Category: Everything else

Managers and people who solve problems

We spent time with Dan Pink, the author of a collection of great books, a couple months ago and the conversation veered to managing managers.

He remarked that he believed that as managers (and everyone is and has a manager in some aspect of their life), we segment folks we work with into two types of people –  people who solve problems and people who create problems.

He gave the example of his search for an architect. His eventual choice was someone who he believed would solve problems than they created.

And, thus, his advice was to be the kind of person who solves problems for our own managers.

I’ve reflected on that discussion a few times in the past months on the areas where I solve problems and create problems for folks around me. It has also helped me appreciate the fantastic job some folks I know do in this regard.

Simple advice. Good advice.

Sources of learning – an evolving 10 year view

I’ve been having a few conversations of late that have aimed to tackle difficult questions like – “How can I learn better?” and “How can I be sure I’m learning?” These are challenging questions and ones I’ve wrestled with a bunch. So, I thought I’d share my evolving perspective after 10 years of writing about this.

My mental model here is that our “learn rate” is proportional to time + energy spent on 3 sources – Books/synthesized information, People (and insightful conversations we have), and our own experiences. When we take the time to reflect on the time + energy spent on these sources and synthesize what we’ve taken away, we begin to develop or improve existing mental models, and over time, make changes to how we approach life. That translation of theory to action is learning.

Reflecting on the mix between these sources in my journey in the past decade, I think the biggest change has been the proportion of learning coming from my own experiences. When I started writing a decade ago, most of my learning came from books and more experienced folks – I didn’t have too many experiences to reflect on. That has changed and the mix looks a lot more balanced of late.

So, my perspective on the “how can I learn better?” question comes down to – what kind of habits/infrastructure do we have in place to make sure we’re reading, regularly having interesting conversations that we learn from, and reflecting on both of these along with the experiences we’re having every day?

And, if I had to break that down to sub-questions, they would be –

i) Are we regularly reading good books/subscribed to insightful blogs or podcasts?
ii) Are we spending time with folks we learn from and having conversations about what we’re thinking about vs. the weather?
iii) Are we finding time to reflect on the above + our own experiences and synthesize?

3 lists of 3

3 lists of 3 that I find helpful as I start a week –

(1) What are the top 3 priorities for the week – across work and home?

(2) What are the top 3 priorities for the week – at work?

(3) What are the top 3 priorities for the day today?

I typically set (1) on Sunday, (2) on Friday before I finish up, and (3) at end of the previous day or at the start of the day. Maintaining consistency doing this has been a boon simply because it helps to know what I’m optimizing for as the week progress.

The principle – progress toward a goal is productivity. Everything else is activity. A simple productivity check at random points during the week, then, is – “are we aware of what goal we’re optimizing toward?”

On success – Ralph Waldo Emerson

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am thinking about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s note on success today. That isn’t just because his is a wonderful, thoughtful, definition (it is) – it is because it reminds us to make sure we must define our success for ourselves.

Counter productive behavior and perspective

Most infants hate changing clothes. So, they generally cry, kick, and scream when it happens. That is, of course, completely counter productive. It only lengthens the process and makes it worse.

I found myself amused when I observed this counter productive behavior the other day until I realized that we aren’t all that different as adults. We often do our equivalent of crying, kicking, and screaming when we deal with inevitable change, have an unexpected difficult conversation, or worry about something we don’t control.

That’s why taking the time to develop the sort of perspective that leads to equanimity can be very powerful. The sooner we can eliminate the counter productive behavior, the more productive we can be.

And, a great way to develop that sort of perspective is to spend more time with folks who have that perspective.

Unlimited vacation perks and game theory

There have been a few news articles going after perks like “unlimited vacation.” The trouble with these articles is that they typically go after these perks quoting folks who run workplaces without these policies and thus tell you that these perks are dangerous. There’s an inherent skin-in-the-game problem there.

A better approach might be to examine such perks from the lens of game theory. The challenge with unlimited vacations is that one’s natural behavior is to want to take a little less vacation than their neighbor – i.e., not enough to be the slacker on the team. This means the natural equilibrium point is to reduce the number of vacation days to zero.

This problem can be easily solved by shifting the equilibrium. For example, companies like Hubspot and LinkedIn (where I work) either mandate 2 weeks of vacation or shut down entirely for 2 weeks in the year. Another way to do this would be to have negative incentives below a certain threshold – e.g. maybe you get some benefit deducted if you don’t take 3 weeks off.

Company culture goes a long way in creating equilibrium points as well. Smart employers understand that breaks result in more productivity. And, cultures can create norms that make it unacceptable to not take these breaks.

Perks aren’t culture – their use is dictated by culture. They are rarely good or bad by themselves. Ping Pong tables, for example, can actually be pretty great if you use them every once in a while to blow off some steam with a teammate.

So, if perks aren’t being used as intended, it is better to evaluate the equilibrium created by the culture and incentives in place. And, game theory is our friend.

(Inspired by the game theory chapter on “Algorithms to Live By” – a very good book :-))

Two question career advice

Someone I know shared the following two questions when I asked her about her favorite pieces of career advice – “First, are you going after hard problems? And, second, would most of the folks who work closely with you now want to have you on their team when they go on to their next gig?”

I love the two question format of career advice. I’ve found myself mulling both questions and frequently asking myself if I am going after hard problems since that conversation.

