Jaison's Blog – Page 2

NYC’s Ranked-Choice Vote: The Killer App for Failed Politics

[My views are my own].

I love a good transformation story. It’s become my life’s work.

There is probably no better story of emerging transformation than the first time use of Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) in yesterday’s elections in New York City. I’m super pumped!

It is not perfect, but IT WAS A REALLY IMPORTANT FIRST STEP! And, it is potentially transformational for beginning to fix the polarization of our politics.

Michael Porter — the Harvard professor that developed the framework of competitive advantage — and Katherine Gehl wrote an excellent book on this in 2020 titled The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy. I highly recommend it.

In the book, they applied the duopoly model that limits competition to our two political parties. And, to them, ranked-choice voting is the killer app for breaking open the system.

The key takeaways are that:

Electoral incentives are biased against moderation and compromise.

“Members of Congress, state legislators, governors and other state officials have to first win a low-turnout party primary, in which ideologically militant voters are more likely to vote.”

This results in a race to the extremes of ideology for party candidates . . . and for funding. I.E., you don’t want to fund a candidate that can’t win a primary. So fund the most extreme candidate.

This system favors ideology over solutions and gridlock over progress.

The machinery of politics “quietly determine[s] everything from how candidates get on a ballot and how we vote to how a bill becomes law. And both sides of the ideological divide are to blame. Waves of unchecked engineering of these rules and practices — orchestrated jointly by Democrats and Republicans — have optimized the elections and lawmaking machinery to protect and perpetuate the politics industry itself and grow its power, not to produce results.” [Gehl and Porter, The Politics Industry]

“The tragic result . . . is a polarized government unable to compromise to solve the nation’s greatest problems or realize its highest aspirations.”

But, over time, ranked choice voting (RCV) has the potential to fix polarization in politics. It can “ensure that the winner will always have support from the broadest possible portion of the electorate.”

What is ranked-choice voting?

Voters are asked to rank their preferred candidates. For example, for the New York Mayor’s primary, we have been asked to rank our top five.

If a candidate gets 50% plus 1 after all the first-choice votes are counted, then that candidate wins.

If no one gets 50% plus 1, it goes to round two. The candidate with the lowest vote count is eliminated and that candidate’s voters’ second choices get redistributed to the other candidates.

This process continues until someone reaches 50% plus 1.

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to my FREE newsletter/blog. The link is at the top of the page on a desktop browser and at the bottom of the page on a mobile browser. Also, please follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.

Also, please accept my apology for the sloppy editing, etc. My objective here is to quickly ship work and new ideas . . . not to spend hours making sure the language is perfect. I hope you enjoyed.

Hanging onto the Bucking Bronco

[My views are my own]

I’ve been a meditator for over 30 years. My father taught me when I was a teenager, and in recent years, I’ve taken up the practice of Transcendental Meditation.

My wife always teases me that it’s just my excuse to escape and take a nap.

Whether it’s just a power nap or something more, I can’t be certain. However, it does have an amazing power to calm the waters of my mind, recharge my batteries, and help me to make better decisions.

Because of meditation, one of my super-powers has been the ability to walk into highly-charged and conflict-filled situations and provide clear-eyed and unemotional objectivity.

Gamifying the Grind

[My views are my own]

Periods of intense growth and learning are always interrupted by time on the plateau.

“Whether you like it or not, there will be plateaus, which in my experience tend to occur right before a breakthrough. Weight lifting teaches you to embrace them, or at the very least accept them. This is an important outcome, with consequences extending far beyond the gym. ‘In the land of the quick fix it may seem radical,’ writes George Leonard, a pioneer of the human potential movement in the 1960s, ‘but to learn anything significant, to make any lasting change in yourself, you must be willing to spend most of your time on the plateau, to keep practicing even when it seems you are getting nowhere.’”
The Zen of Weight Lifting, The New York Times, Nov. 22, 2019, by Brad Stulberg

The challenge with the plateau is that it’s boring — and you’re getting little to no positive reinforcement to keep you moving forward.

This makes it really easy to head off in another direction after some shiny new object.

What’s been most helpful for me has been the perspective that the plateau has always been a base building period for my next big phase of growth.

To keep pounding the stone, I create daily, measurable practices.

When I was a Wall Street research analyst covering the global media and communications industry, I didn’t want to be an ivory tower egghead. I knew too many brilliant analysts whose decades of great work was largely unknown. It was important to me to be in the arena — not just a world of ideas.

