better?

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about two fictional students in our class, Rebecca and Felicity. I got a lot of feedback from that post; a ton of you guys reference my post in your own posts. I had a couple more thoughts since that post, and a couple of responses to things people had written. So here's Rebecca and Felicity Part II.

One of my favorite bloggers has written a series of posts about some of the distinctions he's seen between people. The one I find most applicable to this situation is a post on something he called Incrementalists & Completionists. It argues that people have two different ways of getting things done: some just want something done, and others want to make sure that that the things that gets done, whatever it is, is done right, and done right the first time.

The strikes me as basically the fundamental difference between Felicity and Rebecca. Felicity ready to jump in and do something, even without complete knowledge, while Rebecca views that as a dangerous approach and really wants to understand the situation. One of the posts that a classmate wrote mentioned that they saw the difference between Felicity and Rebecca as the fact that Felicity was a "doer" and Rebecca was, well... not. I feel like that paints Felicity in a positive light and Rebecca is the negative, which was never my intent, for a couple of reasons.

First off, I think that they're both "doers," they just "do" in very different ways. Felicity's an incrementalist. Rebecca probably thinks Felicity is reckless and isn't really "doing" anything but making a mess. Rebecca a completionist. It's not that she's not doing anything, it's that her "doing" involves a lot more prep work first. Rebecca views that as part of the "doing," not separate.

(As an aside, with the number of times I put "do"and "doing" in that paragraph, I feel a little bit like someone's going to think I'm talking about something else entirely...)

The second reason that, despite being a Felicity, I'm not so quick to put her in a fantastic light is that I'm seeing right now, firsthand, some of the negative consequences of Incrementalist type behavior. I first starting feeling sick maybe four weeks ago. I took it easy for a couple of days, but there were things to do, and I didn't want to leave them off, and I was busy. I was much sicker the next week, and I again took a few days off of classes. But then I didn't want to get too behind, so I went back at it, and relapsed again.

I've been so focused on not getting behind in the short-term that long-term, things are slipping a lot and I have now been sick for four weeks. Perhaps, in this instance, letting myself get completely well and only falling behind once would have been preferable.

problems aren't solutions

I'm a bioengineering major. The bioengineering program was only in its second year when I entered as a freshman, and as a result, our requirements for graduation were not particularly stable. Every semester, as it came time to enroll for new classes, we'd invariably get an email from our department advisor, telling us about new requirements that were being added, or old requirements that were being changed.

So it was that some semesters I was taking mechanical engineering classes, and then a couple in chemistry, and then the semester where we took our classes with electrical engineers and pre-med students. We all understood the intent. They wanted us to be as well-rounded as possible, and bioengineering was a huge field.

For some of us, that knowledge was enough. They were trying their best. Some of us, however, felt lost and confused. I picked my concentration of bioinformatics shortly after I got to college. I'd been debating between the bioengineering major and computer science since I first started applying to colleges, so picking the concentration that was a blend of the two seemed only natural.

Completing my concentration required five courses outside of the bioengineering core, two of them background math to help with the higher level courses, one a programming class for the same reason. I only actually had to take two bioinformatics courses, despite it being my concentration, what I'd claimed I wanted to base my life around.

I had to take three difference chemistry courses, and four in the mechanical engineering core. My course requirements stated that, for all that I'd declared by concentration to be in bioinformatics, I was going to take more classes two other different colleges than I was in bioinformatics at all.

I wasn't a particularly special case. Pretty much everyone had similar complains. The ones who wanted to be material scientists wondered why they were dissecting rabbits and the biomechanics people wanted to know why they were required to be able to build and EEG and know the theory behind it (four seperate courses taught this material.)

We did it, because we didn't have a choice, but I don't think very many of us were happy about it.

I know, Bioengineering is somewhat of a special case, but it highlighted for me a couple of problems that I think a lot of college curriculums face.

First of all, I really did take three different chemistry classes. The material in them, however, probably could have been covered in less than two semesters. We had a lot of overlap. I learned how to build an EEG from scratch twice, and a lot of the rules of physics we got again and again too. I had to take differential equations my freshman year, but by the time we got to the classes that used them (sophomore, junior, and senior years) our professors had (perhaps rightfully) decided that we'd forgotten what we'd learned in that class, and spent a couple of weeks just catching us up on the math.

There is a lot of repetition in a lot of course requirements. And it makes sense, in terms of hammering basic, essential skills into a student's head. But I'm a bioinformaticist. I program computers in my spare time. A lot fo the stuff that my curriculum spent a couple of years hammering into my head is not, and will never be, an essnetial basic skill for me. Am I happy for the exposure? Yes. It was interesting the first time. Was I happy to learn it twice more? No. Why did I need to learn this so badly again?

My other "big issue" cropped up when I decided to take a second major. All of my previously "free electives" were filled up trying to fit a second set of degree requirements. I took four or five classes from one of two technical cores every semester. Opportunities popped up. Did I want to take this cool project course? How about this one on design? How about an indepedent study on leadership? Intuitive user interfaces? I did, in fact. I had the prerequisites. I'd learned enough at this point to know that leadership, project management, design, and user interfaces were going to be key to my success in the professional world.

