What I’ve Learned So Far

I don’t have any particular brief for or against Texas Southern University, the Texas Youth Commission, or the Texas Department of Transportation (well, nobody like TxDOT) but I’m just glad to hear someone with clout — Texas Senate Finance chairman Steve Ogden — rake some bloated bureaucracies over the coals.  Patricia Kilday Hart does the explaining at Texas Monthly’s BurkaBlog.

This country would be a far better place, in my opinion, if politicians of all stripes took it upon themselves to ensure that publicly owned institutions really did spend their efforts promoting the public weal.  Ogden’s comments reinforce my overall notion that most government bodies could be shrunk by a sizeable fraction (a third? at least?) with net benefits to the citizenry — if we took the time and effort to shrink them the right way.

Check out this from my old schoolmate Lane:  Scott Berkun, Southwest Airlines, and putting customer service second

So much of what drew me to the Web when I first started working on it over a decade ago was the culture of the place. The companies I worked for, just like the Internet itself, were thoroughly and genuinely bottom-up. Good ideas could and did come from the top or the bottom of the hierarchy. Iconoclastic thinking was encouraged, not repressed. Failure was openly acknowledged, even espoused as a goal, not because the people in charge wanted to see you fail but because because being told it was ok to fail made it ok to try.

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So, maybe you heard about this little buyout that’s been proposed? If not, here’s a smorgasbord o’ links so’s you and I both can come back and re-inform ourselves at any future point.

• From the Texas Observer blog: Don’t Let the Sunshine Fool Ya
  The news that TXU, as part of a $44 billion leveraged buyout, will abandon eight of its 11 proposed coal plants; tackle global warming; invest in conservation; and slash some retail rates by 10 percent is certainly cause for celebration. Yet, the future of Texas’ power sector seems more uncertain than ever.
• From my pal Redneck Mother: Cleaner air, now less long-winded
• And now, an enormous slew of headlines from the New York Times, which has apparently decided to beat this story to death, and then beat the corpse. (They had practice with the recent bidding war for Equity Office Properties.)
  –Private Equity Buyout of TXU Is Enormous in Size and in Its Complexity
  –Deal’s Broader Effect on Coal Plants Is Uncertain
  –A Buyout Deal That Has Many Shades of Green
  –For TXU, One of the Street’s Fabled Barbarians Is Back in the Hunt
  –In Big Buyout, Utility to Limit New Coal Plants
  –At $45 Billion, New Contender for Top Buyout

As for what it all means? I haven’t been able to guess.

Chass it the senior baseball writer at the New York Times, and while he’s still a pro’s pro in covering the business side of the game, he has grown increasingly tiresome over the past few years as his curmudgeon-ish-ness has grown.

Read his current notes column — I’ll wait here.

Okay, I agree with Chass about the overheated media coverage of Roger Clemens, Bernie Williams, and the Jeter/Rodriguez spat.  It’s all just gossip that has very little to do with anything going on the field.  So, I’m with him on these points:  the collective baseball media can spare me any more stories on these “issues”.

But then we get to the silly comments of his last blurb, where he launches into an ill-informed ad hominem attack on Baseball Prospectus and its use of statistics. If Chass doesn’t want to learn anything new about baseball, that’s fine.  But his commentary on the VORP statistic is arrant and stupid — stupid because he takes such pride in his ignorance.  Why reject something just because it doesn’t appeal to you?  Especially when the point of that particular statistic is to simplify the calculation of how good a player is over the proverbial guy-named-Ed at the position?  It’s a simple, useful number that tells you a particular thing in a particular way — and it’s a hell of a lot more useful than batting average or OPS (on base-plus-slugging) to tell you how good a guy is, because it’s specific to the particular position and because it combines offense and defense.

“I suppose that if stats mongers want to sit at their computers and play with these things all day long, that’s their prerogative. But their attempt to introduce these new-age statistics into the game threatens to undermine most fans’ enjoyment of baseball and the human factor therein.”

