You see, his book is more than 500 pages long. I just made an experiment, and one page requires almost exactly 3 minutes of my time to read it attentively, in fact, even a bit more. Yes, sure, speed reading would help, but that’s not what you want reading a really good book. 500 pages to 3 minutes make 1500 minutes to read it just once cover to cover. If you floundered arithmetic classes in your elementary school, let me tell you, that’s 25 hours of your time. Or, more than 3 work days of intensive work without interruptions, not even bathroom breaks! In reality, that’s more like a week of work.

It’s really odd, but somehow the American public treats buying books the same way as buying beef, pork or potatoes – by the pound. Somehow, the thicker the book is, the better it sells and the higher price you can demand. Isn’t it odd?

Think about it. A 500 pages book requires a work week of my time. I don’t know about your income, so lets assume something average. According to the U.S. Census Bureau average (mean) personal income for both sexes age 25-64 is about $44K, or about $844/week. Tony Robbins’ book I mentioned above has a very moderate price of $16, but once you factor in the time you have to spend readings it, the cost of ownership goes up to $860. Really. $16 for the book and $844 for the time you spend reading it. That’s what an average employer pays to an average employee for a week of work. And you spend a week of work to read that book. That defines the real cost of the book.

Imagine that you can buy a book and magically instantly know everything that was in the book. Would it be worth $860? Still, when you buy a $16 book with 500 pages, that’s what your expectations are. Weird, isn’t it?

It’s odd, but when the public buys books by the pound, the publishers have no other way to go, but to comply and produce large books. The result? The market dominated by the “books by the pound”. The result? ROI (Return-On-Investment) for book readers falling down. The next result? Book reading is not treated socially as an attractive career proposition or real self-improvement.

If this trend will continue, the American public will become the least literate in the world (if it’s not already), and for good reason! It will be deprived of high quality literature by the invisible force of the market, so reading won’t bring the benefits anymore, it once did. Can something be done about it? I don’t know… When I write my books, I am conscious of readers’ time, and my books are on average 200 pages only. However, I can tell you first hand, if I’d want them to be successful, I’d have to beef them up at least twice or more before any established publisher will even consider it.

In the Year 2000 the Matrix Has You!

While there is a much deeper truth in it, which I will talk about later, consider this circumstantial evidence for now: how often do you see pictures like that:

Or, like that:

And how often instead you see the pictures like that:

Really?

That’s Hippo, or HiPPO. It represents a decision making concept often used in large corporations. You know, what is it?

HIghest Paid Person Opinion.

In the end, the idea is that you can only have either perfect hiring or only perfect performance reviews. If you make both tight, you will become so fit to the current environments, that any radical change in economy will drive you the way of dinosaurs… See more in the original post.

If not, here it is. You force every team manager rank the members of their teams by the “bell curve”. It means that you sort people into three buckets: a few over-achievers, a few under-achievers, and the rest in the middle. Specific proportion may vary but normally it’s 10-20% on either side and 60-80% in the middle. Then you fire bottom 10% and hire new people instead. Lather, rinse, repeat. The theory says that you get great results. The fame of Jack “The Butcher” Welch says the same.

Have you ever thought that it’s essentially introducing evolutionary environment in the corporation? It’s like some forest, where various species dwell, and 10% of specimen are eaten by the end of the year. The fittest survive and procreate, making overall forest population more and more fit to the environment. Everybody (except those that are eaten) wins.

Speaking of procreation, one thing essential for the evolution is procreation that passes winning traits. How does it work in business? Simple: through the interview process. You see, interview process is designed to accept only those, who are deemed worthwhile by the people, who are already in. Granted, that’s not really procreation, but that’s pretty close analog of it. For example, in software development, if the team believes that C# is great and Java is not, it is not likely for anybody who is good at Java to pass an interview, simply because to be good at Java you have to believe that it’s good to spend the time learning it. Interview process is one of the examples of so called “club system”, where new members have to be recommended by existing ones. In a nutshell, it’s the way fittest (those who were not fired) procreate in any organization: by hiring those similar to them in some aspects.

So, with procreation and natural selection in place, astringent performance review systems a la Jack Welch convert your corporation into an evolutionary environment. Does it work? Well, in the wild evolution worked ok so far — it produced humans, right? And we all like humans, of course, so if it worked so well for us in the long run, it has to work well in managing businesses too. Right?

Wrong!

Lets assume that we have a perfect hiring process, when we get the new people of the same quality as the best people we already have, and a perfect performance review process, not tainted by misunderstandings, differences in styles, personal vendettas and straight incompetence of the management. Would you agree that if that perfect system does not work, there is something really wrong in the whole idea? And, unfortunately, it does not.

