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What is dark matter, anyway?

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Last week, I suggested that we could use dark matter to organize our own cult and meet angels. I was joking. But it got me thinking… what is dark matter, anyway?

I’ve long held that human beings ignore a fundamental truth about how we perceive the world: we do it through our five senses. Our senses let us measure certain frequencies of light (vision), certain chemical reactions (smell, taste), speed of molecules (temperature), pressure (touch), and certain frequencies of air vibrations (hearing). That’s it. We developed physics by explaining what we experience with those senses. We expanded physics by expanding our senses with technology; we invested telescopes that let us see farther. While those technologies expanded our senses, they still measured pretty much the same phenomenon.

Humans are Like Frogs, Minus the Warts

But there’s nothing that says that those are the only phenomena that exist. Frogs, for example, can only see motion. They don’t see stationery objects. To a frog, an object appears when it’s moving and vanishes when it’s not. A frog would create a concept of physics that wouldn’t include stationery objects. A bug could be sitting right in front of a frog, and the frog wouldn’t know about it, as long as the bug stands still. This sucks for the frog, though it’s pretty awesome for the bug.

Maybe humans are frogs. Well, not totally, but mostly. Maybe there are phenomena that we simply don’t have the sensory apparatus to detect. Let’s call one of these “oobleck.” We’ve never built oobleck-detecting machines because we can’t even sense oobleck, so we don’t have any idea that oobleck exists, or what kind of machine might detect it.

Math Saves the Day!

Fortunately, we have math. Calculus and other sophisticated math was originally invented to help Newton with his work on physics and Leibniz with his work on intellectual property law1. The neat thing about math is that math can be used to produce a model of something we know about. For example, you can use math to create a model of how to tie a necktie. The math can then be used to extrapolate that model into realms it didn’t original model. Just a few years ago, math hypothesized the existence of many new necktie knots (85 total), which was then verified by actually tying them. The Pratt is my favorite.

Sometimes, math extrapolates things that don’t seem to make any sense. For example, you can use math to describe creating a funnel that has finite volume and infinite surface area. We tried very hard to make such a funnel in college, but were never able to create the physical object. We had to use a traditional funnel instead.

What’s happened in physics is that the math didn’t quite work. So they added a fudge factor and called it “dark matter.” I’m sure it began as one of those late night ideas you come up with after you have that party involving funnels. Physicists are always plugging in fudge factors and giving them cool names. Einstein came up with a fudge factor that he called “the cosmological constant.” Is that a cool name, or what?

But the reason physicists call themselves scientists is that once they recover from their hangovers, they go observe the universe and find out whether it matches what the math said it should match. If it matches, it means the math may have detected something that our senses couldn’t detect on our own. If we can figure out enough about how this strange thing behaves, we might be able to build machines to detect it. It would be like giving a frog an implant to detect bugs that are standing still. The frog still couldn’t directly see a stationery bug, but the technology could extend its senses in a way that would give it easy access to dinner. This sucks for the bug, though it’s pretty awesome for the frog.

Thus, dark matter.

I think dark matter is really neat. I think it could be the human equivalent of a stationery bug. Sure, it might be merely a place where our current understanding of the universe isn’t complete. Maybe it just means we got our equations wrong. But maybe it’s more. Much more. It could be a signpost into an entire realm of physical phenomena that our senses weren’t built to detect. It seems bizarre, incomprehensible, and magical to us, but it could result in a complete change in our understanding of reality. And who knows where it might lead? It’s a great, unexplored frontier. We just might find out we’re frogs, about to discover there’s such a thing as a bug that’s standing still. If that happens, there will be great rejoicing, and we’ll feast like frogs2!

It’s just a thought.

1 This is a joke. If you don’t get it, Google until you do.

2 Notice how optimistically I’ve skipped over the scenario where we discover that dark matter is the frog and we’re the stationery fly? I’ve been working on improving my optimistic outlook. I think it’s working.

You have to want to succeed as much as you want to breathe. Really?

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I just saw this video, shared on Google+:

“When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you’ll be successful.”

How Bad Do You Want It from Greyskale Multimedia on Vimeo.

The sentiment is common: in order to succeed, you have to want it so bad you burst a blood vessel. The only problem with this sentiment is that I don’t know that there’s any truth to it. Maybe it’s true in weight lifting (I’d like to see the study), but I’m not aware of psychological research or motivation research that supports it. While it’s true if you want something badly, you’ll go after it, it’s also true that too much urgency shuts down creativity, problem-solving ability, and even perception. There are plenty of domains where it’s possible to succeed without that kind of motivation1.