Did I take any of them? No. I was too busy taking my thrid chemistry class, thermodynamics for the second time, and an "advanced" computer architecture course, even though I never cared about the innards workings of the computer in the first place. It was, to say the least, incredibly frustrating.

None of this suggests a solution.

I don't think the solution is cutting classes across the board. Maybe differntial equations and three chem classes weren't useful for me, but they were for someone else. In my ideal world, the "solution" is an extremely heavy emphasis on personalized curriculum, and dedicated academic advisors that make sure the personalizations make sense and offer great advice. The problem with this being that that's incredibly unrealistic and next to impossible to scale.

I think, in the end, as much as I don't want to say this, that the colleges are trying to do the best they can, and probably succeeding. I don't like it, and I'm frustrated a lot, but the entire University doesn't revolve around me. In the real world, there are limited resources. In the real world, everything isn't fair and perfect.

I've gotten what I needed out of college by supplmenting my curriculum with extracurriculars and the two electives I was able to take. It's not ideal, but it worked, and I learned a lot. I still think there's a problem, but lacking a solution, I'm not sure that it's fair for me to demand that something changes.

complete rough draft

Subtitled, "The difference between smart and smart"

Intro and conclusion changed, and the section on the Rule of 150 actually finished. New theme of the idea of "people-smart" and how Gladwell's book is "people-smart" but not the traditional academic sense of smart. It's still rough, most of the middle section needs to be revised, but it's actually complete.

--

There’s a traditional definition of “smart” in the academic sense. It means that you’ve got a thorough grasp of the content that you’re studying, that you’re capable of answering questions correctly. We frequently measure this concept of “smart” by looking at grades and test scores. We put the kids that score highly enough in special programs and honors classes. It’s an easy, objective way to measure intelligence. Give a bunch of people the same questions, and you can pick out the “smartest” ones easily – they answered the most questions correctly. I was one of the smart kids, picked for the honors classes, and getting straight A’s in all my classes. I was good at school. But that didn’t make me “good” in a general sense. People didn’t really take to me. I was very much a loner. I wasn’t popular. I wasn’t overly friendly, and I wasn’t really a leader in groups. I wasn’t would you would call a “people person.” Through elementary, middle, and even high school, it was rare for me to have more than a couple of people that I actually considered friends. I wasn’t particularly uninteresting or awkward, and there were certainly a lot of people that intersected my world, but I didn’t really stick to many of them and they didn’t really stick to me.

The people who know me now will laugh at the girl that I used to be, because not only is working with people part of my job, it’s also something I do easily and willingly. I’m also not a straight-A student, and the only reason that I’m still in honors programs is because reputation sticks around. I get C’s in my classes, but I am a leader in a number of student organizations. I’d still consider myself “good” at school – a different definition of school, where I know that I’m getting a lot out of it. And I’ve lost a lot of the traditional markings of being a “smart” kid, but in a lot of ways, I’m a lot smarter than I ever was growing up. Smart isn’t a one-dimensional thing, and there’s the concept of being smart at people, at understanding relationships and dynamics that can’t be tested in the traditional sense.

Something changed in my life, that tipped me from the traditionally smart category into something more akin to “people smart.” The tipping point for my life, one might say, was coming to college. I became subtly more interesting, gained a tiny more experience in dealing with people, and was exposed to a few more people than I had been most of the time in previous years. I grew less concerned with grades and more concerned with experiences. There were no life-changing moments, but something changed (in my life, at least) pretty significantly.

This is the premise of Malcom’s Gladwell’s bestselling book, The Tipping Point. In it, Gladwell argues that a couple of simple rules are all that in takes to explain a number of huge phenomena. He weaves a story around anecdotes, witty titles, a smattering of science, and incredibly persuasive writing. Gladwell calls his three rules “The Law of the Few,” “The Stickiness Factor,” and “The Power of Context” and claims that they are all that is needed to understand how epidemics start and spread. For the most part, the Law of the Few talks about the “who”s of epidemics, The Stickiness Factor talks about the “what” of epidemics, and the “Power of Context” talks about the “where” of epidemics, with a healthy dose of how the people in those environments impact them. Gladwell comes off as incredibly peoplesmart. And his book, to me, came off as incredibly peoplesmart. But entirely traditional-dumb.

Being a “people person” it is people that fascinate me, and Gladwell’s chapters on people and their role in this epidemic phenomena that I found both most interesting and troubling. Particularly the second and fifth chapters, on “The Law of the Few” and the second half of “The Power of Context,” respectively. Both of these chapters have a large focus on people, special people and people in groups, if I’m being specific, but I mostly picked them because they were the two I related to most when reading the book. Each of these chapters, besides being interesting, does a good job of highlighting the general themes of Gladwell’s writing that I feel a need to comment on.

The Tipping Point wasn’t the first of Gladwell’s books that I read. It was the second, and I was incredibly excited when I picked it up, because I had loved the first. Gladwell is an incredibly entertaining writer, and after picking up one of his books, I find them hard to put down. The science is transparent to a non-technical audience, the anecdotes shared are always intriguing and sometimes something more – Gladwell does a great job of telling a story that his audience will care about, even without knowing any of the players in the story. If he were to write a fiction novel, it would probably go on my must-read list.

