This is one of those books that totally gets me. I cannot possibly overemphasize the importance of reading this book if you are a leader of any kind – business, community, politics or even of your own household. The book, at least for me, articulates eloquently the struggle I have had with simplistic solutions I hear in business world on how to solve problems – “right talent” often being suggested as the panacea. This book – along with a cursory reading of a book like The Drunkards Walk should give a sobering thought to anybody who wants to be a leader.

By the way, I got to know about this book while listening to a Ted Talk by Rory Sutherland. Another guy with some great concepts

I am quoting a few paragraphs together from the book as is but there is simply no substitute to reading the book. And if you do read the book, call me. Would love to discuss your thoughts.

Excerpts:

The success of the physical sciences has encouraged us to believe there might be a science of decision making. All kinds of problems in our business and our financial lives, in the political and personal spheres, could then be managed objectively. Such a scientific procedure would, if done carefully enough, lead every conscientious person to the same answer. As a result, both political and personal disputes could be resolved by applying evidence and rational discourse. The distinction of the great business leader, the measure of financial acumen, would rest only in the ability to arrive at the right answer faster than other people.

Obliquity is the best approach whenever complex systems evolve in an uncertain environment and whenever the effect of our actions depends on the ways in which others respond to them. There is a role for carrots and sticks, but to rely on carrots and sticks alone is effective only when we employ donkeys and we are sure exactly what we want the donkeys to do. Directness is only appropriate when the environment is stable, objectives are one-dimensional and transparent and it is possible to determine when and whether goals have been achieved. The world of politics and business today is afflicted by many hedgehogs, men and women who mistakenly believe the world is like that.



I believe it was Roger who had pointed me to this book. The book was about how a couple (almost my age) sold their home in the USA and lived in other countries. The sentiment so violently aligned with my thoughts and dreams that I bought the book and jumped my “To Read” queue and brought it to the fore.

Somewhat expectedly, the book is about the experiences the author and her husband had while living in a cruise ship and 9 other countries – all in the Americas or Europe (with the exception of Morocco). It is an anthology of various snippets of events that happened to them. Undoubtedly the stories were very interesting. There is lucidity in her writing and some sense of humor too! The author was featured in Wall Street Journal.

That said, it completely disappointed me. The main reason is that my expectations were very different. The 9 countries were all covered in a matter of year and a half or so. So, it was really a few weeks to a couple of months max at any place. I was looking for a little more – maybe 3-5 years in a place. Perhaps, that is what my dream is and that is why I was hoping to learn from their experiences.

Living for a few weeks at a place cannot possibly give you the full experience of a place. You would not have enjoyed all the seasons to begin with. 3-5 years also forces you to immerse in other aspects of life – language as an example (although in this case, most of the countries could be gotten by with speaking English or Spanish) Cultivating a social circle of friends and acquaintances is another.

Note that I am not taking away anything from their experiences. Certainly, I do not know of anybody else who sold their house, packed up and went out in the world without a place to call home. The courage to do so, in of itself, is highly commendable. All the same, I will look forward to hear from somebody else who has done it for longer stretches of time.

Sitting at a bar, Sharmila said “I am having difficulty reading this book for my book club”
“Is it very violent or too dense?”, I asked
“ I can’t follow it at all”
“What is the name? What is the thesis?”
“The Drunkard’s Walk”.
“Oh! In statistics, that is a common problem discussed. If a completely drunk man could take a step east, west, north or south at every step randomly, after “n” steps, what is the chance he is back to his original spot?”
“That is what the book is all about. Chance. Probability.”
“That is my kind of book. Why are you reading it?”
“Well, Seemita-di chose that book”.

Without any fear or favor, I immediately started reading that book since she had already paid for it.

You know how there are certain kind of books that you relate to immediately? For me, it is the genre of human behavior, behavioral economics and so on. But when you put that with Talent in the corporate sector, you have topped it up like you cannot any more.

Few things bristle me more than people who think they understand talent and can predict what kind of talent can cause success. What bristles me precisely is the assumption of determinism and not realizing how much luck or chance plays in the outcome. Little surprise that in get togethers of ex employees of an old startup that succeeded spectacularly before crashing equally spectacularly (and I was fortunate enough to have gone thru the journey) I stick out as a sore thumb when I point out that chance was a bigger factor in our success rather than somehow we had the most brilliant people in this earth and that we suffer from nostalgia when we wipe out all the failures we had on our way to success and then the spectacular burn out.

