Maximum engagement vs Maximum abstraction: how to scale without losing touch with reality

One of the biggest things I had to learn over the last five years was to scale myself without losing touch with the details of the business and the operations. Mental models have been a great tool in that. For me, they are like maps, or mathematical equations; they help me understand reality without having to spend the time to understand everything that happens in the real world. My biggest struggle was to use the right mental model for the right decision making and keeping the mental model updated as reality changed. The real world is very dynamic.

Last year, I stumbled upon an episode of the Endless loop podcast where the guest speaker was Tom Morgan, a knowledge curator in the financial services industry. He talked about a mental model of maximum engagement and maximum abstraction. I have been thinking more about it, and I wanted to expand a bit more on it. 

Here's how he describes it in the podcast. "At maximum engagement, you're one with everything in this undifferentiated mass. And at maximum abstraction, you're completely isolated from the world with enormous power over it, but completely disconnected from it. And I think that a lot of people get into real trouble in life when they become maximally abstracted. So if you're living completely in the map and not in the territory, that's actually one of the descriptions of major depression. It's basically when your map doesn't get updated by new territory. And your network is completely closed to new information and there's no connectivity whatsoever. So, basically people in the executive suite, when no one wants to bring bad news to them, they're almost like completely disconnected."

When you're running things as a leader, the larger the organization, the harder it is to have a maximum engagement experience all the time. So, the ideal situation is to keep walking between two ends of that continuum between maximum engagement and maximum abstraction. Napoleon used to lead his army into battle, when most monarchs and prime ministers at the time stayed in their palaces and cabinet rooms. Duke of Wellington led his army into battle in India and Europe before becoming Prime Minister. Sir Winston Churchill resigned from the cabinet after the Gallipolli disaster and went to command an infantry battalion in France during the first world war. In the software world, Bill Gates coded - until he couldn't. However, the maximum abstraction behavior gave us the tragedies of Iraq and Afghanistan. It also gave us the 2008 financial crisis. The people running our largest banks had no idea what was really backing up the mortgage backed securities. The maximum abstraction behavior definitely helps leaders scale as long as the abstraction - or the model - is getting updated with reality. And the way leaders can update their abstraction is by having that maximum engagement experience to make sure that their abstractions match reality.

What should leaders do to be able to live on maximum engagement, sometimes? Some of the executives at AWS actually roll-up their sleeves and code against the APIs their teams are producing. Leaders go out and talk to customers and participate in customer call-listening sessions. Leaders of smaller or medium sized engineering teams participate in and contribute to code and design reviews. Many product leaders use their own products like a customer would: eating your own dogfood. The trick is not about staying in maximum engagement all the time, but it is about staying at the right level of engagement and using the lessons learned during that engagement to update the abstraction of reality. This also involves creating the right organization culture where anyone in the organization can bring bad news, and bring in suggestions to improve what's broken.

Books I read in 2021

 

Here is my 2021 book list.

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. This was suggested to me by a coworker in a discussion about artificial general intelligence. I found some of the ideas a bit far fetched, but fascinating. I also think that Life 2.0 isn't done yet: we (humans) have not finished our evolution as a culture yet, so artificial intelligence is more like version 2.5. 

The walled garden of Truth: Sana'i. This was another suggestion (in the form of a question) from a coworker. Sana'i was a Persian Sufi poet, who lived in Ghazni (Afghanistan) in the late 11th/early 12th century. 

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the trail of the New World Order, by Bruno Maçães. This is an interesting travelogue cum history lesson plus attempted prophesies by the former Portuguese minister for European affairs. I liked the stories and the insights (for example an insight into the difference between the Chinese and the Indian way of doing business), but I'm not sure if I agree with extrapolating the Chinese economic growth linearly into the future. 

Nishabd Noopur, by Balram Shukla. This is a collection of Rumi's ghazals, both in the original Persian and the author's Hindi translation. Balram Shukla is a professor of Sanskrit and Persian at the University of Delhi. Of course, he teaches Sanskrit in Persian! I loved the translations, and it helped me understand many of the Ghazals really well. 

The Goal: A business graphic novel, by Eliyahu Goldratt. I read it as quick reading before a book club at work. This is probably the most read book at Amazon book clubs. The graphic novel just made the reading faster.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid, by Douglas Hofstader. This is one of the most abstract books I have read in a long time, and I must say that it is very hard to quickly read it. I am now looking for books to help me understand GEB!

The splendid and the vile: A saga of Churchill, family, and defiance during the Blitz, by Erik Larson. This book was also suggested to me by a coworker, and served as a new perspective of the British mindset during the second world war.

India as seen by Amir Khusrau (1318 AD), by Prof. R. Nath. I came across this book while trying to suggest a good book to understand Amir Khusrau. 

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, by Joseph Schumpeter. This was part of my reading to understand the basic model of how the economy works, and how the political forces shape the economy. This is also the book that first introduced creative destruction to describe innovation. 

Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment, by Yanis Varoufakis. This is part of my continued attempt at understanding the great recession and its aftermath: economic and political. Yanis Varoufakis was the Greek Finance Minister for a few months in 2015 as part of the Syriza government and wrote a first hand account of how the European Union functioned. He had the un-enviable task of negotiating with creditors, when debt restructuring and abandoning austerity should have been the right thing to do. I highly recommend this book, but do read Mark Blyth's Austerity: the history of a dangerous idea after this.

