What would learning and other aspects of mental performance look like if they complied with the latest findings in brain research? That’s the question that developmental molecular biologist John Medina explores and answers a dozen ways in Brain Rules. Brain Rules isn’t really a self-help book, each chapter has immediately practical implications and applications for the real world, hence the subtitle: “12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School.”

Medina writes about the brain in a clear, entertaining style that doesn’t require being brainy to grasp. He frequently illustrates the concepts he’s trying to express with colorful anecdotes — and by the end of the fourth chapter, you’ll understand why. Let’s take a walkthrough. Note that this Brain Rules book review only has space to cover the highlights.

Sleep | Rule #1: Exercise boost brain power. Lack of exercise isn’t just unfashionable, it’s unnatural. Our hunter-gather ancestors covered an average of 12 miles on foot a day. The sedentary life of modern students and office workers doesn’t just encourage atrophy of the body, but of the brain. A wide variety of mental tests confirm that subjects who regularly exercise consistently outperform couch potatoes on every measure of cognitive performance: memory, problem-solving, attention, and other faculties.

Exercise helps increase the brain’s supply of oxygen-rich blood, regulate the release of mood-controlling neurotransmitters (serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine), and stimulates the production of protein called BDNF (Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor) which acts as a “fertilizer” for the growth of neurons.

Medina cites a study where students who took time away from academic subjects for physical education performed better on academic tests. He also cites examples of executive installing treadmills in their office for use during calls and email (with laptops mounted on them!), reporting increased clarity and focus.

Survival | Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too. What distinguishes the brains of humans from those of primates? This chapter is more theoretical than practical, but still fascinating. The author examines the work of brain researcher Judy DeLoache, who posits a “Dual Representation Theory” to characterize our capacity for abstract reasoning. The theory describes our ability to attribute multiple characteristics and meanings to objects that don’t possess them. A line can stand for the number one, the letter i, the letter l, or a literal line. “Dual” denotes the difference between the symbolic and the literal.

DeLoache tested a girl of 36 months with a dollhouse and a life-size room whose layout was identical. When DeLoache put a toy dog under the couch of the dollhouse living room, then encouraged the girl to go to the “big” living room to find the big version of the dog, she knew to look under the couch. But a 30-month-old girl is unable to make the connection between scales, and has no idea where to look.

The rest of the chapter discusses the physical evolution of our brains: the three successive layers informally called the lizard brain, the mammalian brain and the human brain (the cortex). Also discussed is the social evolution of human teamwork that compensates for our lack of claws, fangs, wings and fur to protect us from the slings and arrows of nature.

Wiring | Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently. A microprocessor doesn’t modify itself physically when it “learns” (stores) new information. But neurons swell, split and sway as neurotransmitters pass between them during learning activity. Learning literally rewires the brain. Concert violinists, for instance, are observed to have much denser growths of neurons in the hemisphere that controls their left hand, in charge of fingering, than the opposite hemisphere that controls the right hand, in charge of bowing. Darwin observed that the brains of wild animals were 15 to 30 percent larger than their domesticated counterparts exposed to a far less complex environment.

The rate of neural growth seems to match the intensity of real-world learning. At birth, babies have about the same number of connections as adults, but by three years of age, some regions have two the three times the number of connections. By eight, these connections are gradually reduced to adult numbers. The pattern repeats itself one last time from puberty through young adulthood.

Where the brain stores certain types of information, like language, and when these areas mature varies between individuals. Our school system works from the premise that children of the same age “should” be ready for the same curriculum, but about 10 percent of students do not have brains suffiently wired to read at the expected age. Medina offers suggestions for bringing learning and brain development in synch, like interactive software that tests the student’s reading competencies then adaptively tailors exercises to strengthen weak spots.

Attention | Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things. A college lecture is about 50 minutes long, but when asked directly, students will admit that their attention begins to wander after the first 10 minutes. How do we hold attention? Medina cites the work of Michael Posner’s theory of attention when focuses on three facets, or “networks”: the Arousal Network, which monitors the sensory environment for unusual activities; the Orienting Network, for getting our bearings in response to a unique stimulus (Where did that sound come from?); and the Executive Network, for determining the next course of action.

Of the many testable predictions about brain function that have emerged from Posner’s model, Medina focuses on four: (1) that emotional events get our attention, (2) that we process the meaning or gist of a situation before individual details, (3) that the brain is incapable of multitasking (a single task interrupted takes 50 percent longer to complete), and (4) that the brain needs a break from continuous input. The 10-minute threshold is a good starting point for such a break.

Medina began structuring is college lectures in 10-minute modules. He would use one minute of each segment to covey the gist of what the segment covered, then use the rest of the time to provide supporting details that could easily be traced back to the general concept. Sometimes he would start a segment with an emotional “hook,” like a relevant anecdote, to make sure that he kept his students’ attention. After two or three of these, he found that it was usually not necessary to segment the rest of the lecture in order to keep their attention.

Short-Term Memory | Rule #5: Repeat to remember. In the mid-19th Century, Prussian researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted a 30-year series of experiments in which he tried to memorize a series of nonsense words and three-letter combinations. Methodically recording his retention of each piece of information, he noticed a pattern: repeating information at timed intervals increased its retention. Forgetting occurs over time exponentially, according to a predictable curve, so repeating the information with this “forgetting curve” in mind helps flatten it.

Factual information, like the nonsense words that Ebbinghaus learned, or your driver’s license number, fall into a category called declarative memory. Declarative memory is controlled by the hippocampus, which over time passes information from short-term memory (now called “working memory”) to long-term memory. When the hippocampus is damaged, the brain may not be able to form new memories (think of the movie Memento). The other category, non-declarative memory, involves unconscious systems, like the motor skills used in learning to ride a bike.

Besides repetition, Medina offers a couple of principles for increasing declarative memory. First, make the information being learned more elaborate by introducing more associations. This is one of the reasons why the author would use anecdotes in his lectures. By couching facts in stories, there was a richer network of associations to trigger their recall. In short: give examples.

Second, create learning environments with conditions similar to the context of the material being learned. Medina uses the example of having parents create a “Spanish Room” in their homes, filled with Hispanic artifacts. Their children would use the room to study Spanish, with the rule that only Spanish is to be spoken there.

Long-Term Memory | Rule #6 : Remember to repeat. The process of converting short-term memory traces to long-term memory is called consolidation. New memories send electrical signals shooting down from the cortex to the hippocampus and back up to the cortex, even while we sleep. If the stimulus recurrs for long enough (it can even take years, in some cases), the hippocampus cuts of the neurological conversation and stores the results as a permanent memory trace.

Medina discusses the two main models of memory retrieval explored by researcher: the “library model” and the “Sherlock Homes model.” We use both types, depending on the type of information being retrieved.

Factual information, like our home address, is retrieved through the library model — declarative memories encoded by rote learning. The Sherlock Homes model describes memories that are basically reconstructions of the initial situation (the “crime scene”) based on patchwork evidence. These memories may or may not be reliable. One psychiatrist found that 90 percent of adolescents asked if they had ever been disciplined with physical punishment answered in the affirmative. When the same surveyees were asked the same question years later as adults, only a third said yes.

The importance of repetition outlined in the previous chapter is, well, repeated here. Medina proposes a curriculum for the future in which each subject is delivered in 25-minute modules. After 90 minutes, the first subject would be repeated, and then once again for a third cycle. Each subject matter would be similarly interleaved. Every third of fourth day, the entire day would consist of reviewing the material learned in the previous 72 to 96 hours. That sounds like a lot of review, but in a culture that delivers far more information than students can integrate long-term, we may need to prioritize retention over exposure.

Sleep | Rule #7: Sleep well, think well. Studies in underground facilities removing subjects from environmental factors have shown that the body has a series of internal clocks controlled by different regions in the brain.

Our most fundamental body rhythm results from a continuous conflict of two opposing forces: the circadian arousal system (called “process C”) and the homeostatic sleep drive (“process S”). Process C constantly compels us to wake up, and process S compels us to go to sleep. It is not, as we might think, a simple ebb and flow or energy levels. At mid-afternoon, the curves of the two processes converge, and we experience the post-lunch “dip” in energy that has lead some cultures to institutionalize siestas around them.

Sleep research classifies people into three general categories, or “chronotypes.” 10 percent of the population are “larks,” or early chronotypes, who generally wake up before 6 a.m. and feel most alert around noon. 20 percent of the population are “owls,” or late chronotypes, inclined to wake up after 10 a.m. if allowed, feeling most alert around 6 p.m., and usually wanting to go to bed after 3 a.m. The rest of the population is the third category, falling in a continuum somewhere between larks and owls.

Sleep loss has been shown in test after test to diminish attention, recall, logical reasoning, manual dexterity, and a host of other variables affecting learning and productivity. Since late chronotypes often have to work against the norms of office hours, arranging more flexible schedules might recover a huge amount of lost productivity. The author also recommends more regular naps, or a lease an explicit acknowledgment that naps are needed. 70 percent of Americans who admit to taking naps in the workplace report having to do so on the sly — usually in the back set of their cars.

Stress | Rule #8: Stressed brains don’t learn the same way. In evolutionary terms, humans aren’t equipped to handle chronic stress. Back in the day (eons ago), our stressors were saber tooth tigers, snakes and mudslides — terrifying but brief encounters. The extended stress of doing repetitive labor or managing teams is a relatively new phenomenon. Under acute stress, the hypothalamus signals the adrenal glands to flood the bloodstream with adrenaline and cortisol. An excess of adrenaline stops regulating surges in blood pressure, scaring the blood vessels and, over time, possibly leading to stroke.

Stress hormones called glutocorticoids interfere with the hippocampus’ ability to grow new neurons by overruning BDNF and sometimes killing off hippocampal cells directly. As we’ve seen, a healthy hippocampus is critical to memory and learning. Adults with high stress levels have tested 50 percent worse on cognitive tests (declarative memory and executive function) than low-stress adults.

Many of the author’s proposals for dealing with stress at an institutional level come, oddly enough, from a marriage counsellor. John Gottman is famous for marriage interventions that dropped the frequency and severity of hostile interactions, reducing his clients’ divorce rates by 50 percent. Gottman noticed that initial parenthood was the critical point where marital satisfaction drops by 70 percent and maternal depression increases by 62 percent. Gottman embarked on a long-term study that staged interventions right at the moment of pregnancy.

Even more noteworthy than the effects on the marriages themselves were the effects on the children born into them. Children in intervention groups cried less, had stronger attention-shifting behaviors, responded more evenly to external stressors and, physiologically, had more organized nervous systems than children in control groups.

Sensory Integration | Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses. Despite the frequent complaints we hear about “sensory overload,” sometimes more is more. Cognitive psychologist Richard Mayer has run learning experiments with three groups: a first group receiving information through one sense (like hearing), a second group through another sense (like sight), and a third group getting the information delivered through a combination of the two senses. The latter group consistently recalls more information on tests than the former two. Mayer has run similar experiments in problem-solving. Groups given multisensory presentations of problems generated 50 to 75 percent more creative solutions than unisensory groups.

Mayer has distilled five principles that guide is observations on multisensory learning: that students learn better with words and pictures than words alone, that corresponding words and pictures should be presented simultaneously rather than successively, that they should be presented near each other rather than far from each other, that extraneous material should be excluded rather than included, and that animation should be accompanied by narration rather than on-screen text.

Vision | Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses. Sight isn’t just one type of perception. It has the power to frame the rest of our perception. 54 professional wine tasters at the University of Bordeaux given white wine colored with tasteless, odorless red dye described what they tasted as though it were red white (wine tasters traditionally use separate vocabularies for red and white wines).

The eye doesn’t take in images as passively as we once believed. Our retinas actually do quite a bit of low-level visual analysis before sending information along the optic nerve to the brain. Specialized cells within the retina capture individual patterns of light, called tracks, which are like individual movies. Each track is responsible for processing one attribute of an image, like an object’s color, its outline or its movement. Up to a dozen tracks are assembled into a single visual impression.

Vision is by far our dominant sense. Half of the cortex is devoted to processing sight, even filling in our blind spot — the retina’s optic disk. We should see two black holes permanently in our field of vision, but the brain seems to provide us with a composite image. Medina gives many examples of the brain’s ability to manufacture visual illusions, from experiments on amputees who “see” their “phantom limbs” in the mirror to the dreams we experience every night.

The practical application of this visual dominance, or “pictorial superiority effect” (PSE), has been demonstrated repeatedly in teaching and learning. Studies have shown that when information is presented orally, people usually remember about 10 percent when tested 72 hours later, compared to 65 percent when pictures are added.

Gender | Rule #11: Male and female brains are different. The structural differences between men’s and women’s brains aren’t very controversial. In certain areas, the cortex is fatter in women than in men. More prominent differences lie in the limbic system, particularly in the amygdala — which controls the generation of emotions and the memory of them. This region is larger in men, and tends to communicate primarily with the right hemisphere. Female amygdalas normally chat with the left hemisphere.

