Foxes, Hedgehogs, and Problem-Solving
Think Twice
In Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? published in 2005 by Princeton University Press, Philip Tetlock suggests that so-called experts tend to be either foxes (who know a little bit about a great many subjects) or hedgehogs (who know a great deal about only one subject). Tetlock asserts that “foxes” tend to make better decisions because they rely on a variety of sources and consider several different points of view whereas “hedgehogs” tend to view reality through “a single lens” and explain everything wholly in terms of what they already know.
It is worth noting that these two critters were previously discussed by Archilochus (c. 680 and 640 B.C.E.), more recently by Isaiah Berlin in his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, and then by Jim Collins in Good to Great.
In Think Twice, Michael J. Mauboussin supports Phil Rosenzweig’s criticism in The Halo Effect of Collins and other business thinkers who write bestsellers. According to Mauboussin, “The important question is not ‘were all great hedgehogs’ but rather, ‘were all hedgehogs great?’ If the answer to the latter question is no – and it assuredly is – then dwelling on the survivors creates a bias in the analysis, leading to faulty conclusions.”
My own take on all this is, both foxes and hedgehogs first need to make certain that they are asking the right question, that they are solving the right problem. Only then can they determine what they need to know and where they can obtain the information their decision requires.
In another commentary, I will share Mauboussin’s thoughts about how to avoid or correct errors of judgment such as those associated with the “halo effect” and reversion to the mean.
What was she thinking?
Will she still like this public portrayal in 20 years?
Sara observes: I was walking around a local college campus during their recent elections. A young woman had signs from one end of campus to the other proclaiming her run for “Head of the Programming Council.” By the way, this is not a picture of Phyl, Muffy, Fluff-for-Brains or whatever her name is. However, it is eerily similar. I have to be honest, when I saw the signs I began to chuckle…several rude comments about the type of programming she might recommend just leapt into my head before I could shoo them away. Here are some questions that remain for me: what is she selling? No, seriously, when you put your picture on a sign and post it in public, you are selling something! What is the cost of using that type of picture? Once posted, it will never go away completely…so that question will follow her into the future. What message did she mean to convey? This young woman and the logic she and her political campaign committee used elude me.
I am left with a painful example of why women have difficulty changing their image. Gail Evans, points out in “Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman” that the problem is, when women act in a manner that confirms stereotypes, all women get categorized. This journey of equality needs to begin earlier than I had been thinking. It’s important that we teach our daughters the value of self respect, the importance of being aware of their impact and how long the future might be (case in point, hiring companies checking candidates out on MySpace and Facebook.)
Those who know me, know I am not one to publicly poke fun at someone as I am doing now. Please know that I wish the best for Muffy. To be fair to her, I’ve carefully left out the name of the university, concealed her real name and even used a fake picture…so, if this sounds like someone you know and you are offended, talk to them, not me.
“The Five Deadly Business Sins”
Managing in a Time of Great Change
In an article that first appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 1933, Peter Drucker identified what he characterized as “the five deadly business sins.” They are:
1. The worship of high profit margins and of “premium pricing” that always creates a market for the competitor. “And high profit margins do not equal maximum profits.”
2. Mispricing a new product by charging “what the market will bear.” “This, too, creates risk-free opportunity for the competition.”
3. Cost-driven pricing. “The only thing that works is price-driven costing.”
4. Slaughtering tomorrow’s opportunity on the altar of yesterday. Drucker cites the example of IBM that committed this sin at least twice, first when forbidding sales initiatives that could threaten the sales of punch cards and years later when preventing its PC people to contact mainframe customers.
5. Feeding problems and starving opportunities. “All one can get by ‘problem solving’ is damage containment. Only opportunities produce results and growth.”
The complete article as well as 24 others are available for the first time in a single volume, Managing in a Time of Great Change, published by Harvard Business Press in 2009 as part of the centennial celebration of Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005).
Rod Dreher tackles a new role in pursuit of learning — a noble goal
Rod Dreher
Rod Dreher has become a significant voice –I think an honest voice (with whom I frequently disagree – different political viewpoints…) – and he is now leaving the Dallas Morning News to head publications for the John Templeton Foundation. Dallas’ loss…
I know little about the John Templeton Foundation. Here is what they say about themselves, from their Mission Statement:
Our vision is derived from Sir John Templeton’s commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship. The Foundation’s motto “How little we know, how eager to learn” exemplifies our support for open-minded inquiry and our hope for advancing human progress through breakthrough discoveries.
