MACHINA

by Sebastian Marshall

  One thing must be said about training, though, if you’re looking to get multiple people on the same page –

  Set a single canonical way of getting things done, and ensure everyone knows it.

  American Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman, after his retirement from active service, began a remarkable amount of research, studies, and real-world applied training for elite soldiers and law enforcement.

  In On Combat, he advises –

  “When learning skills and ingraining them as muscle memory or autopilot responses, it is important that only one way be taught. W.E. Hicks' 1952 study found that as the possible responses increased from one to two, reaction times increased by 58 percent. In other words, having to choose between options takes time, and the more options you have, the greater the reaction time. This is often referred to as "Hicks' Law," but Sun Tzu said the same thing many centuries ago: "The more possibilities you present an enemy, the more diffuse he is forced to become. The more diffuse he becomes, the more difficult it is for him to concentrate sufficiently to make a successful attack." We want to confuse the enemy with a variety of possibilities, but we do not want to do that to ourselves. Thus, a simple set of skills […] all extensively rehearsed, allows for extraordinary performance under stress."

  In Xenophon’s work, you can read about how the Persian forces learned to make the same set of supporting operations and fundamentals with every battle. They practiced these out on wild hunts, and practiced them against raiders, and brought those skills with them on perilously intense campaigns.

  If you’re leading or coordinating a diverse group of people, make sure they know a single way to default to doing things under stress. A “58% higher reaction time” translates to being 37% slower.

  37% slower doesn’t seem like a big deal until you think about it – that’s the equivalent of only getting 3 days of work done from Monday to Friday, while a better-trained competitor would get 5 days of work done.

  That’s in peacetime. 37% slower in a crisis is perhaps life-and-death.

  On Combat is a terrific read and highly recommended; there’s lots of material about preparing yourself for stress and handling yourself under stress.

  Ensure you know a canonical way to do key actions under pressure, and if you’re leading a team, ensure they’re well-trained too.

  ***

  CONSIDER: A MAN’S GOT TO KNOW HIS LIMITATIONS

  My favorite Clint Eastwood quote is, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it” – but “A man’s got to know his limitations” is a pretty good runner-up.

  Croesus, surrounded by wealth and opulence, came to overrate himself, not realizing the hardened young Persian was a drastically better commander.

  The Oracle at Delphi warned Croesus and advised him to bring strong allies if he faced Persia. Croesus had formed a tentative alliance with the Spartans, but really ought to have focused on having his own Lydian forces garrison and play defense only, and leave the heavy-lifting to the Spartans or similar better-trained warriors.

  Alas for Croesus, he did not know his limitations.

  You ought to know yours, and get help where you need it.

  ***

  CYRUS PULLS CROESUS DOWN FROM THE PYRE

  Cyrus was merciful across his life, allowing conquered subjects to keep their laws and customs, and winning over many disparate people to his cause.

  The legend might be wrong – perhaps Croesus did just burn to death – but the legend has is that Cyrus heard Croesus wailing about Solon, and inquired what he was talking about.

  Croesus told him the story, about fate and fortune, about the things Solon had warned him against.

  And as legend has it, Cyrus pulled halted his executioner and pulled the ex-King down from the pyre, turning him into an advisor to the Persians. Indeed, Persia adopted gold coins and many Lydian technologies after the conquest of the Lydian Empire.

  Cyrus finishes his conquest of much of the known-world, adding advisors and allies who flock to him, and rewarding them well.

  Xenophon tells one last anecdote worth noting –

  “It is not surprising, no doubt, that being the wealthiest of men, [Cyrus] could outdo the world in the splendour of his gifts. The remarkable thing was to find a king outstrip his courtiers in courtesy and kindness. [...] There was a noble illustration of his philosophy in the answer we are told he gave to Croesus, who had taken him to task, saying his lavish gifts would bring him to beggary, although he could lay by more treasures for himself than any man had ever had before. Cyrus, it is said, asked him in return, "How much wealth do you suppose I could have amassed already, had I collected gold, as you bid me, ever since I came into my empire?"”

  Croesus answers him, naming an enormous sum of gold.

  And Cyrus directs his main attendant to “go round to my friends and tell them that I need money for a certain enterprise--and that is true, I do need it. Bid each of them write down the amount he can give me, seal the letter, and hand it to the messenger of Croesus, who will bring it here."

  The messenger returns with sealed envelopes from all of Cyrus’s friends, allies, and clients. He first exclaims and thanks Cyrus – for in addition to the pledges in the sealed letters, all of these people from across the world also gave gifts for him, the messanger, and treated him so kindly.

