One slight drawback: experiencing the work of any of the interview subjects is left as a homework exercise for the reader; Brand Thinking is strictly text-only. It’s an interesting counterpart to more visually oriented books like Sean Adam’s Masters of Design (Sean Adams is himself one of Millman’s interview subjects).

needs more demons? No. I thought this book was terrific. Recommended for anyone interested in branding and identity design.

I’m not an expert in this field, so I don’t know how it ranks among books about identity design, but I certainly found it accessible, engaging, and informative.

needs more demons? no.

My first CD Baby order was #17697, for 8 discs, in 2000. When I got the now-famous colorful shipment notice I thought I’d actually been the first brand new customer to order as many as 8 albums. I thought the email had been crafted for me, in particular. I felt special.

A little later, I placed an even bigger order, and it happened to be while CD Baby was moving across the country. It was delayed long enough that I eventually contacted support, and I promptly got a very nice and apologetic email from Derek Sivers himself (along with the discs, in short order). Again, I felt special.

Later on I learned that everyone got the crazy shipment notice, even for ordering a single disc, and that at the time Derek emailed me, he was one of just two people in the CD Baby “organization.”

And for a little while I felt less special. But eventually I realized that a key part of CD Baby’s value proposition for customers — artists and purchasers alike — was making everyone feel special.

Which, when you think about it, is no small trick.

Reading Sivers’ story of how and why he started, grew, and sold CD Baby, I was strongly reminded of interviews with Dischord’s Ian MacKaye. Partly because they say some of the same things, particularly about not having business growth as a goal. Both describe awkward conversations with “suits” who really can’t grasp this.

But both also display an element of self-contradiction. Sivers says the money didn’t matter — an easy thing to say when your life is not severely constrained by the lack of it — but he did, after all, build a music store, not a music give-away service. Perhaps more tellingly, some of his biggest regrets are about decisions with significant cost impacts. And although Sivers repeatedly says that growth wasn’t a goal, but not only did he consistently make decisions that furthered growth, one of his most provocative epigrammatic guidelines is explicitly about facilitating growth. (It’s to try to make your business practices support double your current volume, which sounds very smart. If you, you know, want to grow the business.)

These cavils aside, this is a pretty great book. Sivers is unusually candid about his mistakes as well as what he did right, and he’s lucid and entertaining. (He says he learned to prize clarity and brevity when crafting emails to CD Baby’s subscriber list, and demonstrates mastery of both here.) You’ll probably be thinking about the contents of this brief book for much longer than the time it takes to read it.

needs more demons? no.

Conti is a computer scientist who researches things like security and information disclosure. As this job description requires, he’s both sharp and paranoid. I bookmarked a dozen or so passages that showcased one attribute or another. He starts out by saying that he considers Google “a sovereign entity equivalent to a nation . . . because of its top-tier intellectual talent, financial resources in the billions of dollars, and world-class information-processing resources,” a viewpoint which strikes me as patently absurd. Throughout there are asides like, “every time an old friend contacts you from a webmail account, a little piece of your privacy dies.” But in the chapter on maps, Conti offers this provocative scenario:

Let’s say [your company] has 1,200 employees located at 10 locations, some not publicly known. Imagine mapping activity form the IP address ranges used by our corporate headquarters, as well as the other locations, all seeking directions from Ministeri Pistarini International Airport in Buenos Aires to the street address of a meeting site at the outskirts of the city. Because this activity is out of the norm, you’ve just created a unique set of characteristics that ties together your various company offices with a potentially sensitive meeting. You’ve also disclosed with a high probability, the travel plans of the meeting participants, as well as given a clue to the strategic importance of Argentina to your company’s planning.

In the chapter on cross-site tracking via embedded content, after dissecting the roles of the (many) sites involved in serving up content for a typical MSNBC.com page, he makes the trenchant point that, “your real privacy in terms of visiting a web site is the equivalent of the worst [privacy] policy of all the sites embedded there.”

