Culture Archives - Assert Digital Ventures

Is crypto the new Amway?

June 22, 2022June 22, 2022
by Andy

I’ve been critical of crypto for many years and, in particular, derivatives like NFTs. My evaluation was always simple through a product lens: what value does it create for what segment / what problem does it solve? Interestingly, when I’ve posed this to crypto advocates, I never get a clear answer (as a side note, I believe the blockchain tech belying crypto has interesting use-cases like chain-of-control for produce so this is mostly focused on crypto/NFTs). In addition, when knowing that the vast majority of crypto is held by a tiny minority of people, you start getting more nefarious thoughts about what is really going on.

This post by Lars Doucet on Noahpinion has some interesting points including the comparison between crypto and Amway.

Amway and crypto on the surface might not immediately seem similar. Amway was (allegedly) a convoluted system where you bought a bunch of products from them that you then sold to family and friends and eventually other customers, and then you recruited those same people to become part of your distribution network, forming your “downline.” Then you would (allegedly) encourage them to recruit more people of their own, forming their own downlines, which would nest inside of yours. From their perspective, you and everyone in the recruitment chain above you would form their “upline.”
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/is-web3-culture-similar-to-amway

My dollars (euros, etc) are already digital. I rarely transact with them physically. Do the transaction facilitation middle-men and clearing agents extract too high a fee? Perhaps, but I know its been coming down dramatically with newfound digital competition (and some regulation particularly in Europe). Plus, those fees fund the many layers of private and public monitoring and regulation which is fundamental to a high functioning financial system that crypto cannot replace (at least under current proposals).

BTW, this video terrifies me:

The rise and fall of rationality in language

January 28, 2022January 28, 2022
by Andy

Fascinating academic paper on the change in use of language over the past ~170 years. The short (if you don’t want to read) is that starting in the 1980s and accelerating in 2007, our use of rational language with facts notably declined and the use of emotional language increased. Not surprising. I can’t wait for the partisans to jump on this expressing their fact-avoid opinions:

After the year 1850, the use of sentiment-laden words in Google Books declined systematically, while the use of words associated with fact-based argumentation rose steadily. This pattern reversed in the 1980s, and this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118

Ten Reasons Why Big Firms Stick With Obsolete Management

October 14, 2020October 14, 2020
by Andy

A useful overview of what many of us have been talking about (including in MBA programs) in how changing the culture is the first step is moving away from legacy management strictures. Tech has mostly led this but large tech firms have created their own entrenched bureaucratic cultures.

The criticism of the Business Round Table (BRT) “head fake” statement in 2019 where major company CEOs said that maximizing shareholder value was no longer their sole focus is apt:

Since the declaration was issued, researchers have found no indication of significant change in corporate behavior. Harvard Law Professor Lucian Bebchuk and colleagues found that few of the signatories obtained the approval of their boards to sign the announcement. Nor has there been any apparent effort to change the many processes and practices that reinforce the goal of maximizing shareholder value. And in cases where the firm has had to make a clear choice between shareholders and other stakeholders, these firms have invariably chosen shareholders ahead of other stakeholders. Massive share buybacks that benefit shareholders, particularly executives, continue to flourish, even where there has been a collapse in profits. Bebchuk concludes that the BRT statement was signed “mostly for show.” Indeed, the declaration may be serving as a cover for an even tighter focus on shareholder returns. According to Professor Rajan, “Recent evidence even suggests that the corporations that [signed on to BRT statement] have been more likely to lay off workers in response to the pandemic, and less likely to donate to relief efforts.” The BRT declaration thus appears to have been a head fake, designed to deflect the negative press that 20^th Century management engenders. While the senior executives may use public statements to deflect criticism, their staff can see that all the old processes supporting shareholder value are still in place. So the safest thing for them to do is to go on acting as before.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2020/10/11/ten-reasons-why-big-firms-stick-with-obsolete-management

MBA program curricula criticism is also appropriate. Most programs are still bathed in 20th century management thinking. This is partially due to their legacy of being stamps of certification for large companies. That has been changing over the past decade as there are fewer company sponsored students. Freethinking around corporate culture change and responsive organizations is happening as we’re doing at NYU Stern but, given academia’s non-hierarchical structure, it takes time to change that culture as well.

