leftovers | the business bro confirms leech therapy

There is one last connecting thread among this post's examples that might resonate better with you, dear reader - the difficulty in executing a passive rather than active intervention. This is a question that goes beyond the ultimately mundane matter of whether we are always working in the smartest possible way - it's a fundamental question of how our behavior builds into a sense of identity and whether doing (seemingly) nothing sufficiently reinforces this feeling.

Although the challenges specific to a doctor, a project manager, or a marketing director may bear little resemblance to one another, there is the shared difficulty of standing by and doing nothing in an area where your interventions prove expertise or authority. What kind of doctor keeps their job if they prescribe no treatments? Who would hire a project manager with an aversion to sending follow up emails? Where can I find a marketing team actively seeking the evidence that their campaigns have the same effect as a blank space? Maybe the deepest wisdom of all is that in prescribing leech therapy yesterday's doctors revealed something armchair experts like me are too eager to forget - in an uncertain world where progress often means two steps forward and one step back, the only thing we know when we don't know is that you have to keep moving.

the business bro confirms leech therapy

A friend once described the fundamental challenge in his marketing director role as the problem of "you never know for sure if it worked". He meant this in the specific way that fields such as statistics define causation, which sets a standard for knowing the effect of an intervention on the outcome. His organization ran campaigns in a way that failed to meet the definition, so they never knew the extent to which their results were caused by their decisions, if at all. One particularly helpful example he used referenced advertising during the Olympics. If his firm wished to determine the effect of their campaign in a statistically viable way, they would have first needed to randomly divide their audience into two groups so that one would see ads while the other would not, then they could compare differences in the groups' behavior to determine the effect of the ads.

Some of you may be familiar with this process by other terms, names, or labels - a randomized control trial, for example, or A/B testing. In their respective fields these are the gold standards for determining causation, which in more conversational terms means knowing for sure that one thing did in fact lead to another. It's rare to hear anyone dismiss the power of this approach when discussed in the abstract - clearly, if you had an idea for progressing toward a goal then you would want to know whether your idea worked. But I have noticed lately that a lot of people lose this conviction when it comes time to put the concept into practice. An obvious issue is that implementing this approach may have practical obstacles. One thing my friend pointed out was that no one he worked with would have agreed to omit certain major markets, which meant the randomization necessary for clean results was no longer possible. Yet my feeling remains that in most cases understanding and implementing this style of thinking would do a great deal to make us all better in our work.

One area where I've thought more about this lately comes whenever I get follow up reminders from certain pushy colleagues. These situations often have something to do with an urgent request or an upcoming deadline, like "hey, can I get an update on this?", that sort of thing. I don't find these very useful, often just creating extra work for me in the sense of having to stop working to meet the deadline in order to send a response, but I don't have any hope that things will ever change with these colleagues. My reasoning is along the lines of the above logic. As far as I can tell, they don't have any sort of system for isolating the effect of a follow up on the outcome. Therefore, every time they follow up, there are only two potential results - either everything works out, which strengthens the belief that following up is the right idea, or it doesn't work out, which I guess leaves things open to interpretation regarding the effect of the follow up. My suspicion is that the common interpretation in the latter case is not "I wonder if following up has any effect" but rather "I should have followed up more often". It makes a strange sort of sense because they're missing a critical data point for considering another conclusion - the example where they did no follow up yet everything worked out - but the more fundamental issue is that since they likely fully believe following up is the right thing, they'll never create the conditions for collecting that missing data point which might prove them wrong.

Maybe the right concept to invoke today isn't the randomized control trial or A/B testing but rather confirmation bias, the tendency to misevaluate evidence by assigning greater weight to instances that support rather than refute your theory. The cure for confirmation bias is actually quite simple, at least in explanation - you have to look for evidence that proves you wrong. I think the challenge for most of us is that we default toward seeking proof of being right rather than ruling out the ways we could be wrong. Confirmation bias plays right into this tendency. For my friend, his marketing department never looked for instances where consumer behavior was the same regardless of whether those consumers were exposed to a campaign; my colleagues don't seem capable of tossing a coin to decide whether they should hit send on a follow up email.

Obviously, none of this is going to be solved due to a quickly scribbled TOA post. Part of the issue is that I fear we miss opportunities to learn about confirmation bias, instead learning or emphasizing different lessons from situations where I would argue for the relevance of confirmation bias. Many readers may have learned that doctors once used leeches as a way to cure sick patients, with my understanding being that the medical theory back then suggested leeches could suck out the diseased blood. This anecdote was always taught to me with the air of "oh, look at how far we've come since those days" and it's indeed true that medicine has advanced many centuries past its dependence on leeches. But this style of teaching only improves my ability to win trivia contests while failing to explore the broader lessons that might apply in the present day. The effective teaching style would point out that this is an example of how confirmation bias enabled the advancement of incompetence, then offer me a way to identify confirmation bias for myself so that I don't fall into the trap of repeating someone else's mistakes.

In the leech example the problem was that the doctors, accepting the theory regarding leeches, never realized some patients would have healed regardless of the intervention, which allowed them to view each recovery as further evidence confirming the leech theory. My colleagues, always ready to send a follow up, never know if the recipient would have completed the job regardless. My friend's firm poured endless resources into campaigns that may have had no true effect on consumer behavior. If we are to learn anything from these examples, it's that knowing whether one thing truly leads to another can be a far more complicated question than it might seem at first glance. So what's the right approach? Knowing whether something worked, for sure, is a very high bar, and perhaps it's not always realistic to aspire to such a lofty standard. But it's frighteningly easy to settle, looking strictly for evidence that our first instinct was right. Maybe the best way is to reframe the idea of what it means to be right - not accumulating evidence in our favor but instead ruling out the ways we could be wrong, methodically and consistently, until being right is the only remaining possibility.

leftovers - reading clearout, april 2022 (reciprocal vulnerability)

While reviewing my notes ahead of preparing the original post, a sentence I scribbled down from Maggie Nelson's On Freedom caught my eye - a lack of reciprocal vulnerability often threatens to undermine certain forms of discussion or advancement. It seems like an unusually wise point, though perhaps this may be lost on those who naturally understand the idea.

I'm remembering as I write this how I would often encounter examples of this thought in action through my hospice volunteering - nurses and staff, fellow volunteers, even certain visitors or residents would find ways to establish connection through reciprocal vulnerability. One advantage of the hospice setting to this idea is that a hospice is an environment defined by vulnerability. The need to take initiative, at least in the sense of emotional exposure, rarely seemed to fall to me. It also helped that with others often going first I could sense just how much exposure was appropriate to support or even advance the interaction - too little, like Nelson writes, and I would undermine the moment. However, it's worth noting that too much could create its own problem. One thing I learned over the years is that initiating didn't always mean a willingness to reciprocate, and my misreading of those signals sometimes led to a retreat whenever I my own vulnerability pushed the other a step beyond their comfort level with reciprocation.

All of this applies outside hospice situations, but being outside that specific environment means a lot of interactions happen with an unstated assumption that vulnerability remains in a quiet corner of the interaction. Therefore, my challenge these days is correctly reading situations to determine just how much I can share without making the other feeling that they would be better off retreating rather than reciprocating. It's not my intent to make this sound like a challenge that I have mastered, or that I am some sort of guru in all matters of difficult discussions. It's really more the opposite - I remain such a beginner that my small successes remain limited to areas where I've had the steps spelled out for me.

But shouldn't we share our successes? There was a moment a few months ago where, as a panelist leading a job interview, I sensed our candidate having a hard time answering certain questions. These questions were, by design, unusual in the context of a recruiting process, with the idea being that they would help us better understand our candidates in the context of our DEI goals. I recalled from my prep work how the candidate's cover letter shared their interest in the organization, telling a story that I could relate to from my own experience, so in a quiet moment I shared a couple of comments explaining why I initially wanted to join the team. It wasn't a magic moment by any means, but it did seem like the answers from that point were a little freer, our candidate perhaps benefiting from access to a wider range of available answers due to a sense that their inherent vulnerabilities would be reciprocated by an interviewer.

who woke the business bro?

Sometimes I find myself in these conversations at work with a person I don't know very well who is explaining to me that, you know, George Floyd was murdered in 2020, it was an awakening, and they've been thinking about a lot of things. My response is always the same, and it's genuine - that's great, we should always be learning, progress is a team sport, and so on. Finding more people who are committed to these ideas is a rewarding part of the job, each one swelling our ranks one at a time, so despite the major setbacks represented by certain current events I remain convinced that we will win - we the people who see each other equally, who reject the bullshit that enables or excuses bigotry, who see the future as a place we will all share together. We will win.

