I’ve found that this mis-aligns my thinking.  The real probabilities you should be thinking about have nothing to do with the event.  You have a 80% chance of being the same company you were before the investor meeting, so how about you focus on that.  After you meet this important person, you’ll still come home to yourself, so why aren’t you anxious about that?

So many companies focus on fundraising as an end that they forget the most important thing for getting there –  you have to build a fundable company.  I do it all the time when I think about how this next meeting or opportunity is going to make all the difference in the world, but I’m kidding myself.  I find it’s a lot more calming to focus on the things which have the highest chance of coming about (you’re still yourself), and just as importantly, are things you control.

He begins by outlining ten of the most widely held beliefs taught about systems and decision making, and after telling a few stories about each he describes a replacement maxim.  The ten claims and their replacements are:

1. Teaching people procedures helps them perform tasks more skillfully. Replacement: In complex situations people will need judgment skills to follow procedures effectively and go beyond them when necessary.
2. Decision biases distort our thinking.  Replacement: Decision biases reflect our thinking.  Rather than discouraging people from using heuristics, we should help them build expertise so they can use their heuristics more effectively.
3. (Sub-point to 2) Successful decision makers rely on logic and statistics instead of intuition.  Replacement: We need to blend systemic analysis and intuition.
4. To make a decision, generate several options and compare them to pick the best one.  Replacement: Good decision makers use their experience to recognize effective options and evaluate them through mental simulation.
5. We can reduce uncertainty by gathering more information.  Too much information can get in our way.  Replacement: In complex environments, what we need isn’t the right information but the right way to understand the information we have.
6. It’s bad to jump to conclusions – wait to see the evidence.  Replacement: Speculate, but test your speculations instead of committing to them.
7. To get people to learn, give them feedback on the consequences of their actions.  Replacement: We can’t just give feedback; we have to find ways to make it understandable.
8. To make sense of a situation, we draw inferences from the data.  Replacement: We make sense of data by fitting them into stories and other frames, but the reverse also happens: our frames determine what counts as data.
9. The starting point for any project is a clear description of the goal.  Replacement: When facing wicked problems, we should redefine goals as we try to reach them.
10. Our plans will succeed more often if we identify the biggest risks and then find ways to eliminate them.  Replacement: We should cope with risk in complex situations by relying on resilience engineering rather than attempting to identify and prevent risks.
11. Leaders can create common ground by assigning roles and setting ground rules in advance.  Replacement: All team members are responsible for continually monitoring common ground for breakdowns and repairing the breakdown when necessary.

All of his replacement claims have common themes of adaptability, experience, and expertise winning over stricture, linear thinking, and risk management.  I’ve found almost all of his ideas to be directly applicable to running a startup and the challenges of making decisions in that kind of environment.  You are constantly in the shadows, with only hints of illumination peeking through.

Some of his replacements are no-brainers on a surface level.  Procedures are dangerous and often have glaring holes you may suspect but may not be able to pinpoint.  Of course data and your frame for looking at it are equally important, and one would expect that over time and with experience you will be able to make more decisions successfully from intuition alone over careful analysis.

His more subtle examples include statements about goal setting, risk management, and heuristics.  These examples are especially applicable to teams of people and early stage projects.  It’s nearly impossible to set goals in the beginning of projects when there are so many unknowns.  Admitting this, and acknowledging that you will have to discover and revise your goals along the way, let’s you clear your mind of these issues and get back to doing.  During the process, if you stay aware, the goals you were looking for will emerge on their own.

An early stage company is essentially a group of people trying to do something together.  Each person will have their quirks and challenges that make them difficult to work with.  You can tinker with a lot of things in a startup’s early days, but not your founding team and stars.  By their nature they will usually add a ton of value, but they are unlikely to change.  It’s up to you to build a culture where the erratic geniuses around you can get their work done, while minimizing their disturbances to progress elsewhere.  A lot of my job is just supporting systems that create a more resilient environment where these folks can still thrive.

These people are just another kind of risk.  Accepting you can’t change or get rid of them is the same as accepting that there are risks you are blind to, that you are in a complex situation where instead of a focus on risk elimination you should focus on risk tolerance.  You will never be able to list everything that could go wrong and rat out the issues, so you must create an environment that is robust and resilient against these risks.

Some of the biggest ideas missing from Klein’s book come from war.  Although he used a few examples from the modern military to show where local problems occur due to a misguided belief in some of the claims above, he made no mention of Boyd and his work on adaptability and the OODA loop, in which expertise and intuition are the keyholes.  Klein even has a diagram of his own that looks like a dumbed down version of the loop.

Clausewitz’ idea of friction also gives us a unique stance from which to appreciate Klein’s work.  Friction is a very apt term to use when thinking about startup problems.  Acknowledgement of its ever-presence, with the care to combat it using the toolkit Klein provides, just might help us get better at making good decisions in our complex world.

