Sandy, Steve, Scott and Succession

By stern on October 20, 2011

I had a rare, unexpected and completely random treat a few weeks ago – forty-five minutes of informal conversation with Sandy Weill sitting in an airport lounge. When the people at the Red Carpet Club denied Mr. Weill entry, I offered to host him as a guest, and was sharply reminded by the staff that guests must “enter, leave and stay with the member.” Mr. Weill took the directive to heart in every way, and graciously offered his opinions on leadership, travel, and succession planning. He is, in every sense of the word, a mensch.

Steve Jobs had stepped down as Apple CEO just earlier in the week, and Sandy and I talked about how Apple went through a variety of phase transitions around of its Chief Executives. We moved from that somber topic onto succession planning, something that I had witnessed firsthand at Sun, and in which he had deeply participated while at Citibank. He said some nice things about Scott McNealy, again, heartfelt and sincere after more than ten years since their last meeting.

Here’s what I took from our chat-with-cheap wine: Stick to the facts when evaluating a peer’s performance. Compliment people you respect whether or not you agree with them and their decisions, because you respect their decision making process and execution. Share personal details to add color but do not boast. Taken together, those rules of executive discource frame reflections on how institutions – companies, universities, associations – change over long periods of time.

Succession planning isn’t hoping that your successor is just like you; it’s finding a leader who figures out how to amplify his or her vision through the senior staff. The successor’s words and actions need to resonate and reverberate through the halls of the company. It’s more music theory than organizational theory; it’s about blending in a new voice in a complex harmony.

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Concall Blues: The Album

By stern on October 18, 2011

After another evening of later-night concalls, punctuated by the Bubba on lead guitar (with adequate doses of crunch, fuzz, wah and phase shifting), I mentioned in passing that blues guitar accompaniment makes conference calls that much smoother. His response: an all-blues album of songs about conference calls.

Here’s my proposed track listing:

1. 65 minutes. The song is listed as 3:45 on the CD, but it runs 4:30 with two false endings.

2. No Pants. Discovering untold truths, and things better left to the strangest of imaginations, discounting for attendance at sci-fi conventions. Contains the previously unknown Mr. Peanut riff.

3. Mute All Lines. A thoughtful exploration of the tragedies of multi-tasking, especially around children, dogs, and bathrooms.

4. Next Slide. Sampling everything from Gregorian chants to Jay-Z’s sampling of the Doors and superimposed over a synthesized back beat, it’s the soulful anthem of those dying by Powerpoint.

5. Repeat. Heavily influenced by Frippertronics, the middle parts of Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach, and the entire catalog of Yngwie Malsteen, this theme and endless variation starts with the most rudimentary of music theory and ends up making Bach glad he’s still dead.

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Steve Jobs and Buzz Lightyear Changed My Life

By stern on October 5, 2011

Social media is lit up tonight from the warmth of words expressing sympathy, sorrow, and condolences over the death of Steve Jobs. Everyone has their story of how Jobs changed their life – in a chance meeting in the elevator, at a conference, through his insistence on insanely great product design. Steve Jobs indeed changed my life as CEO of Pixar, via Buzz Lightyear,something that I say in almost every “Intro to Hal” talk I’ve given in the last 10 years.

Midway through 1995, Sun Microsystems was riding a wave that wasn’t quite yet attributed to Internet surfing, but had its origins in the tidal forces that made the at sign part of our vernacular. We had introduced a new programming language called Java that May, and during one of our engineering conferences, I sat at rapt attention while our keynote speaker — Steve Jobs — introduced his talk with the trailer for Toy Story. Having learned a small fraction of the interactive computer graphics canon (enough to say “Gouraud shading” with a straight face), I was immediately blown away. The texture mapping, the motion blur, the quality of the rendering — it didn’t seem possible within what was “normal” data center architecture, until Jobs told us how it was done and what part Sun Microsystems had had in the rendering farm that generated the movie, frame by animated frame. The “thank you” poster with Buzz Lightyear and a Sun logo that we received as a party favor at that conference still hangs in my home office. Up to that point, computer animation was an interesting experiment, but it hadn’t entered the mainstream; four months later I was taking my then-four year old daughter to see Toy Story at its Thanksgiving weekend premier, and stayed until the very end to see the sysadmin and server credits.