Far from accepting Google’s famous “don’t be evil” precept at face value, Conti continually ascribes the worst possible motivations to Google. He makes insinuating comments like, “Note that these are the publicly acknowledged uses of machine processing of communications. It is a safe bet that many other uses will never be discussed overtly.” In discussing the Google Analytics javascript, which has been through a “minification” process that makes the code hard to read, he saves the admission that “the density of code could also be seen as an attempt to reduce the size of the file, to improve response time.” He fails to mention that minifying javascript for performance reasons is standard practice for high-performance, real-time websites. Conti assumes Google (ab)uses information in ways it has publicly states it does not; one could imagine that at least some of the data mining Conti describes might be technically challenging even for an organization like Google.

But Conti makes another interesting point: Google won’t endure forever, certainly not in its current form***. The individuals who defined Google’s culture and ethics won’t live forever, and there is no guarantee that their principles will be adhered to indefinitely. If Google doesn’t, or even can’t, exploit data in certain ways now, it’s impossible to say with absolute certainty that that will always be true. This sorts of threat isn’t even hypothetical to me — when I signed up for a Flickr account, I was comfortable with Flickr’s privacy policy. I was not at all comfortable with Yahoo!’s privacy policies, which are the ones that matter now.

I don’t plan to make many changes to my web browsing habits as a result of reading Conti’s book, mostly because I already aggressively filter tracking cookies and minimize my use of problematic sites like FaceBook. But I did find it interesting and thought provoking, if sometimes a little shrill.

* I also didn’t remember the author or the exact title. I made a game of trying to track down the book without using Google, pretending that showing interest in this book might set some blackmark flag in Google’s servers. I searched on Amazon, Yahoo!, and even Bing. But I couldn’t track it down without recourse to Google.

** Or at least that someone is trying to establish a connection, which may be interesting in an entirely different way.

*** If nothing else, the end of normal matter in the universe will eventually impose significant changes on Google’s technical infrastructure.

needs more demons? I wouldn’t want to wish more demons on Conti; he seems to have enough of his own.

This seemed like a good reason to learn more, so I decided to read a few of the many books about Google.

I started with Steven Levy’s. It isn’t a corporate puff piece, but with direct participation from key players like founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and longtime CEO Eric Schmidt, it’s the closest thing to an “official” Google book. It’s not entirely uncritical of Google, but it’s tone is generally favorable. It’s divided into eight parts, covering Google’s history, Google’s Internet ad innovations, Google’s culture (including the initial Gmail privacy flap), Google’s physical infrastructure, Android and YouTube, Google’s ethical and privacy dilemmas in dealing with China, Google’s (and more significantly, ex-Googler’s) relationship to domestic politics in general and the Obama campaign/presidency in particular), and Google’s efforts in social media spaces.

It generally seems well-sourced and -supported, with copious footnotes. Levy occasionally speculates on things that are not public knowledge, but in general his guesses seem pretty rational.

Overall I found it credible, readable, and informative, and often engaging and entertaining.

needs more demons? no.

Drive strikes me as a perfectly designed business book. It’s a slim, fast read (it’s substantially padded by a section which essentially recapitulates the book’s content, with some putting-into-practice tips sprinkled in). It invents some new jargon — Motivation 2.0 and 3.0 (Motivation 1.0, if you’re curious, is subsistence-level gotta-survive type stuff) and Type I(ntrinsic) and Type X(trinsic) — in which to frame ideas that have been floating around for a while. Of course there’s a gotcha here as well: implementing many of these concepts requires people in positions of control to give up a lot of it, and they will be threatened by much of what this book proposes. (It does get a little hippy-dippy in places for a biz book, at one point Pink hints that management itself could become an outdated concept.)

Joe Pernice, if you don’t know the name, has one of the most honeyed voices in all of indie rock and a heaping helping of songwriting skill, displayed for the past several years/records in his band Pernice Brothers. Joyce Linehan is Pernice’s partner in Ashmont Records. This book is literally culled from Joyce Linehan’s twitter stream, mostly focusing on communication to and from Joe, about the business of being in a touring/recording band (although Massachusetts residents might note a few poignant moments not directly related to Ashmont Records).