But here’s my problem with Gladwell. A lot of the time it seems that he’s not writing anything more than fiction. I said that his stories were interesting, and that’s not something that I want to take back. However, sometimes they seem to be little more than padding around a supposedly important point that he doesn’t have enough evidence to actually back up. I also said that his science was transparent. I feel that too often, his science is transparent because it’s incredibly flimsy. As an engineer, I respect data, and a lot of the time, Gladwell just doesn’t have it. Compelling observations yes, but even observing the same thing five times in a row doesn’t make it a fact. Obviously, the study of human behavior is not the exact science that physics is, but I still feel as though Gladwell takes too many liberties. That said, I finished the book with interest, and can’t help but see the themes that Gladwell points out in my own life.

Chapter Two of Gladwell’s book “The Law of the Few” is a section detailing a few special people that Gladwell calls Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. There’s a few people in my life who I think best fit these categories. Each of these people have affected my life in various ways, but past my own life, I see the traits that Gladwell identifies as impacting many of the people around me too. I plan on summarizing Gladwell's main points through talking about each of these people. I'm not entirely sure that I feel like actually identifying them, so for anonymity's sake... I think my friends Laura and Peter are Connectors, I think Nate is a Maven, and I'd say Adam is a Salesmen. All of them have had incredibly success at school, but, with the exception of Nate, their grades have all sucked. They also all have great jobs.

Shortly after I moved out to Seattle for a summer internship, a couple of my newfound friends took me out for a night on the town. We met up with some of their friends from back at school, and when I was introduced, I was met with, “Oh, you go to the University of Illinois? Do you know Peter?” In fact I did know Peter, and I wasn’t particularly surprised that these random strangers did either. Just like I wasn’t particularly surprised when I went to visit my boyfriend at his dorm one night, and found a bunch of my friends from high school there, hanging out with girl named Laura that I’d met the first week of classes. Gladwell introduces Connectors as people with incredibly large social networks, people who are masters of something he terms “the weak tie,” an ability to remain acquaintances with an incredibly large number of people across time and space. These people, Gladwell claims, are incredibly important to an epidemic, because they have they contact with an incredibly large number of people, the number of people necessary for an idea to gain enough spread quick enough to take hold. Laura and Peter are people smart.

Of course, even if an idea reaches the critical number of people, it doesn’t go anywhere if someone doesn’t collect and process said information. Gladwell coins another term for the type of people who hoard information constantly, passing it out as necessary. He calls them Mavens, and reading his description, I couldn’t think of anyone else but my friend Nate. Nate is the guy I call pretty much anytime I have a question, it doesn’t matter what it happens to be about, I’ve gotten good advice about technology, design, business, and law. Nate has an opinion about everything, and he can back it up with at least two distinct references. He’s also happy to go to dinner to talk about any issue more thoroughly. In fact, I can’t really imagine making any major decision these days without consulting Nate. I know that even if he disagrees with me, I’m going to receive a lot of good information to think about. People like Nate, claim Gladwell, are what gives an idea enough weight to actually mean something.

Nate isn’t always someone I agree with, even after consuming his wealth of knowledge. But Adam is. I met Adam late one Wednesday night, after a meeting for an organization that I had just joined. He asked if I would be interested in taking on some responsibilities in the organization. I tentatively said yes. Less than twenty-four hours later, not only had my responsibilities quadrupled, I was ecstatic about it, and hoping for more. This is what Adam did to people. He was contagious, and he could convince you of just about anything. Gladwell calls people like my friend Adam “Salesmen” and I couldn’t agree more. For an epidemic to stick, you need more than just the spread of an issue, and more than just information about that issue. You need the issue to matter, and that is what Adam did. He made me care about something that I had been completely unaware of an hour before, and care in a way that it suddenly became the center of my life. Adam is incredibly peoplesmart.

I can’t deny the effect that each of these people have had on my life, and I don’t want to. Have they gotten me involved in social “epidemics” because of their presence? This I’m not sure about. Certainly, Adam was able to get me into something that I didn’t care about before, but it was mostly for his benefit (the work I was doing was, in reality, his work that he had delegated). Nate is, definitely, my go-to source for information, and I’m sure that I’ve learned things from him that I wouldn’t otherwise. And I know perfectly well that Laura and Peter have touched many, many more lives than I probably ever will. And yet, I can’t think of a single epidemic that I have been a part of because of their effect on my life. Maybe these people aren’t perfect examples of Gladwell’s special “Few,” but I guess I sense motivation issues behind the whole question. Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen certainly could start an epidemic – if they were so inclined.

In this section I also have a few critiques of Gladwell and some of his methods. I guess my issue is that I see these people in my life, after the topic is on my mind because I've been reading about them. Would I otherwise? Most of the chapter is anecdotes about a few people, and while stories are a very nice place to start, I feel that after introducing them, Gladwell generally doesn't switch to hard data, he just makes his conclusions off of his stories. I'm not sure that these three types of people aren't superimportant in causing epidemics (after all, they have had noted effects on my life), but I feel like I could probably make up a fourth or fifth and get people nodding along with me that these people exist and have an important role in epidemics. I don't disagree with Gladwell, but I also don't tend to assume that we have the whole picture from seven or eight datapoints.