There is something else I think about in these moments, however, and given that it's not an immediately helpful thought I mostly keep it to myself. If someone highlights 2020 as a turning point, then it means I have around a thirty year head start in terms of at least having some related topics in mind. Such a detail has no real meaning, of course, reflecting merely that I'm a two-time minority in his mid-thirties, but in a workplace context I suspect it means I have the equivalent of a few additional years of experience ahead of the class of 2020. For those who've endured far more serious forms of discrimination than me, the perspective they bring to the workplace is even greater than mine.

It might be necessary for me to work out a way to express this observation in a productive way. It always sounds good on paper to talk of "meeting people where they are", but what do you do when the variation within a workplace is as wide as the gap in math skills between a third-grader and a college graduate? I don't have the answer, but it surely isn't a few optional training sessions per year. I guess this is the age-old problem we are trying to solve - if you aren't among that privileged majority, then you either have to be twice as good at your job just to keep up with your peers or you can recite the company script while the advantage of your experience is eroded down to the corporate average.

leftovers - the business bro catches up to emmitt smith

The post from Sunday talked about the importance of prioritizing search criteria to increase precision as you define the hiring process for a given opening in your team. But how do you make these prioritizations? One helpful starting point is to consider the current team. How can the current team support a new hire in terms of training and development for certain skills? The qualities that a team can share with a new person may suggest a quality that can be deprioritized in the search.

It may also help to consider what the manager is capable of in terms of coaching the new person. If I use my current search as an example, I would point to my ability to teach and train in technical skills as a reason for lowering the priority on this specific criteria, but I might prefer someone with a more developed set of customer service skills because I have less experience training people to improve in their interactions with colleagues and stakeholders.

the business bro catches up to emmitt smith

The combination of the NFL Draft happening just last weekend and my own involvement in a handful of searches for new hires into my organization has me thinking quite a bit these days about performance evaluation, particularly in the context of finding new additions. As a field, it seems to be around where astronomy was a thousand years ago. A specific story comes to mind from a book I read as a kid about Emmitt Smith, the legendary NFL running back who spent most of his Hall of Fame career with the Dallas Cowboys. The team used a first-round selection on the Florida star but some criticized the choice, with my recollection being that his footspeed was a major source of concern. When Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson was asked about this criticism, he responded to the effect of "well, I never saw him get caught from behind in college". Maybe we should call Jimmy the Copernicus of helmet football.

There is more to say about this story, a lot of which I covered in a December 2018 post. However, the direction of that post was a little different than why this story came to mind again recently, so I'll summarize the point from that post then add my new thought. The obvious lesson from the Emmitt Smith story is the importance of knowing which qualities are appropriate to evaluate along the lines of "good enough" - that is, not whether the player is the fastest, but whether the player is fast enough. In a generalized context, what it means is assessing a candidate using a yes/no framework (such as, does the candidate have a specific degree?) but resisting the urge to use relative value in the evaluation (in other words, not comparing GPAs of those who hold the degree). I think this lesson comes through in the above link so I won't harp on it any further.

The other lesson is far subtler but perhaps the more important consideration, particularly if you are generalizing to your own role as an evaluator. The reason Jimmy Johnson could evaluate footspeed on a "fast enough" basis is because he had prioritized the necessary qualities for success in the role. Speed is absolutely critical for success in the sport, but by prioritizing it appropriately Johnson knew he could take a slower player if it meant that the player was a better fit in terms of other more important criteria. I think the first step for any evaluation, particularly in the context of recruiting for a new hire, is to determine the top criteria for defining the best candidate. From my experience this is hard to do if you choose more than two or three qualities, but it's really up to the person in charge to know how many qualities can be precisely evaluated during the search. Once you have those criteria, you need to evaluate each candidate in enough detail to compare one candidate to the other along those criteria. This doesn't mean you would ignore other lower-priority criteria, but it does allow you to take the simpler approach of evaluating for "good enough" in those areas so that your energy is saved for evaluation of the priority criteria.

the business bro shoots for the stars

It seems that when you ask kids about a career aspiration, "astronaut" tends to be among the most common answers. I was never like that, and as I get older I look back with pride on my youthful instincts. I concede that it might be cool to launch off into space and have a look at the planet from above, but I think I would get bored at some point (which I assume, for me, would be around five or ten minutes).

The larger problem is that, like most jobs, there is a reality about work that is slightly misrepresented in the mind of a starry-eyed third-grader. Let's call this one of the lessons saved for adulthood. Basically, what happens is that your first thought about a job might be the best part about the job, and then it's a matter of time before you learn about the other 99% of the work. If we use the example of when I was a third-grader, I might have said I wanted to be a professional athlete, but that answer was ignorant of the following - endless public scrutiny, road trips to places like Manchester or Qatar, missed holidays and milestones, long game days waiting to go to the stadium, the ever-present threat of injury, a constant diligence about what to eat or drink, and so on. It's not so much that I couldn't have handled any of this as a professional, it's just that I didn't think about it when I answered "what do you want to be when you grow up?" as a ten-year old.

So kid, do you want to be an astronaut? Imagine blasting off to space for a mission. You battle through the discomfort of liftoff, breaking through the g-forces or whatever, and swallow away the anxiety of having a billion five-alarm fires strapped to back of your spaceship as your main source of propulsion. Finally, you get the signal to sit back, and look around - it's space! So you look left, and there it is, God's little wonder in blue and green, then you look right... and there's your co-worker for the next few weeks, let's call him Bobby the astronaut, with one finger coming out of his nose... and now it's drifting... it's aiming... his lips part... I guess it's snack time?

I can barely tolerate riding from one subway stop to the next alongside a passenger whose headphones are just a tad bit too loud. How's a round trip to Neil Armstrong's flag going to go alongside Booger Bobby, whose nose grows its own lunch? And it's only the third minute of the trip - what other weird "personality quirks" are you going to discover on the way? Is Bobby going to breathe on your visor, too, until he can draw funny pictures on your fog? That's the thing they don't tell you about work - you can have some kind of notion about a dream job, but for the most a job is about the whole mess of other details where you slowly become frustrated by your lack of agency. What are you going to do when you realize your new colleague is an industrial-strength weirdo? Or a racist? Or just incompetent? Say what you want, but I know the answer - you aren't going to do anything about it. I guess this is a problem that can happen anywhere, but at least I won't be locked inside Apollo 53 when it happens to me.

the business bro games the office chair

It's starting to look like my current work from home arrangement, which has always been described as temporary, is about to slide into permanent status. This led me to do some thinking about acquiring new equipment to improve my home office. One critical item on my shopping list is a chair - I currently don't have a real chair, working through a combination of standing, lying down, and sitting on the floor. It's been perfectly adequate, in fact I actually prefer it to having a proper desk, but it's worth considering if I permanently work from my apartment. As I thought about it, I came up with a surprising hypothesis - the best type of office chair might actually be a gaming chair. The key to my thinking was a realization that companies and gamers are likely to think differently about chairs, which suggests certain possibilities regarding how the market will influence the eventual characteristics of the products.

In the office, equipment is generally regarded as a necessary evil, and this enables a common mentality that expenses should be driven to the lowest possible level. The best example I can think of to illustrate my point is the story about how Amazon's early desks were recycled doors - apparently, Jeff Bezos went to a Home Depot and calculated that attaching legs to a door was cheaper than buying a desk. This cute story makes a point about cutting costs but it requires the reader to accept an unstated assumption - the type of desk has minimal effect on performance. The reverse of this mentality is that an office will invest in equipment if it improves performance, which is why organizations buy top of the line computers for its design staff. But as far as I know, there is no company out there gaining a performance advantage due to its office chairs, and I suspect if it were otherwise we would know about it. When a company feels like its success can be explained by their office chairs, we'll find out the minute someone like Malcolm Gladwell publishes the story.

On the other hand, the gaming environment is defined by tiny factors, implying that equipment is no exception in terms of competitors looking for an edge. This insight is based on a gamer I know who does speed runs - he tries to break records for completing certain games or levels in the fastest time. The details he describes to me reinforce the theme that every second counts. I once sat down with him to watch a few examples of players speed running games I'd played in my childhood. The one that sticks in my mind is from Goldeneye 007, a first-person shooter based on a James Bond film - in the speed run, the gamer used a grenade launcher to create small explosions just behind him, the force of the blast propelling him forward much faster than Bond could run on his own. These types of examples led me to suspect that gaming chairs would have evolved over time through market pressure to become the most comfortable possible version of the product. Comfortable chairs, I figured, would be preferred by the top performers, which would then influence the novices to adopt the same products, eventually giving the top chair a significant portion of the market share. The subtle lesson from the speed running story is playing out - once a player starts using the grenade launcher to run faster, everyone must do it; the most competitive fields are defined by the non-negotiable tactics used by all its competitors, and these can include equipment if such a thing makes a difference in the end.