I read Pernice to Me compulsively in a single sitting — not hard to do, it’s short — and while it certainly entertained me, it left me a little sad.

Pernice to Me has a mean side in more than one sense of the word. I couldn’t help but be reminded of seeing excerpts of Johan Sebastian Bach’s correspondence with the great composer whinging about shillings and farthings. And if you’d have a mental image of Pernice as a “gentle, fragile sad sack”, that you want to keep intact, you should avoid Pernice to Me, because that’s the perception that Linehan explicitly sets out to destroy. She presents Pernice as epically grumpy, a quintessentially high-maintenance and self-involved artist.

But the format of Pernice to Me dramatically reinforces its artificiality. It may be generally acknowledged that reality show editors can paint any cast member as either the villain or the long-suffering hero, but when the stuff from which a work is assembled is exclusively 140-character-or-less soundbites, it really hammers home how very much the selection of exactly which tweets to include or exclude affects the shape of the work as a whole. I was also keenly aware how much I was lacking anything that might put the tweets in context: how long Pernice had been on the road, how much sleep Linehan had, what tone of voice the words were spoken in (many of the tweets are transcribed telephone exchanges).

It also implicitly makes the point that the music industry wasn’t wrong back in the days of Napster: the sky really is falling. Something is wrong with the picture if an artist with all of Pernice’s gifts finds it difficult to eke out a living. And if releasing one of the first books based on a Twitter stream helps Ashmont get some media attention and helps Pernice sell a few more records, more power to them.

needs more demons? not exactly.

But Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be is by no means only for aspiring record-deal-signers, or obsessive students of music culture. In fact, one of the awesome things about the book is how thoroughly outside-the-industry Trynin’s vantage point is. She found herself the object of an archetypical major label bidding war without having much prior knowledge of how such things work, and she doesn’t expect the reader to bring that knowledge either, nor does she get bogged down with business specifics. Although I think this memoir works well as a cautionary tale, it’s also a highly entertaining rags-to-riches-to-rags story, and Trynin brings the same sort of not-quite-what-you-expect sly wit and acuity to her prose that she once brought to her songs.

Needs More Demons? No. The only thing I want to change about this book is to tack on a feel-good happy ending where Trynin had a long, productive, if perhaps niche-y career as an independent artist. Unfortunately, although she played guitar with Loveless for a while, that hasn’t exactly come to pass so far.

While I don’t want to change the book, I do hope somebody assembles a glossary of all the names-changed-to-protect used in it, and I’m not steeped enough in Boston-ania to get very far. “Flint Raft” would seem to be Gravel Pit. “The Front Load” seems to be The Middle East. And…? Please feel free to help in comments.

surprise benefits of pseudo-vegetarianism

I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink in fits and starts over the past two months — it’s on the library’s short-term loan list, so I request it, read as much as I can before it’s due, return it, and repeat. I don’t think it’s a bad way to read such an information-dense book; it provides opportunities to digest and reflect on Gladwell’s theses.

I don’t think he delivers on the implicit promise that has made his books bestsellers among business readers. The Tipping Point provides tools for understanding why some messages — like teen anti-smoking campaigns — don’t “stick.” But it doesn’t provide tools for making messages stick. I think that’s because societies’ response to stimuli is fundamentally chaotic. Ensuring any particular meme spreads is impossible. Even Steven Spielberg directed an unequivocal flop once.*

Blink suffers from a similar problem: it identifies situations in which rapid intuitive assessments — “thin-slicing,” in Gladwall’s parlance — are invaluable, and other situations in which they’re extremely harmful. It doesn’t provide foolproof guidelines for distinguishing “good” thin-slicing from “bad.” Again, I don’t think it’s a soluble problem.

I’m not an expert on cognition; I’m a lay person with probably just enough information to be dangerous. But I think a major component of what makes for human intelligence is that our brains are abstract pattern-recognition machines. The engine that recognizes individual human faces is the same engine that sees animal shapes in clouds and inkblots. I think it’s always going to be subject to errors, particularly in high-stakes situations that require snap judgments: “He’s drawing a gun!” versus “He’s pulling out his wallet.”