Blood Meridian is infamous for the murder and violence described in its pages, most of which is at the hand of or impelled by the judge.  Brilliant and skilled in crafts of life and death, the judge wants us to admit that nothing can ever happen unless someone bares witness.  He says “every man is tabernacled in every other” and asks “what could be said to occur unobserved?”  These thoughts, coupled with his view of war as a birthright and a process for culling nature, allow the judge to lead his small band to murder countless indians, bandits, and innocents they find on the road.

It is not to be confused with a moral quest, indeed the judge is suspicious of members of his band who hold a moral lens to the world.  Instead the judge dances through the pages, his victims baring witness to himself and his marauders just before they’re squeezed out of this world, the judge their final observer.  They will not forget him.  Their observation and death reinforce his identity as earth’s great observer and final suzerain.

One of the more interesting ideas I’ve seen lately comes from James March’s analysis of Don Quixote and its implications for leadership.  He’s done lectures and published books and a video about it, but basically he says that leaders do their jobs by fulfilling a strong identity.  External rewards shouldn’t matter and are even counter-productive, once you’ve declared what you are you are beholden to a number of principles that require you to act a certain way.  This idea is no different than problems central to life – early adulthood is usually described as a struggle to find and know ourselves.

An implication of all this is that if your identity and the universe conspire together to put you in a position of leadership, then your view of yourself is going to effect other people.  Maybe you see yourself as a Type A, an alpha male, or an entrepreneur.  Maybe it’s more subtle than that, some of the best leaders would not dare ascribe those archetypes to their name.  To say that we should be on a quest to find ourselves or know ourselves has always seemed a trite and self-indulgent maxim, ennobled by Beat literature and embraced by reflective adolescents everywhere.  But it may be more important than we think.  Leaders make decisions all the time that, given their status, affect more than one person and sometimes millions of people.

Given the example of the judge, and using the lesson from March, we see that one’s identity will have a profound effect on the rest of the world.  Self-examination and guidance toward a healthy identity become moral imperatives if we are to avoid destruction of the type caused by the judge.  He is the more rare and extreme example, but everyday leaders and managers run around with rampant self-delusions, destructive self-images, and poor empathy.  Mistakes by inexperienced leaders can often be coached away, but not when the problems run this deep.  You have to decide for yourself what you are and how you are tabernacled in your own mirror.  And if you are to be ethical and effective, embraced by colleagues and other men, you better put in the work and embark on that great study of how to be.

The analogy I’ve always used is citations in academia.  If you’re an academic researcher, your credibility and importance is generally based on the number of other scholarly works that cite your own papers.  Herbert Simon had over a thousand citations which makes him a pretty big deal.  My goal with this project is to find who is the most cited artist – who coined a phrase that has been used more than any other?

Finally, after probably 2 years of letting this project sit on the sidelines, and after dragging a colleague at Infochimps away from work over enough weekends, I have started to hack away at my questions.  I have imported a database of around 45,000 songs with lyrics into MySQL and am running queries against it.  The data is not perfect, if you’ve ever managed an iTunes collection then you know how frustrating the metadata can be to organize, but these initial queries are probably within a reasonable ball park.

I am not yet proficient enough to run anything too complicated, so I’ve started with a dozen or so words and phrases that I know are common.  What follows is the phrase, the number of artists who mention it, and then (if interesting) the top artists who mention it and their total songs that contain the word/phrase.

I am already really pleased with the results, but there is a lot more that I want to do.  I have a friend that’s a brilliant designer who will work up a visualization for some of the final results.  Currently my data doesn’t have any years attached to the albums, so once I manage to get that in there then I can understand who said each of these phrases first.  It could be nice to attach geography to each artist, so we could possibly plot the progression of the phrase across the US.

If you have any questions you want to suggest I’d love to incorporate them into the project, and if there are any popular phrases that stick out in your mind please suggest them to me.  There is also another project out there doing something similar called the Hip Hop Word Count, which looks really promising.

What about the things in me that I need to change? Those glaring flaws that they will see in me. How able am I to actually change those?

It’s like once a month the same black dog comes out to misdirect my thinking, to distract and steer me towards self-pecking. It’s always for the same causes – laziness, inexperience, and a hesitation to confront somebody. But is there a better root to focus my efforts on? The resolution to change any of those only ever lasts a few days.

I get the feeling that many organizations only give singular missions to teams or subordinates and forget to unify everything.  It’s apparent when we’re dealing with a company that is making enormous mistakes on the ground, but everybody thinks they’re doing their job correctly because their individual mission is following through.  Nobody there has taken a step back to see how little actions may going to tear that company down in the long run.  Maybe business development’s success is linked to number of logos on a partner page, PR’s success is tied to number of press articles, and development’s success is based on the rate they can crank out new features.  Great!  But what ties it all together?  What is the point?

This mistake happens internally sometimes for us, too.  We grew so fast over the last few months that when a new employee came on they were told a bunch of tasks and they weren’t given a sense for how they fit in the overall picture.  The people I work with are so bright that whenever they come up with something we could do it is almost always a good idea, but not always is it central to our mission.  Or maybe it does relate to our mission, just not yet.  With a small team and a limited amount of cash in the bank we can only expect to inch our way to our goal as a unit.  There can be almost no splintering of functions or projects across our tiny organization, every move has to count.

