proper labmin, may 2022

Howdy reader,

We've had some challenges at TOA headquarters this week (the whole month, honestly) in terms of finishing posts, so technically there is nothing ready for today. I'm also on a little vacation so the traditional standby of a Saturday writing surge wasn't available to me this week. Given the circumstances, let's lean on our old crutch of Proper Labmin, where I walk through a few of the items in draft stage as an informal preview of coming attractions.

The slow scan

I think there is a general idea that the internet has made things faster, but I don't know if this is actually true for everything. When I scan a QR code for a restaurant menu, for example, I think it takes me twice as long to find my order.

My biggest regret

I find it hard to answer generic-sounding questions like "what is your biggest regret?", but maybe it's because I never figured out the answer. I think for me it has to do with the way I look back on certain situations where others made assumptions about me, with the aspect of regret being my failure to create the right conditions such that someone else might have been willing to start the necessary conversation or ask the important question. I think one of life's most important skills is making sure others are comfortable enough to say the things that need to be said, but I know that in the past I've made it possible for others to feel like they were better off not saying the things that needed to be said. The problem with this is that when the things to say remain unsaid, we make assumptions instead. Of course, I am trying to balance this with the reality that I am not responsible for other people's assumptions.

The Business Bro learns from mistakes

I've been loosely outlining the framework for a short book to help first-time managers make the transition into this new type of role. I think I'm going to focus on areas that aren't acknowledged as managerial skills (or at least, don't seem to be based on my experience with trainings, readings, or conversations with other managers). At the moment I have a shortlist of fifteen or twenty such lessons that I've accumulated over my decade or so in the work. The number one idea is that although success as a manager is unique to each individual, resulting from the application of a manager's specific strengths or skills, failure as a manager can happen in more or less the exact same way for everyone. Therefore, one tactic I would describe is the importance of learning what to avoid doing, which I think works best by observing other managers, noticing their mistakes, and making sure you don't repeat those errors.

The hard work of remote

The news has many stories about companies reverting to some kind of in-office setup despite successfully completing their work in a fully remote configuration over the past two years. I think the untold story in these situations is how much work is involved in a remote setup, and perhaps the truth of these "return to office" stories is about organizations who are incapable (or unwilling) to do the extra work that is necessary for long-term success in a remote workforce.

In the flow of being late

Why are some people always late? I think there is a hidden explanation for a minority of cases - when you are rushing to get somewhere on time, our brains actually reward the experience by entering what psychologists describe as "a flow state".

Another rant about cars?

I mean, does anyone care? Maybe I'll post this on Labor Day so you can take the weekend off from TOA. The short version is that much of the cyclist-driver conflict I see in The Two Cities could be resolved if our roads had more space, which in my mind has some similarities to the way airline passengers fight over shared areas like the armrest or the reclining seat. The problem, I think, is that we have been sold the same space twice, so these conflicts come down to individuals being forced to work out the problem of one location being booked twice (by the city government in the case of the roads, by the airlines in the case of our airborne grievances).

The marshmallow fest

There were many books I read in the past decade whose main ideas drew from experimental results or study findings. In the ensuing years, some of these foundational results or findings have failed to replicate while others have been refuted outright. Despite these developments, such books remain on the shelves and readers continue to cite their ideas as proven fact. What are we supposed to do with these works? And how do we navigate the ways such books propagate this bizarre brand of misinformation?

Tidying up the lab

How do I know when to take TOA from offseason to in-season? It's when I have a lot of ideas. I think it's pretty clear based on the above that we're just about at that point, so hopefully we'll be back to full speed sometime in June.

Until then, thanks for reading!

reading clearout (may 2022, part three)

Hi reader, we know the drill by now?

We Don't Live Here Anymore by Andre Dubus (March 2022)

I guess this is part one of a three or four step process of reading through all of Andre Dubus's short fiction. This particular volume brings together his first two collections, Separate Flights and Adultery and Other Choices, both of which I've written about in the past - the former here (note - I still liked "The Doctor") and the latter in two posts here and here (note #2 - I still recommend "The Fat Girl", as seems to be a popular choice among other reviewers). Having said so much already about these works, I suppose there should be little to add, so I'll instead mention a comment from Ann Beattie's introduction - Dubus, following in one of Hemingway's accomplishments, forced the reader to notice how accruing details conflicted with the statements and observations of the story. I can't say all of the work speaks to this insight, but I liked how it set the stage for this first round in my Dubus mini-project.