It’s this phrase that captured my fancy: “How little we know, how eager to learn.” It reminds me of what I wrote recently on this blog about the quest for learning that drives me to keep reading books: KEEP LEARNING — there’s always the next new thing to learn.
I’m going to assume that the John Templeton Foundation diligently seeks to live up to this mission. It is a noble quest.
All the best to Rod Dreher. Keep Learning.
High school football at its best
Our Boys
Later in the locker room, Barta said this to his players and their family members: “Nobody hang their heads in here. We have lined up 80 times against teams, and finally one of them got us in a game that is going to go down there in the history books. They were a play better than us today.
“We’ve never judged ourselves on wins and losses. We’ve measured ourselves on whether we have been there for each other. You guys have been there all along. What you and those who came before have achieved over 79 games is something a lot of schools in America would like to say they have done.”
How many high schools in Texas can say they have? There are rimes when it seems to me that the success of a high school’s football team seems to be much more important than the quality of education that the school provides.
You may wish to check out Drape’s bestselling book, Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen, and Coach Wooden’s Leadership Game Plan for Success: 12 Lessons for Extraordinary Performance and Personal Excellence co-authored by John Wooden and Steve Jamison.
What I’m Not Reading – and why I’m bothered by it (should companies focus, much more, on nurturing jobs?)
From today…
…l’m making it the responsibility of this government…
…to find a job for every American who wants one.Have you seen the look in someone’s face…
…the day they finally get a job?
I’ve had some experience with this.
They look like they could fly.And it’s not about the paycheck.
It’s about looking in the mirror…and knowing you’ve done
something valuable with your day.
And if one person could start
to feel that way, then others….
Soon all these other problems
we’re facing may not seem so…
…impossible.
(Dave, the “stand-in” President, at the Presidential press conference, from the movie Dave)———————-
For eleven and a half years, my colleague Karl Krayer and I have each presented one synopsis a month of a best-selling business book. In that time, themes emerged as dominant and lasting. We’ve read books about how to find the right/best people; how to encourage your best people; why it takes such a serious work ethic to succeed – including the 10,000 hour rule and the need for deliberate practice; how to nurture innovation and cultivate creativity; how to be personally more productive with energy and time management in an ever-more-complex world. These are just a few of the major themes over the last 11+ years.
In the last 15 months, a new theme has emerged – what went wrong? We’ve only presented a handful of such books (we generally have avoided “finance books” at the First Friday Book Synopsis), but the current best-seller lists include titles that make us sort of wish we could simply run for the hills.
For example, this week’s list of business best sellers from the New York Times includes
Too Big To Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin. — The 2008 financial implosion on Wall Street and in Washington, by a New York Times reporter and columnist.
and
This Time is Different by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff. — Analyses of centuries of financial blinders.
But there is one theme that is not being written about. At least, if it is, it has not made it close to anyone’s best-seller list. It is this theme:
how can we build companies that nurture and protect the jobs of the people who make those companies successful?
There are a couple that are close, like the terrific Encouraging the Heart by Kouzes and Posner. But such books deal more with the idea of “bringing out the best in people” than with how to build a company that puts and keeps its own people first.
In other words, the growing joblessness, though understandable, may reveal a subtle truth – companies really do put maximizing profits and increasing productivity as the highest priorities, taking precedence over this question — what is the role of corporations and organizations in maintaining the overall work force for this great nation?
Some popular radio commentators like to call America the greatest country this planet has ever seen. I agree. But I know that one of the things that made it great is the American worker. From Rosie the Riveter, who played such a key role in winning the second World War, to all of the men and women who worked in all for the factories for so many decades, this country was built by a rich and great combination of corporate leadership and an in the trenches workforce of unparalleled strength.
All the day long,
Whether rain or shine
She’s a part of the assembly line.
She’s making history,
Working for victory
Rosie the Riveter
(Big band era song popularized by Kay Kyser).
