Category: Books/Reviews

Lately I’ve been in a rabbit hole exploring the topic of infrastructure. While there, I found my way to Nicola Twilley’s Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves.

I had naively assumed that fresh fruit year-round was a product of improved transportation and logistics. It has much more to do with the complex network of organizations, technology, and hard-won knowledge that constitutes the “cold chain.” Turn out that “fresh” has become a very slippery term. Twilley systematically unpacks that complexity as she walks through the history of this segment of modern infrastructure. For one example, consider the banana, which Twilley tells us has become the “most popular fruit in the world” She goes on

What enabled this transformation? Steamships, trains, exploitative plantation culture, and even CIA machinations—but most of all refrigeration. Bananas are harvested while green and hard; this phase of their existence, preripening, is known to fruit physiologists as the banana’s “green life,” and extending it through thermal and atmospheric regulation is the secret to the fruit’s commercial success. This story—the transformation of a perishable exotic fruit into a high-volume, mass-market, standardized commodity—is emblematic of an entire century’s worth of unceasing efforts, creative experimentation, expensive failures, and increasingly sophisticated solutions that lie behind the standard supermarket produce aisle and its seasonless abundance.

Bananas, apples, orange juice, chicken, and beef all have stories to be told. Stories that most of us are content to remain ignorant of.

This book has stuck with me for reasons I continue to sort out. For one, it reminds me that what seems simple can mask deep complexity. My fascination with infrastructure in general lies at the intersection of its invisibility and its centrality.

Frostbite offers an extended case study of how knowledge accretes, accumulates, and drives complex systems. All while being largely ignored by those who benefit.

 

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

You’ve figured out something important if you manage to coin a term that becomes the “word of the year.” Cory Doctorow did that when he attached the label “enshittification” to aspects of our technological environment that we’ve grown all too accustomed to. He did so back in late 2022. He’s compiled his thinking and analysis since then into his latest book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

His initial focus was on social media platforms. He also noted that all technology applications aspire to become platforms, so there’s little opportunity for mere mortals to opt out. Here is his core definition;

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. (Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification)

The dying part currently seems to be more wishful thinking than observed phenomenon.

Doctorow does an excellent job of cataloging and describing the phenomenon. As a storyteller by trade, he may do too good a job of storytelling at the expense of understanding.

Stories have villains. Not so much for broken systems. Doctorow’s storytelling skill sometimes gets in the way of understanding. He is often so persuasive that we can fail to notice that his stories aren’t backed by a lot of evidence. The phenomenon is real, but the explanation of evil/malevolent intent is hypothetical at best. Systems are harder to change than evil actors. Change the players without changing the rules of the game and you’ll get the same outcomes.

Doctorow gives us a compelling way to talk about the problem. He’s gotten everyone from Nobel Laureates (The General Theory of Enshittification - Paul Krugman) to the Norwegian Consumer Council talking about the phenomenon. It’s up to the rest of us to do the systems change work to make things better.

Everyday seems to bring us news of a new app or service for taking notes. Everyone seems to be offering me courses and workshops promising to make me a world class note taker. All the cool kids are polishing their notes. A niche topic is moving center stage.

Separating signal from noise in these moments can be frustrating. The noise keeps getting louder. In Duly Noted Jorge Arango brings quiet clarity.

The point (of taking better notes) isn’t to stash ideas for later or to have a machine think for you, but to create a space that lets you think more effectively.

There is a deep point here that I first encountered in a story about Nobel laureate Richard Feynman;

[Feynman] began dating his scientific notes as he worked, something he had never done before. Weiner once remarked casually that his new parton [In particle physics, the parton model is a model of hadrons] notes represented “a record of the day-to-day work,” and Feynman reacted sharply. “I actually did the work on the paper,” he said. “Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper. Okay?” (from _Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman_ by James Gleick.)

Writing—getting ideas out of your head—is a fundamental tool for thought. Notes, how they are structured, and how you manipulate them are core elements in making writing and thinking work. Arango lays out how to make notes work better for you.

Good teacher that he is, Arango starts from a very simple foundation;

• Make short notes.
• Connect your notes.
• Nurture your notes.

An important reminder amid the rush of efforts to exploit the new found popularity of notes and note taking/making. Arango does offer more detailed advice but he keeps simplicity at the core.

