Here’s one of my favorite anecdotes about management. An elder in Renaissance Italy comes up to Michelangelo one day and says, “Congratulations! You’re such a great artist, we’re promoting you! Forget about painting, you’re now in charge of procuring canvases and supervising the other artists.”

It’s absurd, laughable, but for some of us it hits uncomfortably close to home. I’ve been thinking recently about one of the questions it raises: motivating managers.

People who do actual work, whether they build houses or trade stocks or play music or teach, all have something in common. They see the results of their work. The end product may take months or years, but they see some concrete progress every day, and that feedback is powerfully motivating.

Managers don’t have that luxury. As a manager, your job is to enable other people. You don’t do much real work yourself, so you don’t get the same positive feedback. You can’t touch a cabinet you built, or play back a killer performance you caught on tape, or see your student’s eyes light up when they finally get it. Your employees get those morale-boosting endorphins, not you.

This is especially true for middle managers. Execs spend their time making decisions, fighting fires, and hopefully shaping strategy. Middle managers, on the other hand, spend most of their time on project and people management. It’s a common joke that middle managers have all of the accountability but none of the power. The kicker is, they also miss the concrete feedback that gets other people out of bed in the morning and working through crunch time.

So, what can we do about this? Is there some visible result, some Kafkaesque spark for managers comparable to a carpenter’s finished cabinet or a teacher’s straight A student?

Maybe that spark is their team, and the work they do. Probably not though. It’s easy to see a day’s work on a cabinet, or teaching a pupil, but a day’s effort managing a team is pretty much invisible. It takes months or years to see measurable changes, which isn’t nearly enough to get you out of bed every morning.

Some people say you shouldn’t be a full time manager in the first place. They advocate that managers also do normal work alongside their employees, on top of their management duties. That can definitely keep the positive feedback flowing, but critics claim that “working managers” often feel pressured to keep up with their employees and fall behind on their management tasks, or worse, overwork and burn out.

Maybe the problem isn’t the job but the people doing it. This was the first moral I got from the Michelangelo story: management is a different thing entirely, and should be treated as such. What if we judged construction foremen on team building and Gantt charts instead of traditional building and engineering skills? What if we recruited detail oriented extroverts to be managers, instead of the employees on their teams?

Unfortunately, managers usually need a solid background in their field. There’s no real shortcut for that; you have to earn it the hard way, by working in the field for years on end.

This leaves us back where we started. Michelangelo may not have been cut out for middle management, but seeing his progress on the Sistine Chapel each day must have been incredibly motivating. Managers deserve that kind of feedback too. How can they get it?

My team at work has a few people in New York, and we’re adding more fast, so I went out there last week to work with them in person. My last visit to New York was 12 years ago, and I spent most of that upstate, so I was looking forward to exploring Manhattan and Brooklyn with enough time to appreciate them.

The trip did not disappoint. Talking with my teammates there in person was really productive. I can’t overstate the value of low latency, high bandwidth communication. Even delays as small as a tenth of a second interrupt the flow of conversation when you’re talking on the phone or VC – much less IM or email - and it’s easy to forget how valuable the subtle cues of body language and facial expressions are. You bond quickly in person and develop relationships that are tough to match otherwise.

Beyond work, we also hung out with great people and did a ton of fun stuff. Here’s a short summary; pictures at the bottom.

Monday: flew into JFK, checked into The Strand, relaxed on their great rooftop deck. Evidently that’s a thing in NY. Initial impressions: good airport, good hotel, bad wine, bad coffee, dressy people, diverse demographics (at least, more than SF), and lots of greenery. Evidently that last part is recent in the last 10 years or so, thanks to Bloomberg. It made a big impression on me.

Tuesday: More bad coffee at ‘wichcraft. Learned the subway, which is great. Settled into the Google NY office, which is nice, if a bit fragmented. Long design meetings at work. Lunch at Little Owl (great burger!) with Edward. Saw Book of Mormon on Broadway, loved it.

Wednesday: Meh coffee at Starbucks. More long design meetings at work. Dinner at wd~50. We skipped the 12 course tasting menu, but we shouldn’t have. A la carte was still fun, but not nearly as interesting. Afterward, bad jazz at Arthur’s and really freaking good jazz at 55 Bar.