The link between structural and behavioral differences, as you might expect, gets pricklier. Researcher Larry Cahill showed slasher films to men and women to see, using fMRI, how their brains reacted under acute stress. In men, the amygdala in the right hemisphere would light up, and in women, the left. The right hemisphere tends to remember the gist of an experience, while the left hemisphere tends to remember detail. Women typically had better recall of the film’s details when tested a week later. Medina suspects that the stereotype of women being more “emotional” than men stems more from the fact that women respond to and remember more details of emotionally charged events then men, making discussions of those events more robust.

Women tend to use both hemispheres when speaking or processing verbal information, and have thicker cabling between to the two sides. This extra faculty can be a double-edged sword depending on who women are communicating with, since women often communicate by implication that’s obvious to other women, but not necessarily to men. Men hearing the question, “Are you hungry?” are less likely to pick up on the implicit request — “I’m hungry, let’s eat” — than to answer the question literally. Women regard the questioner and his or her dispostion as integral to the question itself.

Exploration | Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers. Children love to test reality. So much so that the so-called terrible twos seems to make a theme out of defying authority to discover the consequences. Babies constantly play with objects to test their physical properties: what happens if they’re thrown, dropped, tasted or broken. Over time, these experiments become more deliberate, with children beginning to form hypotheses about what will happen if they do X. At 18 months, for example, they tend to discover “object permanence,” realizing that if they cover an object, it doesn’t disappear; it’s still there when they uncover it.

Exploration occurs through experimentation and emulation. Stick your tongue out at a baby, and if you wait, the baby will return the gesture. Later in childhood, emulation graduates to complex role playing, like Cowboys and Indians. Emulation can also occur internally. When a researcher monitored the brain activity of a monkey when the researcher picked up a raisin (something the monkey had done before), the monkey’s brain reproduced the specific firing pattern of “mirror neurons” used to pick up the raisin himself.

While we never fully stop exploring, it’s clear that for most of us, childhood is the golden age of exploration. How can we extend this reality-testing mindset into adulthood? One way is to simply block time for it. Google is renowned for allowing their employees 20 percent of their time to work on whatever projects they choose. 50 percent of the company’s products, like Gmail and Google News, came from this “20 percent time.”

Medina proposes a “medical-school model” learing environment for other fields of endeavor. Medical students usually walk through a working hospital on their way to class, then begin their internship by in third year, spending half of their time learning on the job. This exposes students to the practice and the people they have to deal with in the real world. Medical schools also expose students to all of the unknowns in the field that are subjects for ongoing research in which the students may participate. Imagine a computer science curriculum where students interned at software firms, learning to deal with coworkers, clients and project managers as well as code.

Brain Rules

I’m a big fan of behavioral research that attempts to square itself with what we know about the brain. Getting facts straight about the brain has a lot practical value. If you’re a late chronotype, for instance, it would be better to spend your time working later than waking up earlier. Instead of trying to flash flood your brain with cramming sessions, spaced repetition would be easier and more reliable. There are plenty of other possible examples, but the main point is that it’s better to understand how to brain operates in order to work with it rather than against it. Brain Rules may be a more useful starting point than a self-help book.

Technorati Tags: Books

I always prefer books to blogs, since they have a beginning, middle and end, and have greater focus and depth. Like Lifehacker’s blog-turned-book, Upgrade Your Life, Personal Development for Smart People (slated for release October 15) puts a frame around Steve Pavlina’s ongoing writing, allowing the reader to take a break from keeping up with constant updates to focus on the author’s core principles. Let’s dive right in.

Introduction. Steve recounts his history in personal development: his commitment to pursue personal growth after a brief stint in a jail cell, his attainment of two college degrees in three semesters, his success in creating a computer game company, and the founding of StevePavlina.com.

He outlines the seven principles of personal development that he distilled over that period. These principles were designed to satisfy the four criteria that characterize them, for the author at least, as laws. They had to be universal, complete, irreducable and internally congruent. The three core principles are truth, love and power; and the four secondary principles are oneness, authority, courage and intelligence. Part I of the book addresses each of these principles, and Part II deals with their practical application.

Chapter 1: Truth. Truth has five key components: perception, prediction, accuracy, acceptance and self-awareness. Pavlina makes fine distinctions between these, but they boil down to perceiving and accepting reality as accurately as possible without denial. Before someone can improve his financial situation, he has to first acknowledge the current reality of that situation, even if he can’t immediately see a way out of it.

Prediction is the realization that certain behaviors lead to likely outcomes. What are the long-term effects of staying in your current job, of maintaining your current diet, of keeping your current network of friends? Instead of looking at behaviors in isolation, determine their trajectory to see if you’re on the right path, and make a change if necessary.

Since our level of self-awareness varies from moment to moment,  it’s important for us to make our assessments and decisions at times when we’re the most clear-headed and rational, writing them down for reference during lower states of self-awareness. The goal is to operate from conscious, principle-centered actions instead of low-level emotional reactions.

Blocks to truth are media conditioning, social conditioning, false beliefs, emotional interference (denial), addictions (including negative habits, not just substances), immaturity and secondary gain. Secondary gain is a short-term benefit from behavior we know to be destructive in the long term, like accepting a paycheck from a dead-end job.

Chapter 2: Love. Steve has an extremely clear bottom-line definition of love. “Love is obviously an emotion, but it’s also much more than that. One of the fundamental choices you face in every encounter is the choice to approach or avoid.” The choice to approach or avoid applies to people as well as to work, places, or anything with which a person can have a relationship.

Love involves connection and communion. We connect with whoever or whatever we put our attention on. We can expand our capacity to communicate to first connecting to the familiar, then gradually branching out to the unfamiliar. Communion is the rapport that cultivates the emotional dimension of love. This rapport stems from our belief in the degree of connection. Because communion depends on our own belief, it’s really a reflection of ourselves. “By communing with others, you learn to love yourself more fully.”

The exercises included here might be a little New Agey for some people’s tastes, but the principles behind them don’t require much suspension of skepticism. This isn’t The Secret.

Chapter 3: Power. Power is “the ability to consciously and deliberately create the world around you,” rather than force, coercion or some other negative attribute. Power has six key components: responsibility, desire, self-determination, focus, effort and self-discipline

Steve heavily emphasizes the need to take responsibility for one’s current situation as a prerequisite to changing it, regardless of whoever or whatever else contributed to it in the past. You’re the one who has to live with your life, not your parents, not society, not your boss. By accepting responsibility, you agree to be an active participant in shaping your life, which is crucial for empowerment.

Desire is related to truth — honestly acknowledging that you want what you want, even if you don’t know how to get it at first. By cutting yourself off from desire, you demotivate and disempower yourself. Self-determination is the recognition that you are the only person with ultimate control over your life. If you relinquish that control to others, you’re still the one in control of doing that.

Chapter 4: Oneness. This is one of the more metaphysical chapters. To wit: “I tried to imagine what it would be like to experience a sense of total oneness. I instantly grasped that the birds in front of me were just as much me as my physical body was.” When Pavlina talks about oneness, he means it literally. Perhaps more accessibly, he also discusses oneness from the standpoint of values: empathy, compassion, honesty, fairness, contribution and unity. A frequent, Gaia-like analogy he uses throughout the book is that we are like cells in a larger body, unified through a single organism.

For a complete perspective on oneness, we need to intellectually understand the interconnectedness of everything, and sense it on a visceral level. Exercises for developing oneness include spending time in nature, physically embracing others while visualizing a complete lack of separation, and visualizing a world where everyone is in complete solidarity.

Chapter 5: Authority. The degree of control you have over all elements in your life is authority, a faculty consisting of five key aspects: command, effectiveness, persistence, confidence and significance. Command is achieved by recognizing that you are the only one in control of your life, not your spouse, boss or guru. Effectiveness is achieved by consistently reviewing the results of your actions, and correcting course whenever necessary.

Persistence requires the recognition that when learning any new skill, an initial phase of mediocrity is inevitable, and the only way out of it is through it by refusing to give up. Confidence builds with concurrently with genuine skill. It’s not necessary to “fake it till you make it,” since starting out unskilled is inevitable, and therefore, truth. Significance is the focus of energy on the projects with the most impact, requiring constant triage.

Chapter 6: Courage. Some people would define courage as the ability to take risks, but Pavlina defines it as the combination of power and love. For courage to have meaning, it has to spring from the desire to create a deep connection, to choose the path with a heart: “If your path has no heart, you’re on the wrong path.”

Courage also requires initiative, directness and honor. Those waiting for life to happen to them will find themselves in for a lifelong wait unless they take learn to take initiative. Instead of timidly feeling out situations before making requests, directness demands that we cut through unnecessary complexity and simply ask for what we want. By risking rejection with as few intermediate steps as possible, we either get what we want or build our courage — something gained either way. Honor is the principle-centered behavior that flows from oneness, from a deep connection to self and others.

Steve suggests a few approaches to building courage. We can reduce our fear of the unknown by educating ourselves on the subject we want to get involved with. We can make an advance commitment to others. We can make low-level risks of rejection, then increasing the outreach over time; and filtering one’s plans for the day with a triage question: “Where is the path with a heart?” By asking this question, it becomes easy to discard the options that feel disconnected.

Chapter 7: Intelligence. The intelligence defined here has less to do with the mental resources need to pass IQ tests as it does with wisdom. Intelligence is the mutually reinforcing union of truth, love and power. Behavior aligned with these core principles begets several emergent qualities: authenticity, creative self-expression, growth, flow and beauty.

In authentic communication, our we express ourselves congruently, without exaggerating or downplaying what’s true for us. Creative self-expression directs our intelligence by tuning ourselves into our message to the world, then cultivating an appropriate medium for that message. Intelligence has the unique quality of seeking it’s own improvement, or growth, so consciously pursuing growth is inherently intelligent behavior. Flow is the wind on our backs that comes from making perceived progress toward something meaningful and important. Beauty is what we experience when we see the underlying order of truth, love and power as governing forces in every aspect of our lives.

The chapter ends with assessment and challenge exercises for each of the seven principles. For instance, one “truth” challenge is, “Confess to a lie or secret you’ve been concealing.” One of the “courage” exercises is, “Make a new request of someone who recently rejected you.”

Chapter 8: Habits. This is the first chapter in the “Practical Application” section. Each chapter includes sections on the application of the core principles of truth, love and power in context.

Habits are automated behavior that spare us the inefficiency of having to reinvent solutions for every situation. But our existing habits can be suboptimal or counterproductive, so considering how much of our behavior consists of habits, they represent enormous improvement opportunities. We can upgrade our habits by enlisting truth, love and power.

We come to terms with the truth of our current and future habits by making three lists: one for our positive habits, one for our negative habits, and another for the habits we’d like to create. One way of eliminating bad habits or forming better ones is with love — overcoming our isolation and connecting with others undergoing, or having gone through, the same struggles. Sometimes we have to do the opposite: disengage from peers whose influence is negative. Power is the disciplined application of effort to achieve the desired habit.

Pavlina recommends using 30-day trials to install or eliminate a habit, where you commit to a certain behavior pattern for 30 days straight (or some other length if desired), after which time you’re free to keep or cancel the behavior. Another approach is stair-stepping, where you increase or reduce a behavior incrementally instead of going for one big change — committing to one less cup of coffee each day, for instance.

Chapter 9: Career. Career is related to creative self-expression. We should identify our core message, then find the ideal medium for expressing it. Our careers need to be true to our creative needs, desires and sense of service, but they also need to be true to our material needs. A career that doesn’t reconcile authentic self-expression with paying the bills is ultimately unsustainable. There’s usually a small overlap between the needs of the market (what Pavlina calls social value) and our own need for self-expression (personal value). The object is to find a career path that exists within that overlap.

Love involves the “message” of your career — connecting with its purpose. Steve recommends a journaling exercise: spending a session writing out an answer, in as many variations as necessary, to the question, What is my true purpose in life?, until you reach the wording that resonates enough you cry. Power involves the commitment to build the career you want instead of settling for something you don’t really want. Not surprisingly, his advice is heavily skewed toward the entrepreneurial path.

Chapter 10: Money. This isn’t a business or personal finance chapter, but a meditation on your relationship with money.

Money is a social resource. When you contribute to society, society remunerates by assigning that contribution a certain cash value. Pavlina underscores the difference between absolute value and social value. A professional athlete’s absolute value may be low, but as someone who’s compensated on the basis of the advertising and licensing revenue he generates for others he has high social value, in the commercial sense. This might seem academic, but it’s an important standard to think about when creating products and services for the market. Many entrepreneurs and employees overprice, or sometime underprice their work by failing to pay adequate attention to market norms.

It’s also possible to make money by exploiting market inefficiencies to bypass the need to make any contribution. In short, we can either contribute, or mooch. Mooching is antisocial and disconnected from love, since it violates the principle of oneness. The only way to adopt the moocher mindset long-term is to lower one’s awareness. When a person operates from the contributor mindset, she has no conflicts about the money she earns, since it directly reflects the social value she’s created for others.

Chapter 11: Health. Pavlina mostly avoids recommending a specific program of diet and exercise (though veganism inevitably creeps in) to invite readers to reflect on their relationship with their bodies. He recommends getting undressed and looking at yourself in the mirror honestly, noting what you like about yourself and why you don’t like. What aspects of what you don’t like can be improved or remedied by predictable behaviors?