  He hands the sealed messages to Croesus, who breaks them open and reads –

  “And Croesus counted, and found, so the story tells us, that the sum was far larger than the amount he had said would have been lying in the treasury if only Cyrus had made a hoard.”

  Cyrus nods, says:

  "You see, Croesus, I have my treasures too. Only you advise me to collect them and hide them, and be envied and hated because of them, and set mercenaries to guard them, putting my trust in hirelings. But I hold to it that if I make my friends rich they will be my treasures themselves, and far better guards too, for me and all we have, than if I set hired watchmen over my wealth. And I have somewhat else to say; I tell you, Croesus, there is something the gods have implanted in our souls, and there they have made us all beggars alike, something I can never overcome. I too, like all the rest, am insatiate of riches, only in one respect I fancy I am different. Most men when they have more wealth than they require bury some of it underground, and let some of it rot, and some they count and measure, and they guard it and they air it, and give themselves a world of trouble, and yet for all their wealth they cannot eat more than they have stomach for--they would burst asunder if they did--nor wear more clothes than they can carry--they would die of suffocation--and so their extra wealth means nothing but extra work. For my part, I serve the gods, and I stretch out my hands for more and more; only when I have got what is beyond my own requirements I piece out the wants of my friends, and so, helping my fellows, I purchase their love and their goodwill, and out of these I garner security and renown, fruits that can never rot, rich meats that can work no mischief; for glory, the more it grows, the grander it becomes, and the fairer, and the lighter to be borne; it even gives a lighter step to those who bear it. One thing more, Croesus, I would have you know; the happiest men, in my judgment, are not the holders of vast riches and the masters who have the most to guard; else the sentinels of our citadels would be the happiest of mortals, seeing they guard the whole wealth of the state. He, I hold, has won the crown of happiness who has had the skill to gain wealth by the paths of righteousness and use it for all that is honourable and fair."

  Was Cyrus not one of the most remarkable men of our species to ever live?

  I believe so.

  And Xenophon, too.

  Measure what you can!

  Manage what you can measure!

  But do not neglect to manage the immeasurable things!

  Temporal Control #4: Rational Accounting

  AMUSING OPENING PARAGRAPH

  “Accounting is hardly a glamorous activity; repetitious, detail oriented, and methodical, it is not a subject that quickens the pulse. Accounting, i
t seems, is as exciting as adding up a long column of numbers.”

  – so contends the July 1991 issue of the American Journal of Sociology, before continuing wryly,

  “Perhaps this image explains its neglect by sociologists.”

  ***

  WHERE ARE OUR BUILDINGS?

  This is not a rhetorical question – no one knew.

  The CEO didn’t know. The COO didn’t know. No single person knows.

  “Where are our buildings?”

  Nobody knows!

  This little anecdote is true – it happened to a friend of mine who I know well, who is not prone to exaggeration.

  She was a hot-shot consultant right out of graduating near the top of her class in university.

  On her first assignment, she and the other junior associates at the consulting firm got sent into a company that had become one of the largest companies in its industry by rapidly acquiring competitors.

  This is an old school industry, you know, 7% profit margins look amazing type industry, and somehow, the CEO of BigAcquisitionCorp had worked some charm on some bankers somehow, gotten a huge bankroll, and gone on a buying spree.

  With no clue exactly what and where he was buying.

  “Where are our buildings?”

  This became my friend’s job for the first year out of university – trying to figure out where this company’s buildings were.

  If I’m doing the math correctly, she was working on this assignment around 5 years ago.

  I checked the company’s stock recently – unsurprisingly, they lost a whole hell of a lot of money and are rumored to be on the verge of bankruptcy.

  “Where are our buildings?”

  Yes, that’s a good question.

  Wouldn't we all like to know where our buildings are?

  ***

  HISTORICAL ROOMS WORTH BEING IN

  It’s not uncommon, I think, for people who are into history to imagine rooms they’d like to be in at different exciting moments in time.

  Perhaps a particular speech was dramatic – what was it like to truly be there and hear it?

  Or, perhaps, there is some great controversy about what actually happened, and if you were there, you could get the real story.

  The later historians recounted that Julius Caesar was torn and vacillating constantly before finally crossing the Rubicon – “and so the die is cast!” – but I’ve always suspected this was propaganda. What would it have been like in Caesar’s tent the night, planning the night before the Civil War?

  But for all the more dramatic choices available, I think the room I’d most like to be in was in Milan in the 1490’s.

  I don’t think Christopher Columbus was doing the most interesting thing in the 1490’s. No, as dashing and daring as Columbus was trying to find a Western route to India and bumbling onto a new continent by accident, no, I think Milan held the most interesting room of the age.

