Ben Casnocha: The Blog

Lessons and Impressions from Indonesia

I recently spent 1.5 weeks in Indonesia. I traveled all over the country (Jakarta, Semarang, Surabaya, Batam, though not Bali) and met some 2,500 students, businesspeople, journalists, and academics. In addition to sharing some of my own views and experiences with local audiences, I learned quite a bit about the country and its people. Below are my key lessons and impressions.

1. Size and scale. Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in world (220 million), an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands. It is the third largest democracy in the world behind India and the United States.

2. A moderate Muslim country. It is home to the largest Muslim population in the world (88% of 220 million). The government is secular and the Islam that is practiced is moderate. State law rules, not Islamic law. As just one small but telling example, there are many Muslim women who do not wear headscarves (though the majority do) and I did not see many men wearing a peci.  Religious freedom flourishes: look at Hindu-dominated Bali, the Christian population, and the various interfaith dialogues and groups. I remember noticing two women sitting next to each other in the audience once: one wore a headscarf, the other had a Christian cross draped around her neck. Contrast this to Saudi Arabia. There, women must always wear full body hijabs (covering head to toe with small slits for the eyes); if you're seen with a person of the opposite sex in public you can be arrested; if you are caught carrying a Bible (or any other non-Muslim religious item) it's grounds for punishment. So it's easy to see why the United States, among other nations, holds up Indonesia as a shining beacon of tolerance and diversity in the Muslim world.

3. Optimism of the People. I surveyed many folks and the vast majority ID'd as optimistic. They think Indonesia will be a center of gravity in the future. They believe tomorrow will be better than today. The 21st century is the century of Asia.

4. Heat and Humidity. It's impossible to walk outside for more than a few minutes without sweating your balls off. I love air conditioning, but I would not want my existence to be defined by it. Plus, humidity is the worst. In Arizona, when I walk outside it takes some time for the oven to heat my body to the point of sweating. In humid climates, when I walk outside I begin sweating almost instantly. While I'm undoubtedly more sensitive to it than locals who grew up there, I'm not that much different: Indonesian social life, I was told, is concentrated in fancy malls, which are safe, full-service, and most of all, air conditioned!

5. Hospitality, Formality, Status. Per my post on being introduced three times, there is a broader culture of hospitality that's impressive and at times annoying.

6. Big Cities in Developing Countries. A general rule of thumb for poor countries is that the big capital cities are sprawling chaotic messes with traffic, pollution, and overpopulation, while the countryside tends to be calm and more interesting culturally. In Indonesia this is totally true. Jakarta is not very livable. I asked probably 10 people who live(d) in Jakarta whether they liked it, and none said yes. The unpredictable traffic. The humidity. The relative danger. Surabaya, the second largest city in the country, seemed far more livable -- still a big city with all the amenities (4 million people) but no traffic and plenty of open space.

7. Politics and Economy. The current president was elected with overwhelming support, despite the huge amounts of corruption that plagues the government. Democracy's recent introduction to the country seems to have more or less taken hold, though there are still aspects of democracy beyond voting that seem fragile. Discussion of internet censorship by the government is, for example, a topic of discussion, and I encountered some odd web site failures during my time there. The Indonesian economy is the big gorilla of the region. It runs mostly on light manufacturing. Rice is big here, and mostly sold within the country. Apparently this large internal market insulated the country a bit from the global financial crisis. Several American friends do furniture manufacturing in Surabaya; the chairs and TV stands you buy at Crate & Barrel or Cost Plus were probably made in Indonesia. Side point of interest: Chile had the "Chicago Boys," Indonesia had the "Berkeley Mafia" -- economists who studied there and brought back liberal economic reform.

8. Suharto Regime. You cannot understand politics in Indonesia without first realizing that the 65-year Suharto dictatorship ended only 11 years ago. Here is more on Suharto. It makes you appreciate Indonesia's political progress.

9. Ramadan. My visit coincided with the holy month of Ramadan, a time when Muslims fast from sunup to sundown. In many places in the Middle East, I'm told all restaurants would be closed during the day. In Indonesia, many restaurants remained open, another sign of its religious diversity. It surprised me to see that when my Muslim hosts broke the fast at sundown after 9-10 hours of no food or drink they did so with a small piece of bread and drink, and then gradually amped up to real food. I've never fasted; in fact, I've never gone more than a few hours without food or drink. Especially given the heat, I was amazed at the restraint and discipline shown by my Muslim hosts.

10. Terrorism. Last year, terrorists released bombs in the Mariott hotel in Jakarta. The more famous 2002 bombing in Bali killed more than 200 people. The size and remoteness of certain parts of the country make it seem likely that radical groups will have the space to band together for some time to come. Nevertheless, the Indonesian government has been effective at capturing radical Islamist terrorist leaders. Just the other week a key radical cleric was arrested for having helped organized terrorist training camps.

I didn't feel particularly unsafe anywhere in Indonesia. Note, at the big hotels, every time you enter you have to submit to a metal detector and car-search. But like in so many places, if you're white, you can walk right through and nobody searches you or scans for metal. When will the terrorists figure out that being / appearing white is the way to evade all security in third world countries?

11. Reading. I took three inter-country flights and observed very few people reading either on the planes or in the airport. I tend to use this as a litmus test....for something.

12. Asian Neighbors and Immigrants. They don't like the Malaysian people. I heard stories about Malaysia's actively racist government policies that punish non-Malays. Not sure how accurate it is, but the Indonesians I spoke to see themselves as a more enlightened society. On the immigration front, Chinese Indonesians have been there for a long time and though they represent only 1% of the population they are power brokers in business. The nice business hotels in the country are full of Chinese Indonesian businesspeople.

13. Inexpensive. It's a super cheap country across the board. India is dirt cheap but expensive as far as hotels go. Indonesia is cheap in everything. True 5 star hotels for US $100 night.

14. Israel. At one event the host at the school announced that (paragraphed) "We are to love all people, Jews, Christians, Hindus, everybody." I was told that it was most unusual to specifically mention, let alone start with, Jews. The anti-Israel sentiment in Indonesia is just political. People don't think Israelis should have set up a new state in Palestinian territory, and so they resent the state, the people, and of course the country that's backed Israel since the beginning: America. Before Obama (who spent time in Indonesia growing up), most Indonesians had an unfavorable view of the U.S., mostly because of Israel, I was told.

15. Entrepreneurial Culture.  I did meet many very energetic and talented young entrepreneurs, and there is a big push within the country to seriously amplify the focus on entrepreneurship. The limiting factor, as it is almost everywhere, is culture. Not a huge acceptance of risk-taking or failure, overbearing parents, etc etc. Same old story. BTW, on the broader business culture, I found it cool that a man can wear either a suit and tie for a formal occasion, or a local batik -- a brightly colored shirt that looks like a Hawaiian short sleeves shirt. Both are considered equally formal.

Bottom Line: Indonesia is a diverse country of rising geo-political interest with very kind people. For these reasons it's worth a visit. The weather is a deal breaker for me in terms of longer stays, and that goes for all ultra-humid tropical climates.

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I thank my various friends and hosts, and to Daniel Phelps for helping me think through the political and economic situation of Indonesia more specifically. (These views are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government.)

The Origins of "Think Different"

My sixth grade technology teacher changed my life.

