Monthly Archives: January 2024

Business Geeks.

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            The history of business is full of stuff–products, practices, people—that didn’t work out.  If you focus on such Eminent Fiascos,[1] you miss two things.  First, you miss how often standard business practices have produced spectacularly good results.  Second, you miss understanding the life-cycle of industries.  Still, a collection of Eminent Fiascos can make fun reading.  Also, they can provide the launching pad for alternative management theories.  So it is with Andrew McAfee’s latest book.[2] 

            McAfee celebrates the “business geeks” in some very successful high-tech companies (i.e. Amazon, Netflix).  From his studies of such companies, he distills four (but really three) characteristics shared by them all.  Essentially, the “business geeks” create a particular “culture,” then let ‘er rip.[3] 

            The first characteristic is choosing Speed over Perfection.  There will be lots of time to improve your product from what you learn about what actually went wrong when people have tried to use it.  (Hence, updates.)  No doubt investing in Help call-centers or ChatBots will help provide an early-warning system about what your engineers or manufacturing managers screwed up in the name of “speed.”[4] 

            The second characteristic is creating Ownership over Subordination.  You ever see Pieter Breughel’s “Return of the Herd”?[5]  Guy on the lower right is poking cattle in the backside with a sharp stick to get them to move forward.  Seems to be working.  Seems to be an important aspect of contemporary American business management.  What McAfee is proposing is that senior managers should tell subordinates exactly what they want accomplished and by when, then let the subordinates figure out the best way to accomplish this task.  (In the military, this is called “mission orders.”[6]) 

            The two other characteristics really are facets of the same thing: Arrogance in Leaders.  On the one hand, McAfee celebrates “Science” over Opinion/Intuition.  Basically, “Science” means hard data.  (Readers might suspect that McAfee is aligning his terms with recent political debates.)  On the other hand, Openness–to criticism, questions, advice, and adverse evidence—deals with the human element, rather than the data element of resisting arrogance. 

            All well and good.  Been done many times.  The danger arises in passing from Creation to Maturity, from Founders to Successors, from Revolution to Defense.  Bureaucrats ascend. 

[1] See Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918). 

[2] Andrew McAfee, The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results (2023).  To get a quick sense of his arguments, see: Andrew McAfee | Speaker | TED 

[3] Rodeo Terms: FloRodeo’s Full Dictionary Of Cowboy Slang – FloRodeo  Scroll down to “L” while trying not to get diverted along the way. 

[4] There is an analogy to rapid innovation in aircraft design between the two World Wars.  Charles Lindbergh first soloed in a Curtiss JN-4, a cloth biplane with a top speed of 75 mph and a ceiling of 6,500 feet (1923).  He flew the Atlantic in a Ryan with a top speed of 133 mph and a ceiling of 16,400 feet (1927).  In 1944, he shot down a Japanese plane while flying a Lockheed P-38 “Lightning” with a top speed of 414 mph and a ceiling of 44,000 feet.  In some areas and times, innovation comes thick and fast.  Waiting around until everything is “dead solid perfect” just gets you left far, far behind.   

[5] Pieter Bruegel (I) – The Return of the Herd (1565) – The Return of the Herd – Wikipedia 

[6] Mission-type tactics – Wikipedia  The article casts valuable light on the importance of personnel selection and training in making “mission orders” work.  Furthermore, it is made clear that many military organizations have only a nominal commitment to the approach, regardless of what they declare.  Implications for business are obvious. 

Gazaedy.

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So, the Israeli are blowing up most of the buildings in Gaza.  According to the Guardian, “about 65,000 residential units have been destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. Another 290,000 have been damaged. That means that about half a million people have no home to return to.”  In all, “Across the whole territory, about 33% of buildings have been destroyed.”  Many others have been damaged without being “destroyed.”  Two-thirds of hospitals and 70 percent of school buildings have been put out of service.   Then there is damage to sewers, fresh water supplies, power generation, and roads.[1]  The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) aren’t done yet. 

A necessity of war in what amounts to a Stalingrad-with-sand, the IDF might say.[2]  It seems more likely that the IDF are trying to render Gaza largely uninhabitable for a long time.  

For the million currently-displaced Palestinians to return home, the rubble will have to be cleared, hopelessly compromised buildings torn down, damaged or destroyed water and electrical supply lines repaired or replaced, new roads constructed, and new buildings of all sorts constructed.  Cemeteries will have to be enlarged.  It might take a decade to repair the damage.   It also will take a lot of somebody’s money.  Recent “guesstimates” suggest that it will cost $50 billion to clear and rebuild.[3]  The usual suspects when it comes to donor conferences for Gaza are the European Union and the United States.  Both are already hard pressed on aid for Ukraine.  Saudi Arabia and the UAE might pay. Iran has $100-120 billion “frozen” abroad.[4]  Somebody could raid into those funds, given Iran’s apparent role in supporting and arming Hamas. 

What happens to the Palestinians of Gaza in the meantime? Spend an unknown number of years living under blue UNHCR tarps?  They aren’t Bedouin.  Probably, many of them will emigrate.

Where?  Would they go in dribs-and-drabs to many places, joining the already existing Palestinian diaspora?  There are more than three million in Jordan; more than 600,000 in Syria; and more than a quarter million in Egypt.  Would any of these countries agree to take in 1-2 million destitute new citizens bearing an intense grievance against neighboring Israel? 

Farther away, there are half a million Palestinians in Chile; a quarter million in Honduras; 200,000 in Guatemala; and almost 200,000 in other Central American countries, along with a quarter million in the United States.[5] 

I haven’t been following this war closely.  I’ve been pre-occupied with recent literature on positive psychology and American business practices.  That’s my excuse (such as it is) for not figuring this out earlier.  But I’d bet that the State Department and the Defense Department snapped to it real fast.  Made the White House aware too.  Although maybe not. They all may have been preoccupied with China and the war in Ukraine.  That would be their excuse (such as it is). 

Raises some questions.  Do we want our hands any dirtier than they are already? Are the Israeli hoping to provoke attacks from the West Bank so that they can do the same thing there?  What if this actually is the least-bad solution?  Hard to believe, but what’s a better one? 

[1] See: The numbers that reveal the extent of the destruction in Gaza | Israel-Gaza war | The Guardian 

[2] “You know, he’s got a point.”—The Mayor of San Francisco in “Dirty Harry” (dir. Don Siegel, 1971.  Hamas could have avoided all this by surrendering right at the start of the war and turning in all their fighters to the International Criminal Court. 

[3] Israel conflict: Who will pay for Gaza reconstruction? – DW – 12/13/2023 

[4] Iranian frozen assets – Wikipedia 

[5] Palestinian diaspora – Wikipedia  Many of the immigrants surging against the southern border are fleeing poverty and misgovernment in Central America.  What share of these are Palestinians?