How Daily Self-Improvement is Geared to Lead to a Crisis

To follow-up on the previous post ‘How to Explain the Contradiction Between Small Changes and Transformation‘, let’s think further about what self-improvement gurus look for when they recommend progressive, daily change that compounds. I believe that in fact they intend to create the conditions for a rupture change.

Most self-improvement literature is for people who are stuck and probably unhappy with their situation. It would be difficult to tell them that they need to change everything immediately, without being prepared. It is much better to ask them to reflect, change, improve themselves day after day toward what they want to be.

At some point there will be a rupture point with their current environment and their current self. Progress will have been made which will suddenly put in bright light the inadequacy of the situation, and a crisis and sudden transformation will ensue: divorce, changing job and/or becoming independent, etc.

In complex system when it is ready for change the slightest disruption will change completely the system, all of a sudden. The point it to reach this rupture point and let the system mature accordingly.

And this is all the subtleness of self-improvement literature: have the system mature so that one day, all of a sudden, a major change can occur.

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How to Explain the Contradiction Between Small Changes and Transformation

I have noticed a contradiction between real world and complexity-driven knowledge, which shows that the changes that really dimension life are those rare, black swans; and the literature about self-improvement that emphasizes the accumulation of small, daily changes and improvements to achieve transformation.

According to one view, which seems to be quite applicable to nature changes and world history, momentous changes are those rare events like wars, catastrophes and unexpected crisis that remodel the world into something widely different.

According to the other view, we should seek progressive, continuous improvement to end up being significantly transformed thanks to the accumulation of changes. This same approach also applies to recommendations about retirement savings, thanks to the aggregation of returns over time: change upon change, compounded, becomes exponential.

Which one should we believe? Which one is true and the one to follow?

Because we live in an increasingly complex world, I would rather seek the momentous change, the crisis, the rupture, as the type of changes that really make sense and redefine our world and ourselves. It is probably the most effective. Seeking a real change may be more effective than progressive, incremental change.

This does not mean that continuous improvement and incremental change are not useful, but they are secondary in the shaping of ourselves and our world to major punctual changes.

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How Leaders Are Needed to Overcome the Status-Quo

This excellent Seth Godin post ‘Living on the delta‘ was a great inspiration. The first topic is about how to deal with status-quo, with those little inadequacies and wrinkles we can’t really get to deal with, because they don’t seem so important.

Status-quo can be invasive. I sometimes meet people who have been managing their small company or organisations for decades in the same way and are desperately outdated in the way they do things. While it is obvious for an outsider it is not for them, and that’s because they have just been managing it, not looking at it from the point of view of a leader.

Leadership – doing the right things – is different from management because it takes a step back to ask whether what is being done is really the right thing to do. Leaders challenge the status quo, managers don’t. And that makes a world of difference. And in today’s world we obviously need more leadership than management!

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How ‘Yet’ is Such an Important Word

Seth Godin in this post ‘A simple missing word‘ reminds us how ‘yet’ is such an essential word. Adding ‘yet’ to simple sentences reminds us that we can learn and do stuff we can’t do yet, and that we can eventually finish projects we are struggling with.

“I have not managed to learn how to do this” is terribly changed when ‘yet’ is added in the end.

““Yet” turns “can’t” into “haven’t.” Yet isn’t the result of brazen persistence. It’s what we earn with learning, insight and generosity.“

Yet is a key word for hope and transformation. Let’s put some more ‘yet’ in our negative sentences!

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How Leaders Influence Organisations

In this interesting article ‘Party supporters shift views to match partisan stances‘ a Danish scientific paper is mentioned that studies how the opinion of political party members changed after the leadership of the party changed. They found that opinions could change significantly to match the leader’s.

“Supporters of a political party change their policy views “immediately and substantially” after that party switches its position on an issue, new research suggests, a sign that political elites could be shaping the opinions of the voters whos views they are supposed to represent“

In general, this is aligned with my experience in (business) organisations: I am always amazed how quickly it is shaped by the leader, and this is particularly visible in good or worse when the leader changes. However it was for me less obvious in the case of a looser setting like a political party.

And indeed it is an interesting question in this case as the political party is supposed to represent the views of its members. Or is it really? Is not more a way to align over a number of main positions to seek power? This certainly provides interesting food for thought about the operation of modern democracies.

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How Data Can Develop Into a Competitive Moat

The example of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies (here on wikipedia, also this excellent post ‘Jim Simons And Renaissance Technologies‘) is an excellent example of a company that has created a substantial competitive advantage from data gathering and interpretation.

