Karmona Pragmatic Blog

I have just finished reading a very interesting book (!!!) “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely and came across a very interesting historic story.

“In 210 BC, a Chinese commander named Xiang Yu led his troops across the Yangtze River to attack the army of the Qin (Ch’in) dynasty. Pausing on the banks of the river for the night, his troops awakened in the morning to find to their horror that their ships were burning. They hurried to their feet to fight off their attackers, but soon discovered that it was Xiang Yu himself who had set their ships on fire, and that he had also ordered all cooking pots crushed.”

“Xiang Yu explained to his troops that without the pots and the ships, they had no other choice but to fight their way to victory or perish. That did not earn Xiang Yu a place on the Chinese army’s list of favorite commanders, but it did have a tremendous focusing effect on his troops (as they grabbed) their lances and bows, they charged ferociously against the enemy and won nine consecutive battles, completely obliterating the main-force units of the Qin dynasty”

Prof. Ariely is making a point about the advantage of making a choice to focus by closing other doors/options/opportunities.

Joshua Baer had an interesting allegory to the startup world in his “Necessity is the mother of Invention” post

“This is similar to when a bootstrapper enters the Valley of Death* and commits to their venture, but before they are making money and cash flow positive. They are forced to figure out how to make it work with what they’ve got. The timeline is not completely in their control.

We’re always tempted to leave ourselves an escape route or path of retreat. And usually that’s a good idea. But sometimes there aren’t enough resources to mount the attack and cover the retreat. In order to be successful sometimes you have to commit the resources to what you believe in because the retreat option isn’t acceptable. Sometimes once you head down a path there is just no turning back, so you might as well commit all of your resources to getting to the end”

Well… this is true but since I am a notorious pessimist and usually like my options open, I have continued reading about this fine gentlemen (a.k.a. Xiang Yu)

I learned that indeed in the beginning of the civil war Xiang Yu was winning but with his rude manners, arrogance and lack of political vision, the tide turned against Xiang Yu and in the end he lost the war to Liu Bang.

In 202 BC, when Xiang Yu and his remaining men had their backs against the river while surrounded by Liu Bang’s troops, a boatman on a raft persuaded Xiang Yu to go with him across the river so he can prepare a comeback.
Xiang Yu said, “When I crossed the River and went west, I took with me 8,000 sons and brothers from east of the Yangtze. Now none of them has returned; how can I face the elders east of the Yangtze?” After declining this offer, Xiang Yu turned around, charged against the Han troops, killed over a hundred men, and finally cut his own throat.
Shortly after his death Liu Bang established the Han Dynasty.

Three concluding facts about Xiang Yu:

• Xiang is popularly viewed as a leader who possesses great courage but lacks wisdom, and his character is aptly summarized using the Chinese idiom “Yǒu Yǒng Wú Móu” (有勇無謀) - “Having Courage but No Strategies” (or  to be foolhardy or to be more brave than wise or to have reckless courage…)
• Xiang’s battle tactics were studied by future military leaders while his political blunders served as cautionary tales for future rulers
• Xiang Yu is also the kind general that raided the Terracotta** tomb less than five years after the death of the First Emperor – Xiang’s army was looting of the tomb and structures holding the Terracotta Army, as well as setting fire to the necropolis and starting a blaze that lasted for three months.

“Yǒu Yǒng Wú Móu” (有勇無謀) - “Having Courage but No Strategies” - Think about it…! ;)

* Valley of Death – A slang phrase to refer to the period of time from when a startup receives an initial capital contribution to when it begins generating revenues.
During the death valley curve, additional financing is usually scarce, leaving the firm vulnerable to cash flow requirements.

** The Terracotta Army or the “Terra Cotta Warriors and Horses“, is a collection of terracotta sculptures depicting the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of China
The figures, dating from 210 BC, vary in height according to their roles, with the tallest being the generals. The figures include warriors, chariots, horses, officials, acrobats, strongmen, and musicians.
Current estimates are that in the three pits containing the Terracotta Army there were over 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses, the majority of which are still buried in the pits.
There is also a legend that the terracotta warriors were real soldiers, buried with Emperor Qin so that they could defend him from any dangers in the next life.

