Tag: book review

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Three Cups of Tea

Apparently, a lot of people have read Three Cups of Tea, the book about Greg Mortenson’s work building schools in rural, mountainous Pakistan. Many have written reviews, and some have disputed his details (though not the broader story).

The normal reaction is to be amazed and inspired by the tenacity and success of this unusual character. And I don’t want to downplay that too much. But I look at the story from the perspective of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers; Carol Dweck’s Mindset; and Dan and Chip Heath’s Made to Stick (among other important books).

From those perspectives, here is a very unusual American who is most comfortable living with and working to help rural, mountainous tribes halfway across the world. It is no great mystery why he is good at that; Mortenson grew up in a foreign country with both parents dedicating their working lives to charity projects. He served in the army, learning to cope with discomfort and yet more foreign cultures and situations. He went to nursing school, learning to listen and care for patients. And finally, he spent many years practicing rock climbing and mountaineering, learning to survive in that sparse, rugged landscape. When he stumbles into Haji Ali’s village, he finally, miraculously, finds himself at home.

From that perspective, here is the story of a man who desperately, tenaciously tries to find a way to return to what he is most comfortable with. Psychologically, he is not unusual. What’s unusual is his exotic set of skills.

It’s easy for us to read this story and think about how hard it would be to leave home, live in medieval conditions for months, and organize the building of schools in hostile political and geographical terrain. But that is because we, unlike Mortenson, do not have extensive training doing charity work in primitive and hostile environments, and we do not feel at home in foreign countries.

From this perspective, I think the most interesting (and entertaining) aspects of the story are what he is not good at.

First, fundraising. He writes five hundred letters to celebrities he has never met. Later, he gives slideshow after slideshow all across the country to audiences essentially at random. He certainly understands tenacity; that’s how you win at rock climbing. But the way you win at fundraising is through connections and the media. The only significant money Mortenson ever received was accidental. A friend with connections to the mountaineering society writes an article for their newsletter, which is noticed by a wealthy ex-climber. Later, soon after 9/11, a journalist friend passes the story to a leading magazine, whose editors for the first time figure out how to describe the charity in a way that sticks: “books, not bombs.” Their cover story finally generates widespread donations. In all, Mortenson wastes years of time doing poorly thought out fundraising that has a minuscule probability of success. He read countless books on southeast asian culture and politics, but no books on effective fundraising. He should have responded to his failure by learning more or asking for help. He worked hard, where he should have worked smart.

Second, delegating. Here, Mortenson gradually improves over the course of the story. He delegates tasks that he is obviously not prepared for, such as driving, bargaining, and translating. But he only stops micromanaging the construction of the schools after Haji Ali (his most trusted mentor) walks him up a mountain and forces him to relent. And throughout the story he continues to insist on personally overseeing all of the projects that the organization undertakes. The board eventually convinces Mortenson to hire a few assistants for donor relations, website, etc., but he never hires another person to do the core work of overseeing the charity projects. In other words, he is ineffective at scaling the organization beyond what is essentially a one-man show. Again, this is not surprising, given that Mortenson has no training or experience in management. But he does not study management nor hire managers to make up for this shortcoming. Instead, he keeps the organization small.

If Mortenson’s true goal was to serve as many needy communities as possible in the rural Himalaya, he would be expanding the organization by training new generations of staff and volunteers to do the same work that he does, and he would be hiring fundraising and publicity experts to spread the word and apply much-needed political pressure.

But that’s not his goal. His goal is the same as all of us. To find our way home.

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Job satisfaction findings from last century

Bill Buxton, in a presentation at CHI 2011, recommended the work of Melvin Kransberg, a pioneering historian of technology. Kransberg apparently published the definitive textbook on the subject, but that is many pages and several volumes long; instead, I read By the Sweat of Thy Brow (1975) by Kransberg and Joseph Gies.

It is worthwhile to read a decades-old book now and then to remind yourself that many of the important problems of today were also problems of the past. What’s most astonishing is how many solutions exist that were proven decades ago, yet are still not widely known, let alone widely implemented.

