history, since it triggered possibly the biggest trash transport program in history, as the city orchestrated a massive garbage trucking program that today ships its trash out all over the country. Of New York City’s 1.3 billion dollar annual budget, about $330 million a year goes towards exporting the trash.

New York’s statistics are astounding: 12,000 tons a day, 24,000lb per person per year, garbagemen making $70,000 a year with overtime (the most experienced making six figures), a 300 square mile territory, a Mafia angle, 1500 trucks, and a transport network that fans out hundreds of miles into the American hinterland.

At the other end of the distribution chain are towns like Fox Township in Pennsylvania, neighbor to the Greentree landfill owned by Veolia, a French company. The residents are understandably ambivalent about the presence of a giant garbage can in their backyard. On the one hand, the landfill is a constant threat to the local environment, the water quality in particular. But on the other hand, half the town’s budget comes from the fees paid by the landfill, which charges $3 per ton as tipping fees to customers, and passes along a cut to the city.

The landfills themselves are fascinating civil engineering structures. Today’s modern sanitary landfills are “dry” landfills (the old theory that garbage should be “wet” so it can degrade faster has been discarded in favor of keeping it as dry as possible and sealing it in so that a landfill is effectively forever). Liquid runoff (“leachate“: exactly the same stuff that you sometimes find at the bottom of your trash can, the brown smelly liquid) is carefully directed to the sewage stream, while vents release the gases. The gases include methane and are a source of revenue, via power generation (there is a BMW plant that runs off landfill gas).

But despite the engineering complexity, these are basically just large trash cans. Lined with plastic like the one in your kitchen. The only difference is that the trash has nowhere to go. Once it is full, it is capped and landscaped, and you get all those strangely beautiful platonic mountains you see when you drive along country highways (you can tell when you are looking at a trash mountain: you will see venting pipes sticking out, and the slopes will be at a precise 30 degree gradient). There doesn’t appear to be any need for alarmism though. America at least, has plenty of room. Other parts of the world may not be as lucky.

There are 2300 landfills around the country. You could say the United States is a collection of 2300 large families, each with one giant trash can.

The Global Picture

I haven’t found a good source that provides a global picture. The CNBC documentary provides a glimpse into China, where Beijing alone has a catastrophe looming (the city is overflowing with garbage in unauthorized dump sites, because the available government-owned landfills are insufficient for the growing city’s waste stream).

Growing up in India, I have some sense of the world of garbage there.  There are both positives and negatives. On the positive side, the large-scale consumerist levels of trash production are still relatively rare in India, and limited to the most well-off, westernized households. Growing up, we generated practically no trash, simply because we mostly ate home-cooked food and did not consume the bewildering array of consumer products that Americans routinely consume. As I recall, we owned a small 2-3 gallon trash basket, and generated perhaps one basket-full a week, most of which was organic matter (which went to our garden). There was little packaging. Groceries came in recycled newspaper bags, which we recycled again.

But what little waste we did generate was poorly captured in the organized waste stream. There were many disorganized small dumps in the back alleys and few dumpsters.

By my teenage years in the 80s, modernity began catching up. Thin plastic bags made from recycled (downcycled actually) plastic caught on and replaced the newspaper bags. After reigning for about a decade, they thankfully declined in popularity (thanks in part due to an unanticipated consequence: stray cows eating them and then dying as the plastic choked their intestines), and I believe have actually been banned, at least in major cities.

On the other end, though much of the waste is basically un-managed, recycling is probably vastly more efficient than anywhere in the West. But the efficiency comes at a great human cost: there is an entire hierarchy of impoverished classes (and socially immobile castes) that makes its living off the waste stream. At the very top (which isn’t saying much) are the door-to-door used-newspaper buyers, who make paper bags or sell to recycling plants (our gardener made some money on the side in this trade, and I spent many evenings as a kid happily helping him and his son,  who was about my age, make paper bags). Also at the top are the wandering traders who exchange junk and scrap metal for new aluminum kitchenware. Below them you find a variety of roles, from the ragpickers and scavengers, who clamber over landfills looking for anything of value, to entire shantytowns of scrap merchants that spring up around the landfills, buying from the scavengers. The system is efficient and picks the waste-stream clean of anything of even the lowest potential value. But yes, it involves humans running a daily risk of all sorts of infection and other dangers.

To foreigners, looking out the window as an airplane comes in to land at Mumbai can be a shock. The landing/take off glide paths often go right over the main garbage dumps of Mumbai and the sprawling mess is anything but pleasant to look at. But if you ever drive past through the city’s neighborhoods where the scavenger trade shops line the streets, you cannot help but admire the gritty resourcefulness with which so many people manage to live off garbage.

But the situation is gradually getting worse, driven both by the exploding population and the rise of American-style consumerism. During my last visit to India in 2008, I noticed that while my mother still ran the same tight, low-footprint household she always has, many of the younger yuppie couples seemed to have adopted the same lifestyle that had shocked me when I first arrived in America in 1997. A lifestyle whose story is written with discarded paper cups, too many paper napkins, water bottles, product packaging and discarded, broken appliances. A culture of home-cooked food is gradually transforming into a culture of take-out food. And it isn’t American-style fast-food that is to blame. You can now buy frozen or packaged versions of almost everything that I thought of as home-made Indian food, growing up. And I have to admit, every passing year here in the States, I cook less, and buy more frozen, packaged foods from my local Indian grocery store. Pizza boxes may be appearing in Indian trash cans, but frozen chana masala boxes are appearing in American trash cans as well (looking around the world though, it seems to me that the Japanese are possibly the most in love with ridiculous amounts of packaging).

But there’s even more to the globalization of garbage than just different country-level views. There is the international trade in garbage. Places like India and China import garbage and recycling at all levels from entire ships destined for the scrap-metal yard (which I wrote about earlier), to lead batteries to paper meant for recycling. The waste stream is more than a network of dump routes that fans out from cities like New York. It is a huge circulatory system that spans the globe.

Exploring Further

I have to admit, despite reading a ton of material on the subject, I am merely a lot more informed, not much wiser. What is the true DNA of the world of garbage? What is its significance within an overall understanding of our world? Is it merely a treasure-trove of anthropological insights, or is there a deeper level of analysis we can get to? The books left me with the uncomfortable feeling that the garbage professionals were so absorbed in the immediate details that they were missing something bigger. But I don’t know what that is. Somehow garbage in the literal sense probably fits into the End of the World theme that I blogged about before (where I proposed my “garbage eschatology” model of how the world might end).

Anyway, I expect my interest in this topic will continue to evolve. I’ve started a trail on the subject (click the image below), which you can explore. Do send me link/resource suggestions to add to it. As you can tell by the relative incoherence of the trail, I don’t yet have a good idea about how to put the jigsaw puzzle together in a more meaningful way.

Perhaps it is professional burnout, but lately I’ve been getting extremely tired of all the stupid things people say about innovation. Especially stupid positive things. A great deal of the stupidity in the conversation about innovation is driven by the desperate urge to be original for the sake of being original. There is a pervasive, unexamined assumption that originality is always a good thing. Copycats, by Oded Shenkar is a delightful little book that takes on a project that I strongly support: taking down the holy cow of innovation and extolling the virtues of imitation.  Ironically, it is one of the most original business books I’ve read in the last few years. It even manages to say something new about the business case everybody loves to hate: Southwest Airlines.

Imitation vs. Innovation

To understand the soul of the argument, think of comedians who do great impersonations. Andy Kaufmann, (played by Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon) had a famous shtick, where he’d get on stage, pretending to be a thickly-accented foreigner, and do absolutely awful imitations of American celebrities. Just as the audience was ready to slip from bewildered “what the hell is this?” reactions to laughing at how terrible he was, he’d change character in an instant and do a pitch-perfect Elvis impersonation. Then he’d slip back into the foreigner voice. It’s worth watching Man on the Moon for that scene alone. And to add to the artistry, that movie has a comic genius of our time, Carrey, imitating one from the previous generation, doing an act based on imitations.

At the other end of the spectrum, innovation priests often slavishly worship the innovative culture of ancient Greece and turn up their noses at Rome: “the only new thing they invented was concrete; everything else they took from Greece and other conquered lands”  True, but which civilization was mostly stuck on a small archipelago, with one failed attempt at world conquest, and which one ruled large parts of 3 continents for several hundred years? Which civilization still has enduring impact today (down to the script — Latin — used in this post, which the Romans copied and adapted from the Phoenicians)?

This is the central point of the book, and all of Chapter 2 (“The Science and Art of Imitation”) is devoted to it: the ability to imitate really well is an uncommon talent.  The brains of social animals have highly evolved imitation capabilities, such as mirror neurons, for that purpose. Even less complex organisms use imitation in very complex ways. At an individual social level, most good things spread by imitation (bad things too, unfortunately). At a civilizational level, Rome had very sophisticated philosophies of imitation.

In business, the benefits of imitation are obvious. Somebody else comes up with an idea, pays the capital costs, goes through the painful process of discovering a market and working out operating processes. Then boom, you come in and steal the playbook and build a much bigger, and better business than the original innovator. The original innovator is probably married to its idea, while you can benefit from 20/20 hindsight, unclouded by emotional bonds.

To be clear, Shenkar is talking about sophisticated high-level, skilled imitation, not the low-level illegal stuff (and to be honest, I see value in that as well. I am not a huge fan of overly strong IP laws — give an innovator a small, context-dependent head start, and then open up the game, is my position).

The First New Insight into Southwest in a Decade

Ever since Southwest Airlines became the darling of business case study writers, the example has been worked to death. I now have a “Southwest rule”: if a business book prominently features Southwest Airlines as an example, I don’t read it (an example of failed imitation in business book writing). I almost didn’t read Copycats for this reason, but then I realized there was something fresh going on.

We’ve all heard the stories of bigger hub-and-spoke carriers trying, with varied degrees of success to copy Southwest, and mostly failing. As far as I know, this is the first systematic treatment of the diffusion of the Southwest model, based on a systematic theory of imitation and adaptation. By teasing apart the behaviors of the successful imitators, Shenkar manages to shed new light on both the original Southwest model, and the processes and deep intelligence required for successful imitation.

The book is full of such refurbished examples.

The Book

The seven chapters in the book range economically over some fertile and little-explored territory. Chapter 1 sets the stage by examining several examples of failed and successful imitation. Chapter 2 starts with theories of imitation from biology and evolutionary theory, and moves on to propose that business scholarship has lagged behind in truly understanding imitation.

Chapter 3 examines the economy-wide dynamics of imitation. One interesting tidbit is that it often takes just one employee from an innovator to bring over the entire DNA of an innovation to an imitator. All the original pioneers of the laser industry were found to contain employees of the original labs. On the other extreme, sometimes innovators themselves know so little about how they do what they do, the only way to imitate even within a company is to copy blindly and wholesale (as the semiconductor industry does, with fabs).  Another interesting tidbit is about “imitation clusters” which, unlike “innovation clusters” do not form around famous universities. They form around industrial zones containing trade schools. Examples are Shenzhen for cellphones and Donggaocun for string instruments.

Chapter 4 examines actual imitation processes in the example cases. As you might have suspected, successful imitators are true imitators. They don’t just copy superficial elements. They unravel the cause-effect patterns in the original (often more insightfully than the original) and rebuild. Failed copycats usually fail by trying to have their cake and eating it too, maintaining old systems alongside new ones. This causes failure for reasons ranging from brand inelasticity to contradictory cost structures.

Chapter 5 is relatively weak. It proposes imitation capabilities and processes (such chapters are always weak in business books for some reason, so it is no great sin). It covers the usual systems, processes and culture/value aspects, and includes chestnuts like “Be Humble.” But the overall point is an effective one. You need to go well beyond neutralizing “Not Invented Here” thinking and actually build a proactive attitude towards stealing the best ideas, wherever you find them. This also goes well beyond the Open Innovation model, because it suggests that it is smart and morally legitimate to not invest in innovation at all, but simply prey on the poor, dumb innovators who don’t understand how to exploit what they’ve found. Like taking candy from babies.

Chapter 6, “Imitation Strategies” is much better, and offers a menu of high-level approaches to imitation.  It has many thoughtful points about risk management, costs and approaches (for example, careful discussions of “pioneer importer,” “fast-second” and “come from behind”).

Chapter 7, “The Innovation Challenge” ties the whole thing together and offers final high-level insights, including some rather clever and non-obvious points about overcoming some of the basic defenses of the imitatees. One I found particularly fascinating was the discussion of overcoming “signaling,” a deterrence tactic used by innovators, to puff themselves up as being more unassailable than they really are.

Paint by Numbers

Throughout, the book contains a healthy sprinkling of revealing statistics. Here are some I liked:

• The costs of imitation are 60-75% the costs of innovation
• Imitation took nearly a hundred years during the 19th century. Between 1877-1930, the average “time to imitation” of a new product/service dropped to 23.1 years. This dropped to 9.6 years between 1930-1939, and less than 4.9 years after 1940.  In the 1950s it was 2 years. Now it seems to be 12-18 months. From 100 years down to 12-18 months. That’s some massive acceleration of diffusion (random factoid: the Mughal emperor Jahangir (1569-1627) had not heard of the discovery of America more than 100 years after Columbus; partly explains why India lagged so far behind the West for nearly a millennium).
• Pioneers who create new markets generally end up with around 7% of the markets they create. The copycats get the rest.

These points suggest a whole new perspective from which to examine patent and copyright laws. Just because someone was first with an idea doesn’t mean they should be allowed to hold it hostage for arbitrary amounts of time, especially if they are terrible at execution. I think copyright and patent protection time windows should be turned into floating variables, and tuned by governments, just like interest rates.  Lower protection when innovations need to diffuse faster. Increase protection when temporary monopoly incentives are too weak to foster innovation. It’s like that cliched scene in action movies when local cops in some podunk little town discover something really valuable, and the FBI march in and say, “we are in charge now.” Sometimes that’s a good thing. Remember, the costs of imitation are not zero. They are 60-75% the cost of innovation. Imitators are adding their own value and creating a market an order of magnitude bigger than most innovators could, left to themselves.

A New Holy Cow

I think we have an innovation bubble going on (I am planning a big post on that). It has become a religion among businesses, and even in tough times, everybody seems to think they need to keep up at least a pretense of doing new things.

I say we should stop. Innovation is important, but only up to a point. Beyond that, the returns to companies, and the economy as a whole, diminish rapidly. Imitation is what typically scales and delivers innovations for the greater good. I’d say many companies would be better off dropping innovation as a strategic priority, and setting up an “Imitation Department” instead, and appointing a “Chief Imitation Officer” (or what would be more delicious, “Chief Thief.” I’d like to be Chief Thief one day).

And I can proudly declare that in this case, I practice what I preach. Wherever possible, I avoid reinventing the wheel. Every good, unprotected idea that I can legally and morally steal and repurpose for my own work, I grab.

For those of you who are offended by the apparent unfairness of this, ask yourself: just how much credit do the on-paper “innovators” actually deserve? New ideas are the result of chemistry among existing ones. Innovation itself is a social process that depends on sharing at a certain rate. Your head is just the accidental crucible. B. F. Skinner once gave an extraordinary, sardonic talk (here’s the MP3, listen to it) about the pretensions of “creative” people. Using an analogy to giving birth, and the idea that your head is merely the accidental womb where stuff from elsewhere reacts, he puts “innovation” in its rightful place. And it isn’t on a pedestal.

James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring.  The pictures below, from the book (used with permission from the author) graphically and literally illustrate the central concept in this failure pattern, an idea called “legibility.”

States and large organizations exhibit this pattern of behavior most dramatically, but individuals frequently exhibit it in their private lives as well.

Along with books like Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization, Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors we Live By, William Whyte’s The Organization Man and Keith Johnstone’s Impro, this book is one of the anchor texts for this blog. If I ever teach a course on ‘Ribbonfarmesque Thinking,’ all these books would be required reading. Continuing my series on complex and dense books that I cite often, but are too difficult to review or summarize, here is a quick introduction to the main idea.

The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure

Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).

Here is the recipe:

• Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
• Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
• Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
• Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
• Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
• Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
• Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility.

Legibility and Control

Central to Scott’s thesis is the idea of legibility. He explains how he stumbled across the idea while researching efforts by nation states to settle or “sedentarize” nomads, pastoralists, gypsies and other peoples living non-mainstream lives:

The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.  Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The pre-modern state was, in many crucial respects, particularly blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people.

The book is about the 2-3 century long process by which modern states reorganized the societies they governed, to make them more legible to the apparatus of governance. The state is not actually interested in the rich functional structure and complex behavior of the very organic entities that it governs (and indeed, is part of, rather than “above”). It merely views them as resources that must be organized in order to yield optimal returns according to a centralized, narrow, and strictly utilitarian logic. The attempt to maximize returns need not arise from the grasping greed of a predatory state. In fact, the dynamic is most often driven by a genuine desire to improve the lot of the people, on the part of governments with a popular, left-of-center mandate. Hence the subtitle (don’t jump to the conclusion that this is a simplistic anti-big-government conservative/libertarian view though; this failure mode is ideology-neutral, since it arises from a flawed pattern of reasoning rather than values).

The book begins with an early example, “scientific” forestry (illustrated in the picture above). The early modern state, Germany in this case, was only interested in maximizing tax revenues from forestry. This meant that the acreage, yield and market value of a forest had to be measured, and only these obviously relevant variables were comprehended by the statist mental model. Traditional wild and unruly forests were literally illegible to the state surveyor’s eyes, and this gave birth to “scientific” forestry: the gradual transformation of forests with a rich diversity of species growing wildly and randomly into orderly stands of the highest-yielding varieties. The resulting catastrophes — better recognized these days as the problems of monoculture — were inevitable.

The picture is not an exception, and the word “legibility” is not a metaphor; the actual visual/textual sense of the word (as in “readability”) is what is meant. The book is full of thought-provoking pictures like this: farmland neatly divided up into squares versus farmland that is confusing to the eye, but conforms to the constraints of local topography, soil quality, and hydrological patterns; rational and unlivable grid-cities like Brasilia, versus chaotic and alive cities like Sao Paolo. This might explain, by the way, why I resonated so strongly with the book.  The name “ribbonfarm” is inspired by the history of the geography of Detroit and its roots in “ribbon farms” (see my About page and the historic picture of Detroit ribbon farms below).

High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt to “rationalize.” The deep failure in thinking lies is the mistaken assumption that thriving, successful and functional realities must necessarily be legible. Or at least more legible to the all-seeing statist eye in the sky (many of the pictures in the book are literally aerial views) than to the local, embedded, eye on the ground.

Complex realities turn this logic on its head; it is easier to comprehend the whole by walking among the trees, absorbing the gestalt, and becoming a holographic/fractal part of the forest, than by hovering above it.

This  imposed simplification, in service of legibility to the state’s eye, makes the rich reality brittle, and failure  follows. The imagined improvements are not realized. The metaphors of killing the golden goose, and the Procrustean bed come to mind.

The Psychology of Legibility

I suspect that what tempts us into this failure is that legibility quells the anxieties evoked by apparent chaos. There is more than mere stupidity at work.

In Mind Wide Open, Steven Johnson’s entertaining story of his experiences subjecting himself to all sorts of medical scanning technologies, he describes his experience with getting an fMRI scan. Johnson tells the researcher that perhaps they should start by examining his brain’s baseline reaction to meaningless stimuli. He naively suggests a white-noise pattern as the right starter image. The researcher patiently informs him that subjects’ brains tend to go crazy when a white noise (high Shannon entropy) pattern is presented. The brain goes nuts trying to find order in the chaos. Instead, the researcher says, they usually start with something like a black-and-white checkerboard pattern.

If my conjecture is correct, then the High Modernist failure-through-legibility-seeking formula is a large scale effect of the rationalization of the fear of (apparent) chaos.

[Techie aside: Complex realities look like Shannon white noise, but in terms of deeper structure, their Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity is low relative to their Shannon entropy; they are like pseudo-random numbers or π, rather than real random numbers; I wrote a two-part series on this long ago, that I meant to continue, but never did].