This book, if not anything, bolstered the basis of my thoughts. Did I mention, I love this book? 🙂 (Psychologists will call it Confirmation Bias 🙂 🙂 )

In summary, the book endeavors to explain how chance plays an outsized role in our personal and professional lives and of all the things we take into account explaining or predicting performance, that is the one thing we do not talk about.

Some quotes from the book:

1. When (Sports) teams fail, the coach is often fired. Mathematical analysis of firings in all major sports, however, has shown that those firings had, on average, no effect on team performance.
2. If the details we are given (of anything) fit our mental picture of something, then the more details in a scenario, the more real it seems.
(RR notes: I can see this in the postings of my Dem and Rep friends on the two Presidential candidates daily in my newsfeed)
3. Availability Bias: In reconstructing the past, we give unwarranted importance to memories that are most vivid and hence most available for retrieval
(RR notes: This is part of the startup recollection)
4. We associate randomness with disorder.
(RR notes: In reality total randomness is actual perfection – it can never be reached)
5. When we look closely, we find that many of the assumptions of modern society are based on shared illusions.
6. There is a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash (of control versus helplessness) is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events.
7. Not only do we preferentially seek evidence to confirm our preconceived notions, but we also interpret ambiguous evidence in favor of our ideas.
8. “Chance is a more fundamental conception than causality” – Nobel laureate Max Born
9. We cannot see a person’s potential, only his or her results, so we often misjudge people by thinking that the results must reflect the person.
10. But ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to ability. And so, it is important to always keep in mind the other term in the equation – the role of chance.

It is a hard hitting book. I had suggested this book to a dear Caucasian friend of mine. Whose reaction after reading the first couple of chapters was that it was a politically motivated book. Surprised by the feedback, I asked him to keep reading on. A couple of weeks later, I was getting constant text messages after every chapter about how he has completely changed his mind.

This book will hit you at some of your core beliefs. It dissects Caste-ism. The common misconception is that caste is an India thing. The author convincingly establishes that caste has been most prevalent – written in law, practiced but the people and enforced by the upper caste people in three areas – India, Nazi Germany and America.

The American reference was the most jarring. The author establishes how “race” was the way casteism was established in America. In fact, it quickly shows how the concept of “race” – as in white or black is arbitrary and makes no sense when you go outside of America. Did you know that there was a court case about whether Indians should be considered white or not (due to Aryan descent and what not)?

The reason for caste is neither feelings not morality. It is about power and resources – which groups will have it and which groups won’t.

Frankly, it opened my own eyes to Dalits in India. Growing up in India, we were never taught about how we treat Dalits. If anything, we were taught about how in the past “harijans” were mistreated. Today, reading news about the crimes against Dalits in modern India, I have a renewed understanding of the insidious nature of subjugation that casteism has wrought in a few societies.

Read this book only if you feel you are open enough to be questioned hard on some of your core beliefs. Else, give it a pass.

I am not somebody who finishes a book in one sitting. I have three unfinished books in my library to prove that. The only one I have ever done before is a book called “The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur” which is easily finished in 20 minutes.

However, this book, I did finish in one and a half hours sitting in the park in Marietta Square while Sharmila was at her art show. The book is written mostly as thoughts journaled by the write Hugh Prather.

It is a very quick read but full of some insights that the author has gone thru…

Here are some that resonated with me:

1. My anxiety does not come from thinking about the future but from wanting to control it.

2. The key to motivation is to look at how far I have come rather than how far I have to go.

3. I believe that for almost everyone else life is also a mixture of unsolved problems, ambiguous victories and vague defeats – with very few moments of clear peace.

4. My trouble is I analyze life instead of live it.

5. Now that I know I am no wiser than anyone else, does this wisdom make me wise?

6. The number of things just outside the perimeter of my financial reach remains constant no matter how much my financial condition improves. With each increase in my income, a new perimeter forms and I experience the same relative sense of lack.