To illustrate, I made a small program that simulates such an evolutionary environment or corporation. To make it easily visible, the competition happens between dots of different color in the environment where some specific color is “ideal”. Think about the dots as bugs with masking color, like those white butterflies hiding on white birch trees. The more some dot’s color is different from the “ideal” color of the environment, the less fit the dot is, the less likely it is to procreate, the more likely it is to be eaten in the current cycle.

So, let’s run the program and you’ll see something like that:

Evolution in a static environment

Yes, I said it does not work. Yes, I understand that considering this picture it worked perfectly, or nearly perfectly. The problem is: yes, it does work, as long as the ideal color of the environment stays the same. Unfortuantely, the environment does not stay the same. In the example with white butterflies coal powered factories made the birch trees black, that eliminated white butterflies and forced them to become black. Fortunately for butterflies, their selection process and procreation was not that perfect, they did mutate and they had enough genetic diversity to become black and survive. Corporations with the perfect hiring process and perfect performance reviews process are not that lucky. Lets run the program again but include catastrophic change in environment every here and now, like it happens in a real economy with some crisis happening every 5-10 years. Here is the new picture:

Evolution with Catastrophic Changes

You see? I even made hiring process not-so-perfect and introduced some mutations allowing to hire not that perfect candidates, and it still does not work. The picture with the “perfect” hiring process is even worser.

In fact, the only hope for a corporation with the perfect performance review system to survive strong changes in the economy is to hire pretty much at random. Then, it does adapt:

Evolution with High Mutations Rate

Granted, that’s what some of them do when it comes to hiring new CEOs, but who can afford hiring at random the rest of the staff in the modern world? And if your hiring process works, then all astringent performance review system does is a long-term harm. It pretty much drives the diversity out of the workplaces to the point, when your company doesn’t have the source material to adapt to sharp environment changes.

By the way, this phenomena is well-known in biological evolution. Many species got exstinguished exactly because they’ve become too fit to the current environment, and got killed, eaten, or starved to death once the environment had changed dramatically. Dinosaurs are just one great example, and we’ve lately seen a few corporate dinosaurs of the American economy following their way. By the way, according to the book “Truth About Managing People” by Dr. Stephen P. Robbins, that’s pretty much what happened in General Motors in the last 10-20 years. Notice that the book was written before the company was forced into the bankruptcy.

Of course, with the modern system, when CEO’s horizon is just 1-2 years, and then they are off destroying some other company, it works for them. It also works for speculative holders of shares. Unfortunately, it does not work for the business in question, and it does not work for those shareholders, who expect their shares to appreciate by the time, when they hit the retirement.

References:

Truth About Managing People, The (2nd Edition) by Stephen P. Robbins – FT Press, 2 edition (September 30, 2007), ISBN-10: 0132346036, ISBN-13: 978-0132346030, 240 pages

Dear Eldar,

I am writing you on behalf of the trade union Brain Cells of Eldar Corps (”the Union”). It came to our attention that you are violating our trade agreement (”Agreement”), specifically, chapter 4.34.(b) stating that members of the Union are entitled to the daily norm of 7 hours of the reduced work shift generally referred to as “sleeping”. While we recognize that members of the Union (brain cells) are exempt employees, who are supposed to work overtime in case of emergency (chapter 4.37.(k)), let us remind you that it was supposed to be a temporary emergency (chapter 4.38.(q)), like a need to run from a jaguar in an African savannah. We contacted respective unions of senses and muscle cells, and they haven’t reported any jaguars or elevated muscle activity, so it seems clear to us that you are violating the terms of our Agreement.

While the Union recognizes your authority as CEO of Eldar Corps., we remind you that you have to live to the terms of the Agreement. Maybe you should move out of jaguar country, or find a safe lair to hide, we don’t know. But unless you want to become a blithering idiot (which you already are, considering that you are writing this letter on our behalf), you have to provide us with the daily allowance of sleep.

Considering that you have consistently violated this point of the Agreement for the significant time (months), the Union has no other option as to declare a 24-hour strike, when you must provide us with sleep or some other form of rest. We also have to inform you that the Union co-opted and is now in negotiations with the reputable company Cold & Flu Business Protection and Worker Representatives, LLC. from Chicago, who say they may be able to make you an offer you can’t refuse.

Yours Truly,
Your Brain, Esq.

P.S. Cold viruses are saying “Hi!” and thanking you for your hospitality. They are impressed with your tolerance to cultural diversity and promise to make every third toast to your health, while they are feasting in your body.