He taught an early-morning elective class on computer repair in which we learned how to fix Macintosh computers. The curriculum covered how to take apart hard drives, how to re-install system software ("C is for CD and that's good enough for me" was the jingle to remember to hold the C key when starting a computer from system software), re-build desktops, run Disk Utility the right way, partition hard drives, and much more. In exchange for the free 7:00 AM class I had to periodically do maintenance and repair work on the school's computers. It was a hell of a deal: the skills I picked up continue to serve me well, and that class facilitated my burgeoning interest in software and the internet (with which I would soon become obsessed).

But the biggest gift from that class and teacher had nothing to do with the nitty gritty of computer repair. Rather, it was the introduction of a certain kind of life philosophy. He forced all of us to memorize the text of the Apple "Think Different" television campaign. We had to recite the ad back to him word-for-word in order to pass the class. It was a profoundly inspiring message.

On our last day, he wrote each of us a personal letter, continuing the theme of the advertisement. Mine read: "If you continue to work hard and do well, you can acquire the skills needed to change the world. With education one can make great scientific or technological breakthroughs, curb world hunger and child labor, prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, promote peace, and have the power to bring about great change in the world. With education, you have the power to do nearly anything. If you don't change the world, who will?" Then, as a postscript, he added: "Be sure to back up your hard drive."

In the 10 years since, I have not forgotten a word from the advertisement and have recited it hundreds of times (no exaggeration!) to whoever will listen, in various venues. (And the short video series I did last year was called Think Different TV.)

For all these reasons, I was extremely intrigued to watch this six minute clip of a young Steve Jobs discussing the origins of the advertisement in the context of marketing, branding, and values. Highly recommended everyone in business.

(via TechCrunch)

Cultural Values, Power, and Event Protocol

Earlier this week in Indonesia, before I went up to give a speech, I was introduced to the audience exactly three times. Three different Important People of the sponsoring organization went to the podium and read the same bio to the same audience. Three. Times. In a row.

In addition to re-introducing me, each Important Person re-thanked other important people in the room, one-by-one, using their full titles, and then riffed yet again on the goals of the event. There were various other formalities related to these Important People like photographs and staged handshakes. It went beyond typical, lovely Asian hospitality: as the audience sat captive, the Important People were making sure everyone in the room knew they were important.

My worldly Indonesian interpreter told me these time-wasting rituals are left over from the Suharto regime. Interesting! Dictators are in the business of keeping the masses subservient. Beyond killing dissenters, I'd imagine a savvy dictator would try to psychologically disarm the people through the careful manipulation of social situations. Since explicit power plays can be self-defeating, dictators (and entrenched interests in general) might cultivate obedience by introducing small customs that subtly reinforce the power of those who hold it.

In my experience, what happened in Indonesia happens in almost every part of the world. I've personally witnessed such over-the-top obsession with titles and power at events in Latin America and Asia. I'm told Africa is the same.

It's not as intense in Europe it seems, though there is still an emphasis on formal status and on highlighting the differences between people even if those differences are irrelevant to the topic at hand. I remember listening to Martin Wolf being introduced in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and hearing first about his degree from LSE 40 years ago instead of his rich journalistic career. I also remember looking at my friend's EU passport on that trip and, to my astonishment, seeing that it listed his advanced degrees (PhD, J.D.) next to his name on the main passport ID page, as if academic degrees were as important as gender when crossing a border.

These customs reveal certain underlying values in a society.

In an older post I discussed the cultural ethos of Formality vs. Casualness. Casualness -- in attire, in manner of speaking, in the way names are presented on paper -- maximizes commonality among people. Formality maximizes difference. A related dichotomy is Past vs. Future. Past emphasizes past accomplishments and titles, your family and cultural history, and gives great deference to elders. Future emphasizes what you are doing today and who you aspire to be tomorrow. Future-oriented cultures, for better or worse, favor the energy of youth over the wisdom of elders. America is a decidedly casual, future-oriented culture, and this is partly what makes it unique.

In any case, it's interesting that cultural values of this sort can appear so visibly in how events are staged and speakers introduced.

Lectures at Home, Homework at School

More wisdom from Sal Kahn (of the Kahn Academy):

...it makes more sense to have students watch lectures at home and do homework at school as opposed to vice versa.

So true! And revealing of larger structural problems of school.

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Robin Hanson's theory of school is that it isn’t about learning material but rather "learning to accept workplace domination and ranking, and tolerating long hours of doing boring stuff exactly when and how you are told." He links to three other possible functions of school:

• Legitimization: Repeated contacts with the educational system, which seems impersonal and based on reliable criteria, convinces students (and their parents) that they are ending up in an appropriate place in society based on their skills and abilities. Thus, people accept their position in life: they become resigned to it, maybe even considering it appropriate or fair.


• Acclimatization: The social relationships in the schools encourage certain traits, appropriate to one’s expected economic position, while discouraging others. Thus, certain relationships are considered normal and appropriate. Subordination to authority is a dominant trait enforced for most students.


• Stratification: Students from different class backgrounds, races, ethnicities, and genders are overwhelmingly exposed to different environments and social relationships and thus are tracked and prepared for different positions in the hierarchy. The different experiences and successes lead each student to see her place as appropriate.

"I Suck"

The striking part in an otherwise ho-hum profile of David Brooks in New York magazine:

Whereas Bobos drew accolades, the response to his 2004 follow-up, On Paradise Drive, and the articles that inspired it, was mixed. Negative reviews gave way to critiques of “Brooksianism” itself....

Brooks took the backlash hard. The day Slate ran a takedown, Brooks was on a book tour. “I read it and then went out to perform before 3,000 people and thought, I suck,” Brooks remembers.

I've read similar stories of A-list Hollywood celebrities reading reviews about their movies and taking criticism very hard. I know Truman and Clinton were two presidents consumed by their critics. No matter how successful or famous or self-confident, negative criticism hurts.

It especially hurts when you are an artist producing work individually. If someone criticizes the company you work for, or a project you worked on with others, the impact is diffused. If someone criticizes an essay you wrote, one that has solely your byline at the top in big bold letters -- it hurts. Here's one writer's reflection on reading negative reviews. I venture that many wannabe artists never produce because they fear exposing themselves to criticism that will inevitably be felt personally.

Reflecting on the negative feedback that I've received over the years -- of the 1.1 million words I've published, there's more than enough crap to arm the haters of the world  -- I believe that the process has made me more civil and empathetic when I criticize other people's work. I have some sense of what's going through the other person's head; I feel like I get what Brooks is saying. Despite the stereotype of the blogosphere as a place where civility sits at the lowest order, it's not like this in most corners, and for me anyway, the exercise of writing stuff in public, engaging with critics, etc. has made more thoughtful my argumentative style, online and off, without dulling any of the actual arguments.

Maybe this is the ideal manifestation of empathy: invisible yet effectual.

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Here's my more in-depth post on receiving criticism / negative feedback from a year and a half ago. Here's David Brooks' information diet.