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p.s. Prof. Ariely also recommends another role model for door closing – Rhett Butler for his supreme moment of unpredictable rationality with his astonishing elan, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn”

*** Warning: this post might contain cultural bias material ;) ***

As most of my friends and colleagues, I had the pleasure of working with Americans for most of my professional life and this post is only the tip-of-the-iceberg trying to capture one tiny angle of the American-Israeli cultural gap.

We (Israelis) think we know enough about English since we have watched many hours of American TV, studied the language from early age and use it constantly and “fluently” during our adult professional life but we should be aware about our tendency to interpret English phrases literally, which results in amusing/frustrating/interesting/challenging misunderstandings – We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.

Executive summary:

• Israelis consider themselves creative, direct and honest but being perceived as arrogant, stubborn, negative, rude and pushy (did I forget any other negative adjective here? ;)
• Americans are professionals, positive, polite and showing respect but being perceived as bureaucrats, artificial and square

Few examples:

German Coastguard | “What are you s(th)inking about?”

Do you have more examples to share?


Relevant books:

• Border Crossings: American Interactions With Israelis
• Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle

Very cool link:

• An American Phrase Book @ http://web.media.mit.edu/~guy/american/

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Random Quote: “Don’t get overconfident. Tiny minds also think alike” (Pasha Bitz, May 2010)

Robert (Bob) Sutton wrote insightful post about “Good Bosses” which I feel it worth more than just a tweet…

With an evidence-based (experience studying and consulting to managers in many settings) approach he have identified a list of key beliefs that are held by the best bosses — and rejected, or more often simply never even thought about, by the worst bosses.

Here are the half dozen I liked most, you can read the rest (+ dedicated post on each one) on his HBR blog post.

• I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
• My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well.
• I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.
• Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too.
• How I do things is as important as what I do.
• Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

@Bob, very insightful – Thanks!

By the way, just added his new book “Good Boss Bad Boss“ to my Delver Wish-List… please feel more than free to surprise me ;)

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Random Quote: “my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand” | Ada Lovelace (a.k.a. the *first* programmer)

Recently, I have encountered an interesting paper (2006) about Chubby – Google’s (Paxos based) distributed lock service.
I was especially amazed by the observations made on the Google engineering capabilities and mindset inside a “formal” research publication.

Although one can easily get into a cynical state of mind reading this paper… I feel that this “pragmatic view” which combines a deep architectural and algorithmic know-how with keen understanding of the social factor in software development is exactly the key to create legendary software.

Anyway, very well written – highly recommended reading…

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“Our developers sometimes do not plan for high availability in the way one would wish. Often their systems start as prototypes with little load and loose availability guarantees; invariably the code has not been specially structured for use with a consensus protocol. As the service matures and gains clients, availability becomes more important; replication and primary election are then added to an existing design.”

“Developers are often unable to predict how their services will be used in the future, and how use will grow.  A module written by one team may be reused a year later by another team with disastrous results … Other developers may be less aware of the cost of an RPC.”

“Despite attempts at education, our developers regularly write loops that retry indefinitely when a file is not present, or poll a file by opening it and closing it repeatedly when one might expect they would open the file just once.”

“Developers rarely consider availability. We find that our developers rarely think about failure probabilities.“

“Developers also fail to appreciate the difference between a service being up, and that service being available to their applications.“

“Unfortunately, many developers chose to crash their applications on receiving [a failover] event, thus decreasing the availability of their systems substantially”

Ken Schwaber was quoted giving this mind-blowing Scrum / mother-in-law allegory:

“imagine that your mother-in-law believed her daughter could do better… and then imagine that she moved in with you… that’s what Scrum is like”

Think about it…

Assuming we shouldn’t aim to completely avoid all errors in software development (since this is an inherent part of any human creation) but rather to spot them as quickly as possible before they become real problems.

And… since Scrum is indeed a very good “tool” to bring the problems in-your-face without any mercy in a daily manner.

So without even getting into the continuous improvement possibilities with mother-in-laws, I really liked the Mother-In-Law allegory :)

By the way, with great anticipation I have proudly joined the Haiku contest @ the famous Ktorium – Wish me luck! :)