Business, Tech, Consulting, Analytics

Death, murder, crime, disease, car wreck, genocide, discrimination, corruption .... blah, blah, blah. That' news. Want to predict the future? Copy this, write "News in 2030", stuff it in an envelope, and put it in a vault. Have your kids or grand kids open it in 2030. They’ll say “Yep, gramps got it right.”  Politicos on both the left and right agree on one thing -- bad news sells. Unfortunately, news functions mainly as a massive reality distortion machine. People complain about inaccuracy and fake news. True, but it's not the REAL problem. The damage comes from looking at everything from a  uniform perspective of societal failure.  For example, children fail a lot. That's how they learn. But they succeed a lot too, sometimes spectacularly. Want to crush a child's spirit? (or an adult's for that matter). Talk only about his failures.  All this is to say we have a responsibility to remember, every waking moment, that ...

On November 25, 1120 A.D., the son and sole heir of the English king Henry I , boarded a new, fast ship to cross the French channel.  The heir, William Adelin, generously provided the crew with wine. Many of England’s elite were on board.  Some on board, just before departure, hurried off the ship—rightly worried about a thoroughly intoxicated crew.  The ocean was churning from storms during the night.   The “white ship” struck a rock and all on board, except for a butcher, drowned.  The cost to society for this entirely avoidable disaster was enormous. The loss of William Adelin set off an English civil war lasting for years, with thousands perishing as the armies of his sister Matilda and Stephen of Blois ravaged the countryside.  In 2014 the city of Flint Michigan made the decision to switch its water supply from the more expensive Detroit system to using the Flint river as its source.  Serious health problems resulted. Babi...

In Praise of Captain Obvious Injustice.  That’s what I think about when the poor dude is humiliated every half hour on television. Why?  In real life and business management, there’s value in questioning the obvious.  Following are some examples from my practice over the years (modified for client privacy) : ·         Obvious : employees get sick, at least once every few years.  Nonobvious : Some employees went for five or ten years without getting sick (zero sick hours).  Resolution : Employees had an informal deal with their supervisor, to not report sick hours, unless it got “out of hand.”  When those employees left the firm, they were over compensated for sick leave not taken.  ·         Obvious : fixed assets cannot have a value less than zero.  Nonobvious : Good intentioned employees shifted assets and broke some of them down into more tractable...

What happens with the internal combustion engine (ICE) goes away? My postage sized yard was due for a haircut this weekend, so I stepped into the garage to get my lawnmower. I thought ... nuts; I forgot to get gas, and it has been a while since I have changed the oil.  Oh, wait .... I have an electric lawn mower with an 82 volt battery.  Just press the button and go.  Gas in the garage is gone forever. Take a look at the graph below (courtesy Bloomberg,  https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-battery-prices/ ): I t does not take a genius to figure out what will happen.  Batteries are getting cheaper and more powerful every year.  It’s an inexorable form of Moore’s law.   Making no assumptions about the environmental goodness of human beings, we can assume that if two things provide the same service and one is cheaper, we’ll go low cost.  Some implications: Within 5-7 years no more ICE powered cars will be ma...

Getting stuck Nearly everywhere you’ll find examples of people who are too good at their specialty.  The Latin term is “ stuckus-in-placeus .”   Let’s do a thought experiment:  assume you could go back in time and look at some of these people when they were  new employees.  They probably had a wide range of interests and skills.  Then, perhaps by chance, they got involved in projects that were a good match with their talent and personality. Praise, raises, and respect came shortly after.  They focused even more on their narrow strengths and become respected by peers and management.  They felt great until one day, working at 10pm, they experienced the unsavory feeling of being stuck. Perhaps one of them was an attorney.  She thought “I’m the best at bankruptcy lawyer in town.  Partners look to me for guidance whenever the topic comes up.  But after five years I’m still a senior associate.  No partner track gets me...

