Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

The HR department is administering the loyalty oath.  This is annual event.  We are requested to testify, via a form, to all our professional affiliations.  To a degree I am, of course, joking.  This invasion of our personal privacy is motivated by three concerns: concerns about possible conflict of interest (i.e. that the best interests of the employer might not be #1), concern that we might be not do what we are paid to do but rather work on some outside project, and finally that we might leverage the employer’s good name to the outsider’s benefit.  I gleaned that list from the sections of the policy manual the form points to.

Social networks are a particularly interesting test case for looking at issues of the multihoming since of course they are where you make you home.  I have account memberships in about a half dozen different social networking sites; but I don’t actually participate in any of them.  Though that all depends on your definition of social networking site.  If your more generous in your definition, including say all the on-line forums and mailing lists that include a social (v.s. purely on-topic) component then the number of sites I have accounts at explodes.  A quick review of my password wallet suggests the number gets up toward a hundred; the phrase ‘a gross’ seems useful at this point.  An then some percentage of the blogs I read have a social (or community) subtext.

Some of these places are quite social.  The shaving and diet forums for example. The Oil Drum and Crooked Timber are two nice examples of blogs that sustain a community around them.  Others are semi-social; the one for my PDA for example.  It’s worth noting in passing that the social can make it a bit tough to keep the sites useful for their nominal on-topic purpose.

Where you sit changes how you look at the question of multihoming and social networking sites.  If you have a large stake in one; owning LinkedIn for example but even if you have invested a lot of your social energy into a particular one your profession for example, then you are likely to be interested in ways of reducing the degree of multihoming.  There is certainly plenty of literature on how to execute on that.

Lots of people interested in knowledge flows have noticed that that individuals that cross between two social/professional networks often account for critical knowledge transfers.  So if your interested in encouraging that kind of thing then you might be interested in how to manage and enable increased multihoming.  I don’t think I’ve ever worked for employer who failed to consciously, though rarely conscientiously, encourage a modicum of that kind of thing.

Multiple social networks create some diversification, which in turn can be a buffer against various risks.  Two risks bear mentioning.  If a social network goes bad having other networks enables members to exit, but also it enable them to be critical and that critique can be key to fixing what going wrong.  Having multiple social networks also allows members to take risks, not just of criticism, but also to take risks that may do irredeemable damage to their reputation; such risks are much harder to take if there no other network to retreat into.

None of this helps to puzzle out the question of exactly how many of my ‘professional’ associations I should enumerate on this form.  I’m sorely tempted to enumerate the complete list of all the on-line forums I’m a member of to which I both feel some loyalty and have any overlap with my employer’s vast range of activities.  Just for fun.  Oh, but curiously I appear to be in a job category where they decided to wave the requirement.  Well golly, now my feelings are hurt - they don’t seem to care if I’m a two timing disloyal abuser of the brand!

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.

“Tyranny consists of the desire of universal power beyond its scope.”

One of the nice things about having a blog is that you can spit out those damn brainstorms before they do too much damage to your equilibrium or worse or are extinguished by your daily life.

I’d not noted before that the evolved animal is like a software platform.

One of the curious facts about software platforms is that they aren’t good for anything. You have to pile an application on to the platform before it solves real problem. That is a useful right first approximation. Of course platforms are good for something, they are good for solving some space of problems. They allow you to build things.

There is a gap between a platform and a problem solution. In platform system design, where we don’t solve problems we just design more platforms, we think of these as layers.

For example the end-to-end principle suggests that the layers should be thin, so that the lower layers are windowed down to a kernel of necessary function and no more. In business theory where platforms go by other names like toolkits, standards, rule sets, and are observed in numerous guises such as major commodities on supply chain, we know that a platform creates an options space of further commercial activity. There is always a lot of competitive to and fro about who gets to capture that value. Suppliers often covet value created down stream from them in the supply chain. That’s no different than how platform vendors often fold high value innovations back into their platform offering. A move that is contrary to the end-to-end principle but is quite rational in a commercial mindset. When we complain about a supplier, say Microsoft, overreaching, say by bundling the web browser with the operating system, we call that monopoly; but as the quote above suggests it’s a kind of tyranny.