So, I developed a daily practice of making an average of 50 client interactions (emails/calls/meeting). Every single day. This was in addition to a 60-hour per week day job of researching and making investment recommendations across a massive global industry.

I tracked my average calls over weeks and months. And, I became a marketing machine.

During the dips and plateau periods of my life, this type of daily practice has kept me showing up to do the work.

I’ve learned to trick my mind by Gamifying the Grind.

And, I take real pride as my streaks extend to months and years.

Wax on. Wax off.

Trust & the Repeatable Transformation Playbook

[My views are my own]

For the last several months, I’ve been working on a manuscript to document my “repeatable playbook” of business transformation.

It’s required me to dive a lot deeper than I originally expected.

I started out by compiling and organizing a list of the tactics I’ve used.

At first, it was exhilarating. It felt like flipping through an old high school yearbook.

I quickly realized that the challenge with tactical transformation is that the cutting edge ideas of today quickly become business as usual.

As I pulled one mental thread after another, it became clear that the repeatable playbook of transformation (and the real source of value) is the people/human stuff.

In large organizations, especially those that have matrixed reporting structures, you can’t do it all yourself.

From my experience, the biggest reason transformation, turnaround and innovation efforts fail is because those leaders never build a posse. They end up alone, screaming into the wilderness — and nobody cares.

If you don’t get people on-side, you are going to be blocked at every move. While you may have buy-in from the center or top of the organization, it’s the people in the middle that actually run the business — and they don’t give a shit about your “brilliant ideas.”

For me, the starting point is always trust.

Corporations are packed full of politics, people with hidden agendas, and transactional relationships.

Quickly and radically establishing the envelope of trust has been my cornerstone for building kick-ass teams — and driving change.

There needs to be rapport, and a sense of protection if you want your teams to do big things, and to take risks.

The Benefits of a Growth Mindset

[My views are my own]

In 2013, I joined Time Warner to help lead the spin-off, IPO and transformation of Time Inc. We were in a terribly disadvantaged position given that we were six months away from an IPO, we had no digital strategy, we were spinning off with over $1B of debt, and print magazine audiences were getting crushed by the exponential growth of the iPhone and social media.

While we couldn’t clearly see our digital future, we knew we needed to start down the path of digital transformation.

So, we just started taking action. We funded hundreds of test projects. It was like spreading seed to learn what might produce the green shoots of our digital future.

To me, this is the Growth Mindset in action.

It’s just like driving at night. You can only see as far as your headlights. But, that’s enough to make the entire journey.

As we moved forward with our test projects and trial and error, we learned more about the path ahead. We started seeing green shoots, and we followed up by pyramiding more funding and resources into those areas.

By the time we sold to Meredith Corp. (four years later) we had built a billion dollar digital business.

The single biggest challenge with transformation (and most entrepreneurial ideas) is that folks never take the first step from A to B. They are frozen by a fixed mindset of not having the certainty of the entire journey mapped out before them.

The Growth Mindset requires you to just get started, learn along the way, adjust as you learn, and keep going.

Finding Meaning in the Valley of Misery

[My views are my own]

“Jaison . . . sometimes in life you just have to eat shit.”
Advice (that I’ll NEVER forget) from my father-in-law during the depths of the Global Financial Crisis

Without a sense of meaning, life can be a senseless grind. Without purpose, there’s just not enough energy to carry you through the periods of stress, uncertainty, failure and burnout.

One source of meaning that’s helped carry me through the hard times is what I call the cult of paying dues.

I have come to believe that there is always growth (like building muscle), new insights, and personal transformation on the other side of the valley of misery.

So, when I’m getting kicked in the teeth, I’ve trained myself to smile (with my newly busted incisors) and say: “This is exactly the challenge that I asked for. Now, what do I need to learn?”

In some super-dorky, Island of the Misfit Toys way, the cycle of a new challenge, suffering, resolution, and growth feels to me like the cycle of a life well lived.

Some of my favorite books which have helped me to find meaning while clawing my way through the valley of misery are:

The Enigma of Exponential Growth

[My views are my own]

In the Industrial Age, change was slow, and major new threats were rare.

It took 26 years for Walmart to open its first Supercenter in a major market. It was a slow- and steady-moving train of disruption.

However, in the Information Age, exponential technologies can be upon you in the blink of an eye.