So this is what I am not reading, and it bothers me — I’m not reading any books about how corporations can nurture this great American work force. We send jobs overseas, we cut jobs in entire industries, we cut entire industries, and we read, month after month, that we have lost even more jobs.
In the article Stop the ‘jobless recovery’ madness! — An economy that isn’t creating employment opportunities simply isn’t doing its job from Fortune, there are two charts that illustrate this truth:
But job and wage growth have been weak for a decade. Total private sector employment has dropped since the Yankees held their previous victory parade, in 2000.
That means there has been no net private sector job growth over a nine-year span where the U.S. population expanded by 11%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In my opinion, the fact there are no best–sellers on this reveals part to the problem. We might have a tendency to take the American worker for granted. We might have a tendency to focus on everything but the well-being of the American worker. And our negligence might be contributing to our biggest problem – a nation without enough jobs is a nation without a healthy economy.
Now, I’m not crazy. I know that if there are not profits, then there is no way to hire and keep the workers. But Henry Ford understood that if you don’t pay your workers enough to afford the cars they were making, then there would be no market, no buyers for the cars.
Well — if you don’t have enough workers to begin with, then the whole economy shrivels and collapses.
I think that CEO’s and Board s of Directors need to be asking, constantly, how can we keep people at work?
The reason that President Obama has called a jobs summit is that we don’t have enough jobs. This is not a small problem – this may be the problem of the era!
Help me out. Anybody got any really good books to recommend on this for me?
About that multi-tasking expertise…
A person using a computer experiences “cognitive drift” if more than one second elapses between clicking the mouse and seeing new data on the screen. If ten seconds pass, the person’s mind is somewhere else entirely. That’s how medical errors are made.
Levitt and Dubner, Superfreakonomics
The books say that women are better at multitasking than men. Maybe so. But I’ve got a theory that all of us have trouble multi-tasking. In fact, I would argue that focus is lost by most attempts to do multi-tasking. Some call the problem Adult ADD, but I think I would call our era the era of focus deficiency syndrome.
The quote above from Superfreakonomics jumped off the page at me. The quote comes from a section of the book discussing medical errors. But it’s the first part that grabs me:
A person using a computer experiences “cognitive drift” if more than one second elapses between clicking the mouse and seeing new data on the screen. If ten seconds pass, the person’s mind is somewhere else entirely.
This rings true – to me. I had not heard of “cognitive drift,” but the phrase certainly describes me — a lot; frequently; maybe constantly. My mind is constantly drifting. I will look something up/do a google search, and as I am waiting for it to load (and, yes, I do have a fast-speed connection) my mind has already gone elsewhere, and it may or may not make it back to where it was just a few seconds earlier.
For my own life, I have found that to read a book effectively – you know, with focus — I have to turn my phone off, my e-mail off, and keep my sight lines relatively clear of anything but the pages of the book. Otherwise, I find myself constantly facing the problem of “my mind is somewhere else” entirely.
The ability to focus on one thing at a time — the ability to single-task — may be a new necessary job skill. I know that it’s a skill that I definitely need to master.
News item – Mac Users are (or, at least consider themselves) more creative than other people
in the beginning...
iPhone users are happier to pay for digital content than the wider online population; while Mac users are more creative and individualistic, a pair of surveys released this morning claim.
reported on the Huffington Post
After turkey and pumpkin pie, during a lull in the football and pinochle, I read this short piece on the Huffington Post on my iPhone. Then, I got home to write this post on my iMac. (I could have posted it from my iPhone – but I haven’t tackled that much complexity and effort yet. So much for my own abilities, such as creatively learning what all I can do with what I have). Back to the news item — it pleased me that surveys show that Mac users are more creative. Here’s the summary:
Analysing aggregated data from 76,000 PC and Mac users asked about aesthetic preferences, media choices, and personality traits, the survey declares that Mac users want to be perceived as unique, prefer bold colors and retro designs, enjoy indie films, and consider themselves risktakers. Those PC users, on the other hand, are more likely to see the world as “different enough already” and appreciate “being in tune with those around them.” This is reflected in their more subtle, “mainstream modern” (neither retro nor extremely contemporary) design choices and their practical choices in clothing, footwear, and cars that favor getting the job done rather than making an overt design statement. From a personality perspective, Mac People are more likely to describe themselves as “verbal”, “conceptual”, and “risk takers”, with PC People countering that they are “numbers oriented”, “factual” and “steady, hard workers”. Interestingly, PC users like John Travolta, while Mac users prefer The Wire.
