Monthly Archives: April 2025

Why engineers and cyclists make for good innovators

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These areas, through necessity, teach sound innovation practices.

In engineering, the necessities are to try to avoid killing or hurting people and also to make sure things work before spending a bunch of money on building a full scale version, having learned the lesson in past experience that you rarely know what you don’t know ahead of time.

So, before building a bridge with a new design just from a set of plans, it is often built on smaller scales and put to the test in the real world to find out what they don’t know.

I remember in one of my engineering classes seeing the footage of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse to make this exact point. That stuck in my head and I think of it often. The bridge itself seemed good enough on paper, but in the real world it didn’t play well with crosswinds. It’s not obvious. Hey, make sure the crosswinds don’t start vibrating the the bridge at a resonant frequency!

In cycling, the necessity is that you learn to avoid making untested changes to your bike, clothing, training, sleep cycle and nutrition right before some big event, because it can cause an unintended outcome that spoils your big event.

You also learn that it’s good to do some course recon work and go for a shakeout ride or two in the area and on the course, just so you know the lay of the land and if your chosen set up will work.

If you want to buy a new pair of cycling shoes, you try to avoid making the first ride in them be the big event. You also don’t throw out your old shoes until you determine if the new shoes will work.

So, you try to give yourself a couple weeks worth of rides in the new shoes to see if they fit right and don’t cause rubbing or blisters. We ‘test’ them out. Then when they past the test, we’ll use them in the big event and feel comfortable throwing the old shoes out.

Every now and again we violate that rule and are punished and reminded of why we have that rule. I had a friend violate it and buy new shoes before a long, multi-day event two years ago and he was kicking himself the whole way because the new shoes ended up being too tight and made his feet hurt and made the event less enjoyable for him.

For people with these backgrounds, this type of stuff becomes second nature.

But for some reason, these lessons are lost on the folks who innovate at many companies.

They don’t think it’s necessary to put something to the test before rolling out. In the past few years, I’ve seen companies roll out a big new systems and big new products with disastrous results because they didn’t test them out.

The disasters could have been easily avoided by testing them out and finding the bugs and fixing them.

But, in all cases, the folks who made the roll decision were overconfident, just like my friend with his new shoes for the bike ride.

They had not learned the lesson that they don’t know what they don’t know.

Sadly, I’ve seen the backed of these flops, and they resist that lesson. They think they can avoid the disaster next time simply by thinking harder to identify all possibilities, rather than simply putting it to the test.

They almost take offense to the idea that they should put something to the test.

That part I haven’t figure out, yet. How do engineers and cyclists seem to learn pretty quickly that the best way to find out what they don’t know is to test something in the real world, but these folks continue to believe they can outsmart the real world?

It’s a possibility that engineering and cycling end up selecting for folks who are able to learn that lesson and folks that don’t end up going onto other things.

If the media did the job people thinks it does…(2)

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…it would be clear to more people who the phonies are.

But, they don’t for a few reasons. One is, the phonies leverage their power to make it costly for media to expose them, so they play nice. Or, members of the media are just as phony, so exposing others’ phoniness risks it backfiring on them to expose their own.

This occurs in all levels of politics, too, even corporate politics. Peons avoid calling out the phoniness of their leaders because they want to keep their job. And, corporate bureaucrats often avoid calling out the phoniness of other corporate bureaucrats because they might get their own phoniness called out.

“Snapchat CEO teaches new employees a strict lesson” on their first day

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I saw this headline and rolled my eyes because it reminds of the clever hoops lots of companies are proud about making their new or potential employees jump through.

The first thing I do was look at their stock price to see if any of this cleverness translates to business performance. Snapchat stock price is down 30% in the last year. Strike one.

But, then I read the article and changed my mind some because I agreed with a few things he said.

He laid off 10% of his employees last year to remove hierarchy “claiming that focusing too much on job titles can hinder people from developing great ideas. The more that you focus your organization around hierarchy, I think the less you’re focusing on the right things, which is how are we making sure great ideas are coming from anywhere, getting surfaced, and being built.”

The test he gives to new employees is for them to present an idea on their first day. It likely won’t be a good idea, but it opens the door to creativity and teaches the lesson that “the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.”

He said, “only 1% of the ideas that Snapchat’s design team pitches are good.”

I agree with all that.

My guess is that employees don’t learn those lessons from that activity. They probably think it’s stupid, do what they need to do to get through it and move on and forget about it.

I do like what he said about job titles.

The natural progression of a successful company is for its purpose to transform from making stuff customers want to providing members of its bureaucracy with job progression and status.

When that happens, achievement is measured by how well you did what someone with status in the bureaucracy asked you to do, at best, or how much leverage you can get on those with status to propel your progression and job title attainment.

Making stuff that customers want becomes a distant thought.

Maher is almost there

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Maher met Trump and said he wasn’t the same guy he’s seen elsewhere and doesn’t know why.

It’s hard to believe that someone who is that close to media doesn’t know why.

It’s the media, Bill.

They cherry pick, frame and cleverly word what they show you to lead you to make conclusions they want to you to make.

They do this so well that you believe that’s what they actually reported to you, rather than what they led you to conclude on your own.