Love helps has connect with the foods that we are most naturally attracted to. Even without a knowledge of carbohydrates, calories and other metrics, most people intuitively know in a big-picture sense if what they’re about to ingest is right or wrong for them. Power is the self-discipline necessary to take control of one’s health, through progressive training, 30-day trials and other techniques. Oneness is a twofold principle here: enlisting the help of others for support (such as running groups or 12-step programs), and realizing the social or global impact of one’s consumption choices (from “modeling” smoking behavior for nearby children to animal cruelty).

Chapter 12: Relationships. Truth is the first foundation element of any relationship. Pavlina argues that true relationship only exist in our minds, as we perceive them, so we have to look within to assess their current status and pay close attention to our feelings, acknowledging the truths we discover without hiding from them. Inattention can be as damaging to a relationship as self-deception.

Our interactions with others involve some mix of truth, love and power, and in unhealthy relationships, there’s an imbalance. Some people are better at expressing themselves through asserting their authority (power) and creating connections (love). Some people have trouble representing themselves to others authentically (truth).

A key relationship concept is oneness. By starting from the assumption that we’re one rather than separate, it becomes much easier to approach others. You don’t have to break the ice when you assume no ice in the first place.

Chapter 13: Spirituality. Steve takes a pluralistic aproach to sprirituality that may even be a bit much for those who consider themselves open-minded. He sees any belief system — Christianity, Islam, Buddhism — as one lens with which to perceive reality. The commonalities consists of truth, love and power; within the differences are usually falsehood, disconnection and disempowerment.

We see the world through a number of spiritual sensory organs: objective and subjective viewpoints, logic and intuition, dreams and visions, religious and philosophical beliefs, and so on. Pavlina argues that by accessing a diverse enough set of channels, we can develop a more accurate and complete picture of reality. Personally, I see this as a cultural rather than ontological argument. A knowledge of alchemy has value in understanding the history of chemistry, but to give it credence as “another perceptual filter” in understanding reality is beyond my capacity, which I’m sure will be seen as a validation of the point.

On the other hand, I totally agree with Steve’s contention that we should stop identifying with a belief system. “When people ask me what religion I am, I tell them the question doesn’t make any sense. I’m a human being, not a religion.” Moreover, he asserts that we should avoid yielding control of our spiritual lives to someone else, whether it’s God, a guru or a counselor. The principle of authority maintains that we are the masters of our own fate.

How Smart is Personal Development?

I’m in the middle of re-reading Personal Development for Smart People, since I enjoyed it that much. If you’re allergic to the Law of Attraction and other mysticism, it’s definitely in there (though the LoA only gets a couple of passing references), but not enough to overwhelm the book’s core principles. The book’s focus on principles and ethics rather than tips and hacks makes it a great antidote to current trends in the personal development field.

Technorati Tags: Books, Reviews

Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch distinguishes itself by shedding light on the economies of scale that undergird the transition from individual machines and IT facilities to remote sites and distributed systems. The author parallels the new paradigm switch with an historical one: the switch from private electrical generation to a utility — hence the subtitle, Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

Prologue. We enter the new world through a tour of VeriCenter’s facilites. Carr was invited by the company’s founder to have a look at the epic IT warehouse in response to a previous publication, Does IT Matter? In the future, companies would forgo investing in their own IT infrastructures, and simply plug into VeriCenter’s mammoth computing resources over the internet. VeriCenter’s facility is the size of a city block, a farm of thousands of computers clustered together.

Chapter 1: Burden’s Wheel. In 1851, Henry Burden built the largest waterwheel of its time to electrically power his farm tool manufacturing operation. A half-century later, his local generator was rendered obsolete by large-scale electrical utilities with far more generating capacity and far greater transmitting distance. The scale economies of these electric utilities could no longer be matched by private factories, and the new plants could generate enough capacity to power households and businesses alike.

The World Wide Web started as a collection of static hypertext pages and links to multimedia files. Surfing the internet was essentially a reading experience. When we wanted to do actual work, we would open up applications that resided on our individual computers, like Microsoft Word or Photoshop. As utility computing gains traction, it can leverage relatively new communication protocols to interact with multiple remote databases in real time, enabling web-based applications like Google Documents, or the photo editing tool, Picnik. Economies of scale will eventually make online applications more robust than their counterparts on our hard drives.

Chapter 2: The Inventor and His Clerk. Thomas Edison’s plans to monopolize electricity were doomed by limitations in his business model, and the technology behind it. His idea was to license his patented system and sell its components to businesses in the market for local power plants — a project that was successful, but short-lived. It took a former employee of Edison’s, Samuel Insull, to conceive of and build an infrastructure of centralized systems based on alternating current, rather than his rival’s direct current, to extend electricity’s reach into the farthest corners of homes and businesses. The utility’s success fed on itself, with increased revenues enabling increased generating capacity at decreased prices, increasing demand.

Chapter 3: Digital Millwork. Like electricity, data processing had a roots at the local level, starting with Herman Hollerith’s punch-card tabulator. His Tabulating Machines Company evolved into International Business Machines under the management of Thomas J. Watson. Tabulators first attracted the attention of insurance agencies, banks, and other institutions after their deployment in the 1890 census. As tabulators, or “computers” progressed into UNIVACs and later mainframes, companies gradually increased their data processing budgets. IT expenditures went from less than 10 percent of the average American company’s equipment budget in the late 1960′s to 45 percent by 2000.

As investment in IT facilities grew, so did their excess capacity. Studies have shown that since the introduction of PCs as “clients” for companies data centers, capacity utilization averages between 25 and 50 percent. Across industries, most firms are using the same hardware and software as their rivals. The redundancy, overbuilding and overstaffing of IT assets is precisely the waste that supply-side solutions like VeriCenter, Google and Amazon Web Services hope to consolidate. As the author asserts, “The PC age is giving way to a new era: the utility age.” The advent of the fiber-optic internet has removed the bandwidth bottleneck that previously prevented distributed computing from becoming economical.

Chapter 4: Goodbye, Mr. Gates. None of this transition is lost on the player who stands to lose the most from it: Microsoft. In 2005, Bill Gates wrote an internal memo warning of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) threat to his company’s revenue stream from desktop and local network applications. Google tiptoed around Microsoft by surreptitiously purchasing land in northern Oregon under the DBA “Design LLC,” and building what’s believed to be the worlds largest data processing plant. By contrast, Amazon Web Services simply exploits the excess capacity it already has, selling cheap data storage and “virtualization” services.

But the big proof-of-concept for SaaS came in 1999 from Salesforce.com, which rented its cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software to companies at a mere $50 per user per month, including a free trial, instead of selling it to companies for tens of thousands of dollars. Reliability and response time were demonstrably similar to local installations, and the software allowed some data to be saved for users to work offline. Moreover, Salesforce’s software was extensible — customers could write customized code to run on Salesforce’s systems. Sales skyrocketed from $50 million in 2002 to $500 million in 2007.

Chapter 5: The White City. The 1893 Columbian Expedition was the first World’s Fair to demonstrate what an electrified city, a “White City,” would look like. While most of the utopian rhetoric that followed was just that, the social transformations that actually did come to pass were real enough. Mass production under Henry Ford’s electrified factories, and subsequently those of his rivals, created a vast American middle class of unskilled workers who were paid higher wages to consent to tediously repetitive work. As this labor force grew, so did the need for personnel required to supervise and coordinate them, leading to an increase in skilled employment, and therefore for higher education. Prior to the 20th Century, the idea that those who failed to attend college were “deprived” was nonexistent. High school enrollment at the turn or the century was under 30 percent.

On the domestic front, electrification transformed housework without actually reducing it. In every decade from the 1910s through the 1960s, “women’s work” has steadily remained between 51 and 56 hours, despite the introduction of electric irons, vacuum cleaners and other paraphernia. These “labor saving” devices mainly resulted in raising the standard of cleanliness expected — an illuminating case study for analyzing the benefit of any technology.

Chapter 6: World Wide Computer. Computing differs from electricity in a key aspect. At the end-user level, the resources of a power tool cannot be shared with remote users. With information tools, resources are inherently sharable. Songs and movies can be exhanged by peer-to-peer systems like Bittorrent. Once the entire collection of systems and services become programmable, they form one giant World Wide Computer. A “mash-up,” for instance, can allow a sales representative to identify a customer stored in Salesforce’s system on a Google Map, and call the customer via Skype. A modern blogger can build a successful site exclusively with web-based tools for writing, image editing, video hosting, syndication and ad serving — essentially for free.

Chapter 7: From the Many to the Few. Between early 2005 and late 2006, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen went from tossing around an idea for an easy-to-use video sharing service to selling the result, YouTube, to Google for $1.65 billion. At the time of acquisition, YouTube had 60 employees. As late as 2006, Craigslist had 22 employees. When eBay purchased Skype for $2.1 billion, the internet telephone company had just 200 employees, with twice the number of subscribers as the 90,000-employee British Telecom.

On the internet, the means of production reduces the need for employment more radically than any previous technological advance. Electrified manufacturing, for instance, increased the need for managers, accountants and engineers. Much of the wealth now being created online is “user generated content,” from videos uploaded to YouTube and reference material submitted on Wikipedia to codebases contributed by open source programmers, shrewdly leveraged by entrepreneurs and investors. These online services provide the means of production for communal work, while keeping the fruits of such labor in the private sector.

Chapter 8: The Great Unbundling. Print journalism is fast becoming a casualty of user generated content, testing the social fabric of the free market. While blogs and online news services greatly expand the variety of perspectives available, their integrity is even more vulnerable to the whims of advertisers than their print counterparts. Since newpapers bundle serious news with more frivolous fare, all of it was equally underwritten by the same ad dollars.

Not so as papers move online. Online ads typically pay out on a click-through or page view basis, meaning that the cost of maintaining a bureau in Sierra Leone is unsustainable if the resulting articles get low page views, especially compared to the latest celebrity faux pas. Social imperatives collide with market norms. Readers who get their national and international news from aggregators like Digg and Reddit may soon find themselves with nothing of substance to aggregate.

The unbundling of news and discourse has other implications. When users can design and filter their own “programming” to suit their preferences, they experience less to challenge their biases. A liberal reader of The Wall Street Journal will inevitably rub against conservative opinion. A conservative reader of The New York Times will encounter liberal perspectives. Customized content threatens to undermine critical thinking by reinforcing presuppositions — “ideological amplification,” as researchers call it.

Chapter 9: Fighting the Net. Like many tools, amoral by nature, the internet can easily be used as a weapon. British forces in Basra found themselves under attack by insurgents armed with intelligence of the troops’ whereabouts from Google Earth. Sometimes, the internet itself is the target of attacks, with so-called “botnets” distributing torrents spam and “denial of service” attacks.

As critical institutions rely more heavily on the internet, the implications of online attacks — or disruptions stemming from natural disasters — cannot be underestimated. Airports, financial markets, and other commercial services in Hong Kong ground to a halt in late 2006 due to an earthquake off the coast of Taiwan. The only physical solution to single points of failure is further distribution of network hubs, which creates the political complication of foreign jurisdictions. Since most of the internet’s “root servers” belong to US agencies, the international community has mounted increasing pressure to democratize (or at least, internationalize) the network.

Chapter 10: A Spider’s Web. In theory, internet users are as anonymous as they want to be. In reality, it’s often possible to infer a user’s identity by correlating usernames, search terms, IP address prefixes, and public map information. Scripting a piece of software to “spider” and download thousands of Amazon wish lists, writer Tom Owad was able to correlate list authors with contact information from Yahoo People Search.

Even when name-level anonymity is preserved, the demographic profiling from large-scale, automated data mining exploits our increasing openness with each other online. “Computer systems are not at their core technologies of emancipation,” writes Carr. “They are technologies of control. They were designed as tools for monitoring and influencing human behavior, for controlling what people do and how they do it.” The author cites companies who are building mathematical models of their workforces based on their collected employee data. Google, for instance, asked its employees to fill out a 300-question survey whose questions ranged from the programming languages they know to the pets they keep.

Chapter 11: iGod. When Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin lets his hair down in an interview, he often talks about the search engine’s teleological development into an artificial intelligence Leviathan. Brin has mused that in the future, a person would be able to plug a “little version of Google” into his brain to “improve” it.

Using Google as a proxy for similar sentiments expressed by the technocracy, Carr’s final chapter foreshadows his recent, controversial essay for The Atlantic, Is Google Making Us Stupid?. He asserts that on the internet, “we seem impelled to glide across the slick surface of data as we make our rushed passage from link to link.”

Epilogue. In one generation, one of civilization’s most fundamental inventions — the wick — ceased to be the primary source of artificial light, replaced by the metal filament. Citing an entry from a German diairist in wartime who was forced to live on candlelight during nightly air raids, he notes that electric light brightness imparts a paleness to everything it shines on. Hence our need to keep candles for more emotional interludes.

