Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Another example for my collection of power law distributions. The data is taken from CiteSeer. It shows the most attractive ten thousand computer scientists. Where attractive means that their papers attracted bibliographic citations. This is normalized by publication year, what ever that means? I feel guilty about posting this one. This kind of competition is extremely toxic to collaboration.

The flat bits on the curve appear to be coauthor pairs. The gentle bow to the curve suggests that something regulatory starts to kick in toward the top. If I had data I presume the curve would become more stern.

Somebody must have computed slope of this curve for different academic domains. The shape over time would be even more interesting. Assuming one has a choice about one’s calling, wouldn’t that be valuable input to the decision?

I once did a consulting gig for a huge bank and learned that thier international funds transfer network would grind to a crawl each May Day.  All over the world workers would take a day off and capitalism would grind to a halt.

If you work in middle management in any large firm you learn to despise one particular task, organizing a meeting.  Coordinating a diverse group of people to all show up at the same time and place; the more diverse the group the harder it is.

A powerful charismatic actor in a distant part of my organization recently organized a gathering in the early evening.  The attendees all showed up.  It was a wily move, putting our loyalty to the workplace in competition with our loyalty to what ever social network we page in just after the workday ends.  He sweetened the deal with food.

So I have this theory, “which is mine,” that one of the functions of holidays is to create interruptions in the usual dance of social network coordination.  They are society device to relieve the stress that builds up if these secondary social networks don’t get some attention.  This theory leads to a natural question: “what secondary social networks did you nurture during the last break?”

The scarcity of these breaks leads to competition.  Around my house we started joking this last holiday season.  “You know, that the Christians stole this holiday from the pagans.   Right?”  “Oh yeah! …  But then, the Pagans stole it from the Neanderthals.” Of course the the commies stole May Day from the Pagans too.
Modern life makes the war on holidays all that more interesting, since modern life is al about juggling numerous social networks.
We don’t do May day in the US.  The tension between capital and labor played out in different ways.  We do have a holiday assigned to labor, but it’s in September.  I don’t think I’ve heard, even once, somebody complain about how we have lost touch with the true meaning of Labor Day.  Putting our Labor Day on the opposite end of the annual calendar from May Day was presumably a scheme to avoid the US labor movement coordinating it’s activities with thier international brethern.

If your goal is to engineer a social network you spend a lot of your time attempting to orchestrate these points of rendezvous.  In or out of existence depending on your goals.   Eid ul-Fitr is an example of a holiday that is close to, but doesn’t quite, land on the exact same day worldwide.  I’ve read rants from people who feel it ought to.  There was a long standing yearning in my household that, if only, we could all agree to exchange presents a week after Christmas morning, think of the money we could save!
Sometimes you find competing holidays running up right against each other.  Halloween next to All Saint’s day is a classic example.  My favorite it Queen’s day in Holland, right next to May day.

The RealtyTrac web site shows real estate foreclosure data for the US. It’s thought provoking to look at places your familiar with thru this somewhat specialized lens. What you want to do here is get to their maps quickly. To do that you:

• enter a zipcode
• select a house at random
• on that house’s abbreviated listing page click on the interactive map button

Then browse around the neighborhood you’ve selected. When you want to look at another neighborhood, start over. Be sure to take a look at good and bad neighborhoods, places your friends and relatives live, and at places you’ve lived over the years. I really hadn’t appreciated how there some seemingly pleasant neighborhoods where it appears that one out of 20 homes are owned by the bank.

One of the two books about business to which I return often is Strategy Safari by Mintzberg et. al. It is a delightful tour through the jungle of approaches to strategic management people have suggested over the decades. In spite of it’s cheerful and concise nature I find I can’t casually read this book. I need to stew for a week or two on each section before deciding I’m done with it. At the same time I prefer to skitter about in the book so I can let one framework fight it out with another while I watch in amusement.

Back in the 1970s and 80s I spent some time associated with the knowledge engineering crowd. That community labored to build a class of software systems, expert systems, that could perform as well as an expert in this or that narrow technical domain. For example let’s say you had a huge expensive chemical plant. In that plant you’d find a guy, call him Joe, and Joe knew how to start it up. It would take a few days to get the thing running and Joe was the guy who knew how to do it. Did I mention? Joe is retiring next year. In the knowledge engineering crowd approach to this problem was to see if you could extract from Joe, via observation, interviews, what ever, a codification of his knowledge. In the AI/expert systems branch of knowledge systems the idea was to code it up software. The unit for such encoding was rule; i.e. Given that the pump in the basement of building 7 is making that funny noise it sometimes makes delay starting the boiler in until the noise stops.

