Management pseudo-science

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I’ve always been amused by the term “management science” which seems to me as absurd as the term “yoga science”. This hasn’t stopped universities and their business schools using the term, though (see this Google search result for UK universities). I’ve been similarly amused by the big-selling business books that one finds in airport bookstalls — so amused, in fact, that I once proposed that people should be able to trade air-miles for an MBA degree. So it was refreshing to find this admirably acerbic post by Freek Vermeulen in – guess where? – the Harvard Business Review!

Management is not an exact science, they say. And I guess most things that involve the study of human behavior cannot be. But I sometimes wonder if that is the reason — or the excuse — that the business sections at airport bookshops are so full of nonsense.

Quite often these books are written with panache. And the authors — aspiring “management thinkers” and “gurus” (never scientists) — have an excellent sense of the pulse of the business public. They are neither crooks nor charlatans; they write what they believe. But that doesn’t make their beliefs right. People can believe vigorously in voodooism, homeopathy, and creationism.

A common formula to create a best-selling business book is to start with a list of eye-catching companies that have been outperforming their peers for years. This has the added advantage of creating an aura of objectivity because the list is constructed using “objective, quantitative data.” Subsequently, the management thinker takes the list of superior companies and examines (usually in a rather less objective way) what these companies have in common. Surely — is the assumption and foregone conclusion — what these companies have in common must be a good thing, so let’s write a book about that and become rich.

In Search of Excellence and Built to Last, to name a few classic examples, followed that formula — including the getting rich bit. One piece of advice to come out of such tomes, for instance, has been to create a strong, coherent organizational culture, like most of high-performing firms studied. However, we now know from academic research that a strong culture is often the result of a period of high performance, rather than its cause. In fact, a very coherent culture can even be a precursor of what is called a competency trap, where firms get stuck in their old beliefs and ways of doing things. Not coincidentally, the list of superior companies frequently starts unravelling when the book is still at the printer’s.

Right on! Worth reading in full.

Banish the trolls but online debate needs (a degree of) anonymity

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This morning’s Observer column.

So the proprietor of the Huffington Post has decided to ban anonymous commenting from the site, starting in mid-September. Speaking to reporters after a conference in Boston, Arianna Huffington said: “Trolls are just getting more and more aggressive and uglier and I just came from London where there are rape and death threats. I feel that freedom of expression is given to people who stand up for what they say and [are] not hiding behind anonymity. We need to evolve a platform to meet the needs of the grown-up internet.”

Quite so. I can see heads nodding in agreement. After all, much anonymous online commenting seems to be stupid, nasty, vicious and ignorant. And that’s just the stuff that isn’t tangential to the topic of the article being commented on. If people have to take responsibility for what they say in public, then they will surely behave better.

That seems like common sense. Whether it is supported by evidence is, however, uncertain because at the moment there isn’t much research, and what there is seems to be mostly anecdotal…

There are, it seems to me, two kinds of problems with online commenting in its current form. The first is bad or pathological behaviour — trolling etc. As I say in the column, there are ways of dealing with that. And there’s always Anil Dash’s method — see his terrific post “If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault”. The second problem is that of harnessing the possibilities of online discussion as a way of enlarging and enhancing the public sphere. Many comments are thoughtful, informed and pertinent, and yet are submerged in morasses of incivility and webs of incomprehensible infighting. Which leads to the thought that perhaps the problem is architectural. Maybe web sites are providing the wrong sort of virtual space. After all, as someone once said, if you provide a boxing ring, people will fight.

Mat Honan has an interesting thought about this. For too long, he says, comments have been stuck in overlooked back alleys where anyone can leave digital graffiti on online real estate.

We’ve bought into the fallacy of comments so completely that they remain nearly universal—and universally terrible. A lot of people have tried to fix them. Yet, as Digg CEO Andrew McLaughlin says, “everyone who runs a commenting system ends up killing themselves or shooting up a post office.” It’s hyperbole, sure, but trying to wrangle online conversations is a messy, frustrating, and typically thankless affair that involves more time than most people have. Even a dedicated team of moderators can hardly compete with legions of trolls and spambots. Nonetheless, lots of people are trying to make you read the comments again—because in those rare moments when comments are great, they are some of the best parts of the Internet.

The most talked-about new system is probably Branch, which moves discussions over to its site and lets publishers select the best threads to embed on their own pages. Want to weigh in? You’ll need to be invited by a discussion’s host or one of its participants. That barrier to entry cuts down on toxic drive-by commenting. When people have to be invited, they’re less likely to be jackasses.