Questions are powerful. Good questions can be game changing.

The World Cup, Google, And The Omnipresent Sorting Theory

France were crowned the new world football champions in the summer. Croatia were the runners up.

The interesting question, then – can we confidently say Croatia was the second best team in the tournament? Would they have beaten Belgium or Brazil if either team had been in their half of the bracket?

While it is likely to be just a battle of your opinion versus mine, I’d hazard a guess that Belgium and Brazil were probably better teams. The challenge is that elimination via brackets does a good job identifying the winner. But, it does a poor job of finding second place. The best approach to finding the stack rank of the teams would be to do a comprehensive round robin where everyone plays each other – equivalent to the English Premier League for example. But, we don’t have time for that in the world cup. So, brackets are the way to go.

Sorting theory
In Computer Science, a sorting algorithm puts the elements of a list in a certain order. Computers, in many ways, are just sorting machines. They take vasts amounts of data and find ways to sort them intelligently and make them available when we need them.

Sorting theory is a key part of introductory computer science and it tends to be a popular interview question topic. Barack Obama was famously asked a question about the most efficient sorting algorithms in an interview at Google. That’s how mainstream sorting questions are. :-)

The efficacy of sorting algorithms is judged by the big O notation. It is the worst case scenario of time taken to sort “n” items. The first sorting aglorithms had a worst case performance of N^2 square. This means the performance gets really bad as the number of items increases. As a result, sorting and, by extension, computation was very expensive.

This was until the Merge sort came along.

Merge sort and life applications of sorting theory
The merge sort has legendary status among sorting algorithms because it made “linearithmic” sorting possible. The worst case is NlogN – effectively MUCH faster than previous sorting algorithms. (Wikipedia has a simple illustration of how merge sort works – if you are interested)

Merge sort is what you do when you split a large pile of laundry, split it into little piles, sort those piles, and then merge them together. The process of elimination in competitions via brackets is, thus, a variant of merge sort.

As Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths share in their book “Algorithms to Live By,” there are plenty of other such life applications of sorting. For example, sorting theory teaches us to never sort email into folders if searching is easy. Sorting is expensive (read: giant waste of time).

Sorting theory also teaches us to use “bucket sort” when possible. Bucket sort or bin sort is what you do when you just separate your laundry into various “bins.” Assuming a small number of bins, it gets sorting done in linear time.

We also see sorting theory play out in every organization via the pecking order. Pecking order was first observed in a brood of chickens who figure out their leadership order by pecking away at each other. The most powerful peckers are higher up in the order. Humans do it too – it is called politics and usually just requires two humans, a room, and some incentives.

Okay, so what does all this have to do with technology and the future?
Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths have a couple of intriguing questions for us here – What is Google? The default answer would be “search engine.”  But, is it really a search engine? Or, should it be called a “sort engine?”

The power of Google is not just in the searching but in its ability to do the sorting. In fact, we could make the argument that it is the efficacy of their sorting algorithm that makes Google the massive money making machine that it is. Google rose to power sorting results into pages with 10 relevant results. Over time, they added ads to the side and then on top and became one of the most valuable companies on the planet.

Let’s take a look at what Google’s sorting looks like right now. These are screenshots as I scroll down for a search for “mattress” – I’ve captured 8 screenshots from beginning to end and I’ve encircled the ads in red.


3 observations –

1. It took me 2 entire screen scrolls before I saw the first completely organic result.

2. I counted roughly 16 organic results/groups and 7 ads.

3. I don’t think I ever scroll past screen 2 – my guess is that I’m not the exception here.

Google, then, is still a sort engine. For most retail searches, however, it just sorts more ads these days than organic results.

Who gets to do the sorting for you?
There are two lucrative marketplaces on the internet – attention marketplaces and retail marketplaces. The biggest leading indicator for the success of a marketplace is whether or not they do the sorting for you.

If Facebook gets to sort the information you see through the course of a day (and, for a majority of the world’s adults, they do), the attention marketplace is theirs. And, if Google gets to sort the results of your retail searches, then they win big as well.

Understanding this truth about sorting explains a lot about the state of the big technology players today. Facebook – including Instagram, Whatsapp, et al – sorts the information the world sees every day. But, they’re working hard to invest in video because they don’t want Netflix and YouTube to sort what you watch.

The New York Times homepage used to be the most prestigious display of sorting two decades ago. It isn’t anymore. Old world publishers are, thus, falling by the wayside. The smarter ones are realizing that the only place they can do the sorting of information for their users is email. So, they’re doubling down on email and building subscription businesses on that (quaint?) piece of technology.

Disney, 21st Century Fox, and the like don’t want Netflix to sort the shows you want to watch. They’re scrambling. So are large telcos who’re finding ways to get in on this action.

Google, on the other hand, is targeting a different kind of foe. Google makes a lot of money off retail searches. But, increasingly, people are starting their retail searches on Amazon. Worse still, they’re able to do so by just talking to Alexa. From a monetization standpoint, that is an existential threat for Google. Google’s $550M in Chinese retailer JD.com is just the tip of the iceberg for Google’s marketplace ambitions. Expect plenty more to follow.

One thing is for certain – In all these moves and the many more to come in the future, sorting will be omnipresent.

(Also posted elsewhere as part of the “Notes by Ada” Project)