Tony K's Blog

This video is stunning. It simply makes my head spin. The changes coming in the next few years are unimaginable.

The expression crack the whip has two meanings. It can be in the sense of a boss (or parent), becoming more strict about work expectations, or it can be referring to the kids game, Crack The Whip. This post is about the latter, but as applied to work. I have been doing headquarters staff work for several years now. One of the issues with it is that you are collecting data and information from people who are not really interested in providing it. Then giving it to people who will not take no for an answer and have high expectations of the quality of the work as well as the data. The game crack the whip is described this way on wikipedia "One player, chosen as the "head" of the whip, runs (or skates) around in random directions, with subsequent players holding on to the hand of the previous player. The entire "tail" of the whip moves in those directions, but with much more force toward the end of the tail. The longer the tail, the more the forces act on the last ...

This one is aimed at Cooper and Will as they prepare to go out on their own, and also so that I have it archived. Being able to fold a t-shirt in 2 seconds is a good thing.

Merlin Mann of 43Folders fame has a philosophy called Inbox zero. He gave this talk at the Google campus in July 2007. It's worth a listen, but if you don't have time, his advice boils down to dealing with your inbox everyday. Every mail gets one of 5 things done to it: Delete (or Archive) - Don't spend a lot of time on building archive folders. Use built-in search capabilities to find things Delegate (Forward to someone else) Respond (keep it short) - Appropriate response length is good. My comment is to put important content into the subject. Defer (Put into a pending folder) - something that you check periodically to see if it has resolved. I use flags in Outlook to keep track of my deferred actions Do or capture a placeholder for it (such as a calendar or a task) General principles: Do email less (unless of course your job is real-time) Do email on a schedule. Turn off mail arrival signals, then once per hour process it using the above five actions. Go back to work. Fi...

This entry on the Overcoming Bias blog got me thinking. Bosses just want the number . I see a lot of confusion between planning, estimating, goal-setting, and forecasting. Forecasting Forecasting as often used in business is simply giving someone the number that represents business performance. Forecasting accurately is impossible , except maybe in the very short or very long term. Nonetheless, you still at some point need to come up with a number. Forecasting is best done using probabilistic techniques and reporting events as probabilities. Simply predicting a number, even if you are right is of little value in most circumstances. Can you imagine a weather forecaster simply saying, "Rain"? Without a percentage and a timing, it's simply not a real forecast. Estimates Likewise when you estimate business performance, wouldn't it be better to say, given the manpower and marketing budget, there is a 10% chance that we can sell 10,000 units, and a 90% chance that we can se...

I work with portfolios of real assets. One of the basic concepts of portfolio analysis and management is that you must know what you value. Very seldom does an organization have one single goal that it pursues to the exclusion of all others. It is a useful framework for looking at the mortgage problem that I wrote about earlier. If your single goal in life is to minimize the amount of interest you pay in your life, paying off your mortgage early may be a good strategy. For most people their house loan is the biggest loan they will ever get, typically paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest over the life of the loan. These are big numbers, exagerrated by the size of the loan and the time period. However, most people have goals besides minimizing the interest paid. If you take it up to a higher level, most people want to maximize their wealth, which in simple terms is simply money in minus money out. Money in that equation can represent any form of value including house appr...

The pay-off-a-little-more-each-month-on-your-mortgage fallacy has been around for a long time. The deal is that the numbers are big, so they are really impressive. Yes. It builds equity faster. (But it's just converting your cash from a flexible form of equity into a less flexible form.) Yes. You pay less interest over time. (But you lose opportunity to invest). Yes, you pay off your house sooner. (How many of us will live in our house for 20+ years though?) There are several ways to look at this prolem though. First, from a strictly financial perspective, the right way to look at this is to consider the alternative uses of the extra money you would be putting into the equity. For example, a 6% loan has an after tax 4% rate. Instead of putting the money into your house, why not put it into a SP500 index fund? It will get you 8% over time (5.33% after taxes). So by putting $1000 into your house, you lose $13.33 each year. Put it into the IRA that you haven't been funding and it ...

Zachary's Pizza is an East Bay institution. It was first started in Berkeley in about 1983 by Barbara Gabel and Zach Zachowski. Recently they opened their third store in San Ramon, CA . They have won every Best Pizza in the Bay Area award, and continue to delight. I grew up in Chicago, so I love the deep dish style with lots of tomatoes. I believe that Zachary's is as good as it gets. I don't know if they have a motto, but "Do no evil." seems to fit them well. One of their defining legacies is that as Zach and Barbara prepare for retirement, they are putting ownership of the chain into an ESOP trust to provide for their own retirement and and for their employees. If you are in the San Francisco Bay area, even if you com from Chicago and are used to the great food there, check it out.

I am an agnostic on the issue of man's effect on global warming. I do not deny that the earth is getting warmer, maybe even alarmingly so. I feel comfortable saying that man's activities are at least a partial cause of this warming, whether from greenhouse gases, deforestation, paving paradise, or simply pumping heat into the atmosphere. I also suspect there are other natural factors at work. Changing orbits, long-term cycles, etc. I am concerned that a big piece of the data is being misrepresented. I am hearing more and more that this correlation and perceived causal relationship between CO2 levels and temperature may be incorrect, that in fact CO2 lags temperature increase by about 800 years typically. This bothers me. All this is probably not relevant in the short and medium term. The linked article is an opinion piece from the San Francisco Chronicle on March 11, 2007, written by Henry I. Miller, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a think tank at Stanford University. Is re...

We all know this. There are sayings, e.g. "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." "Stand up for yourself," "Fight for your rights." It is nice to see some reinforcement of this though. Here are a couple of recent examples from my family. Not long ago, we went to a restaurant in Dublin, California called Stacey's at Waterford. (Scott Adams of Dilbert fame is one of the owners). During the course of a very pleasant meal, everyone had basically finished but one. The waitress came to remove the plates and took all but the one plate. Etiquette 101 says not to do this because the slow eater in the bunch then feels rushed. After we got home, my wife called the restaurant back to point this out to the manager (we did not want to make a fuss at the restaurant). We weren't looking for anything, but at the end, the manager ended up sending us a coupon for money off on our next visit. This worked for us, because we got some cash equivalent, and it worked for them...