Against Occupational Licensing

Matthew Yglesias discusses the follies of occupational licensing, citing the case of whether barbers ought to have licenses to set up shop:

If you just assume optimal implementation of regulation, then regulation always looks good. But as I noted in the initial post the way this works in practice is the boards are dominated by incumbent practitioners looking to limit supply. One result is that in Michigan (and perhaps elsewhere) it’s hard for ex-convicts to get barber licenses which harms the public interest not only by raising the cost of haircuts, but by preventing people from making a legitimate living. States generally don’t grant reciprocity to other states’ licensing boards, which limits supply even though no rational person worries about state-to-state variance in barber licensing when they move to a New Place. In New Jersey, you need to take the straight razor shaving test to cut women’s hair because they’re thinking up arbitrary ways to incrementally raise the barrier to entry.

In principle, you could deal with all these problems piecemeal. But realistically this sort of problem is inevitably going to arise when you pit the concentrated interest of incumbent haircutters against the diffuse interest of consumers. It’s hard enough to make sure that really important regulatory functions related to environmental protection, public safety, and financial stability are done properly.

In the comments section of Marginal Revolution, there's a link to Dan Klein's PowerPoint on occupational licensing. I spent five minutes flipping through the slides and learned a lot about the issue and about how economists think about topics such as this. Highly recommended. I learned, for example:

• Occupational licensing affects 29% of U.S. workers
• There are three levels of control: registration (an official list of providers), certification (if you want to use the official title you have to be certified), and licensing (you cannot do business unless you have a license).
• Popular rationale for licensing includes helping consumers find trustworthy providers because consumer cannot judge quality and safety before and (sometimes) after the fact.
• Official stance on licensing: protects consumers. Skeptical stance: protects incumbents from competition.
• Voluntary supply of assurance: certifications, word of mouth, brand names, warranties, etc.
• Studies consistently support the skeptical stance on OL. Reduces supply, increases prices; no quality difference net net, sometimes even a worse quality among licensed practitioners; depresses wages.
• Licensing boards made up mostly of existing practitioners in the industry and they spend most of their time prosecution unlicensed practitioners, regardless of quality. In-group ethic is strong.
• Another example of the persistence of a bad status quo thanks to concentrated benefits, diffused costs.

BTW it's interesting to see Yglesias's liberal readership bash him in the comments section, even though his sensible less regulation idea ahelps (via lower prices) poor people who consume the services and helps the (generally speaking) poorer people who want to start businesses like barber shops. One commenter, after the onslaught of negativity toward Yglesias, writes: "The left once again reveals itself as not pro working class, or pro woman, or pro black, or pro muslim, or pro oppressed group of the day, but merely the voice of the state." A later commenter says the right doesn't even pretend to care about the oppressed. Both sentiments contain a truth. I think a better way to split the political left and right is comparing the Tragic and Utopian View of the World.

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Here's my older post on the Case Against Credentialism, which covers similar themes.

Instructions for Life

"My code of life and conduct is simply this: work hard, play to the allowable limit, disregard equally the good and bad opinion of others, never do a friend a dirty trick, eat and drink what you feel like when you feel like, never grow indignant over anything, trust to tobacco for calm and serenity, bathe twice a day . . . learn to play at least one musical instrument and then play it only in private, never allow one's self even a passing thought of death, never contradict anyone or seek to prove anything to anyone unless one gets paid for it in cold, hard coin, live the moment to the utmost of its possibilities, treat one's enemies with polite inconsideration, avoid persons who are chronically in need, and be satisfied with life always but never with one's self."

-- George Jean Nathan  (via Josh Newman)

Start-Up Chile: $40k to Live There and Start a Company

Governments round the world are trying to stimulate entrepreneurship. The Chilean government recently announced a bold initiative that stands apart from the usual innovation and start-up handwaving. They are seeking two dozen entrepreneurs who want to move to Santiago for six months to get their company off the ground. The Ministry of Economy will give you US $40,000, take care of your immigration stuff, set you up with local entrepreneurs and mentors, bank accounts, and temporary office space. You do not have to stay in Chile beyond the six months, although their hope is that you do, or at least keep a satellite office or development team in Santiago. In a nutshell: you are being paid to live in Chile for six months to work on your business. All you have to do is apply on the Start-Up Chile web site with info about your background and business idea.

Several people have emailed me about this program. My basic take is that it's a great deal for young entrepreneurs who need to put their heads down and build a prototype. Beyond the seed funding, you enjoy a lower cost of living -- perfect for a bootstrapping coder. Plus, as loyal blog readers know, Santiago is a great city for work and play, replete with enough interesting entrepreneurs and investors to keep you stimulated. Actions speak louder than words: I lived in Santiago for eight months.

The big downside of Start-Up Chile, assuming you're not targeting Chile or the Latin America market, is you are leaving your customers, partners, and potential investors, whose feedback is especially important in the early days. Skype can only take you so far when it comes to customer development and fundraising. Plus, Chile is as far away as anywhere -- SFO-Santiago takes longer than SFO-Tokyo. English print media such as the Economist and the FT do not distribute to Chile. Of course it's easy to read news online, but this is telling of Chile's isolation and small population (and even smaller English speaking population). Don't think you'll fly back and forth like you would to and from Mexico.

Despite its obvious limits, Start-Up Chile is a terrific opportunity for many high-tech entrepreneurs. It should also be a point of interest for other countries looking to foster innovation -- does this rather large investment of taxpayer money actually increase local entrepreneurship in the long-run? Can outsiders effectively infect the culture with their entrepreneurial impulses? Time will tell, but I am not surprised in the least that it is Chile leading the way with this high-risk, high-reward approach.

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I recently wrapped up my eight month adventure living in Santiago. I am proud to have fulfilled my goal of living in another country for a meaningful amount of time -- a goal first set on my 18th birthday. Although I did not achieve fluency in Spanish (for various reasons to be explained later), I do know probably six or seven thousand words in Spanish, I got around the city fairly easily, and I could read a major newspaper cover to cover.

I experienced three historic events while there. First was the election of Sebastian Piñera, the first president not of the Concertacion political party which had ruled Chile since Pinochet. I remember the campaign, the debate, and the honking in the streets all night after the votes were tallied. Second, the fifth-largest earthquake in history shook the country on the 27th of February. I have distinct memories of that night and the subsequent days. The looting on television, the empty grocery store in my neighborhood, the aftershocks that continued for weeks and weeks, tsunami warnings, and virtually every news report referencing el terremoto del veintisiete de febrero. Third, The Chilean soccer team won two big games in the World Cup for the first time in 50 years. The country was captivated and it was hard not to be swept up in the fervor.

Chile will always carry a special place in my heart. It is a physically beatuiful country and singularly diverse in its various landscapes. The people are hard-working and kind. Its economic success is remarkable. It takes a certain patience and perspective to appreciate a city like Santiago compared to its flashy neighbor, Buenos Aires. But I like its underratedness. Of course there are things I do not miss about being there; it is an imperfect country. The flaws do not outweigh my fundamental fondess and admiration for the place. Un gran abrazo a todos mis amigos en Chile.

The Wisdom of Mike Tyson

In a revealing interview with Details magazine, he displays wisdom and perspective about his former boxing life and about what's really important. Excerpt:

How long were you out of prison before you actually felt free?

Never. Not till now, really. This is the freest I ever felt in my life. And I'm still not free. But it's an awesome feeling. I got no money. I'm not a glamour guy anymore. I got friends who've got money, so it looks like I've got money, but I don't. All the money I had, forget it. I never had anything, never had a stitch on me that felt like freedom. But to have somebody by your side, win, lose, or draw. My wife's lived with me in places I wouldn't take a shit in. I wouldn't be a prostitute in some of the places my wife and I have slept.

