Category Archives: frameworks

Change of Venue – Time

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I like the idea of “object shift” or “change of venue.” The idea is that if you loosing the argument in one forum you shift the discussion into a different one. For example you don’t want them to build a gas station on the corner and you can’t get the zoning board to stop it, then you might shift to trying to get the historical commission involved, and if that doesn’t work you shift to folks responsible for guarding the local water table.

Here’s a nice list of venues with that differ in time constant.

  • Geology, Climate
  • Nature, Ecology, Evolution
  • Culture
  • Governance
  • Infrastructure
  • Markets, Weather(?)
  • Firms
  • Fads, Storms

One of the fascinating aspects of the identity puzzle is how discussions skitter across so many of these. Different participants in the discussion relate to each of these in different ways. For example Visa’s strength is at the Firms and Markets layer. The standards bodies tend to emphasis the Market/Infrastructure layers. We are starting to see some fascinating work, via brain scans for example, of how trust runs deep in the human brain. What I love best about that work is how some of it shows that economics students brains are just plain different.

Take Stefan’s First Design Principle

FIRST DESIGN PRINCIPLE: The technical architecture of an identity system should minimize the changes it causes to the legacy trust landscape among all system participants.

It’s an appeal to the fad/firm/market levels to do no harm to the existing infrastrurure, governance, and culture. It’s an appeal to the sacred nature of the institutions that have long time constants.

Or consider Kim’s summing up at the tail of his reaction to my attempt to draw attention to the PR and agency function of “user at the center” rhetoric.

We should just make sure our technologies give  individuals and organizations  freedom of choice, and nurture an ecology of alternatives.  Then people can “vote with their feet (fingers?)”.

What venue is that argument being made in?

Kim’s making an argument at the market/firm level. Nothing wrong with that; the short time constant institutions on that list are vital beasts. But, I’d rather that it was framed without grabbing words that are nearly sacred from other venues. The ecology mentioned isn’t the slow changing deeply wired human nature of trust, it’s the ecology of the firms in the jungle of the marketplace. The freedom is the freedom of consumers to take risks in markets; not the freedom that comes from a well regulated society.

Of course in the posting Kim was reacting to my point was the “user at the center” is can be a sales of those with market power. That our means of tempering power is at the governance/infrastructure level. Kim’s tries to shift it back to the firm/market level.

High Class of Problem

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I love this idea “high class of problem.”

My mother has a maxim for when someone has to choose between two relatively nice options. She calls this “A high class of problem.” “If you have to choose between a Mercedes and a Jaguar,” she says, “and you just can’t decide – that’s a high class of problem.”

In context though it reminds me of what pulls my cord about the home schooling debate.

Professional women in this country do have observable problems. I probably would have continued to work if I could have found adequate childcare, but the fact is, where I live, even though I was willing to pay a lot of money, childcare that was good enough for my kids, and reliable enough for me to be a good bet for my employer, is just not widely available.

One thing I think that women in my position do realize and should be able to communicate to others is to realize that to many people our problem is going to be what my mother calls A High Class of Problem.

Three – or the one more rule.

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One essay in Stephen Jay Gould’s books made a deep impression on me, it was a rant about the dangers of a dialectic argument. Individuals of this species, dialectic arguments, like to join together into herds. The moment one enters the room you can expect a stampede of analogous arguments to show up soon. They also have a clear pecking order that gives lazy groups a well worn path they let the conversation take.

For example. Start to discuss the trade off of speed v.s. quality. Map speed to man, and quality to women. Map man to rude, and women to polite. Map rude to bad and polite to good. Map bad to evil, and polite to noble. If you do this really fast it’s amusing; but built up slowly it leads to nothing but trouble. The escalation is one obvious problem. Another less obvious problem is the forcing of unlikely bed fellows. For example slavery for/against used to be aligned with democrat/republican but then labor/capital is aligned democrat/republican; that wasn’t stable. Or to take another example: secular/religious doesn’t mix well with labor/capital unless you force secular/religious to align with independence/hierarchy – not a very natural mapping either. Strange bed fellows. The strangeness gets magnified as the polarization increases.