This doesn't automatically rule out the possibility of the same mechanism driving the market for office chairs, but from my experience I can guess that offices do not buy chairs based on performance criteria (if I had to guess the criteria, I would go with some combination of design, durability, and price). I'm sure about this partly because I know that many of my colleagues have struggled with office chairs, turning to alternatives such as medicine balls, standing desks, or expensive seats purchased on their own dime in search of a way to get through a day of office work. I have personally experienced a variety of aches and pains that I have blamed on the office chair, which prompted me years ago to build my own standing desk out of recycled cardboard boxes. If offices have been buying chairs for comfort, my personal experience is a highly unlikely outlier. I think this makes sense because from the perspective of a single organization the comfortable chair is a preferred but not required product, and this will remain the case until employees start seeking out firms based on the quality of office equipment. Otherwise, the bottom line is the bottom line - there is simply no need to take on additional costs unless those can be linked to improved productivity.

If I take all of this into account while considering that my goal is to buy a comfortable chair, then the conclusion is obvious - the best office chair for me should be a gaming chair because such chairs were designed (and redesigned) in line with my goals. But is it true? The conclusion certainly has the ring of a classic TOA-ism so I revved up the search engine to see if there was an existing consensus. I came across a few interesting articles, but for the most part they compared the merits of one with the other before helpfully throwing their hands into the air - hey, the chair is up to you! As far as I can tell, there is nothing out there at the moment which offers a definitive statement regarding the better option. This was a little surprising to me at first, but the more I thought about it the more I understood the situation - although I was on the right track, it must be that a comfortable gaming chair doesn't result in enough of a competitive edge to drive the market. Gamers have instead opted for design rather than performance features, a trend which will only strengthen as streaming platforms like Twitch reinforce the importance of looking good on-screen - the chair is a critical part of the presentation.

I suppose the only thing I've actually learned from this exercise is the problem of running with an assumption. Ultimately, it doesn't matter that I can talk about my logic until the sun goes down because the initial assumption - a comfortable chair leads to better gaming performance - wasn't relevant to how gamers made decisions. This is the nature of assumptions, and perhaps those who succeed know something more about them than the rest of us - when to ignore them, when to use them, and when to switch. Bezos, after all, saved a lot of money because he ignored a certain assumption about what a desk should look like, but as the company grew it started to use regular desks. And those speed runners know that the grenade launcher trick works up to a point - too much enthusiasm and Bond's health bar will run out. The chair question, I suppose, requires a similar answer, and maybe I'm sitting on it - a year and a half of working without a chair hasn't been a problem at all, and some of those aches and pains I once associated with the office chair have gone away. The best chair might be the office chair or the gaming chair, but as the article said it's really up to me; the best chair might be no chair at all.

the business bro hits carrots with sticks

My February post that mentioned a former boss and his bonus scheme begs an additional question - why do business bros insist on trotting out these incentive programs if they fall afoul of a simple cost-benefit consideration? It's an important question, and not just because it forces me to admit that despite my constant complaining business bros tend to be a sharp bunch. If the reward offered is so small that employees don't find it to be worth the effort, usually the business bro in charge is aware of the issue. In fact, I remember a few days after the end of the program that our company president mentioned to me in passing that the bonus payout "didn't look very impressive on a check". But surely, we didn't need to see a check to understand the problem. So what's going on here? Is there an underlying truth that carries more weight than my calculation from February?

I think the mental leap is that although the bonus program appears on the surface to be a soggy carrot, in most cases it's understood that such a reward is merely a sugar-coated stick. In other words, the half-edible incentive does less to motivate the team than does the implicit threat of punishment. This is true even when the business bro has good intentions for implementing the program - the response is likely more to do with steering clear of any unstated sanction. The reality is that everyone knows at some point the fact of participation in the program is going to be among the performance evaluation criteria. At minimum, those who've participated will benefit from some intangible rewards, possibly by being regarded as "reliable" or "hard working". The employees understand this, they suspect everything is eventually evaluated, which creates a real problem for anyone who has reservations about participating in the program - the bonus is presented as above and beyond the expectation, but at some point the boss might decide that those who work longer hours are the preferable employees. This looming performance evaluation mechanism, official or not, is the main reason why the decision to participate in the program is much more complex than the simple cost-benefit aspect I mentioned in the prior post.

The problem is magnified when the organization's performance assessment process is not directly linked to a measurable project or outcome, instead being framed in relative terms against a shifting subjective standard for "good standing". These environments subtly remind all staff that as soon as one lemming starts putting in long hours, the rest need to start sprinting for the cliffs lest they be left on the short end of the grading curve. This rat race feeling may be familiar to those who've competed in contexts outside of paid work - I suspect it's true in athletics, academics, social media, and much more; it's the law of nature wherever the standard is relative comparison. At the end of the year, it doesn't matter if the catalyst is a bonus program or not - the review cycle will identify the hardest workers, and the hardest workers will be those who seem to have worked the hardest; the measuring stick is the average work rate within the organization. The bonus program is merely one way to lift the average. The situation is only magnified if the bonus payments are public knowledge, or at least its details accessible to managers, as the numbers can tempt them into using those as shortcuts for performance evaluation.

It seems to me that incentive programs carry a serious risk of driving away anyone who can't afford to participate in it. This exodus may be driven by the "pay cut" factor described last month where the top performers leave to seek wages in line with their abilities, but it would also include employees whose other obligations or interests precluded them from devoting additional time to work. At some point these employees will realize their inability to offer extended time commitments to their work is costing them opportunities, and they will find an organization where the fact of their own lives is not a built-in detriment to their career.

Is this the mechanism that explains pay gaps? I'll stop short of jumping to conclusions but I do think this is an important factor. If I had to answer this question for a given organization, I would ask two questions. First, are existing pay gaps explainable by the ability to work more than forty hours per week? Second, does each staff member have the same constraints when it comes to the first question? I suspect that as I asked these questions while moving up through the levels in the organization, I would find an increasing proportion of those who've simply had more opportunities than their peers. My assumption is that the most common explanation for the fact will make some reference to individual decisions without taking into account how those decisions were influenced by access to certain resources necessary for taking advantage of those opportunities. If my hunch were true there would be far more to say about this fact, but for today I'll simply point out that such an organization would likely favor quantity over quality as it relates to performance, both in terms of measuring individuals as well as their objectives in the hiring process. I'm not sure about you, but I'd much rather prefer to work for someone who worked well rather than worked often, and for an organization who sought this quality in its new hires.

All of this nonsense brings me to my last thought, which is that from my experience there are very few true instances of a carrot or a stick. Or, perhaps a better way to say it is that the best reward is avoiding the punishment. My informal rule of thumb is that if someone offers a pure carrot - in the sense of a reward that can be pursued with no downside - then it's my job to find the hidden stick (and vice-versa). I've heard that in organizations which offer a bonus program, most employees eventually assume the bonus as part of their regular compensation. This is almost always explained with the air of "those silly employees and their careless assumptions" but the reality is that the bonus is surely described as performance based, which means the decision to pursue the bonus is just as much tied to performance as every other aspect of the job. The employees assume that the fact of pursuing the bonus is enough to earn the bonus, so why wouldn't they count those dollars? They know that if for some reason they don't earn the bonus, it likely means they are already on their way to being sacked, so perhaps the better way to describe the situation is that "employees assume if they are still employed, they'll get the bonus". They know the truth - if you aren't being hit with it, it's easy enough to enjoy the carrot.

the business bro's improv class

The most memorable improv show I've ever seen was my first. It happened sometime during my freshman year orientation weekend, inside the campus chapel. I don't recall a single word of the performance, but I'll never forget the structure of this one routine. The team performed its skit, then repeated the same scene, over and over, with one catch - each time, they halved the previous duration. In the final iteration, the team had one second for what was originally a two minute act, and they did all they could - the performance started and ended with everyone falling down onto the floor.

The gimmick had served its purpose. They got up and resumed the show, building on what worked to keep moving forward, but I'd already learned the lesson - given the right constraints, anyone can distill an idea, and distill it again. This kind of thinking is quite pervasive, and mostly for good reason - we are wasteful. There are always extra words, extra sounds, extra movements, but with a little prodding we can trim the excess until we are left with the message - stop, drop, and roll; spring forward, fall back; slow and steady wins the race.

I've been working on teaching this technique recently to one of our younger team members. I've found that his process is thorough to the point of distraction, which runs the risk of a peculiar form of paralysis - he routinely leaves a meeting with an impressive list of notes but is unable to use those to inform his next action. I've started asking him to state a summary of his work, then asking him to summarize his summary, then doing so again - three pages become a paragraph, a paragraph becomes a couple of sentences, the sentences become bulleted phrases. Over the past few months I feel like there has been some progress, and I expect this team member to build on his success over the rest of the year.