I found the most interesting examples of this in By the Sweat of Thy Brow to be the solutions for job satisfaction. I leave you with a series of quotes.

…the classic (1932) British motivational study of girl workers threading embroidery needles…. The girls were told first that they had to thread a hundred dozen needles a day instead of the seventy-five dozen they had been threading. The announcement produced consternation that turned into delight when it was added that on finishing the hundred dozen they could go home. They got through the new quota in time to leave at 2:30 in the afternoon.

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At [a Bell Telephone Company plant], phone directories were formerly compiled by women employees each of whom performed only one of the 17 operations necessary in compiling a directory…. Management found itself endlessly hiring and training new workers. Under the job enrichment ideology, each worker was given an entire directory to compile, performing all 17 steps, from scheduling to proofreading. Turnover dropped substantially.

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Frederick Herzberg, a prominent industrial psychologist, has identified [in 1966] five factors as strong determinants of job satisfaction—achievement, recognition, work itself, responsibility, and advancement…

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‘Perhaps the most consistent complaint reported to our task force,’ said the Work in America study, ‘has been the failure of bosses to listen to workers who wish to propose better ways of doing their jobs.’

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There are no excuses for letting children fail

John Mighton writes in The Myth of Ability:

As far as I am aware, no program in mathematics was ever developed with the expectation that every child in the program would excel. To most educators, the idea of an entire class doing well in any subject seems absurd.

That was published in 2003, but today it is still widely assumed that the “curve” in test scores is a “natural” result of innate differences in human intelligence.

Through a tutoring program that he later extended to classroom teaching, Mighton showed that in fact every child could excel. And he found that such a result requires only two essential ingredients (which match my definition of profound: obvious only in retrospect). They are:

1. The teacher must actually believe that every student can excel.

2. The curriculum and teaching methods must be designed, tested, and refined in a way that treats any student’s failure to learn as being a failure of the curriculum and teaching methods.

This is entirely analogous to creating usable software. Instead of blaming problems on “user error,” you blame the software — and, critically, use that knowledge as an opportunity to improve the design. Creating great software is not easy, but it’s also not rocket science.

Mighton has experimented with various best practices in teaching, many of which have been well documented elsewhere in the psychology literature (and popular literature by authors such as the Heath brothers, Malcom Gladwell, Carol Dweck, Martin Seligman, etc.). For example, he neatly sums up the research on the importance of flow:

Nothing focuses the attention of children more sharply than the feeling that they are meeting a series of challenges and succeeding brilliantly.

But the crucial thing that John Mighton has shown is not in the particulars of his curriculum or philosophy. Rather, it is the simple, incontrovertible fact that he made every single student succeed in math — without requiring extra money or super-human energy or even teachers who previously knew anything about math.

It is an existence proof.

And it means that all of the excuses are bogus. “They can’t focus.” “They don’t care.” “There’s not enough time or money to get through to them.” Every student brought to him as “unteachable” was in fact taught to excel. And it was not even particularly difficult. It was certainly not rocket science.

But if we know how to teach in such a way that every child succeeds, why are we not doing it? Mighton says,

I believe the answer lies in the profound inertia of human thought: when an entire society believes something is impossible, it suppresses, by its very way of life, the evidence that would contradict that belief.

I think it’s harder than that, and a good analogy is racism or sexism. When injustice is ingrained — when “that’s the way it has always been” — elaborate excuses and rationales must be crafted to avoid the conclusion that well-meaning people are perpetuating discrimination (in this case, discrimination against the very students they purport to help). It’s a terrible conclusion to come to. To accept it means admitting that for decades we have been undermining the potential of millions of eager young students.

After seeing how children flourish with even a modest amount of attention, I have come to believe that when a child fails a test it should be regarded as a failure of our system of education. And when millions of children, year after year, fail tests they could easily pass, it should be regarded as the failure of an entire society to care for its young.

