My “they’re all narcissist” base assumption

Whether it’s Larry David, Robert DeNiro, or on a recent Econtalk podcast, Megan McArdle, I have to laugh when they hate on Trump.

Why?

The worst criticism they come up with is that they think Trump is a malignant narcissist.

They might be right.

I laugh because it seems they haven’t figured out that the alternatives to Trump are also malignant narcissists.

I assume Larry David and Robert DeNiro are malignant narcissists, too. Malignant narcissists tend to hate other malignant narcissists. The planet is only so big, after all. There’s not enough room for all of their inflated egos.

I operate with a base assumption that all famous people are malignant narcissists. This includes politicians, celebrities, sports stars, business leaders, your local TV new personalities and more.

You almost have to be a malignant narcissist to shine through at that level. We call them ‘stars’ for a reason. There are a lot of celestial bodies out in space that we can’t see, because they don’t give off enough light. But, stars are special. You can see them from billions of light years away.

If you’ve ever been to a hotbed of talent like LA or Nashville, you may have noticed that there are lots of extremely talented folks performing on the streets. These are the celestial bodies we can’t see. To breakthrough all that, it takes an exceptional level — well, uh — self interest. Sometimes a lucky break, but a lot of time the truth is that the stars are often willing to do things others won’t and sometimes not good things.

I categorize top famous folks as Class A narcissists. I’ve encountered plenty of Class B and C narcissists in my career. Class B tend to occupy C-suite and Board of Directors positions in bureaucracies. Class C are Class A or B narcissists-in-training, going back and forth on how much they are willing to sell out to get what they want.

I could be wrong. I haven’t met and spent time with any top famous people.

But that’s just it, most of us haven’t.

How they seem to us is their public persona. We confuse that with thinking we know them like how we know our friends and family.

They know we make this mistake and exploit it by creating faux public personas that are just the sort of folks we’d like to hang out with or aspire to be, by design. Many attributes of those personas come straight from their market research and focus groups, and age old tales of heroism.

Usually, their public personas aren’t whole fabrications, they are in the realm of ‘based on a true story,’ sort of like how a movie like The Dolphin Tale is based on a true story. Then you visit the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, like I did with my family, where the movie was based, and learn that there were only a few elements of the movie that wasn’t made up and you realize there is a lot of leeway in the word “based.” The real story wouldn’t be all that interesting, after all. It might have made a nice blurb in a magazine. But, to make a movie that people want to watch, we have to add basic elements like a protagonist and antagonist, a couple of key, time bound challenges, interesting characters and a few story arcs.

So, if I assume all these folks are narcissists, then why is it that many folks perceive Trump to be one and don’t realize the others are, too?

I think there’s a few reasons for this.

One, a large part of the public personas are shaped by media and if media is on your side, they play along and help reinforce the good guy image. If they aren’t, they can twist just about any little thing to reinforce a bad guy image. A lot of folks fall for this, unfortunately.

Another is that business people, like Trump, haven’t spent their careers creating false public personas. They don’t know the game as well. Maybe they don’t even think they need to play it. Part of the game, unfortunately, is getting the media on your side. But, they may also require some selling out that folks like Trump aren’t willing to do.

Finally, people are morons and they fall for it. They believe what they want to believe.

So, I laugh when I hear people talk about how much of a malignant narcissist Trump is because that tells me more about them than Trump.

Assuming all the top famous people are all Class A narcissists helps me in a couple ways.

First, it keeps me from trying to judge their characters, which is pointless since all I know about them is what has come through the media filters.

Unfortunately, so much of political debate is character judgement, by design, because it keeps us from thinking about policies and issues.

Second, it allows me to focus more on their policies and actions and see how well they align with what I believe the government should do.

That brings us to another problem, most folks don’t know what they think the government should do which is why they revert to judging character.

Our needs don’t change much, how we meet them does

This is part 2 to my previous post.

Many products have changed over the past 30 years as technology has changed to produce different ways to meet our needs.

I recall when I wondered why I was carrying a digital point-and-shoot camera with me on vacation, while I was taking 95% of the photos with my phone and decided I no longer needed it.

The phone camera offered a way to meet a need (take vacation photos) that was multiple times more convenient on a few dimensions. One, I didn’t have to carry two devices with me everywhere and keep both charged. Two, I didn’t have to download and manage the photos on my phone. Three, I could share photos instantly with others.

Two years before, that camera did a great job of meeting the needs. I didn’t mind the $300 dollars I paid for it. It was small and easy to carry and easy to use. It took great photos. It had a nice, large screen to view the photos. Downloading photos was easy and the software that came along with it was easy to use.