We tend to focus on what we gain by technological change, not what we lose. With generational change, the memory of what gets lost maintains the illusion that progress is an unalloyed benefit.

Conclusion

Carr has gone far beyond outlining the technological imperative that drives the migration to supply-side computing. He review it from within historical, social, economic, moral, and political contexts that lesser authors blithely disregard as a matter of geek utopianism. This is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and would recommend it to anyone curious about the shift to the cloud, or the consolidation of economic forces the shift portends. If that seems a bit much, at least sample some of Carr’s writing his persistently thought provoking blog, Rough Type.

Technorati Tags: Books, Review, Technology, Internet

As a primer on the social web, Anne Truitt Zelenka’s Connect!: A Guide to a New Way of Working challenges the notion that time spent online is counterproductive. The age of connectivity means increased connection, in social terms — what the author calls “social productivity.” Increased interaction gives rise to more ideas and insights, and delivers value in ways that can be quite different that traditional knowledge work. But to realize that value, we have to adopt work styles that are more conducive to social production than “firewalled attention.” Let’s see how far this idea flies.

Chapter 1: Towards a Web Working World. Zelenka contrasts the “early web” of the late Nineties with the social web that has emerged over the current decade. The major nodes of the early web were corporations with their own constituencies of buyers and community members, with no connection of user accounts between different companies and platforms. In today’s web, blogs, social networking, social bookmarking, photo sharing service, and other platforms can be highly interconnected and mutually reinforcing.

The new working style has shifted from “busy work” to “burst work.” Since social productivity involves an exchange of information and ideas, nothing may seem to be happening for long periods until a sudden flash of insight — a burst — allows to worker to moves many leaps beyond what would have been possible with a more incremental, “busy” approach. To maximize the exchange that makes this possible, burst workers employ workstreaming: sharing hour-by-hour accomplishments and thoughts and discovered resources online. Included is a very good table of different online services that clarifies the different types of social networks: social bookmarking, social networking, professional networking, status updaters, and so on.

Chapter 2: Get Ready to Web Work. Web workers have many more options available to them than working exclusively at home or in the office. A mix of the two might be appropriate; perhaps working in a cafe might be more suitable. One interesting option the author mentions I’d like to look into is “coworking.” Coworking takes place in shared offices with cafe-like qualities. A wiki for locating coworking facilities near you is here.

The web worker also needs to work out what kind of “presence/availability” system is most suitable to his or her workflow. There are times where you’ll want your co-workers to know that you’re available, and other times where you need to be uninterruptable. Options like IM, microblogging, chat rooms, and other technologies are all considered. In this chapter, as well as the previous one, Zelenka argues for using “Office 2.0″ cloud-based apps like Zoho Office or Google Docs.

Chapter 3: Burst Your Productivity. In addition to the usual tools for task and project management, like Outlook or Backpack, the author recommends having a tool or service specifically for “Personal Relationship Management,” like LinkedIn or Highrise. Maintaining a list of people to stay in contact with may be as useful for productivity as having a list of to-dos. Social productivity takes a more organic approach to prioritizing, based on fostering authenticity through sharing. If your priorities are unclear, take some small action and let your priorities emerge from what results: “You don’t know which 20 percent of your work will lead to 80 percent of results.”

Chapter 4: Rethink Your Relationship with Email. Zelenka is no friend of email, to put it mildly: “Email is terribly useful . . . with an emphasis on terribly.” The younger generation is abandoning email for IM, text messaging and MySpace. We learn that the effort required to maintain an empty inbox is more trouble than it’s worth, that messages might be too complex for their headers to be used as a to do list, that a single email might require multiple classifications for tags or folders, and my favorite, that “other people generate claims on your time and attention” (welcome to life). In fairness, she does offer tips for configuring email in ways that might find more acceptable.

This was definitely the least useful chapter in the book for me. I find invariably that the people who complain about email overload are the ones who claim that maintaining an empty inbox requires some kind of extraordinary effort. If you open an email and make no decision on what to do with it, your mind will continue thinking about it while you’re reading the next email. If you do decide what to do with it, but don’t move it to a placeholder that maps to the new intentionality (e.g. a folder like “Reply” or “@Action”), your mind becomes its placeholder.

Chapter 5: Surf Waves of Information. Beyond Google and Wikipedia, there are plenty of other ways to gain and share knowledge. There are more specialized search engines, like Pubmed.gov and Emedicine.com for medical research. There are alternative research strategies, like “orienteering,” where you take small steps toward your goal, using what you already know and the new results you uncover to perform subsequent searches. There are tools like online notebooks, social bookmarks, and news services. What may be more important than all of these is cultivating the right attitude for dealing with information: stepping into a stream at your discretion, not drinking from the firehose. Some sensible tips are given for guarding against information overload.

Chapter 6: Connect, Communicate, Collaborate. Virtual teamwork might be more productive that face-to-face collaboration. Zelenka discusses the tools, strategies and mindset necessary to work virtually, while acknowledging a time and place for face time. Email alternatives are once again emphasized, in addition to Web 2.0 collaborative applications like Coghead, BaseCamp and FreeConference. There’s a very good table listing various contact and relationship management solutions. On the “social” side of the social web, the author includes for effective socializing. There’s also a section on “network science” that’s more sociology than actual network theory, but more practical for it.

Chapter 7: Go Mobile. Much of the material here will be familiar to road warriors. It gives advice on finding a good bag for your laptop, what accessories to take with you, options for wireless networking and security issues. The pros and cons of using a smartphone versus a “feature” (basic) phone are weighed, as well as whether you actually need mobile email or simply text messaging. The author includes some advice for making the most of face-to-face meeting, conferences and follow-ups. Again, if you’re not a seasoned business traveller, you’ll probably get something out of this chapter.

Chapter 8: Explode Your Career. Traditional careerism is waning. Climbing the corporate ladder is becoming less and less of an option. It may be time to replace the ladder with different metaphors. You might think of your life as a tree, branching out in different directions; or as a portolio, with a skill set diverse enough to mitigate risk; or as a narrative, where your current state marks a transition to a happier ending. The social web enables you to replace your current job, supplement it, or promote it by sharing your work with others, then eventually monetizing it. Moving beyond an employment situation can be stressful and risky, and Zelenka discusses a number of coping strategies for dealing with the emotional setbacks that might occur.

Chapter 9: Manage Your Money. A chapter on personal finance for the freelancer isn’t going to be sufficient — you’re going to want to get a full book on subject. But the author’s “web worker” take on money management supplements a more traditional book nicely. I really liked the sidebar on “social money management,” covering sites for peer-to-peer microlending, IOU trackers, financial goal sharing, salary comparisons and budget comparisons. Like any good web worker, Zelenka suggests migrating your cash to online banks and brokerages like ING Direct, HBSC or Charles Schwab.

More tips for independent contractors cover setting rates, invoicing, time tracking, and strategies for deal with disruptions in cash flow. “Bursty income possibilities” include stock options, product sales and ad-supported websites. Finally, the psychological factors in personal finance are discussed, such as the tenuous relationship between income and happiness. Studies show that not far beyond the subsistence level, happiness tends to remain the same.

Chapter 10: Blend Your Work and Personal Life. This is a love-it-or-hate-it idea, but an option now viable by way of the social web. When workstreaming starts to employ photo sharing, comments about what we’re currently doing, bookmarks of what we’re reading, and profiles that include our favorite movies, the web worker’s personal and professional lives become a “work-life smoothie.” As a remote worker who might otherwise get cabin fever from working at home, activities like commenting on blogs or employing social networking platforms can help you stay sane.

The author embraces this model, and recommends not isolating work and personal activities. Not only should work and personal activities be blended, we should try to experiment with combining different types of work activities. In a job market that’s continually reconstituting itself, recombination may become a key survival strategy.

Chapter 11: The Future of Web Work. Zelenka points out three trends to watch: the entry of the MySpace generation into the workforce, global economic uncertainty, and increasing discomfort with Google’s power. Generation Y (the so-called MySpace generation) will have grown up with IM, texting and social networking as a norm, which will change the complexion of how work is conducted in the near future. Global economic uncertainty, at least in this book, seems to be identified with housing market decline rather than growing problems in the energy sector. Google’s privacy policies have generating increasing concern: individual search logs are only rendered anonymous after 18 months, and cookies are only disabled after two years. Moveover, as more people come to rely on Google’s web service for document creation and storage, the company stands as a potential central point of failure in more ways than one.

Some thoughts on Connect!

Social networking is one domain of technology that I’ve struggled to understand the point of since Friendster. Being fairly, and deliberately, clueless on the subject, I really enjoyed the taxonomy of the various web services described in this book. The difference between status updaters like Twitter and professional networking like LinkedIn is easier to apprehend when all of these tools are rounded up and defined in one book.

The productivity material was hit-and-miss for me. I like the concept of “social productivity” when it’s applied to social product — blogs, scientific pursuits, design; for other domains, the concept might be more limited. Further, I perfer the type of leak-proof task management and “firewall mode” that Zelenka considers a “more regimented” approach.

Should you connect with this book?

While there were definitely parts of this book that I disagreed with, I was definitely stimulated throughout. As mentioned, it filled a lot of holes in my concept of the social web. I really enjoyed it as an information resource. If you’re new to social networking and want to know what all the fuss is about, or if your just entertaining a vision of what is would be like to live and work virtually, this is a great book to start with. If you’re already a web worker or road warrior, you might want to skim the book to see if you’re not familiar with this “new way of working.”

Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational takes a contrarian view, using the prism of Behavioral Economics — a relatively recent field of counterfoil research that examines the psychological dimension of supply and demand, often finding that humans’ capacity for dispassionate cost/benefit analysis comes up short. In a way, behavioral economics could be considered the flip side of what experts in marketing have been studying for decades, but here it’s used for intellectual self-defense against mercantile manipulation.

Predictably Irrational uses a number of experiments conducted by the author and colleagues at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, the Harvard Business School, and elsewhere to find out if how we normally make decisions is really in our own best interests.Let’s look at the general principles being argued by the author.

Chapter 1: The Truth About Relativity. People tend to look for relative advantage when choosing between options, giving marketers an opportunity to stack the deck toward a certain preferred option. For example, when Williams-Sonoma introduced a then-novel bread machine for $275, sales were cool. Instead of withdrawing it from the market or lowering the price, the company decided to introduce a larger, more expensive bread machine; then sales of the cheaper one skyrocketed. Did shoppers suddenly “need” a bread machine, or was the deluxe model what the author would call a “decoy” — a reference point for relative advantage.

Relative advantage shows itself in many forms of keeping up with the Joneses, from cars to houses. One way we can exploit relative advantage is to control the “circles” around us, moving toward smaller circles to increase our relative happiness. Buying an economy car that’s not judged by the same standard as a sports car can help someone avoid the temptation to upgrade to a sexier, more expensive model.

Chapter 2: The Fallacy of Supply and Demand. Ariely argues that humans fall subject to “arbitrary coherence” when evaluating prices. In other words, the first price we’re exposed to for a type of good or service functions as an “anchor” that influences what we’re then willing to pay in that category from then on. People who move from expensive housing markets, for example, tend to spend the same amount for a house in a much cheaper state, and vice versa.

In one experiment, the author had students write the last two digits of their Social Security numbers as a price next to a list of goods, like computer keyboards and bottles of wine; then asked them — yes or no — if they’d be willing to pay that figure for each good. Then he asked them to write down the most they’d be willing to pay. Those with SSNs between 80 and 99 placed bids that were up to 346% higher than those with numbers between 1 and 20. From studies like these the author concludes that if arbitrary pricing can hold such sway on what we’re willing to pay, we may need to reexamine the notion that free markets are self-correcting.

Chapter 3: The Cost of Zero Cost. “Free” is an emotional hot button that can drive us to acquire things we don’t need — pens, tee shirts and so on. Free is a price point with no perceived downside. People will buy an extra book from Amazon to qualify for free shipping when they could have paid $3.95 and saved themselves $16 by forgoing the book they would have otherwise left on the shelf. In one poll in a Boston mall, people who were offered the choice between a free $10 Amazon gift certificate and a $20 one for $7 overwhelmingly chose the former.

The author set up a booth to sell individual Lindt truffles and Hershey’s Kisses on a “one per customer” basis, pricing the Lindt truffle (a high quality confection) at $0.15 and the Kiss at $0.01. At these “retail” prices, 73% of customers purchased the truffle, and 27% purchased the Kiss. Then he discounted both by one cent, making the Lindt $0.14 and the Hershey $0.00. Sales of the truffle plummeted to 31%, while “sales” of the Kiss rose to 69%. Apparently, free chocolate tastes more than twice as sweet as penny chocolate. The author suggests using the allure of free in public policy. To increase adoption of hybrid vehicles, for instance, make their registration free.

Chapter 4: The Cost of Social Norms. We live simultaneously in two worlds: one of social norms and one of market norms. Programmers will spend hundreds of hours writing open source code without expecting remuneration. Friends will help us move our furniture to a new house for nothing, or at most a favor. These are social norms. The work we do to pay the bills, of course, happens in the world of market norms. We can design better incentives if we understand the difference, and avoid mixing the two norms.