Meanwhile, Gawker built an entirely new publishing platform based on commenting. Called Kinja, it lets authors and readers isolate thought-provoking discussions so every comment isn’t just vomited up chronologically. But Kinja isn’t only about bringing civility; it’s also about moving the story forward by treating an article as a starting point rather than a product. This doesn’t happen magically—it takes work. Writers must actually dive into discussions to surface interesting conversations.

Both of these systems treat discussions as independent acts instead of afterthoughts. “If you want quality conversation, you have to elevate it,” says Josh Miller, who cofounded Branch.

PS: After writing this I came on a lovely cartoon in the New Yorker. It shows Moses reading out the Tablets to the assembled Israelites. At the back, a chap has put up his hand. “Does it have a section at the bottom for comments?” he asks.

Employee #30 leaves the stage

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Astute Wired comment on Steve Ballmer’s departure (announcement of which increased the value of his Microsoft stock by three quarters of a billion dollars btw):

The 21st century doesn’t look good for the tech giants of the ’80s and ’90s. HP and Dell have lost much of their mojo to more nimble operations in Asia that are now building vast swathes of the hardware that drives the web’s most popular services. Oracle is struggling in the face not only of those hardware upstarts, but also a whole new breed of software makers and web companies offering tools that suit the modern internet in ways Larry Ellison’s aging software never could. And then’s there’s Ballmer and Microsoft, who had even more to lose — and lost it.

In some ways, it’s hard to blame Ballmer. Like HP and Dell and Oracle, Microsoft suffers from the innovator’s dilemma. It built such a successful business on the back of Windows — covering not only the desktop and laptops PCs we all used, but also the computer servers and other hardware that drove the modern corporation — it was difficult for the company to change course without undercutting its own bottom line. And the rise of open source software has hit the company right at the heart of its operation.

It’s notable that perhaps the biggest success of Ballmer’s time at the head of Microsoft, the Xbox video game console, wasn’t build on top of Windows, allowing the console to grow and morph on its own, without having to align itself with the Windows monolith.

Why are so many British journalists so cowed by spooks?

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Interesting to read this — in a German magazine.

It’s astonishing to see how many Britons blindly and uncritically trust the work of their intelligence service. Some still see the GCHQ as a club of amiable gentlemen in shabby tweed jackets who cracked the Nazis’ Enigma coding machine in World War II. The majority of people instinctively rally round their government on key issues of defense policy, sovereignty and home rule — even though the threat to the “national security” of the United Kingdom emanating from Edward Snowden is nothing more than an allegation at the moment. Those in power in Westminster have become used to journalists deferring to national interests when it comes to intelligence issues.

The spies expect preemptive subservience and discretion from the country’s press, and they often get what they want. There is no other explanation for the matter-of-factness with which government officials and GCHQ employees contacted Guardian Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger to demand the surrender or destruction of hard drives. What is surprising is the self-assurance that led the powerful to believe that none of this would ever come to light. According to the newspaper, after the hard drives had been destroyed in the Guardian’s basement, an intelligence agent joked: “We can call off the black helicopters.”

Those words reflect the government’s need for chummy proximity. Journalists must avoid such attempts at ingratiation from the powerful, even if it means that they are occasionally denied information and exclusive stories from intelligence sources.

Yep. It’s all part of British elites’ inability to get rid of Imperial afterglow. And it’s also why so many journalists are hostile to people like Glenn Greenwald and Wikileaks. They view them as uncredentialled interlopers on their precious professional turf.

Undermining democracy in order to save it

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Members of my (baby-boomer) generation will remember the grotesque logic sometimes used by the United States in the Vietnam war when US and South Vietnamese troops declared that they had “to burn villages in order to save them” from the Viet Cong. There’s an element of that kind of logic in the wilder justifications for comprehensive surveillance we’ve laboured under ever since 9/11: we have to undermine democracy in order to save it. In that context, Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute has a very informative blog post on “Lawful Interception Capability Requirements” which concludes with this observation:

The European Court of Human Rights has not previously shied away from dealing with intelligence issues, commenting in Leander v Sweden on ‘the risk that a system of secret surveillance for the protection of national security poses of undermining or even destroying democracy on the ground of defending it’ [Application no. 9248/81]. It is not inconceivable that the UK’s sweeping Internet surveillance activities will be found, as the Court did in S. and Marper with the UK’s National DNA Database, to ‘constitute… a disproportionate interference’ with privacy that ‘cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society’.