Thursday: Ran through Central Park. So big! Gave up on coffee altogether. Lunch at Facebook’s NY office with Josh, who’s spinning up one of their first engineering teams there. Dinner in Brooklyn (yay!) at Vinegar Hill House with Jeremy and Sarah. Walked back over the Brooklyn Bridge, had a blast.

Friday: First good coffee! at Culture Espresso. Space shuttle flyby at the Google office. (and again…and again…) Dinner at Perilla with Jane and Derek.

Saturday: Brunch uptown with Sam and Judith (and Ariella!). Supervised our wedding registry at Macy’s. Sightseeing at Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, High Line, and Chelsea Market. Tried to get tickets to Sleep No More, failed, settled for dinner at Bell, Book and Candle.

I started meditating a week or so ago. I took an introductory class, then added a session to my daily routine, and I’ve been keeping up with it pretty faithfully so far. It’s…interesting!

I’m not particularly spiritual, but the health benefits, both mental and physical, are well established. I’m always interested in ways to be more effective at work, play, relationships, etc., and meditation has been on my todo list for a while.

I’m still a beginner, so I’m not doing anything exotic yet, just ten minutes of “mindfulness” meditation a day. I sit upright, eyes closed, alert but relaxed, and think about breathing. I try to focus entirely on the physical sensation of air rushing in through my nose, then out again.

When a thought occurs to me, or I hear a sound, or that little voice inside my head pipes up, I try to acknowledge it, let it pass, and return my attention to breathing. It’s hard, and I’m still bad at it, but supposedly I’ll get better over time.

It’s too early to say, but I’ll post again if I notice any big changes. Fingers crossed!

As a kid, my parents told me to eat my vegetables. My pastor told me to be nice to other kids. The state of California told me I couldn’t drive until I was 16 years old. My teachers told me – and more importantly, my parents – how I should go about learning things.

Some of these things, we accept without a second thought. Others, like education, we’ve debated for as long as we can remember. Regardless, they all have one thing in common: someone else was making my decisions for me.

This constituency pattern is everywhere. Families, companies, governments, product developers, and even protest movements have leaders who make decisions for the group as a whole. The group agrees with them on a few key issues, or voted for them, or is entranced by their charisma, or just doesn’t care enough to object.

The problem is that leaders don’t always get it right. My parents were probably on safe ground with the vegetables, but my teachers didn’t have it quite so easy. The Greek government? The Titanic’s captain? Hitler? They were all disastrously wrong, and their constituents suffered as a result.

We saw this firsthand with the App Engine datastore. When we first sat down to figure out replication, the biggest tradeoff facing us was synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronous is better, but it’s also slower. The datastore was already slower than its main competitor, the relational database – NoSQL wasn’t around yet - and we worried that if we made it even slower, developers wouldn’t use it. So we went with async.

It worked, but it wasn’t ideal. Availability was good, but we knew synchronous would be better. Same with operations workload, data safety, and performance consistency. I did research, talked with users, gave talks, wrote blog posts, and did more research.

Years later, we launched a synchronous version, and it was an immediate hit. Writes were a bit slower, but developers didn’t care nearly as much as we thought. The added reliability, predictability, and guarantees were more important. It’s now the default, and we strongly recommend it.

Sadly, while leaders like us aren’t always right, the alternatives aren’t much better. Much has been made of Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly, a new incarnation of old ideas like direct democracy and participatory economics, but the dirty secret is that constituents don’t know what’s best for them any more than their leaders. Henry Ford’s apocryphal quote, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse,” is popular in business and tech because we often have the same experience. We trust users to tell us if they like something, and maybe why, but not so much what they want.

Nuclear power is a good example of constituents and leaders failing hand in hand. Since Fukushima, countries have fallen over themselves in their haste to back away from nuclear, even though energy experts and the data agree that it’s is one of the cheapest, most effective, and safest energy sources available.

Sadly, that didn’t matter. Media covered the disaster, the availability heuristic kicked in, and our brains decided nuclear power was unsafe at any speed. Politicians, happy to represent their constituents when the cost was an externality, fell into line.

OK, so no one’s great at making policy decisions for constituents, but we still need to make them. What do we do?

Scientific research is an interesting place to look. Publication and peer review may be slow and messy, but it does consistently make progress in the right direction, overcoming even change aversion and other features of our charmingly unreliable brains.

Unfortunately, science works in the wrong direction. Researchers do experiments, measure them, publish results, and only then are judged by their peers. Groups, on the other hand, need to make policy decisions up front, before they know the results. History can guide them, but even when people do learn from it, the lessons are often unclear.