The the AARP asked some lawyers to offer some of their less expensive services to needy retires for $30 an hour, they refused. When the lawyers were asked to offer the same services for free, nearly all of them agreed. The $30 hourly rate was well below market norms, but when the standard was shifted to social norms, the donation of services was entirely acceptable. Ariely suggests applying the same principle in other domains, like using gifts to reward employees instead of cash.

Chapter 5: The Influence of Arousal. How we make decisions in an emotional (“hot”) state needs to be accounted for when we’re calm and better able to evaluate things. The author uses a study of Berkley students who were first polled on a number of questions about sexual preferences, their likelihood of engaging in immoral behaviors (like getting women drunk to decrease resistance to sex), and their likelihood of engaging in unsafe sex. Once the results were in, the same poll was conducted during heavy exposure to sexually arousing pictures. The results from the aroused group were illuminating. In the series of questions on sexual preferences, the likelihood of indulging in more “adventurous” behavior increased by 72%. The likelihood of immoral behavior rose by 136%, and the likelihood of unsafe sex increased by 25%.

The author concludes that instead of relying on our rational judgement when examining an issue, we need to factor in how things will change in the heat of the moment. In this context, it makes sense to carry a condom even if one is committed to abstinence. Pregnant women who insist on a natural childbirth should prepare themselves for a change of mind once the pain of delivery actually kicks in. Whenever possible, it’s better to make decisions away from emotional triggers. When you’re considering that iPhone purchase, the Apple Store isn’t the best environment for rational judgement.

Chapter 6: The Problem of Procrastination and Self-Control. Ariely assigned three papers during a semester to each of three different classes. Students in the first class could pick any due date for each paper they wanted, but they had to stick to it. Students in the second class had until the last day of the semester to hand in their papers, and could hand them in early (but with no additional credit). Students in the third class were given three equally spaced deadlines by the professor. Which class would fare best?

In descending order: the third class (the students with no choice of deadline), the first class (with self-imposed deadlines), then the second class (no deadline prior to end of semester). Precommitted deadlines were the best approach to dealing with procrastination, partly because the teacher’s authority, partly because the students didn’t have to rethink how much time they had — no options, no deliberation. The author concludes that the best remedy to procrastination is structuring some type of precommitment into the endeavor in question, with consequences for transgressions. A “self-control” credit card, for instance, would allow the user to assign maximum expenditures in different categories ($20 a week for coffee), and any spending above and beyond that amount would result in a self-tax, transferable to a charity or another person.

Chapter 7: The High Price of Ownership. This is probably the least surprising chapter in the book. We tend to overvalue what we own. Duke University students with tickets to their college basketball games were contacted and asked how much they would be willing to sell their tickets for. Prospective buyers, who lost their chance to buy tickets, were contacted and asked how much they would be willing to buy tickets for. Sellers typically asked for between $2400 and $3000. Buyers usually were willing to pay around $175.

When we sell something, we tend to think about what we lose (the representation of fond memories) rather than what we’ll gain (money, freedom from excess baggage). The longer we own something, the more of an emotional investment we have in it. This is even true with virtual ownership, which is why it’s a good idea with online auctions to go for items nearest to closing.

Chapter 8: Keeping Doors Open. Letting go of options is hard, even when it’s in our self-interest to do so. Ariely and a colleague decided to see just how hard by designing a game with a three virtual rooms, each with different colored doors. Once in a room, they could earn a certain amount of money (up to $0.10) with each subsequent click. They game allowed a total of 100 clicks. So students had to choose between increasing their pot by a known amount, or spend one of their clicks to find out if a different room offered a better payout.

At least one student hit on the idea that it was better to stick with the former strategy: stay in one room and keep clicking. He made the most money. Other students felt compelled to move from room to room, especially when the game was modified so that one door would gradually fade away with each click, disappearing completely within 12 clicks. If this game contains a life lesson, it’s that we should pick and option and make it work. And although time wasn’t a factor in this game, it is in real life. So when we spend time deliberating over multiple options, we also need to factor in the consequences of not deciding.

Chapter 9: The Effect of Expectations. Which is better — Budweiser or MIT Brew? MIT Brew is a beer hack: Budweiser with two drops of balsamic vinegar. When MIT students were offered a sample of “standard commercial beer” and one, they were informed, with vinegar added, they typically reported preferring the former, despite the fact that they had the opposite reaction when they weren’t informed of the “secret ingredient.” The author cites other experiments in which food and beverages served in different containers evoked different results on taste tests.

The passage on the power of stereotypes was interesting. In one experiment, one group of Asian-American women were asked questions about their race, then given a math test. Another group of Asian-American women were asked questions about their gender, then given the same math test. The group primed to think about their racial identity performed above average on the math test, presumably based on the stereotype that Asian-Americans have a higher aptitude for mathematics. The group primed to think about their gender identity performed below average, based on the stereotype that women have a lower aptitude for mathematics.

Chapter 10: The Power of Price. This is mostly a chapter about placebo effects in general, adding a couple of observations on the increased potency of more expensive placebos, continuing the theme of expectations. Subjects were individually brought into a waiting room, where they read brochures about a painkiller called Veladone. According to the brochure, Veladone was a fast-acting wonder drug that cost $2.50 a dose. A subsequent group of test subjects read the same brochure, but with the price scratched out and replaced with a handwritten $0.10.

In both groups, the subjects were called into a testing room, where they were given a series of electric shocks of different intensities; then they were given Veladone (yes, a placebo) 15 minutes before the mild torture was repeated. Almost all the subjects experienced pain relief from the $2.50 dose, but only half of the subjects receiving the $0.10 dose did.

Chapter 11: The Context of Our Character, Part I. Some types of dishonesty are different than others. Someone who robs a liquor store is likely to get a harsher sentence if caught than an executive who embezzles 20 times as much from his company. But what about socially accepted dishonesty, like “borrowing” office supplies or exaggerating losses to insurance companies? How do people who generally consider themselves honest behave when offered the opportunity to get away with dishonest behavior?

The author uses a series of quizzes administered to students at the Harvard Business School that gave different groups increased opportunities to cheat, complete with a money jar from which one group could pay themselves. While students who could cheat on the tests (the ones not in the control group) did, in fact, cheat, none of them took more money than they were allotted to take for their correct answers (even if the answers were obtained dishonestly). Curiously, in similar honesty tests, non-control groups asked to recall the Ten Commandments or sign a secular honor code prior to testing did not cheat at all. The mere reminder of ethical codes or social norms was sufficient.

Chapter 12: The Context of Our Character, Part II. The author sneaks into MIT dorms and slips six-packs of Coke into communal refrigerators. The Cokes typically disappear within three days. Ariely repeats the experiment, substituting the Cokes for six one-dollar bills on a plate. Even after three days, not one bill disappears. Like the students at Harvard, the thought of taking real cash gave them pause, even if Cokes were fair game.

Ariely continues his discourse with more tests like the ones in the previous chapter, where more correct answers are rewarded with more money. When cash is replaced with tokens, redeemable for cash immediately afterward, cheating more than doubles. This kind of sophistry is particularly relevant in a world where cash is obsolescent.

Chapter 13: Beer and Free Lunches. When customers in a brewery were verbally offered a selection of five free beers to pick from, individuals within a group at each table would tend to pick different beers. When customers were handed a list of the same beers to pick from by checking their preference (thereby making their selection private), their selections overlapped considerably. This suggests that in our culture, we make our choices in part to express our individuality, even at the expense of getting what we really want. The same experiment was repeated in Hong Kong, where individuality is considered almost eccentric, and the results were almost exactly the opposite.

The chapter ends with a summation of the book’s main theme: that economics would make more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, rather than how they should behave.

Is Predictably Irrational worth reading?

It would be hard for any of us to maintain the level of objectivity required to be entirely rational consumers, but reading this book is a good first step toward arming yourself against manipulation. It’s also a fun read just for the experiments conducted (despite the length of this review, I’ve only included a few), and because Ariely approaches what could be a very dry subject with a sense of humor. He doesn’t pretend to have many answers to translate his insights into policy, but at least he’s laid the groundwork for us to ask the right questions.

A Whole New Mind seems intended to be a prognostication epic in the mold of The Third Wave, Megatrends or The World is Flat. It’s often the case with books in this genre that their authors are astute at detecting new memes, but draw questionable conclusions from them. Let’s see how this book fares.

One: Right Brian Rising. Most readers will already be familiar with the functional differences between the brain hemispheres that Pink outlines here, since we regularly use “left-brained” and “right-brained” as adjectives. The left side of the brain is logical and analytical; the right side is non-linear and emotional. These descriptions are naturally oversimplifications, but the author uses them strictly as metaphors for general thinking modalities he refers to throughout the book as “L-Directed Thinking” and “R-Directed Thinking.”

Two: Abundance, Asia and Automation. Knowledge workers — professionals like executives, lawyers and programmers — are overwhelmingly L-Directed thinkers. In the Conceptual Age, the premium that society once placed on knowledge work will be vastly reduced, owing to Abundance, Asia and Automation. An abundant society like ours is a well-oiled delivery system for goods and services, where ubiquitous stores like Target offer cheap products fashioned by A-list designers. Pink argues that the prosperity unleashed by L-Directed Thinking “has placed a premium on less rational, more R-Directed sensibilities — beauty, spirituality, emotion.”

Asia (a proxy for all overseas labor) is a market where knowledge workers can be had at service sector rates. Salaries for programmers, engineers and accountants in North Africa, South America and Eastern Europe are typically 10-15% of those of their Western counterparts. We’ll need to do what foreign workers cannot do equally well for much less money: forging relationships, taking on unique challenges, and managing at the visionary, big picture level.

Automation has encroached on knowledge work, eliminating rote tasks. Software can, without the aid of a physician, perform preliminary medical diagnoses for many common illnesses by applying decision trees to lab results. Some software can even write software. Medical and legal databases online enable a level of self-help among consumers once unimaginable. As automation replaces the rote element of knowledge work, professionals must elevate their skills and services to a more conceptual level to compete.

Three: High Concept, High Touch. In the Conceptual Age, creators and empathizers are the main actors. Creators in must ask themselves three questions of their work.

• Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
• Can a computer do it faster?
• Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?

The attributes that fulfill these criteria are of a character that Pink calls high concept: the ability to create beauty and narrative, to see patterns and opportunities, and to integrate disparate ideas into novel inventions.

High touch is the ability to empathize, to find and elicit joy, to find and create purpose and meaning. Jefferson Medical School now incorporates an “empathy index” in measuring physician effectiveness. Artistic pursuits gain new credibility in the job market: while Harvard’s MBA program admits 10% of applicants, UCLA’s MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program admits only 3%. “MFA is the new MBA.”

Four: Design. This is the first of six core competencies for the Conceptual Age. Artistic impulses once devalued by career-biased schooling are now held in high esteem, as evidenced by the proliferation of design colleges in the last two decades. Design is critical for three reasons: prosperity and technology have democratized access to it, it allows companies to differentiate their products in the marketplace, and more people than ever are aware of design’s role in their environment (in the 1980′s, most people wouldn’t know the difference between Courier and Times Roman fonts). If a toaster is used for a few minutes a day, but on display the rest of the time, aesthetics plays a greater role than utility. The end of the chapter, and each chapter that follows, contains a “Portfolio” section with interesting exercises, suggestions and resources.

Five: Story. Facts are a dime a dozen in the age of the internet. What matters now is putting facts in context, which is why people still pay good money for info products. Story provides the means to lift people out of information overload by establishing context and relevance. Story establishes rapport, which is why the “narrative medicine” movement is gaining traction. When patients talk about their illnesses, they usually do so as a narrative. In narrative medicine, doctors are encouraged to listen to their patients’ story instead of interrupting them with fact gathering questions. Story is also effective for clarifying mission and purpose within an organization, which is why “organizational storytelling” programs have been established within institutions like the World Bank.

Six: Symphony. People in the Conceptual Age must understand the connections between diverse and seemingly disparate disciplines. Symphony (systems thinking, gestalt thinking, holistic thinking) is the ability to perceive and coordinate situational elements to good effect, and to grasp the relationships between relationships. This faculty provides opportunities for three types of people: the boundary crosser, the inventor and the metaphor maker. Boundary crossers move between multiple disciplines and fields of interest. Inventors combine two or more unrelated ideas into a useful synthesis. Metaphor makers enrich our experience of concepts and facts by presenting them in novel contexts.

Seven: Empathy. The ability to attune oneself to another is a critical high concept, high touch skill in the Conceptual Age. Since overseas knowledge workers with attributes measurable by IQ are in healthy supply, the demand for workers with empathy and emotional intelligence will increase. The Stanford Business School, for instance, now teaches a course in “Interpersonal Dynamics.” Work that can be reduced to rules requires little empathy, while the work that remains will require it.

Eight: Play. Pink contrasts the movement of “laughter clubs” spearheaded by an Indian physician with an Industrial Age counterpoint: a Ford assembly line worker in 1940 who was fired for smiling on the job. Games, humor and joyfulness take on a new importance in the Conceptual Age. Companies like Glaxo and Volvo have organized laughing clubs to help grease the wheels of their social functions. The author adds a section on the rise of the video game industry, which is now more lucrative than the motion picture industry. He cites studies documenting how games can be used to enhance work performance.