He also talks about his obsession to win and how this characterizes all great fighters:

Because every fighter has to have that same will, that same need, that same drive . . . to impose their will on another man.

Every fighter in the history of fighting. But none like me. And, believe me, I'm not being immodest. None like me. I studied every fighter in history, at my manager's house up in Catskill, 'cause he had all the greatest fights on film, he had every last one of them, and I watched them all, every night. They were all so vicious, man. Jake LaMotta, Henry Armstrong, Carmen Basilio. Sugar Ray—God, he was vicious. But Jack Dempsey more than anyone. All these guys let you know they wanted to murder you, and they'd take shots from you, over and over and over, get beat senseless, just so they could get theirs in. Sugar Ray maybe most of all. But Jack Dempsey? He wanted to maim you. He didn't want you dead. He wanted you to suffer. He wanted to shatter your eye socket, destroy your cheeks, your chinbone. That's what I learned from Mr. Dempsey, and I believe I learned it well.

(Speaking of crazy people and obsession with winning, in this interview Ron Artest passes along more anecdotes about Kobe Bryant's legendary drive.)

In the Details interview Tyson uses a tornado metaphor, which is apt. He has a knack for metaphors. One of his most famous quotes on fear deploys pitch perfect metaphor effortlessly:

Fear is your best friend or your worst enemy. It's like fire. If you can control it, it can cook for you; it can heat your house. If you can't control it, it will burn everything around you and destroy you. If you can control your fear, it makes you more alert, like a deer coming across the lawn.

(Hat tip to Andy McKenzie.)

Clayton Christensen's Purpose-Driven Life

Professor Clayton Christensen, in a recent commencement speech, lays out his life strategy. Excerpt:

For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.

David Brooks calls Christensen's approach the "Well-Planned Life." Religious people tend to call it the "purpose-driven life." Brooks then contrasts it to what he calls the "Summoned Life":

The person leading the Summoned Life emphasizes the context, and asks, “What are my circumstances asking me to do?” The person leading the Summoned Life starts with a very concrete situation: I’m living in a specific year in a specific place facing specific problems and needs. At this moment in my life, I am confronted with specific job opportunities and specific options. The important questions are: What are these circumstances summoning me to do? What is needed in this place? What is the most useful social role before me?

I don't think Brooks' description quite nails it, and calling it "summoned" is confusing as it actually implies the opposite of what it means. All in all, though, I am more sympathetic to this second approach. I'm skeptical of the notion that each of us as some singular purpose we need to fulfill.

One friend emailed me about the lack of experimentalism in Christensen's purpose-driven philosophy. Using Brooks' language he added a third experimental option to illustrate his point:

Should I climb a mountain?

• Experiential: Sure, as long as it's not too risky.
• Summoned: Is this who I really am? Does this fit my goals or where I'm going?
• Planned: It's not on the list, sorry.

How was the climb?

• Experiential: Great! or "I hated it."
• Summoned: It suited my context
• Planned: Climb? I was busy talking to Jesus about my destiny.

Book Notes: Lords of Strategy

The Lords of Strategy by Walter Kiechel is an outstanding history of strategy as a discipline, the consulting industry in general, and the broader intellectualization of business since the 1950s. It seems hard to believe that "strategy" is a concept that only entered the business lexicon in the 1960s and that the now multi-billion dollar consulting industry is a relatively new creation. Peter Drucker's 1964 book, Managing for Results, had been titled Business Strategies, "but he and his publisher had been persuaded to change it because everyone they asked told them that strategy 'belongs to military or perhaps political campaigns but not to business.'" This is the backdrop to a book about the key concepts that together describe how a company competes, wins, and survives.

Kiechel is an intense thinker who conveys his analysis with great eloquence. Formerly managing editor of Fortune and Editorial Director (top position) at Harvard Publishing, he brings to bear formidable mental horsepower along with personal experience interacting with several of the key characters in the book (Bill Bain, Michael Porter, Tom Peters, etc). A winning combination. My only complaints have to do with the at times over-detail on certain esoteric concepts and his frequent unnecessary five dollar words. (I looked up: garrulous, apostasy, legerdemain, billet, obloquy, peroration, avuncular, obstreperous.)

Overall, this is a top flight book on the recent history of business that I recommend widely. Below are direct-quote highlights.

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Strategy’s coming to dominance as the framework by which companies understand what they’re doing and want to do, the construct through which and around which the rest of their efforts are organized, eclipses any other change worked in the intellectual landscape of business over the past fifty years.

Year to year, companies made plans, mostly simple extrapolations of what they had been doing. Plans, not strategy—the latter word making only scattered appearances in the corporate vocabulary before 1960.

Menand’s masterly account of American thought after the Civil War as told through the biographies of four of its protagonists. In his preface, Menand identifies what they shared in their attitude toward ideas: If we strain out the differences, personal and philosophical, they had with one another, we can say that what these four thinkers [Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles S. Pierce, and John Dewey] had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea—an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not “out there” waiting to be discovered, but are tools—like forks, knives, and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals—that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.

The argument of this book is that precisely the same thing went on with the invention of corporate strategy, except that it didn’t spring full-blown from a single, godlike forehead but instead was assembled from the spoils of many an intellectual and business battle. This is a story not of paradigm shift, but of the bit-by-bit creation of the first comprehensive paradigm that pulled together all the elements most vital for a company to take into account if it is to compete, win, and survive.

Greater Taylorism, the corporation’s application of sharp-penciled analytics this time not to the performance of an individual worker—how fast a person could load bars of pig iron or reset a machine—but more widely to the totality of its functions and processes.

The tamer, more conventional way of framing this tension is to see the history of strategy as a struggle between two definitions, strategy as positioning and strategy as organizational learning. The positioning school, led by Harvard’s Porter, sees strategy making as the choice of where you want to compete, in what industry and from what spot within that industry, and how—on price, with distinctive products, or by finding a niche. The organizational-learning school, by contrast, maintains that no company that’s already up and running can choose its strategy as if it had a blank slate. Almost gleeful in its derision of the positionists—at least its leading spokesman, McGill’s Henry Mintzberg is—the learning school also argues that virtually no strategy ever works as originally planned. The point, they say, is for the company to set off in one direction, learn from the response it gets from markets and competitors, and then adjust accordingly.

This, despite the fact that over three-quarters of the largest American companies, and comparable percentages in countries like France, currently use the services of BCG, McKinsey, Bain & Company, or some combination of them.

you can find evidence everywhere over the past five decades that increasing numbers of people have come to understand business not just by doing it—as it was done in the past, as company lore said it was to be done—but rather as framed and mediated by ideas.

[Business book industry] now marshals eight thousand new titles a year. The number of MBA degrees pursued and granted increased from less than 4,000 a year in the United States in 1948 to over 140,000 today. And finally, of course, there is the rise of the strategy consulting industry, which currently takes in over $5 billion a year worldwide for nothing more than its ideas, analysis, and general smarts.

