(2010-10-11) Rao Good Vs Great And Opportunism

Venkatesh Rao on how Good is the Enemy of the Great (Best Practices, Jim Collins) (and the danger of Business Book-s). First, there’s a success that attracts imitative greed. Then something very predictable happens. A “great” story is retold in ways that only capture the “good” part... The people behind the original success discount the amount of Luck, special conditions and randomness involved in the success, and tell stories (unconsciously or consciously) designed to minimize factors besides their own contribution... So rather than getting the unreconstructed messy story of how chaos turned into order, you get an apparently logical backward extrapolation of the final state. We get the speculative assertion that the end-state process, with its checks and protections could have emerged more efficiently with a given hypothetical storyline... By promising a less messy (“learn from our mistakes”) version of XYZ’s path, without the “inefficient” twists and turns, and by promising the beautiful and efficient end state that currently exists, a path-dependent history culminating in a desirable steady state gets retold as a path-independent story. Worse, you get the suggestion that it is the end-state that contains the value, rather than the truth: most of the value was banked along the way. The end-state merely milks already-won assets efficiently. That last point bears repeating: the end-state is not where the value is. The end-state is a hard-won and defensible value-adding position. The value was banked along the way... So if you follow the “great” formula faithfully you will accidentally build walls that prevent your own bits of Luck and Serendipity from getting through. It is only by creating your own bloody mess that you will be responding to your own unique local conditions and environments, and the lucky breaks your unique initial conditions and unique path offer... To a certain extent, I am advocating methodological anarchy. But this does not mean “be stupid and random.” The real secret to getting from “good” to “great” is selective rule breaking... “Good” imitators either try and achieve modest success, or fail, by applying formulas religiously. But the “greats” find “good” formulas to break... And if there’s no formula worth breaking in your neighborhood, welcome to pioneer country. All bets are off.

He links to a 2007 post on Opportunism. many people just see opportunism as reactivity in a different guise, but the two are in fact radically different... (reactive approaches) can easily get lost in a series of knee-jerk next-actions that head nowhere... Not only does the opportunist not get disrupted by the changing world, she actually takes advantage of it... The bad news: opportunism is a probabilistically effective way of getting things done... there is a chance opportunism won’t do the job... But year after year without opportunism in your toolkit, and a scary, frightening thing will happen to your life. It will become ordinary. You’ll achieve nothing remarkable. In purely decision-theoretic, Las Vegas terms, you will fail to “beat the house.” This is because the rational incentive structures of the world are designed to pay off less than the investment of rational players. Salaried jobs take more out of you than they pay. Non-financial rewards work the same way... Here is a 7-step program...DayDream-ing, Idea Person (2007-11-15-RaoBe[[Idea Person]]), Slack... Recognize opportunity... Start Probing... Start developing a sense for Leverage... Act... Burst... Rinse And Repeat (Iterative - more often than not, you'll lose - Failure). See also 2009-07-31-NewportRemarkableLife.