The Great Filter I just began writing an introductory book on immigration law, with Gianelli Henley, immigration attorney in Jacksonville, Florida.  A few things struck me as I started my research: First, naturalization is an arduous process.  It is easier to thread a sewing machine while it is running than to become a naturalized citizen.  If you are Joe Wanna-be-a-citizen, you start with dozens of forms, any one of which could be rejected and need to be resubmitted.  Next,  you jump through lots of hoops: Can you prove you have cash for at least six months' of living expense? Can you prove you are marrying a US citizen for love and not just to be naturalized?  If Joe wants to marry Sally, a US citizen, then they need to make sure all their stories line up for the interview.  Immigration services are looking for any hint that the marriage is a sham.  Ever been arrested?  Ever had financial problems in the home country?  Ever oversta...

Fashion I'm reading Foundation , by Peter Ackroyd, a book about early English history,.  He's an entertaining writer and throws off some interesting FYI-type comments.  Apparently in medieval England, the thing was to show off clothing with the brightest possible colors.  No matter that the colors clashed.  Bright, loud clothes showed your membership in the well-to-do gentry or aristocracy.  Even different colored shoes were au courant.  I started thinking about fashion in general.  There is no real standard, except that change is mandatory. Many people like quasi-random style variations--it provides an opportunity to broadcast status and success.  So how can this help business people?  Style can be embedded in anything. Customers at the grocery store may walk by the bathroom supplies section and see a toilet bowl brush.  Surely there are no style considerations there.   But yes indeed, a brush with a long, delicately curv...

The over-filtered life Whether in business or personal life, we make an effort to cross-check what we think is reality to what we hear and see.  It is part of being human, and we do it constantly.  We like to think that business decisions, anything affecting our personal wealth, are based on objective reality. Unfortunately, our thinking gets polluted every day.  What do the extreme right, moderate right, middle of the road, moderate left and extreme left all have in common?  They all listen to news which is highly -- actually extremely -- biased towards the negative.  Despite ourselves we are influenced by waves of "ain't it awful" rhetoric.  The information we receive from the outside is not balanced. It is unrealistically filtered so that destructive or at least worsening conditions are front and center.  For example, the average person in Africa lives better than most Americans did a few hundred years ago.  But how many times do we see...

Explore/Exploit--The endless question You’re in a hurry to finish a spreadsheet. You can enter numbers by brute or you can spend a few minutes with Google to figure out a better way. Or maybe you need to write a quick note to HR so you pick up a pen and start scribbling. And then you think of something else that needs to be said--at what point did you cross the line between the quick startup of the handy pen and the slow start but much faster typing in Word? I don’t remember where I read the term but “explore/exploit” has always struck me as one of the key decision points in a productive life. Delay of productive activity is built into the time you spend exploring. Nothing visible is getting done. And you might explore and fail. In elementary school children are not typically told about the large number of settlers who went west and then returned east. So short term, searching for new solutions seems wasteful. The alternative is to stay in some endless loop of what you already kn...

Today's breathless pace favors independent consultants At 4:45pm yesterday I got a call from a client I hadn't heard from in a few months.  Almost out of breath, he says "Can you be here Monday?"  Well, that's rather like asking monks whether monasteries are a good idea. "Of course!" I said.  Client says "OK, gotta run." What to think about such planning?  I happen to know that this person (a pleasant and considerate fellow) has recently been drop kicked into a greatly expanded job.  He has a long todo list plus technical fires to put out almost hourly.  Plus, he has a family.  So, would he like to do a better job planning? Certainly.  Is he at the edge of what he can do?  Probably close to it. While we all have concerns about the  mind-numbing pace of managerial jobs today, we nonetheless have to handle problems right now--in ten minutes, two floors down.  As a religious friend of mine once said, "no rest for the wicked and t...

Recently I published a slim book on the basics of using a package  "DPLYR," in the R programming language.  DPLYR has a detailed and thorough user guide and is open source.  Why would anyone need to buy a book about it? Short explanation: time is a nonexpandable resource for all of us.  We need to allocate it wisely. Long explanation:  Virtually all technical manuals for popular, open source software are written by experts who are immersed in the details.  The authors are typically bright, hardworking individuals who are doing their best to include all relevant details.  Unfortunately, the very abundance of expertise makes them poor writers for people who simply want to use the software as a tool to get something done.  Software should be for everyone with a minimum of startup time . Imagine if someone had to study automotive mechanics before they were allowed to drive a car. Here's an example from another outstanding R package, Lubridate....