7. Don’t fight a fact, deal with it. Don’t discard your self, be more of it.

8. Most mistakes are corrected through increased awareness, which usually does not come without some discomfort.

9. The unstill part of the mind travels from one trivial issue to another, avoiding the present and avoiding love.

10. I can be faithful to my image or faithful to myself.

11. Most decisions, possibly all, have already been made on a deeper level than the sentence level of my mind and my going through a reasoning process to arrive at them seems at least redundant.

12. If the desire to do something is not accompanied by actual doing, then the desire is of not doing it.

13. I don’t think religion is an attainable subject for the intellect. I can only believe when I’m not talking about it.

14. I am noticing that when I am bored, I think I am tired of my surroundings but I am really tired of my thoughts.

15. If I feel disapproval of someone, if I find myself ignoring or turning away from someone in a group, I am probably avoiding in myself what this person represents that I believe is true about me.

16. There is no such thing as “best” in a world of individuals.

17. Whenever I find myself arguing for something with great passion, I can be certain I’m not convinced.

18. I find it almost impossible to make a strong declarative statement in conversation without feeling little nagging doubts and reservations.

19. I thought others’ liking me was a comment on me, but it is a comment on them.

20. If I feel compelled to answer every question, *I* am the one compelling me.

21. Silence can mean confidence. And mutual respect. Silence can mean live and let live: the appreciation that I am I and you are you. The silence is an affirmation that we are already together – as two people. Words can mean that I want to make you into a friend and silence can mean that I accept your already being one.

22. An argument is always about what has been made more important than the relationship.

23. I get along with people a lot better when I recognize that no one ever feels exactly the same about me or anyone else from one moment to the next.

24. All acquaintances are passing.

25. Perceptions are not of things but of relationships.

You might find this interesting. Close your eyes and try to count the numbers 1,2,3…. Do not count it verbally but visually eye thru the numbers from 1 onwards to 100.

Is that number line a straight line? Does it go up and down? Does it go left to right? Does it have colors?

Interestingly, we all have very different mental representation of the number line and we are still not sure how to explain it. Some part of it is definitely the way we read stuff. For example, for me and for most Westerners, the number line goes left to right. When asked, all the 20 students from Iran (studying in a US college) said their mental line went from right to left.

About 5% of the population even associate different colors in different parts of the line. Do you?

My line looks like the one I have drawn here. It goes left to right for the most part, steadily rises till 20 and then takes a sharp bend. 20-40 goes right to left. For most people, these breaks come at a multiple of 10 !!

For some unknown reason, I have a distinct breakpoint between 69 and 70. My mental eyes do not smoothly go from one number to the next – it makes a discrete jump to a point left and higher for 70.

After 100, the pattern repeats. On the negative side, I have no pattern. In fact, this can be explained by the fact that we learnt negatives much later in life. Negative numbers are so unnatural for us to think about (in real life negative number of objects are difficult to comprehend) that the brain consumes a lot of power to hold steady with negative numbers instead of fluently using memory.

Interestingly, when I look at the number line and traverse from left to right, somewhere around 7 is where I feel I am looking straight. 1-6 is on my left. 8 onwards is on my right.

How do you visualize your number line?

Given my love for numbers, lately I have started reading a book on where do our senses for numbers come from? Do animals understand numbers? (They do – but not the way we think). Does a child of 2 months understand the difference between 2 and 3? (You will be surprised!!)

Now I am trying to figure out why is it that in most cultures, we write 2 by repeating 1 in some fashion. Same for 3. But when it gets to 4, we go a very different way. And all cultures have uniformly decided to take a fork while representing 4.

The Roman notation is the most unintuitive. After denoting 2 as nothing but two of 1 and 3 as three of 1, to denote 4, first it introduces 5 !!! And then the understanding of subtraction!!

Why did they do that?

With the new coffeemaker at home, I am trying to learn the fine art of making different kinds of coffee, There is a lot of runway left in that learning. Wanted to pick up some of the theory and history behind coffee. (You might remember my three year journey into gins). I think it was Stephen Leitner who had pointed me to this book “Uncommon Grounds”.