Gladwell spends a later chapter of his book talking about the "Rule of 150." This is something I feel a little safer getting behind. Despite Maxwell's prevalent writing style of story after story, this was something I was familiar with before reading the book, that I've seen in a number of contexts. Personally, it's one of the main topics that came up at an interview I did last year with a University alumni who now works at a data visualization company out in California. It feels less like a cool concept that Gladwell popped some pretty names on and more like an actually verifiable finding with data behind it.

While I liked the topic, I did have a problem with Gladwell’s placement of the chapter. He calls it part II of a study of context, that it’s an example of how environment impacts ideas. And yes, the number of people in an environment are definitely a factor. The chapter still felt like a stretch. Group size is an incredibly well-studied phenomenon, and it definitely affects the relationships between those in said group. But I’d call it a study on group dynamics rather than environment. Maybe a subtle distinction, but it seems to be a subtle tell to the fact that Gladwell is trying to make his ideas neat, pretty, and easy to turn into soundbites. People are messy sometimes. Ideas are messy. A book about them has to be a little messy if it wants to be honest.

Sidenotes aside, I totally believe that the Rule of 150 is valid. When I interviewed my alumni friend, he talked about how his company had changed as it grew. He joined the company in its start-up phase, as one of its early employees. The company has since grown to over that magic 150 number. My friend mentioned how weird the day was when he walked past someone in the hall that he didn’t know. He had always been an extroverted person, and had connections across the company’s various divisions. And yet, when they hit 150 employees, he just couldn’t keep tabs on everyone. It was actually a bit of a minor crisis for him, to realize that he was now pouring his life into a company along with some complete strangers. My friend was smart. People-smart, extraverted and out-going, but he couldn’t keep up with an endlessly growing social network.

Gladwell talks about this 150 number, and the effect it has on social networks. It was through no failing of my friend. Study after study, Gladwell tells us, has shown that we, as human beings, are just not capable of maintaining social connections with a group beyond this number. They start breaking down. Gladwell talks about the effects that the breakdown and lack of communication have on a group. They’re no longer cohesive, they can no longer act as a unit with unified purpose. In order to start an epidemic, Gladwell claims, groups of this 150 size are essential. Too much bigger and suddenly they’re not all talking about the same thing, the groups splinter, and the momentum dies. In another sense, groups of 150 people or less can be smart. Past that, they start getting dumber.

My own social network, depending on what site you ask, is either eight people or around one hundred twenty or almost six hundred. And it’s true, what Gladwell talks about. The first two groups of people, with the people skills I’ve developed, with the types of people I’ve identified in each of those groups, my own Salesmen, Mavens, and Connectors, I think that, if I had a mission, I could, for the most part, get those groups to adopt and take it to heart. But not the 600 person one. It’s too big, too fractured. It’s not a real social network, it’s a representation of a bunch of networks that I belong to.

It’s been a number of months since I read “The Tipping Point,” and I still find that there are days when I’m thinking or talking about Gladwell’s ideas. I loved a lot of what Gladwell had to say about people. I don’t know if I loved it because it was “true” or “smart” or “correct” – but I was generally able to agree, and relate it to the people in my life. Heck, a lot of what he said I was able to relate to myself. I don’t know if it’s because I spend a lot of time studying myself or because my social network at this point is pretty big. The book bugged the hell out of me because it wasn’t traditional “smart” – it doesn’t follow a rigorous scientific method at pretty much any point, though it tries really hard to pretend it’s good science.

But just like people can be different types of smart, so can this book. Without proving most of what it says, it manages to produce ideas that generally ring true, to identify people that we all know. Huge groups don’t work, we know that. Some people are better at people than other people. Connectors can keep groups cohesive, Mavens can spread information between them, and Salesman can get them to act (of course, as long as the groups not too big). So if Gladwell’s book isn’t the straight-A student, it’s probably that kid in the back who is maybe goofing off a little, but has got ideas and his club just raised $1000 off of one of them. And sometimes, it’s not so bad being that kid. Overall, I'd recommend the book, because it's a fun read, but only if you've got someone to sit down and think critically through it with you (maybe one of those traditionally smart kids.)

rebecca + felicity

I'm not sure what happened in class yesterday, but I have some thoughts. A lot of thoughts actually. And I know that they're not everyone's opinions. The following two pieces are about yesterday's class session, where we starting trying to put together a class project. They're from the perspective of two fictional students in our class. I'm sure that it's pretty obvious who I'd tend to side with, but writing the other side (which I did first) didn't feel particularly ridiculous, and it made writing the second half a lot harder. Turns out that when you spend some amount of time disagreeing with yourself, it's hard to completely agree with yourself.

So, here you go...

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Rebecca sat down excitedly, pulling out her notebook and a pen. Of course, no one could tell that she was any more excited than usual, she wasn't the type to let that spill out. School was serious business. It always had been, and Rebecca had always taken that to heart. It was the only opportunity she'd have in her life to devote her sole attention for years to soaking up knowledge that would serve her later.