I, of course, am having fun with all of my personal Mac references. But – there is a really subtle message. I think we all want to be seen as “like” the people we want to be like. So if we want to be known as creative, even subconsciously, then we choose products that reinforce these desires. And we all know, from our earliest days, that “peer pressure,” the simple desire to be “one of the group” will dictate our choices: our purchasing choices, our vocabulary choices, our style choices – all of our choices.
In other words, we dress and talk and act like others in our tribe – in order to be seen as part of the tribe, because this is our tribe.
But back to Mac – is it any surprise that Mac users and creativity go together? Just think about the simplest illustration of this: Steve Jobs seems to be the living exemplar of creativity. Can anyone even picture Steve jobs using a PC? I rest my case.
Book Review: The World of Business
The World of Business
The Economist
Bloomberg Press (2009)
A total of six contributors are identified and presumably dozens of others were also involved in the selection, organization, and discussion of a full range of business topics that begin with “When firms started”(Page 2) and conclude with “Business etiquette tips” (Pages 254-261). Think of this as an anthology of generally brief (i.e. one-page) items (approximately 120 in number) rather than as a dictionary, encyclopedia, “history of….” etc. There is a British flavor to phrasing and spelling but the geographic scope is definitely international. As I worked my way from one entry to the next, I occasionally responded with comments such as “I didn’t know that” or “Oh yes, I had forgotten that.” Here are two that caught my eye:
“Some business giants of the past” (Pages 83-91): Andrew Carnegie, Walt Elias Disney, Henry Ford, William Gibbs (previously unfamiliar to me), Ray Kroc, Alfred Krup, William Hesketh Lever, John Pierpont Morgan, Akio Morita, John Davison Rockefeller, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, Sam Walton, and Frank Woolworth.
“Bubbles that burst” (Pages 164-170). Eight are discussed, including the current “credit crunch” that that has squeezed millions of individuals as well as companies, industries, and even countries. Of special interest to me (because I knew little, if anything about them) are “The Mississippi Bubble” (with a Scottish businessman, ironically bearing the name of John Law, playing a prominent role) and “Railway mania” in the UK (in the 1840s) and in the US (up to 1873). “The railway bubble burst in the ‘Panic of 1873,’ the same year as America’s first successful train robbery.”
One word of caution about this delightful as well as informative book: Do not place it in what the English refer to as the “loo” because those who begin to examine it may not reappear for quite some time.
Book Review: The Story of American Business
The Story of American Business: From the Pages of The New York Times
Nancy F. Koehn, Editor
Harvard Business Press (2009)
This volume provides a wealth of material that originally appeared in The New York Times
from May 11, 1869 (“East and West,” an account by an unnamed correspondent of the celebration at Promontory Point when the railway first connected New York and California) until September 28, 2008 (“The Richest Man and How He Grew That Way,” Janet Maslin’s review of Snowball, Alice Schroeder’s biography of Warren Buffett). The material is carefully organized according to three major themes: the corporation, American business and the changing nature of work, and the defining moments in technology. As Koehn suggests, “Taken together, these aspects provide us a kind of wide-angle lens on some – though by no means all – of the most important individuals and events that shaped American business history and that, in turn, did so much to give form to our own time and our possibilities in it.”
Most readers will check out the Contents and then select articles of special interest to them. Others may prefer to proceed through one section to the next. Whatever the approach, the reading experience shares much in common with a situation in which a person begins to clear out an attic, cellar, garage or storage area and finds several boxes filled with clippings of articles from The New York Times. Some are about the rise of big business, the emergence of Wall Street, “merger mania,” major business leaders; other articles examine the changing nature of work such as the movement from farm to country and the emergence of labor unions; still others examine the “transportation revolution” (e.g. railroad, automobile, and commercial flight) and communication breakthroughs such as radio, television, and the Internet. There are at least some photographs such as one of a Northern Pacific locomotive in 1900 and another in which Henry Ford sits in his car next to a horse and buggy in 1933. However, the bulk of the material consists of narrative text.
Congratulations to Nancy F. Koehn on a brilliant achievement!
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