We need more business leaders not only saying these things but putting them into practice.

Robots Welcome to Take Over, as Pandemic Accelerates Automation

April 11, 2020April 11, 2020
by Andy

As I talk about often, its cultural changes in society’s acceptance and changes in needs that drives new tech adoption, not the technology itself.

“Pre-pandemic, people might have thought we were automating too much,” said Richard Pak, a professor at Clemson University who researches the psychological factors around automation. “This event is going to push people to think what more should be automated.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/business/coronavirus-workplace-automation.html

Zuckerberg’s Jealousy Held Back Instagram and Drove Off Founders

April 9, 2020April 9, 2020
by Andy

Insightful article on the battle Kevin Systrom (Instagram founder) had with Zuckerberg post acquisition. Adds some color to what was playing out in the app experience. While this will continue to add to the Zuckerberg “legacy”, the more interesting element is how organization (and product philosophy for that matter) culture clash can lead to dysfunction even in light of a wildly successful product (and acquisition).

Systrom had never been one to criticize Zuckerberg in front of his employees. But after months of what he saw as obstruction and bigfooting, he wrote a long internal message to his team saying he disagreed vehemently with Zuckerberg’s undercutting of Instagram. By the fall of 2018, Systrom started confiding to his close friends that if Zuckerberg wanted to run Instagram like a mere department of Facebook, maybe it was time to let him. In the name of growth, Instagram adopted some of the strategies Systrom had blocked in the past, including pushing out frequent app notifications and aggressively promoting suggested people to follow. Time spent on the app returned to its typical levels; the Facebook strategies, which had seemed so cheap and anti-Instagram, worked.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-04-07/zuckerberg-s-jealousy-held-back-instagram-and-drove-off-founders

This is why hackathons are essentially useless

November 25, 2019
by Andy

I’ve long been skeptical about hackathons which has been reinforced by from my firsthand experience and talking to other tech leaders especially inside large traditional companies where these have become popular over the past decade. I like the metaphor that you can’t run a marathon to get into shape which is what this approach is. Idea generation should be fluid and facilitated at all times by all those working on customer needs (hopefully most of your organization).

Think of it this way: For every runaway success that came out of a hackathon, such as Facebook’s “like” button, there are many more ideas that ended up shoved in a drawer, archived in a folder, or, worse, tossed in the trash bin. For the majority of participants, these events that are intended to empower can end up being pretty discouraging.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90430416/this-is-why-hackathons-are-essentially-useless

They are often used not only to generate ideas but help morale allowing people the “fun” of spending a day or two out of their mundane job working on new cool things. The irony is that they end up hurting morale as people get really excited they’re onto something which then dies on the vine either due to lack of process to take the idea forward or lack of stakeholder support (I’ve seen too many where the only reason leadership was doing it was to make the company seem “cool” and help as a hiring talking point to really have it backfire into cynicism).

“Innovation theater” … describes the phenomenon of a company making a big show of driving innovation without putting much in the way of resources or substance behind it. In many ways, hackathons are a perfect example of this. They’re highly visible, simple to understand, and seem like an easy way for a company to check the “innovative” box. But what a hackathon doesn’t do is deliver much tangible return for the business or for the employee. It’s a misstep if you realize that after it’s over, all you’ve done is divert resources away from the day-to-day of your business to focus on projects that will never reach your clients.

Any innovation activity has to be contextualized with goals that align to the company’s. Otherwise, there will be lots of cool ideas which have little value. Initiatives with high ROI potential are what innovation activities should be about whether its incremental operational improvement or breakout ideas to move into adjacent businesses.

