8 ms·

Business writing suffers from an epidemic of post-fact rationalization. Looking back, it is trivially easy to parse out whether something someone said was “insi

by a_d 8y ago

Business writing suffers from an epidemic of post-fact rationalization. Looking back, it is trivially easy to parse out whether something someone said was “insightful wisdom” or “useless”. I am continually amazed by the scope and depth of this hindsight bias disease. While this author tries to make a point that bezos is a good writer, I am afraid that this is just riding a wave of bezos worship (like Elon worship, Jobs worship, Buffett workship, [‘name successful business person, preferably, billionaire’] worship) — after bezos’ company is seeing good results. I wish more business writing was devoted to 1) suggesting ways so that people have their own original thoughts 2) Discussing merits of strategies before they become successful 3) Discussing problem solving frameworks 4) early days of companies when they weren’t successful etc. I believe learning about the first 100-300 days of companies would be very instructive. Someone should write a book about that :-)

tim333 8y ago
Re post-fact rationalization, while Bezos and Buffett were successful before having a fan base they also remained successful for a long time after. It's going to be hard to find discussion of "merits of strategies before they become successful" as the people with brilliant strategies will probably already be successful to an extent. Though in Buffett's case he used to lose money in the stock market as a kid - he bought his first stock at age 11. He only really started winning there after reading The Intelligent Investor at 19. He kind of started writing his letters around 27.
- michaelt 8y ago
  The issue isn't fan clubs. The issue is successful companies are riding such a tidal wave of money and good will you can never tell if they're successful _because_ of X, or successful _in spite_ of X. For example, the stock price of GE rose 4000% in the 1980s when Welch introduced Rank and Yank [1]. Does that mean it was a great policy - or was there some other change responsible for the rise, while Rank and Yank had a neutral or even negative effect? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
  - zitterbewegung 8y ago
    This feels like the issue with reproducing research in the softer sciences. From my understanding businesses operate by optimizing over some gradient similar to gradient decent. Correlation or causation is really not the objective (but can be helpful to optimize over).
  - warrenm 8y ago
    The "rank and yank" or 20-70-10 rule was always Big News™ where I grew up (Capital District of NY): GE's global HQ, R&D, etc was all there - along with lots of other business divisions (turbines, chemicals, etc) It's really a secularization/inversion of [true] "Puritan thinking" - whereas the Puritans were worried about whether they stood or fell before God in their faith, belief, and practice, the pervasive inversion/misapplication of that line of reasoning into the secular world brings you the general New York & New England (Welch was born in MA; GE is HQ'd in Schenectady NY) mentality of: - know where you stand - rank others - excessive competitiveness It even show[s|ed] up in loads of college classes where grading would often enough be done on strict bell curves - didn't matter if you earned an "A", if you were the lowest scorer, you could easily be given an "F" (or "D")
  - tim333 8y ago
    Yeah it's pretty hard to tell as a bunch of factors are mixed up and interact. I kind of know the deal with Buffett - he did well partly due to strategy and partly due to being very smart and working very hard. The letters to shareholders are kind of an after effect. Also he's changed strategy over the years as the low hanging fruit in the areas he's operated in have disappeared.
simonh 8y ago
Are your really suggesting there is no value in looking at successful businesses we actually rely on and that determine the competitive landscape in multiple business domains, how they are run and who runs them, and that doing so is a disease? OK.
- closeparen 8y ago
  If your intention is to learn how to create or identify successful companies in the future, then yes, absolutely. You want to know what is different between successful companies and failed ones.
  - elcapitan 8y ago
    Maybe with special focus on the companies that failed while doing everything the same as the cherished success stories.
  - simonh 8y ago
    And there are plenty of articles and blog posts & etc online all the time about such cases, I know I've read many of them. so I don't really understand why this particular article is up for particular criticism, as though JLG has a personal obligation to correct a perceived bias in the internet. The whole premise of this criticism just seems bizarre.
- ergothus 8y ago
  The value comes from learning something, but historically we get trite quips and who stroking puff pieces. There's absolutely value in looking at these people/companies, but we need to contrast to less successful ones AND we need to stop acting like we have a clue why Jobs can be a jerk and succeed ("he won't let anyone interfere with his vision") but the jerk boss we had is a miserable failure ("he thinks he knows best and drives all the talented people away, of course he will fail"). Once people stop concluding easily disproven "lessons", I'll respect their efforts to search much more.
philwelch 8y ago
We all already know that PowerPoint makes us stupid and that the written word is an unsurpassed tool for developing and communicating structured thought, and while Amazon’s success has made Bezos’ insistence and practice of this more prominent, it’s still praiseworthy in the increasingly illiterate world in which we live. Incidentally, for what it’s worth, Gassee was a tech executive himself before many of us, myself included, were even born. He’s not just a pundit.
Regardsyjc 8y ago