Toy Story’s release marked the point at which it became socially acceptable to be a nerd. Email, the web, blogging, social media and wireless client devices bled nerd colors onto everyone else, but the summer of 1995 was definitely the tipping point. And Steve Jobs pushed us front and center. Family conversations that opened with “What do you do?” no longer involved companies named Xy-, Mega- or something-ix; they revolved around talking about what computers could do in the social mainstream.

Of course, Steve Jobs took things to the next level of abstraction. After making entertainment a function of computers, he made computing a function of fashion. We love our iPods, iPhones and Macs because of their elegant design; celebrities talk about what kind of phone they use and we follow them on social media sites. We’re all nerds now. We even have our own TV show (and I’m referring to Big Bang Theory, not Eureka or The Guild even though those are equally outstanding answers).

For every comment about Jobs’ style as CEO and engineer, consider this: What if most executive boardrooms, state legislatures, and our Congress functioned with the same ruthless passion? What if a design — for a bill, a strategy, a foreign policy — that was so obviously underwhelming was simply met with “This is stupid” and forced into re-work? What if we worried incessantly about the design and experience of our work product, and let the profits come as a result of a job well done? There are management and leadership lessons beyond those recorded in the Harvard Business Review, but significantly more valuable.

Thanks, Steve, for the impact you’ve had on nerds everywhere. To infinity, and beyond.

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Do Facebook Lists Leak Personal Information?

By stern on September 22, 2011

Since Facebook introduced Lists a few days ago, I’ve had two people comment to me about actions I’ve taken adding them to pre-defined lists — actions that should have been completely and totally private. This makes me believe that the Facebook lists feature bleeds private information or actions.

Background: Facebook will pre-define lists for you based on your education, work, geography and other easily sortable criteria. It then suggests people to add to those lists, usually based on mutual friendships with those already in the list, or common data such as both having attended the same school. It’s a nice big JOIN problem at its finest.

Problem: I have a friend who is married to one of my fellow Tigers. She and I have mutual friends who are all alumni as well, and I tend to think of her in the “Princeton” category. So I put her in the Princeton list (at Facebook’s suggestion, I should add, again, probably based on common edges in our social graphs).

The Leak: My friend was notified of the list addition and asked to confirm “Princeton” as part of her education (again, assuming that was the criteria that generated the suggestion). Major, major privacy #fail: The fact that I add anyone to a list is private; it’s how I sort my friends and acquaintances and my criteria and grouping algorithms are completely and totally my business.

Unless Facebook would like to tell us that list additions are communicated to the other party, this seems to intrude in my own categorization. What if I create a list called “Ignored Former Coworkers” and add people to it, mostly so that I can avoid their updates that I find distracting? Are they notified of my feelings toward our time together? My guess is that if the list title doesn’t match one of the criteria used by Facebook, there’s no additional information leakage, but my two simple experiments to confirm this weren’t conclusive.

Advice: Create a list for your close friends and family members, and ignore or delete all of the other ones until Facebook figures out how to avoid leaking our non-obvious inclusion criteria.

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Eagle Rock Park 9/11 Memorial

By stern on September 15, 2011

Sun Microsystems co-worker Phil Rosenzweig

Princeton University and Colonial Club friend Karen Klitzman

I rented some pro-grade camera equipment last weekend, intent on enjoying every last minute behind the lens of our son’s senior year of high school football. I decided to take the long lenses out for a test drive, getting a feel for their focus, depth of field and weight, choosing to photograph the Eagle Rock Park 9/11 Memorial early on a Saturday morning. It’s taken five days for me to transcribe what I was thinking at the time.

Walking through the sculptures dedicated to the first responders who lost their lives that day, I headed toward the list of victims’ names on stone slabs that eerily reminded me of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC.  My first reaction was “That’s a huge number of names.”  I began to look for two of my friends who were killed that day, and realized the surnames near me started with “M”: what I thought was the beginning was only the middle of the list.  That’s when the enormity of the tragedy hit me again. I’ve always thought of my classmate Karen Klitzman sharing the ’84 surname with me, but her name was engraved with the age we all shared before ten true summers gone, to quote a Yes song.