There’s a similar zen fable about enlightenment. The story ends differently. The student goes to the zen master and says, “Master, how long will it take me to become enlightened?” “Ten years,” replied the master. “What if I work at every day of the year, every waking hour, and try harder than I’ve ever tried before?” “Then, it will take a lifetime.”

I think we do ourselves a disservice in looking only at the “work unbelievably hard and you’ll succeed” situations in life.

There are plenty of successful people who are motivated by peace, serenity, and joy. And yet they still seize opportunity, they still do work, and they still get what they want out of life. But they don’t have to force themselves into an asthma attack to get there.

There are plenty of people sitting on their asses doing nothing. I agree that asthma-attack motivation is better than nothing for those folks. But it would be nice to put the last few decades’ research into the psychology of achievement into practice and teach people to achieve without needing this stress-filled style.

There are plenty kinds of achievement that are motivated the other way. Do yourself a favor and find one of them. Train hard, keep your eye on your goal, but don’t give yourself a heart attack in the process.

1 Forbes recently did a study of the Forbes 400 and discovered that half of those folks inherited their money. I would submit that those folks reached positions of success without the kind of unbelievable franticness we see in this video.

Physics used to justify wishful thinking

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[Today’s note is a bit of humorous whimsy, completely unrelated to anything I usually blog about.]

I’ve been thinking about the two-part Get-it-Done Guy episode on visualization, and it’s given me an idea. There’s a long history of people misunderstanding physics and using the misunderstanding to promote whatever their belief system of the moment is. Physics brings legitimacy, and the belief system of the moment brings wish fulfillment and the bonus of not having to think too hard. (After all, the math you need to understand real physics… Oy! So complicated!)

Quantum mechanics is where this happen the most. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics—that the universe is simultaneously many different states until an observer measures it—become the New Age justification for the belief “You can wish for what you want and it will happen magically and without any effort on your part.”

Last night I was watching a physics documentary and realized that no one’s built a cult around Dark Matter, yet. Let’s start now1:

There’s a universe full of dark matter that we can’t see or interact with. In fact, the vast majority of the universe is dark matter. Though it’s called “dark,” it’s actually where God, angels and heaven, are. Think of it as just another dimension, as proven by the quantum mechanics “multiple universe” hypothesis. Send me $19.97 and I’ll send you an official Dark Matter Contact Certificate that is guaranteed to attract your angels from the nearest dark matter hub. With your angels at your back, you can do anything! Bake a perfect upside-down cake! Become rich and famous! Live in mansions and drive Bentleys! Drive the wrong way down one-way streets! Jump out of airplanes without a parachute! Even go scuba diving without the tank!!!2

Quantum mechanics is USEFUL! Physics is FUN! And potentially profitable!

1 It worked for L. Ron Hubbard, it can work for us!

2 Any actions undertaken by you are entirely your responsibility. We make no claims of any sort as to the safety of taking dark-matter-inspired action. After all, if your angels don’t like you, or decide that they want you to join them, that sky-diving expedition could end badly. That would be the angels’ fault, and yours, for trusting your angels in the first place.

The Power of Visceral Relationships

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I’m having a conversation on Google+ about social media, and it connected up with an exercise I did today to produce a rather puzzling realization.

Social media has certainly broadened who I know and how we connect. It’s because of social media that I have met some of the great in-person people I know. And I definitely use it to keep in touch with people I’ve met at conferences, etc. It’s just such a weird thing to me.

I’m working my way through a process of re-examining my life, and I did an exercise today of writing down my happiest memories. They mostly fell into categories of: “times I was hanging out in person with friends,” “times I was alone in a nourishing/replenishing environment,” and “times I was performing.” When I think about those memories, I feel really good. I don’t feel really good when I think about my social media interactions, however. I don’t feel bad, either. And that, I think, is why I raised the question. For me, social media relationships are cerebral, not visceral.

That’s great for work, accomplishment, and idea exchange. But it’s the visceral community that, as revealed by this exercise, brings me joy. It’s also the visceral community that make me feel supported, like someone’s got my back, etc. So I wonder how much my social media actually supplants or shifts my relationships from “happy-making” to “engaged-making.” Those aren’t the same thing, and I personally prefer the former to the latter.

