Personal Notebook
Learn to appreciate as an artist things as simple as the day; sleep; walking and running–a room–an ordinary phrase; to read instinct; to drink, to gaze at oneself or speak to oneself–to see afresh, in other words, what has been seen so often–but in its place.
Ever since Moneyball, I’ve paid attention to what Michael Lewis writes about and have been looking forward to his new book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, about the subprime collapse and subsequent financial crisis. At long last, it was my weekend read and proved to be worth the wait.
In typical fashion, it’s well paced with great depictions of interesting people who see the world a little differently. He explains everything about as clearly as you can (when describing financial instruments intentionally named and designed to be difficult to understand), and undoubtedly oversimplifies some concepts and omits details of other (such as Paulson’s gigantic short). Overall, however, the narrative is engaging and insightful and seems to a layman such as myself to be fairly balanced.
As with Moneyball, I find myself wanting to know more about (if not meet!) some of the central figures who in this case brilliantly shorted the market. Colorful people like Michael Burry and Steve Eisman who rejected conventional wisdom and profited wildly.
He provides a suitable indictment of those who should have prevented the disaster, summed up like this (emphasis mine):
The people in a position to resolve the financial crisis were, of course, the very same people who had failed to foresee it: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, future Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankefein, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, and so on… With them were a handful of government officials… All shared a distinction: They had proven far less capable of grasping basic truths in the heart of the U.S. financial system than a one-eyed money manager with Asperger’s syndrome.
It’s of course the tangents like Mike Burry’s Asperger’s condition that are some of the best elements of Lewis’ writing. People who see the world differently, and in this case, put their money where they mouth is.
Lewis, Michael. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.
The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
Working in corporate IT, it’s amazing how often I find myself fantasizing about the consulting life. To work with different companies and different people and varying cultures–each engagement new and exciting. To be able to size up a problem from the outside, and propose or implement a solution, then have the luxury of not living with the consequences of my decisions. Sure, it would probably involve more hours and certainly more travel, but the incentive-based compensation would more than make up for it, right?
Then I talk to a consultant or entrepreneur and hear about the stress of not generating enough revenue and the unpredictability of their compensation. The midnight hours spent rushing on a RFP dropped on you with little notice. The sobering reality of corporate politics in every large engagement that can sometimes leave your entire project in limbo, and you on the bench in the meantime. Oftentimes they even wax about taking a corporate role for the “stability” and “low stress” (I know I did back in the day).
It’s easy to get stuck thinking the grass is greener. We all know the cliche, but few of us live with it’s antidote, gratitude. To be able to step back and appreciate what you have and how fortunate you are to have it. How worse things could actually be, and the sobering knowledge that no matter what the job, their will be plusses and minuses. There is no perfect job–even Steve Jobs a had boss to deal with (and got fired!).
About the only thing I can think of that’s good about grass-is-greener thinking is, if channeled right, it might challenge your complacency and career inertia. By contrast, I can find no drawbacks to gratitude. It makes you a happier, better person and compels you to express thanks to others in your life–something that in the end is what life’s all about.
So next time you find yourself peering over the fence at that green grass, use that as a moment to pause, reflect, and be grateful for what you have. You’ll be happy you did.
WSJ: The Genius of the Tinkerer
I remember reading once that an entrepreneur is simply someone that takes existing assets (or perhaps ideas) and reconfigures them into an arrangement that produces more value than in their present setup. It seemed such a dry description and lacked the sexy and exciting “invention out of thin air” that we have been trained to think is what happens in business.
As I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve come to realize this definition is pretty accurate–“bricolage” as Steven Johnson points out this fantastic WSJ piece:
But ideas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape. We like to think of our ideas as a $40,000 incubator, shipped direct from the factory, but in reality they’ve been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage.
He then goes on to discuss Stuart Kauffman’s concept of “the adjacent possible” to describe those first order combinations that appear in nature.
The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.
Finally, Johnson ties things back to modern “closed-door” corporate R&D:
The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas may seem logical enough, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas. Ironically, those walls have been erected with the explicit aim of encouraging innovation. They go by many names: intellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology, top-secret R&D labs. But they share a founding assumption: that in the long run, innovation will increase if you put restrictions on the spread of new ideas, because those restrictions will allow the creators to collect large financial rewards from their inventions. And those rewards will then attract other innovators to follow in their path.
He ends with one of my favorite scenes from Apollo 13 where the engineers have to design a carbon dioxide filter from miscellaneous items aboard the damaged spacecraft dumped on to the table (“We gotta find a way to make this fit into a hole for this,” he says, and then points to the spare parts on the table, “using nothing but that”).
The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
Ithaca does not exist; only the voyage to Ithaca.
Leaders must wake people out of inertia. They must get people excited about something they’ve never seen before, something that does not yet exist.
Leaders must pick causes they won’t abandon easily, remain committed despite setbacks, and communicate their big ideas over and over again in every encounter.
You have to be able to risk your identity for a bigger future than the present you are living.
But every company of the future is going to be in the business of exquisite care – which means quick turnaround time and convenience. To deliver exquisite care, you need an organization that coordinates well and listens well.