Tag Archives: Trends

The University Isn’t Going Anywhere

Posted on May 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

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There is a lot of talk going around about how universities are broken, and Silicon Valley is going to put the Ivy League out of business. Certainly change is afoot, and continued tuition hikes at twice the rate of inflation are ridiculous. Online universities like Udemy and the Miverva Project are interesting, and may even succeed, depending on whether success is measured in teaching students or in making tons of money. But if success is measured in pushing the existing elite universities out of their current position, don’t hold your breath.

Kevin Carey wrote a piece in The New Republic saying how the roster of leading companies has completely changed over the last century but the roster of leading universities has not. American Cotton Oil is gone, but Harvard remains. Carey states that this is unsustainable; education should be as prone to disruption as business.

But there is a deep flaw in Carey’s analogy. Companies go out of business mostly because people no longer want their products. When was the last time you bought cottonseed oil, or film for your camera? But people still want what universities are offering, especially elite universities. Is education still valuable? Yes. Is a Harvard degree still valuable? Yes. I don’t want any cottonseed oil, but I sure want my kids to get a Harvard education and diploma. And as long as the desire for education and prestige remains (ie. as long as human nature still rules), the elite universities will remain so.

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CEOs: Imagine You Are The Janitor

Posted on March 23, 2012 | 1 Comment

OK, I promise this will be the last entry on cultural change. At least for a while.
But I wanted to return to the topic that started this arc: changes in corporate culture. You might recall how I postulated that a company could change its culture only if that change started at the top. The CEO needs to live the culture that he wants the whole company to have.

But that raises a question: can a CEO, from his top of the heap position, even successfully think through cultural issues? Go back to my prior example, where there is a culture of being late to meetings because the CEO is always late to meetings. If the CEO is always late, but nobody is late to the CEO’s meetings (because he is the boss, after all), then maybe he doesn’t even realize that this culture exists, and that it wastes everyone’s time. His time isn’t being wasted, so perhaps he doesn’t even see the problem.

If this is true of the CEO, it is likely true of other high level executives, depending on the size of an organization. So how can these oblivious executives work to develop a functional corporate culture? Here I turn to the work of John Rawls, a titan of political philosophy.  Rawls tried to develop a political system that maintained the liberty of markets while countering the tendency of market economies to perpetuate economic disadvantages.

In his masterwork, A Theory of Justice, Rawls balanced these two competing strands through an invention he called the veil of ignorance. Rawls suggested that policy makers devise policies via a thought exercise in which they ignored their actual station in life and imagined how the policy would affect the least advantaged person in society. By operating behind a veil of ignorance as to how policies would affect them personally, they would develop policies that were fairer to everyone.

Maybe CEOs and other top executives should sometimes step behind a veil of ignorance. As a thought experiment, it’s not really that hard. Ask yourself “How would the average employee feel about this? What about the lowest ranking employee?” Only a CEO whose ego has been stoked to l’etat c’est moi proportions will not be able to imagine how his underlings might feel. In the case our always late CEO, surely he will recognize how people feel when he is always late to their meetings.  And if he is so Louis XIV that he is truly unable to imagine how others might feel, then that company’s culture is utterly doomed and everyone should just leave.

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Can Congress Change Its Culture?

Posted on March 19, 2012 | Leave a comment

Cultural change is the recent theme here at Thoughtbasket; I discussed how a company might change its culture, and then how America might change some aspects of its culture. Today I want to look at a particular part of America: Congress. The U.S. Congress seems unable to solve any of the problems facing our country, and consequently has an approval rating of only 11 percent, which is the lowest ever. If a group is unable to complete the sole task it is given (governing, in this case) and thus is held in contempt by its bosses (voters, in this case), then that group probably has a culture problem.

The congressional cultural problem is that the entire institution values reelection instead of service (which is why incumbents are reelected more than 80% of the time). Power is more important than policy. Much like the corporation in my first post on this topic had a culture where everyone thought it was OK to be late for meetings, congress has a culture where everyone thinks that it’s OK to prioritize staying in office over doing the job you were elected to do, which is govern.

We can blame each individual congressman – and believe me, I do – but really, it is the institution and its culture that is truly to blame. Expecting some moronic ex-exterminator who only gets a two-year term to swim against a cultural tide of reelection is probably naïve. So, much like in my efforts to change cultural components in the US as a whole, we need a team approach. John Boehner + Nancy Pelosi = change?

