One thing I learned each week in 2017

So I was recently inspired by a really cool post by Tom Whitwell from Flux who posted a list of the 52 things he learned in 2017.  I use Flipboard as my aggregator for stories that I find interesting. These are the articles that I forward to friends, the ideas that I discuss on facetime with buddies back in Australia or on slack channels at work.

The end of the year is a great time to reflect, re-visit and remind myself of all the amazing ideas that are buzzing around out there, plus I feel like it’s one of the few times in the year where there is time for doing that. So without further ado, my Christmas present from me to you: 52 articles on a range of tech, entrepreneurship and management, that I learned from this year.

1. AI was on the media hype train this year which meant some really interesting debates about the ethics of intelligence. I really like this explanation of why a rogue AI destroying humankind is best left to sci-fi movies.
2. Death and grief are two topics I don’t know a lot about but got uncomfortably close to last year. Nothing impacts more, that we talk about less. This account of a widower in her 30’s is empathizable and might give you insight into how to help someone who is suffering.
3. As an ex-pat Australian, I’m saddened to hear of the ongoing campaign to cripple the ABC. It’s an amazing resource for Australians, it helps them think bigger and understand the world beyond Australia’s borders. This article on the Panama papers, relating it to the production of a pair of Nike shoes is just great journalism. Plus the design elements in the storytelling are so well executed. Hat tip ABC.
4. The Atlantic is another source that I love. Lots of great staff writers and a range of topics that are more well rounded than you normally get from US media. This piece, on the advent of pricing discrimination strategies online due to the massive amounts of feedback that markters have access to, is a gem.
5. Still on pricing, I fly quite a bit and I’m always fascinated by the game theory that is, airline pricing. Gary Leff is way more into it than I am and has a great piece on how Basic Economy Fares are a way for airlines to get some people to pay more for their tickets.
6. And while we’re on airlines, using behavioural economics to frame the problem of people leaning their seats back makes for a great read. But as a 2m tall guy, I kind of think the onus is on airlines to provide seating that I can sit in regardless of what the person in front is doing…
7. Financial scandals are my reality TV. Apart from Michael Lewis’ seminal piece on the 2008 GFC, this was the best piece I read all year on bankers behaving badly in 2012.
8. I love a bit of forecasting, particularly in tech and this Above Avalon article sums up the shift to mobile really well and, while it’s an Apple-centric view, it identifies the battlegrounds that tech companies will be fighting over for the next 10 years.
9. An article supporting the claim by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer that the human impact on the atmosphere, the oceans, the land and ice sheets had reached such a scale that it had pushed Earth into a new epoch. They called it the Anthropocene and the numbers are frightening!
10. Universal Basic Income fascinates me. I haven’t seen anything that indicates that there is a model that works (sorry Finland) but the fact that Y-combinator is trying to crack it makes me hopeful! This article on tests in Kenya is a great, practical piece on what methodologies (pay it forward) are being trialled but there are quite a few barriers to overcome.
11. I’ve long suspected that LinkedIn Endorsements are completely rubbish and here’s the data to support that (over and above my wife’s experiment where she put Dragon Training up as a skill and a bunch of people endorsed her for it!)
12. In 2017 I heard the term “Market-Networks” for the first time and I couldn’t agree more with this article by NfX which highlights how they take the best parts of social networks to build trust (read: repeated games) in a marketplace and then use a SaaS model for value distribution.
13. Russia’s Cyberwar in the Ukraine is scary. This is the digital equivalent of pointing your army at your neighbour and giving them free reign. As life becomes more and more digitized, the effecacy of this style of warfare increases. In 20 years no one is going to be nearly as worried about invasion by a land based armed force as a digital incursion that bricks a nation.
14. This wasn’t so much a cool article as just a good question: What is someone going to stop doing when they start using your product? Kicked off a whole bunch of conversations with my friends in Product and working on Startups.
15. Every year Jeff Bezos writes a letter to shareholders. This, (along with Warren Buffet’s letter to shareholders) is a must read. My key take away this year was ‘Don’t let process be a proxy for results’, in other words, don’t get so focused on checking boxes that you lose sight of why you were doing those checks in the first place (I’m looking at you NPS!)
16. Henry Rollins is someone I greatly admire. He does interesting things, he thinks before speaking and he is relentless about improving himself. This article on how he defines success is a fascinating glimpse into the life of a self taught stoic (a philosophy I spent a lot of time reading about this year, thanks Tim Feriss).
17. “It’s not even wrong.” A great article by Benedict Evans on the strategies that people use to dismiss technology and defend the status quo and how these techniques don’t give a position that can be proven or disproven, which then shifts the debate about something that should be quantifiable (even if wrong) into the realm of opinion.
18. The fashion label Supreme is an amazing example of on-trend brand management and Wired has a dig into the bot systems that people have created to buy the labels limited edition releases. Fascinating look at the underlying issues around high-demand products (concert tickets anyone!) and how the problem could be solved, but isn’t because of the benefits (tangible and intangible) to the incumbents.