The Fertility of the Idea

The idea may seem simple (though it is surprisingly hard to find words to express it succinctly), but it is an extraordinarily fertile one, and helps explain all sorts of things. One of my favorite unexpected examples from the book is the “rationalization” of people names in the Philippines under Spanish rule (I won’t spoil it for you; read the book). In general, any aspect of a complex folkway, in the sense of David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, can be made a victim of the high-modernist authoritarian failure formula.

The process doesn’t always lead to unmitigated disaster. In some of the more redeeming examples, there is merely a shift in a balance of power between more global and more local interests. For example, we owe to this high-modernist formula the creation of a systematic, global scheme for measuring time, with sensible time zones. The bewilderingly illegible geography of time in the 18th century, while it served a lot of local purposes very well (and much better than even the best atomic clocks of today), would have made modern global infrastructure, ranging from the railroads (the original driver for temporal discipline in the United States) to airlines and the Internet, impossible. The Napoleanic era saw the spread of the metric system; again an idea that is highly rational from a centralized bird’s eye view, but often stupid with respect to the subtle local adaptions of  the systems it displaced. Again this displaced a good deal of local power and value, and created many injustices and local irrationalities, but the shift brought with it the benefits of improved communication and wide-area commerce.

In all these cases, you could argue that the formula merely replaced a set of locally optimal modes of social organization with a globally optimal one. But that would be missing the point. The reason the formula is generally dangerous, and a  formula for failure, is that it does not operate by a thoughtful consideration of local/global tradeoffs, but through the imposition of a singular view as “best for all” in a pseudo-scientific sense. The high-modernist reformer does not acknowledge (and often genuinely does not understand) that he/she is engineering a shift in optima and power, with costs as well as benefits. Instead, the process is driven by a naive “best for everybody” paternalism, that genuinely intends to improve the lives of the people it affects. The high-modernist reformer is driven by a naive-scientific Utopian vision that does not tolerate dissent, because it believes it is dealing in scientific truths.

The failure pattern is perhaps most evident in urban planning, a domain which seems to attract the worst of these reformers. A generation of planners, inspired by the crazed visions of Le Corbusier, created unlivable urban infrastructure around the world, from Braslia to Chandigarh. These cities end up with deserted empty centers populated only by the government workers forced to live there in misery (there is even a condition known as “Brasilitis” apparently), with slums and shanty towns emerging on the periphery of the planned center; ad hoc, bottom-up, re-humanizing damage control as it were. The book summarizes a very elegant critique of this approach to urban planning, and the true richness of what it displaces, due to Jane Jacobs.

Applying the Idea

Going beyond the book’s own examples, the ideas shed a whole new light on other stories/ideas. Two examples from my own reading should suffice.

The first is a book I read several years back, by Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, which made the argument (originally proposed by the orientalist Bernard Cohn), that caste in the sense of the highly rigid and oppressive, 4-varna scheme was the result of the British failing to understand a complex social reality, and imposing on it their own simplistic understanding of it (the British Raj is sometimes called the “anthropological state” due to the obsessive care it took to document, codify and re-impose as a simplified, rigidified, Procrustean prescription, the social structure of pre-colonial India).  The argument of the book — obviously one that appeals to Indians (we like to blame the British or Islam when we can) — is that the original reality was a complex, functional social scheme, which the British turned into a rigid and oppressive machine by attempting to make it legible and governable. While I still don’t know whether the argument is justified, and whether the caste system before the British was as benevolent as the most ardent champions of this view make it out to be, the point here is that if it is true, Scott’s failure model would describe it perfectly.

The second example is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I am slowly reading right now (I think it is going to be my personal Mount Everest; I expect to summit in 2013). Perhaps no other civilization, either in antiquity or today, was so fond of legible and governable social realities.  I haven’t yet made up my mind, but reading the history through the lens of Scott’s ideas, I think there is  strong case to be made that the fall of the Roman empire was a large-scale instance of the legibility-failure pattern. Like the British 1700 years later, the Romans did try to understand the illegible societies they encountered, but their failure in this effort ultimately led to the fall of the empire.

Aside: if you decide to attempt Mount Everest along with me, take some time to explore the different editions of Gibbon available; I am reading a $0.99 19th century edition on my Kindle — all six volumes with annotations and comments from a decidedly pious — and critical — Christian editor. Sometimes I don’t know why I commit these acts of large-scale intellectual masochism.  The link is to a modern, abridged Penguin edition.

Is the Model Relevant Today?

The phrase “high-modernist authoritarianism” might suggest that the views in this book only apply to those laughably optimistic, high-on-science-and-engineering high modernists of the 1930s. Surely we don’t fail in these dumb ways in our enlightened postmodern times?

Sadly, we do, for four reasons:

1. There is a decades-long time lag between the intellectual high-watermark of an ideology and the last of its effects
2. There are large parts of the world, China in particular, where authoritarian high-modernism gets a visa, but postmodernism does not
3. Perhaps most important: though this failure mode is easiest to describe in terms of high-modernist ideology, it is actually a basic failure mode for human thought that is time and ideology neutral. If it is true that the Romans and British managed to fail in these ways, so can the most postmodern Obama types. The language will be different, that’s all.
4. And no, the currently popular “pave the cowpaths” and behavioral-economic “choice architecture” design philosophies do not provide immunity against these failure modes. In fact paving the cowpaths in naive ways is an instance of this failure mode (the way to avoid it would be to choose to not pave certain cowpaths). Choice architecture (described as “Libertarian Paternalism” by its advocates) seems to merely dress up authoritarian high-modernism with a thin coat of caution and empirical experimentation. The basic and dangerous “I am more scientific/rational than thou” paternalism is still the central dogma.

[Another Techie aside: For the technologists among you, a quick (and very crude) calibration point should help: we are talking about the big brother of waterfall planning here. The psychology is very similar to the urge to throw legacy software away. In fact Joel Spolsky's post on the subject Things You Should Never Do, Part I, reads like a narrower version of Scott's arguments. But Scott's model is much deeper, more robust, more subtly argued, and more broadly applicable.  I haven't yet thought it through, but I don't think lean/agile software development can actually mitigate this failure mode anymore than choice architecture can mitigate it in public policy]

So do yourself a favor and read the book, even if it takes you months to get through. You will elevate your thinking about big questions.

High-Modernist Authoritarianism in Corporate and Personal Life

The application of these ideas in the personal/corporate domains actually interests me the most. Though Scott’s book is set within the context of public policy and governance, you can find exactly the same pattern in individual and corporate behavior. Individuals lacking the capacity for rich introspection apply dumb 12-step formulas to their lives and fail. Corporations: well, read the Gervais Principle series and Images of Organization. As a point of historical interest, Scott notes that the Soviet planning model, responsible for many spectacular legibility-failures, was derived from corporate Taylorist precedents, which Lenin initially criticized, but later modified and embraced.

Final postscript: these ideas have strongly influenced my book project, and apparently, I’ve been thinking about them for a long time without realizing it. A very early post on this blog (I think only a handful of you were around when I posted it), on the Harry Potter series and its relation to my own work in robotics, contains some of these ideas. If I’d read this book before, that post would have been much better.

I have three off-ribbonfarm posts this week that should interest you guys.

Is the Internet Making us Smart or Stupid?

A guest post on VentureBeat, my review of Nick Carr’s The Shallows (a book-length build on his Atlantic piece, “Is Google Making us Stupid.”

The Dangerous Art of the Right Question

On the Trailmeme blog. This post seems to have gone somewhat viral via Hacker News, Lifehacker and a couple of other significant mentions. Slightly lighter fare than you guys are used to here, but should still be of interest.

My Remarkable, Famous Graph

Also on the Trailmeme blog, this one is a sort of follow-up to the previous one, examining the emerging world of infographics, using 3 of my own ribbonfarm graphics to examine the difference between mind-candy and true insight graphics.

Head on over, comment etc.

I rarely read biographies or autobiographies of individuals or groups. This is because I rarely find accounts of success or failure by the people involved, or hired hagiographers, very believable. I usually wait for somebody to tell the story more critically, within a broader context, such as the history of a sector. But I made an exception for Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness for three reasons. First, I wanted to steal concrete ideas from the Zappos playbook about customer-centeredness. Second, I was puzzled by the apparent cultural mismatch in Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos. And finally, I was curious about what a genuinely happiness-centric approach to business looks like. Deconstructing the Zappos story seemed like a good idea. This post is mainly about the last question, as well as some general thoughts about “corporate culture.”

Hsieh’s Story

The book is Hsieh’s story. It is also the Zappos story because he clearly personifies the Zappos DNA. So let’s understand it on those terms.

Hsieh clearly believes deeply in the idea of happiness. It pervades the book, in completely genuine ways. There is a whole section with uncritical adulation of the Positive Psychology movement that is innocent of any skepticism (for skepticism, see my review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided). He also apparently believes that everybody fundamentally wants happiness:

…if you keep asking yourself “Why?” enough times, you’ll find yourself arriving at the same answer that most people do when they repeatedly ask themselves why they are doing what they are doing: They believe that whatever they are pursuing in life will ultimately make them happier. In the end, it turns out that we’re all taking different paths in pursuit of the same goal: happiness.

This incidentally, is not universally true. When I play this game, my final answer always tends to be “so I understand the world better, even if it makes me miserable.” I suspect I am not the only one whose answers converge to something other than “to be happier.” There have to be species besides hedonists and masochists.

Hsieh clearly walks the talk.  There is an extended discussion of his involvement in the rave scene and what he learned from raves about feeling connected to something larger than yourself. It was news to me that the rave movement is about more than dancing Matrix style, and actually has values: PLURR: peace, love, unity, respect, responsibility. What his board called “Tony’s social experiments” seem to have been genuine attempts to create a happiness culture based on his rave experiences.

Here’s a quick précis:

The book starts with early-childhood entrepreneurial experiences, winds its way through a pizza business at Harvard and his first success with LinkExchange, which he and his partners sold to Microsoft. Though that was a financial windfall, he views that episode as a failure because he failed to recognize the importance of culture.

After a description of the brief, mandatory interlude of Web-millionaire poker-playing (there’s quite a good bit on poker-as-metaphor-for-business), we get to the main story: Zappos. Starting as an investor and then getting involved in running the business and taking on the CEO role, Hsieh navigated layoffs, liquidated nearly all his wealth during a death-and-resurrection period, while waiting for a line of credit from Wells Fargo, and led Zappos on to success.  The last part of the book is an argument-by-example, rather than a story, about why culture matters, and why happiness-centric culture is the reason behind Zappos’ success. His own narrative is interspersed with supporting bits authored by others (they are selected to elaborate on, or illustrate his story, not to provide alternative readings of the story itself).

Hsieh comes across as somebody whose life centers around relationships, friendships, group experiences and bet-the-farm gambling instincts.  This is a fun-loving guy who likes manufacturing realities/experiences for his own and others’ entertainment. His interest, evident even in his early childhood stories, in magic tricks, practical jokes and party-planning, all obviously helped shape his character. Those formative experiences are clearly part of the reason why he was able to build an entire company on the strength of its obsessively-attentive customer experience operations.

He is also clearly an extremely smart technocrat, with excellent strategic, financial and technological instincts. But he also comes across as extraordinarily polyannish, with an almost child-like simplicity when it comes to other people, relationships, values and culture. The biblical phrase and a child shall lead them (Isaiah 11:6) kept popping into my head.

Putting the book on the couch for a moment, the story is almost a textbook example of the sort of story that successful, generative adults (and by extension, corporations) tend to tell about their lives, in the sense of  Dan McAdams’ The Redemptive Self, which I have cited before.  And it suffers from all the flaws of that narrative template. For example, there is no acknowledgement or examination of the dark side of experience-manufacturing as a strength: it is also a capacity for deceit.

The way he tells the story, there is no sociopath side to his character, and no sociopaths anywhere around him. Zappos was apparently entirely built by Wonderful Human Beings. I find that hard to believe, but if it is true, then Zappos may be the case study that falsifies all my theories of management. I’ll wait for a few more versions of the story to emerge before I make any revisions though.

Like most autobiographical accounts of events, the book does not  entertain the thought that others might read the events differently. It is written with the unexamined assumption that privileged access to the facts leads naturally to the best account of those facts, so no attempt is made to separate data/facts from conclusions. The book even begins with a disarming acknowledgement:

“Finally…you’ll notice some sentences that aren’t the best examples of English grammar… I wrote this book without the use of a ghostwriter. I’m not a professional writer, and in many cases, I purposely chose to do things that would probably make my high school English teachers cringe, such as ending a sentence with a preposition. I did that partly because I wanted the writing to reflect how I would normally talk, and partly just to annoy all my high school English teachers (who I appreciate dearly).

It is interesting that he believes “professional” writing is about grammar and prepositions rather than about maintaining a certain critical detachment towards your own thoughts. It shows. Charming and endearing though the sentiment is, I immediately saw it as a red flag. To get any value out of the book, I’d have to treat it as the transcript of a psychoanalysis session, rather than a trustworthy and critically self-aware text.

That said, Hsieh is clearly too smart to offer an obviously deluded or flawed account of the events, and is also genuinely selfless enough to not turn the story into a self-serving one. He has made a good case, and he believes in it.

The question is, should you? Or is it too good to be true?

The Zappos Corporate Personality

It certainly isn’t too good to be true in the sense of presenting a false picture of a happy company. From the contributions by others in the company, it is clear that most of the employees are actually significantly happier than employees of other companies.

The Zappos corporate personality appears to be an extension of his own, and this is an outcome of deliberate design. Through the friendship and partnership choices that fueled his entrepreneurial career, as well as the hiring practices he put in place, Hsieh was able to turn his social environment into a projection of his own personality (the social synchrony aspect of the rave culture is not a peripheral element in this story; it is the main point). Everything I’ve said about how he comes across appears to be true of the company as well. The following quotes are particularly revealing:

“Although it seems obvious in retrospect, probably the biggest benefit of moving to Vegas was that nobody had any friends outside of Zappos, so we were all sort of forced to hang out with each other outside the office.”

“I thought about all the employees I wanted to clone because they represented the Zappos culture well, and tried to figure out what values they personified. I also thought all the employees and ex-employees who were not culture fits, and tried to figure out where there was a values-disconnect.”

“There are a lot of experienced, smart, and talented people…but a lot of them are also really egotistical, so we end up not hiring them.”

“The best team members have a positive influence on one another and everyone they encounter. They strive to eliminate any kind of cynicism and negative interactions. Instead, the best team members are those that strive to create harmony with each other and whoever else they interact with.”

Now I am trying my best to be fair here. I am not trying to use selected out-of-context quotes to misrepresent the Zappos culture. I think this is how they actually view themselves, and want their culture presented. This is textbook bright-sidedness/positive psychology. They seem like genuinely fun and nice people (the book makes them sound close to Amway/cult-like, but I don’t think they are that bad; I think I’d like them socially even if I couldn’t dream of working with them). As a company, like Hsieh himself, they walk the happiness talk.

They actually have a “culture fit” HR interview designed to keep things this way. It is clearly a test designed to keep, well, jerks like me out.

If you’ve been reading this site for any length of time, especially my Organization Man series, these quotes should be huge red flags. They are the classic signs of groupthink, assumed consensus, suppression of real dissent and a determined elevation of harmony-seeking over truth-seeking. I doubt anyone at Zappos would agree with this harsh reading, but the conclusion is inescapable. I would be very surprised if anyone at Zappos has read The Organization Man. If the book is in their famous library, and checked out more than three times by people who are still there, I will be guilty of having seriously misjudged them. The library seems to be dominated by books like Fred Factor and Fish, in addition to the usual Seligman-gang Happiness tomes and Tribal Leadership (I haven’t read this one).

What is more, not only is this the culture dominant, it is viewed as having no costs, and as the primary cause of Zappos’ success. Both are deeply dangerous thoughts. The latter particularly so. As I noted in my highlights post on Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization, the “Organization as a Cultural System” is just one of at least 8 major metaphors of organization. Each of the other 7 will yield an alternative account and causal hypothesis of the Zappos story.

The companies of the 50s with a similar “happiness” culture, that Whyte analyzed in the Organization Man, hit a reality shock starting in the late 70s. What killed the culture back then was the  end of the happy, easy-growth era, and the emergence of real and vicious competition as markets matured and stagnated across the board. A new, much harsher culture appeared overnight all over the economy, much better adapted to the new realities. If I am right, and Zappos is a case of déjà vu all over again, they are enjoying the benefits of being the market creator in the growing online-shoes business. If a credible competitor ever emerges, this culture will be in serious trouble. Going by historic time constants in these matters, we can expect that around 2020. Generally, major economic sectors, as they near maturity, attract at least one major challenger which helps create the mature, zero-sum market with razor-thin margins. It remains to be seen whether the Internet-fueled growth era will obey this law.

But we’re wandering. Let’s get back to Zappos, and the three questions that made me read this book.

Zappos as a Customer Experience Role Model

As a playbook to steal from, in building customer-centric organizations, the book succeeds brilliantly, and I got more than my money’s worth in terms of the ideas it gave me for my own projects.  I won’t attempt to summarize or distill the ideas.

Enough said on that. If customer experience is a problem for you, read the book. You will learn a lot.

Zappos and Amazon

I am not going to share my conclusions on this subject. For pretty much the first time on ribbonfarm, I am self-censoring my own thoughts because I think they might get me into arguments I don’t care to get into, and offend people I don’t want to offend. I have an answer that satisfies me, and I’ll forgo the value of debate. I think I am starting to get old.

Happiness as a Business Premise

If you’ve been reading ribbonfarm for any length of time, you know that I steer by a truth/happiness yin-yang dichotomy (see my Philosopher’s Abacus post). So my starting position on the “happy company” hypothesis is a skeptical one.  I’ve sketched the historical-precedent argument why a happiness-culture may run into trouble with market maturation, but I haven’t provided an analytical argument.

Despite my personal preferences, I don’t think being truth/reality-centered is necessary or a better alternative to “happiness” as a foundational premise. In fact “truth-centeredness” can be a lousy foundational premise, because it can be a centripetal force that tears a company apart, as easily as it can be a cohesive force that keeps it together.  Truth informs dismantlement as often as informs mergers (see my Gervais Principle series).

What holds for humans, holds for corporations: beliefs that help you survive and beliefs that are  true are not the same thing.  The pursuit of knowledge can be detrimental not just to your happiness, but to your survivability as a human being or a corporation. It is a self-indulgent luxury like any other life value.

With my own biases out of the way, let’s talk happiness. While Hsieh is very careful to point out that all corporate cultures are different, you get the impression that he thinks happiness-maximization ought to be a foundational premise for all cultures (going back to the “we’re all taking different paths in pursuit of the same goal: happiness” quote).

The part of the book where the happiness idea comes through most clearly is in Hsieh’s discussion of how he came up with the list of core values for the company. I was aghast at how seriously they seem to take a subject that is normally just an exercise in cynical perception-management in other companies. It was a bottom-up process based on what employees thought were the core values. The 37 initial bottom-up value suggestions were eventually edited and distilled down to 10.  The actual lists are revealing enough that I am going to reproduce them:

The Bottom-Up List

Culture is everything, WOW/Service, Trust and faith, Idealism, Company Growth, Long-term, Personal growth and stretching, Achieving the impossible, Team, Family/relationships, Emotional connections, Developing your gut, Empowerment, Ownership, Taking initiative, Doing whatever it takes, Not being afraid to make sacrifices, Unconventional, Bottom-up meets top-down, Partnerships, Listening, Overcommunicate, Operational Excellence, Built for change, Continuous incremental improvement, Innovation, WOM [Word of Mouth], Lucky, Passion and positivity, Personality, Openness and honesty, Fun, Inspirational, A little weird, Willing to laugh at ourselves, Quiet confidence and respect.

The Final List

Deliver WOW through service, Embrace and drive change, Create fun and a little weirdness, Be adventurous, creative and open-minded, Pursue growth and learning, Build open and honest relationships with communication, Build a positive team with family spirit, Do more with less, Be passionate and determined, Be humble.

(apologies for the paragraph style; a bullet-list would have made this post a mile long).

