Catmull describes a turning point that occurred during the making Toy Story 2. People at Pixar worked long hours, seven days a week over a grueling nine-month period to complete the movie. By the end of the nine months, one-third of the staff had repetitive stress injuries. On one occasion, an exhausted artist forgot to drop his infant son off at day care and left him in his car parked in the broiling Pixar parking lot for three hours. When the child was discovered, he was unconscious (fortunately he was revived). The incident traumatized Catmull and others at Pixar. It forced them to ask the question: What have we become?
Pixar had drifted into dangerous territory by putting the movie ahead of the well-being of its people. The harm done to employees, and what could have happened to the child, was a wake-up call that solidified Catmull’s core belief that people must always come first. He identifies three reasons. First, it’s a leader’s responsibility to protect the people he or she leads from pursuing excellence at all costs and it’s irresponsible to do otherwise. Second, no organization is sustainable that allows harm to come to its people. The best people will not be attracted to nor remain in a culture that ignores their welfare. Third, ideas come from people so people need to be the priority.
Victims of Complexity
Moral Reflection
By accepting this narrative of progress uncritically, imagining that technological change equals historic human betterment, many in Silicon Valley excuse themselves from moral reflection. Put simply, the progress narrative short-circuits moral reflection on the consequences of new technologies.
Why Self-Organizing is So Hard
This week, Tony Hsieh issued a challenge to every Zappos employee: self organize or leave.
I wrote a post on the challenges of going Holacratic.
Update: I was asked to come to Zappos to deliver this in-person. Tony Hsieh wasn’t jazzed about my opinion. Only time will tell.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Big Firms Create Big Inequality
The authors find that the relationship between the growth in the size of companies and the level of inequality holds across the rich world. They looked at data from 1981 to 2010 on wages and the size of largest firms for 15 countries in the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries. The relationship between rising levels of income inequality and the size of firms was strong.
This effect is particularly noticeable in America and Britain, where firms have grown rapidly in recent decades. In America, for instance, the number of workers employed by the country’s 100 biggest firms rose by 53% between 1986 and 2010; in Britain the equivalent figure is 43.5%. On the other hand, in places where the size of firms has not changed much, such as Sweden, or where it has shrunk, such as Denmark, wage inequality has grown much less. Part of what is perceived as a global trend towards greater disparity in wages may actually be the result of the biggest firms employing a greater share of workers.
Myspace’s Demise
We were not nimble in any way, shape, or form.
Neither Radical Nor Revolutionary
ATM Job Replacement
The other major change was that the job of a teller changed. Banks began to offer more services, and tellers evolved from being people who put checks in one drawer and handed out cash from another drawer to people who solved a variety of financial problems for customers.
When people get scared about robots replacing workers, the ATM is the usual salve. We hope that technology makes it so humans can offer deeper and more meaningful interactions and services to other humans.
You Are The Traffic
Yes, everybody understood because we all live in this weird thing together called Hollywood. If we all actually were nice, it wouldn’t work.
Disgraced studio exec, Amy Pascal.
What’s the point of working your way to a position of power if you just prop up the same shitty power structure you are supposedly unhappy with?
When Experience is Useless
US neuroscientists published details of experiments on rats, showing that in certain unpredictable situations, they stop trying to make decisions based on past experience. Instead, a circuit in their brains switches to “random mode”. The researchers’ hunch is that this serves a purpose: past experience is usually helpful, but when uncertainty levels are high, it can mislead, so randomness is in the rats’ best interests.
You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ’em, and know when to just say fuck it and do something random.
The Illusion of Control
Astronomical Mindfuck
You can easily fit all the planets in the Solar System back to back into the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
MIND.
BLOWN.
Cause and Effect is Elusive in Complex Systems
A complex system has no repeating relationships between cause and effect, is highly sensitive to small interventions and cannot be determined by outcome based targets, hence the need for experimentation; hence when dealing with complex systems there is the need for experimentation.
Society Isn’t Software
SimCity players have discussed a variety of creative strategies for their virtual homelessness problem. They’ve suggested waiting for natural disasters like tornadoes to blow the vagrants away, bulldozing parks where they congregate, or creating such a woefully insufficient city infrastructure that the homeless would leave on their own.