Also, scientific researchers agree on the rules of the game, not least because it’s so objective. When peers compare numbers, reproduce results, and verify logical arguments, there’s little room for opinion. Group goals and metrics, on the other hand, are fuzzier.

Representative democracy is often described as the worst possible form of government, except for all the others. Free market capitalism is similar, and probably other group structures too. I like them all, but I still hate it when they make bad decisions.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how they can do any better. How about you? What can groups do about this? Is there no foolproof way for them to make decisions?

The documentary film Re:Generation teams up dance music DJs with musicians in traditional genres – classical, rock, R&B, jazz, and country – to combine the best of each. We noticed it on Hulu the other night and idly pressed play, not expecting much. Boy, were we wrong.

Re:Generation grabbed us and didn’t let go. It’s one of the best “behind the scenes” depictions I’ve ever seen of the creative process of composing music. The camera gets in close and follows every step of the way, putting you inside the artists heads’ as they struggle to communicate, build rapport, and ultimately write songs together.

The “odd couple” pairings deserve much of the credit. For example, when members of The Doors met Skrillex, a huge dubstep DJ, most of them had never heard of him and were skeptical. As John Denmore said, “Drummers pride themselves on keeping the beat, and seeing electronic machines doing it? That was different. But when the cameras were off, that’s when I learned that Skrillex was a musician, and he’s a human musician, on top of the electronics.”

The others didn’t start off much better. Pretty Lights ran into trouble when he tried to direct legendary bluegrass singer Ralph Stanley, but when he stepped back and followed Stanley’s lead in the studio, the vocals on their track Wayfaring Stranger turned out evocative and otherworldly.

The odd couples didn’t just contribute comic relief and happy endings. When similar people collaborate, they quickly draw on a reservoir of shared language, experience, and assumptions. Most of their communication is implicit, automatic.

The musicians in Re:Generation started out with none of that. Their surface differences hid their common musicality. They had to talk out loud, making music awkwardly as they gradually, painfully came to understand each other. The shortcuts weren’t available, so they had to dig deeper and find simpler, more primitive ways to bond over the rhythm, harmony, melody, and tone of music itself.

It may have been slower and less efficient for them, but it was gold for us. We saw their process exposed and laid bare like never before. Seeing how the sausage is made may be no fun when it’s sausage, but when it’s music, it’s wondrous.

Best of all, the soundtrack is free! It’s great, and incredibly diverse, as you’d expect. Watch the movie and then listen to it. If you have any interest in music whatsoever, it’s worth it. And if you don’t, for the love of god, find someone to melt your heart of stone!

I just finished playing Journey. It was amazing, as I’d hoped. thatgamecompany is so damn good at their craft.

Sadly though, the automatic, drop-in multiplayer actually detracted from my experience. I thought they’d only use it sparingly, which could have worked, but instead they paired me with other players for most of the game.

They do such a great job building this haunting, mysterious, lonely world, and then ruin it by sticking you with a pesky kid brother. Hey, jump jump jump, beep beep, oh wow look over here I found something! Ooh, is that a puzzle? I can solve that, here, let me!

Sigh. I could play it again with ethernet unplugged, but I’ve already experienced the (ahem) journey, so it won’t have the same impact. I have to admit, I’m a bit disappointed.

I listened to Robin Hunicke’s talk at GameCity from earlier this year, where she explained their motivation. They really wanted the one on one interaction to be a central part of the game, not just an add-on, and they definitely succeeded at that.

My discomfort may say more about me than anything else. I love exploring in games, especially when they have such a rich, atmospheric world. I’m also very introverted. Journey used an admirably light touch, and I could walk away from the other person at any time, but in the end, even just knowing they were there detracted from the immersion.

It’s still a great game, and I highly recommend it. If you play it, though, and you’re an explorer like me, consider signing out of PSN first.

See also:

1. The Longest Journey slow on Windows XP

I’ve just published activitystreams-unofficial, a stand-in ActivityStreams server for major sites that don’t implement it themselves. It currently has implementations for Facebook and Twitter, deployed at these endpoints:

• facebook-activitystreams.appspot.com
• twitter-activitystreams.appspot.com

This complements the unofficial WebFinger and PortableContacts providers I published recently. I’ve updated the WebFinger provider to include Link elements pointing to these new ActivityStreams endpoints.