Like most business bros, I had a hunch my coaching would work, but for most of the journey I was flying blind. This is the essence of what we do - we try a few things and build on success. Like the way applause helps an improv team understand what works, it always helps us business bros to have outside reinforcement of our speculative efforts. A month ago during our division's monthly meeting, I thought I had my greatest reinforcement to date - our chief executive interrupted a short presentation by asking for a one-sentence summary of the preceding few slides. What a vindication of my methods! I smirked as the presenter struggled with the request, finally managing to squeeze his many ideas into a pair of complex, clumsy sentences.

I caught up with my team member a few hours later.

You see, I pointed out, we are not just working on this skill for its own sake. It's a high-level technique, relied on by the very person in charge of our division!

Ah, about that, came the reply. My dog was acting up, so I had to step away from the computer for a minute. I wanted to ask you if I'd missed anything...

Well. So it goes with coaching, I suppose - you draw up the right play, then the quarterback trips and falls. Still, the show goes on, so I nodded slowly to buy myself time. Yes, it was a good question - what had my team member missed while away from the computer? It seemed that I was the appropriate person to ask, having sat silently through the presentation except for that moment when I had chuckled my way through the two-sentence one-sentence summary. But for some reason, my mind had gone blank - I knew the gist but couldn't explain the details. I said I would get back to him.

I felt like someone who had realized Aesop's morals aren't a sufficient substitute for Aesop's Fables. Why is anything longer than it needs to be? I suppose that's the question we all need to answer. Yes, most things can be distilled into its message, but that means something must be lost in the process. I suspect the most likely candidate is the intangible factor, let's call it the essence, which often takes a backseat to the details. We know the hare lost, and from that fact we can learn something about racing, but what we really need to understand is why he took a nap, or why the tortoise kept going.

I think there was something missing in my well-intended coaching, which I perhaps overlooked from the arrogance of being ahead, and having a certain faith in my experience. I'd forgotten that since I already knew the stories, it sufficed to speak in morals. I was rudely reminded of my oversight when my moralizing exposed shortcomings in terms of retaining the new information from the unfamiliar presentation. I think I learned that there are some races which can only be lost, and that you cannot arrive anytime the journey has no destination. There are times where we learn more from reading than from the reading, just as sometimes we can see more on the trail than from the summit. 

If the story has a moral, then why write the story? If the presentation can be summarized in one sentence, then why prepare a presentation? If only a few words from the meeting mattered, then why have a meeting? I think everything about coaching starts and ends when we fall down, realizing that what used to work isn't going to work again, that the gimmick has served its purpose. Yes, the spirit is always good, but ideas always reach their logical conclusion. I think I'm ready to stand up again and start afresh with new questions, better questions - having distilled it to the basic message, what was the point of first having more than necessary? I'm back to it, back to winging it, back on my feet again to make it up as I go along, the lesson having finally sunk in after all these years.

the business bro explains the logic

It's logical that if a sport suffers from low ratings, additional broadcasts of said sport will pull in low ratings. It's also logical that stubbornly airing additional broadcasts of the sport, over and over, will do little to change the reality of those low ratings. It's logical, but not obvious. I cite as evidence the history of The Contender, a reality show that my friend once described as being "about a tournament where the winners fight each other, which is just boxing" (1). The problem with the show was that its focus on the reality TV aspect prevented it from realizing that it was just boxing, a concern it exacerbated by relying on promising but relatively unknown athletes rather than creating a show which featured its most recognizable stars. After all, if ratings for boxing were low when the fights featured the best in the business, how would airing additional fights with less talented boxers increase viewership? It wouldn't, and it didn't. In hindsight, the reality TV aspects of the show became a convenient scapegoat for its failure, taking the blame for low ratings that were always better explained by the reality of boxing on TV (2). 

There is a broader lesson in how misunderstanding the cause of low ratings prevented the business bros in charge from making improvements to the program. The story of The Contender reminds us that this form of blindness - which prevents us from seeing the forest for the trees - is all too common when we try to diagnose the primary cause at the root of the issue. It's similar to a story I shared two months ago about a former boss and his doomed bonus scheme - the math suggested that the additional time required to earn the bonus reduced overall hourly pay rates, implying that the bonus plan was in fact a poorly disguised pay cut. The problem could have been resolved with a better bonus (or, I suppose, by giving the staff an official pay cut, such that the math would suggest pursuing the bonus was profitable).

The biggest universal challenge facing most of us aspiring business bros involves finding the line between the relevance of the moment's details and the eternal truth that almost always sweeps such details away; it's like knowing when to run back into the burning building instead of remaining safely on the sidewalk. One way to illustrate the ubiquity of this task is to look at organizational truisms. The common business bro leans on these truisms to explain away what could otherwise serve as a critical alarm for the organization, but in some cases the truism must be set aside in order to properly recognize the root cause of a particular problem. It's a critical skill, which enables us to see what should have been obvious all along - no one watches boxing, even if the reality TV aspects bring an intriguing twist; no one likes a pay cut, even though most broadly agree that they like bonuses.

The first truism that comes to mind is the Peter principle, which states that in hierarchies employees rise to their level of incompetence; Peter's Corollary adds that the logical outcome for any position in a hierarchy is an incompetent employee. The stunning mechanism is based on the observation that promotions for good performance have no direct connection to success in the next role, seeing as how skills from a lower level are never certain to translate to a higher position. Thus, the conclusion is that an employee rising to a new position will either succeed and be promoted again, or struggle and stagnate at the new level. The business bro who looks at this mechanism may conclude that the situation is hopeless - there are no good reasons to promote someone except for good performance, but firing incompetent people seems like a good way to hurt morale while also dismissing someone who was valuable in a different position. The Peter principle offers an easy escape from the responsibility of resolving the issue - oh, what choice did I have, I had to promote him! And I can't be expected to fire him now, right?

There are two things that come to mind when I think logically about the Peter principle - training and structure. First, does the organization train promoted employees with the same commitment they demonstrate toward a new hire? From my experience, I'd say it's rare for an organization to even recognize the value of training a promoted employee, and my sense is that the promotion from "individual" to "manager" is treated with the barest indifference; I've seen CVS customers receive better training at the self-checkout kiosk than I have seen newly promoted colleagues receive useful managerial training. If entry-level employees are succeeding at rates much higher than promoted employees, perhaps the relevant issue is about training rather than the self-fulfilling prophesies glittering in Peter's crystal ball. But what if the lack of training isn't a relevant concern? This leads me to my second point, which is that the business bro may then wish to consider the hierarchy and assess its functional value. Does the hierarchy improve communication and decision-making, or does it exist merely to allow for promotions as a manner to acknowledge success? Rather than relying on promotions to recognize success, could a compensation scheme tied to the organization's performance be used instead? This would keep employees where they are competent while also enabling the organization to properly reward and acknowledge success. The Peter principle to me seems like an excuse for ignoring two more common issues - the failure of the organization to train promoted staff and the reliance on hierarchy as a way to recognize success.

The second truism is Parkinson's law, which suggests that busywork expands to fill the time allotted for the work. I’m sure anyone can relate to this concept, whether it be in the workplace or elsewhere, though of course it's commonly used to explain the way bureaucracy gradually overwhelms an organization. The suggested remedies to this phenomenon are so void of imagination that I wonder if they are in themselves results of the very busywork to which they state their objection. "If someone takes three hours, give them two" sounds like a decent solution, but it's destined to end with a spectacular double whammy - a missed deadline, closely followed by the particular form of shoddy work that only results from panicked rushing. I struggled a little bit to envision an acceptable remedy for Parkinson's law, then it came to me - the solution is to find interesting work, such that the busywork is no longer necessary; if the busywork is necessary, find new employees who will find it interesting.

I know this solution must be true because I've experienced the same challenge today with writing - having had nothing to write about, I've found something here that resembles busywork, then allowed it to fill up all the space thus far consumed by this essay. The sooner I end this, the better, but lacking as I am at the moment in terms of good ideas, I feel compelled to carry on rather than face the reality. The solution isn't to convince myself to stop, or to work within an invented time constraint, or to write faster - the solution is to find a new topic that contextualizes this subject as busywork, which will enable me to leave it alone without guilt as I explore a new project. I think this is the solution we all know, but prefer to leave unsaid, opting instead to invent wide-ranging explanations of unstoppable phenomena that create so many problems in our lives, problems over which we claim no agency. These explanations make us feel better, but they rob us of the opportunity to reach our potential. When we encounter a bad TV show, an exploitative boss, an organization that refuses to train, the solution is simple - find something better and move on. When we find ourselves mired into the twisted logic of our own busywork, we must stop for a moment until the picture becomes clear - if busywork expands to fill the time allotted to it, and we allot all of our lives to busywork, well, you don't need me to explain the logic of rising to your own level of incompetence.