The central metaphor Arango chooses to organize around is gardening. You plant seeds with your notes. If you nurture and tend to the seeds they will bear fruit. If you ignore them, the best you can hope for is an overgrown mess of weeds.

It’s unlikely this will be the first thing you read about this new world of notes, but you would do well to make it the next.

I’ve taught project management for the last six years. I’ve been a project manager in one way or another for over fifty. I’m somewhere better than average but nowhere near the best project managers I’ve known and worked with.

If I were to teach the subject again, How Big Things Get Done would be required reading. Very little of it is about the tools and techniques that occupy the standard texts. Looking instead at success and failures in well-known, large-scale projects, Flyvbjerg and Gardner provide insight into how to navigate the organizational and political contexts that surround any effort to create something new and consequential.

While it can be more fun to read about the failures, the deeper lessons fall out of understanding how the successes happened. The lessons aren’t hugely surprising;

• Time invested in planning is a lot cheaper and more effective than rushing into doing.
• Going with a proven team eliminates many risks and sets you up to handle the risks you can’t dodge.
• Iteration is your friend. Never depend on getting it right the first time.

The hardest part of their approach is the search for modularity; to find the basic building block that you can organize the effort and the plan around. Their closing chapter is titled “What’s Your Lego?”. Here’s their closing bit of advice:

Get a small thing, a basic building block. Combine it with another and another until you have what you need. That’s how a single solar cell becomes a solar panel, which becomes a solar array, which becomes a massive megawatt-churning solar farm. Modularity delivers faster, cheaper, and better, making it valuable for all project types and sizes. But for building at a truly huge scale—the scale that transforms cities, countries, even the world—modularity is not just valuable, it’s indispensable.

If projects are part of your portfolio, How Big Things Get Done belongs on your reading list.

I’m a product of the case method approach to an MBA. After two years of analyzing three cases a day, I then spent time as a case writer. One of the first questions you would always face was “have you run the numbers?”

Figuring out which numbers you should run and what the heck “running the numbers” was supposed to mean was all part of the learning process.

Vaclav Smil’s most recent book, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going provides an excellent example of the power of this strategy. It also offers a flavor of the experience I encountered too often when I faced a professor without running the numbers first. Here’s Smil’s motivation for this book:

The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast, but in a democratic society no contest of ideas and proposals can proceed in rational ways without all sides sharing at least a modicum of relevant information about the real world, rather than trotting out their biases and advancing claims disconnected from physical possibilities.

Smil lays out his case for the relevant information about the real world that we ought to share. He starts with energy and food. Hard to get much more fundamental than that. If you’ve got eight billion people on the planet, that’s going to call for a lot of food to produce and distribute. That production and distribution depends on energy and most of that energy comes from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels that won’t be easily displaced by renewable sources at the scale implied by a population of eight billion.

This is a theme that Smil continues to hammer on; that you have to look at systems and scale in sync. He drives that home in a series of chapters examining his candidates for the four material systems that underpin our current economic environment; steel, cement, plastics, and ammonia. Not exactly the “software is eating the world” message that we’ve become accustomed to.

Smil stops short of offering specific policy recommendations. His desire is to see policy debates grounded in a better understanding of the relevant underlying systems and their scale. He hints at options that he deems plausible;

Solutions, adjustments, and adaptations are available. Affluent countries could reduce their average per capita energy use by large margins and still retain a comfortable quality of life. Widespread diffusion of simple technical fixes ranging from mandated triple windows to designs of more durable vehicles would have significant cumulative effects. The halving of food waste and changing the composition of global meat consumption would reduce carbon emissions without degrading the quality of food supply. Remarkably, these measures are absent, or rank low, in typical recitals of coming low-carbon “revolutions” that rely on as-yet-unavailable mass-scale electricity storage or on the promise of unrealistically massive carbon capture and its permanent storage underground.
…
The reality is that any sufficiently effective steps will be decidedly non-magical, gradual, and costly.

This is a book that should be widely read. What it needs is a companion volume that delves into the human systems side of how we might go about tying the politics of large scale system change with a grounded acceptance of the facts on the ground.

