Tag Archives: Philosophy

Contemporary Science versus Natural Language

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Item 1. The fastest human-created spacecraft goes 165,000 mph. Pretty amazing. But for it to travel one light year would take roughly 3000 years—basically, the length of recorded human history. The closest star system that hosts an earth-like planet (Alpha Centauri) is 4.4 light years away. Thus, it would take today’s fastest vehicle 14,000 years to make a one-way trip. On our earth, 14,000 years ago humanity’s most sophisticated technology was a stone axe. Thus, while we love to talk about space travel outside the solar system, as well as aliens in UFOs coming to Earth, neither is remotely possible, not now, not ever.

Item 2. There are 30 trillion cells in the average human body. There are 100 trillion atoms in a typical human cell. That means there are three thousand trillion trillion atoms, give or take, in you or me. Atoms are so small that it is not clear any words we have would apply to how they actually operate. Particle and wave are two of the ones we end up using the most. Neither of them, however, can coherently explain something as simple as the double-slit experiment.

Item 3. The metabolic reactions that support all life are mind-bogglingly fast. Take mitochondria for example. They are the organelles that produce the bulk of our ATP, the energy molecule that drives virtually all life’s chemical reactions. Of the 30 trillion cells in your body, on average each one uses around 10 million molecules of ATP per second and can recycle all its ATP in less than a minute. There is simply no way to imagine something happening a million times per second simultaneously in thirty million different places inside your own body.

Item 4. Craig Venter has been quoted as saying, “If you don’t like bacteria, you’re on the wrong planet. This is the planet of the bacteria.” In one-fifth of a teaspoon of seawater, there are a million bacteria (and perhaps 10 million viruses). The human microbiome, which has staked out territory all over our body, in our gut, mouth, skin, and elsewhere, harbors upwards of three thousand kinds of bacteria, comprising some 3 million distinct genes, which they swap with each other wherever they congregate. How in the world are we supposed to keep track of that?

Okay, okay. So what’s your point?

The point is that contemporary science engages with reality across a myriad of orders of magnitude, from the extremely small to the extremely large, somewhere between sixty and one hundred all told. Math can manage this brilliantly. Natural languages cannot. All of which means: philosophers beware!

Philosophers love analogies, and well they should. They make the abstract concrete. They enable us to transport a strategy from a domain where it has been proven effective and test its applicability in a completely different one. Such acts of imagination are the foundation of discovery, the springboard to disruptive innovation. But to work properly they have to be credible. That means they must stand up to the kind of pressure testing that determines the limits to which they can be applied, the boundaries beyond which they must not stretch. This is where the orders of magnitude principle comes in.

It is not credible that there could be a cause that is a million million times smaller than its effect. Yes, it is theoretically conceivable that via a cascading set of emergent relationships, one could build a chain from such an A to such a B, but the amount of coordination that would be required to lever something up a million million times is just ridiculously improbable. So, when philosophers refer to the uncertainty principles embedded in quantum mechanics, and then infer or imply that such uncertainty permeates human affairs, or when they trace consciousness down to quantum fluctuations in messenger RNA, when, in short, they are correlating things that are more than a trillion, trillion times different in size and scope, then they are misusing both the mathematics of science and the resources of natural language. We simply have to stay closer to home.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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People, Time and Money

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People, Time and Money

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you want the next job, figure out why.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting the job you have.
When you don’t care about the next job it’s because you fit the one you have.

A larger salary is good, but time with family is better.
Less time with family is a downward spiral into sadness.
When you decide you have enough, you don’t need things to be different.

A sense of belonging lasts longer than a big bonus.
A cohesive team is an oasis.
Who you work with makes all the difference.

More stress leads to less sleep and that leads to more stress.
If you’re not sleeping well, something’s wrong.
How much sleep do you get? How do you feel about that?

Leaders lead people.
Helping others grow IS leadership.
Every business is in the people business.

To create trust, treat people like they matter. It’s that simple.
When you do something for someone even though it comes at your own expense, they remember.
You know you’ve earned trust when your authority trumps the org chart.

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Amazon’s Innovation Philosophy

1. Invention versus Innovation

It was very interesting that Jeff Bezos only used the word innovation once in his response, choosing instead to focus on talking about invention. I think that there is an interesting distinction and an important point there. Innovation is not something you do it’s something you’ve done. It’s backward looking to some extent because innovation requires widespread adoption. Innovation definitely can be a goal, while invention can be seen as a component of the pursuit, the attempt to innovate. One important point to remember is that inventions typically cross the bridge from invention to innovation because the solution is not only useful but it is valuable, and the customer makes this determination not you. Another important point – not made by Bezos – is that there are many other factors that go along with invention to create innovation that must be managed, including: psychology, communications, education, trends, politics, legal, and more. This leads me to the second insight extracted from Bezos’ response.