I spent quite a lot of time deconstructing these lists, but I won’t bore you with the details. I concluded that the final list is an accurate distillation/summary of the bottom-up list (not surprising given the cloning-culture; the process is in a sense a validation that Hsieh’s strategy of building the company in his own image actually worked. Unless there were closet cultural skeptics who kept their mouths shut). But there are a couple of interesting highlights:

Lucky didn’t make the cut. Somebody clearly thought that luck (of the ‘being in the right place at the right time’ variety) had something to do with the story. I think sheer dumb luck has something to do with every story. There is only so much you can do to make your own luck and do the whole “fortune favors the prepared mind” thing. But as critics of positive psychology like Ehrenreich and McAdams point out, downplaying dumb luck is one of the first moves in going bright-sided.

I initially thought humble meant being existentially humble in the face of all the randomness and arbitrariness of the universe. It is the flip-side of acknowledging “lucky.” But apparently, Zappos idea of humble is the more basic interpersonal “don’t brag” kind, designed to cut egotistical jerks down to size (assuming the recruitment process accidentally let them through).

“Open and honest relationships” doesn’t seem to mean trying hard to see the truth and then telling it like you see it, when necessary. At Zappos, it seems to mean being open and honest about what you really feel. This is a share-your-feelings therapeutic sort of openness. Another reason low-reactor jerks like me, who rarely share feelings, wouldn’t make it past the front door. Again, to be clear, I am not saying this is a bad thing. It is what it is, with costs and benefits.

Finally, there’s a lot I agree with on both lists. Values I share. But it is the ones that I don’t share that ultimately matter. Cultural fit is a matter of complete consensus, not sufficient alignment.

But the biggest surprise to me is that nowhere, not even in the original version, is there any kind of truth-seeking value. I thought I’d see at least one sentiment along the lines of “we don’t hide from reality” or “we admit when we are wrong.” Even though such behaviors are part of the story (such as when Tony and his team admitted that drop-shipping as a business model wasn’t working and that they needed to shift to an inventory model), reality-centeredness isn’t articulated. As I already said, I don’t think truth/reality centeredness is necessary or always useful. But you still expect lip service at least. Again, no judgment, just a note of surprise for me. I am not about to argue with success.

Analyzing the DNA

Is happiness-centeredness as modeled by Zappos necessary under some conditions? History suggests that perhaps early-stage growth companies that are creating a new sector need to be happiness-centric. But I don’t think this is true. I recently reviewed The Lords of Strategy, and it is clear that at BCG, the growth company that created the sector, the governing value was some version of truth-centeredness.

Perhaps happiness-centeredness is necessary for growing market-creating companies that are based on a strong sales culture? This, I think, may be true. I’ve seen other examples that fit the mould (including, though I don’t want to overemphasize these examples, Amway and Saturn).

Is happiness-centeredness irrelevant to success? Are Hsieh and Zappos making a huge, collective correlation-to-causation leap of faith? If we look through non-cultural organizational metaphors, will we find other, more compelling explanations? I don’t know, but when the Zappos story matures, and more versions of the story are available, this would be an interesting PhD thesis question for some student of organizational behavior in 2022 to tackle.

The Broader Corporate Culture Issue

The Zappos story is one of the many things making “corporate culture” a hot topic. I think the topic has gained currency because as “social” enters the brand narrative of companies, the internal culture becomes part of the external brand (Hsieh says as much). With that in mind, a couple of interesting items you should look at:

1. Google, I think, is another happiness-centric company, and its culture has been in the news. I made a trail about it, Google Culture: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, with what I could find. The recent Pandas vs. Lobster post and an older New Yorker feature are particularly useful.
2. Dan Shapiro’s post, Your Company Culture is a Meaningless Platitude, also a response to Hsieh’s book, is a must-read.
3. I haven’t synthesized my thoughts, but a while ago, I wrote this post on the E 2.0 blog: There is No Such Thing as Culture Change

There are two kinds of books that I find valuable, but don’t review. Books about which I have too little to say and books about which I have too much to say. One reason I don’t review them is that with with the first kind of book, I often extract value and dump the book halfway. With the second kind, I read each book so closely and carefully, and over such a long period of time, that by the time I am done, it is too entangled with my own thinking to write about objectively. Still, I thought it would be interesting to attempt a round-up of recent reading in these two categories. These won’t be getting full-length reviews.

The Too Little to Say List

Portfolios of the Poor is a very interesting look at how complex the financial lives of the poor can get. For too long, we’ve been talking about poor-people-economics with broad strokes ideas like “microfinance” and “bottom of the pyramid.” This book (which I’ve just started reading), gets into the fascinating details of how the poor manage their cash lives. Most of the material is based on data from the developing world, but I’ve seen similar ideas in books/articles about first-world poverty. My big takeaway so far has been that for the poor, short time horizon cash-flow management is far more important than long-term capital management. The world of the poor is a bewildering one of small loans from friends and family, giving money to others for safe-keeping, borrowing at very high interest rates for short-term use, and so forth. Scanning the book, I was struck by the idea that for the poor, the volatility of cash flows causes almost as much trouble as the low volume. The other interesting dynamic is that poverty forces social networks to be far tighter because of necessary short-term personal financial relationships. You and I mostly have regular paychecks and a few relationships with lenders like banks, so we can afford to keep friends and family at arm’s length if we want to. Poor people, especially in the developing world,  don’t have that luxury.

From the impoverished to the privileged. Seth Godin’s Linchpin has been greeted with the usual rapturous applause by his devotees. I like Godin’s early work (Permission Marketing in particular), and some of his later work (The Dip, which I over-analyzed here). His previous book, Tribes, is one of only two books I have seriously panned (the other is Blue Ocean Strategy). With Linchpin, he redeems himself a bit. As with The Dip, the core idea is a very good one, that it pays to become indispensable, wherever you happen to be. As is often the case with Godin though, he turns a good, conditional and amoral idea into an overstated, absolute and moral one. The idea deserves a small, neat book, like The Dip, and it gets a longer, fluffier treatment with an unnecessary amount of poorly-justified railing against the non-linchpins of the world. To some extent, I think Godin has gone the Tom Peters route: starting off his career with some really great ideas, but getting increasingly disconnected from the real world, and at times, downright weird. In this case, he is completely enamored of the idea that to be a linchpin is to be an emotionally-invested artist, giving gifts of the spirit to the Universe (shades of The Secret here). The result is that he actually ends up undervaluing the idea. There are better, more pragmatic (even cynical) reasons to be a linchpin, and you don’t necessarily need to think of yourself as some sort of artist to be one. That’s self-indulgence. And yes, there are also good reasons to not be a linchpin on occasion, and staying a little detached. That doesn’t necessarily make you one of the replaceable-parts types that Godin sets up as the strawman antithesis to linchpins. The best thing about the book is probably the Hugh MacLeod cartoons.

Shifting gears, I speed-read three books about food recently, as part of my effort to find  intelligent material in this publishing sector filled with hype, fads and subversion by the agro-industry. After processing piles of dreck, I came up with three books and one DVD that actually made some sort of sense to me.

The first is Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, a short-and-sweet book version of his popular NYT piece, Unhappy Meals. The basic idea is an attack on what Pollan calls “Nutritionism,” the reductionist approach to food, full of obscure and unintelligible (to us layfolk) talk of Omega 3s and gluten. He argues, logically, that we were eating in very healthy ways before the rise of Nutritionism, and that this shouldn’t be so damn hard. His rules are summarizable at tweet-length: Eat food, not too much. By food, he means stuff that you can actually recognize as food due to a visible connection to nature. He contrasts this with the hyper-processed, chemicalized, fortified, unrecognizable stuff that passes for food, which he calls “edible food-like substances.” The book turns the op-ed into a better organized set of principles (including such gems as “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” and “don’t eat any processed food with more than five ingredients”). The rules are good, but incredibly hard to follow, as 900 people found out in a recent Eat Real Food challenge (see this CNN report, An Inconvenient Challenge).

The second food book that I think gets at something truly important is The End of Overeating by David Kessler, which shows how obesity,  fat jokes by stand-up comics notwithstanding, is not entirely our fault. It is mostly the fault of a food industry that has, over half a century, figured out how to hook our three biggest weaknesses: salt, sugar and fat. Not a conspiracy, but a case of Adam Smith unbound. The book made me reconsider my initial skepticism of the move, in New York, to ban salt in restaurants.  While I still think this is a heavy-handed Nanny State way to go about it, I now agree with the broader intention. Obesity is caused by an industry whose logic is similar to the illegal narcotics industry. An element of public-interest intervention, regulation and policing is necessary. It may seem like a matter of individual decision-making, but as with drugs and smoking, the hidden social costs have now become far too high. Some collective tyranny-of-the-majority arm-twisting has become necessary.

The third book is Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrmann, which again is based on a single principle that makes sense: eat nutritionally dense food. This generally means more colors, more textures, more complex flavors, more variety in ingredients, and closer to natural. That’s a rule I can try to follow without getting a degree in biochemistry.  This is, in a way, the prescription for the diagnosis in Kessler’s book. The book starts with a very challenging addiction-recovery sort of diet, and I might actually try that as my first ever attempt at dieting.

And finally, the DVD that ties a lot of this together is Food, Inc. It is an unabashedly leftist and preachy look at the food industry, but if you have the patience to sift through the ideology, there is good stuff there.  The locavores and organic farmers are headed the right way, even if they sometimes come across as embarrassingly simple-minded in their thinking. The big theme in the stuff I’ve found credible in my survey of food/nutrition material is that there is a very strong link between our large-scale unhealthy eating issues and the structure of the food (and ultimately, the healthcare) industry.  The only credible ideas are the ones that go beyond just acknowledging this connection to analyzing it, and basing intervention suggestions on real chinks in the food industry’s armor. No, it isn’t all about will power. I am pessimistic overall though. I think we’ve finally found the right diagnosis, but I don’t think the prescriptions (individual and social) are strong enough to fix things. We are going to keep getting fatter, more stressed and more prone to heart disease and cancer for a while.

The Too Much to Say List

In this department, three books are worth mentioning.

Some books stay on my radar for a really long time, and keep nagging at me until I read them. Dan McAdams’ The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By is one such. It is a highly original and absorbing book about how successful (or what Erik Erickson called “generative”) Americans tend to tell their life stories. Their stories tend to follow a very specific kind of pattern: a redemption narrative. The book starts with a detached, scholarly and academic take on the pattern, and then intelligently takes the high road of understanding and critiquing rather than the low road of turning the pattern into a cheap self-improvement formula.  The book looks at the positive effects such narratives have on the people who live by them, as well as the negative effects: the delusions of manifest destiny and control over fate that they foster, with the concomitant denials of reality. This book has been on my radar since it first appeared in 2005, and I immediately knew I would one day read it, and that it would have a big impact on me. But as with any big idea that is too close to my own thinking for comfort, I wanted to develop my own thinking about personal narratives before tackling it (yeah, I sometimes suffer from deep anxieties of influence). So finally, after nailing the chapter on narratives in my in-progress book to my satisfication, I was ready to tackle this. I wasn’t disappointed.

Next up is Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. I quote bits and pieces of Nietzsche a lot, love his ideas, and have read random extracts and repackagings all over the place in other works. But I have never actually tackled an original. I picked this one to start because the consensus seems to be that it is probably the most representative and accessible of his works. I am about halfway through and loving it. The book shows its age, and you can’t read it in 2010 without thinking about the century of dangerous misinterpretation that followed Nietzsche. The book seems like an easy read, since it is written in the form of an extended parable, but it is actually gloriously challenging and full of ambiguities and subtleties. On every page you find something that would be horribly dangerous if  read in certain ways. I’ll probably need to do a slower note-taking read after I finish my faster read (which is still far slower than most of my reading).

Finally, there is Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization, a grand (and grandiose) attempt at reconstructing the history of human civilization. I started reading Rifkin because his much older 1987 book,  Time Wars, contains necessary reference material for my book. Rifkin is a highly political writer and an old-school leftist. Though I disagree violently with his politics for the most part, he is worth reading because he generally dredges up interesting ideas and perspectives that are worth stealing in the service of other agendas. I’ll review Time Wars in detail later this year, but I thought I’d mention The Empathic Civilization just for fun. I’ve read only two chapters and it already has me screaming in frustration. There is a lot of unnecessary politicization of apolitical ideas, far too many grand, sweeping generalizations, open and pointless warmongering, conjectures passed off as fact, and a rather dated sort of 70s-style lofty rhetoric. Still, there is genuinely an interesting perspective driving the revisionist history, and several interesting thoughts along the way. I think I’ll probably finish the thing. Sometimes, I admit, I am a bit of a self-flagellating masochist when it comes to reading. I tend to go out of my way to read perspectives that I just don’t agree with. I still can’t bear to sit through an entire episode of O’Reilly, but I am getting better.

Some day I should blog about my reading methods. To pre-empt the most obvious question, I generally read something like 10 books in parallel at any given time.

I have reviewed nearly fifty books on ribbonfarm, but I’ve never yet been reviewed by a book. That’s what reading Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany felt like. Blank, a veteran serial-entrepreneur, doesn’t actually set out to grill you, like a brutal VC, till you sweat. It just naturally happens. I found the book while exploring the currently-hot Web conversation around the idea of lean startups. So, since I can’t possibly “review” the book,  let me try to turn the whole lean startup conversation, anchored by this book,  into a self-administered inquisition. For the two entrepreneurial ventures I am currently leading, I score a B+ (for ribbonfarm.com) and a B- (for trailmeme.com).  So here’s the test, a  round-up of the lean startup conversation, and a micro-riff on applying this to your life, since planning improvising a life seems to have become an exercise in entrepreneurship in this century.

This test only applies to an early-stage entrepreneurial venture in a generally new market. You can apply these concepts to a well-defined market with known customers, but that’s not something that interests me. A more basic and intrinsic definition of “entrepreneurial” is a subjective one: if you feel like your life is currently consumed by a project with deep uncertainties, yet feel driven to continue by some unclear force deep down, you are probably an entrepreneur of some sort. There are only 9 questions, so this is a quick zeroth-order test. If you are unfamiliar with lean startup concepts, take this test cold. And no, it isn’t random mind-candy I made up. I actually thought quite seriously about the questions.

If you are applying this to the startup phase of your life (also known as “the twenties”), you’ll need to transpose words like “market” and “product” to that key.

The Inquisition

Q1: What is the ratio of resources you spend on learning and exploring the market (M) for what you have to offer, versus building/engineering (E) it?

Your M/E ratio: (pick a number between 0.1 and 2)

Q2: Have you experienced an “Aha!” moment in thinking about your product vision, when confused, complicated and ugly brainstorming gelled into an elegant high concept?

a) Yes

b) No

Q3: How many times have you managed to trigger an “Aha!” moment (“I get it! This is exciting!”) for a potential customer?

Number of potential customer Aha! moments: (integer)

Q4: Have you conducted focus groups?

a) Yes

b) No

Q5: Did you

a) Design the product first or

b) Define a “customer” and a “problem” first?

Q6: Your job, during the very early days of an entrepreneurial venture, is to:

a) Build something that delights the customer

b) Build something that satisfies the customer

c) Build something that just barely gets the customer on-board, whining and complaining

d) Pretend to offer something to the customer, apologize to those who respond for not having it ready, and scramble to build out the vaporware only if potential customers bite

e) Mutter, “what customer?” and build something rudimentary just because you want to, to prove to yourself that you can

Q7: What portion of the product vision should you drive, as opposed to the customer?

a) 100% you, 0%  customer

b) 80% you, 20% customer

c) 50% you, 50% customer

d) 20% you, 80% customer

e) 0% you, 100% customer

Q8: You’ve built a basic, rudimentary product, a  non-embarrassing number of beta users are kicking the tires, and the thing basically works like you thought it would. Your product development roadmap is pretty much locked down (modulo the natural flexibility of agile/iterative development) for the next year or so, with things you know you have to do. For the same cost, who would you hire?

a) One seasoned serial entrepreneur as CEO/CTO/CMO/COO (choose!) who can help you, wild-eyed-visionary, scale the thing into a “real” business

b) A VP of sales who can hire a few biz-dev/sales type and go out there, pound the pavement, close sales, and grow the customer base

c) Two improv sales/PR/marketing “hacker” type, who likes to endlessly invent, improvise and tweak messaging and positioning ideas, but can’t actually close sales or manage a team

d) Four smart college interns who can listen and communicate with reasonable competence, but otherwise need to be told what to do

Q9:  In the early days, the types of potential customer you should talk to, and seriously listen to are (pick all that apply)

a) Those who have a problem you think you can solve, but don’t know it

b) Those who know they have a problem, and are framing it in ways not wildly different from you

c) Those who are looking for a solution

d) Those who are improvising a solution

e) Those who are unhappy with their improvised solutions and are shopping for something better

Computing Your Score

A1: If M/E is 0.9-1.1, give yourself 15 points, if M/E is 1.1 to 2, give yourself  10 points. Anything less than 0.9, you get 0 points.

Why: The justification is the Grabowski ratio. A classic (but somewhat obscure) study by Ralph Grabowski in 1995 show that M/E (properly defined) around 1 is the lowest risk zone. Below 0.1 the chances of failure skyrocket. Grabowski likes >1 cases, but for Web tech products in particular, I believe you can have too much of a good thing. Hence the lower value of 1.1 to 2.0 answers.

A2: Product Aha: Yes gets you 15 point, No gets you 0 points.

Why: new tech-market innovations are product-driven, not customer driven, and are especially not a union of all feature requests by potential customers. But even if the product vision is your own, but is not driven by an Aha! moment, it will lack the conceptual integrity that can serve as a filter to accept/reject feature requests/feedback.  A product without an Aha! moment behind it will succumb rapidly to entropy even if you manage to fill a need and attract customers.

A3: Customer Aha! Moments: You get 1 point per customer with an Aha! with a maximum of 15.

Why: The customer’s Aha! moment is one data point/piece of evidence towards what is known in the lean startup world as the product-market fit, a term coined by Marc Andreessen. PMF itself is an aggregate phenomenon across the hypothesized market base, but in the early days, you won’t see any signs of it unless you happen to be ridiculously lucky and smart. But if you aren’t at least seeing hope-sustaining evidence in the form of individual Aha! moments through your “customer development” work, the chances are very high that your Product Aha! Moment (PAM) was just some self-indulgent geek-masturbation.

A4: Focus groups: +15 if you HAVEN’T conducted traditional focus groups. -15 if you HAVE and actually been influenced strongly by them. 0 if you conducted focus groups but decided to discard the results.

Why: This one is straight from Blank’s book. Focus groups only work for defined markets with defined customers, who frame their problems in terms of products they already know and understand, which you are trying to incrementally advance in some price/performance ways. The temptation to cover your behind with focus-group due-diligence is very strong, especially if you are an “intrapreneur” in a mature company that evolves its main offerings this way. The small problem is that focus groups might distract you and waste enough time to kill your project. The big problem is that you might not get killed and actually live long enough to be guided by the focus groups, and waste a lot more money before you kill yourself (the opposite of “fail fast”). The classic example of ignoring traditional market research is actually Joe Wilson, the founder of my mother ship, Xerox. Wilson ignored focus-group style “market research” entirely (which said nobody wanted copiers) and bet his photo-paper making company, Haloid, on his belief in the product vision. Of course, you do need to be talking to customers/potential customers, but not through focus groups. That’s just too easy. Half your work will be finding the right people to talk to.

A5: Product first/Problem and Customer first: +15 if you designed the product first, +5 if you defined the problem and customer in detail first.

Why: This one I had the most trouble with. Blank’s model suggests that in hi-tech, the vision should be product-led (and then you go around looking for a problem to solve with it, in a “when you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail” mode). I think this is true of technology-inspired entrepreneurship where the founder is at least partly excited about building something. But Jeff Bezos stands apart as a major counterexample, given the systematic way he found a problem/customer first. But then, in a sense, he was filtering based on an existing “meta product” vision (I have the Internet in my hand, what retail categories can I hammer with it?). So maybe product-led should be a true axiom. I don’t know. Giving the “customer first” option a +5 is my uncertainty hedge. But I genuinely believe that tech-inspired people simply cannot get excited about a problem simply because somebody is actually experiencing it and will pay for a solution. The drive and motivation can only be sparked by an elegant product idea.

A6: Minimum Viable Product: d or e get you +15 points.  c gets you +10, b gets you +5, a gets you -15.

