Frivolous Friday, 05.14.2010: A leadership book I could get behind

Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer from 2001 popped up in the NetFlix queue for this week's Date Night. Surreal fare, but pure escapist fun (with the romantic streak and sin-and-redemption schtick I'm such an unabashed sucker for). Check your brain at the door, but squirrel your sense of justice into your deepest pocket.

Thankfully, Hong Kong cinema isn't likely to infect the weltanshauung of folks who long for an A-list B-school pedigree dating back to Andover. I say "thankfully," because otherwise Shaolin Soccer would be fodder for a business leadership book faster than you can say "roundhouse kick." Because, when you think about it, all the elements are there:

1. The tension between raw talent of the team-members (represented by Sing and his Shaolin "brothers") and hard experience (represented by Coach Fung)
2. The Shining Goal, which has more to do with a shot at capital-R Redemption more than it does with making a living at the chosen craft
3. The obligatory "Big Bad," represented by Coach Hung and his fancy-schmancy (and illegally doped) team
4. The gelling of the team, dually represented by Team Gangster's crossing the line from enemy to teammates...and Mui's last-minute acceptance as a teammate ("I can do this. Trust me.")
   

For as much as I'm jesting, the sad thing is that, had Shaolin Soccer been a Titantic-scale blockbuster, such a book would have been written. Although, if it had, it might have been unconventional in one sense. Namely, the point when "Mighty Steel Leg" Sing provides concrete examples to support his Kung Fu evangelism to the then-skeptical Fung. He points to the lovely woman who could have caught herself after slipping on the banana peel, the driver who could have saved the hassle of parallel parking by shoving his car against the curb, and the tree-trimmer who could have saved his job by using a sword in lieu of trimmers. And also when Hung, in his turn, demonstrates to his team that learning to play by the rules is only half the game when the other team does not.

More sadly, it's this rag-tag-to-riches blueprint (so often telescoped in movies) that is so notably scarce in the lore of business-building. Because where the fist hits the wooden dummy, most of us are (shockingly) not running GE or IBM or--and it pains me to say this--Avis...or even Mackay Envelope. And, yes, it's all well and good to know to fire a Vice President without undermining the morale of her/his underlings. But the fact is that there's a just a weeeeee bit of a gap between corner-office kung-fu and the street-fighting that serves the Chief Cooks and Bottlewashers of this world. And, so far as I can tell, publishers don't want to commit a whole lot of paper and ink into bridging those states.

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Just passing on a (possible) inside joke that I only now twigged into: Mr. Chow, at least according to his IMDB biography, is (surprise!) a huge Bruce Lee fan. Mr. Lee popularized the Wing Chun ("eternal springtime") style of Kung Fu. According to legend, Wing Chun was a young woman who escaped her engagement to an unwanted suitor by besting him in the martial arts. Her trainer was a (refugee) Shaolin adept named Ng Mui--"Mui" being the name of Sing's love interest...and fellow Kung Fu master. Coincidence? Quite possibly. But I laughed out loud anyway.

Sharing a sparkle found in the gray

While it's true that comparing learning a new computer language and learning a new spoken language isn't always the proverbial apples-to-apples proposition, there are a few crucial similarities. The first, of course, is the un-learning that must happen (particularly if the new language is only your second.) I didn't stumble upon another similarity until just today, however: Namely, how having to think about the conventions of a new language forces you to better understand the one(s) you already consider "native."

Given that I will never touch Objective-C again--at least not without considerable financial incentives--at least I've salvaged that scrap of enlightenment from the past three days. Silver linings and all that... And, in the spirit of Views, consider it paid forward.

When half-done is worse than none

I merely demonstrate my past-mastery of the obvious when I say that not all software features are created equal. There aren't too many applications, for instance, that could exist without "Save." But then there's Clippy.

But after today, my sense is that the separator between a crucial feature and a worthless bell/whistle is not (as I used to think) "What would I do if x were missing?" Rather, it's "What would I do if x only half-worked?" To wit: "What if my text editor only saved half the document?" vs. "What would I do if I could only kill Clippy half the time?" That sort of thing.

For a software development application, half-baked integration with version control (a.k.a. source control) is nothing short of an EPIC FAIL. My "tribe" and I learned that all too well this morning. In non-software terms, that's like the brakes on a car working only part of the time. Even 99% success would be unacceptable. Giving user data the same reverence as a newborn in her car seat is definitely not the worst ethos one can have as a software developer. Something I wish a certain brand-name company would grok.

Collateral benefit?

Sorry if I seem to be harping on the tablet PC again; I've been in Objective-C space all day, which sorta-kinda gives me diplomatic immunity. Or something like that. But I was mulling the implications of closing the chasm between desktop and smartphone even yesterday, and that even before the news of Apple's gobsmackingly boneheaded--in my biased opinion--decision to stay in bed with AT&T for the next two years. But here I'm talking about all the "Me, too!" efforts to come in the next ~18 months as the concept goes mainstream. Meaning a tablet that rings up at less than $500, even with a Bluetooth or other headset factored in.