Michael wanted out. He did not like fairy tales, he wanted to escape into the real world. “What’s the use to earn money and getting property, if the state won’t allow me to take it with myself, when I will leave the country? Knowledge is the only property that they cannot take away from me at the customs!”

We are lucky. We live in the Free World and we can have property. Can we?

Just two days ago I was driving from my home and noticed a sign “Estate Sale”. It usually means that somebody died and left a lot of stuff. In Ancient Egypt they’d throw it into the burial chamber for the use in afterlife, but in the modern times we know that they won’t need it. So, we sell it. That’s what the word “estate” means: your earthly possessions, your stuff, your property.

We are accustomed to think of property as something that we OWN, that’s unquestionably ours, that’s something we can rely on being available, when we need it, that’s there at our disposal because we have the right to it. Have we?

Think about an American holy of holies, an American dream, your home, Real Estate. Do you know why real estate is called “real”? Most people think that’s because it’s the only kind of property that is truly real, as “not fake”, material, substantial. Alas, they are wrong.

In fact, “real estate” comes from Spanish. It’s not “real” estate, it’s “royal” estate. That is something that belongs to the King, and you are just granted the privilege to use it.

Ok, ok, we don’t have a King anymore, do we? Then, what do you think will happen if you’ll stop paying property taxes? Do you still think it’s a “real” property or does it begin to feel like a sort of a rent or a lease?

Yes, all property still belongs to the King or, at least, to the Crown. It’s just we have other entities in place of the King: state, county, city, but the point is still the same. You don’t own your property, you’ve just got the right to use it, and a very expensive right by the way. You buy this right for hundreds of thousand dollars, and then you pay a rent that’s called property taxes. Stop paying that rent, and the landlord – state, county, city – we’ll get you out cold on the sidewalk. Here, in the Free World, we still don’t own our property.

Let me share another story with you. About a year or two ago one of very successful Internet marketers Perry Belcher made a mistake. He decided to promote some diet product. I don’t know what happened, maybe he’s got too high share of the market to attract attention of the big boys in the industry, maybe the product was really not on par with its promises – like the most of diet products are, but one day a local county sheriff walked in and sealed all his property. It was not even FDA or FTC, that was just the local county, which got a few complaints from the customers and, in the end, got a few millions in its budget – everything that Perry had. Notice, I don’t claim that it was the reason, I am just stating the facts: money belong to Perry and went where? To the county or state budget. I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong, that’s not the point of my story. The point is that he lost everything: real estate, bank accounts, business, you name it. Everything was confiscated. The King came in and took his Estate just like in medieval Europe or Rome during the soldier emperors or Nero.

Still, in a year and a half, Perry is back on his feet and again making millions. Yes. In a year and a half after he lost everything. Yes, millions. There was one thing the King could not take away: Perry’s knowledge, skills, friends, and ability to market goods and services.

Today in America, it’s still the Soviet Union all over again. The King can strip you away of anything you own with a snap of fingers of lawyers, courts, or government officials. And just like in the Soviet Union, there is still something he still cannot take away: your intrinsic value.

That’s the essence of the knowledge economy. The first time in history of the human kind, we have something that the King cannot take away. At last, we are not interreplaceable slaves, we have an intrinsic inseparable value of our knowledge, skills, and friends.

Don’t get me wrong, money is important. I work hard for the money I earn, some would say that I work too hard and I should do it smarter instead. Hey, I am learning. That’s what I do. Learning. Learning from other people, who hopefully will become my friends. Because learning gives knowledge, skills, and friends.

Because that’s my only Real (”real”, not “royal”) estate that the King cannot take away from me.

Say, if you want to herd sheep, it make sense to buy the best breed of sheep that give the best, most expensive wool, right? Same with any business… The problem is that in the knowledge economy, for example, in the software development, managing the best is a little more complicated than herding the sheep. In fact, it’s often compared more to herding the cats. And if you don’t manage “the best” properly, you may easily end up with a serious trouble and get significantly poorer results than by hiring average and managing them properly. Of course, to manage the best properly, your managers should be the best. Ironic, isn’t it?

So, here is the trouble with hiring the best. Philip Su, who works as a development manager at Microsoft, suggests the following recipe to create great software. Get a lot of great developers; give them a lot of computers; provide them with good salaries, stock options, awards and bonuses, so that they don’t have to think about it; then don’t forget to feed them as needed. That’s it. Once they don’t have to worry about money, they’ll do what they love and know — creating great software. Simple, isn’t it?

The only problem is that such creative heaven is very hard to maintain, even if you have money. Shareholders and Wall Street shout at you that you are wasting money. Yeah, like they did not prove lately again that they don’t have a clue how to manage money, their own or otherwise… Analysts look down at you and write articles about you not following the latest fad and not managing your people properly. No, they don’t create software, they find their reward on Earth by teaching others how to do that. Still, the market listens and your company, including your employees, who have tons of company’s stock, suffer.

