Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

 

  • Myanmar

    Myanmar first came on my radar as a child. I was peripherally aware of it through the bits of Rudyard Kipling that I had read in the school library. Though I was reading Kipling more for his use of words and compact style with which he wrote.

    I had also read a book that made grim reading on jungle warfare from the perspective of Wingate’s Chindits. The Chindits that went into Myanmar were named after the Chindwin river that they crossed. They were made up of underfed troops often weakened by diseases such as malaria and dysentery and suffered an extremely high casualty-rate. It is one of them weird bits of history that the British celebrate, but in reality sound like one long slow train wreck. The closest comparison that I think think of is the Irish lionisation of 1798 rebellion exemplified by Thomas Flanagan’s The Year Of The French. My impression of Myanmar, was a country that is hot and hard to live in. Myanmar was also well known for rubies and sapphires.

    I moved to Hong Kong in 2012, the year before a civilian government had come to power in Myanmar after decades of military rule. Things rapidly started to open up. I worked alongside Red Fuse the dedicated agency that WPP had put together for Colgate-Palmolive.

    In reality, Red Fuse was pretty much the whole of the Young & Rubicam office in Hong Kong at the time. Colgate launched its oral health month campaign in Myanmar with the marketing material printed on the insides of the brown cardboard boxes that there products where distributed to retailers in.

    My more adventurous colleagues took short breaks in Yangoon. Some bought locally mined jade to take back to Hong Kong. A colleague whose partner worked for an airline even moved to Yangoon as airlines set up new routes and hotels opened up catering for business and tourism. I worked on Telenor’s recruitment of of local resellers in Myanmar for its soon to start mobile network. We provided strategy for a local agency to implement.

    Soon after I came back in 2014, I put together a presentation on the potential of Myanmar. But why Myanmar? Well from my perspective other markets were either already on their way or on their way to decline.

    China waning

    I had already seen that China was slowing down from a growth perspective. China was aging, the demographic dividend would last for only another decade or so. (Population growth stalled in China during 2020 according to government official figures. The FT reported that China’s population had gone into decline. I am inclined to believe the FT more.) The Chinese government are sufficiently rattled that they have introduced a three child policy.

    Chinese markets for products were saturated, particularly in FMCG. Whole sections of the economy are still walled off from foreign participation. There is continued capital flight out of the country by local business people and government officials.

    The most important factor that I didn’t put in my slide deck was the gradual Han nationalism tone that was rising in China at the time.

    Vietnam well on its way

    Vietnam was already on the rise and well known by this point. We were getting some of our online creative built in Ho Chi Minh city by staff who were better than Indian or Chinese development houses.

    Myanmar looked like Vietnam in the early 1990s. It has proven oil deposits that are largely tapped out. The Burmah Oil Company and Standard Oil extracted oil from Myanmar from the late 19th century onwards. In 1991, Shell discovered natural gas deposits. By the time I went to Hong Kong, western companies were joining the Indians, Chinese and Malaysians in developing natural gas fields.

    Like Vietnam, there was a large young population, the majority of whom still lived on the family farm. 70 percent of people worked on the land and just 7 percent of people worked in industry. Meaning that workforce could be turned to manufacturing. The population at the time was almost 51.5 million and would grow to 54 million in a couple of years.

    Myanmar by numbers

    In 2012 and 2013, internet penetration was in single percentage figures. That’s why Young & Rubicam were printing marketing materials on the insides of brown cardboard boxes.

    The economy was growing from a low base partly caused by the financial crisis and international sanctions against the military rulers at the time. The economic growth had been stifled by 59 years of military rule.

    Year on year growth looked like the go-go years of China. The average income of a Burmese person was just $10 a day. Although most of the senior business and military elites were very well off indeed with bolt holes for them and their family in Dubai.

    Myanmar had:

    • 119.8 million tons of copper available to mine
    • 283 billion cubic metres of proven natural gas reserves
    • Only 49 percent of the population had access to electricity
    • At least four international tobacco companies had entered Myanmar and up to half of Burmese smoked. Of those who smoked less than 5 percent were smoking filtered cigarettes

    Myanmar challenges

    • Distribution partners. Tobacco companies and Telenor were encouraging people to become retail entrepreneurs
    • Infrastructure development had been prioritised for military rather than commercial needs. Those roads that are available are often of poor quality
    • While half the population had access to electricity, the supply isn’t reliable
    • Corruption is a major issue that I didn’t include in the presentation. The military and historic business elites didn’t get their Dubai penthouses through hard work and enterprise of their own.

