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Gladwell And Anderson Talking Past Each Other

Malcolm Gladwell reviewed Chris Anderson's Free and attempted to dislocate some of the more vaporous claims Anderson makes about an economy based on abundance, not scarcity. For example, Gladwell notes that the true driver of energy costs is the infrastructure and plant, not just the resources being burned up:

Anderson wants to take “too cheap to meter” seriously, because he believes that we are on the cusp of our own “too cheap to meter” revolution with computer processing, storage, and bandwidth. But here is the second and broader problem with Anderson’s argument: he is asking the wrong question. It is pointless to wonder what would have happened if Strauss’s prediction had come true while rushing past the reasons that it could not have come true.

Strauss’s optimism was driven by the fuel cost of nuclear energy—which was so low compared with its fossil-fuel counterparts that he considered it (to borrow Anderson’s phrase) close enough to free to round down. Generating and distributing electricity, however, requires a vast and expensive infrastructure of transmission lines and power plants—and it is this infrastructure that accounts for most of the cost of electricity. Fuel prices are only a small part of that. As Gordon Dean, Strauss’s predecessor at the A.E.C., wrote, “Even if coal were mined and distributed free to electric generating plants today, the reduction in your monthly electricity bill would amount to but twenty per cent, so great is the cost of the plant itself and the distribution system.”

This is the kind of error that technological utopians make. They assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors—that if you change the fuel you change the whole system.

Anderson read the review, and riposted, but only with regard to the comments that Gladwell makes about free journalism:

It’s now clear that the bane of my next year will be questions about the future of the newspaper industry from journalists. I don’t blame them—newspapers are indeed one of the industries most affected by Free (although that’s just one manifestation of their larger problem: having lost their monopoly on consumer attention). And neither I nor anybody else has any good answers, other than the newspaper business is probably going to shrink but not go away, and that the business model will have to change.

But since journalist Malcolm Gladwell has somewhat parochially decided to make the Future of Paid Journalism the focus of his review of Free (which is, ironically, free on the New Yorker’s website; perhaps this is something Gladwell should take up with David Remnick?), I’ll try to respond in a bit more detail.

The fact is, however, that Gladwell responded to several of Anderson's arguments, not just journalism, and Anderson doesn't respond to those at all.

Yes, Gladwell is making the economy of scarcity argument, and it is simple to demolish that stance in the newspaper realm at the moment, as a million people want to write for peanuts (here I am, for example) and the newspapers are in freefall.

But what about energy wanting to be free? Or pharmaceuticals, Chris? Could you please revisit Gladwell's piece and address the hard bits?

[Update 11:47am: Paul Kedrosky weighs in.]

*Personality Not Included

I've just finished reading *Personality Not Included by social marketing guru Rohit Bhargava. I don't know a lot about marketing, but I know what works and doesn't work when companies try it on me, and I'm increasingly interested in the crossover between social media and marketing.

Bhargava examines the concept of personality as it applies to organizations: why it's important for an organization -- or often a brand produced by that organization -- to have a personality at all, and how to use that personality to strengthen customer relationships. The first two chapters are essential reading for any organization that's still stuck in old-school marketing: first, why being faceless used to work but doesn't any more, and second, how social media is fundamentally changing how organizations communicate. Much of the rest of the book is some solid advice on how to create and foster the necessary brand personality, but so many companies are still stuck back in the "why should we do this?" phase that the first two chapters are going to be a major eye-opener for them. Also brilliant are the short "sellevator pitches" at the end of each chapter, summarizing the main message.

With the first half of the book covering the theory of brand personality, the second half digs into tools and techniques for making it happen. The book lists 10 major personality-focused marketing techniques -- curiosity, karmic, participation, un-whatever, sensory, antimarketer, fallibility, insider, incidental, and useful -- then describes each in terms of what it is, why it works, when you should use it, who's already doing it, and step-by-step instructions. There's also guides for finding the accidental spokespeople inside or outside your organization, empowering your employees, creating a successful company blog, and hiring employees with personality.

If I can make one complaint about *Personality Not Included, it's the overwhelming number of gratuitous analogies used in the writing, to the point where I started finding it annoying. I'm not talking about relevant examples, I'm talking about analogies, like the one where he spends half a page talking about Disney's movie High School Musical -- which has nothing to do with anything else in the book -- in order to have us understand the concept of being pressured into sticking with the status quo. By the time that I read a number of these, it started to feel like filler. This is purely an issue of style, not content, and you may experience it differently.

Disclosure: this book was provided to me for free by the publisher, McGraw Hill, through a great program called Mini Book Expo for Bloggers, which allows bloggers to claim a book in order to receive a review copy, in exchange for writing a public review of the book. All books can be shipped for free to bloggers within Canada, and some now can be shipped to the US.

Jason Fried on Small is Beautiful

Jason Fried gave a highly entertaining presentation at CTC2006, today, which summarizes several key themes addressed in detail in the recently released, Getting Real, which I reviewed here. In particular, Jason focused on keeping teams (preposterously) small, focused (no meetings, minimize interruptions), and zero management overhead (keep decisions small).

As usual, Jason was great.

tags: jason+fried, 37signals, getting+real, basecamp, ctc2006

Management by Baseball : The Official Rules for Winning Management in Any Field by Jeff Angus

My pal, Jeff Angus, has a new book out called Amazon.com: Management by Baseball : The Official Rules for Winning Management in Any Field.

Jeff's thoughts on this topic can be reviewed at his blog of the same name, here. I think it will provide good advice to managers everywhere.