But, in just a few short years, my phone could match it well enough on most of those dimensions and beat it on the ones mentioned before.

Two things worth highlighting here.

First, my need to take vacation photos didn’t change. How I met that need did.

I think that’s important because I don’t think many people view it that way. They see one product dying and another rising, but don’t connect that the need remained.

Second, I doubt the business leaders, strategy or product managers of that camera company knew what hit them. I doubt they foresaw that their products would be killed simply because people didn’t want to be bothered with carrying around two devices anymore.

Like most companies, they were probably still plotting a linear path of progression for their products based on what they heard from customers through market research. For example, a common complaint in market research may have been that the camera’s battery life was too short or the view screen was hard to see in bright daylight, so they were working on improving those.

The problem with market research is that customers can’t even foresee how they meet their needs might change.

I didn’t realize how good it would be able to instantly text a photo to people until I could actually do it. Prior to that, it seemed perfectly normal to email them once I downloaded them.

That also impacted how other needs were met. It was common to mail my parents postcards from wherever I was vacationing. But, why do that when I could just text them photos immediately? So, postcard and stamp sales declined as that need was met other ways. And the number of emails I sent with photos attached declined.

It never occurred to me, “it’d be really nice if I could just zap the photos to someone now.” Probably didn’t occur to many others did. Even if a few people mentioned it in market research, it was probably just a few so when the market research folks ranked things to work on for the future that was near the bottom of the list and longer batter life was on top.

Taking vacation photos is just one need that has changed dramatically in the way it is met over the past 20-30 years.

It’s been awhile (or happens much less frequently now) since I’ve bought a paper map, rented a DVD, had a landline, read a physical book, listened to a CD, used a copier or printer, faxed anything, left a voicemail, sent or received or a personal email, bought a stereo and quite a few other things.

What do I take from this?

When I help companies with strategy and innovation, I pay closer attention to the need the product is meeting than the product itself.

Instead of just thinking of the linear progression of the product, I think about the progression of how the need might be met.

I also like to start at the bottom of the ranked and sorted list of customer comments, because those might offer some clues to the dimensions that can disrupt the way the needs are currently met.

The heartbeat of business: how needs are met changes

This if from “The Geek Way” by Andrew McAfee (emphasis added):

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explained to me one of the biggest consequences of this shift: “In the classic corporate model, everything is run in a hierarchical way, the office get bigger over time, and bureaucracies abound. Companies like this were actually successful for a long time because they have some strengths: they’re predictable and they serve their customers well, as long as customers keep needing the same thing. The reason that culture doesn’t work very well in the information age is that the customers need changes, and you have to be able to change more quickly than, you know, every five years.”

from “the geek way” by andrew mcaffee

I liked this because it simply and clearly identifies a main driver of business.

Though I would add something. Often, people’s needs don’t change, but how they satisfy those needs do.

Think of the pager.

It served a need to let you know that somebody wanted to contact you even when you weren’t close to your landline telephone.

It served that need well.

That solution was part of an environment where phones were stationary objects.

Pagers aren’t needed anymore, but the need for somebody to instantly contact you remains.

What changed is how that need was met.

Nobody set out with smart, intentional Harvard Business School strategy to disrupt pagers or capture that market.

How that need was met naturally evolved as the environment changed to where phones became mobile and we have them on us most of the time.

The instant contact need also got solved in different ways as those phones evolved capabilities to connect people in more ways. So much so, that phone calls have become almost as much of a relic as pagers, as a good chunk of our communication has shifted to texting and messaging apps.

The fall and rise of www

I think it’s funny that the internet is returning to its roots of connecting millions of independent websites.

Sites like Facebook and Youtube came along and aggregated a lot of the content, so users spent less time ‘surfing the web’ and more time ‘doom scrolling’ through their sites.

They had a pretty decent thing going, too, until they got enamored by their own power. They couldn’t leave well enough alone. They began believing their own BS. They believe they can influence the masses do whatever they believe is the ‘right’ thing.

To some extent, they can. Many folks are sheep that desperately want to be in the ‘in’ group. Maybe 50 – 70% of the people out there.

Youtubers I’ve been following for a few years, as they’ve created niche content that I find more appealing than homogenized, mass entertainment, are now being pushed by Youtube to create homogenized, mass entertainment void of anything that can be deemed remotely controversial by anybody.

To get around that, they are going back to the world wide web and creating their own sites.