  Sometimes Kai Zau and I are working in the same room – maybe in Tallinn, maybe in Las Vegas, or wherever else. We each tend to our work and mostly ignore each other except for our pre-scheduled meeting times – so much the better for concentration – but we do typically share at least one meal per day.

  I imagine the rooms of Luca de Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci in Milan were much like Kai’s and mine, with them usually working ferociously, and on breaks, talking about mathematics and art, cooking and eating pasta and roasts and breaking bread, most likely deeply concentrating and not bothering each other, and sometimes having scheduled meeting times to collaborate.

  Yes, the discussions that sprang forth from those two men – both geniuses – would reshape the world. I very much would have liked to be in that room.

  ***

  DE PACIOLI AND DA VINCI

  Oh, you haven’t heard of Luca de Pacioli?

  You should have.

  He invented modern accounting.

  And yeah, it blows my mind too that the father of modern accounting was roommates with Leonardo da Vinci.

  Or, at first it was shocking, but then again, maybe not – they must have influenced each other quite a bit. Da Vinci illustrated a number of the geometry problems and diagrams for Pacioli over the years.

  As for Pacioli, his “Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita” was a textbook in Italian covering the state of the art in all forms of math – with a few of his own inventions. It became one of the most important books for business of all time.

  Most noteworthy is laying out precisely how to do double-entry accounting.

  It’s not boring. He quotes Cicero, Dante, and the Bible, and kind of muses his way through explaining why everything is important –

  “Who can say what will happen to a businessman? Businessmen operate on land and sea, in peace and war, during boom and recession, in health and plague. During all these times, they need to know the right to make in markets at international industrial fairs. So, in this sense, the businessman, like the early bird, must remain on the lookout for change all year long.” – Pacioli, Summa

  – and that poetic sense is juxtaposed with very precise technical information on how to keep various types of accounts.

  Of course, Gutenberg had invented his famous metal printing press a few years earlier – Pacioli wrote for the press, and then copies of the textbook could be made en masse. Da Vinci, a student and friend of Pacioli’s, illustrated much of the sections on geometry.

  This fusion would be world-changing: Gutenberg’s invention meant that Pacioli’s book didn’t have to be laboriously hand-copied by monks or scribes repeatedly; it got to be stamped out repeatedly.

  How much did da Vinci’s prestige and beauty add to the uptake? Perhaps a bit. Eventually, the Duke of Milan recruited Pacioli and the book spread across the world, becoming – for the next few hundred years – the definitive text on accounting.

  Yes, if I could be in any room across all of history, certainly sitting around with da Vinci and de Pacioli eating pasta and talking math, innovation, and aesthetics would be one of the top contenders for the room I’d sit in.

  ***

  TEMPORAL CONTROL #4: RATIONAL ACCOUNTING

  CPA and Professor Jeremy Cripps rendered the world a fantastic service by doing a faithful and artistic translation of the Summa –

  http://jeremycripps.com/summa.html

  It’s short, and I think it’s worth reading. If you spend 30 minutes with it, you get a little smarter permanently. It’s a good use of half an hour.

  One of the great tragedies of being human is that “hard work which clearly works well and succeeds if you do it” tends to be unappealing to most people, whereas mystical promises of success without effort or work tend to be highly appealing.

  Said differently,

  “Accounting, it seems, is as exciting as adding up a long column of numbers.”

  ***

  A THEORY WHICH HELPS EXPLAIN WEALTH AND POVERTY

  I have a theory – it’s my own theory. I came up with it. I haven’t seen it anywhere else.

  I think it’s predictive of an immense amount of who has changes in their levels of wealth and poverty.

  I think it explains reasonably well why China went from one of the poorest countries in the world to a genuine superpower in only one and a half generations.

  I think it helps explain who gets out of the tough neighborhood and who doesn’t.

  And once again, it might be seem “stupidly ridiculously obvious” once I lay it out for you – but I contend it works, through and through, from an individual level to a national level, and yet it’s too-often neglected …

  ***

  … ECONOMIC WILDNESS

  Economic wildness, as I define it, is “knowing accurately your past, present, and future economics.”

  You can actually math it out perfectly.

  I know we’re all achievers here, but at some point in your life you knew some idiot hapless friend or acquaintance or cousin, right?

  Y’know
, the kind of guy who can’t get out of his own way, everything is always screwing up, gets a good job for a while but then is randomly unemployed and broke again a few months later and nobody is sure exactly why?

  You got that person in mind?

  Okay, well, call the poor hapless fellow up mentally in your mind, and (mentally) ask him, “Hey, do you know where your money went last month?”

  And… I bet he can’t tell you.