“Strategic Thinking” – The Meaning Behind the Buzzword

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It sounds easy: my client wanted to think more strategically. isn’t that the hot buzzword? “Strategic thinking.” Oooh! Sexy. There’s only one problem: what, exactly, does it mean?

You’d think we would know. But I’ve seen executive teams discuss in all seriousness what the lever does on a piece of machinery. That’s about as non-strategic as it gets. In fact, a general rule is that if you read it in a manual, it’s quite likely not strategic.

What is strategic is when you’re doing something that changes the structure of the business in some basic way. Paint a machine lever red? Not strategic. Decide to outsource manufacturing to China? Strategic, because it changes who you hire, how you manage them, and what they’re capable of achieving. You punt your machines and take on eager young managers who speak Mandarin.

This is the first kind of strategic impact: changing organization structure. This includes outsourcing, selecting vendors (since what you can do now becomes expanded and limited by what they can do), mergers and acquisitions, changing the org chart, going public, and hiring and firing people who will in turn make strategic decisions.

Or consider an entrepreneurial client who insists on answering the phones himself. He’s done it since founding the business 20 years ago and prides himself on knowing everything that’s going on. But now that the company gets a hundred phone calls a day, he decides to install an automated attendant, freeing himself to do other things. This is an example of “business process reengineering,” which is a fancy way of saying “doing things differently.” Changing how a business does something is strategic because different hows give the business different capabilities. If your product is produced on a machine that turns out 100 widgets a day, then you simply can’t bid on a job that wants 500 units by tomorrow. If you can rearrange your factory processes and produce 5,000 units a day, whole new markets open up.

Speaking of markets, choosing the markets to compete in, what to sell, and how to price are all strategic decisions. After all, those decisions determine who you’ll hire, how you set up your org structure, and how you’ll deliver your product or service.

The American Express web site lists 20+ cards. I called a friend in Amex’s strategy group to help me understand the difference between the “Platinum Business” and the “Business Platinum” cards. He said, “I work in strategy. I don’t really know our product lines.” A strategy group that doesn’t know the products? I don’t know what they do, but it seems awfully dangerous to be making organization structure and process decisions without even knowing what your customers are buying.

Everything we’ve discussed so far is cross-functional; they can involve changes that affect many parts of a business. Though it’s possible to make strategic decisions in one area of a company without involving other areas, that’s a dangerous game. If our marketing department starts competing in a new market that cares about delivery time, but doesn’t tell our shipping folks, they can set the company up for failure.

Don’t make the same mistake. Learn when your decisions are strategic.
That means decisions about org structure, process–the HOW–, cross-functional decisions, and the marketing decisions of what to sell and who to sell them to.

If you want to learn more about strategy, my very favorite book is Co-opetition by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff. I also liked Geoff Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm.” Both books are circa mid-90s. There are 83,416 other business books that will teach you some kind of strategic thinking. I’m not sure the specific strategic approach is very important (though consulting firms will make big bucks telling you otherwise); to me, the value comes from learning to think at a strategic level consistently and integrate strategic thinking into your daily running of the business.

Income Distribution and the Ultra-Rich

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A friend wrote to a group I’m part of:

Some folks I know who are at pre-IPO companies are really opposed to Warren Buffett’s support of raising taxes on the ultra-rich, saying that Buffett is helping keep a glass ceiling in place between them and being super rich.

They say we shouldn’t discuss politics in public, because then people won’t like us and we’ll die alone in a gutter. So after much deliberation, I decided to risk ending up in the gutter and posted my response to my friend’s post:

My Response

And thus we find the problem: the vanishingly small percentage of people who stand to benefit from low tax rates on the rich are vocally opposed to changes.

I’m surprised at how vehement and negative my reaction is to your friends’ outrage.

First of all, it’s stupid to complain about taxes and ignore the rest of the costs of their equity.

Tell your friends if they are concerned about increasing their take, they should lobby for the investment banking fees that get withheld from their IPO proceeds to get capped at some rational number. The banking fees are financial rape, but since they’re “standard,” no one bothers to protest. And they should read the prospectus carefully to see how badly their stock and options got diluted by sweetheart deals in the footnotes.

Speaking of which, do they track outstanding shares on a weekly basis and calculate their ongoing dilution? Or market fluctuations? If not, why not? Those effects can have far more effect than the tax rate differences. Did they quiz the founders on the dilution that last round of funding brought, and whether the return to your friends was negatively affected? Was that last round really necessary? Did those capital improvements really need to be made pre-IPO? Etc. Most people cry foul when the government wants a share, but ignore all the others who take a bite. They don’t ask whether those others are providing value for their money.