Even if I don’t think Gladwell’s books quite live up to their hype, they’re informative, provocative, fascinating, and lucidly written.

For instance, his account of Sheena Iyengar’s research on consumer choice provided insight into something that’s intrigued me for the past decade. Iyengar found that customers given an opportunity to taste 6 jams in a store were far more likely to make a purchase than customers who had a chance to taste 24 different jams.

I’m a pseudo-vegetarian. This generally makes dining out straightforward: most of the menu is automatically excluded from consideration. I usually pick from the small set of available options rapidly and without much conscious deliberation. When I dine at a vegetarian or seafood specialty restaurant, I have a larger field to winnow. My selection process is radically different (and much slower). I typically try to find the entrée that maximizes features I like: the one with the ginger, tofu, and straw mushrooms. Sometimes I experience a kind of stress that’s unusual for me: no dish has the poblano pepper sauce, guacamole, and melted jack cheese; I can only get different combinations of two of those ingredients. Then I feel vaguely dissatisfied with a meal that I would unhesitatingly and happily choose if I had fewer options.

Iyengar’s research suggests that this behavior isn’t just me-being-weird. Gladwell’s synthesis provides a framework for understanding it: I “thin-slice” among a few choices, but not among a dozen.

*Of course, Gladwell has certainly “tipped” his own books, so maybe, just maybe, he knows something about hidden marketing levers that he’s not sharing.

the warren harding error error

In Blink, Gladwell devotes a chapter to exploring what he calls the “Warren Harding error.” He contends that the primary reason for Harding’s political success was that the man looked presidential.

Gladwell doesn’t apply this line of reasoning to politicians of the current era (although later he does quote Paul Ekman — who, with Wallace Friesen, assembled the “Facial Action Coding System — claiming that in 1992 he saw Clinton’s tendency for marital indiscretions literally written on his face.)

Whatever I thought of his policies or the abilities he brought to the job, I think I have to concede that Ronald Reagan looked presidential (at least some of the time). He was certainly always too much the gunslinger for my taste. But he could be dignified without entirely losing the humanizing mischievous twinkle in his eyes. If he’d been an actor cast in the role of the president, I think I could have bought it.

The real mystery is the election — twice, yet — of George Walker Bush. The presidential debates of 2004 crystallized this for me. John Kerry with his imposing height and resonant voice, looked and sounded presidential. His opponent looked like a used-car salesman by comparison: shifty-eyed, almost sneering, his voice often distinctly petulant if not actually whining.

And yet he won. Where are you now, oh Warren Harding error? Come back. We need you.

In other news, I took a few of the Implicit Association Tests Gladwell describes in the same chapter (it’s essentially the “be careful about judging books by their covers” segment of the book). Gladwell (and Greenwald, Banaji and Nosek, who developed the tool) claim that the test design is effective even when you know you’re being tested (unlike many sociological tests).

I’m not convinced. I took a test designed to identify an “implicit association” (e.g., an ingrained unconscious bias, more or less) for males/sciences and females/liberal arts. I was prompted by the survey I took beforehand to think fleetingly of famous scientists like Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie, and famous creative types like Julio Cortàazar and Pablo Picasso. My biggest problem was that every time I was shown the words “history” and “philosophy” I had to consciously think “soft science? or liberal art?” But taking the test to the best of my ability still produced outlying data.

Then I took a test to identify implicit associations between ethnic groups and positive and negative concepts. When I was told I was supposed to associate images of caucasian men with negative concepts and images of black men with positive concepts, I muttered “black, good; white, evil” under my breath. No sweat.

deli slices of security

I was initially critical of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink for not delivering on its implied promises, but I’ve revised my opinion of it substantially. It’s had a real impact on the way I think about certain types of situations. I still don’t think it provides a foolproof method for applying its principles, but it does offer tools for identifying problematic patterns in processes. As one example, it provides a framework for examining my misgivings about approaches to security in the post-September 2001 United States.

