Month: August 2017

My apologies to our readers for the lateness of this post but the late flight precluded posting yesterday. The title of this post reflects the lesson that almost everybody learns from their time in Las Vegas – the house always wins. Always. I know there are people who believe, and will tell you they have left Vegas ahead, at least that’s what they think. The truth is that no one leaves Vegas ahead.

Even if you bring some of your money (or theirs) home – the house still won.  Why?  Because that thought will bring you back to Vegas eventually, and they will get their money back. I haven’t met a person yet who didn’t think they could somehow beat the system – and actually beat the system. It just doesn’t happen.

The only way to beat the system is to accept you can’t beat the system and never go back. That may be my answer when it’s all said and done. The previous post summed up our feelings pretty well – Vegas isn’t’ the town we remembered – it is dirty, it’s profane, and it’s not as much fun as we remember.  Maybe we will go back – maybe we won’t.  But we do know this much – the house always wins. Always.

So, the three of us are in Las Vegas and held our fantasy football draft today.  This whole trip has reminded me of a few things that I sometimes seem to forget.Given the tardiness of this post, I figured I would share them in no particular order.

First, this was about as unprepared as I have ever been for a draft, yet I think my team will be all right because I have learned to trust the analysis of the software I use and i allow it to inform my ultimate selection.  This is somewhat akin to what Kasparov was talking about when reflecting on his analysis that good chess players with good chess programs generally performed better than great chess players with good chess programs, because the good players trusted the data analysis while the great players tried to shape the analysis to fit their plan.  I am not saying I have the best team, in fact I am a little uncomfortable playing the strategy that the data analysis led to, but it will be interesting to track through the season.

Second, I am a man of different tastes, desires and pursuits than I was 25 years ago.  While Las Vegas has changed, so have I. Most of our efforts were spent seeing how many steps/miles we could walk and seeing what eating options were nearby.  We did visit the historic Atomic Liquors where they used to watch the nuclear tests go off and where the Rat Pack used to hang out after their shows and we ended up staying up all the way to about 1am Eastern.  Overall, though, the crowds, the heat and the expense combined with the unbridled pursuit of overindulgence has really turned me off of the town.  The fountain at the Bellagio are pretty cool, though.

Third, watching sports in the sports book of a casino is a lot of fun.  There are tons of screens showing pretty much any and every sport available.  The chairs are comfortable, the air is cool and it is one of the quieter places.

Finally, there are a lot of people so intent on maximizing every second to squeeze out as much artificial pleasure as they can, that they miss out on the real pleasures around them.  The fun of this trip wasn’t sum total of the events and locations we visited, but rather the time walking and talking; laughing and discussing.  It wasn’t about the where or the what, but the who.

So, while I move a little slower, need a little more rest and could stand to drop a few pounds, as the song says, I may not be as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was.

This is going to be about our fantasy football league, so if you aren’t in to that, you may want to skip today’s post.  Today, my fellow co-authors and I will be meeting up in Las Vegas for our fantasy football draft.  This is our league’s 25th draft and our 3rd in Las Vegas.  We have had some interesting times over the years, including drafting inside the NFL Pro Football Hall of Fame, drafting around the world, with participants simultaneously drafting in Thailand, Europe and in 3 US time zones, and a very odd visit by a Frenchman in our chat room asking our age, sex and location.  Needless to say, he was quickly, albeit brusquely introduced to fantasy football banter at which point he left.

When we first started, fantasy football was a niche activity.  There were magazines, but the web was just starting to gain traction, so there wasn’t a lot of software or data at our fingertips.  We would make our lists manually based on whatever magazines we trusted and we would gather at a restaurant or other location to draft face to face.  Every week we would pick up the Monday and Tuesday USA Today and calculate the points and update the records.  

I am our third commissioner.  Mike Chaney kicked it off with a core set of owners, some of whom are still with us today.  Jay Phipps brought the league into the computer age in our second year, buying the “My Fantasy League” software and setting up the databases, etc.  I took over after Jay, and got to shepherd us into the Internet and mobile age.  The networked communication allowed us to continue to keep the league going as people could be anywhere yet still join us on draft day.

