Base rate and mean reversion structure

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One decision making suggestion is to start with the base rate, to find a set of comparable circumstances and ask, ‘what typically happens?’

In investing it is to find the price of, say Amazon, and ask how often a company of those characteristics grew at an expected percentage. Rather than start with the idea that Amazon is a great company that does a bunch of things well and so on – we can ask, for companies like this how many have grown at 15% a year? Zero.

Another example is (large, but maybe all) construction. The “base rate” is not good, fast, and cheap but overpromised, over-budget, and underwhelming. You cannot compare this to that people protest. Boloney says Bent Flyvbjerg, the cost overruns and benefit shortfalls are so consistent they are comical.

So starting with the base rate can help. What else?

On Wharton Moneyball the hosts discussed the 2020 Olympics and noted that the United States (men especially) have underperformed compared to years past. Is it culture? Training? Commitment?

“Is the U.S. doing badly or are other countries proportionally better?” – Shane Jensen, Wharton Moneyball, August 2021

Yes, says cohost Cade Massey, “Give Shane credit for the most parsimonious explanation we suggest for most any situation, try regression to the mean on for size and see if that can explain it.”

The idea behind regression to the mean is that performance varies up and down. There are many causal explanations for why this happens, think about talking heads for sports or stocks, but sometimes the mechanism is just old fashioned randomness.

But, ugh, we do no like this. Give me a reason man. So we assign reasons, which may be more comfortable than they are accurate.

We can make easier decisions. Easy decisions are designed. What designing a decision does is it shifts the information people use. Simple starter explanations like, the base rate or mean reversion, both create a decision making structure that will often help people get pointed in the right direction first. Start in the ballpark or base rates and then move towards your unique situation. Start with mean reversion as the mechanism and the adjust for other factors.

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Mean reversion, said Cliff Aeneas (Bloomberg) is basically value investing, “they’re almost synonymous.”

Forever communicating well

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One way to think about good communication is to think about information theory. Or copy machines. Each copy of a copy loses information.

We usually use words as the idea delivery vehicle. Works work, but maybe not as well as we sometimes hope. We can do better.

One way to communicate better is to prioritize trust over understanding. The world is as you say, I don’t have to understand because I trust you. That communication tool works best in time restricted situations.

Another way to communicate well is to consider what ‘language’ the listener understands:

“If you look at (Boris) Johnson’s speeches during the Brexit campaign, they are almost all carefully framed entirely in AngloSaxon words because he knew damn well who he was talking to. That’s always been the key in English or American politics. The idea that someone can speak to the ordinary people not as some quasi foreign elite, but as one of us, is deeply potent to the English and their American cousins.” – James Hawes, The Spectator’s The Book Club podcast, November 2020

But ‘one of us’ isn’t just the words we use. Visuals, emotions, and figurative languages matter too. Sport analytics, for instance, works better visually.

A third aspect is the culture around communicating well. For instance, part-of-the-reason the English language changed was the culture of London. Stable relationships offer little wiggle room for new expressions. But, “In an area like London, where there is a less tight-knit society and consequently lower societal pressures, it opens up language (and other cultural factors) to extensive change.”

To communicate well in that London meant expressing oneself in new ways. I wonder if they would have pronounced it gif or jif?

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Modern English is only five-hundred years old and that change in London is why elementary students have to learn about homophones like meet and meat.

The itty-bitty-shitty-committee

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The itty-bitty-shitty-committee is that voice in your head. It’s the chatter.

“The chatter is the zooming in really narrowly on a problem and getting stuck and spinning over and over in ways that are dysfunctional and destructive. We want to get rid of the chatter that gets in the way of your job, your relationships. and your physical health.” – @Ethan_Kross on Armchair Expert

I’ve been in that loop, in that cartoon whirlpool. I’m the bumbling sea captain. I see it. I try to avoid it. I can’t get out of my own way. Which is kind of wild, being the captain of this ship of one. Kross suggests reframing during rough seas.

It’s not a free bag, it’s a bag that’s been paid for. It’s not a free coffee, it’s a free coffee that’s been paid for. I used to advise college students that anytime they saw the word FREE on campus they could interpret that as “Your tuition pre-paid this for you.”

Time is also a good way to reframe a situation. Do I remember a situation like this from three years ago? No. Then I probably won’t remember this one three years from now. This kind of framing was especially good when my daughters were young. My wife used this too only her mantra was: this too shall pass.

Kross’s specific suggestions echoes Jenna Fischer‘s career advice. Fischer said she looks at herself as the CEO and the product. The boss Fischer said that headshots had to be done by a professional. The talent Fischer had to tell her photographer friend.

“Distance self-talking involves coaching yourself through a problem using your own name like you’re talking to someone else. We are much better at advising other people than ourselves…when we use a name to talk to ourself it changes the perspective, it’s a psychological jujitsu move.” – Kross

That’s incredible reframing. And it works!