It’s even a discipline taught in journalism school called ‘strategic communications,’ and is heavily tied in with marketing and propaganda.

It’s hard for me to believe Maher doesn’t know this. It makes me wonder if he’s playing dumb or is he really that dumb?

Tariffs

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What I expect to hear from free market economists: Dear Leaders of other countries, your smart move here is to eliminate your tariffs and not retaliate with even more. If our leader is threatening to injure us because you are injuring your citizens, it’s even dumber for you to injure your citizens even more than you are already.

Strangely, they only focus their criticism on our leader.

Also, they tell us tariffs are taxes that just raise prices.

That makes me wonder, don’t all taxes just raise prices? Why the special vigor for tariffs over all other taxes?

Some say, tariffs are more distortionary than other forms of taxation.

Then I wonder, are they more distortionary than a 7,000 page income tax code or property and sales taxes that can vary widely from one locale to another?

I mean, I can buy the same bag of coffee at store A in my town and pay a few points lower sales tax rate than store B because Store A is not in a special TIF zone that has a higher tax rate. Why don’t economists cry about that? Is that not distortionary?

“Sludge” and “Encrapification”

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Coincidentally enough, the Freakonomics podcast recently did 2-parter podcast on ‘sludge,’ which sounds a lot like ‘encrapification’ as coined by mountain bike YouTuber Seth on his Berm Peak channel (I wrote about that here).

One guest in the second part put some good words to some thoughts I’ve had in the business world.

That guest was Jennifer Pahlka. I’ll have to check out her book, “Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.“

…we have this concept in consumer tech called a product manager, and it is always confused in government because it sounds like project manager. There are thousands of project managers in every department, agency, whatever, and until recently in government there were zero product managers. So what’s the difference? Project management is the art of getting things done. And there’s so much to do in government, that we have amazing project managers, and lots of them. But product management is the art of deciding what to do.

Project managers get things done in the business world and getting things done is seen as success, so project managers get promoted and end up running the company and lots of things get done.

Project managers crowd out the product managers. So, nobody is deciding what to do. So, what gets done is a bunch of busy work that doesn’t move things forward.

Host, Dubner, puts a good twist on it:

I once heard someone really smart — she used to run universities — and she would talk about how she hires people generally. She said, “I don’t want to hire people who are good at following rules. I want to hire people who have good judgment.” And that really stuck with me, because I’ve come to see that a lot of the trouble in the world — or at least a lot of the sludge — is caused by people who are pretty sure that they’re doing the right thing by following the rules. And it’s very simple to follow rules. It’s kind of paint-by-numbers.

That’s a good distinction between project and product managers. Project managers follow the rules. That is rewarded in bureaucratic organizations.

People with good judgement would rather work on stuff that matters and that drives the rule followers crazy.

This also leads to…(Pahlka again):

I think that in many government processes, they have gone so far towards just following rules — and for reasons that we should talk about, right? There’s real incentives for that, that the public helps create. But we’ve now tried to design processes in which you cannot criticize the judgment of anybody in them because literally no judgment was used. And the outcomes of those systems are almost across-the-board poor. 

This reminds me of so many flops in the business world that get written off because the approach seemed like the smart and right approach, so it wasn’t really anybody’s fault that it flopped.

Another good quote:

We have a really incorrect balance between what I call “stop energy” and “go energy.” There are lots and lots of people in government whose jobs are to make sure something doesn’t happen. And there are very few people whose job is what I call delivery.

Amazon has ‘go energy.’ They call it ‘default to yes.’ When a new idea comes up, don’t say no. Ask how it can be tried?

Businesses have lots of ‘stop energy,’ too. It’s baked into cultures. To see if your organization has ‘stop’ or ‘go’ energy, simply bring up an idea, any idea, with a few people and see what happens.

Do they default to telling you all the reasons why it won’t work? That’s stop energy.

Or, do they try go figure how they can help you see if does work? That’s go energy.

..one government delivery person said to me once, “We were six people trying to deliver the product. We had easily 60 people telling us what we couldn’t do.” Now, those 60 people are well-intentioned and often very thorough, very bright, very dedicated public servants. I mean them no disrespect. It’s not their fault that there’s 60 of them and 6 people trying to deliver the product. That’s a problem of leadership, to say, That ratio is wrong, let’s fix it.

I have a similar story from corporate America. A field leader was sitting next to me in a big conference room with about 25 people from various departments at HQ that he was trying to convince to let him try something new in his region.

Just like Pahlka said, they were all bright, well-intentioned and just doing their job, but they were raising concern after concern and making it tough for this field leader.

He leaned over to me and said, “This is why our competition is kicking our butt. They’re small and don’t have a roomful of people they need to convince to just try something. They just try it and see if it works.”

Pahlka also mentions that she has been approached by folks like me from the business world who let her know they also see these same things in the business world, not just the government.

Her response is that the government is different because it usually has a monopoly on what it’s trying to do, where businesses have competition.

I’ll have to think about that.

Companies suffer by promoting the wrong people

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How?

They confuse “doing what you’re told to do really well” with producing results that drive growth and profitability.

That results in companies where all the leaders are ‘successful’ for having achieved their positions, but the company isn’t any better than it was one year, five years or ten years ago. In many cases, it’s worse off.