Nine: Meaning. Pink describes an increasing trend toward the pursuit of meaning, using Viktor Frankl’s work (Man’s Search for Meaning) as a point of departure. If Frankl, could pursue meaning within the walls of a concentration camp, Pink maintains, we should be able to pursue meaning from the comfort of our abundant lives. Ronald Inglehart’s World Values Survey shows that respondents regularly express greater concern for spiritual and immaterial matters. Spirituality and happiness are increasingly being taken seriously in organizational environments. Pink notes the rise of yoga studios, evangelical bookstores and all variety of “green” products as evidence of a new concern for the role of spirit. Happiness is now a matter of clinical study, and the shift in psychological research from pathology to more humanistic and “positive” frameworks is gaining credibility.

Will this book change your mind?

While A Whole New Mind has a spotty line of argument, it’s an entertaining and thought provoking read, especially if you’re choosing a college major or thinking about changing careers (questions like “Can someone overseas do it cheaper?” are useful to ask). You may end up thinking twice about pursuing a “safe” line of work. The book is an easy read — you can read it in one sitting, or you can grasp 80% of Pink’s theses by reading the first three chapters. The resource sections at the ends of the chapters are fascinating in their own right.

Why “a spotty line of argument”? I edited out my point-by-point objections to Pink’s theses to make this review flow better, but I’ll summarize them into two broad ones here.

First, there’s no reason to assume that overseas workers are less capable of R-Directed Thinking than “we” are. In the Eighties, it was regularly argued that offshored manufacturing would liberate Americans from toil to concentrate on higher-paying, more fulfilling knowledge work. But the bell curve of intellectual aptitude doesn’t flatten based on free market ideals. Five years from now, competitors to IDEO or 37 Signals could just as easily come from Bangalore or Manila as they could from Chicago or San Francisco.

Second, there’s no reason to assume that abundance equals freedom from want, or creates a demand to satisfy transcendental values. I would argue just the opposite — that people in rich countries are preoccupied by their abundance, and dote on their possessions to avoid existential reflection. Just as reporting of crime goes up when actual crime rates go down, perceived scarcity seems to increase with ownership. In a world of more useful things for more useless people, it’s hard for me to agree that a widespread high concept, high touch ethos is a forgone conclusion.

Technorati Tags: Books

Julie Morgenstern’s When Organizing Isn’t Enough is a new slant on eliminating clutter, one that’s implied in other organizing books but rarely explored in depth. The author defines clutter as “any obsolete object, space, commitment or behavior that weighs you down, distracts you or depletes your energy.” This comprehensive definition allows people to identify aspects of “stuff” in their lives that might not qualify as clutter by conventional standards.

For instance, I realized that more than a third of the files in my filing cabinet were obsolete and therefore clutter, despite being very well organized and out of sight. Excessive television viewing and internet surfing would also qualify as clutter. Is this scope of definition valid, and what does the author propose in its stead? Let’s find out.

Chapter 1: What is SHED? Morgenstern uses the mnemonic SHED to represent her four-step process for eliminating legacy issues and possessions. SHED stands for: Separate the treasures, Heave the trash, Embrace your identity and Drive yourself forward. This is clearly a more thematic approach to decluttering that what’s usually offered by professional organizers. This runs the risk of overindulging in pop psychology, as I felt the author’s Organizing from the Inside Out did to a fault. But in SHED, the entire point of the program is to release obstructions to new experiences and life transitions. It’s inherently more psychological as a letting-go process, and less logistical in nature than simply organizing.

Chapter 2: Name Your Theme. SHED starts with the premise that the present moment in our lives is a transition point between our old life theme and a new one, both of which must be explicitly defined. A person might have discerned his old theme to be “professional achievement,” then determined that his new theme should be “building relationships.” Naming one’s theme provides a compass to evaluate which aspects of a person’s life support that theme, and those aspects are the “treasures.” The rest can go. Morgenstern provides case studies and exercises for readers to assess and name their themes.

Chapter 3: Pick Your Point of Entry. This chapter opens with a Zen parable of a man in the midst of a flood. He uses a knife to fashion a raft out of branches from a nearby tree. The raft carries him to safety, and as a result, he resolves to carry the raft with him for the rest of his life, in case it’s needed again. Similarly, we often hang onto things that have outlived their originally valid purpose. Morgenstern calls these things “points of entry,” opportunities to let go of deadwood. Points of entry can be physical items, scheduled items or habits.

Chapter 4: Finding Physical Treasures. The author uses the metaphor of packing for a journey to illustrate the transition to a new life theme. When taking a trip, people naturally leave most of their possessions behind. The first phase of SHED, Separate the treasures, is the art of determining which possessions need to be carried into the current (new) theme, and which ones are excess baggage. Here and in other points of entry, the benchmark is to keep no more then 10-20% of the original load.

Writing a list of “treasure guidelines” provides criteria for what to keep when working through the separation process. Though case studies, Morgenstern discusses the possible psychological factors that turn people into relative packrats, such as filling a void that opened with the death of a parent. This may sound overly speculative, but it’s instructive to trace back to the point in time before the accumulation habit began or accelerated, and consider the possible reasons.

Chapter 5: Finding Schedule Treasures. Treasure guidelines are created again, this time to distinguish time commitments of real value from schedule clutter. Schedule clutter results from three factors: obsolete needs, choosing the wrong activity for the right impulse (scheduling meetings for minor status updates instead of distributing memos or using email), or insecurity (doing other people’s work or maintaining an open door policy).

Chapter 6: Finding Habit Treasures. The treasure hunt continues, but the emphasis here is on extracting the positive need that a bad habit is serving. Habit attachments take five forms: mindless escapes, procrastination, perfectionism, chronic lateness and workaholism. Once the real need is identified, it becomes easier to find a more direct route to fulfilling that need. A series of diagnostic questions is provided for determining the origin, function and severity of each habit.

Chapter 7: Heaving Physical Attachments. We move into the “Heave the treasures” phase for each category of clutter, starting with the physical. If heaving sounds like a ruthless purge, it’s actually not the “toss first, ask questions later” decluttering crusade usually advocated. Remember, this phase follows finding the treasures, so in a sense the heavy lifting has already been done. Still, there’s a difference between preparing for the heave and actually doing it. Morgenstern warns of three potential stumbling blocks to letting go of physical treasures: mechanics, momentum and emotions.

Mechanics are the logistical concerns, like where to take things, or whether to donate or sell them. Momentum deals with scheduling heave sessions to pace yourself sustainably. Since heaving involves detaching one’s identity from representations of the past, emotions are the hardest attachment issue to deal with. A good worksheet is provided for working out the logistics of the purge, strategies are given for maintaining momentum, and a couple of grounding questions are used to assess the emotional weight of a physical attachment. I especially liked the question, “Is this the best and most significant reminder of that time in my life or that person I knew?” By selecting one key reminder, it’s possible to let go of a dozen less significant ones.

Chapter 8: Heaving Schedule Attachments. Many people can appreciate that most of the physical possessions they’ve accumulated could be designated as clutter. But applying the same standard to their schedules may seem rather far-fetched. We’re still holding to the guideline of keeping no more than 10-20% of our current time commitments.

Schedule attachments have three points of entry: unfinished tasks and projects, specific scheduled meetings and appointments, and burdensome roles and responsibilities. For each of these there are three heaving options: delete it, delegate it, or “do it (but diminish the task).” The latter involves either reducing the scale of the task, or finding a more strategic and expeditious way of completing it — like handling an errand by phone instead of by car. The goal of heaving these attachments is to eliminate backlogged tasks permanently rather than replace them with a new backlog. Most of the advice on heaving appointments and burdensome roles boils down to becoming more assertive when setting boundaries. Case studies and scripts illustrated methods of addressing fears and role attachments that can turn people into doormats.

Chapter 9: Heaving Habit Attachments. Both schedule and habit attachments and time clutter, but habits and not calendar or to-do items. Habits are behaviors and routines that relieve pressure in the moment but exert pressure on one’s sense of available time. We all know people who insist that they don’t have time to do something, yet watch several hours of television. Heaving habit attachments is a two-part process: raising awareness of the habit’s “trigger point” — the moment the habit kicks in, and finding a more direct and constructive way to fill the need the habit was serving.

Morgenstern offers strategies for addressing each habit attachment (e.g. procrastination, chronic lateness). One example is her “concentration threshold theory” of procrastination. If you give yourself too little time to complete a task, you’ll resist starting on it because you unconsciously know that it can’t be completed. If you give yourself too much time, you’ll resist starting because you feel like you have all the time in the world.

Chapter 10: Trust Yourself. This begins the “Embrace your identity” phase. Going through a SHED can throw a person into an identity crisis. In the absence of familiar props, the new landscape can be disorienting. This chapter contains exercises for grounding the reader by recovering reference points of skill and resourcefulness demonstrated in the past. Some of these involve searching one’s memory for previous challenges that were overcome, like a first job or a first solo trip. We look through each phase in our lives for evidence of the capabilities required to transition to our current theme.

Chapter 11: Discipline to Deliver. This chapter looks at five disciplines required to deliver on the key set of skills used to realize one’s current theme: drive and determination, organization, self-confidence, health habits and attention. Advice is given for each of these skills, most of which is familiar enough to avoid detailing here (like “avoid obsessing over negative emotions”), but still a worthwhile read.

Chapter 12: Live in the Moment. Since SHED is a letting go of the past, living in the moment takes on a new significance. After a description of “the moment,” the reader is asked to consider what percentage of each day is spent “in the moment,” and to recall occasions or events containing these present-focused qualities. The author argues that living in the moment is usually a faculty that has to be cultivated or recovered through conscious effort, and offers tips for doing so, such as meditation, proclaiming a period of heightened observation, starting every day brand new, and creating checklists of “moment stealers” and “moment grabbers.”

Chapter 13: Break Your Mold. The reader is encouraged to engage in activities unrelated to his or her current theme. The author uses a personal example of taking up gymnastics in her forties, at her daughter’s insistence. Though she initially thought the sport was out of the question at her age, she quickly discovered that it was not only possible, but that it increased her fitness, concentration and adaptability to engage in activities out of her comfort zone. Expanding one’s comfort zone is the primary carryover effect of taking on off-track activities. Lists in three categories are given for the reader’s consideration. If you’re a knowledge worker, for instance, try to develop an athletic skill.

Chapter 14: Experiment with Your Theme. Here we fill the void opened by the heaving process, exploring the themes, skills, projects and values that express the new theme. This is essential to avoid dwelling on what we’ve left behind. Three guiding questions are used to design a lifestyle around the new theme. What activities do I love to do? What topics capture my imagination? What qualities do I cherish? The object is to look for projects and activities that most successfully address and fulfill these questions.

Chapter 15: Beware of the 30 Percent Slip. The SHED is largely complete when a person spends roughly 80% of her time and energy toward realizing her vision of the future, unencumbered by the dead weight of physical and emotional artifacts. The 30 Percent Slip refers to the stalls in progress that are likely to happen during the SHED, and the chapter includes a “Back on Track” diagnostic test to help catch and correct that slip. Some slips are simply recognitions of new themes on the horizon, rather than reversions to old ones. SHED is a continuous, cyclical process, and themes change as life goes on.

Is less enough?

Having only read the author’s first book, Organizing from the Inside Out, I can’t say that When Organizing Isn’t Enough is her best book, but it is by far the better of the two, and I recommend it highly. It’s more focused, and the implications and applications of SHED are more far-reaching than an organizing methodology. If you’re looking for an effective method to experience more life with less stuff, this book makes a great starting point. While much of today’s talk around elimination has an undercurrent of nihilism, SHED is a comprehensive system for letting go of things after giving them due consideration.

ConZentrate is organized into 12 parts, with 34 chapters, or “Ways,” between them.

The introduction lays out the agenda that would be expected from the title. The title’s play on words is a microcosm of one of the book’s writing style, full of wordplays, pop references, jokes and quotations that I found wearisome: “Lord Byron once said, ‘The Head is the dome of thought, the palace of the soul.’ We’ve all heard that Dome [sic] wasn’t built in a day, and neither is the ability to ConZentrate.”

Part 1: Want to Get a Head? This part defines the scope of ConZentration (the word replaces “concentration” throughout the book, a practice I’ll avoid here): single-mindedness, interest in action, perseverance, and management of what Horn calls T.I.M.E. (Thoughts, Interest, Moments, Emotions). It also discusses the blocks to achieving concentration, such as lack of privacy, lack of patience, lack of energy, and so on.

Part 2: Train Your Brain. This section offers a five-minute exercise for clearing your mind by finding a private place, repeating an affirmation, and saying “No!” to any thoughts that intrude during the drill. Horn then recommends limiting your field of vision to the subject matter at hand by using your hand as a blinder. More tips are offered for stopping the onset of unwanted thoughts.