Last week's class sessions had been great. A couple of students had been missing, especially one of the louder ones, who always seemed to jump on every question before it had been fully asked. Rebecca didn't really understand that. Sometimes she liked to berate herself for not thinking on her feet, but in later years, she'd come to peace with the fact that she was methodical in her thinking. In fact, she was proud of it, and it was a skill she'd cultivated. Still, that didn't make it easy to jump into discussions that were moving by leaps and bounds when she was still considering the original question, turning it over in her head a couple of times, looking at it from all possible angles.

Today they were going to start talking about the class project. Rebecca had been waiting for awhile for the chance to start tying all the threads they'd talked about together. It was a huge project to tackle, with a lot of angles that had to be considered. And it wasn't just stuff from previous class sessions, there was the information from the professor's posts, and from critically thinking about the interviews.

The professor started out the class with one of the topics from his recent blog posts that they hadn't gotten a chance to discuss yet. Rebecca had actually spent a lot of time thinking about it when it was posted, and the professor brought up a lot of good points. These were questions that we needed to keep in mind when formulating our final class project. Things to consider to keep the project in the realm of reality instead of careening off into an "ideal" world.

There were other students who clearly didn't get it. The loud one from last week kept asking what the point was of this discussion. "Wouldn't the details matter more after there was a clear view of the project?" No, thought Rebecca. Well, that wasn't strictly true. Yes, the details were going to matter after they were deeper into the project. But talking about them now - and they weren't even details - they were... snapshots to consider - made sure that they were basing the project on what they knew of successful and unsuccessful models. It gave the class more angles to consider so they didn't all rush in blindly from one side and forget some important aspect that made their chosen avenue impossible.

Halfway through the class, the loud ones got their way. Rebecca was dismayed. What was happening now was a mockery of the education process. There was clearly a reason that the professor had been leading the class session as he was. And even if it wasn't clear to them, didn't they at least have enough respect for the professor to let him continue? He hadn't asked for help, in fact, he kept telling the students that their concerns were heard, that they'd be circled back to later. What was wrong with these people?

The class ended. The last half hour had been a whirlwind. There were some concrete project ideas, sure, but the students were scattered across the room and not talking to each other anymore. Were the ideas coherent? Had all the loose ends been tied up? Not at all. And Rebecca felt pretty lost. Was getting to this messy state so quickly worth throwing away another couple hours of discussion that would have also led to concrete project ideas with a lot clearer focus? Rebecca didn't think so. But the loud ones always won.

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Felicity dropped her bag on the floor and propped up her feet on the desk. She'd been excited for this day since she first read the class description on the CHP website many, many months ago. She'd loved school when she was little, but college had disillusioned her somewhat. The classes seemed disconnected, nobody seemed to care about the big picture. She'd been itching for awhile to do something about it.

Not that Felicity tended to have a lot of trouble doing things. She was definitely one of those people who got things done. It was commented on in every review that she'd ever had. She was the person who was off busy making a prototype before anyone else had even settled on what the problem really was. And it got her in trouble sometimes. She acted too quickly, spoke too quickly, and sometimes tried to solve problems that weren't really there while missing glaring issues. Still, it was something she was proud of. Her ability to get to a solution, even if it wasn't perfect. A lot of times, that was the jump-start a group needed to really start making progress.

Today they were going to start talking about the class project. The entire reason that Felicity had taken the class in the first place. Well, besides the fact that she needed it to graduate. It was an exciting project to tackle, a lot of areas that Felicity saw needing serious improvement. It was time to bring everything they'd talked about together and actually do something. Something real. Felicity had had enough of the theory behind change. She wanted to create it now.

The professor started out the class with one of the topics from his recent blog posts that they hadn't gotten a chance to discuss yet. Felicity was antsy, and even more so when the discussion kept heading down that path, careening wildly off of "come up with a class project" into "discuss the theory behind it and some details that may or may not be relevant" quickly. This wasn't a "ideal" world, it was one where they had six weeks, and needed to get something done.

There were other students who clearly didn't get it. They entertained the professor's questions, seemingly forgetting that this was supposed to be a discussion that defined the class project. Then, finally, a light in the dark: "Wouldn't the details matter more after there was a clear view of the project?" YES! The class didn't know what the project was, how could they know which details mattered, let alone what the answers to those detail questions were? You can't understand which parts of your model need to be explored deeply when you don't even have a model! Felicity was incredibly frustrated when this concern was set aside. More than frustrated, she was bewildered.

Halfway through the class, something changed. Felicity was incredibly relieved. A couple of students had taken control of the class. The train was back on the tracks to "projectville" instead of wandering around in some really pretty meadows. If this class session was going to have any value, those students had done what needed to be done. It was clear that the professor wasn't exactly sure where he was going, and we didn't have time for that anymore. Six weeks left in the class, it was time to stop talking about abstracts, and just do something. Anything.

The class ended. The last half hour had been a whirlwind. But an amazingly fun one. There were concrete project ideas now, and the students were split up into groups that were working on something that they cared about. The students were energized. The class was going to be a success. Felicity was excited. Frustrated that they'd wasted the first half of class, but at least it had gotten turned around. Who cared if the ideas weren't perfect? They were real ideas. And something was going to get done.

anonymous

When I started this blog, I didn't bother to make it anonymous. You can look at the username I used for it, the identifying information that I posted. Heck, in my first post I gave everyone a decent snapshot of my life.

