Zachary Burt's Blog

“In war the chief incalculable is the human will.” – B. H. Liddell Hart
“Positions are seldom lost because they have been destroyed, but almost invariably because the leader has decided in his own mind that the position cannot be held.” – A. A. Vandegrift

Warfighting is a US Marine Corps treatise on their philosophy of war, and it’s good. In the book, they define war as “a violent struggle between two hostile, independent, and irreconcilable wills, each trying to impose itself on the other.” This touches on a theme that has being unraveled through the course of my reading and writing – an external concept of reality is uncertain and up to interpretation, and is dictated by those with social dominance, who set the standards for cultural capital; the only “true” reality is the social interaction between members of the human race. People with competing external concepts of reality, also known as the “frame”, will often resort to violence unless one frame can subsume another one – even in subtle ways. The notion of competing frames is the basis for all of social interaction and is what we enjoy in comedy in television or the theater. I wish to do more reading in this area, especially with regards to grooming and cooperation vs. threat displays, and I will soon be stocking up on books on primatology. Anyway — we go to war to impose our will, or frame, on another party. So it is not only nation states that go to war, but everyday humans in love, business & sport: it is with that lens that I read Warfighting.

Friction

Friction is “the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult.” Although external, environmental and enemy threats may cause friction, friction may also “be self-induced, caused by such factors as lack of a clearly defined goal, lack of coordination, unclear or complicated plans, complex task organizations or command relationships, or complicated technologies.” Many of these are issues I’ve addressed previously on the blog. Lack of a clearly defined goal is an important factor in susceptibility to manipulation. Complicated plans showed be eschewed in favor of simple steps; the psychology of games is not too different from the psychology of real life (that post is an excellent reader for avoiding “complicated technologies”). It seems that the USMC has recognized the value of simplicity, because a major thesis of the book is that war is a fundamentally human process and therefore its processes should be built a framework of human nature. Keep it simple, make sure you have a mastery of the basics.

Reducing Internal Friction

And if a fair fight is the result of poor planning, then the first step we can take is by organizing ourselves – especially during peacetime; that way, when the shit hits the fan, we can be ready to roll. However, it is critically important that our peacetime initiatives simulate real-world conditions. The practice and buildup of skills is also known as procedural memory, but memory recall and skill performance is state-based: we recall skills that were built with similar enviornmental prompts. In my amateur view, this means environments that triggered similar neurochemical stimulus, since memory pathways are based on unique combinatorics of neurotransmitter pathing. If we learn important skills during simulated stressful situations, then we will be able to properly execute them in other stressful situations (triggering cortisol, GH and norepinephrine).

We must attempt to reduce our friction and “raise our enemy’s friction to a level that weakens his ability to fight”.

Uncertainty

The ambiguity and inherent uncertainty of war mandates us to take action based on incomplete information. Colin Powell espouses a philosophy of taking action when you have information that predicts a 40-70% likelihood of success. Of course, the authors of Warfighting are quick to point out that “it is precisely those actions that seem improbably that often have the greatest impact on the outcome of war”. Ahh… we have been revisited by our old friend The Black Swan.

Uncertainty and disorder go hand in hand; the USMC recommends we build a framework which we can use to navigate disorder, and also seek to generate disorder and use it as a weapon against our opponent.

Fear, The Mind Killer

“The greatest effect of fires is generally not the amount of physical destruction they cause, but the effect of that physical destruction on the enemy’s moral strength.” I’ve read a bunch of sports psychology books and they all say that given a basic baseline parity of skill, whoever wants to win more will win. I interpret this as having resoluteness of frame (mental strength, moral strength, our interpretation of reality; I get to mix moral strength with interpretation of reality because of the importance of values (and thus, morality) in determining reality and philosophy).

Science vs. Art

“Art includes the creative, situational application of scientific knowledge through judgment and experience, and so the art of war subsume the science of war….the conduct of war is fundamentally a dynamic process of human competition requiring both the knowledge of science and the creativity of art but driven ultimately by the power of human will.” It is only by having a rigorous foundational training in the sciences that we can learn how to creatively apply them – but at the end of the day, if our will to win isn’t high enough, we lose. I plan on taking a 10-day meditation course in order to strengthen my mind, and I do feel like I lack certain sufficient training in the physical sciences (physics, chemistry). Any recommendations of good books there?

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“Invincibility lies in the defense; the possibility of victory in the attack. One defends when his strength is adequate; he attacks when it is abundant.” – Sun Tzu

I notice that I only win, win, win when I am on the attack – whether it be in sports (poker or basketball), getting something accomplished sociosexually, or business. For example, the recent awesome success of AwesomenessReminders has catapulted me into reactive territory, where I’m spending time dealing with the deluge of emails and interview requests rather than proactively accomplishing goals (the release of new, additional products; unleashing strategic ad campaigns; personal development via reading & articulating via the blog). But no more – today I set out a list of six goals to accomplish, and I will EMP the fuck out of whatever is in my way in order to get there.

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Pause for Reflection

What are some of sources of friction that have brought me down in the past?

1. Facebook
2. Hacker News – debatable, my participation in this community may prove to be a wise investment of time; HN is becoming an important relay outlet for valuable information on the internet. Unfortunately, it has also encouraged me to spend a shitload of time reading stuff that I can’t readily integrate – articles from successful entrepreneurs on arcane processes that aren’t germane to my present goals – though I may be benefitting from positive social influence/contagion from people more successful than me.
3. Bad relationships (friends/enemies/girlfriends); inability to read body language and intent
4. Obsession with self-image – this ties into #1 and in many ways #3,5,6,7
5. Smoking
6. Drinking
7. Poor nutrition
8. Misinformation
9. Racketing (I’m taking Landmark Forum this weekend to help me deal with this)
10. Narrative Construction (see #9, #4)

I dropped out of freshman physics so please bear with me on the science metaphors – it seems like each source of friction is also in some ways a two-sided lever, like a see-saw; each brings benefits but also detriments.

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War As An Act Of Policy

“War is an extension of both policy and politics with the addition of military force….the single most important thought to understand about [the USMC's] theory is that war must serve policy.” I interpret this as a dictate: The wars that you wage should serve your premeditated intentions.

Two Types, Two Ways

There are two ways to use military force to impose will on an enemy. One is through the elimination, permanent or temporary, of the enemy’s military power; this is known as the strategy of annihilation or, at least, incapacitation. This is power through dominance.

The second way is convincing the enemy that accepting our terms will be less painful than continuing to resist; also known as a “strategy of erosion”, this uses military force to erode the enemy leadership’s will. This involves using force to raise the cost of resistance higher than the enemy is willing to pay. This strategy is useful for “limited political goals that we believe the enemy leadership will ultimately be willing to accept.” I see this one in youthful romantic relationships all the time; notable examples include a woman coming into a relationship with the purported intentions of casual sex. The male has the upper hand, because it is his frame, dominance and ego that is being served. Then, he becomes addicted to the sex, and his frame is subsumed by the woman’s: a relationship, or even worse, marriage, ensues. Drug dealers use a similar strategy; how many times have you been offered a “free sample”? Free samples appear in all shapes and forms.

It is my understanding that Islam, under the Caliphate, used strategy #2: everyone either dies or consents to Islamic conversion/rule (tax).

Attrition vs Maneuver

Warfare by attrition is straightforward: wear your enemy out and rack up the body counts. See an enemy concentration? Perfect, bomb it. Warfare by maneuver, on the other hand, revolves around incapacitating the enemy systematically. See an enemy concentration? Avoid it, it’s a strength. Instead, concentrate on attacking an enemy weakness and “eliminate a key element which incapacitates the enemy systematically.”

On the social battlefield, do you know the foundation for someone’s confidence? Is it an external achievement that can be mocked, spiraling them into a whirlwind of mental spinning, taking working memory resources offline, unable to support skill execution? Do they have faulty pillars of self-esteem? An entire book should be written: an inventory of relevant tactics.

“We should try to ‘get inside’ the enemy’s thought processes and see the enemy as he sees himself so that we can set him up for defeat. It is essential that we understand the enemy on his own terms.”

“Similarly, we must try to see ourselves through our enemy’s eyes in order to identify our own vulnerabilities that he may attack and to anticipate what he will try to do so that we can counteract him.” My friend, who shall remain anonymous unless he decides to speak up in the comments, calls this “being bulletproof.”

“we can expect the enemy to disguise his dispositions in order to lure us against a surface [strength] that appears to be a gap [weakness].”

