Author: Robert Schlaff

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Fun Stuff Life Lessons My Writing

Questions OR Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at 40

Yale has a wonderful writing class called Daily Themes. This class has been taught at Yale for over 100 years and requires students to write a story each day of about 500 words. I always wanted to take the class but never did. So I started to do some of the writing on my own based on the prompts my friend Aaron Gertler online from the 2015 class.  My favorite one so far is:

Create a conversation between two characters in which everything said on either side is in the form of a question and every question advances the conversation. Avoid rhetorical questions and repetitions.

I hadn’t realized this but the instructor had put in a link to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s “Questions” game — which was what popped into my head as well. With that preamble, I now give you…

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at 40

How did we get here?

Weren’t we promised a happy and fulfilled life if we just gave our life to the company?

Isn’t that why we went to business school?

Wasn’t that the promise once we got out?

Do you feel likely we have climbed a giant mountain up through the clouds only to see more mountain?

Do you think we are at the top of the mountain and can finally see clearly?

Are we getting close to the end?

Do you feel like we are in that Tom Stoppard play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead?”

Or maybe Godot?

So what do we do now?

Should we change our focus and get off the hedonic treadmill?

But what would we do then?

Don’t Zen monks talk about this problem?

Could we leverage some of that?

Why do you always have to talk in business speak?

Aren’t you afraid of death?

Aren’t we dying every minute?

Do you think that’s the secret – living completely in the moment?

Is there any other way?

Why don’t we treat every moment as our last by being fearless and vulnerable and not afraid to fail?

Are you saying failure is good?

How can you have anything valuable without failure?

What about love and courage and accomplishment?

Isn’t that what I’m saying?

Categories
Life Hacking My Writing

A Better Way to Write OR Why You Don’t Need to Write About the iPhone 5

There’s an old saying that the best way to learn something is to teach it. That’s certainly true when working with Blake on a school project. Blake is writing a chapter book at school. At most, it’s going to be 20 pages long. In Blake’s mind this is huge. Like infinitely large.

Blake’s topic is Apple — a topic that he’s passionate about. He wants to write everything in the world about Apple in his up to 20 pages. He wants to explain all the iPhones, iPods, iPads, Macs and everything else that’s ever existed within the Apple oeuvre. I thought it might be more useful to take a historical perspective and highlight the important parts of Apple history. He wanted to stick with his original plan of writing the encyclopedia of Apple.

So I tried to prune some of the low hanging fruit.  “What about the iPhone 5?”

“Of course we have to write about the iPhone 5,” Blake said.

“Why?” I said.

“Because it’s important. That’s where Apple started using Touch ID.”

“No,” I reminded him, “that didn’t happen until the iPhone 5s.”

So we got rid of one Apple product. But the real question here is how to make writing the most productive and fun, While Blake is working on his writing project, I was trying to think about how to optimize my own writing.

I thought about some of the principles we’re using in Agile software development at work and how they could help when writing:

  • Limiting the work in progress  (WIP). It’s much easier to start things than to finish them. I remember someone at Google once told me that “If you have 10 apples, don’t take one bite from each of them.” And it’s the same thing with writing. I only want to have 3 items in progress at any given point. That gives me some flexibility on what to work on but any more than that I start to feel overwhelmed with the work I need to finish.
  • Develop iteratively and refine. Jeff Patton gives a great example of this when thinking about the creation of the Mona Lisa. Da Vinci didn’t sit down and start drawing pieces of the Mona Lisa.
The Mona Lisa Wasn’t Put Together Piece by Piece…
…It Was Refined in an Iterative Fashion
  • He drew the basics. Then he drew the outline. Then he made refinements.
  • Do the most important thing first. In order to develop iteratively, I need to prioritize. By prioritizing the work, it breaks things up into manageable chunks. I’ve also done the biggest things first so I can stop much earlier and still have something that holds together. Then I can edit and refine only the parts I really want to. 
  • Time Box. I give myself a certain amount of time upfront to finish something. If I say I’m going to finish this piece in 2 hours it really helps me prioritize and make sure I’m focused.
  • Split up the planning and the doing. Most people don’t like planning so they mix up their planning and their actual writing. It’s much easier to split up the work into multiple bite-sized chunks. This relieves a lot of cognitive stress and makes the writing more fun.

