Over the past few years, I’ve read quite a few books related to organizational psychology and culture, such as:

• Emotional Intelligence (Goleman)
• The Element (Robinson)
• Authentic Happiness (Seligman)
• Mindset (Dweck)
• Switch (Heath & Heath)
• The Innovator’s Dilemma (Christensen)
• The Lean Startup (Ries)
• Peopleware (DeMarco & Lister)

All of these books use scientific evidence to support ideas that in many ways fly in the face of conventional wisdom. What’s surprised me most is that many of the clear best practices have still not been widely adopted, sometimes decades after first publication. Culture and habits are difficult to change.

But I’m still an idealist at heart, and I want to work at a place where learning is rampant, emotional support is plentiful, work-life balance is required, and creativity is allowed to flourish. Not just to pay lip service to these things, but to achieve them for real. We know that happier employees do better and more valuable work, and we know how to create this kind of environment. It just requires upsetting a lot of the assumptions of mainstream business culture.

I came up with a partial list of what I see as indicators of organizational health. These are meant to be provocative, since most companies do not fit all of these descriptions. Also, I realize that in many cases the devil is in the details, and taking these ideas to the extreme would generally be disastrous. But I stand behind the overall goals.

1. Employees should goof off and be silly together.
   If not, the community is weak and team members need to get to know each other better or be re-assigned.
    
2. Employees should go home early more often than work overtime. If teams feel the need to stay late, there is too much pressure and not enough focus on long-term priorities.
    
3. Employees should typically be working on something different than last year. If not, we have stopped learning; work will become boring and our products and culture will become stale.
    
4. Employees should frequently make mistakes and celebrate them. If everything works on the first try, then we are not being creative enough.
    
5. Employees should feel comfortable challenging any assumption or idea. If the boss is always right, team members feel shut out. If crazy ideas are not encouraged, the environment is not supportive enough.
    
6. Evaluation should be qualitative. Easy metrics such as quotas and billable hours convey a lack of trust and reduce our intrinsic motivation.
    

Achieving goals like these will always be a work in progress, but I think they are worth striving for.

Recently a student I tutor was looking for an online graphing calculator. My brief internet search did not uncover anything satisfactory. But today I found one that really is good. It has only been available for a few months, and works on iPads too.

https://www.abettercalculator.com/

All written in HTML5/Javascript. Probably almost any application that was available ten years ago on any platform can now be ported to the web.

Camera: iPhone 4.

I’ve been thinking for a while about companies that focus on making the highest quality products. I wrote most of this essay several years ago, but didn’t finish editing it until now.

The companies that I’ve spent time thinking about are Patagonia (after reading Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard), Omni Group (because I worked there), and Apple (because it’s perhaps the most well-known company in this category). Some other examples, that I won’t cover here, are Zappos and Theo Chocolate.

I started categorizing these companies as “quality-focused” after seeing a series of industry research reports in 2009 showing that Apple is far more successful than most people assume, given their market share. For example, Apple sold less than 10% of laptops in the US, but about 90% of the laptops costing more than $1000. They sold less than 2% of cellphones worldwide in 2009, yet earned 30% of the total profit in that market. (Today, they have 9% unit share and 75% of profits.) In other words, Apple sells only high-quality, value-added products that can command a wide profit margin.

I realized that Omni and Patagonia similarly have a strategy of selling high-quality, high-price, high-value products. (And I believe the products are worth their higher cost: they last longer, work better, save time and hassle, and are plain old more fun to use than the cheaper competing products in their respective markets.)

I wondered: What else do these quality-focused companies have in common? Is it an entirely different way of doing business?

The first interesting parallel I noticed was that all three companies have gone through a “crisis” period that forced the companies to clarify and strengthen their vision (goals, values, purpose) and fully commit to it. Patagonia’s growth spiraled out of control in the early nineties and the company almost went bankrupt before simplifying their product line and clarifying their goals. Steve Jobs is widely credited for rescuing Apple from demise with his razor-sharp vision for product design and his insistence on quality and simplicity. Omni, too, went through a painful transition that resulted in the loss of a co-founder and a clarified statement of the company’s mission and values.

