Month: February 2016

Using tree names (especially oak) when naming a hedge fund is a about as overdone as using wood-plank background in website design. 

If I have any followers thinking of starting a hedge fund… Please think of something other than a tree.

Clinton’s Theory of Change and Socializing Business

stoweboyd:

In the business context as in the larger world, we should not seek to change hearts, but to change the rules. – Stowe Boyd

Ezra Klein wrote a great piece – Hillary Clinton and the audacity of political realism – examining Hillary Clinton’s orientation toward political change, and he cast her as a political realist, verging on being a political pessimist. I was struck by the relevance of the discussion to the politics involved in the adoption of new ways of work and the tools that engender that.

But first, here’s his take on Clinton:

“I don’t believe you change hearts,” she says. “I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate. You’re not going to change every heart. You’re not.”

This is Hillary Clinton’s political philosophy in a nutshell. It is the hard-won lessons of a politician who had a front-row seat to both Bill Clinton’s impeachment and Barack Obama’s release of his longform birth certificate. It’s the conclusion of someone who has tried to win change amidst Democratic and Republican Congresses, who has worked out of the White House and out of the Capitol, who has watched disagreement and polarization prove intractable, who has seen grand plans die amidst gridlock.

[…]

Clinton’s theory of change is probably analytically correct, and it’s well-suited to a world in which Republicans will almost certainly continue to control the House, and so a Democratic president will have to grind out victories of compromise in Congress and of bureaucratic mastery through executive action.

But it is not an inspiring vision — it does not promise grand advances, transformative change, or a kinder, gentler political sphere. Clinton has the audacity to believe in the limits of her persuasive and political power, and an emphasis on limits doesn’t fill arenas.

Let’s consider what the equivalent of Clinton’s theory of ‘changing hearts’ would be in the context of the spread of the idea of socializing work: making the workplace more humane, more democratic, and more liberal. 

I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate. You’re not going to change every heart. You’re not. – Hillary Clinton

In that context, a Clintonian might start with narrowly-defined plans for ‘success’, because we aren’t going to change all hearts, no matter how soaring our rhetoric, how shiny our tools, or how persuasively we enumerate the purported wonders of worklife after the adoption of new operating principles. Clinton’s position is that there will be entrenched opposition to change, for myriad reasons. Some simply like the status quo, some are afraid of change generally, and some are afraid of the changes being proposed, specifically. And like a great many social undertakings that may lead to a good end, the means to get there may require a great deal of pain and sacrifice from those doing the hard work.

So I advocate adopting the Clinton Theory of Change for the world of work.

First of all, we have to accept that all social organizations are intrinsically and deeply political, and any effective efforts to make any changes need to operate on the principles of realpolitik: political power is intrinsic to business, and any significant change will require wielding power to get there. 

And then, at a foundational level, we have to understand that the natural differentiation in the world between conservatives and liberals has not emerged through some process of rational decision-making by each individual, weighing their perspectives on the balance between change and stability. That split between the Right and the Left is in our wiring, deep in our psychological makeup, just like language and our six senses.

Some simply resist change, and others seek it out. And persuasion based on rational argument fails to sway conservatives, even when they muster seemingly rational arguments to support their positions.

Therefore, in the business context as in the larger world, we should not seek to change hearts, but to change the rules. We need to reward the behaviors that we want to see in our companies, and to build our platforms to support better new ways of work and to dial down affordances that allow bad behavior to persist.

And even before that, our political systems are a platform, a sort of inbuilt technology that we can’t escape. We can no more operate outside of politics – even at work – than bees can exist without of their hives, or that birds could fly without their feathers.

humansofnewyork:

“My wife and I were eating at a rib joint in Key Largo, and we actually took out a piece of paper and made a pros and cons list. The ‘con’ list was pretty normal: time, money, things like that. I remember at the top of the ‘pro’ list was: ‘Full Human Experience.’ After our daughter was born, that became an inside joke with us. Every time she was screaming at bath time, my wife and I would look at each other and say: ‘Full Human Experience.’ The first three months were the hardest. Honestly, we wondered if we’d made a mistake. It was like a bomb dropped and eviscerated everything in our lives. But then our daughter started growing up, and learning to do things on her own, and we kept taking small steps back and getting more of our own time back. There’s an unexpected sadness to getting your life back. It’s like your getting laid off slowly from an equally grueling but joyful job. She’s ten now. And I’ll notice that she’ll be reading alone for an hour without getting bored and jumping on me. We used to make tents on the bed, now it’s more homework and YouTube. Sometimes she’ll go in her room for a long time and close the door. Her life is becoming hers and I’m fascinated by where it’s going to go. But it’s bittersweet that she needs me less and less.”

Full Human Experience. This is it!

Now I see 5-year-olds wearing Doc Martens on the way to preschool. 

2 thoughts: respect for their parents, and – I now see the end in sight for this cycle of the trend. It’s too bad: Docs are both so badass and comfortable, and I really liked the whole nu-grunge revival.

Mubi

Discovered Mubi.com yesterday. Only $5/month, and mostly movies that I’d want to watch anyway. For me, it’s better than Netflix, which I cancelled long ago. Something to keep in mind for the time when there actually is energy and time to watch anything after work. And they do have shorts!

Their curation is great, but it got me thinking how there is room for yet another streaming service, where you and your likeminded friends form groups and do all the movie curation yourself. And the platform would take care of licensing them, one month at a time, from whoever owns their copyrights. That way, you can stream those movies that you want, rather than whatever Netflix (or Mubi or HBOGo) happens to have available at the time. Netflix, with their immense user-ratings database, and agreement with studios/distributors, is perfectly positioned to do something like this, as is Amazon/IMDB. But it doesn’t really make sense for them to do it.

For the fun of it, I could even draw the screen mockups for it. And put it in a portfolio folder that no one will ever see.