Speed, Focus, Surprise, Boldness

Social warfare could be distilled as a battle for the tempo. Other react when you proactively set the tempo. You can set the tempo through superior speed (forcing them always to play catch-up), surprise, focus, boldness, intelligent, ally support, resource domination. The tempo might well be renamed the “frame”. “Frequency” is a similar albeit somewhat different topic that I’m still unraveling.

“Speed is necessary in order to concentrate superior strength at the decisive time and place”; what matters is not absolute speed but relative speed. Superior speed forces reaction. This is huge!

Focus allows you to concentrate resources at critical points, economizing other positions and assuming increased risk.

Surprise, as I have written about before, stems from schema violation. The shock ensuing from surprise is a worthwhile boon, and maybe even the primary benefit of surprise: it induces panic and erodes the will. There USMC claims three ways to achieve surprise:

1. Deception involves getting the enemy to plan for us to do something other than what we are really going to do. So we give the enemy a clear picture of the situation, but we give them the wrong picture
2. Ambiguity requires us to act in an unpredictable way, forcing the enemy to plan for a plenitude of contingencies and therefore not properly for any one.
3. Stealth is achieved when we deny the enemy any information of impending action.

Boldness is a strong outpouring of resources in the right time and the right place; the advantages of a surprise are exacerbated by proper boldness. Virgil said “Fortune favors the bold”, but boldness should be initiated based on strong situational awareness.

Critical Vulnerability and Center of Gravity

Find out which factors are critical to enemy: where are his strengths that, if eliminated, will bend him most quickly to our well? These are the suitably-named “centers of gravity”. A similar concept is that of critical vulnerability– “A vulnerability that, if exploited, will do the most significant damage to the enemy’s ability to resist”. Looking for centers of gravity requires external focus on the enemy, rather than mechanical implementation of systematized procedures. Opportunities to exploit centers of gravity and critical vulnerabilities must be seized and acted upon with boldness.

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I liked this quote: “Our doctrine does not consist of procedures to be applied in specific situations so much as it sets forth general guidance that requires judgment in application. Therefore, while authoritative, doctrine is not prescriptive.”

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Leadership Gems

Leadership gems are something to be expected from a military book. Here are a few:

“Errors by junior leaders stemming from overboldness are a necessary part of learning. We should deal with such errors leniently…Abolishing ‘zero defects’ means that we do not stifle boldness or initiative through the threat of punishment” They still, of course, advocate constructive criticism as part of the learning process.

“Until a commander has reached and stated a decision, subordinates should consider it their duty to provide honest, professional opinions even though these may be in disagreement with the senior’s opinions. However, once the decision has been reached, juniors then must support it as if it were their own.” Money.

“Because … no two situations … are the same, our critiques should focus not so much on the actions we took as on why we took those actions and why they brought the results they did.” Man, if there was ever a quote i needed to hear, this is it. Although it seems like common sense, it’s remarkable the frequency with which I beat myself up over errors – without pausing for the rough equivalent of a “5 Whys” analysis. I want to start doing this!

Mission tactics are the tactics of assigning a subordinate mission without specifying out it must be accomplished. This creates “freedom for initiative that permits the high tempo of operations that we desire….mission tactics requires subordinates to act with “topsight” — a grasp of how their actions fit into the larger situation…..we cannot allow decentralized initiative without some means of providing unity, or focus to the various efforts…>we seek unity not principally trough imposed control, but through harmonious initiative and lateral coordination within the context [ed: frame!] provided by guidance from above.”

“A subordinate commander who is not given a clear purpose for the assigned mission should ask for one….It is often possible to capture intent in a simple “…in order to …” phrase….statement of intent should be brief and compelling–the more concise, the better…Subordinates must have a clear understanding of what their commander expects. Further, they should understand the intent of the commander at least two levels up.”

“[Maneuver warfare] requires a certain independence of mind, a willingness to act with initiative and boldness, an exploitive mindset that takes full advantage of every opportunity, and the moral courage to accept responsibility for this type of behavior. It is important that this last set of traits be guided by self-discipline and loyalty to the objectives of seniors.”

Communication

Our philosophy of command must also exploit the human ability to communicate implicitly. We believe that implicit communication- to communicate through mutual understanding, using a minimum of key, well-understood phrases or even anticipating each other’s thoughts- is a faster, more effective way to communicate than through the use of detailed, explicit instructions.We develop this ability through familiarity and trust, which are based on a shared philosophy and shared experience. This concept has several practical implications…we should establish long-term working relationships to develop the necessary familiarity and trust….key people…should talk directly to one another when possible….we should communicate orally when possible, because we communicate also in…inflections and tone of voice….we should communicate in person when possible because we communicate also through our gestures and bearing.”

Specifically, on trust and “forward command”: “Only by their physical presence [on the frontlines]– by demonstrating the willingness to share danger and privation-can commanders fully gain the trust and confidence of subordinates.”

Combined Arms

“Combined arms is the full integration of arms in such a way that to counteract one, the enemy must become more vulnerable to another. we pose the enemy not just with a problem, but with a dilemma- a no-win situation.” It makes me think of a fork in chess. How can I create more of these opportunities in everyday life?

Decision Making

At the lower levels, “decision making may be an intuitive process based on experience”. At higher levels, “decisionmaking may be a more analytical process based on comparing several options. We should base our decision on awareness rather than on mechanical habit…act on a keen appreciation for the essential factors that make each situation unique instead of from conditioned response.”

Conclusion

Maneuver Warfare “is a statement of mind bent on shattering the enemy morally and physically by paralyzing and confounding him, by avoiding his strength, by quickly and aggressively exploiting his vulenrabilities, and by striking him in the way that will hurt him most….[it's] a philosophy for ‘fighting smart.’”

Warfighting is available on Amazon.com for only $7.99.

Recommended Reading: On War by Clausewitz, The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris, this presentation by Colin Powell

How cool (and appropriate) if I renamed this to “Zachary Burt’s Strategy Blog”?

Anyway, the launch of my newest site, AwesomenessReminders, spawned this comment on Hacker News:

Zack,

I am a fan, but your recent rash of “sites” is worrisome. You launched: HipHopGoblin (<1 year, down), CustomerFind (1< year ago), NYC-Chicago-Bus (49 days ago), EndAnts (23 days ag), CompassionPit (5 days ago!) and now this, AwesomenessReminders.

When do you even have time to improve, even promote, projects if you’re tossing them on a weekly basis? It takes time to make anything monetizable, at least you need to create it first.

I think you’re just an small sample of a generation of people who are coming to see businesses as just “idea + landing page”. Sell, then build. A/B test today and build when the money piles up. etc. etc.

Slow down, for your own sake. Maybe even work on something you actually care about.
HipHopGoblin had a lot of potential, I used to listen to it; so you’re at least capable of discovering and executing good ideas. You just need patience, and maybe someone to ask you “how’s it coming?”. Perhaps .. ProgressReminder?

The reply I wrote was so long that I feel it’s better formatted as a blog post. So here goes:

I agree that HipHopGoblin had a lot of potential. Fortunately, so do a lot of other people. HHG has been acquired by another team and they’ve given me some equity. In return, I am staying on in an advisory role. This allows them to turn the dream into reality and me to do more of what I enjoy (networking with hiphop fans, rappers, and hip hop industry figures… Jay Electronia is following me on Twitter, why aren’t you?). Of course, it’s possible that staying on board in a more dedicated role and seeing it through to the end could have produced a more likely chance of success, I have to an extent de-risked myself yet still exposed myself to the upsides of an excellent outcome. The truth of the matter though is that I completely lost motivation to do programming on HHG, so I was hopeful when the opportunity to pass the torch came into my life and I am confident in the top-tier programming abilities and general caliber of the new team.

As far as CustomerFind, which was started as an indirect offshoot of HHG: I hack in new features when I get the inspiration, but CustomerFind continues to be a profitable, zero-effort source of passive income. Unfortunately, it’s also completely stagnant — zero growth. I believe that the site has extra potential; however, I’ve tried growing it in a few different directions but have each time been stifled because I’m not exactly clear how to market it (or how to grow and rebrand it). Some serious customer engagement would probably be advantageous, but I feel like each customer is using it for a different thing, and there’s not enough of a sample size in order to figure out how to pursue it. I could drive some traffic through an AdWords campaign, and I hired a designer to help me redo the landing page before doing it. Unfortunately, she wasn’t a critical thinker, and ultimately the onus was on me to design the site, but mental blocks and excuses prevented me from doing this (sample thoughts: “i don’t know how to design a fun ux”, “how do I lay out the landing page for an archetypal customer if I don’t even know ANYTHING about who they are?”). But I could just update the website to mention the new Facebook monitoring features I built, but I haven’t. So that’s what’s stopping me from CustomerFind, and I’m glad I have an opportunity to publicly ask for some help – some guidance. The very act of writing this out has actually triggered some inspiration about how I might go about doing it (highlight the main 3 benefits on the homepage, spend some $ trying out different ad combinations). It would require a commitment of a marketing budget, though, and finding a programmer to work on the code base: because I don’t actually feel like doing any programming work on it, myself. I wonder why that is – is it because I’m more eager to hack on early prototypes of fun ideas than continue them? Or is it because the code base is so development-unfriendly that working on it is just no fun? (For example, there’s no automated testing.) Soliciting feedback.