We’re still keeping channels open at an enterprise-wide level through initiatives such as an online idea submission forum, which allows an employee or team to submit any new ideas for review

The author isn’t clear on how they are organized for it but one mistake organizations make is thinking everyone can be an “innovator”. There are two problems with this:

People cannot hold both operational responsibility and expect to spend significant time researching new initiatives. The operational fire drills and goals will always suck up the oxygen.
Operational and R&D mindsets are notably different. The first brings in people who make today a bit better than yesterday and tomorrow better than today. The latter is all about an exploratory mindset to prove oneself wrong until you can’t (and then you have something). It involves a lot of trial and error throwing valuable work away. Not many people can work that way.

Ideas are cheap and should come from anywhere at any time — hopefully, mostly from customer research. What you need is a dedicated team with a strong iterative, test & learn process to incubate them and cast the vast majority of bad ones aside. I share the author’s idea of “investing” in new ideas by looking at ROI. However, that should not be the first step but only after there’s a problem-solution fit.

Public figures now speaking to affect SEO?

October 1, 2019
by Andy

If true, the really means we have crossed into a new domain with public figures choosing their speech to affect SEO and suppress negative stories. Unreal.

Within the space of an hour. This didn’t happen by luck. pic.twitter.com/Z6T7lCBdry
— Remoaning Myrtle #FBPE (@TheAndyMaturin) September 29, 2019

How Apple, the ultimate product company, is a functional…

September 17, 2019
by Andy

The org-du-jour for modern companies is rarely a functional one. Considered outdated as traditional 20th century tops down management, functional organizations are an outgrowth of the need for large functional workforces. When you needed to produce widgets at scale, you needed large numbers of workers, managers of those workers, managers of those managers and so on. The hierarchy and its function reinforced the structure: do what you do efficiently and leadership will ensure it comes together as an end product.

The rise of the knowledge worker, analog to digital transformation and automation changed that. Suddenly, businesses could achieve massive scale with a relatively light workforce. The new worker was not a heads down widget assembler but a highly educated person with ample tools and abilities to create. Thus, the hierarchy was both torn down not only by workers not wanting to be a cog in the wheel but also by managers cut from the same cloth willing to experiment to drive more innovation out of their quite able workforce.

Tech companies tended to lead this charge as massive margins and scale allowed them to toy in areas away from the core business but also retain highly valued employees by affording them flexibility and discretion, to a degree, over what they worked on. This tended to flatten organizations, push decision making down and tear out the base of the traditional hierarchy, mostly to great success, reinforcing its use. Many traditional companies — under pressure of and trying to replicate the innovation within tech companies — are wrestling with their own hierarchies. If not to bring this culture but also to attract and retain the highly valued top-tier knowledge worker.

Amongst tech companies, Apple is a notable outlier. They have retained and thrived under a mostly functional organizational structure and hierarchy. They have even resisted the trend to split into divisions with functional structures like Microsoft did. Some of this was born of tradition being one of the old guard tech organizations. However, how can a company thought of by many as the ultimate tech product organization, thrive with a structure many of their peers consider outdated?

One could argue that Apple is the ultimate manifestation of the functional organization due to their focus on a seamless customer experience. Many tech companies expand from a core base product (e.g. Google’s search, Facebook’s feed, Amazon’s e-commerce store) through ancillary products and services that leverage the network effect. As they experiment with other products, they build up mini-organizations that are mostly self-contained for each of those products. That allows them to iterate and evolve faster and somewhat independently of the core. This is a mostly successful strategy (esp for the three examples above).

However, there is a downside. If your core and side products evolve via largely independent teams, their experience will also diverge creating a disjointed customer experience. Google realized this a decade+ back as Gmail, Maps and GDrive/GDocs became major products. A user moving across them (if they even seamlessly could) might as well have been moving across lightly integrated offerings from different companies. Recognizing this weakness, a team of designers formed a group to unify the experience. It took years and I’m sure a lot of internal arm wrestling but the result was Material Design and now a (more) unified experience.

