Another Reason the Chicken Crossed the Road

Police Lt. Jonathan Ozol in a SF crosswalk

San Francisco police have a new crime-fighting initiative. They're tagging drivers who don't stop for officers who are dressed as inflatable chickens.

On Monday morning [Sept. 16], San Francisco police Lt. Jonathan Ozol wore a flamboyant, inflatable chicken costume as he attempted to navigate a crosswalk on Alemany Boulevard near the intersection of Rousseau Street. The purpose of the exercise was to issue tickets to drivers who flouted state law by not yielding to a pedestrian like Ozol as he attempted to cross. Quite a few drivers failed that test.

The ostentatious costume, according to police Capt. Amy Hurwitz, serves two purposes. “I don’t want them to get run over,” she told me. “But the costume is so bright, it’s like, how can you miss it?”

...State law requires drivers to stop for pedestrians who are entering a crosswalk. Ozol said that failing to do so can result in a citation that could cost the driver a hefty fine of as much as $400.

...Ozol would attempt to enter the crosswalk, and if a driver didn’t yield and allow him to cross, he would wave at two other officers parked nearby. From there, one of the two officers — one on a motorcycle, and the other in a standard squad car — would follow the flagged driver and pull them over.

The numerous tickets and the irresistible publicity have had the desired effect: drivers are slowing down.

Your humble blogger laughed, too, but I think that those who mock the chicken/Big-Bird costumes as a "stunt" have an anti-SF or anti-police agenda.

Kudos to SFPD for their creativity, and coming up with a strategy that appears to be working.

The Limits of Competition

(Image from Yale Insights)

During my career I worked for a CEO who thought internal competition was the way to get the most out of workers.

The competition was at its fiercest when it came to devising a new line of business. My team worked round the clock, as did the others, to come up with an idea and the strategy to implement it.

No team "won." We ended up adopting a strategy proposed by a well-known consulting firm.

Internal competition often is counter-productive.

Internal competition often stifles innovation.

That is what we found in a study of companies that pushed internal teams to compete with each other—whether for formal financial rewards like bonuses, or for informal ones like greater prestige, access to executives and influence.

Yes, by some indicators, the teams ended up working harder when they were battling each other. But they failed in another crucial respect: The more teams competed, the less innovative they were. Simply put, they were wary of sharing information with other teams, so they weren’t getting unexpected, inspiring ideas from people in other parts of the company.

In fact, the only teams that excelled in the study were ones that did choose to share information with others, whether out of necessity or strategically.

Competition drives innovation, but it appears not to work if the organization competes internally. [bold added]

How, then, can companies leverage the benefits of competition without sacrificing information sharing between teams?

For one thing, choose an outside target: Instead of making internal teams battle each other, have them try to beat external benchmarks, such as how many patents a rival company produces. Companies should also make efforts to ensure groups share information, such as holding regular meetings or creating a shared database that any team could use.

Competition is one of the foundational elements of capitalism, but it is not the only element. The free flow of information is another, as well as the shared value to seek the good of the whole.

Rice is Life

We know couples of Asian descent who had newborns during the pandemic. Normally we would deliver baby gifts in person but have been limited to sending cards and gifts via Amazon.

But how may the newborn's parents respond, if they want to send more than a thank-you note?

The insides only come in white (Guardian)

Headline: Japanese parents send relatives rice to hug in lieu of newborns

Parents in Japan are sending bags of rice that weigh the same as their newborn babies to relatives who are unable to visit them due to the pandemic.

The bags come in a wide range of designs, with some shaped like a baby wrapped in a blanket so that relatives can feel as though they are hugging the new arrival while looking at a picture of their face, which is attached to the front.

Your humble blogger thinks the idea is brilliant, but not surprising since it came from the land that made Tamagotchi a world-wide craze nearly 30 years ago. (h/t Tyler Cowen)

Business School (1970's) Didn't Teach Me About This

Success in the modern work environment is a constant battle between too-many procedures and too-little creativity. It's all too easy to get buried in the minutiae--one can get reprimanded or even fired if one doesn't follow rules and catastrophe ensues--yet organizations wither and die if everyone's top priority is crossing the T's.

(Image from http://memegenerator.net/instance/55350082)

By-the-book types can point to unstructured environments that had a negative result:

Many rigid people grew up in turbulent homes that made them long for stability....Some people need reassurance because they’ve been burned in the past, when new projects or initiatives were managed poorly.