Fascinating book. If not anything else, it showed how little I knew about coffee. Some of the highlights of the learnings include:

1. Coffee originated from the ancient land of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). We are not sure when though.
2. Roasting of beans is relatively new – sometime in the fifteenth century
3. Like gin in England, alcohol in general in the USA, coffee all over the world has a rich history of becoming popular only to be blamed for a lot of social ills and then getting banned. Which was usually followed by periods of surreptitious drinking and smuggling.
4. Growing up in India, I was aware of the coffee plantations in the south. What I was not aware of was that coffee made it to India with a Muslim pilgrim taping seven seeds to his stomach and smuggling them to south India during a “prohibition” period in the middle east.
5. Europeans were the ones to start adding milk to coffee while the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern folks still drink their coffee straight. It is theorized that this is because Europeans can tolerate milk while the folks in the Middle East and Mediterranean areas tend to be lactose intolerant.
6. The folks to adopt coffee last – the Scandinavians – ironically are the ones with highest per capita coffee consumption today.

Much of the book is dedicated to detailing how colonialism and slavery were intertwined and abetted by the coffee producing countries. Other than putting forward how unfairly the slaves and locals were treated by the colonials for profit, it also details some interesting history of the Cold War where USA and the CIA got deeply involved in the local politics of Latin American countries thru coffee economics (to stave off the fear of communism taking over).

Above all, when it comes to America, this book is an ultimate treatise on how consumer marketing evolved in the USA. Fascinating history of false claims, brilliant packaging, provocative ads, adoption of the practice of TV sponsorship, all the way to congressional hearings to peddle more of the black aromatic beans!

Another interesting fact: The total value of coffee traded today is larger than the GDP of over half the countries in the UN!!

While this has done nothing to improve my cappuccino foaming skills, I strangely feel smug while drinking a cup of coffee.

Enjoyable read!

Interesting book about the history of coffee!!

by: Chris Clearfield and Andras Tilcsik

I got to know about this book from the Bookclub group in our office. I was actually reading a different book. But the synopsis looked interesting enough that I paused on the other book and started reading this.

This book deals with catastrophic failures like the blowing up of Challenger, or the Deep Horizon blowout or the wrong movie announced as the winner at the Oscars … and tries to find out what are the common traits and how to avoid potential such failures in the future.

The key take away is to realize that a system needs to have two different traits to give rise to catastrophic failures. One is that the system has to be “complex”. By that it does not necessarily mean scale – but systems where their parts are more likely to interact in hidden and unexpected ways. When something goes wrong – multitude components fail and it is difficult to understand the root cause.

The other aspect is “tight coupling”. Loose coupling means there is enough slack that if one component fails, others won’t cascade. Tight means if one fails – others will start failing too. And it cannot be stopped. Ironically, safety systems are the biggest single source of catastrophic failure in complex, tightly coupled systems.

In wicked systems – not much feedback – (as opposed to kind systems – frequent feedback), this becomes even more problematic.

Couple of tricks the authors suggest include:

(*) Subject Probability Interval Estimates: instead of predicting yes or no or 99% vs 1%, predict at different intervals.

(*) Premortem – assume things have gone wrong. Now look back and predict what might have been the reasons

A quote I liked a lot: “We construct an expected world because we can’t handle the complexity of the present one, and then process the information that fits the expected world, and find reasons to exclude the information that might contradict it. Unexpected or unlikely interactions are ignored when we make our construction.”

Some watch outs that are good pointers to corporate leaders too:

More often than not, we don’t take into account  how luck is often the reason systems have not broken down. We take that as a reason to believe the system is fine. (outcome bias)

Support dissenting opinions by speaking the last as a leader.

Our tendency for conformity can literally change what we see. Diversity in a team feels less familiar and feels less comfortable. There might be discomfort, but we tend to be more objective and are less likely to go along.

Homogeneous groups create comfortable feeling of familiarity. This unfortunately leads to doing less well in complex situations AND feeling confident about the same wrong decisions.

Some other interesting things: The most frequently used diversity programs didn’t increase diversity. In fact, they made firms less diverse. Voluntary diversity training is what yielded results. Managers need to feel it was their decision to participate.

Anyways, it is a very good read. Anybody will find some aha! moments from life and work in this.