I guarantee you that Joe Sheehan and Will Carroll, the top daily writers at Baseball Prospectus, watch more baseball than Murray Chass.  I guarantee it.  They love baseball — the game on the field and the numerical patterns that reflect how it is played and how it might be played better.  Now, those guys are half Chass’s age, so I’m not saying they know more about baseball than he does — but they’re using every single tool at their disposal to find out . . . which apparently Chass no longer needs to do.

Give me Peter Gammons any day.  He’s eligible for his AARP discount too but, unlike Chass, his mind is still young.

I like the point of view he expresses here, even though I’ve never had a drinking problem.

He’s right, you know:  we should spend more of our time poking at the powerful, not the pathetic.

A couple of years ago, the Habana restaurant on South Congress Avenue in Austin had a bad fire that shut it down for a while. My family used to go there regularly when we lived in The ‘04, but we live far enough away now that we don’t usually make it back.

This weekend we enjoyed Austin’s fabulous weather on Habana’s front veranda. I had “vieja ropa” and cafe con leche; my wife had Habana’s textbook Cubano sandwich; my kids enjoyed empanadas con tres quesos, with Goya mango nectar to drink. A good time was had by all, and I was pleased to see that the restaurant is bigger and better than ever post-reconstruction.

Give it a try: Habana on South Congress.

Yesterday I went into the store to pick up a few things to stock in the fridge at work. Maybe because I had just wadded yet more plastic bags into the bottom of my pantry for eventual recycling, it occurred to me that I must have something in my car that could serve in place of a grocery bag. A-ha! A canvas bag that I had used to tote library books earlier in the week!

Since the canvas bag is much roomier than a typical plastic grocery bag, I saved probably three bags — and had a nice chat with the grandmotherly cashier about how the plastic bags pile up — from that one trip. Tonight at the same grocery I saved at least a couple more bags when insisted to the young woman ringing me up that a single paper bag — no, not even double-bagged, thank you — would do for four half-gallons of milk. (Apparently, this suggestion was slightly radical for her.)

Well, after reading this on plastic bags — and the effective steps being taken to curb their use — I’m even more committed to giving them up.

Little things can mean a lot . . .

No, he’s not a social activist — he works for Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. As this article from Fast Company explains, he’s a banking analyst with the heart of a behavioral researcher:

He began mining behavioral economics–then an emerging discipline at the nexus of economics and psychology–to explain investors’ irrational behavior during the dotcom boom. He became intrigued by the role of human emotions in markets where prices were moved as much by psychological factors as by earnings reports.

This work interests me in part because I see smart people — myself included — make dumb moves all the time, even when they’re trying to maximize for success in business settings you might think would be removed from our usual foibles. Not so.

More choice tidbits:

In one of his 40 research notes last year, [Montier] argued that investors with more data are not necessarily better off–we have only so much capacity to process information.

(This matches the view of business titans A. G. Lafley and Bill Gross, whom I quoted on this topic here.)

[Montier himself speaking:] Philosopher Karl Popper wrote that after you set up a hypothesis, you should test it to destruction. You should look for all the evidence that goes against your view. But that doesn’t happen in the City or on Wall Street. If someone takes a view on a stock or a market, he wants to hear all the evidence that supports that view. Most people are not inclined to sit down with people who disagree with them.

(Applications for this abound, not least to the formulation of foreign policy. The kernel of U.S. government policy in Iraq during this decade came from the thinking of Paul Wolfowitz, thinking he did as a professor, before he was Deputy Secretary of Defense. Unfortunately, just one view of likely outcomes in Iraq prevailed, and disagreements among policy makers were quashed. That’s not a problem primarily of hawks versus doves or liberals versus conservatives or Democrats versus Republicans — it’s a cognitive problem that runs much deeper, and that affects even the most brilliant and successful people.)

[Montier again:] Put simply, we take things for granted after a while. […] The more you can do to slow down that pattern of getting used to things, the better.

(Part of the reason I write this blog — write at all, for that matter — is to make things new to myself so that I can see them with new eyes. Often it’s the hardest thing a body can do.)