All of these companies also go to great lengths to treat their employees well. There are flexible working hours, plenty of vacation time, convenient and healthy cafeterias, top-notch health benefits, etc. “Let My People Go Surfing” refers to Patagonia’s policy that employees are welcome to skip work every now and then when the waves are high. Apple and Omni’s offices include game rooms, movie viewing areas, and lots of couches. Salaries are generous. The reasoning behind all this has to do with the fact that you need high-quality employees to make high-quality products. One way to attract and retain high-quality employees is to make them appreciate and enjoy working with you.

Patagonia founder Chouinard frequently points out that for many (most?) companies, the real product is the company itself.  In other words, the thing that the founders, executives, board, and employees really care about is maximizing company profits, so that the company itself can be sold or the shareholders can be paid.  The products the company actually makes, and the customers who buy those products, are secondary to the “bottom line.”

By contrast, for the quality-focused companies, the actual products and customers are the real bottom line. Employees emotionally care about customers. They spend time on things that might not be “worth the effort” in a strict sense, but are simply the right thing to do for people they care about. Profitability is only important as a means to this end. As Omni’s philosophy statement puts it, “Businesses that lose money can’t make good software for very long.” Note that Apple has achieved this despite being publicly traded, i.e. with shareholders who presumably demand profit above all else. Maintaining a high-quality value structure is presumably easier for privately held companies like Patagonia and Omni Group.

The primary challenge for any quality-focused company is the need to compete against profit-focused corporations who treat their employees worse and try to rip off the high quality products. How do the quality-focused companies succeed in facing off this threat?

The first requirement is to keep the products truly high quality in a way that customers can trust. Customers will only pay extra if they trust that the high-quality claim is true. There are many ways of establishing that trust, such as always being honest (duh), establishing a consistent brand image to associate with that honesty, and having domain experts recommend your products. World-class rock climbers, skiers, etc. recommend Patagonia equipment. And computer experts in various professions recommend Omni software to their colleagues.

A second requirement is consistent innovation. You have to do this to stay ahead of the copycat competitors. In economics parlance, this gives you temporary monopolies because you have a unique product. Innovation requires creativity, and creativity requires happy employees. Research shows that people under stress, depression, pessimism, and poor health are simply not very creative. This is another part of why caring for employees is so central to making high-quality companies work.

A third requirement is that you protect your innovations, which can be done via speed to market, secrecy, and intellectual property law. Apple is notorious for the lengths to which they go to achieve secrecy. Employees working on yet-to-be-released products have to pass through four layers of security doors to get to their offices. Some emails are sent with identifiable patterns of spaces so that if the message leaks out, the perpetrator can be pinpointed. Apple also applies for dozens of patents each year. It’s harder for smaller companies to maintain a patent portfolio, so secrecy and speed to market are key.

The last requirement I will list (though there are probably many others) is the ability to focus on a narrow and exclusive set of products. Apple has an exceptionally small number of product lines; Steve Jobs has said that he is just as proud of the products he decided not to make as he is of the ones that actually made it to market. Patagonia similarly found that they had to simplify their product line to be profitable. Making high-quality products is difficult and time-consuming. The fewer products there are, the more time can be spent improving each.

My goal here is not to show that these companies are essentially the same; they have many important differences. Still, it seems that the decision to focus on high-quality products has implications for many aspects of a business’s operations and culture. Traditions and common wisdom from the wider business world may well be counterproductive for companies focused on quality.

If you run a company, make sure you understand your priorities.

“If the best designs are the least noticeable (helping yet not interfering), the real challenge is remembering that design is important.”

-me, just now

In grad school, I thought there were two types of advisors (and managers):

• “hands-on” advisors, who check in with you every day and are closely involved with the details of your work
• “hands-off” advisors, who are available for help and advice when you need it but don’t actively involve themselves in your work.

I experienced both types of advisor, and my theory was that you should go with the type that better suits your own personality. Anecdotally, students who tend to procrastinate do better with a “hands-on” advisor pushing them every day, while students who finish homework well ahead of time do better with a “hands-off” advisor who helps when needed and does not add extra pressure.

I’m now reading Peopleware, and realizing that neither style is really ideal. The ideal manager from that book tries to avoid applying pressure or being distracting (which seems hands-off) but spends much of their time actively trying to help their advisees succeed (which seems hands-on).

The real art of management, then (at least for creative/intellectual work), is helping other people to succeed in ways that ideally they will never even know you were involved.

This is analogous to how the best designs “get out of the way” so that the viewer does not even notice them (because they are focused on the function or content).