The performance of the fund over decades (since 1988) has been quite impressive. The approach of the fund was to have a passionate “team of  of mathematicians whose motivation was doing exciting mathematics and science (rather than hired guns who could be lured away by money or pure trading quants, biased by the industry).”

Still, here is the interesting part: “On top of his intelligent hiring and novel approach to trading, Jim Simons recognized that an impressive data pipeline – and the technological infrastructure to digest and analyze that data was a moat to competitors. It is hard to have an edge if you use the same process and the same data as your competitors.” And from Wikipedia: “Renaissance Technologies, along with a few other firms, has been synthesizing terabytes of data daily and extracting information signals from petabytes of data for almost two decades now, well before big data and data analytics caught the imagination of mainstream technology“.

It is thus the poster-child of a company that has used data retrieval and interpretation as a moat. It is dealing with one of the most public and accessible data (financial trading data), but now the same can be done with many other kinds of user data. Data as a competitive moat is already there, has been for years, and is there to stay.

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How the GameStop Stock Event Ushers a New Era of Collective Resistance

The Gamestock event a few weeks ago where individual investors banding together drove the stock price up to create havoc in hedge funds and institutional investors is an interesting illustration of the power of the collective mobilized by social networks against institutions. This happened in a context of a brand loved by passionate geeks being under attack by finance hedge funds. I believe it is only the start of such situations and regulators in all industries will have to develop guidelines to deal with such collective mobilisations.

It is today very easy if there an online community with similar passions to create a movement, and this movement can have real-life effects. It happens on the political scene (various revolutions, not to mention the infamous US Capitol invasion) and will also increasingly happen on the economical scene (various boycotts, or joint action against certain companies deemed nefarious).

In the case of Gamestop, some wonder if it is a manipulation (i.e. a movement started by some people who had a vested interest to win heaps of money) but that will be hard to prove because it does not fall under the traditional stock manipulation definition (see for example this Forbes article “Reddit And GameStop Lessons: Former SEC Enforcement Chief Explains Stock Manipulation And How To Avoid Trouble“). At most an intent may be proven, but individuals that played along can’t get indicted.

Now that it is obvious how online communities can create substantial change in the way markets and regulated activities happen, regulators should develop strong guidelines about how to deal with such events: early detection, preventive actions and also a raft of corrective actions (mostly of the cool-off type) if effects are visible. At the same time collective action has always been part of political and trade-unions freedom and can’t be banned. It is a thin thread and it is essential to develop the right approaches and methods to deal with those events.

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How the Data-Industrial Complex Analogy Has Limits

Lately Tim Cook the CEO of Apple has been using the term ‘data-industial complex’ such as in this article ‘Tim Cook on Why It’s Time to Fight the “Data-Industrial Complex”‘. This is of course a parallel to the ‘military-industrial complex’ and calls up all sorts of influence and lobbyist games, not necessarily for the greater good.

While Tim Cook is using this term in a way to market Apple’s privacy initiatives, it is useful to comment how relevant this parallel with the ‘military-industrial complex’ really is. Wikipedia defines the latter as “an informal alliance between a nation’s military and the defense industry that supplies it, seen together as a vested interest which influences public policy“.

While the data industry certainly creates much value and not necessarily in the best interest of citizens, the alliance with government is more uncertain in particular in view the recent attempts to try to limit the power of major players and anti-trust cases. However, there is certainly an alliance with some powerful political forces and much lobbying to defend data-centric company positions.

In a way this terminology is quite adequate to name a powerful social and political force, in another the analogy has its limits in particular when it is used by Apple CEO, a company that also greatly benefits from user data. Still it reminds us that data management is indeed an industry, with powerful and well resourced players that may use all possible means to defend their power.

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How Dense Cities Get Rewarded in the Collaborative Age

In the book ‘Hedge‘ Nicolas Colin makes the point that dense cities are rewarded in the Collaborative Age. “The Entrepreneurial Age seems to reward large cities and nothing else , and old jobs have been radically displaced as a result . As factories are now empty , the occupied working class is now employed primarily in services — services that are more and more concentrated in cities. Hence , as Richard Florida puts it, the city has become the “ new factory floor”“

There are conflicting movements at stake here: increased possibilities for remote work (enhanced by the Covid crisis), making it possible to live in the countryside at the condition of having a strong and reliable internet connection; and the network effect of cities that allow the deployment of more effective logistics and services. It seems however for Nicolas Colin that metropolis have a future, in particular because “workers are being redeployed from the suburban industrial class of the twentieth century to the urban service class of the twenty – first century“, and because networked services are orders of magnitude more efficient there.

