“The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor
the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when
he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have found the world’s creepiest website. It is People Finders.
I was looking for someone using the usual method of Google, and was
getting hits, but nothing recent. I decided for a goof to Google for
“Missing Persons”. When I have tried those services in the past, they
come back with “Yes, we have all sorts of cool dirt on that person,
and if you just give us your credit card number, we’ll tell you more.”
So I had low expectations. But I got back tons of perfectly accurate
information about the person for free. They offered more information
at three different price levels, but it was hard to imagine what more
I might want to know about most people.
I started exploring for all sorts of people I know. Obviously the more
obscure their name, the more likely it is you will find the exact one you
are looking for. Also, it really helps if you know their approximate age.
This site is completely addicting. I looked up scores of acquaintances,
learning the names and ages of everyone’s parents and siblings, and
all kinds of other creepy stuff. I looked up a few old girlfriends to see
where they live now, and whether or not they got married. Alot of the
things I learned this morning I would rather not know, but it was
too tempting to stop searching. As Jon Stewart says about the
three legged dog, “it is creepy, but you can’t stop looking.”
I did buy the top of the line report for the person that I am trying
to find, and there was a great deal of additional information in there,
all of it none of my business. But as Scott McNealy said in a previous post ,
“you have no privacy; get over it”.
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
We bought a new Sirius radio a few weeks ago, and it is the kind
that can be removed from the car in two seconds by me or a thief.
My son asked me what keeps someone from stealing it in a parking
garage. It is an excellent question.
When I was growing up, I somehow assumed that there was all
sorts of theft by parking lot attendents. I am not sure why, but it
always felt safer parking on the streets of Manhattan and locking
the car doors than putting the car in garage and giving the key to
someone.
At this point, I’ve parked my car hundreds of times at Manhattan
garages, and as far as I know, not so much as a penny has been
taken from my car. One reason for that may be that it seems like
a pretty juicy job. At peak times, the guys who hustle are retrieving
one car per minute, and they seem to average a $2 tip from each
car owner. You have to cut that in half, because sometimes they
are parking the cars instead of retrieving them, and you have
to cut it in half again, because sometimes business is slow. That
is still $30 an hour in cash. Let’s say the guy (I have never
seen a woman doing this job for some reason) works 50 hours a
week. That’s $1500 a week in cash, which is a pretty sweet job.
Few people would risk that gig to steal a Bon Jovi CD out of a car
which would sell for $3 on half.com.
I did a little Googling, and some research backs up my intuition
about this. The Center for Problem Oriented Policing has
this to say about it:
Hiring parking attendants. The largest study of theft in parking
facilities concluded that the most important preventive factor
was the presence of attendants. The study covered more than
50 large parking facilities in London. Whether surface lots, parking
decks, parking garage or underground garages, facilities with
attendants had the lowest theft rates. The lowest rates of all were
in garages where the attendants parked the cars.Two studies–one at a hospital in Northern Ireland, and one at a
park-and-ride lot in England–found large reductions in theft after
attendants began working in parking lots.
So I will continue to be not paranoid about parking in parking garages,
no matter what is in my car. I am sure that at any given moment,
some parking lot attendant somewhere is stealing something from
a car he is supposed to be watching, but my car is safer in a garage
than it is locked up on the streets of Manhattan (or even in front
of my house, as I mentioned in a previous posting.)
Man, there are an uncountable number of trust stories having to do
with Stew Leonard’s. Stew Leonard, Sr. founded a dairy store in Norwalk,
CT in 1969. I think it carried only 8 products when it first opened …
including milk, butter, eggs, and white bread. Right from the
start, it was a fun place to go. You could watch the milk being bottled
right there, and there were animated animals, and then eventually
real animals. It was alot more like Disneyland than a grocery store.
It grew organically. For 35 years, it has seemed different every time
one goes there. Sometimes the change is small; the aisles are rearranged,
or there is an outdoor ice cream stand. Sometimes the change is huge;
Stew buys an adjacent restaurant and completely knocks it down to
make more parking for his store.