And really, we can think of management as the practice of designing an effective work environment for employees. You need to get to know your “users”, understand costs and benefits, solicit feedback, and iteratively improve the design of this environment.

I think Steve Jobs understood this, and was interested not just in designing products but in designing the company itself. It remains to be seen how well he succeeded in this latter pursuit.

Just one of many things an iPad can be.

Dear Editors,

I write regarding a recent article about education reform politics.

There is an entire discipline of professionals who study what works and what doesn’t work in education.  They have done research for decades in every state and all over the world, and they largely agree about what improves student outcomes and what doesn’t. I am talking about education professors, people with PhDs studying schools, teaching, and learning.

In your lengthy article about education reform, and in the larger conversation about these issues, the people who actually know what they’re talking about — education professors — are not consulted or quoted.  Instead it’s just a bunch of donors and politicians with “opinions”.  Can you help us move towards a more fact-based conversation by interviewing the experts the next time you report on education reform (or really any issue)?

Robin

A recent thread on LinkedIn discusses how user experience professionals can answer the question “What do you do for a living?” One contributor wrote:

“I help companies make their products more user friendly.” That’s a term most people understand. If they ask follow up questions I will go into more detail.

The term “user friendly” makes me think of the nineties, as in “Mac is more user friendly than Windows.” I hesitate before using it, because as a software designer, I want to go beyond “friendly” and make interfaces that are also more powerful, more fun, more educational.

But I too have found that “user friendly” is the term that normal (non-UX) people understand. We naturally anthropomorphize computers, and want to know whether they are friendly, like a person we would choose to spend time with.

Designers create this “user experience” via methods such as “human-centered design”, “user research”, “advocating” and “interaction design”… but these are all technical terms that don’t mean much to people outside the field.

What people really want to know is whether the end product will feel like a friend.

John Gruber has written an important critique of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. To me, the following is the most interesting core of the argument:

Prior to Jobs’s return to Apple, design was what happened at the end of the engineering process. Post-Jobs, engineering became a component of the design process. This shift made all the difference in the world.

Isaacson does not understand this.

My impression is that most technologists, journalists, analysts, and certainly the general public do not understand this either. But it is fundamental, and it is indeed the core of what I have always been most interested in doing. I use engineering to solve design goals.

It’s strange that this is a point of confusion, because engineers have always been tasked with creating products that are useful for humans. Perhaps the problem is that as engineering became more complex over time, engineers increasingly focused on their subfields, analyzing the quantitative properties of materials and semiconductors, and were no longer trained in what used to be called “ergonomics.” User-centered design is really just a return to the original intention of engineering — to create technology for humans. It is a reminder that the human side of the equation is just as important as the scientific side, and that these two are intimately connected.

Gruber points out a 5-word Steve Jobs quote that Isaacson should have paid better attention to:

Design is how it works.

In Gruber’s words: “engineering should and can be part of the art of design.”

From the Gates Foundation 2012 Annual Letter:

I still find it hard to believe that 95 percent of teachers are not given specific feedback about how to improve. Even more important than a pay schedule that rewards excellence is identifying and understanding excellence so that teachers know how they can improve. In all the meetings I have had with teachers around the country, and in the surveys we have done, it is clear that most teachers want more feedback and will use it to improve, even if the financial rewards for performance are comparatively modest.

“Those who wish to protect natural ecosystems learn, to their stupefaction, that they have to work harder and harder — that is, to intervene even more, at always greater levels of detail, with ever more subtle care — to keep them ‘natural enough.’”

-Bruno Latour, in Love Your Monsters

“The history of the design professions is largely a history of overqualification, of men and women who have insisted on doing more than either clients or public ever asked for.”

-Ralph Caplan, By Design

Horace Dediu makes an important argument that Apple’s stock price has been based simply on the value of its latest products, whereas “the process of product development at Apple is worth nothing.”

In other words, from the market’s perspective:

Innovations are valuable, but there is no such thing as an innovation process. If there was such a thing, then we could measure it and put a number on its value. Until then, innovation is nothing more than a spin of the roulette wheel.

Dediu’s unspoken point, of course, is that the market is missing something huge: Apple has honed and demonstrated its ability to repeatedly design, produce, and sell innovative consumer electronics products. I am absolutely convinced that their success is not due to luck but rather to a finely tuned innovation process. That doesn’t mean they will never release duds, of course, but it means that on the whole they can be counted on to continue to disrupt markets with innovative products. The wider technology community misunderstands this ability so deeply that instead of trying to copy Apple’s innovation process, they insist that it is nothing but good luck and good marketing.

