How to rapidly kill innovation

 Is your company too innovative? Are your engineers reading material beyond their immediate assignment? Is your audio expert taking too much of an interest in machine learning? Is your corporate culture so strong that it needs to be whittled down to command and control of automatons?

Here are simple steps to make execution slower than a dried up slug: 

1. Divide your company into as many groups as possible
2. Handpick the least co-operative people and empower them to deny access requests
3. Classify the company knowledge into meaningless overlapping categories
4. Build elaborate processes around how each category is handled and revise those processes every few months
5. Further split the knowledge into Sharepoint, Teams and OneDrive folders, each with limited access permissions
6. Encrypt all information
7. Mandate usage of special tools to decrypt information that you already have access to.

On a more serious note, there are legitimate safeguards that a company needs to implement to keep its innovations from leaking out. One needs to implement them with limited scope and even then, emphasize that sharing knowledge enables the organization to be a learning organization that moves fast.

Here are my recommended steps:

1. Start with trust
2. Ensure that trusted people have unfettered access to the information they need
1. This means engineers get access to engineering documents
3. Limit access as required by regulation and by genuine business need
1. Earnings outlook, production and supply outlook, etc.
2. Acquisitions, divestitures, etc.
4. Watch points of ingress and egress
1. Lock down SD cards, USB sticks, private email, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
2. Limit internet access to a list of reputed websites that are audited regularly
5. Eliminate usage of company devices for personal purposes
6. Accelerate the timeline from design to patent filing
7. Rapidly flag violations and include immediate supervisors in the violation notice
8. Design documents are naturally resistant to the most common attacks - such as pictures or screenshots - ensure wide availability of these documents since they increase organization intelligence
9. Audit regularly for company content on the public internet

Anything else is eventually making your organization slower and dumber. Talented people soon leave and that only accelerates the demise of the organization. 

Don't let your organization become a resting place for dead slugs. Rethink document access.

Transactional Coaches, not Gurus

A parable of good behavior that I was told as a child, was that if you're walking and you meet god and your teacher together, you must first greet your teacher since the teacher shows you the path to god.

Since Sanskrit is dead, and the general populace only understands smatterings of it, any shlok/mantr in Sanskrit is taken as the word of god. One such subterfuge is "gurur brahma, gurur vishnu, ...," which basically says that the guru is the boss of the universe.

Eklavya's story from the Mahabharat made me question who was on the side of dharm vs adharm. Eklavya learnt archery on his own, but gave misplaced credit to the guru Dronacharya, who had promised to make Arjun the best archer. So Dronacharya asked Eklavya to slice off his thumb off as dakshina, a tuition fee, to the guru, thereby enabling him to keep the promise made to Arjun.

The rampant abuse of people by the current generation of sri-sris, swamis, yogis and acharyas has been getting widespread public attention in recent years. It is time for modern Hindus to free themselves from the yoke of gurudom and think of people who guide them as transactional coaches. A transactional coach is takes on the role only for the duration of the transaction - no more. You need to play soccer well, you work with a soccer coach. You need to learn yoga, you work with a yoga coach, etc. 

No more spiritual mumbo jumbo. No more dakshinas than the established free market rate. This will enable the "tax" on the Hindu household that currently goes into maintaining the lifestyles of gurus to be used into more productive community building activities.

A coach is an experienced person who has spent years absorbing the field he's coaching about. Is advice from anyone else even legitimate? If Modi, a person who dropped out from school, starts to preach on how to perform well in exams, he needs to be vociferously ignored. Rahul Dravid's personal experience in the Indian national side has enabled him as the head of Indian Cricket's youth program, to keep a full pipeline of cricketers ready for the next level. He has picked winners such as Mohammed Siraj with regularity. 

A coach is able to identify weaknesses to improve upon and guide you on how to play to your strengths. But coaches are only that - experts in their field who get paid to provide guidance to improve. Their guidance is neither a favor to the player, nor indispensable to the player's growth. Granting a coach mythical guru-like stature simply enables abuses - whether in India or in the US at places like Penn State and US Gymnastics.

Have a good long weekend.

Kuntal.

M'aider for corporate culture

Will the spring revival of "corporate culture" come after the widespread availability of COVID vaccines? 

Corporate culture provides an execution framework for employees. It determines the rapidity of response to executive direction, sharpness of focus on the competition, moderates the risk taking appetite and determines the approach to solve problems. For Qualcomm, while there is no definition of culture enshrined, my perspective would be that our culture is to pivot our work to topics raised in all-hands meetings, do what it takes to make the customer launch on time and escalate when needed regardless of title to resolve an issue.

Unlike project-specific top-down command and control, corporate culture is an emergent phenomenon. 

In Emergence, Steven Johnson paints a panoramic canvas on the topic, albeit somewhat haphazardly as compared to Drucker's books, with useful insights. He draws analogies from ant colonies, slime growth, how cities develop over time, etc. "A successful ant colony can live up to fifteen years, despite the individual worker ant living only up to one year." "... the global behavior that outlasts any of its components parts - is one of the defining characteristics of a complex system." A system in which "local behavior leads to global wisdom" is how I would summarize as the key definition of an emergent system.

Corporate culture depends on the collective knowledge of employees that is built up over time. It outlives an employee's career in the company. For executives that cherish their corporate culture and want to preserve and maintain it, questions that might arise are:

• How to ensure that the year-long work-from-home hasn't diminished the prevalent culture in the organization?
• How do new hires, who haven't even stepped into the office since they joined their jobs, participate in the collective knowledge?