Part 3: Focus When You Don’t Feel Like It. Horn advocates an “Act Now, Feel Later” approach to initiative, setting realistic goal lines, establishing if-then rewards for accomplishing tasks, and focusing on objectives over objections. One good high-level focus tip, “Remember Mortality,” is reminding ourselves the price we pay in the scheme of things for making the easy choice, using a focus question like, “What will matter a year from now?”

Further focus questions are employed in the chapter on procrastination. When you’re about to put something off, ask, “Do I have to do this? Do I want to have this finished? Will this be any easier later?”

Part 4: Mind Your Own Business. This deals with crafting an environment conducive to focused work: eliminating disruptive sounds, improving posture, making thing accessible, decluttering, and increasing light levels. Horn recommends some triage best practices, like the 80/20 rule and short, prioritized lists.

There are a couple of good chapters devoted to eliminating interruptions, ranging from conversational tips for controlling motormouths to positioning desks out of a hallway’s line of sight.

Part 5: ConZonetration. These chapters lean heavily of sports analogies and anecdotes to recommend ways of getting and staying “in the zone.” Most of the material here covers the use of strategic visualization to enhance performance. This is one of the book’s strongest chapters, since it seems to draw heavily from personal experience with her two sons’ athletic travails.

Part 6: Make Your Home Your Castle (Not Your Hassle). Many homes are the dumping grounds for frustrations accumulated at work or school. Horn outlines strategies for creating sanctuary instead. No-phone dinner times, more decluttering, mood-setting music, family rules, and so on.

Part 7: Now and Zen. These chapters offer advice for staying in, or getting back to, the here-and-now, such as eye directing techniques and a couple of non-mystical forms of meditation. The breathing meditation exercises are particularly good.

Part 8: Does It All A.D.D. Up? This part emphasizes the need for those with acute attention deficits to set up additional systems, attitudes and distraction filters to stay on task, since willpower far less effective among those who honestly have A.D.D.

The second chapter is less about clinical attention deficits then social ones. The author gives advice for effective listening without interruption, and preparing appropriate replies to awkward questions that are anticipated in future conversations.

Part 9: Head Master. Here we have study tips for academic and continuous learning. While it’s hard to present original material in the realm of study tips, this is not a bad section. Horn recommends scheduling topics in order of difficulty to direct your peak mental reserves for the material that’s hardest to learn. Also discussed are break schedules, notetaking, memory techniques and increasing motivation.

Part 10: Good Thinking. A guide to making decisions and solving problems. “Define the problem” is the boilerplate that kicks off virtually every formal problem solving technique invented, but almost universally ignored in the real world, so it’s good to see the reminder here. Exploring options, getting feedback from others, increasing objectivity are among the topics discussed.

A chapter is devoted to mental fitness, which includes recommended activities like positive self-talk and doing crossword puzzles, but also discusses the link between mental and physical fitness, with tips for diet, exercise and rest.

Part 11: It’s All in Your Head. This section centers on emotional self-management. Some of the tips are as simple as getting out of the house or spending time with a pet, while others are damn-the-torpedoes attitude adjustments (“Resolve to Do, Not Stew”). This was the least useful part of the book for me, but it was clearly designed to end the book on an inspirational note.

Is the book ConZentrated enough?

Like Brian Tracy, Sam Horn anthologizes more than she synthesizes. Each page has at least two or three quotes, meaning at least 700 quotes throughout the book. But also like Tracy, the sheer volume of tips makes it very likely that you’ll run across relevant reminders of advice you’ve encountered before. In hindsight, I would have preferred to skim through the book rather than read it in whole, and I’d recommend you do the same.

The stream of great hacks can lead to flash flooding. Retaining the cream content in a blog as prolific as Lifehacker (typically two dozen posts a day) and triaging the less relevant requires black belt productivity in itself. More than just catching up with the latest moves in knowledge work athletics, readers need to step back and look at the few principles behind the many hacks.

Which is why it’s such a pleasure to have a distilled version of Lifehacker in book form. The first edition, Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day, has been retitled in its brand new second edition to Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better.

Lifehacker Reloaded

Upgrade Your Life is a guided toolbox of downloads, configurations and occasional pearls of wisdom. Reading a book version of the blog is almost a reintroduction to its ethos. Each chapter is an overarching principle for one aspect of streamlining workflow, and the best practices within the chapter are enumerated “hacks” — 116 of them between 11 chapters.

With any productivity blog or book, it’s best to approach it as a buffet, which is precisely what Gina encourages readers to do here: take what’s useful, and ignore the rest. Some of the tips are targeted towards Windows users, some are for Mac users; others are for fans of paper-based task management. The frequent Linux content on Lifehacker is conspicuously absent from Upgrade Your Life, which isn’t surprising, since this is clearly a mass market work.

Let’s take a look at some of the highlights from each chapter.

Chapter 1 — Control Your Email

The first edition began with the chapter, “Free up Mental RAM,” which appears retitled as a later chapter. The new Chapter 1 is Lifehacker’s most recurring theme: efficient email management. Regular Lifehacker readers will recognize much of the advice here, especially Hack #1: get your inbox to empty, and keep it that way. Once an email in your inbox is opened, it should either answered, deleted, archived, or transferred to short-term action folders.

Gina recommends a three-folder system: Archive for permanent storage, Follow-Up for messages with actions that go on your To Do list, and Hold for items requiring further input from the sender or others before it can be cleared. Instead of a Two Minute Rule, Gina recommends one minute: if the email can be answered in one minute or less, answer it; otherwise move it to Follow-Up and extract the action required for your To Do list.

Other hacks include tips for formatting readable subject lines, message bodies and reply quotes; deprioritizing CCed messages and “bacn,” consolidating multiple email accounts through Gmail — and my favorite, scripting boilerplate responses with the Quicktext extension for Thunderbird.

Chapter 2 — Organize Your Data

Gina makes the case for a six-subfolder Documents folder structure that she uses on her Mac, Linux and Windows machines: bak for backup, docs for active project documents, docs-archive, junkdrawer for temporary files (like podcasts and setup files), multimedia, and scripts for those who run executable scripts or shortcuts.

In addition to (or in spite of) the folder system, there’s a strong argument made for shifting from the file cabinet paradigm to embracing robust search tools like the Google Desktop, which integrates results from the web and your hard drive in a single thread. Other hacks in the chapter are for file encryption, consolidated password storage, and photo management. There are even a couple of old school hacks, like do-it-yourself paper planners and tips for effective filing.

Chapter 3 — Trick Yourself into Getting Done

This chapter is state-of-the-art task management, showing readers how to atomize unwieldy To Do lists into a smaller, more concrete set of instructions to self. “At any point during the workday,” Gina writes, “you are in one of two modes: thinking mode (that’s you with the Boss hat on) and action mode (that’s you with the Personal Assistant hat on).” The key is to think like an effective Boss who has to delegate to her assistant with clear instructions — using specific verbs in To Dos like “Phone” or “Email” rather than “Contact” or “Ask.”

Gina points out the danger in writing down To Dos that bundle more than one action — what she calls “multiaction tasks,” or what David Allen calls “projects” or “subprojects.” A multiaction task would be an instruction like “Clean office,” which can’t be done in one step. By focusing on the next action, “File papers on desk,” it becomes easier to move forward.

Like Julie Morgenstern and Tim Ferris, Gina recommends avoiding checking email in the morning, and instead setting up a “morning dash”: spending at least the first hour of each day dedicated to finishing the one most important task on your list. Another good hack, borrowed from Morgenstern, is the time map: a table or spreadsheet of a model day in which you shade in sections according to your ideal distribution of activity categories, which is then compared to a log of your actual distribution. Also included are timer hacks, automated activity logs, and advice for avoiding time sinks and overwork.

Chapter 4 — Clear Your Mind

Originally titled “Free up Mental RAM,” this chapter stresses the importance of getting thoughts out of your head and into some outboard memory system, whether paper or electronic. The brain’s short-term memory makes a poor storage space for holding dozens of implicit commitments like “I need to get my tires rotated” or “We’re having dinner with Angela on Friday(?)”. The mind has to constantly issue itself reminders of these internal agreements, leading to persistent stress and distraction.

Most of hacks consist of electronic tools and techniques, like keeping action lists in text files, updating your Google Calendar via email, setting up a personal wiki, emailing reference photos from your cell phone to Flickr, and a detailed look at Remember the Milk.

The RTM entry was the first of many times I read and learned something in the book that I glossed over whenever it was mentioned on the blog. I’ve ignored the online list manager Remember the Milk because I was convinced that I had to keep my lists in the cloud. In fact, RTM is Google Gears enabled, meaning that lists can be stored offline if desired.

Since notetaking is still faster and more fluid on paper for most people, there are a couple of hacks on better notetaking and creating customized note paper.

Chapter 5 — Firewall Your Attention

As the author’s most famous catchphrase, “Firewall Your Attention” shrewdly frames concentration as the art of removing distractions, or making them inconvenient to access, instead of relying on discipline. Leechblock is one such distraction filter: a Firefox extension that blocks designated websites at set times, adding a layer of security settings that make unblocking difficult. If that’s not enough, Gina gives instructions on how to edit your hosts directory to give a “Server Not Found” error message when you point your browser to whatever sites you’ve added to hosts.

Other hacks include clearing icons from the desktop, setting up multiple desktops, shutting down your email client when not in use, and even tips on how to organize your house into a distraction-free environment.

Chapter 6 — Streamline Common Tasks

Lifehacker readers will be familiar with most of these hacks, but they bear repeating. The keyboard hacks covered here are Windows and Firefox shortcut keys, utilities for customized keyboard launching (Launchy on Windows, Quicksilver on Mac), and utitilies for creating hotstrings (Texter on Windows, TextExpander on the Mac). Hotstrings allow you to create custom abbreviations that replace themselves with larger strings of text, like “TFI” for “Thank you for your interest.” This is a must-apply hack.

Non-keyboard hacks include information resources available via text messaging, batch photo resizing, more GCal tips, and a look at the clever Qipit web service that allow you to email snapshots of whiteboards and printed pages for automatic scanning to PDF.

Chapter 7 — Automate Repetitive Tasks

Most of these hacks are for routine computer management — things we all know we should do, like backing up our hard drive, but are too boring to get around to. These types of tasks are terrific candidates for automation. Freeware strategies for backing up to an external drive are detailed for Windows (SyncBack) and Mac (using Leopard’s native Time Machine utility), as well as web-based service solutions like Mozy. If you’ve organized your document folders as recommended in Chapter 2, Gina’s “Janitor” VB script cleans out the junkdrawer folder at scheduled intervals. And there are a couple of tips for putting Windows’ “Scheduled Tasks” function to good use.

Also included are ways to automate the downloading of multiple files and the emailing of backup files. There’s also a cool VB script for logging individual entries of some metric, like your weight for the day, which automatically updates a spreadsheet.

Chapter 8 — Get Your Data to Go

It’s amazing how many options we have to work at different sites. We can store huge files on a flash drive, run applications on a flash drive, create and share documents with online office suites, access web apps via text message, install virtual private networks or control PCs remotely through VNC. All of these options are addressed in detail.

One of the coolest additions to the book’s second edition is Mojopac, a free “PC on a stick” utility that lets your run a copy of your PC’s Windows or Linux image directly off of an external drive, such as an iPod or a USB flash drive. The various Twitter SMS “bots” were news to me. Through Twitter you can send text message updates to your Remember the Milk task manager, or retrieve a particular list. There’s a timer bot to send reminders to yourself, one for logging expenses, and another for logging gas mileage. Apparently you can do more with Twitter than let the world know you’re getting a burrito.

Chapter 9 — Master the Web

A potpourri of skills, extensions, bookmarklets and other resources for getting the most from your browser and the internet. The chapter has a great guide to Google search operators — terms that modify and filter searches. Most of it’s old news to power users, but I found a couple of operators that I didn’t already know, like adding a tilde before a keyword to include its synonyms in the search (~PDA).

RSS is another technology that’s old news except to novices — majority of computer users. It’s good to see a clear explanation of what it is for those who might be afraid to ask. Even many people who familiar with RSS still unaware how the ability to access or create dynamic feeds.

Other hacks in this largish chapter include instructions on installing Firefox extensions, recommended extensions, favorite bookmarklets, finding reusable media in the digital commons, clearing your browser history, and porting your Firefox configuration to copies on other computers.

Chapter 10 — Hone Your Computer Survival Skills

If you can spell Lifehacker, you’ve probably been conscripted by friends and family as tech support. What sounds like a dull read is actually an interesting and informative chapter on the basic maintenance skills and software utilities we should all have. Most of the content is targeted to Windows users, since Windows is usually the target of attacks.

It discusses all of the basic enemies of good computer health, like malware, spyware, viruses, browser hijacking, startup folder bloatware — and gives solutions for them. I threw most of the mentioned utilities on a flash drive, and now feel ready to diagnose and repair anyone’s computer the next time it throws a fit. File merging, system restoration, data recovery, thorough file deletion and proper filewalling round things out.