Ah, strategy. The word goes back to the Greek stategos, for “the office or command of a general,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The inner eye pictures a grizzled, helmeted Homeric figure arraying his forces before the enemy hoplites come over the hill. (Once they’re in sight it’s all tactics, according to the standard military usage.) The faint whiff of battlefield command that still hangs about the word is one reason for the term’s popularity among corporate chiefs.

businesses should expect their costs to decline systematically, at a rate that can be accurately predicted. (You can always do it for less.) Different companies making the same product may have very different costs—heresy to many economists at the time—and your cost position should reflect your share of the market.

The call-to-action message, shocking to many at the time, was that you couldn’t truly understand how you were doing in a business or likely to do unless you understood exactly how you stood vis à vis your competitors. How did your share of the market compare to theirs? Were your costs lower or higher? If you didn’t have any cost advantage, how else might you differentiate your product? With the experience curve, the strategy revolution began to insinuate an acute awareness of competition into the corporate consciousness.

Early Perspectives explicated this logic with daunting clarity: a company will probably need to sell a new product for less than cost until volume builds.

The theme that strategy is about choice, that a company must pick a strategy that distinguishes it from its competitors, was to become a constant in Porter’s work over the decades that followed. It would secure him the place as head of the “strategy as positioning” school.

crucial problems in strategy were most often those of execution and continuous adaptation: getting it done, staying flexible.” (Or, as Jack Welch approximated the point more pungently in his 2005 book Winning, “In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.”)

Asked to explain the success of In Search of Excellence, Peters cites, besides other factors, the book’s abundance of exemplary tales. This was a first among business books, he maintains, arguing—mostly accurately—that “Peter Drucker doesn’t tell stories.” The ability to tell a story well, one rooted in the frustrations and occasional epiphanies in corporate life, launched Peters into celebrity on a circuit that steadily grew on the pattern of his success, that of the management author cum speaker.

There are observers who maintain that much of what goes on in business organizations comes down to a struggle between those who see the enterprise largely through the lens of the numbers—sales figures, costs, budgets—and those who focus instead primarily on people, their energies, ambitions, and limitations. A gross oversimplification, of course, but one that approximates the argument between the two schools of strategy.

After a little more back-and-forth, the final estimate would emerge: fewer than 10 percent of their clients, in the consultants’ judgment, were fully successful at putting their corporate strategies to work.

In a magisterial McKinsey staff paper, “Perspectives on Strategy,” John Stuckey, for two decades a leader of the Firm’s practice in that area, makes an observation fundamental to the issue of implementation. Once you have designed your strategy, he writes, and aligned your organization around it, “the task of executing the strategy remains,” obviously. He goes on, in words that probably should be framed and hung on the wall of every corporate conference room where these matters are deliberated: “This means more than just running the business: It generally means changing the business.” It was precisely the question of how to do this

Today, there are still those who argue that the single-minded focus on the shareholder need not have prevailed, indeed should not have prevailed.

There is a theory—Canadian scholar Danny Miller lays it out nicely in a 1991 book, The Icarus Paradox—that when companies truly get into the deepest trouble, it’s usually not because of their weaknesses but rather because of their strengths. Or more specifically, it’s because they tend to overdo the very energies, inclinations, and expertise that brought them success.

The Financial Times recently reported that “around 500,000 students will graduate with MBAs globally this year”;

the brightest young business minds from the real work of management into the ranks of parasitic consulting. I wrote an article or two along these lines myself. This, I now realize, was a monumentally stupid argument—though some continue to make it—for at least two reasons. First, it is premised on the assumption that the fresh-caught MBA will remain a consultant the rest of his or her life. The odds are dauntingly against this. The up-or-out policies of the consulting firms, a reflection of their structure—the income of the seniors being dependent on the firm’s ability to bill out teams of lesser-paid juniors—dictate that no more than one out of eight or ten who start will survive the progressive weeding process and eventually make partner. While 25 percent of Harvard’s MBAs may go into consulting in any given year, only 11 percent of HBS alumni say they continue to work in the industry. It’s probably more accurate to view a two- or three-year initial stint in consulting as akin to the postdoctoral program a newly minted PhD scientist might embark on, as an opportunity to develop and hone analytical skills originally acquired in school.

Some observers widened the discussion to argue that “intellectual capital” constituted the “new wealth of organizations,” as posited by the subtitle of the best book on the subject, Tom Stewart’s Intellectual Capital. But unlike the financial variety, intellectual capital beyond the tradable was damnably difficult to measure, anatomize, or capture, no easier than core competencies.

Haas quotes TPG’s Coulter: “Every day you don’t sell a portfolio company, you’ve made an implicit buy decision.”

no one has yet produced proof that being acquired by a PE outfit consistently results in downsizing any more ruthless than what has become the general corporate norm.

Laws in every state prohibit automakers from selling a car directly to you or me; the sale has to go through a dealer, which the car companies came to regard as their real customer, with predictable, dismal effects. Costs? Easier to buy a few more years of peace with the United Auto Workers—kick the can down the road a little farther—even if it means that it costs us a few thousand more to make each vehicle than it does those devils from abroad. Competitors? Per the quotation from Henry Ford II in the preface, what do foreigners with their little “shitboxes”—his term—know about making real cars?

In March 2009, Jack Welch—of all people—told the Financial Times that “on the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.” The man once viewed as the poster CEO for value creation went on to explain: “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy,” and, more surprisingly, “Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products.”

Impressions of Brazil

(Me on the iconic mosaic promenade next to Copacabana beach on the one rainy day)

I recently spent 10 terrific days in Rio de Janiero and Paraty, Brazil.

It was more vacation than fact-finding so I skipped Sao Paulo and the normal set of meetings I would have arranged to discuss the politics and economics of the place. My impressions, then, are less intellectual and more experiential.

1. City / Beach. The beaches of Rio are stunning. But there are stunning beaches all over the world. Rio is different because a big, bustling city juts up right against the beach. As you lie on white sand, in front of you is ocean, islands, and green trees. Behind you are tall buildings, and hills packed with small homes. There is a certain allure to the remote island beach. But those places usually lack good infrastructure nearby. The Rio beaches are as beautiful as any I've seen, and there are plenty of bathrooms, food markets, showers, wi-fi, etc. nearby.

2. People. The Brazilian people were super energetic, diverse, friendly, and of course, very beautiful. I spent a good hour sitting on a beach chair on Copacabana beach, drinking a fresh coconut, and just watching all the people bustle around me. (And then several more hours reading books.) The racial diversity among beachgoers was striking. The commitment to string bikinis, even among 75 year-old 150-pounds overweight women, was impressive.

3. Safety. I've never traveled to a place where I had heard so many first-hand accounts of people robbed or mugged. Statistically, too, it's supposed to be bad: it is the top-ranked city in the world for "violent international deaths." This reputation probably explains why we saw so few Americans. I didn't feel unsafe at all, though. Granted, I stayed in the nicer neighborhoods and didn't wander around centro at night. But I felt more exposed in Buenos Aires than I did in Rio, and that includes comparing the airports and bus stations.

4. Paraty. This is a small colonial town in-between Rio and Sao Paulo. It is a lovely, sleepy place, with cobble stone streets downtown, beautiful ocean-front views, and rural dirt roads. Boat rides, horse riding, and plain old hiking all easily available.

5. Soccer. Soccer was everywhere. Truly, everywhere. Rich and poor, young and old. On beaches, on grass fields, on cement courts, on dirt paths. It makes sense that Brazil is a soccer power: when the best athletes in a country of 190 million people are funneled into one sport, they're bound to be good.