Coke’s bad decision was more of an issue its science norm

In this post, I wrote about Andrew McAfee’s book on innovation culture, “The Geek Way.”

In it, he writes about the blunder Coke managers made in swapping its classic soda with New Coke in the 80s. I also mentioned in my previous post on why I’m not a fan of the term, ‘data-driven decisions.’

Full disclosure: I lived through the trying times of the Pepsi Challenge. My buddies and I thought we found a cheat code for scoring free soda.

I thought the New Coke story was a good choice for backdrop for McAfee to discuss one of the his four innovation norms (listed in the linked post), just not the one he used it for: openness, or how free people are to speak up, even to senior people.

I think it could serve as a better backdrop for one of his other norms, ‘science.’

In McAfee’s telling of the story, he points out that the taste tests are not a good predictor of what people will actually buy.

But, then McAfee claims if Coke’s culture had more openness, someone may have made that point and prevented the CEO from making a big blunder.

It turns out that while people preferred sweeter soda side-by-side after they came into a mall from the heat of summer, there were reasons and situations where people still preferred Coke. Some folks, for example, preferred a less sweet drink paired with dinner. For others, old Coke was what they were used to.

I doubt that openness alone would have led to that discovery. I think believing it would is hindsight bias.

Had they asked Coke employees to list why this move might not work beforehand, this reason may have appeared on that list, along with hundreds of others and it would be impossible to tell which are valid or not.

If managers let those reasons prevent any new trials, then we would never get any new hits. And it would just be a guessing game to try to pick the good reasons from the bad.

This is why the other norm of science is so important. It can help you discover what will really happen despite the hundreds of reasons we can imagine why it won’t work.

Taste tests might be an early indication to help guide product development and new products.

But, before making the bold move of replacing a core product with a new one, it’s best to dip your toe in and try it in small experiment that as closely resembles how that decision will play out as possible, like a pilot or test market, to see how customers will truly respond.

‘Data-driven decisions’ can be bad

Replacing classic Coke with New Coke was a data-driven decision and it was a bad decision.

Data-driven decisions can be worse. Gaining an understanding of genetics and evolution led humans make some horrific ‘data-driven decisions,’ (e.g. eugenics).

There is a lot of distance between data and the decisions that folks claim are based on the data. For me, what happens in that distance is 10 – 1,000x more important than the data.

I see the use of the term ‘data-driven decision’ as a con.

It works. People seem to associate the term ‘data-driven decision’ with being scientific and being scientific is the noble pursuit of the truth.

So people seem to assume that someone who makes ‘data-driven decisions’ can be trusted to make the best decision based on the data available.

It even buys them some protection from accountability if it turns out to be a bad decision, “after all, it’s what the data told us to do.”

If you see me roll my eyes when someone says ‘data-driven decision,’ that’s why.

The next post talks more about the distance between the data and the decisions. We call that judgement.

“Are You Engaging in Innovation Theater?”

That’s the title of this article by Mike Shipulski on Braden Kelley’s Innovation website.

It’s worth a read if you are involved in innovation efforts in any domain.

It hit the nail on the head with my experience with mature companies that do things that fool people into think the company is innovating.

Many folks engaged in this innovation theater aren’t aware of it. They are like characters in a play that don’t realize they are fictional characters in a play and will reject the notion.

This is a good taste from the article:

If a return on investment (ROI) calculation is the gating criterion before starting an amazing project, that’s innovation theater. Projects that could create a new product family with a fundamentally different value proposition for a whole new customer segment cannot be assigned an ROI because no one has experience in this new domain. Any ROI will be a guess and that’s why innovation is governed by judgment and not ROI. Innovation is unpredictable which makes an ROI is impossible to predict. And if your innovation process squeezes judgment out of the story-line, that’s a tell-tale sign of innovation theater.

If the specifications are fixed, the resources are fixed, and the completion date is fixed, that’s innovation theater. Since it can be innovation only when there’s novelty, and since novelty comes with uncertainty, without flexibility in specs, resources, or time, it’s innovation theater.

If a steering team is involved, it’s innovation theater. Consensus cannot spawn innovation.

Mike Shipulski, “are you engaging in innovation theater?”

Characters in the play will scoff at the notion that using ROI as a gating criterion is fruitless because innovation is unpredictable. They cannot imagine any other way of doing it. They are linear thinkers who have been told all their life that they are smart because they can solve linear problems really well — like acing tests by studying more.

If you suggest that ROI is unpredictable, they will think you don’t know how things work or that you might be little crazy. They can’t imagine any other way. How can leaders decide which ideas to work on if ROI is unpredictable?

