Joshua Go

Today, I realized one of the key challenges facing small business: growing while preserving the quality of service. For a business selling goods, there's mass production: leave it to the machines. But in the service industries which still require high levels of skill, this is a little trickier. It's something we've still got to figure out. I thought of this today as I went to see Douglas, a mechanic friend of my dad. He's a good mechanic, and he set up shop for himself in Mountain View a couple of years ago. My family goes to him every time we want to fix our cars — not only because he's my dad's friend, but because he doesn't charge through the roof, because he won't charge for trivial things, and because he does a thorough job. His customers have been known to bring him pizza and other treats out of gratitude. Every time I go to his shop, all the bays are full, with several cars queued up waiting for each bay. I asked him if he ever thought about putti...

There are many reasons why I prefer not to argue with people. The two biggest reasons for me are that I don't want to waste my time, and I prefer not to rock the boat by creating personal unpleasantness. After thinking about it, though, I've decided that it's good to argue. As someone who has worked well on my own for a long time, I'm finding that working closely with a team and putting myself in a leadership role requires that I look beyond my personal productivity and look at how to build up the team. By avoiding arguments, I save myself time from explaining myself, but alienate the rest of the team by not involving them in my thought process. In economic terms, they are forced to operate on imperfect information--and the fault of this lies squarely with me because I have an aversion to heated arguments. Because I don't take the time to argue, I also force myself to operate on imperfect information. Yes, the argument can be unpleasant, but when people listen, it a...

The web is good for quick, throw-away information (time-sensitive things like news) and for reference. It's fast. It allows jumping. It can be updated in real-time. The web is not good for books or anything requiring deep thought. It's too distracting, and the display technology we have today makes it too straining on the eyes to read for too long.

So these days we've got Ubuntu , Ruby on Rails , and Aptana . I'm used to running Fedora, writing webapps with PHP, and doing my development in a text editor such as vim or emacs. It seems like there's something new coming out everyday, and it's a choice between checking out these new offerings or getting something done. I figure that if the tools I'm using are good enough to get things done, why switch? I'd only consider using a new tool if it allows me to do something that I can't do with my current toolset.

The trouble with aggregate measurements and policies is that they fail to take local variation and local circumstances into account. This is impossible even with the best-intentioned top-down policies. And this is why we've got local government. Aggregates simplify the complicated picture and most of the composite information is lost when presenting the aggregate.

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.