I did do some Customer Development meetings related to CustomerFind, and pivots suggested room for a potential enterprise-y Social Media dashboard product. Unfortunately, I am not thrilled with the prospect of competing in that market (hint: against Radian6, Alterian SM2), given how much funding those companies have as well as their development squads & adoption rates. I do have an idea for an easy SaaSy product in that niche that I may yet develop, but I’m going to keep the idea secret for now lest someone steal it. (It will probably be my next product once AwesomenessReminders is fully humming.)

Oh, and I do have one other idea about how CustomerFind could be huge. It will probably involve about $3000 in expenses to solve a few important customer development hypotheses (there is technology risk AND market risk, but if the technology works I will just use it for myself and not bother taking it to market unless I feel like world domination). Big “if” there, though.

EndAnts is getting scrapped. It’s something that I believe should exist, but I don’t know how it should be presented. At this point the UI sucks so bad that even I don’t enjoy using the product. Apparently, at least some people like it, given that they’re motivated enough to email me about it. How many people like it? I don’t know, I don’t have a good device for keeping track of Retention metrics (Google Analytics’s “New” vs. “Returning” feels too vague). Any suggestions for dealing with this?

CompassionPit is growing. It has proved to be a source of relief for many people. I’m slowly launching a PR campaign for it. One thing I’m working is making sure I use the principles of SUCCESs in the pitch, which is useful in getting people to remember your ideas. Incidentally, I’m thinking of forking it off and rebranding it as Webconfessional.com, geared towards Catholics. How selective is the Vatican with their RFQs? Are they ready to go digital? Religious groups need digital solutions.

And it’s looking like AwesomenessReminders will be another source of passive income, with over 19 signups already (zero paid traffic sent!).

So yeah – to address the original concerns, maybe in a sense, I should be swinging for the fences, trying to go big or go home. Maybe I should pick a market that I really personally care about and dedicate myself to it. To these concerns, I have nothing but rationalization. (The “try it and see” has worked profitably in the past; I’m also building up a skill set that will make me better prepared for when I sit down for “the long haul” (once I identify the right market); at least I am collecting persistent sources of income along the way (this blog is one of them, but it’s also technically a loss given the amount of money I spend on books: please donate to my Amazon.com book fund to encourage future posts! PayPal payments to zackster@gmail.com would be greatly appreciated).

I welcome your thoughts, and opportunities for collaboration.

P.S. Anticipating a potential criticism, I am being open, but not transparent. I have a few other products in the pipeline, but I am not ready to launch them yet so I am remaining mum for strategic purposes.

Hi loyal blog readers,

I haven’t posted for about 3 weeks now. Here’s what I’ve been busy with:

EndAnts

I launched http://www.EndAnts.com – a site to help you end Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs). As I have previously mentioned here on ZacharyBurt.com, negative thinking is bad for our emotional health. The site uses a technique from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy called distortion thought records and also includes social game-like components (“karma points”, a “leaderboard”). At first I thought I could market it to Cognitive Behavioral Therapists, but after a few hilarious failed customer development meetings (one guy tried to recruit me as a business partner to start a completely different idea with him), and a few dozen unanswered emails, it seemed like I was barking up the wrong tree, peddling vitamins instead of painkillers.

I did get a few other people using the site, and at least a few of them expressed to me that they were getting some value out of it. But ultimately, I found that EndAnts in its current incarnation is not a site that I personally enjoy using – so I’m going to retool it until it becomes software that I personally want to use.

CompassionPit

Ever have a personal problem that’s weighing you down, but you can’t really tell a friend – because they’ll use it against you in the future, or because you’re embarrassed, or because it lowers your social status? Well, I’ve felt that pain before, and that’s why I created http://www.CompassionPit.com, an anonymous one-on-one chat site where the tag line is “Chat with an anonymous stranger who won’t judge you.” I plan on sending out annunciation emails, but apparently Nylon Magazine already found it and named it “site of the day”.

Reading

In July I set out a goal to read 30 books. I don’t think I accomplished that, but I definitely cracked at least 20. In retrospect, not knowing the exactly number of books I did read is probably related to why I failed: I wasn’t keeping exact track. Another disappointment from ZB town is that I did not blog about the vast majority of the books I read. I don’t know why; I probably rationalized it as something like, “they only generated one or two new interesting insights and I don’t feel that the ideas are polished enough ideas as to be construed blog-worthy”. I definitely regret this, because most of the ideas I express in this blog aren’t particularly polished anyway. Hopefully one day a publisher will pay me to go through my previous entries and refine/reframe them into something book-worthy…

Anyway, I have finally finished Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. It kicked lots of ass and has borne some awesome paradigm shifts that readers of this blog are going to find particularly interesting.

Thanks for your continued readership and participation.

Zachary Burt

Steganography Presentation

It’s clear that now more than ever content is getting distributed digitally. For example, Amazon recently revealed that it sold more books on the Kindle last quarter than hardcovers. Unfortunately for the copyright holders, digital content is super easy to pirate. And although the ethics of the situation are unclear (as a society, do we even want to enforce copyright?) this post proceeds from a frame that we have a digital property and want to protect it.

DRM (“digital rights management”) is out. People hate it (although the closed iTunes ecosystem might suggest otherwise, they might be an exception due to the dominance of Apple’s delivery infrastructure). In general, people want their files to be unencrypted so they can use them how they want and when they want. So how do you distribute your written content in a way that deters piracy? One method is to have your ebook distributor automatically add a stamp to every copy of your PDF. This is really easy to do, with only a few lines of code. Unfortunately, it’s also really easy to subvert, with only a few lines of code required to paste a big black block over every stamp.

You could password protect the file, instead, but the password can easily be distributed. The problem (from an abstract perspective) is that while you can do a unique one-way password decrypt, once you get into the content, you have access to all the information. Then you can redistribute the information however you want. What you need to do is somehow encode the information so that you have a way of identifying a unique signature, but at the same time not significantly visually shift the information in any way as to alert the viewer! In other words, the text itself (or the information-content itself) must be structured in a way that you can infer extra information.

My first proposed solution? Modifying the kerning of the text in a way that will subtly, yet uniquely, determine a key. The problem with my solution is that the text can be scanned and normalized, and then re-outputted as either a separate PDF or even a text file. The normalization process is difficult- by having to parse the PDF text, you’re forced to use some sort of OCR technology. This obstacle can be solved if you have a sufficiently randomized font, such that the person decrypting is forced to rewrite the OCR algorithm each time a new text is to be interpreted. This is a decent deterrent, but not foolproof.

Another solution: Make sure that the aesthetics of the presentation of the information are a significant value-add. That way, by normalizing the text, you’re losing information.

Another solution: embed some useful diagrams in your document, and use a steganography technique like LSB encoding to hide the user’s key. Unfortunately, it’s also easy for a would-be pirate to write software that applies a random pixel distribution wash over the entire page, in order to distort the obscured information.

So for god’s sakes, play your cards close to your chest and don’t let people know what’s up. But I’m working on some software to automatically add these sort of subtly protections to ebooks without disrupting the user’s ability to fully own and enjoy their purchase. Contact me if interested.

Remember my post “Why Games Are Fun: The Psychology Explanation“? In it, I wrote:

“Fun games operate on the principle that our actions will definitely bring us closer to the goal. If you go and slash rabbits (action), you will definitely gain experience points (relation), and you will eventually level up (goal).

This is the reason so many people, including myself, have failed at difficult, uncharted things like entrepreneurship. There’s no guarantee that our next step will bring us closer to the goal. For example, we could easily invest 6 months into building a product that nobody wants to buy. Now, that specific problem can be ameliorated through processes of customer development, but the general problem still exists.

So what is Customer Development?

Customer development is an entirely new approach to taking a product to market. The old school method of Product Development is this: spend a long time building something, launch publicly with lots of PR and advertising fanfare, cross your fingers and pray for the best. But Customer Development is this: find a set of customers with a common need, and then build a product that meets that need. Although you’re developing the product, you’re really developing the quintessential customer who is hopefully representative of a big market.