There could possibly even be an argument on the fact that the creative class would tend to move to the countryside or small towns whereas the working class would tend to concentrate in cities, creating further inequality (and being an opposite trend than the one observed in the 20th century).

In any case, dense cities and metropolis seem to have a future as places of creativity, encounters, and network efficiency. How much concentration on a limited number of cities will happen remains to be seen.

On the same topics, previous posts include

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How Instability of Income and Occupation is not New

In the interesting book ‘Hedge‘ by Nicolas Colin, the issue of career in the new Collaborative Age (which he calls ‘Entrepreneurial Age’) is addressed. “The mark of the Entrepreneurial Age is greater instability at every level . It leads to permanent fluctuations in households ’ sources of income . Today’s workers alternate overlapping periods of training , wage – earning , starting a business , looking for a job , working as a freelancer.”

This obviously seems a significant departure from the Industrial Age stable wage-earning model that would require substantial changes in the setup of our social security nets, and in our psychology.

But is that really such a big change compared to the current situation? I observe a lot of my friends that went into more conventional careers being now retrenched or otherwise deemed redundant and who actually feel a bit lost because they were not prepared to this instability. The fact that people are made redundant when they reach 45+, in particular in management roles, is not new, but it is often underestimated or not talked about. However it has always existed due to the pyramidal organisation of the corporation. It has just maybe been accelerated in the later years due to more frequent restructuring, mergers and acquisitions. Thus, although it accelerates, this instability is not new. It is just that we are not psychologically prepared for it by society.

I find from my experience that it is actually all in the psychology. I have started my own consulting company at 40, instead of continuing a conventional career in the management of established companies. It has taken me some years to get used to the ups and downs, adjusting my personal system to have sufficient reserves in case of crisis, and it is now not a problem any more (even with Covid-19!).

Thus, be prepared for instability of income and occupation. But that is not new, and it is just that we need to be more prepared for it psychologically than what is usually recognized.

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How to Overcome Both Science Reproducibility and Innovation Crisis

Stuart Buck’s post ‘Escaping science’s paradox‘ addresses the current science reproducibility crisis, and in particular if the current context of replication issues and suspicions could diminish innovation. His view is that “I do not think there’s a contradiction between reproducibility and innovation. Contrary to common belief, we can improve both at once“.

The paper first gives a raft of useful references about the issues of reproducibility and the apparent decrease of innovation (compared to the budgets spent) in science today. One particular issue is the capability of institutions to fund ‘out of the box’ innovative research.

The author proposes to achieve a consistent high rate of innovation “by incentivizing failed results, and by funding “Red Teams” that would aim to refute existing dogma or would be entirely outside it.” He first proposes to make sure there is less bias towards positive results in publications by enticing publication of null result experiments or even negative results experiments. And then he proposes to make sure there is always an independent challenge to avoid groupthink, and that systematic replication of important results should be funded.

It is quite interesting to observe how improving the outcome of scientific research ends up being a psychological balance exercise, making sure to erase biases towards positive results and providing means to foster innovation. This demonstrates how the shaping of the institutional framework is important to achieve the results we need for scientific research.

On the same topic – read our previous post ‘How to Overcome the Science Reproducibility Crisis‘

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How Media Advertising Got Upended by Internet

In this excellent summary paper ‘Did Google and Facebook kill the media revenue model?‘ Frederic Filloux takes a deep insight on the evolution of media advertising evolution in last decades. It benefitted initially paper media and it got completely upended by Internet. The interesting part is that its actual value has also plummeted – making it cheaper for people to advertise but also diminishing the possible revenue stream for media.

“The inefficiency of advertising in print, radio, and TV has always been its historical flaw.” By providing a far more targeted solution, internet advertising suddenly increased dramatically advertising efficiency. In addition, it was suddenly possible to much better measure the effectiveness of a campaign to improve it.

In addition, availability of advertising channels created a major deflation of advertising expenditure and the post contains staggering graphs (out of which the illustration of the post is extracted) showing how total advertising value plummeted in the last decade, with total media adverting expenditure diminishing by more than 25% in most developed countries (after an historical increase that was much more than inflation, so it is also sort of a correction).

Could printed media have reacted earlier? Maybe, but as Frederic Filloux concludes, the changes were so systemic and overwhelming that some exceptions may have transformed sufficiently, but certainly not the entire industry. “Most of the legacy media were in denial. They acted too late and too little. But they were not in a position to do otherwise.”

At the end, media advertising is another area where internet has upended the value chain, and at the same provided more value to advertisers. It should be seen as a quite positive shift for the overall value chain and consumers, were it not for the overwhelming position of Google and Facebook.

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