6. Favelas. We went on a tour of two Rio favelas, the famous shanty towns / slums erected on public land and run primarily by drug lords. There's much poverty. Some live underground and access the above-ground world via a maze of tunnels and ladders. Still, there is quite a functioning society in the favelas. Every store you could imagine. Banks. TVs. Etc. The main story doesn't seem to be jaw-dropping objective poverty (India is far worse) but rather the proximity of poverty to the wealth of Rio. The American School in Rio costs some $30k a year to attend and sits literally three minutes away from a favela. We were told on the tour that different drug cartels run different favelas but since they guarantee safety to the people (so long as they don't report any activity) the drug-run hoods are quite safe to live in. When police catch a kingpin from one cartel they will simply drop him off on the streets of another favela to ensure his swift death. Oh - and my ears may have deceived me, but I thought I heard a kid yell at us on the tour, "They don't even care about us."

7. Kites. Brazilian kids are obsessed with flying kites. Especially in Paraty. This was so memorable that it's worth its own point.

8. Patriotism. The people seemed extraordinarily patriotic. Many donned the national colors. Flags draped buildings and cars. Maybe this was simply leftover World Cup fever. But I felt something more. The Rio Olympics in 2016 may serve for Brazil a similar purpose as the Beijing 2008 games did for China: an announcement to the world that Brazil, pregnant with potential seemingly forever, has at last arrived on the global stage.

I Know That You Know That I Know

Malcolm Gladwell's article this past May examined the "I-know-they-know-I-know-they-know" regress as it relates to spying and national intelligence. If country X knows that country Y is intercepting their communications, isn't country X likely to communicate intentionally wrong information? It's an interesting read.

On a more personal level, social situations where I know the other person knows something about me but they are not aware that I know that they know, or variations thereof, are always intriguing and challenging. Interactions bulging with meta data.

Andre Aciman, in a long, interesting essay in The American Scholar, touches on similar themes when, as an aside, he talks about his favorite French novels which have sentences or paragraphs like:

Her lover knew, by the way she showed every conceivable proof of love for him, that she was determined to say no to him.

Or:

Her future husband could tell, by the way she blushed whenever they were alone together, that she felt neither love, nor passion, nor desire for him; her blushes came from exaggerated modesty, which in her coy, girlish way she was pleased to mistake for love. The very means meant to conceal her blushes is precisely what gave them away. Her husband guessed by how happy his wife was when she heard that their friend was not going to join them on their trip to Spain that he was the one with whom she’d have betrayed him if only she had the courage.

Or:

The frown with which she seemed to dismiss the man she wished she didn’t love told him everything he longed to know. Even the abrupt, rude manner with which she snapped at him as soon as they were alone was a good sign: she was more in love with him than he had ever hoped.

Or:

I thought that if anything could rekindle your feelings for me, it was to let you see that mine too had changed, but to let you see this by feigning to wish to conceal it from you, as if I lacked the courage to acknowledge it to you.

A Question Men Ask Themselves

Elsewhere in the world of gender:

• Marty Nemko on how men don't have it easy in society.
• The always-funny Kelly Oxford tweets: New numbers: 100% of girls with good posture are called 'bitches'.
• Here is how to give a great man to man hug. Highly informative. I would just add that if you're doing a goodbye hug it should be at the very end of the interaction. Any sooner, and you risk having to pass time with the person you just hugged / said-goodbye-to -- could it get any more awkward?
  

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Elsewhere on the web, and on completely different themes: I was moved by Tony Judt's reflection in the NYRB about trying to sleep with Lou Gehrig's disease. Eric Falkenstein's detailed critique of Nassim Taleb in general and Black Swan in particular was interesting -- I'm not qualified to comment on the more technical finance / math points, but I do agree that Taleb's (and many others') constant bashing of "experts" has gone way overboard. I learned quite a bit about the history of American foreign policy from George Packer's review of Peter Beinart.

Book Review: How to Be a High School Superstar

Cal Newport's latest book is called How to Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Into College by Standing Out (Without Burning Out).

This is a book with loads of original ideas for any student at any level on how to do remarkable things that will favorably attract the attention of others, and in particular college admissions officers. Cal details his various philosophies such as:

• Why doing less is the foundation for becoming more impressive.
• Why demonstrating passion is meaningless, but being interesting is crucial.
• Why accomplishments that are hard to explain are better than accomplishments that are hard to do.

Woven into effortless prove, compelling personal examples, and rigorous academic research, are boxes such as the following:

The Laundry List Hypothesis: Adding to your schedule an activity that could be replicated by any student willing to sign up and invest a reasonable amount of time in it can hurt your impressiveness.

The Goodness Paradox: Most people assume they know how to become good. Yet most are not good at anything. (He goes on to explain how exactly you can get good at something.)

Cal is probably the most rigorous and eloquent writer in the student success space. Because of the sophistication of his ideas -- clearly presented as they may be -- I expect this is a book only the best high school students (though all parents) will fully appreciate.

For purposes of full disclosure, in addition to Cal being a good friend and collaborator, there's a chapter in the book on me. He focuses on how I used the "law of under-scheduling" and "law of randomness" to build a gap year after high school that turned out to be the most phenomenal 15 months of my life.

This is not a book I could have or would have written. He starts from the premise that admission to a selective college is the goal of high school. By emphasizing how one can seem impressive to college admissions officials, Cal addresses the millions of high school students and parents for whom this task is foremost. He wisely ignores folks like me who sit on the radical fringe and start from the premise: "Why college?" Fortunately, many of his philosophies have broad, general application, regardless of the path you choose. So come one, come all.

I highly recommend this book to parents and driven students. Cal and I will do something special for readers of this book later in the year. So if you're interested go ahead and buy the book and hold onto your Amazon receipt.

How to Think About Money

"Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn't be about the money." -- Tim O'Reilly

The Feel-Bad Effect from Not-So-Close Facebook Friends

My good friend Stan James writes about how social networks amplify the feel-bad-in-comparison effect when you see people raving about how glorious their lives are:

In my trips back to Colorado, I have been struck each time by the discord between people’s Facebook lives and what they say in private. On Facebook they have been on an amazing vacation to exotic beaches. In person they confess that the vacation was a desperate attempt to save a marriage. On Facebook they have been to gliteratee tech conferences. In person they confess they haven’t been able to sleep for months, and are on anti-anxiety medication from the stress of financial pressures on their company...

What’s interesting is that this feel-bad Facebook effect seems to come from a distinct source: not-so-close Facebook friends.

In the case of true close friends, you know about all the crap that is going on in their lives. From deep interaction, you know the specific pains and doubt that lies behind the smiling profile picture...

Since TV was invented, critics have pointed out the dangers of watching the perfect people who seem to inhabit the screen. They are almost universally beautiful, live in interesting places, do intereseting work (if they work at all), are unfailingly witty, and never have to do any cleaning. They never even need to use the toilet. It cannot be pschologically healthy to compare yourself to these phantasms.

So it’s interesting that social networks have inadvertently created the same effect, but using an even more powerful source. Instead of actors in Hollywood, the characters are people that you know to be real and have actually met. The editing is done not by film school graduates, but by the people themselves.