The University of Washington has about 30,000 undergraduates, about 500 of which were enrolled in introductory classes in the statistics department. Assuming that number holds every quarter, 1500/30000 = 1.6% of UW students take an intro statistics class each year.

There are 18 million college students in the United States. If the overall percentage who take statistics is the same as at UW, then about 300,000 college students take intro stats each year in this country.

Bret Victor released a really excellent article about what is missing in the user interfaces of current technology, and what we should consider when crafting visions for the future. Compelling and easy to understand.

I call [iPad] technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade….

We live in a three-dimensional world. Our hands are designed for moving and rotating objects in three dimensions, for picking up objects and placing them over, under, beside, and inside each other….

To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.

Read the whole article, which has great pictures as well.

“There is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians, and spectators.”

-Liz Coleman, president of Bennington College [TED talk]

“Statistics: that’s a subject that you could and should use on a daily basis. It’s risk, it’s reward, it’s randomness, it’s understanding data. I think if… all American citizens knew about probability and statistics, we wouldn’t be in the economic mess we’re in today.”

-Arthur Benjamin [TED talk]

“Children starting school this year will be retiring in [2070]. Nobody has a clue what the world will look like in even 5 years time, and yet we’re meant to be educating them for it. The unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.”

 - Ken Robinson [TED talk]

I thought this was worth coming back to. From an article titled “Heart Before Head: The Legacy of Steve Jobs.”

Jobs: ”Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

You: What do my inner-voice and heart want most for me to do with my life?

Jobs: ”Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

You: If I trusted that eventually the dots will connect when I follow my heart, what would be my vision and what would I do next?

Jobs: ”Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”

You: What big choices would I make if I only had a short while left to live?

In high school, I made a website on ancient Roman architecture as a class project in world history. That was over ten years ago. A few days ago I got an email:

I recently came across your resource website at http://www.robinstewart.com/personal/learn/romarch/links.htm and I found it to be extremely helpful in some personal academic research I’m doing — I just wanted to say thank you.  As a student and an educator, it is a rare treat to come across such thoughtful and concise online resources like this, especially the older ones. In my humble opinion, this is one of the timeless treasures of the Internet.

I forwarded that along to the teacher of the history class, with the subject line “History project website still useful more than ten years later…” His response:

Hi Robin.  Wow.  That is really kind of awesome.  I wouldn’t have bet money that the site was still on-line. Bravo all over again.

I guess this is why I keep things around on my website.

To plan a statistical hypothesis test, specify the model you will use to test the null hypothesis and the parameter of interest. Of course, all models require assumptions, so you will need to state them and check any corresponding conditions.

When the conditions fail, you might proceed with caution, explicitly stating your concerns. Or you may need to do the analysis with and without an outlier, or on different subgroups, or after re-expressing the response variable. Or you may not be able to proceed at all.

-Intro Stats (De Veaux, Velleman, Bock)

From the trenches of science, it’s easy to label evolution deniers and global warming skeptics as dumb or at least uninformed. But we should remember that the scientific method is not an intuitive process, and takes a lot of time to learn.

For one thing, the scientific method is based on probabilities, which humans famously misunderstand. We play the lottery because we have a chance of winning, even though that chance is vanishingly small. We tend to think of very large or small probabilities as less extreme than they actually are, so when scientists say there is a 95% chance (or even a 99.9% chance) that, say, smoking causes cancer, it is easy for us to simply hear “they’re not sure.” Intuitive science is based on stories and anecdotes, rather than quantifiable statistics. We might pray and then find out that our friend returned to health. So there’s “a good chance” that the one caused the other. Isn’t that the same as scientists saying “there’s a good chance” that antibiotics were the cause of her recovery?

For another thing, it’s not immediately obvious that we need controls and placebos. If we want to find out whether an intervention works, why would we do an experiment that doesn’t actually use the intervention? Worse, isn’t it morally wrong in many cases to not give the intervention? In order to prove that an educational or healthcare strategy is effective, we have to not use the strategy in some classrooms and hospitals. Scientists are monsters!

