Il capitale umano

We watched "Il capitale umano" last night on video. It was a great story with interesting, multidimensional characters, a tight script and some good acting.  Worth seeing but not great ***.

Die Wahlverwandtschaften

I read the 1809 novel “Elective Affinities” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe last week.

I really loved the characters, became engrossed in the story and was very upset by the ending.  It is a very powerful story but really depressing.  The abstract concept of chemical equations dominating human chemistry was lost on me.  Don’t read this book or you’ll cry. ** out of *****.

Gray Mountain by John Grisham

I finished John Grisham’s Gray Mountain yesterday

It is a typical light reading Grisham book with some fun court room antics, legal humor, cardboard stereotype characters, and big, evil entities.  I enjoyed the jabs at the FBI goons more than the never-ending attacks on the big Coal companies.  Entertaining *** out of *****.

How to get people to do what you want

A best-seller on Amazon caught my eye. I did not buy it yet because my reading input hopper is too full.


I did, however click on the video advertisement by the author. You can watch it here.

Kishor starts out by explaining that the person whom you are trying to convince has four "Goals" from your conversation.

Material Goal	Process Goal
Identity Goal	Relationship Goal

The top two, which are less than 40% of the weight in the person's decision-making process about whether to do what you want or not, are conscious and rational. The bottom two are impractical, unconscious, illogical, and much more important.
The Material Goal is the ostensible, rational, objective choice to be made -- what does the person want? What materially is in it for that person? What shall I gain? How will it maximize my return on investment, net present value, scope / price?
The Process Goal is how do I get to the end state of what you want me to do. What is my path? How do I get to the end-state? How difficult will the method / journey be?
The Identity Goal is how this decision affects my perception of myself. Who am I? Will I gain authority/power? How will I see myself if I do what you want? What am I afraid of? What embarrasses me? How will I appear to myself and others if I do what you want? How will I appear if I do not? Will I lose face?
(In all cases of these bottom two, more-important goals surface as rationalizations only slightly related to the true emotions and unconscious thought process.)
The Relationship Goal is how will this decision affect my relationships with others? If I am a "team player" and the team likes the idea, I shall go along. If I must share the activity or result and I am a lone hero, then I shall not want to do what you say.
Then Kishor goes on to write a formula:
H = E + G + B + A
H is Action (Handlung in German) -- which action I take when you try to convince me to do something?
E is Ego: Who am I? The higher my level, the bigger my ego. Will I be more important if I do this? Will it give me more power or a better perception of my skill, authority, power, fame?
G is Greed -- I want it. I must have it now.
B is Comfort (Bequemlichkeit in German). The more options I have, the more uncomfortable I am; the less complicated and simpler it is, the more comfortable I am. I don't want to have to think too hard. Narrow my choices and dumb down the offering.
A is Fear (Angst in German). Uncertainty. Should I do it? Should I take that step? Worry. Do I have a bad feeling about this? You must make the person comfortable, unafraid, and confident in the decision. Offer certainty, comfort, simplicity, assurance, and you can win over rational arguments.
Kishor goes on to talk about how and why these factors normally get a negative connotation but are actually neutral and can be seen in a positive light. Humans are not computers. People who make decisions have feelings. To succeed at convincing people, we must get inside their head. Build a holistic picture of their environment, friends, partners, boss and see them as human beings. Like a camera-man, get inside the feelings of the other person at an emotional level.
Kishor spent the last 5-10 minutes of the video selling his book, transparently using all four of the methods of argument above, possibly to demonstrate the technique, possibly to earn more money by selling his book.
It looks like a pretty good book for sales guys.

Flash Boys

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys

Fantastic book.  Highly recommended.

Old Power and New Power

During my awesome vacation of December 2014 and January 2015 I was able to catch up on reading and among the interesting articles I read is the December 2014 Harvard Business Review article on “Understanding New Power.” The article postulates distinctions and frames discussions of individuals’ and institutions influence over each other in interesting ways.  I am dissatisfied with the author’s scholarship but I enjoyed reading his original ideas.  The article is short and I recommend it.

 

 

Read the whole thing.

Mob Programming

 

Mob Programming

Better Ops Patterns and Practices

Dev-Ops, anyone?

ice bucket

Talia challenged Yofi and her mom; her mom challenged me.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=671430366283410

https://www.facebook.com/mitchwyle/posts/10152638658479269

Night Watch keeps getting better

James Mickens’ column in usenix magazine keeps getting better.  This month’s riff on systems programmers is spot-on.  Here is a representative excerpt:

I need mission-critical people; I need a person who can wear night-vision goggles
and descend from a helicopter on ropes and do classified things to protect my freedom while country music plays in the background. A systems person can do that.

Or, this one:

When it’s 3 A.M., and you’ve been debugging for 12 hours,  and you encounter a virtual static friend protected volatile  templated function pointer, you want to go into hibernation and  awake as a werewolf and then find the people who wrote the  C++ standard and bring ruin to the things that they love. The  C++ STL, with its dyslexia-inducing syntax blizzard of colons and angle brackets, guarantees that if you try to declare any reasonable data structure, your first seven attempts will result  in compiler errors of Wagnerian fierceness:
Syntax error: unmatched thing in thing from std::nonstd::__
map<_Cyrillic, _$$$dollars>const basic_string< epic_
mystery,mongoose_traits &lt; char>, __default_alloc_<casual_
Fridays = maybe>>
One time I tried to create a list<map<int>>, and my syntax  errors caused the dead to walk among the living.

It just keeps getting better.  Read the whole thing.