In 2010, Jeff Bewkes (former CEO of Time Warner) referred to Netflix as: “It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world? I don’t think so.”

He wasn’t alone. In 2010, most media industry participants viewed Netflix as an over-hyped toy; one that would never be a real threat to the powerful incumbent media conglomerates where Content is King.

But, within 5 years, Netflix had more than 70 million global subscribers. Today, it is the Goliath with more than 200 million global subscribers and almost $20B per year of content spend.

One reason for this blind spot is that humans tend to overestimate what is possible in the short-term, and vastly under-estimate what’s possible over the long-term. We tend to think linearly — assuming a constant rate of change — not exponentially.

What the skeptics have missed is that Moore’s Law has jumped the tracks.

“In 1965, Intel founder Gordon Moore noticed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit had been doubling every eighteen months. This meant every year-and-a-half computers got twice as powerful, yet their cost stayed the same. Moore thought this was pretty astounding. He predicted this trend might last a few more years, maybe five, possibly ten. Well, it’s been twenty, forty, going on sixty years. Moore’s Law is the reason the smartphone in your pocket is a thousand times smaller, a thousand times cheaper, and a million times more powerful than a supercomputer from the 1970s. And, it’s not slowing down.”
The Future is Faster Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Exponential growth is no longer just about microprocessing power. It’s now converging with anything that’s been digitized.

“In the 1990s, Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google . . . discovered that once a technology becomes digital—that is, once it can be programmed in the ones and zeroes of computer code—it hops on the back of Moore’s Law and begins accelerating exponentially. In simple terms, we use our new computers to design even faster new computers, and this creates a positive feedback loop that further accelerates our acceleration—what Kurzweil calls the “Law of Accelerating Returns.”
The Future is Faster Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Once digitized, whole industries and institutions are being re-engineered — including layering in the benefits of artificial intelligence, robotics, sensors, blockchain, etc.

One of the most mind-bending recent examples is the development of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.

Historically, drug development was an extremely slow analog process of trial and error with a 90% failure rate.

But, today, the speed of drug development is accelerating at an exponential rate because we can now engineer biology the way we engineer other things. Genetics is just the software code for our bodies. And, the human genome project has mapped that code.

In January 2020, within a month of first identifying the virus in Wuhan, and months before the U.S. shutdown, Moderna designed the entire chemical structure of the vaccine based on digital versions of the virus.

And, it did it in just 48 hours.

The lesson for transformational leaders is that we are poised for one of the greatest periods of innovation (and disruption) that we’ve ever seen.

Underestimate exponential technology at your own peril!

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to this newsletter/blog (link at the top of the page on desktop browser and at the bottom of the page on mobile browser), follow me on Twitter, and connect with me on LinkedIn; and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.

A Legit Tech (and Cultural) Revolution

[My views are my own].

We are living through a legitimate tech (and cultural) revolution.

The coming waves of technology innovation have the potential to gain yards against many of the chronic problems of society.

Ed-tech
Biotech
Climate-tech
Alternative energy
Virtual communities
Fin-tech
Crypto
3D Printing
Distributed Computing
5G and 6G

An unbelievable number of areas are hitting Metcalf’s Law — the largest set of exponentials we’ve ever seen.

However, the transformational power of exponential technology is not just a story of rainbows, unicorns and iPhones for everyone!

The digital transitions to-date have been breathtaking . . . and, at times, terrifying.

The music industry entered the digital storm in the late 1990s. Industry revenues peaked in 1999, and declined for 16 years (falling ~50%) before adopting a streaming model and returning to growth.

Thousands of newspapers have failed — with collateral damage across journalism (the fourth estate) and politics.

Bricks and mortar retailing has been a dumpster fire for a decade with specialty retailers, department stores and malls experiencing extreme levels of distress.

And, now, the largest, and most important parts of our economy and society (health care, education, energy, food, finance) are sailing into a storm of exponential technologies.

The good news of the past decade is that entire industries have made the big pivot — and emerged as fully reinvented digital players.

There is a lot to be learned from these successful transitions.

The New York Times has pivoted from being an organization totally focused on shipping a daily print product to becoming a 24/7 digital-subscription-first powerhouse. And, NYT common stock has re-rated, rising 10x over the past decade.

