Online Purity vs. Brick and Mortar Messiness

For a majority of my professional life, I worked at a large company that sold consumer electronics online. I did various types of marketing analytics: analyzing sales to determine how to incent salespeople, building models to pick which customers to pitch which products to, then several different jobs setting prices for different types of products. Then, just over a year ago, I left the company to take a job managing pricing for a moderately large chain of quick service restaurants.

There's been a lot to learn moving from electronics to food service -- but the biggest change, given that I deal with data and prices, has been going from working with a company that sold virtually all its products via the web or phone to a company in which sales depend on what's going on at several thousand individual locations scattered all over the country.

For someone who spends his time trying to figure out how to set prices based on sales data, this takes a lot of getting used to. At my previous company, I could put an item on sale and within hours see the sales pick up. The vast internet, and the ease with which people using shopping portals search out the lowest price on expensive purchases like electronics, made it incredibly easy to measure and predict the effect that setting the price of a given product at different levels would have.

Here things are very different. Not only is making a change harder (changing the price of a product involves getting the crews at hundreds or thousands of locations to all make the right change to their menus on the same day, getting them many materials they need to make that change, making sure they have the supply of the featured items to meet increased demand, etc.), but the results are much harder to read. If the results at a couple dozen locations are terrible in response to a promotion, is that because something was "the wrong price", or because there was construction in the neighborhood making that location hard to get to, or because the assistant manager left and things were run badly for a couple weeks while people scrambled to re-organize the team, etc. Not only can it take a lot of extra work to figure out some of these extraneous factors -- because of scale and the ability of the people at each location to explain what they're running into, you never actually know all of them.

It struck me recently that one of the appeals of the online world is that it presents a sort of streamlined mental universe, in which rivers of data flow smoothly and are little interrupted by local particularities. Having been designed by people who think in numbers, the internet is particularly congenial to those who like the world to be quantifiable. I think at times there's a tendency among those of us who try to understand the world via data to make the rest of the world work "more like the internet" simply because the internet is made to work in ways more easily comprehended by out methods -- a bit like preferring fiction to real life because fiction tends to have a comprehensible plot.

He Made Great Stuff

For some reason, even in our highly consumeristic culture, it seems oddly inappropriate to laud someone's life because he designed great products that millions of people bought and enjoyed -- becoming incredibly rich in the process. People are supposed to be lauded for achievements in the areas of politics, charity and art, but they are seldom praised for what they've achieved in business.

Arguably, there was much art that went into the leadership Steve Jobs provided to Apple and Pixar over the years. On of his hallmarks was an insistence on perfection, and it shows in the two companies he's most famous for leading.

The first Apple product my family bought was a Mac Plus back in 1986, when I was in second grade. I spent countless hours on the computer -- writing, drawing, playing games, developing some of the technical skills that I now make my living by. And ever computer that I've bought new since that time has been an Apple (despite a seven year stint working at Dell.)

During all that time spent around Apple users, I've had plenty of chance to learn that there is, at times, something a bit cultish about some Apple fans. Yet in the odd spectacle of people literally around the world showing up and leaving flowers and cards and candles in memory of Steve Jobs at Apple stores, I think there's something else going on as well.

Jobs became successful (at death his wealth was around $8 billion) through an insistence on building products that delighted customers. "Insanely great" was his oft repeated product criteria. In our global, capitalist economy, he was able to delight millions of people while making billions of dollars. For all that Apple design is all about pleasing customers, it runs at far higher profit margins than any other computer maker, and has been rivaled in worth in the last year only by Exxon-Mobile. (As someone wryly observed: "Apple's market cap: 353 billion, and people are leaving flowers and notes for Steve Jobs at Apple stores. Bank of America's market cap: 62 billion, and people are marching on its offices in protest.") And yet the reason why people have this oddly strong emotional reaction to Jobs' death is not some side effect of his business success -- it's the thing that drove it. Over the last three and a half decades he made product after product that people loved, and which they think made their lives better.

Rest in peace.

UPDATE: Donald points out a little known point. Jobs was adopted, son of unmarried college students, and in the post-Roe world would probably never have been born. Like our president.

Memoirs of a Facebooking Man

[with all due apology to Siegfried Sassoon]

For quite some time I held aloof from Facebook, considering it the domain of those who couldn't live without reading updates on what their friends were eating for lunch or what music was playing on distant people's iPods, but in the end I succumbed.  There were people I wanted to keep in touch with who were on, and in the end it proved to be a good way to provide distant friends and family with the sort of "here's a cute kid picture from today" or "listen to what the girls said" kind of news which doesn't fit at all within our editorial mandate for the blog and seems to inconsequential to actively mail to people.  Somehow the fact that one can, in a few moments, provide some photo or anecdote to everyone of one's acquaintance, but leave them to see it only if they look for it, provides a similar experience to being in more regular personal contact.  One knows what people are up to and it allows a sort of inconsequential chit-chat which a relationship maintained over intentional communications such as phone calls and emails generally lacks and yet which frequent person contact usually includes.

In this sense, I've found Facebook surprisingly useful, and it's allowed me to remain far more connected with distant friends and family than would otherwise be the case.

And yet, it doesn't take long on Facebook to realize that "social networking" lacks one of the most basic elements which allows social interaction to be harmonious. On Facebook, links and status updates posted to one's wall are visible to everyone in one's network.  Which, of course, runs counter to the most basic rule of having more than two friends in the world: you don't talk about everything with everyone. 