Stew is a creative marketer. He has distinctive plastic bags for carrying
groceries, and he also turned the design into a t-shirt. He used to offer
people gift certificates or 12 free ice cream cones to send in photos of
themselves in interesting places with the bags and shirts. The bulletin
board was bursting with photos: Great Wall of China with a Stew’s bag,
Eiffel Tower with a Stew’s bag, Dubai Airport with a Stew’s bag. There
was even a doctored one of Neil Armstrong on the moon holding a Stew’s
bag (this was way before Photoshop was invented, so someone spent
more than 12 ice cream cones worth of their time creating that.)
Here was my photo, taken on the roof of the World Trade Center.
In time, Stew’s became the World’s Largest Dairy Store, and Stew becomes
a bit famous. He becomes friends with Frank Purdue of Purdue
chickens, Paul Newman (who sells alot of food besides being an actor),
and President Reagan. He is written about in bestselling business
books such as In Search of Excellence. There are television shows
and magazine articles about him and his business philosophy. Behind
the store is a Mercedes with the license plate MOOOO.
I was not super motivated in high school, but I wasn’t a hoodlum either.
The one time I actually skipped school, I went to Stew Leonard’s, which
was a 20 minute drive from my school. My friend Joel drove. On the
way out of the store, we ran into … my mother! That was not very
cool. She should have been angry, but was not. Thanks, mom.
Stew’s abounds in trust … for the customer, and for the employees.
When you go into any of his stores, there is a three-ton granite rock
out front with this engraved in it: “Rule #1 — The Customer is
Always Right; Rule #2 – If the Customer is Ever Wrong, Re-Read
Rule #1.”
Their stated management philosophy is: “Take good care of your
people and they in turn will take good care of your customers.” And
this is not just lip service … they just won Fortune magazine’s “100
Best Companies to Work For” for the fifth year in a row. They invest
a great deal in outside training for their employees, such as Dale
Carnegie courses, which is certainly unusual in an industry where
there is probably high turnover.
One of my friends worked there years ago. This friend was not
always telling the truth, and it was hard to know what to believe
when talking to him (he never lied to me, exactly, but let’s just
say he had a different understanding of the world than most people).
One day, he said to me … “Stew has 40 cash registers, but a few of
them are not hooked up to the computer.” This was a preposterous
accusation. Stew, with friends at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, would
never do that! He often said that he resisted the temptation to open
more stores because he would lose the ability to oversee the stores
and control every aspect of the customer experience. If he wanted
to make more money, he could have opened more Stew Leonard’s
stores, since it was a tried and true successful formula. He didn’t
need to avoid taxes, which is what it sounded like he was doing.
Well, it turned out to be true, and Stew was sentenced to five years
in prison. The store did not close; it was taken over by Stew’s
children, and it is thriving. New stores were opened in Danbury
and Yonkers, and they seem hugely successful.
I don’t think there was much of a sales dip when Stew went to jail.
If anything, the place seems bigger now. Tax evasion is one of those
crimes that most people are not passionate about. A few people
probably considered him even more of a folk hero for getting away
with it for a while. But at one point, there was a scandal where
his scales were shown to be coming up short. People went nuts
over that, because this time, Stew was stealing directly from them
instead of the big old wasteful government. It is a much less serious
crime (and maybe it was even unintentional), but that’s the thing
that seemed to piss off the most people.
“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will
show themselves great.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility
on him, and to let him know that you trust him.
— Booker T. Washington
Bob Herbert wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times on January
5, 2006 about a new law that requires people to prove U.S. citizenship
to receive health care under Medicaid.
He says that this will be especially hard on the people who need Medicaid
the most … poor people, because they are less likely to have passports
or birth certificates. He writes:
There are no exceptions to this onerous provision, not even for
people with serious physical or mental impairments, including
Alzheimer’s disease.You haven’t heard much about this latest threat to the republic
because there is no evidence it is much of a problem. As the
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has reported, an
extensive study by the inspector general’s office of the
Department of Health and Human Services “found no substantial
evidence that such false applications are actually occurring …Many poor people live far from the cities or towns where they were
born and do not have ready access to their birth certificates. And, as
the center said, a large number of African-American women,
especially in the South, were unable to give birth in hospitals
because of racial discrimination. Many of them never received
birth certificates for their babies.
The whole thing is preposterous, both on moral grounds and on
economic grounds. I know of many senior citizens, whether they
grew up poor or middle class, who have no birth certificates.