They miss the blindingly obvious reason why predicting ROI doesn’t work. If it did, then the company should have a steady pipeline of innovation successes and the folks predicting ROI of new ideas should be making a lot of money. If not, they’d probably figure out real quick that they should leave and start their own VC firm.

So if predicting ROI doesn’t work, what does? It’s not a big secret. Many highly innovative companies and startups use it.

I saw it for the first time when we presented a new CEO of a mature company with a slate of new ideas for the next year so he could pick the 2-3 he wanted us to work on, (as if he had the secret ROI calculator to predict winners), like we had done with previous CEOs (who thought it was their job to predict winners).

He said, “How am I supposed to know? Why can’t you try them all, even if in small ways, to see which ones have the most promise?”

We did and we had the most innovative time in my career for the next few years, resulting in a culture that I’ve been trying to recreate since, without success, because the characters in the innovation theater don’t realize they are reciting lines of a play.

Good podcast on Pro/Rel from 3Four3 and my thoughts on how Pro/Rel makes a big difference at the grassroots level to help young players develop

I think Gary & Joey do a great job discussing how an open system changes soccer at the grassroots.

Most pro/rel discussion centers on what happens with the pros, so it was refreshing to hear someone talk about the effects it has all the way down to the grassroots at the local youth clubs and contrast youth clubs in the U.S. with youth clubs in pro/rel countries.

The podcast is available on iTunes and here: The Ongoing U.S. Open Cup Fiasco, Pro/Rel, and Are There Any Real Clubs in American Soccer?

I want to tie in a point another frequent 3Four3 guest, Kephern Fuller, made years ago on the podcast and I wrote about it here.

Fuller said, based on his experience, youth players in Europe have a better sense for where they want to go, while kids in the U.S. are just happy to be the best on their current team and are okay as long as the team seems to be having some success.

I believe the differences Gary & Joey discuss in this podcast are why youth players in Europe have a better sense for where they are headed.

Here’s why…

In the U.S. individual youth teams are insulated from each other and senior and pro teams. Even within larger clubs, players on a team might only get some visibility to one or two other teams — the teams they share a practice field with.

Kids are happy to be the best on the team, as Fuller pointed out, because this insulation provides no other good points of comparison.

They don’t pay much attention to pro games. They don’t pay any attention to their high school varsity games. Clubs, in fact, are forced by state high school athletic associations to not be involved with high school teams. The senior kids disappear from youth clubs during high school soccer season.

As a coach, I tried to get kids interested in watching the higher level teams so they could see where they were headed. It was a hard sell. They just didn’t connect with players they didn’t know.

What about competition, you might ask? Isn’t that a good point of comparison?

Not if the competition suffers from the same insulation as your team. You can tie 3-3 and think you are doing just fine, never realizing that both teams way behind.

Not having good points of comparison outside the team is why kids end up comparing themselves to teammates. That’s all they can really do.

The result is few youth players in the U.S. have a long-term benchmark for where they should be headed as a player.

Contrast that to the environment of youth clubs in Europe, where the local club’s senior team plays a similar role as our local high school varsity team, with a few exceptions.

One exception is there isn’t a divide forced between that team and the rest of the club by the state’s high school athletic association.

That has several positives that contribute to youth players in Europe having a better sense of where they are heading.

One is that clubs rely on those senior players to help coach younger kids to keep club costs down. This allows the younger players to get to know the senior players personally and develop role model relationships. A lot of these kids then develop a natural interesting in wanting to watch their coaches’ games, which gives them a point of comparison beyond how their current team and a vision for, where they are headed.

In that environment, whether a player is best on his U9 team or the team wins by 7 goals matters, but players also have another gauge on their performance. For example, they might more readily realize they won by 7 goals because the opponent was subpar, not because they played the style of ball or executed the positional roles like the senior team does.

X Posts that I scroll past

When I see these things, I scroll past it because these are tricks to increase engagement or plant seeds of thought in your head without being held accountable for planting them.

“Watch this video. What do you see?”

Trust me, they could give 2 craps about what you see or about the video contents itself. They only care that you click on their video and post something. That’s how they get paid.

“Are you paying attention yet?”

This follows some set of random facts that seem to suggest that there might be some conspiracy connecting them together. The trouble is, the author doesn’t connect the dots. My rule is, if the author doesn’t want to state what he or she thinks those facts mean, then I don’t need to waste my time thinking about it either. I

My rule is, if the author isn’t willing to say what he or she thinks it means, then it’s not worth me thinking about it.