2. “We are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time”

You may have a great vision for what is possible, but customers may not be ready. There may be incremental improvements or complementary products that must come onto the marketplace before your product can succeed. The political or legal climate may not be right for the transformation your product or service may enable (think Segway). You must seek to understand where you will be misunderstood so you can make plans to address the misunderstandings. If you assume people will ‘just get it once they see it’ you will fail. Also, the more disruptive or radical an innovation the more your communications must shift from explanation to education. But frankly, you can invent amazing things but just be too early. Corning’s Gorilla Glass was invented 50 years ago, and only now is becoming successful. Kindle wasn’t an overnight success, neither was Amazon’s third party seller effort – it took three tries to get it right. Which leads me to the third insight…

3. “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details”

How many leaders can make this distinction accurately between vision and details? How many leaders can throw away their execution to start again in service of their vision? Apple threw away the Motorola ROKR and tried again and came up with the iPhone. Amazon tried three different times to get the third-party sellers just right because they believed in the vision that opening up their store to outside sellers was the right direction to take their business. The key distinction here and the questions to ask yourself when something is failing are the following:

“Do we have the wrong vision for where the market is moving or do we have the wrong details?”
“Have we misjudged key timing, legal, political, or other aspects in our pursuit of this vision?”

4. “We are planting more seeds right now, and it is too early to talk about them”

This is one of the keys to the pursuit of innovation – not going public too early. Bezos’ captures it perfectly with his comment about it being very difficult to innovate “if you are not willing to be misunderstood”, and I would add that it is very difficult if you are not PREPARED to be misunderstood. You must have a plan. So, innovate early and often, place lots of small bets, continue to invest in the ones that fit your vision and overcome key hurdles, and most importantly keep things quiet until you have a good grasp on exactly how you plan to explain your invention or educate people on its potential value BEFORE you go public – or the road from invention to innovation will only get harder.

What do you think about the Jeff Bezos commentary below?

Continue reading for an excerpt of the text of Bezos’ response, transcribed from the company’s webcast.

“You should anticipate a certain amount of failure. Our two big initiatives, AWS and Kindle — two big, clean-sheet initiatives — have worked out very well. Ninety-plus percent of the innovation at Amazon is incremental and critical and much less risky. We know how to open new product categories. We know how to open new geographies. That doesn’t mean that these things are guaranteed to work, but we have a lot of expertise and a lot of knowledge. We know how to open new fulfillment centers, whether to open one, where to locate it, how big to make it. All of these things based on our operating history are things that we can analyze quantitatively rather than to have to make intuitive judgments.

When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago…. There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.

If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company. AWS also started about six or seven years ago. We are planting more seeds right now, and it is too early to talk about them, but we are going to continue to plant seeds. And I can guarantee you that everything we do will not work. And, I am never concerned about that…. We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give up.

But. if you get to a point where you look at it and you say look, we are continuing invest a lot of money in this, and it’s not working and we have a bunch of other good businesses, and this is a hypothetical scenario, and we are going to give up on this. On the day you decide to give up on it, what happens? Your operating margins go up because you stopped investing in something that wasn’t working. Is that really such a bad day?

So, my mind never lets me get in a place where I think we can’t afford to take these bets, because the bad case never seems that bad to me. And, I think to have that point of view, requires a corporate culture that does a few things. I don’t think every company can do that, can take that point of view. A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are, is that we are willing to invent. We are willing to think long-term. We start with the customer and work backwards. And, very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

I believe if you don’t have that set of things in your corporate culture, then you can’t do large-scale invention. You can do incremental invention, which is critically important for any company. But it is very difficult — if you are not willing to be misunderstood. People will misunderstand you.

Any time you do something big, that’s disruptive — Kindle, AWS — there will be critics. And there will be at least two kinds of critics. There will be well-meaning critics who genuinely misunderstand what you are doing or genuinely have a different opinion. And there will be the self-interested critics that have a vested interest in not liking what you are doing and they will have reason to misunderstand. And you have to be willing to ignore both types of critics. You listen to them, because you want to see, always testing, is it possible they are right?

But if you hold back and you say, ‘No, we believe in this vision,’ then you just stay heads down, stay focused and you build out your vision.”