While patience is required when dealing with inflexible colleagues, your humble observer has been successful in getting what he wanted from them more often than not:

1) As a manager who has had to deal with thick rulebooks, I've also been "inflexible." Playing the misery-loves-company card during a discussion can be effective.

2) Most employees aren't blind to the necessity of keeping the company profitable--therefore, their jobs safer--and know that progress means sometimes changing or ignoring the rules. Pointing to the good of the organization, especially for a situation that the book-drafters hadn't thought of, often works.

3) If you're dealing in or with government, where people risk their jobs by bending procedures no matter how unreasonable, be prepared to forego talking. Go over their heads and/or enlist the aid of powerful outside person(s) to override objections. Even if you are successful, be prepared to wait a long time; taking up meditation frequently helps.

Guru Greatness Gone

(Image from clipartpanda.com)

Economist writer Schumpeter laments the lack of excitement in the business thought-leadership industry:

The main problem is that the guru business is reaching the end of a long cycle of creativity. For the past two decades or so it has been driven by two seismic economic changes—the rise of the emerging world and the digital revolution....

Ironically, the digital revolution is making it harder for new gurus to emerge. Many of today’s biggest business changes are being driven by “quants”, who excel at finding meaning in big data or at producing algorithms that can automate lots of work, but who are much less good at putting numbers into words or at thinking about what big data and automation mean for industries beyond their own.

Like any guru, Schumpeter may be over-analyzing the "problem." When your humble observer attended business school in the 1970's, consulting firms like McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group competed with investment bankers for many of the top graduates.

Not only did consultants help to fix clients' systems, e.g., accounting, sales, computer, inventory, etc., they also helped to design broad strategies and vision statements.

Now the top students start their own firms and have no need of a vision developed by outside experts who are actually more "inside the box" than they are.

Creativity may have fled the gurus, but from the vantage point of one who lives near San Francisco and Silicon Valley there's more than enough to go around.

Advancements in Brain Science

Gout and Alzheimer's
My genetic predisposition to gout has a silver lining; gout correlates with a lower incidence of Alzheimer's disease. In a study covering nearly 300,000 British patients over five years

Those with gout, whether they were being treated for the condition or not, had a 24 percent lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

The reason for the connection is unclear. But gout is caused by excessive levels of uric acid in the blood, and previous studies have suggested that uric acid protects against oxidative stress. This may play a role in limiting neuron degeneration.

(WSJ illustration)

Finger-fiddling and Creativity

Certain kinds of hand movements have an impact on cognitive functioning, improving focus or sparking fresh thinking or faster learning, according to several recent studies.

Manipulating a smooth stone or a string of beads that are pleasing or soothing to touch can evoke “the timeless, ancient human practice of meditative ritual” and screen out extraneous stimuli.

The generations that preceded ours didn't have the technological tools, but they were arguably better thinkers. Perhaps it was because they were always fiddling with cigarettes, matches, lighters, and smoking paraphernalia.

Elder Sex and Cognition

Older men and women who were satisfied with their sexual relationships and considered sexuality an essential component of aging performed better on tests of cognitive function than those who felt sexuality and intimacy were unimportant.

The Dutch study covered 1,747 men and women, average age 71.

Yes, dear, my gerontologist prescribes daily treatment.

And You Thought Fighting Over the Armrest Was Bad

In the "public" position.

The B-Tourist strip has an initial appeal to everyone who flies coach. The B-Tourist is

a portable curtain that silently screams “do not disturb.” The elastic curtain.....can be stretched between headrests to the back and the front of the passenger, thereby creating a cocoon of privacy around the passenger’s head.

"Private"

The drawback: in the cattle-car seating that passes for economy flying, only true sociopaths will have the nerve to ignore the negative vibes emanating from fellow passengers. The curtain

a) shouts that the passenger wants nothing to do with the rest of humanity (one can feel that way, but one isn't supposed to say it),

b) uses the headrest of the passenger in front, and

c) makes it difficult for seatmates to ask to go to the bathroom.

Look for regulators to kill this idea in the cradle. Flight safety rules that prohibit obstacles in the footpath will certainly bar the erection of these barriers. Said the poet, "Good fences make good neighbors," but he wasn't thinking about airplanes. © 2014 Stephen Yuen