Here are the steps I use to implement these principles:

  1. Topics. This is really just the very high level of topics that I want to write about. I keep a list in Evernote. It’s good to try to keep this list prioritized because the items on the top become the most exciting ones that I want to tackle. Possibly I might put in a very high-level outline at this point.
  2. Story Bits. This is when I start to flesh out the idea. This can be done on index cards, post it’s, or just a piece of paper. My favorite way of brainstorming is Mind Mapping. There’s a great book that taught me how.
  3. Organizing. Then it’s time to create a broad outline. Some good ways of building the outline are user story mapping and the pyramid principle (summary here). These days when I’m writing a blog post I just write out my the paragraph order and my topic sentences.
  4. Write. Once I’ve done he organizing, the writing is fairly easy. It’s just fleshing out the idea. Each paragraph really should only be one idea and I’ve already written that idea down in the last step.
  5. Refinement. This is where I go in and make sure that spelling is correct and that everything makes sense. This is best to do once I’ve had some time to rest and take a look at it. There’s normally some silly mistakes but in general I’m happily surprised with what I wrote.

By following these steps I’ve been able to write a lot more and have a lot more fun doing it. Give it a try!

Categories
Kids Product Management

Alexa and Google in Our Home

In our home, we have a rule that there are no phones at the dinner table. We do this so everyone is paying attention to each other — not their phones. When a person has a phone at the table, it lets them be alone, even if they are sitting in a group. It gives that person a superpower to transport their mind to a completely different place. People are alone together (per Sherry Turkle):

Teenagers Alone Together

When you have an Amazon Echo or Google Home, that is another entity in the room. Some people are worried about how kids are being rude to Alexa and how they will bring this rudeness to their interactions with people. I think this is a red herring. It’s much easier for kids to deal with a free standing AI like Alexa than trying to teach children how to deal with a human being combined with a smartphone.

When the iPad came out, many of the reviews highlighted how useful it was for children. It’s the same way with voice assistants. The kids will do a lot of exploring. You’ll want to lock the machines down these down to prevent purchasing everything on Amazon. We’ve learned a lot from our kids’ explorations, most interestedly that there are songs called I Pooped and Diaper Baby.

For reference, our setup is two Google Home Mini’s that are each next to a Chromecast. We also have an Amazon Echo in the dining room table.

Some other things that we use the voice assistant for:

  • To check the weather
  • To play music
  • For the kids to watch their TV show on Netflix
  • To turn on and off the TV (Chromecast + Google Home)
  • As an intercom (between the Google Homes)

Update (2/10/2018): There’s a great video about politeness and Alexa called Southern Alexa.

Categories
Books / Audiobooks Life Lessons

Being OK With Uncertainty OR he Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (audible) is the amazing story of Robert Peace, a prodigy who grew up in inner city Newark, got into Yale, excelled there and ended up dead as a drug dealer back in Newark.

It’s a journey into a world that I’ve never really known, except for the Yale section which seems pretty accurate. The author, Jeff Hobbs, Rob’s Yale roommate wrote this story mainly to understand what happened to Rob and to share it with others. After Rob’s funeral, many people saw this amazing man as just another drug dealer but Jeff started getting so many stories that he decided to write a book. Jeff does the most amazing job digging through the story. He interviews Rob’s drug dealer friends who were forbidden from attending the wedding. He interviewed Rob’s boss when he was a drug dealer. He interviewed Yale masters and deans. And he got a whole lot of material from Rob’s secret society friends who he’d told his life story.

What’s amazing is that as much as you’d like the author to give an answer, he doesn’t. It’s frustrating but makes it that much more worthwhile. It’s a book about listening, not talking. Jeff talks about not giving answers here:

Maria Popova talks about how rare it is to not give answers and live with uncertainty in the first of her 10 Learnings from 10 Years of Brain Pickings. She says that we live in a culture where people are pressured to have an opinion, even when they have no basis for that opinion. Because they’re uncomfortable saying “I don’t know,” they fake it and just regurgitate something they read or saw on TV. They don’t invest the time to truly have their own opinion because they don’t feel comfortable staying in that nebulous zone of uncertainty. But, she says, “It’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.” For a great little blog post on the value of uncertainty, read Maria’s musing on John Keats and “Negative Capability.”

If you want to see the opposite, take a look at this guy who thinks he has the answer. In one of the most jarring questions I’ve seen in a long time, he wants Jeff to comment on his theory that Rob Peace had a death wish. It’s clear that the questioner is not comfortable living with uncertainty.

Read the book and wallow in this unfamiliar space with wonderful characters, no answers and no heroes.

Categories
Kids

On Martin Luther King Day

Martin Luther King Day is more than just another day off from work. His widow Coretta Scott King goes through the meaning of the day and what it means. She says that:

Every King Holiday has been a national “teach-in” on the values of nonviolence, including unconditional love, tolerance, forgiveness and reconciliation, which are so desperately-needed to unify America…. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is not only for celebration and remembrance, education and tribute, but above all a day of service.

