Siouxneil

Prop D is a small tax on ridesharing rides in San Francisco that varies from 3.25% for a regular ride to 1.5% for a shared or EV ride. Proponents say it would reduce congestion and increase revenue for public transit.

Both ideas are totally wrong. This ballot initiative is a wrecked remnant of political infighting.

I believe in creating new laws that actually accomplish something useful. New laws that are half-baked just gum up the works of government like old legacy software code, or like that overpriced shirt that you really should get rid of because you never wear it but feel guilty for doing it. Voters should reject lazy lawmaking like this. (also, clean up your code and get rid of that shirt)

Brass tacks:

First, this won’t help congestion. Think of the longest ride share you ever took in San Francisco. This tax would add about 78 cents to that ride. An average ride would cost about 50 cents extra. Would 50 cents really change your mind about whether to take a ride? No. Didn’t think so. So much for reduced congestion.

Second, this won’t help public transit much. Yes, it would raise about $32M per year. But consider that the budget is almost $1 billion … that is about 3% of the total budget. Plus, I generally hate pigeon-holed funding like this. There are better ways (see below).

Apparently this flat tire of an idea is the compromise between a higher tax proposed by a supervisor (Aaron Peskin) and Uber and Lyft lobbyist. Win-win for the politicians & lobbyists. Loss for us, the citizens.

Better ideas:

How about putting a big tax (like $2 per mile) for cruising without a passenger in the car? That would put heat on both the companies and the drivers to pull over when waiting for a fare.

How about just a tax per mile? While not as good, at least it would stand a shot at reducing congestion.

Uber and Lyft will hate these ideas of course. But so what. This is our city, not theirs. If they want to put up a stink and fund a big campaign like Juul, let ’em.

Join me in rejecting this stupid ballot initiative. I would love it if someone wanted to put up an alternative next time around.

Sunil Paul is a San Francisco resident with his wife and two kids. He helped invent ridesharing as co-founder and CEO of Sidecar.

Photo credit:  Pablo Guerrero on Unsplash

I looked at the front page of the Wall Street Journal today and the headlines told a tale of executive power being checked. Trump finally faces impeachment. WeWork’s board fired it’s founder-ceo. The former CEO of Volkswagen faces criminal charges for faking emissions controls. And Boris Johnson was rebuked by the UK Supreme Court. I don’t know what the deal is with craft brewers drinking light beer but I’m sure it is amusing.

We may be having a moment. The pendulum is swinging back to accountability to voters, shareholders, and established rules. 

At the risk of over indexing on recent news, though, let’s look into how we got here. 

The problem of the executive taking liberties is a long one. Plato, Aristotle, and Confucius all grappled with it. They recognized that in time of fast-changing conditions like war, countries need to entrust the executive with more powers. But they also knew that unchecked power leads to tyranny. Plato dreamed of benevolent philosopher kings.

While the founders of the US wanted three equal branches of government, the dynamic shifted in the 20th century with the expansion of the executive branch through world wars, depression, and the cold war and war on terror. One crisis after another seemed to call for a strong and expansive executive branch.

The relationship between the CEO and boards also shifted over time. The shareholder movement that started in the late 20th century had a long term impact of expecting boards to be more muscular representatives of their shareholders. If they didn’t, they risked being replaced by activist shareholders.  At least that was the case for conventional public companies.

Meanwhile Silicon valley was building the case for more executive control.

We discovered founder CEOs are really good at exploiting new technology and painting a compelling vision of what was possible if we build something. Think of the founders of companies like Intel, HP, Apple, Microsoft. They led their companies with vision and were willing to challenge the establishment.

Jobs returning to Apple was an example that resonated particularly deep in Silicon Valley. It as close as you could come to a controlled experiment. Founder-led Apple flourishes in the early years. After the founder departs, the company flounders. He returns and it turns into a jaggernaut.

Then came Google. Their founders seemed to get it right with an experienced executive as CEO while they matured as company executives. Importantly, when they went public, they copied founder control share structures copied from family-controlled companies like the Washington Post. It gave the founders unprecedented control.

By the 2000s it was simply the way you did business if you were a smart founder CEO. The combination of plentiful capital and the precedent of Google, then Facebook, and many more made it easy to justify. Before then, it was an accepted practice to bring in the “adult” CEO to replace or augment the founders. As companies stayed private longer, the level of accountability of boards declined.