Why: This question probes your intuitive understanding of the idea of Minimum Viable Product due to Eric Ries.  Your goal in the early stages has nothing to do with making the customer happy. It is to find out if there is a market for what you might build. Example: running an AdSense campaign for “Anti-gravity machine for $100″ which takes people to a vaporware page that tells them “Not ready yet, but sign up here if interested.” This is the absolute cheapest way to get the market intelligence you need. But I have enough of a tech-geek in me that this purely business-minded data-driven approach leaves me cold, so I also put in the “passion option” (e) where you build something above the MVP level just for the hell of it. I think this is actually a better idea because you not only discover whether customers might want it, but you also discover if the idea excites you enough that you might want to build it and run with it for years. So (e) is a good answer if you are geeky enough to be happy building something and accepting the risk that you might have to throw it away. So long as you don’t build an over-engineered monstrosity that goes way beyond probing potential marketability.

A7: Vision ownership:  b gets you 15 points, c gets you 10, a, d and e get you 0.

Why: Straight from Blank’s book. Feature requests should be accepted by exception, not as a matter of standard practice. If your product vision is not self-indulgent masturbation, most of the things you hear from potential users should be on your roadmap anyway. If  more than 20% of your backlog ends up occupied by surprising requests that you agree with, you need to revisit your vision, and check it for conceptual integrity and completeness. If it is more than 50%, your product vision is downright incoherent and you have no clue how to prioritize anything. You should drop the effort and head back to the drawing board, and not talk to potential customers until you have an idea worth defending.

A8: Hiring and staffing: c gets you 15 points, d gets you 10 points, a or b get you -15 points

Why: Again, straight from Blank’s book. There is absolutely no point in hiring a professional manager type to grow the business if you don’t have unmistakeable evidence of a working “product-market fit.”  In other words you need to know which direction to grow in. Experienced sales VPs are about executing a validated sales roadmap through staffing and growth. Your ideal hire, before your PMF stage, is c, an improv artist or two, who might not close sales (or hook users, for traffic-as-proxy-for-monetizability Web outfits), but has the creativity and persistence to keep tweaking the message and positioning till he/she gets it right, and can reliably trigger “Aha!” moments in customers. Interns get you some points because you can always coach ‘em just enough to add value, and avoid doing the kind of heavy-hitter damage a or b might do.

A9: Listening to customers: Give yourself 15 points if you picked only (e). Subtract 3 for every other option you picked.

Why: And again, straight from Blank’s book. At an early stage, you are testing and validating a problem/market hypothesis and users who are at varying levels of ignorance or misframing of their own problems aren’t useful. Only those who understand and frame their problems well enough to be jury-rigging a solution can guide you in useful ways. These people should be providing the 20% “exceptional feature requests” that are guiding you. Everybody else is basically too hard to sell to, and will anyway only be convinced by “social proof” (other adopters).

Inflexibility Tax Calculation:

• If you hate the way this inquisition frames entrepreneurship and are boiling over with indignation, subtract 50.
• If you are saying “Wow! This is brilliant, awesome stuff and I agree absolutely,” subtract 50.
• If you are saying “Yeah, I mostly agree, and I’ve been doing this in my own improvised way, but I disagree on a couple of points,” leave your score alone.

The -50 cases mean you are either getting defensive in knee-jerk ways because you are married to an alternative theology OR you are buying THIS theology without question. In either case, you may be lacking the ability to critically think ideas through,  and do the “structured improv” act that is being an entrepreneur. If I were a VC, I wouldn’t bet on you.

Scoring:

135+: You get an A-.

120-135: B+

105-120: B

90-105: B-

75-90: C

60-75: D

0-60: F

There is no A or A+. You only deserve those grades if you get past the early stages and hit cash-flow-positive (A) and recovered investment (A+) stages, respectively.

The Lean Startup Theology

Okay, I dropped some of you off the deep end there, except for a few links. Here’s the 411, with reference to this Ultimate Guide to Lean Startups trail.

1. Start with the single most important idea, which Andreessen explains in this exceptional post about Product-Market-Fit
2. Eric Ries is the main cheerleader for the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) concept; tackle this next
3. I haven’t seen Eric mention Grabowski in his blogging, but that’s the hard empirical evidence behind what he preaches, so take a quick look and test yourself for a potential Inventoritis infection
4. The 101 level stuff: the Lean Startup conversation assumes you understand Geoff Moore’s ideas at least at a rudimentary level. Read either Crossing the Chasm or Dealing with Darwin (preferred). Or at least the Amazon reviews.  And review Christensen’s ideas about disruptive vs. radical innovations that you think you understand, but likely don’t.
5. Then tackle Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany, and work real hard to understand the somewhat mind-numbing step-by-step recipes and flowcharts. Unlike most such recipe/flowchart oriented books, a great deal of thought has gone into these. This is a detailed tactical manual with lots of deep insight about the right sequencing of moves behind it. Yes, it is self-published, is rife with typos (which Blank disarmingly forgives himself for, with the line “the horrifically bad proofreading, design and layout is now a badge of honor”), but it is worth the slog. It is an extremely left-brained book, but informed by deeply right-brained sensibilities. In fact it opens with a discussion of Campbell’s monomyth as a script for entrepreneurs. The book had me at “monomyth.”
6. Speaking of Campbell and right-brained stuff, the whole lean startup movement (despite the connotations of lean six sigma) is surprisingly art and design oriented. Though not an official part of the lean startup dogma, Paul Graham’s famous Hackers and Painters is probably required reading.
7. You’ve done the bottom-up thing. Read Eric Ries overview of lean startups
8. Fittingly, this trail guide begins and ends with Andreessen. A set of videos he did is worth viewing.

I’ll wrap with a quote from item 7 in your Lean Startup coursepack:

“…the process of planning is very valuable, for forcing you to think hard about what you are doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless” — Marc Andressen

This is nearly identical in spirit to Eisenhower’s famous line, “Planning is everything, plans are nothing.” But it is good to hear this truth restated for the startup world. The heart of the lean startup religion is a certain predisposition towards improvisation over planning.

Do I believe this theology out of the box? No, and I think if you aren’t able to understand and apply this stuff critically, it will simply not work. For Trailmeme, I’ve had to sell my own unique mashup of this model’s elements, with my own beliefs, to stakeholders within Xerox. If you are not capable of hacking this model, you are not capable of using it.

So here’s a test of your ability to hack this: email me/post a comment about an important missing concept that adds to, or modifies, this theology in some way. If you can’t make an original contribution (mine, for instance, was connecting the dots to Grabowski), you aren’t ready.

Ribbonfarm as a Lean Startup

I won’t share the detailed scoring that got me a B- for Trailmeme, since that is being driven by a team, not just me, and we don’t want to give away our game plan, but it is interesting that without realizing it, and entirely by gut instinct, I’ve been growing both Trailmeme and ribbonfarm according to this theology. In both cases, I was fumbling along, making stuff up as I went along. Exploring  (and now attempting to join) the lean startup conversation has clarified my thinking a lot, but I am still fumbling quite a bit.  Anyway, highlights from the history of the nearly 3-year-old “ribbonfarm as a lean startup.”

1. Product-driven, not audience-driven: I started blogging with only a “product vision” and zero customer input. I just had a huge backlog of stuff I was itching to write about, and didn’t care about whether it would get read at all. I also ignored every “focus group” type of advice I found. I don’t blog within a niche, I do 2000+ word posts once a week as opposed to 300 word posts twice a day, I make no attempt to SEO my post titles. All in all, very much a lean-startup, hackers-painters kind of start.
2. Listening very selectively to readers: When I did start listening to readers, I basically ignored (sorry guys) all but a very small handful of people for whom my writing seemed to resonate particularly deeply. Not quite a single-muse strategy, but call it a small “advisory panel.” And I wasn’t doing this in any disciplined way until 2 years into the game. I just liked the comments/emails from certain readers and wanted to talk more to them. The informal ribbonfarm advisory board (you know who you are) has about a dozen people now.
3. Following the MVP model: Here’s the bullet-point story behind Tempo, which will be my first book. Following the MVP model for this was entirely an accident. Installing the “Email this” plugin showed me what articles were getting emailed the most. I discovered to my surprise that the most emailed and the most commented lists weren’t the same. My post on strategy, tactics, operations and doctrine was an early email hit, but saw relatively little comment action, and also happened to map perfectly to a larger book concept I wanted to work on. The post was a fairly crappy early MVP draft of the ideas in the book it is growing into, but it still seemed to scratch a market itch in its primitive form. I turned the book project itself into an MVP by putting up a sign-up page very early (after I’d written a couple of chapters to convince myself I would be motivated to finish the thing). That list now has over 500 emails. That’s a pretty decent pre-sell permission list. I accidentally also followed Seth Godin’s advice (quote: “The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you’ll need later.”)  These days, I do MVP stuff a little more systematically, often probing a theme with a single post before putting out higher-effort posts around that theme.
4. Searching for Product-Market-Fit: Marc Andreessen’s product-market fit post talks about the visceral difference between the “before” and “after.” I had experienced this second-hand while I was first employee at Sulekha.com, but hadn’t experienced it as the principal/founder. The Gervais Principle article did that for me. That was a major “product-market fit” moment. I still couldn’t define my niche or write a “problem hypothesis” statement for it the way Blank demands,  but I now have a lot more clarity about what I am writing, for whom, and what is “core” versus “non-core” for my writing (to use Moore’s terminology). I’ll never be able to stop wandering randomly outside my putative “core,” but at least I know where it is now.

Your Life as  a Lean Startup

I’ll leave you with one major thought that I’ve been pondering lately. The idea of “planning” a career is now garbage. You can only improvise one. Listening dutifully to old-economy career counselor types at ages 18 and 22 and “first layoff” is now the stupidest thing you can do. To a large extent a) your career picks you, not vice-versa, and b) It isn’t about what you want to do, but which one of the things you like doing achieves a “product-market fit” with the labor market. This means, the new rules of life/career planning are:

1. Try on different careers for size at MVP level: dabble in stuff and do internships as early as you can, write blogs, contribute to open source projects, and so forth
2. Look for product-market fit: Your epiphany about “what I want to do with my life” while hiking in the mountains, is only half the story. The other half is what the market wants to do with you. If you can’t trigger an Aha! moment in someone outside of yourself, you don’t have a career
3. Fake it till you can make it, another MVP idea: pretend you can do stuff before you can actually do it. Sprint like crazy to acquire skills your “Aha!” customers decide to actually buy from you, thanks to your posturing

Okay, that’s enough lists. Gotta get back to my lonely pair of parallel Hero’s Journeys.

Temptation is a dangerous thing. Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich could have been the thoughtful and definitive polemic against runaway optimism and positive thinking that America sorely needs today. Yet, by succumbing to the temptation to politicize a malaise that affects both the Left and the Right, Ehrenreich has managed to reduce a potential trigger for a “Realism Revolution” into what too many will dismiss as yet another shrill, leftist screed. It isn’t that. Okay, it is a bit. But it is well worth reading, even if you have to summon up all your patience and reading skill to tease apart the valuable, ideology-neutral thread in the narrative from the noise.

Before You Read the Book

Ehrenreich, who previously wrote the truly thought-provoking liberal-ethnographic look at poverty in America, Nickel and Dimed, is one of the few overtly-political writers I can tolerate long enough to read. She can argue cogently when she wants to, without stooping to the pointless posturing, opponent-bashing and choir-pleasing so typical of the genre. She thinks relatively independently, and does something rather rare among politically-motivated writers: she looks at evidence in the real world and is willing to let ugly facts kill beautiful theories if necessary. She is also capable of breaking from dogma and asserting an individual political view on occasion. I expect a lot of this is due to her scientific training (more on the effect of that later; it isn’t all positive).

Only between a third to half the book is carefully-argued though. For the rest, she defaults to the political positions, posturing and rhetoric you would expect: communities and collectivism over individualism, job security over layoff-logic, and the usual bogey of inflated executive pay magnified into a gigantic club with which to beat on the entire philosophy of capitalism. And of course, an overarching theme of humanism and the unstated assumption that liberals have a monopoly on compassion. In these sections, as you would expect, you get the simplistic reader-infantilizing lectures that so annoy any intelligent listener, when it comes to crudely politicized discourses.

All in all, a challenging read. You’ve been warned. The only reason I am reviewing and recommending it at all is that it is a crucially important subject and a very courageous treatment of a theme likely to unpopular with everyone from TED-talk fans to neo-hippies. religious conservatives, and “life coaches.”  Something with the capacity to offend so many varied people deserves a look. Speaking of TED talks, this video (view it twice; you’ll be thoroughly entertained the first time, and go “wait a minute…” the second time) is pretty much the antithesis of Bright-Sided.

It isn’t all uphill annoyance-suspension reading though. There are truly delightful bits, like the much-deserved skewering of The Secret, by far the most egregiously moronic version of positive-thinking ever invented.  (If you love The Secret, stop reading this blog and go away. Now. I don’t like you. By the law of attraction, you shouldn’t be here anyway. You don’t want me ruining your abundance, do you?)

The central message is this: positive thinking is killing us.  And to a first approximation, she is right. I am itching to throw in a lot of ifs and buts, but I’ll defer that. Basically, she’s right.

The Book

The book is spaghetti-like, so I’ll summarize the basic argument. Over a century and a half, “positive thinking” grew from being a legitimate reaction to the toxic effects of Protestant Ethic Calvinist culture into a monster that has gotten an entire country adopting delusional thinking as religion. Thanks to positive thinking, America is ignoring and shutting out reality with pathological glee, and suspending even basic and reasonable standards of doubt, caution and defensive forethought.

The dubious benefits of “positive thinking” aren’t what they seem.  Positive thinking is a house of cards that falls apart if you push just a little, and a good deal of the book is devoted to the project of nudging the house of cards towards collapse. I wholeheartedly agree with that agenda. That house of cards needs toppling.

The reason it has grown without toppling for so long is debatable. For the leftist Ehrenreich, it is a consequence of those delusions serving the usual villains (greedy, individualist corporate types who want to paper over grim realities with cheery coats of paint). For a rightist with Ehrenreich’s level of intelligence, it wouldn’t be hard to construct an alternative argument blaming the edifice on the sense of entitlement and culture of victimhood that Ehrenreich tries (and fails) to legitimize (the frontispiece line is “To complainers everywhere: Turn up the volume!”).

Fortunately, for those of us whose politics cannot be represented by 1 bit, there are ideology-neutral reasons that could also be blamed. I blame basic human broken-brain psychology that likes to seek out delusions of one variety or another, with “Left” and “Right” being the two most popular overarching ones. The optimism/positive thinking bias didn’t need to fight to thrive in our brains. Our brains are naturally wired for delusions via such phenomena as the confirmation bias.

Whatever the reasons for its existence, let’s take a look at the house of cards itself, and what the book does to it.

Introduction

The book begins with an outline of the main arguments, starting with some key contradictions. For example, even the most basic data don’t support the core ideas of “positive thinking.” America, the most overtly and ardently “positive” among all nations, rank only twenty-third in self-reported happiness studies and far worse in more objective measures that attempt to measure happiness. As she notes even the “dour Finns” do better. Next, she sketches out the reasons why the notion that positive thinking is “obviously” psychologically healthy, is false.

She introduces the book’s philosophy with one of the broader sentiments that I resonate with, that form part of her alternate “realist” philosophy, that advocates neither positive, nor negative delusions, but acceptance of reality:

The truly self-confident, or those who have in some way made their peace with the world and their destiny within it, do not need to expend effort censoring or otherwise controlling their thoughts.

So at least we agree at a very fundamental level.  That line was what made me persevere and finish the book, even though I wanted to stop many times, out of annoyance.

Chapter 1: Smile or Die: The Bright Side of Cancer

The first chapter is a very personal narrative, based on Ehrenreich’s battle with breast cancer, and how it pitted her against an entire healthcare culture that is built on denial. The chapter chronicles how the breast cancer movement, for all the good it does in raising money for cancer research, actually works against patients’ best interests by promoting positive thinking as an element of a cure. In one particularly compelling bit, she talks about how patients are encouraged by support groups to draw pictures of immune cells battling cancer cells. Later, research showed that immune cells don’t do much against cancer. Even if they did, the idea that cheerleading could help seems peculiarly delusional. She makes a compelling case that imposing the heavy burden of constant cheerfulness (how many of us without terminal illnesses can keep that up?) on people already struggling with the pain and horror of cancer treatment is simply inhuman. It should be okay to spend time grieving and being depressed or angry. Apparently it isn’t. Complaining is not allowed (it would kill the buzz of the healthy positive-thinkers).

While I don’t normally condone victim stances, when it comes to cancer, I agree. That’s not a foe you can face cheerily, and you shouldn’t have to, if you don’t want to. You should be allowed negative reactions. When you are going through hell, allowing you to scream if you want to, seems to be the least the rest of us can do.  But the breast cancer movement apparently insists on foisting its pink-tinted brand of cheer and teddy bears on all who are involved in the world of cancer. If this is true — and it seems to be — it doesn’t seem right.

Chapter 2: The Years of Magical Thinking

Next, in Chapter 2, Ehrenreich broadens her agenda to take on the entire positive-thinking speaker movement. Here is where you get the part I like, the somebody-put-that-retarded-Secret-out-of-its-misery bit. But she goes well beyond, taking on woolly-headed amateur physicists who manage to find quantum-mechanical evidence for positive thinking (“in the loony extrapolation favored by positive thinkers, whole humans are also waves or vibrations”), and life coaches who can barely keep their own lives together. Can you say Stuart Smalley?

I found myself privately going, “Halleluejah!” even as I cringed at some of the more unnecessary ad hominems that liberally pepper the writing.

Chapter 3: The Dark Roots of American Optimism

This is easily the best chapter in the book. It is a through and revealing look at how we came to live in an era where positive thinking has become a basic, unquestioned axiom of healthy-mindedness (a phrase coined by William James). She starts with the early origins of positive thinking as a reaction to the excesses of the harsh Protestant Ethic/Spirit of Capitalism Calvinism. This discussion is nuanced, and in places, achieves Max-Weber levels of insight.

You would expect the victims [of Calvinism's harsh imperatives] to be drawn primarily from the cutting edge of economic dynamism. Industrialists, bankers, prospectors in the Gold Rush of 1848 should have been swooning and taking to their beds. Insteady it was precisely the groups most excluded from the frenzy of nineteenth-century competitiveness that collapsed into invalidism…The largest demographic to suffer from invalidism or neurasthenia was middle-class women…. As one of Mary Baker Eddy’s [an early positive thinking pioneer] biographers writes: “Delicate ill-health, a frailty unsuited to labor, was coming to be considered attractive in the young lady of the 1830s and 1840s…” Here too, under the frills and sickly sentimentality of nineteenth-century feminine culture, we can discern the claw marks of Calivism. The old religion had offered only one balm for the tormented soul, and that was hard labor in the material world [... denied to women]. Take that away and you were left with the morbid introspection [the reference is to Calvinism's dictate to introspect on sins, not general brooding] that was so conducive to dyspepsia, insomnia, backaches and all the other symptoms of neurasthenia.

The chapter moves from these early origins of the positive thinking movement as a reaction to Calvinist negative introspection, to its legitimization by the likes of Emerson and William James. From there the movement grew to its peak with writers like Norman Vincent Peale and Napolean Hill, growing ever more dangerous in its encouragement of positive-delusional thinking.

Chapter 4: Motivating Business and the Business of Motivation

That provides the segue point into the origins of the more modern and familiar version of positive thinking. The analysis begins by examining how Peale and his cohorts succeeded, by selling a life-supporting delusion to the world of salesmen (and it was mainly salesmen when business motivation got started). The peculiar loneliness and existential burdens of early modern sales proved to be the perfect breeding ground for the entire industry of motivation.

Here the Chapter slips, about halfway through, into mostly incoherent anti-corporate vitriol that seeks to lay all the blame for the ills of positive thinking at the door of corporate greed.  That said, there is a very poignant discussion of how the whole positive-thinking arsenal is deployed to mitigate the unpleasantness surrounding layoffs. This is where Ehrenreich over-reaches. You could argue cogently about the dynamics of greed-vs.-entitlement that led to modern layoff culture as portrayed in Up in The Air. Louis Uchitelle does that in The Disposable American a lot more carefully. That corporations callously use the motivation industry to manage layoffs, is not an argument against the logic of layoffs themselves.  Neither is the fact that CEOs are overpaid. Layoffs have their own intrinsic economic logic. Those are strawman arguments, much like rightist arguments against unions, based on corruption within labor leadership and the effects of strikes on the production of, say, life-saving drugs.