So on this Martin Luther King day, my family and I participated in the Time of Good Day of Service. We visited an elderly homebound woman as part of the Dorot program. Dorot is a great organization that partners professionals and volunteers to enhance the lives of the elderly. They do a number of programs but the ones that are most relevant to us are the visits to the elderly around holidays. This is a great way for the kids to learn about charity — and there are relatively few charitable events that kids can participate in.

In this year where people are becoming more divided, it’s great to go and meet a stranger, learn from them and take part in our shared humanity.

BTW, this is an incredible video of two a capella groups, one Jewish and one African American, singing Shed a Little Light in honor of MLK day.

 

Categories
Books / Audiobooks Ideas Product Management

The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig

Have you ever had a thought that the whole world was crazy? That there was something so painfully obvious that you couldn’t believe everyone was missing? For me, it was the idea that all business books had the same plot:

  1. Let me tell you about this new business theory I have!
  2. I will prove this new theory about business by showing that it applies to great companies like Wal*Mart, Apple, etc.!

I kept wondering why it was only me. Then I came across the book The Halo Effect (with great summary here) by Phil Rosenzweig.

Rosensweig’s key point is that companies only have one independent variable that can be measured — how good it’s doing financially. Companies that are doing well have all these awesome attributes: great leadership, great culture, etc. And companies that are doing poorly have all these horrible features: poor leadership, poor strategy, etc. He uses the example of Cisco:

As an example, when Cisco Systems was growing rapidly, in the late 1990s, it was widely praised by journalists and researchers for its brilliant strategy, masterful management of acquisitions, and superb customer focus. When the tech bubble burst, many of the same observers were quick to make the opposite attributions. Cisco, the journalists and researchers claimed, now had a flawed strategy, haphazard acquisition management, and poor customer relations. On closer examination, Cisco really had not changed much—a decline in its performance led people to see the company differently. Indeed, Cisco staged a remarkable turnaround and today is still one of the leading tech companies.

This isn’t an exercise in analysis or science — it’s an exercise in storytelling. People look at how well the company did and create a story retrospectively to explain it. Rosenzweig quotes Eliot Aronson who says “people are rationalizing beings rather than rational beings.”

But how can these books be so off when they do so much analysis? They talk about going through tens of thousands of pages of financial reports and business press. But maybe this is just theater to make the findings seem more valid than they really are. The less we know about a topic the more we need to dress it up. I remember when I asked a math professor “Why don’t you see very many well-dressed mathematicians?”

Math is different from other fields in that you don’t have to prove you’re an authority in math. Your math does it for you. You can solve the problems, they can’t. In English and the Humanities, it’s much more subjective, and so you need some extra way of establishing yourself as an authority figure.

The core problem in analyzing great companies is that there isn’t any good data. Criteria like leadership, customer orientation and culture are subjective. And the financial success of the business leads directly to the contagion of the other metrics.  Rosenzweig says:

The halo effect is especially damaging because it often compromises the quality of data used in research. Indeed, many studies of business performance—as well as some articles that have appeared in journals such as Harvard Business Review and McKinsey Quarterly and in academic business journals—rely on data contaminated by the halo effect. These studies praise themselves for the vast amount of data they have accrued but overlook the fact that if the data aren’t valid, it really doesn’t matter how much was gathered or how sophisticated the analysis appears to be.

The upshot is that business books are telling you stories about great companies and rationalizing the greatness of those companies.  For managers who are looking to improve their companies, these books won’t be helpful. The books are peddling quick fixes and “one size fits all” strategies. But these strategies certainly won’t work for all companies. Managers and leaders need to understand that their role is to be agile and do what’s best in their specific role. They need to look at their company and their environment and determine what strategies will have the best chance of success.

Categories
Fun Stuff

How Numbers Work In The Real World

I really like numbers. I understand that not everyone likes numbers as much as I do and that’s OK. I still like you.

Radiolab did an awesome podcast on Numbers a few years ago. There’s a lot of great stuff in there and it’s accessible even to people that are afraid of math. One of the most interesting bits is how our natural sense of numbers is different from formal math. Come to think of it, that may be why some people have a problem with math.

The core idea is something they refer to as natural counting. We’ve all been conditioned by math classes to think of counting as 1,2,3, etc. However, in the natural state, people act differently. On the show, they told of an experiment with an Amazon tribe where people do not count and don’t have numbers beyond five. They showed the tribesmen a line. On one side they placed 1 object and on the other side, they placed 9 objects. The experimenter asked, “What number is exactly between 1 and 9?” The response was “3.” The reasoning works like this:

  1. First person has 1 stick
  2. Middle person has 3 sticks (3 times as many as the first person)
  3. Last person has 9 sticks (3 times as many as the second person

So the second — the one in the middle has 3 sticks.

