In many (most?) organizations, “being a team player” is code for “being nice” — which, in turn, is often code for “not contradicting anyone.” The problem with this is that it leads to groupthink and mediocre (or often just plain wrong) results.

I think that this Slashdotter has it right: (emphasis added by me)

I’ve worked for years in highly effective teams, and with success. I can tell you what made all the difference: The presence of equals to debate issues with, so that we could talk each other through the problems and emerge from the session with the feeling that we had defined better solutions. Perhaps we are all arrogant nuisances, but as long as we understand and respect each other we keep each other in check, and can function as effective team members.

The “respect among equals” also translates to “respect among people above and below you in the hierarchy” when such hierarchies exist:

• Listen to & consider what your boss says, but call him out on it when he’s wrong or hasn’t justified his assertions.
• Listen to & consider the objections of those below your skill and/or station, but correct them when they’re mistaken and clarify the reasoning behind your positions.

You should only be stating agreement when you reach the same conclusions based on the available information. If you don’t think you have enough information to defend a contrary position, it’s better to state that outright rather than agree by default. The lack of agreement, even without the presence of opposition, might be enough to show that the position is potentially unreliable.

Being a helpful member of a team means working to achieve the same goal as the other team members. It does not necessarily mean following the same process.

Update: Fixed the link to Slashdot. Sorry for that.

Right now I have the $20 Fido plan, which gives me 200 minutes (which I barely use). Add on $11 for voicemail/caller ID (which are must-haves on a mobile phone IMO), the “System Access Fee”, and taxes, and I spend about $41/month on my phone. That’s about as low as it gets without resorting to pay-as-you-go schemes. I currently own my (unlocked) phone and am not on any contract.

If I were to get the iPhone, I’d:

• Pay $40/month more for fewer minutes.
• Pay an extra $4/month for the same voicemail/caller ID package.
• Get 400MB of data usage. That’s probably too much for casual mobile browsing but probably too little to use as a serious mobile alternative ISP (not that the iPhone can function as a mobile modem; that feature isn’t in the hardware).
• Get access to Rogers’/Fido’s wi-fi hotspots (which appear to only be at The Second Cup; it’s not even at the airport).
• Get locked into a 3-year contract.

When I totaled up the purchase price, extra costs, and taxes, I figure that an iPhone would cost me $1977.15 more (over 3 years) then what I’m paying now. The iPhone is definitely a tempting product in itself, but the really high TCO and the restrictions placed on it (software wise) mean that I’m going to turn it down.

Instead, I’m going to wait for Android (should arrive later this year) and hope that something good will come out of that.

From the Same Wikipedia article on Jeanne Calment:

In 1965, aged 90, with no living heirs, Jeanne Calment signed a deal, common in France, to sell her condominium apartment en viager to lawyer François Raffray. Raffray, then aged 47, agreed to pay a monthly sum until she died, an agreement sometimes called a “reverse mortgage”. At the time of the deal, the value of the apartment was equal to ten years of payments. Calment lived more than thirty additional years. Raffray died of cancer in December 1995, at the age of 77, leaving his widow to continue the payments for twenty more months.

There’s a fair amount of evidence and for the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which states that it’s impossible to achieve better-than-market returns (when adjusted for risk) on a regular, repeatable basis.

However, if there’s one person who can disprove the EMH, Warren Buffett is that person. Not only has he very consistently done better than the market for decades. Not only does his existence create some evidence against the EMH, but he can cite other real-world examples too:

We bid on this particular issue - this happens to be Citizens Insurance, which is a creature of the state of Florida. It was set up to take care of hurricane insurance, and it’s backed by premium taxes, and if they have a big hurricane and the fund becomes inadequate, they raise the premium taxes. There’s nothing wrong with the credit. So we bid on three different Citizens securities that day. We got one bid at an 11.33% interest rate. One that we didn’t buy went for 9.87%, and one went for 6.0%. It’s the same bond, the same time, the same dealer. And a big issue. This is not some little anomaly, as they like to say in academic circles every time they find something that disagrees with their theory.

