Why rules often suck

I was reading the recent issue of The Economist on the plane today, and I was struck by an article titled Law v Common Sense, subtitled Will Barack Obama protect Americans from his fellow lawyers? In it was the following choice text:

The relentless piling of law upon law—the federal register has 70,000 ever-changing pages—does not make for a more just society. When even the most trivial daily interactions are subject to detailed rules, individual judgment is stifled. When rule-makers seek to eliminate small risks, perverse consequences proliferate. Bureaucrats rip up climbing frames for fear that children may fall off and break a leg. So children stay indoors and get fat.

The point of the article is that Obama's likely appointment of Cass Sunstein to the White House could help address some of these issues, perhaps even leading to real (and needed) tort reform.

That got me thinking to business in general, and a recent study that we commissioned from The Economist showing that 70% of people need to work around their company's established processes in order to effectively get their work done (Actually, when I pose that question to a group of successful people, the actual answer is 100%).

Rules are good.  Unless they suck.  When I'm confronted with rules that suck (RTS), I'm often reminded of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, which discusses when it is our individual obligation to rise above the rules of society and embrace a higher truth (yes, the subtleties of this particular example are distracting).

Peak production, peak waste, social media and Must Ignore

I enjoyed Tim O'Reilly's post today, Waking up from the 'Nightmare on Tech Street', itself a response to Om Malik's recent piece. Finally, I felt, someone was touching on the upside of oil demands finally declining, or celebrating the slowdown in our culture of excessive consumerism.

As he notes, peak production usually equals peak waste:

In a recent conversation with my daughter Arwen and son-in-law Saul Griffith, Matt Webb remarked that he'd like 2008 to be remembered as the year of "peak consumption." Saul pointed out, though, that the term "peak waste" is perhaps more accurate. In an analogy to peak oil, he suggested that maybe we've reached the pinnacle of waste in our consumer culture. I do wonder if we will look back at the past few decades as a kind of sick aberration rather than a golden age, with good times we want to get back to. Like Saul, I'm hopeful that we can get rid of the waste, and get back to creating things of lasting value.

I've heard the term waste applied in another way lately, in regard to people spending time in social sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. These pundits usually follow such comments with an aside like, "I don't need to be talking to people about what I just ate for lunch." And then, of course, people laugh, thinking, Oh, those silly, wasteful twitterers.

Those of us that actually use Twitter may have another perspective: perhaps this is a lean, efficient mode of communication. Perhaps a glance at it a few times a day can lead to unexpected insights and help build better relationships. And maybe even be a little bit fun.

Whoever killed the Dinosaurs, please stand up.

So it turns out that, perhaps, Dinosaurs were felled not by a gigantic asteroid, but by tons of sulfur polluting the atmosphere. Think of the smell!

Whichever theory will prove true remains to be seen, but we see this again and again: sufficient evidence over sufficient time leads us to a worldview which feels more and more like fact. Facts that we make decisions on. Facts that that lend concreteness to our lives.

How many arguments have been made for asteroid research and defense techniques that cite the extinction of dinasaurs?  Many. If Volcanoes turn out to be the true culprit, do we know which policies or government programs should be revisited to see if they are still valid?

Decision Velocity ~ IT Velocity

I enjoyed Jim Stogdill's recent post My Web Doesn't Like Your Enterprise, at Least While it's More Fun, about the various perceptions around the speed of Enterprise IT versus Web IT.  He writes

"Artur replied with this quote from one of his friends employed at a large enterprise: "What took us a weekend to do, has taken 18 months here." That concise statement seems to sum up the view of the enterprise, and I'm not surprised. For nearly six years I've been swimming in the spirit-sapping molasses that is the Department of Defense IT Enterprise so I'm quite familiar with the sentiment.I often express it myself."

Jim goes on to say that Enterprise IT is like this for good reason, a natural outgrowth of what is important to their business, their customers, and their shareholders, and that eventually the web too will be this boring, this predictable, and this unexciting.  Perhaps, but it there is another side to this discussion.

IT is the whipping boy because they are in an unfair position: the world is moving faster, business is moving faster, compliance is getting harder, budgets are shrinking, yet the kids in the Cloud can afford to make mistakes (think: Twitter downtime) with no one caring, and so IT consumers (employees) have unrealistic expectations (think: be as good as my stuff at home, dammit).

OpenSocial is making progress; the world spins faster

Jason Kincaid wrote a nice piece on TechCrunch about the progress of OpenSocial (a standard interface for plugging your social application into a social network), with a rather attractive and impressive chart:

So what does this have to do with decision making? Not much, but it is such a pretty chart, so I thought I'd post it.

Actually, it is a bit relevant. We've talked about how the workplace is being transformed, and this is part of the reason... the increasing social aspects of applications. While OpenSocial is usually talked about in context of the popular consumer Social Networks (which gives them the ridiculous and oft-misleading numbers above), a growing number of enterprise applications are starting to utilize it, for a simple reason: it is not that hard, and it gives you wide reach.

Cars on Demand, College Laziness and Modern Efficiency

I'm a big fan of Zipcar, as those around me know.  I just reserved one for tomorrow, and since I waited so long, I had to choose a pickup waiting at a local McDonalds, instead of my usual Prius down the street.  But I didn't mind since it took me only about 25 seconds to find it, book it, and have a car ready for me tomorrow at 5:30 AM.

As I did this I was thinking about speed.  Satisfying the speed of business is not about perfection  -- it is about things being good enough, provided they are fast enough.

People People People People People

I work at a large company.  My nature is to move quickly, which often feels impossible.  In the past few weeks, a lot of the impossibility has involved not knowing the right people.

A lot of smart people think about this, for example the labcoats behind Organization Network Analysis.  Looking at how people work together in a network can often yield surprising insights into whether the organization can move fast or slowly.

A lot of the rest of us do this everyday without thinking about it, with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Yammer and the rest, leveraging each other to speed ourselves up (I didn't list MySpace, since that slows people down).

But it comes down to one thing... the degree to which you can communicate effectively, quickly, and trustfully with the people you need to get things done.  If you couldn't conceivably get agreement with someone over IM then you don't have the right relationship with them to decide things in business time.  The last guy I hired I negotiated purely over SMS while I was on the tarmac, otherwise I would have lost him.

Fast Fast Fast Fast requires People People People People.