Supporting change implies acceptance of this terrible conclusion: that for generations we have been letting students fail, letting poverty persist, and letting the economy correspondingly sink — and that there is no excuse for it. How can we live with that guilt? Especially as a student or teacher in the system that is perpetuating the injustice — someone who has the power to make change?

I think that Dweck’s “growth mindset” is a good place to start. It helps us accept the truth as a learning opportunity to do better.

Because the fact is, we already know how to do better. And putting it off is only making the situation worse. As Matt Wilka and I concluded, “just do it!”

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By design

“For the sake of design integrity, a professional designer will put up with vast amounts of discomfort, and resent any consumer unwilling to make the same sacrifice.”

-Ralph Caplan

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This is what happens when voters don’t understand economics

In college I never understood why you were allowed to be a Political Science major without taking any Economics courses. Isn’t it true that money is power? Isn’t politics primarily concerned with protecting and distributing wealth? There are some social issues like education or abortion that seem at first to fall outside of the realm of economics; but Freakonomics shows us how even there, quantitative economic analyses yield important insights.

I only took one Political Economy course and no pure Political Science classes, so arguably I didn’t try very hard to find answers to these questions. But at the very least, I didn’t see how you could have a complete discussion of political issues without bringing economics into it.

In a previous blog post I mentioned a brilliant history teacher who didn’t understand the importance of campaign finance reform. Was he a product of an educational system that allowed people to take no economics classes?

In a heretofore-unrelated line of thought, I also couldn’t understand how Republicans managed to get re-elected by working class voters after repeatedly cutting taxes for the wealthy and cutting services for the working class. I wasn’t satisfied with the easy answer, “there are a lot of dumb people in this country.”

One of my co-workers grew up in rural Indiana. He said he started voting Democrat after moving to Seattle, but his family all voted Republican. Why? He said they weren’t dumb, but “they just don’t know any better.” I was still left wondering, why not? And what exactly don’t they understand?

What’s the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank essentially describes how most of “conservative America” does not believe economics is an important part of politics. The Republican rhetoric is as follows. Anyone who tells you that you deserve more money is insulting you by insinuating that you don’t have enough money (and by extension, insinuating that you are a failure). And anyone who makes arguments based on economic theory you don’t understand are pretentious “elites” who are simply inflating their own egos and insulting you by insinuating that you’re dumb. Why else would they be talking about math, when the issues that really matter are moral issues that they disagree with you about, like abortion and the right to bear arms.

What really struck me, in other words, is that the Republican narrative crucially depends upon widespread ignorance of basic economic theory.

From this perspective, Bill Clinton’s famous rallying cry “It’s the economy, stupid” seems in some ways genius (put the focus back on economics); but also feeds easily into the rhetoric (“he’s calling you stupid”).

Frank points out that the amazing thing about Marxism and Communism historically is that they got everyday people interested in economic theory. Today in America that is not the case. Economics is being systematically belittled by politicians. The system is really quite extraordinary—politicians funded by the wealthy get elected by the working class majority to enact “morally correct” policies which actually turn out to benefit the wealthy. All of this while blaming other politicians for the actual deteriorating prospects of working class Americans.

My case for why we should teach Economics 101 in the first year of high school has never been stronger.

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The Innovator’s Dilemma

After reading Disrupting Class and several articles about disruptive technology on the asymco blog, I decided I should go to the source and read The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen, published in 2000. It’s one of those books that seems fairly obvious in retrospect — now that ten years have passed and its lessons have largely been absorbed into business practice and culture.

The book is based on Christensen’s PhD thesis, which originally looked at technology and business trends in the hard disk drive industry. He found that some technologies (such as improved read-write heads) served to “sustain” existing product lines and cement the dominance of existing companies, while other technologies (such as smaller form factors) ended up “disrupting” existing products to the extent that once-dominant companies sometimes went out of business in just a few years.