    2021

    Of course the military overthrow of the elected government through all that into chaos.

  • George Gilderism + more things

    George Gilderism

    An interesting debate on what I would term “George Gilderism” of the techno-utopia is just around the corner versus the concern that innovation is slowing. George Gilder is the author of Telecosm; which encapsulated techno-utopian optimism at its peak in the mid-1990s; just as the web was coming into its own. ‘George Gilderism’ has since been brought to issues such photo and video imaging through to a blockchain based web.

    I’ve been making my way slowly through The Rise and Fall of American Growth which makes a convincing argument against ‘George Gilderism’. Stewart Brand in his work The Whole Earth Discipline makes a tepid case for ‘George Gilderism’. Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants suggests that technological progress almost has a will to happen. And that will or technium as he puts it is running at increasing cadence which seems to counter the idea of slowing innovation. Kelly doesn’t make a compelling case for ‘George Gilderism’ either, technological progress brings its own problems. Innovation runs at different speeds at different times, in different fields.

    Here’s Intel executive Stacy Smith on what would have happened to the car industry if it had been able to reap the benefits of innovation in the same what the semiconductor field had:

    If you apply the same metric to something like gas mileage, it says you could drive to the sun from Earth on a single gallon of gas.’

    If there were a Moore’s Law in the car industry, you could drive to the sun on a gallon of gas – MarketWatch (April 1, 2017)

    Noah Smith makes the case for optimism here: Answering the Techno-Pessimists (complete) – Noahpinion and the Applied Divinity Studies blog makes the case for the great stagnation – Isolated Demands for Rigour in New Optimism | Applied Divinity Studies

    Finance

    The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of bitcoin | Financial Times – so it’s a threat to offshore financial industry? There are so many things wrong with cryptocurrencies, but this seems like an odd flaw to pick on.

    Share price ‘pop’ in US IPOs falls by half | Financial Times – this could be a good thing, as it shows that IPOs are closer to being optimally priced rather than management teams leaving a large amount of money on the table

    FMCG

    Nestlé document says majority of its food portfolio is unhealthy | Financial Times – they’re ok in moderation, but this will bring in a lot of shareholder pressure

    Ideas

    We Need More Public Space for Teen Girls – Bloomberg – “We had nothing to do and there was nowhere to go. So we’d go and hang out on the swings in the early evening and chat as the light slowly faded into dusk. It was better than sitting around at home.” – but why are spaces failing now where they didn’t in the past? I talked this through with a few friends of both genders who thought it odd. It sounded more like a law enforcement issue around public safety than a space issue. I could see an argument for a safe online space, for girls, boys and everyone in between – but that comes with its own complexity. I thought that the problem was that kids are the PlayStation generation or have their lives stuffed with activities by middle class parents.

    BUSINESS: Warren Buffett sinks climate measure, says world will adapt – www.eenews.net – completely missed this when it originally came out. On a related note I was listening to a podcast interview with Niall Ferguson promoting his book Doom and he mentioned that we have seen remarkably little volcanic activity over the past 200 years. When that picked up again, we could be dealing with global cooling. (This also explains why when I was a kid; the concern wasn’t global warming, but a new ice age). But even at that time, although the media missed it; the general consensus that carbon dioxide causing global warming was a bigger effect than short lived particles in the air reducing sun and causing global cooling. Even Richard Turco’s A Path Where No Man Thought which posited the idea of a nuclear winter has been proven wrong in subsequent analysis. There may be some cooling effect but not the kind of effect envisaged by massive nuclear conflicts.