Reading and thinking about “Breakdown of Will” has been triggering some very surprising connections to all that. Animals are wired to manage their attention in a way that is at odds what we believe to be the optimal way to manage the attention of a rational man. There is a gap between the platform, i.e. the animal, and the problem to be solved, i.e. to be a rational man. It is into this gap that we humans pour our clever rationalizing schemes. Applications on the platform.

So that was my brainstorm. What triggered it was some stuff at the beginning of a book from the anthropology library about trying to explain religion. The introduction was working it’s way through the necessary dross and was talking about Darwinian explanations for religion. My reaction was “The platform can only tell you so much about the applications that run on it.” Darwinian ideas are a major supplier in the explaination of animal systems, but there is a tendency for people to let these ideas overreach their natural scope. You see a similar overreaching by the ideas that come of economics. At this point in my thinking about the ideas in “Breakdown of Will” I’m more inclined to put religion in the application layer as part of our struggle to create useful solutions atop the worse is better legacy platform.

The Shangri-La diet Shangri-la Dietbook is out; it’s excentric author is doing his book tour; the echos of the PR machine are reverberating thru the media ecosystem; and apparently I’m not immune to their effects. Darn!

What caught me was two things. This fun cheerful paper on “Self Experimentation” by the diet’s inventor Seth Roberts. What really did me in though was more than 30 years ago when I first became interested in cults I read my way thru some marvellously silly books written by “Jane Roberts.” Jane’s gig was channeling, she would channel a dude name Seth. It’s a great exemplar of the art of speaking like a mystic; you know stuff like: “transforming invisible atoms into the dazzling theater of the world.” One side effect is that whenever I hear the name Seth I tend to get a foxy smile, and this time the name Roberts too!

I might not even have read the paper on self experimentation if it hadn’t been authored for inclusion in a book on behaviorism. I’m a huge fan of practical behaviorism; and I often recommend Jane Pryor’s book “Don’t shoot the Dog.” It’s delightful and a far better thing to read than this new diet book.

The diet turns about to be behaviorist at its core. Animals all (really all of them apparently) are very good at learning causal chains of behaviors; most of which end in food. The classic version of this is Pavloff’s dogs who he noticed would salivate when he rang the dinner bell; rather than when the food showed up. Animal trainers can do amazing things with these causal chains getting animals to walk around on two feet, jump thru flaming rings, roll over, etc. etc. all just for a treat. The behaviorists have written libraries full of papers about the fine tuning of these causal chains, how to strengthen them, weaken them, extend them, etc. etc.

So the trick at the heart of Robert’s scheme is to weaken the causal chain between taste and calories. Consider the animal that has built a link between a bell and dinner. If that animal wants calories it craves the bell; it’s weird but true. Now of course a bell isn’t calories so we can weaken that link in two simple ways. We could randomly ring the bell so the animal abandons it’s illusion that these two things are linked. Plan B is we could stop ringing the bell before meals. Either will work just fine; though as the behaviorist research shows these links can be surprisingly robust if they have been trained up just right.

Robert discovered that both tricks appear to work. That he could reduce the body’s craving for food (aka taste) by either means. He could providing a lot of random tastes so it wouldn’t build a strong link between them. He even found articles in the literature of experiments where animals whose food was flavored somewhat at random stopped eating so much. He could also break the linkage by providing calories with zero flavor. The theory in both cases is the body weakens the causal chain between taste and calories; which in turn leads to reduced craving for food.

The theory is somewhat more complex than I’m making it here. You’d have not trouble finding a few dozen explainations if you poke around in the web. But for me I was particularly taken to see a diet based on such an extremely simple confident application of behaviorism.

I have this old wound which while it handicaps me it has the useful side effect that I can predict the weather. Whenever this wound begins to act up I can sense storms just over the horizon. This article suggests some particularly bad weather ahead. Consistent with current climate trends though.