Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

Thoughts from Average is Over

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On Google Play, where I bought this book, I wrote the following terse book review;

This is not a book that you understand in the first twenty pages.

The concept is pretty simple – boredom and a want of simplicity are keeping us from working with all of the tools we have to build a better world, a better economy, and a better life. However, the volume of detail Cowen goes into on just how that world might look is compelling, dangerous, and a little scary – but in a good way.

I’ve already recommended this to at least 3 people – and will continue to do so in the future.

Average is Over - Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation - Tyler Cowen | Google Play Books
Oddly, I found this book via Imgur – not via a business blog.

The ability to work with and interpret for computers is a big deal – and it’ll continue to be bigger and bigger as computers get better. All those soft skills your councillors tried to foist on you will pay off, if they already haven’t. However they won’t necessarily just pay off with people – they’ll pay off with your ability to be the back-channel between those who understand computer work, and those who do not.

This is a core part of what Cowen is getting at, but the reasoning behind it is very important to understanding the why for why this interpretation is so crucial to developing personal and cultural economic success.

Bizarrely, while this is an economist’s book about computing, and it comes very clearly from a statistical thoroughness I can’t possibly recognize in a book review properly, Average is Over feels very much like a galvanizing agent for knowledge workers. It’s not going to teach you to handle margins, do statistics in any real way, or anything like that. What this book offers is an understanding – from a non-business point of view – of just why the rush in knowledge work is so meaningful, against the backdrop of “normal people living normal lives.” It’s also a fairly damning account of just why the middle class is evaporating – though, thankfully, the book has some things to say about why that’s not necessarily a bad thing either.

What I appreciate most, personally, is that Tyler Cowen is and behaves like a knowledge worker himself.

If you follow him on Twitter, or read the blog at Marginal Revolution, you’ll get a broader sense of what fuels Cowen’s work, and where his passion is; making life better through adding value to information, which should be the knowledge worker’s mantra.

Without becoming too exhaustive, I’ll leave some key thoughts I had from the reading of Average is Over – and hopefully they’ll either spark some discussion or urge you to read the book itself;

  • The “average” being discussed is the middle class, without a doubt. Strangely, how I read this is that – and I’m nowhere near equipped to back it against data – there’s going to be far more room to get into the “have” category none the less, for those willing to do so. We’re not all going to like that, on both sides. Barriers to entry to the have-class are going to relate much more to personal effort in the future than legacy advantages.
  • Elitism is OK, as long as it puts on a polite face. We see this in gaming culture all the time. Even the most staunch “git gud son” players of online games can be the best of people – if they understand, and have the soft skills available, how to manage their environments and the people in those environments. As a force for internal personal development, or even external encouragement, “good enough isn’t good enough” is actually really powerful.
  • Median inflation adjusted income is dropping, have we compared this to an increase or a decrease in consumption? What gets me is that, if needs-and-expenses are also dropping, then inflation might be more related to wants. Again, we’re seeing that “effort” as above, may relate to force of will and personal austerity in some areas. Maybe people who don’t get the Apple Watch are the winners, in other words.
  • Your data is your most valuable and irreplaceable currency – and I’ll probably talk about this a little more soon. Tim Cook (Apple) very recently threw a pooh-pooh at Google and Microsoft for making business out of people’s’ data. What’s interesting about this, as relates to the book, is the idea that aggregates most often trump individuals as far as big-enough-data is concerned, and oddly that makes us safer and not less secure.

There’s so much more here as fuel for discussion. What I’m electing to take away from the book en mass though is the idea that setting your expectations, and then learning how to back those expectations out toward reality, is a killer app in terms of thought technology.

Get Average is Over by Tyler Cowan on Google Play Books – or, you know, that other place that used to be nothing but books and now sends you toilet paper overnight.

The Mental Disadvantage of Intentional Deviance

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Boxing day was a bust. We spent much of the day trying to figure out why, and we came up with a few answers. It’s come down to either: (a) everyone knows Boxing Day sales are incredible, but also doesn’t want to be part of the crush; or (b) everyone went to the big box stores; or (c) everyone shopped online.

It’s perfectly possible Amazon and other e-tailers could have had awesome one-day-only deals. Even though there’s so much fuss over Cyber Monday, Boxing Day is a universally recognized deal-grab that any business dealing with the public would be stupid to not take advantage of.  This is altogether likely, and I don’t have the stats, but I don’t think I could be as frustrated with that; it’s not because online shopping is killing retail, it’s because ecommerce is an entirely different industry selling a similar product. It’s like comparing journalism to copywriting – same product, worlds apart.

Well, sure, lots of people go to big box stores for the great deals – doorcrashers have been a way of life for them for years, whereas my chain is only three years into the Great Door Crasher trend. But one of my colleagues figured that one box store has, maybe, 13 of a given TV which means a hundred people will go and 87% miss out. We, however, have four locations for each of their single monoliths, and if we have four TVs per location, it means there’s actually a much MUCH larger percentage chance you’ll get what you want from us. But if a TV goes Doorcrasher in a boutique, does it make a sale?

