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Intel: anyone can challenge anyone

From FORTUNE’s “Lessons in Leadership: The Education of Andy Grove“:

[Intel CEO Andy] Grove had never been one to rely on others’ interpretations of reality. … At Intel he fostered a culture in which “knowledge power” would trump “position power.” Anyone could challenge anyone else’s idea, so long as it was about the idea and not the person–and so long as you were ready for the demand “Prove it.” That required data. Without data, an idea was only a story–a representation of reality and thus subject to distortion.

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Intel’s ups and downs

From FORTUNE’s “Lessons in Leadership: The Education of Andy Grove“:

By 1983, when Grove distilled much of his thinking in his book High Output Management (still a worthwhile read), he was president of a fast-growing $1.1-billion-a-year corporation, a leading maker of memory chips, whose CEO was Gordon Moore. … What Moore’s Law did not and could not predict was that Japanese firms, too, might master this process and turn memory chips into a commodity. …

Intel kept denying the cliff ahead until its profits went over the edge, plummeting from $198 million in 1984 to less than $2 million in 1985. It was in the middle of this crisis, when many managers would have obsessed about specifics, that Grove stepped outside himself. He and Moore had been agonizing over their dilemma for weeks, he recounts in Only the Paranoid Survive, when something happened: “I looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance when I turned back to Gordon, and I asked, ‘If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?’ Gordon answered without hesitation, ‘He would get us out of memories.’ I stared at him, numb, then said, ‘Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back, and do it ourselves?'”

… once IBM chose Intel’s microprocessor to be the chip at the heart of its PCs, demand began to explode. Even so, the shift from memory chips was brutally hard–in 1986, Intel fired some 8,000 people and lost more than $180 million on $1.3 billion in sales–the only loss the company has ever posted since its early days as a startup.

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Zombie ships adrift off the shore of Africa

From “Happiness: The Chinese zombie ships of West Africa“:

We’re in the big African Queen inflatable, cruising alongside an anchored trawler. It’s more rust than metal – the ship is rotting away. The foredeck is covered in broken machinery. The fish deck is littered with frayed cables, and the mast lies horizontally, hanging over the starboard side. A large rusty Chinese character hangs on railings above the bridge, facing forward. It reads ‘happiness’. …

Moff turns the boat, taking us to another of the rusting fishing vessels, 70 nautical miles (130km) off the coast of Guinea, West Africa. We had been told this was where old pirate fishing boats were left at anchor, abandoned. We didn’t expect to find living people on board the dying ships. …

We head away, going with the current, which was purple and green with the dregs of spilled fuel. Throughout the afternoon, I keep noticing just how dirty the water is, with oil and fragments of plastic.

We arrive at Long way 08, which is in line for refuelling. This trawler is in a poor state, with the hull covered in masses of good-sized shellfish.

Four young Chinese crewman meet us with smiles and welcomes. They tell us that some of them have been on board for 2 years, non-stop. The trawler itself has been out here for eight years, and would probably be kept going for another six or so, or as long it lasted.

Here’s the thing – these ships seldom, or ever, visit a port. They’re re-supplied, refuelled, re-crewed and transhipped (unloaded) at sea. The owners and crews don’t seem to do any basic maintenance, apart from keeping the engine and winches running. There’s no glass in the portholes, and the masts are a mess of useless wiring. These floating deathtraps don’t carry any proper safety gear – on one boat, I saw the half-barrel case of an inflatable liferaft being used to store a net. …

We move to the second ship, where again, a bunch of friendly young guys have been sitting at anchor for two months, waiting technical help and a new crew. Their engine doesn’t work, and they no safety gear or radio. They can, however, run their watermaker, for desalinating seawater. Lines of drying fish hang over the deck, but they’re running out of other food, and are often forced to signal other fishing boats for help. Like everyone else, their future is uncertain. …

