Extend your horizons and do what others can’t

Posted on August 14, 2019

Sounds good

It started with a disappointing audio system.

A diligent MIT engineering student was nearing the end of his doctoral studies, and as a classical music fan he decided to purchase the best stereo he could find as a reward for his hard work. He had been taking apart and repairing radios since he was a child, so he knew far more than the average consumer about what made them work.

Despite researching the best options available, the quality of the resulting purchase was underwhelming.1 This triggered in Amar Bose an obsessive interest in figuring out how to reproduce sound in ways that were more pleasing, even if they defied conventional wisdom. So began decades of scientific research into acoustics, which came naturally given his later status as one of MIT’s most popular professors.

His work soon reached a point where commercialization was the right next step, leading to the founding of the Bose Corporation. It would go on to make significant advances in audio technology, including noise-cancelling headphones and custom systems for luxury cars and large public spaces.2

When embarking on this path Bose did one thing very differently: he chose to maintain it as a closely-held, private entity. It grew slowly and deliberately instead of taking in external investment that would instantly ratchet up the pressure to grow. Even after his speakers started capturing significant market share he resisted the lure of IPO riches. Read more…

One can only imagine how time-consuming this research was without an internet to browse audiophile review sites. ↩
The next time you board a plane peek into the cockpit, you might notice your pilot wearing a Bose aviation headset. ↩
As a holder of said MBA degree, I hope that if the situation ever arises I will have the perspicacity to not fire the next Amar Bose. ↩
In case you were wondering the cold fusion thing proved to be a bust, but the fact that world’s power plants aren’t out of business should have tipped you off. ↩
This problem of course varies greatly depending on the cost of your whip. That Geo Metro probably won’t handle it like a Bentley Mulsanne. ↩
Or as smooth as a German or Japanese bullet train, for those wanting a more earthbound analogy. ↩
Probably not coincidentally, this company also has MIT founders. ↩
Apparently his was the kind of mathematical genius that involved being able to figure out the necessary equations for noise-cancellation before the flight even landed. ↩
Amar Bose did end up comfortably in the billionaire class, so the additional wealth he forewent through his lavish spending would have had zero impact on his life, while the company’s health made a big difference. ↩

weak sauce

Posted on August 11, 2019

a description applied to something that is uninspiring, ineffective, underwhelming, or otherwise below reasonable expectations and/or not as good as comparable items, as in “I thought the keynote presentation would be a hit but those new products they introduced were weak sauce”; draws an analogy to a hot sauce that fails to provide the expected levels of spiciness, making it unsuitable for its intended purpose; as with several other examples of jargon (goat rodeo, push back, watch-out, etc.) speakers use this term to soften the harshness of something potentially negative; never to be used with an article, the grammatically unusual usage further heightens its impact: “that’s weak sauce” is correct, while “that’s a weak sauce” is not

The singularity isn’t real, people

Hype springs eternal

Posted on August 7, 2019

You, robot

Ray Kurzweil was a precocious child, to put it mildly.

His fascination with robotics and programming began early, and by the time he was a teenager he was already demonstrating the technological brilliance that would come to characterize his career. His pioneering approach to machine learning led to a television appearance at 17 where he demonstrated his new musical composition tool. Software he coded was included on computers sold by IBM. While in college he created a program that matched students to their ideal universities, which was sold for several hundred thousand dollars.1

His inveterate tinkering would later produce breakthroughs in areas as diverse as character recognition, optical scanning, and music synthesizers. Kurzweil founded multiple companies to capitalize on these inventions and went on to establish himself as one of the world’s most prominent advisors and speakers on technology and society.

But Kurzweil’s story wasn’t entirely without adversity. The early deaths of his father and grandfather impressed on him the frailty of the body and its inevitable decline. He responded to this genetic inheritance in proto-Silicon Valley hacker fashion, formulating a regimen involving a pharmacy’s worth of unregulated supplements and experimental treatments of dubious efficacy in an effort to stay young.2 Read more…

It was bought for $100,000 in 1968, which due to inflation is the equivalent of $750,000 in 2019, reminding us of the economic principle that a dollar today is not the same as a dollar yesterday.
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Life hacking isn’t exactly new, but the one thing its proponents have in common through the ages is that they end up equally as dead as the rest of us.
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Most commonly used for the beginning of the universe, when everything instantly began to exist. ↩
This physical world is known by the charming appellation “meatspace”. ↩
AI is becoming the new “Uber for X” in trendiness, as in “Our company will use AI to transform hamburgers”. ↩
Ironically, Kurzweil himself is among these very smartest of the smart. ↩
And these folks are compensated very handsomely given how difficult the work is, which is having some complicating effects on the housing markets of the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Take an input, perform an operation, produce an output, which is what the Casio calculator watch I so proudly sported in elementary school could do. ↩
Not to mention the horses that were previously used to power mills by walking in circles around a driveshaft. ↩
The desire for salvation is intrinsic, and when one religion is jettisoned another will rise to fill the void. Singularitarianism locates the idea of a transcendent God within humanity’s own creative power, and that pretty much never ends well. There’s a reason why utopias don’t last.
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Mortality remains implacable, something that has been known since Genesis: for dust we are, and to dust we shall return. ↩