I’ve been through 4 IPOs and they’ve all been feeding frenzies. Of all the parties who lifted significant sums (sometimes many millions) out of the transaction, at least the government provides something in return:

  • A stable system of contracts, which makes IPO-able business possible in the first place.
  • A public infrastructure that gives them electricity, water, food, etc. so they can spend their time building their business instead of worrying about the logistics of running a server farm when power is spotty and only available for part of the day.
  • Financial markets that, no matter how corrupt individual players may be, at least provides liquidity for those IPO-bound friends.
  • A justice system that enforces the contracts allowing business to rely on them.
  • Etc.

Perhaps your friends should learn something called gratitude for having the privilege of living in one of the very few times in human history where we had an infrastructure that afforded them any chance at an IPO, combined with the incredible luck to be at a company that can viably go public (which only ~.02% of companies do).

On the other hand, I’ve been through 4 IPOs—all when the tax rate was a lot higher than it is now—and still have to work for a living. Maybe I’m just bitter and begrudge your friends a lifetime’s worth of free money without them having to contribute to the upkeep of the system that made it all possible.

How rich is an ultra-rich person?

Most people have no idea how truly ultra one must be to be one of the ultra-rich. Let’s tie the numbers to something real:

A million dollars is 25 years’ income for an American median family (median income is about $40K)

Ten million dollars is 250 years’ income.
100 million dollars is 2,500 years’ income.
A billion is 22,500 years’ income.
Ten billion is 225,000 years’ income.

John Chambers stashed four of those overseas to avoid taxes. Bill Gates has four of those in his bank account. In other words, enough money for a family of four to live at an American median standard of living for a million years, ten times as long as our species has existed.

Explain to me the value system in which there is any way to justify that concentration of wealth.

Yes, the mechanism of the system allows that to be accumulated by one person. But to argue that somehow we should be concerned about his tax rate seems bizarre. Honestly, a 100% marginal tax rate seems perfectly reasonable to me. He has enough to survive for a million years. No matter how hard he works, or what he contributes, he doesn’t need a single cent more.

(Nor do I believe his contribution to the human race approaches the contribution a family of four would make over a million year timespan, no matter how much one may like Windows.)

Tell your friends to use their after-tax proceeds to start another company that’s more successful, only they can do it in another country with a more favorable tax structure. I suggest Haiti. Port-a-Prince is looking for commerce.

Email Overload – Where the CEO of Xerox and I Disagree

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As you probably know, I’ve launched my You Are Not Your Inbox, so I’m revisiting some of my old thoughts about Email Overload.

Tim Sanders wrote a blog entry that references a Business Week article (“What’s So Bad about Information Overload?”) on information overload I commented on last week. The writer suggests that information overload might be good. There might be some valuable information, and besides, young people can handle it just fine.

Sure. In what universe? My Get-it-Done Guy podcast email and people’s reaction to my
What is Email Costing You Assessment, suggest many people of us feel our life force being regularly sucked from our bodies by information overload. It makes us jump from topic to topic. It interrupts us when we need to concentrate. And then we feel guilty that we still can’t keep up. Gee, that sounds like a resourceful emotional state for reaching our goals.

Yes, we’re getting more info. Yes, some of it’s useful. But that’s not the point! We need to ask: is it useful enough? Are the benefits—financial, social, or emotional—worth the cost?

For Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy (mentioned in the article), the answer is Yes. In email, they say things they would never say otherwise. Like that comment about the chocolate mousse, telephone pole, and garter belt. Who would ever say that out loud?

Of course, an anonymous suggestion box would fill the same function. Even better, the tipster could actually include the original garter belt. But apparently, those emails are amazing enough that Anne devotes a lot of time to her email. Since she’s gotten great results at Xerox, for her, the benefits might be worth the cost. (Assuming, of course, that her success is because of email, rather than in spite of it. Maybe a weekly suggestion box would be just as good.)

If you’re top dog, no one pays attention to how you use your time as long as you produce business results. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. Our pointy-haired boss gives us specific goals, and email can suck up a lot of time without moving us towards our real goals. That “Top 10 Reasons Working Here Sucks” email will only help you reach your goal if that goal is a new job at your major competitor’s firm.