Footnotes

1) My friend's capacity for these concise summaries was famous in our group - we used to refer to them as "___'s logical explanations". I didn't realize that these explanations, which we mostly treated as comic relief, were also examples of highly advanced critical thinking about the BS in daily life.

2) I assume they thought the show was like American Idol for boxing, but the process of an audience voting for singers based on short performances has no equivalent in the music industry, which gave Fox's hit program a necessary novelty factor that undoubtedly contributed to its success.

toxic culture

There's something I can't quite figure out regarding toxic cultures. If you go by how much people talk about the importance of culture, you'd think workplaces would be almost allergic to anything culturally detrimental, yet for the most part the negative culture seems to be the norm. Think about it - do you know anyone who advocates for a lousy culture? I don't, but I've seen many of these same people deliberately take action to destroy the culture they claim to value so much. Why is it that talking about a strong culture doesn't seem to be enough to get people to build it? It would be like a college crew coach discovering that the freshman rowers, recruited for their commitment to rowing, were in fact unable to even lower an oar into the water. But amusing though this analogy may be, it doesn't help me find the source of this issue.

These stories sometimes make their way into the media, where I often take a closer look just in case there are clues to help me better understand the phenomenon. The most recent public example that came to my attention was the story about the toxic culture at the Reply All podcast, which Spotify acquired as part of its $230 million deal for Gimlet Media. Based on the timeline I can pull together from this article, the issue of the workplace dynamic at Gimlet was a concern prior to the sale. Again, I have to wonder - if a company was building up its value with an eye on an eventual acquisition, surely it would make the most sense to build a strong culture? In addition to the productivity benefits, the strength of the culture might make for another selling point to attract a potential buyer.

Luckily for Gimlet, even though Spotify seemed to know about the problems it chose to proceed with the purchase. Now, I admit that there is no way I could know this for certain, just as there is no way I could know for certain that the employees at Gimlet would have all agreed in principle about their desire for a positive culture, but I'm comfortable making the assumption that Spotify would do its due diligence before agreeing to a $230 million outlay. This makes sense to me - I've seen friends scour Yelp for forty-five minutes researching lunch, so what I'm saying is that you would do a lot of work to ensure the success of any matter concerning $230 million. Reply All, one of Spotify's biggest podcasts according to the above linked article, is currently on indefinite hiatus while addressing its culture, so if there was a problem of this magnitude at the time of the acquisition then surely those vetting Gimlet would have known all about it.

But it's occurring to me now that perhaps my earlier confusion was misplaced - if a company like Gimlet can have its internal problems yet still command top dollar on the open market, then surely the message for every other startup is to focus on the things that build the valuation while leaving the other stuff - like culture - for later, for after the acquisition, for another company. There has never been, to my knowledge, a company acquired for a huge sum on the basis of its great culture alone. I have no doubt that everyone who claims to value culture is sincere, but the answer is often presented in an unrealistic vacuum, where the question poses a ridiculous choice - do you prefer a strong culture or a weak one? Who would say the latter? In the real world, culture is one among many variables, so maybe the question should be - how much money would you take to relegate culture to the bottom of your priority list? What I'm saying is that it's a toxic culture when an organization's leaders know there is a $230 million incentive to ignore their employees' concerns. 

the business bro's math of innovation is fifteen percent correct

It's bizarre the way busy business bros make time to talk about innovation - how much they like it, that they believe in it, that they consider themselves innovators, and possibly even inventors, though of course their only recent invention is this fresh charade of self-delusion; busy people don't have time for innovation. It sounds like one of those ancient riddles - if your entire day is allocated to predetermined tasks, how much time is left for new pursuits? I suspect this logic was at the foundation of 3M starting "15 percent time", a program which encourages employees to "set aside a portion of their work time to proactively cultivate and pursue innovative ideas that excite them." If there isn't time for innovation, then the only solution - or at least the initial step - is to make time for innovation. This style of programmatic thinking is not limited solely to 3M, and there are many more successes from this approach than just the famous example of the Post-It note - loyal TOA subscribers reading this on Gmail should pause for a moment in acknowledgement of the email service having been developed during Google's variant of the concept (cleverly renamed "20 percent time" by the tech giant, perhaps to disguise its roots). But the existence of these programs is the exception rather than the rule in most organizations.

The situation concerns me because my experience suggests that innovation is beyond the reach of most organizations, whose leaders seem to think innovation is the result of little more than sporadic votes of confidence. One reality shared across the different roles I've held in three organizations has been the proliferation of busy business bros who allocate every hour of staff time to an existing concern, the frenzy of short-term directives occasionally being interrupted long enough for them to insist - yes yes, we're open to change, invention, and progress. The actions always spoke louder than the words, or at least it was in my case, as I've found over the years that my various attempts at innovation would generally be met with a range of reactions ranging from indifference to open hostility, but rarely support. It reminds me of something Michael Lombardi said on an episode of The GM Shuffle podcast - if you think someone is smart, you should be able to list off two or three specific things about this person that support your position. When I think back to leaders I've worked with who spoke in grand terms about their commitment to innovation, it strikes me that not a single one of them said - here are two or three specific things I've done that demonstrate my commitment. Instead, they always spoke of their intangible qualities, like dedication to the cause; sometimes they wrote checks for future creativity that would have bounced at the patent office.

The temptation is to conclude that organizational behaviors reflect the natural human tendency to crave the familiar and the routine over the unknown. I remain open to the possibility that the business bros of my past feared change at a visceral level and tailored their managerial philosophies such that the status quo could reliably protect them from the horror of tomorrow, this terror being their only certainty regarding the otherwise unknowable future. However, the issue with this conclusion is that there were always certain instances where the gatekeepers would relent in the face of new evidence. In my first managerial role, I could never implement an official work from home program for my team, but working from home was otherwise permitted for a wide range of exceptions including my six weeks on crutches, anyone who moved out of state, or a violent case of the common cold; I was almost fired from another job for trying to automate a certain process using SQL, but a few months later a similar project was assigned to me as a top priority. I am sure millions of workers have asked at some point during the past year - why did it require a worldwide pandemic for our organization to embrace virtual collaboration?

I am intrigued by the possibility that failures to lead innovation are less about business bros being afraid of the unknown and more about them ignoring the underlying math, which in my mind always demonstrates the return on innovation. The example of the COVID-19 pandemic is especially intriguing to this point as almost all employers with the capability shifted to remote work, seemingly overnight, in a mass admission of the new cost-benefit equation. I suspect prior to this moment many organizations existed much like my own, where there was a clear divide between junior and senior management in terms of each group's belief regarding the benefit of widespread remote working arrangements. In fact, my current organization - which years ago grudgingly permitted senior staff to work from home for one day a week, assuming of course that the staff member in question met a long list of additional criteria, a checklist that covered at least one printed page and included critical reminders such as "staff may be asked to attend key meetings in person on their work from home day", this document a testament to the tireless work that addressed every risk associated with one butt being out of one seat for one day a week - this organization of mine suddenly found its entire roster logging into Zoom meetings from home, a transition period that lasted all of three days; there is no official verdict at the time of writing, but all signs point to this being a permanent arrangement, due mostly to the success of the past year. The mentality change, it should go without saying, was due to the sudden mortal risk of riding the Green Line to the office, which convinced everyone that 2019's reservations over working from home suddenly represented trivial concerns in the larger context of the advantages of remote working considerations.

If you strip away the buzzwords that litter certain TED Talks about innovation, I suspect you'll find that the truth underpinning programs like "15 percent time" is the same as for any other successful business practice - the balance of costs and benefits associated with the approach is beneficial to the company. This is crucial because the business bros who hide their fear of change by keeping everyone busy may find a cost-benefit approach more convincing, as many did when COVID-19 simplified the calculus of working from home - after all, the only consistent truth about business bros is that, given two numbers, they will cleverly steer their organizations toward the more beneficial of the figures. I suppose the logical conclusion, then, is to explain the math of innovation in the simplistic terms necessary for allowing a busy business bro to see the benefit. I usually refer to this as "managerial math" and the concept is simple - you have to figure out if the innovation has a profit, just as you would do in building the case for any other business plan.

I'll use the example of innovation through coaching to highlight this idea. The math involves accounting for the following - on the cost side, I consider the time I spend coaching, the time a colleague spends learning, the opportunity cost to both coach and colleague, and the possibility of allocating resources in the future to repair errors associated with misusing the new technique; on the benefits side, I tally the time saved from reapplying the new skill across future iterations, the direct cost savings or revenue gains of a new approach, and the possibility of inspiring colleagues to pursue additional training. I'm comfortable estimating these aspects of the equation but those concerned of painting with broad brushstrokes are advised to incorporate a comfortable margin that protects against this risk - for example, only proceed if benefits exceed cost by over 10%.