This turns out to be much harder than it looks. Which we probably knew going into it, since back in the 70s it became common to observe that it took experts about a decade to become competent. That if you modeled the scale of their rule set you can then say that they learned a new rule at the rate of about one or two a day over that decade. It is unlikely you can pull the rules back out of Joe’s head much faster than that. Joe can’t just rattle off his rule set as if you were down loading some file. For Joe these rules are intuitive. I like to say they are compiled in. He doesn’t think thru why the boiler’s start up should be delayed, and in fact he may not even be able to tell you that he’s waiting or the pump to stop making the funny noise. At least he can’t tell you without a effortless moment of introspection.

I was reminded of all that as I read the delightful chapter on the “culture school” of strategic management. The culture school had a few years of popularity when the Japanese cars caught the attention of the B-school crowd. Any number of them up and ran off to Japan and for many of them it was the first time they had seen a radically different culture, i.e. Japanese culture. So a favorite theory what the strategic magic Toyota had that GM didn’t was culture.

But what is culture? It’s unlikely that GM could have been saved by introducing underwear vending machines; but would moving all their suppliers into a dense single city have helped? Culture is like expert knowledge, decompiling it is very hard. If you stop a member of a culture in the midst of some activity and demand “so, why do you do that?” What is the functional value of sleeping on the train? Standing up?

I was delighted by the answer they suggest in Strategy Safari, i.e. that Culture is exactly that which you can’t explain; i.e. it is the expert knowledge which you haven’t codified and made rational. Which of course makes it a bit difficult to manage. If your faced with a competitor who’s advantage over you is cultural the challenge is convert culture into codified knowledge. That’s hard, like getting Joe to mention that thing about the funny noise. Machine that changed the world is a good attempt at that for the Toyota example.
Strategic Safari has a nice framing of why culture is valuable. Firms have unique resources; e.g. capital, location, skills, property, talent. Some of these unique resources are particularly unique because their competitors can’t imitate them; e.g. these resources are valuable, hard to substitute for, and rare. When Steve Job’s brings a few other CEOs on stage during his MacWorld keynotes he is signaling just that: Apple has Steve and as you can see these other guys ain’t Steve. Microsoft has HotMail, but competitors like Google and Yahoo are able to, over time, imitate it and build a substitue.

Knowledge resources are particularly easy to imitate, but only if you can codify it. The harder a company’s knowledge assets are to codify, aka cultural, the more likely they can actually provide a strategic advantage. A valuable culture will be hard to codify. They also have nice five step recipe for how to kill a culture (useful when faced with a dysfunctional culture):

1. Manage the Bottom Line, no actions that can’t rationally explain their benefits.
2. Plan every action, avoid spontaneity and thus learning.
3. Move managers around preventing domain expertise from displacing their managerial skills.
4. Always objective, aka portfolio management.
5. Always use recipes with five steps.

Discussing with a friend how culture is the asset you can’t rationalized he mused that it sounds like the problem many super heroes have e.g. that their super power is accessible only via some irrational pathway. We chortled at the idea of a fantastic four of strategic marketing. The Johnny Storm of PR; the Incredible Hulk of closing; Mr. Fantastic of discriminatory pricing; and the Invisible Woman of customer support.

Last fall InsiderPages.com put a price, on dollar, on what they were willing to pay for local business reviews. I stumbled on this when yesterday morning Google injected some very critical reviews of my auto mechanic onto a map page.  I was checking if I’d found the right phone number.

These reviews were bad enough to trigger my calling two other mechanics.  They couldn’t take my car until next week.

Finally I went back to look at the reviews. They were weird.  They complained about the prices my guy charges for food and refered to some newspaper article about his his bad behavior. They were totally bogus!  He doesn’t sell food and my area papers are far too business friendly to ever write such an article.

The reviews Google subscribed to came from Insider Pages.  Looking up auto mechanics I could see that they, amazingly, had one and only one review for every mechanic in town.  That’s not how community generated content looks.
When I signed up to write a counter review I was prompted for a promotion code and that lead me web pages showing their promotion last fall.

This kind of slander could destroy a small business and it should be criminal. Insider pages knowing paid people to create fraudulent reviews and given the statistics of the reviews I say they made no effort manage the problem. Google’s authority only magnifies the crime. I presume it would be a piece of cake for some lawyer to find a thousand businesses slandered like my auto mechanic has been and bring suit against the various parties in this example. Something more severe than letting the market punish them is appropriate.

This is the dark side of social networking (talent scrapping) sites. Get the talent to commit the crimes you need committed. It’s the social networking site owner as troll. In the worst case the business is looking for a way to force, i.e. blackmail, the local businesses into participating at the site.  Angie’s List has been accused of that.