For a long time the only place to really learn about  Customer Development was by reading this book called Four Steps to the Epiphany written by the guy who invented customer development. Much respect to Steve Blank for inventing customer development, but his book is really boring, dyslexic, and generally confused. The reason such a smart guy wrote such a shitty book is because Four Steps is actually a compilation of lecture notes meant to be used as a companion to a course taught by Mr. Blank himself. But people bought it anyway because it was the only codification of this new and intelligent business strategy.

But now there’s another book about customer development, and it actually makes sense. It’s only 75 pages long, it uses pretty colors, and it clearly defines its terms, one at a time. The writing is practical and lucid but not pretentious and imaginative; the exercises it provides are actionable and useful. It’s called The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development and it’s available at http://www.custdev.com (apparently you can use the  coupon code “LEAN” for a discount), and it’s Four Steps to the Epiphany without the suck.

After reading it and completing some of the exercises, I immediately felt better about my business projects. I feel like I know exactly what my risks are, and what to do next. The road is mapped out and the ambiguity is removed. In fact, the day after I finished reading it, I reached out via phone to 20 potential customers and set up two meetings for this week. So not only did I get the feel-good high of reading a business book, but it actually helped me get results immediately.

Did you know there’s a simple pattern that regularly predicts what ideas people will remember and which ones they won’t?

I’ll illustrate by example. Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? It’s a cognitive bias that says competent people underestimate their skills and incompetent people overestimate their skills. The Dunning-Kruger effect was discovered as early as 1999, but only came into the mainstream web cultural consciousness in late 2009. All of a sudden, boom: one mention appeared after another. What happened?

Some people might argue that it hit The Tipping Point, in Gladwell-speak. This is very plausible. “The Law of the Few”, “Context”, and “Stickiness” are the factors that determine the Tipping Point of a social-cultural epidemic. This article concentrates on ideas with “Stickiness”: ideas that are memorable are ideas that “stick”. Why does the Dunning-Kruger effect stick?

In the Heath brothers’ book Made to Stick, they claim that ideas that bear properties represented in the acronym SUCCESs become sticky: they are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and a Story. The stronger each attribute, the stickier the idea.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is…

Simple: incompetent people are overconfident, and competent people are too humble in their self-appraisal.

Unexpected: common sense would dictate that experienced people realize their strengths, and the incompetent should be aware of their weaknesses.

Concrete: it’s not just an abstract notion like “zeitgeist”, but instead something very real that we can experience in our everyday lives.

Credible: it was discovered by two researchers.

Emotion: hearing about it heals our self-esteem. Maybe we’re better than we give ourselves credit for! Indeed, not giving ourselves credit where credit is due is a cognitive error dismissed by Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.

But it’s not a Story. Oh well. Alligators escaping into NYC sewers is a story, and that’s one reason it became such a sticky urban legend. However, the D-K effect is on Wikipedia, and in the digital age (where, I would guess, most of the conversation about the D-K effect is being held) linking someone to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect is similar to telling them a story. It’s definitely not the same thing, though, as storytelling is a human tradition that probably has some interesting properties entirely outside of my awareness.

To better understand what’s going on with these principles of stickiness, we should look at an important principle in psychology: the schema. A schema is a mental representation that sets the context for information. For example, 1+1 means nothing in and of itself, but within the schema of the number system, 1+1=2. So “simple” ideas are ones that are easily understood within the schema of the listener. If I told you that I jumped a foot in the air today, that would be simple and understandable. But if I told you that I jumped twelve feet in the air, you would need to understand a few other schemas before that information could fit into your reality. Otherwise, you would either ignore it (filtering it out) or it would be too complex, and you would struggle to pay attention. Richard Feynman used to make fun of mathematicians, saying things like “mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that’s proved is trivial”. Indeed, abstract math proofs often simply jump from one building block (or schema) to another.

Stepping back a bit, the only reason that many people struggle with advanced high school math is because they never really got the fundamentals down. In order to be good at Algebra 2, you have to really master “factoring”. In order to be good at factoring, it helps if you’ve mastered the times tables. In this way, schemas are like skills. Acquiring a new, more complex one often simply requires you to chain previously learned skills together. It’s worth pointing out for the purists among us that schemas can be independent of each other, and a “more advanced schema” (better model) may not necessarily be more complex, but instead, a radically different paradigm.

But if you’re an author communicating an idea, all that matters is that your concepts fit into your audience’s schema. If they don’t, you must begin your discussion within a familiar schema before gradually introducing more complex schemas. The “curse of knowledge” refers to the tendency for someone with an advanced understanding of an idea to no longer be able to identify with the schemas of a person whom he is addressing, leading to communication problems.

(Based on this, my personal theory is that in school, instead of being taught by experts, we should be taught by children slightly older than us (but guided by an older mentor to provide suggestions and resolve conflicts). We learn better from peers anyway. Eventually I’ll open up the Zachary Burt Elementary School of Excellence. I’ll train the boys in fighting and the girls in gossip techniques, and once time travel is invented we’ll destroy Plato’s Academy at T-ball.)

Schema dissonance, as I call it, is the same reason why an executive-type can say “our goal is to maximize shareholder value” and understand exactly what to do, but a front-line employee will have no idea how to put that into action. If you want to set good company values that can steer your employees in the right direction during times of ambiguity, make sure they fit into the employees’ schemas. Disney calls its park employees “cast members”. Can you smoke outside while you’re working? Well … if you’re an actor in a play, can you take your costume off while you’re on stage? No? Okay, there’s your answer.

Similarly, the language of a business’s website needs to fit into the schema of your prototypical customer. I used to blindly ignore all those ads at the airport about “ERP” until I learned more about how enterprise softare works. The ads didn’t fit into my schema. (This is fine, I’m not part of the target audience for the ads.) So, a good, simple idea will click with people’s schemas.

When our schemas are violated, it is unexpected, and we experience the emotion of surprise. When we experience the emotion of surprise, our eyes open wider so we can take in more information: we pay attention. And we better remember things that we pay full attention to. Makes sense that Sticky ideas are surprising, eh? If you violate a schema right away, this creates a curiosity “hook”, which is an uncomfortable tension in need of resolution. Most people are curious, so they will often pay attention for a long time, even for a minor intellectual payoff: it’s just a quirk in human nature.

Note: when our schemas are significantly jarred, we will often have trouble sleeping. I haven’t seen any research confirming this, but my suspicion is that it’s because our minds are racing through all the new implications and need to recalibrate.

Although some people are gifted with abstract reasoning skills, most people want to see concrete examples. The authors of Made to Stick actually recommend that teachers BEGIN with concrete examples, and then work back to the abstract concepts. So if you want an idea to “stick”, then you’re going to want to illustrate it with something that the listener can visualize in their head.

Sticky ideas are credible, but there are two types of credibility. One is external credibility, such as when they are endorsed by an expert, or a lot of people believe in it, lending credence through social proof. Check out “God” for an example of an idea with external credibility. The other type of credibility, though, is internal credibility. Also called “falsifiability”, this is when a listener can verify the idea for himself. The Dunning Kruger effect has internal credibility because someone can easily imagine people they know who are incompetent yet overconfident. This is called a “testable credential”. Wendy’s succeeded big-time with their “Where’s the beef?” campaign because people could go ahead and see for themselves that burgers had more beef.

A cool sticky idea is in the FedEx logo. Did you realize that there’s an arrow embedded in the FedEx logo?

Surprise!

It’s cool because you can go ahead and test it out for yourself, on the spot! Internal credibility.

The next important one is emotion. Emotional ideas and emotional events are more likely to be remembered. It’s like they’re stamped in color into your memory. Can you think of the last time you had a big crush? I bet you remembered each little detail of conversations you had with that person, and then proceeded to annoy the hell out of your friends when trying to perform micro-analysis of every facet. Your memory was so strong because the moment you had with the elusive heartbreaker was emotional. (Note how I just imbued my statement about the strength of emotional memories with internal credibility?)

The Heaths note that our emotional decisions are activated by self-interest when resulting with immediate, tangible, and significant consequences, but are more motivated by group goals when considering the long-term (my guess is there’s also probably a game theory explanation for this). For example, we might vote to impose a $500 fine on littering from the comfort of an air-conditioned voting booth, but on a hot and stressful day, it could be easily tempting to toss our water bottle on the street once we have our hands full. Dale Carnegie’s classic How To Win Friends and Influence People speaks to the same ideas: appeal to higher motives, speak to the other person’s interests.