In terms of an insight from the works, it may come down to one of a few interesting observations. I liked the idea that the most malignant lie between two people is when a topic becomes impossible to discuss, which forces a selectivity in conversation that can drive a terminal wedge into the relationship. I was amused by a couple of perspectives - the battle to remain set in one's ways underscores a certain desperation, and that cliches always linger as a ready excuse for someone who wishes to absolve responsibility in a situation. The deepest idea was that the power of a ritual is how no one needs to fully understand if they lean on the knowledge in the activity. The most powerful idea was that people sometimes don't grasp the idea of being valuable solely because someone else values them.

The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert (June 2021)

I made a couple of previous TOA mentions of her prior essay collection, The Word Pretty (here and here) over a week or so in April 2021. I enjoyed The Unreality of Memory just as much, noting "The Great Mortality" for a reread (a pre-2020 work that mentions Fauci - read it here). The essays are relatively short and I think my strong reviews are more than hint enough at my recommendation, so I'll just note a couple of the memorable insights for today. I've repeated a few times in the past year or so Paul Virilio's (paraphrased) thought that "the ship invented the shipwreck", the kind of idea that underscores the theme in a number of Gabbert's essays - progress via new technology invents problems or instabilities in the system. I was also intrigued by the insight that malaria is described as anything that responds to malarial drugs, which speaks to the significant research that went into this collection. I've been thinking about the analogy of hunger and empathy - just as hunger has no specific value unless it makes us eat, perhaps empathy has no use unless we take action, explaining the fatigue we feel when confronted with far-off events outside of our control. As a nice parting thought, Gabbert reminds us that the The New York Times suggested our understanding of global warming was completed by 1980; I guess I'll remind people, too.

reading review - everything i want to do is illegal

I read this 2007 release back in 2019 so today's summary comes with the usual caveats regarding the cobwebs decorating the edges of my notes. One thing that struck me as I reviewed online commentary about this work was the sheer number of people who felt Salatin's political views made for a lesser book. Most of these comments are a decade-plus old so I imagine this aspect has not improved over the past few years. That said, I think it's a highly recommended work for anyone who can keep their focus on the details specific to Salatin's experience in trying to bring local food to the table.

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal by Joel Salatin (July 2019)

A big theme - perhaps the only one - of this work dealt with the effect of regulation on the small producer. Everything Salatin wants to do, in a sense, seems to encounter one bureaucratic obstacle or another. The portions of my notes that jumped out to me in this regard spoke first to general principles which Salatin then ties back to his experience. For example, noting that innovation requires many tiny prototypes with the space and flexibility to iterate, Salatin points at regulations dictating minimum starting sizes as an enemy of innovation (and somewhat questionably blames this for inadvertently creating a closed market). He also observes that industries where regulations burden producers will always disproportionately harm the smallest firms, adding that factors regulated for creating risk at scale might not cause problems in smaller settings and are therefore inappropriate to enforce for the smaller firms. The overall idea here is that bureaucracy stifles our access to local food, which Salatin feels represents the highest quality food for the consumer.

If I had to offer something resembling either an alternate perspective or an outright counter-argument, I would consider where quality should fall within our collective food goals. A casual Google search suggests somewhere close to 700 million globally suffer from hunger, which is a figure I could easily see doubling or tripling based on the measurement methodology. I think Salatin's perspective, which prioritizes quality within a framework heavily influenced by his libertarian views, partly ignores the misalignment of his goal with that of the bureaucracy he blames for the issues he identifies in this book. If I had to choose a single priority for a collective food strategy, I would choose feeding everyone ahead of a consideration such as quality. In fact, I would choose feeding everyone at the expense of other seemingly more popular priorities such as minimizing the climate impact or remaining loyal to political philosophies. I'm always impressed with people like Salatin who apply their expertise in a specific area to sketch a vision of a world much-improved on our current mess, but I usually conclude that they are ahead of our time by decades or even centuries, when they may finally have the freedom to make the world a better place because we all agree that the world is, finally, good enough for everyone.

reading clearout (may 2022, part two)

Hi reader, some quick remarks on a couple of reads.