Below is one calculation using a situation from a few years ago - I was considering an email to a large group which would explain a trick I thought they could use in Excel files. I came up with the following estimates:

Costs (known)

• Time to draft email: one hour
• Cost - one hour of my salary
• Time to read email: one hour (sixty colleagues, half will delete or ignore, two minutes each for the thirty who read the email)
• Cost - one hour of aggregate salary among sixty total (thirty responsive) colleagues

Costs (unknown)

• Fixing future errors
• Opportunity cost of writing/reading email

Benefits (known)

• One percent annual efficiency for three colleagues
• Response rate to email: three colleagues (assuming ten percent read and respond)
• Time saved in Excel: three hours (one hour per colleague based on one hundred total Excel hours in a year)

Benefits (unknown)

• Colleagues develop curiosity and proactively pursue additional skills

In other words, by writing out the email, I figured it would cost us two hours with certainty in terms of my time plus the time thirty colleagues spent reading the email. In addition, there was an unknown risk associated with someone screwing up the concept and making a mess of an existing file or process. I expected a one percent efficiency increase for the three colleagues that ultimately read and applied the email, with each of those three saving one hour per year based on an estimate that they spent one hundred hours each year using Excel. As it was on the cost side, I also noted the possible gain of these three colleagues choosing to pursue additional skill development opportunities based on this exposure to a new technique. The stated numbers give a clear verdict - three hours of gain for two hours of cost, so writing the email was a great use of my time - a 50% return on the overall investment.

If I think back to the various supervisors and managers from my three different career stops, I would estimate 100% of them would pursue any opportunity with a 50% return, with that morning's original priorities relegated to secondary status with immediate effect. However, there is a catch - I'm fairly certain not a single one of them would agree that my spending an hour on an instructional email demonstrated a good use of my time, even if I used my above calculation to demonstrate the error in the rebuttal. It could be due to any number of factors, with the most likely being a dispute over my assumptions, but the key is that the specific nature of the dispute doesn't matter because each moment spent in additional discussion adds to the cost side of the above calculation. If the process of making my case takes up a half-hour of work for two people, then the stated benefit in the math is wiped away - it's now three hours of cost for three hours of benefit; effectively, any business bro who filibusters through a presentation of managerial math is strengthening the objection through the cost associated with the act of objecting.

There could also be an outright refusal to consider the managerial math, which is a problem in its own way, but I think the underlying objection in such a case follows a track that I'm quite familiar with from experience - they would point out that my hour writing the email meant an hour lost for a different priority. It would likely be implied at this point that seeing as how the superior set the priorities to begin with, the eventual conclusion of any discussion was destined to affirm the superior's original set of objectives; the battle ahead of me to change existing priorities promised to be bloody, and forever uphill, with pyrrhic victory representing the closest thing to a positive outcome. This is the worst form of objection to innovation in my mind because most mediocre managers actually think they are asking a smart question - if you do this, what do you have to stop doing? It never occurs to them that questions like this often hold back innovation.

I actually encountered an endorsement of this question recently in a mediocre management book, which should have been named Good But Not Great Questions for Good But Not Great Managers. It sounds good, this question - if you do this, what do you have to stop doing? - but it imposes an unnecessary scarcity consideration onto the topic of innovation, which is inappropriate given that new thinking lives on the infinite side of known boundaries. If I think about how to ask this question without shoehorning the scarcity mentality, I end up with a superior question - why aren't we already doing this? I suppose an alternate formation offers a similar upside - when else can we do this? The power of a program like "15 percent time" is obvious when considering these reframed versions of the merely good question - if you do this, what do you have to stop doing? The answer lies in the inverse - if we don't do this, then we don't innovate. As noted above, it's also often the case that small innovations lose their marginal return in the course of prolonged discussion, debate, or justification. The unspoken value of a program like "15 percent time" is that it should eliminate the need for these questions - there is no discussion required when the employee is encouraged to direct time toward projects that have the faintest hint of innovation. In the context of the coaching example from above, it's also worth noting that the response rate to such an email might improve if those colleagues felt like working on the skill was an acceptable use of their "15 percent time", which is yet another possible benefit to such a program - it creates time to pursue meaningful learning opportunities.

This leads me to my overall point, which is that the biggest barrier for innovation in most cases is talking about it - by definition, innovation is about discovery within the unknown, and I don't consider the unknown among those topics which invite intelligent discourse. Even the managerial math that I outlined above, compelling though it may be in certain cases, seems like it does more harm than good in the way it suggests the possibility of a knowing conversation about an unknowable subject. The only way an organization can demonstrate a commitment to innovation is to set as many of its people as possible to the task, which of course means all of them, and to set them to the task in a way that eliminates any and all known barriers to innovation. I believe a program like "15 percent time" helps move an organization closer to innovation, but in some ways I find the broad definition from 3M ("pursue innovative ideas") too narrow for my tastes. I recommend a variant of this program that encourages employees to use time in a self-directed manner, even if it's as little as 5 or 10 percent, with the only requirement being the self-belief that the activity will someday help the organization. I would clarify that this includes personal and professional development projects, and for organizations that do not allow for remote work I would even recommend allowing "offsite" time to count within the parameters of this program; I would allow anything that did not attract the notice of the local police. I suggest such extremes because ultimately innovation comes down to one necessary ingredient, time, which means a policy whose administrative requirements take time away from itself is self-defeating -  the moment people busy themselves with justifications, the program itself has become the obstacle; busy people don't have time for innovation.

the business bro says a good idea isn't good enough

I've noticed a theme among the various motivational techniques, incentive programs, and reward structures I've been researching over the past hour or so, none of which seem any more or less likely to succeed than the next - it's about enough being enough. The way I see it almost anything should work, provided it's good enough to motivate, incentivize, or reward an employee. Is a monthly prize for the best performer going to increase productivity? It sure will, assuming the prize is good enough.  

I'm reminded of an amusing few months from a past job when my boss created a bonus scheme to try and get us all to work longer hours - without going too deep into the details, let's just say the midnight oil remained in its unburnt state. If he had asked me for my opinion on the matter, I would have shown my boss what I'd calculated on the back of my pay stub - once I factored in the extra hours necessary to earn the bonus, I'd determined that it lowered my average hourly pay, so I'd decided that it was better to have a social life than to pursue the incentive; the bonus was a good idea, but it wasn't good enough.

toa rewind - public criticism

I made a reference in Sunday's footnotes regarding my refusal to criticize subordinates in public. I'm not sure if I've written anything about the philosophy except its origins, which I detailed in this post about my college basketball coach.

leftovers - the medusa and the snail (business bro musings)

This book describes the Delphi method, which produces group opinions by collecting simultaneous rather than sequential responses to a prompt, event, or meeting. These are circulated and revised until the group reaches a consensus; the method restrains the mimicry and groupthink that can undermine open discussions. I realize in hindsight that I partially incorporated this method while collecting feedback as a hiring manager, but oddly I haven't encountered it in other contexts.

Thomas also notes that lowering costs in medicine means attacking the underlying mechanism of disease at the earliest possible stage, which reminded me of something I remember from The Goal - inventory should be kept at the lowest cost stage of the process. The way he says that most major diseases hinge on a single key mechanism also invoked Eliyahu Goldratt's business bro classic for the way it mirrored The Goal's analysis of bottlenecks.

the business bro's productivity resolutions

Thirteen and a half years ago, Marc Andreessen posted his guide to personal productivity, which is most notable for his recommendation to avoid keeping a schedule. Amusingly, in an interview from May 2020 with The Observer Effect he fully reverses course on his advice, and in this republished transcript of that conversation you'll see what appears to be a screenshot of his detailed schedule appear after a couple hundred words. What changed his mind? Andreessen offers his own explanation, but I think I can add to his response - it's a necessary adjustment made by someone whose contribution has changed from being an individual to being part of a team. A way I think of this goes back to something I remember reading a few years ago - a leader should be efficient with things, but effective with people. A highly efficient way to work from the perspective of an individual's production is to maintain the freedom to work on the most important thing at any given time, but this doesn't quite work as well in the context of effective collaboration - there is no guarantee that a colleague will be available in the moment you suddenly feel like working, so at minimum the schedule serves to protect a period of mutual availability.