Let’s look at another example. Imagine you’re giving out bonuses at work and you have a pool of $500,000 and you want to fairly distribute the pool. You could give everyone the same amount of money. But what if someone made $1 million and 4 people made $100,000. You could give everyone $100,000 as a bonus. But that doesn’t feel fair. To be fair you’d give everyone about the same percentage of their salary as a bonus — which in this case would be about a 36% bonus for everyone.

Another non-intuitive concept on Radiolab is Benford’s law.  Benford’s law says that in the real world, you’ll see the number 1 appear many times more as the first digit than the number 9. This happens for naturally occurring phenomena like money in your bank account, size of countries or views on YouTube.

Radiolab has a great story on how this is used in the real world. Say someone was trying to commit a fraud on tax returns. They would be trying to create “random” numbers by having the first digit of each number evenly distributed (equal numbers of 1,2,3, etc.) But Benford’s law says that you should have more 1’s as the first digit than 9’s. So if numbers end up looking more random than they would be in the real world, that’s a sure sign of fraud.

So why does this happen? For the same reason that we saw above, things like to grow by percentages rather than units. Think about the bonus example. Say things are growing by 10%. If you start with the number 1 the next numbers are 1.1, 1.21, 1.33. 1.46, 1.61, 1.77, 1.94. That’s 8 numbers that start with a 1. For 9, you have 9 and 9.9 so that’s only 2 numbers that start with a 9 (and then you’re back to another number that starts with a 1).

For a more detailed explanation of Benford’s law including a pretty technical mathematical explanation, check out Singing Banana.

So why is this important? Even though we think about the world in 1, 2, 3’s, it’s actually more about the changes from where we are now. It’s 10%, another 10%, another 10%, etc. By understanding the world in these terms it’s more intuitive and more useful.

Categories
Kids

Winter Exercise — Stair War and Stair Chemistry Fluxx

We live in a 30 story building. In the summer the kids can run and play outside but in the winter they need to get their exercise inside the building.

So we started to climb the stairs inside our building. The building is 30 floors high so getting to the top is a nice workout. When Blake was about 3, he would climb to the top of the building with excitement. We even started learning numbers. We learned that there is no number 13 in our building — or is there? But as the boys got older they want to do something more exciting so we created a game called “stair war.”

The rules for stair war are the same as the card game of war but every time there’s a war you go up that number of flights of stairs. This makes climbing the stairs a bit more interesting. The game has a number of interesting properties:

  1. Each time there’s a war you go up on average 7 flights assuming you go up ten flights for J, Q, K, A
  2. One out of every 13 plays, on overage, is a war. There are 169 ways that cards can lay between hands 13 x 13. But only 13 of them are wars.
  3. On average that’s about half a flight on average for each card flipped you go up 7 flights every 13 plays.
  4. But there’s a lot of uncertainty which adds to the excitement. You don’t know when the war is going to happen!

Blake is 8 now so we can play more interesting games. Our new favorite is now Chemistry Fluxx (sample game) on the stairs. We play a game of Chemistry Fluxx and then go up 10 flights of stairs — repeat until exhausted. Chemistry Fluxx is part of the Fluxx series, a card game where the rules and goals of the game are always in “Fluxx.” Watch the sample game and you’ll get a good idea of how it works. We speed up the game by changing the initial rules to something to draw 2 / play 2 to speed things up. Also, Chemistry Fluxx teaches them a few chemistry facts while you play!

Categories
Kids

The Hidden Thirteenth Floor

In my apartment building, like many others, there’s no 13th floor. The floors go right from 12 to 14.

Continue reading “The Hidden Thirteenth Floor”
Categories
Fun Stuff

Exploring Towers

I’ve always loved going to the tops of towers. When I was at Yale we used to climb up on towers and look across the campus. This was before every door was locked.

Freshman year, my friends Lutz and Christine joined me in a quest to figure out what was at the top of the library. If you look at the top of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, you can see something that looks like a tiny castle (you can see it if you zoom in on the roof). We spent a few afternoons trying to figure out what this secret castle was. As it turns out, it’s actually a castle! When the library was built, they thought it would be a nice way to hide the machinery on the roof. In the age of Facebook, we can actually see what the castle looks like:

Sterling Castle

More recently, when I’m up at SchoolPlus for the boys to take their Math and Science class, I found another tower. This is the view from the south tower at the Union Theological Seminary.

It’s a wonderful place for me to sit and do some writing.

Today the building is under construction. As I looked out upon the garden I couldn’t help but think that this is what Rapunzel must have felt like.