If you read the stories of self-made billionaires they strikingly have a lot in common. Also all the following billionaires had troubled times and if you read their stories, you will see how they overcame them. From the books I've read about the following self-made billionaires so far (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Yvon Chouinard, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger) the most important things I've found they have in common are that: They avoid competition, think long-term, and don't copy others foolishly. Longer explanation: -They break down the world to the fundamentals, the essential, the Feynman method. When Musk wanted to build SpaceX everyone thought he was crazy. But when he broke it down to the raw costs for space shuttle manufacturing, the typical costs were too high and he saw opportunity. Many people tend to learn complex abstract concepts without truly understanding the building blocks or learning trees that it took to get there. There can be times when someone calculated incorrectly but everyone took it for granted and it became the status quo of knowledge. I believe these are one way to access the secrets in plain sight. Question everything. - They focus on the long game like the power of compound interest. They operate with a vision of what the future might look like 10 years down the road, and then they work backwards to create that vision. Did they see the future, did they just build it before anyone else, or both? - Most of the billionaires I've read about had humble beginnings. Yvon Chouinard used to sleep in his van. Elon Musk couch surfed during his worst times. Jeff Bezos started out in his garage and made tables from doors. - All of them have very strong beliefs. They are not swayed by what everyone else is doing which is how most, even big companies fail. Peter Thiel mentions mimetic theory, basically that people copy each other, even companies, and that's how you get competition. Buffett indirectly talks about it too. ExxonMobil hires a fertilizer expert and then all the other oil companies start hiring a fertilizer expert even if they don't really know why Exxon hired one in the first place. Or how big companies (GEICO) can lose focus of their circle of competence by getting distracted by what everyone else is doing and creating inferior copycat products - which eventually leads to value loss of their core competency and what actually drives value for their customers. I think that's one thing that makes them all special. They all took different routes to get where they are. To be tacky, they didn't follow someone else's road, they created their own. - They didn't do it alone. All those people knew how to build and lead a great team. If they didn't, they found someone who could. Books I'm getting this info from: Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard Zero to One by Peter Thiel Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
swyx 8y ago
Bezos famously declined to be interviewed for the Everything Store because of the narrative fallacy. Ironically in avoiding it he is probably letting it happen.
rweba 8y ago
One of the best books I read last year was "The Halo effect" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000NY128M/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000NY128M/ It talks about exactly this issue: If company A is successful, we explain it by saying that the management is absolutely brilliant, if company B does the exact same things but is failing, we explain it by saying that management are totally incompetent. It's a major cognitive bias which renders most "business press" articles totally worthless. The solution, obviously, is to gather a large amount of data and do some rigorous analysis. People have tried to do this but the general conclusion is that there are no real simple rules that a business can follow to always succeed despite our eager desire for simple explanations.
- kevstev 8y ago
  I personally refer to this as the "Marissa Mayer problem." To me the real mark of success and brilliance is not just succeeding once, its succeeding multiple times. Jumping on the Google or Amazon rocketship and doing well there, while there is something to be said about the fact that you didn't screw it up, doesn't necessarily mean that you are brilliant. She went to Yahoo, and while she did a decent job putting lipstick on a pig, I think it showed that she is a mere mortal and not a genius. What is impressive about Amazon IMHO is that they have succeeded in multiple businesses. One could argue that they are all under the halo of "ecommerce" but what was just a bookseller spread into virtually everything sold online, reshaping distribution networks, moving into groceries, content, etc.
  - ALee 8y ago
    In a recent NYT interview, here's what she had to say about that: "[T]iming is everything... Yahoo’s offerings could consume hours a day, and trying to regain that moment in time was really hard... regaining that contextual relevance that was afforded to Yahoo in 1999 and the early 2000s was difficult."
  - abritinthebay 8y ago
    To be fair to Mayer, I don’t think anyone could have saved Yahoo. She presided over a (mostly) graceful decline which allowed a reasonable end to the company. She wasn’t some genius but I never understood why she was considered that by some anyhow: she’d previously shown solid competency not amazing insight.
lkrubner 8y ago
I strongly agree. I'd like to see more honest conversation about the problems people face when building a business. I'd like to see more honesty about failure. I'd also like to see more transparency about the amount of personal conflict that tends to come up when building a business. This sums up my views: ---------------------------- Recently, I exchanged some email with my friend Colin Steele, currently CTO of TypeZero and formerly CTO of RoomKey.com. We discussed another startup that had failed, and he wrote: It’s sad and disheartening. I think few people understand how amazingly difficult it is to start a new business, and run it successfully. Drama, people, and personalities, seem to have an outsized role in how these things crash and burn. There needs to be some codification of best internal practices for creating startups, like Steve Blank’s book “4 Steps To The Epiphany,” but for the culture; a co-routine that runs alongside “customer development” — call it “culture development” or something. I agree wholeheartedly, and would also add that more public discussion of the difficulties would help startup culture. I would make an analogy to the history of divorce in the United States. The divorce rate rose for much of the twentieth century, and it peaked in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then there has been more public discussion about what makes marriages strong. You can see the trend reflected on television shows: neither Leave It To Beaver nor the Brady Bunch mentioned the difficulties of marriage, and that was the era when the divorce rate was rising the most. Modern sitcoms talk endlessly about the difficulties of marriage. Couples still face drama and conflict and personality, but the public discussion seems to have granted people the vocabulary they need to address their problems, and the divorce rate has come down. Popular awareness helps. At the very least, books and movies can help explore the important reality that startups are not easy. https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/0998997617/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...