To enable macrointelligence and adaptibility in emergent systems, here are a few points Steven Johnson makes, paraphrased by me:

1. Make information widely available within the organization - information on competition, new technology, performance of business units, etc. 
2. Keep organization structures simple: too many dotted lines and joint responsibilities detract the focus from execution. It forces employees to learn a non-simple vocabulary to talk the language of each leader. 
3. Encourage cross-team encounters: when a company is young, everyone knows everyone else and information flows rapidly. As a company grows, one group does know know the activities of other groups. This diminishes the adaptability of the collective. 

Here are my thoughts on implementing the above - starting now and continuing upon return to campus.

1. Have multiple touchpoints per week for the employee that require the employee's active participation: 1-1 manager / team-lead meeting, small team meeting, cross team code/design review meeting, etc. Large group meetings are good for broadcasting content but don't provide the opportunity to the employee to ask questions or influence the outcome of a decision, which could lead to disengagement.
2. Use video calls for 1-1 meetings: this baselines expectations for mutual attentiveness, environs, grooming and dress code.
3. The speakers and people with a question in a large meeting should turn on their videos: this establishes a question / answer protocol and enables non-verbal interactions.
4. Allow working-from-home for two different teams. Since chance encounters at work are not possible currently, encourage short-term cross team projects as a way to build up connections within the organization. Two is a good number - I think more would lead to a diffusion of effort. 
5. Let the participants ask questions that a leader would normally ask for the sake of speedy progress toward the conclusion in a presentation. In an in-person meeting, body movements, hand gestures, etc. signal to the speaker to pause and let the other person speak. In remote meetings, the leader should step back and steer the participants to do a bulk of the talking, while steering the group in the direction of productivity.
6. Leaders should explain why they are taking a decision a certain way and let the team correct them real-time. The "why" enables new joinees to understand the thought process and the motivation in achieving a decision. 
7. In-person high-level design review meetings, energized sprints in bring-up labs, cross-team debug efforts, chance meet-ups for lunch in the company cafeteria - were good opportunities to bring people together for cross-team encounters. Bring them back as soon as safety protocols permit.

If you have reached this far, I owe an explanation for the title. Vaccines will be widely available by April. The first of May could be considered as the first day back at work in the office. May Day, celebrated on the first of May is a celebration of the Spring season. Corporate culture needs to be celebrated AND saved. The word for asking for help is "Mayday" repeated thrice, which itself comes from the phonetic equivalent of the French "venez m'aider" - come and help me. Too much cryptic crosswording at an impressionable age leads to an overly convoluted precis. 

What are your thoughts?

Kuntal.

The problem with Bitcoin

Middlemen induced carrying cost is the main problem with Bitcoin and all public ledger based currencies.

Until a few years ago, paying a $2.50 fee to withdraw cash from the ATM was the norm. Fee-free withdrawal was available only at your local bank's ATM and that too was limited to a few withdrawals per month. Now, with credit union networks or by maintaining a certain balance, one rarely comes across ATM fees. Bitcoin takes us back to paying a fee, not just for a withdrawal, but for any transaction with it. Let's work out why this fee cannot be removed and why a better solution is needed for wider adoption of public ledger based currencies.

With cash, one central bank issues the currency, regulates its supply and checks for fraud such as counterfeit bills. Once the currency is printed, the cash could undergo many transactions before it comes back into the banking system. Verification is done at the point of transaction without the requirement of a public record of the transaction. For example, you buy groceries, you pay with the cash in your wallet, the grocery store clerk checks that it is familiar looking money and accepts the payment. The proof of the transaction is that you got your groceries and the grocery store has the physical currency you used as payment.

The problems with the central bank approach are: virtually unlimited paper money can be created by a small number of decision makers - thereby eroding trust in the currency, slower innovation by established financial systems such as SWIFT, periodic financial cataclysmic events such as the dot com crisis in 2000 and the housing bubble in 2008, etc. Having the inherent value of a currency tied to purchasing power is actually a good thing for a central bank with reserve currency, but not so much for countries whose currency does not get accepted beyond their borders. 

Bitcoin provides an elegant solution to many of the shortcomings of the current system and kudos are due to the early adopters for supporting the value of cryptocurrencies with real money. 

However, there are structural shortcomings to the current generation of cryptocurrencies. Let's start with the public ledger - a record of all transactions done on a coin, and in my opinion one of the biggest shortcoming. The reason for Bitcoin's public ledger is that since the currency is digital, it can be easily copied. To prevent copying, the transaction must be publicly validated and recorded so that if the same money is used for a different transaction, that transaction will fail. This carrying cost - of always remembering the transaction along with the actual cost of the transaction are unsustainable for widespread adoption. 

Although physical cash isn't "fee free" either, it is very likely always better than Bitcoin in terms of transaction costs. It takes resources to operate the mint, mine the metals to make coins, pay for law enforcement for checking compliance, pay salaries to central bankers, etc. Even if the world were to fully move to a cryptocurrency based society, these agencies would still be needed to some extent, so the current system is cost-neutral.

An ideal cryptocurrency would function with cash-like properties - uniqueness, fungibility, stateless verification and low transaction cost. Are there central bank issued cryptocurrency or quantum computing solutions that can address the above problems? 

I think than an algorithmically managed coin issuance scheme operating like a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) but operating under regular tuning by the Federal Reserve will be a strong candidate for the next generation US Dollar. Another option would be to stay decentralized but use the uniqueness guaranteed by the quantum mechanical property of teleportation. More of this later, perhaps when work-related downtime again aligns with the Christmas break. It's going to be a busy 2021.

Happy New Year everyone. 

Kuntal. 

PS - the US Congress did a great thing recently by passing the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA).  The lawmakers that deserve praise and support are: Carolyn Maloney, Mike Crapo, Sherrod Brown, Maxine Waters and Patrick McHenry.