These are just the first few tricky aspects of science that come to mind. As I re-read the Intro Stats textbook, I’m reminded how subtle a lot of this is, and how even professional scientists can sometimes get it wrong. That doesn’t mean we should be skeptical of science as a whole, though science itself relies on a healthy skepticism of individual results (another subtle distinction!). It does mean that scientists and journalists should try to explain the scientific process, over and over, day after day, when presenting results to the public. Because if you’re not doing science every day, it’s easy to forget how it works.

I hope to do what I can to help everyone do more science every day.

Apparently, a lot of people have read Three Cups of Tea, the book about Greg Mortenson’s work building schools in rural, mountainous Pakistan. Many have written reviews, and some have disputed his details (though not the broader story).

The normal reaction is to be amazed and inspired by the tenacity and success of this unusual character. And I don’t want to downplay that too much. But I look at the story from the perspective of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers; Carol Dweck’s Mindset; and Dan and Chip Heath’s Made to Stick (among other important books).

From those perspectives, here is a very unusual American who is most comfortable living with and working to help rural, mountainous tribes halfway across the world. It is no great mystery why he is good at that; Mortenson grew up in a foreign country with both parents dedicating their working lives to charity projects. He served in the army, learning to cope with discomfort and yet more foreign cultures and situations. He went to nursing school, learning to listen and care for patients. And finally, he spent many years practicing rock climbing and mountaineering, learning to survive in that sparse, rugged landscape. When he stumbles into Haji Ali’s village, he finally, miraculously, finds himself at home.

From that perspective, here is the story of a man who desperately, tenaciously tries to find a way to return to what he is most comfortable with. Psychologically, he is not unusual. What’s unusual is his exotic set of skills.

It’s easy for us to read this story and think about how hard it would be to leave home, live in medieval conditions for months, and organize the building of schools in hostile political and geographical terrain. But that is because we, unlike Mortenson, do not have extensive training doing charity work in primitive and hostile environments, and we do not feel at home in foreign countries.

From this perspective, I think the most interesting (and entertaining) aspects of the story are what he is not good at.

First, fundraising. He writes five hundred letters to celebrities he has never met. Later, he gives slideshow after slideshow all across the country to audiences essentially at random. He certainly understands tenacity; that’s how you win at rock climbing. But the way you win at fundraising is through connections and the media. The only significant money Mortenson ever received was accidental. A friend with connections to the mountaineering society writes an article for their newsletter, which is noticed by a wealthy ex-climber. Later, soon after 9/11, a journalist friend passes the story to a leading magazine, whose editors for the first time figure out how to describe the charity in a way that sticks: “books, not bombs.” Their cover story finally generates widespread donations. In all, Mortenson wastes years of time doing poorly thought out fundraising that has a minuscule probability of success. He read countless books on southeast asian culture and politics, but no books on effective fundraising. He should have responded to his failure by learning more or asking for help. He worked hard, where he should have worked smart.

Second, delegating. Here, Mortenson gradually improves over the course of the story. He delegates tasks that he is obviously not prepared for, such as driving, bargaining, and translating. But he only stops micromanaging the construction of the schools after Haji Ali (his most trusted mentor) walks him up a mountain and forces him to relent. And throughout the story he continues to insist on personally overseeing all of the projects that the organization undertakes. The board eventually convinces Mortenson to hire a few assistants for donor relations, website, etc., but he never hires another person to do the core work of overseeing the charity projects. In other words, he is ineffective at scaling the organization beyond what is essentially a one-man show. Again, this is not surprising, given that Mortenson has no training or experience in management. But he does not study management nor hire managers to make up for this shortcoming. Instead, he keeps the organization small.

If Mortenson’s true goal was to serve as many needy communities as possible in the rural Himalaya, he would be expanding the organization by training new generations of staff and volunteers to do the same work that he does, and he would be hiring fundraising and publicity experts to spread the word and apply much-needed political pressure.

But that’s not his goal. His goal is the same as all of us. To find our way home.

It bugs me that I still have not written up blog posts about some of the very best books I’ve read. In fact, my very first blog post was an unfulfilled promise to follow up with interesting thoughts on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There was too much to say, and not enough time to say it.

I think it’s true in general that the best books are difficult to summarize. Whereas I can easily summarize in a blog post the important ideas of a merely decent book, the really great books are concise and nuanced and reward a full and careful reading. What can I say in a blog post to do it justice?

So perhaps I will start creating placeholder blog posts, which simply tell you that a book is so worth reading, I’m at a loss to even describe it.