I wrote last year about how John Boehner could be a hero by teaming up with democrats to pass substantive policy that would address the nation’s fiscal problems. Here is another opportunity for heroic action: he could rally all of congress, teaming with his arch enemies, to promote a culture of service instead selfishness.

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Posted in Politics, Trends

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Is Corporate Culture The Same As Country Culture?

Posted on March 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

I recently posted about corporate cultures, and how the only way a corporation can change its culture is from the top. Based on some of the feedback I received I’ve decided to expand my scope and explore a larger cultural change: how the United States might change some parts of its culture. For example, one aspect of America’s current culture that seems problematic is that we want all kinds of services (Medicare, Social Security, strong defense, good roads, etc.) but we want the lowest taxes possible. Those two desires are incompatible; a culture that emphasizes taking without giving will prove challenging in the long run.

In my prior post, I discussed that a change in corporate culture requires a CEO who is willing to push that change. In the case of a country, who might play that role? You would naturally think the president, but we know that won’t work. Plenty of recent presidents have talked about changing the culture, but none have succeeded. Hell, none of them could change the culture of a few hundred people in Congress, let alone a whole country. And that’s not really surprising; a country is not a hierarchical structure the way a company is, so people have no reason to necessarily follow what the leader says.

The president could try to lead by example, or by using the bully pulpit, but I can only imagine the furor  that would erupt  if a president (or governor, or senator, or mayor) announced that “OK people, your constant desire to get lots while paying little is complete crap; going forward we are all going to be more realistic.” No, that wouldn’t work at all.

What if all our leaders teamed up? Suppose a whole slew of politicians – national and local, democrat and republican, male and female – got together to announce an initiative aimed at realism. This could be risky, since taking a stand isn’t really what politicians do; they hate being out on limbs by themselves. But that is why they would team up with members of the other party. After all, as I noted in my prior post, cultural change requires leaders to actually lead. Then they could get business leaders on board; everyone from Warren Buffett to Charles Koch. Throw in some celebrities – nothing happens in America without celebrities – and then maybe we’d have something.

It’s possible that this is nothing but a pipe dream. Can we really expect politicians to team up in order to lecture voters? Probably it will never happen. But maybe we should expect more from our leaders.

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Folder People vs. Non-Folder People

Posted on August 8, 2011 | 2 Comments

In reading reviews of the new Apple OS X (Lion), I was struck by how many reviewers mentioned the All My Files, Mission Control and Launchpad features, all of which display files and applications in a way so that users don’t have to organize their work in folders. I was reminded of when Gmail first came out, and everyone talked about how it didn’t have folders, because you could just search for whatever email you wanted to see.

This was alien to me. I have always organized my work in folders, both in my computer and in real life. When I worked in finance, each new deal got its own accordion file into which went a series of manila folders: due diligence, projections, legal issues, etc. So organizing my computer files and email into folders and sub-folders seemed completely natural to me. How else could you display your work on a computer?

Folders. Very neat, very organized. Even with a mustache.

And there I went, blithely assuming that everyone was comfortable with the folder metaphor. Sometimes I would look at someone’s computer where the desktop was a mass of unorganized icons, but I assumed that was an aberration; I must have just caught them in the middle of a crazy project.

It wasn’t until I read about computer scientist David Gelernter that I realized there might be other ways to look at your information. He developed something called Lifestreams in order “to minimize the time users spend managing their documents.” Lifestreams dumped the file and folder metaphor in favor of “a time-ordered stream of documents.” That seemed crazy to me – I would much rather look for documents “from Project Neptune” than “from sometime in 2003, which I think is when I worked on Neptune” – but it was clear that other people, even computer science people, didn’t think that way.

It appears that lots of people don’t think the way I do. Maybe most people. But whether the count is lots or most, clearly many would prefer to avoid the folder metaphor. To quote from one review of Lion, “The addition and prominence of “All My Files” is yet another vote of no-confidence in the user’s ability to understand and navigate the file system.”

So let’s add another dichotomy into which we can divide people: folder people vs. non-folder people. While improvements in search technology may eventually make this distinction obsolete, right now it seems like the non-folderites have the upper hand, with user interface designers catering to them. That’s fine, as long as folder capability still exists. But if that capability disappears, folder thinkers will have no choice but to rise up and let the Lifestreamers tremble. We have nothing to lose but our files!

