From the Desk of Eric Ries -- Year-End Edition

From the Desk of Eric Ries -- Year-End Edition

December 20, 2019

  From the Desk of Eric Ries 

Year-End Edition

"We should look with suspicion at simple-looking systems. The physical world is like a river in which a thousand streams come rushing — it is supposed to look messy...[this isn't] suggesting all chaos is good. But when you hear someone suggest we put some order into a system, there should at least be a red light flashing in your head."

The relationship between creativity, success, and discovery is the through-line of The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up by Florent Crivello, a product manager who works on micromobility. He ties together what he calls "beautiful equilibrium" with Amazon's famous two-pizza teams, the value of understanding the structure that lies beneath apparent mayhem in a company, and some very wise questions to ask in order to determine whether superficial chaos is hiding productive underlying organization. He's a proponent of "chaotic success over tidy failure" and reading why is well worth your time.

Below are some discussions of my recent work, including highlights from this year's Lean Startup Conference and some other books and articles I've enjoyed recently. Some of the books will be out in the new year, but you can pre-order them now, which is a great way to support their authors in the weeks and months leading up to publication.As always, if you have thoughts or feedback to share on anything I've included, send them to: [email protected]

 

[Conversations and Coverage]

 Expertise in the Age of YouTube"If you want to get better at hypnosis, or the Curly Hair MethodTM, or anything else, it is now your right to be spoiled for choice. There will be multiple YouTube channels with step-by-step tutorials, surprisingly constructive comments sections, and rapidly improving production values. They will all be free. There will be Reddit communities with tips, war stories, and memes. If you post a question, or a report on your progress, dozens of strangers will offer you personalized advice and encouragement." A deep dive into the benefits and implications of acquiring skills online.From Aristotle to Ringelmann: a large-scale analysis of team productivity and coordination in Open Source Software projects

"The majority of studies in empirical software engineering suggest that - due to coordination overhead - teams of collaborating developers become less productive as they grow in size. This phenomenon is commonly paraphrased as Brooks’ law of software project management, which states that “adding manpower to a software project makes it later”. Outside software engineering, the non-additive scaling of productivity in teams is often referred to as the Ringelmann effect, which is studied extensively in social psychology and organizational theory...Using fine-grained data on the association between developers and source code files, we investigate possible explanations for the observed relations between team size and productivity."

"Four thousand years ago, the Early Bronze Age farmers of southern Germany had no Homer to chronicle their marriages, travails, and family fortunes. But a detailed picture of their social structure has now emerged from a remarkable new study. By combining evidence from DNA, artifacts, and chemical clues in teeth, an interdisciplinary team unraveled relationships and inheritance patterns in several generations of high-ranking families buried in cemeteries on their farmsteads."

"For CEOs, this new stance is certain to have far-reaching consequences: heightened scrutiny from various camps to ensure that the vows made to stakeholders aren’t empty rhetoric; the necessity to draw on personal traits and capacities that might have been underutilized when there were fewer priorities to juggle; and a push by reformers to revamp the incentives that determine executive pay."My friend told me a story he hadn’t told anyone..."‘David Bowie said, ‘I’m always afraid as well. But this is how you can feel brave in the world.’ And then it was over. I’ve never forgotten it. And years later I cried when I heard he had passed.’" 

"Bezos realized that he had to change the internal communication infrastructure before he could actually change the byproduct of the organization. He understood that  a radical organizational change was required to arrange the internal dynamics in a way that would allow the creation of something like AWS. Specifically, what he got right was an internal communication system designed to (1) embrace accessibility as its most important commandment in order to (2) enable a strong platform mindset and (3) incentivize extreme dogfooding." 

"...there are still many ways to ensure more that many more people can participate in America’s successes. And while there are no silver bullets, nor will there ever be complete agreement about every policy detail, we see many excellent ideas that are ripe for bipartisan collaboration and that can begin the process of adapting our economic policies so that they work for far more people."

Before the East India Company "In retrospect, the rise of the Company seems almost inevitable. But that was not how it looked in 1599, for at its founding few enterprises could have seemed less sure of success."