I shared a few of the paragraphs I had written with a friend, because I liked the way I'd strung certain phrases together. And he asked me, "Is this public?" I told him that of course it was, I had nothing to hide, it was just for class. He pointed out a few things, how easy it was, even though I'd been vague, to piece together exactly who and what I was talking about in some places. He was right, and it wasn't information that I intended to make public.

I made one change very quickly. Search engines can no longer index this blog. Yes, some of them still have an archive, and will until stuff gets re-crawled, (search engines are fascinating!) but for the most part, this blog is a lot easier to find unless you have a link to it, which is entirely possible for the people in this class, but a lot less likely for the internet as a whole.

I am pretty open in this blog. The consequence is that I'm limiting the number of people that have easy access to it as much as possible. And that's not necessarily a good thing. Writing on the internet has a lot of advantages: it's easy to share, it's easy to provide links to other relevant things. It's easy to become relevant to someone who had no idea that you exist.

But it's hard to be completely honest. And I'm not. I talked about this in an earlier post. I'm not completely honest even though I've done some amount of locking my blog down to the general public. I might be completely honest if no one was reading this, but if I'm being completely honest, I wouldn't be writing this if no one was reading it.

I've got another journal out there on the interwebs, and that one is a hell of a lot more anonymous. And a lot more public. I'm pretty sure that any of you could read it and you would have no idea for one second that it was me. I'm a lot more honest there. Emotionally open and such. And I'm a lot less honest too, because nobody who reads that blog has any idea of where I go to school, or what classes I take. Heck, while they could probably figure out that I lived in the United States, that's about all the location-narrowing they could do. And the only reason they might guess that my name doesn't start with a 'Z' is because very few peoples' do.

I guess what I'm saying here is that there's a tradeoff between being open and honest and being publicly identified. I think a lot of the biggest gains from the internet come from the freely-sharing of ideas and crossing of communication boundaries and the raw honesty that someone can share when nobody knows who they are. I think the biggest losses from the internet come from the lack of honest, personal connection from people that comes when nobody knows who you are.

This blog has a little of both. I'm real, I'm a real person, who all know who I am. Maybe not everything about me, but something. At that both means that what I write means more to you than some random stranger, and that what I write is a lot more guarded because it's attached to my name.

I don't think there's a "best way to deal" with this, because I think it's one of those trade-offs that you can't get around. What's the best way to deal with having an awesome car and actually having money? Decide which is more important to you or win the lottery.

Best way to deal with being open in the internet age? Decide what's important to you early on, or stay off the internet.

really rough draft

Growing up, I wasn’t would you would call a “people person.” Through elementary, middle, and even high school, it was rare for me to have more than a couple of people that I actually considered friends. I wasn’t particularly uninteresting or awkward, and there were certainly a lot of people that intersected my world, but I didn’t really stick to many of them and they didn’t really stick to me. The people who know me now will laugh at the girl that I used to be, because not only is working with people part of my job, it’s also something I do easily and willingly. The tipping point, for my social life, one might say, was coming to college. I became subtly more interesting, gained a tiny more experience in dealing with people, and was exposed to a few more people than I had been most of the time in previous years. There were no life-changing moments, but something changed (in my life, at least) pretty significantly.

This is the premise of Malcom’s Gladwell’s bestselling book, The Tipping Point. In it, Gladwell argues that a couple of simple rules are all that in takes to explain a number of huge phenomena. He weaves a story around anecdotes, witty titles, a smattering of science, and incredibly persuasive writing. Gladwell calls his three rules “The Law of the Few,” “The Stickiness Factor,” and “The Power of Context” and claims that they are all that is needed to understand how epidemics start and spread. For the most part, the Law of the Few talks about the “who”s of epidemics, The Stickiness Factor talks about the “what” of epidemics, and the “Power of Context” talks about the “where” of epidemics, with a healthy dose of how the people in those environments impact them.

Since becoming more of a “people person” it is people that fascinate me, and Gladwell’s chapters on people and their role in this epidemic phenomena that I found both most interesting and troubling. Particularly the second and fifth chapters, on “The Law of the Few” and the second half of “The Power of Context,” respectively. Both of these chapters have a large focus on people, special people and people in groups, if I’m being specific, but I mostly picked them because they were the two I related to most when reading the book. Each of these chapters, besides being interesting, does a good job of highlighting the general themes of Gladwell’s writing that I feel a need to comment on.

The Tipping Point wasn’t the first of Gladwell’s books that I read. It was the second, and I was incredibly excited when I picked it up, because I had loved the first. Gladwell is an incredibly entertaining writer, and after picking up one of his books, I find them hard to put down. The science is transparent to a non-technical audience, the anecdotes shared are always intriguing and sometimes something more – Gladwell does a great job of telling a story that his audience will care about, even without knowing any of the players in the story. If he were to write a fiction novel, it would probably go on my must-read list.