Consider just this one example from his blog, where he discusses the Devil Rays manager, Joe Maddon, who has innovated in response to Red Sox slugger Joe Ortiz, and basically has adopted a softball model: moving people from the infield to the outfield.

The definitive work on innovation [Innovation: The Basis Of Cultural Change by H.G. Barnett] makes it clear that a lot of successful innovations (a lot of unsuccessful ones, too) come from borrowing wholesale at first, then fine tuning, a process from another discipline. Bringing together tools everyone has but not everyone uses, with a classic innovation path produces an experiment worth trying. Ortiz may adapt by starting to hit the ball the other way (a guarantee of depriving himself to a degree of the very thing that makes him so feared, in exchange for the possibility of making it up with a new technique). Maddon 1, Ortiz 0. It's always worth considering analogically experimenting with a process innovation from another field in your own -- it won't always work out (this Maddon tweak may go away or stick), but you won't know unless you try it.

tags: jeff+angus, management+by+baseball

Getting Really Real: A Review Of 37signals' Getting Real

Getting Real is a smart, readable, and mind-bending manifesto dedicated to debunking the misconceptions of death-march, stalinist style software development, and simplifying the inscrutable processes that lead to building high quality software. Inspired -- perhaps indirectly, since it is never explicitly referenced -- by the Agile Programming movement, Getting Real is at once an operating manual on building great software, and a comprehensive condemnation of the startlingly dumb preconceptions that animate most software development.

The book reads like the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Taoist guide to strategy and survival.

" The tao that can be described
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be spoken
is not the eternal Name.

The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of creation.

Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery.
By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.

Yet mystery and reality
emerge from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness born from darkness.
The beginning of all understanding." Tao Te Ching - part 1

" The Tao is like an empty container:
it can never be emptied and can never be filled.
Infinitely deep, it is the source of all things.
It dulls the sharp, unties the knotted,
shades the lighted, and unites all of creation with dust.." - Tao Te Ching part 4

"Sometimes the best way to know what your app should be is to know what it shouldn't be. Figure out your app's enemy and you'll shine a light on where your need to go.

When we decided to create project management software, we knew Microsoft Project was the gorilla in the room. Instead of fearing the gorilla, we used it as a motivator. We decided Basecamp would be different, the anti-Project." - Getting Real, Pick A Fight

"Every time you say yes to a feature, you are adopting a child." Getting Real, Start With No

"Scope down. It's better to make half a product than a half-assed product," - Getting Real, Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope

"Listen to your code. It will offer suggestions. It will push back." - Getting Real, Code Speaks

The two works are unabashedly moralistic and enigmatic, using examples from nature and seemingly paradoxical juxtapositions of contradictory ideas to enlighten the reader. And they share the refreshing openness of the enlightened, who know that the secret to enlightenment is that there is no secret: the truth is there, right in front of your nose, even if you can't see it yet.

Getting Real is as radical a break with conventional wisdom about building software as is imaginable. As an analogy, consider the impact of cargo containers on commercial shipping: instead of hundreds of stevadores carrying boxes of cargo, and manually stowing them in the ships' cargo holds, today pre-loaded containers are lifted from trucks or trains, by cranes, and stacked on the ships like enormous lego blocks. A handful of trained crane operators can literally do the work formerly accomplished by hundreds. And the ship stays at the dock for a hundredth of the time it would have under the former approach to loading and unloading. Note that this productivity boost is not due to the specific individuals involved being smarter, or better trained: it is the outcome of a completely different approach to the problem, and the application of better building blocks in the processes involved. Getting Real is the same: throw out the preconceptions of striving to get hundreds to take small steps faster, and instead use a smaller group who see the process differently. In the case of Getting Real, however, the process insights rely on better programming tools -- like Ruby on Rails -- as well as a pervasive and zen-like certainty that less is more, small is the new big, and that anything that detracts from the act of delivering quality software to the user should be deep-sixed.

The book is fun to read, even for people not involved in software development. There are gems throughout, like this one:

The best software has a vision. The best software takes sides. When someone uses software, they're not just looking for features, they're looking for an approach. They're looking for a vision. Decide what your vision is and run with it.

And remember, if they don't like your vision there are plenty of other visions out there for people. Don't go chasing people you'll never make happy.

[...]

Our vision has followed a similar path. They [37signals' apps] don't try to be all things to all people. They have an attitude. They seek out customers who are actually partners. They speak to people who share our vision. You're either on the bus or off the bus. - Getting Real, Make Opinionated Software

The "on or off the bus" reference is taken from Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his examination of the Merry Pranksters, a collection of hippies and beats who traveled around in a bus, experimenting with mind altering substances on an odyssey of self-discovery and enlightenment. Like the authors of Getting Real, the Merry Pranksters knew that there is no middle road: you are either on the bus -- acting in accord with the right set of principles -- or you are off the bus. No indeterminacy. No hedging. No compromises.

I expect that Getting Real will have a large impact, which is to be expected by the popularity of the author's Signals v Noise blog and the following that 37signals has achieved through their software, writing, and seminars. When I interviewed Jason Fried, the president of 37signals and the ringleader of this new band of Merry Pranksters, I was struck by the ideas driving the software and their articulation. I concluded by saying this:

[from The New Visionaries: Jason Fried, 37signals]

The impact they [37signals] are having on the world is larger than the success of their apps, like Basecamp. It could be that the larger legacy of 37signals will turn out to be the promulgation of this set of design and life principles that will have a larger impact on the community of developers than the impact of their products on the community of customers.

tags: jason+fried, 37signals, book+review, getting+real, new+visionaries