The Siege by Helen Dunmore (March 2022)

Given current events, it's probably odd timing that I would read a book sympathetic to Russia in wartime - The Siege is set during the Nazi blockade of Leningrad, which spanned almost 900 days and resulted in possibly the highest number of casualties from any battle in human history. The book focuses on a handful of civilians who end up together in one apartment during the first frozen winter, when the reality of starvation defines their every living moment. This was not among my top reads of the year so far, but it left a significant impression on me for the way Dunmore creates the doomed feeling of being in Leningrad at that time. I'll likely carry the memory of how the book creates this mood, so to speak, in the same way I've done with the title story of George Saunders's Tenth of December or the Town half of Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (these being the two examples I can think of at the moment where the story's mood infused my reading experience). If I must choose one of Dunmore's comments for my takeaway, it might be that cities exist so long as everyone remains in agreement that they should, or that a persistent shortage creates a false sense of security in that it becomes so hard to imagine a situation becoming worse than the status quo of the bare minimum. In closing, I'll add a personal note that this particular winter of 2021-22 was for me a notable example of Dunmore's insight that any serious winter is marked by a moment when it feels like spring will never come.

Racism 101 by Nikki Giovanni (May 2021)

I mentioned Giovanni's Gemini a few weeks ago, but in this case I reveal that I recounted my experience a bit out of order - today's book was the one I read first, almost a year ago today. Both books are essay collections from a writer better known for poetry. Of the many essays in this work, I noted "Campus Racism 101" and "Meatloaf: A View of Poetry" for a reread. I'll likely pick up any remaining essay collections of hers in the near future, which I suppose implies that her work is highly recommended by TOA. 

I've seen some suggestions in a few comment sections that Racism 101 isn't about either poetry or racism - the former reveals a lack of research before reading, the latter I suppose demonstrates a certain fact about the way readers define or envision how we write about the topic. Let me share a few of the notes I took down from the reading, then you can decide if this book might have covered racism. One revelation noted that believing in people is tough because inevitably people will let you down, while another pointed out that although being a minority in college is tough it's even tougher to eventually lose out on jobs or promotions due to an inferior education. In another section, she mentions the importance of knowing your own perspective rather than trying to represent that of the millions associated with you via race. Do we need more? She asks at one point why if it's easier for minorities to get into college, why are they still the minorities in college? Or why not call the "regular" history curriculum White studies, in order to clarify the distinction with African-American studies? Maybe those commenters were correct about this collection, but I'd like to remind them that there is a full system of secondary school which is a prerequisite to most 101-level coursework.

the normal Guinness

Longtime readers will surely recall my outrageous declaration just a couple of weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic where I announced, in no uncertain terms, that I was refusing recommendations of all pandemic-informed new releases. Specifically, my ban covered any new releases claiming some kind of basis in the "lessons learned" from the pandemic. I was thinking about this the other day but I couldn't remember if I posted it to TOA, so I went back and checked the archives. My investigation indeed discovered the evidence linked above, but upon rereading I also noted a long-forgotten clause - "This applies for the first year after I finish my next Guinness at a bar." Shit! There's a lot that hasn't returned to normal, but I should have known better about the Guinness. I guess if I need to say it, I'll say it - fire at will, folks. Books and articles, podcasts and videos, whatever you think I need to see, hear, or read about these alleged lessons can now be sent my way (but please reread the fine print if you want to send a TED Talk). Don't worry, I won't immediately mock your recommendation.