Then you give up and introduce performance reviews, bell curve, or even layoffs when other companies lose money and have tough times. Well, Adam tasted the prohibited fruit, started to use metrics, heaven is gone and replaced now by an evolutionary environment. That is, the place where the fittest survive, and the rest, well… perish.

Notice, the “fittest”. Fittest is not the smartest. It’s not the strongest. It’s not even the best professional. It’s just that, the fittest. “The boy who lived,” no matter how the survival was achieved.

But maybe it’s not that bad, is it? After all, all nearest relatives of humans – chimps, pigs, rats – they all live in an evolutionary environment and succeed, right?

Speaking of rats, let me tell you an interesting piece of trivia, I’ve heard long ago. On medieval ships rats were a huge problem. One of the ways to get rid of them was called “A Rat King.” Sailors were catching as many rats as they could, put them into an empty barrel, and did not feed them. The weakest rats were eaten fast by others, of course, so very soon you only had “the best” rats in the barrel.


However, and here comes the catch, in the evolutionary environment there is no such thing as strong and weak. There are only those who are stronger, and those who are weaker. Once all the weakest are eaten, one of the strongest become the weakest. And then another one. And the next one. And so on, until there is only one Big Rat in the barrel called a Rat King. The fittest.


After that the sailors release the Rat King, and by this time it already knows that fellow rats taste much better than scraps and moldy grain. So, it does the job much better than any cat could, leaving the ship mostly ratless, “best rats” or otherwise.

Oh, well,… so what did we talk about? Sorry, I’ve got carried away with an irrelevant story… Oh, yeah, corporations that hire the best and then force an evolutionary environment! So, what I am trying to say, is that hiring the best is a fine idea, as long as you know how to manage them. Unfortunately, too many don’t. If you hire the best, you have to put them into a creative environment. If instead you put them into an evolutionary environment, you may get, well, “the fittest” instead. And you’ll have nobody to blame for that but yourself.

Seriously. Evolution is a harsh mistress. Wherever there are resources and competition for them, there are parasites. Turn on evolution in your corporation, and parasites will fill your management ranks. Ever wondered why Wall Street guys were so insistent in their advice to you? They wanted these jobs for their kin!

Don’t tell me lies. Never tell me lies. I cannot accept your lies.

Even if you believe in them yourself, don’t tell me your lies. Even if your boss believes in them, don’t tell me your lies. Even if your family believes in them, don’t tell me your lies.

It does not matter, if it is a big lie or a small lie. It does not matter if it hurts me or helps me. It does not matter if it affects me or not. Don’t tell me your lies.

It does not matter if this is a lie about Enlightened Future of Humanity (whichever it is). Or about Values of your Political System (whichever it is). Or about how happy I should be working for such a great company (whichever it is). Don’t tell me your lies.

On a staff meeting you expect me to be inspired by the company pep-talk. But I cannot.

On meetings you expects me to say finally that we made a good decision. But I cannot.

On my performance review your expect me to agree with your opinion. But I cannot.

That’s not because I am not a team player. That’s not because I am not collaborative. That’s not because I cannot reasonably estimate myself.

Because I am a team player, and I can follow team decisions even if they are wrong. Because I am collaborative and I can compromise to reach the goal. Because I can estimate myself comparing to what my colleagues achieved and how they are praised for that.

But I cannot say that wrong decision is right, it’s still wrong. But I cannot say that compromise is better that the right decision, because it still not better. But I cannot accept that somebody is worth more than me because you just like him, you have to have something more than that.

What’s the use of a scale, if it will show pound and kilogram the same to avoid bias in favor of US or EU system?

What’s the use of a microscope, if it’s made to show male and female cells the same way because legally they are “equal”?

What’s the use of a camera, if it shows black and white with the same color on photos?

My mind is my precious tool. It has the ability to see things right. To distinct clearly right and wrong, truth and lie, good and bad.

This is why I can make good designs. This is why I can create complex systems. This is why I can do my work.

My mind is what makes me different from a part-time worker at McDonald. From pizza delivery guy. From cashier at the grocery store.

My mind is the reason why you hired me. My mind is the reason why you need me. My mind is the reason why you are paying such money for me.

If I’ll accept your lies, I will break this tool. If I will accept your lies, I will not be able to distinct truth from lie anymore. Good design from a bad design. Right decision from a poor one. Bug from a feature.

If I’ll accept your lies, I will be useless to you.

Don’t tell me your lies.