There is a line of trees with memorial plaques that form a different kind of timeline of the day’s events, one tree for each horrific tick of the history clock. In fifteen years it will be an impressive wall of foliage, outward and upward, marking the transition to autumn. Looking over the steel girders taken from the original World Trade Center foundation, you see midtown Manhattan in the background. On 9/11 people gathered in the park to watch the events unfolding across the Hudson River, and today you look through the vestiges of that day toward a skyline that’s changing, again, in positive directions, mostly upward.

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Sudden Adulthood and 9/11

By stern on September 15, 2011

My birthday is September 11, and I think that gives me a certain right to wax philosophical about the day. I’ve previously recountedhow and why I wasn’t in Windows on the World that day. Over the past year, I’ve shared a lot of stories with my hockey teammate Andrew, who was featured in the Newark Star-Ledger “Children of 9/11″ section this past weekend. When he shared personal details about losing his mother that day, I commented that as a 13-year old, he was thrust into sudden adulthood.

Eagle Rock Park, 9/11 Memorial, West Orange, NJ

What I realized watching the news stories and rememberances this weekend is that our entire country was forced to deal with sudden adulthood ten years ago, and I’m not sure we’ve made a smooth transition.

People are definitely more tense and afraid than before. Flying through London Heathrow in late 2001, I saw a man with a turban wearing a t-shirt that read “Don’t Freak, I’m a Sikh.” My fear then, and now, is that anyone who would appreciate the rhyme and reason behind the shirt already knew enough about Sikh culture to feel empathy that he needed a disclaimer. We’re more sensitive to religious headcoverings of some kinds, but not others – this is America, and whether you wear a hijab, a yarmulke, a priest’s collar, or a Red Sox baseball cap, you’re entitled to your freedom. I frequently tell people that an office near an old apartment of mine in Boston was the target of a terror attack – a gunman shot and killed one of the doctors working there for performing abortions. The enemy is extremism, of any form, at the fringe of any religion.

I click-staggered into “waking up full of awesome”. I’ll take it one level of abstraction higher: America is still full of awesome. You wake up every morning in this country with more freedom, opportunity, and out of the box protection than anywhere else. Sure, we have dysfunction in our politics, and we are dealing with bullying from non-sovereign entities with perhaps a bit too much of an emo attitude (it pains me to write that). But I’m reminded almost daily of my friend Larry, who wandered outside of our happy nerd confines to interview with a certain company down the street, and came back humbled and a bit pasty-faced. No matter how strange our engineering brew had become, we were still doing engineering and represented the flat-out best place to be for people of our bad-at-following-rules inclinations. That’s the way I think about our country – some things are broken, but spend some time elsewhere and rather than being upset that you have to call the cable company, you appreciate having four local carriers with a wide variety of unfiltered content from which to choose.

It’s easy to wake up full of awesome in America. It means being a bit more responsible for how we treat each other, and our neighbors, friends and partners, and to get over our own views of what’s best or right. So maybe in ten years we’ve gone from sullen teenager to an immediate adulthood that dissolved into a slightly slacker, mildly emo state. It’s ok – not just because those young adult stereotypes turn into wildly successful web comics, TV sitcoms, and movies, but because at the end of the show, they’ve gone on to something bigger and better.

The time to evaluate where we’ve gone as a country isn’t ten years after 9/11, it’s twenty-five years later, an entire generation, giving us the time it takes to build a firm footing as an adult.

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Numbers Game

By stern on August 4, 2011

I’m continually amazed by the number of people who put money at risk without understanding the mathematics of expected return and vigorish (or commission, house advantage, or retailer markup, take your pick). I witnessed the most egregious violation during a recent trip to Atlantic City, where they they offer blackjack with a variety of side bets – you can bet that you’ll match the dealer’s up card, that your first two cards will total 20, or that the dealer will break in three cards. Players are enticed by jackpot-like payouts on the side bets; getting two queens of hearts dealt up in the “Lucky Ladies” side bet game pays out at 125:1 – equivalent to most player’s entire bankrolls if you hit it just once.