… we talk to the chirpy Guinean fisheries observer on their vessel. He’s very chatty, and tells us what is going on – that the other trawler was basically being dumped here. He says that the Chinese boats were in poor shape generally, and that last year, one had sunk, taking 14 crew with it. What are conditions like on this boat? He shrugs: “Not good. But I have to have a job.” …

Later, as we drop some supplies to the engine-less trawler, we see one of the crew hauling himself along on a rope, while standing on a small raft. It’s bizarre sight, but this is how they get between the two decrepit vessels. …

Earlier in the day – before the graveyard of zombie trawlers, fisheries inspectors had told us of where the fish actually goes. Caught by the Chinese and other trawlers, it’s transhipped to several different vessels. ‘High value’ stock goes to Las Palmas, in the Canaries and off to the dinner tables of Europe. The ‘dirt’ fish is transhipped to Africa. The Chinese fishermen, it seems, barely get a look in. ‘Happiness’ indeed.

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The incompetent don’t know it

From “Unskilled and Unaware of It“:

It seems that the reason for this phenomenon is obvious: The more incompetent someone is in a particular area, the less qualified that person is to assess anyone’s skill in that space, including their own. When one fails to recognize that he or she has performed poorly, the individual is left assuming that they have performed well. As a result, the incompetent will tend to grossly overestimate their skills and abilities. A few years ago, two men from the Department of Psychology at Cornell University made an effort to determine just how profoundly one misoverestimates one’s own skills in relation to one’s actual abilities. They made four predictions, and executed four studies.

Justin Kruger and David Dunning made the following predictions before beginning their investigation:

  • Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria.
  • Incompetent individuals will suffer from deficient metacognitive skills, in that they will be less able than their more competent peers to recognize competence when they see it–be it their own or anyone else’s.
  • Incompetent individuals will be less able than their more competent peers to gain insight into their true level of performance by means of social comparison information. In particular, because of their difficulty recognizing competence in others, incompetent individuals will be unable to use information about the choices and performances of others to form more accurate impressions of their own ability.
  • The incompetent can gain insight about their shortcomings, but this comes (paradoxically) by making them more competent, thus providing them the metacognitive skills necessary to be able to realize that they have performed poorly.

… In short, the study showed that the researchers’ predictions were spot-on. …

Also interestingly, the top performers tended to underestimate their own performance compared to their peers. The researchers found that those participants fell prey to the false-consensus effect, a phenomenon where one assumes that one’s peers are performing at least as well as oneself when given no evidence to the contrary.

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How to really practice to get better

From “How to be an expert“:

Maybe the “naaturally talented artist” was simply the one who practiced a hell of a lot more. Or rather, a hell of a lot more deliberately. Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University, has spent most of his 20+ year career on the study of genuises, prodigies, and superior performers. In the book The New Brain (it was on my coffee table) Richard Restak quotes Ericsson as concluding:

“For the superior performer the goal isn’t just repeating the same thing again and again but achieving higher levels of control over every aspect of their performance. That’s why they don’t find practice boring. Each practice session they are working on doing something better than they did the last time.”

So it’s not just how long they practice, it’s how they practice. Basically, it comes down to something like this:

Most of us want to practice the things we’re already good at, and avoid the things we suck at. We stay average or intermediate amateurs forever.

Yet the research says that if we were willing to put in more hours, and to use those hours to practice the things that aren’t so fun, we could become good. Great. Potentially brilliant. We need, as Restak refers to it, “a rage to master.” That dedication to mastery drives the potential expert to focus on the most subtle aspects of performance, and to never be satisfied. There is always more to improve on, and they’re willing to work on the less fun stuff.

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30 years without sleep

From “Vietnam man handles three decades without sleep“:

Sixty-four-year-old Thai Ngoc, known as Hai Ngoc, said he could not sleep at night after getting a fever in 1973, and has counted infinite numbers of sheep during more than 11,700 consecutive sleepless nights.