Still, the rest of the argument, and the general indictment of the motivation industry is justified and well-executed. Even if she doesn’t quite make the case she would have liked to: that the industry exists solely to help manage layoffs, and that corporations and CEOs are pure evil.

Chapter 5: God Wants You to Be Rich

This is another chapter that at once made me nod vigorously, while making me cringe at the unnecessary cruelty in the writing. The target this time is the world of feel-good megachurches,  a la the omnipresent television preacher, Joel Osteen. This goes into territory that is completely unfamiliar to me, so it was very thought-provoking. The chapter covers the emergence, through “corporatization,” of the modern megachurch where God and self-abnegating religiosity of the traditional variety take a back seat to general spiritual cheer-leading based on the premise (to use her delicious skewer-language) that God is some sort of concierge sitting around to deliver the bounties of a benevolent universe to you via mail order.

I don’t want to comment too much about this chapter, since I am not religious and I don’t want to offend those of you who are. But the general point she makes is that the old Calvinist God had some things right after all, and that misfortune and suffering are part of what religion is meant to help you face up to and deal with, not help you deny. Just because nobody likes a downer, doesn’t mean religions should succumb to peddling the fluff the devout-in-denial demand of their concierge God’s customer reps. If Marx was right and religion is the opiate of the masses, then modern megachurch positivism is one of the best pieces of evidence.

Chapter 6: Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness

Now comes one of the most troubling parts of the book. In this chapter, Ehrenreich takes on Martin Seligman and his cohorts. This is probably the most flawed chapter of all: Ehrenreich throws out a dozen babies with the bathwater. By this point, the book has become such a slave to the developing momentum of “anything with the adjective ‘positive’ is bad,” that she chooses to tar an entire academic community of presumably intelligent people with the same brush, based on her limited reading of the personality idiosyncracies of one of the field’s leaders.

Yes, it is true. Most of the positive psychology literature leaves the naturally skeptical among us doubtful. And yes, happiness is more complicated than the shoddier writing within the movement would suggest. But there is no denying that the movement has produced valuable insights, such as the strengths model of education and career choices, and the work of Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi on “flow” phenomena. It is also undeniable that in creative work, the best way to produce results is to let self–reinforcing trains of conceptual thought run away with themselves.  Being absorbed in a flow-like state while working out an intricate programming or art problem, is not the same thing as denying the existing of pain and misery on weekends. It is certainly not the same as suggesting, like the horrible woman behind The Secret apparently did, that the people hit by the 2004 tsunami invited disaster with negative thinking.

I don’t think positive psychology as an academic field is any better or worse than any other, in its friendliness to the hegemony of reigning paradigms and groupthink. Yes, there are shyster life coaches selling snake oil, but there are also people who’ve put in the hundreds of clinical practice hours and study, and deserve their membership in the helping professions. Yes, there are “television scientists” and a fringe of hangers-on with dubious credentials, some of who bring discredit to the movement, and others who add value despite being un-credentialed. All par for the course in any field. Including biology. Some fields are just luckier in that they deal with more concrete forms of evidence and models of proof and truth.

Chapter 7: How Positive Thinking Destroyed The Economy

This is the “let’s blame the economic mess on positive thinking” chapter. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this chapter, other than to note that Ehrenreich is mostly right.  It doesn’t seem controversial to assert that delusional positive thinking on the part of  both the non-credit-worthy and the deluded/evil-sociopathic money managers, contributed to the collapse we are living through.

One connection is particularly neat: the idea that the megachurch gospel of “God will give if only you ask” led a lot of people to ignore real danger signals from their financial-life details and take on more debt than they could handle.

The contribution of positive thinking is perhaps not as big as she imagines, but still, it is an intriguing thought that it did contribute significantly.

Chapter 8: Postscript on Post-Positive Thinking

In this last chapter, Ehrenreich redeems herself a little, for her sins in earlier chapters, but not entirely. There are some thoughtful philosophical points made here, and sober reflection is substituted for wild rants. Here is one bit I understand and get, even though I am probably too much of a risk-taker to live by this principle:

Realism — to the point of defensive pessimism — is a prerequisite not only for human survival but all animal species. Watch almost any wild creature for a few moments and you will be impressed, above all, by its vigilance.

My flavor of realism, I guess, is full-speed-ahead-and-damn-the-torpedoes risk-taking. We’re all going to die anyway.

Reading Ehrenreich

Reading somebody who you believe has a fatally-flawed view of the world, yet has spotted interesting truths and should be listened to, is one of the most challenging intellectual exercises imaginable.

Ehrenreich is particularly challenging, because she is so absolutely sure of herself, and so blind to her own biases, while being amazingly perceptive about others’ biases. It isn’t that some of the arguments are confused and incoherent. Every ambitious book has tighter and looser parts, and I am okay with that. What makes reading this book hard are the systematic biases and its perverse lack of imagination.

What are these biases? Some are not actually an outcome of her ideology. Take for instance her assumption that her scientific mindset is the only scientific mindset possible. True, if you are talking about morons reading the Law of Attraction into a pop-science description of quantum mechanics. But while we all agree that the scientific spirit relies on reproducible results and a dialectic that allows all of us to separate matters of experimentally-demonstrated fact, designated collectively as such, from matters of opinion, that’s where consensus on “what science is” ends.

As a microscope-wielding biologist by training, Ehrenreich conflates realism with what I might call “sensorism”  or “naive empiricism” (i.e. the real is only what you can literally see; conceptual thinking has no role).  I have often noticed this bias among those from the more experimental disciplines.  They do not easily get that runaway conceptual thinking is as essential to scientific thought as obsessive microscopy, especially when it comes to synthesis (engineering for instance) or realities hidden too deep below the surface to easily see (in quantum physics for instance), which causes the division of labor between theorists and experimentalists in the first place.

This isn’t delusional positive thinking. It’s called imagination and we need it to think, enjoy life, do science, and survive. Denying cancer isn’t the same thing as suspending disbelief long enough to enjoy Harry Potter. Or suspending apparently solid “empirical facts” long enough to imagine creative what-if scenarios, philosophical counterfactuals and paradigm-shifting ideas in physics. Ehrenreich apparently does not understand imagination, or know how to tell it apart from delusion, so she ends up attacking it alongside delusional “positive thinking.”

This experimental biologist’s eye travels with Ehrenreich beyond biology. She can see the real retina-assaulting suffering of the poor and the laid off. She cannot see the equally real macroeconomic dynamics that legitimize the workings of the creative-destructive economy, and require the conceptual microscopes of mathematical modelers and statisticians. A perfect example of this extrapolation of her personality, interests and intellectual style into a model of behavior for everybody is this passage:

[the positive thinkers say] surely it is better to obsess about one’s chances of success than about the likelihood of hell and damnation, to search one’s inner self for strengths rather than sins? The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on onself when there is so much real work to be done.

And there you have it in black and white. Only completely literal-minded engagement of reality (which includes an imagined notion of “community”) counts. “Love and solidarity” are for everybody. There is no room for people who’d rather be alone most of the time, like me (and no, we’re not spending our time either brooding or having wild fantasies).  There is no room for people who can take only a tiny piece of reality as input and work wonders with it in their heads, like Einstein did with the Michaelson-Morely experiment. There is no room for art as a way of seeing. She even implies that “thinking” isn’t real work (even though later she manages to contradict herself and accuses positive thinking for reducing people’s abilities to reflect thoughtfully).

From here to deeply prejudiced ad hominens and hagiographies is a short leap.  This, in my book, is unforgivable. For all their faults, Joel Osteen and his wife do not deserve this:

He is shorter than [his wife] is…heavily gelled black hair has been styled into a definite mullet. She wears a ruffled white blouse with a black vest and slacks that do not quite mesh together at the waist, leaving a distracting white gap.

And this has precisely what relevance to the deconstruction of megachurches?  Even the poor guy’s music is not immune from random swipes that mean nothing: “extremely loud Christian rock devoid of any remotely African-derived beat.”  Apparently, in her book, African influence is necessary for musical tastes to be legitimate.

You could forgive her if she were an equal-opportunity satirist.  She is not. people she agrees with get positive portraits. In looking for an anti-Seligman in psychology, she finds Barbara Held,

“a striking woman with long black hair and a quick sense of humor”

while poor Seligman of course is of course:

“a short, solid, bullet-headed man.”

Held might truly be brilliant, I don’t know. And Seligman I think deserves some of this criticism. That does not justify this sort of writing. From prejudiced use of ad hominems, to assumption of the moral high ground (infuriatingly, she assumes that only liberals — specifically her kind of liberal — can feel compassion, work to improve the environment and donate to charities), there are lots of annoyances. This is not an easy sort of writing to read.

So the short version is: there are deep flaws in the book and Ehrenreich’s thinking in general. Expect to do some work and exercise some restraint and self-discipline to extract value. Do not rush to judge her or the book, as she has rushed to judge you. There is still a major and important idea here, one that deserves attention.  Don’t ignore the message because the messenger is not perfect.

Once every four or five years, I find a book that is a genuine life-changer. Impro by Keith Johnstone joins my extremely short list of such books. The book crossed my radar after two readers mentioned it, in reactions to the Gervais Principle series: Kevin Simler recommended the book in an email, and a reader with the handle angelbob mentioned it in the discussion around GP II on Hacker News. Impro is ostensibly a book about improvisation and the theater. Depending on where you are coming from, it might be no more than that, or it might be a near-religious experience.

The Alien Soulmate

In Your Evil Twins and How to Find Them, I defined an evil twin as “somebody who thinks exactly like you in most ways, but differs in just a few critical ways that end up making all the difference.”  I listed Alain de Botton and Nicholas Nassim Taleb among my evil twins.  Johnstone has defined for me a category that I didn’t know existed, “alien soulmate”: someone whose life has been shaped by radically different life experiences, and thinks with a completely different conceptual language, but is like you in just a few critical ways that make you soulmates.

Johnstone’s life (described in the opening chapter, “Notes on Myself”) seems to have been shaped by extremely unpleasant early educational experiences. Mine has been shaped largely by rewarding ones.  He loves teaching and is clearly unbelievably good at it; the sort of teacher who changes lives. I dislike teaching, and though I’ve done a fair amount of it, I am not particularly good at it. His life revolves around theater, while mine revolves around engineering, which are about as far apart as professions can get. I could go on, but you get it. Polar opposites on paper.

We seem to share two critical similarities. First, like me, he seems to stubbornly think things through for himself, with reference to his own observations of the world, even if it means clumsily reinventing the wheel and making horrible mistakes. Second, like me, he seems to adopt methodological anarchy in groping for truths. Anything goes, if it gets you to a valuable insight; no religious adherence to any particular methodology, scientific or otherwise.

There is also a connection that may or may not be important: I was active in theater for about a decade, from sixth grade through college.  In school, I was mostly the go-to guy for scripting class productions, and in college I expanded my activities to acting and directing. I even won a couple of inter-hostel (intramural to you Americans) acting prizes, and was the dramatics secretary for my hostel for a year. Not that that means much. It was pretty much a case of the one-eyed man being king in the land of the blind. Engineering schools are not known for producing eventual movie stars.

But though I was pretty much a talentless hack among other talentless hacks, in retrospect, my experience with amateur theater did profoundly shape how I think. I suppose that’s why I resonated strongly with Impro.

I am pretty sure though, that experience with theater is not necessary for the book to have a deep impact on you. It seems to have attained a cult status with a wide audience that extends well beyond the theater community, so if you like this blog, you will probably like the book.

The Book

The book, first published in 1981, is a collection of loosely-connected essays on various aspects of improvisational theater. The essays are not philosophical (which is why their philosophical impact is so startling). They are about very specific details of stagecraft. There are exercises designed to teach particular skills, acting tips, short explanations motivating the descriptions of the exercises, and insider references to famous theater personalities (the only name I recognized among all the references was Stanislavsky, he of the Method School). This is what makes the non-theater reader feel so pleasantly blindsided. You shouldn’t be getting epiphanies about life, death and the universe while reading about how to put on a mask or strike a pose. But more on that later, here’s a quick survey of the contents.

Chapter 1, Notes on Myself, begins with an exercise designed to get you seeing the world differently. Literally. The exercise is to simply walk around looking at things and shouting out the wrong names for things you see (for example, look at your couch and yell “apple”). The effect he asserts, of doing this for a minutes, is that everything seems to come alive and acquire the intensity it held for you when you were a child. Try it for a bit. It works, though I did not experience as much intensifying as he claims his students typically experience. After that unsettling start, we get a short and unsentimental, yet poignant and intimate, autobiographical sketch of  his early educational experiences.  The descriptions of the experiences are accompanied by deft insights into the nature of education . This chapter includes the philosophical premise of the book, that adults are atrophied children, and that traditional education accelerates rather than slows this process of atrophy. But the point is not made with any sort of political intent. It is simply presented as a useful perspective from which to view what he has to say, and why theater training has the effects it does.

Chapter 2, Status, is particularly spectacular, and the most accessible chapter in the book. It is based on the idea that the only thing you really need to do, in preparing  to improvise a scene, is to decide what status to play, high or low, in relation to the other actors on stage. Through a series of explanations and descriptions of startlingly original exercises, Johnstone illustrates the working of status dynamics in interpersonal interactions. One that I found both enlightening and hilarious was this: you have a completely boring, everyday conversation with your improv partner, but include an insult in every line you make up.  Here’s one of his example fragments:

‘Can I help you, fool?’

‘Yes, Bugeyes!’

‘Do you want a hat, slut?’

I’ve done just enough theater to be able to visualize this clearly, but I suspect, even if you have no experience with theater, you can imagine how this strange exercise can turn quickly into drama that helps you understand status. There are other surgically precise exercises that are designed to teach how personal space relates to status, and how master-servant dynamics play out. One true Aha! moment for me was a throwaway remark on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which I saw in New York last fall. I knew of the play by reputation of course, but I had no idea what to expect, and whether I would ‘get it.’ I only ‘got’ it at a fairly superficial level, but enjoyed it immensely nevertheless, for reasons that I did not understand. Yet, others in the audience seemed to not get it at all, to the point of being bored.

Impro completely explained the play for me. The play’s appeal lies in the fact that it is a showcase for status dynamics.  The four characters, Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky, perform what amounts to a status opera. Though a good deal of the content is nonsensical, the status interactions are not.

Chapter 3, Spontaneity, describes exercises and acting principles that seem like they would take you perilously close to madness if you tried them unsupervised. Having had a lifelong preference for learning by myself rather than listening to teachers, I don’t often tell myself, “this material needs a teacher.” So that should give you an idea of just how unusual this is likely to be for most people.  Johnstone recognizes this, and he notes that the work described in this chapter is closer to intensive therapy than to learning a skill. In fact, it sounds like it would be more intense and more effective than therapy (therapy being, like teaching, yet another process that I don’t trust to others). I am surprised nobody has invented theater-therapy. Actually, I take that back. I once knew a girl who did “prison theater.” I never understood the point of that. Now I do. Done right, I suspect prison theater could lower rates of recidivism. Maybe there are other examples of theater as therapy.

Chapter 4, Narrative Skills, is close to the best fiction-writing advice I’ve ever read, probably second only to Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer (also recommended by a regular reader, Navin Kabra).  The material in this chapter actually got me curious enough that I put down the book and tried out one of the exercises right then. At the time, I happened to be on a long flight from DC to Tokyo (on my way to Bali), so I actually sat there for an hour with my eyes closed, thinking up a story, and then spent another hour scribbling like crazy, writing it down. I came up with probably the best plot outline of my life. I might actually flesh it out and post it here at some point (I dabbled in fiction a fair amount about a decade ago, but somehow never pursued it very far).

Chapter 5, Masks and Trance, is easily the most intense, disturbing and rewarding chapter. The subject is acting with masks on, a stylized sort of theater that seems to have been part of every culture, during every time period, until “enlightenment” values began stamping it out. Since I had just returned from Bali when I read this chapter (examples from Bali feature prominently book’s treatment), and seen glimpses of what he was talking about during my trip, the material came alive in particularly vivid ways. The chapter deals, with easy familiarity, with topics that would make most of us very uncomfortable: trances, possession and atavistic archetypes. Yet, despite the disturbing raw material, the ideas and concepts are not particularly difficult to grasp and accept. They make sense.

The Book, Take Two

So much for the straightforward summary of the book. That it teaches theater skills effectively should not be surprising. What is surprising is the light it sheds on a variety of other topics. Here are just a few:

1. Body Language: I’ve always found ‘body language’ a somewhat distasteful subject, whether it is of the traditional “covering your mouth means you think the other person is lying”  variety, or  neurolinguistic programming, or the latest craze, the study of microexpressions. Despite the apparent validity of specific insights, the field has always seemed to me intellectually disreputable and shoddy.  Impro does something I didn’t think was possible: it lends the subject dignity and intellectual respectability. The trick, with hindsight, is to view the ideas in the field in the context of art, not psychology.
2. Interpersonal Relationships: I spend a good deal of time thinking about the principles of interpersonal interaction, and writing up my thoughts. The reason Impro sheds a unique sort of light on the subject is that it describes simulations of what-if scenarios that would never happen in real life, but serve to validate theories that do apply to real-life situations.
3. Psychology: Elsewhere in recent posts, I’ve recommended the classic books on transactional analysis (TA), Eric Berne’s Games People Play and What Do You Say after You Say Hello and Thomas Harris’ I’m OK–You’re OK. I’ve always felt though, that TA, while useful as an analytical framework, isn’t very helpful if you are trying to figure out what to do. Impro is pretty much the “how to” manual for TA, and it works through a sort of experimental reductio ad absurdum. There is no better way to recognize the stupidity of game playing than to act out (or at least think out) game scripts in exaggerated forms.

You’ll probably find insights into other subjects if you look harder. I suspect the reason there is so much to learn from the practice of theater is that the humanities and social sciences lack a strong culture of experimentation. Theater is, in a sense, the true laboratory for the humanities and social sciences.

I’ll finish up with one thought. I explain the tagline of this blog, “experiments in refactored perception” as geekspeak for “seeing the world differently.” If you ignore the theater-manual aspect, that pretty much describes the book: it is a textbook that teaches you how to see the world differently.

At the heart of Dan Pink’s new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is an insight that makes you want to yell in frustration at perversely obtuse academic worlds that marginalize seminal clarifications of the blindingly obvious: trying to motivate creative work with carrots and sticks backfires. As the book notes, this truth has been known to folk wisdom at least since Mark Twain wrote the famous fence-whitewashing episode in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Apparently — and I did not know this — this folk insight has been repeatedly validated by the discipline of psychology since 1949, when the first clear evidence appeared in a serendipitous accidental experiment by Harry Harlow. Yet, mainstream psychology has systematically ignored and marginalized this line of research, even going to the dystopian extreme of firing those intellectually honest enough to pursue the work anyway.

The major contribution of Drive is in elevating what ought to be a basic axiom of business from the level of Twain-ian (and Drucker-ian) opinion, to the level of scientific, not-optional, fact. The “Aha!” element of the book isn’t this bald fact (which isn’t surprising in isolation), but in pointing out the gap between “what science knows and what business does.”  The marginal status of the body of research in psychology is no excuse: major business thinkers from Drucker onwards have been saying the same thing for decades. Yet, nearly all businesses run on carrot-and-stick motivational architectures.

The Big Idea

The book contains a pretty comprehensive overview of the entire body of work in psychology underlying the insight, starting with Harlow’s experiments with monkeys in 1949 to hot-off-the-presses work by Theresa Amabile of Harvard. Here is perhaps the most accessible result, which you may have seen before, that builds on the “candle experiment” devised by Karl Duncker in 1945 (Wikipedia says 1945, the book says “1930s” and I am not sure which is correct). In the original experiment, given a box with some thumbtacks, matches and a candle, you have to figure out how to attach the candle to the wall.