In the end, my friend’s strategy seems to be the right one: don’t spend too much time purusing the lives of people who aren’t in your life. And spend more time learning about the uncut, unedited, off-line lives that your friends are actually living.

Very true when reading other people's public content. People tend not to share their warts in public forums. Keep that in mind if you feel shitty in comparison when reading about the apparent charmed life of a blogger you don't know well in real life.

Four years ago I wrote a somewhat similar post but from the perspective of a person who writes generally upbeat tweets and blog posts. When you know you are going to blog about an experience before you have the experience, you want it to be good so that you can write a positive post that's fun to write and read. It changes the actual experience to be more positive. After writing about the (positive) experience, it's in the historical record. When you read old posts to remember your past, you feel happy about all the positive experiences you accumulated and recorded. It's not just about whitewashing the past or selective memory (though this is part of it); there's an anticipatory effect of sharing the experience in a public forum that changes the actual experience for the better.

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I just told a friend I was writing this post. She said, "This is a litmus test I use for how close I am with a friend. If s/he doesn't tell me anything bad about their life, I assume we're not very good friends."

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Note to readers: Blogging will be light for the next month due to extensive travel, and probably more sporadic than usual for the rest of 2010. If you don't already use an RSS reader I encourage you to do so, and subscribe to this feed. You can also get my posts via email.

Chris Sacca on How International Travel Informs Entrepreneurship

My friend Chris Sacca, micro-VC and former Googler, in a recent interview on TechCrunch TV says he prefers to hire people in Silicon Valley who've traveled / lived outside the United States:

Folks who have been exposed to [the developing world] tend to be a lot easier to work with here. They see the bigger picture, they feel lucky to be in such a privileged setting, and they go after what they're doing not just as a for-profit entrepreneur but they see a much more whole approach to business.

He goes on to talk about how traveling abroad forces humility on you. It also builds patience, in my experience.

On Silicon Valley, Chris says:

Silicon Valley is a way of thinking about business: it’s a way of focusing on end users and their problems; it’s a way of hiring smart people, paying them relatively little, but giving them equity in the company; it’s a way of sharing information with the people that you work with, flat transparent organizations… peers working side by side to solve problems; it’s a lot of optimism, it’s a lot of focusing on big problems and audaciously trying to pursue solutions there.

Below is the embed. In other clips, Chris talks about The Next Big Thing (mobile), Twitter, and other topics.

The Secular Church, Continued

French 19th-century sociologist Auguste Comte started one in his time. Here's how it worked:

He observed that conventional faiths usually cemented their authority by providing people with daily (and even hourly) schedules of who or what to think about - rotas typically pegged to the commemoration of a holy individual or supernatural incident. So he announced a calendar of his own, animated by a pantheon of secular heroes and ideas. In the religion of humanity, every month would be devoted to the honouring of an important field of endeavour - for example, marriage, parenthood, art, science or agriculture - and every day to an individual who had made a valuable contribution within these categories.

....in Comte's religion of humanity, there were classes and sermons to help inspire one to be kind to spouses, patient with one's colleagues and compassionate towards the unfortunate.

Because Comte appreciated the role that architecture had once played in bolstering the claims of old religion, he proposed the construction of a network of secular churches or, as he called them, temples of humanity. ...Inside the temples, there would be lectures, singing, celebrations and public discussions. Around the walls, sumptuous works of art would commemorate the greatest moments and finest men and women of history. Finally, above the west-facing stage, there would be an aphorism, written in large golden letters, invoking the congregation to adopt the essence of Comte's philosophical-religious world-view: Connais-toi pour t'améliorer ("Know yourself to improve yourself").

...in London, where secular services were held every Sunday morning. "We gratefully commemorate the beauty of mother earth," began one example, which Congreve delivered in a white tunic with a chain around his neck bearing Comte's image on one side and Plato's on the other. "We meet as believers in humanity. We use all that the past can offer us by way of wise utterances - poems or music, the religious writings of the east or west - but we admit of no revelation and no being outside of man."...

My previous secular church round-up post.

Tim O'Reilly: A Splendid Life

Tim O'Reilly:

• Runs a $100 million dollar book publishing and conference business
• Runs a venture capital fund that invests in tech entrepreneurs
• Owns a pair of white Icelandic horses that he enjoys taking care of
• Bakes scones and serves them with a strawberry jam that he makes himself
• Happily married for 35 years
• Lives on a 14-acre apple orchard in beautiful Sebastopol, CA

More from the profile of him:

O'Reilly says he has tried to use his company to demonstrate that being an entrepreneur can represent a means of exploring the world, one that is just as profound as religious inquiry or Greek philosophy or New Age introspection. "Business doesn't have to be separated from the rest of life," he says.

A Jr. MacArthur Foundation and Colin Marshall

There needs to be a MacArthur Foundation that focuses on emerging talents. It should give no-strings-attached grants to emerging talents in the same way MacArthur does for established talents. The grants would be given regardless of type of talent, though it would emphasize those demonstrating extraordinary creative potential yet who do not have much money. (I support economic affirmative action at young levels; I do not support racial affirmative action.) The current MacArthur genius grants are terrific in that they're given to individuals instead of causes or projects, but oftentimes the people don't really need the money or recognition. This "Junior MacArthur" program would involve placing riskier bets on still unproven individuals who nevertheless display great potential and tremendous self-direction. Grantees would use the money however they see fit to make the world a better place.

The first grantee should be Colin Marshall. Colin is a talented artist. He is one of the clearest thinking writers on the web. He runs a successful radio interview program. He runs a site about podcasts. He writes columns. He writes essays. He writes blog posts. He makes films. He tweets prolifically. He's 25 years old.

But there's a problem: his work doesn't generate much money. It's always been hard to make a living as an artist or self-employed intellectual. Especially so when Colin, by his own admission, knows nothing about making money:

Kinda trippy that I've biologically persisted nearly to the age of 25 without any idea whatsoever of how to make enough money to buy a car, isn't it?...I react to the mechanics of moneymaking with the same befuddlement that many of these well-heeled vehicle owners do when they stare at the dark, occult forms under their hoods.

At present, Colin has to spend some portion of his day doing bullshit work:

...[W]hatever one could call my "creative daily routine" turns out to be highly variable, since I have to wedge it in around "regular work," that is to say, the stuff that pays me cash bucks but is not broadcasting/interviewing, writing/essayism, film/video or sound/music. (I'm not sure how much sense it makes to organize life this way at my age, but bear with me.)

He knows the bullshit work could, if he's not careful, become the real work:

I've seen more than a few people fall into this basic scenario: get some McJob or cultivate an unengaging "fallback" career to support whatever it is they "really" do; grow dependent on the entity providing said McJob/fallback; build up a lifestyle whose monthly expenditure requires said employment; gradually, imperceptibly forget about real endeavors in the name of shorter-term concerns; become some hideous institutional creature, like a blind fish that feeds whatever nutrients happen to float across the ocean floor.

In any event, some extra money would go a long way for him:

...I personally reside at the point on the curve where an extra few grand — or, say, a double sawbuck left in the ATM — can greatly widen the smile on my face. Maybe this is a bad sign for someone my age, but when I saw Sibilance link to a WSJ article about how a 22-year-old girl managed to make it in NYC on $30,000 a year, my reaction was not "Woah, how'd she swing that?" but a series of elaborate fantasies about all the things I could do with the impossible dream of $30,000. Hell, what couldn't I do? That's "thousand" with a T, people. (And yes, when I think about how Ira Glass famously made "only" $60,000 a year for a long time while working hard on the radio, my inner voice becomes Robin Leach's.)