But here’s my problem with Gladwell. A lot of the time it seems that he’s not writing anything more than fiction. I said that his stories were interesting, and that’s not something that I want to take back. However, sometimes they seem to be little more than padding around a supposedly important point that he doesn’t have enough evidence to actually back up. I also said that his science was transparent. I feel that too often, his science is transparent because it’s incredibly flimsy. As an engineer, I respect data, and a lot of the time, Gladwell just doesn’t have it. Compelling observations yes, but even observing the same thing five times in a row doesn’t make it a fact. Obviously, the study of human behavior is not the exact science that physics is, but I still feel as though Gladwell takes too many liberties. That said, I finished the book with interest, and can’t help but see the themes that Gladwell points out in my own life.

Chapter Two of Gladwell’s book “The Law of the Few” is a section detailing a few special people that Gladwell calls Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. There’s a few people in my life who I think best fit these categories. Each of these people have affected my life in various ways, but past my own life, I see the traits that Gladwell identifies as impacting many of the people around me too. I plan on summarizing Gladwell's main points through talking about each of these people. I'm not entirely sure that I feel like actually identifying them, so for anonymity's sake... I think my friends Laura and Peter are Connectors, I think Nate is a Maven, and I'd say Adam is a Salesmen.

Shortly after I moved out to Seattle for a summer internship, a couple of my newfound friends took me out for a night on the town. We met up with some of their friends from back at school, and when I was introduced, I was met with, “Oh, you go to the University of Illinois? Do you know Peter?” In fact I did know Peter, and I wasn’t particularly surprised that these random strangers did either. Just like I wasn’t particularly surprised when I went to visit my boyfriend at his dorm one night, and found a bunch of my friends from high school there, hanging out with girl named Laura that I’d met the first week of classes. Gladwell introduces Connectors as people with incredibly large social networks, people who are masters of something he terms “the weak tie,” an ability to remain acquaintances with an incredibly large number of people across time and space. These people, Gladwell claims, are incredibly important to an epidemic, because they have they contact with an incredibly large number of people, the number of people necessary for an idea to gain enough spread quick enough to take hold.

Of course, even if an idea reaches the critical number of people, it doesn’t go anywhere if someone doesn’t collect and process said information. Gladwell coins another term for the type of people who hoard information constantly, passing it out as necessary. He calls them Mavens, and reading his description, I couldn’t think of anyone else but my friend Nate. Nate is the guy I call pretty much anytime I have a question, it doesn’t matter what it happens to be about, I’ve gotten good advice about technology, design, business, and law. Nate has an opinion about everything, and he can back it up with at least two distinct references. He’s also happy to go to dinner to talk about any issue more thoroughly. In fact, I can’t really imagine making any major decision these days without consulting Nate. I know that even if he disagrees with me, I’m going to receive a lot of good information to think about. People like Nate, claim Gladwell, are what gives an idea enough weight to actually mean something.

Nate isn’t always someone I agree with, even after consuming his wealth of knowledge. But Adam is. I met Adam late one Wednesday night, after a meeting for an organization that I had just joined. He asked if I would be interested in taking on some responsibilities in the organization. I tentatively said yes. Less than twenty-four hours later, not only had my responsibilities quadrupled, I was ecstatic about it, and hoping for more. This is what Adam did to people. He was contagious, and he could convince you of just about anything. Gladwell calls people like my friend Adam “Salesmen” and I couldn’t agree more. For an epidemic to stick, you need more than just the spread of an issue, and more than just information about that issue. You need the issue to matter, and that is what Adam did. He made me care about something that I had been completely unaware of an hour before, and care in a way that it suddenly became the center of my life.

I can’t deny the effect that each of these people have had on my life, and I don’t want to. Have they gotten me involved in social “epidemics” because of their presence? This I’m not sure about. Certainly, Adam was able to get me into something that I didn’t care about before, but it was mostly for his benefit (the work I was doing was, in reality, his work that he had delegated). Nate is, definitely, my go-to source for information, and I’m sure that I’ve learned things from him that I wouldn’t otherwise. And I know perfectly well that Laura and Peter have touched many, many more lives than I probably ever will. And yet, I can’t think of a single epidemic that I have been a part of because of their effect on my life. Maybe these people aren’t perfect examples of Gladwell’s special “Few,” but I guess I sense motivation issues behind the whole question. Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen certainly could start an epidemic – if they were so inclined.

In this section I also have a few critiques of Gladwell and some of his methods. I guess my issue is that I see these people in my life, after the topic is on my mind because I've been reading about them. Would I otherwise? Most of the chapter is anecdotes about a few people, and while stories are a very nice place to start, I feel that after introducing them, Gladwell generally doesn't switch to hard data, he just makes his conclusions off of his stories. I'm not sure that these three types of people aren't superimportant in causing epidemics (after all, they have had noted effects on my life), but I feel like I could probably make up a fourth or fifth and get people nodding along with me that these people exist and have an important role in epidemics. I don't disagree with Gladwell, but I also don't tend to assume that we have the whole picture from seven or eight datapoints.