The solution is to tack the empty thumbtack box to the wall and use it as a stand.  People find it difficult because they have to overcome “functional fixedness”: seeing the box only as “container of tacks” which blinds them to its use as a “potential candleholder.” I suspect, even when you do see the possibility, you might hesitate out of undue deference to authority and the idea that you aren’t “allowed” to use the box that way. Subjects solve the problem much faster if presented with the same raw material, but with the tacks outside the box.

Functional fixedness, interesting though it is in its own right, isn’t the point. The point in Drive is made by further experiments by Sam Glucksberg of Princeton, on what motivational schemes do to solution times. The unambiguous result is this: adding cash incentives results in the subjects taking, on average, three and a half minutes longer to “see” the solution. This perverse effect goes away if you redesign the problem to be routine/mechanical instead of requiring creativity (by taking the tacks out of the box). Carrots and sticks do work for more mechanical tasks (Pink distinguishes between the two types of problems with the labels “algorithmic” and “heuristic” but I think these are problematic, not least because there are such things as algorithms that run on heuristics. The looser labels “mechanical” and “creative” are probably safer).

That’s the big idea. Pink cites dozens of other experiments and variations that validate and build on the same basic point: creativity is killed by carrots and sticks.

The Book

The book itself has two agendas: to describe and drive home the Big Idea and its implications, and to start a conversation about the “gap between what science knows and what businesses do.”

Part I starts by covering the story of the research, including bits from behavioral economics for those of you who like that stuff.  This section alone is probably worth the price of the book.

Next, we get a speculative list of reasons why carrots and sticks don’t work for creative work. The book calls this list the “Seven Deadly Flaws”

1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation
2. They can diminish performance
3. They can crush creativity
4. They can crowd out good behavior
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior
6. They can become addictive
7. They can foster short-term thinking

I was a bit disappointed by this, since it is essentially a restatement, with different words, of the empirical results. It isn’t an analysis or an exploration of more fundamental causality.  Part I then moves on to a short discussion of special circumstances when carrots and sticks do work (no surprises there: algorithmic work, the mainstay of industrial organization). Part I concludes with a riff on Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y, and is titled “Type X and Type I” (for intrinsic), and is based on an approach to motivational psychology called “self-determination theory” developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. This chapter is solid.

Part II is an attempt at generalization and broader synthesis, and draws on, among other things, the work on flow by positive psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi which you are probably familiar with, if you read this sort of nonfiction. The generalization offers up a framework based on “Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.” There is a good deal of discussion of recent management ideas like the “Results Only Work Environment” (ROWE) pioneered at Best Buy. This material is largely skimmable if you’ve been keeping up with recent 2.0-flavored management literature and are familiar with positive psychology. If not, the review is workmanlike and will get you up to speed.

Part III is the “conversation starter” material for wannabe evangelists and management change-agents. The section is not intended for smooth, enjoyable reading, but for reference and as cut-and-paste fodder. There are plenty of lists, including a list of six business thinkers who “get it” (not surprisingly, the list contains Douglas “Theory X and Theory Y” McGregor, Drucker, Jim Collins, Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson (ROWE) and Gary Hamel), and another list of 15 fifteen essential business books. There is a quick recap, a glossary, and something called a “Drive Discussion Guide” with 20 conversation starters. The material will likely be useful to those who intend to use this book to launch yet another attack on Management 1.0. Dan Pink is certainly among the leading innovators when it comes to rethinking the book as merely the anchor element in a whole multimedia production that includes Twitter, Facebook, videos (there is a TED video) word-of-mouth evangelists, and a business-social agenda.

But Part III is likely to annoy those who have no intention of becoming evangelists, don’t want to “start conversations” about the idea, and like their books to be books. My advice: if that’s you, just ignore Part III entirely.  In fact, Part III could have been entirely removed from the book and put on an online-only “extras” Web site. Readers smart enough to be reading books like this don’t really need dead-trees versions of material that naturally lends itself better to online organization, and is meant for cut-and-paste use.

The Road Not Taken

I do wish though, that the book had dived into the why more deeply. The “Seven Deadly Flaws,” like I said, are merely a succinct restatement of the empirical results. They do not constitute an analysis. Neither does the SDT idea (which seems vaguely like Maslow in a new package). The book moves a little too rapidly from diagnosis to prescription. The prescription is based on an extrapolation from “carrots and sticks are bad” to “goals are bad,” a stronger assertion that I happen to agree with. But the incomplete diagnosis leads to problems at this point: we get a prescription based on the idea of “purpose,” a close cousin of “goal” which I don’t think gets us anywhere. Purposes are merely somewhat softer and more abstract goals that sound more lofty and noble and suggest a hint of religion (as in the Christian bestseller, “The Purpose-Driven Life”). It’s just holy carrots and sticks or “mission statements” and “values.”

The more promising path is actually indicated but sadly, not pursued very far in the book: the key words here are “intrinsic drive.”  I think this intrinsic drive, far from being about lofty things like purposes, is about a very childish quality: playful restlessness (which Pink does talk about briefly, using his own kids as examples). In its natural form, this results in random pleasurable behavior that merely lets out energy, and is driven by immediate, uncensored reactions to sensory stimuli (what we call “curiosity”). Play is fun because the behavior itself is fun, regardless of what, if anything, it achieves (ever seen a child just skipping around in circles yelling “Whee!”?). Play is possible because play environments are built to be safe (no sticks).

My theory is that adult drive is nothing more than comprehensively hooked childish curiosity that has led play down an interesting rabbit hole (or a virtuous spiral), so we end up putting in 10,000 hours of Ericssonian deliberate practice and turning into driven adults, passionate about chemistry or steam engines or whatever.  This argument is present in the book, but buried and lost among many other narrative threads. It should have been front-and-center.

Coincidentally, Dan’s social-media publicist, Jeremy Epstein, sent me a link to a great article making precisely this point: that to be innovative, you have to think like a 4-year old at some level.

This is a rich vein worth exploring deeply. I have a good many thoughts of my own in this direction, but I’ll leave those for another day.

The Evolution of Dan Pink

I’ve kept up an occasional email exchange with Dan over the past 6-7 years, mainly because, through a curious coincidence, I’ve been thinking about many of the same things at the same time. I recently met him in person for the first time during a Drive event at a DC bookstore.

I’ve reviewed his earlier books Johnny Bunko (JB) and A Whole New Mind (AWNM), and his first book, Free Agent Nation, not only motivated a lot of writing on this site, but actually motivated a technology project I started at work (on next-generation crowdsourcing/marketplace platforms). I routinely cite FAN in presentations for that project. Drive explores a topic that I have also explored quite a bit (see for instance, my post Theory W, Theory X and Theory Y).

If you are hearing about his work for the first time, you might find this Dan Pink trail useful. Besides his books, his website is well worth following. One of the threads on his blog that I enjoy the most (in fact I was hoping that would be his next book) is on emotionally-intelligent signage.  Here’s a pecha-kucha presentation he did on the topic (20 slides, 20 seconds each, 6 minutes, 40 seconds total).

I recommend all of Dan’s writing, but not because I agree with it completely. I don’t,  and in many ways I am philosophically his evil twin, since I approach many of the same ideas with a more tragic stance and a cynical outlook. I could never work up the enthusiasm and energy he does, in linking his writing to a positive social change agenda.

Dan’s writing is important because it is honest, which is quite a rarity in this genre. As it builds on itself, it self-corrects. If FAN, for instance, over-stated the case for free agents, Johnny Bunko corrected that by exploring how life within large corporations could be satisfying as well (hint, become a sociopath, to use my own darker language). FAN had the seeds of a weakness for form and style over content, and AWNM went a little overboard with high-concept design, but then again, with Johnny Bunko, a nice balance was struck between form and content (in fact, thanks to the comic-book medium, the distinction vanished).

Drive, in some ways, represents a full-circle return to a start-of-journey FAN-like voice. The approach is cautious and tentative. The book is unusually deferential towards the authorities it cites, compared to the previous books, and errs on the side of praise and inclusion rather than exclusion. Though there is, like I said, a too-quick move to prescription, the focus is, rightly, on starting a conversation rather than defending definitive-sounding answers.

Not to be mean, but unlike a certain other famous zeitgeist-leading-pop-social-psychology writer whose last name starts with G and ends with ladwell, Pink never deliberately mangles ideas and facts in the service of an overweening high concept, or assumes a voice of authority where even the experts admit to uncertainties. Unlike Gladwell, whose ideas (always intriguing and thought-provoking) I naturally distrust, and routinely re-analyze for myself, I find myself generally trusting Dan’s ideas out of the box. The assumption of best faith is far easier to make.

So go ahead and read his stuff. You may occasionally be annoyed by the change-the-world agenda, but you’ll get your money’s worth and find yourself going down lots of interesting paths.

As some of you know, I occasionally (very occasionally in recent times) guest post over at the Enterprise 2.0 blog. I just posted a combo-pack review of two recent books there: Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 and Fraser/Dutta’s Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom.

Click on over and read. There are also a few links scattered in the piece, to my older E 2.0 theme articles. At some point I’ll make an E2.0 trail, but for now, you might also enjoy this trail on the “Enterprise 2.0: What A Crock” debate that has recently been brewing (start reading or go to the Trail Map)

I’ll be out on vacation for the next couple of weeks, so I won’t be posting new material till January. If I have time, I might set up a couple of “rerun” posts on older popular pieces before I leave.

Happy Holidays!

Recently a reader emailed me a note: “I just wanted to bring to your radar ‘the pleasures and sorrows of work’ by Alain de Botton, and what you thought of its theses.” Now de Botton (The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, The Consolations of Philosophy, How Proust Can Change Your Life) has been on my radar for a while. I had browsed his books at Barnes and Noble a few times, but always put them down due to strange, sick feelings in my stomach. Thanks to this reader’s gentle nudge, I finally caved and read the first of the three, and managed to figure out why de Botton’s books had made me viscerally uncomfortable at first glance: he is my evil twin. An evil twin is defined as somebody who thinks exactly like you in most ways, but differs in just a few critical ways that end up making all the difference. Think the Batman and the Joker. Here’s why evil twins matter, and how to discover yours.

Why Evil Twins Matter

In the closing scene of Batman Begins, Commissioner Gordon tells the Batman that a new villain is abroad who has “a taste for theatrics, like you” and shows him the Joker’s calling card. The premise of the evil twin setup plays out in the sequel, the  The Dark Night. Towards the end, Heath Ledger’s disturbing Joker elaborates on the logic: “I wouldn’t kill you! What would I do without you? …You complete me.”

Comic book universes provide plenty of examples of this fundamental idea, that your nemesis is not a polar opposite, but an eerily similar person who is just different in a few subtle but critical ways.  Some narratives in fact present the nemesis as a polarity within one character, as in the Jekyll and Hyde model and more recently, the Hulk.

If you think about it, this makes sense. Your nemesis has to be interested in the same things as you, operate in the same areas, and think and act at levels of sophistication similar to yours. Polar opposites would live lives that would likely not even intersect. List the 10 most important elements of your social (not private) identity. In my case for instance, they might be PhD, researcher, omnivorous reader, writer, individualist, polymath-wannabe, coffee-shop person, non-athletic, physically lazy, amoral, atheistic and so forth. If you turned them all around, you’d get something like high-school drop-out, non-reader, groupie, parochial, pub person, sportsy, physically active, moral and religious. I am no snob, but it is highly unlikely that I’d have much to do with somebody with that profile.

On the other hand, if you meet somebody to whom every adjective applies, but they rub you the wrong way at a deep level, what are you to conclude? The clash has to be at the most subtle levels of your personality. Meeting your evil twin helps you find yourself, which is why you should look. Of course, I am being somewhat facetious here. You don’t have to hate your evil twin or battle him/her to the death. You can actually get along fine and even complement each other in a yin-yang way.

de Botton, Taleb and Me

Take Alain de Botton for instance. Despite my “evil twin” adjective, I think I’d like him a lot and get along with him quite well. No climactic battles. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is just beautiful as a book. As you know if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, I write a lot on the philosophy of work. The book literally produced dozens of thoughts and associations in my head on every page. Since I was reading it on the Kindle, I was annotating and highlighting like crazy. We think about the same things. He opens with a pensive essay on container shipping logistics, something I’ve written about. The Shawshank Redemption with its accountant hero is one of my favorite movies; de Botton finds romance in the profession as well. I’ve written about ship-breaking graveyards, he writes about airplane graveyards. He seems fascinated by aerospace stuff. I am an aerospace engineer. He sees more romance in a biscuit factory than in grand cathedrals. So do I. Like me (only more successfully) he shoots for an introspective, lyrical style. But as I continued reading, I realized I was intellectually a little too close to the guy.

When I tried putting my notes all together, the feelings of discomfort only intensified. There was no coherent pattern to my responses. I realized that, in a way, you can only build one picture at a time with a given set of jigsaw pieces. Writers normally leave enough room for you to construct meaning so you feel a sense of control over the reading experience. With evil twins, that’s not possible, since you are trying to build different pictures. I felt absorbed in the book, but also confused and disoriented by it.

Thinking harder, I realized that the points of conflict in our worldviews were at a very abstract level indeed. In a deep sense, de Botton’s worldview is that of an observer. Mine, though I do observe and write a lot, is primarily that of a get-in-the-fray doer. He is content to watch. I feel compelled to engage. He admires engineers and engineering; I felt compelled to become one and get involved in building stuff. It is a being-vs.-becoming dynamic.To a certain extent, he is driven by needs of an almost religious nature: to overcome his sense of separateness and be part of something larger than himself. My primary instinct is to separate myself. It is a happiness vs. will-to-power dynamic. One last example. de Botton is clearly a humanist: he wants to be kind and feel for others, and paradoxically, ends up being quite cruel in places. I, on the other hand, am mainly driven by a deep ubermensch tendency towards hard/cold interpersonal attitudes, but end up surprising myself by being kind and compassionate more often, in practice. Kind cruelty vs. tough love. I could go on.

Another of my evil twins is Nicholas Nassim Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan). I am re-reading the latter at the moment, and I noticed that Taleb describes himself as a flaneur. In the comments to my piece, Is there a Cloudworker Culture? a reader noted that my self-description as a cloudworker sounded a lot like the idea of a flaneur. Again, a lot of the exact same things interest us, and we share opinions on a lot of key fronts (the nature of mathematics, empiricism and falsifiability, unapologetic elitist tastes, long-windedness, low tolerance for idiots and the accidentally wealthy, a preference for reading books rather than the news). And again, we part ways at a deep level. That’s a story for another day.

So before we move on to the How-To section, a recommendation. If you feel strangely attracted to my writing, and yet rebel against it at some deep level, you might really (and unreservedly) love de Botton and/or Taleb. I am too close to their thinking to do justice to them with book reviews, but you should read them. If the books help you clarify who you are, and you end up dropping ribbonfarm from your reading list, I’ll consider it my good deed for the day.

How to Find Your Evil Twin

In my case, my evil twins mostly turn out to be writers I’ve never met. Sometimes dead writers. That’s because so much of my life revolves around books and ideas. I suspect most people have a pretty good chance of actually meeting and getting to know their evil twins.

The key things to look for are the following:

1. You share a lot of interests, down to very specific details like books read, places visited, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds (though oddly enough, not race or ethnicity).
2. Your thinking levels are similar, and your conceptual categories for viewing the world are similar
3. You try to act in the world in very similar ways; you choose similar means and ends
4. You reach similar conclusions about what is, what ought to be, what you should do and how
5. If you ever meet them in person, you instantly resonate with them

That sounds like “soulmate” right? Now for the differential that will discriminate between soulmate and evil twin:

1. If you are straight, they are the same gender as you. If you are gay, I don’t know.
2. You lean in different directions on key philosophical tradeoffs. For example, if you both believe “truth vs. kindness” is a fundamental tradeoff, you lean towards truth, while he/she leans towards kindness.
3. On the important question of attitude towards others, you are clearly different. You want different things from other people and the world at large.

So go, look for your evil twin. You will be enlightened by what you find. If you already know who yours are, I am curious. Post a comment (suitably anonymized if necessary).

Last fall, I spent a long weekend in the Outer Banks region, a few hours south of Washington, DC, reading a collection of Agatha Christie pastiches called Malice Domestic, Volume 1 (now the title of an annual mystery  conference). The summer tourist season was over, and the hordes had moved on to Maine and Vermont to chase the Fall colors. The days were gray, windy, rainy and chilly.  The beach front properties had mostly emptied out, and most of the summer attractions were closed. We had a large three-level beach front house to ourselves, with a porch facing the troubled, ominous sea.

The ocean view from our hotel at Cape Hatteras, Outer Banks

Perfect conditions for bundling up in a blanket with a cup of hot cocoa and a mystery. Reading Malice Domestic was a revelation. None of the included writers even came close to creating Christie-like magic. Which led me to wonder: does Poirot endure because he represents certain truths about how to think effectively, which lesser fictional detectives lack? I think so.

The Poirot Doctrine

I learned from the varied failures in Malice Domestic that  period settings, isolated cozy contexts (such as locked libraries) and quirky detective personalities are not necessary, let alone sufficient, for an effective mystery story. Neither is parlor-trick deductive rationality of the Holmes variety.

What makes Poirot endure is his capacity for what I call narrative rationality (the title of a chapter of the book I am writing): the ability to understand and influence a situation through stories. What saves the quirks of his character (such as his penchant for “merely arranging facts,” borderline obsessive-compulsive fastidiousness and sybarite comfort-seeking) from seeming arbitrary is that they integrate seamlessly and logically into his thinking style.

One element of narrative rationality is particularly important in Poirot’s style, the fact that it is strongly driven by a doctrine, a set of beliefs about how the world works and should work.  Poirot’s doctrine constrains and defines his narrative imagination, which helps drive the plot.

Poirot’s doctrine comprises several sorts of right-brained, left-brained and moral beliefs that allow him to quickly get beyond a myopic Holmesian preoccupation with footprints and cigarette ash. He can therefore think more effectively at higher levels of abstraction and ambiguity. Sure, as a literary creation, Poirot is rather crude, and yes, the contrived nature of his cases can make his thinking style itself seem contrived. Still, his thought processes, unlike those of Sherlock Holmes say, are surprisingly useful as a model for us non-fictional humans in the real world.

Poirot’s psychological doctrine in particular, is a robustly intelligent one, based on subtle ideas about human behavior and skepticism of  jargon-happy Freudian-technical theorizing. An example is the assertion he offers (I forget in which novel): “women are sometimes tender, but they are never kind.“ I forget how Poirot uses the idea in his reasoning, but I remember immediately feeling a great sense of clarity and relief when I read it. It is a personality heuristic — one that I find to be true — that requires the vocabulary of a storyteller rather than that of the theorist or experimentalist, and proves powerful in reasoning about human (in this case, female) behavior.

This is a right-brained sort of doctrinal element, one that enables him to recognize patterns. But Poirot can go left-brained as well. For instance, at one point he explains his bachelorhood to Captain Hastings as follows: “In my experience, I know of five cases of wives being murdered by their devoted husbands. And twenty-two husbands being murdered by their devoted wives. So thank you, no. Marriage, it is not for me.” Poirot is a Bayesian rationalist: he applies the spouse-as-prime-suspect principle frequently in stories. In fact it is so likely that a husband or wife will turn out to be the murderer in a Christie novel that she has to expend much of her ingenuity in muddying marital equations.

Poirot’s Moral-Philosophical Universe

But even right and left-brained tendencies do not add up to whole-brained narrative rationality. This is where Poirot truly rises above other fictional detectives: there is a moral-philosophical dimension to his thinking that is at once fatalistic (“people do not change”) and normative. Though he is Catholic, his views are actually closer to the Protestant doctrine of predestination, and the Poirot plots are, as a consequence often Greek-tragic in their inevitability (Death on the Nile is a good example). His most frequent normative doctrinal utterance is probably “I do not approve of murder.” The line usually appears after Poirot has provided a nuanced and sympathetic exposition of the motives and actions of all concerned, and it seems like he has practically justified the murderer’s actions. But once he presents his compelling theory of the case, he draws his line in the sand. Unlike the non-fictional francophone,  Madame de Stael, who is credited with the quote “to understand all is to forgive all” (“Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent”), Poirot never allows the murkiness of psychology to cloud his moral vision, thereby saving the Poirot stories from the tedious and self-absorbed agonies of many modern fictional detectives.

