Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Your company could be here.
I am, for the first time, opening up to newsletter sponsorships. For more information about how to put your brand in front of thousands of highly skilled, highly engaged professionals, send me an email. First come, first served.
Now accepting keynotes for 24Q2-24Q3
Every year, I create three main presentation decks. For 2024, they are:
What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do: How to turn uncertainty into a competitive advantage. (Based on my new book by the same name.)
Regression Toward the Meme: Why modern leadership falls into old traps - and how to avoid them.
The Efficiency Illusion: How to uncover the hidden costs of digital commerce and create profitable growth.
If you want to book me for your event, corporate speaking slot, or workshop, merely send me an email. To make sure I am available, however, please do so at your earliest convenience; my availability is limited and the schedule is filling up fast. More information may be found here.
A couple of updates before we go-go
This past weekend, my wife happened to see one of the girls who go to the same kindergarten as our daughter. She was out walking with her mother, but clearly all was not well; she was crying. A lot. In response, her mother screamed at her, incessantly, to shut up.
I do not know what got the mother to that point. We all have bad days. But such “parenting” just angers me to no end. Shouting at a young child does nothing to stop her crying - it just ensures that she cries all the more on the inside, and for a lot longer.
Our kids cannot choose the parents that they get, but we can damn well choose the parents that we are.
Bah. Just bah.
On a significantly more positive note, Operation Mincemeat was nominated for five, and won two (best supporting actor, best new musical), Olivier awards this past weekend. In a different life, I vaguely knew someone involved, which makes me know no more about the show than anyone else, but it does give me some insight into how many years they have toiled to get to this point.
The musical, as it happens, is now the highest rated in West End history (64 five star reviews last I checked), has been extended eight times, and is clearly making the rest of the theatre world pay attention.
Lovely stuff. Get tickets.
Moving on.
2024.3.e
The undeservedly unknown
Part III: Jane Jacobs
Unlike those who have preceded her in this space, Jane Jacobs (May 4, 1916 - April 25, 2006) did not have an academic CV that makes you question your career. In fact, she did not even have a college degree. This was a point of common emphasis among her detractors; as a woman who had the audacity to criticize experts in male-dominated fields such as economics and urban planning, she was regularly dismissed as nothing more than a loudmouth housewife who would be better off making cupcakes for her husband.
Fortunately, she took no heed.
Instead, she wrote a number of very successful books, inspired movements, and became a major influence on radical centrist thought (the last of which, perhaps contrary to her early analysis of societies, would probably not have impressed David Graeber).
Yet as well-known as her work is to urban planners, it is entirely unknown to strategic planners. The primary reason, obviously, is that most of them are more interested in enjoying metropolitan life than reading about it - and the connection between Jacobs and strategy is anything but self-evident.
However, there is indeed value to be found; the evolution of cities could be a source of insight into suburban customer groups, for example. But in particular, her book The Nature of Economies (2000), written as a conversation between friends, illustrates a fundamental aspect of markets that the broader strategic populace has yet to grasp: they do not function like machines, but like ecologies.
Long-time readers will, of course, be familiar with this now established scientific fact. But Jacobs explains why they do in simple-to-follow terms, as well as break down adjacent concepts such as fractals:
“You’ve just identified a fractal”, said Kate.
“I keep coming across references to fractals,” said Hortense, “but what are they? And why should we care about them?”
“They’re complicated-looking patterns that are actually made up of the same motif repeated on different scales,” said Kate. “For instance, a muscle is a twisted bundle of fibers. Dissect out any one of those fiber bundles, and you find that it, too, is a twisted bundle of fibers. And so on. When you get down to the irreducibly smallest fiber, which you need an electron microscope to see, you find that it’s a twisted strand of molecules. That’s a real-life fractal. Mathematicians make computer-generated fractals, fascinating in their complexity and seeming variety, yet each fractal is made of repetitions.”
Fractality, to those who have not come across the concept before, may appear an abstract and theoretical construct without any apparent practical implications for strategy. But it is actually immensely important to grasp at least in principle, as premium subscribers will be aware of by virtue of previous newsletters.
The reason is that most popular strategic frameworks inherently are non-fractal, that is to say, they cannot be repeated in the same form throughout the organization. As a result, they sooner or later cause all kinds of problems with operational alignment; the people closest to the proverbial ground simply do not see how the strategy applies to their work. As good as the strategy may look to the C-suite, it has a practical value for the average employee akin to that of a chocolate teapot.
Similarly, Jacobs’ book highlights the problems of assuming (as many do intuitively) that there is symmetrical input-output relationships in complexity:
“The symbolic butterfly (from the famous butterfly effect; my clarification) doesn’t merely mean that small causes may have disproportionately large consequences,” said Hiram. “That’s long been observed. As the old saying has it, the kingdom was lost for want of a horseshoe nail. Nor is the meaning of of the butterfly merely that it can be impossible to take into account every cause, influence, and interrelationship in a complex system, owing to causes being too many, subtle, varied, and volatile.”
“The major jolt packed into Lorenz’s discovery was this: even if every influence on some types of complex systems could be accurately taken into account, their futures would still be unpredictable.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Hortense. “How can you know that?”
“A system can be making itself up as it goes along,” said Hiram. “The weather is like that. Evolution is like that. Economies, if they aren’t inert and stagnant, are like that. Since they make themselves up as they proceed, they aren’t predestined, they aren’t predictable.”
“That may be a novel idea to meteorologists, but it’s old news to linguists,” said Armbruster. “Speakers make a language and yet nobody, including its speakers or scholars, can predict its future vocabulary or usages, precisely for the reason you’ve said: Language makes up itself as it goes along. Even when languages start out the same, like those weather patterns, they diverge idiosyncratically. Who would have predicted French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mallorcan, Provençal, Romanian, or even Florentine Italian and Sicilian Italian from Latin?
Again, the point is made in such a way that even the uninitiated may follow along and understand. Indeed, the entire books is written in such a style, which is why it provides an excellent introduction to complexity. Jacobs touches upon a number of key features of complex adaptive systems without being technical about any of them, which in turn makes her work accessible. Among the topics that her characters discuss are bifurcations, feedback loops, adaptation, uncertainty, exaptation, and combination - all things which by name alone may appear daunting but in the book are explained in natural conversation.
Although I would never dismiss Jacobs as a housewife (nor dismiss housewives, for that matter), she is admittedly not a technical expert like Robert Burgelman and Alicia Juarrero. But I would be surprised if a novice reader does not come away with a better understanding of the complex world from her work, than from her more academically seasoned contemporaries.
Ultimately, perhaps precisely because she is not part of an academic elite, you get the feeling that her main objective is to entice the reader to join her in intellectual exploration, whereas others would rather put up barriers to ensure only a select few get to enjoy the experience. And that alone makes her worth reading in my book.
Next week, we are going to discuss the work of a man whose name is entirely unknown to the greater masses, yet is revered among those who know it.
Until then, have the loveliest of weekends.
Onwards and ever upwards,
JP