 

A Brief History of a Perfect Future: Inventing the World We Can Proudly Leave Our Kids by 2050. Chunka Mui, Paul Carroll, and Tim Andrews. 

Full disclosure, I’ve known and worked with the authors for over twenty five years. I’m biased. Largely because I have first hand knowledge of how smart they are and how deeply they think. 

In A Brief History of a Perfect Future, they take an old observation of Alan Kay’s–“the best way to predict the future is to invent it”–and turn that into a planning process you can apply yourself. 

When the goal is invention not prediction, you want to understand what you have to work with. You’d like to work with what is cheap and readily available. Today, computing power qualifies. Thirty years ago that wasn’t the case. Fortunes were made by those who recognized that trend and acted accordingly.  We’re still learning how to think about what’s possible with essentially free computation. 

Mui, Carroll, and Andrews extend that line of thinking into seven “Laws of Zero,” These are factors of production on similar improvement paths; computation, communication, information, genomics, energy, water, and transportation. What becomes possible when you can anticipate thousand and million-fold improvements in price and performance in any one of these elements? When they improve in concert? 

The authors play out potential scenarios in the next section of the book. What futures might we invent for ourselves? None are foreordained. None are impossible. The scenarios provided here are provocative and plausible. 

The point, of course, is not whether these particular futures come to pass. We’re not running a race on a fixed track. We’re building new roads to new destinations. Much more fun and rewarding than chasing someone else on their road. These are traveling companions worth getting to know.

One of my bad habits is obsessing about my deficiency of good habits. I know that good habits are important because the nuns and monks were relentless in telling me so; decades later their ambivalence about my academic success without suitable discipline still lingers.

I’m not devoid of good habits. Lately, I’ve had some success with Jerry Seinfeld’s keep the streak going/don’t break the chain trick (Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret), although Friday’s NY Times Crossword stumped me, breaking a 355-day streak. Two and a quarter years ago, I managed to reboot a journaling habit by starting a Morning Pages effort. 

Habits are on my mind lately for several reasons. Back in March, I finished Wendy Wood‘s Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick and thought it worth processing my thoughts into a post here. A bit slower than I would like, but not unusually so. 

More recently, I came across an interesting blog post from Eleanor Konik, The Difficulties of Teaching Notetaking » Eleanor Konik. I’ve been chipping away at improving my own note-taking practices and was toying with how and whether to incorporate any of that into my teaching. Konik’s argument is that no one implements good techniques simply because they’re good techniques. We’re all adept at cost/benefit calculations and the payoff structures for most “good” habits are hugely dependent on how heavily you weight the suasion of authority figures. For most of us, most of the time, the payoff for following objectively good practices doesn’t rise to the effort. 

This is where the accumulating research on habit formation comes in. Converting an activity from an invocation of willpower to automatic pilot effectively eliminates the effort and energy part of the equation. This is why Alfred North Whitehead’s observation continues to show up in discussions of habit:

 Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. 

We know that thinking is expensive. As knowledge workers, thinking is a definitional component of your work. One of the highest returns on IQ points is reducing the demand for IQ points wherever possible. 

Woods offers an observation that I’ll close with; 

we repeatedly do the things we love doing. But we also grow to love the things that we repeatedly do.

The task then is to be more intentional about the practices whose repetition will lay down the habits that will free up the capacity for better “operations of thought” when those decisive moments arrive.

Review: Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life

I think my father made decent money, although I don’t have any concrete numbers. But, if you have seven children to feed, clothe, and educate stretching every dollar is sound practice. My mother did this with sometimes frightening skill. She would drive out of her way to save a few pennies per gallon on gasoline or milk, both of which we consumed in prodigious quantities. Frugal was a badge of honor. Mom lived “time is money” more than any business school professor I ever met. It was a source of friction between us from time to time.

Ashley Whillans is a Harvard Business School professor whose research makes the case that we have that mantra inverted; “money is time.” But, unlike a mathematical inversion, the direction you adopt makes a difference. Whillans research investigates the trouble we get into by accepting the conventional wisdom. That leads to solid advice on how to shift your perspective to prioritizing time over money in spite of the pressures to do the opposite. Appropriately enough, Whillans manages to compress all of the argument and advice into a compact package respectful of and worth your time.