Record keeping wasn’t so great 80 years ago, and town halls
burned down, and all sorts of other things. Even if the birth
certificate exists, it is not always easy to get. My kids were born
in the same wealthy town as a recent president, and the process
for getting a copy of a birth certificate is a nightmare. When I
finally made it, I asked for five copies. The snotty bureaucrat
said “What do you need five for?”, and I muttered “So I never
have to see you again as long as I live.” But I digress. 
So there are two sets of people who would be trying to get health
care from Medicaid: people who are citizens, and for which getting
the documentation of citizenship could be a huge pain at a time
when they are quite sick, and people who are not citizens, and who
want some sort of free health care. First of all, I doubt that anyone
would come to the US specifically for free health care, because a
plane ticket from some third world countries would cost more than
the medical care would in that country, and really sick people
would not be keen on boarding a plane anyway. Still, some would
certainly make the journey, and some non-citizens might be here
for a visit and fall sick when they are here. But remember, the
law already exists that people have to BE citizens. This new
provision says they have to PROVE that they are a citizen. So
anyone trying to get free health care is already breaking the law,
and their resistance to buying or creating a fake birth certificate
might be pretty low, especially if it were a life and death matter.
Creating a phony US passport is way beyond the skill level of
amateurs, but a fake birth certificate is a breeze. There is no standard
format, and the ones I have seen look like they could be done in about
10 minutes by anyone with a scanner and a laser printer. I can
almost hear you say “but they have an official embossed seal”,
but those kinds of raised seals are custom made as graduation
gifts for $29 all the time. If my non-citizen parents needed a
$50,000 operation, I would make a seal that said “Town of Rye,
NY” instead of “From the Library of Timmy Haskell”.
By the way, creating a phony passport from other countries is not
even so hard, or at least it wasn’t 10 years ago. A colleague of mine,
who will remain nameless, had his passport confiscated by his country
of birth. Yet he had bought a ticket home. I asked him what he was
going to do, and he said “I’ll buy a passport at the travel agent’s office
in Queens.” I explained that I didn’t think it worked that way, and
he’d be arrested for using a phony passport.” He said “they are real
passports.” Sure enough, I asked around, and real passports, stolen
from the official printing office of that country, could be had for a price.
And the name of the person and vital information was handwritten
anyway (at least in those days). Yikes!
So come on, let’s face it. This will prevent plenty of entitled people
from receiving Medicaid, waste everyone’s time getting the
documentation and attempting to verify its authenticity, and will
create a cottage industry of birth certificate fakers. The people
who were breaking the law anyway, by pretending to be citizens,
will get fake documents and just be guilty of a different law. Now
what happens if they get caught? Let’s see, we prosecute them, and
send them to jail … where they receive free medical care! As Homer
Simpson would say “Doh!”.
One of the hottest topics on the web these days is Wikipedia. The goal is
absurd on the face of it – a web based, multilanguage encyclopedia of
much human knowledge where everyone in the world can edit any
page at any time. Even a guy like me, with “Trust” tattooed on my
bicep, would say that the concept is silly. Except Wikipedia is working
now, and working rather well. Both the New York Times and the
scientific journal Nature had articles about it in the past month, and
they were not saying how ridiculous it is. Instead, they were benchmarking
it head to head against Encyclopedia Britannica, Encarta, and Bartleby’s,
and Wikipedia is not far behind in accuracy on many topics.
So why does this work? I love the quote from Wikipedia, which seems
straight out of the Trust Manifesto:
We assume that the world is full of reasonable people and that
collectively they can arrive eventually at a reasonable conclusion,
despite the worst efforts of a very few wreckers. It’s something
akin to optimism.
A more typical belief would be from the writer of the New York Times article:
It may seem foolish to trust Wikipedia knowing I could jump
right in and change the order of the planets or give the electron
a positive charge. But with a worldwide web of readers looking
over my shoulder, the error would quickly be corrected.
There was a mini-scandal recently where someone posted something
bogus in Wikipedia as some sort of practical joke. He wrote:
“John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General
Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s. For a brief time, he was
thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy
assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing
was ever proven.”
John Seigenthaler Sr. is still alive, and he really was the assistant
to Robert Kennedy, and he’s pretty pissed that someone wrote
that in Wikipedia, and wrote an article about it in USA Today, where
he even listed the IP address of the person who wrote the fake article.