If we remember. Usually when someone cuts us off on the road they’re an idiot. When we do it it’s because we’re late. Maybe that’s part of it. We see things differently when the information changes and a simple switch in internal dialogue can create big switches outside in our actions.

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Dax Shepard and Kross talk about the IBSC around 31:20. The distant self-talk reframing is known as Solomon’s paradox.

This time is different: 70s airlines

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This time is different is an attempt to understand when this time is different rather than when it’s not. Our working model is that TTID when the system changes.

In the high jump, things were different because the landing area went from wood chips to soft foam, allowing athletes to land on their back.

In startups like Uber, things were different because the technology costs like AWS and GPS fell. Similarly is Ben Thompson’s question: what happens when marginal costs are zero?

A systemic change was the case of airline deregulation in the 1970s:

“Something else happens and you can see it in the airline route maps. Look at one in 1978 and you don’t see that many red lines but in 2017 it’s an explosion of red all over the country and there will be these spots where they’re very dark: Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis. These are hub airports. Hub and spoke activity really takes off after this (airline deregulation) legislation.” – Bruce Carlson, My History can Bear up Your Politics, August 2021

Prior to deregulation, the average flight was 55% full and a ticket from New York to Los Angeles cost $1482 in inflation adjusted dollars compared to $268 in 2021. Carlson points out too that a number of companies like Pan Am went out of business after the deregulation.

Pan Am

Those idyllic phots are temping. Those were the days. But that’s like someone fifty years from now looking at Instagram and thinking that was life. Hey, everyone was beautiful and always on vacation.

These posts are an attempt to categorize when TTID. So far it’s when a fundamental aspect changes how a business creates value and captures value.

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In 2019 one billion people flew in the United States. One in six 2019 flyers were on a Southwest flight. One in twenty went through Atlanta.

“Going for the no”

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Mike Maples Jr. worked for a software company that enabled telecom companies to offer broadband service. Mike’s job was sales.For many telcos it wasn’t even a buy or build? question because they were in the hardware business: driving tucks, laying cable, and climbing telephone poles.

But not every company was a potential client. “I started” each pitch, Maples said, “by saying, ‘This many not be a good use of your time.'”

“I would start to make body language like I was going to leave because my goal was to have them reach out, pull me back, and go, ‘No, I’m screwed I’ve got to have three million subscribers in the next eighteen months, my CEO just committed to that on their last Wall Street call.” – Mike Maples Jr., Founder’s Field Guide August 2021

It wasn’t just customers Maples wanted, but the right customers. In high-cadence systems, the wrong customers slow a business’s innovation cycle. “They’re going to ask me for requirements that don’t matter for building a different future” Maples said, “because they’re conventional thinkers who live in the present.”

Traditionally we think of CAC as customers per dollar spent, but customers are heterogeneous, that’s a two-dollar word we learned during Covid. Maples is a venture capitalist so he wants to invest in things that are small now but will be huge later. In the current circumstances that means technology. So Maples restricted his customers because the product he sold (or, wanted to sell in the future) was very specific.

The opposite case can work too: expanding a customer base by offering a more generic product. This is the American Picker case. People browsed the antiques but bought the t-shirts.

A business model is not static. It’s more like a philosophy combined with a Bayesian formula. It has to change with the conditions, but that starts with an awareness of one’s system.

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Systems and CAC are two of my favorite ideas. Read them all in a daily email drip on Gumroad. Find it on Amazon too.

They’re not waiting on a phone call from Paris

MIKE

One strength of L’Oreal is a focus on cosmetics. Rather than a breadth of products like their competitor Unilever, L’Oreal has a tighter focus. That’s not all they do well according to Aoris Stephen Arnold:

“Another part is how they have organized internally, the company works very hard to have a decentralized model. The people running the Lancome brand in Australia or the people running the Redken brand in Brazil own it and are in control of it. They’re trying to get the benefits of their size and scale but have the flexibility, agility, and entrepreneurial feel of a small company and it is hardwired into their DNA, it is how they have operated for a long time. It has benefitted them as markets change, as they have in the last year, because they aren’t waiting for a phone call from Paris to tell people what to do.” – Aoris Stephen Arnold, Australian Investors Podcast, July 2021

Decentralized command is the idea that problems should be solved by the person closest to them. Sometimes Penn Jillette and his partner Teller are hired for private events. These events are good, but Jillette writes, his agent will warn the group ahead of time. “They’ll get a better show if they let us make all those decisions (what jokes, what volunteers, etc.), which is true and they usually understand that. But if they insist, we give them what they ask for, and they’re happy with that, too…but we know we weren’t as good as we could have been if they had just let us do our jobs.”

