Henry Hagnäs

Food for The Eagle - Adam Savage's speech to Harvard Humanism Society

Know-How by Ram Charan

I’m sure there are other book-buying addicts like me that sometimes wake up with a book in their hand they don’t know why they ordered. Ram Charan’s “Know-How: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform From Those Who Don’t” is exactly one of those. According to my GMail archives I first mailed myself a note to buy this book, and several others, from work in 2007. This was during a time I was interesting in management, business and leadership so it makes sense. I never got around to reading the book then and picked it up now, only to find a bunch of business drivel that really should have been an essay or two.

There really needs to be a format (I guess Harvard Business Review et al are that currently) where longer essays instead of books can be published. Unfortunately I’ve also seen examples of books that come out HBR-articles that are nothing but the same idea but with 300 pages of fluff around it.
Anyway, the eight know-hows that Ram Charan thinks that leaders have to have are: positioning and repositioning, pinpointing external change, leading the social system, judging people, molding a team, setting goals, setting laser-sharp priorities and dealing with forces beyond the market. It really is as common sense as you would imagine. Leaders apparently need to be able to envision their business landscape and make corrections to products etc, they need to be good team-builder and judges of character and good at steering that group etc. The last point, “Dealing with forces beyond the market” is marginally useful for people that aren’t from the Internet generation but really, does it come as a surprise that there might be people objecting to your business-ideas if you act like Monsanto?

I ended up making some kind of record on reading through the book, didn’t want to write about it unless I actually thumbed through it, it took me a couple of hours and I’m not getting that time back. I’m a fast reader so even fluffy books that give me a few new ideas of ways of thinking are worth thumbing through but this one really has no redeeming factors. Every chapter begins with a short description about the idea or know-how and then goes into cuddly business-stories, half of them about Jeff Immelt at General Electric, about how he and his team made good decisions. He backs the story up with more anecdotes from other companies, basically name-dropping.

The problem with business anecdotes is that there are so many business that do well despite doing lots wrong (and companies that do everything right but fail), that a business writer will always find one that supports his position for at least a few years. Studies have shown that many companies management books show off as exemplary really haven’t beat the market or held up in the long run. Try reading a few 10 year old management books and you’ll see. There’s no real research or statistics in this book, only stories and anecdotes that don’t really help anyone trying to become a better leader. The next CEO of GE won’t need this book to make the right decision.

Keep away. I should’ve.

Copenhagen Travel Log and Pictures

Thursday 1. April

Travel started, as it often does, with an ungodly early wake-up. Traveled from Turku to Helsinki-Vantaa Airport into the rising sun. 

No problems at the airport, security line had a wait of about 5 minutes and we had checked in the evening before over the Internet. Flight was uneventful, not counting a couple of crying children.

     

Copenhagen had a blue sky as we arrived but turned windier and grayer over the afternoon. Trains run every 20 minutes into the city center but lines to ticket-terminals were surprisingly long when we arrived so we grabbed a bite to eat at the airport before leaving. We checked into our hotel, Grand Hotel Copenhagen ( http://www.grandhotelcopenhagen.com/ ), which was reasonably priced and very close to the central train station. 

           

Side note: I’ve had luck picking hotels from the Ebookers site, they aren’t the cheapest but there are always reasonable alternatives and they have been of high quality. 

After checking in we walked to the “Rådhusplads” where Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! has a museum. I’ve been there before as a kid and thought Riikka would like it so we went in there. It’s an interesting place, I found it interesting to go back now too since it has been years and I have a new perspective on the weird things. 

We bought combo tickets that got us into the HC Andersen “tour” as well that is adjacent to Believe it or Not but that was a bit of a letdown. It was mostly just (well-made) scenes out of his childhood and some of his stories but didn’t feel as “alive” as Believe It Or Not. 

           

Afterwards we walked Ströget all the way down to Nyhavn, which is a little touristy harbor with lots of eateries and patio-bars but since the weather was getting worse all the time we snapped some pictures and turned around and went back to the hotel via a nice little Italian place on Ströget.  