Apple is the epitome of the unified experience. They marshal a massive, highly skilled workforce to create focused products. They are rigorous about seamless integration through the whole experience which is often their only differentiation. The way they achieve this is at the top of the functional hierarchy. In many ways, this is Steve Jobs’ greatest legacy for the company. His, at times ruthless, focus on experience, unified his executives and thus his teams. They built highly focused and skilled organizations (e.g. chip engineering, user interface design, etc). Because no one (but the execs) had responsibility for the overall experience, they didn’t afford anyone to go off the farm from the core design. In fact, they often kept other functional teams in the dark about what the others were working on only agreeing to limited information and “interfaces” between them for necessary integration.

Thus, one could argue that Apple’s products are what they are due to the functional organization as opposed to being hindered by it. Is it replicable? Perhaps, but the argument that this is Jobs’ greatest legacy has merit. Over the decade or so since his direct involvement waned, the organizational design and culture continues but one could argue that the lack of innovation from Apple since — with mostly incremental and accessory products & services — is due to not having him drive the integrated experience over a functional organization from the top.

There Is No Tech Backlash

September 15, 2019
by Andy

This reminds me a bit of the adage “90% of people talk about privacy but only 10% do anything about it.” Maybe this is just emblematic of the depth of dependency (and its dependency in most cases, not addiction) on tech. The deepest I see is people now having an ability to avoid social situations around them by going to their device or using Facebook to connect when they feel they can’t connect to those around them. Deeply entrenched habits are not easily displaced (and remember that you never really lose a habit, it can only be replaced by something else).

It’s fun, and increasingly fashionable, to complain about technology. Our own devices distract us, others’ devices spy on us, social media companies poison public discourse, new wired objects violate our privacy, and all of this contributes to a general sense of runaway change careening beyond our control. No wonder there’s a tech backlash.
But, really, is there?
There certainly has been talk of a backlash, for a couple of years now. Politicians have discussed regulating big tech companies more tightly. Fines have been issued, breakups called for. A tech press once dedicated almost exclusively to gadget lust and organizing conferences that trot out tech lords for the rest of us to worship has taken on a more critical tone; a drumbeat of exposés reveal ethically and legally dubious corporate behavior. Novels and movies paint a skeptical or even dystopian picture of where tech is taking us. We all know people who have theatrically quit this or that social media service, or announced digital sabbaticals. And, of course, everybody kvetches, all the time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/opinion/tech-backlash.html

Shareholder Value Is No Longer Everything, Top C.E.O.s Say

August 20, 2019
by Andy

This is a subtle but important move saying corporations exist for all stakeholders. Finally chipping away at the narrowly focused Chicago-school of economic thought that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” that Milton Friedman proffered in 1970.

21st century companies need to be responsive. That doesn’t forgo profit and shareholder responsibility but that there’s a longer game which means that corporations have a broader responsibility to customers, employees and the environment generally. Having the Business Roundtable take this step is an important sea-change.

Nearly 200 chief executives, including the leaders of Apple, Pepsi and Walmart, tried on Monday to redefine the role of business in society — and how companies are perceived by an increasingly skeptical public.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/business/business-roundtable-ceos-corporations.html

Three years of misery inside Google, the happiest company…

August 18, 2019August 18, 2019
by Andy

There’s almost too much here to analyze but a good (long) summary of the changing culture of Google. They’re often cited as the modern company paradigm of transparency, autonomy and networks of employees. Seems to be unraveling 20 years on. Was the principle of not checking your personal views at the door a good one?

ON A BRIGHT Monday in January 2017, at 2:30 in the afternoon, about a thousand Google employees—horrified, alarmed, and a little giddy—began pouring out of the company’s offices in Mountain View, California. They packed themselves into a cheerful courtyard outside the main campus café, a parklike area dotted with picnic tables and a shade structure that resembles a giant game of pickup sticks. Many of them held up handmade signs: “Proud Iranian-American Googler,” “Even Introverts Are Here,” and of course, “Don’t Be Evil!” written in the same kindergarten colors as the Google logo.
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery-happiest-company-tech/