rabbit trail

Posted on August 5, 2019

a meandering path that has only a tangential connection to the issue at hand; if pursued it will derail a group from its core task or objective, and so the term is usually invoked as a gentle reminder to stay focused, as in “We could try to model the macroeconomic factors at play, but let’s not go down that rabbit trail”; from the notion that rabbits’ movements are chaotic with no regular or predictable structure, such that following them requires excessive effort with low probability of actually finding one; alternative version is rabbit hole, used interchangeably

Bigger and bingier: the business of more

Sometimes more is less

Posted on July 31, 2019

Happy meals

Before it became the colossus of fast food with outposts in nearly every country, McDonald’s was a novel hamburger chain with a limited menu and an emphasis on low prices. A distinguishing feature was its rapid service, which hinted at the operational efficiency that would soon become a trademark of the concept.1

Ingredients were delivered fresh, including whole potatoes that were laboriously transformed in store into the brand’s signature French fries.2 The initial menu was almost quaint in its simplicity. Beverages came in just one size and contained seven ounces (200 ml), a little over half of a modern aluminum can. Fry portions were 2.4 ounces (68 g), less than the smallest option on today’s menu. The hamburger that was the main attraction wouldn’t look out of place in a current child’s meal—though the marquee did encourage diners to buy them by the bagful.

The combination proved to be very compelling, as customers flocked to the new restaurants. Signage out front touted the overall number of hamburgers served, ticking up steadily into the millions and then billions until management finally decided to stop keeping track. The implication of these figures was clear: the massive quantities sold showed that McDonald’s was worthy of a visit. Read more…

Its ubiquity led to a geopolitical theory known as the Golden Arches doctrine, which stated that no countries with McDonald’s locations would go to war with each other. The theory plausibly held for a while, but sadly there are recent examples that run counter to it. ↩
Originally fried in beef tallow, the recipe was changed in the 1990s to employ vegetable oil due to anti-fat sentiment, now considered by many to have been misplaced, and causing those old enough to remember to pine for the fries they can no longer buy. ↩
It’s hard to imagine how much larger a soda could be, unless you want it delivered through an IV.
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This happened shortly after the widespread publicity generated by the documentary “Super Size Me”, in which the creator ate solely at McDonald’s for 30 days but also consumed twice his daily caloric needs and didn’t exercise, with predictable results. ↩
Despite all the original programming, Netflix’s most streamed show is the U.S. version of The Office, which ended in 2013. ↩
And their friends and family members who share their passwords. ↩
An expedition doesn’t really require a Range Rover if the only stop is a suburban Whole Foods. ↩
In the meantime, some people get extremely rich, so there will always be an incentive to test these short-term limits. ↩
That’s not to suggest that the Texas barbecue joint referenced in the linked article provides health food—fatty brisket is far from it. But the hours-long lines serve a gating function, making this a rare meal for all except the most intrepid fans. ↩
Sadly in the case of the opioid epidemic it appears this model was literally true, with manufacturers now receiving intense scrutiny regarding their role in over-prescribing and the resulting deaths. ↩

accordion effect

Posted on July 26, 2019

a phrase describing a phenomenon where changes to one element are likely to have rippling or unpredictable effects on others, usually in the context of an analytical model with nested or interlocking parts, as in “We could change the market share assumption, but that’s going to have an accordion effect on the rest of the numbers”; derives from the movements of an accordion while it is being played, where the bellows expands and contracts dynamically in response to squeezing movements from both halves of the instrument; the term originates in physics and engineering, where a common use is to describe the bunching and slowing of groups of vehicles as they proceed down a road

Continuous change versus the big bang approach

Smooth the learning curve

Posted on July 24, 2019

Start me up

The digital economy of 1995 hadn’t reached anywhere near today’s all-encompassing levels of cultural saturation, but that year still featured one of the splashiest consumer technology rollouts in history. This one wasn’t orchestrated by Apple though, as Steve Jobs had only recently returned to a company that was barely clinging to life.1