One trick here is to get people to respond with what they think it means, which increases engagement and the original posters paycheck. Another trick is to plant seeds of thoughts in your head without being held accountable for planting those seeds.

It might look something like: “The wind is blowing. I saw something in the sky I could not identify. Are you paying attention yet?”

The first response is, ‘Aliens are here!”

So you go away thinking the original poster is saying aliens are here. When you say something stupid about aliens later and reference the original poster as a source, the original poster will respond, “I never said that.”

A provocative headline, repeating of the headline with a few more words another repeating of the headline with a few more words and one additional piece of info and then you have to expand to see more.

This reminds me of someone leading me through dense woods with a thin trail of bread crumbs. I stop because I will likely end up at the gingerbread house or falling off a hidden cliff.

Online news has evolved into this, too. Any article on the Daily Mail is a good example.

I believe it’s a trick to keep you reading past the fold to make it look like engagement with the article is higher than it would be if they just got to the point in one sentence.

No thanks.

“The Geek Way,” by Andrew McAfee

On this EconTalk podcast, Andrew McAfee discusses his book The Greek Way, which is about four cultural norms of highly innovative companies.

After listening the podcast, I bought the book and read it. I highly recommend it.

Here are the four cultural norms with a brief explanation.

Speed of iteration — Geek way companies try things at a frenetic pace, constantly learning from their trials and failures.

I call this an iterative, trial-and-error process.

I personally believe most of our lives fall into this type of process, but we don’t recognize it. Getting a job is an iterative, trial-and-error process. You write a resume, apply, network, interview and you don’t expect 100% success rate. Each iteration you tweak things along the way based on what you learn from each failure.

Dating is the same. Learning to walk and talk. School work, to a degree. You try a homework problem, see what you got right and wrong and keep iterating until you can do it right.

Ownership — In Geek Way companies, people are encouraged not only to have ideas but to take the initiative to try to prove them out, rather than just throw them over the wall to an innovation group or slot them through a bureaucratic review process that arbitrarily decides which things to try.

Science — How does your company settle disagreements? Geek Way companies prefer trying things over other methods, like Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.

Openness — In Geek Way companies, it’s safe to have and air opinions that are different from leadership.

I agree with these and highly recommend the book for anyone interested in innovation.

I lived a good A/B/A test of seeing a company — by accident — go from a typical large company bureaucracy with anemic innovation, to a Geek Way culture back to bureaucracy and anemic results.

During the Geek Way, it was fun, folks across the organization pitched in on things that weren’t necessarily on list of strategic initiatives, we iterated toward successes that are still in use in that company today, learned from failures and hit one big home run.

I can attest that it works.

I can also attest that it’s really difficult for bureaucrats to buy into it.

I do have a few nits of the book, two of which I will mention here and will save more for future posts.

McAfee calls it the Geek Way because this culture is common in tech companies, which are commonly founded by geeks. In some parts of the book it seems like he thinks this culture originated in turn of the century Silicon Valley due to certain factors, like the ability to quickly alter software code to iterate.

I think the Geek Way is common early on in successful startups dating way back. He even provides plenty of examples. It wasn’t clear to me whether he realized this or not.

Second, McAfee offers surveys for folks to rate their organizations on each of the norms.

If I gave those surveys to folks in bureaucratic cultures, I believe many would rate their company high.

“But we already do that,” is the most common objection I encounter when I pitch this culture. I believe that’s because they have no point of comparison.

For example, at the end of the speed of iteration chapter, a survey statement is how much do you agree with: “We have a short cycle time for delivering something?”

Many people I’ve worked with in bureaucratic organizations will strongly agree with this statement. When a project fails to be a commercial success, they even often cite as as success that we at least showed we could get something to market quickly.

Except that usually took 9 months to a year.

I’d re-write the statement from “we have a short cycle time for delivering something,” to “the typical cycle time from initial idea to initially getting it front of real customers in the marketplace is days or weeks instead of months or years.”

This gives them something to compare to.

People ingrained in bureaucracies would be more likely to strongly disagree with that statement.

Though, they would also try to tell you why that’s dumb. “We would not want to do it that quickly! That wouldn’t give us enough time to make sure the product is refined to our high standards.” Or, “There’s no way we can do it that fast and not risk big legal issues if something goes wrong.”

That they can’t imagine ways to overcome these objections and achieve such quick cycle times is part of why bureaucracies persist.

It doesn’t dawn on them that other companies, like Geek Way companies, have figured out how to overcome these and that might be part of the reason they do well.