Studio Non Troppo

In Seth Godin’s post today, he uses an example of a fuel conservation problem to illustrate the practical limitations and pitfalls of coming across logic (in this case, arithmetic):

A simple quiz for smart marketers:

Let’s say your goal is to reduce gasoline consumption.

And let’s say there are only two kinds of cars in the world. Half of them are Suburbans that get 10 miles to the gallon and half are Priuses that get 50.

If we assume that all the cars drive the same number of miles, which would be a better investment:

• Get new tires for all the Suburbans and increase their mileage a bit to 13 miles per gallon.
• Replace all the Priuses and rewire them to get 100 miles per gallon (doubling their average!)

Trick question aside, the answer is the first one. (In fact, it’s more than twice as good a move).

We’re not wired for arithmetic. It confuses us, stresses us out and more often than not, is used to deceive.

I’ll focus on the “trick question” part and leave the math to the reader (Seth also includes a couple links in his post with demonstrations of the arithmetic.)

In all likelihood, the best answer to the problem would be c) none of the above. Replacing the Suburbans with 50 mpg Priuses – or even with cars that get just 20 miles per gallon – would be far better than either of the alternatives. And that’s obviously only one of many alternatives, including radical ones such as “walk!” These aren’t answers Seth is unaware of; he was just making his point about arithmetic, confusion, and deception.

The point I want to make in this post is this:

Optimizing a bad choice rarely gets you ahead of where you could be if you made a better choice.

Having something work out the right way is not a matter of the thing.

As Malcolm Gladwell would put it in Outliers, it’s not just a lot of hard work that made Bill Gates more wealthy than 99.9999999% of the other people in the world. Nor was it his smarts. No, those things were necessary for his off-the-charts success, but they were not sufficient. It also took a constellation of opportunities, huge and irreplicable opportunities (though not necessarily evident as such at the time) for his hard work and smarts to pay off in such an over-the-top way.

When developing a product, say, for example, a bar of soap, it is absolutely critical to recognize that the nature of the new soap is not the key to its success in the marketplace.

The bar of soap simply does not exist on its own. It is tied, inextricably, to the particular marketing plan you attach to it. And to the time (the specific time, not just the time of day or time of year) in which it is released. And to the words you use when you describe your pet project to your friends. And to the global contingencies of soap manufacturing processes today, the day you email companies for production bids. Think the butterfly effect, smushed down to a world of implications in an instant.

There is no such thing as a bar of soap, separate from the myriad details necessary to imagine, design, create, sell, and use that bar of soap.

It’s so complicated, really, that it’s almost miraculous that any particular bar-of-soap idea succeeds. Richard Feynman talked once about how miraculous it seemed that of all the possible license plate numbers in the world, he just happened to see ARW 357 one morning. (Think about that, and feel the delightful discomfort in your mind. He was talking about how some things we consider miracles are examples of an outside-in way of looking at things that are equivalently, but differently and beautifully weird when we look at them from the inside out.)

Catching a wave is absurdly unlikely, and it’s easy to credit wave-catching surfers with superhuman skills. But it’s not that. It’s time on task, luck, sequences of opportunities, a willingness to keep playing with configurations. Aside from mental spin and Taoism, success is neither within our power nor outside of our power.

Everything, logic included, is necessary but not sufficient.

Isn’t that grand?

Photo: TravOC

In surfing, catching a wave requires being in the right place at the right time.

As a beginning surfer, I marveled at how exhausting all the paddling was: paddling out through the break, paddling to try to catch the wave, paddling back in to position after missing the wave. The really good surfers never seemed to work as hard to get up on a wave, though. They spent most of their time looking out to sea, watching for waves. (I never did learn how to read the water that way. The undulations I thought would become good waves didn’t.) Then they would gently paddle into position. (Why there? How do they know to go there?, I thought).

And then, while everyone else paddled furiously in vain efforts to catch the wave, the real surfers would make one, two vigorous strokes and be up.

Catching a wave requires one to be in the right place at the right time. It also requires a wave.

Photo: gilles chiroleu

About halfway between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, off the west side of I-25, stands someone’s great idea that didn’t make it. Originally designed as an outlet mall, it failed to attract enough customers and was bought up by a Native American group that renamed it “Traditions!” and restyled it as one-stop shopping for Indian gifts.

That failed, too, and some other enterprising folks bought up the whole outfit and turned it into a turnkey movie studio and production mall (can you call that a mall?)

I saw recently that it’s for sale again.

I’m guessing it has something to do with the location. People driving between Albuquerque and Santa Fe are, for the most part, pretty focused on getting to the city they didn’t leave from. The drive is about an hour but would be 15 minutes longer to exit I-25 and see the “great idea,” given that it’s not an easy-off, easy-on exit.

In any event, the “great idea” wasn’t.

Since so many people with much more disposable income than you come up with great ideas that fail, you should notice this and not take it for granted that your great idea will succeed.

But don’t take this the wrong way.

You should still try out your great ideas. Just spend a little time figuring out how you’re going to avoid bankrupting yourself if the idea doesn’t pan out. That way, you can keep rolling out new trials of new “great ideas,” and eventually, in retrospect, some of your guesses will turn out to have been right on.

Here’s a lesson from a university in how not to support your employees. For those of you in the academic world, nothing here will surprise you (you may accuse me of toning down the story, even). But for anyone in business, I hope at the very least this typical story will cure you of any grass-is-greener (or grass-is-more-sensible, or grass-is smarter) feelings you might have.

Photo: Bibi

I’m on the docket to teach an advanced problem solving course this coming fall, and the best book for this particular course happens to be published by a consultancy in England called IFR. The campus bookstore is a for-profit store with a contract with the university, and the bookstore routinely tries to minimize its costs by under-ordering textbooks.

Over time, the bookstore managers have found that some significant percentage of students orders textbooks from places like Amazon, where they can frequently be had for much less than the bookstore is able to sell them. So, rather than have to return books to the distributor, the bookstore just orders fewer books than will be needed for the course. For a course with an expected enrollment of 25, the bookstore may order 15 books.

What happens when there are too few books in the bookstore?

Now what generally happens is that this causes students to go through the first several classes of the semester without a textbook. In this particular case, with the book not available through Amazon and coming from across the pond, I’d say it’s more likely to be several weeks without a textbook.

Yay England!

So I contacted the author in England, who very generously offered to ship me a stack of the books (at a 15% academic discount, even) and to take back any books I didn’t sell to the students. Even with costly shipping from the U.K., the amount per book came out to about $62.

The sources I had found in the U.S. for the book (though only an older edition is available in the U.S.) ran about $100 plus shipping. I can imagine that the campus bookstore, if it even were willing to get the books, would probably have to charge at least $100.

But then the department chair asked the administration if it would be OK for our department to front the money for the purchase of the books, and the administration said no, it would not be OK.

The reason given was that the university has a policy of not “going around” the bookstore.

Now I understand the business interests of the bookstore in wanting an exclusivity agreement, but I don’t know why such a policy is really in the interests of the university.

Or, to put it another way: shouldn’t there be a policy that the university will help students get the best resources available? Or reward faculty who figure out ways to teach more effectively while reducing costs? You can imagine how disincentivized I will be in the future to try to work out a deal like this at this university.

What to do, what to do?

I think there’s a valuable lesson here: use your policies to help you help your employees and customers. Policies should be useful tools that can be–and should be–modified when necessary for you to achieve your goals. If your policies are running you, instead of being sensibly used by you, chances are they’re doing lasting harm to your business relationships.