In a broad sense, Andreessen's reversal is an important demonstration of the necessity of making adjustments in order to get the most out of our time and effort. It's with this lesson in mind that I recommend both of the above links to anyone interested in personal productivity, regardless of whether or not you feel productive at this moment, because the key to productivity is making the constant adjustments necessary to account for ever-changing circumstances. I think anyone will find at least one new idea in those links that will make them more productive in 2021, which is a great return on around thirty minutes of reading investment.

I pulled three ideas I'll try over the next few months:

1. Keep the schedule but throw out the agenda

I think some people hear advice like "keep a strict schedule" and extend the recommendation until every minute of the day is planned to the tiniest detail, so I present this as a reminder that adding structure is often a premature optimization. Idea #1 has familiar tones to advice I've leaned on for writing (don't make detailed outlines), conversation (it takes a while, maybe a half-hour, before anyone knows what's being discussed), or eating (don't ignore a satiety signal just because you decided ahead of time to have "a big dinner").

The main point is that although we should avoid determining the exact details of how to use our time until we're in the moment, it's recommended to have dedicated blocks of time on the calendar at the start of each day for the most important activities. A great example of how to put this into action is in the context of a meeting - the broad objective and a talking point or two should help organize the time, but too much planning will prevent the group from shifting focus if an unanticipated but critical topic comes up halfway into the discussion.

2. Keep four lists: to-do, watch, later, and today

Andreessen presents these across two separate sections without explaining what I consider the most important result - the structure allows us to preserve the purpose of a list, which is to keep us from overlooking, forgetting, or losing track of important things, without succumbing to the temptation of using it throughout the day as a cheap source of endorphins.

This is based on my experiences with the standard to-do list, which tends to start innocently enough but eventually accumulates tasks and projects that can't progress without some external influence (often a person, an event, or just the passage of time). It seems like at this point the list is on its way to becoming an overflowing parking lot of stuck items, which starts to undermine the point of the list - rather than organizing and tracking, it becomes a source of anxiety. The lack of control over stuck items, the sheer volume that makes effective prioritizing impossible, the nagging but growing sense that the list will expand indefinitely - these factors combine to start making the entire exercise seem like a giant waste of time and effort. The common response at this point is a final, desperate attempt to take back control of the list by routinely adding trivial tasks to the top, which allows for the steady satisfaction of crossing off mundane items - the laundry is DONE, the toilet is FLUSHED, and those constantly arriving emails are filed into an inbox subfolder deceptively named READ LATER. This final step always feels great at first, but I've learned that once a list becomes a repository for the daily tasks I don't need to write down, then it's only a matter of time before the to-do list project will be scrapped - it's become too interruption-driven to serve as a useful reference for long-term considerations.

The approach I'm going to try for a few months divides the standard to-do list into four relevant subsections. The to-do section is everything in my control, which means I can prioritize it, while the watch section is pending some external step and will be organized by my best guess regarding completion of that step. The later section is for anything I merely need to remember, which I'll organize as they come to my attention. The final section - today - is a list of the few things I'm going to do on that day. I'm optimistic about using these four subsections because it restricts each of the problems I've highlighted above to one area - prioritization is strictly for the to-do section, lack of control defines instead of undermines the watch section, endless expansion is the point rather than the plague of the later section, and the joy of crossing out completed items is the sole function of the today section. My plan for the start of 2021 is to try and update these lists at the start of each day.

One last thought about the watch section - Andreessen notes how he uses Apple's concept of a "directly responsible individual" to help him keep track of who to check with for project updates. I can confirm from experience that this is a useful detail to include in the watch section. If you keep track of this detail over an extended period of time, you'll also have some data that you can use to spot patterns for common bottlenecks, which can be critical if your colleagues are routinely causing delays or missing deadlines (1).

3. Work on email exactly twice per day

There's nothing new about this one - I shudder to think how many productivity posts would return on a full TOA search for "email" - but it's an important reminder because I often slip from my own standard. The reality of remote work means I'm constantly checking email, so for me the primary emphasis on the above is "work on" - sorting and filing, reading long messages, or sending nonurgent responses would all qualify in this sense. The approach I used for the latter half of 2020 was productive - at the start of each day I got in the habit of clearing out my main inbox, while during the day I learn to leave as "unread" any item that required more action than just filing - so for me Idea #3 is more about a 10% increase in discipline rather than the start of an entirely new approach.

And a little extra advice from the Business Bro...

One additional note about email - there are at least one million different articles, podcasts, and books out there describing the optimal way to file emails. My recommendation is to file them according to the way you look for them, which of course means every person will have a different strategy. But I think this is the best way because for most people their inbox is a living, breathing, and forever changing personal library of information, which means it should follow the ethos of the library in the way you can find what you are looking for without a massive amount of manual effort. The way I organize email will soon mirror the lists I described in #2 - I'll have folders for to-do, watch, and later, with subfolders organizing items by project. If the email exists outside those categories, it means I need it only for future reference, which leads to a separate level of organization under one of the following categories - meetings (individuals, cross-functional groups), completed projects (ordered by start date), ongoing processes (organized by subject) or recurring communication (such as weekly updates, monthly FYIs, procedural memos, etc). I do it this way because, again, that's how I look for things - by project, by meeting, by communication frequency, etc.

Footnotes

1) I used to call my watch list the domino list, a label I used in the sense that one event would allow me to knock off the next item. This was an evolution from the original name, trigger list, which had the same ethos - one event would trigger the next one. The way people started using the word trigger forced me into the change because it turned my list into a possible source of confusion ("what do you mean, my confirmation email triggers you?"). I'd say watch list is a good label, and hopefully it will be the last time I change the name of this list.

Endnote

If you aren't sure about whether you could benefit from improved organization, ask yourself two important questions - do you know where to find everything, and can you find everything in a reasonable amount of time? If either answer is no, you need to be better organized, and a good starting point is to review your organization whenever you don't find something in the first place you look; a logical follow-up step is to adjust your organization so that you are able to find things wherever you initially look for them.

the business bro's competitive myth

One of the legendary stories about me (if you will indulge me for a moment) goes back to my early days managing a team at my first job. One day, I walked into a team meeting and essentially accused three of my most competitive people of being uncompetitive. This went over about as well as gifting a globe to a flat earth conspiracy theorist, but on the bright side it's made for a pretty good story - let's just say I think I've been asked "Hey Tim, do you think I'm competitive?" more than a couple of times over the past few years (1). The outrage was a good response at the time (and, I think, the teasing callback is a good response now) because one of the great Business Bro virtues is competition - we want to be competitors, forever winners with our ideas, grit, and culture; we want to join competitive teams, and define our successes as a result of a competitive mentality. Simply put, we all want to be winners, but how can you win, in any sense of the word, without being competitive? The question for leaders, for Business Bros of all levels, is how to find that competitive spirit and harness it to lead the team, competitively, to victory.

On that day a few years ago, I had realized after some time that my team had a problem with competitiveness, though it wasn't strictly a lack of the quality that was the problem. I first noticed this after I started interacting with the team more often outside of work, where I was surprised to see highly and almost pointlessly competitive individuals emerge from their daily nine-to-five hibernation. Whenever I spent time with them in casual settings, I always sensed the will to win simmering under the surface, with the most competitive of the group seeming to suffer from an allergy to losing - it was like they had wagered their entire existence on the outcome of any game, and would therefore commit all of their energy and determination to achieving victory at the dart board, Skee-ball machine, or bar trivia night. The team was full of unique individuals but this burning desire to win was one of the few consistent qualities among them, clear to anyone at any time with one exception - in the workplace. When the bright lights of the office came on, it was like the stage was suddenly just a little too intimidating for them to dive fully into the competitive possibilities of their roles.

I didn't consider this a huge issue, but I was a little curious about the phenomenon. What happened at work that scared away competitiveness? What made this innate characteristic disappear in these team members? My limited personal experience helped me relate to the situation - I'd spent most of my first year and a half simply trying to fit in, a process that inadvertently stifled most of my personal strengths; I didn't even try to teach myself programming until year three. There is a particular pressure on new employees - and especially on young or inexperienced ones - to try and perform in accordance to a perception regarding their employer's wishes. Without explicitly being taught, I figured out that it's not advisable to challenge people's assumptions, or at least all of them at once, but this was the inevitable result if I tried things outside the expectation (2). My group was young, which suggested this was a factor - if the organization discouraged competitiveness, the last place to expect open defiance would be in the rookie class.

The organization's stance toward competitiveness was obvious to me from how the CEO described our roster. The company line - we'd hear it every few months or so - reinforced how our "talented" group of employees was central to our success; we hired "talented" people who played to win. This never resonated with me, which at the time I thought was specifically because I had a healthy dose of blue-collar thinking, and I didn't regard "talented" as a positive descriptor; our high school basketball team took pride in the slogan "hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard", printing it on our t-shirts, and perhaps this conditioned me to sniff out talented people so I could zip past them when they inevitably became complacent. In my mind, "being talented" wasn't a job quality, it was a coping mechanism that losers relied on to console themselves when I beat them. If our CEO was talking about how "talented" we were, in my mind he was essentially turning us into a passive group, and setting us up for failure.