Today, we have real-time scoring, up-to-the-minute stats and injury reports and so many sites available, you don’t really have to research anymore.  Now it seems like everyone is in a couple of leagues and you would be hard-pressed to find any place in game day that doesn’t have some sort of group getting together to watch the games.  So, I look back on our league with pride and happiness.  We have been there from almost the absolute beginning and have enjoyed every bit of the ride.  We have a great combination of old and young owners, which gives me hope we will see the league continue for many years to come.

A common phrase in the military is “Been there, done that.” It’s an overused statement but it relates a kinship of shared experience between people with a common perspective, at least in part. People who use this phrase generally have credibility with the listener so both parties can share stories, laugh, cry or commiserate about the shortfalls of the experience. But this post is about the opposite of a shared experience.

Heres the advice: If you’ve only heard about something–an experience, an organization, an activity–don’t pretend you understand it. Don’t complain about it. Don’t make suggestions about how to fix it. Don’t spread rumors about it. Instead, learn about it. Listen to understand. Ask questions. But ask them with a bent toward comprehension of the subject, not critiquing it.

If you haven’t been there or done that, be quiet and learn about it. Otherwise all you’ll do is lose credibility and make people mad.

I’ve spent the past year leading our agency’s Career Services function which falls under our Human Resource Directorate. I’m not an HR professional, but I volunteered to run the function because I wanted to learn something different while attempting to have a positive impact on as many agency employees as I possibly could. There have been many days (sometime weeks) when I wondered why  would subject myself to so much frustration, political maneuvering and self-centered thinking. Before I got too far down that dark road, I’d have the joyful experience of seeing the right people promoted, great supervisors selflessly taking care of their troops and employees complimenting their career service representative for outstanding customer service. This roller coaster ride has been everything I volunteered for: a growth experience through which I’ve learned the intricacies of human resource work and why HR professionals become hard-hearted after too long in this field; improved my competencies in listening to understand, empathy and critical thinking; and I believe the team I’ve worked with has had a very positive impact on our colleagues across the agency.

During this experience, I’ve found myself focusing on one very specific aspect of leadership: decision-making. Part of my team’s responsibilities is running our hiring, promotion and assignment processes. Each of these decision-making processes are tremendous opportunities to make a decades-long investment in our national security mission while simultaneously fraught with the potential to pick a candidate who shines through the selection process only to become a public service parasite sucking up a salary without really contributing to the nation. (Before I continue, let me disabuse you of the prominently held notion that government servants are lazy, tax-eating bums. While I only have experience in the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, I can say that those types of employees are far outliers from the average committed civil servant.)

So how do you pick the best and the brightest when making such a significant investment? Some people insist interviews are the only way to really get to know a candidate. Others say you need to see the broader picture including resume, cover letter and interview. The more thorough assessors take all this information and add practical assessments such as critical thinking challenges, leadership labs and peer interaction exercises. Adding more and more aspects to the assessment process further refine the decision, but even with all that work we only get a snapshot of the candidate and won’t really know their true colors until they get into the job and start to unveil their protective mask donned to impress us. Yet, we often feel we have enough data to make an informed decision and select the force of the future. We convince ourselves that we know what we’re doing. We foolishly believe we are all good decision makers and can see patterns of behavior in short timeframes, but science has proven we are really poor decision makers when we don’t rely on as much data as possible to help guide us. When hiring prospective civil servants, the best approach is an internship over the course of multiple summers. This has been proven out at my agency and others.

If only we could force our politicians to serve internships so we could see their true colors before making our decision.

One of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman, wrote a personal credo for the UK newspaper, The Guardian in 2015. I’d like to share that credo considering recent events. I offer his credo without commentary.

What I Believe by Neil Gaiman

“I believe that it is difficult to kill an idea, because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast.

I believe that you can set your own ideas against ideas you dislike. That you should be free to argue, explain, clarify, debate, offend, insult, rage, mock, sing, dramatize and deny.

I do not believe that burning, murdering, exploding people, smashing their heads with rocks (to let the bad ideas out), drowning them or even defeating them will work to contain ideas you do not like. Ideas spring up where you do not expect them, like weeds, and are as difficult to control.

I believe that repressing ideas, spreads ideas.

I believe that people and books and newspapers are containers for ideas, but that burning the people will be as unsuccessful as firebombing the newspaper archives. It is already too late. It is always too late. The ideas are out, hiding behind people’s eyes, waiting in their thoughts. They can be whispered. They can be written on walls in the dead of night. They can be drawn.

I believe that ideas do not have to be right to exist.