We think with our hearts, and except in the long-term (because planning engages the prefrontal cortex), we don’t think with our brains. We make decisions on an emotional basis and then backwards rationalize them. So when we’re trying to prove a point to someone, we should make them feel, not think. You may think that statistical data is useful when trying to convince someone, but in fact, the best purpose of statistics is to illustrate a relationship, rather than get people to concentrate on actual numbers. Once people shift into an analytical frame of mind, they’re going to be less likely to act, more likely to question what you’re saying, and less likely to hand over the contents of their wallets to you. Keep them emotional! Men, this applies to dating, as well. If you are about to take a girl home and then you amateurishly shift the conversation to politics, she’s going to get analytical and then start reasoning why she shouldn’t go home with you. Similarly, know how it’s easy to neglect to put on a glove in the heat of the moment, even though you know it’s the right thing to do, and you swore that you’d never go raw dog again? We make emotional choices. We remember emotionally. If you want your idea (or your Saturday night) to be sticky, then be mindful of the emotional affect of your content.

Finally, stories offer a pre-packaged form for your idea to be retold. The other person doesn’t need to do any thinking or creative brainstorming, they can simply recycle your format and then offer a new twist of their own if they like. There may also be evolutionary reasons for stories to be better remembered: you can tell the story of Uncle Grunt who died when eating the poison berries.

Sticky ideas get people to:

1. Pay attention (via Unexpected surprise)
2. Understand & Remember (via Concrete examples)
3. Agree/believe (through Credibility)
4. Care (via Emotional resonance)
5. Be able to act on it (via a Simple Story to tell other people)

I like Made to Stick and it’s definitely going to influence the success and structure of my future blog posts, public speaking, rumor mongering (people are more likely to spread an outlandish claim..because it’s UNEXPECTED), and business marketing endeavors. You can get check it out on Amazon, here.

If you’re interested in learning more about schemas, this blog post is an awesome look at them in the context of rationalization (and other defense mechanisms) & cognitive dissonance.

For years scientists have known that context shapes our appreciation of things: we feel that expensive water tastes better, even though in blind taste tests we cannot distinguish; we report that adding vinegar to beer makes it taste worse, even though if we drink it BEFORE finding out that it has vinegar, we think it tastes better. We refuse to drink soup out of a brand new hospital bedpan, even though it might be cleaner than a restaurant bowl.

Why is this? Is it because people are not rational actors?

No. It has nothing to do with rationality. Our subjective experience is shaped by memory. As we experience something, it triggers ‘hooks’ into past memories, and each memory might have an associated emotion. The hospital bedpan will trigger disgust. However, zen masters can transcend this; they have built a skill to see things for what they are, instead of letting their mind wander into associations. Consider this story from the most excellent book, Zen Flesh Zen Bones:

Tosui was a well-known Zen teacher of his time. He had lived in several temples and taught in various provinces.

The last temple he visited accumulated so many adherents that Tosui told them he was going to quit the lecture business entirely. He advised them to disperse and go wherever they desired. After that no one could find any trace of him.

Three years later one of his disciples discovered him living with some beggars under a bridge in Kyoto. He at once implored Tosui to teach him.

“If you can do as I do for even a couple days, I might,” Tosui replied.

So the former disciple dressed as a beggar and spent the day with Tosui. The following day one of the beggars died. Tosui and his pupil carried the body off at midnight and buried it on a mountainside. After that they returned to their shelter under the bridge.

Tosui slept soundly the remainder of the night, but the disciple could not sleep. When morning came Tosui said: “We do not have to beg food today. Our dead friend has left some over there.” But the disciple was unable to eat a single bite of it.

“I have said you could not do as I,” concluded Tosui. “Get out of here and do not bother me again.”

One of the tenets of many Eastern spiritual practices (as espoused by new age groups) is that often times it is not just the thing that bothers us, but our emotions about the thing. For example, we can be annoyed and stressed about a stubbed toe, instead of just experiencing the throbbing for what it is. Oppositely, we can be happy about owning a t-shirt worn by a celebrity, because our happiness derives from not only the raw value we can get from the shirt itself, but from all of these emotions we experience from the shirt.

When we feel joy about possessing Barack Obama’s used necktie, it is because we feel that the tie bears his essence. Paul Bloom’s new book, How Pleasure Works, calls this vantage point “essentialism”: we project essences onto things that we perceive, and it’s a near-universal part of being human. The world might just be a bunch of random atoms, but our minds have learned to carve our perceptions into discrete objects. In order to explain these objects, we give them essences.

Let me give an example of essentialism in action. Imagine that your favorite pet has been magically duplicated. Would you want the duplicate, or would you prefer the original? Studies predict that you would prefer the original. Why? Because the new pet doesn’t have the “essence” of the old one… somehow, it’s just not the same. There’s a logical phylogenetic (evolutionary) explanation to this one: we want to make sure that we stay bonded to creatures with whom we share genetic interests.

So maybe the advanced human can transcend essentialism. You’d definitely have a “leg up” on people less conscious of their preferences. But then again, maybe you’d end up like the monk Tosui, who lived under the bridge.

Further reading: Zen Flesh Zen Bones, How Pleasure Works, Predictably Irrational.

The Cognitive Surplus

The advancement of technology has left people with an abundance of time on their hands, and in his newest book, Clay Shirky calls it a “Cognitive Surplus”. The story goes something like this: back in the day, when people got bored, they drank. A lot. Then the industrial revolution came around, and people were busier than ever. Finally, technology progressed, enabling shorter workdays and time to consume the fruits of technological advancement, for example, television.

Television

A lot of people think that TV is a waste of time. They resent its brain-dead nature; they believe that it’s a channel for social conditioning and that it generally makes the world a worse place. Shirky himself says that if we redirected our TV watching hours to acts of creation, we could produce the equivalent of 100 Wikipedias per year. Jeez. Fuck TV, right? But it’s actually not so black and white.

To understand why not, it helps to understand what motivates humans.

People have individual drives and group drives. Drawing on the same concepts as Dan Pink and his book Drive (and this awesome animated talk), Shirky notes that people, as individuals, want a sense of autonomy as well as a feeling of competence. In other words, they want to choose what they do and then they want to be good at it. Competence is conducive to a state of flow, and autonomy, or self-direction, is the opposite of learned helplessness – which, as we know from Martin Seligman’s classic Learned Optimism, is equivalent to depression. And as group members, people aspire to group membership and generosity. One of the reasons that giving things away feels good is because it activates the generosity reward centers of our brain. And one of the reasons we enjoy compliments is because they may enhance our self-concept of being a member of a group: compliments raise our social status. One study indicated that people are more respective of airport directives if the signs actually picture humans instead of plain symbology: this draws on explanations of social proof, socially (human) constructed realities, and wanting to adhere to social (group) norms.

Online collaboration, à la Wikipedia, is a socially positive phenomenon ultimately explainable by new opportunities piggybacking on timeless motives. Wikipedians get to feel autonomous when they choose what to work on, competent in their area of expertise, generous with their time, and a sense of group belonging.

New “social media” is two-way communication, and harkens to the more real roots of human culture: a culture of sharing and interaction (think tribal dances, or fast-forward to audience participation on YouTube). You’d think that TV, on the other hand, is a one-way communication with its culture of receiving (being a couch potato, streamed programming chosen by advertisers and satellite dish owners). But once again the social lens elucidates. One of the more interesting ways that TV affects us is that some people actually turn it into a two-way process. Seeing their favorite characters on TV alleviates a sense of loneliness and allows them to experience group membership without having to be in the physical presence of other beings. In that way it can be viewed as participatory culture, especially with the advent of online discussion forums (e.g. Lostpedia, OfficeTally).

So maybe we shouldn’t go ahead and assume that TV is destroying our capacity for Wikipedia-creation (and I do realize that 100 Wikipedias is “just” a concrete illustration of an abstract mathematical relationship, but metaphors also bear concrete implications). Maybe we should instead figure out ways that less skilled people can achieve a sense of belonging while making a substantial social contribution that benefits everyone, and not just group members. Maybe a free social mechanical turk, with a leaderboard, for use by non-profits?

I am reminded of how in Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely demonstrates that people are willing to do huge favors for each other in social contexts, even without invoking the principle of reciprocity: they are motivated by pure generosity. But it’s possible the joy is actually derived from being perceived as generous instead of the generosity itself. For example, I might give you a ride home every day from the kindness of my heart, with no expectation for compensation or any other indebtedness – but if you then offer to pay me $1 per ride, I will feel that you are taking advantage of me. Instead of getting the payment of being perceived as generous (cash equivalent… $50? a better deal for me?), I am getting paid an insultingly low wage.

The social brain can be a key to understanding human behavior. So the next time you’re puzzled by some quirk in human nature, ask if there’s a social explanation.