19. The whole idea of how “cool” works and the design element of branding is an ongoing fascination for me (although definitely as an observer from the sidelines!) and this article in the Atlantic about Raymond Loewys sense of populist design aesthetic gives a reasonable hypothesis on why the highest grossing movies for 14 of the last 15 years have been sequels.
20. Pretty much everything that Ben Thompson writes is gold. I read his Stratechery blog every week (and I think a subscription might be on the way this Christmas!) so it’s hard to single out one article but this one on how Facebook is a form of monopoly we haven’t seen and how the US doesn’t have a regulatory system that is equipped to deal with this new type of monopoly, is great. Good to read alongside this, from Bloomberg, asking whether regulators should take action.
21. Which then begs the question, what does fulltime work look like in the future? This is an interesting idea of the “pop-up team” which assembles to solve a specific problem or project, then disappears. If you’re working but you’re not thinking about this then you’re missing out on shaping the conversation that will set your future.
22. Although I’ve tried to stay away from Trump articles in this list¹, I am very interested in the root cause of his rise to power. Joblessness, in a population segment that has been employed is definitely one of the primary factors. Worth a read because this isn’t just a change the US, this is a societal change and it’s just the US is the most visible example.
23. Alongside the joblessness of your father, there are more people starting to look at how the education and cultural values of boys impact their internal measure for what it is to be a man. While this article is written with a focus on the Middle East, this is a conversation the West needs to having as well.
24. I couldn’t get through this without having something about bitcoin but I’m going to keep them all in one place.
    1. This is a great primer on blockchain (the underlying tech behind cryptocurrencies like bitcoin) and explains why this is such a big idea.
    2. Medium is such a great source of interesting ideas for crypto and this article on “What will Bitcoin look like in 20 years” is one of my favorites. I love a futurists take on the world of today, and this cleverly integrates a likelihood with each prediction.
    3. Digging a little deeper into the impact of a non-state owned financial asset, this is an excellent explanation of how scary that is for governments and gives some scenario’s around how that might play out without getting too far into tinfoil hat land.
    4. The three economic era’s of bitcoin is a great article to help you understand who has the power at each stage (and who is going to resist moving to the next era as the balance of power shifts).
    5. Lastly, some market analysis. I’ve tried to stay away from these kind of things because I suspect they’ll date poorly in terms of information relevancy but this is a great “short history of bitcoin”
25. A couple of links here to the Gig Economy. The Conversation reinforces that nothing is new under the sun, including sharing economy services, which were par for the course in the 18th century. And then this article was out there trying to put some data behind earnings from platforms like Uber and AirBnB and highlights some of the challenges that will be faced in relying on this type of work for a full time income.
26. If you want to know what freaked me out the most this year, it’s this article by Zero Hedge on just how bad a shape the global bond market is in post-quantative easing. This is scarier than Trump and Kim Jong Il. If anyone figures out a good way to short the bond market (for an asset that will be worth something when the world economy implodes) let me know.
27. And here’s the economics double-header; why LIBOR is unreliable and how massive an undertaking it’s going to be to unwind $350 trillion of contracts that tie to it!
28. But speaking of North Korea, it’s easy to dismiss them as crazy people (or at least the government) based on the coverage that they get from Western Media. While they are doing terrible, terrible things to their populace, there’s a method to their madness. Much like Trumps brand of political chaos.
29. Farnam Street is a blog I only subscribed to this year, but I find their weekly emails really interesting. This one in particular caught my eye, I’ve always wondered about Critical Mass, how it differs depending on the activity (governmental revolution vs. a viral marketing stunt), the risk involved and the amount of change required.
30. NYT had an amazing article on the dying art of disagreement (open in an incognito window if you’ve read too many NYT articles without a subscription this month!) I think it’s really important to be able to discuss topics, even the uncomfortable ones, in public because that discourse is what forces people to think about why they believe or support something. I’ll be the first to admit that I regularly put my foot in my mouth when it comes to political correctness and a huge thank you needs to go out to the people who put up with me and help enlighten my outlook.
31. And the best example I can think of this year of this was the discussion around Google’s firing of James Damore. There’s a lot of complexity to that discussion (more than I can cover in a paragraph here) but if we silence the conversation then we drive these behaviours underground which is far more dangerous. It’s also worth noting that his perspective is not unique, nor is it limited to men.
32. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an amazing example of the evolution of the civil liberties movement. This article on DRM is a great example of the amazing work that they do. And if you’re wondering, why does this matter and how does it affect you, here’s an example of the impact of internet surveillance on the conversations I was advocating in the previous item!
33. I’d never thought about McDonalds and Starbucks as bar-raisers but this article makes a really good case that they lift the bar at the bottom. The minimum standard for a coffee in most cities in the world is Starbucks. Hopefully you live somewhere where there are better options but a Starbucks quality coffee is such an upgrade over what existed 10 years ago. And that minimum is going to continue to increase.