The reason these companies failed was not that they were poorly managed, but because the disruptive products were in completely separate markets (and accompanying “value networks”). The existing companies were simply not designed to compete in those new markets. For example, 5-inch drives were sold to minicomputer makers, while 3.5-inch drives were sold to personal computer makers (with shorter design cycles, higher volumes, and lower profit margins). The existing minicomputer customers had no need for 3.5-inch drives, so the 5-inch manufacturers saw no market and no need to produce them until it was too late and other startup companies were already dominating the emerging market for personal computer hard drives (3.5-inch).

In other words, the businesses of making and selling 5-inch versus 3.5-inch drives were so different that being the dominant expert in hard drive technology was not actually much of an advantage. In fact, it was a disadvantage because the whole organization was designed to compete in the old business and naturally fought attempts to undercut that business.

But how do you know if a given product idea is going to be disruptive?

One clue: disruptive products are usually simpler, less powerful, and have smaller profit margins than existing products. So they need to find markets that value product attributes like convenience, reliability, and ease of use over sheer power. For example, business accounting software in the nineties was driven by the needs of large enterprise customers and so was quite complex and powerful. Quicken disrupted this market by creating a simpler, cheaper product based on its personal finance software. This was so much easier to use that it quickly gained an 80% market share among small business owners who did not need all those extra features.

What makes technologies “disruptive” rather than just “niche” is when they progress far enough to compete up-market with existing product lines. For example, Quicken continued to add features so that larger and larger businesses were able to use its software, pushing out the old software companies to only serve the largest enterprise customers. Potential disruptive technologies should have a plausible development plan that will eventually displace existing products up-market.

The big take-aways are:

1. If you want to start a new company, do it with a product idea that is likely to be disruptive. Otherwise, you have very little chance of making any headway against existing players.

2. Generally the only way to manage disruptive technologies from within an existing company is to create a totally separate organization with the sole purpose of going after that disruptive technology. If you don’t keep it separate enough, resources will inevitably be borrowed to take care of existing business and the new products will languish.

Apple has a better record than most for its ability to disrupt its own products before competitors get the chance. Horace Dediu makes a good argument that the iPhone should be seen not as “a better phone” but as a disruptive technology for personal computers: a simpler and more convenient way to accomplish computing tasks such as email and web surfing. The inclusion of a phone capability just makes it all the more convenient. I know at least one person who decided to get an iPhone instead of a new laptop; and Apple’s iPad is even more competitive with laptop computers. iPhones and iPads will continue to “move up-market” by adding the ability to conveniently handle ever more computing tasks. As this happens, Macs and other desktop PCs will increasingly be seen as high-end tools for power users.

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Chaos: Making a new science

If there was any doubt that science is driven by people politics as much as anything else, look no further than James Gleick’s 1987 book, Chaos: Making a new science.

The book chronicles the history of chaos theory; but “chaos” is also a good word to describe the scientific community’s embarassingly slow acceptance of the findings and tools of this new mathematical subfield.

The book held particular interest for me because of an unsolved mystery in a research paper I wrote in college, Weather forecasting by computer. Edward Lorenz, who published the first research on what would become chaos theory, calculated in the late 1960s that “even with perfect models and perfect observations, the chaotic nature of the atmosphere would impose a finite limit of about two weeks to the predictability of the weather.” Despite this, I was reading brash predictions in books published in the early 1980s that we would soon be able to forecast the weather months or years into the future. Why did it take more than a decade for this fundamental mathematical result to make its way even to experts writing about weather forecasting?

Gleick wondered the same thing. The fact that his conclusions took the form of an entire book is testament to the many factors at play. (I was a bit relieved to confirm that I wasn’t just missing something obvious.)

Part of the answer is that chaos theory was outside the scope of existing academic disciplines, almost by definition. It tried to make sense of problems that couldn’t be solved using traditional mathematics — the very problems that most researchers (and entire science departments) stayed away from because the chances of progress seemed slim. Over time, disciplinary boundaries developed such that most of these problems were not considered valid topics in physics, biology,… and even weather forecasting.