Hire people, advised James Mattis, who can “unleash their initiative”.

The decentralized command is not a complicated idea but to see it in an organization as far-ranging as L’Oreal can inspire other organizations. It’s worked on Seinfeld and The Simpsons. It worked for Alice Waters at farm-to-table Chez Panisse and for every-meal-is-the-same-at-McDs founder Ray Kroc. Spotify’s discover weekly came from a decentralized command. So did the iPad keyboard.

The decentralized command approach isn’t a panacea, but for organizations pointed in the right direction it can sure make them better.

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A couple other L’Oreal figures. The company accounts for 12% of the beauty market globally, and turns up in 50% of the beauty queries on YouTube. L’Oreal also spends 60% of its advertising dollars online.

Numeracy at Best Buy

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We note that numeracy is important but it is hard to box in what numeracy is and how to use it well. Generally it is this idea that numbers explain some parts of the world well and we should use those numbers in a world full of people.

Yes?

Maybe an example will help:

“The Best Buy Geek Squad was reporting the mean (repair time) to their customers. A customer walks in to get their computer fixed, the part is on backorder, and the Geek Squad would quote the mean time to repair the computer. Of course, that means plenty of people’s repairs were not the average amount of time. So they changed and reported the 95th percentile time. They ranked the past times and now quote that to the customer – which is what people want!” – Elea Feit, March 2018

Like wet bias, maybe we can’t handle the truth. Or rather, maybe the way we see the world makes more sense one way rather than another.

One thing people are pretty bad at is randomness. We use stories to connect actions to events. Another thing we tend to miss is thinking that what did happen was the only thing that could have happened. It’s not.

We work around this through design. For instance, we know innovation is important but without separate metrics and incentives it’s less likely to happen. Put another way, it’s the framing stupid.

Wet bias makes sense. Being less honest than possible also makes sense. Quoting average waits may be more accurate but it’s less valuable.

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Design and framing were two of my favorite ideas. For the ideas vitamin-style in a daily email drip, buy the email-drip on Gumroad. Find it on Amazon too.

Ship Platinum, Receive Gold

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Within a system like an office, neighborhood, or team there are two main levers which drive behavior: culture and incentives. Culture, says Ben Horowitz, is what people do when they aren’t told what to do. Incentives are the rewards from actions. Incentives are easy to create but don’t always get the intended action.

One incentive might be fines for thin plastic bags. One potential action is customers switch to re-useable bags. Hey look! That’s was the plan.
Hannibal Loves It
Another potential action is using thicker bags. In this case the incentives led to the opposite anticipated actions: more plastic trash.

A family friend pays his kids for good grades. It works, but it’s likely a combination of culture and incentives. This is an incentive system that could easily go awry.

Another incentive that goes awry is rewarding for gross figures rather than net. This was the case in the record industry said Will Page:

“They would ship a platinum record because shipments were what qualified a platinum record. It wasn’t actually sales, if half-a-million albums came back to the factory gate it was up to the CFO to deal with the cost of returns. Once you create rules to play by people will bend those rules. If bonuses are related to platinum status and platinum status is related to shipments, then what do people do? They ship a million records.” – Will Page

1978’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band soundtrack was reported Platinum but was a sales bust. The following year the rules were changed and Platinum meant shipments minus returns within 120 days. That number has crept back down to thirty. It’s incentives all the way down!

A Platinum album is one million units. Gold half that. Album certification – ship Platinum, receive Gold back – feels like a thing of the past. But incentives are not.

The Last Lecture sign

MIKE

On September 18, 2007 Randy Pausch entered a Carnegie Mellon University lecture hall and gave his ‘last lecture’. Pausch’s lecture was one of a series hosted by the university where varying academics spoke about “what mattered.”

What made Pausch’s lecture so moving was that weeks before he learned his pancreatic cancer had gotten worse. Pausch passed away ten months later.

Pausch’s story is beautiful and someone can join the twenty-million views on YouTube. But we want to think about something different, Pausch’s book, The Last Lecture.

“It’s not the bestseller that interests me,” said John Thompson, “it’s the world that makes bestsellers possible.”

There’s a lot of good stories every year, why was TLL a New York Times bestseller for 112 weeks and not some other book? Part of the reason is the business model.

“How do you value this book? You have fifteen pages of an outline by an author who has never written a book before, how much are you going to pay for it? It went for 6.7 million dollars. I thought that was crazy, who would pay 6.7 million for a book by an author who had never written a book and may not even live long enough to write it.” – John Thompson, Oxford Bookes University, November 2010

Thinking like an anthropologist, Thompson’s first order of businesses was to figure out the business landscape. Every industry has competitors and collaborators. There are explicit and implicit incentives.