by a_d 8y ago

tim333 8y ago

Re post-fact rationalization, while Bezos and Buffett were successful before having a fan base they also remained successful for a long time after. It's going to be hard to find discussion of "merits of strategies before they become successful" as the people with brilliant strategies will probably already be successful to an extent. Though in Buffett's case he used to lose money in the stock market as a kid - he bought his first stock at age 11. He only really started winning there after reading The Intelligent Investor at 19. He kind of started writing his letters around 27.

michaelt 8y ago
The issue isn't fan clubs. The issue is successful companies are riding such a tidal wave of money and good will you can never tell if they're successful _because_ of X, or successful _in spite_ of X. For example, the stock price of GE rose 4000% in the 1980s when Welch introduced Rank and Yank [1]. Does that mean it was a great policy - or was there some other change responsible for the rise, while Rank and Yank had a neutral or even negative effect? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
- zitterbewegung 8y ago
  This feels like the issue with reproducing research in the softer sciences. From my understanding businesses operate by optimizing over some gradient similar to gradient decent. Correlation or causation is really not the objective (but can be helpful to optimize over).
- warrenm 8y ago
  The "rank and yank" or 20-70-10 rule was always Big News™ where I grew up (Capital District of NY): GE's global HQ, R&D, etc was all there - along with lots of other business divisions (turbines, chemicals, etc) It's really a secularization/inversion of [true] "Puritan thinking" - whereas the Puritans were worried about whether they stood or fell before God in their faith, belief, and practice, the pervasive inversion/misapplication of that line of reasoning into the secular world brings you the general New York & New England (Welch was born in MA; GE is HQ'd in Schenectady NY) mentality of: - know where you stand - rank others - excessive competitiveness It even show[s|ed] up in loads of college classes where grading would often enough be done on strict bell curves - didn't matter if you earned an "A", if you were the lowest scorer, you could easily be given an "F" (or "D")
- tim333 8y ago
  Yeah it's pretty hard to tell as a bunch of factors are mixed up and interact. I kind of know the deal with Buffett - he did well partly due to strategy and partly due to being very smart and working very hard. The letters to shareholders are kind of an after effect. Also he's changed strategy over the years as the low hanging fruit in the areas he's operated in have disappeared.