Poirot’s moral philosophy mostly seems to be inherited from Christie herself — Poirot, like Christie, is a religious conservative who is deeply suspicious of socialist save-the-world tendencies. Curiously, some of his moral strengths seem to arise from Christie’s subconscious awareness of, and overcompensation for, her own moral flaws. Christie herself is blatantly xenophobic and racist (see Hickory Dickory Dock for instance). Poirot began his career in The Mysterious Affair at Styles like any other xenophobia-inspired Christie caricature, full of ridiculous, unreconstructed Latin pomposity. But he evolves through later novels into an ironically self-aware egoist. By the time of his death in Curtain, he has evolved in ways that the English, with their misguided sense of modesty and self-deprecation, never can.

To the extent that the moral elements of Poirot’s doctrine represent philosophical truths, they simplify his detective work and allow him to drive events towards decisive outcomes. This again, is an element of his thinking style that I find useful in the real world: keep your psychology complex, but your morality simple. Otherwise you’ll never get anything done.

There is one last element in Poirot’s doctrine: the recognition and exploitation of the flaws of others’ doctrines. The best known exploit, of course, is his tendency to exaggerate his foreignness and play on the xenophobic prejudices and assumptions of civilizational superiority on the part of the English characters (who always seem to describe him with archaic words like mountebank and jackanapes). The key moment of redemption in a Poirot novel, the one that anchors the reader’s identification with him, is when a shrewd English character calls Poirot out on his charade, at which point he can assume his fully-realized character. But this is not just a recurring motif of exposition and identification in the Poirot canon. The very point of a Poirot novel is to validate and reinforce the superiority of Poirot’s doctrine over lesser doctrines. The moment of truth is not really the revelation of the murderer, but the point in the story at which it becomes clear that Poirot’s world view provides the best perspective with which to make moral sense of the plot. The solution to the murder validates the doctrine.

The whole-brained Poirot doctrine — right-brained, left-brained and moral — allows him to reason around more ambiguous situations than any other fictional detective. The integrated unit of thought in Poirot-style thinking is the story. He urges witnesses to talk freely, speculate, and tell their story as they please, correctly understanding that people think, remember and talk (whether they are lying or telling the truth) through narratives. His own theories in turn, take the form of evolving stories, which he continually tests for both psychological and empirical plausibility. Though he has the dramatic imagination of a playwright, he never loses sight of the distinction between bald facts and the accounts of those facts; he never hesitates to kill beautiful theories if they fail to account for  even a single trivial observation or psychological implausibility. And of course, like any good fictional detective, the significance he assigns to specific facts in his stories is often very different from the significance attributed to them by his witnesses in their stories. Poirot stories are really stories about stories.

Christie frequently highlights the complexities of Poirot’s thought processes by juxtaposing them against those of other characters, who operate by simpler doctrines. Compared to the lurid and sensationalist imagination of Captain Hastings and the damn-the-facts fantasies of Ariadne Oliver, Poirot’s own theories of the case can appear very prosaic. On the other hand, the lack of imagination of Inspector Japp and Miss Lemon can make Poirot seem like Shakespeare. Again, this is not to say that Poirot is not capable of fantastic imagination when the situation warrants it, as it does in Murder on the Orient Express. When the facts justify bold leaps of faith, Poirot leaps.

Beyond Poirot

Perhaps I am backward-looking, but to my mind, Poirot has never been topped in the annals of fictional detection. Christie’s other creations can mostly be dismissed. Tommy and Tuppence are the worst secret agent characters ever, Parker Pyne is a bore and Superintendent Battle rarely does anything except look enigmatic while others solve the crime. Even Miss Marple is pretty much a one-trick right-brained pony. Her stock-in-trade is identifying similarities in personality patterns across widely disparate social situations (an urbane Duke in London might remind her of Tommy The Butcher’s Boy). The entire holographic Marple universe is based on the dubious one-element doctrine, people are much the same everywhere, which allows for specious extrapolations of the social psychology of St. Mary’s Mead to the rest of the world.

Within the Christie universe, only the mysterious Mr. Quin is something of a match for Poirot, when it comes to doctrine-driven detection. In many ways, thanks to being partly a supernatural-allegorical construct, Mr. Quin is often more sublime than Poirot. If you haven’t read the Mr. Quin books (there are only a few), you should.

Among fictional detectives who have appeared since Poirot (at least the ones I’ve read/watched on TV), only  Dr. House, solver of medical mysteries, comes close. Though nominally a Holmes-inspired character (the show is full of insider Holmes references), the character of House is much closer to that of Poirot, once you discard the superficial Holmes connections. Like Poirot, House is an ironic-doctrinaire mix of right-brained intuition, left-brained statistical skepticism, and a complex-but-black-and-white moral compass. The fact that most of us understand absolutely nothing of the medical jargon in the show underlines the fact that House’s appeal lies at a doctrinal level.

The Short Version

Trust your right-brained pattern-spotting. Be a skeptical, data-driven empiricist. Add a moral compass. Tie it all together with storytelling. Be aware of, and exploit, the flawed doctrines of others. Do not be concerned about the morality of this: doctrinal flaws provide the moral justification for their own exploitation.

To most of us, the oceans are about romance, not shipping logistics. Violent thirty-foot waves and gripping piracy tales are conspicuously missing from The Box, the first shipping-themed book I reviewed. While that story (see my post the epic story of container shipping) had all the passion and high drama of a business thriller, it was essentially a human and technology story. The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime tells a parallel tale, one focusing on the realities of the oceans themselves . There are plenty of waves and pirates here, and this is easily the most absorbing maritime-themed book I’ve read since Treasure Island, which is saying a lot, since it is non-fiction.

The "Alondra Rainbow", pirated and renamed "Mega Rama" (picture from Indian Coast Guard site)

Old Mankind and the Sea

Unlike deep space, the oceans seem just within reach of the grasping, civilizing instincts of humanity. On land, especially as consumers who can safely ignore the question of how their stuff gets to them from China, it can seem as if the oceans have been tamed by the Amazonian one-click. After all, we get our iPods and Wii consoles delivered pretty reliably, don’t we?

The good news for us romantic landlubbers is that despite steel hulls, GPS and diesel engines, the oceans remain untamed. The bad news is that despite steel hulls, GPS and diesel engines, the oceans remain untamed. As Katrina reminded us, the oceans can still take a casually violent swipe at us and wreak havoc. The reliability of modern shipping does not imply that we have domesticated the oceans. The big and believable suggestion in the book is that we never will.

Langewiesche’s is a near-flawless modern, global voice. I bought the book because I was enthralled by an extract in The Atlantic a few years ago.  The book tells the stories of a bewildering cast of characters: Eastern European captains, Pakistani crews, Malaysian pirates, Indian shipbreaking yards, bleeding-heart European Greenpeace activists, and Alaskan oil-spill investigators. In less competent hands, this could have ended up as a sea-cowboy story for overgrown boys (think Deadliest Catch), a self-absorbed tale of human-scale tragedies (think Perfect Storm), an overwrought tale of environmentalism (think Whale Wars) or a random leftist screed about the exploitation of third world humans by Western mega-corporations.

Fortunately Langewiesche avoids all those temptations. With precise strokes, he first humanizes, and then dehumanizes, both first and third world nations and peoples, gently getting you to  focus on the grandeur of the oceans themselves. Whether he is forcing you to vicariously experience the chilling horror of being in a sinking ferry (the Estonia) in a violent Baltic storm, or presenting the farcical aftermath of the tragedy within the  byzantine world of European maritime politics, he brings a sort of ironic compassion to every story.

The raw material is almost too rich for a single book. There are oil spills and shipwrecks, the chaos of international “flags of convenience” and tales of  tradeoffs between avoiding expensive delays and foolhardy storm-defying navigation. There are pirates haunting the Straits of Malacca, terrorists and dirty bombs hiding in containers, and desperate navies and coast-guards trying hopelessly to catch them all. Above it all looms a single theme: the cluelessness of us landlubbers about the medieval anarchy that your Chinese-made iPod navigates, in the process of getting to you somewhere else on the planet. The people dealing with the oceans come across as the last true frontier folk, the last adults protecting the rest of us children from a universe that is far wilder than we think.

Though it is about modern shipping, the whole book has a timeless quality to it. You could be reading The Odyssey, the tales of Sinbad the Sailor or Treasure Island. A particularly eerie bit of timelessness is in the briefly-sketched story of the trial and execution, in China, of the pirates who hijacked the Cheung Son and murdered its crew in 1998:

On the way to the execution ground, a group of them, who were drunk on rice wine, defiantly sang, “Go, go, go! Ale, ale, ale!,” the chorus from a pop song called “Cup of Life.”

No wonder Eric Cartman went off to Somalia to become a modern-day pirate. My own fascination with the sea began when my dad introduced me to Treasure Island. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. Stevenson wrote that book in 1883. It wasn’t until after I turned thirty though, that I managed to experience the ocean first-hand, on a cruise to the Caribbean. It did not disappoint; the oceans lived up to all my romantic expectations, and even the crassness of cruise-ship buffets could not ruin it for me. There is nothing quite like being on the deck of a ship in the open ocean, out of sight of land.

Blue Planet

A series of stories of tragedies at sea forms the backbone narrative. The book opens with the story of a rusty tanker, on its last legs, the Kristal, making its way from India to Europe with a load of molasses, with a Ukranian captain and a Spanish-Pakistani crew. The Kristal broke in half in stormy seas and killed most of its crew, and this opening anecdote serves to shatter your notions of the the ocean as a benign place. The book then moves on to the Exxon Valdez and other tales of oil spills, and finally to a detailed telling of the story of the sinking of the passenger ferry, Estonia. There are other vignettes scattered throughout.

This is more than a collection of “exciting tales of the sea.”  A bigger picture emerges through the stories. We learn that there are really no governing authorities at sea, besides a near-toothless IMO working through obscure trans-national certification companies. We learn that ships mature and gradually get downcycled, as they age and rust. In the story of the Kristal, we are informed, as an aside, that molasses tends to be the sort of cargo carried by tankers on their last legs, since spills don’t cause much damage. In the oil spills section, we learn that European nations selfishly maneuver to direct oil spills to their neighbors’ shores.

The point of this wreck-to-wreck tale is not to focus on how unsafe ships can be. It is to highlight the fact that human technology is much flimsier than we think, when faced with an environment that routinely unleashes earthquake-level forces. The Titanic is not a tale of isolated hubris: the ocean still retains the capacity to destroy our best efforts at ship-building if we are not properly respectful. I found myself wondering: what would land technology be like if trucks and cars had to deal with roads that routinely bucked and swayed like demonically-possessed mountains?

This core narrative is about our fundamental limitations when it comes to dealing with the oceans. The logic of the other narratives flows from this basic one.

One key supporting story illustrates the failure of the human political imagination to really comprehend the oceans. This is the story of how we ended up with today’s bizarre state, which can contain a ship built in Japan flying the flag of Malta, owned by a holding company in Italy, but really owned by somebody else altogether, certified seaworthy by a French company, being captained by a Ukranian and crewed by Pakistanis. Far from being a situation of heartwarming  international cooperation,  it is a dangerous, nearly ungovernable, stateless mess. The most we’ve been able to extend the logic of landbound nation-states is twelve nautical miles, the extent of territorial waters, which are still too much for most navies and coastguards to deal with.

There are plenty of other themes, but I’ll highlight just two more, piracy and shipbreaking, since they highlight the limits of the idea of the nation state, and provide an unusual perspective on globalization.

Nation and Ocean

The piracy and ship-breaking stories in the book both involve India, which was particularly illuminating for me, since I have never thought about my identity as an Indian citizen being derived from my more basic identity as a land-based primate.  Barring the doings of one 11th century emperor, India itself has very little of note in its maritime history, compared to say, the European nations or Japan.  Despite its 7000 km coastline, India’s national self-perception is primarily a land-based and isolationist one. So the view from the oceans, which connect the world physically,  is rather unsettling.

Like the legal business of shipping, the structure of modern piracy too is the outcome of the confused stateless anarchy of the seas (unlike the older epoch of Caribbean piracy, much of which was state-sponsored).  The Straits of Malacca are where much of the action takes place  (not Somalia, as most Americans imagine). What makes piracy in this region so surprising is that it is a very narrow, massively busy seaway that would seem like the most civilized part of the oceans. Over 50,000 vessels pass through every year, through the 2.8 kilometer wide chokepoint near Singapore. All around are the industrialized and heavily populated shipping-dependent countries of South East Asia. This is as close as you can get to oceanic bumper-to-bumper highway traffic. Yet, pirates routinely vanish with entire ships, with millions of dollars worth of cargo.

The big piracy story in the book involves the Alondra Rainbow (the picture at the top of this article), which was hijacked in a carefully planned and coordinated attack by a group of Malaysian and Indonesian pirates in 1999, while carrying a cargo of aluminum ingots worth around $10 million. The ship vanished and the Filipino crew, along with their Japanese captain, were cast adrift in the Indian ocean (they were rescued).  The ship managed to transfer half of its booty to another ship, and then apparently got rechristened the Global Venture before fleeing across the Indian ocean, eluding searchers. Most such stories apparently end there, with a vanished ghost ship, but in this case the story had a non-ghostly ending.  It was spotted, sailing under the name Mega Rama, by the captain of a Kuwaiti freighter, the al-Shuhadaa, who alerted the nearest country, which happened to be India. The Indian coast guard patrol boat Tarabai responded and chased the ship down, and with the help of a Navy missile corvette, the Prahar, finally managed to arrest it as it was attempting to flee into Pakistani waters.

The Indian Navy and coast guard apparently had a good deal of fun with the exercise, and were rather proud of having actually caught a pirated vessel for once, and enjoyed quite a bit of media attention as they shepherded the stolen ship into Mumbai harbor. The Mumbai courts and police, however, were decidedly less happy about having a high-profile international piracy case being dropped into their already overburdened laps.

What followed was a piece of international silliness, as a country with no stake in the ship, crew, pirates or victims, ended up having to use taxpayer money to prosecute a complex precedent-setting piracy case. The case worked its way slowly through the Indian courts as the world figured out how to apply nation-state level laws to a crime that obviously transcended the very concept of a nation. Langewiesche reports a particularly revealing conversation with a Mumbai police officer, about why they were reluctant to accept the captured ship:

What would happen, he asked, if India convicted and imprisoned them, but after their release Indonesia refused to accept them?… “What did you conclude?” I asked. “That they would become stateless people.”  Then the problem for India, he said, would be where to send them. I suggested that they could be repatriated to their natural environment at sea. He smiled wanly.

The leading maritime attorney in India prosecuted the case pro bono, and easily outmaneuvered the poor public defender assigned to the pirates by the court. The pirates were found guilty, and imprisoned. They were mostly the underlings, not the kingpins, and some seemed to have no idea they’d been recruited into a piracy plot by a manning agent. The real culprits remained mysterious citizens of the oceans.

If this story puts the nations involved in the background and the ocean itself into the foreground, the next story, also involving India, is even weirder, and involves all the oceans of the world.

The center of the action here is Alang, the coastal city in Gujarat which is home to nearly half the shipbreaking trade in the world. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh among them handle nearly the entire international trade of scrapping old ships for steel, a dangerous business involving explosions, toxic chemicals and awful conditions. The trade ended up in the region over the course of half a century, as both the labor costs and safety issues made it politically impossible to conduct in other parts of the world.

View of Alang (from globalsecurity.org). Google Images turns up many more fascinating pictures.

Through the late nineties and early 2000s, controversy erupted, spearheaded by Greenpeace, over the idea that rich shipping companies were exploiting the developing world and not paying the true lifecycle costs of disposing off  their floating, toxic deathtraps safely. As you might expect, the workers in the industry (escaping worse relative poverty) were entirely hostile to European do-gooders acting on their behalf, arguing with grim pragmatism that death from toxic chemicals was rather better than death by starvation. Langewiesche tells the various versions of this story with an unsparing eye, but the tale of this activism, framed by ideas of nationhood, ends on a surreal note, which underlines the meaninglessness of ideas like “Western” and “Developing” land-worlds where the oceans are concerned.

But others in the business told me that the more likely effect of such reforms… would simply be a new and less direct route to Asia: ships would pass through more hands, would maybe live longer plying faraway waters under new names and flags, and would still end up dying on some filthy beach. Already, there was evidence that European shippers had begun to find new foreign  buyers for vessels that they would normally have sold directly to scrappers.

In fact the whole story is surreal. Lyrical descriptions of the careful orchestration of the ship-breaking process (which made me itch to visit Alang) are interspersed with unsentimental indictments of all parties. Included is a drive-by shooting at people like me, alongside a spirited defense of the shipbreaking merchants:

They were direct men, who walked willingly among the laborers; and though they had grown wealthy on the backs of the poor, they maintained a connection to them nonetheless. The alternative seemed to be the disengagement I had witnessed in New Delhi and Mumbai, where the upper levels of society were floating free of the ground, aided by the the airlines and the Internet, as if the poverty of India were a geographic inconvenience. [His] own daughter had graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in computer science… but standing beside him on the beach, in the midst of his piles of scrap, I suspected he knew that shipbreakers were unfashionable among the Indian elites…Alang was becoming an embarrassment.

Guilty as charged, though I think the charge applies to the entire global elite, studiously ignoring the problem of disposing off the biggest physical artifacts humans build. My first thought was that the Internet is to “free floating” people like me what the oceans are to the impoverished thousands living off it: a stateless anarchy (we are not yet at the stage where anyone can claim to be a “global citizen,” a phrase I detest for its vacuousness). My next thought was that this is a self-serving view. The Internet is nothing like the oceans.

Between the Nation-State and the Globe

As it happens, some of the other reading I am doing right now deals with rarefied subjects, far removed from messy things like ship-breaking, like the rise of global financial integration through bond markets,  the history of the first true multi-national corporation, the British East India company and yes, undersea Internet cables. Within all these tales, spanning several centuries, there is a constant subtext of assumptions about the oceans.

The Outlaw Sea precisely nails the big point about oceans: they are the physical manifestation of the “stuff” between the global system of nation-states and the abstraction of the “globalized” world, which really only exists on the Internet today. But we forget that the transnational anarchy that is the Internet could be rapidly and comprehensively fragmented and shoehorned into nation-state boundaries by the flipping of a few key router switches, and the reconfiguring of a handful of satellites.

The ocean though is not, never has been, and (it seems) never can be subsumed within the nation-state system. It will always form a gray zone of anarchy sandwiched between global and national contexts. Despite its grim implications, in an odd way it is an uplifting thought that the oceans will never be within our control. Looking back, I think I realized this point, and grew fascinated by it, very early. I have always been fascinated by maps, but as a schoolkid, one set of maps in particular, fascinated me. This was a series of maps included with special issues of the National Geographic, that presented the world with the oceans in the foreground. There were maps for each of the major oceans, with finely detailed depictions of mid-ocean ridges, mountain ranges, volcanoes and currents. The oceanic areas of the maps were a riot of blues. Landmasses on those maps were shown in background-white, with barely any annotation. This, I thought, is a better way of looking at Planet Earth.

My friendly librarian allowed me to steal the maps from the library’s copies of the National Geographic. For a while I had a couple tacked to my bedroom walls, but for many years, I just had them folded away. I would frequently take them out to look at; meditate upon.

I think what fascinated me back then was the same thing that fascinates me today: the incredible richness and complexity hidden behind a simple statistic: our world’s surface is 70% water. Land is a sideshow.

This article is about a number I call the optimal crucible size. I’ll define this number — call it C — in a bit, but I believe its value to be around 12. This article is also about an argument that I’ve been unconsciously circling for a long time. Chris Anderson’s Free provided me with the insight that helped me put the whole package together: economics is fundamentally a process driven by abundance and creative-destruction rather than scarcity. The reason we focus on scarcity is that at any given time, the economy is constrained by a single important “bottleneck scarcity.” Land, labor, factories, information and most recently, individual attention, have all played the bottleneck role in the past. I believe we are experiencing the first major bottleneck-shift in a decade. “Attention,” as an unqualified commodity is no longer the critical scarcity. Collective attention is: the coordinated, creative attention of more than 1 person. It is scarce and it is horrendously badly allocated in the economy today. The free-agent planet under-organizes it, and the industrial economy over-organizes it.  That’s the story of C, the optimal size of a creative group. There are seven other significant numbers in this tale: 0, 1, 7, 150, 8, 1000 and 10,000. The big story is how the economy is moving closer to C-driven allocation of creative capital. But the little story starts with my table tennis clique in high school.