         

Friday 2. April

One of the reasons I wanted to go to Copenhagen, apart from it being one of the cheapest and easiest alternatives when we (belatedly) started planning a trip for easter, was that it was close by to Helsingborg where I lived for 5 years with the family (age 10-15). I also spent the summer of 2003 working there. I wanted to see what had changed and show Riikka my second hometown. 

On friday we took the train first to Helsingör which is north of Copenhagen, on the danish side of Öresund. Helsingör is a pretty little city right over the water from Helsingborg. Long friday and the windy, cold weather kept everyone home or away so we had most of central Helsingör to ourselves. Surprisingly the ferry was pretty packed with people however. 

                 

We walked around a bit in central Helsingborg but it was as empty as Helsingör so we soon took the bus to Rydebäck, a suburb to Helsingborg where we actually lived. Rydebäck has since grown some but most notably gotten its own train-station, which we used on our way back to Copenhagen via Malmö (completing our trip around the Öresund-region). 

                         

Thanks to the bridge between Malmö and Copenhagen the Öresund-region has become a very vibrant area and it shows in both infrastructure but also the mood. It’s a very urban yet nice environment, public transport works and there are people in motion even on slow days like this eastern friday. Finland has a lot to learn about public transport, here it really seems like a genuinely good idea to use public transport while in Finland it feels like a chore - either because you don’t have a car or want to be environmental. 

The weather improved all through to day and the evening was a pleasant spring evening. Unfortunately it was ruined by my childhood memories being shattered. I’ve always been a science geek so for the young me, the impressive IMAX science shows at the Tycho Brahe Planetarium were the highlight of any trip to Copenhagen. This time they have “upgraded” the projectors to 3D, which means that the 1000 m^2 screen was much darker and had less vivid colors than before. Compared to the awesome nature shows available nowadays, like Life from BBC, the IMAX show felt cheap and simply didn’t impress. Sorry to say I will not be going to any more IMAX-theaters anymore.

Saturday 3. April

Riikka is a big fan of gardening, plants and green things like that so of course we had to go to the Botanical Gardens. It helped that they opened up early too. The Copenhagen Botanical Gardens are quite large and very pretty but I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves. 

               

Saturday was only the only full day that wasn’t a holiday so we returned to a now rather busy Ströget for some window-shopping. Didn’t buy much though, unfortunately global commerce has made shopping a very similar experience everywhere you go. Very much the same brands and same types of stores, nothing surprising or delighting. That said, I did get a new pair of jeans for those who care. 

     

One of the biggest and nicest surprises of the trip was the Ny-Carlsberg Glyptotek. Surprising because it was so big, beautiful and awesome but I had never heard of it. Apparently the heir of the founder of the Carlsberg breweries was a huge art, and especially sculpture, fan. The Glyptotek is not just his collection but in large parts based on his collection of sculptures and both the building and the scale of it was really impressive! We spent a lot of time there but its one of those places that are too big to see in one go. Go see it if you go to Copenhagen!

                   

Sunday 4. April

Sunday was our last day and it was very windy and rainy. After our last, excellent, breakfast at the hotel we checked out and left our bags at the train-station before going to the National Museum of Denmark. Entrance is free and its the biggest museum in Scandinavia. The lower parts with stone-age, bronze and iron-age displays were interesting but really, we should have stopped there. Riikka liked the other parts more but I was getting tired and bored before we reach the top floor. Since its free you can go there on multiple days and that’s what I’d recommend, go and see one floor at the time or you’ll be overwhelmed (and cranky). 

                   

After the National Museum it was time to go back to Kastrup for our flight back home, we arrived early so I could meet up with my friend Joakim who has moved to Malmö and came over to meet us. Very nice to meet him! Security lines were minimal and there was no problem showing the PDF boarding cards either.

Flight and bus back to Turku was uneventful. 