In both government and business we’ve had the rise of the “imperial executive” – CEOs and Presidents who have massive discretion with little accountability by boards of directors or Congress & courts.

Now it feels the pendulum is starting swinging away from the imperial executive. After being entranced by the magic of founder CEOs and ground breaking Presidents, we are learning what happens when we don’t get the benevolent philosopher kings. And rediscovering the truth of, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” 

The rise of the “people”

Here is what else these three have in common. The downfall begins with loosing the confidence of key members of a broad group of individuals. There is a widespread narrative about the boards of WeWork, Uber, and Nancy Pelosi rising up to re-establish the checks and balances of good governance. That’s because there is drama in these stories and they involve individuals. In other words, an easy to digest and report story.

The real truth is that these individual actors are channeling the signals from lots of individual actions. It was only when their CEO’s behavior was hurting the board members’ investment did they step in to fire their CEOs. Did these boards not know about questionable financial deals or a screw-the-rules culture earlier? Of course they did.  WeWork and Uber boards were willing to put up with all sorts of bad behavior by their CEOs until potential public shareholders balked for Adam Neumann’s overreach, tanking their IPO. Uber’s board suddenly got religion after consumers revolted against Travis Kalanick’s toxic behavior with campaigns like #deleteuber. 

The case of Trump, it took the recent Ukraine-Biden scandal for Nancy Pelosi to support impeachment. What changed? Moderate Democrat House members in swing districts, themselves reading the mood of their voters, voiced support for it. I found it especially interesting that a group of House members who all served in the military or intelligence branches described it as a national security concern. I agree. But weren’t any number of other previous Trump scandals threats to national security? Of course they were. The difference is that the sense of the voting public is changing.

This is a way that democracies and shareholder-consumer constituents should be operating. They can check the power of the executive through representatives.

Oh, and what about Boris and the VW CEO? The courts are having their day in Europe. It isn’t quite the same situation, but also a major check on the function of private and public executives.

It feels like we are having a critical moment in the accountability of executives in our society. There has been a wave of support for a stronger executive in business and government for decades. It feels like it may have crested. It will be an interesting theme to watch.

I remember being rousted out of bed by my father fifty years ago today. I had just been re-united with him in Oklahoma from Punjab, India. Of all the experiences in this new land, that morning is etched into my brain. Here was a man on a grainy black and white video image stepping onto the moon, where no one had ever gone before.

I was an explorer of a new world, too. A little four year old boy in a strange land. When I arrived a few months earlier, I paused on the way to my father’s door to touch the white fluffy stuff on the ground. It was cold. Snow! An avalanche of new experiences followed like learning English, making friends with a boy with blonde hair, catching lizards, and the joys of pecan pie.

Space and the moon continued to be an inspiration through my life.

Later, in middle school, I learned about European explorers and fantasized about seeing a land and being the first in our recorded history. What was the opportunity to do that now? Space was the obvious answer.

In college, as I struggle with my classes and questioned whether to continue in engineering, I looked up and saw a poster of the space shuttle. If I wanted to be a space pioneer, an engineering degree was a path.

After college, I was not happy with the job options I had – one offer from the Tennessee Valley Authority. I read an article about the design of a space station in Virginia. I decided I would move there and try to get a job working on space station. It took my several years but I did land that job and helped design the information systems on the space station.

Decades later when I heard about the success of Bert Rutan’s Scale Composites and Branson’s Virgin Galactic, I realized I could fulfill a dream of going into space. I was told I made the fastest decision of any Virgin Galactic “founder” — I applied on a Friday and signed up on a Monday. Despite being behind schedule by about ten years, I am still looking forward to that experience.

Today, as I hike in Armstrong park in California (the name is coincidence but still…), I’ll be thinking about that small step for a man. It inspired a four year old immigrant boy in Oklahoma for a lifetime. Along with the rest of the world, I follow in that foot step.

Photo by Todd Diemer on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking about meetings lately as I read social science work. It has helped me understand and appreciate meetings.

Conversational size is four. 

I’ve often wondered why the best work in a meeting occurs when it’s just four people, sometimes five.

Anthropologists who observe social situations have observed the natural size of group conversations is four or fewer. Notice next time you are at a party notice what happens when a fifth person joins a conversation. At first there might be an effort to keep one conversation, especially if there is a person with high status who is speaking. But fairly soon, the group breaks up into smaller conversational cells. 