Why? Think tablet PC + headset + Skype. Baaaaad juju...not just for AT&T, but all cellular carriers who--even in 2010--just don't get that the boundaries between voice and text and web exist exclusively in the delusions of corner-office morons. Morons who probably still refer to the act of calling somone as "dialing." (If--if--we're lucky, the suits in question aren't "retro" enough to also refer to their handsets as "the Ameche.")

But for the rest of us, there could well be one (considerable) collateral benefit, even beyond the extinction of the "data plan" swindle. Ever notice how folks wearing headsets tend to converse at more normal volumes (presumably b/c headsets allow them to hear the other end of the conversation better than a handset)? With even mediocre luck, the odds of not having to unwillingly eavesdrop on navel-gazing inanity should drop drastically in a world of tablets and headphones.

Dunno 'bout you, but that's something I know I can get behind.

The "tribalism" of sunk costs

Another day, another commentary about why the iPad will or won't take over the world...and thus another Animal-House-scale food fight in the comments. Tribalism is ugly. It ate half an hour of my time, flipping between technical specs & reviews of the WeTab vs. the Adam. Both are Android-powered tablets due (at least in theory) this summer. That's another form of tribalism at work, no question: Like I'm gonna show up at the Linux User's Group flashing anything but... ;-)

But inasmuch as tribes need to revere a common figurehead and revile a common enemy and all that, it didn't occur to me (until seeing the somewhat steep WeTab price-tag) that sunk costs might just be part of the interpersonal duct tape that holds consumer "tribes" together. It's not solely a gadget thing either: Remember "Nobody got fired for buying IBM"? That seemed to last almost into the Lou Gerstner era. True, once upon a time IBM had a reputation for quality (and the premium to go with it). Similarily, Toyota's acceleration problem was attributed to accident well after the company understood the underlying pattern. The mentality can outlive the reality by nearly impossible amounts of time.

And, as with wine, people seem to think that if they paid more for it, it must be worth the extra coin. Right? Riiiiiiight??? That, and once you've shelled out several hundred clams on a new toy or indentured yourself to a phone contract, you don't want to look like a rube. So to emphasize your non-rubeness, you pay for the new shinys as soon as you can find a suitable beggar for the alms of the old ones, and the cycle perpetuates. (Cough. Not that I've ever been guilty of that... Cough, I say. Cough.)

And so the comments-section slag and counter-slag rather disguises the fact that tribes aren't necessarily as close-knit as the Jets-vs.-Sharks ethos would suggest. (My yardstick: If you wouldn't let a fellow slagger crash overnight on your couch, were s/he stranded in town, it's not a tribe.) Thus can sunk costs create a tribe of one. Which I think both sad and scary that "stuff" has the power to do that to people. I just hope that it doesn't happen too often.

A bit of niftiness before vacation*

I dropped a package off at the FedEx station, arriving so closely on the heels of lunch break that I suspect the gentleman at the counter actually cut his lunch short to help me. I asked him how he was doing on that warm & breezy Saturday afternoon. "Living the dream," came the reply, with nary a trace of sarcasm. Nifty, seeing that kind of attitude give a Mom & Pop feel to the branch office of a world-spanning corporation...and too nifty, IMO, to keep to myself.

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* For me, technically speaking, it isn't a "vacation"--merely more code-writing and less writing about coding. See you all again a week from tomorrow (May 10th)!

A new front in the tablet war?

Over dinner, Dennis mentioned that one of his cohorts had purchased a Nook (Barnes & Noble's e-reader). Cohort is a voracious reader with limited living space, so it makes huge sense. Alas, my primary use for a Nook is canceled out by B&N's appalling lack of digital offerings in programming books. I suppose if I traveled a lot, an iPad would make more sense than carrying an eReader and netbook (assuming that a viable Linux/Android-powered tablet doesn't hit the market, naturally).

I haven't done much business with Amazon since they went over to The Dark Side in the late 90s, so I'm blaming that grudge for not thinking of this sooner. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.) Amazon's been in the music/movie business for quite some time. They've also spent a lot of bling building the cloud app/storage sideline, which--until now--seemed to me like quite the break from their core competencies of online retailing. Their e-reader, the Kindle, already downloads digital book purchases via WhisperNet. Granted, the Nook has music playback, but Barnes & Noble seems to be ambling in the direction of supporting networking in the more peer-to-peer sense (i.e. friends can borrow your books) than with the internet at large.

The upshot is my guess that, in renting out application/storage horsepower, Amazon is not necessarily interested in it as a long-term cash cow. (That sort of thing tends become a commodity sooner or later.) Rather, their current customers may be in fact subsidizing not only the initial outlay for hardware and staffing, but also Amazon's learning-curve in mastering the art of scalability. Then, too, Amazon has the brand equity in books/music/video that Google does not. All of which, were I one of Steve Jobs' minions, would keep me awake at night wondering what tricks the next edition of the Kindle will do.