When you’re deciding how much time to spend with your inbox, think long and hard about the benefits you’re getting. After all, there’s lots you could be doing with that time. Ask yourself if there is any other way to get those same benefits? If you hired a $50/hour assistant to read and answer your email every day, what would you tell him/her to process versus ignore? Are you following those same guidelines?

Being perfect in every way, I follow my own advice and am ultra careful with my email habits. Even so, I often get sucked in for up to 30 extra minutes a day. Since I’m perfect, that must be the perfect amount of time to waste. But there’s still a nagging feeling: that comes out to three weeks per year. If I’m going to spend three weeks a year blathering mindlessly, I’d rather do it wearing a bathing suit on a sunny Caribbean beach than sitting hunched over my computer in my basement office, looking like one of the Mole People. At least on the beach, I might get a tan.

So don’t take my word for it. Don’t take Tim Sanders’s word for it. And don’t take Business Week’s word for it. Your email time is productive to the extent it helps you get what you want out of life. Hold it to a high standard and if it isn’t performing, drop it from your life faster than that stalker you accidentally dated in college. With email, only you can take control; there’s no way to get a restraining order.

The Key Business Concepts Missing From The National Debt Debate

In business, if you decide to do a project you scope out the project. You estimate what it will cost, over what time frame it will produce results, and so on. Then you decide how to finance it. There are many, many possibilities: you might finance it by paying for it directly. That’s equity investment. You might borrow to pay for it, which is debt financing. You could also finance it in other ways by having suppliers or customers carry part of the cost. Which option is best depends on many factors, including prevailing interest rates, payback periods, and so on.

It’s easy to get people to have a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of lower taxes, however. So for political reasons, virtually the entire debate has focused on “do we finance our government with taxes (the equivalent of equity) or debt?” That’s been turned into rallying cries about taxes that candidates use to drive elections.

If we were making good decisions, the national debate would be about how we want to spend our money. In 2011, the only large discretionary category is defense at $722 billion(*). If we include mandatory spending, the other large categories are social security, Medicare, unemployment assistance, and health care.

Once we’ve made that decision, we would decide whether it makes sense to fund those measures with equity or with debt. The consequences of debt default would, of course, be included in the financing discussion.

Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans seems much inclined to cut spending. They cut specific items that they’re ideologically opposed to, but they don’t touch the big items listed above. And not even candidates who claim to advocate small government propose slashing the only large discretionary item in the budget, our $722 billion defense budget.

What worries me most, structurally, about debt is that debt has to be repaid with interest. An ever-increasing percentage of our national budget is going to pay interest on debts incurred decades ago, whose benefits have long been played out. If we continue funding things with debt, we’ll be piling up interest payments that could eventually wreck us.

Why do people not like high taxes? Because it brings into stark reality the fact that policy choices have real monetary consequences that we must pay for collectively. We like our highways, and our Medicare, and our defense department. But we don’t like to face up to the cost of those things.

Debt allows us to defer taking responsibility. High taxes forces us to take responsibility immediately. That’s why I favor tax hikes. For the ultra-rich? Certainly; they use far more of our infrastructure than the average person uses (e.g. airports, the justice department, the banking system, etc.), and it’s only fair that they pay their fair share of the common resources they’re using. But for all of us. Taxes force us to make smart choices now, rather than giving us the false luxury of waiting for emergency to push us into harried stupid choices.

And above all, I believe in paying $10 for a $10 expense. When we finance with taxes, that’s what we do. When we finance with debt, we pay $11 or $12, or $20, or $50 for that $10 expense. And I don’t care if you’re conservative or liberal, that’s just plain dumb.

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(*) You can see the budget numbers here. Try clicking “hide mandatory spending”: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html

Job hunting process

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As we’ve been developing JobTacToe.com, we’ve been discovering that most job hunters we’ve encountered don’t seem to have particularly good process in mind. They don’t know what they should do each day. They have no metrics set up to know if they’re making progress. They just do what they do, and hope that it works.

The challenge for us as a business is that people don’t know they have a lousy process. If they don’t know they’re disorganized, they won’t think to visit our site to help put structure around their search.

I’ve taken a stab at an initial page called “Give me Job!” (quoted from our JobTacToe caveman job hunter Zak) that lays out at least a skeleton of what’s required. If you have any suggestions, please send them along. It’s hard, being intimately familiar with the job search process, trying to figure out what will be useful to someone who doesn’t know much about what is and isn’t successful.