    Xi Jinping on external propaganda and discursive power – China Neican 内参 – aka more and better Wolf Warrior. It was interested that this was misinterpreted by many people as a softening in tone by China. The reality is that the CPC views everything in terms of struggle, which is means their strategic approach is like a ratchet. It was interesting to read alongside the below article in The Spectator

    China is not as strong as it appears | The Spectator – The truth is that China is not as strong as it appears. As the Stanford scholar Elizabeth Economy points out, the country spent $216 billion on domestic security in 2019 — three times its expenditure of a decade before, and even more than what it spends on the People’s Liberation Army. Yet if Beijing’s internal problems continue to get worse, it will fall back on nationalism as a source of legitimacy. This will not be a comfortable experience for the West. ‘Communist China is bad, Han nationalist China will be worse,’ – the party is already validated by Han nationalism and has been a good while, so this worst case scenario is already here.

    Intellectual property

    Maine man sues his company, claiming it allowed Chinese access to US trade secrets | War Is Boring

    Luxury

    Busan’s Rich Have Only Malls to Spend Money on – The Chosun Ilbo

    Marketing

    Miller Lite, New Balance team up on ‘dad shoe’ beer koozie | Marketing Dive – Through the Shoezie, Miller Lite is hoping to appeal to the middle-aged men who represent an important cohort of beer drinkers and those who embrace dad fashion, which has become a trend as consumers retro looks. New Balance’s 624 Trainer — the model on which the koozie is based — is referred to as the classic “Dad Shoe” in the announcement. DDB San Francisco organized a modeling session for the Shoezie in which dads were placed in typical dad scenarios, such as cleaning the garage and searing a steak. By combining these elements of dad culture, Miller Lite is taking a lighthearted, relatable approach to Father’s Day

    Modern brands have forgotten that good ad slogans work (rest and play) | Business | The Times – Lloyds Banking Group, Pepsi and the food division of Marks & Spencer have brought some or all of their marketing in-house, partly as a cost-saving exercise. But partly, as Richard Warren, Lloyds’ head of marketing, claims: “No one can write in ad agencies any more.” Ouch. – So much here in factors causing this move. Relentless cost cutting has reduced agency talent bench, if you’re 40 you’re done. Agency focus on disruption and innovation over craft because of the media buying profits offered from online.

    Retailing

    How the Depop generation thinks | Vogue Business – so a lot of similarities with earlier generations at their age then. the Etsy acquisition of Depop is more about consolidating crafting and thrifting rather than a generational play per se.

    Tymbals – The edge @ ROI – The latest wonder to be rolled out of Nigel Scott’s RoboVC investment model. The DTC Dropship Arbitrage for evaluating the relative efficiency of eCommerce biz models

    Security

    Polish trial begins in Huawei-linked China espionage case | Reuters – Huawei, which fired Wang after his arrest but has helped finance his legal fees, told Reuters in a statement last month that its activities are “in accordance with the highest standards of transparency and adherence to laws and regulation.” – some interesting bits in the article. First of all, Huawei picking up a good deal of the legal fees for an employee that they ‘fired’. Secondly, Wang was interested in tapping of military optical fibres in Poland, which hints at technology theft and the depth of military and intelligence alliance between Russia and China

    Technology

    Huawei’s HarmonyOS: “Fake it till you make it” meets OS development | Ars Technica – All the evidence points to HarmonyOS being built on top of Android; but with Android mentions removed. Knowing Huawei they are probably violating GPL as well

    RISC vs. CISC Is the Wrong Lens for Comparing Modern x86, ARM CPUs – ExtremeTech

    Telecoms

    Bandwidth Boosts Could Help Unclog Space Communications | EE Times 

    Web of no web

    Killer drone ‘hunted down a human target’ without being told to – The March 2020 attack was in Libya and perpetrated by a Kargu-2 quadcopter drone produced by Turkish military tech company STM “during a conflict between Libyan government forces and a breakaway military faction led by Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army,” the Star reports, adding: “The Kargu-2 is fitted with an explosive charge and the drone can be directed at a target in a kamikaze attack, detonating on impact.” – At the start of my agency career, autonomous software agents would aid the consumer. I had a German dot com client called DealTime who had a Windows-only app for consumers. It would go out and find the best price on the web for items that they where interested in and keep an eye on those prices over time. Now we have Amazon and suicide drones.

  • Get Tough by William E Fairbairn

    What is Get Tough?

    Get Tough is a book on hand-to-hand fighting originally published in 1942. It is important for what it represents as much as it is with regards its content.