simonh 8y ago

Are your really suggesting there is no value in looking at successful businesses we actually rely on and that determine the competitive landscape in multiple business domains, how they are run and who runs them, and that doing so is a disease? OK.

closeparen 8y ago
If your intention is to learn how to create or identify successful companies in the future, then yes, absolutely. You want to know what is different between successful companies and failed ones.
- elcapitan 8y ago
  Maybe with special focus on the companies that failed while doing everything the same as the cherished success stories.
- simonh 8y ago
  And there are plenty of articles and blog posts & etc online all the time about such cases, I know I've read many of them. so I don't really understand why this particular article is up for particular criticism, as though JLG has a personal obligation to correct a perceived bias in the internet. The whole premise of this criticism just seems bizarre.
ergothus 8y ago
The value comes from learning something, but historically we get trite quips and who stroking puff pieces. There's absolutely value in looking at these people/companies, but we need to contrast to less successful ones AND we need to stop acting like we have a clue why Jobs can be a jerk and succeed ("he won't let anyone interfere with his vision") but the jerk boss we had is a miserable failure ("he thinks he knows best and drives all the talented people away, of course he will fail"). Once people stop concluding easily disproven "lessons", I'll respect their efforts to search much more.

philwelch 8y ago

We all already know that PowerPoint makes us stupid and that the written word is an unsurpassed tool for developing and communicating structured thought, and while Amazon’s success has made Bezos’ insistence and practice of this more prominent, it’s still praiseworthy in the increasingly illiterate world in which we live. Incidentally, for what it’s worth, Gassee was a tech executive himself before many of us, myself included, were even born. He’s not just a pundit.

Regardsyjc 8y ago

If you read the stories of self-made billionaires they strikingly have a lot in common. Also all the following billionaires had troubled times and if you read their stories, you will see how they overcame them. From the books I've read about the following self-made billionaires so far (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Yvon Chouinard, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger) the most important things I've found they have in common are that: They avoid competition, think long-term, and don't copy others foolishly. Longer explanation: -They break down the world to the fundamentals, the essential, the Feynman method. When Musk wanted to build SpaceX everyone thought he was crazy. But when he broke it down to the raw costs for space shuttle manufacturing, the typical costs were too high and he saw opportunity. Many people tend to learn complex abstract concepts without truly understanding the building blocks or learning trees that it took to get there. There can be times when someone calculated incorrectly but everyone took it for granted and it became the status quo of knowledge. I believe these are one way to access the secrets in plain sight. Question everything. - They focus on the long game like the power of compound interest. They operate with a vision of what the future might look like 10 years down the road, and then they work backwards to create that vision. Did they see the future, did they just build it before anyone else, or both? - Most of the billionaires I've read about had humble beginnings. Yvon Chouinard used to sleep in his van. Elon Musk couch surfed during his worst times. Jeff Bezos started out in his garage and made tables from doors. - All of them have very strong beliefs. They are not swayed by what everyone else is doing which is how most, even big companies fail. Peter Thiel mentions mimetic theory, basically that people copy each other, even companies, and that's how you get competition. Buffett indirectly talks about it too. ExxonMobil hires a fertilizer expert and then all the other oil companies start hiring a fertilizer expert even if they don't really know why Exxon hired one in the first place. Or how big companies (GEICO) can lose focus of their circle of competence by getting distracted by what everyone else is doing and creating inferior copycat products - which eventually leads to value loss of their core competency and what actually drives value for their customers. I think that's one thing that makes them all special. They all took different routes to get where they are. To be tacky, they didn't follow someone else's road, they created their own. - They didn't do it alone. All those people knew how to build and lead a great team. If they didn't, they found someone who could. Books I'm getting this info from: Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard Zero to One by Peter Thiel Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