There’s the rub. The actual odds of drawing two queens of hearts in an eight-deck shoe are about 3,000 to one against (the real math is 8/416 x 7/415 to find the probability; assuming you start with a full shoe). The casino is paying you at a fraction of the required return on that one particular occurance — there’s a reasonable house advantage when it happens. But since it’s such an infrequent occurance, you need to look at the house advantage over all of the possible payouts (getting twenty with every combination of ten valued and A-9 pairings, and the bonus levels for suited and queen-included hands). You can find house advantage analyses of various side bets in blackjack; while I was initially inclined to believe that they were astronomical (over 20%) most side bets hover in the 3-8% vig range. So while you lose that bet frequently (the dealer breaks in more than three cards, or not at all, or you don’t get twenty in your first two cards), the greater than even money payouts serve to reduce the house advantage.

Count me educated: Playing the “bust it” bet is a better return on your money than playing the hard way bets on a craps table. And there’s the thrill of a jackpot payout.

So how much should you bet? That’s where the two competing mechanics of betting come into play: bet amount and bet variation. Playing well, with 3:2 blackjacks and generous doubling and splitting rules, you can get the house advantage in blackjack down to about 1.5%. You might choose to treat your side bet as a second, equal risk bet to your main “hole” bet, in which case maintaining about a 5:1 ratio between them gives you consistent risk. In other words: Bet $10 on your hand, and $2 on the dealer break side bet, and your expected return on each bet is about minus fifteen cents.

I started down this mental boardwalk after watching someone bet the same amount on the blackjack hand and the side bet, clearly increasing the house advantage on the total amount on the felt. The net result of that betting strategy is to make blackjack about three times more expensive, per hand, averaged over all of your bets. The counterbalance to house advantage is bet variation. If you’re winning a bit less than half of your hands, on average, you need to increase your bet (and win) periodically to expect a positive return over dozens or hundreds of hands. Betting the same amount every hand, every time, may result in you winning five or ten bets, but the probability of that is the same as the probability of a coin toss coming up heads five or ten times more than tails over a larger number of tosses.

Tonight’s mathematical and phraseology rambling comes to a close with a linguistic dissection of the New York State Lottery’s tag line “You never know.” People are fond of saying that buying a lottery ticket (for the jackpot games) is stupid, because buying a ticket doesn’t appreciably increase your chances of winning. That is false: If you don’t buy a ticket, your probability of winning remains at zero, and no higher. What people mean, I believe, is that the odds of winning the lottery are so astronomical, that the probability of a family member or friend hitting it big and making a gift to you nets an expected return about equal to that of winning the entire jackpot after buying a ticket. You never know, right? So the expected winnings are the same whether you buy a ticket or not; your expected return isn’t because the ticket has a cost. The expected return on a $1 ticket is close to minus one dollar; the expected return from knowing people who play the lottery is miniscule but positive.

If you want to ensure a positive return on your gambling stake, buy tickets to see Guys and Dolls. Otherwise, know the rules of the numbers game.

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Pep Talk: Best Buddies Ride 2011

By stern on July 25, 2011

My friend Pat, a/k/a pep, is technically my first work friend, first mentor, and the source of many introductions: systems administration, USENIX conferences, fast cars, Cold War Russian culture, a Unix deity, Erdos numbers, obscure bands with opaque anti-love songs, aerobics (do not laugh), and bad kung pao chicken (after aerobics class, unfortunately). One of the most valuable things I learned from her was the difference between urgent and important tasks, and setting priorities to deal with each. One of the best time and people management lessons conveyed without yelling.

Pep experiences transportation in a bimodal distribution – she owns one of those really fast cars and is a also serious bike racer who somtimes bikes to work. “Serious” as in century rides comprising a staple of her bicycle diet, riding through the mountains of Northern California with the most literal definition of aplomb (modulo the French derivation, of course – no pep story is complete with self-reference and mathematical terms).

Pep rides in the Best Buddies Hearst Castle Challenge each September, 100 miles of biking through fog and hills in support of a very solid charity that helps people (of all ages) with learning disabilities. She’s been one of the top fund raisers the past few years, rewarded with a reception at the Castle and a dip in the Neptune pool. You can read details about her training and biking regime on her blog, or on the page detailing her previous Best Buddies rides, where you can also make a donation. It’s the financial equivalent of being able to throw her in the pool.

It’s my annual pep talk.