    Fairbairn as an author

    By the time Get Tough was written in 1942; Fairbairn was an experienced published author. In 1926, Fairbairn wrote the book Defendu. This was a step-by-step guide to Fairbairn’s fighting system that distilled his experience in street fights, alongside the jujuitsu he learned from early Japanese teachers that went abroad. In this respect Fairbairn, was similar to the Gracie family in Brazil, Imi Lichtenfeld’s Krav Maga and the Soviet founders of SAMBO. Globalisation drove hybrid fighting styles. Something we’d later see with mixed martial arts in general.

    Defendu as a title didn’t catch on that well as a title so it was republished as Scientific Self-Defence in 1931.

    The second world war resulted in Fairbairn’s most prolific period as an author. He wrote Shooting to Live with a colleague and firearms expert Eric Sykes. All-In Fighting was written by Fairbairn as a manual in close quarters combat. Though a section on using firearms in a close up situation was contributed by P.N. Walbridge.

    Get Tough was an American and Australian edition of All-in Fighting, but without the section by P.N. Walbridge. Where All-in Fighting was aimed at the soldiers Fairbairn and his colleagues taught, Get Tough looked to appeal to a wider audience.

    Fairbairn provided an edited version of his work called Self Defence For Women and Girls, which is about a quarter of the pages of Get Tough. There was also an American edition retitled Hands-Off!

    Fairbairn managed to write the book whilst training British commandos. Fairbairn and Sykes had a falling out sometime in 1942 and were never reconciled. Fairbairn took his expertise to to the US and Canada. Sykes carried on teaching in the UK.

    Get Tough and colonialism

    Get Tough was a distillation of experience that Fairbairn had in Korea and then later in Shanghai. As a member of the Shanghai Municipal Police he had been involved in hundreds of fights with local and international residents of the port city.

    The experience led to Fairbairn to play a role in developing:

    • Anti-riot techniques
    • Police sniping techniques with Eric Sykes
    • The Defendu fighting style
    • Two types of knives. The Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife. A slender but sharp double sided stiletto blade designed the weapon to strike at the vulnerable parts of an opponent’s body, especially the vital organs. The original version was known as the Shanghai knife and had a 6 inch blade. It was likely part of the cache of illegal weapons that Fairbairn and Sykes brought back to the UK from Shanghai during the war. The military versions were 1.5 inches longer, to get through winter clothing. The Smachet, a large broad knife almost like a machete or a Roman sword

    Fairbairn’s work was based on the health and lives of colonial subjects. Fairbairn often enjoys exclusive credit for this work, but the reality was that it was a collaborative effort from several officers in the Shanghai Municipal Police including Eric Sykes and Dermot O’Neill. The Shanghai Municipal Police was what modern organisational theorists would have termed a ‘learning organisation’.

    Part of this learning culture was forced upon them by events. The Shanghai Municipal Police killed four members of a protest in May 1925 because they didn’t have enough police on duty to manage a demonstration. This felt rather similar to the Amritsar shootings of 1919, which shattered support for British rule in India by both Indians and people in the UK.

    This led to the Shanghai Municipal Police founding the first modern SWAT team called the reserve unit; this unit was also responsible for modern methods of policing riots.

    The Get Tough legacy

    Defendu had been taught to hundreds of policemen who rotated through Shanghai before the second world war. They then went on to work in other outposts of the British Empire in a policing or military capacity.

    When Sykes and Fairbairn brought their particular set of skills back to the UK in 1940. They were put to work training commandos and and secret agents in their skills. These skills were taught to military age men and women, the women were predominantly going to be dropped by parachute into occupied Europe.

    Again hundreds, if not thousands of people passed through the schools that they ran in Scotland and the south coast of England. Some of the people who went through those schools were from overseas. When they eventually went home, the ideas and training that they learned went with them and were put to use. At first trying to retain colonial rule. Then later, building up nascent special forces units including units from the US, Belgium, Holland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

    Over time these countries evolved their techniques to match modern war, but the principles where still there.

    After the second world war, the colonial policemen of the Shanghai Municipal Police who survived scattered across the British empire. Fairbairn went to Cyprus to train police in his techniques. He then ran two sessions in Singapore for the newly formed riot squad unit.