The word (another German one) for an individual mission or focus is schwerpunkt, and it must be born of the auftragstaktik.  At Infochimps we have one goal – to be the plumbing for the data web.  To that end, our organization has 3 teams – a business development team, a data team, and a site team.  Business development’s job, or schwerpunkt, is to listen to as many people as possible for which data is valuable and to evaluate opportunities for the company.  Data team’s schwerpunkt is listen to this feedback and build products, and the site team’s schwerpunkt is to build the best site possible that enables this pipeline.  So long as everyone is working with their schwerpunkt, the company will always be in motion towards its goal.  Partner logos, press articles, and site features are only means to this end.

Prehension is when your hand knows what to shape itself to before it picks up a familiar object, say a lighter or a hammer.  Consider what this is like for the master blacksmith who has struck his hammer 10,000 times.  His mind, shoulder, and arms expect and conform to every exact action he takes with that tool.  Or consider a mind of prehensility, a mind that shapes itself to new ideas and challenges.

Sennett highlights challenges as an important step in the process of mastery but gets more technical than saying that this is just “to learn.”  Challenges aren’t only a ground for finding solutions, but are where we go to find problems.  You have to break some things or identify when they do not work to understand them.  An auto mechanic will know an engine after having broken it down to pieces and put it back together.  To get your startup business right, you must discover and understand why you’re not selling enough or developing the right product.

You can use the process outlined in The Craftsman in any pursuit.

This got me thinking.  A millionaire by today’s standards and he is still making decisions on basic emotions.  His daughter cries for home so he pulls out the purse and provides work and the livelihood for the architect, suppliers, and laborers on a massive project.  Imagine that – his want to make his daughter happy supported hundreds of people because of his decision.

Now imagine Ebay’s former CEO Meg Whitman championing the purchase of Skype for $2.6B.  Everyone around her agreeing to it, an $8.5B bureaucratic machine of lawyers and bean-counters mobilizing to make this happen.  In the end it was a bad decision, a poor fit.  Should have never happened.

What emotions were at play here?  What basic feelings made her and the people around her go through with this?  Whatever they were they weren’t enough.  The real issues weren’t strong enough on the table, and the quest was wrong.

Infochimps is still a small startup, and any decisions we make only have a swath of 3-10 people.  But it is so important for us to maintain our focus while we burn cash.  A slight deviation from the course at this stage can lead to a difference of hundreds of miles at the end.

I try to ask these these questions whenever an important decision is on our minds.  What is really pulling us in this direction?  Where are there biases?  Why should we do this?  What would our advisors say?  What could this mean 6 months, 1 year, and 5 years down the road?  What have we learned from decisions like this in the past that can make this experience better?

-Isn’t the DEMO conference, where we just launched at, just another trade show?  I doubt they would dare use those two words in any place associated with that “elite” high-technology conference.  But trade show is the only way I could get across to my own father what it really is.

-Seth uses the music industry as an example of something that is fundamentally changed.  The phonograph is only 120 years old.  The music industry, as a distribution system, is a very, very young industry.  Even so – the very first commercialization attempts, before distribution was even an issue, involved the sale of special concerts and premium content, in Mozart’s case his manuscripts and biographies, which is where things are returning.

-My roommate is a general contractor and has been building his website for the past month.  Just through maintaining this and his Google listings, he is able to get a handful of calls per week.  This is still just advertising.  Thanks to Craigslist (just classifieds), $4.95/mo hosting plans (just a brochure), and Google (just a phone directory listing) he is able to participate in the industry at little or no cost and compete with entrenched players that can afford the old ways of doing things.

At the least, what these new tools and technologies do is help us to focus on the fundamentals – great products, content, and service.

I work at http://infochimps.org/, where I do business and customer development.  Recently I have been bringing in more help, from technical programmers and data mechanics, to internship roles to help me in my position.  We are doing some of this through on-campus recruiting and the students that listened in Business Administration 101 are the worst applicants that I get.

Their resumes are boring and bland.  In BA101 you are taught how to write a three paragraph cover letter saying that you look forward to this ____ position.  That you’re a hard worker, your GPA shows it, have great communication skills, and you look forward to working in an office environment.  And then include nothing else, because employers do not want to see that.  I know they do, I was there.

I get these applications, with good GPA’s, some work history, and my first question is always “Have you been out of the state of Texas?”  In the interview, their most important answer is the one to “Tell me about a project or experience that you’ve had that was self-directed.”

The directors of the business school programs somehow don’t see that these are the most important qualities any excellent employer is looking for.  I want to know if you were born in Panama and spend 2 months a year there.  That’s COOL.  That means you may see things differently than everyone else.  When a business school disencourages the inclusion of this on a resume, and even the three years you may have spent living on a sailboat in the Caribbean, they are seriously fucking you in the ass.