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Tech, Strategy, and other interesting things by Roberto Zoiaby Roberto Zoia

talent

Why even smart people get bad results

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Warren Buffet on why even smart people get bad results, quoted by Peter Bevelin in Seeking Wisdom. From Darwin to Munger (p.36):

It’s ego. It’s greed. It’s fead. It’s mindless imitation of other people. I mean, tehre are a variety of factors that cause that horsepower fo the mind to get diminished dramatically before the output turns out. And I would say if Charlie and I have any advantage it’s not because we’re so smart, it’s because we’re rational and we very seldom let extraenous factors interfere with our thoughts. We don’t let other people’s opinion interfere with it… we try to get fearful when others get greedy. We try to get greedy when others are fearful. We try to avoid any kind of imitation of other people’s behavior. And those are the factors that cause smart people to get bad results.

I always look at IQ and talent as representing the horsepower of the motor, but then in terms of the output, the efficiency with which the motor works, depends on rationality. That’s because a lot of people start out with 400-horsepower motors and get a hundred horsepower of output. It’s way better to have a 200-horsepower motor and get it all into output. So why do smart people do things that interfere with getting the output they’re entitled to? It gets into the habits, and character and temperament, and it really gets into behaving in a rational manner. Not getting in your own way.

Psychology as Superpower

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A quote from Brandon Sanderson’s novel Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds:

Psychology-as-superpower is a recurring theme in my works. I’ve always believed that the personality traits that make us each distinctive (the way we process information, the way we motivate ourselves, the way we shelter our psyche from the bad while learning to cherish the good) can be either our greatest strengths or our most dramatic limitations. How you see yourself, along with how you use what you have, often more important than talents, skills, or even supernatural abilities.”

Distributed work force and talented people

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Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder and CEO, interviews Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic. They talk mostly about online publishing, but around minute 26 Matt talks about Automattic and its distribuited force of 235 employees:

Just like today it seams crazy to discriminate on something like gender, not just morally but also mathematically –you are taking off half the qualified applicant pool–, just by selection bias you are going to have a less qualified people. And 99.999 percent of people in the world aren’t going to be in the Bay Area (San Francisco). There is a lot of smart people not here. Arguably, collectively more intelligent than the people who are here.

So, when you stop discriminating on the basis of location, what happens? It turns out that you can get incredibly talented and smart folks, who can almost live-style overcharge, in base of Bay-Area-salaries with non-Bay-Area-living [costs].

The whole interview is an hour long and is worth watching, but you can listen to just the fragment below.

How to retain talent, have less processes and policies, and be a highly creative company

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This SlideShare presentation of Netflix’s organizational culture is worth watching. Some excerpts:

Processes…

Most companies curtail freedom as they get bigger. (…) Desire for bigger positive impact creates growth, growth increases complexity. Growth also often shrinks talent density. Chaos emerges. Business has become too complex to run informally with this [low] talent level.

Process emerges to stop the chaos. No one loves process, but feels good compared to the pain of caos. Process-focus drives more talen out. Avoid chaos as you grow with ever more high performance people, not with rules.

Netflix vacation policy and tracking

Until 2004 we had the standard model of N days per year. Meanwhile, we are all working online some nights and weekends, responding to emails at odd hours, spending some afternoons on personal time, and taking good vacations.

An employee pointed out… we don’t track hours worked per day or per week. So, why are we tracking days of vacation per year? We realized (…) [that] just as we don’t have an 9am to 5pm workday policy, we don’t need a vacation policy. Netflix vacation policy and tracking: “there is no policy or tracking”.

Lesson: you don’t need policies for everything.