34. Only one more Stratechery article, I promise! This one is a great explanation about how the internet has led to the end of gatekeepers. Relevant for businesses but also for politicians, Hollywood and the press.
35. I want to be clear, I don’t run marathons (and given the state of my knees, I never will) but I’m fascinated with the mindset that is required for this type of activity. Resilience was a big buzzword last year but this is a whole new level of masochism. Read on if you want to learn about a race that only 14 people have ever finished (so far!)
36. Speaking of which, I’ve always scored high on tests that measure resilience which was something I took a lot of pride in. However, no character trait comes without a cost and this year I learned about how too much resilience can hurt not only yourself, but those around you.
37. Spotify is my favorite service for streamed music and I love their Weekly Discovery playlist. This dives into the tech behind how they select songs for the list and just generally, some of the technical challenges behind building an algorithm for such a “human” set of preferences. And if you enjoyed that article, check out this one on how songs end up on playlists at Spotify (see what I did there!)
38. Silicon, it’s in every complex product we produce these days but the production of this component is fascinating as well as the secondary market that’s grown up around it. Which in turn leads to people behaving badly and the worlds greatest Silicon heist! With the advent of electric cars, this same article will be written about Cobalt or Lithium or Manganese in the future.
39. Speaking of which, this seems the right time to segue into an article called Carmageddon. I would have read it for the title alone but between my time at Uber with self driving cars and the fact that it had an excerpt of an Oatmeal comic in it (check that out if you’re sick of reading!) completely won me over.
40. And while we are here, autonomous vehicles are right up there with AI on the 2017 buzzword list but this article asks a great question about how the social relationship in shared space changes when “human driving and human walking” becomes “human walking and software driving” (hint: some people are assholes and they’re going to make life really difficult for self driving cars).
41. In 2006, Netflix held a competition with a prize of $1m; all you had to do was improve the accuracy of the recommendation engine by 10%. This ultimately contributed to Netflix’s ascent to dominance over the incumbents as well as burgeoning competitors but the use of data and the development it spurred in the field are an amazing story.
42. Time for some science! This was one of my favorite articles about the way our jaws evolved and how the changes in our diets over the last 10,000 years have shrunk our jaws. On the upside, people with weak chins (like me!) can enlarge their jaws by chewing more. Or you can grow a beard… whatever.
43. This has been a watershed year for calling out long-ignored biases and behaviours in the workplace. I was at Uber while Susan Fowler was there and while I didn’t have contact with her or her team, I can totally understand how that situation occurred. Ellen Pao was one of the first people to try and expose this and maybe the timing wasn’t quite right but if you are in an industry that behaves like this, understand that this is not going to be tolerated. Change. Now.
44. A history of the humble sandwich. Just one of those things that no one thinks about but is actually an amazing story and a complex behemoth in its own right. Will be fascinated to see how the Brexit affects the sandwich manufacturing process. If consumer demand is there but no one wants a career as a sandwich maker, is automation the only answer?
45. I like to read pieces about the Australian Economy from a broader perspective and this hour long masterpiece by Matt Barrie, the CEO of freelancer.com is well worth the time. You won’t agree with everything but it’s a fascinating read backed up by good use of data.
46. Income inequality continued to trend this year but with a lot more data than was present at the outset of the 99% movement. Understanding around what moves people into the 1% bracket was much better understood as well as the effects of inherited wealth and the rate at which income has grown for the rich vs. the working class.
47. Which then begs the question, why? Bloomberg has a balanced analysis of this as well as an exploration of what the potential impacts are as wages, and therefore the spending power of the middle class reduces and the economic engine of growth stalls.
48. When we ask why is it so, there is a school of thought around “rentier capital” that suggest that the current, shareholder first, actually stifles innovation and enriches value extractors, not value creators (part of the reason I think it’s worth looking into the seismic shift that is cryptocurrency).
49. One of the best lenses for understanding the different approaches to capitalism is looking at Google vs. Apple. One of the biggest questions that successful public corporations have faced recently is what to do with the profits they are making? Who is responsible for deciding what to do with those profits (management or investors)?
50. One of the ways that companies have avoided taking a position on this (apart from not making big profits!) is by spending it acquiring other companies. But Vox makes the argument that the size of the warchests (~3T on US company balance sheets) is unbalanced and startups are less keen than ever to go public or be acquired for fear of loss of control or profit.
51. Who knew the market for online mattress retailing was so… sordid!?! The story itself is a great read but it also makes you pause and think about all the reviews you read online and who you trust. Makes me feel much sadder about the wirecutters purchase earlier this year by the NYT.
52. Even though this appeared in the middle of year, I’ve included this last because if you’re a New Years resolution person, I reckon this is good way to go about it. Seth Godin and two lists to define your outlook for 2018.