I believe you have every right to be perfectly certain that images of god or prophet or man are sacred and undefilable, just as I have the right to be certain of the sacredness of speech, of the sanctity of the right to mock, comment, to argue and to utter.

I believe I have the right to think and say the wrong things. I believe your remedy for that should be to argue with me or to ignore me, and that I should have the same remedy for the wrong things that you think.

I believe that you have the absolute right to think things that I find offensive, stupid, preposterous or dangerous, and that you have the right to speak, write, or distribute these things, and that I do not have the right to kill you, maim you, hurt you, or take away your liberty or property because I find your ideas threatening or insulting or downright disgusting. You probably think my ideas are pretty vile, too.

I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win.

Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they are even true.”

One of my coauthors recently wrote about the wisdom of crowds vs the knowledge of experts.  I’d like to expand on that topic just a bit. Too often “experts” will overrule the wisdom of the crowds and push forward with plans they think are best. Usually these plans end in failure because of the shortsighted or often blind intentions of the those who think they know best.

One example of this are some of the poor business choices made by McDonald’s.  For years McDonald’s was the leader (and still is) in the mass production of repeatable, quick hamburgers and fries. You knew what you were getting regardless of where you bought you Big Mac and fries. You may have occasionally received an off burger – but for the most part from Bangor, Maine, to San Diego, California, a Big Mac was a Big Mac. When I worked at McDonald’s, the biggest complaint I heard from customers was that McDonald’s stopped breakfast too early, and I was often asked when McDonald’s was going to offer all day breakfast. The management of my McDonald’s passed this information and even asked permission to offer extended times for breakfast but was told that part of the franchise agreement was offering menus at times set by McDonald’s corporation.

Later, when McDonald’s sales numbers were being squeezed by other fast food franchises such as Burger King and Wendy’s, they looked for ways to maximize their market share.  McDonald’s conducted consumer polls and the result (as I read in my MBA classes) was that offering an all-day breakfast menu – the same suggestion I heard when worked there – was what customers wanted. Offering all-day breakfast was not much of a logistical stretch for most stores and did not require new equipment or training.  The answer was obvious. Wrong.

McDonald’s decided instead to experiment with pizza, fried chicken, and even burritos. The corporate staff were ignoring their base strengths (fast, cheap burgers and fries) and their customers, and chasing a market share they would never win.  All of these new menu items required more equipment, training, and expense for the franchise holders. None were popular.  Later, when McDonald’s changed senior management they finally got the hint and started offering all-day breakfast on the menu but not before losing a large market share to other fast food franchises.

The story was repeated with Coca Cola corporation’s failed roll out of “New Coke.” Coke’s executives were worried about Pepsi’s popularity in the 1980s, despite Coke having most of the market share, and changed the recipe to be more like Pepsi.  This is still taught as one of the largest management failures of all time in business schools.  The lesson learned? Listen to crowds, listen to your customers, and play to your strengths.

I was reminded yesterday evening about the importance of scars.  Our pastor was gone and the gentleman filling in for him talked about it and I thought the points were worth sharing.  Scars hurt to acquire.  They represent pain and trauma that we went through at some point, and can generally be a reminder of something bad that happened.  That said, there is a beauty in scars if you think about it.

First, scars remind us of pain, but also of healing.  They represent the miracle of what was ripped and torn being made whole once again and that is truly something worth remembering.  They show that, while there were struggles and difficulties, you made it through and are stronger for it.

Second, they remind us of what not to do again.  Let’s face it, many scars are the result of us putting ourselves in situations or places that can do us harm.  Scars serve as a reminder to exercise wisdom based on our experiences and not repeat the mistakes of the past.  Like Ebenezers are monuments to remind us of past victories, scars are like personal Ebenezers of trials and victories of the past.

Finally, scars help us relate to each other.  As others go through difficulties and trials, our willingness and openness about our scars gained through similar trials draw us closers together and make us collectively stronger.  Likewise, the lessons from the scars of others help us weather the trials of today.

So, while they may not be pretty, scars are actually pretty special things to be appreciated in their own right.  Have a great week!