“I don’t know whether the insomnia has impacted my health or not. But I’m still healthy and can farm normally like others,” Ngoc said. …

Ngoc often does extra farm work or guards his farm at night to prevent theft, saying he used three months of sleepless nights to dig two large ponds to raise fish.

Neighbor Vu said Ngoc volunteered to help beat a drum during the night and guard the house for the relatives of the dead during funeral ceremonies so that they could take a nap.

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Blogging at IBM

From “3,600+ blogs: A glance into IBM’s internal blogging“:

Through the central blog dashboard at the intranet W3, IBMers now can find more than 3,600 blogs written by their co-workers. As of June 13 there were 3,612 internal blogs with 30,429 posts. Internal blogging is still at a stage of testing and trying at IBM but the number of blogs is growing rapidly …

US, Canada and Australia are very active countries but also in small European countries there are quite many internal bloggers. 147 in Sweden and 170 in the Netherlands to mention two examples. …

… the most common topics.

News or events that affect the business
“When IBM sold the personal computing division rumours were flying around before it actually happened and people were blogging about that, giving their opinions about what was going to happen and how it would affect IBM.”

Metablogging
“It’s a new technology of special interest to people who blog.”

Administrative things
“The little changes going on in the company — the water-cooler talk.”

Product announcements
“Not necessarily of general interest but of interest to the specific community working with the product.”

Hints and tips
“…for example about what bloggers have found interesting on the intranet.”

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Ben Jones sands his floors

From Ben Jones’ Benblog, February 2003:

Prepare. Sand down the roughest parts. Vacuum. Gaze. Gaze again. Sand a level finer, starting to expose more of the grain, slowly in parts, lightly. Stopping frequently, when the machine is strained. Changing the pad. Vacuum. Clean. Assess. Gaze. Gaze again.

This time is the first touch.

There are some rough spots. Some you know you can’t get out. But it’s beautiful still, all the same. More so even, with character I didn’t know was there before.

And then another round. This time is not so rough, not so much dust. On some spots, the sander seems to polish more than cut. Wait for what dust there is to settle again. The pads don’t need to be changed so much now. I know where the sander will catch.

I’ve made some gouges here and there, impatient with rough spots, stains. I’m more careful, more accepting now of the others I find. They will come out with a finer hand, or they will stay, part of the wood’s character, that I’m growing to love even more.

Vacuum. Clean. Assess. Gaze. Gaze again.

This time I stroke, grasping the wood as fully as I can. Knowing the rough spots especially.

And then once again, now the 100 grit. Smooth now, with enough teeth to hold a polishing coat. To last a while. Shining through. With a touch up here and there.

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The value of learned experience

From Robert E. Kelley’s Consulting: The Complete Guide to a Profitable Career:

… a loud knocking pipe created turmoil at a large nuclear plant. No one could figure out what was making the noise or how to stop it. Finally one of the engineers suggested contacting Charlie, the retired maintenance man. Charlie listened to the knocking pipe. He then followed the pipe’s course throughout the plan. After fifteen tense minutes, Charlie located a pipe connection. He asked for a large monkey wrench. Instead of using the rench to turn the pipe, he hit the pipe connection four times with the wrench. At that point, the knocking stopped. Quite relieved, the management thanked Charlie profusely. In addition, they told hime to send a bill for his services. When they received the bill, however, they were quite upset. It merely said, “For services rendered–$1,000.” They complained that the fee was exorbinant for fifteen minutes’ work. Charlie offered to send an itemized bill if they wanted one. They did. It read:

    For 15 minutes' work      $  25.00
    For knowing where to hit  $ 975.00
    TOTAL                     $1000.00

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The mercurial man

From "The Producer" in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, an article about the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer:

[Edgar J. Scherick, the TV producer, hired Grazer when he was young, & had this to say about him:] "One day, he told me he was dissatisfied. We talked for half an hour and I gave him a raise. The next day, he quit. Why? You tell me."

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