We ended up asking a couple of people, by the end of the day. And it turns out most people know – deeply believe – that boxing day in the malls will be idiotically busy, and try to avoid it unless absolutely necessary. One customer even called it Pugilist Day – needless to say, we lost our hats laughing.

But is this the case?

There’s a gap, where everyone avoids an action because “everyone else” will be doing it. People avoid entrepreneurship because it’s already done. Shoppers avoid the busy days, because they want to avoid the crowds more than they want to take advantage of the deals. As the actions and their consequences scale upwards, the result of this intentional deviance gets bigger, and eventually we see what we had yesterday: malls with no one in them on the biggest shopping day of the year.

I almost wish I was at the shop today to see if everyone who avoided coming in yesterday showed up today; that’s the other result. If everyone takes the road less travelled, you still end up in the middle of the pack. But of course, you can’t see this because the pack surrounds you, and for all you know the other road holds ten times the number of people.

Being different just like everyone else – isn’t always a good idea.

Academic Proof vs Social Proof

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rank and file - photo by spacepleb
photo by spacepleb

How do you justify getting a degree in the age of social proof?

I’m not going to pretend to know the statistics nationally, but of the graduating class I came from, two people I’m aware of did the “right thing” and went to college to get degrees. One in sociology, one in psychology. Both of them are still working retail because there are no jobs requiring the degrees they have. It’s a little unsettling. But then, I wasn’t one of the two who got the degrees.

Instead, I worked. I intended to work until I found something worth going to school for – I still do, and the options are narrowing as my experience increases and my tastes settle – but now I’m wondering if it’s not possible to simply use the experience I have as a foothold to the career I’ll eventually retire from. It really makes me wonder how useful the post-secondary educational system is.

A part of this comes from my frustration with the education system itself. My father’s a teacher and has been for his entire adult life, nearly forty years I think. I’ve seen a number of the struggles he has with the system itself, the bureaucracy behind the scenes, and it makes me a little worried for the students who have to put up with the end results of this. I’m convinced it’s time for an overhaul, but I admit there’s little I could contribute to the doing of that.

Instead, I think it’s important that businesses begin to more adequately recognize when someone’s had better training in one direction or the other. In some instances, there is no substitute for a degree. Accountants, software designers – there are things you learn from concise, critical study that simply cannot be taught on the job. The degree, the certificate – these things still have merit, but their arena has to change, and employers need to recognize this.

Similarly, work experience provides a number of benefits degrees do not. Soft skills, prioritizing beyond the current assignment, forward thinking – the workplace has need of these abilities far more than the schools do, and for certain jobs – strategy, marketing, sales, perhaps even reaching as far as executive positions, given the right kinds of experience, it may be more effective to consider someone’s real life decisions and knowledge beyond the classroom will inevitably be more valuable.

I think one of the troubles with the acceptance of work experience and real-life CV-building experience might be the question of scale. There is a lot of standardization in schooling, if someone’s passed, they have proven their ability to keep up with accepted norms, and like any machine, business relies on standards and metrics. Life experience provides none of this clean-cut, rationed demarcation, which will likely prove the biggest frustration for recruiters trying to pull in the talented rather than the credentialed.

But at the end of the process, when the dust settles and the new workplace adjusts to new venues for education, the same will apply as does today: there is no clearcut benefit in pushing yourself or anyone else down an educational path they’ll waste, when they could be gaining other valuable learning simply by sitting up and living in a way that’s attentive to their needs and highest good.

Life at the Scale of the Internet

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Somehow my store now has CBC Newsworld running all the time now, instead of music. As such I’ve been exposed to a lot of news lately – on the one hand it means I’m a bit better informed than usual, and on the other, it exposes me to three hours of balloon boy coverage, which no one needs.

But it’s gotten me thinking about a quote I heard I can’t recall where, that went something along the lines of

Businesses need to begin thinking in the scale of the internet, because anything smaller is already outmoded.

Don’t quote me on that quote. It’s a sentiment, not even a paraphrase, but it did hit me pretty hard. Something as large as the internet, with no set borders, and an ever-diversifying infrastructure (whether it’s able to scale itself at pace with itself has yet to be seen) is about as intangible as it gets. How do you measure something like this? It’s all well and good to think in the scale of the internet, but if you try to encompass the Net in your head, it’s going to explode.

So how can we narrow it down and make it concievable without threatening the scale of the thing itself?

You don’t. And there’s the problem. The information explosion began a lot earlier than the internet. Ars Technica ran a piece the other day about the menace of content copying (pursuant of course to copyright debates, which I’ve addressed before) that has a quote regarding the beginning of Big Content:

In 1906, famous composer John Philip Sousa took to Appleton’s Magazine to pen an essay decrying the latest piratical threat to his livelihood, to the entire body politic, and to “musical taste” itself. His concern? The player piano and the gramophone, which stripped the life from real, human, soulful live performances.

“From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful,” he wrote. “And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters.”

