Joshua Go

Today I went to the post office to mail three envelopes to my brother. I found out that it would cost me over nine dollars to mail them separately, and the lady helping me advised me to just get it mailed in one package since they were all going to the same address. The total came to $4.05. What savings! If the post office were privately run, they would have an incentive to maximize profits, but since it's run by the government, I'm looked after as a consumer.

Macro-level views are useless without micro-level material to work with. Suggestions about how to run a company are useless if there is no company to work with. For all the attention that macro-level views get in the business journals, what I personally need to pay attention to now is producing the micro-level stuff that gives the macro-level theorizing a reason to exist.

The past couple of days, I've been working on putting together a software release and the manual to accompany it. I found the task pretty overwhelming, especially since I had to edit the document while putting the software together. One thing that I realized towards the end was that I could cut down the apparent scope of the job by ripping out pages that did not need to be edited anymore. I wouldn't have to worry about touching those pages, and could focus on the remaining pages. This helped me feel like I was making progress, and it actually helped me move forward by keeping my focus on the next page that I wanted to finish (and rip out).

This afternoon, I attended a lecture by Dr. Dean Simonton , professor of psychology at UC Davis. He talked about scientific genius and creativity. One of the common work habits of people who made major contributions to knowledge in their fields was to have a network of enterprises --that is, to have multiple projects going on at the same time. Instead of focusing on just one project until it's done, having a network of enterprises means that these projects feed off each other and contribute to each other, essentially making the ultimate outcome more than the sum of the parts.

When assigning people in a company to do knowledge- or research-intensive work, I can see the benefits of working in pairs. When I'm working as part of a pair on a difficult problem, I don't feel like I'm alone, incompetent, or somehow not measuring up whenever I run into unavoidable (but formidable) obstacles. I don't feel so bad because my partner is going through the same thing. When we report on our progress, it's less psychologically taxing because the burden of responsibility is halved. It might be an ideal way to do things in a lot of cases, because it doesn't completely alleviate the workers of responsibility, but distributes the load on each person to make it more bearable.

As an Asian-American, it might be alarming to read Bush's details on a foiled terror plot in Los Angeles. The article states that Southeast Asians were recruited to carry out the planned attack. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm figuring that Asians will be profiled from now on. I'm okay with that and I understand the concern for security, but I'm guessing that the whiny Asian-American activist types will not be happy to hear this. They'll make a stink about it. Eventually, the smart thing to do would be just to profile young people everywhere. Once Middle Easterners and Asians are profiled, al-Qaeda may turn to other ethnic groups to carry out their plans.

I was reading Eric Hobsbawm's Industry and Empire this weekend. One interesting argument in the book is that Britain suffered decline because it got complacent about its dominant position. If it was being out-produced or out-innovated, it could retreat back into the comfort of its world empire. Having a power base is useful to buffer against shock or sudden change, but the factors causing the shock or change shouldn't be ignored. Even though it's reassuring to have something to fall back on, this comfort is a temporary solution and something must be done about the root cause of the problem. Another book I read this weekend was Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America . Its thesis is that the man who shot McKinley was only one part of the "murder." The McKinley legacy was also wiped out by his successor, Theodore Roosevelt. (The author of the book, Eric Rauchway, is a professor at UC Davis. I took his course on the Gilded Age and Progress...