The wealth of well worn dialectics tends to make it easy to fall into these trap. To help counter that in my own thinking I’ve been seeking a a catalog to three sided things. For example geographic/political ones – New York, New Jersey, Connecticut; or England, Scotland, and Wales. Sooner or later I’ll get around to pulling together my current collection and posting it.

Moving the discussion from two to three has, of course a more general form. For example now when ever I see a list, like hardware, software, services, I ask “Can I have another?” Solutions?

One Lesson on Economics

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We all know that the market system is an amazing decentralized social planning and allocation mechanism if externalities are small, if returns to scale are in general diminishing, if we are happy with the distribution of wealth and the concommitant distribution of economic power it gives rise to, and if Say’s Law holds–if supply does indeed create its own demand, and we don’t have to worry about large-scale unemployment and deep depressions.

more: Brad DeLong

Update: a second lession.

Value

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Different kinds of value.

  • Signal Value — the red car, book’s cover, the beautiful wife.
  • Use Value — the dependable car.
  • Labor Value — really a cost, the cost of the labor necessary to create the good.
  • Experiance Value — sometimes called entertainment value, i.e. the experiance of going to Starbucks is more than the quality of the coffee.
  • Option Value — all the things the buyer imagines he can do with the good.
  • Salvage Value
  • Net Present Value — a quant’s means of discounting the sum of future benefits generated by the good via the owner’s discount (or interest) rate.

More?

Update: There doesn’t seem to be a standard term for the value that might be described as durable, dependable, trustable, consistent; e.g. the absence of risk.

Fear of the New

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This is a list of various ways that folks frame up their fear of the new (the innovative?).

  • These new things, they are just trifles.
  • They are a threat to the established order.
  • Typical Nuevo Riche behavior!
  • Their novelty is transient.
  • Go ahead sink you money into that. But beware, it’s not going to come to anything.
  • Stuff like this, well, it always suffers from exaggerated claims.
  • This is just disruptive.
  • Oh, this could be very destablizing.
  • Don’t be impulsive!
  • This is going to lead to disaster!
  • It’s Eve’s apple all over again! Run away.
  • This will lay waste to our entire ecology.
  • Snort. People into that stuff? They are just status seeking.
  • Conspicuous consumption, that’s what’s going on here.
  • They just think they’re happy.

The list is descended from one in Albert Hershman’s book Shifting Involvements, all his stuff is a hoot.

If your against something, say SOAP, Rest, Axis, cell phones, … you name it … then you can just pluck one of these off the list and write up another blog posting.

I laughed out loud when I read that one about “status seeking” since that’s the default diagnosis of what’s going on in open source by the fearful outsiders.

This list is analogous to the list Michael Porter pulled together back in the 1970s that enumerates the risks faced by new or emerging businesses. Porter’s list is more useful if your inside the new thing and struggling to make it survive or think thru what the nature of your customer’s objections are.

  • Erratic Quality
  • Customer Confusion
  • Raw Material Risks
  • Perceptions of Obsolescence
  • Regulatory Climate
  • Image & Crediblity with Funders
  • Absense of Standards
  • High Costs
  • Immature Infrastructure
  • Mobility Barriers
  • Subsidy of traditional solution
  • Short Time Horizon
  • First-Time Buyers
  • Spin Offs
  • Strategic Uncertainty
  • Technology Uncertainty

I seem to have lost source of this last one. This list’s audience are people who are trying to pull a new initiative out of the skunk works phase and start to actually change the organization around them. It enumerates five fundamental wells of resistance that you encounter at that step.

  • Existing assumptions about what’s key.
  • The current strategy.
  • The consensus about what the future goals are.
  • The background of the current management.
  • The social network of managerial relationships.