A Table-Tennis Story

R and I played table-tennis nearly every day in high school. We were regular partners in a loose clique of serious players at our club, comprising approximately a dozen players. The score in nearly every 3-game match would go something like 21-14, 21-7, 23-22.  It wasn’t that I was getting creamed every time; I’d occasionally take a game off R. He was only slightly better than me, in just about every department, but that all added up to him beating me nearly every time. He knew his strengths (defense/offense, forehand/backhand) enough to always pick a better strategy for each game. He selected his shots better and executed them better. The net result was that I was beaten mentally and physically. Errors would accumulate, and I’d invariably choke.

Then one day, I managed to convince S, whose father had been a state-level champion, to practice with me (there was no point playing, he would have beaten me 21-0, 21-0, 21-0). S was the sort of calm, unflappable guy who simply cannot be psyched-out or forced into error. He had an almost robotic level of perfection in all basic elements of the game.  S put me through half an hour of very basic forehand-to-forehand top spin practice rallies, and it completely changed my game. After that, I still mostly got beaten by R, my regular partner (who was fundamentally more talented than me), but I actually began winning the occasional match, and all games were a lot closer.

Fast-forward 15 years. At the University of Michigan, I organized an informal tournament at the residential scholarship house I was living in at the time. Out of the field of about 8-10, I came in second. Most Americans in the house fared as well as you’d expect; since they view “ping pong” as not really a sport, most of them lack basic skills. I beat most of them relatively easily, but was beaten pretty handily by a Korean-American guy.

A final data point. About 2 years ago, with rather foolhardy confidence, I joined in a Saturday afternoon group of serious Chinese players. The result: I was beaten comprehensively by everybody. In particular, by a bored, tired-looking 14 year old  (clearly first-generation) who looked like he hated the game and had been dragged there by his immigrant father.

Collective Attention and Arms Races

Now step back and analyze this for a moment. Table tennis is primarily information work. It is not among the more physically demanding games except at the highest levels. My serious table-tennis clique in an apathetic-to-the-game country, with a lousy athletic culture (India) got me to a certain level of competence: enough to beat many casual players in a vastly more athletic country (the US). But a disengaged kid from the diaspora of an athletic country that is crazy about the game (China) was able to beat me with practically no effort, despite being far less interested (apparently) in the game than me.

This little story captures the most essential features of collective attention. It exists at all scales (from small clique to country to planet). Within a group that is paying coordinated attention to any information-work domain, skill levels rapidly escalate, leaving isolated individuals far behind. I call this the arms race effect, and it is a product of a fertile mix of elements in the crucible: competition, mutual teaching, constant practice and sufficient, but not overwhelming variety.  This is a very particular kind of attention. It isn’t passive consumption by spectators, and it isn’t performance for an audience. It is co-creation of value: that same dynamic that is starting to drive the entire economy, blurring lines between producers and consumers.

So our challenge in this article is to answer the question: what is the optimal size of a creative group? Is country level attention the best (China and table tennis) or clique (my high school)? Is it perhaps 1 (solo lone-ranger creative blogger)? Our quest starts with the first of our supporting-cast numbers, 10,000. As in the 10,000-hour rule studied by K. Anders Ericsson and made famous by Gladwell in Outliers.

10,000 Hours and Gladwell’s Staircase

Gladwell is a jump-the-gun trend-spotter. He nearly always finds a uniquely interesting angle on a subject, and nearly always analyzes it prematurely in flawed ways. That’s a story for another day, but let’s talk about his latest, Outliers. The basic thesis of the book is that there are all sorts of subtly arbitrary effects in the structure of nurture (Gladwell’s way too smart to play up a naive nature/nurture angle) that make runaway success a rather unfair and random game of chance. In particular, Gladwell focuses on a key argument: that to get really good at anything, you need about 10,000 hours of steadily escalating practice, with opportunities to “take your game to the next level” becoming available at the right times. For instance, due to some weird cutoff-date effects, nearly all top Canadian hockey players are born in winter (thereby, Gladwell implies, unfairly penalizing burly talents born in warmer months). This basic argument is just plain wrong for the simple reason that no human talent is that specifically matched to particular arbitrary opportunity paths like hockey. No talented human being is starkly “hockey star or schmuck.” There are presumably other things demanding strength and athletic ability available in Canada and other parts of the world, that have no winter bias (or perhaps, complementary summer biases). As Richard Hamming put it eloquently in his famous speech at Bell Labs, You and Your Research, “There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn’t. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.”

But that said, Gladwell is on to something. The pattern of increasing opportunity stage-gates he spotted is real, but most of the arbitrary effects he talks about (being born at certain times, your university having one of the first computers, and so forth)  are red herrings/minor elements that confuse the issue.  But one effect is not a red herring, and that is the fact that the staircase of opportunity puts you in increasingly intense crucibles of collective co-creative attention.

The Distillation Effect

Start with 1728 (12^3) people and let them learn widget-making in144 groups of 12, for 3000 hours. Then take the top talent in each group and make 12 groups of 12, and again let them engage in an arms race for 3000 hours. Then take the final top 12 and throw in another 4000 hours. With two levels of distillation, you’ve got yourself a widget-making dream team. Or a fine scotch. A team that will be leaving the remaining 1716 far, far behind. You can watch this process accelerated and live today on America’s Got Talent and American Idol. Imagine the same process playing out more slowly over 20 years. What does that transformation look like?

That is what is scarce. Collective attention. That’s what creates the 10,000 hour staircase-of-opportunities that Gladwell talks about. Information may want to be free, but live attention from other humans never will be (AI is a different story).

A note of irony here: Gladwell was also among the first to stumble across the importance of such dream-team crucibles,  in The Tipping Point. Today, researchers like Duncan Watts have pointed out that viral effects don’t necessarily depend on particularly talented or connected “special” people (the sort Gladwell called “mavens” and “salesmen”). But “special” people do have a special role in shaping culture. It is just that their most important effect isn’t in popularizing things like Hush Puppies, but in actually creating their own value. New kinds of music, science, technology, art or sporting culture.

This is the signal in the noise, and here is the lesson. Information work in any domain is like weight training: you only grow when you exercise to failure. The only source of weight to overload your mental muscles is other people. And the only people who can load you without either boring you or killing you are people of approximately the same level of talent development. And that leads to the question: what happens when you hit the top crucible of 12 in your chosen field? Where do you go when there are no more levels (or if you’ve reached the highest level you can, short of the top)? That brings us to the next two numbers in our story: how you innovate and differentiate as a creative.

1 Free Agent and 1000 Raving Fans?

I’ve hated the phrase “raving fan” since the day I heard it. If you are not familiar with the argument, Kevin Kelly, who originated the idea,  claims that an individual creative — blogger or musician say — can scrape along and subsist in Chris Anderson’s Long Tail, by attracting a 1000 raving fans who buy everything he/she puts out (blogs, books, special editions, t-shirts, mousepads; 1000 raving fans times $100 per year per fan is a $100,000 income). Kelly’s original adjective is a less-objectionable “true” rather than “raving” but “raving has caught on, and the intended meaning is the same.

This basic  model of creative capital is just not believable for two reasons. First, it reduces a prosumer/co-creation economic-cultural environment to a godawful unthinking bleating-sheep model of community. I try to imagine my blog, for instance, as the focal point of a stoned army of buy-anything idiot groupies, and fail utterly. I would not want to serve such a community, and I don’t believe it can really form around what I do. I certainly refuse to sell ribbonfarm.com swag.

The second problem is the tacit assumption that creation is prototypically organized in units of 1. The argument is seductive. The bad old corporations will die, along with its committees of groupthink. The brave new solo free agent, wandering in the woods of cultural anarchy, finds a way to lead his tribe to the promised land of whatever his niche is about. “Tribe” is a related problematic term that Seth Godin recently ran amok with.

The reason Kelly (and others like Godin) ends up here is that he answers my question “after the dream team, what?” with “individuals break away, brand themselves and become individual innovators.” Kinda like Justin Timberlake leaving N’Sync. A dream team of 12, in this view, turns into 12 soloists. Not that he ignores groups, but his focus is on the individual.

Individuals vs. Groups

That’s not what happens. You cannot break the crucible rule. 12 is always the magic number for optimal creative production. The reason people make this mistake is because they draw a flawed inference from the (correct) axiom that the original act of creativity is always an individual one. I’ve talked about this before: I am a believer in radical individualism; I believe, as William Whyte did, that innovation by committee is impossible. Good ideas nearly always come from a single mind. What makes the crucible of 12 important is that it takes a group of competing/co-operating individuals, each operating from a private fountainhead of creative individual energy, to come up with enough of a critical mass of individual contributions to spark major revolutions.  Usually that’s about 12 people for major social impact, though sometimes it can happen with smaller crucibles. These groups aren’t the deadening committees of groupthink and assumed consensus. They are the fertile, fiercely contentious and competitive collaborators who at least partly hate the fact that they need the others, but grudgingly admire skills besides their own.

What happens when you exit the dream team level in a mature disciplinary game is that you get out there and start innovating beyond disciplinary boundaries; places where there are no experts and no managed progression of levels with ritualistic gatekeeper tests. But you don’t do that by going solo. You look for crucibles of diversity, multidisciplinary stimulation and cross-pollination. But you still need the group of 12 or so, training your brain muscles to failure.

This gives me a much more believable picture. As a blogger, I am the primary catalyst on this site, but I am not creating the value solo. If I try to think of the most valuable commenters on this site, I can think of no more than 12. My best writing has come from trying to stay ahead of their expectations, and running with themes they originally introduced me to. But that’s far from optimal, since I still am the dominant creator on this blog. The closer I get that number to 12 via regular heavy-weight commeters, guest bloggers and mutually-linked blogroll friends (I’ve turned my blogroll off for now for unrelated reasons), the closer I’ll get to optimum. Think of all the significant power blogs: they are all team-acts. Now, I may never get there, and there’s multiple ways to get to 12, but the important thing is to be counting to 12. At work these days, I am pretty close to that magic number 12, and enjoying myself a lot as a result.

So the important number for the creative of the future is 12, not 1 or 1000. But what about money and volume? Don’t we need a number like 1000? Not really. As the creative class matures, you won’t really ever find 1000 uncritical sheep-like groupie admirers. That is a relic of the celebrity era. The real bigge- than-crucible number is not 1000 but 150. Dunbar’s number.

The Dunbar Number and $0.00

Why 150? That’s the Dunbar number. The most people you can cognitively process as individuals (the dynamics are entertainingly described in the famous Monkeysphere article). That’s the right number to drive long-tail logic. By Kelly’s logic though, I have to get to, say, 100,000 casual occasional customers before I find my 1000 raving fans (1% conversion is realistic).

Face it: there’s no way in hell most of us will get there. If I accidentally did, through this blog, I’d probably erect walls to keep the scary crowds out somehow. That picture makes sense for almost nobody. I write long, dense epic posts and don’t bother to be accessible. I look to attract readers who can keep up with me. Unapologetic intellectuals in fact, whose own eclectic interests overlap sufficiently with mine to create the right mix of resonance, dissonance and dissent. In terms of Geoffrey Moore’s classic pair of business models: complex systems (a few high-touch, high-personalization customers) and volume operations (mass-consumption stuff), this blog is a complex-systems play. I can (and have) written posts entirely with one reader-muse in mind. I have more chance of making a living off 100% of a base of 150 powerful micropatrons than from 1% of a base of 100,000. The question is: which is actually the right type of model for the individual creative (in a crucible of 12 similar-minded others; not selling to each other, but collectively representing a high-value-concentration crucible)?

I am going to make a prediction: personalization and customization will rule. Without that common prefix of the day, “mass-.” Mass customization/personalization is a good model for Enterprise 2.0, but individual creatives have a far better chance of creating an economically sustainable lifestyle by paying close individual attention to 150 people than by selling the same thing to 100,000 and hoping 1% of the sheep convert to your religion. This isn’t to say that volume games can’t succeed. But it isn’t the way most people will succeed, because the numbers will not add up. Can you really imagine a significant proportion of the world’s information worker/creative class being able to draw 100,000 unique visitors per month to their blogs, most of whom will be other creatives trying to build their own 100,000/1000?

The “100,000 base” argument can be safely ignored for most of us. And that’s what I’ve done to most of the 62,000 unique visitors Google Analytics tells me have visited this blog since I opened up shop in July 2007. An overwhelming majority of them bounced away before I could even say “Hi!” Some read one article and never came back, leaving only an IP address behind. In an age where superhits and celebrities are on their way out, that’s what any crowd of ~100,000 will do. Your actual goal as creative today is to find and keep your 150, to whom you pay individual attention.  Pass-through crowds don’t deserve much attention. In fact, the monetary value of your transaction with them is exactly $0.00. Anderson hammered home the point that to the masses, the right price for your work is $0.00, but he didn’t address the flip side. They are also worth only $0.00 to you on average. Which means you should put no marginal effort into pleasing them. If one of them finds something you did for your 150 useful, let them have it. You get paid in word-of-mouth, they get free stuff. Small serendipitous barter transaction. Aggregate over 100,000 and net hard-dollar value is still 100,000x$0=$0. The barter is non-zero sum, but doesn’t pay your rent.

Personal Economic Neighborhoods

By carefully curating your Dunbar neighborhood of at most 150 (in practice, likely much less), in collaboration with your crucible of 12 (each curating their own 150-neighborhoods, with a good deal of overlap), through actual personal attention, you create the foundation for your life as a cultural creative and information worker. Free agency is an important piece of this, but don’t dismiss traditional economics: a good part of your 150 is likely to remain inside the formal organizations you are part of.

The Kelly number, 1000, is important, but not in his sense. If you and your crucible of 12 are creating value in a loose coalition, and each have a 150 circle with some high-value overlap, the total is probably near 1000. So that’s 12 people sharing a community of 1000, each of whom gets personal attention from at least 1 of the 12. The members of the 1000 get the overhead savings of finding more than 1 useful, personally-attentive creator in one place.

Count the 12 most valuable co-creators you work with. Now consider the overlap in your Dunbar neighborhoods. If the average level of overlap isn’t in the double digits (the actual set-theoretic math is tricky), you probably haven’t reached critical mass yet. Guess where you can still find such critical mass today? Inside large corporations. Any pair of people in my immediate workgroup of around 12 can probably find 20-30 common acquaintances. Our collective personalized-attention audience at is probably around 1000. Large corporations still allocate collective attention pretty badly (they hit the numbers, but get the composition wrong), but still do a better job than say, the blogsphere. But the free-agent nation is catching up rapidly. The wilderness is becoming more capable of sustaining economics-without-borders-or-walls every day.

So how will you create and monetize your Dunbar neighborhood? By definition, there are no one-size-fits-all answers, because the point of working this way is that you’ll find opportunities through personalized attention. Not a great answer, I know, but still easier for most of us than dreaming up ideas that can net 100,000 regulars of whom 1000 turn into raving fans.

8: The Maximal Span of Control

We’ve argued that the optimal crucible size must be greater than 1 and less than 150, but we still haven’t gotten to the reasoning behind 12 rather than 30 or 5. Another number will help get us there: 8, the upper end of the range of a number known as the span of control. The number of direct reports a manager can effectively handle, and still keep the individualized calculus of interpersonal relationships tractable.

What happens when you exceed the span of control? You get hierarchies. You cannot organize, complex coupled work (think space shuttle) requiring more than 8 people in a flat structure. But here’s the dilemma: between 9 and 15, if you split the group into 2, you may get high overhead and micromanagement by managers with too little to do, and other pathologies. So between the limit of a single manager’s abilities, and the optimal point at which to force cell division, ontogeny and organization, you get a curious effect: the edge of control. Single-manager structures fail, but team chemistry can take over. The whole thing is just barely in control, and teetering on chaos.

Should sound familiar. Those are the conditions, complexity theorists have been telling us for decades, that spark creative output. More than 8, less than 16. Why 12, besides being a nice mean? Anecdotal data.

The Ubiquity of 12

I hope you are too smart to conclude that I am making 12 a number of religious significance. It is simply the mean of a fairly narrow distribution. Still, it turns up in a surprising number of “creative crucible” places in practice:

1. The dirty dozen (alright, there were also the 7 samurai)
2. Juries (creative judicial decision-making)
3. Teams in cricket and soccer (~12)
4. The number of apostles required to start a major religion
5. The approximate size of famous cliques of mathematicians, scientists, engineers, philosophers, writers and so forth.
6. Ideal class sizes in education
7. G-8, G-12
8. Ensemble casts (Friends, Seinfeld, counted with frequent regular side characters who appear often enough that you recognize them).
9. Improv comedy groups (typical size of a generation of SNL regulars).

(I believe there is some research related to Dunbar number research that actually talks about how “small world” groupings where you really intimately know the others in the group tend to be around 12. All our craze for weak links has tended to distract us from the fact that the small world is small in 2 ways: the maximum distance on the social graph between 2 nodes being 6, and the fact that we cluster in small groups).

The Magic Number 7

Let’s get to the last of our big list of numbers. Seven. As in, Miller’s famous magic number, the number of unrelated chunks of information you can manage in your short-term memory at a given time, and a big implicit hidden variable in everything we’ve talked about so far. It’s why lists of 7 are effective. So let’s make up a list of 7 to summarize the key concepts so far.

1. Collective Attention: a group of people paying attention to the same thing, with the group size varying in size from 2 to 6 billion.
2. Arms Race: The effect by which groups paying collective attention to something force individuals within the group to rapidly improve their skills and separate the group from outsiders.
3. Mental Exercise-to-Failure: The fact that only people close to your talent level can load your mind in ways that cause you to grow
4. Crucible: The optimal-sized creative group. Stages of crucibles reach successively higher plateaus and culminate at the dream-team level, beyond which lies innovation.
5. Innovation: The graduation of a creative from a dream-team level in a disciplinary game to a more diverse and unstructured type of crucible, with few rules.
6. Dunbar personalization: The idea that you are more likely to succeed as a creative in the new economy by paying personal attention to up to 150 people, than by paying mass attention to 10o,000 in hopes of harvesting a 1000 raving fans.
7. Span of Control: The threshold group size for a crucible. Above this number creativity is possible. Below this, the group can be brought under the dictatorial and low-creativity control of a single individual.

That’s CAMCIDS for you acronym buffs. I know. I am a terrible person.

Managing Collective Attention Scarcity: The Dynamics of 12

A little paper math shows you why collective attention is scarce. Marketers will recognize a classic example: marketing sugary cereals to a kid, but closing the sale with Mommy, is much trickier than marketing and selling to the same person. You need the collective coordinated attention of both, and you need that attention to have “good” chemistry. But unlike individual-level attention scarcity and its complement, the myth of information overload, you cannot solve the collective attention problem through appropriate reframing and a good set of automated filters. Also unlike individual attention dynamics, the action isn’t in stuff like advertising, fame or too many emails. It is co-creation groups.

Individual attention economics was merely poorly managed, and is now technology exists to manage it well, even though it hasn’t diffused completely. Collective attention, even if it is optimally allocated, is fundamentally scarce, since it requires live people in the other 11 empty spots in the crucible.

Optimal allocation is hard because the numbers blow up in your face. A Dunbar community of 150 admits 11175 unique pairings. Most will be fights, divorces and toxic messes. A few will create great value. Searching that space for the Gates-Ballmers and the Jobs-Wozniaks is horrendously hard. That’s why it is a scarcity. Things do get simpler once a core of 2-3 start to attract enough to reach that critical mass of 12, but not by much. The math is much harder for more complex ways of thinking about groups, but you get the idea. Can you think of all possible ways to break down the world’s population of 6 billion into constantly shifting crucibles of 12?

But let’s at least work on the right problem.