In fact, this battleship has been at the bottom of the sea for at least a month because I can point to the specific date of this poison-pill Guinness: April 10, 2021. This isn't because I have a supernatural recall, it's because I remember coming home from Fenway and watching a soccer game while lying down on my floor (on the advice of my liver, it having been over a year since I'd done any kind of notable day-drinking). The game ended a few minutes after I woke up from a Guinness-induced stupor, Trent Alexander-Arnold smacking in a stoppage time winner to offer some normality to the soccer universe. The goal snapped Liverpool's record six-match home losing streak, which of course coincided with the lockdown precautions that barred supporters from reinforcing Anfield. Anyway, with details like those at my fingertips it took about ten seconds to confirm the date when the bleak darkness of a long year broke, just briefly, to flash a hint of light.

The day also broke what was surely a personal record in terms of meeting a friend for a few beers, a nearly four hundred day spell which in 2019 would have seemed as improbable as Liverpool's losing streak. The strangest thing about walking down to Fenway for those beers then coming home to watch Liverpool win on tape delay was the unfamiliarity of it all. This kind of Saturday afternoon used to be normal, but the experience felt like eating solid food after a long bout of food poisoning. I could look back here and remark that the pandemic had me a stranger to my own life, or expand this essay into a wide-ranging meditation on the great disruption caused by these uncertain times. But I fear such directions would overlook a more important truth about life. The truth is that adjustment has always been the only normal. The Guinness itself was unplanned, something my friend wanted to try because chemo had changed his taste buds, each poison pill covertly taxing the tongue until the malty combination of chocolate and coffee started going down like molten rust, so I redirected my order because showing solidarity meant being there, and I wanted to be there when the flavor came back. So much else had changed, all of it before 2020 - plans were made days in advance rather than hours, meeting in the middle now meant the Green Monster, and brief meditations on death and illness interrupted the brilliant ignorance of our helmet football analysis. The buzz on that spring day was back to normal, but we should have known better about the Guinness.

leftovers - the business bro catches up to emmitt smith

The post from Sunday talked about the importance of prioritizing search criteria to increase precision as you define the hiring process for a given opening in your team. But how do you make these prioritizations? One helpful starting point is to consider the current team. How can the current team support a new hire in terms of training and development for certain skills? The qualities that a team can share with a new person may suggest a quality that can be deprioritized in the search.

It may also help to consider what the manager is capable of in terms of coaching the new person. If I use my current search as an example, I would point to my ability to teach and train in technical skills as a reason for lowering the priority on this specific criteria, but I might prefer someone with a more developed set of customer service skills because I have less experience training people to improve in their interactions with colleagues and stakeholders.

the business bro catches up to emmitt smith

The combination of the NFL Draft happening just last weekend and my own involvement in a handful of searches for new hires into my organization has me thinking quite a bit these days about performance evaluation, particularly in the context of finding new additions. As a field, it seems to be around where astronomy was a thousand years ago. A specific story comes to mind from a book I read as a kid about Emmitt Smith, the legendary NFL running back who spent most of his Hall of Fame career with the Dallas Cowboys. The team used a first-round selection on the Florida star but some criticized the choice, with my recollection being that his footspeed was a major source of concern. When Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson was asked about this criticism, he responded to the effect of "well, I never saw him get caught from behind in college". Maybe we should call Jimmy the Copernicus of helmet football.

There is more to say about this story, a lot of which I covered in a December 2018 post. However, the direction of that post was a little different than why this story came to mind again recently, so I'll summarize the point from that post then add my new thought. The obvious lesson from the Emmitt Smith story is the importance of knowing which qualities are appropriate to evaluate along the lines of "good enough" - that is, not whether the player is the fastest, but whether the player is fast enough. In a generalized context, what it means is assessing a candidate using a yes/no framework (such as, does the candidate have a specific degree?) but resisting the urge to use relative value in the evaluation (in other words, not comparing GPAs of those who hold the degree). I think this lesson comes through in the above link so I won't harp on it any further.