This is a problem that plagues more than just the frat boy who pauses to consider whether the "Here's me and the guys when were were so drunk we couldn't find either our pants or the sorority house" would offend his fiance's mother.  Unless you have somehow managed to attain a network of friends and family who are all in near harmony in regards to their beliefs and opinions, you must either stick to the most bland of "Stopped to have lunch at a great deli.  Look at this pastrami sandwich!" updates which will offend no one other than your college friend who is now a militant vegetarian and animal rights activist, or else at times post things which offend others. 

For instance, because I tend not to discuss religious or political issues at work except with people I know and trust very well, I've made it an absolute rule never to be connected with any work acquaintances on Facebook.  Yet even so, one is likely to read the political jokes Cousin Melchior thinks amusing about how all people in your political party suffer from sexual dysfunction, and which he couldn't help sharing because surely none of his friends would think otherwise, view the video of a cat being torn apart by mad beavers which your old college roommate thought was hilarious, and see the article which Aunt Mildred believes everyone should read on the importance of sterilization in a crowded world.

None of these people, in all likelihood, would have brought these topics up with you individually, or perhaps even at a social gathering in which you were present. They're think of "their friends", whoever that group of people is whom they are most used to addressing such things to. And yet, in the process, they send these things out to an array of other friends and relations whose reactions are likely to be very much other than what they intend.

This kind of accidental exposure is the sort of thing which makes one feel like being more ideologically and culturally selective about whom one is acquainted with. The old college friend whom it's interesting to catch up with, or the cousin's new husband who was so hilarious at last Thanksgiving, suddenly becomes someone you'll feel much more ill disposed towards next time you meet him (if you won't avoid him entirely) when you find out that he holds your deeply held religious, moral or political beliefs in contempt -- or merely that he has an offensive sense of humor. And while there's a smug satisfaction to thinking, "Well, at least I know now what he's really like." Acquiring the knowledge necessary to like people less is not necessarily a desirable thing. In many cases, it may be better not to know about the elements of one's friends' lives which one would find dislike-able.

The unfiltered nature of social networking online quickly makes on realize how much one filters social interactions in real life, and how much social cohesion relies on not sharing everything you're thinking with everyone you know.

Technical Temptations

This mischievous voice keeps telling me that a 3G equipped iPad would be the perfect house hunting tool, since you could carry it with you to look up directions, look for house listings near where you are, plan itineraries on the hoof, etc.

Doesn't help that the expenses of moving remove all sense of sticker shock. "I mean, sheesh, it's under a thousand dollars and if it make house hunting more efficient..."

The Days Are Just Packed

This is one of those articles I'd had sitting up on my desktop in a browser window for several days -- hesitating over whether blogging about it would be too great an irony given the subject matter. I suppose I'm actually more unplugged than many these days. I carry an old-fashioned flip phone, so although I can be rather reclusive at large gatherings I will not be the one you see bent silently over an iPhone, tapping away. Though I sometimes feel like, for want of time, most of my interaction with people who are outside my immediate family is via facebook, email, blog, etc., I have at least not reached the point where I compulsively check these while on the run. I don't have an iPad or Kindle yet, though I'll admit my keep wishing I had an excuse to justify the expense. And I continue to hold out against twitter, though this is perhaps an empty virtue given that I'm clearly too verbose for it anyway.

This is of little help in that my work puts me in front of a computer for 9-10 hours a day, and at home the computer is always on and available. A walk through the living room seems to necessitate a quick check to see if "there is any news" in the form of a new email or something going on on Facebook. At work, "taking a break" often means pulling a web browser up over my Excel window for a few minutes "browsing around". And when I have busy-work of some sort to get through I often end up listening to a podcast or audiobook while working.

And while I can at least claim to actually cover territory (walking, jogging or cycling outside in the real, non-air-conditioned world) or lift real weights while exercising -- I often do so while listening to an audiobook or music.

It's not so much even the desire to be entertained all the time, but rather the flailing sense that there is never enough time. It's hard to read even a portion of the books I'd like to have the chance to get through, and I don't get to spend time in person with friends as often as I'd like, and so I find myself trying to cram bits of reading and social interaction into smaller and smaller pieces of what would otherwise be spare time.

Though I can't help wondering to what degree this destroys time rather than optimizing it. For all that listening to Shelby Foote's monumental Civil War, A Narrative for an hour while covering four or five miles at a walk allows me to feel like I'm not "wasting" the time that needs to go into keeping my body from completely atrophying into an appendage of my desk, I wonder sometimes if I waste equal amounts of time with repeated five minutes checks of facebook, blog comments, etc. at intervals far closer than is necessary -- simply because it's a brief exercise that fits well into moving from one task to another on the ever-present computer. (Or perhaps more honestly -- serves as a timewaster during the 5-10 minutes I put off moving to the next task.)

A while back, a friend got me to take a couple hours out of a weekend morning to go play ultimate frisbee for a couple hours despite the Texas heat, and I was struck by how different it is, mentally, to spend some time doing physical activity without simultaneously having your brain engaged in some unrelated, information-based task. It was something so mentally refreshing I know in my heart I should find some way to commit to doing that sort of thing much more often. And yet, that would mean giving up time to just one thing...