If there was something in here that you likes, or if you learned something new, let me know in the comments, I’d love to chat some more on it with you.

 

 

¹ There were no articles on Trump included because, while there were some nuggets of gold in the unrelenting media shitshow that has been his year in office, I didn’t actually learn much from them. It was more like a slow motion trainwreck that you can’t not watch. That said, I’m happy to share some of the better articles like “How to build an Autocracy”, “Trial balloon for a Coup” and “I’ve got a Little List”, if anyone is still interested.

Data Analysis and Stats

A common theme across MBA programs is exposure to and at least basic skills in, statistical analysis. The value of this can’t be understated, if you’re already working as a quant or did significant amounts of stats in your undergrad you’re not going to be exposed to many new concepts here but for those that haven’t done a lot, this can be a real eye opener. I noticed it particularly with friends that came from the more qualitative industries, marketing or legal, they all highlight that this is where their industries are headed. Gone are the days when a marketer could say “give me a product and I’ll sell it to everyone”, the industry is driven by analysis: what defines a segment in your industry; what is their willingness to pay; how price price sensitive are they? No one is going to invest in your campaign unless you can demonstrate what you expect to achieve and how you are going to measure the results and the answer to both of those needs to be statistically rigorous.

At MBS I did two primarily statistics based subjects (a core data analysis subject and an elective on market research) which, content-wise, can effectively both be split into two parts. Firstly you have the number crunching component: how do you run a regression, how do you test for correlation? The second (and in my opinion far more relevant component for managers) part is what questions do you ask and what you do with the results? Understanding the mechanics behind how data analysis works is handy but lets face it, most people don’t enjoy crunching numbers. I’m convinced there’s something behavioral in there that links back to primary and secondary school and the finality of either getting the right or the wrong answer that pushes people away. I see why there needs to be a component of this in the course but even as an engineer, I’m rarely going to do this kind of analysis myself, I’m going to hire someone who does it professionally and let them do the math. Where an MBA grad can add value is in the interpretation.

I’ve learned that interpretation of statistics is a dark art, far more qualitative than you would expect and, like anything where subjectivity is involved, this sets up a system that can be manipulated by those with the will to do so. Nowhere is this more evident than in media polls; read through a newspaper and look for the headline that screams “Labor drops 2% in two party preferred rankings” then look for the fine print. What was the sample size, how was selection controlled for uneven distribution of voting preferences, what’s the standard error? Unless it’s backed up by rigorous analysis, a headline like that is at best crap and at worst outright misleading. Print media in Australia still plays a major role in shaping public opinion in Australia but its that kind of reader manipulation that destroys the trust of the public when the realize that they’ve been had, the problem is, without an understanding of how statistics works, people miss the deception.