The administration argues that the lack of major terrorist incidents within the US demonstrates the effectiveness of the Homeland Security and Transportation Safety initiatives. This argument is obviously specious. The lack of a major incident in the first half of 2001 scarcely proved that the US was well-protected from a terrorist attack in the second half of the year. And the penetration of the new system by the “shoe bomber” and razor-blade-toting blog readers (for example) makes a strong case that the new system is not necessarily more effective at threat identification than the old system.

Back when the major concerns of airport security were preventing the influx of drugs and illegal (but peaceable) aliens, I was involved with a competitive bid to develop training for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. As part of the effort, members of our team accompanied INS personnel on airport security details and took some of the courses given to the agents. (For the record: all of the material I was exposed to was unclassified.) It was obvious that the most effective agents relied heavily on the sort of intuitive assessments Gladwell describes in Blink. In particular, they were very good at identifying people who had something to hide. Other people have written about the hazards of inexperienced personnel and over-reliance on trickable technology. But I wonder: does a process that makes all passengers nervous and uncomfortable make it fundamentally easier for people with malicious intent to slip through?

As part of my ongoing research on improving MBTA usability, I’ve been listening to the chatter between MBTA dispatchers, bus drivers, train operators, station managers, and other staff. Shortly before Christmas, toward the end of evening rush hour, I heard an exchange that that went like this:

We have an incident of an unattended package that has been sighted on the east platform of [station name].

About half a minute later, I heard the following reply:

A passenger forgot her package. She’s on her way back to the platform to retrieve it now. Please just let her get her bag.

In Gladwell’s parlance, I felt that I had ample opportunity to “thin slice” the conversation. The first speaker was officious, with a pseudo-military quality that verged on pompous. He used the passive voice and awkward, redundant, and jargon-y terminology.

The second speaker was clearly fed up with the first speaker. I had the distinct impression it wasn’t the first such conversation. The tone of voice — and the word “please” — suggested that the speaker thought it was unlikely that the woman would be allowed to get her bag back without additional hassle.

The second speaker had a good opportunity to make a realistic assessment of how likely the passenger was to pose a terrorist threat. The second speaker implied face-to-face contact with the passenger — who was probably cramming in last-minute shopping on the way home from work, and carrying one package too many. The first speaker was making decisions on the basis of a blurry picture on a monitor and (I suspect) a procedural manual revised in the wake of September 2001.

I’ve spent much of my career working on training products for state and federal agencies, and I think it’s likely that the new rule book specifies that any unattended package must got through the full threat evaluation procedure, no matter what the station manager recommends. After all, there’s always a chance that the station manager has somehow been coerced into making a false statement.

The problem is, this approach just doesn’t work. Being on high-alert forever is the same as not being on alert at all — people aren’t wired to maintain peak vigilance indefinitely. Procedures that are excessively cumbersome will eventually be disregarded. And while I understand that discounting the judgment of those closest to a potential threat situation may protect the MBTA from liability, I’m far from convinced that it’s the best way to actually increase the overall safety of the system.

Needs More Demons? No. I’m not even going to make a corny joke about devils in details.

Mostly, though, Roving Mars is a book about project management. Squyres often speaks, somewhat disconcertingly, about “doing science” as if science is merely a product of having assets correctly positioned, in the same way that a movie’s revenue is the product of having copies of the film in theatres. He admits that, from his perspective, one of the critical goals of the Spirit and Opportunity missions was to justify more Mars missions, in the same way a succesful product generates more demand in the marketplace.

Much of the ground Squyres covers will be familiar to anyone who’s manged a difficult project (perhaps especially a software development effort). He covers intial brainstorming; marketing and proposal development; forming strategic alliances with competitors; the struggle for budgetary, schedule, and manpower resources; risk mitigation strategies; motivational techniques; benefits and drawbacks of delegation and outsourcing; troubleshooting and quality assurance; and aproaches to consensus-building and fostering effective decision-making. It’s a fast and engaging read. Several chapters are written in the form of Squyres’ journal entries, which gives it a “you are there,” sort of immediacy. For a book about project management, it’s often surprisingly suspenseful and moving, and Squyres’ “boldly go where no one has gone before”-style enthusiasm is palpable.