I have been delving deeper into crowd-sourced behaviors and the impacts of social media on society in response to a book I have been reading by Daniel Suarez.  During my digging, I discovered a couple of interesting facts about social media that made me start to think about the impact it has on everyday life.  For example, on Twitter, each day enough words are tweeted to fill a 10 million page book.  Granted, that would be a pretty boring read, and I am not sure if emojis count as words, but 10 million pages a day is a pretty significant number.  Likewise, it is estimated that it would take just a shade over 1,000 years to watch all the YouTube videos currently posted.   Facebook recently shutdown one of its AI engines because it was starting to communicate in ways that Facebook didn’t intend.

When you compare those types of numbers to numbers of movies released in a year or prolific authors, etc., you see pretty quickly that the technology of social media has become the great equalizer in our society.  The specialty niches of book, music and media publishing and sales have now been moved from the hands of specific publishing houses/management companies to the hands of anyone with decent equipment and good bandwidth.  Not too many years ago, self-publishing was an arduous and questionable endeavor due to the lack of sales venues, however, today, you have your choices of where to publish your manuscript and the price you want for it.  Have a song?  You can publish and sell it through a number of music sites.  Want to develop video content?  Just get a good camera and get started.  Not sure what you are doing?  There is probably a YouTube video to show you exactly what to do.

The availability and the power of the tools we have at our disposal today makes it easy to disrupt an established business, but it also makes it hard to not get disrupted.  My personal opinion is that we will see many more industries disrupted as technology continues to expand into new fields, such as predictive analytics, quantum computing and biosynthetics/human-machine augmentation.  With that jobs will be lost and new jobs will be created.  Garry Kasparov, the former World Chess Champion, who defeated Deep Blue and then was beaten 2 years later by Deep Blue, held several chess tournaments allowing chess players to use any computer software/hardware to help them in the tournaments and had some fascinating insights.  He said they noticed that good players with good software tended to defeat great players with good software because good players tended to utilize the strengths of the software, while great players tended  to try to force the computer into their line of thinking.  Now, before you say, not me, let me ask, have you ever ignored your GPS because you “knew better”?  We all do it in areas where we believe ourselves to be experts vs the machines.  The point Kasparov was making was that we need to embrace the concept of working with expert systems and trusting them now to allow us to more quickly move to the next new economy and more quickly enjoy the benefits of the technology boom.

Anyway, his talk was fascinating and he has written a new book on it that I recommend to anyone interested in how technology and expert systems are starting to permit human augmentation and enable growth in new areas.  In the meantime, I will try to get a little better at trusting my GPS…

I just attended a very nice retirement ceremony for an acquaintance and his family. The reason it was so nice is because of the character of this family and all the things they’ve accomplished together and through this military officer. It wasn’t your boilerplate ceremony–the honoree made sure it didn’t seem to take as long as it did by making it fun, interactive and very personal. I was especially moved by the comments his children and wife made about him. It was a visible demonstration of the advice I often give mentees: When the time comes for us to leave this Earth, it’s not very likely that we’ll look up trying to find our coworkers and ask, “Why didn’t I spend more time at work?” Our family an friends are the ones that truly matter and if we don’t recognize that early, we will pay for it later.

I paid for it a little at the ceremony. The honest love and affection this family had for each other made me wonder if I’ve given all I can for my family and friends. That question has been on my mind a lot lately, primarily because of some very negative things that have been happening at my agency. As each questionable decision is made, I drill even more forcefully inward trying to assess if I’ve done all I can in each area of my life to drive out positive outcomes. The more I poke at that question, the more I wonder if my priorities are straight. This wonder is reinforced, even exacerbated, by conversations with work friends about the current state of our agency. We debate about what we didn’t do to prevent the increased lack of integrity and blatant nepotism. We console each other that it’s beyond our control and we can only influence what is in our own sphere. But I don’t believe it.

I’ve spent the past five or so years tilting at these windmills trying to prevent the decay of culture and repeatedly raising what I believe to be the main challenges that keep us from making progress. Sometimes, it works, but more often than not it falls on deaf ears. I feel like Don Quixote only instead of the focused futile fight that Cervantes describes, I’m riding around Amsterdam trying to understand why these windmills keep popping up all over the place. It can be crushing to think of all the things I’ve been unable to accomplish for my team, for my agency, for my friends and for my family.

Yet, and this may sound, really depressing, I know that there is a bottom to all of this. I know that the windmills won’t win. I know that endurance, patience and the relationships I’ve built with real friends and family will win the day. Although, I’ve fallen short in my mind, and sometimes in theirs, I also know that I don’t do anything alone…even tilting at windmills.