I was talking about this with a friend and he pointed me to a TED talk by Arthur Benjamin where he suggests that the problem is that we’re teaching maths wrong. He argues that the progression we have in schools at the moment (arithmetic -> algebra -> calculus) is going in the wrong direction. Calculus is great, as an engineer or a physicist it’s fundamental to our professions but for 90% of the population, it’s completely irrelevant but statistics (and the associated field of probability) is something that we use every day of our lives. I won’t steal his thunder, it’s only 3 minutes long and like most TED presentations, it’ll leave you thinking.

But back to the value that a stats course adds to an MBA… One of the things that an MBA does really nicely is combine the general knowledge and some big picture perspectives with the specialist insights that you have from your experience prior to the MBA. The ability to look at the micro and macro levels of things is one of the core skills that an MBA pushes you to develop and statistics knowledge helps you ask the right question, get more valuable insights when you interpret information and understand the difference between opinion and something that’s statistically significant. You may not have the best maths skills in the class but that doesn’t matter, being able to understand how the information is relevant and how you can use that information is what is important. Some schools understand this difference and finding one that does will help you have more than a primary/secondary, right/wrong  experience. Looking back, it’s one of the key things I would look for (content wise) in an MBA program.

Do You Need a New Job?

I’ve received my advanced preparation materials for the first unit: World of Management. This is the compulsory intro subject that you do before starting the rest of your course which introduces the content and baselines the requirements for being a manager. The material for the unit itself appears to be broken down into two main themes:

• the first explores the gamut of management and outlines what MBS considers to be the core of study giving an introduction to things like Organizational Behaviour and Business Accounting, basically so everyone is clear about the scope for the core classes
• the second component is the self analysis section: what am I good at, where are my weaknesses and from this, what am I going to study? This combines a few tools like motivation/skill set tests along with psych reviews and a blockage survey to help you clarify where you are at.

Reading through the prescribed text, it’s a bit like a paper extract, it throws out a couple of teasers and concepts to get you excited about a field of study. One that really resonated with me was in the self analysis section of the book and laid out some guidelines for conducting an ‘Occupational Analysis’ or in my mind: Do you need a new job? It’s not copied verbatim but the ideas are theirs, I’m just passing them on because I think they’re pretty useful (Dainty, 2008, p 141)

I like to think that I put a fair bit of effort into my personal relationships, if I’m feeling uncomfortable about something with someone I’ll try and discuss and drill down into why that’s the case and (I think) I’ve got some good models for identifying a problem and starting  discussion. So it seemed really strange to me that I had this structured and thought out process for my personal life but I’d never done the same thing with my job (which is a pretty important factor in my life). I wonder if other people are in this boat too and if they are, the perhaps this will help clarify which areas in your professional life you are having problems with and from there, whether they are significant enough for you to want to do something about them:

Consider the following in terms of your current role

Motivators:

• Are you paid enough for what you are doing?
• What are your opportunities for promotion? And is promotion important to you right now (next 12 months)?
• Do the hours you are working suit your lifestyle?
• Is the culture of the organization right for you? Do you feel like the company does the right thing?
• How is your relationship with your boss? What about the 3 people you interact with most?

 Capabilities:

•  How would you rate your skills and knowledge for the job you are doing right now? Are you interested in improving them? If you are, what have you done about it?
• What skills and knowledge do you need for the next job along the career path for you?
• Does your current role utilize your top 3 skills?
• Are these top 3 the ones you’d like to stick with or would you like to develop something else?

Interests:

• When was the last time you learned something new in your job?
• When was the last time you were challenged in your role?
• What percentage of your time are you spending doing things you don’t like (direct sales, report writing, attending meetings: whatever you don’t enjoy)?
• Are you satisfied by your work?

Looking back at my last job and answering these questions, it provided a framework for understanding why I wasn’t enjoying the role (despite enjoying the Company and the people I worked with).

 

Reference:  Paul Dainty & Moreen Anderson, 2008, The MBA Companion, Palgrave Macmillan