(Seigenthaler co-founded USA Today, so it wasn’t hard for him to get
the article published.) Anyway, the culprit was finally discovered, and
it was a guy who was playing a joke on a coworker. He resigned from
his job at a Nashville delivery company, although it isn’t clear how
that rectified anything.
One can imagine all sorts of hacks and stunts with Wikipedia.
Marriage proposals from nerds embedded in articles about Star
Wars, nasty graffiti from fourth graders doing book reports on
aquaculture, and Osama bin Laden directing attacks via an article on
tomatoes.
For those who are still skeptical, I recommend the Nature article,
and a very long, but fascinating Wikipedia replies to common
objections.
By the way, I just got Sirius radio, and heard a Saturday morning
show with A.J. Jacobs, the author of The Know It All
one of my favorite books last year. A. J. read the entire Encyclopedia
Britannica, cover to cover. On Sirius, he said that he reads Wikipedia
every day, but it is growing so fast that he can never hope to keep
up.
Here’s a prototype of the new logo.
It may not immediately represent trust to most people, so
some explanation is necessary.
When I lived in Pittsburgh, my roommate ran in the Pittsburgh
marathon. He told me about some blind runners who ran the race
by holding a rope and being guided by a sighted runner. I have no
idea why, but we decided to replicate this by running around a busy
parking lot, taking turns closing our eyes. It was one of the most
uneasy feelings I have ever had. Even though I completely trusted
Dave, I felt that I was going to crash into a parked (or moving!) car
at any moment. I suppose if we did it longer, we would have grown
more used to the sensation. Perhaps blind people are more used
to relying on others for guidance, and this would feel natural to them.
For a fun experiment, find someone you trust, close your eyes and
go out running as fast as you can in an environment with obstacles,
and note the sensations you are feeling.
Oh yeah, don’t forget the rope.
P.S. If you need any great design work done, please contact Icepond
Studios. They have done it all, from graphic design for mom and pop
businesses, to Oscar winning Hollywood animated films, and everything
in between. And they are some of the nicest people I have ever met.
“It is an equal failing to trust everybody, and to trust nobody.”
— English proverb
When the Oklahoma City bombing happened 10 years ago,
Bill and Hillary Clinton gave some moving speeches. At the time,
that was one of the biggest terrorist acts ever done on American
soil, and actually, it still is. I remember quite vividly one thing
that Hillary said in a speech to some kids around that time.
She said roughly “there are more good people in the world than
bad people”. I have thought about that line constantly since then.
It really sums things up perfectly. It is comforting, but at the same
time realistic. There are bad people in the world. It is just
that they are outnumbered, so you need to think about what that
means.
Thanks to Google, I found the original quote in context.
MRS. CLINTON: I’m very happy to have this chance to talk
with children here in the White House and children who maybe
have been watching cartoons or just getting up around the
country and turning on the television set. I know that many
children around the country have been very frightened by
what they have seen and heard, particularly on television, in
the last few days. And I’m sure that you, like many of the
children I’ve already talked to, are really concerned because
they don’t know how something so terrible could have happened
here in our country.But you know, whenever you feel scared or worried, I want you
to remember that your parents and your friends and your family
members all love you and are going to do everything they can to
take care of you and to protect you. That’s really important for
each of you to know.I also want you to know that there are many more good people
in the world than bad and evil people. Just think of what we
have seen in the last few days. Think of all the police officers
and the firefighters, the doctors and the nurses, all of the
neighbors and the rescue workers, all of the people who have
come to help all of those who were hurt in Oklahoma. Think
about the people around the country who are sending presents
and writing letters. Good people live everywhere in our country,
in every town and every city, and there are many, many of them.
The term diversity has been hijacked to mean many different
things, and it is often problematic to think about what it really
means. But it is the right word for the concept I want to cover, and
there is no equal subsitute.
I think that it is a fundamental law of the universe that diversity is
good. The benefits of diversity appear in so many different contexts
that its goodness is something ubiquitous like logic, or gravity, or
death, or taxes.
In 2006 American culture, diversity is often taken to mean that a
group (be it employees in a company, or students in a university,
or models in an advertisement) should be composed of a certain
mixture of ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and
so forth. So the idea of diversity gets boiled down to simplistic policies
such as “1% of all admissions to the college should be Pacific Islanders”.