A second part of the answer is that many of the important results of chaos theory themselves defined limitations on what is possible to know or achieve, especially when seen through the lens of traditional approaches. Scientists and other leaders didn’t want to believe these pessimistic claims, and they were easy to ignore when coming from a suspicious fringe group of career-insensitive mathematicians.

A third part of the answer is that even when the essential properties of chaos theory had been well established by mathematicians, the theory was not useful to mainstream scientists until practical mathematical tools were developed. Several important mathematical results eventually helped to show how disparate data sets all displayed chaotic “bifurcations” and “period doublings,” for example. As scientists were given more concrete patterns to look for, evidence of chaotic behavior became increasingly visible to them.

And yet a fourth part of the answer is that the main tools used to investigate chaos theory — computers — were new and unfamiliar to mainstream scientists. Lorenz was one of very few theorists in the 1960’s who had access to expensive computer time (and the knowledge to use it). And although rigorous mathematical proofs were eventually found for many components of chaos theory, for many years the most important results were simply the outputs of clever computer programs. Running experiments like this via numerical simulation was a totally new approach. Scientists and mathematicians had every reason to be skeptical.

At the time Gleick’s book was published, chaos had finally become broadly accepted in science and had led to a few high-profile applications such as heart pacemakers. Yet even now, 20 years later, chaos theory is not part of the standard curriculum at any level of school. I studied it for a few weeks in high school as part of a special end-of-year diversion; and in college as an elective math course that was only offered one semester every other year. And I went to very progressive schools. When Steven Wolfram unveiled his “new kind of science”, non-experts missed the fact that he was talking about this same line of research. The new science is still in its infancy.

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Form Follows Fiasco

We can always use a reminder to keep it simple. This one comes from the thoughtful and amusing textbook Form Follows Fiasco by Peter Blake, published in 1977. (A friend recommended the book, which was not in the public library holdings but was available used on Amazon for about $4.) In this passage, he is discussing one of the problems with construction via prefabricated modules.

Many wonderfully inventive designers spent decades, if not lifetimes, trying to perfect the absolutely perfect, universal joint — the magic mechanical device that would join their modular panels together in wedlock (yet leaving open the possibility of some future disengagement, for the sake of greater post-marital flexibility).

But it was all in vain. The universal joints, the seams, the gaskets, the unbelievably ingenious interlocking connectors — many of them leaked, wracked, delaminated, or experienced some sort of material fatigue. Yet jointitis — a disease increasingly prevalent among theorists in prefabrication — continued to spread. One of prefabrication’s most illustrious pioneers designed a joint to connect two or more wooden panels; it was a miracle of ingenuity, and required little more from the on-site joiners than a doctorate in Chinese puzzling. The pioneer, it seemed, had never been told of an earlier and less sophisticated joint used in wood-framing, known as the nail.

My take on the overarching theme of the book is that there’s something to be said for a little messiness. The straight, clean, orderly, centrally planned structures of Modernist architecture and Modernist urban planning sound good in theory. But in practice, they are expensive to keep straight and pure, so before long they become ugly (stained cement walls). They are also bland and boring because they are so simple (high-rise apartments and suburbia). And they are inefficient because they artificially standardize (modular approaches that are ok for many uses but not great at anything) and require connecting artificially separated functions (rush hour in heavily zoned cities, and the “universal joints” discussed in the above passage).

The alternative is to turn to more practical, locally and organically designed, human-centric (not technology-centric), financially sustainable structures. He points to examples of old wood-and-brick buildings that have been completely repurposed but still work great; vibrant urban centers like SoHo, which was designed organically by new residents violating the zoning laws; and structures such as Grand Central Station which hide all of the technology (trains, subways, electricity, plumbing) to make a welcoming, functional, human-centric space.

As always, there is a balance to be found between order and disorder, predictability and randomness. The Modernist movement was in many ways a reaction against the disorder and uncleanliness of previous eras. Form Follows Fiasco and more recent trends swing back from the extremely sculpted order of Modernist plans to reintroduce what they hope is a healthy dose of messiness.