Mole End

Things that are are easy to measure. (Well, actually, they're not, but that's another section of this blog entirely. For this moment, let us assume they are.) Things that are not, on the other hand, are quite difficult to measure.

The Mole's late mother had a lovely response to a certain class of hypothetical questions. Where others might reply "How should I know?" or "That's just silly", her rejoinder was "If you had a brother, would he like cheese?". This captures the essence of a counter-factual: what can we say about some contingent fact in a set of circumstances that are not? The resolution requires the introduction of some other premise, some hypothesis about the universe in the situation that has not transpired.

Your organization probably does not have KPIs or OKRs or even SLAs for cheese. But The Mole would lay heavy odds that you cannot throw a stone in your office without hitting someone -- ok, HR would not approve of stone-throwing and thanks to SARS-Cov-19 there's probably no one in the office -- who has at some point claimed to have delivered an initiative that saved the company some resource. And there's your cheese: the savings are relative to the expenditure that would have happened had the initiative not been executed.

Without discipline, anyone can concoct an alternative scenario that fits their ends. The savings were huge! The savings were trivial! The savings doubled our profitability! The savings were actually negative!

There is only one answer, for which The Mole is indebted to the wise Wayne Lim: don't launch the savings initiative until the stakeholders have signed off (ideally in blood) on the counter-factual. Since resource consumption is likely to be dynamic and costs are likely to be complex (e.g., comprised of fixed and variable components), the counter-factual must take the form of a model: it must be sufficiently parametrized to account for the relevant actual state of the world at the future time. With such a model in hand it is much more difficult for savings claims to be attacked Big Lebowski style.

And if you must inquire about The Mole's family: everyone loves cheese, so naturally that hypothetical brother would.

Leo McGineva never existed: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

Theodore Levitt at least tried to give a proper attribution; too many people now attribute the remark in question to Levitt himself. What remark you ask, and whence did it come? Excellent questions that have preoccupied the Mole for many hours over many years.

The earliest version of the remark that the Mole has found is the one in the second paragraph below from Percy H. Whiting's 1947 book, "The 5 Great Rules of Selling" (pp. 39-40):

Therefore you don't sell insurance, you sell protection; you don't sell securities, you sell a means for retiring at sixty; you don't sell advertising space, you sell customers delivered at the store; you don't sell a rug, you sell a floor beautifully covered.

Leo McGivena wrote: "Last year over one million quarter-inch drills were sold -- not because people wanted quarter-inch drills but because they wanted quarter-inch holes. When you buy an automobile you buy transportation. When you buy a mattress you are buying comfortable sleep. When you buy carbon paper you are buying copies."

Note, sadly, that Whiting did not provide proper attribution despite getting McGivena's name right. He's not alone: Dr. George H. Hopson of the DeLaval Separator Company of Poughkeepsie, NY, contributed some thoughts on salesmanship to the 1958 Annual Report of the New York State Association of Milk and Food Sanitarians -- the Mole kids you not, having procured a scan of the relevant pages through the kind efforts of Ms. Amy Rhodes -- that appear to have been taken without attribution from a later edition of Whiting's book.

Why, you may ask, is the Mole fussing so? Because McGivena's reasoning about drill bits captures an essential truth that product managers should heed. It is at the root of the modern formulation known as Jobs To Be Done, and is frequently repeated. McGivena deserves credit!

The mystery of where this insight was first published remains. The Mole will continue to dig.

The Mole has once again relearned an old lesson — "to see a world in a grain of sand" — in his usual way:  get drawn in by the specific, then twig to the wider idea.  This time the context was the seventh episode of Alexis Madrigal's podcast Containers and the text was this:

Every time I hear that clip from Frank, I can feel my heart swelling with this vision of a utopia that seems finely tuned for me. There is economic justice, racial solidarity, rich culture, opportunity for anyone willing to work. Right here in Oakland.

…

But nostalgia is a trap. Nostalgia blinds us to the failings of the past … and to the potential of our own time. We are alive now and the best we can do with the romance of the past is distill the values and visions that intoxicate us into principles for the future that we want to make.

Wise words.

• Worldometers (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries)
• 91-DIVOC (http://www.91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/), the best way to monitor on a log scale. Looking at NY and CA on the US State-level data and switching between log and linear is a great way to build intuition about the math of flattening the curve.
• SF Chronicle tracker (https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2020/coronavirus-map/), a quick reference for the daily Bay Area numbers.
• USA Facts (https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/), an excellent county-level visualization across the US.
• NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html), another county-level visualization, with commentary.
• Johns Hopkins (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html), the go-to source for global information
• Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus), which has a lengthy and informative explanation of the limits of what we can infer from the data we have.
• Aatish Bhatia's unusual trend analysis (https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/), which intrigues me even though I'm not quite sure how helpful it is. (Watch the Minute Physics video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XLXg4fYsc) for an intro.)
• COVID Exit Strategy (https://www.covidexitstrategy.org/)
• COVID Tracking (https://covidtracking.com/)

At times The Mole displays behaviors that might be variously described as having a very narrow craw, or a jaw with a death grip, or an obsessive inability to forget and move on.  Today's object lesson starts on 23 April 2010 -- yes, The Mole not only wrestles with ideas over the span of a decade, but also can, at least sometimes, pinpoint the moment the struggle began.

In fact, you can hear it for yourself right here.  That's Steve Blank speaking at the 2010 Startup Lessons Learned conference (notes on the conference by the estimable Sean K. Murphy here).  The Mole has been bothered ever since by the notion that the term "lifestyle businesses", describing firms that provide employment and income for a modest number of people, is a perjorative.  While The Mole is not sure that Blank himself means it quite that way, he does at least have a preference for other kinds of companies.  He has said as much:  " When I started teaching, I thought all entrepreneurs and startups did what I did for 21 years - aim for billion-dollar markets and keep at it until you achieved liquidity or ran out of money."

That attitude, and the focus on going big or going home, have lead to the toxic culture of megastartups we see today.  The Mole was therefore delighted to read about the Zebras movement, and, though even a quick Google search shows that he is reporting old news, hopes to help spread the word.