Those remind me of this marvalous quote: “It’s not ignorance does so much damage; it’s knowin’ so derned much that ain’t so.” — Josh Billings

Politics 101

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Another addition to my set of little frameworks for explaining things. I’ve lost the back pointer to where I learned this.


This is tool for thinking about budget items when the budgeting is embedded in a political context. And when isn’t it? The budget items can each be scored by two measures. First, how strong the claim of that item is; i.e. how pure, noble, and necessary it is. For example the maintenance of the public health system that inspects the food supply has a strong claim to funding. Second, how politically strong the parties who will advocate for a given item are. For example it’s rare that the executive suite’s benefit package goes unfunded.

Presumably an ethical practitioner of the political craft strives to draw a line thru his budgets that is more horizontal wile a practitioner who believes in giving power it’s due strives toward a vertical line. Of course reasonable people can dispute the how to score the claims – such dispute are, of course, why you need politics.

Example: Say your required to propose a budget within some cap; but you want to do more. What to do? Leave strong/strong items out of the budget. For example: funding the war in Iraq is strong/strong. It will get funded. That’s why the war’s been funded almost entirely with supplemental funding bills. These tricks make it subtle to read budget projections.

Update:The annual release of the president’s budget triggers … a more original source for this model. David Stockman, who knew? Homework; draw three curves in the space shown: a) a imaginary existing budget, b) a goal budget and c) best budget to propose to shift toward your goal budget. Extra credit pretend your really evil.

“Uncertainty is Kryptonite to Corporate Decision Making”

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Something for the frameworks category. Lifted, and some of the context shaken off, from John Robb’s Global Guerrillas.

In the original context this was about how to attack the supply chain of the modern military. In the second world war opposing sides spent resources on destroying the other side’s supply chains; blowing up railroads and supply depots for example. Given that the modern military has become deeply dependent on corporate outsourcing the locus of attack shifts from the physical to the organizational.

So John summarizes this list of three things that can lead to the failure of a large firm.

  • Moral. A company is morally isolated when it cannot meet its obligations to its stakeholders. These include profits to shareholders and safety/morale to employees. Management teams that don’t meet their obligations to these stakeholders are either summarily replaced or held legally/financially liable.
  • Mental. Uncertainty is Kryptonite to corporate decision making. Too much uncertainty and corporate valuations fall. If an operation introduces new uncertainties that taints daily decision making, it will likely terminate it.
  • Physical. In order to do business, corporations enmesh themselves in a deep web of connections. If a corporation’s activities put their relationships with suppliers, financiers, and partners at risk, they are obligated to cease them.

That’s a great list. Those only get more important as you rise up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Working Environment

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Some speaker at ApacheCon thru up a list like this. I wanted to get it into my frameworks category.

A good working environment for a programmer:

  • An office with a door
  • and no phone
  • A culture of asynchronous communication
  • A fast workstation
  • and two monitors. You wouldn’t believe how much difference a second monitor makes
  • and their operating system of choice
  • Good development tools.
  • A fast Internet connection
  • Snacks and drinks they don’t need to leave the office for
  • A good-natured working environment
  • Flexible working hours
  • Tasks appropriate to their ability
  •  and if at all possible, that they find interesting
  • Investment (emotional or financial) in the end-product

This appears to be the original source: The floggings will continue until morale improves.

This is a great list as far as it goes.

But, there are some serious things wrong with this list. From the labor point of view it is is far too selfish in nature. From the manager point of view it’s reflects the what I’ve sometimes referred to as the dwarf model of labor management – “Lock them in a room with a pile of straw and wait for the gold to appear.” Organizations are more subtle creatures than that!

I’d certainly add things like effective organization, collaboration, and leadership. The no phone thing seems a bit over the top and probably redundant with the culture of asynchronous communication. Also lacking is anything about assuring the collective work is in fact collective. In fact I suspect that all the failure modes enumerated in Implementation Games could hide out in an organization that managed to do everything the list above.