A few landscape changes took place through the 1980s. Small independent bookstores yielded to chains. Scale meant changes in bargaining power. In that decade literary agents grew in stature, slightly empowering writers. Publishers meanwhile consolidated in number and power.

By the late 90s and early 00s the book selling economics was like venture capital or film: around 30% of books, estimated Thompson, generated the bulk of the revenue. Along with the need to grow, the incentive was to find Big Books like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003).

Finding a “Dan Brown” was a dream, quite literally. Instead, publishers looked for new authors with good ideas. Lacking that they tried something we are more familiar with in 2021: platform.

Walk into a 2010 bookstore said John Thompson, and each of those books at the front table were paying $1 in rent to be there. Books had to sell quickly or they were returned to the publisher. Without a “Dan Brown” the next best route was someone with a platform and so in 2004 Paris Hilton became a NYT bestseller.

Randy Pausch had never written a book, but Randy Pausch had been written about. Two days after the lecture, Jeffrey Zaslow featured Pausch’s pronunciations in the WSJ. Following that Oprah and ABC got in touch. After that Hyperion publishing.

This era feels like a shift in celebrity, as least through the lens of book sales. While Pausch’s talk wasn’t the most popular it was on the growing site YouTube. In 2005 Ronaldinho’s Touch of Gold was the video people shared. In 2006 it was Evolution of Dance. EOD became the most viewed YouTube video with ten million views. It had the most viewed crown, lost it, got it back, loses it (this time to Avril Lavigne), gets it back and loses it for the last time to ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’.

Evolution of Dance was number one for about as many days as Baby (Bieber) and Despacito (Fonsi) and half as long as Gangnam Style (Psy). It was the first viral video.

I remembered TLL as a dual feel good story. Both the message and that the message shined through. It does, but TLL succeeded because of the business model. Publishers wanted hits and lacking a “Dan Brown” looked for people with a platform.

Pausch’s story is beautiful and as a teacher I hope he would appreciate this post. In Internet time 2007 feels like a long time, but the things we did then we do now and we did before. There’s lots of change in actions but much less in reasons. Looking back at this moment is a nice (dual) reminder about how we live.

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A couple other tent pole moments: 2010 – Old Spice, the man your man could smell like. 2012 “Hi I’m Mike founder of Dollar Shave Club dot com…” and 2012s Gangnam Style is first video with one-billion views.

Hiring stakeholders

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Every business has stakeholders. Each entity in “the supply chain” is a stakeholder. There are supplier stakeholders: credit card companies deciding who or not to service. There are customer stakeholders: voting with their feet. There are government stakeholders: adjusting the dials of the economic system as if it were an aquarium.

There are also employees as stakeholders.

“I think of Masterclass, I think of Coda. I think of a company that we just invested in. They’re very clear and upfront about their culture and the process. And I think that A, attracts people who are excited about that type of culture and B, by the time that somebody has actually gone through the process, it’s very clear to them what working in the company is like.” – Roseanne Wincek, Invest Like the Best, August 2021

The LTV/CAC idea applies to all stakeholders. There are many ways to lower the CAC, and it’s one of the more interesting business questions because the lower the CAC the better the business model.

But even a CAC of one doesn’t work if the LTV is zero. The most important part then is getting the right stakeholders, and the best way to do this is clarity. We are the kind of people who do this sort of work.

This isn’t easy. It’s not like a business can say: this is our business model, because alpha erodes. And, it’s not just competitor stakeholders that affect how an organization runs. Any stakeholder can change the rules. Landlords raise rents. Suppliers vertically integrate. Life changes!

Zappos once ran a campaign with a CAC of $18,500. That was inefficient. But a company who does more convincing that clarifying will have the same results: a lot invested and little to show. For instance, Ottawa Canada is a phenomenally good place to built a software company?

“If I hire someone through this very intricate hiring process that we have, there’s an understanding the chance of us still working together in ten years is really high. It’s a commitment from both sides. The company needs to be worth working for in ten years, but because of that, we can have a very different relationship than in a place where the expected tenure is eighteen months.” Tobi Lütke, The Tim Ferriss podcast, June 2020

Shopify filters employees through an “intricate hiring process.” Investment managers filter limited partners through ominous letters. Brands filter customers through advertising.

Maybe flexibility is the best way to think about stakeholders. How much do your stakeholder restrict your range of motion, and is there a way to increase ones flexibility?

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Erik Jorgenson calls analogies our mental ‘sporks’. Brilliant!. The credit card companies were top of mind because the OnlyFan payment situation was news around the same time as the episode. Visa and MasterCard have stakeholders too. Sometimes it’s situations like this that provide opportunity for a business. If someone won’t “do X”, that’s a smaller market and more of a chance to avoid alpha erosion. Lastly; CAC, alpha erosion, and stakeholders are all on the list of my favorite ideas.