In which I disagree with a leadership expert
Ah, I love the HBR. No other publication is taken so seriously, yet so frequently contradicts itself.
Let’s look at this article about the latest JPMorgan dust-up.
The facts: JPMorgan created a unit to strategically trade against itself — sort of an internal hedge fund — to allow the larger organization to take greater risks. Trust me, it makes sense. Only, it seems that things got out of control, and they ended up losing 2 Billion dollars in a quarter.
Let’s look at the article. “If You’re Not Micromanaging, You’re Not Leading.” His thesis is that Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPM, should have gotten more into the numbers about the hedge unit earlier on.
And, sure, if he had done that, the whole thing wouldn’t have exploded. But what about their housing arbitrage unit? Or their capital funds guys? Or their corporate paper operation? How about that FaceBook IPO they were managing?
This is the truth: Plenty of people at the hedge unit knew that JPM was overexposed. And no one told the CEO, despite meeting after meeting. That is the problem. That is Jamie Dimon’s leadership failure. He either failed to have honest people in place, or failed to let them know that honesty was more important than the numbers.
And just to underline how mistake Mr. Schrage is about his numbers, I give you the fact that he is talking about numbers at all. I mean, he’s an academic — he has to write about numbers, otherwise his papers won’t get accepted. Look at his second example, however,
The raw material astonished and appalled him. The code was both hastily and poorly documented; the result was confusion and ambiguity that not only created delays but introduced errors into the software. The deadline-driven programmers, unfortunately, thought nothing of improvising just-in-time documentation via email, and misunderstandings and typos quickly propagated program-wide.
Everyone on that project knew what the problem was. They just didn’t tell the boss. Why? Because they had numbers to meet.
Source: rfrm
Offhanded prediction
Within 600 days, Mark Zuckerberg is no longer in charge at Facebook.
The corporate system is quite rigid, and shareholders have their quarterly expectations. And I think that they have overshot that with their valuation.
I suspect that Zuckerberg will cease having fun, and decide to go and enjoy some of his billions.
Source: rfrm
I suppose, if you wanted to camber down on details, you can argue that some of these peers are being convinced through logical argument, and then the peer effect spreads. I would argue that it is far more valuable to make narrative arguments, which are much more persuasive to groups than are logical arguments.
Source: fictn
Rescue me
55,000 Haredi attended a rally about the dangers of internet use.
Since women were not allowed at Mets Stadium, they attended the anti-internet rally via webcam.
Tickets, apparently, were available on Ebay.
Eytan Kobre, who runs a weekly Jewish magazine in Brooklyn, said that social media tools like Facebook and Twitter can lead people away from prayer. “I know that Facebook ruins marriages,” the New York Daily News quoted Kobre as saying.
There is a lot here, but I’ll keep it small.
1. A marriage (or faith, or anything at all) that can be ruined by Facebook is not that strong in the first place.
2. Lots of people want to be rescued from lots of things — sickness, death, paying the bills, and, apparently, the internet. Beware anyone selling rescue — it’s usually a prison in disguise.
And I thought that they were good at loyalty …
What to make of this?
Essentially, a bunch of Romney’s Foreign policy advisors dish about the frustrations of working with Romney to the Sunday edition of the New York Times. Feel free to read that last sentence again.
It was just one example of what Mr. Romney’s advisers call a perplexing pattern: Dozens of subtle position papers flow through the candidate’s policy shop and yet seem to have little influence on Mr. Romney’s hawkish-sounding pronouncements, on everything from war to nuclear proliferation to the trade-offs in dealing with China. In the Afghanistan case, “none of us could quite figure out what he was advocating,” one of Mr. Romney’s advisers said. He insisted on anonymity — as did a half-dozen others interviewed over the past two weeks — because the Romney campaign has banned any discussion of the process by which the candidate formulates his positions.
I could yak on about what this means in terms of policy making, dissension in the ranks, basic hiring, interest in the job, and essential leadership skills, but I’ll just ask a question:
Can you imagine what it would be like if Obama’s foreign policy advisors leaked to Fox News?
A million little bugs. (Android fragmentation. h/t Ars Technica)
Can you remember a time when iPhones didn’t have apps? I barely can. Now, they’re arguably one of the leading reasons to buy Apple hardware. They make it easy — mod of the iOS market is is 3 phones, 3 tablets (double the resolution!), and the odd iPod. All largely similar, all running the same operating system. 6 or 7 devices, one OS.
And then you have Android. 10,000s of devices, nearly 4,000 OS versions.
Design isn’t just aluminum and glass.
All psychological defenses have a common structure: that two legitimate but contradictory beliefs are held simultaneously, one consciously, one unconsciously, alternating variously. That way all possibilities are covered. Change is neutralized.
Why making sense matters
“[My Husband] wrote Amendment 1 was because the Caucasian race is diminishing and we need to uh, reproduce.”
Jodie Brunstetter, the wife of state Sen. Peter Brunstetter
“It can be argued that mayors represent the last functioning form of government in the country,” Rybak said. “Maybe I’m putting that too strongly. But mayors have a lot of credibility these days that you don’t find in Congress.”
The Obama campaign, Rybak said, is intentionally leveraging that credibility by using mayors as surrogates.
Feed the lizard … with chicken
Haidt’s studies bear out his message is that for every one of us, however rational we think we are, intuition comes first, and strategic reasoning second. That is, we rationalise our gut instincts, rather than using reason to reach the best conclusion
Been saying this for a while. But the kicker is at the start of the article:
Imagine, if you will, a man going to a supermarket, buying a ready-to-cook chicken, taking it home, and having sexual intercourse with it. He then cooks it and eats it.
The point being, there is nothing identifiably morally wrong with what the man did with the dead poultry. What could be worse than killing it? And besides, we wouldn’t look down on ways of using that chicken that are downright wasteful. And look, the cooking process is going to kill … anything he gave it in the not cooking process.
But, “ick”, right? And we have to find a way to explain that to ourselves.
