Daniel Hayward

Every week, Amazon executives get together and discusses 400-500 metrics in 60 minutes.

That's 9 seconds a slide for an hour straight and it provides enough value that they've been doing it for years.

Actually, some of these slides are 3 seconds and others are 30. It depends whether there is anything to report. Looking at them each week gives them good familiarity for when there is something to report.

There are some things about Amazon I hate (they have an outsized negative impact on warehouse safety in America). I'm not going to deny that they are profitable. This practice might be a big part of “why.”

Translating this to a small contractor (which relative to Amazon, your business is small), 400 metrics would be insanity.

What wouldn't be crazy is to look at how they got to that many metrics. For each department they have done their level best to identify causal metrics for specific outcomes.

And they continue to iterate and work on this.

Example:

If you're trying to get more customers (who isn't?), then you might identify that bids need to go out more often. After you think about it for a while and track that, you might realize that there's something upstream of bids going out.

You aren't getting invited to bid as much as you would like (or aren't getting invited by the right folks). And then you would do the work of identifying the causal metric for that and start reporting it.

So then we come to where I had intended to write from the beginning, which is, what should I put in a dashboard? Sometimes I see dashboards or desire for dashboards for no other reason than “I want to be data driven.”

Mimicking someone before you have any understanding of why isn't going to get you where you want to go.

If you're going to make a point of tracking expenses, revenue, hours, incidents, close calls, win rates, overhead, margin, schedule variance, equipment downtime, then have a reason!

What are you actually trying to accomplish? Is spending the time tracking actually getting you what you want?

Full article:https://commoncog.com/the-amazon-weekly-business-review/

If you have something to say, ChatGPT cannot replace you.

Something I've been thinking about for the last few weeks is, “Why write, when AI can do it faster? Why should anyone?”

There is a material difference between when a human writes and when AI does.

When you write, there is something behind the words. There is a meaning, a point to what you are trying to say. Let's call it a gift that you are giving to the reader. “I have something important for you, here you go.”

When AI writes that doesn't exist. It isn't trying to tell you anything at all. There is no intention behind the picture, it is just doing a very good job at guessing of what you expect to hear or see.

If you have something to say, keep saying it. It might take a while for people to find your message who need to hear it, but when you finally connect with them, there is a kind of magic that can't be automated.

The reason that art and writing are meaningful is because of the author's intention behind it; what are they trying to communicate?

Even if art to someone who isn't trained (or is, for that matter) is indistinguishable between a human artist and GAI (generative artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, Dall-E etc), the human artist for all their faults, is actually trying to do something. Listen to any artist who cares talk about what they're doing, it is imbued with meaning, more than the audience could ever pick up on. When you have GAI create something that looks like art, it's completely stripped of any meaning. The AI isn't trying to communicate anything, all it is (right now) is an algorithm that is attempting to guess the next most likely word, what order these pixels should be in based on the inputs. It's extremely sophisticated, more than I can understand, but to the computer, there's nothing behind the words. It’s almost the same as someone trying to draw Shakespeare’s works.

There can be no clarifying questions because there is nothing to clarify.

When you (yes, you) feel there is meaning behind something GAI spit out, it is because you put it there.

You can give your child a doll that searches the internet for answers for them. Unless you live in Germany, where it is considered an act of espionage.

This is an island, on a lake, in an island, on a lake, and in the legend of the original name, means “Old Lady's Bottom.”

You can book a ferry ride here.

“Why don't you hurry!”

Death waits for no man, but I'll be damned if I rush to meet him. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

I've no mind to hurry. Motion is not progress. I will plod along at the pace I am going because I know no mistakes will dog my heels. I will not circle back and around again to make it right.

When I was young, I thought and acted like a child, but now childish ways are left for the children.

My thoughts race before me making ten mistakes before I take a misstep. In this way I have died ten thousand deaths. Before my race is finished, I expect as many again.

Death has courted me these many years and you ask why don't I rush.

There is a glacier that bleeds.

Seth Godin on Tim Ferris' Podcast

When we (Boomers) were draft age, that was when the draft really mattered. And when we were listening to rock and roll, that’s when music really mattered. And when people needed to make money for their family, that’s when Wall Street really mattered. And now boomers are dying. And so we are living in a culture where there’s an overhang of all these people with loud voices talking about the end of the world because it’s the end of their world, but it’s not the end of the world.

This feels true and important and I can't figure out how to respond but it's been bouncing around in my head for about 2 weeks.

Boomers make up about 1/5 of the population of the US and my guess is hold about 80% of the wealth (or more, depending on how far you take Pareto's rule). The oldest boomers are 77 and youngest are 59. Probably, the largest wave of boomers started to retire about 10 years ago (2014), might have accounted for some of the wage stagnation we experienced. The rest will retire by 75, which is in the next 16 years.

I wonder if the tenor of political conversation is more apocalyptic because their world is ending.