    The contents of Get Tough

    Fairbairn wrote Get Tough for a wide range of readers, not just the military as Fairbairn himself said:

    It is not the armed forces of the United Nations alone who can profit by learning about how to win in hand-to-hand fighting. Every civilian, man or woman, who ever walks a deserted road at mid-night, or goes in fear of his life in the dark places of a city, should acquaint himself with these methods.

    Get Tough by William E. Fairbairn

    The book covers:

    • Blows
    • Releases – how to get out of holds by an assailant
    • Holds
    • Throws
    • Miscellaneous advice – mostly covering improvised weapons from things at hands
    • Use of the knife – Fairbairn talks about using the Sykes-Fairbairn fighting knife
    • The Smatchet – use of a short machete type weapon designed by Fairbairn
    • Disarming an opponent of his pistol

    If you’ve trained in a martial art, you’ll have done drills of some sort like katas in karate. Fairbairn’s work doesn’t have drills per se. The idea is that if you do the hold or the blow, you are unlikely to need follow up.

    More book reviews here.

  • Military civil fusion response + more

    Military civil fusion

    How Should the U.S. Respond to China’s Military Civil Fusion Strategy? | ChinaFile – Over the past four years, the U.S. government has invoked military civil fusion (MCF) to justify a range of policies. For instance, MCF was among the rationales for the reform and expansion of export controls to include certain “emerging” and “foundational” technologies, as well as for the addition of companies and universities to the “Entity List” and “Unverified List” that the Department of Commerce maintains. The Trump administration partially justified attempts to ban WeChat and TikTok from the United States through initial claims about the companies’ alleged linkage to MCF. Moreover, a presidential proclamation on Chinese students and researchers studying in the United States cited students’ proximity to entities engaged in MCF as grounds for denying or revoking visas – military civil fusion is probably one of the biggest things that will affect innovation over the next couple of decades. It will shape the prioritisation of innovation topics in the west as a reaction to what happens in China.

    Luxury

    The Limits of Luxury Livestreaming | Jing Daily 

    Marketing

    Bitcoin declined substantially in value this week. The inciting incident seems to be Elon Musk waking up to the environmental impact of cryptomining. Papa Johns Pizza put out an offer in the UK which seems to bet a rise in the value of bitcoin.

    Promotional offer from Papa Johns Pizza UK

    This offer could democratise ownership of bitcoin, but it’s unlikely. Instead it feels like a PR driven story that could turn into the Hoover’s free flight debacle of 1992. It is apparently to celebrate Bitcoin pizza day.

    Media

    What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks – Columbia Journalism Review – really interesting findings, though I am surprised that the percentage link rot is only 25% – I was expecting it to be much higher given the range of years covered. When you have 72% link rot from 1998, it gives a counterpoint to ‘on the web is forever’. My friend Ian often talks about how he can’t find a video demonstration of Orange’ home of the future from the dot com era. This data supports his empirical experience. The work that the Internet Archive do is immensely important. But it misses the interconnectivity between content; which is an important part of the medium and the context of online.

    These Ex-Journalists Are Using AI to Catch Online Defamation | WIRED – so you’ve spotted it, what next?

    Security

    The Full Story of the Stunning RSA Hack Can Finally Be Told | WIRED – interesting story that foreshadowed the SolarWinds breach a decade later

    Technology

    New 2021 Ford Focus RS hot hatch axed | CAR Magazine – interesting story. It implies that motor companies won’t be able to do niches and halo cars. This will have a knock on for suppliers, forcing consolidation. It also has implications in terms of the need for design houses and design teams, motorsport participation and brand differentiation. And the software aspects of car experience looks even worse for the consumer – ‘The uncomfortable future of in-car upgrades has begun’ | CAR Magazine

    Ford’s Ever-Smarter Robots Are Speeding Up the Assembly Line | WIRED – up to now manufacturing robots have been programmed to do a series of movements, not that dissimilar to a CNC machine. This means that they are intolerant of inconsistency. Ford, Nissan and Toyota are looking to use machine learning to handle inconsistency. The man on the line is fine if his screwdriver, is placed in roughly the same place as it was when he put it down. He or she doesn’t mind what part of a bolt they pick up in the parts bin. Yet that kind of thing requires a lot of machine learning work for robots. It will be incremental gains on tasks like this that moves automation forwards

  • Measure What Matters by John Doerr

    I was recommended Measure What Matters by my friend and fellow ex-Yahoo Cathy Ma. Cathy found the book useful in her way through managing teams. In Measure What Matters, John Doerr explains the idea of objectives and key results or OKRs.

