KFCblog - November 2022

Life

The year continues to fly by. We haven't had snow yet in Chicago, but a few days of frost. It's hard to believe Thanksgiving is in a few weeks and Christmas will come right behind that. Not only that, Tommy will be graduating from DePaul at the end of the month with his degree in business. Does anyone want to hire a young Corless before he gets corrupted like his Dad?

Speaking of young Corless's, excuse the avuncular pride as I share the my niece, Juliet, had her first crossword puzzle published by the NY Times last Friday. Here's a very complementary write-up of the puzzle. She'll be available for hiring in 2024. :)

Sports World

World Series: Astros beat the Phillies for their second championship since their tainted 2017 championship. The series included the 3rd post-season no-hitter ever. Interestingly, manager Dusty Baker in a Gump-like way has been the visiting manager in two of them!

Football - The Bears are mediocre and the Giants and Jets are falling back to earth. The Eagles and Bills are the class of the league. NBA has started and the LA LeBrons are looking LeTerrible, with Milwaukee and Phoenix starting strong. College Basketball starts this week with North Carolina leading the polls.

And of course, the FIFA World Cup begins later this month in Qatar. The US is in Group B with England, Wales and Iran. The US has a good chance of getting out of group play if they beat Wales in their opening game on November 21. Brazil, France, England, Spain and Argentina are considered the major contenders. I will try to not mention to my Italian colleagues the absence of 4 time winner Italy.

Hello, World

The Olympic project continues to gain momentum despite a lack of a CEO at the helm of the Milano-Cortina Organizing Committee. If all goes well, we will deliver a few major pieces of technology before the end of the year.

Given that this is my first major project in the [kind of?] post-COVID world, I've been spending a lot of time trying to build the right culture in this globally distributed team. Our team (and the teams of the Organizing Committees) are essentially start-ups so we get the advantage of a blank slate. On the technology side, this mindset has been very empowering as we are doing all of the things we have been counseling our clients to do for years (agile, empowered teams, automation everywhere, cloud native, etc.). The challenge is that we actually have to do those things rather than simply advise about those things.

The key challenge is how do you do something at the scale of a big company while still acting like a startup. Jeff Bezos nails the key challenges companies face from the gravitational pull of being a Day 2 company. From his 2016 Letter to Shareholders:

As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2

A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp.        

There's also a concept of "Managerialism" to guard against. Quoting from the great investor and entrepreneur Erik Torenberg's blog post called The Revenge of Entrepreneurial Capitalism:

You could think of Bourgeois capitalism as Robber Baron capitalism (think?Atlas Shrugged) — industrialists like Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie building up their empires and retaining a controlling stake in them. What’s differentiating about Bourgeois capitalism is that the owners are also the managers. The people who own the company also?run?the company. There’s total alignment between managers and shareholders.

Managerial capitalism, by contrast, is defined by the split between ownership and control — on both the founder and investor side. Instead of owners having direct control, you have layers of intermediary managers (e.g. board of directors, executive teams, hired CEOs) who are running the company on behalf of the shareholders and original owners, but who also have different incentives as a result of having less ownership. They may be more short-term driven than long-term driven, for example, since they are incentivized by their salary instead of their equity ownership.        

He goes on to point out the negative impact of managerial capitalism:

Managerialism has other unique downsides as well. Managers, consciously or unconsciously, are more likely to create invisible problems to justify their job. Or worse, they prevent real problems from being solved in order to preserve their scope. They are incentivized to do so: If someone is in charge of a problem, and that problem is solved, they no longer have a job. So the perverse incentive is to expand the scope of the problem for which they are the solution. Success looks like having more and more problems that justify the department getting bigger and bigger every year. These bureaucracies, because they are optimizing for their own survival, end up selecting for loyalty over competence, which means they get worse and worse every year. This describes both big corporations and big government.        

So our Day 1 efforts around building the next generation of technology for the Olympic and Paralympic Games come with this incredible responsibility to fight against the "way it's always been done" and to create literally the best jobs on the planet.

Caught My Eye

The world's most valuable brands. There is no surprise with Apple, Amazon and Google occupying the top 3 slots. Deloitte coming in impressively at #54.

We all know that Apple Lightning cable is dead (starting next year) as Apple embraces USB-C (Thanks EU!). This article sums it up perfectly: It's 2022 and USB-C is still a mess

There's no doubt in my mind that it's time to have the robots/sensors call the balls and strikes in baseball. Try this interactive exercise to find out how much better YOU would likely be than today's humans.

If you use your Apple Watch for workouts, these "lesser known" workout types will make you smile. My favorite is "Carrying all the Groceries in a Single Trip".

If you want to colorize an old photo, Palette.fm is an online, free alternative. Its output was a little better than Photoshop, IMO.

Many of you know that my basement has a bunch of classic arcade games but only one pinball machine - Twilight Zone, which I bought as it barely edged out Addams Family. Here's a story why Addams Family remains so popular 31 years after it came out.

In just a couple of weeks, the World Cup will begin in Qatar. There's a muddled history of corruption on how the WC wound up in Qatar.

Conway's Law came up during a recent meeting. I had to explain what it was (Thanks Martin Fowler). No, JT, Melvin Conway, not Conway Twitty.

Some think that the passing of Queen Elizabeth II will start a trend of former colonies removing the British Monarchy as their formal head of state. Barbados started this movement last year.

Now that most of us have realized that our crypto/NFT investments are not likely to accelerate our retirements, Businessweek has created a long and thorough view of state of the union for crypto. Good airplane read.

These electric skates are the most unusual thing I have ever wanted to buy although I couldn't think of any reason why :)

Do you want to know where you'll come out if you dig a hole straight through the center of the earth? Here.

Have you ever looked at an unusual charge on a credit card statement and weren't sure what it was for? Enter WhatsThatCharge.com

From the great kottke.org - Unexpected simultaneous events in history. My favorite is "the last use of the guillotine was in France the same year Star Wars came out."

I Bought This: For Xmas after a 2 year COVID-delayed Kickstarter wait.

Closing Quote

“My coach said I run like a girl. And I said if he ran a little faster he could too." ~ Mia Hamm