Gladwell spends a later chapter of his book talking about the "Rule of 150." This is something I feel a little safer getting behind. Despite Maxwell's prevalent writing style of story after story, this was something I was familiar with before reading the book, that I've seen in a number of contexts. Personally, it's one of the main topics that came up at an interview I did last year with a University alumni who now works at a data visualization company out in California. It feels less like a cool concept that Gladwell popped some pretty names on and more like an actually verifiable finding with data behind it.

However, on a quick note first, whhhat does this have to do with context?

(Paragraph on Ari visiting and what we talked about)

(Paragraph on what Gladwell actually says)

(My life as a “people person”, and how does this relate?)

Finally, I want to conclude the review by hopefully drawing some conclusions between the special types of people and their impact on the groups talked about the later chapter. Probably another quick mention of my likes and dislikes of Gladwell if I don't feel like I'm beating a dead horse. Overall, I think I'd recommend the book, because it's a fun read, but only if you've got someone to sit down and think critically through it with you.

getting it right

At the company where I've spent my last two summers, alignment is A Big Deal. At the end of every fiscal year, upper management for each group gets together and makes a set of commitments, which are then announced to the next level of management, who makes another set of commitments for their group that relate to the overall organization's commitments, all the way down to each individual employee, who makes a set of commitments for the year that (supposedly) align with the commitments of every sub-group that he's a part of, all the way up the chain.

Even as an intern, it was my responsibility, within the first two weeks of my arrival, to come up with a set of goals for the summer that aligned with the organization's greater aims. (Typing it out like this sounds a little bit creepy, and maybe like the "company" I was working for was actually a cult.)

The first summer that I worked there, I was approximately three degrees of terrified about writing these commitments. I didn't know if they'd be good enough, make sense, get approved, yadda yadda yadda. After all, they were my first real assignment at my first real job, and I had no idea what to expect. There was even a fancy form that we had to submit these goals of ours, and they were sent off somewhere that seemed incredibly official and important sounding. Pretty much every intern that arrives and has to write commitments for the first time freaks out and probably stays late at work at least one night making sure that everything they write is perfect.

The second summer is a lot different. I started at the same time as a couple first-time interns, back in May, and while they were frantically gathering advice from anyone they could find, I was telling them not to worry. Because as far as any of my other returning intern friends or I could tell, that form went into a big, scary, official-sounding void. Nobody had to okay them, except your manager, who, in all likelihood, was going to, because they didn't really have a solid handle of what you were going to contribute that summer either. And besides, they could be changed. They were just a piece of paper, a consequence of working at a multinational, multibillion dollar, multi-thousand person company.

So I scribbled (actually typed) something down a half hour before the meeting where my boss was going to okay my commitments, and they were okayed, and they went off into the void, and I continued working on what I was already working on, and that piece of paper really did nothing for my "alignment" of my goals with the company's.

Until something went wrong. Not bad, horrible, somebody died wrong. But both of the projects that I was working on turned out to be six month projects instead of six week projects, and both of the groups I was working with thought that I should devote my remaining time solely to their project, and that the other one, was, of course, far less important. So I was left with a choice: Work myself to the bone and not enjoy the summer at all, or make a choice on my own about which project I should actually dedicate myself to.

I decided that I wasn't ready to give my entire summer up, and so I was left with (yet another!) choice. And for this one, I didn't have a whole lot of data. Certainly, my commitments were worthless here. They just said I'd work on both projects, and gave me no help with the prioritization question.

Luckily, not everyone had spent as little time writing commitments as I had. Somewhere up the line, there was actually an established set of goals. A couple of themes that we really wanted to come across strongly in the next release of our product, a couple of objectives for the improvement of the organization. And seeing those commitments, my choice was easy.

One of my projects spoke directly to the larger goals of the organization. Besides being something that I'd said I wanted to work on, it was a core component of something my grand-grand-manager had set out for all of us to accomplish. It made the decision easy, and it was also the perfect justification to the group that I ended up leaving.

The next question to ask is, "Was I right?" Were the goals that had been set up for us almost a year in advance still the most applicable? Was designing a system of alignment like this really the best way to remain agile in a fast-paced market? I want to say no. I want to say that such a rigid structure, passed down through an organization that is not known for being particularly flat, made us lose sight of what was really important, and just grab some low-hanging fruit. We couldn't have known about the opportunity that my second project ended up fostering. It was supercool, and supernew.

But if I'm being honest, I have to say yes. The project I ended up putting most of my time into the last few weeks was somewhat boring and tedious. It also tied up a lot of loose ends on a project that was already halfway out the door. It meant a polished product with less features, but in a time where we were being heavily criticized for poor product quality, it was exactly what we needed.

Now that we've got that solid base, the organization's commitments for the new fiscal year are to get cooler. Try things that haven't been done. When I go back, I hope to pick up the work on the fun project that I had to let slide. Because this is the right time for that. And someone with a lot more market knowledge and business experience and seniority already knew that. Also when I go back, I'll put some thought into my commitments. Because I'm realizing that this alignment issue is a lot bigger deal than a couple meetings a year. And our commitments are one of the best ways we've got for making sure everyone's got the same goals in mind.

(For reference and humor, the other things I wanted to be cheeky and write this "alignment" post about: How much my back and neck hurt, how hard it is to get a document to look nice, and my D&D characters.)