They’re all just little side projects, and may not be hugely useful on their own, but together they’re another step toward implementing OStatus bridge apps for more of the major social networking sites.

Feedback and pull requests are welcome!

See also:

1. WebFinger for Facebook and Twitter
2. PortableContacts for Facebook and Twitter
3. Facebook comments vs. Twitter replies

Unfortunately, I don’t have anything special to say right now. Life is good, friends and family are good, work and side projects are good. I have a couple future posts brewing, but they’re still too early to write up just yet.

So, uh…hey look, is that a cat rolling a watermelon out of a lake?

I’ve just published portablecontacts-unofficial, a stand-in PortableContacts server for major sites that don’t implement it themselves. It currently has implementations for Facebook and Twitter, deployed at these endpoints:

• facebook-poco.appspot.com
• twitter-poco.appspot.com

They complement the unofficial WebFinger providers I published last month, which I’ve updated to include Link elements pointing to the new PortableContacts endpoints.

Both are just little side projects, and they may not be hugely useful on their own, but together they’re another step toward implementing OStatus bridge apps for more of the major social networking sites.

Feedback and pull requests are welcome!

See also:

1. WebFinger for Facebook and Twitter
2. Facebook comments vs. Twitter replies
3. Facebook app for OStatus?

For a long time, I thought economic inequality was basically OK. Sorry, I should rephrase: I thought it was bad, of course, but not inherently harmful. I changed my mind recently, and I’ve been reflecting on why and what I can learn from it.

The complaints about inequality always seemed to boil down to the same thing: fairness. Inequality is unfair, so it’s wrong. I’m human, so I’m naturally sensitive to fairness, but it still didn’t sit right with me. I just didn’t see the concrete harm. A rising tide lifts all boats, so if poor people still have a good quality of life, what’s wrong with rich people being rich? Plus, incentives are important, so we want to reward people who work hard and create value, right? Not to mention that we’ve never found a reasonable, effective way to prevent inequality. Socialism and its cousins clearly aren’t it.

I flattered myself by thinking I’d analyzed the issue thoroughly and reached the best conclusion. Of course, the more likely story is that I inherited it from my parents and friends, like we all do, adopting supporting arguments after the fact to satisfy my ego. Regardless, whatever the reason, I believed it.

Then I started noticing research from people like Richard Wilkinson, Jill Eisen, and The Equality Trust showing the concrete harm. Wilkinson, for example, compared relative inequality in hundreds of countries to all sorts of societal indicators – health, divorce, crime, voter turnout, even trust – and found that they all correlate strongly. The famously equitable Scandinavian countries, for example, fare well across the board. Countries like the US, not so much.

I’m an engineer, so I have a natural affinity for research and data, and after reading enough of this, I found myself convinced. Correlation isn’t causation, sure, but even if inequality is just a tracking indicator, you still want it to go down. Too much relative inequality is inherently harmful.

This isn’t the first time I’ve changed my mind about politics. I believed in capital punishment too, a long time ago, until I heard a fascinating thought experiment. When we look back at history and policies like slavery and genocide, we all agree they’re wrong. In 100 years, when people look back at us, what will they think we got wrong? I couldn’t come up with much, and still can’t, but I figured capital punishment was one candidate. I just couldn’t imagine we’d still be killing people as part of our social contract.

What can I learn from all this? First, I expect I’m wrong about lots of other things too. I’m resigned to the fact that most of my core beliefs probably developed early on, in my subconscious, and only later did I circle back to justify them with intellectual arguments. If those instincts were wrong about capital punishment and inequality, that’s probably just the beginning.

Second, I need to fight to keep an open mind every minute of every day. I didn’t change my mind because I got smarter or thought harder, but because I learned and absorbed new ideas. I need to be ready and willing to do that all the time, even if it’s not easy or fun.

Finally, all this has made me curious about politics in the media. I’m a firm believer that you can’t change other people, you can only change yourself, which makes the usual persuasive editorials and analysis seem odd. They endorse this candidate, disapprove of that policy, weigh in on this or that ballot measure, but do they really change people’s opinions? How about some storytelling instead, some personal journeys and heart-wrenching mea culpas?

In any case, thanks for your patience during this bit of navel gazing. I won’t make it a habit, promise.

Painting by Sean Cheetham for American Thinker. Photo by Samantha Celera.