swyx 8y ago

Bezos famously declined to be interviewed for the Everything Store because of the narrative fallacy. Ironically in avoiding it he is probably letting it happen.

rweba 8y ago

One of the best books I read last year was "The Halo effect" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000NY128M/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000NY128M/ It talks about exactly this issue: If company A is successful, we explain it by saying that the management is absolutely brilliant, if company B does the exact same things but is failing, we explain it by saying that management are totally incompetent. It's a major cognitive bias which renders most "business press" articles totally worthless. The solution, obviously, is to gather a large amount of data and do some rigorous analysis. People have tried to do this but the general conclusion is that there are no real simple rules that a business can follow to always succeed despite our eager desire for simple explanations.

kevstev 8y ago
I personally refer to this as the "Marissa Mayer problem." To me the real mark of success and brilliance is not just succeeding once, its succeeding multiple times. Jumping on the Google or Amazon rocketship and doing well there, while there is something to be said about the fact that you didn't screw it up, doesn't necessarily mean that you are brilliant. She went to Yahoo, and while she did a decent job putting lipstick on a pig, I think it showed that she is a mere mortal and not a genius. What is impressive about Amazon IMHO is that they have succeeded in multiple businesses. One could argue that they are all under the halo of "ecommerce" but what was just a bookseller spread into virtually everything sold online, reshaping distribution networks, moving into groceries, content, etc.
- ALee 8y ago
  In a recent NYT interview, here's what she had to say about that: "[T]iming is everything... Yahoo’s offerings could consume hours a day, and trying to regain that moment in time was really hard... regaining that contextual relevance that was afforded to Yahoo in 1999 and the early 2000s was difficult."
- abritinthebay 8y ago
  To be fair to Mayer, I don’t think anyone could have saved Yahoo. She presided over a (mostly) graceful decline which allowed a reasonable end to the company. She wasn’t some genius but I never understood why she was considered that by some anyhow: she’d previously shown solid competency not amazing insight.

lkrubner 8y ago

I strongly agree. I'd like to see more honest conversation about the problems people face when building a business. I'd like to see more honesty about failure. I'd also like to see more transparency about the amount of personal conflict that tends to come up when building a business. This sums up my views: ---------------------------- Recently, I exchanged some email with my friend Colin Steele, currently CTO of TypeZero and formerly CTO of RoomKey.com. We discussed another startup that had failed, and he wrote: It’s sad and disheartening. I think few people understand how amazingly difficult it is to start a new business, and run it successfully. Drama, people, and personalities, seem to have an outsized role in how these things crash and burn. There needs to be some codification of best internal practices for creating startups, like Steve Blank’s book “4 Steps To The Epiphany,” but for the culture; a co-routine that runs alongside “customer development” — call it “culture development” or something. I agree wholeheartedly, and would also add that more public discussion of the difficulties would help startup culture. I would make an analogy to the history of divorce in the United States. The divorce rate rose for much of the twentieth century, and it peaked in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then there has been more public discussion about what makes marriages strong. You can see the trend reflected on television shows: neither Leave It To Beaver nor the Brady Bunch mentioned the difficulties of marriage, and that was the era when the divorce rate was rising the most. Modern sitcoms talk endlessly about the difficulties of marriage. Couples still face drama and conflict and personality, but the public discussion seems to have granted people the vocabulary they need to address their problems, and the divorce rate has come down. Popular awareness helps. At the very least, books and movies can help explore the important reality that startups are not easy. https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/0998997617/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...