Quote of the month from article on iPhone's rise and "fall"

Pictures from our trip to Copenhagen

Ended up taking lots of pictures in Copenhagen even though the weather was pretty grey at times. I edited it all down to 33 favourites that I just added to my Flickr page:

(You can click through to Flickr for short descriptions)

I'll write some more about Copenhagen later with additional pictures.

Copenhagen for Easter

Tomorrow me and my girlfriend fly to Copenhagen to spend Easter. Back in Turku late Sunday. Weather is getting better even though we'll probaby get wet at some point but hey, what can you do? Planning to take a day-trip to my old hometown, Helsingborg on the swedish side of Öresund too so I can show Riikka where I spent 5 years of my youth.

Happy Easter everyone! The hotel should have Wifi so I'll see if I get around to posting updates along the way.

Pixar's Ed Catmull on Management

A very interesting video from 2009 of Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar, showed up in my twitter-feed this morning; its called “Keep Your Crises Small”:

It’s almost an hour long and was filmed at Stanford Graduate School of Business so it's mostly from a management and business perspective about the challenges that Pixar has had even though it has been successful. I spent a few years being pretty interesting in a lot of management and business stuff and read a lot about it; enough to become a little cynical I guess — management theory has some truth to it but there are lots of gurus who don’t really know very much in the end. This presentation is far from some management consultant guru and is packed with interesting and useful knowledge. Ed seems like a very pragmatic manager and he cuts through a lot of bullshit. I’d like to think its because of his technical background but I might be biased there :).

Anyway, watch that if you have any interest in either background information about Pixar or practical management stuff, albeit on a a pretty high level.

Some of my notes:

• Don’t confuse organizational structure with communications structure, i.e. keep information flowing between teams and everywhere even if you put up a hierarchical structure 
• Managers hate being surprised, don’t let them know about something new at a meeting among everyone else 
• Success hides problems. Just like a healthy body can take a lot of unhealthy behavior, a successful company can get away with a lot of bad decisions 
• People (and teams) are more important than ideas, good teams will do great things with mediocre ideas but mediocre teams will do mediocre stuff with good ideas 
• People copy the wrong things, don’t copy 3D technology if the really good thing is the storytelling — easy to copy technology but almost always the wrong thing to copy 
• Always do a post-mortem after projects but always change the metrics so people don’t game the system 
• There are services that give you the essence of business books and they are really interesting because they show how content-free the books are (Henry: YES!) 
• There are some phrases that are “truths” and important in the community but doesn’t actually change behavior, “Story is important” (movie making), “Designing from the inside out” (Architecture), “Quality is king” (Engineering) 
• Human organizations are inherently unstable but fail very slowly, most people won’t notice it and let the success blind them — collapse is then quick. 
• Constant self-assessment important, look for the hard truths — especially when successful.

The Most Badass Alphabet Ever

via unrealitymag.com

Wow. Some people have way too much time on their hands... Click link for more nerdy alphabet-fun :)

TEDTalk: Gaming can make a better world

Jane McGonigal presents one of the best talks of TED 2010 this far, about how gaming can change the world. Very interesting ideas and information!

I especially like the whole idea about human resources not fully utilized in gamers. I also think there are, especially among young people, other groups of people that are underutilized in today's world because the people with money and resources don't understand them. Daniel Suarez's books Daemon and Freedom(tm) touch open these issues aswell. Maybe companies should start giving experience points for a job well done?

Finanssikriisi - Elämää taantuman keskellä

Finally leafed through this collection of essays written during the financial crisis by Vesa Puttonen, a well-known finance professor in Finland. I got it as a free subscriber gift when I subscribed to "Arvopaperi" a finnish monthly magazine about economy (stopped subscribing after the cheap 4 months, wasn't worth it to me).

I mostly read it because Puttonen has written several textbooks about economics and investment that I've been thinking about buying and this was a cheap and easy way to see if I like his style. I did so I'll probably look into buying one or two of his textbooks soon.

This book, however, wasn't worth much - but then again, I paid nothing for it and neither should you.