Buffet has also said:

Observing correctly that the market was frequently efficient, they went on to conclude incorrectly that it was always efficient. The difference between these propositions is night and day.

Unfortunately, frequently efficient is enough to force most of us to give up on dreams of making it big in the stock market. It’s been shown time and time again that most investors cannot beat the market (after adjusting for risk) on a regular basis. (Keep in mind that this includes most active mutual fund managers too).

Buffett knows this, and gives some advice for us unwashed masses:

Well, if they’re not going to be an active investor - and very few should try to do that - then they should just stay with index funds. Any low-cost index fund. And they should buy it over time. They’re not going to be able to pick the right price and the right time. What they want to do is avoid the wrong price and wrong stock. You just make sure you own a piece of American business, and you don’t buy all at one time.

He also said:

…for most people, the bulk of their income is going to come from earning power in their chosen profession. Therefore, from the standpoint of building wealth, free time is better spent sharpening one’s professional skills rather than studying investing.

Personally, I’ve seen a lot of people at a lot of different jobs spend their time chit-chatting about stocks and investing rather than working or finding ways to enhance the business they’re already in. And consider this: how many people do you know that have made the bulk of their fortunes investing their own money in companies that they didn’t also have a hand in managing? Keep in mind that most professional financial investors make their money from commissions, not investments, and most capitalists, entrepreneurs, and executives make their money from growing their own companies. There’s only a handful of Buffetts that make it big in stocks.

(Inspired by this Lifehacker post.)

Never start vast projects with half-vast ideas.

Paraphrased from this Slashdot Quote in How Microsoft Plans To Get Its Groove Back With Win7.

What kind of world do we live in where Visa is worth only 1/3 of Yahoo?

Graham just wrote a post on his new blog about the difference between Business Process Automation and Business Process Improvement. Both terms are literally self-explanatory, at least at a shallow level; Graham explains them in more detail. Specifically, he claims that you should automate (BPA) before improving (BPM) your business processes.

BPA vs. BPM is very much the same debate as efficiency vs. effectiveness. Efficiency means doing something with low costs; effectiveness means doing something with high results. Of course, both are important, but I think that effectiveness trumps efficiency every time: you’ll never reach your goal if you set out in the wrong direction, regardless of how fast you can travel.

You can also see this principle in terms of software. BPA is sort of like performance optimization: you’re trying to take the existing processes and make them work faster, but largely in the same way. But all the tweaks in the world won’t save an algorithm that’s fundamentally inadequate. Replace that algorithm and you may get several orders of magnitude more benefit than the tweaks brought you. Quicksort vs. Bubble sort is the textbook example of this.

Graham claims that automations are a much faster/simpler change to make (relative to more strategic shifts) and thus provide quicker, more realizable performance gains. That certainly can be true in some cases, and in some organizations that may be all that’s possible. However, I don’t think that’s always true. Automating some processes can be extremely difficult and time consuming; in fact, it may even be impossible given current technology or impractical due to the costs. Indeed, improving the process may mean altering it so that it can be more easily automated.

In the end, automating business processes before managing them may be wasted effort if those same processes are going to be replaced.

Because the French have no word in their language for entrepreneur, they are not capable of understanding the American concept of laissez-faire.

By paiute on French Fine Amazon For Free Shipping on Slashdot.

I saw “24 hours”, “Must Have”, and “Crap”, and immediately thought “software development rush job.” That’s not quite the intent this Indexed card had, but I think it’s still appropriate.

Update: Hrm, I can’t hotlink to the image, and I’m not going to make a copy on my server… so I guess you’ll have to click the link if you want to see the card. That lessens the impact.

PR isn’t marketing. PR is marketing’s evil stealthy brother. It loves to masquerade as news, science studies, etc. Marketing plants the seeds, but PR ploughs your mind first.

Comment by Moraelin on “Mathematician Theorizes a Crystal As Beautiful As A Diamond” on Slashdot