In 2011, Warner Music Group was sold to billionaire Len Blavatnik for $3.3 billion. At the time, revenues were declining at a high-single-digit rate. The music industry has since pivoted to a streaming model, and the company has returned to growth. In 2020, Warner Music Group IPO’d and is currently valued at $20 billion.

Over the past decade, Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig “pulled a Netflix” and pivoted from textbook rental into digital textbooks, online tutoring, and other digital student services. Chegg stock has re-rated as it has transformed, and is up more than 20x over the past five years.

Through this process of digital reinvention and transformation, these companies are discovering new strengths and capabilities including direct-to-consumer relationships, immense data and intelligence capabilities, global addressable markets, and network effects.

They’ve turned away from declining legacy business models, and made the leap aboard the exponential growth curve.

On one hand, I believe we are entering a period of unprecedented disruption.

On the other hand, it’s an incredible time to be a transformational leader—helping people, organizations and institutions to change/adapt.

Why I’m Creating and Posting Content

[My views are my own].

For most of quarantine, I’ve felt like a tortured artist.

I should be lot more content.

My family is safe and healthy; I’ve been able to spend a lot of time outside with my wife and kids (which I love); and, my work has provided me with some new/interesting challenges.

But, I’ve found that I’ve been itching for a new creative challenge.

Back in September, I decided that I wanted to experiment with creating content and distributing it through social media.

After a big start, work and life got busy. So, I stopped writing.

About a month ago, I joined Seth Godin’s The Creative’s Workshop. And, I committed to spending an hour a day (every day) writing.

I farted around for the first few weeks of the workshop. What I wrote felt more like bad teenage diary entries.

Then, over the last week, I decided to just write short snackable content, and I quickly published three blog posts (Dad Buzz, Shit-Birds, and Mass Delusions).

I’m still finding my voice. But, I think I want to use this time to:
Begin creating content to capture the ideas in my head; and get it out to the world.
Leverage social media to start a dialog around these issues with my network. (LinkedIn has been surprisingly productive for driving traffic to my blog, and for general engagement).
I’ll probably turn my attention to more work-related issues including Business Transformation, Return to Growth, and Change Leadership.

Thank you!
Jaison

The Pendulum of Ideas (and Recurring Mass Delusions)

[My views are my own].

I bought my first stock at the age of 23.

It was 1995.
We were in the middle of a raging bull market.
Over the next five years, the Nasdaq 100 index rocketed from 480 to 4,800.

Boy . . . that was fun!

During that first bull market, with every passing month, my opinion of myself grew more and more certain.

Going into 2000, I was a 28-year-old Master of the Universe . . . with a fatal blind spot.

In hindsight, I was just surfing the crest of a tidal wave.

I’ve now been investing for more than 25 years. I’ve survived two massive bear markets and innumerable market crashes.

I’ve analyzed at least 1,000 companies; I’ve worked as a senior analyst on Wall Street; and I’ve made every mistake in the book.

One thing I’ve learned along the way is that the “big ideas” of every market cycle are almost always unmasked as mass delusions.

Let me give you an example.

In 2006, I was at a Value Investors Conference at Lincoln Center. The speakers were the rock-stars of our generation. There were over a thousand attendees.

What had once been an obscure corner of the investment world had gone mainstream. It felt like a golden age for value investing!

The fatal blind spot was that the value-style is all about ignoring the crowd. However, by 2006, it had become the mania.

Over the last fifteen years, the value-fever has broken and been unwound. Value investors have been crushed — with many returning outside money or just leaving the business.

This swinging pendulum of ideas (and recurring mass delusions) doesn’t just happen in the crucible of the stock market.

It can happen any time we turn our trust over to the crowd.

It’s QAnon. It’s Gamestop. It’s the Tech Boom. It’s the Tech Wreck. It’s “Housing Prices Never Go Down.” It’s the Global Financial Crisis. It’s Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. It’s Disco and the Macarena. It’s even frickin’ Beanie Babies and Fidget Spinners.

It’s the human condition.

So, next time you feel absolute certainty about something, and everyone around you is reinforcing how you are all geniuses . . .

Don’t be so quick to buy your own bullshit.

And, if you are going to take the time and energy to buy into a specific mental model, you should spend time really understanding the bear case against it.

Not that there is a bear case against the Macarena . . . but . . . you get it.

PS – My wife and I just watched the movie Our Friend. It’s beautiful. We had a good cry. Highly recommended.

PPS – Tom Brady is the GOAT!