No, this product launch costing hundreds of millions of dollars and generating several multiples of that in return was pulled off by Microsoft, led by Bill Gates and crew.2 The company unleashed a major transformation of personal computing through an operating system with the utilitarian name of Windows 95.3 The event was a phenomenon, with shoppers lining up outside of computer stores like sneakerheads waiting for a fresh drop of Yeezys.4

An operating system was the unglamorous backbone of computing, making it a strange candidate for such intense fandom. But it had been several years since the last Windows iteration, and the new version marked a radical change in usability, flexing the potential of the graphical interface and introducing elements like the Start button that persist to this day.5 Read more…

Apple soon needed a cash infusion to stay in business, and in a Shakespearean turn of events its unlikely rescuer turned out to be Microsoft, which had no inkling that it was propping up the company that would eventually blow it out of the mobile and media markets. ↩
The spectacle of Gates and top lieutenants dancing on stage to the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” at the launch event is… interesting. Let’s just say they danced like no one was watching, except a whole lot of people were watching. ↩
In addition to easy identification it has the advantage of immediate obsolescence. As soon as the calendar ticks over to the next year you know you have outdated goods and start thinking about a newer version. From a marketing perspective, this is a feature, not a bug.
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At the time, software was sold on things called “disks”, which had to be physically acquired from places called “stores”. And Yeezys are Kanye’s shoe collaboration with Adidas, but you already knew that. ↩
Apple aficionados claim, not without warrant, that Microsoft was merely aping features that the Macintosh long had. Apple’s own OS was named “System 7” and had launched a few years earlier, albeit with a tiny fraction of the hype surrounding Windows 95.
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Except when you get the reminder from your computer telling you a restart is necessary to install system updates, which you then snooze like an unwanted alarm. ↩
Which at one point offered the quadruply-branded Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail. I mean, just pick one horse and ride it. ↩
Fun fact: the original owner of the Gmail domain was a branded service featuring the cartoon cat Garfield. If he at least got some Google shares in exchange that should be enough to keep him in lasagna for the rest of his nine lives. ↩
Except for those of you still using those Yahoo accounts. ↩

battlefield promotion

Posted on July 19, 2019

to be thrust suddenly into a position of greater responsibility due to some corporate machination, scandal, resignation, or the like that unexpectedly removes an incumbent from his or her position, leaving the one promoted to quickly fill the void; such events can blow up carefully laid succession plans and frustrate others who had hoped to assume the role under more typical circumstances; those who receive such promotions may be chosen for proximity or expediency more than merit; from the idea that leaders with authority over soldiers in battle would need to be quickly replaced were they to become casualties, so as to avoid leaving a platoon rudderless

Two alternative paths for professional growth

Choose your focus

Business

Posted on July 17, 2019

Development opportunity

The industrial revolution and the subsequent rise of management techniques brought with them a greater focus on evaluating performance. Instead of laboring solo on the farm or in a home workshop, employees moved to factories and offices. They were now under the watchful eyes of owners who could compare them with others completing identical tasks.

It became fashionable to replace intuition with data, evaluating staff based on the quantity of material handled or the number of finished products they turned out. The archetypal example is that of Frederick Taylor and his principles of scientific management, notably applied to steel workers who could purportedly carry more iron if incentivized and monitored rigorously.1

A new class of efficiency experts tried to figure out how enterprises could wring more profits from their employees’ activities.2 This produced an early form of developmental feedback: do more of X, less of Y. Rewards could then be based on measurable factors instead of ambiguous ones. Read more…

The debate as to the appropriateness of his approach rages on a century later, as the seeming reduction of workers to cogs in a machine rubs some the wrong way. ↩
Some of the more prominent management consulting firms got their start focusing on worker efficiency, including McKinsey. ↩A
In urgent cases this was done with much less deliberation, hence the term “battlefield promotion”. ↩
Although public speaking skills don’t appear to be mandatory, given how many senior leaders become stilted upon taking the stage. #cringe ↩
Few current fast food CEOs got their start as fry cooks trying to avoid hot grease. These days they’re more likely to be private equity wizards. ↩
Taken to the extreme in American football, where players have highly specialized positions (like long snapper) and may be on the field for only a few seconds of the actual game, during which time they better not mess up. #youhadonejob ↩
Based on prevailing stereotypes, he or she often is. ↩

torqued

Posted on July 15, 2019

a very rarely-used term that means to be skewed, slightly inaccurate, or in need of some minor adjustment, as in “I think the presentation of those user statistics should be torqued towards our top customers, we want the conclusions to really pop”; adapted from the more common understanding of torque as twisting or rotation, or in more precise terms a force applied perpendicularly to a radius; part of a long and inglorious tradition of co-opting scientific terms for usage in business contexts where they appear superficially relevant, as with titrate, optics, and calibrate