Chapter 11 — Manage Multiple Computers

Most of the discussion here is for sharing resources over a network. Non-admins will be surprised at how easy some of the hacks are, like setting up shared folders in Windows and Macs computers and exchanging files between the two platforms. Microsoft’s SyncToy and FolderShare get mention for synchronizing folders between computers, so that the two folders have the latest file image. Other shared resources discussed include browser bookmarks, printers, a single operating in a dual-monitor setup, and a single keyboard and mouse between two computers.

Finally, Gina gives instructions for sharing an Intel Mac’s hard drive with OS X and Windows using Boot Camp. This was the only weak spot in the book for me, since anyone marginally interested in a dual-boot Mac would have probably made installing Windows and Boot Camp a priority long before picking up this book. But I suppose it does technically qualify as a hack, and not a trivial one.

Should you Upgrade?

I don’t have to deliberate on this one — yes, even if you have a copy of the first edition. Not only has the technology changed between editions, but the thematic organization of the book is noticeably more streamlined. If you’ve never read Lifehacker in book form, you might be surprised at how much easier it is to digest without being on the lookout for the next post, or clicking on every interesting link.

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency takes the themes Tom DeMarco covered in his most well-known book, Peopleware, and congeals them into a single term that can be applied broadly to many resources and faculties — time, money, personnel, risk tolerance — to maximize an organization’s agility and responsiveness to change. The term slack is defined as “the degree of freedom required to effect change.” Obsession with absolute efficiency militates against change.

The book opens with a stark analogy. DeMarco depicts two slider puzzles with space for nine tiles. The first puzzle is the one we’re used to seeing as children: of the nine spaces, only eight are occupied with tiles. The empty space is the slack that allows the tiles to shift, making the puzzle a game worth playing. The second puzzle, more efficiently, occupies all nine spaces with tiles, maximizing use of all available resources. The former puzzle is 11.1 percent less efficient but 100 percent more playable. The latter puzzle is incapable of change.

Busyness

In this chapter, the author argues that extreme busyness is counterproductive to an organization. He uses the example of a secretary, “Sylvia.” Her usefulness to an executive is largely related to her availability to take on new tasks as they come up. To respond to her boss when he needs something filed, typed or scheduled, she can’t be in constant motion — the current task will interfere with the new task, regardless of which one is more important. But a consultant observing Sylvia strictly on the basis of time and motion would conclude that if she’s idle (available) 47 percent of the time, that idleness is waste that’s ripe for recovering. He suggests putting her in a “pool” for sharing with another boss. If the slack is taken up in this way, she’ll be too busy to get started immediately on new tasks, and work will start to pile up. Efficiency programs drive availability out of the organization.

The need to look busy across an entire department results in inbox hedging. Since no one can look idle, employees become anxious to keep some work in reserve at all times, slowing down their current tasks to pace the reserve if necessary. An empty inbox means nothing to work on, compelling employees to create activities to keep themselves in conspicuous motion.

The Myth of Fungible Resource

A fungible resource is one that’s freely exchangeable, or perceived to have equivalent exchange value. Four dollars might buy a latte or a gallon of gas; the cash is a fungible resource. The same logic can be disastrous when applied to human resources. The “matrix management” approach of sharing a single knowledge worker across several projects who reports to several bosses incurs a task-switching overhead whose impact on productivity usually goes unquantified. Some task-switching penalties are mechanical: putting away one set up materials, pulling out another, changing venue, etc. Other penalties are intellectual. When conceptual work, like designing an ad campaign, is interrupted, the knowledge worker has to mentally retrace that work during the following session. There’s usually an immersion time for each session necessary to overcome mental inertia. There’s the emotional frustration of being interrupted, requiring time to regroup. If the work is done in a team, there’s a “team binding” effect that gets disrupted.

DeMarco puts the minimum task-switching penalty at 15 percent. He participated in conducting a study of over 600 programmers, monitoring and correlating their project completion against the number of tasks they switched between, working in their own environments. Each task switch averaged 20 minutes of lost concentration, and the programmers experienced an average of 0.4 switches per hour — a loss of over one hour of productive effort a day.

Business Instead of Busyness

This chapter discusses the benefits of designed-in slack, and the perils of its absence. Slack enables organizations to effect proactive, ongoing redesign instead of the reactive, crisis-induced restructurings characteristic of more rigid institutions. Slack reduces employee turnover, not just of star employees, but of all employees whose cost in human capital gets overlooked and unquantified. Slack increases the capacity to invest in the future by setting aside resources necessary for reinvention to happen (taking funding out of R&D to trim the fat is a faulty long-term growth strategy).

DeMarco has always stressed the need to recognize turnover in quantitative terms. As an example he uses the departure of Orin, who gets replaced by Oliver. Oliver is zero percent useful to the project on the first day, 100 percent useful on his last day. In addition to his technical skill, Oliver must have another faculty, which the author calls domain knowledge, “some explicit knowledge of the area in which the skills are deployed” — the street smarts of knowledge work. If the replacement’s ramp-up time factors in domain knowledge, there should be a cost in human capital, which DeMarco accounts as half of the ramp-up time. If Oliver takes six months to get up to speed, assuming a linear increase in his domain knowledge over that period, half of his monthly cost is human capital drain. Naturally, the higher the turnover percentage, the higher the human capital drain, which is true as true of average employees as it is of stars.

Working employees at full capacity over the long-term course of a development project will increase turnover as surely as a runner attempting to sprint the entire length of a marathon will abandon the effort. Exit interviews of employees find that one of their most frequent grievances was that they felt used. Aggressive schedules need to be reexamined for their impact on turnover.

The Cost of Pressure

DeMarco distinguishes knowledge work from rote work by quoting Peopleware co-author Tim Lister: “People under time pressure don’t think faster.” It’s possible to speed up motion, but not thinking. Since think rate is fixed, knowledge workers are left with three avenues for accelerating performance: eliminate wasted time, defer tasks that aren’t mission critical, and stay late. Since knowledge workers tend to be hired on the basis of their mental performance, they’re usually inclined to eliminate wasted time and noncritical tasks without being impelled to do so from without; there’s not much of an improvement opportunity here.

Staying late, on the other hand, is the contemporary hallmark of knowledge work. But long hours, being relative to normal hours, can only create a short-term boost in output, as demonstrated in a later chapter. Working twice as many hours as yesterday might show double the output today, but putting in the same long hours tomorrow is unlikely to show the same increase. Even if it did, the negative impact on personal and family life will create countervailing pressures.

A slight increase in pressure might reduce delivery time by 10 or 15 percent, coming from whatever poor triage and wastes of time remain for elimination. With additional pressure, workers become resentful and resort to “undertime” (manufacturing personal emergencies to take care of on company time). With still more pressure, workers begin looking for work elsewhere.

Overtime

This chapter includes of fascinating account of what gets factored out of industry-wide predictive metrics on development projects in fields like architectural design, circuit design and software development. A typical practice used to predict completion time for a project is to create a scatter diagram plotting effort in workdays against so some correlative metric, like the number of circuit junctions tested and proved. For the correlations to be meaningful, the factors measured need to be defined in such a way that the scatter points fall as close to the trend line as possible — the object is to find the factors that improve prediction by narrowing the scatter. One possible refinement would be to substitute effort in workdays with effort in workhours. In theory, this would improve accuracy, since the number of hours worked from day to day can be highly variable. In practice, increasing the hours per workday makes no empirical difference. “The twelve-hour days don’t accomplish any more than the eight-hour days. Overtime is hogwash.”

DeMarco returns to the turnover theme, reiterating the need for managers to explicitly note the cost of lost human capital. Showing a pie chart with budget breakdowns for research, prototyping, sales support, and the like, turnover is conspicuously absent. “When I ask presenters, ‘Where is the personnel turnover in this pie chart?’ they look at me blankly.” One example used in a previous chapter put the turnover cost at 12 percent of the cited manpower budget.

The author discusses some of overtime’s less controversial negative impacts, like the fatigue and lethargy characteristic over overworked teams, and the decline in quality resulting from doing work that requires peak concentration during past-peak hours. Somewhat more original is his argument that overtime encourages wasted time. Once employees recognize that they and their peers will be available well beyond their putative quitting time, they make time during the official work day for arbitrary meetings, they interrupt coworkers for non-emergencies, and allow themselves to be similarly interrupted. After all, there’s always overtime to take up the slack.

The Second Law of Bad Management

A short, simple chapter. The First Law is an oft-quoted one coined by Jerry Weinberg. “If something isn’t working, do more of it.” DeMarco declares the Second Law of Bad Management to be: “Put yourself in as your own infielder.” He makes a case for a strict division of labor, that managers should spend their time managing and not doing the work they’re supposed to management. Management is hard because it requires focus on the shifting nuances of attitudes and relationships. Managers who take up production work are seeking refuge from the people skills needed to make the workplace run smoothly.

Quality

DeMarco nominates Adobe Photoshop as the best software product of all time, citing nine reasons such as: “It redefines the whole notion of photo processing,” “It allows you to do things that were unimaginable before,” and “It is solid as a rock.” Only the latter reason quoted has anything to do with the lack of defects. Most initiatives that fall under the rubric of “quality” consist entirely of defect prevention and removal. If absence of defects is only one component of the user’s perception of quality in Photoshop, it stands to reason that the focus of quality initiative should expand to other criteria: uniqueness, usefulness, market impact and consistency with changing customer work modes. Quality, even by the conventional standard, takes time. To increase the quality of product, there must be a reduction in the quantity of products to those that are most essential or help redefine the company.

Management by Objectives

While MBO in name has declined as a buzzword from the 1950′s, the legacy of measuring departmental performance by a few quantitative measures assumed to be representative of the organization’s goals lingers on. Trying to increase an organization’s growth and profit by focusing on a handful of component performance characteristics is questionable. It induces stasis and risk aversion by ignoring most performance measures except for the ones judged to be “key.” “Do everything the same as last year, only this year do more of X.”

Reduction of organizational health to combination of lower-level objectives invites dysfunction. An initiative to increase throughput may also increase turnover. If the former is successful, the latter will be ignored despite its greater impact on the bottom line (selling more widgets at a higher cost-per-employee).

Fear and Safety

When an employee has to learn a new skill, or a manager has to guide a department in an entirely new direction, what is often at stake is not the risk of getting fired in the event of failure, but the more subtle risk of mockery from one’s peers. This, according to DeMarco, is the main impediment to organizational change. “Irony and sarcasm, public humiliation, exasperation, managerial tantrums, eye-rolling: These are the true enemies of essential change. To make an organization change-receptive, you need to rout all these kinds of disrespect from the culture.”

Danger in the White Space

The white space referred to here is between and across hierarchies in the org chart. Managers at the same level are would-be peers who spend their time communicating with those above and below them, but never interact between themselves to learn from other. Competition makes them insular, unable to share their managerial insights across the white space. The notion that some competition is healthy preserves the culture of stasis. Since competition involves offense and defense, it’s easy to focus on the positive aspects of “scoring” in offense while ignoring the inevitable stasis resulting from defense.

Learning and reinvention in an organizational culture take time, and it’s important to make that time by not assigning projects to carry out in the time it would take the trainer to complete. “Training = practice by doing a new task much more slowly than an expert would do it.”

Uncommon Sense

This is the first of several excellent chapters on risk management. Risk management acknowledges stochastic control over projects rather than deterministic control. With stochastic control, you only control the likelihood of an outcome. Turnover can be reduced, but not guaranteed, by controlling variables like scheduling, compensation and benefits. Deterministic control is linear. The flow of electricity through a bulb can be predictably controlled by turning the dimmer knob.

A stochastic overview of a project is created with a risk diagram, a curve that plots the odds of completing a project against a given timeline. The peak of the curve is the most likely completion date. The toes of the curve are the most optimistic and worst-case scenarios. Viewing a project this way allows you to focus on the entire continuum of possibilities, not just the most likely date or better. Subsequent chapters discuss the details of risk discovery and risk containment. It’s important to budget additional time and money across the range of risk. If a part’s supplier suddenly drops the ball, and you’ve identified that risk on the front end, you’ve kept a communication channel open with the next lowest bidder and are ready to tap into the allocated risk reserve to pick up the slack, without incurring a huge setback in schedule.

Working at Breakneck Speed

In the days of sailing ships, naval forces would advise their captains to “proceed with all prudent speed,” not at “top speed.” Sailing ships were inherently risky, due to keeping more sail aloft in high winds, fatigue, unknown waters and other factors. DeMarco advises knowledge work ventures to proceed with all prudent speed by looking at the entire risk diagram, not just the optimistic-to-likely completion scenarios, and contingency plan around setbacks. If time is spent on a risk that doesn’t materialize, “put that in the same category as the money you spent last year on life insurance that turned out not to be needed.”

Is Slack worth taking up?

Slack could be much thinner, more like Peopleware, if DeMarco consolidated the chapters that have similar points. But it’s a fast read, and for managers not accustomed to books on project management, the section on risk management is particularly strong. Although the book is targeted for executives, it’s a great read for employees in any type of knowledge work, especially to pick up early warning signs that his or her department is bitten off more than they can chew. Slack could save you from becoming collateral damage to an “aggressive schedule.”