The piece is long, but well worth reading. Still, the primary example is that innovation kills copyright, which was instituted to foster innovation. It’s all very Greek myth, really, and it’s a bit much for me to handle. But this is what traditional media is trying to convince me the internet is doing.

How much impact does the trading of culture for technology have on us, after all?

I have to wonder. So here’s an experiment. In my iTunes right now, there are 2401 songs, which total 7.4 days of continuous music, taking up 16.09 GB of hard drive pace on my computer. Now, about 80% of this comes from discs I’ve ripped out of my own collection in the last eleven years I’ve been collecting music. A further 10% is directly from the iTunes store, and the remaining 10% I can’t lay a direct cause to. We’ll say pirating, because it’s as likely as anything else.

Now, if I sort my iTunes by play count, I get 9 songs with counts over 50. A total of 34 songs have been played more than 25 times, 312 songs have been played once, and 1552 songs have never been played at all.

Never. Not once. This means more than 3/4 of my iTunes library I’ve never even heard.

Now, further, I checked which songs I play the most. Just about all of them are new music, things I’ve gotten from the iTunes store. Of the 9 songs with counts over 50, 8 of them are iTunes+ songs, actually. And every single song I’ve purchased has been played more than 10 times.
This means that the 3/4 of my library which I’ve never played is just about entirely made up of my old albums. Having looked into the things I have which have been played between 5 and 10 times, that makes up the entirety of the Mystery 10%, which I can’t account for having paid for any time in my life. Not one of these songs has been played since about ten days since it was added to my library.

My iTunes library is an analogue for how I see the internet scale.

I visit, consistently, 48 sites on the net every day. Some, such as Google Reader, get massive amounts of visits – this is because I suck all f the good content, the blogs I like reading, into my gReader and never visit the main sites again unless I want to make a comment. Mark Dykeman recently asked on his blog a question about how much impoetus we’re giving people to involve themselves with our internet presenses (post: Do you need to read this?) and it’s a damned good question. How much of the internet do we really need? How much of it is expendable?

And that’s the lie right there. Because the answer is none of it. I don’t care that 4chan exists on a day to day basis, but it’s there, and someone cares. I couldn’t pay less attention to Ground Round’s exquisitely designed brouchureware website if I was paid to do so – but someone visits every day, I bet, because they care. Search explosion or not, content explosion and overload or not, it’s all there for a reason; someone cared enough to put it there, and someone cares enough to keep it there.

How can businesses – and worse yet, people – think in internet scale effectively, when the long tail is so visible it hurts? Especially when my long tail is not your long tail is not Clay’s or Bill’s or Tim’s?

Convince me to care. That’s the internet scale in four words. Otherwise, I’ll keep racking up the play counts on things I already access regularly, and you’ll end up like the pirated music on my iTunes; neglected, discounted, and neither making money nor losing any. From me, anyway. I can’t speak for anyone else.

What are you going to do to convince me to care?

The Law Of Diminishing Returns

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We see this all the time in the store, and I’m noticing it’s a bigger concept than most people give any credence to. Here’s the short of it.

I’ve got three times the paint I need to paint my house, and three times the amount of time needed to do it in.

So what do I do? Generally speaking, there are only so many coats of paint you can put on something before it actually starts to look worse than when you started. That’s diminishing return in a nutshell – the idea that continuing to work on something without allowing for a finished product eventually damages what you’re doing.

One good example of this is promotion, ad saturation. If you see a clever ad on TV, you pay attention. But then you see it again – the message sinks in, true, but if it’s the sad kind of instance where the same commercial plays over and over again every second minute throughout the day, the brand driving this ad is actually damaging itself by making you annoyed with the ad. You never want to see it again. If you ver hear of the company again it’ll be too soon. Internet memes suffer the same fate, but for less benefit. Repeat something obnoxious once or twice and it’s funny, but eventually, reviewing the same tired joke on purpose will get you less benefit every time.

That’s the Law of Diminishing Returns right there – when the task is over, when the joke has run its course, give up the ghost or lose a portion of your investment to the dropping effect.

It’s visible when it happens, sadly outsiders see it more often than those involved, and it’s terrible. A task that should have taken one unit of effort is given two, and almost all of the second unit is wasted because of the dimming effect. And simple changes often mean better returns! If you’re painting the house, set a rule for how many coats to use, and keep the spare paint for later projects. If you’re running the ads, either do a very short, intense run and write the extra time off to keeping public opinion high – or, cut the amount of runs in a 24 hour period in thirds and run the ad for twice as long – it still means less ads viewed, but it also means less people annoyed, and that’s a benefit too, one that marketers seem to be missing.

More is not always better!

It’s like the big dip before success, only worse, because if you don’t recognize that the success has been had, there’s no bounce back. Sometimes it can be hard to recognize when this diminished return happens. I hope companies catch onto this sometime soon – it’s a struggle for individual people as well, so I’ve little hope for this – but there’s a lot of waste going on in terms of energy (energy as time, capital and other forms) that could be avoided if more time was spent learning how to judge where the cliff comes in and how to recognize it when it happens.