Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Balancing innovation and execution

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Good essay in the Small Business section of the NY Times, “Why ‘Innovate or Die’ is a Lie” by Cliff Oxford.  His subject is balancing the need to innovate with the need to execute.  Having worked at a small business which sells custom scientific instruments and R&D services as its primary source of revenue, I feel I’m pretty well tuned in to understanding the balance between innovation and execution.   We didn’t get paid for just having neat ideas.  We got paid to build devices or write software which did useful things – tangible things.

For all the hype about the need to innovate, you absolutely need to execute.   Innovation is important.  Execution is essential.  Having good ideas is pointless if you can’t get stuff done.  Oxford understands this:

Getting stuff done means packaging, selling, delivering and collecting the money to increase revenue and profits. If you are best in class at getting stuff done and use creativity to reduce complexity and chaos, you just may have yourself a fast-growth business. But if you do, you will quickly learn that the biggest risk to your business is not that it will die because you stop innovating — it’s that it will die because you fail to rein in your innovating and start executing.

Execute.  Execute.  Execute.  Oxford continues:

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Letter from a Birmingham Jail

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Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” fifty years ago today.

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading about Sen. Rand Paul’s speech to students at Howard University last week.  The context is the GOP’s efforts to develop support beyond the angry white guy demographic.  Ta-Nehisi Coates sums up the problem with Paul’s speech and, more generally, his approach:

Rand Paul went to Howard University, lied, and then got his ass kicked. That’s not so bad. I got my ass kicked regularly at Howard. That was the reason my parents sent me there. But having gotten his ass kicked, his answer is to not to reflect but to make an allegation of racial discrimination.

And until there’s some reflection I don’t see the GOP’s rebranding efforts having any effect.  Coates also commented on the “lack of reflection” problem a few weeks earlier in the wake of Dr. Ben Carson’s speech at CPAC (emphasis mine): Continue reading →

Social science experiment

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Reuters:

A non-profit group plans to hand out free shotguns to residents of Tucson, Arizona in an effort to show that more guns mean less crime.

The Houston, Texas-based Armed Citizens Project has raised about $12,000 or enough to fund about 36 weapons, Shaun McClusky, a Tucson realtor who launched the Tucson effort, told Reuters on Friday.

The group has begun tracking illegal activity in three crime-ridden neighborhoods and will continue to monitor the crime rate after guns are distributed.

“This is about public safety. This is about people protecting themselves,” said McClusky, a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for mayor in the city’s last election.

Each single-shot weapon will come with a lock and training. Single-shot weapons were chosen because they are inexpensive and are unlikely to be stolen as criminals don’t want them, McClusky said.

Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik, a Democrat who has advocated for stricter gun controls in Tucson does not agree with the underlying premise of the giveaway program.

“To suggest that giving guns to people in high-crime neighborhoods will make them safer is ridiculous. I think it’s dangerous,” Kozachik said.

He called the program a “solution seeking a problem,” and predicted city residents will reject the program as it becomes more widely publicized…

Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how things turn out…

Noah Smith, Markets in Almost Nothing

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An excerpt from Noah Smith’s post, Markets in Almost Nothing:

One of the first things I noticed when I started studying economics was that goods that can’t be bought and sold are basically ignored. That might be fine for determining prices of stuff (especially if people have quasilinear utility), but when you have massively incomplete markets, the basic big results of first-year microeconomics – the welfare theorems – go totally out the window. In addition, to get comprehensible results for the prices and quantities of exchange-able goods, you need to make a lot of heroic assumptions about the non-exchange-able goods – in other words, when people spend most of their time working for things that money can’t buy, their behavior toward the things that money can buy gets a lot more complicated.

And when I think about it, I realize that people do spend much of their time working for things that they can’t possibly buy. Here are some examples of things that can’t be purchased in any market, even with one hundred billion dollars or a million tons of gold:

* Love

* The respect of your peers

* A feeling of career “success”

* The ability to fit in with other human beings

* Close friends

* Your family being proud of how your life turned out

* The feeling of being good at what you do

* Dignity

There are many more examples. It’s not a question of whether these things should or shouldn’t be traded in markets. It’s simply that they cannot be.

Andrew Bracevich, A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz

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Andrew Bracevich in Harper’s Magazine (link courtesy of Brian Hart):

Dear Paul,

I have been meaning to write to you for some time, and the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war provides as good an occasion as any to do so. Distracted by other, more recent eruptions of violence, the country has all but forgotten the war. But I won’t and I expect you can’t, although our reasons for remembering may differ.

Twenty years ago, you became dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and hired me as a minor staff functionary. I never thanked you properly. I needed that job. Included in the benefits package was the chance to hobnob with luminaries who gathered at SAIS every few weeks to join Zbigniew Brzezinski for an off-the-record discussion of foreign policy. From five years of listening to these insiders pontificate, I drew one conclusion: people said to be smart — the ones with fancy résumés who get their op-eds published in the New York Times and appear on TV — really aren’t. They excel mostly in recycling bromides. When it came to sustenance, the sandwiches were superior to the chitchat.

You were an exception, however. You had a knack for framing things creatively. No matter how daunting the problem, you contrived a solution. More important, you grasped the big picture. Here, it was apparent, lay your métier. As Saul Bellow wrote of Philip Gorman, your fictionalized double, in Ravelstein, you possessed an aptitude for “Great Politics.” Where others saw complications, you discerned connections. Where others saw constraints, you found possibilities for action.

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On the value of reading literature

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David Toscana is from Mexico and writes about what he sees there.  It doesn’t take much imagination to apply his observations to our society:

Earlier this week, I spotted, among the job listings in the newspaper Reforma, an ad from a restaurant in Mexico City looking to hire dishwashers. The requirement: a secondary school diploma.

Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures… schools aimed to offer a more dignified life.

Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.

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Just because it’s obvious to you doesn’t mean it’s obvious to everyone else

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I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to give unambiguous directions.  Via my wife:

I’m reading George Lakoff’s Moral Politics.  From the first chapter:

Whenever a cognitive scientist hears the words, “It’s just common sense,” his ears perk up and he knows there’s something to be studied in detail and in depth – something that needs to be understood.  Nothing is “just” common sense.  Common sense has a conceptual structure that is usually unconscious.  That’s what makes it “common sense.”  It is the commonsensical quality of political discourse that makes it imperative that we study it.

Yes, the video is funny on its merits – presuming the only injuries were to pride – but it does point you at some deeper stuff.

Dodge Omni GLH-S

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overlooked-cars-02a-0411-xl

Popular Mechanics:

Carroll Shelby is best known for his Cobras, and also the vehicles he brought to market with Ford. Lesser-known partnerships included an affair with Oldsmobile and a longer tryst with Chrysler. The lowly Dodge Omni GLH-S four-door hatch (500 produced in ’85) and Dodge 024 GLH-S two-door hatch (1000 in ’86) were among the first Chryslers to receive the full Shelby treatment. The GLH-S moniker stood for Goes Like Hell Some-More. Really. With intercooled turbo 2.2-liter four-cylinders making 175-hp, the cars were capable of ripping low 14-second quarter-mile times in stock form and were easily coaxed into the 12s with simple mods.

For the record, there was a time when I wanted one of these – main motivation was the surprise factor.  Come on, who in their right mind expects an Omni to do a 12 second quarter-mile?