Of course, Colin could (and should) learn more about how to monetize his talents. But beyond a basic increase in entrepreneurial savvy -- which would not require selling out by the way -- beyond that, it becomes difficult to do the kind of work that he does (esoteric film reviews, for example) without spending a huge amount of time trying to raise money or work dull side jobs.

If Colin could focus on his art and not worry about the cash bucks, the world would be a richer place. I realize there are a million other people who think of themselves as falling into this category. Many writers, for sure. I'm highlighting Colin because a) he's a friend, b) he's young, c) a small amount of money could go a long way for him.

Bottom Line: Someone should start a program that gives no-strings-attached grants to high potential individuals under 30 with extraordinary creative potential (yet little money), and a demonstrated ability to self-direct and self-manage. Person-driven philanthropy.

How to Cook Restaurant-Quality Food

Last year the always worthwhile Adam Gopnik wrote a great piece about cookbooks. Delightful reading for anyone unusually interested in cooking. For the rest of us, there was one big overarching practical nugget:

...hyper-seasoning, and, in particular, high salting, is a big part of what makes pro cooks’ food taste like pro cooks’ food....

Mark Peel, in his Campanile cookbook, comes near to giving the game away: “We chefs all lie about our mashed potatoes,” he admits. “We don’t tell you we’ve used 1½ pounds of cream and butter with 1¾ pounds of potatoes. You don’t need to know.” (Joël Robuchon, the king of his generation of French cooks, first became famous for a purée that had an even higher proportion of butter beaten into starch.)...

After reading hundreds of cookbooks, you may have the feeling that every recipe, every cookbook, is an attempt to get you to attain this ideal sugarsalt-saturated-fat state without having to see it head on, just as every love poem is an attempt to maneuver a girl or a boy into bed by talking as fast, and as eloquently, as possible about something else.

I've learned a bit about cooking over the past several months. Below, I add two points of advice to Gopnik's:

1. Add salt.

2. Buy rotisserie chickens from the supermarket.

3. Buy a rice cooker.

Tacit Liberal Support of Afghanistan War

MoveOn.org, one of the most influential liberal organizations in American politics, tops its homepage today with this key issue: "Rescue government from corporations and lobbyists."

Meanwhile, the United States is engaged in the longest war in U.S. history, costing billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and ironically "increasing and multiplying the terror threats we face"...and there is no end in sight.

If John McCain were president making the same decisions as Barack Obama on the war in Afghanistan -- sending 30,000 more troops, backpedaling on withdrawal dates -- my liberal friends would be in the streets protesting. Instead, liberals are peddling decades-old lines about corporate greed. Is the glamour of Barack Obama really so strong that they quietly accept his agenda even if they disagree?

I am not qualified to analyze Afghanistan in a serious way. I have never been there, I have never served in the military, I know little about the region. But from everything I read, it appears the counterinsurgency operation right now is a clusterfuck. If you read about the history of Afghanistan, perhaps this shouldn't be a surprise. In George Friedman's credible analysis, these sentences stood out: "The United States is trying to invent a national army where no nation exists, a task that assumes the primary loyalty of Afghans will shift from their clans to a national government, an unlikely proposition."

Andrew Sullivan has been heating up the rhetoric on Obama:

This much we also know: Obama will run for re-election with far more troops in Afghanistan than Bush ever had - and a war and occupation stretching for ever into the future, with no realistic chance of success. Make no mistake: this is an imperialism of self-defense, a commitment to civilize even the least tractable culture on earth because Americans are too afraid of the consequences of withdrawal. And its deepest irony is that continuing this struggle will actually increase and multiply the terror threats we face - as it becomes once again a recruitment tool for Jihadists the world over.

Or here:

This is a war based on fear, premised on a contradiction, and doomed to carry on against reason and resources for the rest of our lives. Maybe this is why you supported Obama - to see the folly of nation-building extended indefinitely to the least promising wastelands on earth, as the US heads toward late-imperial bankruptcy. It is not a betrayal as such. But it is, in my view, a huge and metastasizing mistake.

So will Obama's liberal base -- the people he must listen to more than any other -- speak up? Will they acknowledge that not actively opposing Obama's insane escalation of the war in Afghanistan constitutes tacit support?

Andreessen: Smart = Curiosity + Drive

In a video interview with Fortune magazine (embed below), Marc Andreessen says that in the context of early stage entrepreneurship, smart = curiosity + drive. He says an entrepreneur should be curious their whole life (presumably about the world in general) and then when starting the company be curious about the company, industry, etc.

This is kind of surprising to me. I take 'curious their whole life' to mean they're curious about many different things. I take 'curious about the company' to mean curious about the company in a monogamous, all-consuming, obsessive way.

What's the likelihood that someone who's generally curious can turn off that radar for 5-10 years and focus the curiosity on one thing? Do "curious" and "obsessive" go together in one human package with any frequency?

Or if not, is Marc saying that an entrepreneur can be intensely curious about the company at the same as being curious (at a noted level) about the world in general? If this is the case, is the entrepreneur requirement of crazy focus a myth?

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Here is my old post asking whether you'd rather hang out with business people or academics if you wanted to maximize interestingness. The comments section is outstanding. As of now, my ideal life is working with entrepreneurs (broadly defined) all day, but having breakfast, lunch, and dinner with journalists and academics. With entrepreneurs you get driven people who want to change the world. With public intellectuals you get big thinkers who are relentlessly curious.

Of my icons list of nine people, three are entrepreneurs, two are academics, two are political thinkers, one writer, one comedian. This analysis of Where's Waldo makes me want to add Werner Herzog to the list.

Cached Thoughts in Conversation

Kaj Sotala, on LessWrong, says that in oral conversation he frequently has trouble formulating sentences and thoughts fast enough to keep up. His solution: cached thoughts.

Both of these problems are solvable by having a sufficiently well built-up storage of cached thoughts that I don't need to generate everything in real time. On the occasions when a conversations happens to drift into a topic I'm sufficiently familiar with, I'm often able to overcome the limitations and contribute meaningfully to the discussion. This implies two things. First, that I need to generate cached thoughts in more subjects than I currently have. Seconds, that I need an ability to more reliably steer conversation into subjects that I actually do have cached thoughts about.

I agree it's hard to think new thoughts in real-time. 90% of the things I say in conversation are probably formulations of stuff I've already said / written / thought about.

But if the most fluid conversations between two people rely on each person drawing upon the appropriate cached thought to suit the moment, doesn't this mean that neither party is learning very much or generating new thoughts?

Possibly. However, in oral conversation there is spontaneity and randomness. You can never be certain where a conversation will lead. The joy is in following a conversation's natural arc.

Real-time interaction with another mind can introduce -- in the same frame, in the same moment -- two or three of four cached thoughts you have never before thought about at the same time. In this way, conversation can still be a learning device inasmuch as it helps you make connections among your existing ideas and knowledge. Oral conversation may not generate brand new thoughts, but it can enrich and make interconnected your old ones.

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Here's my popular post on in-person conversation skills. Here are annoying conversation stoppers.