Two things the real world lacks that games and simulations don’t:
- The ability to make dramatic changes to the fabric of reality
- Obsessive players more interested in the outcome than the strategy itself (winning at any ideological cost)
Even Amazon Forgets
Bezos’s guiding principle for Amazon has always been to start with the needs and desires of the customer and work backward. But when it came to the Fire Phone, that customer apparently became Jeff Bezos. He envisioned a list of whiz-bang features, and the Tyto team started experimenting with a slew of promising technologies: near-field communication for contactless payments, hands-free interactions to allow users to navigate the interface through mid-air gestures, and a force-sensitive grip that could respond in different ways to various degrees of physical pressure. Perhaps most compelling was Dynamic Perspective, which uses cameras to track a user’s head and adjust the display to his or her vantage point, making the on-screen image appear three-dimensional.
- Lab126 is one of the few successful in-house R&D teams, interesting to see Bezos second guess it.
- Putting the customer first is HARD. You have to let go of your own ego. The way this article describes it, this was Bezos’ Spruce Goose, everything he could possibly want shoved into one monstrosity.
- Jobs already taught us that adding features doesn’t add value for the customer.
On Complexity Economics
There’s a third reason why complexity economics is under-rated. It does not give us a means of foreseeing the future. Of course, conventional economics doesn’t do so either. But the difference is that complexity theory tells us that such forecasts might well be impossible – which is not what the customer wants to hear. The best it can do is help us understand what has happened. And for me, this is good enough. As someone once said, “Economists have only changed the world; the point, however, is to understand it.”
I literally spent 3 years of my life reading every book and every academic paper on complexity (totaling more than 200 sources last I counted, and yes, humblebrag). For my money, Butterfly Economics is a great primer to viewing economics through the lens of complex systems.
The Hidden Cost of Complexity
One of the hardest lessons to internalize in software engineering is the hidden costs of additional complexity. Sometimes, complexity is just inherent in the problem space. Matching passengers and drivers while adjusting prices to balance supply and demand is a complex and hard problem. So is routing questions and answers to the people most likely to answer and read them while scaling a community and maintaining quality. Or developing a rich document editor that works well across all devices and supports real-time collaboration. That’s the inherent complexity that we need to tame for the products to succeed.
But other times, the complexity that we wrestle with is complexity that we introduced ourselves. We wrote code in a new programming language that few people knew and now we have to maintain it. Or we added additional infrastructure because we wanted to try the new, hot technology stack that we read about on Hacker News, but it fails in ways that we didn’t initially expect. Or we introduced a feature that few people use but that consumes a disproportionate amount of our time through fixes and bug reports.
Replace “code” with whatever you build your own products from, and it’s still true.
Women Are the Cure for Speculative Bubbles
A report by Barclays shows that in the five years to March 2011, hedge funds run by women and minorities returned 82.4 per cent, while non-diverse funds returned only 51 per cent. They did this with much less volatility, and with a far smaller drawdown during the 2008 crisis. Yet only 3.3 per cent of all hedge funds were run by women or minorities.
Friends at Work
The results were definitive: Friends outperformed acquaintances on both tasks. The reason? Friends were more committed at the start of a project, showed better communication while doing the activity, and offered teammates positive encouragement every step of the way. They also evaluated ideas more critically and gave one another feedback when they were off course.
The impact of having a friend at work.
I’ve been asking that question as part of a survey in most of my client org’s for the last few years. There’s always a handful of people who feel offended to entertain the notion of having a friend at work. I always feel the worst for them, that they think work is solely a battlefield where their ambitions are either laid waste to or lay waste to others.
The Secret to Radical Change
Why has Strive made progress when so many other efforts have failed? It is because a core group of community leaders decided to abandon their individual agendas in favor of a collective approach to improving student achievement. More than 300 leaders of local organizations agreed to participate, including the heads of influential private and corporate foundations, city government officials, school district representatives, the presidents of eight universities and community colleges, and the executive directors of hundreds of education-related nonprofit and advocacy groups.
These leaders realized that fixing one point on the educational continuum—such as better after-school programs—wouldn’t make much difference unless all parts of the continuum improved at the same time. No single organization, however innovative or powerful, could accomplish this alone. Instead, their ambitious mission became to coordinate improvements at every stage of a young person’s life, from “cradle to career.”
I once worked for an incredibly well funded, well intentioned, but ultimately stubborn to collaborate non-profit (backed by a former US Vice President). I wish more social change organizations would drop their guard and coordinate with their brother and sister organizations like Strive has.