    Measure What Matters

    About John Doerr

    If you’ve worked in or around the Silicon Valley technology space from the PC age through to the 2010s Doerr’s name will have a passing familiarity to you. Doerr was a salesman at Intel in the 1970s, realised that there were too many good people ahead of him and took an over in venture capital instead. Doerr was involved in funding:

    • Compaq – Compaq kicked off the market for ‘IBM compatible’ PCs and made the first portable ‘IBM compatible’ PC. Soon after IBM was no longer the dominant player in personal computing leading to the Wintel duopoly. Compaq eventually offered a full range of large servers, workstations and PC when it acquired Digital Equipment Corporation and Tandem Computing. Compaq was in turn bought by H-P
    • Netscape – Netscape Communications mainstreamed the internet browser, email client, web servers and email servers. The server software lives on in Oracle’s product line via the Netscape – Sun Microsystems alliance. The browser indirectly carried on through an open source project Mozilla
    • Symantec – Symantec started off as a natural language processing company in the early 1980s, it became famous for its Mac antivirus software and then went into the DOS and Windows market after merging with Peter Norton Computing. It now has a consumer facing business called NortonLifeLock and the business focused software part of the business was sold to Broadcom
    • Sun Microsystems – Sun Microsystems started off as a UNIX workstation manufacturer. Over time they built up a healthy server and software business that supported much of the infrastructure of the web. They were instrumental in the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix – which influenced parts of the macOS that I am typing this post on, RISC processors in your smartphone, thin client computing like Google Docs, and virtualised computing that is instrumental for cloud computing. Sun Microsystems workstations were popular with investment banks, telecoms companies and internet startups bought their servers. The company’s decline can be marked by the dot com crash. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and their technology lives on
    • drugstore.com – was a first generation e-tailer in health and beauty products. Walgreens bought the business in 2011, and shut down the website five years later.
    • Amazon.com – needs no introduction
    • Intuit – Intuit sells financial software in the US. TurboTax helps Americans do their tax returns, Mint provides a personal finance dashboard for consumers and QuickBooks is accounting software for small and medium sized businesses
    • Macromedia – Macromedia was a software company that developed tools for creatives and programmers. It was eventually acquired by Adobe. Macromedia products live on in the Adobe product range
    • Google – the search engine.

    About OKRs

    For all of the companies that Doerr has funded he has advocated OKRs. The idea of OKRs came from Doerr’s colleague at Intel Andy Grove. OKRs are a collaborative process. The idea is that it is used with teams and the individuals who make up the teams. Management seeks to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. The key results in OKRs are how you track progress towards the objective, create alignment within the team, and encourage engagement around measurable goals. They are also supposed to flex with circumstance, which is one of the key points of separation from Peter Drucker’s management by objectives (MBO).

    The first part of the book Measure What Matters explains the origin and process behind OKRs.

    You can get everything that you need in the first two chapters covering 35 pages.

    The Cult of OKR

    The rest of the book is a series of self aggrandising endorsements of OK from senior executives who are OKR advocates:

    • Larry Page of Alphabet
    • Bill Davidow of Intel
    • Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook
    • Bill Gates on The Gates Foundation

    It crosses the line for me and almost reads like a high water mark for Silicon Valley hubris; Doerr’s book was published in 2018. Three years later and:

    • Bill Gates is in the most trouble he has been in since the Judge Jackson ruling
    • Alphabet and Facebook are being assailed by regulators around the world
    • Intel looks like a shadow of its former self. Its fabrication process are three years behind competitors. Customers are designing their own chips and AMD is eating their lunch in high performance processors

    Secondly, Doerr’s book, whilst acknowledging Andy Groves role of OKR creator; fails to acknowledge that Andy gave a good descriptor of OKRs in his 1983 book High Output Management.

    I think one of the reasons that I am not that keen on Measure What Matters, is that the book doesn’t work for culturally as a non-American. Instead I would recommend Andy Grove’s own book High Output Management. More books that might be of interest here.