Of course, these rules are very context dependent, and a rule such
as this one might increase diversity at a college in Maine, and be
discriminatory at a college in Hawaii. When the idea of diversity
becomes synonymous with affirmative action, the goal is usually good,
but there is often a giant supply of paradox and irony.
If we take a broader view, diversity is an essential concept in finance,
sports, engineering, politics, genetics, networking, and much more.
An investment portfolio that maximizes return while minimizing risk
is not made up of one investment. On the contrary, diversity is carefully
considered and measured (and called a related term, diversification).
A successful baseball team can be made up of great pitchers who are not
great hitters, and great hitters who would be mediocre catchers, and
coaches who might not qualify to be even minor league players. In other
words, each player is extremely strong at a small number of things,
but they do not each have the same set of skills.
The most successful project teams are usually made up of people with
varying backgrounds. It usually makes no sense to hire only people
with exactly the same skills … for most projects of any complexity,
this is completely redundant. Hiring practices and laws often focus
on superficial dimensions, such as gender, race, and age, rather than
the other dimensions, such as skills and knowledge, but both play
an important role in having a strong project team. I remember being
part of an urgent project in 1999 where a system had to be deployed
to replace an aging one with a Y2K problem. The first deployment
absolutely had to happen one week in April, which happened to contain
Easter and Passover. Since the project team was extremely diverse in
religious beliefs, there were people who celebrated Easter, Passover,
and other holidays. Because of this diversity, there was someone
available every day of the week to push the deployment forward without
needing to ask someone to work a holiday that they celebrated.
Communications networks are another great example of the power
of diversity. The Internet is the evolution of the ARPANET, which was
a packet switched network designed to survive all sorts of global
mayhem. (That same diversity and redundancy is what makes
censorship almost impossible on the Internet, much to the chagrin of
some governments.)
Diversity is absolutely essential to the Trust Manifesto. When
transactions are rare and there is a huge amount at stake, it becomes
more difficult to extend trust, because the consequences can be bad.
When transactions are smaller and more frequent, it is easier to
estimate the probabilities of things going well or poorly, and the
probability of a completely negative outcome is slim. Imagine you
are drowning 1 mile offshore, and it is foggy. You have your
choice of being sought after by 100 people on a large Coast Guard
cutter, or 100 people on 100 jet skits. Both involve the same manpower
and equipment cost, but there is a much greater chance that at least
one jet ski will wander close to you before you drown.
Most personal and business situations involve huge numbers of
transactions with relatively smaller stakes. The diversification that
comes from that is where the opportunity lies. Perhaps an example
from investing will illustrate this best. Imagine three scenarios for
investing $100,000. The first scenario is putting all of the money
into US Treasury Bills. These are considered the least risky of all
investments, and the yield is usually fairly low … let’s say 4% for now.
Then, one could put all $100,000 into a stock that has appreciated
30% a year for the last four years. If all goes well, you could make 30%
this year, but of course it is a risky bet. Unless you are completely
risk averse, (or the opposite … addicted to gambling), neither of these
alternatives is appealing. Instead, a reasonable solution might be to
buy a basket of stocks that averaged 12% returns last year. If you put
$10,000 in each of 10 stocks, and a few have a bad year, you are still
likely to make more than the Treasury Bill yield. In the meantime, your
risk is far lower than if you had all of the money in the one stock that
might return 30%.
In business school, one learns about how to reduce risk in a portfolio
through diversification. One surprising thing is how small a number
of stocks are needed in a basket in order to reduce most risk. I
remember that having just 8 stocks is almost as good as having 100
stocks, in terms of risk reduction.
I hope that you can see the connection between this type of diversity
and some scenarios we have covered in previous postings. Just like
one should not be unnessarily worried about one investment doing
poorly in a diversified portfolio, one should not be overly worried about
one customer or supplier taking advantage of you. The idea is to
structure things to take managed risks. People do not become wealthy
by only investing in Treasury Bills, and people do not become wealthy
by perpetually hanging out in casinos (unless they own them). It is in
that area between these two extremes, where people take small risks
on large numbers of transactions, and learn to be comfortable doing
that, where profit is made and personal happiness is found. A crucial
part of all this is that fundamental property of the universe: diversity
is good. This pops up in almost every field if you look hard enough.
Others have more efficiently made the same point as me by using these
eight words:
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
“We’re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone – but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy”
— Walter Anderson
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