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“Fly From Here” Reviewed

By stern on July 12, 2011


Disclaimer: I’ve been a serious Yes fan since about 1976. The release of Relayer was a big part of my musical discovery, and I sit facing a lithograph of Roger Dean’s cover in my home office. They are, without a doubt, my favorite and most-listened to band over the forty years I’ve been listening to music. With that, I really wanted to completely love the new Yes release, Fly From Here, the first studio release in ten years.

I like it, which is the equivalent of “I like you as a friend” in music romance. It has some good moments, and deserves a few more rotations on the iPod. My major complaint is that it feels assembled – some keyboards, some guitar licks, some layered vocals – and not so much experienced as older Yes albums. On the other hand, it’s so much better than the last two things that passed for studio albums (Open Your Eyes and Magnification) that it’s comfortable. And there’s the trouble: I didn’t want comfortable. I wanted the jarring, what’s-that-sound effect of hearing “Sound Chaser” for the first time (having to look up “fruition” in the paper dictionary), the delight I get out of listening to Steve Howe’s guitar solos in various versions of “Yours Is No Disgrace” and even the contrasts of “Tales” (listen to “The Ancient” starting around 12:20 in for some of the best Howe guitar work in the context of Yes songwriting. Ever.) Those aural reactions don’t happen at first listen. The best comparison, on many levels, is to Drama – including Geoff Downes on keys and the production hand of Trevor Horn. I absolutely hated it when it was first released, and now I am privileged to have heard “Machine Messiah” and “Tempus Fugit” live.

For now, I’ll take assembled, and remember that “change we must.”

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Bennie There, Haven’t Done That

By stern on July 12, 2011

I’ve lamented over the public cluelessness of bad tourists before, and I’ve had a week since our holiday weekend on Long Beach Island to really decompress after some of the bad behavior I witnessed before transcribing thoughts. While my New York City criticisms tend to indict visitors from other countries, the gnarliness seen earlier this month was pure Northeastern US selfishness.

The Jersey Shore comes with its own lexicon: custard is soft serve ice cream, “golf” always implies windmills and clown faces, not bunkers and dog lefts right, and directionally it’s “down the shore” even if you’re going east or north relative to your home address. Less happy connotations are attached to “shoobies” (people who supposedly put their shoes in boxes before going on the beach) and “bennies” (an acronym-turned-diminutive-turned-ugly of Bayonne Elizabeth Newark, the cities at the head end of the rail line that connected them down the shore in the 50s). Bennie now refers to anyone who behaves badly while down the shore.

Examples abound:

Stop for pedestrians in crosswalks, people on bikes, families going to or from the beach with body boards, umbrellas and chairs. Even if there’s not a crosswalk, stop sign or other traffic flow indicator, stop your car.

Puddles are a by product of any amount of rain. The water table tends to be high near the shore, and storm drains take a while to sink an inch or two of rainwater into the nearest bay. Do not drive through puddles so fast that you splash people. First of all, if you’re splashing, you’re going too fast and second, it violates the de facto law of respecting pedestrians.

Give the bike lanes a wide berth. Don’t drive in them, especially to make a tight right turn after not stopping for someone waiting to cross the side street.

Despite the obvious progression of the time arrow and some economic realities, it was great to be back down the shore. A few favorite houses have been torn down and replaced with much more expensive and expansive retreats. Shermat’s Amusements is long gone (at least a decade now), replaced by a short row of townhouses. The Ship’s Wheel II in Harvey Cedars, rebuilt after the 1962 hurricane that pushed the first edition of that store into the bay, has retired like its original owners. The Hands and Surf City 5&10 department stores, stock more clothing and less in the way of hardware and tools in light of the declining number of DIY homeowners. But the Crust and Crumb bakery still makes sugary treats that are worth the calories, the wait, and the anticipation of walking back to your humble abode with a bag of elephant ears. Skate and surf culture have made a strong comeback, and there are at least half a dozen surf shops to outfit kids longboarding on the boulevard. The Showplace Ice Cream Parlor remains the best way to end a great day entertained by up and coming musical theater talent.

Even the occasional bad bennie behavior can’t detract from this: The sun sinks over the yardarms of the Bay Village Schooner (forever the Lucy Evelyn in my mind), the beach gear is rinsed off and you’re out for a walk with a girl you fell in love with 40 years earlier. Even if you’re splashed by a passing BMW with New York plates, you’re down the shore.

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