Social Apps

Drawing on the above insights, Clay provides some hints for the intelligent cultivation of social web apps:

1. Start small
2. Behavior follows an opportunity for social or personal advancement
3. Default to social: del.icio.us succeeded where other online bookmarking services had failed because bookmarking was public from day one
4. It is more difficult to groom a community of 100 users than 12 users, and easier to maintain a community of 1000 users than one of 100 users
5. Through the law of large numbers, there are lots of people with diverse interests, and they will find each other through the internet
6. Intimacy doesn’t scale
7. Support a supportive, self-moderating culture
8. Faster to learn, sooner to adapt: this plays on Customer Development concepts
9. Success creates more problems than failure
10. Clarity is violence: Get away from functional fixedness; leave the rules open and learn from what people choose to do with the tools you built for them
11. Try anything and try everything (and hope for black swan events!)

LINK: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age is available on Amazon.

I recently picked up John C. Maxwell’s The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership – there are a lot of books on leadership, but when I was flipping through its pages at Barnes and Noble, its contents really resonated with me so I bought it. I was later comforted to learn that it is among the top-rated books when searching for “leadership” on Amazon.com.

Something you should know about me, if it wasn’t already patently obvious, is that I am not a natural leader. I am, however, a naturally fluent and eloquent speaker. For a long time, I painfully and mistakenly confused my oratory charisma with charisma and leadership par excellence. I have experienced a lot of frustration stemming from wanting others to follow me and then being disappointed when I didn’t achieve the results I wanted. This was due to a disconnect between my perception of my leadership abilities and others’ perception of my strength as a leader. (And if there isn’t already a whole category of mental health literature dedicated to disconnects between your self-perceptions and others’ perception of you, there ought to be.)

Fortunately, leadership is a skill that can be acquired, and it’s one that I’m working on. I have a long journey ahead of me, and this book has helped me realize actionable areas where I can work to grow.

This post is long – I am not yet skilled enough in leadership to write a shorter one – but it is shorter than Maxwell’s book.

Here we go.

1. Law of the lid – leadership ability determines a person’s level of effectiveness

For any goals that require participation or cooperation of other people, your effectiveness will be greatly impacted by leadership. Fortunately, leadership ability is something you can work to improve: a good start is by better alignment with these laws!

2. Law of influence – the true measure of leadership is influence–nothing more, nothing less

Leadership doesn’t come from a title. This may explain why a lot of people cling to their titles, say, in the workplace environment; it validates a self-image of being high ranking, without requiring any real charisma. It may also explain why some people become egregiously offended by people claiming to be the CEO of businesses with a handful or even zero employees. (Big-time CEOs are often true leaders, and awarding yourself a big title can help you influence others: c.f. my summary of Cialdini’s Influence.)

Leadership doesn’t come from having a lot of knowledge; there are plenty of academics and other obscure erudites who aren’t leaders. However, a lack of knowledge can sabotage an otherwise capable leader; indeed, knowledge breeds capability, which is a trait of the leader, but knowledge alone is not sufficient criterion for leadership. Leadership doesn’t come from being a manager or entrepreneur. As a manager, you’re just managing pre-existing systems to make sure that they don’t run off course. As an entrepreneur, you’re just identifying and executing on business opportunities. Of course, leadership skill can greatly help a manager or entrepreneur succeed. And leadership doesn’t come from being a pioneer. Just because you are the first to explore an unknown area (for example, experimenting with a new approach to nutrition) doesn’t make you a leader. Instead, proof of leadership is found in followers. If other people follow your foray to the unknown, then you are a leader.

I’ll reiterate: proof of leadership is found in followers.

Several factors come into play when people emerge as leaders: their character (who they are), their relationships (who they know), their knowledge (what they know), their intuition (what they feel), their experience (where they’ve been), their past success (what they’ve done), and their ability (what they can do).

There is a difference between leadership with leverage, where someone follows you because you have control over their salary, academic history, or can hold some other gun to their head, and pure leadership, which stems from influence.

If you want to test your leadership skills, try getting involved with a volunteer organization and try to effect change. This may be one of the reasons employers like Joel Spolsky value starting non-profits in college: its a test of leadership ability. And as Maxwell mentions (in Law 20), having leaders in your organization is a great boon.

3. Law of Process – leadership develops daily, not in a day

We need to use our pre-frontal cortex and construct a long-term plan for cultivating our leadership skills. Determine a personal plan for growth; set goals. I found this book to be helpful. You can also make long-term investments in people who follow you; one way to do this is by creating a culture of growth within your company (or any other organization). Tony Hsieh did this at Zappos (check out my notes on his book Delivering Happiness).

4. Law of Navigation – anyone can steer the ship but it takes a leader to chart the course

Preparation is critical! Maxwell advises that you do your homework before creating an action plan: draw on past experience, hold intentional convos with experts and team members to gather info, and examine current conditions. I can testify from personal experience that it is much much easier to get someone to comply with your wishes if you have exhaustively prepared. My high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Casey O’Connell, taught that to me by making sure that we tried as hard as we could on a problem, and then writing down our specific questions, before approaching him for help. That way, we could get immediately down to business. Similarly, people on message boards are much more likely to help you with a problem if you’ve done your homework: tell them that you’ve experimented with different approaches and that you’ve searched on Google before asking. People like to help, but they often resent their time being wasted, which is a sign of disrespect. As you’ll see in Law 7, respect for others is an important attribute of a leader.

Also, it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to fake skill. Studies have demonstrated that experts remember more details from conversations in subjects of their expertise, spot more nuanced features when glancing at a subject-relevant object, and can have quicker response times to questions. When you are talking with someone, through your response time and other subtle cues, they can get an intuitive read of your preparedness or expertise.

5. Law of addition – leaders add value by serving others

Are you making things better for those who follow you? You can lead others for whom you are making conditions worse (e.g. in abusive relationships), but this is not a profitable and viable long-term strategy (c.f. recent drama in the stock market). Value adding requires intentionality: although we’ve been socially conditioned to think otherwise, we humans are really selfish creatures. You can argue about altruism (Williams syndrome cases are an exception), but normal altruism is mostly directed toward group members, and you can even argue that selflessness only exists because of selfish payoff (check out my notes on Cialdini’s Influence for a summary of “reciprocity”). Perhaps through an evolution of consciousness we can conceive of all of humanity as one group, but that would be subject for another post.

Maxwell says we add value when we value others, when we make ourselves more valuable to others, and when we know and relate to what others value. This last one is huge, both in personal life and in business. On a business’s website, we should tailor our messaging to what the customer actually cares about instead of bragging about our own success. In writing this blog, I am going to try to be aware that examples I provide from my personal life actually help drive points home and are not simply self-serving egocentricity (I have already done some vicious editing).

Some exercises recommended by Maxwell:

* If you want to improve in this area, you can practice doing small acts of service for others without seeking credit or recognition for them, and then continue until you no longer resent doing them.
* Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 on how well you relate to the values of people close to you. If you can’t articulate what someone values, then spend more time with that person in order to improve. (I just applied this idea when shopping for a birthday gift.)

6. Law of solid ground – trust is the foundation of leadership

Maxwell says that trust comes from competence, connection, and character. Character communicates consistency, potential, respect; character comprises integrity, authenticity, and discipline. In order to develop integrity, don’t shave the truth, don’t tell white lies, and don’t fudge numbers. Be truthful even when it hurts. In order to develop authenticity, be yourself with everyone. In order to develop discipline, do the right thing every day regardless of how you feel. If you want to test whether you’re trustworthy, ask yourself: do you regularly carry weighty responsibilities? Do you hear bad news from followers instead of just good news?

If your followers aren’t placing their complete trust in you, you shouldn’t blame them. Instead, ask yourself what you can do to build more trust.

7. Law of respect – people naturally follow leaders stronger than themselves

This one is huge. Having an understanding of this is very important to understanding human nature. People will only follow leaders stronger than themselves and very rarely follow leaders weaker than themselves. People may follow someone weaker if it’s in the context of the workplace, or if they absolutely need to in order to achieve some personal end. However, people will rarely comply with people weaker than them and they will resent having to follow someone weaker than them. (It could be fun to do an analysis of leadership in the context of the TV show The Office, wherein frustration results from having a non-leader, Michael Scott, with a leadership title. Incidentally, I am planning another post about The Office, tentatively titled “Information Theory and Comedy”).

