Studio Non Troppo

We humans tend to use categories a lot, at least as adults. Having a category allows us to save space in our brain; it’s like a compression system. By “compression system,” I just mean that it takes less brainpower to remember “a number whose six digits are eights” than to remember “eight hundred eighty eight thousand, eight hundred eighty eight” (it’s also easier to type).

So when someone asks me, “what do you do?”, it’s easy for me to reply that I am a professor. Or that I am a conductor. Or that I am a blogger.

Of course, I’m not principally a blogger. And, frankly, I feel uncomfortable with the statements “I am a professor” and “I am a conductor,” too. They’re convenient replies; they take considerably less time and brainpower to speak than it would to figure out and communicate my existential nature.

It can be good to take the easy way out and lean on a category. After all, I don’t want to bore absolutely everyone with endless self-analysis. But categories should be tools we can use to think; we shouldn’t let ourselves be the tools of categories.

So the next time you are trying to solve a problem, consider whether the categories you’re using to describe the problem are helping you solve it…or boxing you in.

Recently, there was a big scuffle at the university where I work: should the mountain in the logo be blue (as it is currently) or yellow? All sorts of complaints and tomfoolery, made unintentionally comic by several individuals’ use of the “reply all” button to emails that had been sent out to the campus-wide mailing list.

But with all the discussion and gratuitous character assassination, one point was ignored: if a brand is supposed to represent an entity, there has to be an entity to represent. A brand can’t do all the work of standardizing and unifying on its own.

There are many different ideas of what this particular university is, what “its” goals are (which begs the question of what is “it”), and what “its” goals should be, and these different ideas are protean, in flux, none definitively unifying the constituents.

If the brand had been designed to correspond closely to one of those identities, some people would be supportive, and others would dissent, but there would at least be an active correspondence, one that the supportive folks could leverage in their work and that the dissenting folks could rally around and against. But the brand is sufficiently vague so as to avoid choosing sides.

So it doesn’t brand.

To the outside observer, the university’s brand either fails to indicate and represent an identity, or it indicates and represents a failure to create identity.

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: debaird

If the lifeblood of business is relationships, how can an introvert succeed in business?

Being introverted doesn’t mean being weak at creating, nourishing, and sustaining relationships; being introverted just means not radiating a desire to interact with others in certain contexts. A more introverted person may initially shy away from sales and blogging, but there is more than one way to skin a cat (though I must say, that’s quite a saying when you reflect on it.  What possessed people to think about skinning a cat, anyway!?), and “introverted” and “extraverted” are not pure categories but rather social constructions.

Even with the internet’s constraints, and most certainly in spite of the deafening voices out there insisting that social medium X or Web 2.0 technique Y is “what everybody’s doing,” there must be ways of building and enjoying two-way relationships online that the introvert-leaning type can excel in.

What are they? What are the tools of choice, or the “modes of choice” while using the tools available?

Suggestions and observations welcome from extraverts and introverts welcome!

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.