The other lesson is far subtler but perhaps the more important consideration, particularly if you are generalizing to your own role as an evaluator. The reason Jimmy Johnson could evaluate footspeed on a "fast enough" basis is because he had prioritized the necessary qualities for success in the role. Speed is absolutely critical for success in the sport, but by prioritizing it appropriately Johnson knew he could take a slower player if it meant that the player was a better fit in terms of other more important criteria. I think the first step for any evaluation, particularly in the context of recruiting for a new hire, is to determine the top criteria for defining the best candidate. From my experience this is hard to do if you choose more than two or three qualities, but it's really up to the person in charge to know how many qualities can be precisely evaluated during the search. Once you have those criteria, you need to evaluate each candidate in enough detail to compare one candidate to the other along those criteria. This doesn't mean you would ignore other lower-priority criteria, but it does allow you to take the simpler approach of evaluating for "good enough" in those areas so that your energy is saved for evaluation of the priority criteria.

reading clearout (may 2022, part one)

Hi - a few more comments on recent reading.

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman (March 2022)

This was an excellent book, perhaps for me as good as it can get for light reading. I've written about a few of Backman's other books in the past, so perhaps TOA readers will recall his tendency toward gentle, heartwarming stories that affirm his belief in his fellow human beings. One idea I'll take from the reading was a comment that young people start their careers looking for a purpose, but by the end all they really want to know is the point. I offer that this thought likely applies to far more than careers. There were also some sharp insights into our financial system - for example, the failure to consider the danger of greed in its design, or that the true societal divide is between those who can borrow money and those who cannot. One of the more memorable sections in the book led to the following note - when someone asks you if another person seems happy, you should consider what happiness means for that person.

What is Found There by Adrienne Rich (September 2021)

An excellent essay collection, but ultimately not one I will give a strong endorsement due to it being relatively forgettable a few months after the reading. Rich is perhaps better known as a poet and feminist rather than as an essayist, though I imagine the topics she wrote about here (the sub-header is "Notebooks on Poetry and Politics") will be familiar to her dedicated readers. As I dig through my notes, I see a few lines stand out from the rest - that middle-class Americans must actively find out who suffers for their comfort, that we are lazy to call white history as just history, or that poetry begins anytime two things come together for the first time. There is a wisdom in the thought that the busy culture of modern society creates a special challenge for creators, who are doomed to begin their work with a sense that they are wasting time, and I liked the pragmatism of the observation that even if race doesn't truly exist there is still the reality of racism.

The theme I notice in my notes, which I believe can be applied somewhat generally across Rich's lifetime of work, is that the act of separating marginalized experience from politics is not just misguided, but also destructive - for any person outside a culture's norms, experience is always steered by politics. However, someone who lives fully in this reality can find the act of constantly relating across barriers to be an endless source of creativity, perhaps by using art to help others see new ways to interpret how all kinds of people can respond to the urgent questions of a given time. The challenge is straightforward - is expression merely mirroring the environment, or does it reveal something known to the individual that is out of sight for others? It's a challenge that is far more difficult to accept for the compartmentalized individual, who conforms to a certain form of expression that unwittingly stifles the full range of one's capacity for art.

how to read an antiracist

I took my seat for the train trip home from New York and immediately noticed a passenger on the other side of the aisle - on her lap was How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, a book I thought so highly of that I recently put it on my shortlist for TOA Book of the Year. I hope this doesn't give the wrong impression. I tend to notice the books other people are reading in public, and when I see a book I've read myself it usually counts as a Notable Moment (what an exciting life I lead these days). In other words, spoiler alert - I didn't ask her opinion of the book.

I mean, how could I? The prior paragraph gives the wrong impression in another sense. The train was not a minute out of New York before the book moved from lap to the floor, where for the next four hours it fulfilled a dual function of glossy placemat and occasional footrest. I'd like to think I missed something while absorbed in my own reading. I suppose it's possible that while I walked to the other end of the car my fellow passenger scooped up the book and took in a few of Dr. Kendi's words, but as far as I observed the book remained closed for the duration of the trip.

I'm tempted to read too much into this, to expand an irrelevant anecdote into some broader analysis of how it represents the root of certain important issues, but I think it's better to stop here. Why bother making a point like "there are a million ways to not read, just as there are a million ways to not be antiracist"? I think we all know that we should do certain things, the importance of doing these things requiring no additional explanation from me, and every day we choose to either do these things or not do them.