There are six ways leaders gain other’s respect:
1. Natural leadership ability.
2. Respect for others. Following a leader is voluntary.
3. Courage. Courage includes doing what’s right, even at the risk of failure, in the face of great danger and under the brunt of relentless criticism. It gives followers hope.
4. Success. This is self-explanatory, but everyone enjoys siding with a winner.
5. Loyalty. People respect people who stick with the team until the job is done, remain loyal to the organization when the going gets rough, and look out for followers even when it hurts them.
6. Adding value to others.

If you’re curious about “measuring your respect”, try looking at the caliber of people who choose to follow you. Your strength is signified by both the ceiling and the average strength of your followers. Also, you can try seeing how your people respond when you ask for commitment or change: this tests your compliance, which is the measure of your influence, which as stated in Law 2, is the true reflection your strength as a leader.

If your goal is to improve your strength, rather than measure, then create a goal, practice or habit for each of the six areas. Ask people in your life who are closest to you what they respect most about you, and ask them to tell you in which areas you most need to grow. Then chart your course based on their honest feedback.

8. Law of intuition – leaders evaluate everything with a leadership bias

Leaders read a lot of things: leaders read situations, leaders read trends, leaders read their resources, leaders read people, and leaders read themselves. Leaders are intuitive in their areas of strength.

In order to grow in this area, I’ve been working on my ability to read people. If this is something you’re interested in, you can read my notes on Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman or What Every Body Is Saying by Joe Navarro. Paul Ekman’s book Unmasking the Face is also fairly good, and he has an online course to train your ability to quickly interpret emotions. I’m going to sign up for it and review it soon.

Maxwell advises, “Think about your current projects or goals. Imagine how you can accomplish them without doing any of the work yourself…except by recruiting, empowering, and motivating others.”

Ask,
Who is the best person to take this on?
What resources do we possess that can help us?
What will this take financially?
How can I encourage my team to achieve success?

9. Law of magnetism – who you are is who you attract

People attract others of similar generation, attitude, background, values, energy, giftedness, and leadership ability. Be cognizant of that. As Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s elite venture capital firms, says on their webpage explaining their criterion for companies they choose to invest in: “A company’s DNA is set in the first 90 days. All team members are the smartest or most clever in their domain. ‘A’ level founders attract an “A” level team.” Other books also express the notion that “B” founders attract a “C” level team, and so forth.

10. Law of connection – leaders touch a heart before they ask for a hand

Maxwell says that there are eight steps to connection:

1. Connect with yourself
2. Communicate with openness and sincerity
3. Know your audience
4. Live your message
5. Go to where they are
6. Focus on them, not yourself
7. Believe in them
8. Offer direction and hope

He also offers the helpful maxim, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

11. Law of the inner circle – a leader’s potential is determined by those closest to him

On selecting your inner circle, ask:
1. Do they have high influence with others?
2. Do they bring a complementary gift to the table?
3. Do they hold a strategic position in their organization?
4. Do they add value to me and to the organization? seek people who help you improve
5. Do they positively impact other inner circle members?

A “yes” answer to the above five criteria is not sufficient grounds for inclusion, but Maxwell cautions that a single no is grounds for exclusion. He adds that in general, you should look for people who evince excellence, maturity, and good character in everything they do.

12. Law of empowerment – only secure people give power to others

If you’re feeling insecure about this, Maxwell claims the paradoxical “making yourself dispensable, you actually make yourself indispensable”. Unfortunately, he does not justify it from a logical perspective, but it seems intuitively right and I’m ready to believe him based on his extensive leadership experience. Maybe the paradox is true because having the ability to empower people is a leadership trait, and strong leaders are always desirable.

Also, he recommends that you start believing in your people. Dwell on their positive qualities and characteristics; look for their greatest strengths and envision how they could leverage those strengths to achieve significant things. You gain nothing by dwelling on their weaknesses (except, perhaps, when evaluating for termination or reassignment). As Dale Carnegie advises, “Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.”

13. Law of the picture – people do what people see

There’s a reason that “do as I say, not as I do” is such an ineffective leadership strategy. We are mimetic learners and more readily learn by imitation rather than through explicit instruction. I go into mimetic learning more in my post on The Inner Game of Tennis.

Some points:
1. Followers are always watching what you do
2. It’s easier to teach what’s right than to do what’s right
3. We should work on changing ourselves before trying to improve others
4. According to workers surveyed, the most valuable gift a leader can give is being a good example

Mission provides purpose, answering “why?”
Vision provides a picture, answering “what?”
Strategy provides a plan, answering “how?”

If you want to improve your alignment with the law of the picture, list three to five things you wish your people did better than they currently do. Now, grade your performance on them. If your self-scores are low, then you need to change your behavior. If your scores are high, then you need to make your example more visible to your people.

14. Law of buy-in – people buy into the leader, then the vision

The leader finds the dream and then the people; the people find the leader and then the dream. If you are struggling to find people willing to listen to your great idea, perhaps you should consider improving your leadership skills.

15. The law of victory – leaders find a way for the team to win

The best leaders are relentless in their pursuit of group victory. Leadership is responsible, losing is unacceptable, passion is unquenchable, creativity is essential, quitting is unthinkable, commitment is unquestionable, victory is inevitable.

There are three components that lead to victory:
1. Unity of vision, with everyone sharing a common agenda. This is crucial, and unfortunately, many people have their own personal agendas (of advancement, or psychology game-play) that really work against project success.
2. Diversity of skills
3. A leader dedicated to victory and raising players to their potential

16. Law of the big mo – momentum is a leader’s best friend

In top-tier organizations, there is a spirit of excellence that produces positive upward momentum.

1. Momentum is the great exaggerator
2. Momentum makes leaders look better than they are
3. Momentum helps followers perform better than they are
4. Momentum is easier to steer than start
5. Momentum is the most powerful change agent
6. Momentum is the leader’s responsibility
7. Momentum begins inside the leader

In order to foster momentum, continually praise effort, but reward and celebrate accomplishments. I’m not certain about the best way to reward someone, whether it’s through social rewards, cash incentives, or cash equivalents (e.g. sports tickets). Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that achievement-based cash awards only work in a mechanical environment, like a factory or homomorphisms thereof, and not in environments requiring creative thinking: in those environments, it actually suppresses performance. My intuition is that cash equivalents are best.

Early wins are critical, so try to see how quickly you can build some kind of momentum.

17. Law of priorities – leaders understand that activity is not necessarily accomplishment

The Pareto principle, as applied to business, states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort.

If you want to improve in this area, three questions are important:

1. What is required?
2. What gives the greatest return?
3. What brings the greatest reward?

List your answers to the above three questions, and then delegate or eliminate things from your life that weren’t listed. As Hiten Shah says, “Do what you love and outsource the rest.” One thing I have to do in my business is make spec documents. The truth of the matter is, this is something I can easily teach to others to a point that they could easily do it 80% as well as me, and probably exceed me with practice. I am going to write a blog post on how to create kick-ass spec documents, and then I can just hire someone else to do them for me.

18. Law of sacrifice – a leader must give up to go up

There is no success without sacrifice. Leaders are often asked to give up more than others. You must keep giving up to stay up; there’s a common fallacy that once you’ve reached the finish line, you can revert to old behaviors. And the higher the level of leadership, the greater the sacrifice.

Make two lists: things you are willing to give up in order to go up, and the things you are not willing to sacrifice to advance. I’ve made some sacrifices already, such as in my diet (avoiding meat, raw and refined sugar, and other indulgences). I’ve stopped smoking, and I’m planning on making a post on how to stop smoking, targeted towards people who are thinking about quitting. Also, I’ve really cut down on my alcohol consumption; I rarely drink when I go out. (This doesn’t pose any social problems, since if I want to drink something when I’m out, I order water and tip the bartender, and nobody really cares.) Something I should give up, but haven’t yet, is negative thinking. I am working on it, though. One way I’m tackling it is through journaling gratitude at GratitudeLog.com (I should make this a daily practice).

Something I’m not yet willing to give up is playing basketball.

19. Law of timing – when to lead is as important as what to do and where to go

Timing requires an understanding of the situation, maturity (right motives), confidence, decisiveness, experience, intuition (e.g. about timing and morale), and preparation (if the timing isn’t right, the leader must create those conditions).

20. Law of explosive growth – to add growth, lead followers–to multiply, lead leaders

Leaders who develop leaders want to be succeeded. As I mentioned earlier, when you make yourself dispensable, you paradoxically become indispensable. Leaders who develop leaders develop the top 20 percent; leaders who develop leaders focus on strengths; leaders who develop leaders treat individuals differently, focusing on the highest-performing individuals; leaders who develop leaders invest time in others, building for the very long-term.

Unfortunately, developing leaders is not an “add-water-and-stir proposition”. Leaders are hard to find (they don’t flock, like most humans/other animals), they’re hard to gather, and hard to keep.

