Noah Brier's Barbarian Blog

Good Decisions, Bad Behavior

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 04:02:29 -0400

The Economist Free Exchange points to a very interesting point about the side effects of consuming organic/environmentally friendly products :

Consumer choices not only reflect price and quality preferences but also social and moral values as witnessed in the remarkable growth of the global market for organic and environmentally friendly products. Building on recent research on behavioral priming and moral regulation, we find that mere exposure to green products and the purchase of them lead to markedly different behavioral consequences. In line with the halo associated with green consumerism, people act more altruistically after mere exposure to green than conventional products. However, people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products as opposed to conventional products. Together, the studies show that consumption is more tightly connected to our social and ethical behaviors in directions and domains other than previously thought.

I love this. One of the things I thought about a lot at SXSW were the side effects of turning everything into a game. Every incentive disincentivizes another behavior.

via Free Exchange

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Glowing Rectangles

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:02:30 -0500

The best onion articles are the ones that make you a little uncomfortable :

A new report published this week by researchers at Stanford University suggests that Americans spend the vast majority of each day staring at, interacting with, and deriving satisfaction from glowing rectangles.

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Business Expiration Dates

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 04:02:27 -0500

What would happen if we decided at the beginning when a company should die?

I’ve had a few conversations recently about the idea of businesses with expiration dates and I thought maybe it was worth getting some thoughts down. Essentially I’ve been playing with the thought that instead of puttering out 8 years down the line there might be an opportunity for a company to choose its end date and put itself to rest peacefully.

Nobody wins forever. It just doesn’t happen. The big company who have been successful for a century can be counted on your hands. Of course there are Harvard Business Review case studies written about them and they’ve been massively successful, but they are anomalies. A company like GE really shouldn’t exist according to most of what we know about the world. (They are a client of mine, so take whatever I say about them with a grain of salt.) They’re massive, in a ton of different businesses and have existed for over 100 years. This isn’t normal.

What we see in reality are millions of corpses of businesses and ideas that have made their impact (or not) and then petered out into oblivion without leaving much more than a memory. Some of them get bought and swallowed by a bigger company, others have their ideas copied and commodotized and many just don’t have the business or financial chops to make it all work for more than a few years.

So what if instead of worrying about all that you just decided at the beginning you were going to end it all six years in? I’m not sure how you’d decide the timeframe, but let’s put that aside for a second and imagine what would happen if you did. One hope is that it would solve the short-term over long-term problem. Part of the long-term issue is that you have no idea how far into the future “long-term” really is. Company management doesn’t know how long the company will last, so they optimize for the now (they also don’t know how long their jobs will last, but I’ll get to that in a minute). It may be overly hopeful, but as long as one choose a reasonable time-frame (5-10 years) I wonder if you couldn’t lift the decision-making out of the immediate.

The problem here, of course, is that the employees will likely not plan on sticking around for all that time. This, I think, is actually the biggest problem in most of business at the moment. It’s certainly the shortcoming of my business expiration idea, because if employees aren’t in it for the full haul we’ll have the same sort of misaligned incentives and general screwups (at least at the beginning). So on this one, what if we started making jobs with expiration dates? Most of the people I know go into jobs at the moment with little plans of making it beyond three years (as of 2008 the average job tenure for Americans between 25 and 34 years of age was 2.7 years ). Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing isn’t what I’m really interested in at the moment, instead I wonder what would happen if you just capped it. Especially in the advertising industry, where turnover seems higher than most, what if you just signed people up for 2.5 years in the first place. Companies would know what to expect out of the employees and could plan their transition far better and employees wouldn’t have to stew as they got bored. Obviously you’d have to figure out a financial incentive system that worked with this sort of arrangement so that the person didn’t check out at year two, but that could be figured out I suspect.

Anyhow, as usual, this is just me thinking out loud. Happy to hear any thoughts. I don’t know if either of these are actually good ideas, but they at least seem theoretically intriguing.

Ethical Paralysis

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 04:02:27 -0500

I quite liked the following description of the state we’re all left in by the glut of food books on the market at the moment (from an otherwise unremarkable ”
>Lunch with the FT with Jonathan Safran Foer

:

I suggest that the effect of all these books could be to provoke a kind of ethical paralysis. A couple of years ago writers such as Barbara Kingsolver, Alisa Smith and JB MacKinnon argued for local food because of the ecological cost of transportation – which made sense to me until I read Professor James McWilliams’ Just Food (2009), which argues cogently against this locavore approach. Pollan has praised producers such as Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm, known for its sustainable farming methods; Foer interviews another farmer, who thinks Polyface is “horrible” because it produces “industrial” rather than “vintage” birds. One side gives us permission to eat something; another denies it, so we end up walking out of the supermarket with no food.

I know it’s not new, but it’s nicely described and ethical paralysis is a good name for the situation.

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Editing the Google Algorithm

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:02:27 -0500

Wired has a real nice article on Google’s search algorithm . It’s a real score for the Mountain View massive as it makes the whole process seem not evil at all … It actually feels quite quaint:

Recently, search engineer Maureen Heymans discovered a problem with “Cindy Louise Greenslade.” The algorithm figured out that it should look for a person ~~- in this case a psychologist in Garden Grove, California -~~ but it failed to place Greenslade’s homepage in the top 10 results. Heymans found that, in essence, Google had downgraded the relevance of her homepage because Greenslade used only her middle initial, not her full middle name as in the query. “We needed to be smarter than that,” Heymans says. So she added a signal that looks for middle initials. Now Greenslade’s homepage is the fifth result.

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