Do read the whole thing; it’s not very long, and it’s well worth your time:

Prophet Among Pinstripes.

Just the other day, I mean?

Joel Spolsky is on the same page. And I can say, having once worked in a call center, that I would much rather have answered the phones for Joel at Fog Creek. If you care about good customer service, do read all of this:

Seven steps to remarkable customer service.

This blog has issued forth, with some periods of inactivity, for more than a year. Many if not most of its readers are friends of mine. This surely is true for its regular readers, who are few in number. The audience has grown across the year, but only slightly.

Now, like every hard-bitten writer, I believe I have interesting things to say to you — things you will find so interesting that you can’t help but come back for more, and tell all of your friends that they ought to be joining you and me in the conversation here. But how well do I live up to my conceit, here in the actual posts I write? How consistently am I giving something worth coming back for? My own opinions on this don’t mean much, because I can look at the numbers of visitors — one-timers and repeaters — and determine that the value this blog has generated has been, well, let’s say okay. At best.

In the long run, I hope to give you community. I read John Scalzi’s blog because I’ve come to feel as though I know him, even though we’ve only exchanged a couple of e-mails in person. But I’ve read his blog for more than a year, and I’ve voiced my own opinions in his comment threads with the like-minded (and otherwise) folks there. I’ve read some of his books, too, and so I feel even more invested in the community he’s built up. If I thought he were just doing it as a ploy to sell more books, I wouldn’t be interested. But it seems, instead, that while he’s happy to sell more books, he really wants to interact with a readership. He wants to exist in a community, and he’s put in the time and effort to recruit members of his own community. Similar impulses seem to drive Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who have gone to great lengths to promote community commentary at Making Light.

Community, on this blog, will come when it comes. For now, it’s lifetime count on comments, across all posts, is something under 100. If you’ve been waiting for the right time to start commenting, please be assured that the right time is now. Every comment — even those that disagree with me or take me to task — is like a gift to me, because I want to build a community around my own themes.

For now, what I can give you is the fruit of my own experience, reading, and thinking around those themes. In other words, I want to give you the gift of what I’ve learned so far. Thus this blog’s new name.

It would be much simpler for me to keep a sharp-edged blog about, say, developments in the high-tech business world. But the world doesn’t need another Scoble, Winer, or Searls, and anyway those guys do what they do much better than I could. I have a newcomer’s naivete — hopefully beneficial — when it comes to marketing, but there’s no reason to look to me for marketing wisdom ahead of Kawasaki or Godin. I lift weights and I run, but I’m no expert on training. I read books and I’m getting a doctorate, so I have my own ideas about scholarship and the academic world, but I’m no Holbo or Bitch. Et cetera.

But what I can give you — some that all of these worthies cannot — is the fruit of what I have learned so far. My friends seek out my advice and tell me it’s useful; I score off the charts for intuition; my mind gravitates naturally to the big picture. So I find that, when I immerse myself in a subject, I make connections that others don’t.

Hey, I’m a million miles from perfect. My follow-through stinks, and despite my own advice, my habits of mind are not what they should be. But I do like people and I do want to connect and help when and how I can. Encouragement comes easy to me.

So here’s a habit we can build together. I’m going to spend less time collecting miscellaneous thoughts here, and more time putting into words what I’ve learned about life so far. I have points of view, hopefully useful ones, on how the world does work and how it might work better, not in some wonk’s paradise but in the here and now with the stubborn application of common sense. (There’s my nod to this blog’s old title.) My thoughts often center on our environments — the physical and social and political ones around us, as well as the psychological environments within our own heads. I will keep trying to puzzle through these, whether the matter at hand is business, careers, health, “the environment”, or what have you. I hope you will let me into a little corner of your life and lend your own voice to teach me something better for tomorrow.

All I’m talking about is trying to figure out how to live life. No big whoop. Join me, won’t you?

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More on the theme of giving gifts:

Robert Paterson on The Gift Economy in Action

Hugh Macleod: Three Thoughts on Customer Engagement

Kathy Sierra on Loveocracy

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