The Accidental superpower, by Peter Zeihan. "The next generation of American preeminence and the coming global disorder", according the author, is inevitable. This is the first book of Peter Zeihan's series that is describing a new world-order that (according to him) will start in the 2020s. This is when the US will become disinterested in policing the world, will be self-sufficient in energy and food, and the US rivals (China and Russia) will experience a demographic collapse. "It takes twenty years to raise twenty year olds", according to Zeihan. I would recommended it to the people who are predicting that China is about to take over.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, by Walter Isaacson. This book covers Jennifer Doudna's career and the development of CRISPR, the gene editing tool. I bought this for my daughter to get her inspired, and I got inspired too! 

Here's a list of books that I started reading, but haven't finished yet:

Railroader: The Unfiltered Genius and Controversy of Four-Time CEO Hunter Harrison, by Howard Green

Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A corporate fool's guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie, 

Multipliers: How the best leaders make everyone smarter, by Liz Wiseman.

It's your ship: Management Techniques from the best damn ship in the Navy, by Captain Michael Abrashoff. 

And here are the books that I read for the second time in 2021.

Writing systems of the World. This was actually one of my first purchases from Amazon, and I seem to have misplaced that book in my last move. I love it as kind of a reference book on writing systems.

Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world, by Jack Rutherford. 

Baburnama. My ritual yearly reading.

How Great Generals win, by Bevin Alexander. I read this over the winter break to prepare for another book club at work. I blogged my book notes earlier.

Summarizing, my reading over the last few years has a few themes.

Understanding leadership and strategy. This is where I venture far into documented and verified history as much as I can and take inspiration from leaders from the past. Leaders who also led armies (or navies) tend to inspire me the most, because they not only had to talk, but they also got to organize and act.

Understanding who we are, where we came from, why we are here, and where are we going. This is not only the material aspects of who we are (language, history, genetics), but also the spiritual aspects. My interest in Sufism has come from this urge to understand. Reading the translations of the Upanishads (no, I have not mastered Sanskrit well enough to understand the original) helps me analyze the nature of being, consciousness, and reality.

Understanding how the economy works. This has been another theme, not just to figure out where and how to invest, but also to be clear on the cause and effect in economics. I thought that Ray Dalio's explanation was fascinating, but I felt missed the political piece of the cause and effect machine. Mark Blyth's books and lectures have helped me understand as well. 

Understanding the cycles of history, and trying to predict the future by exploring the role of technology in shaping the future. My interest in understanding history in terms world orders comes from this. Bruno Maçães, Peter Zeihan, Kishore Mahbubani, Henry Kissinger, Yuval Noah Hariri are some of my recent friends and teachers in that journey.

My previous book lists:

2020   2019     2018     2017     2016    2015    2014    2008    2007

Book notes: How Great Generals Win

 "Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeperat bellum", said the Roman general Vegetius: "If you desire peace, prepare for war". What fascinates me about military history are two related things: strategy and leadership. How great commanders and generals plan their steps to attain their objective, and how they inspire and lead people towards that objective. Wars are bad, and in almost all cases represent the worst of humanity, but in many cases it also represents some of the best ideals of humanity too: loyalty, courage, sacrifice, and the willingness to fight to uphold what we believe is right and just. A war can also change the flow of human history, as I wrote in the seven battles that changed the world.

Bevin Alexander's How Great Generals Win is a short account of the leaders and strategists and discusses some common patterns of successful generals in the way they pursue their strategy:

1. Great generals do not repeat what has failed before. They do not send troops directly into a battle for which the enemy is prepared and waiting. On the contrary, they strike where they are least expected against opposition that is weak and disorganized. "The way to avoid what is strong is to strike what is weak" said Sun Tzu in the Art of War.

2. Great generals do things that break their enemy's will and resolve to fight, like Sherman did by marching through Georgia and the Carolinas, and like the Mongols did by making the enemy believe that their army was three times larger than it actually was. This also means training, development, and morale of one's own troops is equally important.

3.  Great generals pursue a "plan with branches". This is the strategy of spreading out the attacking force into multiple advancing columns that can reunite quickly when necessary. When correctly executed, this ends up scattering the opposition because they have to defend on all fronts, whereas the attacking forces have the options for surprise action, including attacking the rear (manæuvre sur les derrières: the rear maneuver, used by Napoleon many times). 

4. Technology changes the equation, but not for long: stirrups, the compound bow, gunpowder, canons, tanks, and (now) nuclear weapons gives superiority to the party possessing it, only until everyone else builds or steals the technology. But even the temporary technical advantage (Agincourt, in 1415, with the English longbow for example, or ending the first world war with the technical superiority of tanks, or the Manhattan project) is worth pursuing.

5. Great generals concentrate forces where they matter. "The nature of strategy consists of always having, even with a weaker army, more forces at the point of attack or at the point where one is being attacked than the enemy" (Hans Delbrück). This is not in contradiction to the "plan in branches", but it gives the general the prioritization they need on when and where to spread out and surprise.

Business strategy is different from war, and there is considerable temptation to equate a competitor with an enemy. But, the dynamics is different. In business, a fully informed customer is a willing participant, and what matters is a strategy of delivering value and convenience better than anyone else. 

I think the book should have included great admirals and naval battles too. Lord Nelson's unconventional thinking and planning at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) was key to the victory there. Instead of the conventional engagement of the French fleet in a single parallel line of battle, he instead divided his fleet into two columns and approached perpendicularly, breaking up the French fleet into three and surrounding it. Nelson also had the advantage of a better trained and a more experienced naval crew.