Throughout he makes a solid case for his own talents as a manager (despite his penchant for tantrums). And throughout he reinforces my growing sense that there is something fundamentally and systemically wrong with the current best-practice management of complex engineering development efforts.

The Mars rover project is repeatedly stymied by mistakes that simply shouldn’t be made: instruments designed to work sideways but not upright, confusion between English and metric units, pieces that are fabricated to the wrong size. It’s perhaps especially disheartening to compare these errors to the highly-publicized mistakes NASA has made in recent history, from grinding the Hubble’s mirror to the wrong spec to the material science failures that cost the lives of space shuttle astronauts.

Also disturbing — but eerily familiar to me — was the degree to which the developers of the Mars rover software were unable to predict its behavior. I was shocked by how frequently the rover team was faced by problems I’ve faced with notoriously buggy commercial software. Computer that crashes as soon as it boots up? Been there, fixed that. Corrupted flash memory? Ate my second cellphone alive.

I’m convinced that the issue isn’t stupidity or incompetence on the part of the team, not just because these folks have high-falutin’ degrees in their fields, but also because every smart team I’ve had a chance to observe or directly work with — including some folks who made me feel positively dim — has made similarly obvious mistakes on sufficiently complex projects. On the biggest projects I’ve been associated with, it was sometimes painfully obvious that no single person understood the whole requirements document. I once saw a data entity diagram that covered a large conference room wall from floor to ceiling. I saw team members literally start sobbing when it became evident that fundamental assumptions underlying that diagram — which represented over a year of work and several million dollars — had never been valid.

I’ve begun to think of it as a big picture/little picture problem. When teams are stovepiped, each group can do its “little-picture” work and check and resolve its internal errors. On small, well-characterized projects, group leaders can grasp the “big picture” at a level of detail that permits identification and resolution of problems that cross group lines. But on projects that are bigger and more uncertain, it becomes impossible for anyone to grasp the gestalt of the project at a sufficient level of detail. Things start to slip through the cracks.

Since Malcolm Gladwell’s books — particularly The Tipping Point — have had more influence on my thinking than any others in a decade or so, I’m inclined to wonder if large engineering projects are being constrained by the fundamental limits of human cognition. I’m even tempted to wonder if Gladwell’s “magic number” 150 might crop up somewhere in a calculation of maximum manageable size.

I don’t think the problem is insoluble, but I think it calls for new techniques for asserting correctness. There are mathematical methods for “proving” the correctness of software. They’re seldom applied in the real world, partly because they’re cumbersome and expensive, but also, I think, because they rely on not changing requirements during development. I argue that since no one ever understands the requirements for complex projects, it’s almost inevitable that the requirements will change when one or more deficencies are identified midstream. My anecdotal experience suggests strongly that many serious engineering errors arise from failure to understand the consequences of a requirements change during the development cycle.

The engineering development process of the future should attack this problem from three angles:

• The requirements definition phase must systemically address the inability of humans to fully characterize the behavior of extremely complex systems.
• Throughout the development cycle it must embody consistency checks that prevent errors of the English/metric variety
• Throughout the development cycle it must explicitly maintain the constraints on its own behavior, so that flaws resulting from requirements changes are immediately evident.
  (Software often has implicit constraints, e.g., it only works if only one document is open. Currently, information about these constraints may only exist in the mind of a single developer.)

Two other takeaways from Roving Mars:

• Good golly, rocket scientists drink more than I would have guessed.
• Wow, a lot of Mars probes have just flat out disappeared. Some enterprising sci-fi writer ought to be able to get at least a short story out of the conceit that the Martians shoot down any probe that gets too close to their cities, and play games keeping just out of camera range of the ones they allow to land.

Needs More Demons? No, Squyres’ project is plenty bedevilled.