Raphael's workbench

Reading Renaissance: Books, AI Skepticism, and Corporate Games

An important thing that happened this month is a reboot of my reading habit. Thanks to a small technical investment, I found myself reading most days of the month.

My reading was somewhat of a study program. Throughout the last six months, I had taught “The Algorithm” to provide me a reading list of titles that are currently hip in the influencer world. A lot of it is junk, but I was willing to sift through it and find its jewels, if any. Here is where I got so far:

How to win friends and influence people - Dave Carnegie
My second time reading this. During the first time, ten years ago, I did not fully understand it and it did not resonate. This time, I felt life had already moved me past its teachings. Plus, many principles in there do not gel well with the directness of Dutch culture. This text is due for a localization.
The fifteen commitments of conscious leadership - Jim Dethmer et al.
Although I did not particularly like its overly binary framing, my experience tells me that the underlying principles are sound. At least three chapters felt like they were teaching me something. I plan to skim this again after I read the other titles in my list.
Your next five moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy - Patrick Bet-David
This one is the real deal. This is a book that made me think clearly: “wow, this knowledge is extremely actionable and I wish I had read this earlier in my life.” I learned quite a few things on first read, and do plan to read it thoroughly a second time a bit later.
High growth handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 people - Elad Gil
Another page turner. I read about two thirds of it, then I paused. It was too much to absorb at once! It felt as if each chapter was touching my belief system, and I learned a few things about myself in the process. This will accompany me throughout the year and probably after that.
How to master the art of selling - Tom Hopkins
I opened this book with the ambition to learn how to work more effectively with salespeople. I was surprised to learn about some sales techniques that had been invisible to me previously. This feels useful. The more important discovery, however, was how much of the trade is dedicated to psychological self-help for the salespeople themselves, to give them strength in the face of frequent (and necessary) rejection. The running commentary about grit, confidence-building and discipline feels very applicable to many other fields. If anything, this book helped me find some respect for the role of sales and the hardships of salesfolk when interacting with the new generation of buyers.

Last month, I was reflecting on how I surprised myself wanting to go outside every day, in contrast to my previous lifestyle. This month, I surprised myself looking forward to my frequent commuting train rides, because they offer comfortable and focused reading time. I might even acquire a reading chair!

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Traveling recently also offered me numerous idle periods, i.e. fertile ground for serendipitous bits of interstitial learning.

For example, I learned that I had internalized too many restrictions about what are the “right” ways to learn something. Milan Cvitkovic taught me what a real “experimental” lifestyle could look like in Things you’re allowed to do, and Saul Munn taught me new ways to explore problems through methods for producing solutions.

In the AI/LLM area, I was delighted to discover Harrison Chase’s LangChain (github), the first time I felt some order in the chaos: composable abstractions with LLMs as building blocks. Meanwhile, I still believe that the “AGI” ambitions of OpenAI (et al.) are overblown and that LLM abilities will soon taper off, in the same way that Moore’s law was ultimately altered by limits in Dennard Scaling. Apparently, I am not the only one with these thoughts; Dwarkesh Patel offers a simple argument in the same direction in Will Scaling Work? — we will simply run out of fresh data to train models.

The Reddit community also has its insightful moments. I derived genuine feelings of happiness and learning pleasure from two threads in particular. Through What’s something that’s painfully obvious but people will never admit?, I learned of a few mistaken beliefs about how “different” I felt from fellow humans, and it left me feeling a bit more socially connected. In What’s something small you started doing that makes you drastically happier?, I took many notes of things I will want to try through the year; it left me feeling quite optimistic about my future well-being.

The discovery of holacracy led me to examine what makes US corporations choose more-or-less the same authoritarian model for decision-making, and why it is so different from other systems. This is not my first foray into the science of corporate governance, and I still stand by my belief that corporate structures are social games where participants often do not realize that they can influence the rules. Nevertheless, I learned about the various connections between esoteric topics such as sociocracy, European works councils, Agile software development, consensus decision-making, workers’ self-management, co-determination or even open-source governance.

Through all this chaos, I was wondering if there had been any attempts at standardizing these models, perhaps as a foundation to what most workers experience nowadays? It turns out that yes, such a thing exists. Robert’s Rules of Order is a recognized basis for most decision-making structures in the Anglo-Saxon world, in both public and private organizations. In the US corporate world, this is further amended by Donald Tortorice’s The Modern Rules of Order, published by the American Bar Association, and then further amended by state laws in Delaware, where most US firms are incorporated. These various rule books have been adapted in each European country, for example the Dutch government publishes a standard guide which I have seen used in both private and public settings already.

Perhaps humorously, the many hours I spent reading the above were prompted by a quip in this controversial writeup by Charity Majors: My boss says we don’t need any engineering managers. Is he right?

As Dan McKinley famously said, we should “choose boring technology“. Boring doesn’t mean bad, it means the capabilities and failure conditions are well understood. You only ever get a few innovation tokens, so you should spend those wisely on core differentiators that could make or break your business. The same goes for culture. Do you really want to spend one of your tokens on org structure? Why??

For better or for worse, the hierarchical org structure is well understood. There are plenty of people on the job market who are proficient at managing or working with managers, and you can hire them. You can get training, coaching, or read a lot of self-help books. There are various management philosophies you can coalesce around or use to rule people out. On the other hand, the manager-free experiments I’m aware of (e.g. holacracy at Medium and GitHub, or “Choose Your Own Work” at Linden Lab) have all been quietly abandoned or outgrown. Not, in my experience, because leaders went mad for power, but due to chaos, lack of focus, and poor execution.

I disagree with the conclusion, but the read was interesting.

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The discovery was a bit random, but I also found myself enjoying Joey Schweitzer’s Better Ideas on Youtube. I like his voice, I like his focus during his monologues, and most of his proposals are not even half-bad. I usually like to try and poke holes at the rationales used throughout the self-help genre and Joey’s videos resist my poking quite a bit. One video that challenged me in particular was The fastest way to transform your life and I still keep thinking about it.

On a related note, Liam Porritt also intrigues me and I found some unexpected inspiration from his 4 habits to find fulfilment.

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Global politics: John Burn-Murdoch (Financial Times) wrote A new global gender divide is emerging (cache). I found the argument convincing and it felt important.

“It would be easy to say this is all a phase that will pass, but the ideology gaps are only growing, and data shows that people’s formative political experiences are hard to shake off. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that the proliferation of smartphones and social media mean that young men and women now increasingly inhabit separate spaces and experience separate cultures.”

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Raphael Poss Avatar Raphael Poss is an entrepreneur who occasionally publishes field notes on systems, leadership, and the messy edge between technology and people.
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