There are three stages to developing leaders: stage 1 is developing yourself. Stage 2 is developing your team. And stage 3 is developing leaders.

21. Law of legacy – a leader’s lasting value is measured by succession

The recipe:

1. Know the legacy you want to leave
2. Live the legacy you want to leave
3. Choose who will carry on your legacy
4. Make sure you pass the baton

There’s an exercise that can help with steps one through three: imagine that you’re attending your own funeral and somehow have the ability to hear what people are saying at your eulogy. What do they say about you? Now consider what you’d want them to say about you – and act accordingly to shape their future behavior, today. Others may benefit from Steve Pavlina’s exercise on finding your life purpose. This may be my weakest area; right now, I don’t have any strong purpose. I do know that there’s more work I need to do in order to uncover it. But I’m doing this work, and sharing it on the blog.

* * *

By reading his book and posting these “laws”, I am affirming Maxwell’s influence. Do I think that this list is comprehensive and exhaustive? No. Do I think the 21 laws are “irrefutable”? Not necessarily. But as Max DePree says, “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.” (Recall Steve Jobs’s famous “reality distortion field”.) DePree’s claim makes sense in a tribal sort of way; our realities are socially constructed, and who best to set the tone, or frame, than the leader? So Maxwell’s use of definitive language, “irrefutable”, is understandable. I hope this post has benefited you on your quest to improve yourself as a leader. I know it’s benefited me. If you want to check out the book on Amazon, you can do so here.

Keith Johnstone’s Impro, subtitled Improvisation and the Theatre, comprises four essential sections: Status, Narratives, Spontaneity, and Masks, but I saw one theme emerge: the malleability of human nature. In my most recent post, I mentioned the Fundamental Attribution Error, a social psychology term. The Error, also known as correspondence bias, reflects the tendency of observers to over-value innate personality traits when explaining behavior, and fail to take into account situational circumstance. It seems that Johnstone has an intuitive understanding of this phenomenon, and I feel that Impro is actually a psychology book masquerading as an improvisational theatre textbook.

In the introduction, Johnstone began by reflecting on his school days, recalling how teachers shaped behavior according to cultural expectations, and violently reacted against students who failed to live up to their perceived norms. I recall one study in which students who tested as “dumb” were placed into gifted classrooms, and students who tested as “smart” were placed into remedial classes; the teachers were none the wiser and had no reason to assume that something was afoot. After a year of teaching, “dumb” students tested “smart” and “smart” students tested “dumb”. It’s a testament to the idea that we really live up to the expectations others project onto us, and the fundamental importance of the self-fulfilling prophecy in activating behavior. In Zen Poker, one of the rules is not to let your opponent’s expectations of difficulty fool you into erring where you otherwise wouldn’t; sometimes, due to social pressure, we have a tendency to cave into others’ expectations. The precise psychological mechanisms explaining this behavior are currently a mystery to me, but they are likely explored in greater depth in the literature. My intuition is that it’s a Transaction Analysis-style game in which we achieve a greater sense of safety by living up to the group’s expectations instead of pursuing individual glory. I am curious how appearance of this phenomenon – caving into others’ projection of false pressure – varies between individuals from collectivist versus individualistic societies.

Indeed, in Impro, Johnstone discusses other phenomena like how an actor with a cold will suppress all symptoms for the duration of the performance, or how putting on a Mask will activate unforseen behavioral characteristics. He insightfully observes, “Sanity has nothing directly to do with the way you think. It’s a matter of presenting yourself as safe,” a platitude with which I agree. It’s all about keeping group harmony. He also says, “I see the ‘personality’ as a public-relations department for the real mind.” Perfect!

Whatever comes out when you speak or act in an entirely unstifled stream-of-consciousness. This channels true creativity, divine inspiration, and flow. I feel like this fits into the paradigm I’ve been sketching. It’s a loss of the ego (self), and a connection to the true Self (“God”). Very few people are truly uncreative – instead, they stifle their creativity out of fear for being judged and made a pariah for their truest thoughts and intentions. People won’t improvise because they censor; they fear they are revealing ‘too much’. Thus Johnstone suggest it is the teacher’s responsibility to absolve them of responsibility for what they say, until they achieve greater self-knowledge and self acceptance, and are no longer embarrassed by their true nature. By the way, in hypnosis, people who are ‘normal’ are most suggestible. That’s why they became “normal” in the first place, because they are suggestible! People’s personalities are truly flexible, and I am very suspect of people who try to say that personality is a static thing. (There appears to be a general consensus amongst psychologists that personality is more reluctant to change after age 30 – perhaps because they’ve accumulated too many neural pathways, or perhaps because their entire sense of reality is predicated on certain axiomatic notions linked to their personality. I don’t know.)

The juiciest, and most fun part of the book for me, however, was Johnstone’s discussion of status. In human interaction, our status is always moving up or down in relation to others in our social environment. Always! This is reflected by our body language as well as our verbal language; the vast majority of status transactions operate outside the realm of conscious awareness. Our behavior is extremely affected as well as limited by our status. High status people are limited just as low status people are limited; they simply experience different constraints. By the way, please don’t confuse the notion of group status with cultural concepts of socio-economic status; perhaps due to cultural memory, socio-economic status can occasionally affect group status, but I believe it is simply a pretext (or frame) for group status. Despite our attempts to brainwash ourselves into thinking otherwise, status is a very real thing. Moreover, you cannot really fake status, and it is constantly being announced through our body language (vocal tonality, eyes, arm positioning, leg positioning, etc.). This is one reason why people become self-conscious of being photographed: their status is being broadcast in a very real way, and they compensate by crossing their arms (in attempts to appear neutral) or making goofy faces (in attempts to take themselves “out of the game”).

Check out this cool link for a description of high status vs. low status behaviors: http://greenlightwiki.com/improv/Status – you’ll notice how low status people move out of the way for high status people, and high status people don’t look at low status people. This may because status is regulated through dopamine levels, and as I discuss in this post on the practical neuroscience of Buddhism, attention is modulated through dopamine. The specific intricacies of the relationship have yet to reveal themselves to me in a collapsible theoretical model, but I’m working on it. By the way, status is often broadcast through space, and one of the reasons that people love going away and looking out the top of the mountain is that it allows for an uninterrupted projection of their personal space. Humans (and other animals) are incredibly well-adjusted to status projections, and our body language is often modified to adapt to the body language of people outside our range of vision. (Also, I suspect, we are sub”conscious” of this while sleeping, and our body-position reflects the complex interpretation of the presence of others, even in another room.)

Johnstone provides this excerpt from the book The Human Zoo, labeled “Ten golden rules for people who are Number Ones”:

1. Must clearly display trappings, postures and gestures of dominance.
2. In moments of active rivalry you must threaten your subordinates aggressively
3. In moments of physical challenge you (or your delegates) must be able forcibly to overpower your subordinates
4. If a challenge involves brain rather than brawn you must be able to outwit your subordinates
5. You must suppress squabbles that break out between your subordinates
6. You must reward your immediate subordinates by permitting them to enjoy the benefits of their high ranks
7. You must protect the weaker members of the group from undue persecution.
8. You must make decisions concerning the social activities of the group.
9. You must reassure your extreme subordinates from time to time.
10. You must take the initiative in repelling threats or attacks arising from outside your group.

You’ll notice that high status group members are required to stifle the expression of lower status group members. Ritualized displays of status, endemic to much corporate culture, is the reason that innovation is so scarce. People don’t improvise and they expend proportionally greater energy (as compared to say, a start-up company) on satisfying the whims of their superiors. A recent consulting trip brought me to visit a company based in Atlanta. The employees were too preoccupied with status transactions – trying to raise their rank – instead of aligning their behavior with intentions toward improved corporate welfare. This was a stark contrast to the culture of companies like NetFlix and Zappos, that have adopted a strategy that transcends status-obsession.

Finally, I’d like to conclude with some questions on the nature of happiness as it relates to status. I very much suspect that happiness is a social phenomenon, and that status plays a role in our own experience of happiness. However, status is simply a coping strategy. Some people become very good at acting out high-status roles, and some people become very good at acting out low-status roles; these are simply (arbitrary?) roles within a group that help serve both group and individual welfare. A healthy concept of self-esteem will allow you to switch between high-status and low-status roles as necessary; insecurity should not prevent you from taking on a high or low-status role, whether in the theater or real life. Well, according to the Bard, they’re the same thing.

Related reading: my notes on Delivering Happiness by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, my notes on the body language book What Every Body is Saying by FBI body-language expert Joe Navarro
LINK: Purchase Impro on Amazon.