When I was younger and less certain of my status, I took it personally when this happened. It turns out we’re all just humans. Wish I’d known that when I was 20.

Meeting as ritual.

Another insight comes from reading The Evolution of Human Cooperation by Charles Standish. He puts forward the idea that the more group coordination required, the more ritual associated with it. He cites examples of different types of activities and the associated rites and magic associated in ancient Polynesian and other civilizations. The central ritual of modern organizations is the meeting. And it is true that the more coordination required for a project, the more meetings. Rites and magic are optional.

Meetings as deep work.

I am reading Deep Work, where Cal Newport advocates for more time spent in contemplative work away from the distractions of email, text, Slack, and shared office space. 

Twice in my career I worked on my own (in the mid 2000s and again in 2016). Each time I found myself pulled into other people’s agendas through email, text, and other media (in the 2000s it was voicemail; today it is Slack & social media). Turns out I use meetings to keep me focused.

A good problem solving meeting (4 people or less) – is like deep work. We keep each other on task. We are focused for 30-90 minutes on a small set of related topics.

Within a company, it is important to have a combination of deep work meetings and deep work of individuals. Too many larger coordination meetings is either a sign of excess complexity or poor meeting management. Or maybe inadequate magic.

Larger coordination meetings can be effective, however, for communicating goals and solving internal logistics problems. They even help build creativity by cross fertilizing ideas, problems, and solutions. A study to observe how scientist work found that lab meetings were crucial to effective & creative research. Turns out big breakthroughs in science are more likely a result of a staff meeting than being hunched over a microscope.

It seems, though, that these meetings are also the ones at highest risk of someone falling asleep. I wish I had words of wisdom to eliminate this problem. I suppose one is: don’t do these meetings more than once a week. Second: if someone falls asleep, don’t invite them to the next one.

Natural breaks in meeting sizes

Work by Robin Dubar (you may have heard of the Dunbar number) seems to show that our social networks exist in layers of intimacy with about 5, then about another 10, followed by about another 30, then a total of about 150 people.

I think these numbers also correspond to the rough size of different meetings. If you want to solve a knarly problem or brainstorm effectively, don’t have a group bigger than five.

If you want to have a conversation among a larger group where one or two present information and others ask in depth questions, 15 people is about the max. It is a useful limit for a coordination meeting, corporate boards, and most committees. It is the maximum size of meeting that has direct decisions and results in cooperative learning.

If you have a meeting with roughly 50 people, you can only have one presenter at a time and limited questions and comments. These meetings can be used for updates and community building, but not for decisions or creativity. They should be short and infrequent.

Meetings to build identity and shared values

Really large meetings of 100 and more are not about decisions or “real work.” They are important and can be effective, however, as long as they are done with the right goals in mind. These meetings are about creating a sense of connection and identity of the group. Also, they are best done at the end of the work week, preferably with beer.

Meetings of thousands and larger are about broadcasting and instilling shared values. Both are used to communicate high level goals and get the organization aligned on the same objectives. Most leaders are terrible at these types of meetings and it makes them a huge waste of time.

What makes for an effective large meeting? The most important are stories that connect what the organization wants with what individuals do every day. That is why skilled politicians use stories so often. A second insight I learned from reading Harari’s books (especially Sapiens). A big meeting is about building shared mythologies — by “mythology” I mean epic stories, not fake stories — that help define the culture of a company, non-profit, or state. That is why speeches for big audiences so often invoke the founding of a country, company, or organization.

I’ve learned to appreciate meetings that are well executed, right-sized, and well timed. A well run organization will have lots and lots of opportunity for deep work for individuals and small groups, occasional large meetings of about 45-50, and rare very large meetings over 100 people.

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

I read through the summary of the report on automation by Brookings and McKinsey. It is worth reviewing because it is a realistic, nuanced view of the dangers and opportunities of automation.

It feels like the conversation is moving closer to what we had before the big advances in neural networks. Those advances, especially Alpha Go Zero, set off a frenzy of speculation that all our jobs were doomed and an AI superintelligence would subjugate us puny-brained humans. I think we are realizing that while the latest advances are amazing, they are still brittle. Alpha Go Zero can’t drive a truck or even tie shoelaces, even if it can whip anyone’s ass at Go.

It feels more likely that ten years from now we will have really powerful pattern matching machines that can do things like drive trucks and tie shoelaces. Yet those machines will probably suck at playing Go.