But even as I rolled my eyes each time our CEO made these proclamations about our "talented" team, I was starting to see the flaws in my mentality and becoming better at expressing the thinking underlying my objections. My fundamental protest to the word was rooted in the effect it had on people; the talented person could thrive as long as complacency was kept at bay, but complacency is a fairly standard feature whenever it's hard to measure success, which is the case for most office environments. The problem in my team, which I'd initially hypothesized was an inability to apply their skills in a workplace context, was actually more of a question about reference points - who were they competing against? At the day-to-day level in almost every business, this is never clear, which is a big reason why most organizations work hard to set goals and create accountability; it's an admission that we can only compete against ourselves. It's easy to be competitive when the scores are announced at the end of each round (or stock prices prominently displayed on a blinking ticker board) but learning to push the person in the mirror to a higher standard every day is a different matter; self-competition is the inevitable conclusion of an evolving competitive mentality.

Our company was no different in this regard and set goals as part of a performance improvement process. This presented a fresh set of questions for me, namely the concern that I'd never responded to goals. My opposition to goals isn't as strong (or strongly held) as my reaction to being called "talented", but it does share some similarities. The most significant parallel was the way it was rooted in experience - I'd done perfectly fine by simply trying to get a little better each day and saw no need to invent measurements and timelines to market the process; the first year I read over eighty books, I learned of it the next year, when I went back and counted - at no point had I announced an annual target.

I was open to the possibility that others might respond better to external signposts like goals, but I only seemed to notice instances of team members using outside benchmarks to their own detriment. A common occurrence was the noticeable way energy levels would drop anytime we encountered an immovable obstacle that took us off the trajectory for meeting a goal - rather than attack the challenge with a renewed effort, it felt like an inevitable heaviness settled into our thinking and discouraged a second effort. There were also those instances where someone settled for an inferior performance by justifying it against the benchmark of a lesser colleague, a problem so pervasive that our president once asked me to help out in another department's training because he thought the trainer (who had just announced his resignation) would set an abysmally low standard - his own - while onboarding his replacements.

At the root of the problem was a widespread belief that the organization was simply incapable of meaningful change, a founding myth reinforced by the old guard who told one too many stories of false dawns promising change and innovation - the inevitable arc of these failures had convinced us that the status quo was a permanent feature of the organization. This is a hard, serious problem that most people encounter throughout their careers, and there is no easy solution. However, in my mind the first step toward progress is dispelling the notion that unless things are visibly changing, things are never going to change - the best way to instill this belief is directing the emphasis of the competitive spirit inward, toward the self, which is always the starting point in any change process, and encouraging a mentality that measures an individual's growth against a personal, internal reference point.

I'd like to say that, armed with this ever-accumulating insight, I marched around the office and instilled a sense of internal motivation in each and every person over whom I had even the tiniest influence. It certainly feels about the time for it in this essay, at least by the terms of the "problem-struggle-insight-solution" storytelling model favored by all those chattering Business Bros whenever they share an anecdote from the front lines. I will admit that I did try one or two things in a group context - including that cringe-worthy story at the top - but I learned quickly from the initial stumbles and refocused my efforts to individual meetings, where I could speak more plainly about struggles, challenges, and opportunities specific to each person (2). The change, like any lasting transformation, was a grinding process full of starts and stops, but I like to think shifting the competitive mentality from an external to internal focus had a lasting effect, both for the organization and for individual careers.

******

The idea of competitiveness is a healthy one when understood in all its diversity. The obvious kind is the one we see, which anyone can talk about - the will to win, the fiery attitude, the desire and passion and energy coming together in the most visible way on the journey to victory. This is the competitiveness that sees sprinters blast off with the starting pistol, running as hard as possible to the finish until they collapse dramatically in a spent mess after winning the race; we know it because we see it in all forms of competition. But the less obvious version escapes most novices, most likely because it's never visible - it's the form of competitiveness where you study, train, and commit to a winning lifestyle, so that when the starting pistol goes off you are one of the runners with a chance. It's competing at midnight, when you review it one last time; it's competing at the grocery store, when you break a cycle and step toward nutrition; it's competing in the mirror, when you call out your own lies and rebuild from the exposed truth.

The thing that makes success isn't the competitiveness of wanting to beat opponents when you see them at the race - it's the competitiveness to beat them when you don't see them; it's competing in each of those long, lonely hours of preparation, which are a prerequisite to reaching your potential on the big day. The reality is that most people, whether they see themselves as competitive or not, don't have this understanding and don't compete with their habits, routines, and lifestyles; leadership means taking responsibility for instilling this mentality and setting people on the path that will take them to their full potential.

Footnotes

1) The problem with being a manager is that you don't really remember the things you say to your team - for me, the recall period lasts around fifteen minutes - but your team will somehow corral each and every syllable that flees your pompous lips. Actually, I should revise that - your team will forget all the smart things you say, but if anything dumb gets out there prepare for total recall.

There's another similar story (which I will not write about, beyond this footnote) a couple of folks from this team like to tell about the day I (apparently) asked a new hire "does a tree ever stop giving shade"? I believe this happened, but don't ask me about it.

2) This changed for me as I got older - I realized how the downside was essentially a small investment that, despite sometimes flopping, would pay off handsomely in the long-term. This doesn't necessarily make it an easier process, but it was helpful perspective for me anytime I came to that thin line between cog and contributor.

Of course, for young people - as I was in those first couple of years after college - this isn't a realistic way to think about the world. The big problem is that first jobs are almost always "cog" situations - the employee accepts a job despite being mostly the same as the other candidates. In these roles, there just isn't much room for defying expectations. I'd tentatively suggest traditional first jobs are a good idea for young people committed to being part of a certain industry, but for anyone else it might not be worth the hassle - better off trying to find a "contributor" situation, where value isn't so closely aligned with fulfilling a job description.

leftovers - business bro, working manager (specialization)

Last week, I shared some thoughts on the idea of "working managers". One thing I excluded was how the trend runs against what I perceive as the widely accepted preference for specialization. If your organization values management as a skill, wouldn't you want those who are good at management to focus a majority of their time in the role much in the same way you'd like your best programmers to spend most of their time writing code?

Of course, the other possibility is that "working managers" is just another example of how organizations find ways to waste time. If I think of the working manager as an equivalent to the programmer who spends half the week in listless meetings, perhaps my perspective on this topic will change.

business bro, working, manager

The next time I interview for a new job, I'm going to ask this question - how do working managers choose between management work and individual contributions? It seems like the most important thing to learn before joining an organization because I would understand how the culture viewed management - is it a valuable function, a glossy label for supervisory tasks, or merely a career development crutch (but shaped like a carrot!) to reward strong individual performance?

I can already envision how my question will cause problems. The best-case scenario would be a confused interviewer, perhaps buying time with some form of stammering, and maybe forcing a strained smile or slow nod, all preceding the inevitable canned conclusion - of course, it's impossible to know, for sure, what anyone might do, since the context of current priorities is very much a factor in any decision. This is when it would all fall apart for me, or at least for my candidacy, because I would stop to explain that I meant after all factors were considered, that I want to know what the decision is when it's entirely a fifty-fifty proposition - in short, what pressure does the culture exert on the working manager? It would fall apart because if I have to follow up, if I have to go through the step of asking for the answer again, then it's likely the interviewer doesn't want to give me the answer, which means no one in the organization wants to give me the answer; culture in an organization is like the current in a river - everyone in the water can feel the pull, and speak to it, which means evasion implies something unspeakable about the undertow, such that the swimmers fear the very articulation of the fact will discourage those on the banks from joining them.

The only sure thing in this situation would be my conclusion - pass - because from a nonresponse I can at least deduce that the organization doesn't regard managerial work with the same reverence it might reserve for traditionally independent contributions such as, say, programming, or producing a colorful report. This is vital in the context of my own role and its managerial function, but it's even more important in the sense that it will determine how my manager works with me - when I look at my list of qualifications for an ideal manager, I don't have "prioritizes his or her own work ahead of me" atop the list, in fact it's not even on the list; I never considered such an absurd possibility. What's the point of having a good manager if your good manager never manages? It's like a restaurant having its best cook cleaning tables. But most organizations have fooled themselves into the delusion of a part-time manager, a pattern I notice consistently in the notes I collect from peers about their careers, or in the history of my own experiences; the working manager is not only common, but ubiquitous, and in nearly all cases the order of words on the job description is accurate - working, manager.