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Posted in Business, Technology, Trends, Pop culture

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More Tech Bubble Datapoints

Posted on August 5, 2011 | 1 Comment

Here are two more items showing that Silicon Valley is in the midst of another startup bubble:

  1. TaskRabbit, which has A) a dumb name; B) a terrible premise; C) the ridiculous idea that it won’t need to staff up in order to grow (because it has a terribly inexperienced CEO); and D) NO REAL BUSINESS MODEL.
  2. A WSJ article about how PR firms are now turning down clients and taking equity in lieu of cash compensation. Since the main value of PR firms is hiring cute young women who flirt with male reporters to ensure that their clients get press coverage, any time PR firms start feeling as powerful as VC funds (like they did in 1999), you know that you’re in a bubble.
  3. San Francisco apartment rents are skyrocketing, to the point that local real estate people are calling it a bubble.

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More on Tipping Point Flaws

Posted on July 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

A new study out of RPI shows that when 10% of a population shares a belief, that belief will inevitably be taken up by a majority of society. And when less than 10% has a belief, it will never be taken up. This conclusion was reached by running many scenarios through various computer models of societies. Most interesting, and most daggerly through Malcolm Gladwell’s theoretical heart, is that no matter what sort of connection scheme the researchers put in their models — equal connections, some highly connected “influencers,” promiscuous connections — the results turned out the same. Yet again, Gladwell’s concept of important trend setters falls under the weight of experimental data.

No More Tipping Point

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The Calculus of Romance

Posted on June 28, 2011 | Leave a comment

I’m not using calculus metaphorically in that headline. I really want to talk about calculus and romance, specifically differential calculus and romantic relationships. But this needn’t be a math lesson; you can follow the links to Wikipedia for the full details on how calculus works, or take lessons from the Khan Academy.

Generally speaking, a derivative is a measure of change, and you can take derivatives of derivatives. So a first derivative describes a function, measuring the rate of change of that function. In the graph below, the first derivative is the tangent that measures the slope of the function. A second derivative describes the rate of change of the first derivative, a third derivative describes the second, and so on. You get the point.

Illustration of derivatives

How on earth does that relate to romance? Well, consider a romantic relationship to be a function, moving along the X-axis of time. When you are discussing your relationship (which you hopefully do sometimes), that is like the first derivative – describing the trajectory of your relationship. Sometimes you may talk about how you talk about your relationship, improving your communications skills. That is the second derivative. But if you are having real problems communicating, you may talk about how you talk about talking about your relationship. That is the third order derivative, and it’s bad.

Nobody likes higher order derivatives, and nobody likes talking about talking about talking. So make sure you get those second derivatives right!

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Posted in Philosophy, Pop culture, Trends

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Cupcakes Anyone? Yes, Please!

Posted on June 24, 2011 | 2 Comments

As long as we are talking about bubbles (which I did here and here and here), I should note that some people also think we are in a cupcake bubble (like this person and this person and even this person). I can’t disagree; here in SF there are three cupcakeries in just a 10 block area, each selling pretty much identical over-priced cupcakes with too much frosting.

And yet, there is something special about a cupcake. Look at this photo (taken by me, in case you thought I was just a pretty writer):

The cupcake trailer, in Austin TX

Seriously, how fun does that cupcake look? Really fun. And that, I think, is the key to the cupcake’s success. They are so little and whimsical and colorful that you can’t help but smile when you see them. Most important, they have that dollop of frosting on top. Of course it’s too much, and too sweet, but it looks like a swirly party hat, a pastel pillow of creamy goodness that you could jump right into. No wonder you can’t resist a cupcake on your plate.

When you see a full cake, it looks delicious, but also kind of serious, maybe even intimidating. You have to slice it, and share it, and then probably store what you didn’t finish, and then you have the pressure to keep eating the leftovers so that you can finish them before they start to get hard and crusty in the refrigerator. A cupcake, on the other hand, has none of those difficulties. No slicing, no leftovers, no pressure. Just pop it in your mouth (one, two or three bites…it’s up to you) and be transported back to your childhood.

So yes, there is definitely a bubble in cupcake bakeries, but the cupcakes themselves will continue to crowd out cakes, as long as we prefer fun to dour in our desserts made out of flour.

 

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More on the Tech Bubble

Posted on June 20, 2011 | 4 Comments

One day, two NY Times articles bolstering the bubble hypothesis.

One explicitly describes the bubbly behavior of investing $41 million in photo-sharing startup Color before it even launched its product.

The other describes how some Wall Street broker-dealers with no experience in technology are throwing money at shares in hot private companies. Fast-money Wall Streeters are one step above the shoe shine boy when it comes to bubble indicators.

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Posted in Business, Technology

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